William M. Hawley Bücher

Shakespearean Tragedy and the Common Law examines punishment in Shakespeare's tragedies from the perspective of English Renaissance common law cases and theory. William Shakespeare's work is grounded conceptually in the «artificial» reason of common law as embodied by the great jurist of the age, Sir Edward Coke. Coke's legal rationale is sufficiently distinct from our own to suggest that a reasonable spectator in Renaissance England would interpret key elements of Shakespeare's art differently than we do today. Punishment, the sine qua non of these plays, is treated via a spectrum of legal retribution, restitution, deterrence, and reform. Dr. Hawley's close examination of all ten plays and some fifty cases reveals how law, art, and philosophy shape Shakespeare's tragic vision.

This book provides new insights into the theatrical and philosophical foundations of Shakespeare's history plays through a dialogue with the theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricoeur. Widely regarded to be anti-historical and nihilistic, Derrida and Foucault are shown to hold as responsible an attitude toward politics, truth, and art as Ricoeur. In the author's close critique of the ten plays, the sometimes conflicting views of these theorists reveal Shakespeare's developing historical understanding. Rather than promulgating a single historical perspective, Shakespeare's «historiography» plays afford pluralistic views of myth, politics, gender, sexuality, intersubjectivity, and religion because of their profound theatricality. Shakespeare's «detour» into history and culture thus joins the skeptical dimension of critical hermeneutics.