A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare's The Tempest and Early Modern EpistemologyB. J. Sokol
About the Author:
B. J. Sokol gained his first degree in mathematics in New York, and for a number of years taught mathematics and science, as well as doing research and designing electronic and computer equipment in several countries. His doctorate and master's degrees are in English literature. He has taught English at London University since 1974, for most of that time at Goldsmiths College. His main fields of research are in twentieth-century and Renaissance literature. His more than fifty publications often take an interdisciplinary approach (although a number are purely scientific, or rather technological). After A Brave New World of Knowledge, his next book, co-written with his wife Mary Sokol, will be on Shakepeare, law, and marriage.
A Brave New World of Knowledge studies Shakespeare's The Tempest using materials relating to the history of early seventeenth-century proto-science. These materials are either newly investigated, or are derived from sophisticated recent work that has been little consulted before by Shakespeare scholars. This book is centrally concerned with a classic of dramatic literature which is extraordinary in terms of its genre, structure, style, language, mythos, characterization, and long-term influence. All of these elements are addressed. Yet, to do so, the book finds it valuable to confront quite large questions about the nature and dissemination of the early seventeenth-century so-called "scientific revolution." The study also considers, somewhat generally at its outset and then in varied specific ways throughout, what the best interdisciplinary approach to a Shakespeare play might be. It argues for the futility, or possible deceptiveness, of any search for a "master discourse" which could provide a single main correlative for understanding The Tempest. Instead it illustrates, and argues for the superiority of, interdisciplinary approaches to the complex play which are empirically led and so never irrefutable, and which consciously intend to build on a body of earlier work so as to achieve accumulative increments of understanding. These would therefore be approaches that observe both the established findings and the disciplinary norms of all of the interdisciplinary areas in question. Read a review of this book:
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ISBN 0-8386-3925-9, Price $49.50
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