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Kevin Curran (ed), Shakespeare and Judgment

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 September 2017
Pages463-464
Author
DOI10.3366/elr.2017.0448
Published date01 September 2017

Professor Kevin Curran, of the University of Lausanne, has assembled and edited ten lively essays by Shakespeare scholars, including one of his own concerning Prospero's twenty-line epilogue from The Tempest which – by invoking audience participation as well as its verdict upon the play's narrative – redistributes authority while it invokes responsibility, skill, and discretion among the groundlings. This emerging right to judge, joined to the chore of it, is teased from King Lear, Hamlet, Henry V, and of course, Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, the most “legal” of Shakespeare's plays (along with the aforesaid epilogue study). Curran's Shakespeare and Judgment represents an achievement; a fresh look at judgment in Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare often concentrates on the process of judgment, the essays explain, a process requiring both reason and mercy. In Hamlet, as Vivasvan Soni emphasizes, the playwright casts judgment as a tenuous bond linking the subject to its object, one which inhabits the world while distancing from it, one which references both subjectivity and “the milieu of ideality in which it operates” (45). Soni proposes that we see Hamlet less as a story about indecision and more as a meditation on judgment. Prince Hamlet must decide Claudius’ guilt; he must also determine when to conclude his own deliberations. One guise of judgment represents the effort of assessment but judgment also embeds a decision about when to stop the assessment; delay is a secondary question within any judgment.

Hamlet's father's ghost is intangible and without real substance. It is a spirit; like a rumour, or a story (a ghost story?). It provokes Hamlet and demands action, but its form and its allegations are uncertain. Judgment, Soni asserts, is “predicated on certain kinds of fiction, like the ghost” (50). Faith in fictions (legal fictions?) enables judgment, as competing narratives are questioned and explored. Ultimately, judgment is terminated – a conclusion is finalised. But the burden of judgment is not always alleviated by its conclusion; the agonising can be endless. Ultimately, the only relief from the burden of judging is Hamlet's death – “To die, to sleep – No more.”

Subsequent essays expand the notion of judgment from an interiority into a social construct. Katherine...

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