With the exception of Hamlet, Othello is Shakespeare’s most controversial play. It is also his most shocking. Dr Johnson famously described the ending as “not to be endured”, and H.H. Furness, after editing the Variorum edition of the play, confessed to wishing that “this tragedy had never been written”. No play in performance has prompted more outbursts from onlookers: there are many recorded instances of members of the audience actually trying to intervene to prevent Othello murdering Desdemona.                        It is a more domestic tragedy than Hamlet, King Lear or Macbeth, and it is the intimacy of its subject matter which gives it its dramatic power. Othello is a faithful portrait of life, wrote one anonymous Romantic critic. “Love and jealousy are passions which all men, with few exceptions, have at some time felt.”  Othello has also prompted more critical disputes than any other play except Hamlet. How could the hero possibly believe his wife had been unfaithful within a few days of their marriage? Is the marriage consummated (as it is usually assumed to be)? Is Othello a noble hero or is he really just a self-deluded egotist? And in this play about a disastrous inter-racial marriage, how important is the whole issue of race? Is the play itself racist?                  This book looks at what Othello is really about and why it has such power to move us. It aims to offer a clear, authoritative and fresh view of Othello, while taking account of the many fascinating insights other critics have had into the play in the four centuries since it was written.

Shakespeare's Othello (The Connell Guide To ...)

Literature & Fiction

Bradshaw, Graham

History & Criticism

Connell Publishing

When The Great Gatsby was first published, in 1925, reviews were mixed. H.L. Mencken called it “no more than a glorified anecdote”. L.P. Hartley, author of The Go-Between, thought Fitzgerald deserved “a good shaking”: “The Great Gatsby is evidently not a satire; but one would like to think that Mr Fitzgerald’s heart is not in it, that it is a piece of mere naughtiness.” Yet, gradually the book came to be seen as one of the greatest – if not the greatest – of American novels. Why? What is it that makes this story of a petty hoodlum so compelling? Why has a novel so intimately rooted in its own time “lasted” into ours? What is it that posterity, eight decades later, finds so fascinating in this chronicle of the long-gone “Jazz Age”, flappers, speakeasies and wild parties? It is, after all, scarcely a novel at all, more a long short story. But it has a power out of all proportion to its length. It is beautifully written, making it feel even shorter than it is, and is full of haunting imagery. It is also, perhaps, the most vivid literary evocation of the “Great American Dream”, about which it is profoundly sceptical, as it is about dreams generally. In the end, however, as D.H. Lawrence would put it, it is “on the side of life”. Gatsby’s dream may be impossible, so much so that the book can end in no other way than with his death, but up to a point he is redeemed by it and by the tenacity with which he clings to it. It is this that makes the novel so moving and so haunting.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (The Connell Guide To ...)

Sutherland, John

Connell, Jolyon

Despite the astringency of her writing, Austen is often thought of as the mother of romance. She has made the Regency period (1811-1820) almost synonymous with modern popular notions of the romantic. Directly or indirectly, she has influenced romantic novels by authors such as Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier and supermarket fodder of the sort published by Mills and Boon. Of all her books, though, it is Pride and Prejudice which comes closest to delivering the fairytale story of the ordinary girl who catches and marries a prince. As Janet Todd shows in this entertaining guide, however, it is not just the most inventive and ebullient of her works, but also the one which closes with the heroine most in the ascendancy and least controlled by either parent or husband. Here, for the only time in Austen’s novels, the romantic dream of bourgeois individualism taming aristocratic authority actually does come true. But if, on one level, Pride and Prejudice is a reworking of the Cinderella story, it is a fiction of much greater depth than Austen’s ironic, self-deprecating description of it as “rather too light & bright & sparkling” would suggest. “Beneath the light, bright and sparkling surface,” says Edward Neill, “it investigates the social heart of darkness.” In Pride and Prejudice, Austen explores not just what it is like to be a girl in search of a suitable husband, but what it is to be human, brilliantly illuminating the difficulties of the individual living within society and the necessity constantly to reconcile personal needs with those of the wider world around one.

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (The Connell Guide To ...)

