What can Shakespeare – or literature more generally – tell us about ethics? In the Pacific Views Talk for Spring 2026, Professor Jim Kearney (English) discusses the ways that Shakespearean theater invites its audiences to be entertained by the vicarious experience of the ethical, often ethics in some extreme or impossible circumstance.

What does it feel like to be enjoined to avenge your father’s death? What is it like to banish your daughter or disavow your community? To forgive the unforgivable? To murder? Shakespeare and his fellow early modern playwrights inherited and developed rhetorical and philosophical practices geared toward the creation of immersive virtual experience.

Advance registration is recommended as space is limited.