Lifelike Shakespeare

Who is really there, and how do we know that they are so? Lifelike Shakespeare offers a new account of Shakespeare's creativity by exploring what lies at the margins of humanness in his works. Shakespeare often summons absent, remembered, or imagined people into lively presence---unborn children spring into being, forgotten voices are recovered, and the dead are quickened. Shakespeare was working closely with the quality of artistic 'liveliness' which brings people surprisingly and vividly into presence. But rather than following the standard rules of mimesis, Shakespeare's lifelike people instead challenge, disturb, and re-imagine natural life. The once living, the seemingly living, and the potentially living finally get their due as Shakespeare unsettles the boundaries between life and art, and between reality and unreality. In poems such as Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets, writing comes close to generating new life. Shakespeare's theories about creativity and vitality develop further in plays including Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Winter's Tale. These works shed fresh light on our own living present at a time when life has become startlingly proximate to lifelike representation, and physical and virtual reality seem more or less inseparable. Lifelike Shakespeare ultimately reveals Shakespeare as a thinker profoundly attuned to the fragile thresholds between presence and absence, animation and stillness, continually probing what it means for a figure---or an idea---to come vividly to life.

Katharine A. Craik is Professor of Early Modern Literature at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of eading Sensations in Early Modern England (2007) and editor of Shakespeare and Emotion (2020) and, with Tanya Pollard, Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (2013).