Description: Providing a provocative and original perspective on Shakespeare, Peter Holbrook argues that Shakespeare is an author friendly to such essentially modern and unruly notions as individuality, freedom, self-realization and authenticity. These expressive values vivify Shakespeare's own writing; they also form a continuous, and a central, part of the Shakespearean tradition. Engaging with the theme of the individual will in specific plays and poems, and examining a range of libertarian-minded scholarly and literary responses to Shakespeare over time, Shakespeare's Individualism advances the proposition that one of the key reasons for reading Shakespeare today is his commitment to individual liberty - even as we recognize that freedom is not just an indispensable ideal but also, potentially, a dangerous one. Engagingly written and jargon free, this book demonstrates that Shakespeare has important things to say about fundamental issues of human existence.
Brief description: Peter Holbrook teaches English Literature at the University of Queensland.
Review Quotes: Peter Holbrook, in his weighty but succinct and eloquent book, challenges both aspects of this conservative narrative. He trawls through Shakespeare's works to find emphatically that assertions of selfhood, freedom and individualism are not exceptions in the plays and Sonnets, but so frequently expressed as to be the norm, and that in this sense it was Shakespeare who inaugurated and sanctioned libertarianism in Western philosophy and culture.
R.S. White, English and Cultural Studies at The University of western Australia