Face-To-Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy (Hardcover)
Explores the drama of proximity and co-presence in Shakespeare's plays
Key Features
- Brings together the rare pairing of philosophical ethics and performance studies in Shakespeare's plays
- Engages with the thought of philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Cavell, and Emmanuel Levinas
This book celebrates the theatrical excitement and philosophical meanings of human interaction in Shakespeare. On stage and in life, the face is always window and mirror, representation and presence. It examines the emotional and ethical surplus that appears between faces in the activity and performance of human encounter on stage. By transitioning from face as noun to verb - to face, outface, interface, efface, deface, sur-face - chapters reveal how Shakespeare's plays discover conflict, betrayal and deception as well as love, trust and forgiveness between faces and the bodies that bear them.
Matthew J. Smith is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Azusa Pacific University. Julia Reinhard Lupton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author or co-author of five books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (2018), Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (2013), and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (2006). A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-director of the New Swan Shakespeare Center at UC, Irvine.