Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Performance, and Philosophy

"This book is yet another superb result of the long-standing publishing joint venture of the UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series and University of Toronto Press. The volume’s editors have brought together twelve stimulating and original essays."

Goran Stanivukovic, Saint Mary’s University, Renaissance and Reformation

"Entertaining the Idea represents a definite stream in current thinking about Shakespeare, and it offers enlightening links between the professional worlds of the theatre and the academy that may interest those outside the sphere of professional Shakespeareans."

Christopher Warley, Professor of English, University of Toronto

"Entertaining the Idea is a significant contribution to research in the field of Shakespeare scholarship and performance studies. It has great significance for the field of philosophical aesthetics as well as ethics."

Michael Bristol, Professor Emeritus of English, McGill University

"This innovative collection brings together an impressive range of established and emerging scholars. Together, their essays show Shakespeare's plays performing important philosophical work, enacting and expanding essential concepts."

Jennifer Rust, Georgia K. Johnston Professor of English, St. Louis University

"This innovative and compelling volume represents a major contribution to Shakespeare studies. Starting from a seemingly simple observation that Shakespeare’s plays are remarkably entertaining, this study’s explorations of how Shakespeare entertains ideas – in the sense of welcoming them, playing with them, conversing with them, testing and challenging them – lead to strikingly novel and compelling delineations of various ways in which Shakespearean entertainment interweaves philosophy with performance, making each the measure and interlocutor of the other.

Donald Wehrs, Hargis Professor of English Literature, Auburn University

"Entertaining the Idea admirably prioritizes the sometimes playful, sometimes risky work of thinking rather than the satisfaction of knowing. Addressing readers as co-experimenters, creative interlocutors, and fellow teachers, the contributors model a collaborative, dynamic form of literary-critical engagement. The collection thinks through Shakespeare's status as a resource for philosophical and ethico-political reflection not only by delivering new interpretations but also by expanding the notion of reading to encompass exercises, trials, proposals, object lessons, and provocations that bring the plays to unpredictable life."

David Simon, Assistant Professor of English, University of Maryland

"Entertaining the Idea offers a dazzling array of lucid, provocative essays on Shakespeare’s intellectual commitments and their ethical implications. In dialogue with thinkers such as Aristotle, Hegel, Hadot, and Cavell, Shakespeare’s plays come alive as embodied, open-ended, and electric thought-experiments."

Patrick Gray, Associate Professor of English, Durham University