Renowned Shakespeare scholar lectures at UD

Dr. Stanley Stewart speaks on 'Shakespeare and the Limits of Wittgenstein's World'

By: Eric Haney

Posted: 2/23/10

The University of Dallas invited Dr. Stanley Stewart, distinguished professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, to present a public lecture on his ninth book, "Shakespeare and Philosophy." Stewart delivered his lecture entitled, "Shakespeare and the Limits of Wittgenstein's World" before students and faculty on Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Art Auditorium. UD's Dr. John Alvis and Dr. Brett Bourbon followed Stewart's lecture with comments before the floor opened to questions from the audience.

Dr. Scott Crider gave the introduction for his former professor, "Stan the Man" Stewart, fondly recalling the way Stewart would obliterate the arguments of second-rate literary critics in the classroom. In his lecture, Stewart spoke on the particular challenge that William Shakespeare posed for Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein first encountered a difficulty with Shakespeare when he was a student in Cambridge. He became deeply suspicious of the professors there who lavished praise on the bard and spoke with an air of wisdom and authority on Shakespeare's plays and poems.

Wittgenstein could not understand any response to Shakespeare but speechlessness. Indeed, this was his own reaction because he could not find in Shakespeare's plays symmetry, correspondence to reality or moral sense. Instead, he found dream-like logic, self-coherence and indeterminacy. For Wittgenstein, Shakespeare's project seemed more like a sketch than a painting - it seemed like something dashed-off and incomplete. Something about Shakespeare's plays unnerved Wittgenstein, Stewart said.

Alvis' response consisted of an observation and a hypothesis. Reading "Shakespeare and Philosophy," he observed a trend in which the more recent philosophers tended to depart from Shakespeare's language. Shakespeare described reality using words such as reason, nature, God, virtue, spirit, wisdom, sweetness and state. Alvis hypothesized that one would do better to understand Shakespeare through philosophy by engaging those philosophers who speak in a language closer to his own.

Bourbon's response was in part an attempt to trace Wittgenstein's critiques of Shakespeare - that his plays are unrealistic and morally relativistic - to Wittgenstein's changing ideas about sense and nonsense. These ideas about philosophical language were first developed in Wittgenstein's seminal philosophical treatise, "Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus," but were re-evaluated later in his career. Bourbon argued that Wittgenstein's trouble with Shakespeare had to do with his judgments of him from ethical and aesthetic grounds. He conceived of him as a player of language games - a maker of coherent nonsense.

Stewart has written extensively on 17th Century poetry and the English Renaissance, he is a former president of The Association of Scholars and Critics and he is the editor of The Ben Jonson Journal. He has addressed the relationship between philosophy, literature and literary criticism in books such as "Nietzsche's Case" and "Renaissance Talk."