Shakespeare's Arguments with History

Argument was the basis of Renaissance education; both rhetoric and dialectic permeated early modern humanist culture, including drama. This study approaches Shakespeare's history plays by analyzing the use of argument in the plays and examining the importance of argument in Renaissance culture. Knowles shows how analysis of arguments of speech and action take us to the core of the plays, in which Shakespeare interrogates the nature of political morality and truth as grounded in the history of what men do and say.

RONALD KNOWLES is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading. He is author and editor of books on Shakespeare, Charles II, Jonathan Swift and Harold Pinter, including Henry IV Parts I & II, The Critics Debate, Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, and King Henry VI Part II, 'The Arden Shakespeare'.