Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy

Jennifer Bates is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University. She specialises in 19th-Century German Philosophy with an emphasis on Hegel. She is the author of two books: Hegel's Theory of Imagination (SUNY, 2004) and Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (SUNY, 2010). Richard Wilson is Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London, and the author of Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage; Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows; Secret Shakespeare: Essays on theatre, religion and resistance; and Will Power: Studies in Shakespearean authority. He was described by the critic A.D, Nuttall as ‘perhaps the most brilliant of the Shakespearean historicists’.

The contributors are all of high caliber and the essays are adventurous, refreshing and wide-ranging in their appeal. The book will make a substantial contribution to the task of exploring Shakespeare as a critical thinker,　 whose dramas perform conceptual work of the first order.　 This is a break with both the dominance of "theory" and with historicism.

• Foreword by Michael Witmore; Acknowledgements; Notes on Contributors; Introduction: Richard Wilson; Part I: The Play’s The Thing; 1. Paul A. Kottman: ‘“The Charm Dissolves Apace:” Shakespeare and the Self-dissolution of Drama’ (The Tempest, Aristotle and Hegel); 2. Jennifer Ann Bates: ‘Hamlet and Kierkegaard on Outwitting Recollection’ (Hamlet and Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript); 3. Tom Stern: ‘Schopenhauer’s Shakespeare: The Genius on the World Stage’; 4. Peter Holbrook: ‘Nietzsche's Shakespeare’; 5. James A. Knapp: ‘Richard II’s Silent, Tortured Soul’ (Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Marion, and Levinas); Part II: That Wide Gap; 6. Andrew Cutrofello: ‘Is Othello Jealous? Coleridge and Russell contra Wittgenstein and Cavell'; 7. Edward S. Casey: ‘Hamlet on the Edge’ (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty); 8. Howard Caygill: ‘Levinas and Shakespeare’; 9. Christopher Pye: ‘Contra Schmitt: Law, Aesthetics, and Absolutism in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale’ (Carl Schmitt); 10. Julia Reinhard Lupton ‘Arendt in Italy: Or, the Taming of the Shrew’ (Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito); Part III: Damnable Iteration; 11. Richard Wilson: ‘Ship of Fools: Foucault and the Shakespeareans; 12. Catherine Belsey: ‘Antinomies of Desire: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Sonnets’; 13. Bernard Freydberg ‘“No” as Affirmation: A Continental-Philosophical Reading of Coriolanus’; 14. Christopher Norris: ‘Provoking Philosophy: Shakespeare, Johnson, Wittgenstein, and Derrida’; 15. Nicholas Royle ‘Miracle Play’ (Jacques Derrida)