In The Theater of Love

Many people believe only those with a Ph, D. in literature can understand Shakespeare. They would probably be surprised to learn, then, that he wrote his 36 plays for the shopkeepers, the housewives, the apprentices of London. These were ordinary people who eagerly paid their way into the Globe Theater and eventually made him a rich man. Though Shakespeare will certainly make you think, he was never a literary snob or an elitist. He knew how to use ordinary tools like character and plot as well as word to make his point. If you have a bit of imagination and pay attention to detail, you can understand Shakespeare. If you're willing to exercise those skills, In The Theater of Love will provide everything else to make 11 of his most popular plays accessible to you, regardless of your familiarity with British history, literary analysis, or Elizabethan culture. In clear, understandable language, these explanations of the major plays will help you comprehend exactly why Shakespeare's work remains timelessly inspiring and exceptional.

Shakespeare's major plays, the book argues, were forged on the anvil of desire. Taken from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the scene on the front cover where the fairy queen Titania passionately woos the rustic, Bottom, now bearing a head magically transformed into an ass's, says much about Shakespeare's view of love and desire. A parody of Ovid's fables about gods imposing their carnal passions on hapless mortals, it dramatizes desire's power to transform deformity into irresistible beauty. Like Ovid, however, Shakespeare also recognized desire's other manifestation in the selfish brutality that ignored the helplessness of others. Out of this duality came troubling questions about desire, love, and the human intersection with the divine. Though the Elizabethans admired antiquity, England's Christian culture struggled to accommodate pagan acceptance of the erotic. Shakespeare was no exception. Though early works imitate Ovid, his view of love becomes surprisingly rich and complex as he confronts the moral dynamics of desire. Because of this clash of cultural values, he carefully delineates the nature of good and evil, demonstrating why the same passions that can degrade can also enrich. A close reading of the major plays becomes a journey into the heart of desire that will challenge contemporary media's often simplistic and decidedly secular conception of love. Once you witness these dramas of love and desire, you begin to appreciate why his work continues to intrigue and delight his many devoted followers.

While each chapter references relevant scholarship to provide historical context and literary background, the author strives to be reassuringly knowledgeable without being intimidating. Since no assumption is made about the reader's familiarity with the plays, each chapter incorporates a brief summary of the main characters and the plot to provide context for the discussion that follows. Infrequent but useful reference is made to other authorities to elaborate or support an important idea, but those are never allowed to distract from the goal of explaining the text of a play or the book's developing viewpoint.