Shakespeare's Individualism

Description

Providing a provocative and original perspective on Shakespeare, Peter Holbrook argues that Shakespeare is an author friendly to such essentially modern and unruly notions as individuality, freedom, self-realization and authenticity. These expressive values vivify Shakespeare's own writing; they also form a continuous, and a central, part of the Shakespearean tradition. Engaging with the theme of the individual will in specific plays and poems, and examining a range of libertarian-minded scholarly and literary responses to Shakespeare over time, Shakespeare's Individualism advances the proposition that one of the key reasons for reading Shakespeare today is his commitment to individual liberty - even as we recognize that freedom is not just an indispensable ideal but also, potentially, a dangerous one. Engagingly written and jargon free, this book demonstrates that Shakespeare has important things to say about fundamental issues of human existence.

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, Andre 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 Elisabethains 'The book's bravery in questioning the gains and contradictions of contemporary literary theory is bracing.' The Times Literary Supplement