Todd, Janet

Great Expectations is one of the best-selling Victorian novels of our time. No Dickens work, with the exception of A Christmas Carol, has been adapted more for both film and television. It has been as popular with critics as it has with the public. In 1937, George Bernard Shaw called the novel Dickens’s “most compactly perfect book”. John Lucas describes it as “the most perfect and the most beautiful of all Dickens’s novels”, Angus Wilson as “the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced”. Great Expectations has been so successful partly because it’s an exciting story. Dickens always had a keen eye on the market and subscribed to Wilkie Collins’s advice: “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, above all make ‘em wait.” From the violent opening scene on the marshes to the climax of Magwitch’s attempted escape on the Thames, the story is full of suspense, mystery and drama. But while these elements of Great Expectations have ensured its popularity, it is also a novel which, as this guide will seek to show, raises profound questions not just about the nature of Victorian society but about the way human relationships work and the extent to which people are shaped by their childhoods and the circumstances in which they grow up.

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (The Connell Guide To ...)

British & Irish

Macbeth may well be the most terrifying play in the English language, but it hasn’t always been seen that way. It has divided critics more deeply than any other Shakespearian tragedy – and the argument, in essence, has been about just how terrifying the play really is and about how we should react, or do react, to Macbeth himself. No Shakespearian tragedy gives as much attention to its hero as Macbeth. With the exception of Lady Macbeth, there is much less emphasis on the figures round the hero than there is in Hamlet or Othello. Unlike King Lear, with its parallel story of Gloucester and his sons, Macbeth has no sub-plot. And its imagery of sharp contrasts – of day and night, light and dark, innocent life and murder – adds to the almost claustrophobic intensity of this most intense of plays. So why are critics so divided about Macbeth? Why is it so disturbing? Why do we feel compelled to admire its hero even as we condemn him? How reassuring is the last scene, when Macbeth is killed and Malcolm becomes king? Do we see this as the intervention of a divine providence, a restoration of goodness after all the evil? Or do we see instead signs that the whole cycle of violence and murder could be about to begin all over again? And what does the play really tell us about good and evil? In this book Graham Bradshaw answers these questions, and shows how it is only in recent years that the extent of Shakespeare’s achievement in Macbeth, and the nature of his vision in the play, has really been grasped.

Shakespeare's Macbeth (The Connell Guide To ...)

Dramas & Plays

In the 400 years since The Tempest was first staged, millions of words have been written about it. Critics, directors and actors have interpreted it in widely different ways and developed theories ranging from the more-or-less plausible to the eccentric and the completely outlandish. It is undoubtedly one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, and as well as its bewitching music, its hallucinatory quality and its enchanted island setting, it contains some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful poetry and most famous lines. From Caliban’s “The isle is full of noises” to Prospero’s “We are such stuff/As dreams are made on”, The Tempest haunts our collective imagination. But what is it actually about? Is it about British colonialism, as so many modern critics, especially modern American critics, firmly maintain? Is it a Christian play? Or is it, as Sir Peter Hall believes, the “most blasphemous play Shakespeare wrote”, about a “man on an island who’s allowed to play God and who doesn’t just dabble in witchcraft but actually performs it”? Is it an anti-feminist play, as some feminist critics believe? Or does it, on the contrary present a softer, more feminised view of the world than his earlier works? And what does The Tempest, the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own, tell us about his view of art, and of the human condition? This short guide, drawing on the most interesting and arresting criticisms of the play, explains the issues which have perplexed and divided scholars through the ages, and offers a bold, incisive and authoritative view of its own.

Shakespeare's The Tempest (The Connell Guide To ...)

Conrad finished Heart of Darkness on 9th February, 1899 and on publication it had an impact as powerful as any long short story, or short novel ever written – it is only 38,000 words. It quickly became, and has remained, Conrad’s most famous work and has been regarded by many in America, if not elsewhere, as his greatest work. Exciting and profound, lucid and bewildering, and written with an exuberance which sometimes seems at odds with its subject matter, it has influenced writers as diverse as T.S.Eliot, Graham Greene, William Golding, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. It has also inspired, among others, Orson Welles, who made two radio versions the second of which, in 1945, depicted Kurtz as a forerunner of Adolf Hitler, and Francis Ford Coppola who turned it into the film Apocalypse Now. More critical attention has probably been paid to it, per word, than to any other modern prose work. It has also become a text about which, as the late Frank Kermode once complained, interpreters feel licensed to say absolutely anything. Why? What is it about Heart of Darkness that has captivated critics and readers for so long and caused so many millions of words to be written about it? And why has its peculiarly dark and intense vision of life so frequently been misunderstood? Graham Bradshaw provides the answers in this illuminating guide.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (The Connell Guide To ...)

