This paper consists in a historical survey of some of the treatments that the Albanian hero Scanderbeg has received in British literature--from the Elizabethan period until the early Twentieth Century--emphasizing in particular the ambivalence with which the character is invested in many such treatments in consequence of Scanderbeg's contradictory image as champion of Christianity in the struggle against the Ottomans and at the same time as traitor to the people in whose culture he was raised.

This paper examines Shakespeare’s Henry V from the perspective of the play’s deep concern with languages and with the dynamics of their interaction. The drama is characterised by linguistic heterogeneity of various kinds, from the blatant bilingualism that sets it apart from other plays in the canon, to the welter of regional dialects, personal idiolects, and stylistic registers that are also played off against one another within it. At the same time as it enacts a confrontation between the English and French tongues, and the mentalities and cultural perspectives they respectively encode, it also juxtaposes different voices articulating contrasting evalua-tions of events and discrepant perceptions of the protagonist himself. The linguistic multiplicity of the play is therefore part and parcel of the ambivalence of attitude with which recent criticism of the play has increasingly been concerned. At the same time, it also implicates issues having to do with translation and other forms of cultural negotiation, as well as those of names and of the mechanisms through which these are conferred. If on the one hand the king is implicitly attempting to establish linguistic uniformity through his military conquest of France, he is unable to curb the tendency towards linguistic fragmentation that is manifest among his own subjects and even in his own use of language.

There are respects in which the numerous messengers thronging Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra might be seen as constituting a “medium” in the sense in which Marshall McLuhan employed the term: that is, as extensions of the self profoundly influencing the character of the society in which they are used. This essay examines some of the implications of the fact that individuals and entire cultures in Shakespeare’s play are obliged to resort to the use of intermediaries in order to communicate with one another as well as transact with the world at large. At the same time as they are shown to be in-dispensible, the dubious role that messengers play in Shakespeare’s tragedy suggests that all such mediatory processes are inherently unstable, and that information obtained by means of external agents functioning as extensions of the individual's own perceptual and cognitive apparatus inevitably provides only a distorted picture of reality.

This essay examines the interrelation of the concepts of cause, reason and motive as they are explored in Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar”. The frequency with which the words “cause” and “reason” recur in connection with Brutus, and the complexity of the manner in which the various meanings of the words are played off against one another, suggest that the thematic interest in the problem of defining human motivation is central to the concerns of the play as a whole and to the understanding of this character in particular. What is remarkable is that while Brutus insistently invokes reasons for his decision to kill Caesar he never actually gets around to specifying them in unequivocal terms, so that the audience is left frustrated in its desire to understand what it is that impels him. What Shakespeare would appear to be doing then is deliberately problematizing the issue of human motivation, tantalizingly holding out the prospect of explanatory closure without actually supplying it, so that what we are left with is a sense of the ultimate indecipherability of human conduct.

This paper examines Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life” from the point of view of its treatment of the interconnected themes of language and time, and of its relation to the recent film adaptation Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve. Among the issues discussed is the debt owed by both Chiang’s story and Villeneuve’s film to the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf and Jorge Luis Borges.

This paper examines certain aspects of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 145, and of the epitaph inscribed on his grave in Stratford-upon-Avon, arguably the first and the last poems composed by the dramatist. Although the grave is often described as being anonymous, it is suggested that Shakespeare does name himself obliquely in his epitaph, and that there are significant analogies between the manner in which he does so and the way in which he indirectly names his wife Anne Hathaway in a sonnet that may record an episode, whether real or imagined, in the history of their courtship.

This paper considers three plays of the English Renaissance in which the figure of the magician looms into particular prominence: Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, The Alchemist by Ben Jonson, and The Tempest by William Shakespeare. These works are examined in relation to the conflicting conceptions of occult studies that were prevalent in Elizabethan England, and to some of the real-life characters who exemplified these conceptions in the popular imagination. Both The Alchemist and The Tempest make explicit allusion to Marlowe’s tragedy, their respective protagonists reflecting contrasting facets of the ambivalently conceived Faustus of that play. Whereas Jonson’s objective is to expose the cupidity and charlatanry involved in the occult practices of his day, Shakespeare, more interested in the metaphorical implications of such practices rather than the reality, is concerned to vindicate the constructive role played by a redeemed “magic” that enhances the potentialities of human life without doing violence either to natural or to divine law.

The affinities between Shakespeare’s King Lear and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and in particular the pattern of allusion to eyes and to eyesight developed in both plays, is familiar critical terrain. The purpose of this essay is to consider in a somewhat broader perspective King Lear’s relation not only with Oedipus the King, but with the entire group of works generally referred to as the Theban plays. Elements in common between the works by Shakespeare and Sophocles, among which are the eyesight motif and its symbolic connotations, the figures of devoted daughters, a concern with rela-tionships between parents and children, and an interest in what constitutes real knowledge of the self and of the world, are discussed in the first section of the essay. The question of why such parallels should exist, and in particular of whether Shakespeare knew Sophocles’ works either at first hand or as mediated through the derivative plays of Seneca, is investigated in the second part, while in the third the symbolic implications of the sight pattern shared by the works are examined in depth.

The argument of the book is that at a time in European cultural history in which the problem of knowledge was a matter of intensifying philosophical concern, Shakespeare too was in his own way exploring the possibilities and shortcomings of the various interpretative models that can be applied to experience so as to make it intelligible. While modes of understanding based upon such notions as those of naturalistic causality or rational human agency are shown to be inadequate in Shakespeare’s plays, his characters often impart form and significance to their experience through what are essentially narrative means, projecting stories onto events in order to make sense of them and to direct their activity accordingly. Narrative thus plays a crucial role in the construction of meaning in Shakespeare’s plays, although at the same time, as the author emphasizes, his works are no less concerned to illustrate the perils inherent in the narrativizing strategies deployed by their protagonists which often render them self-defeating and even destructive in the end.

A Comparative Analysis of "The Tempest" and "Doctor Faustus".

David Lucking sees Shakespeare’s plays as negotiating tensions between a number of alter-native, and sometimes mutually antagonistic perspectives. Some of these perspectives are associated with particular languages, cultures and texts, while others involve philosophical issues such as the nature of personal ontology and distinctions between reality and dream, being and nothingness. In elaborating his insights Lucking draws extensive comparisons with Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and between Sophocles’ Theban plays and King Lear, and he also pays close attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra. Re-assessing a wide range of earlier commentary, his nine essays confirm the lasting value of apposite contextualization in tandem with detailed close reading.

Surveys a number of literary works, belonging to different epochs and different genres, which have in common the fact that they enact a tension between the realms of life and art, domains that tend to be represented as being reciprocally dependent on one another but also, at a certain level, as being fundamentally incompatible and even mutually destructive.

In this essay, Lucking details the many allusions that the word "rose" may have suggested to Shakespeare's audiences, calling into question the linguistic skepticism voiced by Juliet in the balcony scene (Act II, scene i).

While Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is not about interlingual translation in any overt sense, there nevertheless is a respect in which it reflects the issue of what is involved in the translation from one language and cultural tradition to another, and most particularly the fact that such an activity inevitably entails a displacement and transformation as well as a potential deformation of its object.