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older narratives and Neoplatonising them. Michelangelo’s poems number, in complete and fragmentary forms, some 302, and contain several groups addressed to Cavalieri: according to the edition by Enzo Noè Girardi (1960), they are Nos 56–62, 72–84, 88–98, 101–108 and 259–260. At the same time, between 1534 and 1547, when she died, aged fifty-seven, Michelangelo wrote poems to
concerns as a distinctly temporal phenomenon. This seems to me perfectly appropriate, and not only as a necessary reassessment of Shakespeare’s place in contemporary culture. Perhaps more than for any other Shakespeare play, the legacy of Julius Caesar is bound to time and temporality, and not only because of its historical self-consciousness. As a classroom text the play has become a kind of memorial to
One of the stories Shakespeare tells in Antony and Cleopatra is a political story of regime change, the translatio imperii that marks in geographical terms the progressive shift, historically, of the centre of geo-political and geo-cultural imperial power steadily westwards. Alexandria's fall is Rome's rise. Ordering his lieutenant, ‘Go forth, Agrippa, and begin the fight’, Caesar is announcing a new global settlement, ‘The time of universal peace is near’ (4.6.1,5) – prematurely, as it turns out, since, ironically, the battle he orders
In Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare marks the passage of time ‘with great precision’; why, then, can’t commentators ‘agree such a seemingly elementary chronological point as the number of days the plot covers’? 1 P.A. Daniel reckoned the action concluded on the sixth day; 2 John Munro argued for fewer than six; 3 Caroline Spurgeon 4 and G.B. Harrison 5 counted five; Harley
Shakespeare and his contemporaries grew up in a world caught between two irreconcilable, adversarial views of existence. One of the principal artifacts of the collision between the Catholic and Protestant cosmologies – indeed, its most pervasive aspect, inescapable as time itself – was the existence of two rival calendars. During Shakespeare’s lifetime Julius Caesar’s old
In 1992 Graham Bradshaw wrote,‘Although it is factitious and distracting, the theory or myth of ‘double time’ is still respectfully trundled out in every modern scholarly edition of Othello … It has been as long-lived as Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear which held the stage for a century and a half and, like that adaptation, deserves to be firmly laid to rest.’ 1
A brief poem about Cixous’s encounter with a feather in the author’s garden. This closing piece picks up motifs of the garden, the secret, and the relation between human and non-human animals (especially birds) developed over the course of the book.
This book joins together Shakespeare and Proust as the great writers of love to show that love is always anachronistic, and never more so when it is homosexual. Drawing on Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and Levinas and Deleuze, difficult but essential theorists of the subject of ‘being and time’ and ‘time and the other’, it examines why speculation on time has become so crucial within modernity. Through the related term ‘anachronism’, the book considers how discussion of time always turns into discussion of space, and how this, too, can never be quite defined. It speculates on chance and thinks of ways in which a quality of difference within time—heterogeneity, anachronicity—is essential to think of what is meant by ‘the other’. The book examines how contemporary theory considers the future and its relation to the past as that which is inescapable in the form of trauma. It considers what is meant by ‘the event’, that which is the theme of all post-Nietzschean theory and which breaks in two conceptions of time as chronological.
what grounds the place and time ‘which speaks’ might be larger than or otherwise different from the place and time which ‘is spoken.’ 4 At no point in his discussion does Weimann deploy the vocabulary of ‘trafficking’ or ‘intertextuality’, although from the very outset he is preoccupied with the ‘interaction of diverse modes of playing’, whose intricacies commingle ‘with the representation of character’. 5 What drives Weimann’s complex argument is the distinction between ‘literacy
to the play by David Womersley. 7 Lake’s account is, of course, plausible, but that it is the Bastard who should pronounce on the state of England cannot easily be tied down exclusively to an event that was, by the time of the appearance of Shakespeare’s play, some six or seven years old. Elizabeth’s excommunication, and the Catholic claim that she was Henry VIII’s illegitimate daughter, might also be what a ‘politically sentient or aware member of the audience’ perceived, and if so, then