Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy
Drama, Criticism, Philosophy
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
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.