ABSTRACT
In the Preface to his Works of Shakespear, William Warburton advances the following argument for the value of his author:
Warburton’s assessment is arrestingly different in its focus from twenty-first-century accounts of Shakespeare’s worth. Today, we take it for granted that Shakespeare’s canonicity is founded on his rich, original use of the English language and on his theatrical flair. Warburton, however, does not focus on language or on the theater. Instead, his appreciation of Shakespeare rests on “Knowledge,” “Science,” and “Nature.” Of course, these words as Warburton uses them did not mean to him what they mean to us. The term scientist as we understand it today first appeared only in 1830 in William Whewell’s The History of the Inductive Sciences (Turner 511). Science, in the eighteenth century, was a much broader term than it is today. It signified any branch of knowledge, not a discipline opposed to the arts, while Nature meant the full range of phenomena, not simply what today we would consider “natural phenomena.” Nevertheless, these two terms as employed by Warburton are related to what we mean by “science” today because they resonate with the idea of searching for objective knowledge about the world. Warburton appeals to “Science” and “Nature” to depict Shakespeare as a supreme investigator who reveals the underlying regularity of human behavior.
