Neema Parvini - Shakespeares Moral Compass

SHAKESPEARES MORAL COMPASS

EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE AND PHILOSOPHY

Series Editor: Kevin Curran

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy takes seriously the speculative and world-making properties of Shakespeares art. Maintaining a broad view of philosophy that accommodates first-order questions of metaphysics, ethics, politics and aesthetics, the series also expands our understanding of philosophy to include the unique kinds of theoretical work carried out by performance and poetry itself. These scholarly monographs will reinvigorate Shakespeare studies by opening new interdisciplinary conversations among scholars, artists and students.

Editorial Board Members

Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham

James Kearney, University of California, Santa Barbara

Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine

Madhavi Menon, Ashoka University

Simon Palfrey, Oxford University

Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham

Henry Turner, Rutgers University

Michael Witmore, The Folger Shakespeare Library

Paul Yachnin, McGill University

Published Titles

Rethinking Shakespeares Political Philosophy: From Lear to Leviathan

Alex Schulman

Shakespeare in Hindsight: Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy

Amir Khan

Second Death: Theatricalities of the Soul in Shakespeares Drama

Donovan Sherman

Shakespeares Fugitive Politics

Thomas P. Anderson

Is Shylock Jewish?: Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeares Jews

Sara Coodin

Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeares Stage

Katherine Gillen

Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form and the Transformation of Comedy

J. F. Bernard

Shakespeares Moral Compass

Neema Parvini

Forthcoming Titles

Making Publics in Shakespeares Playhouse

Paul Yachnin

Derrida Reads Shakespeare

Chiara Alfano

The Play and the Thing: A Phenomenology of Shakespearean Theatre

Matthew Wagner

Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic: Selfhood, Stoicism and Civil War in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra

Patrick Gray

Conceiving Desire: Metaphor, Cognition and Eros in Lyly and Shakespeare

Gillian Knoll

Shakespeare and the Truth-Teller: Confronting the Cynic Ideal

David Hershinow

Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage

Christopher Crosbie

For further information please visit our website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecsst

SHAKESPEARES
MORAL COMPASS

NEEMA PARVINI

EDINBURGH

University Press

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

Neema Parvini, 2018

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun Holyrood Road,

12(2f) Jacksons Entry,

Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

Typeset in 12/15 Adobe Sabon by

IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, andd

printed and bound in Great Britain.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 3287 0 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 3289 4 (webready PDF)

ISBN 978 1 4744 3290 0 (epub)

The right of Neema Parvini to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Id like to thank Kevin Curran for encouraging this project, and Michelle Houston and the rest of the team at Edinburgh University Press for having the vision to launch this excellent and exciting series on Shakespeare and Philosophy. I am also grateful to colleagues who read sections of and made many helpful suggestions on this book, especially Jonathan Haidt, Patrick Gray, Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, James Knapp, Evelyn Gajowski, Jyotsna Singh, Will McKenzie, Michael Bristol and Ria Chatterjee. Thank you to Wendy Lee for tremendous copy-editing work, and to Rebecca McKenzie and James Dale for seeing this through to production. Much love also to my parents for their continued support, and especially my mother for her thoughtful comments. Finally, thank you to Sarah Frazer for being such a great partner; your love, patience and understanding, not to mention your attention to detail in proof reading, are much appreciated.

SERIES EDITORS PREFACE

Picture Macbeth alone on stage, staring intently into empty space. Is this a dagger which I see before me? he asks, grasping decisively at the air. On one hand, this is a quintessentially theatrical question. At once an object and a vector, the dagger describes the possibility of knowledge (Is this a dagger) in specifically visual and spatial terms (which I see before me). At the same time, Macbeth is posing a quintessentially philosophical question, one that assumes knowledge to be both conditional and experiential, and that probes the relationship between certainty and perception as well as intention and action. It is from this shared ground of art and inquiry, of theatre and theory, that this series advances its basic premise: Shakespeare is philosophical.

It seems like a simple enough claim. But what does it mean exactly, beyond the parameters of this specific moment in Macbeth? Does it mean that Shakespeare had something we could think of as his own philosophy? Does it mean that he was influenced by particular philosophical schools, texts and thinkers? Does it mean, conversely, that modern philosophers have been influenced by him, that Shakespeares plays and poems have been, and continue to be, resources for philosophical thought and speculation?

The answer is yes all around. These are all useful ways of conceiving a philosophical Shakespeare and all point to lines of enquiry that this series welcomes. But Shakespeare is philosophical in a much more fundamental way as well. Shakespeare is philosophical because the plays and poems actively create new worlds of knowledge and new scenes of ethical encounter. They ask big questions, make bold arguments and develop new vocabularies in order to think what might otherwise be unthinkable. Through both their scenarios and their imagery, the plays and poems engage the qualities of consciousness, the consequences of human action, the phenomenology of motive and attention, the conditions of personhood and the relationship among different orders of reality and experience. This is writing and dramaturgy, moreover, that consistently experiments with a broad range of conceptual crossings, between love and subjectivity, nature and politics, and temporality and form.

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy takes seriously these speculative and world-making dimensions of Shakespeares work. The series proceeds from a core conviction that arts capacity to think to formulate, not just reflect, ideas is what makes it urgent and valuable. Art matters because, unlike other human activities, it establishes its own frame of reference, reminding us that all acts of creation biological, political, intellectual and amorous are grounded in imagination. This is a far cry from business-as-usual in Shakespeare studies. Because historicism remains the methodological gold standard of the field, far more energy has been invested in exploring what Shakespeare once meant than in thinking rigorously about what Shakespeare continues to make possible. In response, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy pushes back against the critical orthodoxies of historicism and cultural studies to clear a space for scholarship that confronts aspects of literature that can be neither reduced to nor adequately explained by particular historical contexts.