"Argument was the basis of Renaissance education; both rhetoric and dialectic permeated early modern humanist culture, including drama. This study approaches Shakespeare's English history plays, the Roman plays and Troilus and Cressida by analyzing the use of argument in the plays, by exploring the disjunction between verbal argument and the argument of action, and by exploring the wider importance of argument in Renaissance culture.

Knowles shows how analysis of arguments of speech and action takes us to the core of the plays, in which Shakespeare interrogates the nature of political morality and truth as grounded in the history of what men do and say."--BOOK JACKET.