ABSTRACT
By the close of the sixteenth century, William Shakespeare was consciously changing his poetic presentation. This chapter focuses on the plays that illustrate the modality of a new ethics which testifies to how Shakespeare has successfully immersed into the vogue and demonstrated the “metaphysical or mature Shakespearean” style as acclaimed by Patrick Cruttwell. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s reasoning, scepticism, intellectual profundity and the lover’s psychology mark the emerging mature Shakespearean style that experiments on “old words new” with “compounds strange. With initial credit in the popular Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare is ready to further propagate his new ethics in The Merchant of Venice. Among other things, the poet-playwright makes good use of favourite themes to envelop his “progressive” thinking. A judicious review of the poetry will conclude that Shakespeare gives his readers a different impression between his early works and later works.
