Dramaturgical studies of Shakespeare's Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure.

We respond to these plays as it is given to us to respond, every response a potential starting point, and no response final. Our next insight will arrive not as a new truth standing on the back of a true one already in hand. Instead we move from error to error, from half-truth to half-truth. If things go well, our insights will not all lie in the same plane. They will trend towards or around or into something. It is a process that resembles maturation.

How far a process of this sort can be promoted and carried are difficult things to know. It helps to become aware of depths, which exist such that being at one level is different from being at another. Think of the slippery slope of crime, where there have always been distinctions: the greater and the lesser, the monstrous and the unavoidable. Passing from one level to the next changes things. So in Shakespeare.