[PDF] Shakespeare Between Machiavelli And Hobbes eBook

Author : Andrew Moore
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 44,41 MB
Release : 2016-08-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1498514081

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Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare’s political outlook by comparing some of the playwright’s best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. By situating Shakespeare ‘between’ these two thinkers, the distinctly modern trajectory of the playwright’s work becomes visible. Throughout his career, Shakespeare interrogates the divine right of kings, absolute monarchy, and the metaphor of the body politic. Simultaneously he helps to lay the groundwork for modern politics through his dramatic explorations of consent, liberty, and political violence. We can thus understand Shakespeare’s corpus as a kind of eulogy: a funeral speech dedicated to outmoded and deficient theories of politics. We can also understand him as a revolutionary political thinker who, along with Machiavelli and Hobbes, reimagined the origins and ends of government. All three thinkers understood politics primarily as a response to our mortality. They depict politics as the art of managing and organizing human bodies—caring for their needs, making space for the satisfaction of desires, and protecting them from the threat of violent death. This book features new readings of Shakespeare’s plays that illuminate the playwright’s major political preoccupations and his investment in materialist politics.

Author : Alex Schulman
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 50,80 MB
Release : 2014-07-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0748682422

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What were Shakespeare's politics? As this study demonstrates, contained in Shakespeare's plays is an astonishingly powerful reckoning with the tradition of Western political thought, one whose depth and scope places Shakespeare alongside Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. This book is the first attempt by a political theorist to read Shakespeare within the trajectory of political thought as one of the authors of modernity. From Shakespeare's interpretation of ancient and medieval politics to his wrestling with issues of legitimacy, religious toleration, family conflict, and economic change, Alex Schulman shows how Shakespeare produces a fascinating map of modern politics at its crisis-filled birth. As a result, there are brand new readings of Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Richard II and Henry IV, parts I and II , The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.

Author : Quentin Skinner
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 447 pages
File Size : 36,42 MB
Release : 2018-01-25
Category : History
ISBN : 1107128854

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Offers new insights into the works of Machiavelli, Shakespeare and especially Hobbes by focusing on their use of rhetoric.

Author : Matthew D. Dinan
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 41,32 MB
Release : 2021-05-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1498585906

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This volume presents a series of essays in honor of noted scholar of political theory, Mary P. Nichols. The essays reflect Nichols’ pathbreaking work in ancient Greek political thought, as well as her influential treatments of works of literature and film in conversation with political theory. Part I: Conversations Concerning Love and Friendship features essays about the philosophical meaning of human connection and affection. Part II: Conversations Between Politics and Poetry looks at the political significance of art, and the ways in which political rule can be understood to be “artistic” or poetic. Part III: Conversations from Tragedy to Comedy considers whether the human need for community is something to be lamented or celebrated. Broad in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, the essays in this volume address authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Mary Wollstonecraft, G.W.F. Hegel, Jane Austen, Henry James, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, as well as the films of Woody Allen and Whit Stillman.

Author : Niccolo Machiavelli
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 14,28 MB
Release : 1988-10-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521349932

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Professor Skinner presents a lucid analysis of Machiavelli's text as a response to the world of Florentine politics.

Author : Ann Ward
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 26,97 MB
Release : 2021-09-28
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1000452506

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This book examines politics through the lens of art and literature. Through discussion on great works of visual art, literature, and cultural representations of political thought in the medieval, early modern, and American eras, it explores the relevance of the nation-state to human freedom and flourishing, as well as the concept of citizenship and statesmanship that it implies, in contrast to that of the ‘global community’. The essays in this volume focus on shifting notions of various core political concepts like citizenship, republicanism, and nationalism from antiquity to the present-day to provide a systematic understanding of their evolving histories through Western Art and literature. It highlights works such as the Bayeux Tapestry, Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twain’s Joan of Arc and Hermann’s Nichts als Gespenster, among several other canonical works of political interest. Further, it questions if we should now look beyond the nation-state to some form of tans-national, global community to pursue the human freedom desired by progressives, or look at smaller forms of community resembling the polis to pursue the friendship and nobility valued by the ancients. The volume will be invaluable to students and teachers of political science, especially political theory and philosophy, visual arts, and world literature.

