Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T07:43:12.087Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 30 - Persian Virtues

Hospitality, Tolerance, and Peacebuilding in the Age of Shakespeare

from Part III - Shakespeare and Global Virtue Traditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2023

Julia Reinhard Lupton
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Donovan Sherman
Affiliation:
Seton Hall University, New Jersey
Get access

Summary

How do the virtues of toleration and hospitality manifest in early-modern drama? This chapter defines the virtues of toleration and hospitality through their intimate association with Ancient Persia, its rulers and foundational Zoroastrian ideology of promoting order and unity in diversity in the kingdom for communal harmony and felicity. Although an unexpected parallel, early modern writers call upon the locale of Persian as a concept with the capacity to inspire English monarchs to model themselves on paradigms of intercultural hospitality found in vignettes of Persia’s rulers, such as Cyrus and Artaxerxes, in Greek texts. These stories of cooperation between Persians and Greeks provide the context for Shakespeare’s enigmatic reference to Persian clothing in Act 3 when Edgar momentarily inhabits a Persian persona from Lear’s delusional perspective. Shakespeare’s use of ancient Persian virtues draws attention to the subtle forms of intercultural cooperation that hover in the background of his tragedy and radically contribute to a form of historical revisionism that privileges the forces of cooperation over conflict between oppositional groups such as Persian and Greeks of antiquity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shakespeare and Virtue
A Handbook
, pp. 300 - 305
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×