Shakespeare's Folly: Philosophy, Humanism, Critical Theory

ISBN-13: 9780367877910 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 214 str.

Sam Hall

Opis

This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare’s drama. The discourse of folly’s wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. It is the first study of its k

Spis treści

Preface

Acknowledgements

A Note on References

Chapter One:

1.1. Introduction

1.2. A Philosophy of Folly?

1.3. Shakespearean Fools

Chapter Two: Humanism and Shakespearean Folly

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Stultitia’s Metamorphosis

2.3. Dialectics and Utopian Enlightenment

2.4. Playing the Fool in Utopia

2.5. Playing and Mocking

2.6. Essaying Folly

2.7. Identity Critique

Chapter Three: Opening the Silenus: The Fool’s Truth

3.1. Introduction

3.2. Theology and the Silenus

3.3. Silenic Style

3.4. The Casket Test

3.5. Self-Serving Mercy

3.6. Epilogue

Chapter Four: Jesting at the Court of History

4.1. Introduction

4.2. Degeneracy

4.3. Deformities

4.4. Echoes of Folly

4.5. Telling the Truth through Lies

4.6. Cretan Historians

4.7. The Use and Abuse of History

Chapter Five: Love’s Fools

5.1. Introduction

5.2. Inhuman Allegories

5.3. Temporality and Allegory

5.4. True, False, Other: The Logic of Folly

5.5. Love’s ‘Strange Capers’

5.6. The World Turned Upside-Down

5.7. Modalities of Melancholy

5.8. What a Fool Honesty is

5.9. Losing Eden

Chapter Six: Folly and Aesthetic Judgement

6.1. Pitiful ambition in the fool

6.2. Your sovereignty of reason

6.3. Here’s fine revolution

6.4. Your fat king and your lean beggar

6.5. Terrible Eloquence

6.6. Reason in Madness

6.7. The excellent foppery of man

6.8. A 0 without a Figure

6.9. This prophecy Merlin shall make

6.10. Let us deal justly

6.11. Thy life’s a miracle

Epilogue: Sapere aude?

O autorze

Sam Gilchrist Hall is a Teacher of English at the British Council, Hungary, and a Visiting Instructor at the University of Debrecen.