Title: Reason Not
Subtitle: Emotional Appeal in Shakespeare's Drama
First published: 2009
Description: This book guides the reader through some of Shakespeare’s most emotionally turbulent dramatic worlds, offering a close examination of the fascinating emotional rhetoric employed by several key characters. These characters manipulate others – and sometimes even themselves – using a device broadly known in the terminology of rhetoric as ‘Emotional Appeal’. Although Shakespeare displays immense interest in the human passions and makes frequent use of the tools of classical rhetoric, this study presents the first systematic inquiry into the emotional component of rhetoric in his drama. Emotional appeal plays a prominent role at the levels of theme and plot in four of Shakespeare’s plays: ‘Henry V’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Othello’ and ‘Coriolanus’; a close examination of this device as employed in each of these plays thus offers new insight into other significant issues of concern to Shakespearean research.

Furthermore, ‘Reason Not’ offers the reader a broad perspective on Shakespearean drama by highlighting diverse characters who embody the human tendency to worship Reason and rationalise reality. In contrast to those ‘emotionally intelligent’ characters who acknowledge the crucial power of emotion and their inability to neutralise it, we encounter other characters who deny this reality. Ironically, it is precisely the latter, those who deny emotion and obsessively seek rationality, who eventually fall victim to their own intense passion, in some cases in response to emotional appeals from others.


Contents: ‘Henry V’: Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, ‘Henry V’ and the Rhetoric of Intimidation – Regulating the Degrees of Anger and Fear as the Key to Victory – The Play’s Emotional Appeals and Their Questionable Effect on the Plot – ‘Julius Caesar’: The Anger Hidden Within Brutus’ Heart – Reason and Passion in the Orchard Soliloquy and in Brutus’ Speech to the Populace – ‘The Cause is in the Will’: The Rationalisation of Emotion in the Play – Brutus Inflames Italy through a Series of Unintentional Emotional Appeals – ‘Othello’: Othello’s Desire for Reason – Rousing Othello’s Passions by Exploiting His Desire for Reason – The Figure of Reasoning as an Effective Means of Rousing Would-Be Men of Reason – The Figure of Reasoning and Othello’s Active Role in His Own Downfall – ‘Coriolanus’: The Obsession with ‘Name’ in ‘Coriolanus’ – The Power of Ethos in the Rhetorical Processes of the Play – The Emotional Appeals That Defeat Coriolanus and Their Foundations in Ethos – Ethos, Shame, and Coriolanus’ Surrender to His Mother’s Persuasion – Shakespeare’s Emotional Appeals in Light of Modern Theories of the Emotions.
Subjects: Knowledge, Emotions in literature, Rhetoric and psychology, Persuasion (Psychology) in literature, Criticism and interpretation, Psychology, Shakespeare, william, 1564-1616, criticism and interpretation, Shakespeare, william, 1564-1616, knowledge and learning, Psychology in literature
People: William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
LC classification: PR3065 .S58 2009