Author: Roy Tsao
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Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy: A Proposal
(The proposal sketched in this post is further developed in my paper “Hobbes’s Theory of Peace,” presented at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.) 1. What is the point of Thomas Hobbes’s moral philosophy? What question or questions of moral theory did he think he had settled? In writing Leviathan, Hobbes evidently took great pride in his would-be…
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The “Hamlet” Murder Mystery
1. Old King Hamlet, sleeping in his orchard, was secretly murdered by Claudius, his brother and successor on the throne. His son, the Prince bearing his name, learns of this when he’s given a gruesome, detailed account of the crime from the Ghost of his father, the dead king returned from the grave. Prince Hamlet…
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“King, Father, Royal Dane”? Hamlet’s Dubious Father
1. “Where else in Shakespeare,” A.C. Bradley once asked, “is there anything like Hamlet’s adoration of his father? His words melt into music whenever he speaks of him.” Really? It may be true that the prince waxes lyrical whenever he has occasion to speak of the former king’s high qualities, but how well did the…
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A Tainted Election? “Hamlet” and Politics
For roughly the first half of Hamlet, the audience is left in suspense as to whether or not Claudius, the present king, had in fact secretly murdered his predecessor, Prince Hamlet’s father. Then the prince devises and executes a plan to find out, and deems his suspicions confirmed; we in the audience get to be…
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The Player Prince
1. My favorite line in Hamlet is a casual remark of Hamlet’s to Horatio, late in the play. It occurs just after he agrees to take part in his fatal fencing match with Laertes. Hamlet had just been telling Horatio of the devious means by which his uncle the king has tried to get him killed,…
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Toward a Theory of “Hamlet”: Six Theses
1. It’s no accident that the Players arrive at Elsinore when they do. Hamlet is just pretending to be surprised when Rosencrantz & Guildenstern tell him of their arrival. He knows they’re coming, because it was he who had sent for them. He’s been waiting for the players to arrive, so he can carry out…
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Bad Shakespeare, Bad Politics: The Case of the Central Park “Julius Caesar”
1. Unlike most of those who have felt the need to express an opinion of Oskar Eustis’s production of Julius Caesar at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, I’ve actually seen it. I attended a performance during the third of the three weeks of previews that preceded its formal one-week run — a couple of…
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Is Othello Insecure?
W.E.B. Du Bois coined the phrase ‘double consciousness’ to name the anxious self-doubt that is commonly suffered by those for whom social success or acceptance is barred by hostile race prejudices. “The facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and…
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What might Arendt have to say about Trump?
A few people have been asking me my thoughts on the recent surge of interest in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, in relation to our present political crisis. I’m working on writing something on the subject, but meanwhile – to air some rough ideas – I offer the following snippet of a conversation I had last week…
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Arendt: “The reality in which we live”
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who…
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