Shakespeare's Labored Art: Stir, Work, and the Late Plays articles

Recent articles from Shakespeare's Labored Art: Stir, Work, and the Late Plays

Preface.
January 1, 1999... This book originally saw life in 1982 in the form of an article, "'Stir' and Work in Shakespeare's Last Plays," which was published in Studies in English Literature. But it was only after 1990 that the idea of Shakespeare's labored art,...

Work and Shakespeare's age.(Chapter 1)
January 1, 1999... The history of labor in Shakespeare's age begins with the Bible and the impact of religious doctrine on successive generations. As Jacques Le Goff has shown, "Christianity did offer a spiritual approach to labor, a veritable theology of...

From Hamlet to Timon of Athens: work in Shakespeare's later plays.(Chapter 2)
January 1, 1999... Shakespeare's major tragedies constitute a watershed for our subject. Before 1604, Shakespeare's most sustained portrayal of labor serves to counterpoint the aristocracy's freedom from work. Elliot Krieger establishes this fact with reference...

Pericles.(Chapter 3)
January 1, 1999... At the beginning of Pericles, when Antiochus likens his Daughter to "this fair Hesperides,/With golden fruit, but dangerous to be touch'd" (I. i. 27-28), he identifies the myth that the Prince of Tyre has used to express his desire for her:...

Cymbeline.(Chapter 4)
January 1, 1999... In the early acts of Cymbeline, work is espoused by the play's villains--the Queen, Jachimo, and Cloten. Wickedly bent on incapacitating or killing her step-daughter Imogen and making her boorish son Cloten heir to her husband's throne, the...

The Winter's Tale.(Chapter 5)
January 1, 1999... In Cymbeline, Shakespeare depicts the breeding of children as a kind of work. That continues to be the case in The Winter's Tale. "This has been some stair-work," the Old Shepherd judges when he finds the abandoned babe Perdita--"some...

The Tempest.(Chapter 6)
January 1, 1999... Critics have often considered the opening scene of The Tempest to be a paradigm of the perilous state of existence and the range of moral reactions to sudden trial and threatened death. (1) Shakespeare presents timely labor not only as the...

King Henry VIII.(Chapter 7)
January 1, 1999... In the previous chapter, the notion of "working" things "That bear a weighty and serious brow" was taken from the Prologue of King Henry VIII and applied to Shakespeare's depiction of Prospero's troubled ("beating") mind in order to...

The Two Noble Kinsmen.(Chapter 8)
January 1, 1999... At the beginning of The Two Noble Kinsmen, an undeniable call to perform the work of war produces in Theseus the troubled mind associated with Prospero and King Henry VIII. Even as Theseus and Hippolyta are in progress to their wedding, three...

Shakespeare's labored art.(Chapter 9)
January 1, 1999... We have seen that Shakespeare, beginning with Coriolanus and Timon of Athena (but especially with Pericles), incorporated numerous multivalent images of labor into his work. This dramatic representation encompasses physical labor of several...