Abstract

"With What Persuasion" investigates Shakespeare's representations of persuasive action in order to discern an ethics of rhetoric in the following plays: Hamlet, All's Well That Ends Well, Othello, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale. The dissertation's argument is that there is an ethics of rhetoric in the plays, an argument about the power of speech to influence action, an argument against torture and exploitation, an argument for creative rhetoric that yet acknowledges the difficulty of such rhetoric. In discerning in Shakespeare an ethics of persuasive action, I am engaging in a rather naive activity, neither historicist nor poststructural. I use the plays as sites for practical philosophy; I practice ethics there. Not to discern a Renaissance ethics, but to argue a contemporary one; not to undermine our ordinary ethical intuitions, but to defend them. Shakespeare's plays have much to teach us about ourselves, and they help us answer an important ethical question: How should we speak to one another? That is the question throughout. In Chapter 1--"False Fire and Spoken Daggers"--I defend ethics in literary interpretation by examining Hamlet's mimetic practice as a form of ethical desire, drawing a relationship between his status as a revenger and his fascination with playing and poetry. In the next four chapters, I outline Shakespeare's ethics of rhetoric. Chapter 2--"Our Boundary Stones"--distinguishes rhetoric from violence by arguing against the contemporary collapse of all influence into one category of "force" in an analysis of the "torture" of Parolles. Chapter 3--"Iago's Sophistic"--examines Iago's sophistry in Othello, an instance of exploitive rhetoric for which the audience must take some ethical responsibility. Chapter 4--"Graceful Words and Desire"--concedes that creative rhetoric does not always succeed; in it, I explore Isabella's attempt to convince Angelo in Measure for Measure, the rhetor here subjected by the very audience she attempts to persuade. Chapter 5--"Mimetic Spells"--discusses the nature of creative rhetoric in The Winter's Tale and argues that Paulina is Shakespeare's master of creative rhetoric. All four chapters attempt to define creative rhetoric, a form of persuasion distinct from violence and exploitation