📖 William Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare
By:Richard Hillman
Published on 1993 by Twayne Pub

Are they comedies, romances, tragedies, or satires? Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, All's Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure so clearly resist conventional genre classification and reductive critical schemes that they have come to be known as his |problem plays.| In one of the few books in recent years to take on these notoriously slippery texts as a group, Richard Hillman elegantly turns that artificial categorization to critical advantage, showing us that this radical instability of genre is not an obstacle but an invitation to understanding, and that it frames human existence itself as a tableau of shape-changing uncertainties. In these three works, Hillman explains, the dramatist played with, not according to, the rules of genre; each is an exquisitely volatile fusion of traditional romance material and realistic style, comic resolutions and tragic tendencies. In close, detailed readings of the plays, Hillman shows us how each creates a turbulent world of circulating desire, misplaced blame, moral instability, and pervasive self-deception.