PREFACE

    When I began writing up the evidence for a philosophy in Shake-speares Sonnets, I decided that more than one volume was required to do justice to its consistency and comprehensiveness. The first decision was to separate the material relating to Shakespeare from that relating to the thinkers whose work enabled me to develop an understanding of the Sonnet philosophy.
    Of the resulting four volumes, the first three are devoted to Shakespeare. They consider the arrangement of the philosophy of the whole set (Volume 1), the individual sonnets (Volume 2), and the poems and plays (Volume 3). Volume 4, then, presents the relevant material on thinkers such as Marcel Duchamp, Stephane Mallarmé, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Charles Darwin, and provides a critique of other thinkers who have tried to understand Shakespeare’s works.
    The role of Duchamp, Mallarmé, Wittgenstein and Darwin in the development of an understanding capable of revealing the Sonnet philosophy is considered in Part 1. I studied the four thinkers for twenty-five years before discovering the Sonnet philosophy in 1995. A combination of Duchamp’s insight into the logic of myth, Mallarmé’s profound aesthetics, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, and Darwin’s philosophic approach to the biological enabled me to appreciate Shakespeare’s consistent and comprehensive philosophy.
    The art of Marcel Duchamp is significant because of the four thinkers he arrived at an understanding of the logic of myth. Because the mythology of any culture embodies the deepest expression of its origins and values, Duchamp’s articulation of the logical conditions for any mythology in his major work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,Even, commonly referred to as the Large Glass, provides the groundwork for relating the contributions of the other three thinkers. There is a direct correspondence between the principal elements of the Large Glass and the Sonnets.
    After ten years of investigating the Sonnets it is evident that without an insight into Duchamp’s achievement an understanding of their mythic logic would be nigh impossible. The Sonnets have remained impenetrable to traditional scholarly or literary analysis because it lacks the required insight into the logic of myth.
    In general terms, Part 1 offers another way to configure the Sonnet ideas presented in differing ways in the first 3 volumes. By presenting the relation between Duchamp and Shakespeare as a letter to the Duchampian scholar Thierry de Duve, who makes one of the more philosophical critiques of Duchamp's readymades, the gap between current scholarship and the ideas presented in these volumes should become evident.
    Part 2 then features ten essays on seminal thinkers who have attempted to understand Shakespeare’s works but failed. The essays are intended to provide a variety of entry points into the Sonnet philosophy by first articulating a thinker’s (or a pair of thinkers) basic contribution to their field, and then showing why they have been unable to understand Shakespeare’s natural logic.
    The essays on Duchamp and Mallarmé supplement the material in Part 1. The essays on Thomas Jefferson, Riane Eisler, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, consider thinkers who moved considerably toward the natural logic of the Sonnets without appreciating the precision of Shakespeare’s mythic logic. The essays on Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, Stephen Booth and Helen Vendler, Germaine Greer, and Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein, consider thinkers who have thought deeply about Shakespeare’s works but whose adherence to aspects of traditional beliefs have prevented them from understanding the Sonnet logic.