Few of Shakespeare's tragic characters have had so marty detractors as Richard II, who has been variously dismissed as a capricious tyrant, a self-absorbed poet, and a Protean dramatic forcé whose unpredíctable actions at times threaten the structural integrity of the play. This perception has in turn influenced the interpretation of Bolingbroke as a competent antagonist who brings much-needed ...

Inference has long been the concern of assorted disciplines that vary in focus, rationale, apparatus, terminology, and achievement. There would appear an inverse proportion between the range and the orderliness of the knowledge accumulated by the various disciplines. Literary study tends to the first extreme, logic and its heritage in modern pragmatics to the second, either imbalance precluding...