This new edition of the essays I have devoted to individual plays of Shakespeare incorporates an essay on Macbeth written five or six years after the others were initially collected and published as Disowning Knowledge. Macbeth was the remaining great tragedy of Shakespeare's I had not been moved, or was otherwise not able, to test against the thought that this mode of tragedy is a response to the crisis of knowledge inspired by the crisis of the unfolding of the New Science in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, especially as articulated so decisively for philosophy in the next generation following those tragedies by Descartes's articulation of modern skepticism. The absence of testimony from Macbeth left an obvious gap in the tale I was exploring; yet, whatever the losses in writing about Shakespeare without professional thoroughness, I have gained in being allowed to leave things incomplete, as it were uncovered, until I felt I had something interesting and urgent enough to say in my circumstances. In particular, concerning Macbeth, until I would, if ever, find a way to account for its famous spookiness, which would mean, for me, find the spookiness or uncanniness as reflected in the skeptical process.

The essay on Lear has, I believe, been requested for reprinting, in a sense, more than any other piece of my writing.