Hazarding All

Philosophers call the arrival of a new way of grasping reality an epistemological shift. This book argues that Shakespeare produced a shift of this kind by controlling theatricalisation itself, using the stage's own machinery as his tool. Its argument draws on terms that Kant and Husserl developed when proposing such shifts. Shakespeare is presented as going beyond those philosophers, anticipating and already realising the direct, systematic access to reality that they hoped for.

The analysis centres on pairs of plays and the drama of consciousness unfolding within them. Through that drama, playwright and spectator together, in a shared intersubjective process, reach an 'onlooker' consciousness that steps outside the fiction and play-acting of performance and recovers the actuality of the objects in their worlds.