Books by Brights
William Shakespeare's Sonnet Philosophy
Author: Roger Peters
ISBN: 0-476-01587-1
To Purchase: The four volume slipcase set costs NZ$195.00 plus postage and handling. It can be bought either directly (NZ customers) from the booksellers listed at www.quaternaryinstitute.com (click the publication link, then the purchase link) or through the same booksellers' website shopping carts (international customers).
Description
The 1760 pages of William Shakespeare's Sonnet Philosophy present comprehensive evidence and argument to show that Shakespeare had a thoroughly naturalistic world-view. Volume 1 shows how Shakespeare, around twenty years after he started writing plays, structured his Nature based philosophy into the Sonnets of 1609. Volume 2 examines each of the 154 sonnets line by line to show that the embedded Sonnet philosophy is the basis for understanding their individual contributions to the set. Volume 3 analyses a selection of Shakespeare's poems and plays to show that they can only be fully understood from the vantage of the Sonnet philosophy. Volume 4 features an in-depth study on the shared mythic logic of Marcel Duchamp and Shakespeare, and then in ten other essays examines the attempts of other thinkers/writers to understand Shakespeare.
By revealing for the first time in 400 years the brilliant and systematic Nature based philosophy published by Shakespeare in the Sonnets of 1609, the four volumes show that Shakespeare goes further than any other thinker or writer ever in articulating the natural logic of the human mind, and in particular its capacity for the highest or mythic level of expression. If Galileo demonstrated the natural logic of the planetary system, and Charles Darwin demonstrated the natural logic of organic life, Shakespeare by 1609 had written out a systematic philosophy for the full gamut of the human mind. The sophisticated thematic and numerological structure of the Sonnets enables Shakespeare to interrelate ethics ("truth") and aesthetics ("beauty") and other traditional concerns such as the logic of the body, mind, time, immortality and music with unprecedented consistency.
Visit the website www.quaternaryinstitute.com for more detailed information, and for images of the covers and selected pages of the slipcase set.
About the Author
Roger Peters is an artist and independent scholar who graduated from the Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland New Zealand in 1974. He currently lives with his wife, artist and teacher Maree Horner, in the countryside of South Taranaki New Zealand. Ten years ago he attended a reading of the complete set of Shakespeare's Sonnets and has worked full time since then preparing the findings for publication. He received a substantial grant to publish the four volume set, and has since created the company Quaternary Imprint (NZ) Ltd.
