Overview

For many theatergoers and readers, Shakespeare's lofty reputation as the world's greatest playwright has turned him into an intimidating, even a forbidding figure. In Shakespeare High and Low, Jeffrey Knapp helps us to understand and enjoy Shakespeare's plays by restoring Shakespeare's own sense of them as neither high culture nor low culture, but a potent amalgam of both. Only in recognizing Shakespeare's determination to connect with every social class in his theater can we begin to grasp how his plays have managed to thrill audiences for so many centuries and across so many cultures.

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9781399543705

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Reviews

Dramatic, energetic, humane, witty, able to appeal to a wide audience without ever compromising intelligence, nuance or sophistication - Jeffrey Knapp's new introduction to Shakespearean drama demonstrates many of the characteristics it cherishes in the plays it analyses. A wonderfully persuasive and accessible introduction to eleven of the best scripts ever written.--Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute and University of Birmingham Witty, learned, and above all humane, Shakespeare High and Low demonstrates that in casting Shakespeare as a paragon of high literary culture, modern readers have diminished his signal achievement: to speak across differences. Knapp introduces a Shakespeare who reveals the precarity and smallness of the certainties by which we live - a reckoning that brings us to laughter as well as tears.--Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Jeffrey Knapp is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of numerous awards for both scholarship and teaching, he has written extensively on Shakespeare, in An Empire Nowhere (1992), Shakespeare’s Tribe (2002), Shakespeare Only (2009) and Pleasing Everyone (2017).

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