Of Human Kindness | Hardback

Of Human Kindness | Hardback Description

An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare&s greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare&s plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare&s genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways.   Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare&s most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat &the other.& Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature&s power to champion what is best in us.