Shakespeare and Loss

Shakespeare and Loss explores how, in Shakespeare's late tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra), some of the most fundamental forms of understanding and life that bind human communities togethergrieving, loving, giving, acting/doing, speaking and being human, conversing and judgingcan become dangerously, even lethally obscure. These losses, Sarah Beckwith contends, shape the form, plot, and preoccupations that the late tragedies take and define them as a group, which she terms "tragedies of exile." This unprecedented and searing run of tragedies written between 1601 and 1608 features protagonists who are driven out (or drive themselves out) of family and society, finding themselves banished (or seeking exile) to the edgelands of civilization. Using philosophical insights from Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, Shakespeare and Loss shows that the exile of these protagonists is ultimately linguisticthey are exiled from sense and intelligibility, stripping from them vital concepts of human bondingloving, grieving, givingthat they realize are precious only when it is too late.