by David P. Gontar (August 2012)

There is a trend in recent Shakespeare scholarship to assimilate his art to earlier thinkers, such as Michel de Montaigne and Niccolo Machiavelli. As such undertakings do not rest so much on documentation as they do on inference, discretion and speculation, they should proceed only with the greatest care. The admirably reserved and deliberate temperament we observe in Montaigne, for example, is wholly at variance with the passionate and venturesome spirit of Shakespeare. Even though there may be hints of skepticism in some plays, the epistemological mood of modern thought is alien to Shakespeare's realism and the inner turbulence of an Othello or a Lear.  more>>>