Shakespearean Genealogies of Power
A Whispering of Nothing in Hamlet, Richard II, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter’s Tale
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:4th Oct '10
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£43.99(9780415593458)
Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare’s involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate legal and political, even constitutional concerns, Shakespeare’s theatre opened up a new perspective on normativity. His plays reflect, even create, "history" in a new sense on the premises of the older conceptions of historical and legal exemplarity: examples, cases, and instances are to be reflected rather than treated as straightforwardly didactic or salvific. Thus, what comes to be recognized, reflected and acknowledged has a disowning, alienating effect, whose enduring aftermath rather than its theatrical immediacy counts and remains effective. In Shakespeare, the law gets hold of its normativity as the problematic efficacy of unsolved – or rarely ever completely solved – problems: on the stage of the theatre, the law has to cope with a mortgage of history rather than with its own success story. The exemplary interplay of critical cultural and legal theory in the twentieth-century – between Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Kantorowicz, Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben, Robert Cover and Niklas Luhmann – found in Shakespeare’s plays its speculative instruments.
Brilliant, intense, and original. Like Benjamin, whose book on German baroque drama is comparably difficult, Haverkamp rewards every bit of concentration and labor. Just when it seemed impossible to write about Hamlet in a fresh and exciting way, Haverkamp comes along and shows how it can be done. His work will have a serious impact on anyone interested in the application of theory to Shakespeare.
Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University
Anselm Haverkamp writes in, but also to, the European Shakespeare tradition, a stage shared by Hegel, Freud and Benjamin as well as Beckett, Brecht and Müller His readings pursue the emergence and mutation of Shakespeare’s futures in response to the refiguring pressures of theatrical performance, philosophical engagement, avant-garde adaptation, and epochal catastrophe. This study of Shakespeare’s ongoing effects is the most stunning account to date of what it means for Shakespeare to be our contemporary – and why we should care.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine
Armed with the double-edged saber of historical erudition and textual acumen, Anselm Haverkamp storms the Fortresses Elsinore, and Dunsany, but also most of the idées reçues of contemporary Shakespeare criticism, and in the process challenges readers to radically rethink and reread what they thought they knew – not just concerning Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard II, but about power, violence, theater and literature in the modern world.
Samuel Weber, Northwestern University
ISBN: 9780415593441
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 520g
192 pages