Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, guilt, and violence in Shakespeare
Cambridge University Press, $43.95 pb, 174 pp
Shakespeare
Corrupt with virtuous season
A therapeutic approach to Shakespeare
by P. Kishore Saval •
Portrait of William Shakespeare (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)
Familiarity may have inured us to Shakespeare’s violence. Poison, suffocation, suicide, rape, and assassination are among the central events of his major plays. But the upper-middle-class respectability of too many Shakespeare performances and the insipid, managerial culture of academic ‘Shakespeare studies’ threaten to reduce the greatest of all dramatists to something antiseptic and safe.
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