Search results for "Lessing"

Political Shakespeare and the Blessing of Art

2018

This text attempts to detail the functions and effects of some of Shakespeare's aesthetic strategies, and to determine their relationship to ideology. While this is critical territory that cultural materialists and new historicists have extensively mapped, the current text avoids the preferred methods of enquiry that these lines take. Rather than giving focus to the containment strategies of a dominant ideology, my investigation proceeds via a close reading of certain elements from Act 5 of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I attempt to demonstrate that meaning in the play is determined and encompassed within the self-reflective and dissimulating structures of Shakespeare's art. I su…