Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos [Paperback]

Focusing on Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, the four main tragedies and Antony and Cleopatra, the author examines two models of nature in Renaissance culture, one hierarchical and the other contrarious.This text argues that there were two models of nature in Renaissance culture, one in which everything has an appointed place, the other showing nature as a tense system of interacting opposites, liable to sudden collapse, such as the world of Shakespeare's tragedy.This text argues that there were two models of nature in Renaissance culture, one in which everything has an appointed place, the other showing nature as a tense system of interacting opposites, liable to sudden collapse, such as the world of Shakespeare's tragedy.Dr. McAlindon argues that there were two models of nature in Renaissance culture, one hierarchical, in which everything has an appointed place, the other contrarious, showing nature as a tense system of interacting opposites, liable to sudden collapse. This latter model applies to the whole of Shakespeare's tragedy. It can be seen in the characterization, the settings and the imagery of the tragedies, which the author analyzes in chapters devoted to Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.1. Introduction: 'Nature's fragile vessel'; 2. A medieval approach: Chaucer's tale of love and strife; 3. Romeo and Juliet; 4. Julius Caesar; 5. Hamlet; 6. Othello; 7. King Lear; 8. Macbeth; 9. Antony and Cleopatra. The model McAlindon offers has several advantages. It greatly enlarges the Elizabethan world model as outlined by several scholars in the 1940s and 1950s, a picture so incomplete in explaining the disintegration of the individual and society in Shakespeare's tragedies that later scholars assumed that all premodern conceptions of natural order are of little relevance. McAlindon is anxious that we realize how deeply indebted Shakespeare was to his own time's cultural inheritance....By far the mosl³»