Shakespeare Beyond Science (When Poetry Was The World)

Shakespeare Beyond Science: When Poetry Was the World approaches Shakespeare as rhetorician. This means jettisoning the yearning to find the ‘true meaning’ of Shakespeare’s texts — as Shakespeare wrote at a time when poetry was not meant to be interpreted, but experienced as a window on the world. Sky Gilbert looks at Shakespeare in the context of the ‘style wars’ that obsessed the early modern period, placing Shakespeare on the side of Lyly, Nashe, Sturm and the Greek rhetorician Hermogenes, against the new forward-looking more scientific approach to literature, as expressed by early modern philosopher Petrus Ramus (whose followers in England were Sydney and Gabriel Harvey). In the end Shakespeare was a post-structuralist, more concerned with form than content, and confident of the dangerous magical power of words not only to persuade but to construct our consciousness.