Hazarding All: Shakespeare and the Drama of Consciousness

• Shows the pervasiveness of Shakespeare’s chiasmus of theatricalisation: the back-and-forth, and forth-and-back, movements between role-playing consciousness and a would-be non-role-playing consciousness that is never free from role-playing
• Demonstrates and explains how Shakespeare opens a shared space of negativity within partnered chiastic relation of two plays
• Explores that the product of this chiastic relation for the playwright and the spectator is an object of reflection that they encounter outside theatre
• Explains that, as a result, the playwright and the spectator move toward an intersubjectivity and a reciprocal intentionality toward sustained being

Philosophers speak of newly accessed ways of knowing reality as epistemological shifts. This book demonstrates how Shakespeare effected a massive shift of just this kind in his bold management of theatricalisation itself. These pages levy on terms of Kant and Husserl that they elaborated in proposals for such shifts. It will be seen that Shakespeare exceeds the proposals of the philosophers. He anticipates and already brings to a working consummation a systematic and immediate access to the ways of knowing reality that they contemplate as hoped-for desiderata. In, and through, the drama of consciousness played out in the pairs of plays examined here, the playwright and the spectator together – intersubjectively – attain to an ‘onlooker’ consciousness that exits the fictionality, the play-acting, of theatricalisation; and they are enabled to recover the actuality of objects in their worlds.