Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy

by Paula Marantz Cohen

Overview

An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy

While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways.

Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300258325
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	02/09/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	384 KB

About the Author

Paula Marantz Cohen is the Dean of the Pennoni Honors College and Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University, as well as host of the television interview show The Civil Discourse. She lives in Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

1 Shakespeare's Empathetic Imagination 7

2 Richard III: Unrealized Potential 13

3 Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V: Beginning 23

4 The Merchant of Venice: Blueprint 37

5 As You Like It: Gender 53

6 Hamlet: Self 63

7 Othello: Race and Class 75

8 King Lear: Age 87

9 Measure for Measure: A World Without Empathy 101

10 Antony and Cleopatra: Wider Vistas 115

11 The Winter's Tale: Across Generations 129

Conclusion 141

Notes 147

Index 153

Editorial Reviews

"Straightforward, persuasive and eminently sympathetic....[C]onveys the pure thrill of close reading: the almost dizzying effect of peeling away layers on a great work of art to find further strata beneath—the intense pleasure of getting it."—Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Wall Street Journal

“Of Human Kindness is a dazzling book, tight in its prose, expansive in wisdom. From teaching Shakespeare, Paula Marantz Cohen learned the Bard's amazing ability to reach us in our humanity.”—David Blight, Yale University

“Cohen has captured a deep truth about Shakespeare’s work that has not been explored before—his insight into the human heart that reveals our ‘better angels.’ This is a subtle and smart work that adds substantially to our understanding of the greatest writer the world has known.”—Carmen Khan, Artistic Director, The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theater

"Thoughtful, astute, invitingly readable—and uncommonly timely. Especially now that so many younger readers are casting suspicious glances at Shakespeare, Of Human Kindness shows with mind-changing clarity why his work has never been more relevant to our common problems."—Terry Teachout, drama critic, The Wall Street Journal

"Paula Marantz Cohen approaches Shakespeare as a passionately close reader, concentrating less on the dramatic spectacle of the plays than their poetic richness and depth. The result is a marvellously perceptive and stimulating primer on the essential humanity, and humaneness, of this supreme literary artist."—John Banville, author of The Sea

"By tracing the evolution of character and complexity throughout his plays, this book ingeniously shows how Shakespeare, by enlarging his own compass of empathy, also created a more well-rounded and empathetic character for all humanity."—Devorah Baum, author of Feeling Jewish

From the Publisher

12/18/2020

Cohen (English, Drexel Univ.) chronicled her experience teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates in essays in The American Scholar and Wall Street Journal. Two pieces, on the character Shylock from The Merchant of Venice and the titular character from King Lear, provoked so much comment she decided to write this book, so other teachers could show students how and why Shakespeare remains relevant in the 21st century. Cohen notes that, in Shakespeare's time, patriarchal attitudes dominated. But, as the author shows, as Shakespeare matured, he was able to create non-normative characters, and empathize with them. It didn't happen immediately. His early play, Richard III, is brilliant theater, but Richard acts in a vacuum, engaging others only to use or destroy them. But the character sets the stage for Shylock, both villain and victim, and Prince Hal grows in front of our eyes onstage. By engaging with Shakespeare, Cohen argues, we gain a sense of empathy, which helps us better understand those who are being othered in the present. VERDICT First and foremost, this book is for anyone who has ever taught Shakespeare to young students. It's too short, but perhaps that makes it more likely to be read.—David Keymer, Cleveland

Library Journal

Narrator Janet Metzger presents Cohen’s well-researched and well-written arguments about the lessons on empathy to be learned from Shakespeare. While Metzger delivers the somewhat academic lectures in a carefully articulated manner, she dramatically performs the excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays that illustrate the author’s points. Cohen’s thesis centers on Shakespeare’s empathy for “the other” and how this grows and changes over the course of his writing. She suggests in her conclusion that students should read the plays and discuss them to glean their deepest lessons, rather than just watching the plays in performance. Listeners might find that process applies to this audiobook as well. Though well narrated, it would better serve students of Shakespeare in its written form. E.Q. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

MAY 2021 - AudioFile