To entertain an idea is to take it in, pay attention to it, give it breathing room, dwell with it for a time. The practice of entertaining ideas suggests rumination and meditation, inviting us to think of philosophy as a form of hospitality and a kind of mental theatre. In this collection, organized around key words shared by philosophy and performance, the editors suggest that Shakespeare's plays supply readers, listeners, viewers, and performers with equipment for living. In plays ranging from A Midsummer Night's Dream to King Lear and The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare invites readers and audiences to be more responsive to the texture and meaning of daily encounters, whether in the intimacies of love, the demands of social and political life, or moments of ethical decision. Entertaining the Idea features established and emerging scholars, addressing key words such as role play, acknowledgment, judgment, and entertainment as well as curse and care. The volume also includes longer essays on Shakespeare, Kant, Husserl, and Hegel as well as an afterword by theatre critic Charles McNulty on the philosophy and performance history of King Lear.

Uniquely, this guide analyses the play's critical and performance history and recent criticism, as well as including five essays offering radically new paths for contemporary interpretation. The subject matter of these essays is rich and diverse, ranging across the play's philosophical identification of sexual love with self-realization, the hermeneutic implications of an editor's textual choices, the minor characters of the play in relation to Renaissance performance traditions, Romeo and Juliet in opera and ballet, and the play's Italian sources and afterlives. The guide also contains a chapter on the key resources available, including scholarly editions and easily available DVDs, and discusses the ways in which they can be used in the classroom to aid understanding and provoke further debate. Edited by leading scholar Julia Reinhard Lupton, this is an essential guide for both students and scholars of Shakespeare.

This volume maps Shakespearean virtue in all its plasticity and variety, providing thirty-eight succinct, wide-ranging essays that reveal a breadth and diversity exceeding any given morality or code of behaviour. Clearly explaining key concepts in the history of ethics and in classical, theological, and global virtue traditions, the collection reveals their presence in the works of Shakespeare in interpersonal, civic, and ecological scenes of action. Paying close attention to individual identity and social environment, chapters also consider how the virtuous horizons broached in Shakespearean drama have been tested anew by the plays' global travels and fresh encounters with different traditions. Including sections on global wisdom, performance and pedagogy, this handbook affirms virtue as a resource for humanistic education and the building of human capacity.

Explores the drama of proximity and co-presence in Shakespeare's plays Key Features Brings together the rare pairing of philosophical ethics and performance studies in Shakespeare's plays Engages with the thought of philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Cavell, and Emmanuel Levinas This book celebrates the theatrical excitement and philosophical meanings of human interaction in Shakespeare. On stage and in life, the face is always window and mirror, representation and presence. It examines the emotional and ethical surplus that appears between faces in the activity and performance of human encounter on stage. By transitioning from face as noun to verb - to face, outface, interface, efface, deface, sur-face - chapters reveal how Shakespeare's plays discover conflict, betrayal and deception as well as love, trust and forgiveness between faces and the bodies that bear them.

This book examines the ways in which the literary genre of hagiography and the hermeneutical paradigm of Biblical typology together entered into the construction of "the Renaissance" as a canon and period. It is not about saints' lives in themselves, as either literary or historical phenomena, but instead addresses the structural effects of hagiography in the secular literature of the Renaissance.
The central texts analyzed--Boccaccio's Decameron, Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale--all manifest key moments and aspects in the creation of a Renaissance canon for the post-Renaissance world. The epochal significance of these works, saturated in religious allusions as well as scenes of profane life and classical art, is shown to rest in neither the normative piety nor the subversive heresy of any of these writers, but rather in their crafting of myths of modernity precisely out of the religious material that formed such an important part of their daily vocabularies.

What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? Such questions--bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life--animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has often been obscured. Julia Reinhard Lupton gently dislodges Shakespeare's plays from their historical confines to pursue their universal implications. From Petruchio's animals and Kate's laundry to Hamlet's friends and Caliban's childhood, Lupton restages thinking in Shakespeare as an embodied act of consent, cure, and care. Thinking with Shakespeare encourages readers to ponder matters of shared concern with the playwright by their side. Taking her cue from Hannah Arendt, Lupton reads Shakespeare for fresh insights into everything from housekeeping and animal husbandry to biopower and political theology.

Presents Shakespeare's theatre as a powerful forum for shaping our capacity for virtue Opens virtue ethics to new political and ecological stakes by building bridges between ancient philosophy, contemporary virtue ethics and Shakespeare's drama Demonstrates the semantic, pragmatic, and phenomenological range of virtue in Shakespeare's plays and dramatic practice by emphasizing the embodied, performative and deliberative dimensions of virtue Offers new readings of virtues such as courage, friendship, constancy, kindness and judgment, as staged in Shakespeare's drama 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.

