Kevin Curran, Shakespeare’s Theater of Judgment: Six Keywords – Edinburgh University Press, September 2024

Available open access at the above link

Part of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy series.

Argues for the social and ethical importance of judgment in politics, law, art and everyday life, taking Shakespeare as a guide and travel companion

• Reassess judgment as a positive, collaborative, and forward-looking act of social creation
• Shows how Shakespeare’s plays contribute to the history and theory of judgment as it has developed between antiquity and the present day
• Demonstrates the importance of theater for cultivating judgment and moral intelligence

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.