Shakespeare and Judgment
Shakespeare and Judgment

Author: Kevin Curran

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2016-10-27

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 147441317X

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Ranging widely across law, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, this book offers the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaShakespeare and Judgment gathers together an international group of scholars to address for the first time the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama. Contributors approach the topic from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, covering plays from across Shakespeare's career and from each of the genres in which he wrote. Anchoring the volume are two critical contentions: first, that attending to Shakespeare's treatment of judgment leads to fresh insights about the imaginative relationship between law, theater, and aesthetics in early modern England; and second, that it offers new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation. Taken together, the essays in Shakespeare and Judgment offer a genuinely new account of the historical and intellectual coordinates of Shakespeare's plays. Building on current work in legal studies, religious studies, theater history, and critical theory, the volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Key FeaturesProvides the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaOffers a fresh perspective on the imaginative relationship between law, religion, and aesthetics in Shakespeare's playsModels new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation.

Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment
Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment

Author: Kevin Curran

Publisher:

Published: 2024-09-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781399516365

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[headline]Argues for the social and ethical importance of judgment in politics, law, art and everyday life, taking Shakespeare as a guide and travel companion Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment delves deep into the intellectual culture of Renaissance England and the dynamics of Shakespearean theatre to recover a positive, collaborative and future-oriented understanding of judgment, something largely lacking in contemporary social and philosophical discourse. Presenting a series of chapters organized around single keywords, the book enlists the help of Shakespeare to assemble a new lexicon for judgment, one that allows us to think and talk about our capacity for discernment in cooperative and community-making terms. Readers of Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment will come away with a clear and urgent sense of why judgment is an indispensable component of public life, and why theater offers a particularly powerful locale for cultivating it. [bio]Kevin Curran is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and General Editor of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy series. His books include Shakespeare's Legal Ecologies (2017), Renaissance Personhood (2020), and Shakespeare and Judgment (2017).

Corporeal Judgment in Shakespeare's Plays
Corporeal Judgment in Shakespeare's Plays

Author: Heidi Nicole Cephus

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13:

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In this dissertation, I examine the complex role that the body played in early modern constructions of judgment. Moving away from an overreliance on anti-theatrical texts as the authority on the body in Shakespeare's plays, my project intervenes in the field Shakespearean studies by widening the lens through which scholars view the body's role in the early modern theater. Through readings of four plays--Richard II, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale--I demonstrate that Shakespeare uses a wide range of ideas about the human body from religious, philosophical, medical, and cultural spheres of thought to challenge Puritan accusations that the public theater audience is incapable of rational judgment. The first chapter outlines the parameters of the project. In Chapter 2, I argue that Richard II draws parallels between the theatrical community and the community created through the sacramental experiences of baptism and communion to show that bodies play a crucial role in establishing common experience and providing an avenue for judgment. In Chapter 3, I argue that Shakespeare establishes correspondences between bodily and social collaboration to show how both are needed for the memory-making project of the theater. In the next chapter, I show how Shakespeare appropriates what early moderns perceived of as the natural vulnerability in English bodies to suggest the passionate responses associated with impressionability can actually be sources of productive judgment and self-edification. I argue the storm models this passionate judgment, providing a guide for audience behavior. In Chapter 5, I argue that the memories created by and within the women in The Winter's Tale evoke the tradition of housewifery and emphasize the female role in preservation. Female characters stand in for hidden female contributors to the theater and expose societal blindness to women's work. Through each of these chapters, I argue that Shakespeare's plays emphasize the value of bodily experience and suggest that the audience take up what I have termed "corporeal judgment."

Last Things and Last Plays
Last Things and Last Plays

Author: Cynthia Marshall

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780809316892

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In this first sustained examination of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and The Tempest in the context of English Renaissance discussions of death, judgment, and afterlife, Cynthia Marshall contends that the late plays of Shakespeare represent the active concerns of a culture heavily imbued with apocalypticism. Only recently has there been wide recognition of how thoroughly apocalyptic thought pervaded the culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Millenarians, Puritans, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics all shared a concern for last things. Even King James I, speaking in Star Chamber, referred to "the latter days drawing on." In fact, these four plays, considered in themselves, exhibit distinctive qualities of "lastness." They contain, Marshall argues, an alternative theatrical eschatology, representing anxieties about judgment, hopes for personal reunion, and transcendent perspectives on time.

Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies
Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies

Author: Kevin Curran

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0810135183

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Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices. At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts. The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource.

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels

Author: W.R. Elton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1351900676

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’No one of Shakespeare’s plays is harder to characterize’, said Coleridge of Troilus and Cressida. Over the centuries, generations of critics have faced the challenge of determining exactly what sort of play Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is. Described by Victorian commentators as ’dark’, ’decadent’ and ’bitter’, the work has, until now, retained its designation as a ’problem play’. In this ground-breaking study, leading Shakespeare scholar, W R Elton attempts to dismantle this presumption. His research places the play in the historical context of the Inns of Court law-revels tradition. By close analysis of the text, Elton demonstrates his belief that Troilus and Cressida was written specifically for an audience of law students and lawyers and that the play manifests many elements of a law-revel, including misrule, inversion, mock rhetoric and logic, and mock trials. In so doing, he provides explanations for many of the puzzling and mysterious elements that have previously baffled critics.

Shakespeare's Curse
Shakespeare's Curse

Author: Björn Quiring

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 113449100X

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Conceptualizing the curse as the representation of a foundational, mythical violence that is embedded within juridical discourse, Shakespeare’s Curse:The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama pursues a reading of Richard III, King John, and King Lear in order to analyse the persistence of imprecations in the discourses of modernity. Shakespeare wrote during a period that was transformative in the development of juridical thinking. However, taking up the relationship between theater, theology and law, Björn Quiring argues that the curse was not eliminated from legal discourses during this modernization of jurisprudence; rather, it persisted and to this day continues to haunt numerous speech acts. Drawing on the work of Derrida, Lacan, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, among others, Quiring analyses the performativity of the curse, and tracks its power through the juristic themes that are pursued within Shakespeare’s plays – such as sovereignty, legitimacy, succession, obligation, exception, and natural law. Thus, this book provides an original and important insight into early modern legal developments, as well as a fresh perspective on some of Shakespeare’s best known works. A fascinating interdisciplinary study, this book will interest students and scholars of Law, Literature, and History.

Shakespeare's Comedies: All That Matters
Shakespeare's Comedies: All That Matters

Author: Michael Scott

Publisher: John Murray

Published: 2014-08-29

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1444189972

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In Shakespeare's Comedies: All That Matters, Mike Scott explores and explains the secrets that have made Shakespeare's comedies so enduring that they continue to be performed, watched and studied by millions of people every year. Professor Scott focuses in turn on The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice and builds an argument based around Shakepeare's use of language to prompt the audience's imagination and thought. This original little book, and its companion volume Shakespeare's Tragedies, fills a major gap in the market for a book which will enable readers to understand a Shakesperean play in the context of its ouevre. This accessible and readable book will appeal both to students and general readers, giving a fascinating intoruduction to Shakespeare's comedies - and what matters most about them. "'Comedy is a serious business' says Michael Scott - it is, and his splendid short book takes it very seriously as it should, but remains lively and wonderfully readable withall." Dr Drummond Bone, Master of Balliol College, Oxford "An authoritative and expert overview of the entire fields of Shakespearean Comedy and Tragedy combined with persuasive and eminently accessible close readings of particular plays. Michael Scott brings to the task and infectious enthusiasm and deep knowledge of their theatrical, literary and cultural significance and he provides a clear and compelling endorsement of their continued relevance. These books provide an exemplary introduction to the complex world of Shakespearean drama, full of insights, observations, and ideas, all of which are brought firmly to bear on the abiding question of what these plays mean for us today." John Drakakis, Professor of English at the University of Stirling "Everything is so clear - no academic jargon, for instance. With Shakespeare's Comedies, even the most critical scholars can learn something... as well as students at the start of their encounter with Shakespeare and the same for regular theatre goers. To address all three at once... has to be an accomplishment... from the Introduction to the Conclusion... to the last sentence: (the) reader will readily grasp why this series of books is called All That Matters." Professor M.L.Wine, Evanston, USA