Status Updates From William Shakespeare: Gesamm...

Love's Labour's Lost

Conceptually very interesting--the thought experiment here has a fabular setup, a 'war against our own affections,' immediately impugned by the appearance of those who render the Navarrese oath always already perjured. The oath's faustian object, 'to know what I am forbid to know,' does not turn tragic, as the anagnorisis resolves the problem of 'wooing but the sign' but little else.

The Comedy of Errors

Something of a critique of Occam's Razor or an example of the Quine-Duhem thesis in practicum, whereby twins from abroad substitute in variously for local twins, none the wiser. The simple explanations for the errors that result are either that the locale is sorcerous or that the exogenous ones are insane, preventing via false consciousness correct apprehension of events.

Classics confirmed.

Edward III

This text develops, across multiple authorial hands, the beginnings of a critique of nominalism insofar as the 'name' of something (death, the king, the husband) is placed in nuanced relation to it affiliated substance. Like Talbot in 1 H VI, the substance and the shadow are complicated abstractions. That said, scene 2 (one of the Shakespeare's) is a lovely little mock ars poetica.

14JAN26
Finished Twelfth Night

'The Rape of Lucrece'

As with Richard III, will sets the limit of conscience for Tarquin--he effects what Hobbes would later call the 'last appetite in deliberating' vis-a-vis his planned crime, whereas a parallel solitary internal agon proceeds afterward within Lucrece, regarding the cause of the assault. For Tarquin, she is besieged Troy to be destroyed, a militarization of eros; but for her, she is Philomela.

As You Like It - 4/5