Edinburgh University Press
Shakespeare in Hindsight
About this book
We know William Shakespeare matters but we cannot pinpoint, precisely, why he matters. Lacking reasons why, we do our best to involve him in others, or involve others in him. He has been branded many times over—as Catholic, Protestant, Materialist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Postcolonial, Popular, Cultural, and, even, Popular-Cultural. In many ways, Shakespeare is overwrought. Why one more ‘approach’ to Shakespeare? One reason is because whatever these approaches say about tragedy in particular, none of them help us to feel tragedy. Or, rather, they subordinate tragedy to something else—to considerations of, say, class, race, or gender. What these approaches manage to do is explain tragedy away. What this book does is to help us feel tragedy first and foremost—hence to perceive it better. The aim of Amir Khan’s counterfactual criticism of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, A Winter’s Tale and Othello, then, is precisely to reanimate the tragic effect, long since lost in some deluge of explanation.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
v -
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Acknowledgements
vii -
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A Note on Texts
ix -
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Series Editor’s Preface
xi -
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1. Introduction
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2. My Kingdom for a Ghost: Counterfactual Thinking and Hamlet
41 -
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3. Reversing Good and Evil: Counterfactual Thinking and King Lear
67 -
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4. Staging Passivity: Counterfactual Thinking and Macbeth
89 -
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5. Reversing Time: Counterfactual Thinking and The Winter’s Tale
101 -
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6. ‘Why Indeed Did I Marry?’: Counterfactual Thinking and Othello
121 -
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7. Conclusion
139 -
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Notes
145 -
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Further Reading
161 -
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Index
169
