Abstract
Regina Maria Schwartz’s Living Justice, Loving Shakespeare begins with a personal story about her mother’s chronic illness, and her outrage at the language used about the value of life in modern culture. From this she develops a meditation on the nature of love, justice and human relationships, via engagements with Shakespeare’s plays, Biblical texts, and the traditions of commentary and interpretation which surround them. The book is deeply concerned with the value of individuals, but argues against an atomised notion of individualism. Schwartz critiques what she sees as dominant economic-centred systems of value and distribution, arguing instead for an ethical approach engaged with ideas of love and forgiveness. These are teased out of Biblical passages, and demonstrated in striking readings of plays including King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice.
The result is a thought-provoking and intensely-felt book which sets vast themes against each other, drawing on thinkers including Plato, Maimonides, Augustine and Rawls. It is encouraging to see Biblical interpretation from both Christian and rabbinic commentators used to intervene in such debates, and Schwartz emphasizes the intellectual subtlety and practical value of her sources. The book’s deeply personal focus is one of its major strengths: it begins from a personal story, and insists on the need to centre abstract questions around people and their value. This essential characteristic can sometimes make it a little difficult to expand Schwartz’s ideas beyond the context in which she presents them, as memories of her grandmother’s teaching, or impulses which sprang from her own experience. This is clearly deliberate, as it follows the shape of the argument about personal value and love, but it can obscure the other possible conclusions to be drawn from her arguments, or make it unclear how the book speaks to other debates. Given the huge scope of issues like love and forgiveness, there can also be some blurring of the details of particular scholarly fields, as when assertions are made about the revisions of Lear or the choice of Biblical translations. These make sense within Schwartz’s line of reasoning, and are treated as established, but might be contested by specialists in those fields are unproven or simply debatable. Nonetheless, this is an engrossing and rewarding study with much to offer.