This Element demonstrates how Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing models an understanding of the philosophy of Stoicism as performance, rather than as intellectual doctrine. To do this, it explores how, despite many early modern cultural institutions' suppression of Stoicism's theatrical capacity, a performative understanding lived on in one of the most influential texts of the era, Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, and that this performativity was itself inherited from one of Castiglione's sources, Cicero's De Oratore. The books concludes with a sustained reading of Much Ado to demonstrate how the play, in performance, itself acts as a Stoic exercise.
- ISBN13 9781108751797
- Publish Date 5 August 2019
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Cambridge University Press
- Imprint Cambridge University Press (Virtual Publishing)
- Format eBook
- Language English