0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays," William Hazlitt presents an incisive exploration of the complex and timeless characters crafted by William Shakespeare. This collection of essays showcases Hazlitt's eloquent prose and keen analytical acumen, as he delves into the psychological and moral dimensions of Shakespeare's protagonists and antagonists. Evoking a romantic literary style, Hazlitt weaves his personal reflections with critical analysis, emphasizing the relevance of Shakespeare's characters to human nature and society. The essays reflect the prevailing themes of the early 19th century, situating Hazlitt within the Romantic movement while illustrating the profound impact of Shakespeare's work on contemporary thought. William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was a prominent English essayist, critic, and philosopher whose passionate advocacy for individualism and emotion in literature influenced his interpretation of Shakespeare. A contemporary of the Romantic poets, Hazlitt's own experiences of love, disappointment, and the intricacies of human relationships informed his understanding of Shakespeare's diverse array of characters. Hazlitt's literary criticism embodied a unique blend of intellect and emotion, making his insights resonate with readers and scholars alike. This book is an essential read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Shakespearean characters and their enduring significance. Hazlitt's sharp intellect and rich descriptive language invite readers to engage with these iconic figures in new and thought-provoking ways. Whether you are a student of literature or a dedicated theater enthusiast, Hazlitt's essays offer illuminating perspectives that stand the test of time. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays
Table of Contents
Introduction
Shakespeare's enduring power, this book contends, resides in the felt reality of his characters and the drama of minds in motion. William Hazlitt approaches the plays not as monuments but as living encounters, inviting readers to test their sympathies against figures who think, desire, and err. His emphasis falls on the inner springs of action rather than on mechanical plot, seeking the pulse where language, passion, and circumstance converge. From this vantage, the plays become studies in consciousness that anticipate modern psychological reading while remaining rooted in rhetoric and stagecraft. The result is criticism that argues through vivid description, comparison, and an alert ear for tone.
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays is a work of literary criticism by William Hazlitt, first published in 1817 in Britain during the Romantic era. It gathers essays on individual plays and topics across tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances, aiming to convey the living presence of Shakespeare's people. Hazlitt writes as an English essayist and reviewer addressing an educated general audience, bridging the world of theater and the world of books. Written amid a flourishing culture of playgoing, it reflects a moment when criticism sought to make art intelligible and stirring without reducing it to rules. The collection remains a landmark of Romantic-era Shakespeare commentary.
Readers encounter an energetic, conversational voice that moves from close scrutiny of a single speech to broad reflections on human nature. Hazlitt favors sharply drawn character sketches, contrasting temperaments and motives, and he attends to how rhetoric shapes thought while performance colors interpretation. The tone is ardent, sometimes combative, yet generous to multiple impressions, and the rhythm alternates between quick insights and sustained argument. He assumes an engaged reader but keeps the prose vivid and concrete, avoiding technical jargon. The experience is that of a lively companionable guide: persuasive, disputatious when needed, and consistently attentive to what makes scenes feel immediate and true.
Central themes include moral complexity, the play of imagination, the tension between passion and judgment, and the social texture of authority, friendship, and love. For Hazlitt, Shakespeare's characters are not abstract emblems but agents moving through contingent situations, acting from mixed motives under pressure. He explores how language embodies feeling, how comic vitality and tragic intensity draw on the same abundance of life, and how the plays invite sympathy without endorsing every act. This approach opens questions about responsibility, self-knowledge, and the limits of rational control, encouraging readers to weigh competing claims rather than accept tidy classifications or purely doctrinal readings.
Because Hazlitt wrote as an active observer of the theater, stage practice informs his criticism. He considers how delivery, gesture, and pacing can illuminate or obscure a character's design, and he weighs the difference between reading a scene on the page and seeing it acted. That dual perspective allows him to register subtleties of tone, irony, and timing that escape abstract analysis. At the same time, he treats the plays as literature capable of standing on their own, attentive to structure, imagery, and rhythm as sources of meaning. The result is a method that unites performance sense with close reading, bringing both into a single frame.
