Shakespeare's Theater of Judgment: Six Keywords

Shakespeare’s Theater of Judgment makes a case for the social and ethical importance of judgment in politics, law, art, and everyday life. It delves deep into the intellectual culture of Renaissance England and the dynamics of Shakespearean theater to recover a positive, collaborative, and future-oriented understanding of judgment, something largely lacking in contemporary social and philosophical discourse. Presenting a series of chapters organized around single keywords, the book enlists the help of Shakespeare to assemble a new lexicon for judgment, one that allows us to think and talk about our capacity for discernment in cooperative and community-making terms. Readers of Shakespeare’s Theater of Judgment will come away with a clear and urgent sense of why judgment is an indispensable component of public life, and why theater offers a particularly powerful locale for cultivating it.

Kevin Curran is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and general editor of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy. His books include Shakespeare’s Theater of Judgment (2024), Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies (2017), Renaissance Personhood (2020) and Shakespeare and Judgment (2017).