Lecture 12

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Richard Iii ◽  
Moral Feeling

In the last lecture I endeavoured to point out in Shakespeare those characters where pride of intellect, without moral feeling, is supposed to be the ruling impulse, as in Iago, Richard III, and even Falstaff. In Richard III, ambition is, as it were, the channel in which the reigning impulse directs itself; the character is drawn by the Poet with the greatest fullness and perfection; and he has not only given the character, but actually shown its source and generation. The inferiority of his person made him seek consolation in the superiority of his mind; he had endeavoured to counterbalance his deficiency. This was displayed most beautifully by Shakespeare, who made Richard bring forward his very deformities as a boast. To show that this is not unfounded in nature, I may adduce the anecdote of John Wilkes, who said of himself that even in the company of ladies, the handsomest man ever created had but ten minutes’ advantage of him....

Immanuel Kant

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Brophy
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Philosophical Foundation ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
Moral Feeling ◽  
Transcendental Idealist

Agamben’s complicated engagement with Immanuel Kant celebrates the brilliance of the German idealist’s thought by disclosing its condemnatory weight in Western philosophy. Kant was writing in the midst of burgeoning industrial capitalism, when each new scientific discovery seemed to push back the fog of religion in favour of science and reason; meanwhile Agamben’s work develops in concert with the crises of advanced capitalism and borrows significantly from those philosophers who endured the most demoralising upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Whatever lanugo Kant was eager for us to shed in the name of individual freedom,1 Agamben sees in this crusade for civic maturity a surprising prescience: ‘[I]t is truly astounding how Kant, almost two centuries ago and under the heading of a sublime “moral feeling,” was able to describe the very condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and great totalitarian states of our time’ (HS 52). To a remarkable extent, Agamben finds that Kant’s transcendental idealist frame of thought lays the philosophical foundation for the state of exception.

Thomas More’s Richard III and Shakespeare

Moreana ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 42 (Number 163) (3) ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Douglas Bruster
Keyword(s):  
Richard Iii

For his drama Richard III Shakespeare clearly relied on More’s narrative as filtered mainly through the chronicles of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed. The complications of transmission and authority relating to Shakespeare’s use of More’s unfinished work, and to the numerous forms each text would come to assume, uncannily replicate the very issues of authority and validation their narratives scrutinize. With his account More produced an archetype of modern, cunning individualism, an archetype that Shakespeare would popularize in Richard III.

The Three Bodies of Saint Thomas More

Moreana ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 43 & 44 (Number (4 & 1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Germain Marc’Hadour
Keyword(s):  
Thomas More ◽  
Richard Iii

Résumé Les trois corps du titre sont le corps physique de l’homme, le corps du Christ dans l’Eucharistie, et son Corps mystique, qui est l’Eglise. Le premier est représenté par le portrait qu’Erasme fit de son ami londonien, et par les portraits que More lui-même fit de Pic, de Mrs Shore, maitresse d’Edouard IV, et de Richard III. Outre le terme de ‘body’, More emploie celui de ‘corps’ lorsqu’il se réfere au ‘Corps entier de la Chrétienté’, c’est-à-dire l’ensemble des nations qui constituaient l’Europe catholique. Quelques paragraphes examinent les rapports du corps avec l’âme et l’esprit, ainsi que la place privilégiée de l’œil et de la main.

Histoire et théâtre : Richard III, Thomas More, Shakespeare

XVII-XVIII ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Roux
Keyword(s):  
Thomas More ◽  
Richard Iii

Richard III as a Romantic Icon

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicoletta Caputo
Keyword(s):  
Richard Iii

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

The Speaking Silence of Citizens in Shakespeare’s Richard III

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Cartelli
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
The Public

This chapter examines the commentative words and silences of the citizenry in Richard III, noting that although silence was customarily expected from commoners in the presence of the elite, it could also signify, in both Shakespeare’s version of Richard’s reign and Thomas More’s, the inscrutable resistance of a dissident citizenry. In London, citizen debate and discussion, informed and intelligent, comprised an important forum of Elizabethan public life; and in Shakespeare’s play, citizen non-compliance with the manipulative fabrications of Richard and Buckingham disrupts the performance/reception dynamic to undercut the bonding of the theatre’s citizen audience with the hitherto charismatic Richard. Though their speaking silence betokens the proud heritage of citizen resistance to royal and aristocratic presumption and contempt, Richard and Buckingham obtusely misread this as obtuseness, revealing themselves to be held in a kind of self-hypnosis by the public transcript, memorably subverted by Shakespeare.

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