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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture

Shakespeare’s Virtuous TheatrePower, Capacity and the Good

Edited by Kent Lehnhof, Julia Reinhard Lupton and Carolyn Sale

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£105.00

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About this book

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.

Reviews

This virtuosic collection of essays focuses on the virtues tending us towards co-operative and collective life. An absorbing, intelligent and original book, and an important addition to literary and intellectual history.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Series Editors' Preface

Introduction – Kent Lehnhof, Julia Reinhard Lupton and Carolyn Sale

Part I: Ecologies of Virtue

1. Cordelia’s Fire – Carolyn Sale 2. Voice, Virtue, Veritas: On Truth and Vocal Feeling in King Lear – Katie Adkison 3. Reading Virtues: Shakespeare’s Animals – Karen Raber

Part II: Virtue’s Performances

4. Shakespeare and the Virtue in Complaining – Emily Shortslef 5. Masculine Virtù and Feminine Virtue in Much Ado About Nothing – Kristina Sutherland 6. The Virtue of Humour in King Lear – Kent Lehnhof 7. Vita Energetica: Love’s Labour’s Lost and Shakespeare’s Maculate Theatre – Ian Munro

Part III: Virtue in Transit

8. Cymbeline and the Renewal of Constancy – Jesse M. Lander 9. Cymbeline and the ‘Swan’s Nest’ of Britain: Insularity, Chastity and Innogen’s Greater Transnational Virtues – Michael Gadaleto10. Sufi Theoroticism, the Sophianic Feminine, and Desdemona’s Tragic Heroism – Unhae Park Langis

Part IV: Sustaining Virtue

11. Enduring the Eventual: A Virtuous Way of Reading Shakespeare – Thomas J. Moretti12. Sustaining Courage in the Humanities: The Example of Hamlet – Daniel Juan Gil13. On the Virtue of Grief – Michael Bristol

Afterword – Kevin Curran

Notes on Contributors

Bibliography

Index

About the contributors

Kent Lehnhof

Kent Lehnhof is professor of English at Chapman University. He is author of some two dozen articles on early modern literature and culture and is co-editor (along with Moshe Gold and Sandor Goodhart) of the essay collection Of Levinas and Shakespeare: “To See Another Thus” (2018). His articles have appeared in such journals as Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, English Literary Renaissance, ELH, SEL, Modern Philology, and Criticism. He is currently working on a book-length study of vocality and ethics in Shakespeare’s late plays.

Julia Reinhard Lupton

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author or co-author of five books, including Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (2018), Thinking with Shakespeare (2015), and Citizen-Saints (2012). She has edited or co-edited many volumes and special issues, including Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook (with Donovan Sherman), and Shakespeare’s Virtuous Theatre: Power, Capacity, and the Good (with Kent Lehnhof and Carolyn Sale), Shakespeare and Hospitality (with David Goldstein), and Face to Face with Shakespeare (with Matthew Smith). She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Carolyn Sale

Carolyn Sale is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Film and Creative Writing at the University of Alberta. Her work on early modern writers and the law includes The Law in Shakespeare (2007), Shakespeare and the Law (2008), The History of British Women’s Writing, 1500–1610 (2010), Shakespeare and Judgment (2016), The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700 (2017) and Shakespeare and Wisdom: Ecological, Ecumenical, and Ethical Horizons (2024). She also co-edited Shakespeare’s Virtuous Theatre: Power, Capacity and the Good (2023) with Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kent Lehnhof.

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