Shakespeare and the Dialectic of Certainty

Shakespeare's plays examine the theme of certainty with consummate skill, exploring evil and good, assurance and its absence, intuition and love, evidence and interpretation and the dialectical methods used to guide moral action. The first chapter of this book establishes the intellectual perspective of 16th- and 17th-century epistemology, emphasizing the paradigm shift in dialectic - the art of logic - that precipitated a crisis of thought among such figures as Dee, Marlow, Bacon and Raleigh. The rest of the book discusses 14 of Shakespeare's plays. Beginning with the early comedies, then treating tragedies, history plays and one problem play in terms of their special approaches to the questions of certainty, the book shows how Shakespeare breathed life into what might have remained a scholastic debate.