Shakespeare and Judgment

Shakespeare and Judgment PDF Author: Kevin Curran
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474413161
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Ranging widely across law, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, this book offers the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaShakespeare 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 FeaturesProvides the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaOffers a fresh perspective on the imaginative relationship between law, religion, and aesthetics in Shakespeare's playsModels new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation.

Shakespeare and Judgment

Shakespeare and Judgment PDF Author: Kevin Curran
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474413161
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Ranging widely across law, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, this book offers the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaShakespeare 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 FeaturesProvides the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaOffers a fresh perspective on the imaginative relationship between law, religion, and aesthetics in Shakespeare's playsModels new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation.

Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare

Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare PDF Author: Robert R. Reed
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780608185071
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book

Book Description


Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies

Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies PDF Author: Kevin Curran
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810135183
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices. At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts. The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource.

Shakespeare and the Law

Shakespeare and the Law PDF Author: Bradin Cormack
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022637856X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book

Book Description
"William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life; trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare's thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law's technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects. Shakespeare and the Law opens with three essays that provide useful frameworks for approaching the topic, offering perspectives on law and literature that emphasize both the continuities and the contrasts between the two fields. In its second section, the book considers Shakespeare's awareness of common-law thinking and practice through examinations of Measure for Measure and Othello. Building and expanding on this question, the third part inquires into Shakespeare's general attitudes toward legal systems. A judge and former solicitor general rule on Shylock's demand for enforcement of his odd contract; and two essays by literary scholars take contrasting views on whether Shakespeare could imagine a functioning legal system. The fourth section looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, both in the plays and in our own world. The volume concludes with a freewheeling colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Judge Richard A. Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier that covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion"--Jacket.

Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare

Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare PDF Author: Robert Rentoul ReedJr.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813186544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book

Book Description
Divine retribution, Robert Reed argues, is a principal driving force in Shakespeare's English history plays and three of his major tragedies. Reed finds evidence of the playwright's growing ingenuity and maturing skill in his treatment of the crime of political homicide, its impact on events, and God's judgment on the criminal. Reed's analysis focuses upon Tudor concepts that he shows were familiar to all Elizabethans—the biblical principle of inherited guilt, the doctrine that God is the fountainhead of retribution, with man merely His instrument, and the view that conscience serves a fundamentally divine function—and he urges us to look at Shakespeare within the context of his time, avoiding the too-frequent tendency of twentieth-century critics to force a modern world view on the plays. Heaven's power of vengeance provides an essential unifying theme to the plays of the two historical tetralogies, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth. By analyzing these plays in the light of values held by Shakespeare's contemporaries, Reed has made a substantial contribution toward clarifying our understanding of the plays and of Elizabethan England.

Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment

Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment PDF Author: Kevin Curran
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781399516365
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
[headline]Argues for the social and ethical importance of judgment in politics, law, art and everyday life, taking Shakespeare as a guide and travel companion Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment delves deep into the intellectual culture of Renaissance England and the dynamics of Shakespearean theatre to recover a positive, collaborative and future-oriented understanding of judgment, something largely lacking in contemporary social and philosophical discourse. Presenting a series of chapters organized around single keywords, the book enlists the help of Shakespeare to assemble a new lexicon for judgment, one that allows us to think and talk about our capacity for discernment in cooperative and community-making terms. Readers of Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment will come away with a clear and urgent sense of why judgment is an indispensable component of public life, and why theater offers a particularly powerful locale for cultivating it. [bio]Kevin Curran is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and General Editor of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy series. His books include Shakespeare's Legal Ecologies (2017), Renaissance Personhood (2020), and Shakespeare and Judgment (2017).

A Thousand Times More Fair

A Thousand Times More Fair PDF Author: Kenji Yoshino
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006208772X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book

Book Description
“Fascinating....Loaded with perceptive and provocative comments on Shakespeare’s plots, characters, and contemporary analogs.” —Justice John Paul Stevens, Supreme Court of the United States “Kenji Yoshino is the face and the voice of the new civil rights.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickled and Dimed A Thousand Times More Fair is a highly inventive and provocative exploration of ethics and the law that uses the plays of William Shakespeare as a prism through which to view the nature of justice in our contemporary lives. Celebrated law professor and author Kenji Yoshino delves into ten of the most important works of the Immortal Bard of Avon, offering prescient and thought-provoking discussions of lawyers, property rights, vengeance (legal and otherwise), and restitution that have tremendous significance to the defining events of our times—from the O.J. Simpson trial to Abu Ghraib. Anyone fascinated by important legal and social issues—as well as fans of Shakespeare-centered bestsellers like Will in the World—will find A Thousand Times More Fair an exceptionally rewarding reading experience.

Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments

Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments PDF Author: Robert G. Hunter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820338540
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book

Book Description
Robert G. Hunter maintains that the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Elizabethan mind was in great part responsible for the emergence of the outstanding tragedies of the age. Luther and Calvin caused men to ask how God can be just if man is not free, and Shakespeare's greatest tragedies confront the vexing problems posed by these altered conceptions of man's freedom of will and God's providential control of natural circumstance. Shakespeare's audiences were not single-minded. He wrote for semi-Pelagians, Augustinians, Calvinists, and men and women who did not know what to think. Confl icting certainties, doubts, and uncertainties were his raw material, both within his mind and the minds of the audience. Hunter shows how Shakespeare uses the major attitudes toward God's judgment in creating Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He notes that Shakespeare's different viewpoints are the heart of the tragedies themselves. Even after Shakespeare's imaginative considerations of the mysteries, the tragedies seem to consistently provide questions rather than answers, and what they inspire in their beholders is more likely to be doubt than faith.

The Trial of Man

The Trial of Man PDF Author: Craig Bernthal
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare often used trials or other scenes in which his characters are subjected to some sort of judgment-especially divine judgment-to convey the meaning of his plays. In The Trial of Man, Craig A. Bernthal, a lawyer and Shakespeare scholar, shows how paying careful attention to the Elizabethan religious and legal context in which Shakespeare lived illuminates many of his most famous works, including The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII.

The One King Lear

The One King Lear PDF Author: Sir Brian Vickers
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674970330
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book

Book Description
In the 1980s influential scholars argued that Shakespeare revised King Lear in light of theatrical performance, resulting in two texts by the bard’s own hand. The two-text theory hardened into orthodoxy. Here Sir Brian Vickers makes the case that Shakespeare did not cut his original text. At stake is the way his greatest play is read and performed.