Stoicism as Performance in Much Ado about Nothing
Acting Indifferently

Demonstrates how Much Ado about Nothing models an understanding of Stoicism as performance, rather than intellectual doctrine.

Donovan Sherman (Author)

9781108707299, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 August 2019

75 pages
17.8 x 12.8 x 0.6 cm, 0.08 kg

This Element demonstrates how Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing models an understanding of the philosophy of Stoicism as performance, rather than as intellectual doctrine. To do this, it explores how, despite many early modern cultural institutions' suppression of Stoicism's theatrical capacity, a performative understanding lived on in one of the most influential texts of the era, Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, and that this performativity was itself inherited from one of Castiglione's sources, Cicero's De Oratore. The books concludes with a sustained reading of Much Ado to demonstrate how the play, in performance, itself acts as a Stoic exercise.

1. Why truth?
2. Why representation?
3. A certain recklessness
4. No more than reason
References.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Shakespeare plays [DDS]