Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist

Anthony Raspa is a Retired Professor of English at Laval University, Canada.

"This learned, astute, economical, and lucid study convincingly places Shakespeare's plays within the matrix of the moral philosophy that defined Renaissance thought about life and human nature and that has long been called Christian Humanism. Raspa nimbly and judiciously moves between a close study of six plays thoughtfully selected from the Shakespeare canon and an extensive but focused knowledge of the philosophical writers of the time. His argument, in the face of the various currents of postmodern criticism, that Shakespeare's plays cannot be fully understood without reference to the prevailing intellectual climate and the mindset the playwright shared with his literate contemporaries, is suave, temperate, and compelling." - Henry Auster, English, Retired Professor of English, University of Toronto, Canada "Any effort to read Shakespeare benefits from a fresh historicizing of his plays. Such critical efforts attempt to show the complex negotiations between Shakespeare's plays and their contexts. Yet, too often, 'contexts' become a mire of forced readings, bloodless cultural systems and patterns, and ideological schemes. Professor Raspa's book offers us a way out of this predicament. He returns us to the plays, which appear before us in this book, not as emerging from social and political transactions, but as springing from the cognitive strength of a great mind working with tremendous force on the enduring questions that shape the life of humankind." - Daniel H. Strait, Professor of English, Asbury University, USA "Anthony Raspa has achieved an eloquent re-thinking of Shakespeare's Renaissance humanism - a re-thinking that has its own solid interpretative value, quite independent of current culture wars. All of the chapters are impressive, especially chapter III - 'The Wisdom of King Lear' - where Lear's relation to the wisdom of Apollo is seen in an important new light." - Sanford Budick, Professor of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

• 1. Shakespeare, the Critics, and Humanism2. Metaphysics as the Way Things Are: King John and Hamlet3. The Wisdom of King Lear 4. Macbeth's Imagination as Fatal Flaw5. Beauty and Misfortune in Romeo and Juliet6. Of Animals and Men: The Tempest