The English Department presents the 2016-17 Shakespeare Studies Lecture on Monday, Oct. 10, at 4:15 p.m. in Scripps 111.
Dr. Lars Engle, the James G. Watson Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Tulsa, will discuss”Montaigne’s Shakespeare: King Lear and the ecology of obligation.”
A reception follows the lecture.
Lars Engle
Educated at Harvard, Cambridge and Yale, Engle is the author of Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago, 1993), coauthor of Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries (Blackwell, 2014), and an editor of English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (New York: 2002). He has articles on a variety of topics in such journals as PMLA, Modern Philology, SEL, YJC, English Studies in Africa, Pretexts, Shakespeare Quarterly, Exemplaria, Shakespearean International Yearbook, and 3pR, and has essays in many edited collections. He’s won three teaching awards and been a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Abstract: Montaigne in his essays and Shakespeare in King Lear both illustrate the folly and self-contradiction involved in denigrating cruelty as “unnatural.” Both thereby take the idea of Nature apart, battering the idea to shake off sentimental and ideological baggage that is not firmly attached. Both then reassemble Nature in skeptical comparison to human institutions that are alleged to ground moral obligation in ecology: the family, the state, the affections. As so often when we watch Shakespeare moving intellectually in parallel with Montaigne, Shakespeare seems less satisfied than Montaigne with the somewhat consolatory Epicurean observation that human beings suffer and err needlessly by taking too limited and too engaged a perspective on their lives.
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