Biography

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Sam Gilchrist Hall is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Károli Gáspár University and Managing Director of Yorick College, a digital-learning platform devoted to Shakespeare, which is to be launched this autumn. He was educated at the University of London and has published a monograph, Shakespeare’s Folly: Philosophy, Humanism, Critical Theory (Routledge, 2016), along with several articles on early modern literature, philosophy, theology and Critical Theory. His postdoctoral research is largely concerned with conceptualisations of dwelling and belonging in early modern utopias and histories. An avid writer of fiction, he has recently completed a novella, Inside Virgil Caine: One Man in His Time, and is working on his first full-length novel, provisionally entitled The Bachmann Tapes.

Please contact him (Sam.Hall@kre.hu) for enquires about supervision of research projects or theses in the following areas: European Modernism, Shakespeare, Early Modern Literature and Critical Theory.

Shakespeare’s Folly

This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare’s drama. The discourse of folly’s wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. Like Erasmus, More, and Montaigne before him, Shakespeare employs folly as a mode of understanding that does not arrogantly insist upon the veracity of its own claims; a fool’s truth, after all, is spoken by a fool. Yet, as this study demonstrates, Shakespearean folly is not the sole preserve of professional jesters and garrulous clowns, for it is also apparent on a thematic, conceptual and formal level in virtually all of his plays.

Examining canonical histories, comedies, and tragedies, this study is the first to either contextualize Shakespearean folly within European humanist thought, or to argue that Shakespeare’s philosophy of folly is part of a subterranean strand of Western philosophy, which itself reflects upon the folly of the wise. This strand runs from the philosopher-fool Socrates through to Montaigne and on to Nietzsche, but finds its most sustained expression in the Critical Theory of the mid to late twentieth-century, when the self-destructive potential latent in rationality had become a reality. This book makes a substantial contribution to the fields of Shakespeare, Renaissance humanism, Critical Theory, and Literature and Philosophy. It illustrates, moreover, how rediscovering the philosophical potential of folly may enable us to resist the growing dominance of instrumental thought in the cultural sphere.

You can find and buy the book on Amazon and Routledge.