Sanford Budick's Hazarding All: Shakespeare and the Drama of Consciousness maintains that Shakespeare, in his six plays, goes beyond Husserl's phenomenological reduction or epoché and Kant's concept of the sublime. Based on this perception, Budick analyzes the characters’ speeches and the plays’ structures, which employ the chiasmic schema (AB:BA).

In chapter 1, Budick begins with a discussion on John Keats's negative capability, finding in it the negation of a solipsistic ego. Given this, Budick seeks the achievement of negation in Shakespeare's frequent use of “nothing” in his plays. According to him, the moment of negation enables Shakespeare, the author, and the spectator to situate themselves from the standpoint of onlookers of the play and share a consciousness in facing it from an extra-theatrical perspective. Budick claims that intersubjective consciousness can be witnessed in the frequent exchanges of chiastic speech in Shakespeare's plays. The most representative case is “What's [A] Hecuba to [B] him or [B] he to [A] her, / That he should weep for her?” (2.2.492–4), in Hamlet, which is a kind of basso continuo latent in Budick's argument in this book.

Chapter 2 first pays attention to Antonio's sadness in The Merchant of Venice and addresses his anxiety about being “worth nothing” (35). Then, Budick states, “Within The Merchant of Venice, the vacuity of the nothing can certainly seem to reign supreme” (37). Regarding the antisemitism in the play, Budick notes Carl Schmidt's idea of an “‘intrusion of time’ or an ‘Einbruch’ or ‘breaking in’ of an extra-fictional reality” into the reality on stage (46). Furthermore, Budick refers to the possibility that, although Shakespeare must not have been aware of a “second epoché ” when composing The Merchant of Venice, the Bard would have come to understand the necessity of the concept in the chiasmic mirroring of a set of plays such as Hamlet and As You Like It.

Chapter 3 is concerned with proving that Hamlet and As You Like It not only include various sorts of chiasmic speeches but also that there are chiasmic similarities in the plays’ structures. Concerning Hamlet, Budick stresses that Hamlet discloses his inward self via chiasmic speeches. In addition, he finds similarities between Hamlet's attitude to the “nothing” and that of Orlando and Rosalind of As You Like It, and points out that the plays share a structure that mirrors one another, not only in the characters’ speeches but also in their plots.

The Merchant of Venice is revisited in chapter 4 by pairing it with another Venetian play, Othello. Above all, it is curious to note the chiastic dramatic structure in which a daughter from a detested race is married to a white Christian in The Merchant of Venice, while a general from another detested race marries a white nobleman's daughter in Othello. Apart from this, Budick's analysis of Iago's repeated utterances of “nothing” is insightful, and the second epoché in both plays discloses that the problems of discrimination against Black people and antisemitism are theatrically unrepresentable.

Chapter 5 discusses the idea of blessing, as depicted in King Lear and The Winter's Tale. It demonstrates how Cordelia's reference to “nothing” at the beginning of King Lear is permeated throughout the play. In particular, Budick points out the possible influence of Paul's Epistle to the Romans on Paulina's image of engrafting. This provides a salient mixture of Budick's rigorous reading of The Winter's Tale and an appropriate analysis of graphic images of engrafting from Leonard Mascall's manual on the same.

Some readers of Hazarding All might regard it as epistemologically anachronistic, and others might be disappointed at the scarcity of rare historical materials dealt with in it. It should be noted, however, that there has never been such a comprehensive attempt to clarify the concept of nothing in Shakespeare's plays as these profound analyses by Budick. The utmost importance of the atemporal “now,” as revealed by an epoché in Shakespeare's plays, has never been explored so philosophically. These two distinctive ideas alone should be sufficient to convince readers to embrace a reading of Hazarding All.