The Philosopher’s Toothache proposes that early modern Stoicism constituted a radical mode of performance. Stoicism—with its focus on bodily sensation, imagined spectatorship, and daily mental and physical exercise—exists as what the philosopher Pierre Hadot calls a “way of life,” a set of habits and practices. To be a Stoic is not to espouse doctrine but to act. Informed by work in both classical philosophy and performance studies, Donovan Sherman argues that Stoicism infused the complex theatrical culture of early modern England. Plays written and performed during this period gave life to Stoic exercises that instructed audiences to cultivate their virtue, self-awareness, and creativity. By foregrounding Stoicism’s embodied nature, Sherman recovers a vital dimension too often lost in reductive portrayals of the Stoics by early modern writers and contemporary scholars alike. The Philosopher’s Toothache features readings of dramatic works by William Shakespeare, Cyril Tourneur, and John Marston alongside considerations of early modern adaptations of classical Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius) and Neo-Stoics such as Justus Lipsius. These plays model Stoic virtues like unpredictability, indifference, vulnerability, and dependence—attributes often framed as negative but that can also rekindle a sense of responsible public action.

"This book offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy. Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices"--

"This book is about the way in which Shakespeare's plays have inspired readers to "talk back" and about some of the forms such talking back can assume. It is also about the way different interpretive communities, including students, read their cultural, political, and moral assumptions into Shakespeare's plays, appropriating and transforming elements of plot, character, and verbal text while challenging what they see as the ideological premises of the plays. Texts that talk back to Shakespeare pose questions, offer alternatives, take liberties, and fill in gaps. Some of the transformations discussed in Talking Back to Shakespeare challenge deeply held assumptions such as, for instance, that Hamlet is a tragic hero and Shylock a stereotypical grasping usurer. Others invent prior or subsequent lives for Shakespeare's characters (women characters in particular) so as to account for their actions and imagine their lives more fully than Shakespeare chooses to do. Very few of these works have received much critical attention, and some are virtually unknown or forgotten." "Rather than a comprehensive study of Shakespeare transformations, Talking Back to Shakespeare is an innovative exploration of the kinship between the kind of talking back that occurs in the classroom and the kind to be found in texts produced by writers who "rewrite" some of Shakespeare's most frequently taught and performed plays. Such re-visions unsettle the cultural authority of the plays and expose the accumulated lore that surrounds them to probing, often irreverent scrutiny." "Much of the talking back comes from marginalized readers: women, like Lillie Wyman, author of Gertrude of Denmark: An Interpretive Romance, and other nineteenth-century women critics, or Jewish writers, like Arnold Wesker, whose play The Merchant transforms the relationship between Antonio and Shylock. Some talking back comes from an international collection of oppositional voices of the 1960s, including Charles Marowitz, Aime Cesaire, Eugene Ionesco, and Joseph Papp. Talking Back to Shakespeare ranges from popular books like the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley to obscure, seldom-read ones like Percy MacKaye's ambitious four-play prequel, The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark. What these published texts share with student journal entries and transformations is the assumption, familiar to postmodern readers, that Shakespeare's plays are essentially unstable, culturally determined constructs capable of acquiring new meanings and new forms. By bringing together these two kinds of "talking back," Rozett challenges the traditional separation between critical and pedagogical inquiry that has until recently dominated English studies."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"The modern literary critic", T. S. Eliot wrote in 1929, "must be an 'experimenter' outside of what you might at first consider his own province; [...] there is no literary problem which does not lead us irresistibly to larger problems." This book follows Eliot's principle and situates his literary and critical work in a wide context that reveals manifold links between aesthetics, ethics, politics and epistemology: the historical context of early-twentieth-century idealism, vitalism and pragmatism, especially the intensely political Bergsonian controversy, and the modern context of the philosophies of Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. 'Knowledge', it argues, was verbalised in the modernist age, individualised into the act of 'knowing', an act with motives and goals, and thus introduced into the realm of ethics - a process central to twentieth-century thought. Eliot's poems especially, constructed as "a life composed", a literary lifetime linking composition and composure, ponder the virtue of precision, the sins of pride and "mental sloth", the temptation of prejudice and the need for conviction. Decidedly tentative, Eliot's poems solve the problem of morally significant literature. In a century of suspicion, they ask the crucial question of where one should start to rely.

Shakespeare Studies is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing more than three hundred pages of essays and studies by critics from both hemispheres.

Presenting a background study of honor, the author compares ancient concepts with the sympathetic restatements of them that appeared during the Renaissance. He places Shakespeare's plays in the context of these Renaissance ideas, pointing up the sharp conflict between Christian morality and the revived pagan humanism. He demonstrates by pertinent evidence from the plays that Shakespeare favored humanist values over Christian values. Originally published in 1960. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Explores Shakespeare's representation of the failure of democracy in ancient Rome This book introduces Shakespeare as a historian of ancient Rome alongside figures such as Sallust, Cicero, St Augustine, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hegel and Nietzsche. It considers Shakespeare's place in the history of concepts of selfhood and reflects on his sympathy for Christianity, in light of his reception of medieval Biblical drama, as well as his allusions to the New Testament. Shakespeare's critique of Romanitas anticipates concerns about secularisation, individualism and liberalism shared by philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel and Patrick Deneen.

Why should we bother with Shakespeare today? A provocative perspective on the theme of individual freedom in Shakespeare's work.