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Reviews

""A New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year"" ""This engaging study . . . finds common threads in the plays’ inner workings, most notably a delicate, calculated interplay between plot and personality."" * The New Yorker * ""Ambitious and intriguing. . . . An erudite and scholarly exploration of the Bard’s work."" * Kirkus Reviews * ""Lewis’s book offers so many fresh insights and well-turned phrases that I had to buy a new notebook to fit them all in.""---Philip Womack, The Spectator ""Taking on an analysis of what Shakespeare was attempting to achieve with his run of 10 tragedies requires not just a knowledge of the plays and the theories and speculations of all those critics and commentators who went before but also a robust hypothesis that brings something new to the table. Rhodri Lewis. . .manages to pull off this herculean task with some aplomb. . . . This book is a must for anyone interested in studying Shakespeare in any depth.""---Terry Potter,, The Letterpress Project ""Shakespeare’s Tragic Art is an important addition to the literature about Shakespearean tragedy and essential reading for those interested in the subject. It is more than that, however – it offers an insight into a way of understanding those mysteries of human existence that Shakespeare had some understanding of and passed on to us through his tragic dramas.""---Ralph Goldswain, No Sweat Shakespeare ""The best volume on the Bard I have read since Emma Smith’s This Is Shakespeare. . . . A valuable critical work that sees the Bard as a 'temperamental skepticist' whose mission is more diagnostic than it is didactic: this Shakespeare is of particular use in our current addiction to the blind alleys of dogma.""---Bill Marx, Arts Fuse ""Provocative, stimulating . . . Lewis ends by commending the freedom of interpretation that Shakespeare allows us, a freedom that entails a willingness to be open to his disturbance of our unthinking complacency.""---Paul Dean, New Criterion ""While keeping one foot firmly in historicism, [Lewis] also connects the tragedies to the modern sensibility that understands the human individual as observer and observed, both subject and object of the constructions of art. . . . Heidegger’s Weltbild here rubs shoulders with the Renaissance’s heritage of verba (words) and res (things). The resulting analysis is sharp, engaging, and surprisingly readable."" * Choice Reviews * ""An impressive display of scholarship. . . .[Lewis’s] targets are the ideas to which these characters adhere and the delusion that they can be authors of their own destinies. In the confinement of his characters, we recognise our own confinement too.""---Adrian Poole, Literary Review ""As cogent an account as I have seen of how the unique qualities of Shakespeare’s tragic characters, qualities which have often been treated as presciently modern in other studies, emerged out of early modern intellectual culture writ large. . . .Terrific.""---Curtis Perry, Review of English Studies ""Informed and perceptive.""---David Rowland, Australian Book Review ""In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, the author offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it – of what drew him toward tragic drama, and what makes his tragedies so very distinctive.""---David Marx, David Marx Book Reviews

Author Information

Rhodri Lewis teaches English at Princeton University. His previous books include Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton) and Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke.

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