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Shakespeare On The Edge: Border-crossing In The Tragedies And The Henriad
This book analyses works by not only Shakespeare but also his contemporaries to argue that many of the plays of Shakespeare's central period, from the second tetralogy to Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello, engage with the idea of England's borders. But borders, it claims, are not only of geopolitical significance. In Shakespeare's imagination and indeed in that of his culture, eschatological overtones also accrue to the idea of the border. This is because the countries of the Celtic fringe were often discussed in terms of the supernatural and fairy lore and, in particular, the rivers which were often used as boundary markers were invested with heavily mythologized personae.
154 pages, Hardcover
First published November 22, 2005
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October 11, 2025
【Shakespeare on the Edge / Lisa Hopkins / 2005, Ashgate】
I think a student of Shakespeare is not expected to find one's own raw emotions in his plays, as Hopkins says about Othello:
--Though the characters experiment with such a wide variety of perspectives, the audience is not encouraged to share any of them, unless, perhaps, it is that of Cassio. (P108)
Otherwise one would be an innately dramatic person who finds it surprisingly hard to experience almost everything that people share (you'd be surprised but I dislike birthday parties of my own, because I really fear realizing my ardent sense of duties for my age put aside). And this book is mainly a study on those often excessively dramatic characters transgressing the borders, from:
--Despire their associations with virginity and integrity, however, it was also clear that islands were more vulnerable than the mainland: (P90)
To the intricacy of the characters' rhetoric interwoven with want of love and hate at the same time, embroidered with one's own 'cultivation':
--Alonebwuth his mother, Hamlet's horticultural references become less cryptic and allusive and more clearly towards a conception of moral choice in the form of emblematic landscape. (P49)
...and this landscape of garden is bordered with the brook which drowned Ophelia, or the Lethes for English people from whence Knut or William the Conqueror would come. And this border is also transgressed lawfully, but maybe maliciously:
--To be wise is, for Iago, to know the value of the stock-in-trade if the maritime trade routes. (P95)
The last chapter on King Lear might be a bit blurry and inconsistent, considering it's a book on boundaries and Shakespeare (religious boundaries are not always as strong as national ones, like the one between Scotland and England, the very theme of King Lear). However, this solid New Historicist study promises you a real intellectual excitement.
I think a student of Shakespeare is not expected to find one's own raw emotions in his plays, as Hopkins says about Othello:
--Though the characters experiment with such a wide variety of perspectives, the audience is not encouraged to share any of them, unless, perhaps, it is that of Cassio. (P108)
Otherwise one would be an innately dramatic person who finds it surprisingly hard to experience almost everything that people share (you'd be surprised but I dislike birthday parties of my own, because I really fear realizing my ardent sense of duties for my age put aside). And this book is mainly a study on those often excessively dramatic characters transgressing the borders, from:
--Despire their associations with virginity and integrity, however, it was also clear that islands were more vulnerable than the mainland: (P90)
To the intricacy of the characters' rhetoric interwoven with want of love and hate at the same time, embroidered with one's own 'cultivation':
--Alonebwuth his mother, Hamlet's horticultural references become less cryptic and allusive and more clearly towards a conception of moral choice in the form of emblematic landscape. (P49)
...and this landscape of garden is bordered with the brook which drowned Ophelia, or the Lethes for English people from whence Knut or William the Conqueror would come. And this border is also transgressed lawfully, but maybe maliciously:
--To be wise is, for Iago, to know the value of the stock-in-trade if the maritime trade routes. (P95)
The last chapter on King Lear might be a bit blurry and inconsistent, considering it's a book on boundaries and Shakespeare (religious boundaries are not always as strong as national ones, like the one between Scotland and England, the very theme of King Lear). However, this solid New Historicist study promises you a real intellectual excitement.
Displaying 1 of 1 review