SHAKESPEARE'S SCHOLARS

Knowing thyself.

This elegant, brief book explores the figure of the scholar in selected Shakespeare plays to argue that those plays can teach us how to know ourselves. A professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Keilen seeks a personal, humane approach to literature—a view that works of verbal art not only tell us about their own time but teach something about the present. In Love’s Labor’s Lost, Hamlet, and The Tempest, Keilen finds the scholar-hero in dilemmas comic and tragic. How did a playwright who, by all accounts, did not have more than a grammar school training, characterize the rising class of university wits, philosophers, and political advisers? For all his college learning, Hamlet remains indecisive. For all his bookish skill, Prospero fails at governance. And in Love’s Labor’s Lost, perhaps Shakespeare’s wordiest and in-joke-ridden play, Keilen finds the fissures that beset all academic life. There, men seek not to embrace the world but, rather, to exclude society. Each of these plays becomes an allegory of failed academia: a lesson for the modern professor who forgets a debt to public life. This is a book of provocation. The author writes, “There is no greater temptation for scholars than to imagine that our profession makes us special, set apart from other people and the sphere of common life.” And this: “Like everybody else, Shakespeare scholars must figure out how to live in societies where broken promises and betrayals of trust are as common as the air we breathe.” Keilen chose to focus on three plays with broken promises and betrayals. They are tales of wisdom learned too late. His book’s goal is to teach us to be humble, self-knowing, and generous before it is too late for us.

A bracingly honest study of Shakespeare’s scholar-heroes designed to get the modern scholar back into public life.