Halpern's book is well worth the read. Its complex, multi-faceted and wide-ranging arguments will certainly appeal to scholars of history, philosophy, economics and theatre.
The British Society for Literature and Science Of all the books published this year, Richard Halpern's Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy perhaps best exemplifies the clarity and consequence of argument that becomes possible when we extend our frame of reference beyond a single period to pursue a set of philosophical problems that have come to constitute our notions of politics and the political.
Studies in English Literature This is a book about tragedy in which Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is at least as important as Aristotle's Poetics. . . . Halpern, to his credit, tests his ideas against the more complex world of Hamlet with persuasive results. He helps us see how the search for favour and reward at court elides with the cash nexus on which the travelling players and armament workers depend.
London Review of Books Eclipse of Action brilliantly correlates the rise of political economy with the attenuation of action, virtue, and selfhood in tragic drama. Halpern's inventive readings of Aeschylus, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Beckett disclose the unfolding of tragedy in response to the performative life and statistical capture of labor. Here we find a revelatory theoretical space triangulated by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life An ambitious reconsideration of tragedy that is at once deeply theoretical and richly historical, Eclipse of Action rethinks two canons: the canon of tragic drama and the canon of political economy. This is history on a scale to which literary scholars have become unaccustomed. Precisely because Halpern disregards protocols of discrete fields, this book will be widely read, cited, argued with, and celebrated. It belongs on the shelf next to the likes of Walter Benjamin, George Steiner, and Raymond Williams.
Martin Harries, author of Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment Eclipse of Action will interest classicists, early modernists, literary historians, philosophers, and cultural historians, as well as many general readers. It is lucidly and engagingly written and has a compelling story to tell about the complex interrelations between tragedy, modernity, and political economy. I admire this book tremendously.
Victoria Kahn, author of The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts