Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Reconstructing Shakespeare, or Harlotry in Bardolatry
- Playing Shakespeare
- Take me to your Leda
- Sign Theory and Shakespeare
- Time in Richard III
- New Concepts of Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Henry V as Working-House of Ideology
- Shakespeare and his Sources: Observations on the Critical History of Julius Caesar
- The Speculative Eye: Problematic Self-Knowledge in Julius Caesar
- Learning by Talking: Conversation in As You Like It
- Measure for Measure: Mirror for Mirror
- Allegory and Irony in Othello
- Cruelty, King Lear and the South African Land Act 1913
- The Rationale of Current Bibliographical Methods: Printing House Studies, Computer-Aided Compositor Studies, and the Use of Statistical Methods
- Shakespeare’s Late Plays at Stratford, Ontario
- Shakespeare Performances in London, Manchester and Stratford-upon-Avon 1985–6
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index
The Speculative Eye: Problematic Self-Knowledge in Julius Caesar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Reconstructing Shakespeare, or Harlotry in Bardolatry
- Playing Shakespeare
- Take me to your Leda
- Sign Theory and Shakespeare
- Time in Richard III
- New Concepts of Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Henry V as Working-House of Ideology
- Shakespeare and his Sources: Observations on the Critical History of Julius Caesar
- The Speculative Eye: Problematic Self-Knowledge in Julius Caesar
- Learning by Talking: Conversation in As You Like It
- Measure for Measure: Mirror for Mirror
- Allegory and Irony in Othello
- Cruelty, King Lear and the South African Land Act 1913
- The Rationale of Current Bibliographical Methods: Printing House Studies, Computer-Aided Compositor Studies, and the Use of Statistical Methods
- Shakespeare’s Late Plays at Stratford, Ontario
- Shakespeare Performances in London, Manchester and Stratford-upon-Avon 1985–6
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Index
Summary
Terry Eagleton began his early book on Shakespeare and Society by quoting from Ulysses' effort to draw Achilles into action in act 3, scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida; at Ulysses' urging, Achilles remarked on the notion that we see ourselves only by reflection:
The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others' eyes . . .
For speculation turns not to itself
Till it hath travel'd and is mirror'd there
Where it may see itself
and Ulysses continued,
no man is the lord of anything,
Though in and of him there be much consisting,
Till he communicate his parts to others
(3.3.103-11, 115-17)Eagleton read these words as saying that 'uncommunicated qualities don't have any real existence at all; a man is not simply known to others through communication, he can only know his own experience by putting it in a communicable form' and that 'a man who contracts out of public life is contracting out of reality'.
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- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 77 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988
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