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Overview
This book is an inquiry, through Measure for Measure, into Shakespeare's understanding of drama as a vehicle for social reform. It examines an assumption central to Shakespeare's inherited humanist tradition: that literature, and particularly drama, is capable of promoting a better society and it finds Shakespeare interrogating this assumption, asking whether drama that has been fashioned according to reformist principles of the great humanist educator Erasmus can, after all, achieve the remediating effects it seeks. Shakespeare explored this question in Measure for Measure at a time when the humanist consensus of roughly a century's duration in English culture seemed about to be eclipsed by a hardening of the positions of people who held opposing views on social issues.Book Details
Published
April 30, 2000
Publisher
Newark : University of Delaware Press ; c2000.
Pages
192
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780874136715