Shakespeare as a Way of Life Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness [Hardcover]

Shakespeare as a Way of Life?shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In a series of close readings,?Kuzner shows how Hamlet,?Lucrece,?Othello,?The Winters Tale,?The Tempest, and?Timon of Athens, impel us to grapple with basic uncertainties: how we can be free, whether the world is abundant, whether we have met the demands of love and social life.

To Kuzner, Shakespeares skepticism doesnt have the enabling potential of Keatss heroic negativity capability, but neither is that skepticism the corrosive disease that necessarily issues in tragedy. While sensitive to both possibilities, Kuzner offers a way to keep negative capability negative while making skepticism livable. Rather than light the way to empowered, liberal subjectivity, Shakespeares works demand lasting disorientation, demand that we practice the impractical so as to reshape the frames by which we view and negotiate the world.

The act of reading Shakespeare cannot yield the practical value that cognitive scientists and literary critics attribute to it. His work neither clarifies our sense of ourselves, of others, or of the world; nor heartens us about the human capacity for insight and invention; nor sharpens our ability to appreciate and adjudicate complex problems of ethics and politics. Shakespeares plays, rather, yield cognitive discomforts, and it is just these discomforts that make them worthwhile.

This is broad and provocative thinking of the first order that promises to show how Shakespeare engages what remain some of the deepest questions concerning the human condition. Throughout the book, Kuzner reads Renaissance humanism, ethics, epistemology and theology in relation to their modern responses and redirections, reinvigorating historical study and theoretical discourse alike through the kinds of astute and creative cross-pollination that have made him such a distinctive voicls.