"e;Shakespeares works do not embody any doctrine or set of beliefs, as his critics have long been tempted to suggest, but they do stage encounters with certain kinds of thinking ethical, political, epistemological, even metaphysical that still concern us nowadays. They can be shown to draw on ancient philosophies Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism either directly or through medieval and continental Renaissance thought. Or their scenarios can be likened to those of other kinds of intellectual argument, such as legal or theological discourse. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate the value of thinking with Shakespeare, either as embodied in Shakespeares own creative programme or in our use of philosophical paradigms as an approach to his works. The contributors are Colin Burrow, Terence Cave, Gabriel Josipovoci, Charles Martindale, Stephen Medcalf, Subha Mukherji, A. D. Nuttall and N. K. Sugimura."e;

Introduction Approaches 1. Why Shakespeare is not Michelangelo 2. The Opinion of Pythagoras 3. Shakespeare Philosophus Investigations 4. False Trials and the Impulse to Try in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries 5. Two Concepts of Reality in Antony and Cleopatra 6. Dreaming, Looking, and Seeing: Shakespeare and a Myth of Resurrection Afterwords 7. When Shakespeare Met Montaigne 8. The Last Word