Chapter 1 Peter Ramus and the Basis of Logic.- Chapter 2 Thomas Smith, Edward de Vere, and William Cecil.- Chapter 3 Peter Ramus, Edward de Oxford, and the Basis of Logic.- Chapter 4 Ramus’s Method.- Chapter 5 The Strengths and Weakness of Ramism.- Chapter 6 Introduction: Ramism and Game Theory.- Chapter 7 The Banker and His Player.- Chapter 8 Oxford, Ramus, and Love’s Labour’s Lost.- Chapter 9 Oxford, Ramus, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.- Chapter 10 Deadlock and the Prisoner’s Dilemma in King John.- Chapter 11 Assurance Games in Antony and Cleopatra (Part 1).- Chapter 12 Assurance Games in Antony and Cleopatra (Part 2).- Chapter 13 Chicken in King Henry V (Part 1).- Chapter 14 Chicken in King Henry V (Part 2).- Chapter 15 Conclusion.
Michael Wainwright is Associate Lecturer of English and Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His previous monographs include Darwin and Faulkner’s Novels: Evolution and Southern Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Toward a Sociobiological Hermeneutic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and Game Theory and Postwar American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
The Rational Shakespeare: Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship examines William Shakespeare’s rationality from a Ramist perspective, linking that examination to the leading intellectuals of late humanism, and extending those links to the life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The application to Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets of a game-theoretic hermeneutic, an interpretive approach that Ramism suggests but ultimately evades, strengthens these connections in further supporting the Oxfordian answer to the question of Shakespearean authorship.