Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth offers fresh evidence of the universality of Shakespeare's genius. The play juxtaposes a perfunctory performance of Hamlet in an English boarding school with a courageous staging of Macbeth as a protest against Communist tyranny in 1978 Czechoslovakia. The play shows that, paradoxically, Shakespeare's plays have less of an impact in England than they do in foreign countries, where differing political circumstances, far from forming an obstacle to appreciating Shakespeare, actually bring his plays to life with a new power. By portraying the secret police interrupting the Czech Macbeth, Stoppard explores how artists can struggle against totalitarianism, and, in particular, how they can develop secret codes to express their dissidence, even under the watchful eyes of the surveillance state. Encountering Shakespeare behind the Iron Curtain, Stoppard developed a new seriousness as a playwright and a new interest in the relation of art and politics.

Ronald Beiner wants to have it both ways. We know this because, near the end of his book, he tells us that he is a “dualist,” someone for whom “philosophy and citizenship are defined by radically distinct purposes: the job of philosophy is to strive unconditionally for truth, and the job of citizenship is to strive for good and prudent judgment about the common purposes of civic life, and each should focus strictly on fulfilling its own appointed end without worrying too much about the other.” So there needs to be “a steady appreciation of the fundamental chasm between what we (as citizens) need in the world of practice and what we (as human beings) need from the world of theory” (224). This, however, would be abhorrent to most of the political philosophers Beiner covers. Because they are not dualists but monists; to them, theory and practice should be one.

Leon Craig's five books are interrelated by a common approach: Craig writes of philosophic matters juxtaposing them with literary works, or one may reverse the order—whichever way, the exegesis proceeds in tandem. Moreover, he has intertwined the books in a sequential development. One can perceive Craig discovered his fountainhead in Plato. His first book, in 1993, The War Lover: A Study of Plato's “Republic,” has left its genetic pattern upon the next four, Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare's “Macbeth” and “King Lear” (2001), The Platonian Leviathan (2010), Philosophy and the Puzzles of “Hamlet” (2014), and his latest, The Philosopher's English King: Shakespeare's “Henriad” as Political Philosophy (2015). In this latest effort, Shakespeare is the philosopher and Henry V the best of Shakespeare's English kings. But you will not appreciate the extent and intricacy of Craig's web unless you recognize that Plato's thought, especially as that thought has been conveyed in The Republic, runs through every filament. To be precise, taking such themes of that dialogue as Socrates's notion of a tripartite human soul, his taxonomy of defective regimes, his all but best regime of “Guardians,” and Socrates's ultimately best constitution, rule by a philosopher become king or king become philosopher, or only somewhat less improbably, a king become an understanding student of a counselor philosopher. Then, best self-government within the individual soul is likewise worked out in The Republic as Craig reads it. To my mind he has read Plato aright.

Theory at its best should be a kind of friendship. Thinking is something one does on one's own; but having thought one's way to a set of theoretical positions, one exposes those intellectual commitments to the test of seeing how they stand up to friendly but challenging scrutiny. I'm grateful for the critical commentaries on my book featured in this symposium because they seem to me to have generated interesting and thoughtful responses to what I have written; but I'm no less grateful because they also nicely exemplify this spirit of dialogical friendship. In that way, they help to vindicate the enterprise of theory as I have just characterized it. These theorists are also my friends, and the friendship is constitutively grounded in a shared commitment to theory as a vocation.