Often a collection of essays by seasoned scholars gathered around the work of two important writers from different times and places constitutes a value of its own. Its assembly is designed to explore whatever interesting consequences and new insights may be garnered from examining their writing in this uncommon conjunction. And in this case, the bare fact that at the moment of our proposal to Purdue University Press (that we might produce a book on Levinas and Shakespeare) there were more than seventy-nine book-length publications already available with phrases like “Levinas and” in the title or subtitle but not a single tome linking Levinas to Shakespeare is probably reason enough for a collection of this kind.
But the importance of this volume for those of us who have worked on it is more than that. Levinas gets what Shakespeare is doing. And he gets it because what Shakespeare is doing is what he himself is doing in philosophy, which is to say, studying human relations and human subjectivity in all of its complexity and infinite variety. That may sound like a commonplace, but it’s not. Shakespeare and Levinas are working at two different ends of the same theoretical spectrum: namely, constituting a meditation on “the whole of philosophy.” “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (H 1.5.167-168) Hamlet remarks to his classmate, and we have to understand by that remark a reference at once to learning in general (beyond the confines of the study halls they may have attended at Wittenberg where theology and philosophy were discussed) and to the human capacity to think such thoughts in context of the full range of arenas in which ethical concerns for others (via faces, ghosts, and the responsibilities they command) come to the fore.
* * *
There is another more practical reason. The book has something of a fortuitous genesis. In 2014, I (Sandor) was invited by Kent Lehnhof to submit a paper to a projected volume on Levinas and Shakespeare which I did (it remains substantially the one produced below). The volume was assembled and submitted to a press in the spring of 2015 and when the press returned it (for reasons perhaps related to the fact that it would close its doors less than a year later), Kent graciously offered the project to any of us willing to pursue it. Since I myself was well into the planning of a conference on Levinas at Purdue (a meeting of the North American Levinas Society in July of 2015) in which Ann Astell and Steven Shankman (who had written about both writers) were participants, and since I knew that Moshe Gold and Donald Wehrs were among the contributors Lehnhof had invited for his project, I saw an oportunity. I invited Ann Astell, Moshe Gold and Don Wehrs to deliver papers in a session on Shakespeare and Levinas that I moderated (and to which Steven Shankman responded) and the five of us—Astell, Shankman, Gold, Wehrs, and I—met for lunch at Hillel afterwards.
The current volume was born of that communion. We decided we would add papers of Astell and Shankman to the list of contributors to the volume among others (Richard Cohen’s essay, that had pioneered philosophic thinking about the conjunction of the two writers, was also added), and that Gold and I would explore the potentials for the collection’s publication. The prospect of publishing with Purdue University Press a volume involving at least two current or former Purdue faculty members seemed to me a natural (I remain a professor of English at Purdue and Ann Astell was a professor of English before moving to Notre Dame as a professor of theology). I approached Peter Froehlich and the rest, as they say, is history. Froehlich sent it out for review and when the letters that came back were positive, he decided to publish the volume and that it would be perfect for the book launch he was constructing. The book that follows is an extension of these efforts.
The serendipity of these circumstances seems telling. Whatever drew us individually as literary readers to the Levinas conference (and Levinas’s understanding of the ethical) is probably not unrelated to whatever drew Levinas to Shakespeare to begin with, and to the profound literary critical ethical reading with which the English Elizabethan writer was already deeply engaged. One aim of this book is to explore more fully that engagement.
We are grateful to many people who have contributed in different ways to the production of this book. We thank Kent Lehnhof for his initial idea to gather together a collection of essays addressing Levinas and Shakespeare. We thank Peter Froehlich, the newly installed director of Purdue University Press who spotted the need for and value of a volume like this one in our very first conversation. His gathering of a staff of devoted workers—including Katherine Purple, Rebecca Corbin, Susan Wegener, Leah Pennywark, Lindsey Organ, Bryan Shaffer, and others who contributed to the production of this book behind the scenes—assisted our efforts in countless ways as did his personal enthusiasm for our work. We are grateful to the outside readers of the manuscript of this volume who had confidence in what they read and envisioned the value of seeing it in print. The final manuscript benefited immeasurably from their suggestions.
And we are grateful to others. Some of the material in this book appeared in prior publications and we thank the publishers, editors, and current owners of the rights to those publications for permission to use versions of the following material.
In particular, we thank Michael P. Burton, director of the University Press of New England, for permission to publish Richard A. Cohen’s “Some Reflections on Levinas and Shakespeare” which appeared in his book Levinasian Meditations. Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion, published by Duquesne University Press (Pittsburgh, PA) in 2010 on pages 150-168; Gabriel Dotto, the director Michigan State University Press (East Lansing Michigan) for permission to reproduce the chart that Sandor Goodhart has used in his essay in this volume and which originally appeared in his earlier book, The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014) on page 214; John Morgenstern, the director and execuitive editor of Clemson University Press, for permission to reproduce Geoffrey Baker’s “Other Capital: Investment, Return, Alterity and The Merchant of Venice” which first was published in The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal, Volume 22 (2002), 21-36, by Clemson University Press; and George Leaman, Director of the Philosophy Document Center (Charlotteville, VA), for permission to reproduce Steven Shankman’s “From Solitude to Maternity: Levinas and Shakespeare” which was first published in the journal Levinas Studies, Volume 8, number 1, pages 67-79, by Duquesne University Press (Pittsburgh, PA) in 2013.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude and acknowledge others from whom we have been privileged to learn who are not mentioned above. “Much have I learned from my rabbis, even more have I learned from my colleagues,” Rabbi Chanina says. “But from my students I have learned more than from anyone else” (Ta’anit 7a).
| 20 October 2017 / 30th Tishrei 5778 | Sandor Goodhart and Moshe Gold |