From Solitude to maternity: Levinas and Shakespeare
ENThe present essay tries to place Shakespeare’s three greatest tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear) in the context of Levinas’ s own developing ideas as a philosopher, as well as to suggest how, if we read these plays with Levinas’ s thought in mind, we can see in them as yet unrevealed ethical depths. Shakespeare figures in Levinas’s philosophical development from the time of Existence and Existcntsmtd Time and the Other, both published just after World War II, through Humanism of the Other and Otherwise than Beinjj in the early 1970s. Among Shakespeare’s works, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Kinjg Lear were three plays that Levinas particularly admired. In the course of my essay I will refer to the work of Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who also alludes to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and whose work had such a powerfully formative influence on Levinas’s thought.
