The Passion of Reason: Shakespeare and Ariosto as Dantean Philosophers

The Passion of Reason reads Shakespeare intimately as a poetic philosopher in the tradition of Dante Alighieri, for whom reason is naturally passionate. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) helps us appreciate Shakespeare as a Platonist who teaches that, in virtue of its mysterious roots, the philosophical life (reflection itself) cannot be contextualized. The (re)discovery of Shakespeare on Platonic grounds challenges much of what modern scholarship has had to say about Renaissance poets, exposing us to dimensions of Shakespeare’s plays-focusing on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet-that have long remained obscured. The plays exhumed from beneath modern discourse are paths through which we as readers are to purge ourselves of earthly passions, by way of entering into a realm of ideas as fundamental spheres of understanding. The goal, however, is not the reduction of passion to reason, but the restoration of passion as a fundamental property of reason itself.

It is very difficult, in our age, to write something significantly new about Shakespeare, especially when addressing some of his most renowned works. But Marco Andreacchio’s book succeeds in doing so. By going back to the sources and their context, The Passion of Reason argues convincingly that to properly understand Shakespeare we need to attempt to recover, via a close philological reading, the author’s intentions.
- Dr. Arpad Szakolczai
Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University College Cork, author of Post Truth Society: A Political Anthropology of Trickster Logic

This groundbreaking monograph reopens the question of what Renaissance poetry and drama were meant to accomplish for their earliest readers. Against the grain of modern critical habits, which often reduce Renaissance texts to ideological products or historical curiosities, Marco Andreacchio argues that writers such as Ariosto and Shakespeare composed their works as philosophical and spiritual exercises-structured journeys of purgation designed to guide readers beyond illusion, attachment, and passion toward a transformative encounter with death as the horizon of truth.
- Raymond N. MacKenzie, Professor of English, University of St. Thomas