Shakespeare's Possible Worlds

Simon Palfrey offers a new way of understanding Shakespeare's playworlds, with piercingly original readings of language, scenes, and characters.

Simon Palfrey (Author)

9781107058279, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 May 2014

392 pages
23.3 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.69 kg

'… unlike any other monograph in Shakespeare criticism published recently … The intellectual labour that went into [this book] is dazzling. Ideas from literature, literary criticism, art history, fine arts, film, science, religion, rhetoric, philosophy, and new media abound, plunging the reader into an unexpected reading experience.' Goran Stanivukovic, Saint Mary's University, Nova Scotia

New methods are needed to do justice to Shakespeare. His work exceeds conventional models, past and present, for understanding playworlds. In this book, Simon Palfrey goes right to the heart of early modern popular drama, revealing both how it works and why it matters. Unlike his contemporaries, Shakespeare gives independent life to all his instruments, and to every fraction and fragment of the plays. Palfrey terms these particles 'formactions' - theatre-specific forms that move with their own action and passion. Palfrey's book is critically daring in both substance and format. Its unique mix of imaginative gusto, thought experiments, and virtuosic technique generates piercing close readings of the plays. There is far more to playlife than meets the eye. Influenced by Leibniz's visionary original model of possible worlds, Palfrey opens up the multiple worlds of Shakespeare's language, scenes, and characters as never before.

Part I: 1. Where is the life?
2. Purposes
3. Embryologies
4. Shakespeare the impossible
5. Popular theatre and possibility
6. Shakespeare v. actor
7. Formactions
8. Playing to the plot
9. Middleton
10. Jacobean comi-tragedy
11. Everyman tyrant
Part II: 12. The monadic playworld
13. The truth of anachronism
14. Possible history: Henry IV
15. Anti-rhetoric
16. Falstaff
17. Scenes within scenes
18. Strange mimesis
19. How close should we get?
20. Metaphysics and playworlds
21. Pyramids of possible worlds
Part III: 22. Perdita's possible lives
23. A life in scenes
24. Scene as joke: Much Ado
25. Buried lives: Macbeth
26. The rape of Marina
27. Life at the end of the line: Macbeth
28. Dying for life: Desdemona
Epilogue: life on the line.

Subject Areas: Drama & performing [Children's / Teenage YND], Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature & literary studies [D]