Shakespeare Thinking

The idea's the thing. Oxford scholar Womersley has had it with literary theory and its discontents. His new book sets out not to meditate on language's limitations or on the power plays of nascent colonial states or on the impersonations of gender on the stage, but rather to "write once more about Shakespeare as a man whose plays reflect on deep questions of enduring human importance and to resist the modern academic trend of retreating from the central human preoccupations which animate his drama." To do so, he turns to four major plays--Othello,Hamlet,Macbeth, andKing Lear--to explore the nature of human action and the ways in which we respond to social norms and ethical guidelines. He proceeds through a set of largely common-sense assertions. "At the most fundamental level, literature is heavily invested in the concept of personal identity." "Civilization demands that human instincts are ruthlessly suppressed." "For Rousseau, civil society could not exist without language." Much of this book is a broad-brush intellectual history of Western thought. There is almost as much Locke and Darwin, Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, Kant and John Rawls as there is Shakespeare. The plays are used to illustrate great themes. Readers and playgoers who go to Shakespeare for the richness and playful ambiguity of his language, or for the thrill of men and women sparring on the stage, will not find much here. But for those who ponder questions of social responsibility and moral action, who query the nature of "man" (with all the gender wake behind that word largely suppressed), and who want affirmation that the Western cultural tradition offers guidance for "deliberate moral choice," this is a book for you. A familiar story of philosophical approaches to identity and moral choice, illustrated by memorable examples from the Bard. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.