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).

"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 extracts from contemporary documents that may not otherwise be easily accessible. Headlam Wells draws a revisionist cultural map of the period, looking at Shakespearean texts in the light of early modern political debates that have too often been ignored by scholars who want to see his plays refracted through the glass of twenty-first century theory. Instead of treating Shakespeare and his contemporaries as our intellectual precursors, he portrays them with wonderful clarity as belonging to a mental world that is radically different from our own." - Michael Hattaway, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Sheffield

• 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.