Abstract
The seventeenth century opened with Hamlet, Macbeth, and Descartes’s cogito, and closed with Spinoza. Modern thought is marked by the reflection on the self and its substance, with money as the other great adventure of the period: its “fixation” on value. It is the time of the constitution of a new self as well as of the fixation of the value of money. To explore Shakespeare’s creation of new thought in these two main fields—subjectivity and value—I organized my reading of Shakespeare into two constellations: first, the one on the self and time (Hamlet and Macbeth), enclosed between Descartes and Spinoza, and second, on money and value (King Lear and Timon of Athens), enclosed between Foucault and Deleuze. The first is a reflection on the self (or on the consciousness and the unconscious) and on power and potentia (or on the imagination and the use of time). The second is a reading of Shakespeare’s critical approach to money, to value and affects.
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Notes
See, among many studies on the topic of money in Shakespeare, Frederik Turner, Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982);
Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
On the issue of money and poor laws in Shakespeare, see the already quoted William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996);
Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001);
and Paola Pugliatti, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
See also Carroll, “Language, Politics, and Poverty in Shakespearean Drama,” in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 142–54;
Richard Wilson, “Against the Grain: Representing the Market in Coriolanus,” The Seventeenth Century 6 (1991): pp. 111–48.
On value and Lear see Mark Koch, “The Shaking of the Superflux: King Lear, Charity, Value and the Tyranny of Equivalence,” Upstart Crow 10 (1990): pp. 86–100;
Harold Skulsky, “King Lear and the Meaning of Chaos,” Shakespeare Quarterly 17 (1966): pp. 3–17;
Stanley Wells, “Money in Shakespeare’s Comedies,” in Shakespeare et l’argent, ed. M.-T. Jones-Davies (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993), pp. 161–71;
Susannah R. Ottaway, Lynn A. Botelho, and Katharine Kittredge, eds., Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Pre-Industrial Past (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002).
In this sense it is true that the structure of Spinoza’s thought reminds us of Shakespeare, as Antonio Negri has pointed out in The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Another account of this intensity is the “Epistemological Foreword” of Walter Benjamin to his Origin of the German Baroque Drama.
It has also been called “thoughtless wisdom.” See Kiernan Ryan’s contribution to Shakespeare’s Philosophy, one-day seminar, Royal Holloway, London, May 28, 2010, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/05/shakespeares-philosophy.
See King Lear, ed. George Kirkpatrick Hunter (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 153–60;
Daniel Larner, “The Image and the Thing Itself: Reflections on Musical Form in King Lear,” in Shakespeare Jahrbuch 127 (1991): pp. 31–39;
James O. Wood, “A Special Cadence in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1961): pp. 465–67.
See also Stanley Wells, “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song and King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 14 (1963): pp. 311–15.
See Ryan’s clear introduction to King Lear (London: Penguin, 2005).
On Lear’s becoming human: the movement is one of acquiring more and more self-knowledge (see Heller, Renaissance Man [New York: Schocken Books, 1981]). However, it is not only a movement toward becoming human but also a profound dissolution of power as the capacity for creating (value, the State, the law, himself). From this dissolution comes salvation (“we’ll sing like birds i’th’cage”). See Ryan, introduction to King Lear, lii.
Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, The Shakespeare Key (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1879). See also “Gemins,” “Immediacy,” “Attask’d,” “cadent,” and “Congreeing.”
See for instance George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 143.
My translation. The original German is in Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Eugen Diederichs Verlag: Düsseldorf-Köln, 1956), postscriptum.
Lilian Winstanley, Macbeth, King Lear and Contemporary History: Being a Study of the Relations of the Play of Macbeth to the Personal History of James I, the Darnley Murder and the St. Bartholomew Massacre and also of King Lear as Symbolic Mythology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
See Félix Guattari, L’inconscient machinique, Essais de schizo-analyse (Paris: Encres, 1979).
See Gilles Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme (Paris: PuF, 1968).
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© 2013 Margherita Pascucci
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Pascucci, M. (2013). Conclusion. In: Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324580_8
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