"Curran mobilizes for the study of Shakespeare a deep knowledge of Enlightenment and modern philosophy, and is equally adept at negotiating the complexities of early modern English law and culture."—Luke Wilson, author of Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern England
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“Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies is intelligent, lucidly written, and consistently engaging. Kevin Curran demonstrates that Shakespeare’s 'thinking with' the law goes hand in hand with his articulation of a transactional and social, rather than bounded, conception of selfhood. This book is marked by scrupulous archival work and close engagement with twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy; its achievement is to demonstrate how early modern legal discourse provides Shakespeare with an imaginative resource for articulating an ethics of exteriority.” —Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., author of Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster
"This law and literature text will be most helpful for those scholars, especially Shakespearean ones, who desire a new take on the nature of selfhood. The writer combines notions of national identity with larger concepts of justice, obligation, individualism, and society. Clearly recognizing the scholarship of seminal scholars—legal and political—Curran grapples with a new way to investigate law, literature, poetics, ethics, and the theater." —Renaissance Quarterly
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