Ebook: The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood

Shakespeare's dramatis personae exist in a world of supposition, struggling to connect knowledge that cannot be had, judgments that must be made, and actions that need to be taken. For them, probability-what they and others might be persuaded to believe-governs human affairs, not certainty. Yet negotiating the space of probability is fraught with difficulty. Here, Joel B. Altman explores the problematics of probability and the psychology of persuasion in Renaissance rhetoric and Shakespeare's theater. Focusing on the Tragedy of Othello, Altman investigates Shakespeare's rep.;Acknowledgments; Prologue / ""As If for Surety"": The Problematics of Shakespearean Probability; Part I. Toward a Rhetorical Genealogy of Othello; One / ""My Parts, My Title, and My Perfect Soul"": Ingenuity, Apodeixis, and the Origins of Rhetorical Anthropology; Two / ""Against My Estimation"": Ciceronian Decorum, Stoic Constancy, and the Production of Ethos; Part II. The Logic of Renaissance Rhetoric; Three / ""Apt and True"": Speech, World, and Thought in Shakespeare's Humanist Dialectic; Four / ""Yonder's Foul Murders Done"": Place, Predicament, and Grammatical Space on Cyprus.