Shakespeare's Individualism

Providing a provocative and original perspective on Shakespeare, Peter Holbrook argues that Shakespeare is an author friendly to such essentially modern and unruly notions as individuality, freedom, self-realization and authenticity. These expressive values vivify Shakespeare's own writing; they also form a continuous, and a central, part of the Shakespearean tradition. Engaging with the theme of the individual will in specific plays and poems, and examining a range of libertarian-minded scholarly and literary responses to Shakespeare over time, Shakespeare's Individualism advances the proposition that one of the key reasons for reading Shakespeare today is his commitment to individual liberty - even as we recognize that freedom is not just an indispensable ideal but also, potentially, a dangerous one. Engagingly written and jargon free, this book demonstrates that Shakespeare has important things to say about fundamental issues of human existence.

Introduction; Part I. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Selfhood: 1. Hamlet and failure; 2. 'A room...at the back of the shop'; 3. Egyptianism (our fascist future); 4. 'Become who you are!'; 5. Hamlet and self-love; 6. 'To thine own self be true'; 7. Listening to ghosts; 8. Shakespeare's self; Part II. Shakespeare and Evil: 9. 'Old lad, I am thine own': authenticity and Titus Andronicus; 10. Evil and self-creation; 11. Libertarian Shakespeare: Mill, Bradley; 12. Shakespearean immoral individualism: Gide; 13. Strange Shakespeare: Symons and others; 14. Eliot's rejection of Shakespeare; 15. Shakespearean immoralism: Antony and Cleopatra; 16. Making oneself known: Montaigne and the Sonnets; Part III. Shakespeare and Self-Government: 17. Freedom and self-government: The Tempest; 18. Calibanism; Conclusion: Shakespeare's 'beauteous freedom'.

Peter Holbrook teaches English Literature at the University of Queensland.