Donovan Sherman’s Second Death begins with the question “what is a soul?” and explores how and where we might detect the elusive entity onstage in Shakespeare’s plays. The study is concerned mainly with the soul as “lived practice” rather than with the departed soul (8), though Lear’s unseen and imagined ghost opens the monograph, and Hamlet’s ghost appears in the conclusion. Although the theater might seem an unlikely place to look for the soul’s presence in the living (to look for more than portrayals of ghosts, that is), Sherman points out that the theater “mediates itself in relation to something beyond its capacities—an implied world, character, or quality that the audience fabricates through the perception of arranged concrete cues,” a process that “resonates with the means by which the soul maintained its own necessary distance from complete definition” (8).

Sherman traces the soul from Cordelia’s vanished breath to Hermione’s breathing statue, producing fresh readings of Shakespeare, while using Shakespeare, in turn, to illuminate philosophical concepts of the soul. The first chapter proposes that the soul is theatrical but not mimetic, expressive but beyond representation. Sherman draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, to develop the idea of the expression, as opposed to the representation, of the soul, which becomes a key concept unifying the chapters. Chapter 1 delineates major strands of thinking on the soul, from Plato through to Catholic and Protestant theories, with an aim of highlighting, in the following chapters, traces of these discourses in theater and society. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 argue that certain Shakespearean characters become souls within the logic of their plays, namely Shylock, Coriolanus, and Leontes, but also Jessica and Mamillius, among others. As soul, these characters become isolated or expelled from the “representational fabric” of theater, within which the soul “starts to look like just the opposite: a villain, a pariah, or a madman” (10). Each chapter deals with the paradox of the soul as detectable only through its absence, as beyond perception and yet present. The author approaches this paradox by attending to the “deferrals, concealments, whispers, breaths, silences, elisions and other ripples through fields of representation” (41). This attention advances Sherman’s contention that, despite being in one sense unrepresentable, the soul is theatrical.

Sherman connects each play’s treatment of the soul with wider literary and cultural associations. Early modern engagement with the notion of metempsychosis factors into his interpretation of space in The Merchant of Venice, while uses of monument, including the textual monument of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, inform his discussion of Coriolanus performing absence, or acting as monument. The contradictions inherent in elegy provide a useful starting point for considering mourning and the soul in The Winter’s Tale, and the concluding discussion of subjectivity in Hamlet turns to current notions of the avatar.

Second Death’s interdisciplinary approach will interest scholars of philosophy, Shakespeare, and early modern drama alike. The questions Sherman tackles about how to read the soul in the theater open new ways of thinking about performance itself, making the study relevant to performance studies as well. Second Death offers a challenging, dense read, not easily accessible to readers unfamiliar with the philosophy Sherman draws upon. The Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy series announces scholarship that pushes against currently more dominant historicist and cultural-studies approaches to literature in order to address components of art that cannot be reduced to a specific historical context, and Sherman’s study reflects this aim, putting Shakespeare’s plays in conversation with philosophy on the soul both early modern and contemporary. Rather than using such philosophy primarily to shed new light on Shakespeare’s work, or using Shakespearean drama to illustrate complex philosophical concepts, this study does both.

Apart from its interdisciplinarity, Second Death contributes to early modern scholarship through its very focus on the soul, a topic that has been relatively overlooked—or else displaced or elided in discussions of subjectivity and interiority—despite what Sherman identifies as a recent “return to religion” in the wake of poststructuralism (2). It also argues for a revision of our understanding of antitheatricalism. Sherman claims that while firm “anti-representational or anti-imitative prejudice” certainly existed historically, “the theatre itself is not ever coherent enough to present itself as something to be against at all” (176). Just as the line demarcating body from soul is not clear, Sherman points out, neither is the line between proponents and enemies of the theater.