Shakespeare reveals his interest in the popular theme of courtly love, which came to him as an established tradition, in a number of his plays. This tradition can be traced back to the troubadours of Provence who, during the Crusades, appeared as a class of knights whose chief values were valor, courtesy, and knightly worth. From the troubadours came the idea of love service: every knight must have a lady whose relationship to him was parallel to that between him as a vassal and his lord. This love service came.to be looked upon as leading to moral dignity and true chivalry and it was performed by the knight for another 's wife. An elaborate set of rules grew up describing the nature of courtly love and the attitudes and responses of both the knight and the lady. From Provence courtly love spread to Italy where it was endowed with spiritual and philosophical aspects by Cardinal Bembo, Dante, and Petrarch, for example. By the time that the tradition reached England it had been modified, added to, and conventionalized in its passage through Italian and Northern French literature. A number of Shakespeare's predecessors made important contributions to the courtly theme: Chaucer suggested its evil consequences, Castiglione established the rules to guide the perfect courtier and the lady, and emphasized marriage as the only acceptable end of courtly love, Sidney combined the medieval chivalric and the classical pastoral traditions in an imaginary setting where chivalric ideals always triumphed over evil, and Spenser added a strong moral note, recognizing the physical as well as the spiritual aspects of love in his emphasis on virtue and constancy. By the time that Shakespeare began to deal with courtly love, courtesy meant more than the medieval idea of a willingness to undertake love-service. It meant gentlemanly conduct, refined manners, intellect, and a high moral purpose. When Shakespeare took up the courtly theme, it had been refined considerably. In an early treatment of the theme, Shakespeare satirizes the folly connected with courtly love and the courtly ideal. This is seen in Love's Labour's Lost where the ladies only toy with the men and where love is not triumphant. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona the satirical vein is continued and the weaknesses inherent in courtly love are exposed in the struggle between love and friendship. As You Like It is another play in this group where courtly love is satirized. Rosalind becomes the spokesman for sincerity and faithfulness in love and condemns artificiality and sham. In a group of plays which treats the courtly theme as comedy (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Henry IV (Part I), and Henry V) Shakespeare is more fun-loving and gentler in his presentation than he was in the plays where courtly love was treated satirically. No serious issue mars the comic atmosphere as we see the humorous side of love in each of these plays. In another group, Romeo and Juliet, The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline, we see the strength derived from romantic love which is presented as a genuine passion leading to permanence. Such love gives strength in adversity and though love ends tragically in Romeo and Juliet and nearly ends tragically in the other two plays, we see that it enables the lovers to meet their fate, even when it is death. Shakespeare reverses the theme in the following plays: All's Well that Ends Well, Much Ado about Nothing, Measure for Measure, and Richard II. In the first three the lady uses a trick to win her man, and in Richard II she pleads for love but is rebuffed. The scheming and trickery of the first three plays in this group brings the theme close to unpleasantness and degrades the courtly lover. Shakespeare here probes the realistic aspects of the theme and shows men and women as they really are. This treatment is followed through in the tragedies Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, and Othello, where the unpleasant, realistic aspects of courtly love lead naturally to tragedy. In these tragedies the gaiety and idealism of the conventions of courtly love have disappeared completely and the true possibilities have been exposed. After these plays, courtly love no longer could supply a valid pattern for loving and living. In The Tempest the theme is subverted and love is seen as the force of renewal in the world. The lovers are no longer of interest as courtly lovers but appear as mature people whose marriage becomes the hope of a better world. The conventional suffering for love is gone and in its place is a mature, reasoned attitude to the most basic of man's emotions. With this play Shakespeare has come all the way from artificiality and sham to a lasting, satisfying type of love. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Orientador : Rosemary Arrojo / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-16T01:15:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Esteves_LenitaMariaRimolli_M.pdf: 3442223 bytes, checksum: 29c4bd6d4125e61ee8f4cea39a549531 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1992 / Resumo: Esta tese tem como objeto quatro traduções da tragédia Macbeth, de William Shakespeare. Enfocando principalmente as três bruxas e sua relaçãoo com o destino de Macbeth, a tese se propoe a verificar as diferenças de tratamento que cada uma das traduções deu a esta questão. Partindo de uma concepção pós-estruturalista de tradução, segundo a qual a mesma é vista como uma transformação e nao como um mero transporte de significados, a tese serâ desenvolvida no sentido de se comparar as diferenças de configuraçbes dadas às bruxas e verificar quais seriam as consequencias dessas diferenças na consideração do texto da tragédia como um todo. Embasada em teorias que não consideram o texto como um receptáculo de significados a serem extraldos pelo leitor, esta tese pretende demonstrar que as bruxas configuradas em cada tradução são diferentes das demais, o que acaba fazendo com que as traduções se transformem em diferentes tragédias de Macbeth.Textos distintos que são fruto de diferentes leituras do "original". . A história do texto "original" de Macbeth serà analisada, com o objetivo de se demonstrar como este texto é fragmentado, tendo passado por várias transformaçbes até chegar à sua forma atual. Essa visão fragmentada do texto em questao ratificará a noção de "original" que será adotada neste trabalho, ou seja, que o "original" representa uma possibilidade de múltiplas leituras, e nãoo se apresenta como texto terminado, pronto, à espera de um leitor que o decifre corretamente / Abstract: Not informed. / Mestrado / Mestre em Linguística Aplicada

Shakespeare’s Shylock from the Merchant of Venice is a complex character who not only defies simple definition but also takes over a play in which he is not the titular character. How Shakespeare arrived at Shylock in the absence of a Jewish presence in early modern England, as well as what caused the playwright to humanize his villain when other playwrights had not is the subject of much debate. This thesis shows Shakespeare’s humanizing of Shylock as a blurring of the lines between Jews and Christians, and as such, a shift of usury from a uniquely Jewish problem to a human problem. This shift is then explicated in terms of a changing England in a time where economic necessity challenged religious authority and creating compassion for a Jew on the stage created compassion symbolically for Christian usurers as well.

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of the warrior-hero ideal as it evolves in Shakespeare's English and Roman plays, and its ultimate failure as a standard for exemplary conduct. What this study demonstrates is that the ideal of kingship that is developed in the English histories, especially in the Second Tetralogy, and which reaches its zenith in Henry V, is quite literally overturned in three Roman plays--Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. The method of determining this difference is a detailed analysis of these groups of plays. This analysis utilizes the body of Shakespearean criticism in order to note the almost total silence on what this study shows to be Shakespeare's growing disillusionment with the hero-king ideal and his final portrait of this ideal as a failure. It is the main conclusion of this study that in certain plays, and most particularly in the Roman plays, Shakespeare demonstrates a consciousness of something more valuable than political expediency and political legality. Indeed, the tragedy of these political heroes lies precisely in their allegiance to the standard of conduct of the soldier-king. Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus, among others, suffer defeat in their striving to capture a higher reality. This investigation demonstrates that the concept of honor has lost its value in the social matrix of political machinations.

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