Playwriting & Screenwriting, Playwriting, English Drama - 16th-17th Century - Elizabethan & Jacobean Eras - Shakespeare - Literary Criticism, U.S. & Canadian Drama - Literary Criticism
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Overview
In O'Neill's Shakespeare, Normand Berlin explores the relationship of William Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill through detailed, often surprising, intertextual readings of the two great playwrights' work. In the first book-length study of this crucial literary and dramatic relationship, Berlin probes far beyond the usual listing of allusions and references. This is the exploration of an "essential, basic, even natural" connection, in which Shakespeare is shown to have fundamentally shaped O'Neill's creative imagination. Following O'Neill's career chronologically, Berlin divides his study into two parts. The "first career" (culminating in Mourning Becomes Electra) is explored through recurring themes that evoke Shakespeare: the sea, black and white, and the family. O'Neill's "second career" (from Ah! Wilderness until the last plays) is examined through Shakespearean genre classifications: comedy, history, tragedy, and tragicomedy. Though always grounded in close textual readings, Berlin's analysis spirals outward to encompass O'Neill's artistic and psychological development and touches on the questions of tradition, transcendence, and human nature inevitably raised when such literary connections across history are drawn.Book Details
Published
December 31, 1993
Publisher
Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c1993.
Pages
280
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780472104697