Shakespeare wrote at a unique historical turning point: the world was
understood through poetry -- rather than through the science of
observing it. In Shakespeare Beyond Science: When Poetry Was the
World, Sky Gilbert's radical new research locates Shakespeare as a
disciple of the Greek rhetorician Hermogenes, and a student of the
Neo-Platonist Johannes Sturm. No, not just another 'interpretation' of
the meaning of Shakespeare's work. Instead, a radical approach to
Shakespeare as magician and rhetorician, as a post-structuralist, more
concerned with form than content, and confident of the dangerous magical
power of words not only to persuade but to construct our consciousness.