Shakespeare wrote at a unique historical turning point: the world was understood through poetry – rather than through the science of observing it. In Shakespeare Beyond Science: When Poetry Was the World, Sky Gilbert’s radical new research locates Shakespeare as a disciple of the Greek rhetorician Hermogenes, and a student of the Neo-Platonist Johannes Sturm. No, not just another ‘interpretation’ of the meaning of Shakespeare’s work. Instead, a radical approach to Shakespeare as magician and rhetorician, as a post-structuralist, more concerned with form than content, and confident of the dangerous magical power of words not only to persuade but to construct our consciousness.