Shakespeare's Folly

This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare’s drama. The discourse of folly’s wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. It is the first study of its kind to either contextualize Shakespearean folly within the European humanist milieu, or to argue that Shakespeare’s peculiar philosophy of folly is part of a subterranean strand of Western philosophy. This book will make substantial contributions to the fields of Shakespeare, Renaissance humanism, Critical Theory, and Literature and Philosophy.