Shakespeare and Mannerist Tradition: A Reading of Five Problem Plays
Cambridge University Press, 8/21/2008
EAN 9780521023719, ISBN10: 0521023718
Paperback, 212 pages, 23.5 x 15.6 x 1.4 cm
Language: English
This 1996 book offers an original approach to Shakespeare's so-called 'problem plays' by contending that they can be viewed as experiments in the Mannerist style. The plays reappraised here are Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. How can a term used to define a movement in art history be made relevant to theatrical analysis? Maquerlot shows how famous painters of sixteenth-century Italy cultivated structural ambiguity or dissonance in reaction to the classical canons of the High Renaissance. Close readings of Shakespeare's plays, from the period 1599 to 1604, reveal intriguing analogies with Mannerist art and the dramatist's response to Elizabethan formalism. Maquerlot concludes by examining Othello, which marks the end of Shakespeare's Mannerist experiments, and the less equivocal use of artifice in his late romances.
Introduction
1. The problem of Mannerism
2. From art to theatre
towards a definition of Mannerism
illustrations and commentaries
3. Mannerism in reaction to formalism
4. Julius Caesar and dramatic coquetry
5. Hamlet
optical effects
6. When playing is foiling
Troilus and Cressida
7. Mostrar l'arte
All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure
8.The end of the Mannerist moment.