Why are human societies hierarchical? How did centralized political authority originate? Anthropologists tell us that foraging societies are egalitarian compared to their agrarian and industrial successors. So what prompted our foraging ancestors to submit to the authority of big men, chiefs, and kings? And how did the big man once installed in the center maintain his authority in the face of the resentment mobilized against him? Shakespeare’s Exiles addresses these fundamental ethical, political, and anthropological questions by looking at two of Shakespeare’s most eccentric big men. Why does Timon, the once-legendary host of Athens, refuse to return to his beloved city? And why does Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, promise to break his staff and throw his books into the deep blue sea? In this highly original and provocative book, Richard van Oort shows that Shakespeare is not just a dramatist but a philosopher, political scientist, and anthropologist too.
1 Introduction
2 The Hunger Artist of Athens
3 The Last Temptation of Prospero
4 Epilogue: Atonement
Biography
Richard van Oort received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine in 2002, and was visiting assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia until 2007, when he joined the English department at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Shakespeare’s Mad Men: A Crisis of Authority (Stanford University Press, 2022).
“The insightful analysis of Timon of Athens that opens Shakespeare’s Exiles provides the point of departure for an amazingly lucid unraveling of the complex theatricality of Shakespeare’s farewell work, The Tempest, in the finest demonstration yet of van Oort’s mastery of what we must call ‘theatrical anthropology.’”
--Eric Gans, University of California, Los Angeles
“Shakespeare’s Exiles treats Timon of Athens and The Tempest as ‘ethical discovery procedures.’ In contrast to the ‘big men’ of Shakespeare’s earlier plays, Timon and Prospero achieve an uncanny self-realization by marginalizing themselves. Van Oort’s original and compelling readings unmask the power relations of these plays without dispelling their attraction as theatrical illusions.”
--Blair Hoxby, Stanford University
"Shakespeare’s Exiles completes Van Oort’s ambitious trilogy on Shakespeare, one of the most fascinating projects in literary studies today. Drawing on the generative anthropology of Eric Gans, Van Oort sees in Shakespeare’s career a sustained and evolving reflection on the place of sacrificial violence in human culture, on the formation and dissolution of political authority and the possibility of recovering from personal and social catastrophe. Van Oort lets everything ride on the power of his interpretation of Shakespeare as an interpreter of culture, and in doing so makes an exemplary case for placing literary studies at the core of humanistic inquiry."
- Paul A. Kottman, Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research
