Shakespeare and moral agency

223 Pages·2010·0.93 MB·English

by  Bristol

Shakespeare and Moral Agency
Continuum Shakespeare Studies
Shakespeare’s Cues and Prompts
Murray J. Levith
Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre
Keith Gregor
Shakespeare and Moral
Agency
Edited by Michael D. Bristol
The Continuum International Publishing Group
Continuum London Continuum New York
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© Michael D. Bristol and contributors 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-8264-4676-3 (hardback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Acknowledgments x
Introduction: Is Shakespeare a Moral Philosopher? 1
Michael Bristol
Part I The Agency of Agents
1 Moral Agency and Its Problems in Julius Caesar :
Political Power, Choice, and History 15
Hugh Grady
2 A Shakespearean Phenomenology of Moral Conviction 29
James A. Knapp
3 Wordplay and the Ethics of Self-Deception in
Shakespeare’s Tragedies 42
Keira Travis
4 Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being: Shakespearean Puzzles
about Agency 55
Richard Strier
Part II Social Norms
5 Conduct (Un)becoming or, Playing the Warrior in Macbeth 71
Sharon O’Dair
6 To “Tempt the Rheumy and Unpurged Air”: Contagion
and Agency in Julius Caesar 86
Jennifer Feather
7 Ethical Questions and Questionable Morals in Measure for
Measure and The Merchant of Venice 99
Kathryn R. Finin
8 “The oldest hath borne most”: the Burdens of Aging and
the Morality of Uselessness in King Lear 111
Naomi Conn Liebler
Part III Moral Characters
9 Quoting the Enemy: Character, Self-Interpretation, and
the Question of Perspective in Shakespeare 129
Mustapha Fahmi
vi Contents
10 The Fool, the Blind, and the Jew 142
Tzachi Zamir
11 “Unlucky Deeds” and the Shame of Othello 159
Andrew Escobedo
12 Agency and Repentance in The Winter’s Tale 171
Gregory Currie
13 What’s Virtue Ethics Got to Do With It? Shakespearean
Character as Moral Character 184
Sara Coodin
Works Cited 200
Index 211
Notes on Contributors
Michael Bristol is Greenshields Professor Emeritus at McGill University in
Montréal, Québec. His publications include Carnival and Theatre (1986);
Shakespeare’s America/America’s Shakespeare (1990); and Big-Time Shakespeare
(1996). For several years he taught a graduate seminar on Shakespeare and
Moral Agency. Since his retirement he has tried, with limited success, to become
a fl âneur.
Sara Coodin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at McGill
University. She is completing her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Philosophizing
Shakespeare” on Shakespeare, virtue ethics, and the emotions. Her next project
will be a study of The Merchant of Venice and the Jewish hermeneutic
tradition.
Gregory Currie teaches philosophy at the University of Nottingham; before
that he taught in Australia and New Zealand. He is a graduate of the London
School of Economics and a past fellow of St John’s College Oxford. His latest
book, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories, is due to be published by
Oxford in 2010. When he has the time, he rings the bells at his local church.
Andrew Escobedo is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate
Studies at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He is the author of Nationalism and
Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (2004). He is
currently working on a project about personifi cation as an expression of
Renaissance ideas about the will.
Mustapha Fahmi is Professor of English Literature at Université du Québec à
Chicoutimi. He is the author of several publications on Shakespeare in English
and in French, as well as two poetry collections, The Last of the Nightingales
(Casablanca, 1987) and Poems from the North (Montreal, 1993), both in Arabic.
He is currently working on the relationship between literature and the
environment, articulating an ecocritical reading of Shakespearean comedy
based on Heidegger’s later philosophy. Dr. Fahmi is a fanatic of English football
with a particular fondness for Manchester United.
Jennifer Feather is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro. She received her PhD from Brown University in 2006.
Her work focuses on depictions of violence and understanding of selfhood in
early modern literature.
viii Notes on Contributors
Kathryn R. Finin is Assistant professor of English at the State University of
New York at Oneonta where she specializes in Shakespeare and Early Modern
English literature. Her work has been published in various journals, including
Renaissance Drama, Renaissance Forum, and Cahiers Élisabéthains. She received the
Distinguished Research Award for her work on English Renaissance Drama
from Binghamton University where she earned her doctorate in 1997. She has
also received numerous research grants and a Distinguished Teaching Award
from SUNY-Oneonta. Fascinated with classical and medieval labyrinths since
childhood, Professor Finin regularly offers various labyrinth walks on campus
and in the local community.
Hugh Grady is Professor of English at Arcadia University in Glenside
Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a
Material World; Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reifi cation, and
Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to
Hamlet. He has edited Shakespeare and Modernity for the Accents on Shakespeare
series, and is currently working on a book on the connections between
Shakespeare’s plays and aesthetic theory.
James A. Knapp is Associate Professor of English and Director of the University
Honors College at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Illustrating
the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books
(2003) and articles in the Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, and Criticism, as well as in
a variety of book collections. He edited a double special issue of Poetics Today
with Jeffrey Pence, entitled: “Between Thing and Theory, or The Refl ective
Turn,” and served as editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory from 1999 to 2004.
He is currently completing a book on the relationship between ethics and vision
in Shakespeare and Spenser.
Naomi Conn Liebler is Professor of English and University Distinguished
Scholar at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Her publications include
Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: the Ritual Foundations of Genre (Routledge, 1995);
Tragedy (Longmans Critical Readers Series, 1998, co-edited with John Drakakis),
and two edited essay collections: The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance
Drama (Palgrave, 2002) and Early Modern Prose Fiction: the Cultural Politics of
Reading (Routledge, 2007). She has served as Trustee of the Shakespeare
Association of America and as co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on
Shakespeare. Her current research focuses on “Shakespeare’s Geezers,” his
negotiations of old age throughout his dramatic and poetic genres. She
attended The Woodstock Festival (“Three Days of Peace and Music”) in 1969.
Sharon O’Dair is Professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode
Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. She co-edited
The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Cornell 1994) and is author
of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (Michigan 2000).
Notes on Contributors ix
She has published many essays on Shakespeare, literary theory, and the
profession of English studies, and currently is working on a manuscript entitled,
“The Eco-Bard: The Greening of Shakespeare in Contemporary Film.” She
recently sold her Porsche 144, which had a top speed of 150 mph.
Richard Strier is Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor at the
University of Chicago, where he’s been his whole career. He has published Love
Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry, and Resistant Structures:
Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts; various essays on Luther, Milton,
and Shakespeare; and has co-edited a number of volumes on writing and
political engagement in the seventeenth century. He is currently completing
“The Unrepentant Renaissance: from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton.”
Keira Travis is currently teaching Shakespeare and seventeenth century
literature at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.
She holds a PhD from McGill University, and recently held a postdoctoral
fellowship at Stanford University. Her research studies the language of gesture
and movement in Shakespeare’s work as the expression of character’s ethical
orientation.
Tzachi Zamir is a philosopher and a literary critic. He is Chair of the Department
of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds teaching positions
in the department of Comparative Literature and the Faculty of Law (Hebrew
University), and in the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. He has been
an active member of acting companies since 2004, and has studied acting
primarily in the Tel-Aviv based branch of the Jacques Lecoq school of theatre.
His main publications include Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean
Drama (2006), and Ethics and the Beast (2007). His current research project is
about the philosophical dimensions of dramatic acting.