For contemporary readers, the book offers a model of humane criticism that values sensitivity over system and inquiry over dogma. Its questions remain alive: What do we owe to flawed characters who mirror our own inconsistencies, and how does art enlarge sympathy without dissolving judgment? In an age of quick takes, Hazlitt's attentiveness to language and feeling demonstrates the patience that deep reading requires. He shows how criticism can be personal yet public-spirited, rooted in experience while open to debate. The essays encourage readers to listen closely, consider alternative views, and let understanding grow through contact with Shakespeare's dramatic variety.
Approached on its own or alongside the plays, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays offers guidance without pedantry and enthusiasm without credulity. It can serve both first encounters and rereadings, pointing audiences back to the text with sharpened curiosity. By tracing how character emerges from speech, situation, and stagecraft, Hazlitt builds a bridge from Romantic-era playhouses to present-day classrooms and theaters. The reward is a renewed sense of how the plays think and feel through their people. In presenting Shakespeare as a maker of living characters rather than allegorical figures, the book invites readers to meet these presences as if newly alive, and to measure themselves against them.
Synopsis (Selection)
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays is a sequence of essays, first published in 1817, in which William Hazlitt surveys Shakespeare's drama through its people rather than plots. He outlines the distinctive temperament, motives, speech, and dramatic function of central and secondary figures, and he relates them to the plays' settings and structures across tragedy, comedy, history, and romance. Proceeding play by play, he summarizes situations, isolates contrasts between characters, and points to moments of theatrical emphasis that define them. The book's organizing aim is descriptive: to present how Shakespeare's characters appear to think and act on stage, and what patterns of feeling and behavior they establish within each work.
He begins with the Roman and political tragedies, where public action and private temperament are closely linked. In Coriolanus, he outlines the patrician soldier's uncompromising pride and the pressures of civic opinion. Julius Caesar is considered through the counterpoise of Brutus's scruple and Antony's rhetorical force, with attention to how the conspiracy unfolds through character. Antony and Cleopatra sets policy against passion, traced through the lovers' contrasting impulses. Timon of Athens illustrates disappointed liberality turning to misanthropy; Troilus and Cressida treats valor, craft, and inconstancy within a skeptical vision of war. Across these plays, Hazlitt emphasizes speech, decision, and public display.
Turning to the great tragedies, he devotes sustained attention to Hamlet. He characterizes the prince's reflective temper, tracing how meditation complicates duty and action. The essay sketches relations among Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, and the court, noting how soliloquies, the play within the play, and responses to chance events define each part. He describes the mingling of wit, melancholy, and sudden resolution across the acts, and he marks how observation and delay shape the tragedy's progress. Supporting figures such as Polonius, Laertes, and Horatio are treated in terms of their dramatic offices and the pressure they place on the protagonist.
In Othello, Hazlitt lays out the dynamics of trust, insinuation, and jealousy, concentrating on the contrast between Othello's frank honor and Iago's calculated design. He follows the chain of suggestions and proofs that shift belief and provoke catastrophe, and he distinguishes Desdemona's steadfastness from surrounding suspicion. Macbeth is presented as a study in ambition tempted and terrorized. The relation of the protagonists, the prompting of the supernatural, and the imagery of blood and night are noted as shaping forces. He traces how resolve and remorse alter from scene to scene, observing the compactness of the action and its moral atmosphere.
King Lear is treated as an extreme case of authority, ingratitude, and endurance. Hazlitt sets the king's rash division against the constancy of Cordelia, the Fool's commentary, and the Gloucester subplot, marking how storm and shelter parallel inner alteration. He follows the steady accumulation of trials and recognitions through to the play's concluding severity. Romeo and Juliet is considered in terms of youthful ardor and familial division, with attention to the speed, imagery, and counterpoint of private vows and public quarrels. He also remarks on tragedies of excess or satire, noting how Timon and Titus frame misrule or outrage.
