Overview

The technological advances of the past several decades have provided us with unprecedented access to a large portion of Shakespeare's canon on film for viewing and reviewing. Now, instead of wrestling with Shakespeare on the page, the average person with access to YouTube or Netflix or Amazon can inexpensively experience Shakespeare as he was meant to be experienced, in performance. Still, for the everyman or everywoman, Shakespeare is a challenge. The language can be daunting, the narratives can be convoluted, and the context of the actions unfamiliar to the average audience. What seems lacking in spite of the volumes of scholarly books that line the library shelves are a sufficient number of resources for the everyman/woman who feels encouraged to engage more deeply with Shakespeare through today's filmic treatments. It is to this audience and end that this book is devoted. Shakespeare's Villains: great and small uses Shakespeare's villains as the unifying element to introduce and explore many (not all) of Shakespeare's dramas. Why villains? Because they are fun and fascinating, because they represent some of Shakespeare's most vividly drawn characters, and because they invite discussion of themes such as the nature of justice and of evil that are as relevant today as they were in Shakespeare's day. Harold Bloom, the noted Shakespeare scholar, credited Shakespeare with inventing the human. By this he means that Shakespeare has created characters that reflect human nature with a range of virtues and vices, filled with ambiguities and contradictions. No where is this more consistently obvious than in the villains he created. This book groups the Shakespeare's villains into several broad categories based on what drives their villainy. The first category is the 'revenger, probably the most common villainous character in Elizabethan/Jacobian drama. Following this are the usurpers, the traitors, the villainous women, and finally, miscellaneous miscreants, mobs, minions and a monster.

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