Envy Theater. William Shakespeare

The largest modern literary and cultural critic, an anthropologist and philosopher turns to Shakespeare"s work and finds confirmation of his mimetical theory there. According to Zhirar, people strive for objects not for the sake of their own value, but due to the fact that they are desirable for someone else - we imitate or copy their desires. In such a mymetic desire, the author sees one of the foundations of human being.

Using his method, Girard reveals the previously unexpected internal consistency of problematic plays, such as Troil and Cressida, and raises the status of "sleep on a summer night" from chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book is replete with new and unexpected interpretations: Shakespeare appears to be a "prophet of modern advertising", and the threat of a nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Perhaps the most intriguing in it is a brief, but brilliant chapter, interpreting in a completely new perspective a Lecture of Stephen Daedal about Shakespeare in Joyce Ulysses. According to Zhirar, only Joyce, perhaps the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, approached the understanding of the greatest playwright of the Renaissance.

Rene Girard claims that his work about Shakespeare is inextricably linked with everything that I have ever written. " For more than fifty years, he wrote about the mimetical, or "borrowed" desire and the conflict that it gives rise to. His insights have amazing parallels in Shakespearean plays and poems, especially in "sleep on a summer night", "Julia Caesare" and "Winter Tale". Therefore, the "Envy Theater" is a necessary part of the Girarovsky canon.
Michael Kirvan, O.I., Institute of Loyola, Trinity College, Dublin

A brilliant and deep study, an unexpected reading of Shakespeare. Girard sees in the great playwright a congenial thinker, almost a contemporary who was able to penetrate into the very foundations of the human society and discovered mimetic violence there.
Alexey Bodrov, BBI rector

The fact that many readers of the Girard are final - a distinctive feature of his genius. I mean that if you already understand his approach to a separate play, you will no longer be able to neglect them. Rather, its interpretation becomes the problem of confusing common sense, what we always knew.
James Alison, a Catholic priest and theologian

"Envision, like a mimetical desire, makes something desired on who has a privileged connection with him. Envy longs for the highest being, which is not possessed by this someone or something separately, but only their connection. Envy involuntarily indicates the inferiority of being. ...

The mimetic approach solves many "problems" of the so -called problematic plays. ... He opens the dramatic unity and thematic continuity of Shakespeare"s plays, allows us to understand how the author’s ideas changed, and comprehend the history of his work in connection with his personal history. Finally, the mimetical approach opens up the original thinker, who has been ahead of his time for centuries, more modern than any of our so -called leading thinkers.

Shakespeare discovered a force that periodically destroys the system of cultural differences and again restores it - this is a mymetic crisis, which he calls the distinction crisis (Degree) He sees his resolution in the collective violence of the scapegoat mechanism (for example, Julius Caesar) The omega of one cultural cycle becomes an alpha of another. It is the unanimous persecution of the victim (Victimage) that transforms the destructive power of mymetic rivalry into the creative power of the sacrificial mimesis, periodically reconstructing the initial violence to prevent the return of the crisis. "
Rene Girard