William Shakespeare

by Terry Eagleton

This is a bold and original reinterpretation of almost all of Shakespeare's major plays, in the light of the Marxist, feminist and semiotic ideas of our own time. Through a set of tenaciously detailed readings, the book illuminates a number of persistent problems or conflicts in Shakespearean drama - in particular a contradiction between words and things, body and language, which is also explored in terms of law, sexuality and Nature.
Language and desire, Terry Eagleton argues, are seen by Shakespeare as a kind of 'surplus' over and above the body, stable and social roles and a fixed human nature. But the attitude of the plays to such a 'surplus' is profoundly ambivalent; if they admire it as the very source of human creativity, they also fear its anarchic, trangressive force. Underlying such ambiguities, the book convincingly shows, is a deeper ideological struggle, between feudalist traditionalism on the one hand, and the emergence of new forms of bourgeois individualism on the other. This book revels how, in the light of our own contemporary theories of language, sexuality and society, we can understand the issues present in Shakespeare's drama which previously have remained obscure.

Genres: Shakespeare, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 1986

About the author

Widely regarded as England's most influential living literary critic & theorist, Dr. Terry Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and as Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was Thomas Warton Prof. of English Literature at the University of Oxford ('92-01) & John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester 'til '08. He returned to the University of Notre Dame in the Autumn '09 semester as Distinguished Visitor in the English Department.

He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.

Reviews

[Vatikanska Milosnica · Rating 5 out of 5]

upping my rating because this was lowkey visionary

[Eric Vollmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terry Eagleton has a fascinating interpretation of Shakespeare's work based upon a quasi-marxist, quasi-Freudian - and thoroughly knowledgeable perspective. Well worth the trip!

[Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

About the most influential book on my thinking; a dissection of the power dynamics between language and culture and value and nature, using Shakespeare as source material. Re-reading it 23 years later it still blows my mind.

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 3 out of 5]

【William Shakespeare / Terry Eagleton / 1986, Basil Blackwell Inc.】

There are two main layers in this book. The first is in which he actually discusses the Shakespearean plays in this way:

--For the worthless [like Antonio's flesh] to become most precious is also the point if casket scenes at Belmont, where the relative values of lead and gold are inverted. (P45, 3, I)

--Lear's body / clothes metaphor is a grossly simplistic image of the relations between Nature and culture, as the play itself recognizes. (P90, 6)

The second is in which he - a renowned critic who was revolutionarily new in the era talking about Jacques Lacan, Lenin or Bertolt Brecht and borrowing their words to explain Shakespeare, which is dubious whether this is actually a discussion:

--Shakespeare's quandary is a version of Bertold Brecht's, who once remarked wryly that only somebody inside a situation could judge it, and he was the last person who could judge. (3. II)

However, it's also dubious if the seemingly rigourously taken quotes are actually really scrutinized - or maybe they're just exploited on the ground of, say, deconstruction? I'm really not too sure - but at least, this type of language sometimes smell intellectual bending, like this:

--Orsino at the opening of Twelfth Night should link it to music, an art form of the signifier alone, and one if which he wishes to surfeit and die. (2, II)

It's very obviously *no* considering what music was like even in early baroque - music talked even better in that era, as you'd expect in almost everyone from the era, represented especially by Vivaldi and Purcell (they're still later on though).

[Catherine King · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this the least of all the Eagleton I’ve read so far. “Academic” in a bad way. Eagleton chases down Shakespearean symbolism as though the Bard wrote philosophical puzzles, instead of plays often based on preexisting materials.

I really disliked it when he got to the chapter "Nothing," about Othello, Hamlet, and Coriolanus. Eagleton opens by saying "Nothing" *could be* Elizabethan slang referring to a woman's genitals. And then, of course, the natural next step is to wax rhapsodic about how "nothing" reinforces the male's superiority, but if you take it a step further, "nothing" introduces castration anxiety, and the nothingness of women becomes the abyss of all men's fears, and I wanted to gently take Eagleton by the shoulder and say "But what about women's identity, my dude? Women's subjectivity?"

[Debbie Baker · Rating 2 out of 5]

really inconsistent. loved the first 25 pages or so, and a few random pages after that, but it was a sharp fall-off.

[Merve Hançer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once you start reading this book, you won't be able to put it down easily, especially the first 30-35 pages or so. But the rest of the book is anything but smooth sailing.