Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos

This study focuses on Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, the four main tragedies and Antony and Cleopatra. Tom McAlindon argues that there were two models of nature in Renaissance culture, one hierarchical, in which everything has an appointed place, and the other contrarious, showing nature as a tense system of interacting opposites, liable to sudden collapse and transformation. This latter model informs Shakespeare’s tragedy.

• The book is a direct challenge to the school of cultural materialism and new historicism • Offers a close reading of Shakespeare’s tragedies, useful for students

1. Introduction: ‘Nature’s fragile vessel’; 2. A medieval approach: Chaucer’s tale of love and strife; 3. Romeo and Juliet; 4. Julius Caesar; 5. Hamlet; 6. Othello; 7. King Lear; 8. Macbeth; 9. Antony and Cleopatra.

‘McAlindon’s argument shows that the binaries [in Shakespeare’s tragedies] are hardly a postmodernist revelation and that the Elizabethans themselves did not feel obliged to find in them the subversive and deconstructive inflections that transfix new-historicist and cultural-materialist critics. This is the important virtue of Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos ...’. Shakespeare Quarterly

‘Founded on a commitment both to sound understanding of intellectual history and to humane values.’ The Review of English Studies

‘ ... a work of genuine scholarship ... a humane study and one of real intellectual integrity’. The Yearbook of English Studies