Description
Book SynopsisShakespeare is worth reading, this book argues, because his works help us to make epistemological weakness into a way of life. Kuzner shows how his works offer a means for coming to terms with basic uncertainties about freedom, the world’s abundance, and the demands of love and social life.
Trade Review"This is broad and provocative thinking of the first order that promises to show how Shakespeare engages what remain some of the deepest questions concerning the human condition. Throughout the book, Kuzner reads Renaissance humanism, ethics, epistemology and theology in relation to their modern responses and redirections, reinvigorating historical study and theoretical discourse alike through the kinds of astute and creative cross-pollination that have made him such a distinctive voice on the scene of Renaissance studies." -- -Julia Reinhard Lupton University of California, Irvine "Shakespeare as a Way of Life is a thoughtful, meditative, beautifully written book that will interest readers of all critical stripes, whether their bent is toward history, theory, or close reading. Kuzner gives us poised and nuanced readings of his key Shakespearean works. Most of all, he makes a brilliant, original case for Shakespeare's carving out a new kind of skepticism, one that is his own and not classifiable as purely Pyrrhonian or Montaignean or proto-Cartesian." -- -Katherine Eggert University of Colorado, Boulder
Table of Contents1. Introduction: Shakespeare's Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness 2. Ciceronian Skepticism and the Mind-Body Problem in Lucrece 3. "It stops me here": Love and Self-Control in Othello 4. The Winter's Tale: Faith in Law and the Law of Faith 5. Doubtful Freedom in The Tempest 6. Looking Two Ways at Once in Timon of Athens Epilogue: Shakespeare as a Way of Life Acknowledgments Notes Index
