Eric Langley – författare

To ask, with Hamlet, the deceptively simple question 'what is the cause?', is, as this study demonstrates, to get to the heart of some of the early-modern period's most resonant, far-reaching, and contested topics. It is a question that informs everything from the largest metaphysical enquiries to the tiniest instances of particulate physics, asking what this study shows to be one of the most pertinent questions of a philosophically ambitious, intellectually aspirational, theologically destabilized age. Taking King Lear as its focus, this book situates Shakespeare and his world-weary tragedy at the intersection of major epistemic trajectories in philosophical, religious, and scientific thought. Shakespeare's play, it argues, was produced at a crisis-point, a crux at which confidence in an older metaphysical order was being incrementally eroded, and was yet to be recuperated by the advent of the 'new' physics and later natural-scientific philosophies. Shakespeare writes, in short, at a moment of profound causal uncertainty, conscious of cultural change, and yet not confident of the wisdom of his age's purported progress. Consequently, King Lear is shown to be a play riven by causal scepticism and deep-seated intellectual doubt, in which Shakespeare cycles through a rich array of classical analogues, philosophical influences, biblical sources, and literary intertexts, finding each unfit for the Machiavellian machinations and politic purposes of an incipient modern age. This ambitious and far-reaching study offers a new understanding of Shakespeare's philosophical underpinnings, illuminating his active, informed participation in an aetiological debate that should be understood as the key epistemological enquiry of his time.

Understanding the early-modern subject to be constituted, as Shakespeare's Ulysses explains, by its communications with others, this study considers what happens when these conceptions of compassionate communication and sympathetic exchange are comprehensively undermined by period anxieties concerning contagion and the transmission of disease. Allowing that 'no man is . . . any thing' until he has 'communicate[d] his parts to others', can these formative communications still be risked in a world preoccupied by communicable sickness, where every contact risks contraction, where every touch could be the touch of plague, where kind interaction could facilitate cruel infection, and where to commiserate is to risk 'miserable dependence'? Counting the cost of compassion, this study of Shakespeare's plays and poetry analyses how medical explanations of disease impact upon philosophical conceptions and literary depictions of his characters who find themselves precariously implicated within a world of ill communications. It examines the influence of scientific thought upon the history of the subject, and explores how Shakespeare—alive to both the importance and dangers of sympathetic communication—articulates an increasing sense of both the pragmatic benefits of monadic thought, emotional isolation, and subjective quarantine, while offering his account of the considerable loss involved when we lose faith in vulnerable, tender, and open existence.