Quentin Skinner highlights the use of judicial rhetoric in some of Shakespeare's most famous works, shedding new light on Shakespeare's reading and the intellectual base of his work.

• Introduction


• 1: Classical Rhetoric in Shakespeare's England


• 2: Shakespeare's Forensic Plays


• 3: The Open Beginning


• 4: The Insinuative Beginning


• 5: The Failed Beginning


• 6: The Judicial Narrative


• 7: Confirmation: Juridical and Legal Issues


• 8: Confirmation: The Conjectural Issue


• 9: Refutation and Non-Artificial Proofs


• 10: The Peroration and Appeal to Commonplaces


• Appendix: The Date of All's Well That Ends Well


• Bibliography


• Index

Quentin Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London. He is Fellow of the British Academy and the Academia Europaea, and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and other learned societies. His scholarship, which is available in more than twenty languages, has won him many awards, including the Wolfson Prize for History in 1979, a Balzan Prize in 2006 and the Bielfelder Wissenschaftspreis in 2008. He has also been the recipient of numerous honorary degrees. His two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), was listed by The Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the hundred most influential books of the previous fifty years. HIs other books include Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996), Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008), and a 3-volume collection of essays, Visions of Politics (2002).