Shakespeare as a Way of Life
James Kuzner
Abstract
This book shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In readings of Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens, I show how his works offer a means for coming to terms with basic uncertainties: about how we can be free, about whether the world is abundant, about whether we have met the demands of love and social life. Though there exist many accounts of Shakespeare’s skepticism, none approach it as does this book. Some accounts portray that skepticism as enabling—wh ... More
This book shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In readings of Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens, I show how his works offer a means for coming to terms with basic uncertainties: about how we can be free, about whether the world is abundant, about whether we have met the demands of love and social life. Though there exist many accounts of Shakespeare’s skepticism, none approach it as does this book. Some accounts portray that skepticism as enabling—whether by fostering Keats’ heroic, ultimately positive “Negativity Capability” or by serving as a subjective foundation for the tolerant, liberal state—while others portray it as a corrosive disease, in need of cure. While not denying these possibilities, my project presents an alternative, attending to varieties of skepticism that keep negative capability negative but that make skepticism livable—that ask for a lasting disorientation, for practicing the impractical, for a drastic reshaping of the frames by which readers view and negotiate the world.
Keywords:
aesthetics,
cognitive science,
ethics,
freedom,
love,
political theology,
politics,
Shakespeare,
skepticism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780823269938 |
| Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: September 2016 |
DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823269938.001.0001 |
