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The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood

Online ISBN:
9780226016122
Print ISBN:
9780226016108
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood

Published online:
21 February 2013
Published in print:
15 March 2010
Online ISBN:
9780226016122
Print ISBN:
9780226016108
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Shakespeare's dramatis personae exist in a world of supposition, struggling to connect knowledge that cannot be had, judgments that must be made, and actions that need to be taken. For them, probability—what they and others might be persuaded to believe—governs human affairs, not certainty. Yet negotiating the space of probability is fraught with difficulty. This book explores the problematics of probability and the psychology of persuasion in Renaissance rhetoric and Shakespeare's theater. Focusing on the Tragedy of Othello, it investigates Shakespeare's representation of the self as a specific realization of tensions pervading the rhetorical culture in which he was educated and practiced his craft. In this account, Shakespeare also restrains and energizes his audiences' probabilizing capacities, alternately playing the sceptical critic and dramaturgic trickster.

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