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Corrupt with virtuous season

A therapeutic approach to Shakespeare
by
April 2022, no. 441

Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, guilt, and violence in Shakespeare by James Gilligan and David A.J. Richards

Cambridge University Press, $43.95 pb, 174 pp

Corrupt with virtuous season

A therapeutic approach to Shakespeare
by
April 2022, no. 441
Portrait of William Shakespeare (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)
Portrait of William Shakespeare (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Familiarity may have inured us to Shakespeare’s violence. Poison, suffocation, suicide, rape, and assassination are among the central events of his major plays. But the upper-middle-class respectability of too many Shakespeare performances and the insipid, managerial culture of academic ‘Shakespeare studies’ threaten to reduce the greatest of all dramatists to something antiseptic and safe.

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