Shakespeare and Judgment

Description

Ranging widely across law, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, this book offers the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama Shakespeare and Judgment gathers together an international group of scholars to address for the first time the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama. Contributors approach the topic from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, covering plays from across Shakespeare’s career and from each of the genres in which he wrote. Anchoring the volume are two critical contentions: first, that attending to Shakespeare’s treatment of judgment leads to fresh insights about the imaginative relationship between law, theater, and aesthetics in early modern England; and second, that it offers new ways of putting the plays’ historical and philosophical contexts into conversation. Taken together, the essays in Shakespeare and Judgment offer a genuinely new account of the historical and intellectual coordinates of Shakespeare’s plays. Building on current work in legal studies, religious studies, theater history, and critical theory, the volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Key Features - Provides the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama - Offers a fresh perspective on the imaginative relationship between law, religion, and aesthetics in Shakespeare’s plays - Models new ways of putting the plays’ historical and philosophical contexts into conversation Shakespeare and Judgment Copyright Contents Acknowledgments List of Contributors Introduction Part I: Staging Judgment: Deliberation in the Plays 1. Preventive Justice in Measure for Measure 2. Believing in Ghosts, in Part: Judgment and Indecision in Hamlet 3. Shakespeare’s Law and Plowden’s Authority Part II: Audience Judgment: Deliberation in the Theater 4. “Gently to hear, kindly to judge”: Minds at Work in Henry V 5. “Practis[ing] judgment with the disposition of natures”: Measure for Measure, the “Discoursive” Common Law, and the “Open Court” of the Theater 6. The Laws of Measure for Measure 7. Prospero’s Plea: Judgment, Invention, and Political Form in The Tempest Part III: The Ethics of Judgment 8. Antinomian Shakespeare: English Drama and Confession Across the Reformation Divide 9. Bracketed Judgment, “Un-humanizing,” and Conversion in The Merchant of Venice 10. The Judgment of the Critics that Makes us Tremble: “Distributing Complicities” in Recent Criticism of King Lear Index