Shakespeare Beyond Science: When Poetry Was the World

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.

Sky Gilbert is a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, theatre director, and drag queen extraordinaire, and one of Canada’s most controversial artistic forces. He was co-founder and artistic director of Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times Theatre -- one of the world’s largest gay and lesbian theatres -- from 1979 to 1997. He has had more than 40 plays produced, and written 7 critically acclaimed novels and three award winning poetry collections. He has received three Dora Mavor Moore Awards (The Whore’s Revenge, Suzie Goo, Private Secretary, The Situationists) as well as the Pauline McGibbon Award, and The Silver Ticket Award. There is a street in Toronto named after him: ’Sky Gilbert Lane.’ His play about the criminalization of AIDS -- It’s All Tru -- will be published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2020. The workshop of his one act opera about Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Criminal (with music by Dustin Peters) was performed in April 2019 to critical acclaim https: //barczablog.com/2019/04/27/workshop-of-shakespeares-criminal/ . Dr. Gilbert is a professor of creative writing and theatre at the University of Guelph.