A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (Paperback)

by Rene Girard (Author)

No customer reviews yet. Be the first.

List Price:	CDN$ 27.74
Price:	CDN$ 17.55 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details
	o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Usually ships within 4 to 6 weeks.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca. Gift-wrap available.

8 new from CDN$ 17.55 5 used from CDN$ 26.82

Frequently Bought Together

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Total List Price: CDN$ 91.19
Price For All Three: CDN$ 70.23

Some of these items ship sooner than the others. Show details

This item: A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare by Rene Girard
Usually ships within 4 to 6 weeks.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard
Usually ships within 4 to 6 weeks.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details
Violence and the Sacred by Ren� Girard
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.ca.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

The Girard Reader

by Rene Girard

5.0 out of 5 stars (7) CDN$ 20.76

The Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine

by Pope Benedict XVI

CDN$ 11.69

› Explore similar items

Product Details

Paperback: 376 pages
Publisher: St. Augustine's Press; Reprint edition (April 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1587318601
ISBN-13: 978-1587318603
Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15.2 x 3 cm
Shipping Weight: 454 g
Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #87,470 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Product Description

Book Description

In this ground-breaking work, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics turns to the major figure in English literature, William Shakespeare, and proposes a dramatic new reading of nearly all his plays and poems. The key to A Theater of Envy is Girard's novel reinterpretation of "mimesis." For Girard, people desire objects not for their intrinsic value, but because they are desired by someone else - we mime or imitate their desires. This envy - or "mimetic desire" - he sees as one of the foundations of the human condition.

Bringing such proocative and iconoclastic insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night's Dream from the status of a chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book abounds with novel and provocative interpretations: Shakespeare becomes "a prophet of modern advertising," and the threat of nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a brief, but brilliant aside in which an entirely new perspective is brought to the chapter on Joyce's Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus gives a lecture on Shakespeare. In Girard's view only Joyce, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, comes close to understanding the greatest of Renaissance playwrights.

Throughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare, Girard's prose is sophisticated, but contemporary, and accessible to the general reader.