Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
David Scott Kastan is the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University. Among his books are Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (1982), Shakespeare after Theory (1999), and Shakespeare and the Book (2001). He has produced important scholarly editions of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part One, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus; and he edited the five-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (2006). He currently serves as one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare.Aimed especially at an undergraduate audience, Kastan combines deep historical learning, careful close reading, and a fast-paced prose style. The book also contains a steady stream of critical wisdom that I think scholars at any level could benefit from.
Kevin Curran, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
A sophisticated and erudite book.
Expository Times, Adam Trettel
David Scott Kastan's elegant and concise book, A Will to Believe: Shakespear and Religion, is based on a series of four Oxford lectures in honour of Stanley Wells...The elegance of the writing and intelligence of the commentary make these lectures continuously provocative, and a please to read.
Gerard Kilroy, The Times Literary Supplement
[A] brief, elegant book
David Womersley, Standpoint
Kastan's thoughtful, learned, and judicious readings leave us with genuinely new evaluations of what Shakespeare does and does not render visible, and make possible, in his extraordinary plays. A Will to Believe leaves us with a will to think, learn, and live more.
Julia Rienhard Lupton, Literature and History
Kastan writes compellingly of Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King John, Othello and The Merchant of Venice in agnostic terms while insisting on their numinous essence
Tiffany Taylor, The Times Higher Education
A Will to Believe is a substantial work by one of the major Shakespeareans of our time. It matches deft critical ability with proper scholarship, wide and deep learning with acute judgment.
Andrew Hadfield, Irish Times
[T]opics ... are handled with an incisive intelligence and adroitly deployed contextual scholarship which stimulate us into seeing these problems afresh. As a result, we finish the book understanding more acutely the complexities of religious life in Shakespeare's England, and appreciating more subtly the richly troubled religious world of his plays.
Paul Hammond, The Seventeenth Century
a brilliantly graceful book that everyone interested in religion and in Shakespeare (i.e., just about all of us) should read and recommend to students and friends.
David Bevington, Renaissance Quarterly
Kastan's short, accessible, and brilliantly readable book asks why the question of Shakespeare's belief is so important to us, and surveys the treatment of religion in the plays themselves. Its author successfully avoids both the recent tendency to read religion as merely a metaphor for power, and the equally unhelpful determination to interpret the plays as religious allegories.
Alison Shell, Church Times
This slim volume based on lectures originally delivered at Oxford in 2008 has an importance out of all proportion to its size. It discusses the way religion functions in the works of William Shakespeare and will appeal to anyone interested in English history as well as those whose main concern is with the playwright himself.
Paul Richardson, The Church of England Newspaper
This is something that is long overdue in Shakespearian circles ... Kastan succeeds in transforming the debate over religion into something worth reading.
David J. Davis, The New Criterion
David Kastan's meticulous book treads carefully between the pits already dug in this crowded field, combining sober biographical analysis, based on recent documentary research, with sensitive close readings ... Kastan effectively debunks crude biographical lunges from text to assumed context.
Glyn Parry, English Historical Review