I have resisted earlier suggestions that the few essays I have devoted to individual plays of Shakespeare be put together as a book. I did not want to give the impression that I felt I had arrived at a stable view of Shakespeare's writing from the limited perspective I work from and the limited sample of plays I have worked on; and I did not feel the justifications I have for my intrusions into this fearful territory would make themselves felt taken in isolation from the philosophical bearings that led me to them. But with the completion of the two hitherto unpublished essays included here, on Hamlet and on The Winter's Tale, I began to wish to assess what happens to the essays in the face of one another, or backed against one another, and to let them find their weight with just the philosophy that clings to them in their individual emergencies. The misunderstanding of my attitude that most concerned me was to take my project as the application of some philosophically independent problematic of skepticism to a fragmentary parade of Shakespearean texts, impressing those texts into the service of illustrating philosophical conclusions known in advance. Sympathy with my project depends, on the contrary, on unsettling the matter of priority (as between philosophy and literature, say) implied in the concepts of illustration and application. The plays I take up form respective interpretations of skepticism as they yield to interpretation by skepticism. To indicate as much for each of these plays is the task of this introduction.