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Description of  Limited Shakespeare: The Reason of Finitude (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)

Shakespeares poetic-dramatic worlds are inescapably limited. There is always, in his poems and plays, a force (a contingent drive, a pre-textual undertow, a rational-critical momentum, an ironic stance, the deflections of error) coercing plot and meaning to their end. By examining the work of limits in the sonnets and in five of his plays, this book seeks not only to highlight the poets steadfast commitment to critical rationality. It also aims to plead a case of hermeneutic continence. Present-day appraisals of Shakespeares world-making and meaning-projecting potential are often overruled by a neo-romantic and phenomenological celebration of plenty. This pre-critical tendency unwittingly obtains epistemic legitimation from philosophical quarters inspired by Alain Badious derisive rejection of "the pathos of finitude". But finitude is much more than a modish, neo-existentialist, watchword. It is what is left of ontology when reason is done. And cool reason was already at work before Kant. In accounting for the way in which Shakespeare places limits to life ( Read more