A similar insight is precipitated by Quentin Skinner's Forensic Shakespeare, which like A Will to Believe had its origin in a series of lectures delivered in Oxford. As delivered, Skinner's lectures were marvellous examples of the lecturer's art — meticulously prepared, vivaciously and wittily delivered, enlightening and entertaining, and seasoned with a little well-directed malice. Now enlarged into a book, the scholarly underpinning of the argument is more to the fore, as is only natural. Skinner contends that, during a certain period of his career, Shakespeare's dramaturgy was shaped by the tropes and precepts of forensic rhetoric — that in these late Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays "there are numerous major speeches, as well as several complete scenes, that are basically constructed according to the classical rules governing the inventio and dispositio of judicial arguments". Here Shakespeare follows the precepts of the rhetoricians "with a remarkable degree of tenacity and exactitude".

The Shakespeare specialists will be fighting over the details of Skinner's argument for many years. He does take up strong and exposed positions on questions about, for instance, the dating of some of the plays. One of the delicious pleasures of attending Skinner's lectures was to see the professional Shakespeareans almost literally chewing the carpet — the lectures were themselves a brilliant illustration of the advantages, even in the modern world, of attending to the practical guidance of the ancient rhetoricians. Nevertheless, Skinner's angle of approach to the plays certainly reveals new detail about the structure and plotting of a scene such as Julius Caesar III.ii, where Brutus and Antony speak to the mob over the corpse of Caesar. And to be made aware of the particular forensic valency of certain, apparently ordinary, words in Shakespeare's vocabulary — words such as "matter", "foul", "fair", and "issue" — is to come closer to a contemporary understanding of the language of the plays.

But what is striking about Skinner's book is that, while it reveals with exemplary scholarship new features of Shakespeare's dramaturgy, and their forensic roots, it doesn't shift the interpretation of the plays. (This is no criticism of Skinner, whose goal is explanation, not interpretation.) Before Skinner wrote this book, most of us had overlooked the rhetorical dimension to Shakespeare's dramaturgy. But we had not therefore misunderstood Shakespeare's plays. Indeed, Skinner's analysis reinforces the judgments of what we might call an "ordinary" reading of the plays. Every member of the audience at a production of Hamlet realises that Polonius is a verbose fool. Thanks to Skinner, we now know how and why, in the terms of early modern forensic rhetoric, Polonius is precisely that. Modern scholarship is not returning to a Johnsonian model, but perhaps it is doing something almost as good, namely vindicating the idea that great art can, after all, produce "just representations of general nature".