Introduction

The reader is presented with the prospect of the revival of a Platonic Shakespeare obscured by the modern intellectual habit of discounting the possibility of a poetry that is well equipped to disclose finality in nature and thereby to illuminate its own context, without needing to be contextualized from without. A Platonic Shakespeare helps us dive into questions that, in the wake of a “Machiavellian revolution,” our scholarship has all but forgotten. The reader is further introduced to Shakespeare’s Platonism through the delineation of essential features of classical (both ancient and medieval) Platonism, highlighting the primacy of being over becoming. The discussion proceeds to address the question of “exotericism” as art by which classical writers “descend” on the plane of readers so as to best raise them to an author’s plane of understanding—whence the importance of transcending the conceptual limitations of modern hermeneutics, recovering poetry as method to illuminate its own context, while educating the reader to transcend mechanistic conceptions of life, and by extension all historicist expectations. Finally, Shakespeare’s poetry is exposed as educating our desire and thus helping us be better lovers.