Shakespeare's Political Spirit
Negative Theology and the Disruption of Power

Reading Shakespeare's drama as a negative mode of political thought, Nicholas Luke reorients how we think about politics in Shakespeare.

Nicholas Luke (Author)

9781009348249, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 December 2024

284 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.1 cm, 0.56 kg

Shakespeare's Political Spirit proposes a radical rethinking of the political in Shakespeare. Writing against traditional positivist approaches, Luke's revisionary critical practice recuperates the negativity staged in political disruptions, contradictions, defeats, and failures and thereby opens Shakespeare's plays to a surprising, yet compelling array of hopeful political and social imaginaries. Howard Marchitello, University Professor of English, Rutgers University-Camden

This exciting and challenging study reorients how we think about politics in Shakespeare and on the early modern stage. By reading Shakespeare's political drama as a negative mode of political experience and thought, Nicholas Luke allows us to appreciate the imaginative and disruptive elements of plays that might seem politically pessimistic. Drawing on a long religious and philosophical tradition of negativity and considering the writings of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida and Badiou, Luke pursues a phenomenology of political spirit that looks to the creative potential of experiences of failure, haunting, estrangement, impasse and dream. Through his notion of a negative political theology, he challenges traditional understandings of political theology and shows that Shakespeare's drama of negativity is more than a form of pessimistic critique, but rather a force of freedom and invention that animates the political imaginations of its audience.

Introduction
1. Jack Cade in a time of protest
2. The Spirit of Caesar and the second circle
3. Coriolanus and the work of Spirit
4. Not to be – to be: Hamlet, Kierkegaard, and the Eternal in time
5. The Tempest and the Spirit of the Air
Afterword
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]