The Improbability of Othello
Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood
The Improbability of Othello
Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood
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. Here, Joel B. Altman explores the problematics of probability and the psychology of persuasion in Renaissance rhetoric and Shakespeare’s theater.
Focusing on the Tragedy of Othello, Altman 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 Altman’s account, Shakespeare also restrains and energizes his audiences’ probabilizing capacities, alternately playing the skeptical critic and dramaturgic trickster. A monumental work of scholarship by one of America’s most respected scholars of Renaissance literature, The Improbability of Othello contributes fresh ideas to our understanding of Shakespeare’s conception of the self, his shaping of audience response, and the relationship of actors to his texts.
464 pages | 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2010
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue. "As If for Surety": The Problematics of Shakespearean Probability
Part I. Toward a Rhetorical Genealogy of Othello
One. "My Parts, My Title, and My Perfect Soul": Ingenuity, Apodeixis, and the Origins of Rhetorical Anthropology
Two. "Against My Estimation": Ciceronian Decorum, Stoic Constancy, and the Production of Ethos
Part II. The Logic of Renaissance Rhetoric
Three. "Apt and True": Speech, World, and Thought in Shakespeare’s Humanist Dialectic
Four. "Yonder’s Fair Murders Done": Place, Predicament, and Grammatical Space on Cyprus
Part III. Willful Words, Christian Anxieties, and Shakespearean Dramaturgy
Five. "Tis in Ourselves That We Are Thus, or Thus": Will, Habit, and the Discourse of Res
Six. ’Preposterous Conclusions": Eros, Enargeia, and Composition in Othello
Seven. "Prophetic Fury": The Language of Theatrical Potentiality and the Economy of Shakespearean Reception
Part IV. Tropings of the Self in Shakespeare’s Scripts
Eight. "I Am Not What I Am": Shakespeare’s Scripted Subject
Nine. "Nobody. I Myself": Discovering What Passes Show
Part V. Performing the Improbable Other on Shakespeare’s Stage
Ten. "Were I the Moor, I Would Not Be Iago": Ligatures of Self and Stranger
Eleven. "It Is Not Words That Shakes Me Thus": Burbage, as if Othello
Epilogue. "Make Not Impossible / That Which But Seems Unlike": The Twilight of Probability and the Dawn of Shakespearean Romance
Notes
Bibliography
Index