Thinking with Shakespeare
Essays on Politics and Life
What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? What are their rights? To whom are they obligated? Such questions—bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life—animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has been obscured by historicist approaches to literature.
Julia Reinhard Lupton gently dislodges Shakespeare’s plays from their historical confines in order to pursue their universal implications. From Petruchio’s animals and Kate’s laundry to Hamlet’s friends and Caliban’s childhood, Lupton here restages thinking in Shakespeare as an embodied act of consent, cure, and care. Rather than putting the plays in service of an ideological program, Thinking with Shakespeare encourages readers to ponder matters of shared concern with the playwright by their side. In a landscape populated by she-doctors, minor monsters, bankrupted hosts, and faithful cupbearers, Shakespeare tests what it means to consider our humanity fully. Taking her cue from Hannah Arendt, Lupton reads Shakespeare for fresh insights into everything from housekeeping and animal husbandry to biopower and political theology.
“Julia Lupton is one of the most interesting critics writing on early modern literature today. In her previous work, Lupton has engaged in a remarkable exploration of modes of citizenship and community. In this new book, she extends this work, offering a dazzling meditation on Shakespeare's relevance for Renaissance and contemporary thinking about Jewish and Christian orders of politics and life. Ranging widely from Aristotle and St. Paul to Arendt, Schmitt, Agamben and Virno, Lupton provokes us to rethink our own commitments to literature and to public life.”—Victoria Kahn, University of California, Berkeley
“Capacious, charmingly written, brilliant and innovative in its readings, and bracing in its challenge to business as usual in Shakespeare studies, this book is an extraordinary intellectual achievement. There is no reaching after relevance here; it simply falls, like ripe fruit, into Julia Lupton’s expertly placed hand.”
“Julia Lupton’s fabulous Thinking with Shakespeare takes Shakespeare fully into politics and visits Hannah Arendt at home. These are not the only reversals enacted in this wonderful salon-text, in which improbable conversation partners meet to discuss always timely topics (virtue, hospitality, consent, biopolitics, theology) and laughter as well as insight ensue. Lupton is an expert reader of texts who finds something new even in the most well worn terrain. Everyone with an interest in citizenship, no matter their disciplinary home, should read this book.”
“The book offers fresh, lucid interpretations in chapters dedicated to The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Lupton convincingly explores ‘the special appointments between politics and life’ staged by these plays. . . . An extensive bibliography makes this fine book even more useful to interdisciplinary readers interested ni the fate of Shakespeare among political philosophers today.”
“[Lupton’s] book is a feat of interdisciplinarity, reflecting an erudition of Shakespeare scholarship, literary theory, and political theory that is profound and deeply impressive, and written with artful prose that is playful and smart. . . . Her book must be read not only as a leading scholar’s expert interpretation of Shakespeare but an invitation to political theorists of all types to find sustenance in the Bard.”
A Note on Texts
Introduction
TWO / The Hamlet Elections
THREE / All’s Well That Ends Well and the Futures of Consent
FOUR / Job of Athens, Timon of Uz
FIVE / Hospitality and Risk in The Winter’s Tale
SIX / The Minority of Caliban
SEVEN / Paul Shakespeare
Epilogue / Defrosting the Refrigerator with Hannah Arendt
Bibliography
Index
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
Philosophy: Ethics
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