Best Selling Books by David Womersley

How Shakespeare’s exploration of central human questions—about identity, politics, religion and right and wrong—explains his lasting power, popularity and relevance In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson famously argued that Shakespeare is enduringly popular because he “is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” Johnson’s view largely prevailed until the late twentieth century, when it was challenged by a growing scepticism about the existence of a general human nature. In Thinking Through Shakespeare, eminent literary critic David Womersley pushes back against this change by exploring how Shakespeare’s plays think through—and invite us to think through—deep human questions of lasting importance. Thinking Through Shakespeare explores four perennial human problems: personal identity, the distinction between civilization and barbarism, the relation between political power and religious authority and the tension between means and ends. It examines the history of these problems, from antiquity to today, and traces how Shakespeare engages with them in the great tragedies—Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear—but also in his other plays. Without arguing that human nature is universal or unchanging, or that Shakespeare has some special access to timeless wisdom, the book makes the case that his drama is powerful because it serves as a forensic tool, probing rival perspectives on questions that have preoccupied many people in many societies over many centuries. By revealing in new ways how Shakespeare’s plays are animated and driven by central human problems, and why he should again be viewed as the great poet of human nature, Thinking Through Shakespeare opens up a richer understanding and appreciation of his work.

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed ''certen matters of Divinytie and of State unfitt to be suffred''. How had questions of divinity and state become entangled? The Reformation had invested the English Crown with supremacy over the Church, and religious belief had thus been transformed into a political statement. In the plentiful chronicle literature of the sixteenth-century, questions of monarchical legitimacy and religious orthodoxy became intertwined as a consequence of that demand for a usable national past created by the high political developments of the 1530s. Divinity and State explores the consequences of these events in the English historiography and historical drama of the sixteenth century. It is divided into four parts. In the first, the impact of reformed religion on narratives of the national past is measured and described. Part II examines how the entanglement of the national past and reformed religion was reflected in historical drama from Bale to the early years of James I, and focuses on two paradigmatic characters: the sanctified monarch and the martyred subject. Part III considers Shakespeare''s history plays in the light of the preceding discussion, and finds that Shakespeare''s career as a historical dramatist shows him eventually re-shaping the history play with great audacity. Part IV corroborates this reading of Shakespeare''s later history plays by reference to the dramatic ripostes they provoked.

David Womersley''s book investigates Edward Gibbon''s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as both a work of literature and a work of history, examining its style and irony, tracing its classical and French sources, and highlighting the importance of its composition in three instalments over a period of twenty years. Dr Womersley discusses each of these instalments in detail, plotting the work''s transformation from conception to completion, and relating this to the achievements and limitations of the philosophic historiography which Gibbon inherited from Montesquieu and Hume, but finally discarded. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire emerges from this study as a work more flexible in its sympathies and surprising in its judgements than has hitherto been granted, while the magnitude of Gibbon''s achievement as a stylist, historian and thinker is brought into sharper focus.

The subject of this book is the story of the conflict between Gibbon and those he mockingly dubbed the "Watchmen of the Holy City," and it explores the ramifications of an elusive aspect of authorship. By considering the sequence of interactions between the historian and his readership, Womersley makes possible a more intimate understanding of what might be called Gibbon''s experience of himself. At the same time he deepens our knowledge of the conditions of English authorship during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

''James was a king tragically trapped by principle. Yet was it wise to attempt to change the national religion?'' The short reign of James II is generally seen as one of the most catastrophic in British history, ending in his exile after he unsuccessfully tried to convert England to Catholicism, a crisis that would haunt the monarchy for generations. Ultimately, David Womersley''s biography shows, James was a man whose blindness to subtlety and political reality brought about his ruinous downfall.

David Hume reshaped, redirected, and re-energised the English essay. His sceptical, rational, self-questioning persona created what amounted to a new intellectual arena, in which it was possible to think afresh about the world and the self. When he famously wrote that ''the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster'', something had changed. David Womersley has spent a lifetime studying the literature of the eighteenth century. This definitive new two-volume edition of the essays follows Hume''s division of his essays into two parts, and allows the modern reader to enjoy this extraordinary writer in all his moods, from benign optimism to gloomy foreboding. The editorial apparatus supplies indispensable intellectual and bibliographical context for these rewarding, humane, and yet also subtly provocative writings. Volume 2 is published simultaneously.

David Hume reshaped, redirected, and re-energised the English essay. His sceptical, rational, self-questioning persona created what amounted to a new intellectual arena, in which it was possible to think afresh about the world and the self. When he famously wrote that ''the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster'', something had changed. David Womersley has spent a lifetime studying the literature of the eighteenth century. This definitive new two-volume edition of the essays follows Hume''s division of his essays into two parts, and allows the modern reader to enjoy this extraordinary writer in all his moods, from benign optimism to gloomy foreboding. The editorial apparatus supplies indispensable intellectual and bibliographical context for these rewarding, humane, and yet also subtly provocative writings. Volume 1 is published simultaneously.

"An authoritative edition of the most important late seventeenth and early eighteenth century pamphlets on the "Standing Armies" controversy"--

In the summer of 1994, on the occasion of the bicentenary of Gibbon''s death, a group of scholars gathered in Oxford to commemorate and explore his achievement, producing this volume of essays. Eighteen years earlier, in 1976, there were similar gatherings for the bicentenary of the publication of the first volume of The Decline and fall, likewise producing published collections of essays. Comparing the present volume with its predecessors, how has scholarship devoted to Gibbon changed in the intervening years?The dominant theme of Gibbon studies during this recent period has been ''disaggregation'', and this can be understood in two senses. Firstly, there has been textual disaggregation. Works which earlier scholars were content to treat as ''un ensemble'' are today scrupulously delaminated: manuscripts are compared, different editions collated, separate instalments discriminated, successive drafts juxtaposed. It seems safe to say that no modern study of Gibbon could gain a hearing unless its author was evidently a master of the relevant textual bibliography. The result of this renewed interest in bibliography has been a much sharper awareness of the complexity of Gibbon''s writings as literary artefacts. Secondly, disaggregation has also occurred in the contexts, both English and European, within which Gibbon''s work demand to be read. The Enlightenment itself is now apprehended as a congeries of movements and events that attracted men of divergent aims and beliefs. In this freshly complicated setting, Gibbon''s life and work emerge as key points, through which swirled many of the most important intellectual currents of the day. The essays collected in this volume exemplify and extend these trends in Gibbon scholarship. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780729405522?cc=us