Citation

Zamani H, Abbasi P. Journal of Language Teaching and Research 2015; 6(5): 1145-1156.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015)

DOI

10.17507/jltr.0605.30

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The Renaissance clearly witnessed a revitalization of human's worldview towards education, the arts, and critical thinking. In the midst of this social, cultural and political transformation, a renewed perspective was held on the subjects of euthanasia and suicide. Philosophy began to struggle free from the fetters of Christianity and to redefine its targets as the production of free and intellectual citizens. Many wellknown figures of Renaissance philosophy put forward theses that were reckoned at the time to be harshly iconoclastic, such as the permissibility of suicide. Shakespeare, the chief figure of the English renaissance, in line with anti-religious discourses of his time, employs characters who radically pertain to suicidal ideologies of the ancients. The dominant theme of suicide pervading his works demonstrates how the Renaissance man mirrored the Greek and Roman ideologies and how the process of secularization exposed him with a sort of absurdity as a result of which suicide could be tolerated or even more admired. The present paper, aims, on the one hand, to defy many contemporary arguments which ill-foundedly endeavor to introduce Shakespeare as an anti-suicide figure. On the other hand, the authors show how Shakespeare was heavily influenced by the religious, humanistic, artistic and scientific discourses of his time in his exposure to the theme of suicide. The paper's main discussion is preceded by an overview so as to introduce the fluctuation of attitudes towards suicide through history until the Renaissance. The study may be reckoned as a great stride towards a newhistoricist study of Shakespeare and the idea of suicide. © 2015 ACADEMY PUBLICATION.

Language: en

Keywords

Suicide; Ancients; New-historicist; Renaissance; Shakespeare