The End of Kinship: "Measure for Measure", Incest and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood - Softcover

Shell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801852420 ISBN 13: 9780801852428

Publisher: John Hopkins University Press, 1995

Synopsis

In this commentary on Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure", Marc Shell focuses on the play's basic themes of sexual extremism, exchange and political order. At the crux of the play, he notes, the novice nun Isabella accuses her brother Claudio: "Is't not a kind of incest, to take life/From thine own sister's shame?". Shell's analysis shows how Claudio's request is a kind of incest in a reading that extends his earlier work on philosophical and literary economies. Developing fully the thematic role of the monastic orders in Shakespeare's drama, Shell demonstrates that the play lays bare some of Western culture's most fundamental tensions - between natural and political teleologies, between Christian and political ideals of brotherhood and the incest taboo, and between the pragmatic imperative to classify people and the moral imperative to treat them all alike.

About this title

About the Author

Marc Shell is professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of 'The Economy of Literature' and 'Money, Language, and Thought', also available from Johns Hopkins .

Edition details

• Publisher: John Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801852420
• ISBN 13: 9780801852428
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312