Shakespeare’s Politics

Robin Headlam Wells is Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Literature at Roehampton University, London. His publications include Elizabethan Mythologies (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Shakespeare's Humanism (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

• Preface; Introduction; 1. Civilization and the debate on human nature; 2. Gender; 3. Forms of government; 4. The just ruler; 5. Rebellion; 6. Providence and history; 7. Natural law; Postscript: Shakespeare's politics and modern criticism; Chronology; Bibliography; Index.

"A new revised and enlarged edition of Robin Headlam Wells' book will be widely welcomed. It combines the features of a reader and a monograph, offering students long quotations from the non-fictional prose works that they (and to many of their teachers) never get around to reading Wells is no slave to fashion, and with Augustan assurance draws a cultural map that is refreshingly conservative, looking at Shakespearean texts in the light of sixteenth century debates, which have too often been ignored by scholars who want to see his plays refracted through the glass of twenty-first century theory."- Michael Hattaway, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Sheffield