Shakespeare's Individualism

Peter Holbrook teaches English Literature at the University of Queensland.

'This is a free-spirited book - and in this sense, it practises the individualism that it preaches - in its inventive interweaving of its discussion of Shakespeare with numerous exponents and inflectors of liberal/individualist thought, including Montaigne, Blake, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Frederick James Furnivall, John Stuart Mill, A. C. Bradley, André Gide, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. One of the undoubted strengths of this approach is the way it enables Holbrook to embark on a number of different excursions into his topic, with each one frequently adding a fresh angle, implication, or alignment.' Cahiers Élisabéthains

• Introduction; Part I. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Selfhood: 1. Hamlet and failure; 2. 'A room...at the back of the shop'; 3. Egyptianism (our fascist future); 4. 'Become who you are!'; 5. Hamlet and self-love; 6. 'To thine own self be true'; 7. Listening to ghosts; 8. Shakespeare's self; Part II. Shakespeare and Evil: 9. 'Old lad, I am thine own': authenticity and Titus Andronicus; 10. Evil and self-creation; 11. Libertarian Shakespeare: Mill, Bradley; 12. Shakespearean immoral individualism: Gide; 13. Strange Shakespeare: Symons and others; 14. Eliot's rejection of Shakespeare; 15. Shakespearean immoralism: Antony and Cleopatra; 16. Making oneself known: Montaigne and the Sonnets; Part III. Shakespeare and Self-Government: 17. Freedom and self-government: The Tempest; 18. Calibanism; Conclusion: Shakespeare's 'beauteous freedom'.