The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom
The Poet as Teacher of Statesmen This volume joins a growing chorus of scholars who approach Shakespeare as a political thinker.[1] The chapters that follow explore how…
The Problems Are Everlasting, the Bard Indispensable
The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom. Khalil M. Habib and L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2018. In 2015…
Of Infinite Variety: The Promise of Comedy in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Shakespeare’s comedies can generally be understood through their endings in marriage. In marriage, two particular individuals, with diverse and even opposing desires and interests, are reconciled as…
Teaching Hamlet: The Play’s the Thing
Consider a famous question asked at dinner parties: If you were stranded on a desert island and had only one book, what book would that be? The…
The Presence of the Spoudaios, Spoudaic Potential, and the Spoudaic Spectrum in Western Literature From Shakespeare to the Present
The aim of this article is to propose the notion that the spoudaios, spoudaic potential, and the spoudaic spectrum are constantly recurring figures in literary texts in…
Hamlet, The Affective Roots of Decision, and Modernity
Hamlet is a play so rich in insight regarding human existence, so revelatory and reverberative, that Harold Bloom is justified in calling it a “poem unlimited."[1][2] All…
Romancing the Sources: Framing Tales in Hamlet and King Lear
1 Polonius commends a visiting troupe of players as “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, [tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,]” (II,ii,396-99).[1] We…
Contract, Friendship, and Love in The Merchant of Venice
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has been interpreted in numerous ways that range from focusing on the roles of women and marriage to examining questions of justice…
Emending Othello; Explaining Othello: A Critique of Contemporary Principles of and Practices in Editing Shakespeare and A Historical-Literary Interpretation of Othello’s Jealousy
To see the world in a grain of sand is, in editing Shakespeare, to inspect the implications of different pronouns at III, iii, 96-7 (TLN 1696-7), in…
Some Maladies of Early Modern Race Study in Shakespeare
The spring 2016 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly (67.1) updates the state of early modern race study in Shakespeare. Guest editors Peter Erickson (Northwestern) and Kim F. Hall…
Answer the Question, Question Authority, and Read Inclusively: Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear
Let me begin by declaring that, unlike my fellow colleagues, who are college professors, I am an independent, unaffiliated scholar. My status entitles me to quip that,…
The Witches of Macbeth: A Weyward Translation
Imagine a smoking cauldron rising from the trapdoor of the Globe’s center stage as you hear echoes of thunder from the attics. Three bearded men cloaked in…
Sources, Scholarship, and Sense: Shakespeare’s Use of Holinshed in Macbeth
1 The study of sources and influences suffers a bad reputation in Shakespearean scholarship, for the most part, deservedly so. Earlier generations of scholars too much entangled…
Shakespeare after Theory
Shakespeare after Theory. David Scott Kastan. New York: Routledge, 1999. Theory is dead—if the title is the message of David Scott Kastan, English professor at Columbia University,…
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: The Epitome of Anti-Stratfordian Scholarship
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: The Epitome of Anti-Stratfordian Scholarship. Diana Price. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2000. 1: Overview I do not care who wrote the plays conventionally attributed,…
