Includes bibliographical references and index.

Certain questions engross Shakespeare from his early plays to the late romances: the nature of motive, cause, personal identity and relation, the proper status of imagination, ethics and subjectivity, language and its capacity to occlude and to communicate. Yet Shakespeare's thought, Nuttall demonstrates, is anything but static. The plays keep returning to, modifying, and complicating the playwright's preoccupations. The author does not limit discussion to moments of crucial intellection but gives himself ample space in which to get to the distinctive essence of each work." "Much recent historicist criticism has tended to "flatten" Shakespeare by confining him to the thought-cliches of his time, and this in its turn has led to an implicitly patronizing view of him as unthinkingly racist, sexist, and so on. Nuttall shows us that, on the contrary, Shakespeare proves to be more intelligent and perceptive than his twenty-first-century readers.