Who is a citizen? What is a person? Who is my neighbor? These fundamental questions about group membership and social formation have been posed repeatedly in political and religious discourses. Citizen-Saint uses keys works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton to examine the aims, limits, and legacies of classic and modern citizenship in Western literature. Turning to the potent idea of political theology to recover the strange mix of political and religious thinking during the Renaissance, Julia Reinhard Lupton unveils the figure of the citizensaint, who represents at once divine messenger and civil servant, both norm and exception. Embodied by such diverse personages as Antigone, Paul, Barabbas, Shylock, Othello, Caliban, Isabella, and Samson, the citizen-saint is a sacrificial figure: a model of moral and aesthetic extremity that inspires new regimes of citizenship with his or her traumatic passage into the public sphere. And these scenes of civic entry ultimately dramatize the literature of citizenship in both its evident impasses and its enduring potential.

Great halls and hovels, dove-houses and sheepcotes, mountain cells and seaside shelters--these are some of the spaces in which Shakespearean characters gather to dwell, and to test their connections with one another and their worlds. Julia Reinhard Lupton enters Shakespeare's dwelling places in search of insights into the most fundamental human problems. Focusing on five works (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale), Lupton remakes the concept of dwelling by drawing on a variety of sources, including modern design theory, Renaissance treatises on husbandry and housekeeping, and the philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The resulting synthesis not only offers a new entry point into the contemporary study of environments; it also shows how Shakespeare's works help us continue to make sense of our primal creaturely need for shelter.

Explores the drama of proximity and co-presence in Shakespeare's plays Key Features Brings together the rare pairing of philosophical ethics and performance studies in Shakespeare's plays Engages with the thought of philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Cavell, and Emmanuel Levinas This book celebrates the theatrical excitement and philosophical meanings of human interaction in Shakespeare. On stage and in life, the face is always window and mirror, representation and presence. It examines the emotional and ethical surplus that appears between faces in the activity and performance of human encounter on stage. By transitioning from face as noun to verb - to face, outface, interface, efface, deface, sur-face - chapters reveal how Shakespeare's plays discover conflict, betrayal and deception as well as love, trust and forgiveness between faces and the bodies that bear them.

Romeo and Juliet is the most produced, translated and re-mixed of all of Shakespeare’s plays. This volume takes up the iconographic, linguistic and performance layers already at work within it and tracks the play’s dispersal into neighbouring art forms – including ballet, opera, television and architecture – and geographical locations, including Italy, Ireland, France, India and Korea. Chapters trace Shakespeare's own acts of adaptation and appropriation of sources and the play's subsequent migrations into other media. Part One considers reworkings of Romeo and Juliet in Hector Berlioz's 1839 choral symphony and ballets choreographed by Sir Kenneth MacMillan and John Neumeier. Part Two explores the afterlives of Shakespeare’s lovers in the narrative forms of fiction, film and serial television, including works by James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and HBO's series Westworld. Part Three examines dramatic adaptations of the play into other languages, dialects and cultural contexts. Authors consider Hindi translations and the complex and changing status of Shakespeare's work in India, as well as productions of the play in Korea set against its evolving history. The volume ends with a first-person account of staging Romeo and Juliet at an HBCU (historically Black college/university), documenting the tensions between the notion of Shakespeare as a universal author and the lived experiences of marginalized communities as they engage with his plays.

Great halls and hovels, dove-houses and sheepcotes, mountain cells and seaside shelters--these are some of the spaces in which Shakespearean characters gather to dwell, and to test their connections with one another and their worlds. Julia Reinhard Lupton enters Shakespeare's dwelling places in search of insights into the most fundamental human problems. Focusing on five works (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale), Lupton remakes the concept of dwelling by drawing on a variety of sources, including modern design theory, Renaissance treatises on husbandry and housekeeping, and the philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The resulting synthesis not only offers a new entry point into the contemporary study of environments; it also shows how Shakespeare's works help us continue to make sense of our primal creaturely need for shelter.

Uniquely, this guide analyses the play's critical and performance history and recent criticism, as well as including five essays offering radically new paths for contemporary interpretation. The subject matter of these essays is rich and diverse, ranging across the play's philosophical identification of sexual love with self-realization, the hermeneutic implications of an editor's textual choices, the minor characters of the play in relation to Renaissance performance traditions, Romeo and Juliet in opera and ballet, and the play's Italian sources and afterlives. The guide also contains a chapter on the key resources available, including scholarly editions and easily available DVDs, and discusses the ways in which they can be used in the classroom to aid understanding and provoke further debate. Edited by leading scholar Julia Reinhard Lupton, this is an essential guide for both students and scholars of Shakespeare.

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.