Eight tragedies of Shakespeare: a Marxist study: New Edition PDF
Preview Eight tragedies of Shakespeare: a Marxist study: New Edition
About Victor Kiernan Victor Kiernan (1913-2009) ranks among Britain's most distinguished historians. After a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a long period spent teaching in India, he joined the History Department at the University of Edinburgh, where he served as professor of modern history from 1970 until his retirement. Over the course of his life he authored such works as Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare, The Lords of Human Kind, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, The Duel in European History and numerous others, as well as translating two volumes of Urdu poetry. Other works by Victor Kiernan available from Zed Books Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age America: From VYnite Settlement to Global Hegemony Ei!1lt Tragedes of Shakespeareinoo 1 13111!2015 1813 1 Ei!1lt Tragedes of Shakespeareinoo 2 13111!2015 18131 EIGHT TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE VICTOR KIERNAN Introduction by Terry Eagleton Zed Books LONDON Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare.indd 3 13/1112015 18:131 1 This edition of Eight Tragedies of Slwkespeare was ftrst published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SEll SRR, UK. wwwzedbooks.co.uk Original erution published byVerso Books in 1996. Copyright © Heather Kiernan, 1996 Introduction ©Terry Eagleton, 2016 The right of Victor Kiernan to be identifted as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. Cover designed by Michael OswelL All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, -without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78360-735-8 hb ISBN 978-1-78360-688-7 pb ISBN 978-1-78360-689-4 pdf ISBN 978-1-78360-690-0 epub ISBN 978-1-78360-691-7 mobi Ei!1lt Tragedes of Shakespeareinoo 4 13111!2015 18131 To N.S.K. Bear free and patient thoughts. -King Lear IV vi. SO Ei!1lt Tragedes of Shakespeareinoo 5 13111!2015 18131 Ei!1lt Tragedes of Shakespeareinoo 6 13111!2015 18131 Contents Introduction by Terry Eagleton IX Foreword Xl PART I Programmatic PART II Introductory 1 The Condition of England 19 2 The Theatre 25 3 Shakespeare and Tragedy 29 4 The Tragic Road 37 5 The Others 42 PART III The Plays 1 Julius Caesar (1598-99) 53 2 Hamlet (1600-D1) 63 3 Othello (1603-D4) 88 4 King Lear (1605-D6) 104 5 Macbeth (1606) 124 6 Timon of Athens (1606-08) 140 7 Antony and Cleopatra (1606-08) 154 8 Coriolanus (1608) 173 PART IV Tragic Themes 1 The Hero 191 2 Villains and Revengers 206 3 Man and Superman 214 4 War 222 5 Political Shadows 228 I Ei!1lt Tragedes of Shakespeareinoo 7 13111!2015 18131 6 Women and Men 239 7 Religion and Pliilosopliy 252 8 Endings and Beginnings 264 Bibliography 275 Index 283 Ei!1lt Tragedes of Shakespeareinoo 8 13111!2015 1813 1 Introduction by Terry Eagleton Marxist criticism of Shakespeare begins with Marx himself, who as a formidably erudite scholar in the great heritage of European hwnanism had a passion for his work and quotes liberally from it in his own writings. His comments, however, tend to be as brief as they are perceptive; whereas what this absorbing study has to offer is a set of detailed, sustained analyses of the major tragedies, all set firmly in their historical context and properly unafraid to raise that most embarrassing and impolite of all English subjects, the question of social class. Kiernan begins by noting the complex relations between the extraordinary flourishing of tragedy in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and the fact that it took place in an era of profound historical transfonnation. One might add to his remarks that this relation is not confined to that particular moment. There have been four major outbreaks of tragic art in the history of Europe - ancient Greece, the age of Shakespeare, the moment of French neo-classical tragedy and the modern period from Ibsen to Arthur Miller - and all of them occur at a time of momentous transition. More particularly, tragedy tends to emerge at a point where a traditional order is still up and running but is increasingly in conflict with forces which threaten to undo it. The ancien regime is on the wane but still powerfully influential, while the emergent world is increasingly buoyant but unable as yet to oust it. It is not hard, for example, to see ancient Greek tragedy as staging just such a collision between the realm of myth, gods and heroes, and the gradual dawning of a new fonn of enlightened rationality which subjects that sacred sphere to critical interrogation. Oedipus is a key figure here, as a character who must deploy his rational powers to discover the fearful secret of his origin, but who in doing so becomes tragically aware of just how much eludes the conscious mind and shades off into darkness. As for French neo classical drama, Lucien Goldmann has brilliantly demonstrated in The Hidden God how the silence of God in an increasingly secular, rationalised world does not render the intolerable burden of his presence any less painful. Modernism, it has been claimed, arises from a process of modernisation which is still incomplete. It is when the modern is still alarmingly or Ei!1lt Tragedes of Shakespeareinoo 9 13111!2015 1813 1
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