Hugh Grady

Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics explores ideas about art implicit in Shakespeare's plays and defines specific Shakespearean aesthetic practices in his use of desire, death and mourning as resources for art. Hugh Grady draws on a tradition of aesthetic theorists who understand art as always formed in a specific …

In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's image of "an universal wolf" of appetite, power, and will represented and critiqued the emerging systems of modernity: mercantile capitalism, Machiavellian politics, and value-free rationality. Rereading Troilus, Othello, King Lear, and As You Like It, Grady finds many parallels …