Julia Reinhard Lupton’s Thinking With Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life will quite possibly become one of the most important books on Shakespeare to be published in this decade. The book contains two chapters on Shakespeare’s tragedies ‘The Hamlet Elections’ (pp. 69-95) and ‘Job of Athens, Timon of Uz’ (pp. 131-159) (an earlier version of this chapter appeared in Alternative Shakespeares III, 2007): the first of these reads Hamlet’s relationship to Horatio and Fortinbras, not forgetting Ophelia, via Carl Schmitt’s reading of the play and his concern with the state of emergency. Lupton suggests that there are two kinds of friend left on stage at the end of the play, “the enemy-turned-friend of the European state system represented by Fortinbras, and the philosopher-friend of a more civic tradition represented by Horatio” (p. 95). She suggests that “[b]oth have been elected to represent Hamlet” (p. 95). Lupton’s Hamlet is one which invites the audience to “think with Shakespeare about the shapes, origins, costs, and limits of political community” (p. 95). The chapter on Timon of Athens reads the play alongside the Book of Job, focusing on the politics of hospitality and the gift. Reading the play as one of Shakespeare most philosophical works, she argues that “[b]oth the Book of Job and Timon of Athens occupy the deserted margin between politics and life in order to reassemble provisional fellowship out of the remains of friendship and hospitality” (p. 132). As Lupton explains in the book’s introduction, the subtitle of the book is in “partial homage to [Hannah] Arendt” (p. 8) who chairs her critical symposium of thinkers as she seeks to “capture a set of moments in Shakespeare in which certain political questions come up against the problems of life and living” (p. 8).
“What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? What are their rights? To whom are they obligated? Such questions – bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life – animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has been obscured by historicist approaches to literature. Julia Reinhard Lupton gently dislodges Shakespeare’s plays from their historical confines in order to pursue their universal implications. From Petruchio’s animals and Kate’s laundry to Hamlet’s friends and Caliban’s childhood, Lupton here restages thinking in Shakespeare as an embodied act of consent, cure, and care. Rather than putting the plays in service of an ideological program, “Thinking with Shakespeare” encourages readers to ponder matters of shared concern with the playwright by their side. In a landscape populated by she-doctors, minor monsters, bankrupted hosts, and faithful cupbearers, Shakespeare tests what it means to consider our humanity fully. Taking her cue from Hannah Arendt, Lupton reads Shakespeare for fresh insights into everything from housekeeping and animal husbandry to biopower and political theology.”
– Book Blurb
Shakespeare Books 