宝拉•马兰茨•科恩是一位获奖学者和教师，在与学生一起探讨莎士比亚戏剧时她发现，教授和讨论他的戏剧能在课堂上激发出惊人的同情心。在这本简短而富有启发性的书中，她展示了莎士比亚的天才之处在于他唤起共情的能力，即使他的人物存在于异国情境中，行为方式应该受到谴责。

科恩带着她的读者探讨了莎士比亚最**的戏剧精选，包括《哈姆雷特》、《奥赛罗》、《李尔王》、《威尼斯商人》等，展示了莎士比亚对我们如何对待 "他人 "的深刻而清晰的思考。

An award-

winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare’s greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy

While exploring Shakespeare’s plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare’s genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways.

Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat “the other.” Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature’s power to champion what is best in us.