The rhetorical ideal of life -- The fundamental strategies: Plato and Ovid -- Games and high seriousness: Chaucer -- The Ovidian Shakespeare: Venus and Adonis and Lucrece -- Superposed poetics: the sonnets -- Superposed plays: Hamlet -- The self as middle style: Cortegiano -- The war between play and purpose: Gargantua and Pantagruel -- The dramatic present: Shakespeare's Henriad
