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Abstract Built around some of the most electrifying scenes in Shakespearean tragedy, The Drama of Complaint examines Shakespeare’s theatrical experiments with the poetic forms of complaint that were so prolific in early modern literature, showing how these conventional forms became crucibles for unconventional philosophical thought. Treating the literary field of complaint as a repertoire of stylized stock scenarios animated by conceptions of the good, this book argues that these microdramas of discontent and desire repeat across the period’s literature as vehicles of ethical thought, and that Shakespeare’s arrangements of these familiar scenes model and provoke new ways of thinking about ethical subjectivity and the good life. Drawing on early modern moral treatises and essays, Reformed theology, sermons, conduct manuals, and compendia of Aristotelian and Stoic moral philosophy alongside the period’s literature, the book identifies and theorizes five particular poetic forms of complaint and develops new readings of Shakespearean tragedies to which each of these forms is integral. By constructing a taxonomy that privileges the recurrence of particular objects of desire (justice, mercy, an end to suffering) over the characterological traits of particular complainers, it brings into relief the habitual ways of conceptualizing the good that shape and are articulated in these poetic forms. In showing how early modern scenes of complaint are critical points of entry to literary inquiries into ethical questions, The Drama of Complaint illuminates the literary practices of early modern England while gesturing to the rich potential that has led thinkers from Boethius to Montaigne to Freud to imagine human (un)happiness by constructing or interpreting scenes of complaint.
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