Shakespeare as Political Thinker

Shakespeare as Political Thinker PDF

Author: John Alvis

Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13:

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The essays contained in this book proceed from the common conviction that Shakespeare s poetry conveys a wisdom about politics commensurate with his artistry. Well-known thinkers discuss Shakespeare's understanding of politics, the idea of the best polity, the relationship between character and political life, and the interpenetration of poetry, politics, religion, and philosophy.

Shakespeare’s Political Wisdom

Shakespeare’s Political Wisdom PDF

Author: T. Burns

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-04-03

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1137314656

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Shakespeare's Political Wisdom offers interpretations of five Shakespearean plays with a view to the enduring guidance those plays can provide to human, political life. The plays have been chosen for their relentless attention to the questions that were once and may sometime become, or be recognized as being, the heart and soul of politics.

Shakespeare's Politics

Shakespeare's Politics PDF

Author: Allan Bloom

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1964

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0226060411

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Taking the classical view that the political shapes man's consciousness, Allan Bloom considers Shakespeare as a profoundly political Renaissance dramatist. He aims to recover Shakespeare's ideas and beliefs and to make his work once again a recognized source for the serious study of moral and political problems. In essays looking at Julius Caesar, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Bloom shows how Shakespeare presents a picture of man that does not assume privileged access for only literary criticism. With this claim, he argues that political philosophy offers a comprehensive framework within which the problems of the Shakespearean heroes can be viewed. In short, he argues that Shakespeare was an eminently political author. Also included is an essay by Harry V. Jaffa on the limits of politics in King Lear. "A very good book indeed . . . one which can be recommended to all who are interested in Shakespeare." —G. P. V. Akrigg "This series of essays reminded me of the scope and depth of Shakespeare's original vision. One is left with the impression that Shakespeare really had figured out the answers to some important questions many of us no longer even know to ask."-Peter A. Thiel, CEO, PayPal, Wall Street Journal Allan Bloom was the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor on the Committee on Social Thought and the co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. Harry V. Jaffa is professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School.

Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought

Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought PDF

Author: David Armitage

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-09-10

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 052176808X

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Leading literary scholars and historians examine Shakespeare's engagement with the characteristic questions of early modern political thought.

Rethinking Shakespeare's Political Philosophy

Rethinking Shakespeare's Political Philosophy PDF

Author: Alex Schulman

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2014-07-21

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0748682422

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What were Shakespeare's politics? As this study demonstrates, contained in Shakespeare's plays is an astonishingly powerful reckoning with the tradition of Western political thought, one whose depth and scope places Shakespeare alongside Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. This book is the first attempt by a political theorist to read Shakespeare within the trajectory of political thought as one of the authors of modernity. From Shakespeare's interpretation of ancient and medieval politics to his wrestling with issues of legitimacy, religious toleration, family conflict, and economic change, Alex Schulman shows how Shakespeare produces a fascinating map of modern politics at its crisis-filled birth. As a result, there are brand new readings of Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Richard II and Henry IV, parts I and II , The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes PDF

Author: Andrew Moore

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-08-29

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1498514081

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Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare’s political outlook by comparing some of the playwright’s best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. By situating Shakespeare ‘between’ these two thinkers, the distinctly modern trajectory of the playwright’s work becomes visible. Throughout his career, Shakespeare interrogates the divine right of kings, absolute monarchy, and the metaphor of the body politic. Simultaneously he helps to lay the groundwork for modern politics through his dramatic explorations of consent, liberty, and political violence. We can thus understand Shakespeare’s corpus as a kind of eulogy: a funeral speech dedicated to outmoded and deficient theories of politics. We can also understand him as a revolutionary political thinker who, along with Machiavelli and Hobbes, reimagined the origins and ends of government. All three thinkers understood politics primarily as a response to our mortality. They depict politics as the art of managing and organizing human bodies—caring for their needs, making space for the satisfaction of desires, and protecting them from the threat of violent death. This book features new readings of Shakespeare’s plays that illuminate the playwright’s major political preoccupations and his investment in materialist politics.

Shakespeare's Political Pageant

Shakespeare's Political Pageant PDF

Author: Joseph Alulis

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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Literary works, through their very personal means of characterization, reveal the direct effect of politics on individuals in a way a political treatise cannot. The distinguished contributors to this volume share the belief that Shakespeare is the author who most effectively sets forth the multifarious pageant of politics. Shakespeare's rich canon presents monarchy and republic, tyrant and king, thinker and soldier, and Christian and pagan. The twelve essays in Shakespeare's Political Pageant discuss a broad range of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry from the perspective of the political theorist. This innovative book demonstrates the immense value of seeing Shakespeare's plays in the context of political philosophy. It will be an important source for students and scholars of both political science and literature.

Thinking with Shakespeare

Thinking with Shakespeare PDF

Author: Julia Reinhard Lupton

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-10-04

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 022671103X

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What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? Such questions—bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life—animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has often been obscured. Julia Reinhard Lupton gently dislodges Shakespeare’s plays from their historical confines to pursue their universal implications. From Petruchio’s animals and Kate’s laundry to Hamlet’s friends and Caliban’s childhood, Lupton restages thinking in Shakespeare as an embodied act of consent, cure, and care. Thinking with Shakespeare encourages readers to ponder matters of shared concern with the playwright by their side. Taking her cue from Hannah Arendt, Lupton reads Shakespeare for fresh insights into everything from housekeeping and animal husbandry to biopower and political theology.

Shakespeare and the Political Way

Shakespeare and the Political Way PDF

Author:

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-09-10

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0198848617

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This book develops an original approach to theories of political power and seeks to show the particular value of examining these issues through the frame of Shakespeare's plays.

Of Philosophers and Kings

Of Philosophers and Kings PDF

Author: Leon Harold Craig

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780802086051

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This innovative work argues that Shakespeare was as great a philosopher as he was a poet, and that his greatness as a poet derived even more from his power as a thinker than from his genius for linguistic expression. Accordingly, Leon Craig's interpretation of the plays - focusing primarily on Macbeth and King Lear, but including extensive comments on Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Measure for Measure - are intended to demonstrate what can be gained from reading Shakespeare 'philosophically.' Shakespeare, Craig argues, had a persistent fascination with the relationship between politics and philosophy, and even more precisely, with the idea of a philosophical ruler. Macbeth and King Lear are given detailed exposition for the special light they cast on tensions between philosophy and politics, knowledge and power. They show how the pursuit of an adequate understanding of certain practical issues - transient yet recurring - necessarily leads to considerations that far transcend the particular circumstances in which these practical problems arise. Metaphysics, cosmology, and man's confrontation with nature, were made dramatically manifest by Shakespeare to challenge and promote philosophic activity among his audience and readers. Unconventional in its approach, but working within the tradition of such critics as Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa, Craig's book makes a substantial contribution to understanding the general principles of Shakespearean drama.