1st Edition

Shakespeare's Feminine Endings Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies

By Philippa Berry Copyright 1999
    212 Pages
    by Routledge

    212 Pages
    by Routledge

    Philippa Berry draws on feminist theory, postmodern thought and queer theory, to challenge existing critical notions of what is fundamental to Shakespearean tragedy. She shows how, through a network of images clustered around feminine or feminized characters, these plays 'disfigure' conventional ideas of death as a bodily end, as their figures of women are interwoven with provocative meditations upon matter, time, the soul, and the body. The scope of these tragic speculations was radical in Shakespeare's day; yet they also have a surprising relevance to contemporary debates about time and matter in science and philosophy.

    Chapter 1 Disfigured Endings; Chapter 2 Double Dying and Other Tragic Inversions, Romeo, Juliet; Chapter 3 Echoic Language and Tragic Identity, Hamlet; Chapter 4 Disclosing the Feminine Eye of Death, Othello; Chapter 5 Fortune’s Fools, Macbeth; Chapter 6 Cordelia’s Bond and Britannia’s Missing Middle, King Lear;

    Biography

    Berry, Philippa

    'An important approach to literary studies generally, asking us to think about the ways that secondary meanings and associations might reveal anxieties and equivocations below the surface of what we think we can hear.' - Times Literary Supplement