ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that Shakespeare is all but exclusively concerned with individuality in his exploration of the human condition, and that the enduring appeal of his plays is also due to his concern with man as an essentially collective being. It offers an alternative to the dominant tradition of searching for indices of contemporary Western culture's ambivalent individualism in Shakespeare. The book attempts to loosen the epistemological stranglehold of models of Western individual subjectivity which have claimed Shakespeare for their own prized representative since the eighteenth-century 'discovery' of Shakespeare and his genius. It demonstrates how Shakespeare relates the crowd to class conflict, to rhetoric and to the theatre, to the organization of the state; and how he links rumour to fear, to fame and to philosophical doubt.
