Procession of Characters from Shakespeare's Plays by an unknown 19th-century artist

“What a Piece of Work Is Man”: Shakespeare and the Staging of Philosophy

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
— Hamlet (1.5.167-68)

This iconic challenge to the limits of human knowledge sets the stage for an exploration of how Shakespeare’s plays wrestled with the philosophical upheavals of the Renaissance—where classical thought, Christian doctrine, and emerging humanism collided in unprecedented ways.

This four-part lecture series brings together leading scholars to examine how Shakespeare transformed the stage into a vibrant arena of philosophical inquiry. From the revival of Plato and Seneca to the subversion of Machiavellian power, Shakespeare’s plays do not merely quote philosophy—they enact it, using drama to test ideas about morality, sovereignty, selfhood, and the very nature of reality.

Shakespeare’s age—like ours—was defined by intellectual chaos: the collapse of medieval certainties, the rise of empirical science and the emergence of colonial powers violently reshaping global politics. By putting his plays in dialogue with thinkers from Plato to Cicero to Montaigne, the series highlights how Shakespeare didn’t merely reflect contemporary thought, but rather engaged with recognizably modern questions of skepticism, agency, individualism and the problems of knowledge, arguably inventing modern selfhood as we know it today.