Shoaf demonstrates that part of the enduring value of Shakespeare's art is his poetry of likeness in the "land of unlikeness" where human beings invent their likenesses. It shows that Shakespeare's theater is also Shakespeare's theory of the psychology of likeness and unlikeness in the human struggle for an individual identity.

Shoaf shows that Shakespeare's theater is also Shakespeare's theory of the psychology of likeness and unlikeness in the human striving for the most elusive and allusive of all attainments--an individual identity.

A book of poems written over 40 years, dating from the 1960s to the present, taking as their themes sex, children, death, love, and the language that tries to represent them.

Lucretius and Shakespeare on the Nature of Things maps large, new vistas for understanding the relationship between De rerum natura and Shakespeare's works. In chapters on six important plays across the canon (King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream), it demonstrates that Shakespeare articulates his erotics of being, his great creating nature (The Winter's Tale), by drawing on imagery he learned from Ovid and other classical poets, but especially from Lucretius, in his powerful epic that celebrates Venus and her endless creativity....