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Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds, but the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As this book reveals, the modern human/animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’ famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what the author terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, the author explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, the author argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, the book contributes to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.

In this book, the author confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With a distinctive psychological acumen, this book argues that William Shakespeare's play frames the uneasy relationship between Christians and Jews specifically in familial terms in order to recapitulate the vexed familial relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The book locates the promise—or threat—of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play. Drawing on a variety of cultural materials, it demonstrates that, despite the triumph of its Christians, The Merchant of Venice reflects Christian anxiety and guilt about its simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of Judaism. In this psycho-theological analysis, both the insistence that Shylock's daughter Jessica remain racially bound to her father after her conversion and the depiction of Shylock as a bloody-minded monster are understood as antidotes to Christian uneasiness about a Judaism it can neither own nor disown. In taking seriously the religious discourse of The Merchant of Venice, the book offers a book both on the play itself and on the question of Jews and Judaism in Renaissance England and beyond.

A curious transvaluation is taking place in our study of the past: negatives are becoming positives and vice versa. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are now being hailed as correctives or alternatives to that order. Conversely, chronology and periods, the mainstays of that order, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent. Secularization, once embraced as the great precipitate of the modern era, is now also on the defensive. In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare Studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term. The book demonstrates how challenges raised at a conceptual level have thrown into question some of the key tenets and practices of the study of Shakespeare. Each chapter focuses on one of the temporalizing terms: the detection of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project. All four chapters coalesce around a common objective: to show how the emergence of these historical coordinates, long after Shakespeare, affected the editing, staging, and criticism of his plays.

Shakespeare's dramatis personae exist in a world of supposition, struggling to connect knowledge that cannot be had, judgments that must be made, and actions that need to be taken. For them, probability—what they and others might be persuaded to believe—governs human affairs, not certainty. Yet negotiating the space of probability is fraught with difficulty. This book explores the problematics of probability and the psychology of persuasion in Renaissance rhetoric and Shakespeare's theater. Focusing on the Tragedy of Othello, it investigates Shakespeare's representation of the self as a specific realization of tensions pervading the rhetorical culture in which he was educated and practiced his craft. In this account, Shakespeare also restrains and energizes his audiences' probabilizing capacities, alternately playing the sceptical critic and dramaturgic trickster.

William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life, and trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering a team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, this book demonstrates that Shakespeare's thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law's technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects. It opens with three chapters that provide useful frameworks for approaching the topic, offering perspectives on law and literature which emphasize both the continuities and contrasts between the two fields. In its second section, the book considers Shakespeare's awareness of common law thinking and common law practice through examinations of Measure for Measure and Othello. Building and expanding on this question, the third section inquires into Shakespeare's general attitudes toward legal systems. A judge and a former solicitor general rule on Shylock's demand for enforcement of his odd contract; and two chapters by literary scholars take contrasting views on whether Shakespeare could imagine a functioning legal system. The fourth section looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, both in the plays and in our own world. The book concludes with a freewheeling colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Judge Richard Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier that covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion.

Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare's timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians, who view modern claims of Shakespeare's uniqueness as a distortion of his real professional life. This book draws on an array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare's authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries actually understood it. It argues that Shakespeare tried to adapt his own singular talent and ambition to the collaborative enterprise of drama by imagining himself as uniquely embodying the diverse, fractious energies of the popular theater.

Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeare's most complex and idiosyncratic characters. With his unsettling eloquence and his varying voices of protest, play, rage, and refusal, Shylock remains a source of perennial fascination. What explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeare's plays? This book posits that the figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself. It argues that Shylock is a breakthrough for Shakespeare the playwright, an early realization of the Bard's power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulses—characters larger than the plays that contain them and ready to escape the author's control. Shylock is also a mask for Shakespeare's own need, rage, vulnerability, and generosity, giving form to his ambition as an author and his uncertain bond with the audience. The vision of Shylock as Shakespeare's covert double as given in this book leads to a probing analysis of the character's peculiar isolation, ambivalence, opacity, and dark humor. Addressing the broader resonance of Shylock, both historical and artistic, the book examines the character's hold on later readers and writers, including Heinrich Heine and Philip Roth, suggesting that Shylock mirrors the ambiguous states of Jewishness in modernity.