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Midsummer Night's Dream

The substratum here is an alien dispute between Oberon and Titania regarding the possession of a changeling, which is a horrid little bit of myth. Within that context, Theseus consummates his forced marriage to Hippolyta, whom he 'wooed with the sword,' and Egeus mirrors Capulet's dire parental demands; the connection to R&J is solidified by the low mechanicals' parody thereof.

Romeo and Juliet

It's not just that she's 13 and he's 16-20; sure they have irrational adolescent emotionalism--but he changes from loyalty to Rosaline, whereas Juliet once dedicated remains loyal--perhaps an artifact of the marriage market. Their decease brings extinction to their oikos lines, which is the only thing that can resolve the residual 'airy word' of the dantean feud, a la Williams and MacIntyre.

Richard II

Agamben's modal ontology in action. Richard while acknowledging that he fills an office and plays an actor's role (two ways to get at the issue) nevertheless insists on a royal substance, sacral monarchism--whereas his successful antagonist realizes that this substance distributes socially, even if not democratically. The text requires some stark historical elisions to make it work, of course.

violent and emotionally charged memories often remain at the fore, while those of rescue tend to recede, not least because it is the former which the state reinforces and has institutionalized. The stories of humanity, of risking one’s life to save others, are dismissed from the public imagination, and at times from personal recollections too.

We were recalled by a scream--[he] had slid from his seat on the hearthstone, and lay writhing in the mere perverseness of an indulged plague of a child, determined to be as grievous and harassing as it can.

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.

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.

'Don't you see that face?' she enquired, gazing earnestly at the mirror. And say what I could, I was unable of making her comprehend it to be her own.

'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.

'Venus and Adonis'

After losing both the object of her affection as well as the debate between lust and love, Venus 'immures' herself on Paphos to remain the invisible legislator of eros, as disclosed through her nomothetic prophecy which includes all manner of things, including her own role at Troy.

Richard III

Richard ultimately fears 'shadow' rather than 'substance' because to him sovereignty is not a matter of bodies distributed through space but of manufactured consent, the theatricality of authority producing popular acclaim rather than rights 'due by birth.' The two wooing scenes are constitutive of theatrical sovereignty.

He was, and is yet, most likely, the wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a bible to rake the promises to himself, and fling the curses on his neighbors.

Titus Andronicus

Inheritor of classical conventions from Seneca and Athenian dramatists whereby the engine of tragedy is the conflation on the one hand of all executive and judicial offices in the person of the monarch as well as on the other hand the collapse of the despotic functions of the monarch's oikos with those offices of the polis aforesaid. NB the only good parent here is villainous atheist Aaron.

1 Henry VI

the historical timeline collapses events of 1429, 1440, 1453, and others into a single juxtaposition in order to stage an epistemic rupture through Talbot’s obsolescence and Joan’s techne—wherein we read sorcery as cipher for engineering. The old order is not ready for the event, embodied in artillery, that renders its virtues unintelligible—the world is changed and none of them is ready for it.

The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and [they] are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice.

3 Henry VI

Develops the thesis of the prior text, wherein sovereign silence allows for a agambenian anomie, a hobbesian wasteland--sharply noted when Henry attempts to claim a right in the discussion, only to be ignored.

For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it won't stand a whole lot of racking. [...] Cora's right when she says all he needs is a wife to straighten him out. And when I think. about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn near hopeless.

2 Henry VI

the silence that was imposed on Silvia and Bianca in the two prior plays in order to constitute order and prevent tragedy is here assumed by the sovereign as the marker of holiness--instead of speaking as holder of the office of executive, his 'bookish rule' offers prayers that can only defer judgment--an unholy dereliction as witches, false miracles, ghosts, and ochlocratic violence proliferate.

Communalism may have erupted with Partition but it certainly did not end in 1947, or in 1971 for that matter. Partition remains an ongoing process in Bangladesh with communal tensions, crystallization of religious identities and an ‘otherization’ of Hindus increasingly prevalent.

The Taming of the Shrew

analysis of a disciplinary program over 'madness' wherein a despotic gender regime constructs a compliant subject. As with Silvia at the end of TGV, the objections of Katherina, Bianca, and the Widow are preempted so as to keep this text within 'comedy'--if they could speak their own ethics, it would amount to Hegelian impasse; readers otherwise see the tragedy that the text disallows.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

There's a moment in III.i wherein one of the purported gentlemen finds himself in a dilemma between the duties of amacita and ministerium when he decides to shift his devotion from his betrothed to his friend's betrothed. It's similar to the opening of R&J wherein Romeo abandons Rosaline upon sight of Juliet--though this one resolves implausibly as comedy despite attempted rape.

Not infrequently, one encounters copies of important people; and, as with paintings, most people prefer the copy to the original.

The task of education is to make the individual so firm and sure that, as a whole being, he can no longer be diverted from his path. But then the educator must wound him, or use the wounds that fate delivers; when pain and need have come about in this way, something new and noble can also be inoculated into the wounded places.

The affinity between Renan and Gobineau, for example, was acknowledged by Renan to be a common philological and Orientalist perspective; in subsequent editions of the Histoire generale he incorporated some of Gobineau's work within his own. Thus did comparatism in the study of the Orient and Orientals come to be synonymous with the apparent ontological inequality of Occident and Orient.

But here I have to leave untold
what love I saw within her holy eyes,
not just because I do not trust my speech,
but, too, because recall cannot retrieve
that much, unless Another is its guide.

Here you shall be--awhile--a visitor;
but you shall be with me--and without end--
Rome's citizen, the Rome in which Christ is
Roman; and thus, to profit that world which
lives badly, watch the chariot steadfastly
and, when you have returned beyond, transcribe
what you have seen.

if all peoples were to agree about certain religious things, the existence of a god for example (which, by the way, is not so in this case), then this would only be a counterargument to those things that were maintained, the existence of a god for example: the consensus gentium and hominum6 in general can in fairness only pertain to foolishness.

Confine yourselves, o humans, to the quia;
had you been able to see all, there would
have been no need for Mary to give birth.

We are from the start illogical and therefore unfair beings, and this we can know: it is one of the greatest and most insoluble disharmonies of existence.