Essays by leading authors on Shakespeare drawing on contemporary and early continental philosophy. The chapters address the span of the tragedies, comedies and history plays in the light of thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Ibn Sina and Jean-Luc Marion, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Schmitt, Arendt, Lacan, Levinas, Foucault and Derrida.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Michael Witmore
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction - Richard Wilson
• Part One: The Play's the Thing
• 1 ‘The Charm Dissolves Apace’: Shakespeare and the Self-dissolution of Drama (The Tempest, Aristotle and Hegel) - Paul A. Kottman
• 2 Hamlet and Kierkegaard on Outwitting Recollection (Hamlet and Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript) - Jennifer Ann Bates
• 3 Schopenhauer's Shakespeare: The Genius on the World Stage - Tom Stern
• 4 Nietzsche's Shakespeare - Peter Holbrook
• 5 Richard II's Silent, Tortured Soul (Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Marion, and Levinas) - James A. Knapp
• Part Two: That Wide Gap
• 6 Is Othello Jealous? Coleridge and Russell contra Wittgenstein and Cavell - Andrew Cutrofello
• 7 Hamlet on the Edge (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) - Edward S. Casey
• 8 Levinas and Shakespeare - Howard Caygill
• 9 Contra Schmitt: Law, Aesthetics and Absolutism in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (Carl Schmitt) - Christopher Pye
• 10 Arendt in Italy: Or, the Taming of the Shrew (Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito) - Julia Reinhard Lupton
• Part Three: Damnable Iteration
• 11 Ship of Fools: Foucault and the Shakespeareans - Richard Wilson
• 12 Antinomies of Desire: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Sonnets (Jacques Lacan and François Lyotard) - Catherine Belsey
• 13 ‘No’ as Affirmation: A Continental-Philosophical Reading of Coriolanus - Bernard Freydberg
• 14 Provoking Philosophy: Shakespeare, Johnson, Wittgenstein, Derrida - Christopher Norris
• 15 Miracle Play (Jacques Derrida) - Nicholas Royle