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COPYRIGHT 2004 Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN)
Ewan Fernie 2002: Shame in Shakespeare. Accents on Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. 274 pp.
The study of shame in Shakespeare (and in any other major English writer) is one of those topics that, for various reasons, have been neglected by most scholars in the English speaking world. Interestingly, many of the few works that have analysed it in English literature have focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and have done so in the wider context of Western thought and literary tradition, as if these topics (shame plus their aggregates, of which honour is the most obvious) were somehow alien to English studies proper. The reason may certainly have to do, at least in part, with the obvious need to incorporate into such studies an important intellectual classical background: Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius and, in general, most of the major Stoics; but also Humanists such as Valla, Vives, Ficino, Guevara or Erasmus; or old Germanic traditions on the life of fame, among others. In general, for these and other reasons, it is not easy to find works devoted to this topic and which focus exclusively on English literature. However, there certainly is a handful of penetrating books and articles which, more or less periodically, have analysed this issue together with the related concept 'honour' from different perspectives, and which, per force, have created a reduced canon of studies which anyone working in the field has to know. Thus, Edward M. Wilson's "Othello, a Tragedy of Honour" (1952), "Family Honour in the Plays of Shakespeare's Predecessors and Contemporaries" (1953), and "A Hispanist Looks at Othello" (republished in 1980); Charles L. Barber's The Idea of Honour in the English Drama (1957) and The Theme of Honour's Tongue (1985); Curtis B. Watson's Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honour (1960); Paul N. Siegel's "Shakespeare and the Neo-Chivalric Cult of Honour" (1964); Stanley Cavell's "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear" (1969; republished in 1976, 1987, and 1999); Norman Council's When Honour's at the Stake (1973); Rodney Poisson's "The 'Calumniator Credited' and the Code of Honour in Shakespeare's Othello" (1976); or, more recently, John Alvis's Shakespeare's Understanding of Honor (1990). As these studies show, the only serious approach to shame and honour, in Shakespeare or elsewhere, would have to take into account, before the analysis of literary texts is attempted, the semasiological problems posed by these and other related concepts (honour, dishonour, honesty, reputation, shame, embarrassment, or guilt); then, the anthropological, sociological and even psychological implications of their role in a given community, and consequently the characteristics of that community; and finally the philosophical corpus sustaining, throughout history, their relevance and meaning (mainly,...
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