ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about whether there is any critical mileage in figuring Shakespeare as a philosopher. Though conclusive evidence is hard to come by, it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Derrida. Two philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition who have explored, productively, interfaces between philosophy and literature are Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum. Cavell rightly points out that if Shakespeare is indeed 'the burden of the name of the greatest writer in the language, the creature of the greatest ordering of English', it is reasonable to suppose that his writing might engage 'the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture'. In Shakespeare's mature plays, auditors, or at any rate readers, were certainly expected to follow complex exchanges of ideas.
