Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The History of British Political Thought: a Field and its Futures
- PART I BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND HISTORY
- PART II BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND LITERATURE
- 6 Republicanism in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Britain
- 7 Dramatic Traditions and Shakespeare's Political Thought
- 8 Irony, Disguise and Deceit: What Literature Teaches us about Politics
- 9 Poetry and Political Thought: Liberty and Benevolence in the Case of the British Empire c. 1680–1800
- PART III BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND POLITICAL THEORY
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Dramatic Traditions and Shakespeare's Political Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The History of British Political Thought: a Field and its Futures
- PART I BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND HISTORY
- PART II BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND LITERATURE
- 6 Republicanism in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Britain
- 7 Dramatic Traditions and Shakespeare's Political Thought
- 8 Irony, Disguise and Deceit: What Literature Teaches us about Politics
- 9 Poetry and Political Thought: Liberty and Benevolence in the Case of the British Empire c. 1680–1800
- PART III BRITISH POLITICAL THOUGHT AND POLITICAL THEORY
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Like a prism, Shakespeare's plays are shot through with the political thought of his time; but like a prism, they omit no single ray, but refract a multitude of colours. In the much-cited 1993 volume, The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, John Guy, Donald Kelley and Linda Peck delineate many of the recurring topics that informed political thinking before the Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. The role of counsel in good governance, the proper education of a prince, the body politic as concept and informing metaphor, Tacitus, Ovid, and republicanism, resistance theory, Machiavelli and the new statescraft: these are but a few of the topics discussed throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and hardly one fails to make an appearance in Shakespeare's works.
Of course, Shakespeare might not to everyone seem the most obvious source of political reflection on the Elizabethan stage. After all, it is Marlowe in The Jew of Malta who brings Machiavelli on stage, vaunting his free-thinking ways:
To some perhaps my name is odious,
But such as love me, guard me from their tongues,
And let them know that I am Machevill,
And weigh not men, and therefore not men's words
(Prologue, ii. 5–8).But it is Shakespeare, in Richard III, who creates a villain hero who, ‘set[ting] the murderous Machiavel to school’, embodies the new philosophy as a means to power and a principle of rule and not just as the signature of an exotic Italian villainy.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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