When Middlemarch was first published in 1872, it was recognised as an unprecedented achievement and as marking a new era in the development of the novel. Edith Simcox, later a close friend and personal champion of George Eliot, wrote that Middlemarch “marks an epoch in the history of fiction in so far as its incidents are taken from the inner life”. One of her shrewdest early reviewers, R.H. Hutton, compared her work to that of her popular contemporary, Anthony Trollope, saying: “He scours a greater surface of modern life but rarely or never the emotions which lie concealed behind. His characters are carved out of the materials of ordinary society; George Eliot’s include many which make ordinary society seem a sort of satire on the life behind.” Today, for fans and detractors alike, says Josie Billington in her succinct but comprehensive and highly entertaining guide, Middlemarch is synonymous with what we mean by the terms “novel”, “realism” and “Victorian”, and its power to move modern audiences was demonstrated by the powerful appeal of the BBC dramatisation in 1994. So what makes this novel great even for those who feel cheated or saddened by it? For the novel’s passionate admirers, Henry James among them, “that supreme sense of the vastness and variety of human life… which it belongs only to the greatest novels to produce” offers its own rich consolations. Perhaps that sentiment is best summed up by the 20th-century novelist Stanley Middleton, who said, if we have no God, we do at least have Middlemarch.

George Eliot's Middlemarch (The Connell Guide To ...)

Billington, Josie

Romeo and Juliet is routinely called “the world’s greatest love story”, as though it is all about romance. The play features some of the most lyrical passages in all of drama, and the lovers are young, beautiful, and ardent. But when we look at the play, the lyricism and the romance are not really what drive things along. It is true that Romeo, especially early on in the play, acts like a young man determined to take his place in an immortal tale of love. Everything he says is romantic – but rather like an anniversary card is romantic. His words propel nothing, or nothing but sarcastic admonitions from his friends to forget about love and to treat women as they should be treated, with careless physical appetite. The world we have entered is rapacious more than romantic. Everyone knows something of this, from the film versions of the story if nothing else. Romeo and Juliet must fight for their love inside a culture of stupid hatreds. But it is not a simple case of love versus war, or the city against the couple. If it were, it would nicely reinforce clichés about true love, fighting against the odds. In this book Simon Palfrey suggests that the play Shakespeare actually wrote is more troubling than this. Juliet’s passion – for all her youth, for all its truth – is at the very cusp of murderousness. Juliet is the world’s scourge, in the sense that she will whip and punish and haunt it; she is also its triumph, in the sense of its best and truest thing. The deaths her love leads to are in no way avoidable, and in no way accidental. They are her inheritance, the thing she was born to. Of course she takes Romeo with her. But it is at heart her play.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (The Connell Guide To ...)

Palfrey, Simon

Few novels have caused more of a stir than Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In England, the Duchess of Abercorn stated that she divided her dinner-guests according to their view of Tess. If they deemed her “a little harlot”, she put them in one group; if they said “Poor wronged innocent!”, she put them in another. It is a telling illustration of the novel’s word-of-mouth success. The Daily News wittily claimed that “pessimism (we had almost said Tessimism) is popular and fashionable”. Fan-mail arrived: Hardy said that his mail from readers even included confessional letters from various wives who, like Tess, had gained premarital sexual experience but, unlike her, had not told their husbands of it. Hardy’s fame was now so great that he was a frequent guest at fashionable dinner parties. In 1892 he recorded that Tess’s fame had spread round the world and that translations were multiplying, “its publication in Russia exciting great interest”. Controversy generated publicity. Publicity generated prosperity. Sales of Tess far surpassed those of any of Hardy’s previous works, and between 1900 and 1930 was reprinted “some forty times in England alone”. In addition to making Hardy famous and rich, the scandalous Tess attracted, and has continued to attract, an extraordinary range of critical opinion. Victorian reviewers, humanists, neo-Marxists, deconstructionists, cultural materialists, new historicists: everyone has had something to say about the novel. This book, drawing on the best of these critics, shows why, for all its faults, it has such power, and explains the angry and uncompromising vision of the world contained within its pages.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Ubervilles (The Connell Guide To ...)

Watts, Cedric

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