Among the problem comedies, Measure for Measure is analyzed through questions of authority, chastity, and pardon, with Isabella and Angelo contrasted in principle and conduct. All's Well That Ends Well brings forward resourceful virtue in pursuit of reluctant merit, read through Helena's perseverance and Bertram's flight. The Merchant of Venice is positioned between comedy and gravity: Portia's wit and the casket trial are set against Shylock's bond, with courtroom rhetoric and legal form shaping outcomes. The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor exemplify domestic conflict and practical jest, where stratagem and social custom govern resolution.
In the high comedies of wit and disguise, Hazlitt highlights the interplay of temperament and festive setting. As You Like It presents pastoral ease and quick intelligence in Rosalind's management of affection. Twelfth Night balances affectionate error and self-love, from Viola's steady bearing to Malvolio's self-regard. Much Ado About Nothing exhibits sparring dialogue and overheard reports as agents of both division and union in Beatrice and Benedick's story. A Midsummer Night's Dream arranges lovers, artisans, and fairies into intersecting comic planes, with imagination directing change. Love's Labour's Lost is noted for verbal flourish and deferred closure within a courtly frame.
The history plays are surveyed for their portraits of rule, faction, and national character. In Richard II, ceremonial kingship and eloquence are contrasted with political competence. Henry IV, Parts I and II, develop the education of Prince Hal alongside Falstaff's comic vitality; Hazlitt traces the tavern world against the field of honor. Henry V concentrates on practical command and public rhetoric. The three parts of Henry VI and Richard III dramatize civil war and unscrupulous ascent, with stress on contending energies. King John, Richard III, and Henry VIII are discussed for their episodic design, speech, and emblematic situations.
The later romances are read as works of loss repaired and wonder achieved. Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest present trials, recognitions, and reconciliations, with heroines such as Imogen, Perdita, and Miranda shaping the humane turn. Prospero's art is treated as a framework for reflection and release. Pericles and other doubtful or collaborative pieces are noted briefly. The volume closes by reiterating Shakespeare's range of character and the consistency of dramatic truth across modes. Hazlitt's arrangement and summaries collectively convey the book's central purpose: to exhibit how Shakespeare's people generate the plays' movement, tone, and enduring impression.
Historical Context
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays was composed and published in London in 1817, in the midst of the British Regency (1811–1820) under the Prince Regent, later George IV. The city’s twin patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, dominated public entertainment, and the expanding periodical press fostered a new, argumentative reading public. Coffeehouses, debating societies, and institutions like the Surrey Institution formed hubs where politics, theatre, and philosophy converged. Postwar London reeled from economic dislocation, yet staged grand cultural display. Within this urban, commercial, and highly politicized setting, Hazlitt wrote criticism that treated Shakespeare’s characters as living agents, aligning classical drama with the urgent moral and civic questions of 1810s Britain.
The French Revolution of 1789 and the volatile British 1790s profoundly shaped Hazlitt’s political imagination. Britain’s Treason Trials of 1794, the Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices Acts of 1795, and periodic sedition prosecutions targeted radicals like Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke. Hazlitt, raised in a Unitarian dissenting milieu by the Reverend William Hazlitt, absorbed arguments for civil liberty and freedom of conscience. During the Peace of Amiens in 1802 he traveled to Paris, encountering the Napoleonic regime and the Louvre’s contested spoils. The book reflects these experiences by reading Shakespeare’s tyrants, demagogues, and insurgents through a lens sharpened by decades of revolutionary hope and political reaction.
The Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815) and their aftermath formed the immediate backdrop to publication. Britain’s maritime blockade, continental campaigns, and final victory at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 left a demobilized population and a strained economy. In 1815 Parliament enacted the Corn Law, prohibiting foreign wheat imports until prices rose above 80 shillings a quarter, protecting landowners while keeping bread dear. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora caused the Year Without a Summer in 1816; harvest failures, unemployment, and high grain prices intensified distress. London and provincial towns saw agitation: the Spa Fields mass meetings of November–December 1816, the Derbyshire Pentrich rising in June 1817, and widespread food riots. The government under Lord Liverpool responded with repression. Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth oversaw the suspension of Habeas Corpus (March 1817–January 1818), expanded the spy system (notably William Oliver, known as Oliver the Spy), and passed a new Seditious Meetings Act in 1817. Hazlitt brought out Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays in precisely this climate of surveillance and curbed assembly. His analysis of usurpation, lawful authority, conspiracy, and crowd psychology in plays like Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus resonated with readers living through loyalist mobilizations and radical assemblies. Without naming specific controversies, the book frames questions of conscience, legitimacy, and the abuse of power that haunted postwar Britain, offering Shakespearean paradigms for understanding a society balancing victory abroad with coercion at home.
Censorship and press prosecutions shaped the intellectual milieu in which Hazlitt wrote. Leigh Hunt, editor of the Examiner and a close associate, was convicted of libelling the Prince Regent in 1812 and imprisoned from 1813 to 1815. In December 1817, satirist William Hone faced three successive jury trials for blasphemous and seditious libel and was acquitted each time, a celebrated victory for public opinion. Theatre itself was policed by the Lord Chamberlain under the Licensing Act of 1737, and audiences had recently asserted power in the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden (1809). Hazlitt’s book channels these tensions by treating the stage as a public arena where authority and resistance play out, praising performances that energize civic feeling.
Rapid economic and social transformation marked the 1810s. The Luddite disturbances (1811–1816) in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire protested mechanized production’s impact on skilled labor and wages. The Speenhamland system of 1795 tied poor relief to bread prices, yet failed to prevent acute hardship during the wartime and postwar crises. Bread riots erupted repeatedly, notably in 1800–1801 and again amid the 1816 scarcity. These facts inform Hazlitt’s attention to Shakespeare’s commons: the Roman plebeians in Coriolanus, the citizens in Julius Caesar, and the recruits pressed by Falstaff in Henry IV become vehicles for reflecting on subsistence, dignity, and the ethics of governance in a stratified, market-driven society.
International settlement after Napoleon reinforced conservative order. The Congress of Vienna (September 1814–June 1815), led by Metternich with British Foreign Secretary Viscount Castlereagh, restored dynasties and drew a balance of power. The Holy Alliance (1815) pledged monarchs of Russia, Austria, and Prussia to uphold Christian legitimacy; Britain cooperated pragmatically through the Concert of Europe. This diplomatic architecture coincided with domestic retrenchment: loyalist associations flourished, reform petitions met resistance, and national security rhetoric justified surveillance. Hazlitt’s readings of Richard III and Macbeth, focused on usurpation, fear, and statecraft, mirror debates over legitimacy and reason of state that underwrote the European restoration and British executive policy.
Theatres and print culture expanded Shakespeare’s reach in ways that shaped Hazlitt’s method. Drury Lane, rebuilt after the 1809 fire and reopened in 1812, and Covent Garden, rebuilt in 1809, staged star-driven repertory. Edmund Kean’s breakthrough as Shylock on 26 January 1814 at Drury Lane, followed by Richard III, Hamlet, and Othello, sharpened public arguments about tradition versus innovation, and class inflected taste. Meanwhile, widely circulated editions by Johnson, Steevens, and Malone (notably the 1803–1813 Johnson–Steevens–Reed iterations) fed a broader reading public. Hazlitt’s book, grounded in playhouse immediacy yet speaking to solitary readers, reflects a culture where civic judgment was exercised both in the pit and on the page.
The book functions as a social and political critique by translating Regency conflicts into moral inquiry. Hazlitt foregrounds conscience against expediency, exposing how power cloaks itself in ceremony, how crowds can be flattered or bullied, and how poverty warps justice. His sympathetic treatment of commoners and his suspicion of courtly cant implicitly challenge oligarchic privilege under the Corn Laws, emergency powers, and censorship. By making Shakespeare’s characters arbiters of ethical life, he indicts a system that prizes rank over merit and force over persuasion. The result is a sustained interrogation of class division, repression, and public virtue in postwar Britain, articulated through historical parallels rather than overt polemic.
