Richard II (Wordsworth Classics) -

William Shakespeare

Wordsworth Editions

2013

144 páginas

4h 48m

ISBN-13: 9781840227208

Richard II is one of Shakespeare's finest works: lucid, eloquent, and boldly structured. It can be seen as a tragedy, or a historical play, or a political drama, or as one part of a vast dramatic cycle which helped to generate England's national identity. Today, to some of us, Richard II may appear conservative; but, in Shakespeare's day, it could appear subversive: "I am Richard II", declared an indignant Queen Elizabeth. Numerous recent revivals in the theatre and on screen have demonstrated the enduring power and poignancy of this drama of the downfall of an egoistic but pitiable monarch. Richard II is the seventeenth volume in the Wordsworth Classics Shakespeare Series, in which each volume has been freshly edited by Cedric Watts.

Resenhas (3)

5 (Perfeito)

"Always experimenting, Shakespeare composed 'Richard II' as an extended metaphysical lyric, which ougth to be impossible for a history play, but for Shakespeare everything is possible.

[The piece] studies the decline and fall of a remarkable poet, who happens also to be an inadequate human being, and a hopeless king. (...) His two roles are antithetical, so that his kingship diminishes even as his poetry improves.

(...) [He] wins not so much our sympathy as our reluctant aesthetic admiration for the dying fall of his cognitive music. (...) It is better to think of 'Richard II' as chronicle rather than tragedy, and of Richard himself neither as hero nor as villain but as victim, primarily of his own self-indulgence, yet also of the power of his imagination."

Harold Bloom: Shakespeare - The Invention of the Human, c. 16