As You Like It – A ‘Robin Hood’ Play

2001 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 393-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Leach
Keyword(s):  
Robin Hood ◽  
As You Like It

Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Chiari
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Ability To Act

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.

Harry Potter – National Hero and National Heroic Epic

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-28
Author(s):  
Ulrike Kristina Köhler
Keyword(s):  
Harry Potter ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Robin Hood ◽  
Feudal Society ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Heroic Epic ◽  
National Model ◽  
National Hero ◽  
Norman Invasion ◽  
Character Building

Joanne K. Rowling's teenage wizard has enchanted readers all over the globe and Harry Potter can truly be called an international hero. However, as I will argue, he is also very much an English national hero, complying with the national auto-image of the English gentleman as well as with the idea of Christian masculinity, another English auto-image holding that outdoor activity is more character-building than book learning. I will also show that the series can be read as a national heroic epic in two respects. First, Harry Potter, alias Robin Hood, has to fight the Norman yoke, an English myth haunting the nation since the Norman invasion in 1066. The series displays as a national model an apparently paternalistic Anglo-Saxon feudal society marked by tolerance and liberty as opposed to foreign rule. Second, by establishing parallels to events which took place in Nazi Germany, the series takes up the idea of fighting it, which is a popular topos in British (children's) literature which serves to reinforce a positive self-image.

Life in a ‘No-go Area’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nida Kirmani
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Robin Hood ◽  
Geographic Mapping ◽  
Academic Study

This chapter by Nida Kirmani offers a rare academic study on Lyari. It historicizes Lyari’s development as a contradictory ‘no-go’ site of resistance, protest and gang warfare. This perspective is organized around two of Lyari’s most notorious protagonists, Rehman Dakait and Uzair Baloch. Drawing on narratives of fear that comprise and interweave into everyday life in Lyari, she analyzes the persistent question of the extent to which gang war constitutes politics, rather than being separate to or an obstacle to politics. Through a portrait of Rehman as a community ‘Robin Hood’ figure, Kirmani’s analysis describes a geographic mapping of the paradox of ‘military-humanitarianism’ at the level of local gang warfare. This both mirrors, and also provokes, some original insights into ways these projects are inextricably linked in national and international politics.

Visually Attending to Fictional Things

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Currie
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Robin Hood ◽  
Screen Medium

There is a kind of perceptual-imaginative experience we have when we watch screen-based fictions. In such situations it is natural to think of ourselves as “watching Robin Hood” rather than as watching Errol Flynn dressed as Robin Hood. Screen-based fictions are not the only fictions that allow this kind of experience but they encourage it in ways that theatrical dramas cannot quite match, while still photographs do a poor job in this regard. This chapter offers an explanation of this kind of experience, partly by reference to features of the screen medium and partly by reference to aspects of human perceptual-cognitive architecture. The architectural story will tell us something about imagination that reflection on the phenomenology of imaginative experience fails to disclose. The resulting picture may also help us to understand certain kinds of delusions.

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Capp
Keyword(s):  
Sibling Relationship ◽  
King Lear ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
The Family

This chapter introduces the issues, surveys briefly the existing literature, and sets out the scope of the book. It summarizes contemporary views on the appropriate relationship between siblings, especially the rights and responsibilities of an elder brother towards his sisters and younger brothers. Contemporaries saw these as grounded in both nature and scripture, but recognized too the strength of sibling rivalries and resentments over favouritism and inheritance. These were often explored in contemporary drama, such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It and King Lear, and in social commentaries and polemic. The imagery of brotherhood and sisterhood pervaded the language as well as literature of the period, both as tokens of friendship and (in the case of elder/younger brothers) of oppression within the family. In language as in life, the sibling relationship was a heated and divisive issue for both parents and children.

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