This collection of essays explores how the Shakespearean drama enacts ancient virtues and conceptualises new ones in complex fictional scenarios that test virtues for their continuing value.
Contributors approach the virtues as a source of imaginative, affective and intellectual nourishment and consider how Shakespeare’s art increases our capacity for new pursuits of the good. Examining Shakespeare’s virtuous theatre in tragic, comic and romance modes and from ethical, theatrical and political perspectives, this volume establishes virtue as a framework for a socially, environmentally and spiritually renewed literary criticism. Contributors balance historical depth and philosophical insight with the art of close reading as they contemplate the dynamic field of virtue – embodied, responsive, energetic and dynamic – as it ebbs and flows across time, among multiple wisdom traditions, and in the entangled lives and troubled circumstances of Shakespeare’s characters.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Series Editors' Preface
Introduction – Kent Lehnhof, Julia Reinhard Lupton and Carolyn Sale
Part I: Ecologies of Virtue
1. Cordelia’s Fire – Carolyn Sale 2. Voice, Virtue, Veritas: On Truth and Vocal Feeling in King Lear – Katie Adkison 3. Reading Virtues: Shakespeare’s Animals – Karen Raber
Part II: Virtue’s Performances
4. Shakespeare and the Virtue in Complaining – Emily Shortslef 5. Masculine Virtù and Feminine Virtue in Much Ado About Nothing – Kristina Sutherland 6. The Virtue of Humour in King Lear – Kent Lehnhof 7. Vita Energetica: Love’s Labour’s Lost and Shakespeare’s Maculate Theatre – Ian Munro
Part III: Virtue in Transit
8. Cymbeline and the Renewal of Constancy – Jesse M. Lander 9. Cymbeline and the ‘Swan’s Nest’ of Britain: Insularity, Chastity and Innogen’s Greater Transnational Virtues – Michael Gadaleto10. Sufi Theoroticism, the Sophianic Feminine, and Desdemona’s Tragic Heroism – Unhae Park Langis
Part IV: Sustaining Virtue
11. Enduring the Eventual: A Virtuous Way of Reading Shakespeare – Thomas J. Moretti12. Sustaining Courage in the Humanities: The Example of Hamlet – Daniel Juan Gil13. On the Virtue of Grief – Michael Bristol
Afterword – Kevin Curran
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Kent Lehnhof is professor of English at Chapman University. He is author of some two dozen articles on early modern literature and culture and is co-editor (along with Moshe Gold and Sandor Goodhart) of the essay collection Of Levinas and Shakespeare: 'To See Another Thus' (2018). His articles have appeared in such journals as Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, English Literary Renaissance, ELH, SEL, Modern Philology, and Criticism. He is currently working on a book-length study of vocality and ethics in Shakespeare’s late plays.
Julia Reinhard Lupton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author or co-author of five books, including Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (2018), Thinking with Shakespeare (2015), and Citizen-Saints (2012). She has edited or co-edited many volumes and special issues, including Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook (with Donovan Sherman), and Shakespeare’s Virtuous Theatre: Power, Capacity, and the Good (with Kent Lehnhof and Carolyn Sale), Shakespeare and Hospitality (with David Goldstein), and Face to Face with Shakespeare (with Matthew Smith). She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Carolyn Sale is associate professor of English at the University of Alberta. Her work has appeared in journals including ELH, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Quarterly, as well as various essay collections including The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy (2018), The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700 (2017), Shakespeare and Judgment (2016), The History of British Women’s Writing, Volume 1, 1500–1610 (2010), and The Law in Shakespeare (2007). She is completing the book manuscript 'The Literary Commons: The Common Law and the Writer in Early Modern England, 1528–1628'. Earlier work in the phenomenology of Shakespeare’s theatre includes 'Eating Air, Feeling Smells: Hamlet’s Theory of Performance', reprinted in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Hamlet (2009).
Review :
This virtuosic collection of essays focuses on the virtues tending us towards co-operative and collective life. An absorbing, intelligent and original book, and an important addition to literary and intellectual history.
