Human remains in “Hamlet”, “King Lear” and “Othello”

Abstract

The dominance of various forms of historicism in literary studies means that the study of literature has largely become the study of history. The essay counters this tendency by attempting to retrieve a sense of the human/humanist value of literature. However, rather than advocating a simple return to the kind of humanist criticism that was influential in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Anglo-American critical tradition, it engages via Shakespeare with sceptical perspectives in order to show how Shakespeare himself ‘de-natures’ the human but not to the point where it is emptied entirely of meaning.