E-grāmata: Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks: Shylock Beyond the Holocaust [Taylor & Francis e-book]

Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks: Shylock Beyond the Holocaust uses Jewish theology to mount a courageous new reading of a four-hundred-year-old play, The Merchant of Venice, and propose a similar analysis of Othello and The Tempest.

Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks: Shylock Beyond the Holocaust uses Jewish theology to mount a courageous new reading of a four-hundred-year-old play, The Merchant of Venice, and propose a similar analysis of Othello and The Tempest. This book puts Shakespeare criticism into creative conversation with Jewish thought while teasing out character epiphanies or revelations in Shakespeare’s humiliating setting. While victimhood and antisemitism have been the understandable focus of scholars for decades, Lion urges scholars, performers, and readers to see beyond the racism in Shakespeare’s plays by recovering Shakespearean themes of potentiality and human flourishing. Lion joins the race conversation in Shakespeare studies today by drawing on the intellectual history and oppression of Jewish peoples, borrowing from Jewish thinkers Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Joshua Heschel as well as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and rabbis from the Talmud to today. These Jewish sources illuminate the possibility of hospitality, care, and love in a community where nastiness is the norm. This volume interweaves Protestant, post-confessional, Jewish, kabbalistic, and post-denominational ideas with Shakespeare’s poetry as they were similarly interwoven in the intellectual and spiritual exchanges of early modern Venice.