Modernity Unbound: Birmingham, Shakespeare, and the French Revolutions

George Dawson (1821-71) was the visionary behind the foundation of the Birmingham Shakespeare Memorial Library for all the people of the city, regardless of class or creed. This article explores the connections he made between Shakespeare and the revolutions in France. In 1848, Dawson strode the barricades of Paris with Emerson. He was also acquainted with Thomas Carlyle. His understanding of Shakespeare’s revolutionary potential drew from but also differed from the ideas about the Bard developed by these more famous thinkers. For Dawson, what Keats termed Shakespeare’s “negative capability” is positive capability raised to a higher power: the capacity to enter into and realise not just one but any number of characters. This inspired and informed the ambitious liberalism of Dawson’s “Civic Gospel”, helping to make late-nineteenth-century Birmingham a progressive modern city, from which we can still learn today.C’est au visionnaire George Dawson (1821-71) que l’on doit la création de la Birmingham Shakespeare Memorial Library, ouverte à tou.te.s, sans distinction de classe ou de croyance. Le présent article explore les liens qu’il fit entre Shakespeare et les révolutions en France. En 1848, Dawson monta aux côtés d’Emerson sur les barricades parisiennes. Il rencontra aussi Thomas Carlyle. La vision que Dawson avait du potentiel révolutionnaire de Shakespeare s’inspirait, tout en étant différente, des théories que ces penseurs mieux connus avaient développées à propos du Barde. Pour Dawson, ce que Keats nommait la « capacité négative » est en réalité une capacité positive dotée d’une plus grande puissance, celle de faire corps avec et de réaliser non pas un seul mais un nombre infini de personnages. C’est ce qui inspira et nourrit le libéralisme ambitieux de « l’Évangile Civil » de Dawson, qui contribua à faire de Birmingham, à la fin du XIXe siècle, une ville moderne et progressiste, dont nous avons encore à apprendre aujourd’hui

Shame in Shakespeare

This thesis is a critical study of the theme of shame in Shakespeare. The first chapter defines the senses in which shame is used. Chapter Two analyses the workings of shame in pre-renaissance literature. The argument sets aside the increasingly discredited shame-culture versus guilt-culture antithesis still often applied to classical and Christian Europe; then classical and Christian shame are compared. Chapter Three focuses on shame in the English Renaissance, with illustrations from Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, and Milton. Attention is also paid to the cultural context, for instance, to the shaming sanctions employed by the church courts. It is argued that, paradoxically, the humanist aspirations of this period made men and women more vulnerable to shame: more aware of falling short of ideals and open to disappointment and the reproach of self and others. The fourth chapter is an introductory account of Shakespearean shame; examples are drawn from the plays and poems preceding the period of the major tragedies, circa. 1602-9. This lays the groundwork, both conceptually and in terms of Shakespeare's development, for the main part of the thesis, Part Two, which offers detailed readings of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. In Each case, a consideration of the theme of shame illuminates the text in question in new ways. For example, and exploration of shame in Hamlet uncovers a neglected spiritual dimension; and it is argued that, despite critical tradition, shame, rather than jealousy, is the key to Othello, and that Antony and Cleopatra establishes the attraction and limitation of shamelessness. The last Chapter describes Shakespeare's distinctive and ultimately Christian vision of shame. In a tail-piece it is suggested that this account of Shakespearean shame casts an intriguing light on a little-known interpretation of Shakespeare's last days by the historian E.R.C. Brinkworth

‘To sin in loving virtue’: desire and possession in Measure for Measure

This essay offers a startling new reading of Shakespeare’s Angelo as a paradoxical if not tragic hero who discovers in his sudden and inexorable impulse to rape a nun in the dark that desire is always more-or-less demonic – even, and perhaps especially, when it is most elevated and for what is most sacred and rightly lovable.  The burden of Angelo’s tragic knowledge is that we ‘sin in loving virtue’, that we are more like the carrion than the violet in the sun, that we ‘corrupt with virtuous season’.  Measure for Measure emphasises we cannot but desire as a self and in a body, to the effect that the very otherness we honour in desire we immediately want to compromise by enjoying it for our own.  The paper will argue that though it is Angelo who emblematises this, it is no less true of Isabella; and it is especially depressingly and irredeemably the case with the Duke

To Sin in Loving Virtue: Desire and Possession in Measure for Measure

This essay offers a startling new reading of Shakespeare’s Angelo as a paradoxical if not tragic hero who discovers in his sudden and inexorable impulse to rape a nun in the dark that desire is always more-or-less demonic – even, and perhaps especially, when it is most elevated and for what is most sacred and rightly lovable.  The burden of Angelo’s tragic knowledge is that we ‘sin in loving virtue’, that we are more like the carrion than the violet in the sun, that we ‘corrupt with virtuous season’.  Measure for Measure emphasises we cannot but desire as a self and in a body, to the effect that the very otherness we honour in desire we immediately want to compromise by enjoying it for our own.  The paper will argue that though it is Angelo who emblematises this, it is no less true of Isabella; and it is especially depressingly and irredeemably the case with the Duke