Quentin Skinner highlights the use of judicial rhetoric in some of Shakespeare's most famous works, shedding new light on Shakespeare's reading and the intellectual base of his work.

• Introduction


• 1: Classical rhetoric in Shakespeare's England


• 2: Shakespeare's forensic plays


• 3: The open beginning


• 4: The insinuative beginning


• 5: The failed beginning


• 6: The judicial narrative


• 7: Confirmation: juridical and legal issues


• 8: Confirmation: the conjectural issue


• 9: Refutation and non-artificial proofs


• 10: The peroration and appeal to commonplaces


• Appendix: The date of All's Well That Ends Well

Quentin Skinner was born in 1940 and educated at Bedford School and at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of Christ's College in 1962 and appointed to a Lectureship in the Faculty of History at Cambridge in 1965. Between 1974 and 1979 he was based at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Returning to Cambridge, he served successively as Professor of Political Science (1979-1996) and as Regius Professor of History (1996-2008).