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Drawing from cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Gillian Knoll traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors - motion, space and creativity - that shape desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare.
Explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stageAdvances a new critical methodology that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, and pleasure itselfExplores the philosophical underpinnings of erotic metaphors, drawing from ancient, early modern, and contemporary thinkers such as Aristotle, Giordano Bruno, Gaston Bachelard, Emmanuel Levinas, Kenneth Burke, George Lakoff, and Mark TurnerIlluminates the dramatic vitality of philosophical and contemplative erotic speechProvides the first full-length study that pairs John Lyly's and William Shakespeare's drama, uncovering new forms of intimacy in their playsTo 'conceive' desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Gillian Knoll traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors - motion, space and creativity - that shape desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Metaphors, she argues, do more than narrate or express eros; they constitute erotic experience for Lyly's and Shakespeare's characters.
Drawing from cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Gillian Knoll traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors - motion, space and creativity - that shape desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment argues that enchantment constitutes a key emotional and intellectual dimension of Shakespeare's comedies. It thus makes a new claim about the rejuvenating value of comedy for individuals and society. Shakespeare's comedies orchestrate ongoing encounters between the rational and the mysterious, between doubt and fascination, with feelings moved by elements of enchantment that also seem a little ridiculous. In such a drama, lines of causality become complex, and even satisfying endings leave certain matters incomplete and contingent—openings for scrutiny and thought. In addressing enchantment, the book takes exception to the modernist vision of a deterministic 'disenchanted' world. As Shakespeare's action advances, comic mysteries accrue—uncanny coincidences; magical sympathies; inexplicable repetitions; psychic influences; and puzzlements about the meaning of events—all of whose numinous effects linger ambiguously after reason has apparently answered the play's questions. Separate chapters explore the devices, tropes, and motifs of enchantment: magical clowns who alter the action through stop-time interludes; structural repetitions that suggest mysteriously converging, even opaquely providential destinies; locales that oppose magical and protean forces to regulatory and quotidian values; desires, thoughts, and utterances that 'manifest' comically monstrous events; characters who return from the dead, facilitated by the desires of the living; play-endings crossed by harmony and dissonance, with moments of wonder that make possible the mysterious action of forgiveness. Wonder and wondering in Shakespeare's and other comedies, it emerges, become the conditions for new possibilities. Chapters refer extensively to early modern history, Renaissance and modern theories of comedy, treatises on magical science, and contemporaneous Italian and Tudor comedy.
Shakespeare's History Plays boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare's history plays beyond anti-humanist theoretical approaches. This important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way of reading Shakespeare as a supremely intelligent and creative political thinker, whose history plays address and illuminate the very questions with which cultural historicists have been so preoccupied since the 1980s. In providing bold and original readings of the first and second tetralogies (Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2), the book reignites old debates and re-energises recent bids to humanise Shakespeare and to restore agency to the individual in the critical readings of his plays
Highlighting the necessity of literary thinking to political philosophy, this book explores Shakespeare's responses to sixteenth-century debates over the revolutionary potential of Cynic critical activity.
Explores Shakespeare's representation of the failure of democracy in ancient Rome This book introduces Shakespeare as a historian of ancient Rome alongside figures such as Sallust, Cicero, St Augustine, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hegel and Nietzsche. It considers Shakespeare's place in the history of concepts of selfhood and reflects on his sympathy for Christianity, in light of his reception of medieval Biblical drama, as well as his allusions to the New Testament. Shakespeare's critique of Romanitas anticipates concerns about secularisation, individualism and liberalism shared by philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel and Patrick Deneen.
