Critical Survey

butcher They are all in order, and march toward us.

cade But then are we are in order when we are Most out of order.

The article establishes that Stevenson cast his Richard III in the same mold as his iconic pirate Long John Silver, and that both characters acquired some of their menacing vitality from Stevenson's one-legged friend and collaborator William Ernest Henley. More broadly, Stevenson's historical novel presents a corrective to the top-down perspective of the Shakespearean history play or rather its conscription by Victorian ‘Great Man’ historiography. The Black Arrow takes aim at the ‘Kings and Battles’ school of history by demonstrating that the reigns of the former and the outcomes of the latter often hinge on the unsung contributions of people who – due to their age, gender, class status, or ability – seldom feature in the official chronicles. Yet Stevenson also pathologises disability as a tragic predicament that must be overcome through heroic self-assertion. His novel thus redefines historical greatness while urging caution towards those who aspire to it.

In his first tetralogy, Shakespeare presents a starkly pessimistic counterpoint to Thomas Nashes’ enthusiastic celebration of the early modern stage's renascence of chivalric ideals. Figures like Talbot – emblems of an older chivalric order – fade into irrelevance as their lofty self-conceptions clash with the cold pragmatism of a new political world: their outdated virtues are received with apathy by a rising generation of Machiavellian courtiers such as Richard III. As such, Shakespeare's portrayal of these older characters represents an irreparable disconnect between the medieval past and his own early modern present. England's defeat by France – a painful emblem of his time – is transformed from a straightforward military failure into a symptom of inexorable decline: Norbert Elias's “civilizing process”, framed as a moral unraveling rather than material progress. By sidestepping a blunt, mortifying reckoning with England's inadequacies against French power, Shakespeare's narrative becomes elusive and layered – less a chronicle of events than a haunting act of traumatography.

Shakespeare's Richard III, like his other plays, aims to expose the flaws and shortcomings of the real world. This article adopts the perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism based on the theoretical framework developed by Chinese scholar Nie Zhenzhao to argue that Richard's ethical predicament arises from both internal and external factors within the play's ethical context. It analyses Richard's ethical identities and the motivations behind his irrational ethical choices, highlighting the potential consequences of disregarding ethical principles for individual gain. Additionally, it discusses Shakespeare's belief in human nature, exemplified through Richard's ethical consciousness and the moral emotions demonstrated by other characters. Finally, the article explores Shakespeare's ethical tendencies, emphasising his ideal of restoring sound ethical values through the portrayal of characters and plot arrangements in the play.

In his first tetralogy, Shakespeare interrogates his age's faith in technological progress as a triumph of the rational over the superstitious. In 1 Henry VI and Richard III, he dramatises an epistemological aporia: the overloading of the rational summons forth a future of ghosts. In keeping with Derrida's mystical foundation of law, the imposition of the material, more immediately represented as the gunpowder technology in 1 Henry VI, creates ruptures in meaning that resist assimilation into rational discourse. This material excess lingers into a putatively rational age in Richard III, where confidence in historical progress is consistently frustrated by representational enigmas. Even Richard, the play's arch-rationalist, finds himself unnerved by the ghostly other that fractures his carefully constructed economy of reason. Rather than reaching self-sufficiency, then, Shakespeare's vision of technological modernity remains inextricably bound to its repressed counterpart: the very superstition it seeks to erase.

Romeo and Juliet (1597) is the most famous romantic tragedy written by William Shakespeare. Like other Shakespearean plays, it offers complicated personalities whose psychic intentions and motivations can only be unveiled through a deep psychoanalytic reading. As such, this article is an attempt to analyse the play in the light of Lacanian psychoanalytic theories such as the phallus, the Other, the split subject, objet a and the masquerade. We argue that while Juliet's faked death initially appears as an act of rebellion against the oppressive structures of her male-dominated society, it ultimately transforms her into a passive and silenced object of beauty, admired and objectified by both Renaissance patriarchal society and contemporary audiences. Through this portrayal, Shakespeare invites readers and audiences to reflect on how women's identities were shaped and constrained by Renaissance social expectations.

The weakening of the chorus destabilises its symbiotic, triadic nexus with action and audience. In Hamlet, however, Shakespeare rejuvenates this quondam bond and strengthens and materialises this reciprocal connection between the chorus and the audience through the categorical utilisation of the chorus. Because of the sophistication of the Shakespearean audience, the chorus is designed to satisfy the varied demands of the privileged and the plebeian. Therefore, in Hamlet, a flattering chorus enchants a sophisticated audience, with vestiges of the classical chorus remaining; the privileged audience is consciously educated by the choral performance, while the vulgar audience can be musically inspired by the poetic chorus. Shakespeare innovatively revamps the chorus to recruit audiences of all stripes, and even for the vulgars, the chorus could awaken the ‘latent poetry’ therein. Moreover, in the process, the hazy subjective consciousness of the vulgars as ‘the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals’, is enlightened. Shakespeare revives the tragedy of humanity by contemporising the traditional elements.

This article is a reassessment of Timon of Athens as a cynical critique of the ethics of economy and the destruction of human relations. Contextualising the play in early modern gift economies and indebted patronage, the play states that Shakespeare plays out the disappointment of mutual trust in a culture that relied on symbolic exchange and the display of virtue. The moral and philosophical price of betrayal in a morally bankrupt society is dramatised when Timon falls in a civic ideal as a misanthropic exile. The paper combines the insights of Stoic philosophy with economic anthropology and affect theory to analyze the disintegration of moral coherence and social definition, as indicated by the formal fragmentation of the play, its allegorical characters and its rhetorical surplus. Through following the tension between the spectacle of the mass and inner disillusionment, the article reveals Timon of Athens as an incredibly contemporary tragedy, one that reveals the weakness of generosity and the destructive possibility of an economy in which generosity becomes meaningless and insignificant like something under control.