Author : David Armitage
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 19,83 MB
Release : 2009-09-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1139480421

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This is the first collaborative volume to place Shakespeare's works within the landscape of early modern political thought. Until recently, literary scholars have not generally treated Shakespeare as a participant in the political thought of his time, unlike his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. At the same time, historians of political thought have rarely turned their attention to major works of poetry and drama. A distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors examines the full range of Shakespeare's writings in order to challenge conventional interpretations of plays central to the canon, such as Hamlet; open up novel perspectives on works rarely considered to be political, such as the Sonnets; and focus on those that have been largely neglected, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a coherent and challenging portrait of Shakespeare's distinctive engagement with the characteristic questions of early modern political thought.

Author : DS Mayfield
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 1115 pages
File Size : 10,16 MB
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3110701774

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Human life is susceptible of changing suddenly, of shifting inadvertently, of appearing differently, of varying unpredictably, of being altered deliberately, of advancing fortuitously, of commencing or ending accidentally, of a certain malleability. In theory, any human being is potentially capacitated to conceive of—and convey—the chance, view, or fact that matters may be otherwise, or not at all; with respect to other lifeforms, this might be said animal’s distinctive characteristic. This state of play is both an everyday phenomenon, and an indispensable prerequisite for exceptional innovations in culture and science: contingency is the condition of possibility for any of the arts—be they dominantly concerned with thinking, crafting, or enacting. While their scope and method may differ, the (f)act of reckoning with—and taking advantage of—contingency renders rhetoricians and philosophers associates after all. In this regard, Aristotle and Blumenberg will be exemplary, hence provide the framework. Between these diachronic bridgeheads, close readings applying the nexus of rhetoric and contingency to a selection of (Early) Modern texts and authors are intercalated—among them La Celestina, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Wilde, Fontane.

Author : Leon Harold Craig
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 39,38 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1580465315

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This book on Shakespeare's Henriad studies the tetralogy as a work of political thought. Leon Harold Craig, author of two previous volumes on Shakespeare's political thought, argues that the four plays present Shakespeare's teaching on the problem of legitimacy, or who has the right to rule -- one of the perennial questions of political philosophy. Offering original interpretations of each of the plays, Craig discusses the demise of divine right in Richard II, political upheaval and disputed rule in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and the attempt to reestablish legitimacy on a new basis in Henry V. While focusing especially on the plays' various interpretive puzzles, Craig shows how the four plays constitute one narrative, culminating in the rule of England's most famous warrior king, Henry V, whose brilliant achievements were undone by ill fortune. Craig concludes with an epilogue on what might have been had Henry lived to consolidate his conquest of France and unify it with England under a single crown. Supported by a wealth of scholarship, both historical and critical, The Philosopher's English King makes a major contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on Shakespeare as a political thinker, providing further evidence for why the poet deserves to be recognized as a philosopher in his own right. Leon Harold Craig is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Alberta.

Author : Kimberly Hurd Hale
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 163 pages
File Size : 22,33 MB
Release : 2016-10-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1498509932

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The Politics of Perfection: Technology and Creation in Literature and Film provides an exploration of the relationship between modern technological progress and classical liberalism. Each chapter provides a detailed analysis of a film or novel, including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, Michael Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. These works of fiction are examined through the lens of political thinkers ranging from Plato to Hannah Arendt. The compatibility of classical liberalism and technology is questioned, using fiction as a window into Western society’s views on politics, economics, religion, technology, and the family. This project explores the intersection between human nature and creation, particularly artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, using works of literature and film to access cultural concerns. Each of the works featured asks a question about the relationship between technology and creation. Technology also allows humanity to create new types of life in the forms of artificial intelligence and genetically engineered beings. This book studies works of literature and film as evidence of the contemporary unease with the progress of technology and its effect on the political realm.