ABSTRACT
In his extraordinarily helpful study, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art, Philip Edwards works from premises that may seem in the abstract not only potentially complex but paradoxical. One of them is this:
The protean Shakespeare seems to change his being as he moves from the cosmos of Hamlet to that of Othello, of Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. Our attempts to synthesize and catch the common factors too often hide the more obvious and more important quality of dissimilarity. The characters speak different languages, were brought up in different moral worlds, face entirely new difficulties—just could not belong in the neighbouring play. In each play a different mind seems to be creating a different world. 1
