Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority - Softcover

Richard Wilson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814324924 ISBN 13: 9780814324929

Publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr, 1993

Synopsis

Shakespeare predicted neither palaces nor princes would outlast his "powerful rhyme." In Will Power, Richard Wilson considers the factors that charged Shakespearean literature with such force.
This volume presents a wide-ranging historical background and sets the terms of contemporary Shakespeare criticism in the context of developments in philosophy, economics, and cultural theory. In a sequence of close readings of the entire range of plays, Wilson locates their social logic in relation to practices such as execution, electioneering, enclosure, childbirth, death, and the writing of wills. His two points of reference are the large Foucauldian argument about the institutional changes in Early Modern Europe that were connected with the formation of the modern state and conceptions of private property and subjectivity, and the specifics of social life and the particularism of local contexts that give us a more historically embedded Shakespeare.

About this title

Book Description:

Shakespeare predicted neither palaces nor princes would outlast his "powerful rhyme." In Will Power, Richard Wilson considers the factors that charged Shakespearean literature with such force.

About the Author:

Richard Wilson is a lecturer in English at the University of Lancaster.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0814324924
• ISBN 13: 9780814324929
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 289