The Rational Shakespeare, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018 Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship

The Rational Shakespeare: Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship examines William Shakespeare?s rationality from a Ramist perspective, linking that examination to the leading intellectuals of late humanism, and extending those links to the life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.  The application to Shakespeare?s plays and sonnets of a game-theoretic hermeneutic, an interpretive approach that Ramism suggests but ultimately evades, strengthens these connections in further supporting the Oxfordian answer to the question of Shakespearean authorship.

Michael Wainwright is Associate Lecturer of English and Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His previous monographs include Darwin and Faulkner’s Novels: Evolution and Southern Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Toward a Sociobiological Hermeneutic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and Game Theory and Postwar American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Provides close textual analysis of Shakespeare’s plays

Draws on biographical and critical sources to chart Peter Ramus’s theories

Illustrates new evidence for the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship