Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays - Hardcover

Packer, Tina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307700399 ISBN 13: 9780307700391

Verlag: KNOPF, 2015

Über diesen Titel

Críticas:

Praise for Tina Packer s
WOMEN OF WILL
At once humanistic and grounded in the historical context of Elizabethan England . . . astute.
-Elizabeth Toohey, "Christian Science Monitor"
Fierce and witty.
-Broadway World
This work by the founding artistic director of the celebrated Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, is everything lovers of the Bard would want . . . Don t miss!
-Barbara s Picks, "Library Journal"
Fascinating . . . detailed . . . Her experience in the theater gives her book a hands-on dimension . . . her knowledgeable tracing of connections among the plays and parallels among characters is never less than compelling.
-Michiko Kakutani, "New York Times"
Packer recognizes in Shakespeare s full dramatic trajectory a great artist gaining an ever fuller understanding of both genders human identity . . . An important and fascinating addition to feminist literary criticism.
-Bryce Christensen, "Booklist" (Starred Review)
You have given me a sublime, healing gift . . . Rarely, if ever, in untold years of my own Shakespeare studies have I experienced a work that leaps from the page into my mind, heart, body, and soul with such luminous, revelatory vibrancy as your ruminations and revelations . . . To read your narrative of each play, to ponder the trajectory of Shakespeare's evolution in his understanding and portrayal of women, to enter into the tangled, interconnected historical and biographical connections and contexts of Shakespeare life with such precision and aliveness, and to surrender to the immense questions that matter most to us, of power, institutional and cultural structures, the realities of women in every era, the treasure of language, and the mysteries and powers of creativity itself, gave me illumination and pleasure and hope beyond what I can express here.
-Martha Andersen
A joy to read. The language is conversational - an easy tone that belies the depth to which Tina Packer is able to reach into the plays to unveil the evolution of Shakespeare's awareness of the power inherent in 'the feminine . . . This consummate lover of all things Shakespeare delivers a dazzling new message about Shakespeare's capacity to learn and grow from observations and interactions with women, and transmute these into characters that become more complex, more true, more powerful. "Women of Will "is destined to become one of the best-loved books about Shakespeare, never to be filed into the bookcase, always accessible in case of need.
-Tamar March, Founder, Arden Seminars, Inc.

Visceral and intellectual . . . A sparkling, insightful exploration of Shakespeare's words and world.
-"Kirkus""

Praise for Tina Packer s
WOMEN OF WILL
At once humanistic and grounded in the historical context of Elizabethan England . . . astute.
-Elizabeth Toohey, Christian Science Monitor
Fierce and witty.
-Broadway World
This work by the founding artistic director of the celebrated Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, is everything lovers of the Bard would want . . . Don t miss!
-Barbara s Picks, Library Journal
Fascinating . . . detailed . . . Her experience in the theater gives her book a hands-on dimension . . . her knowledgeable tracing of connections among the plays and parallels among characters is never less than compelling.
-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Packer recognizes in Shakespeare s full dramatic trajectory a great artist gaining an ever fuller understanding of both genders human identity . . . An important and fascinating addition to feminist literary criticism.
-Bryce Christensen, Booklist (Starred Review)
You have given me a sublime, healing gift . . . Rarely, if ever, in untold years of my own Shakespeare studies have I experienced a work that leaps from the page into my mind, heart, body, and soul with such luminous, revelatory vibrancy as your ruminations and revelations . . . To read your narrative of each play, to ponder the trajectory of Shakespeare's evolution in his understanding and portrayal of women, to enter into the tangled, interconnected historical and biographical connections and contexts of Shakespeare life with such precision and aliveness, and to surrender to the immense questions that matter most to us, of power, institutional and cultural structures, the realities of women in every era, the treasure of language, and the mysteries and powers of creativity itself, gave me illumination and pleasure and hope beyond what I can express here.
-Martha Andersen
A joy to read. The language is conversational - an easy tone that belies the depth to which Tina Packer is able to reach into the plays to unveil the evolution of Shakespeare's awareness of the power inherent in 'the feminine . . . This consummate lover of all things Shakespeare delivers a dazzling new message about Shakespeare's capacity to learn and grow from observations and interactions with women, and transmute these into characters that become more complex, more true, more powerful. Women of Will is destined to become one of the best-loved books about Shakespeare, never to be filed into the bookcase, always accessible in case of need.
-Tamar March, Founder, Arden Seminars, Inc.

Visceral and intellectual . . . A sparkling, insightful exploration of Shakespeare's words and world.
-Kirkus

"

Reseña del editor:

From one of the country’s foremost experts on Shakespeare and theatre arts, actor, director, and master teacher Tina Packer offers an exploration—fierce, funny, fearless—of the women of Shakespeare’s plays. A profound, and profoundly illuminating, book that gives us the playwright’s changing understanding of the feminine and reveals some of his deepest insights. Packer, with expert grasp and perception, constructs a radically different understanding of power, sexuality, and redemption.

Beginning with the early comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors), Packer shows thatShakespeare wrote the women of these plays as shrews to be tamed or as sweet little things with no definable independent thought, virgins on the pedestal. The women of the histories (the three parts ofHenry VI; Richard III) are, Packer shows, much more interesting, beginning with Joan of Arc, possibly the first woman character Shakespeare ever created. In her opening scene, she’s wonderfully alive—a virgin, true, sent from heaven, a country girl going to lead men bravely into battle, the kind of girl Shakespeare could have known and loved in Stratford. Her independent resolution collapses within a few scenes, as Shakespeare himself suddenly turns against her, and she yields to the common caricature of his culture and becomes Joan the Enemy, the Warrior Woman, the witch; a woman to be feared and destroyed . . .

As Packer turns her attention to the extraordinary Juliet, the author perceives a large shift. Suddenly Shakespeare’s women have depth of character, motivation, understanding of life more than equal to that of the men; once Juliet has led the way, the plays are never the same again. As Shakespeare ceases to write about women as predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the inside, embodying their voices, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any of his male characters. Juliet is just as passionately in love as Romeo—risking everything, initiating marriage, getting into bed, fighting courageously when her parents threaten to disown her—and just as brave in facing death when she discovers Romeo is dead. And, wondering if Shakespeare himself fell in love (Packer considers with whom, and what she may have been like), the author observes that from Juliet on, Shakespeare writes the women as if he were a woman, giving them desires, needs, ambition, insight.

Women of Will follows Shakespeare’s development as a human being, from youth to enlightened maturity, exploring the spiritual journey he undertook. Packer shows that Shakespeare’s imagination, mirrored and revealed in his female characters, develops and deepens until finally the women, his creative knowledge, and a sense of a larger spiritual good come together in the late plays, making clear that when women and men are equal in status and sexual passion, they can—and do—change the world.

Part master class, part brilliant analysis—Women of Will is all inspiring discovery.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: KNOPF
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0307700399
• ISBN 13: 9780307700391
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336