Shakespeare and the Truth-Teller: Confronting the Cynic Ideal

by David Hershinow

Overview

Examines the early modern reception of classical Cynicism and the rise of literary realism

• Promotes a new understanding of the intersection between literary character and ethical character, especially with respect to literature’s role in facilitating belief in the revolutionary potential of individual critical agency
• Deploys the reception history of Diogenes the Cynic as a methodological point of contact between historicist and presentist approaches to Shakespeare
• Draws new interdisciplinary connections between Shakespeare studies, literary theory, critical theory, and political philosophy
• Includes novel readings of King Lear, Hamlet, and Timon of Athens as well as other early modern texts and a number of major works of modern philosophy and political theory

Highlighting the necessity of literary thinking to political philosophy, this book explores Shakespeare’s responses to sixteenth-century debates over the revolutionary potential of Cynic critical activity – debates that persist in later centuries and inform major developments in Western intellectual history. Analysing cynic characterisations of Lear’s Fool, Hamlet and Timon of Athens, Hershinow presents new ways of thinking about modernity’s engagement with classical models and literature’s engagement with politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474439589
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	08/31/2021
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

David Hershinow is Director of the Writing Center at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part I: Our Cynic Legacy

1. Cynicism and the Courage of Truth
2. The Realist Turn: Parrhêsia, Character, and the Limits of Didacticism

Part II: Shakespeare’s Cynics

3. Shakespeare’s Bitter Fool: The Politics and Aesthetics of Free Speech
4. Cynicism, Melancholy, and Hamlet’s Memento Moriae
5. Cash is King: Timon, Diogenes, and the Search for Sovereign Freedom

Coda
Index

What People are Saying About This

Julia Reinhard Lupton

Honest counselor and bitter fool, fearless speaker of truth to power and tub-dwelling public masturbator, the Cynic philosopher Diogenes enlivens some of Shakespeare’s most compelling plays, including King Lear, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. In this timely and fascinating study, David Hershinow traces the Cynic challenge to power and conformity backwards to Shakespeare’s sources in ancient philosophy and forwards to Hegel and Foucault, discovering in the Cynic stance the enduring allure of a criticism capable of changing the world through the sheer audacity of matching blistering words to outrageous deeds.