Shakespearean Orders. Language, Representation and Epistemic Subversions

William Shakespeare’s plays rely on, and to an extent reproduce, the space of resemblances of the early modern episteme and the system of binary oppositions of Western thought; at the same time, they also produce a knowledge that is subversive of those. By discussing the ambivalent relationship of Shakespeare’s plays with the epistemic space of the early modern culture and by also taking into account the distance and ‘discontinuity’ of those texts from the present of our reading, this study engages with the ‘difference’ – as pastness, as subversion of orders – of the plays.