Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. Conal Condren is a Scientia Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales and an Honorary Professor at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland. Andrew Fitzmaurice is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney.

• Introduction David Armitage, Conal Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice; Part I. Contexts: 1. Shakespeare's properties David Armitage; 2. The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare's plays Cathy Curtis; 3. Shakespeare and the ethics of authority Stephen Greenblatt; 4. Shakespeare and the politics of superstition Susan James; Part II. The Court: 5. Counsel, succession and the politics of Shakespeare's Sonnets Cathy Shrank; 6. Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal Aysha Pollnitz; 7. The corruption of Hamlet Andrew Fitzmaurice; 8. Unfolding 'the properties of government': the case of Measure for Measure and the history of political thought Conal Condren; 9. Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship: Henry VIII Jennifer Richards; Part III. The Commonwealth: 10. Putting the city into Shakespeare's city comedy Phil Withington; 11. Talking to the animals: persuasion, counsel and their discontents in Julius Caesar David Colclough; 12. Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus Markku Peltonen; 13. Shakespeare and the best state of a commonwealth Eric Nelson; Afterword: Shakespeare and humanist culture Quentin Skinner.

Review of the hardback: '… one of the most important new studies of Shakespeare to have appeared this century. It takes the discussion of Shakespeare and early modern political thought to a hitherto unseen level of sophistication. For the first time, we are offered a serious and sustained reading of Shakespeare in the light of the 'Cambridge school' of work on the language of political theory … contributors come from diverse perspectives … and yet they create a strikingly unified image of a Shakespeare who is at once a deep political thinker, a consummate master of rhetoric and a wily refusenik when it comes to orthodox positions … deserves a prominent place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in Shakespeare - more than that, of anyone interested in the interplay between literature and the history of political thought.' Jonathan Bate, University of Warwick