Entertaining the Idea shakespeare, philosophy, and performance Edited by Lowell Gallagher, James Kearney, and Julia Reinhard Lupton ENTERTAINING THE IDEA: SHAKESPEARE, PHILOSOPHY, AND PERFORMANCE THE UCLA CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY SERIES ENTERTAINING THE IDEA SHAKESPEARE, PHILOSOPHY, AND PERFORMANCE Edited by Lowell Gallagher, James Kearney, and Julia Reinhard Lupton Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library © The Regents of the University of California 2021 utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0743-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3624-4 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-3623-7 (PDF) ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Entertaining the idea: Shakespeare, philosophy, and performance / edited by Lowell Gallagher, James Kearney, and Julia Reinhard Lupton. Names: Gallagher, Lowell, 1953– editor. | Kearney, James (James Joseph), editor. | Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 1963– editor. Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library series ; 29. Description: Series statement: UCLA/Clark Memorial Library series ; no. 29 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200255657 | Canadiana (ebook) 2020025572X | ISBN 9781487507435 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487536244 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487536237 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Criticism and interpretation. | LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Philosophy. | LCSH: Philosophy in literature. | LCSH: Thought and thinking in literature. Classification: LCC PR2986.E58 2021 | DDC 822.3/3–dc23 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Toronto Press. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 lowell gallagher, james kearney, and julia reinhard lupton Section I: Keywords 1 Role Playing 19 tzachi zamir 2 Habit 29 j.k. barret 3 Acknowledgment 43 sarah beckwith 4 Judgment 55 kevin curran 5 Entertainment 73 jeffrey knapp 6 Curse 86 björn quiring vi Contents 7 Way of Life 102 james kuzner 8 Care 115 sheiba kian kaufman Section II: Extended Encounters 9 Shakespeare’s Now: Atemporal Presentness in King Lear and The Winter’s Tale 135 sanford budick 10 Hegel with Hamlet: Questions of Method 165 anselm haverkamp 11 Bliss Unrevealed: The “Trial” in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale 185 paul a. kottman Afterword 207 charles mcnulty Works Cited 215 Contributors 233 Index 237 Illustrations 1 and 2 Leonard Mascall, A booke of the arte and maner how to plant and graffe all sortes of trees, 1590 152, 153 3 John Philipp Kemble as Hamlet, Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1801 179 4 Annibale Carracci, Lamentation of Christ, ca 1604 197 5 Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498–9 198 6 Michelangelo, The Deposition, 1547–55 199 Acknowledgments This collection grew out of a year-long sequence of symposia on the topic “Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Performance, and Philoso- phy,” held at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in 2016–17. We would like to thank UCLA and the Clark Library for their generous support of this year of research exchange. As Clark Professors for the year, we had the opportunity to mentor two extraordinary post-doctoral fellows, Sheiba Kian Kaufman and Ariane Helou. Our collaboration originated in an intercampus research group, “w/Shakespeare,” funded by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, 2012–14. The UC Irvine New Swan Shakespeare Center provided additional funds to hire Danilo Caputo and Olivia Rall for research assistance for this vol- ume. We would like to thank the center’s patron, Dr. Marilyn Sutton, for her generous support of our research endeavours. Lowell Gallagher, The University of California, Los Angeles James Kearney, The University of California, Santa Barbara Julia Reinhard Lupton, The University of California, Irvine ENTERTAINING THE IDEA: SHAKESPEARE, PHILOSOPHY, AND PERFORMANCE Introduction LOWELL GALLAGHER, JAMES KEARNEY, AND JULIA REINHARD LUPTON To entertain is to delight and amuse (Hamlet wants no “lenten entertain- ment”), but also to receive guests and hence to court risk, from the real dangers of rape, murder, or jealousy (Lucrece, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale) to the more intangible exhilaration of self-disclosure and captivation in response to another (Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night). To entertain an idea is to welcome a compelling thought or beckoning fiction into the disinhibited zone of speculative play. “I’ll entertain the offer’d fallacy,” says Antipholus of Syracuse as he abandons himself to the com- edy of errors (2.2.183).1 Like Antipholus, readers of fictions and viewers of plays entertain “themes” and “dreams” (2.2.178–9) on their way to rec- ognition and new knowledge, as a mode of testing the significance and reach of the suppositions they encounter in a world co-created by their imaginative participation. To entertain an idea is to take it in, accom- modate and pay attention to it, give it breathing room, dwell with it for a time. The conceit of entertaining an idea suggests a temporary visitation or trial period, a flirtation that might turn into more, but for now is a fling, a temporary affair. This welcoming gesture recognizes the mul- tiple sensory channels through which an idea may take shape – not only through vision or abstract cogitation (the Platonic ground of the idea as a species of form or discernible shape) but also in vision’s concert or tension with haptic and auditory impressions. The idea so entertained is necessarily a stranger, and to invite a stranger into one’s parlour, closet, or confidence is to accept risk by exposing oneself and one’s house- hold, including the household of the soul, to unknown incursions or visitations. The practice of entertaining ideas suggests a ruminative and meditative approach to thought, inviting us to think of philosophy as a form of hospitality and a kind of mental theatre. From this perspective, 4 Lowell Gallagher, James Kearney, and Julia Reinhard Lupton Shakespeare’s plays supply readers, listeners, viewers, and performers of diverse backgrounds with equipment for living. Shakespeare solicits us to be more alert, more critically self-aware, more responsive to the tex- ture of an encounter, whether in the intimacies of private bonds, the bustle of social life, the tangled arenas of political action, or the turbu- lent eddies of ethical decision. Just as the conceit of entertaining carries diverse accents, so too the semantic range of the aesthetic “idea” harbours complex legacies that are variously reactivated on Shakespeare’s stage. Erwin Panofsky’s land- mark study Idea: A Concept in Art Theory remains a touchstone guide to the dominant philosophical and aesthetic theories of the idea, from Greek antiquity through the Renaissance, that percolated into Shakespeare’s artisanal culture. From the perspective Panofsky unfolds, the lingua franca of the idea in Renaissance art theory turns in part on the genera- tive tension and play between Platonic and Aristotelian perceptions of the origin and potency of the idea (and its semantic cognates, disegno interno and concetto), construed as both transcendently derived copy and humanly crafted rival, respectively, of metaphysical realities.2 As Panof- sky argues, “The concept of Idea as reinterpreted in the Renaissance … secured freedom to the artistic mind and at the same time limited this freedom vis-à-vis the claims of reality.”3 In this body of thought, the limit at stake is less a milestone in the supposed march toward a purely imma- nent secular order than a threshold posture, engaging both the mind’s observation of nature and the contemplation of metaphysical intuitions of reality as speculative exercises that continually test – and entertain – the permeable boundaries between the known, the unknown, and the realm of conjectural possibility. In Shakespeare’s era, the enveloping background to this dynamic of aesthetic energies entertained a vibrant traffic in ideas about the nature of the secular world that carried impressions inherited from Augustine’s influential understanding of secularity. Augustine’ssaeculum, described in the City of God, denotes an inherently ambiguous “middle ground” poised between sacred and profane orders, a provisional composite of earthly and heavenly cities: “In truth, those two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgment.”4 For Augustine, the secular dimension to human history meant that it contained “no signposts to sacred meaning, no landmarks to the his- tory of salvation,” no providentially guaranteed link between Roman Empire and Christianity.5 “In declaring the saeculum to be largely opaque to human scrutiny,” Peter Brown suggests, “Augustine protected the Introduction 5 richness of human culture