Title: Shakespeare, Milton and the Dissociation of Sensibility
Subject Classification:  Literature and Literary Criticism, Religion and Faith, History  
BIC Classification: DS, HRC, HB
BISAC Classification: LIT015000, REL015000, REL015000
Binding: Hardback, eBook
Publication date: 29 Jul 2025
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83711-436-8
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83711-437-5

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Description

Shakespeare, Milton and the Dissociation of Sensibility addresses an issue which was much debated in the 1950s and 1960s but has not been re-visited recently. The issue was first raised by T.S. Eliot in his essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, included in his Selected Essays, and was also explored by F.R. Leavis in his essays on Milton in Revaluation and The Common Pursuit. The book compares several plays of Shakespeare – chiefly Hamlet, but also Measure for Measure, Anthony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale – with the poetry of Milton in his epitaph ‘On Shakespeare’ and in Paradise Lost, arguing that Eliot’s concept is essentially accurate and that the ‘dissociation’ he talks of is closely connected with the split in Christianity between Catholicism and Protestantism, initiated by the Reformation and Henry VIII’s split with Rome and persisting into the present.

It offers extensive evidence – chiefly through a reading of The Winter’s Tale, but also in the sections on Hamlet – to support the current consensus among Shakespearean scholars that Shakespeare harboured Catholic sympathies and was engaging with current religious controversies in his plays. It also canvasses the idea that Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ can be identified in the complementary positions of some major nineteenth-century writers.

The book is intended for university students, researchers and teachers interested in literature, literary criticism, cultural studies, history, theology and philosophy.

Biography

Author(s):  RLP Jackson is a graduate of Auckland and Cambridge Universities. Formerly a Senior Lecturer at Sydney University, he has published on Shakespeare and the Nineteenth-century novel.

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