Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos

"Open-minded and intelligent. What is particularly attractive about the book is the close reading it offers of Shakespeare's tragedies in all their Renaissance complexity." Notes and Queries

"McAlindon is an unpolemical writer, but this, along with his earlier English Renaissance Tragedy, represents the most direct challenge to [cultural materialism]...which has yet been published. The enormous amount of reference to earlier critics is, however, a measure of McAlindon's scrupulousness as a scholar....a work of genuine scholarship....a humane study and one of real intellectual integrity." The Yearbook of English Studies

"Founded on a commitment both to sound understanding of intellectual history and to humane values." The Review of English Studies

"...committed, scholarly, and humane study...." Shakespeare Survey

"A valuable contribution to the mainstream tradition of Shakespearean interpretation....In today's climate, this is a welcome and useful restatement of a tradition of thinking and mythmaking that has been largely eclipsed by new historicism....If tragedy is indeed the representation of an experience of chaos, its essence conflict and contrariety, then McAlindon's informing hypothesis about an essentially antithetical and contentious cosmos provides a capacious model, formal, philosophical and historical at once, of dualism and dynamism, embracing different levels of understanding, from the cosmological to the ethical...to the generic...and down to the smallest linguistic/imagistic details." Renaissance Quarterly

"McAlindon's argument shows that the binaries [in Shakespeare's tragedies] are hardly a postmodernist revelation and that the Elizabethans themselves did not feel obliged to find in them the subversive and deconstructive inflections that transfix new historicist and cultural materialist critics. This is the important virtue of Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos....McAlindon is judicious and perceptive." Shakespeare Quarterly

"I admire the independence of this book hugely." The Year's Work in English Studies