Shakespeare in Chinese Philosophy: Kings and Rectification of Names

Yanli HUANG

Abstract


Appeal for order and harmony permeated Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and it relied a lot on the monarch. This paper aims to analyze the images of three monarchs in Henry IV and Richard II to interpret Shakespeare’s political philosophy from perspective of Confucius’s thought of rectification of names. Richard II is the legal king, but he doesn’t follow what a king should do; Henry IV is also not Shakespeare’s ideal king for he takes the crown illegally, though he performed well as a king; with legal succession of the crown and Machiavellian tactics, Henry V is the perfect monarch for Shakespeare.

 


Keywords


Monarch; Rectification of names; Political philosophy

Full Text:

PDF

References


Baker, H. (1974). Henry V. In G. Blakemore (Ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare, Boston: The Houghton Mifflin Company.

Fung, Y. L. (1948). A short history of Chinese philosophy. New York: The Free Press.

Goddard, H. C. (1951). The meaning of Shakespeare (p.149). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Leggatt, A. (2005). Shakespeare’s political drama (p.62). Taylor & Francis e-Library.

Liu, X. F. (Ed.). Shakespeare’s kings. Beijing: Hua Xia Publishing House.

Machiavelli, N. (1979). The Prince and Discourses on Livy. In P. Bondanella and M. Musa (Eds. and Trans.), The portable Machiavelli. New York: Viking Penguin.

Pierce, Robert B. Shakespeare’s History Plays, Ohio State University Press, 1971.

Raffield, P. (2008). “Terras Astraea reliquit”: Titus Andronicus and the loss of justice. In P. Raffield and G. Watt (Eds.), Shakespeare and the law. Oxford: Hart Publishing.

Shaw, C. (1985). The tragic sub-structure of the Henry IV plays. Shakespeare Survey, 38, 61-67.

Sullivan, V. (1996). Princes to act: Henry V as the Machiavellian prince of appearance. In J. Alulis and V. Sullivan (Eds.), Shakespeare’s political pageant. London: Rowman and Littlefield.

Wells, S. (Ed.) (2007). The Cambridge companion to Shakespeare studies. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/12396

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2022 Yanli Huang

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Share us to:   


 

Online Submissionhttp://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard


Reminder

How to do online submission to another Journal?

If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mailoffice@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture