UNSW School of Arts and Media Seminar: “Nietzsche?s Shakespeare”, Peter Holbrook, University of Queensland

SAM Seminar Series, 2014

When: Friday 23 May, 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Where: Robert Webster Building, Room 327, UNSW
Map: http://www.facilities.unsw.edu.au/sites/all/files/page_file_attachment/KensingtonCampus.pdf
All welcome!

In this presentation, I suggest that Nietzsche’s engagement with Shakespeare was extensive and insightful and that the philosopher had a profound kinship with the dramatist. The reason for this affinity is that, ultimately, Nietzsche’s own thinking is fundamentally dramatic: notions of character, situation, action are basic to the way he conceives human experience and philosophy itself. The lecture attempts to give a broad overview of Nietzsche’s complex, and sometimes ambivalent, relationship to Shakespeare.

Peter Holbrook is Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at the University of Queensland, Australia, and Director of the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800). He is the author of Shakespeare’s Individualism (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare (University of Delaware Press, 1994), and co-editor, with David Bevington, of The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, 1998).