Spirits Finely Touched: The Testing of Value and Integrity in Four Shakespearean Plays

Some of Shakespeare's plays give us the impression of wisdom or universal insight because they insistently remind us of anxieties rooted in philosophical doubt. Armed with a fresh analysis of Shakespeare's inherited resources for articulating such anxieties, Skulsky shows that in four plays - Hamlet, Measure for Measure, King Lear and Othello - the drama of doubt in search of an exit gives its own kind of urgency to the more familiar Shakespearean drama of action and motive. The result is a book that challenges a good measure of 20th century Shakespearean scholarship. The four plays emerge from this study as insidiously telling exercises in the undermining of our working faith in the rationality of moral choice and the possibility of knowing other minds. The author points out that Shakespeare takes calculated risks with our personal interest in his heroes by assigning to them not only contemptible actions but disturbing convictions. In some of the plays, such convictions end by looking just as plausible as they do at the outset. In others, Shakespeare seems to attempt a special kind of tragic affirmation and compassion - an affirmation that is designed to encompass unrelieved pessimism, and a compassion that finds a place even for the worst of the damned.