Shakespeare and Wisdom: Ecumenical, Ecological and Ethical Horizons

This volume interweaves Shakespeare’s wisdom with ancient spiritual practices and the insights of a post-secular age in order to explore a transhistorical space of sapient knowing and living. Pursuing the delight of heart, soul and understanding in the synaesthetic experience of theatre and the meditative space of poetry, sapiential Shakespeare explores knowledge, love, beauty, nature, will and power in conversation with multiple wisdom traditions, tapping into a global sensus communis rooted in energetic knowing-with. This collection of essays begins in the Mediterranean with classical, biblical and Egyptian wisdom, moves to the East to consider Sufi and Buddhist wisdom and then turns to the West to reflect on Indigenous science and ways of knowing. Sharing a common root in oikos, meaning home, the ecumenical and the ecological converge in an embodied ethics and politics of care premised in an ecological rather than ego-logical way of being.

Unhae Park Langis is a scholar-seeker, Love activist, Earth travailer and stitcher of text and textile. A former teacher of twenty years, she is the author of Passion, Prudence, and Virtue in Shakespearean Drama (2011) and numerous essays in ethical criticism in collections and journals including Shakespeare Studies, EMLS, Upstart Crow, and Literature Compass. As a research fellow at the New Swan Shakespeare Center, University of California, Irvine, Langis has evolved from a virtue to a multi-perspectival wisdom hermeneutic through Stoic, Buddhist and Sufi readings of Shakespeare in several collections including this present volume.

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author or co-author of five books, including Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (2018), Thinking with Shakespeare (2015), and Citizen-Saints (2012). She has edited or co-edited many volumes and special issues, including Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook (with Donovan Sherman), and Shakespeare’s Virtuous Theatre: Power, Capacity, and the Good (with Kent Lehnhof and Carolyn Sale), Shakespeare and Hospitality (with David Goldstein), and Face to Face with Shakespeare (with Matthew Smith). She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.