Born out of symposia held at UCLA in 2016–17, Entertaining the Idea collects an impressive array of perceptive, humane, and frequently scintillating essays centered on the interplay between philosophy and performance. Divided into two sections—the first, simply headed “Keywords,” contains eight short, thematic essays; the second, labeled “Extended Encounters,” offers three longer pieces—the collection retains an organic unity all the more remarkable for the diversity of arguments and approaches on display here. While readers will find isolated chapters rewarding, the volume as a whole beautifully broadens our ways of thinking about philosophy (“as a form of hospitality and a kind of mental theatre,” 3) and performance (as reflective of the “inherently enactive character of core ethical concepts,” 6).
Tzachi Zamir's revelatory opening chapter on “Role Playing” examines how the activity—distinct from lying, pretending, and even acting—can serve as a “gateway into touching reality” (22) and, in some cases, affords the only way of being with others, a subtle reading that moves easily between Shakespeare's drama and his sonnets. J. K. Barret's chapter on “Habit” courses along similar wavelengths, examining how habit may be transient rather than ingrained, a “modality of fiction” (38) that remains all the more germane for ethics in how it opens for the agent multiple alternative worlds.
In her chapter on “Acknowledgment,” Sarah Beckwith begins with Stanley Cavell and The Winter's Tale to read the Dardenne brothers’ 2005 movie L'enfant as a kind of adaptive winter's tale in its own right, though it never references Shakespeare's play directly. Kevin Curran's chapter on “Judgment,” one of the collection's strongest, asks us to consider what it feels like to judge, and offers a reading that recuperates pre-Enlightenment judgment as “collective, physical, and creative rather than individual, rational, and normative” (57). While Jeffrey Knapp's essay on “Entertainment” examines how early modern dramatists create pleasure by encouraging audiences “to see their relationship to author and actors as profoundly conflictual and therefore as itself dramatic” (76), Björn Quiring's “Curse” turns to antagonisms of a different, but equally performative, sort by considering this “eminently theatrical speech act” (87) where power and impotence, fantasy and reality converge.
James Kuzner's compelling chapter “Way of Life” proposes that the “performance of doubt” (102) in A Midsummer Night's Dream moves the quartet of lovers toward a more uncertain and yet, for this, more complete and potentially lasting vision of love. In the section's final essay, “Care,” Sheiba Kian Kaufman considers the transformation of “individual concern into collaborative possibility” (116) in King Lear and The Tempest, two plays deeply invested in representing the needs of “particularly vulnerable populations” (118). The volume's introduction promises short pieces that “aim to be portable and teachable” (12), and one could easily see multiple essays here—those by Zamir, Curran, and Kuzner, in particular—as working especially well in the classroom.
The collection's turn to lengthier, more densely argued essays begins with Sanford Budick's work on “atemporal presentness” in The Winter's Tale and King Lear. Here, Budick considers how “the momentary bracketing of external reality transforms our sense of time into an internal, atemporal now or presence and suspends us in a sense of ‘Wunder ’”(136), a process Budick sees at work not only within each play itself but also through the interplay of both texts taken together. Anselm Havercamp's penultimate chapter turns to “Hegel's reading of Shakespeare” as perhaps the “foremost instance of what it means philologically, in terms of method, to read literature philosophically” (168), and finds that “Hegel deciphered in Shakespeare's theatre an epistemological drama of objective history, rather than of lived experience” (178).
For the final chapter, Paul A. Kottman takes Hegel's commentary on bliss in Christian art, most fully realized in “the religious love, the passionless love, of Mary for her son, Christ” (187), as the framework for a perceptive reconsideration of Stanley Cavell's reading of The Winter's Tale, foregrounding instead the crucial role of “maternal grief and maternal love” (195) in Leontes's conflicted path toward acknowledgment and restoration. An afterword by Charles McNulty offers a closing rumination on the challenges and rewards of staging King Lear, a play sometimes figured as more readable than performable in its philosophical complexities.
All told, Entertaining the Idea collects original, engaging essays that deftly handle the unique pressures the phenomenology of performance can exert on the history of ideas and the matter of embodied ethics.
