Shakespeare and the New Science in Early Modern Culture / Shakespere e la nuova scienza nella cultura ealry modern

Shakespeare’s modernity resides in the highly cognitive potential of his language and in the way different paradigms overlap in his works, in a phase in which newly problematized models of cognition brought about by the new science – or “the new philosophy” as John Donne called it – were deeply complicating the way human beings saw themselves and the universe. How is this revolutionized epistemic framework catalyzed in Shakespeare’s art? And how does Shakespeare’s art contribute to it? There is a crucial epistemic core in his works which demands to be dealt with from the perspective of an integrated form of knowledge. The authors of this book take up just such a challenge, finding a guide in the Renaissance dialogue among the ‘Artes ’, the name that at the time – the time of Leonardo, Copernicus, Vesalius, Michelangelo, Kepler, Galileo, Bruno, Bacon – was applied to both abstract and empirical domains of knowledge