The study concludes with two chapters on the Roman plays and assesses Shakespeare's representation of the problem of conscience (Julius Caesar) and magnanimity (Antony and Cleopatra) in the light of Machiavelli's republicanism."--BOOK JACKET.

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare’s political outlook by comparing some of the playwright’s best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. By situating Shakespeare ‘between’ these two thinkers, the distinctly modern trajectory of the playwright’s work becomes visible. Throughout his career, Shakespeare interrogates the divine right of kings, absolute monarchy, and the metaphor of the body politic. Simultaneously he helps to lay the groundwork for modern politics through his dramatic explorations of consent, liberty, and political violence. We can thus understand Shakespeare’s corpus as a kind of eulogy: a funeral speech dedicated to outmoded and deficient theories of politics. We can also understand him as a revolutionary political thinker who, along with Machiavelli and Hobbes, reimagined the origins and ends of government. All three thinkers understood politics primarily as a response to our mortality. They depict politics as the art of managing and organizing human bodies—caring for their needs, making space for the satisfaction of desires, and protecting them from the threat of violent death. This book features new readings of Shakespeare’s plays that illuminate the playwright’s major political preoccupations and his investment in materialist politics.

Professor Skinner presents a lucid analysis of Machiavelli's text as a response to the world of Florentine politics.

Written in the 16th century, The Prince remains one of the most influential books on political theory. Its author, Niccolo Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat and political theorist, and is considered the father of modern political thought.

This book provides fresh interpretations of five of Shakespeare's history plays (King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V), each guided by the often criticized assumption that Shakespeare can teach us something about politics. In contrast to many contemporary political critics who treat Shakespeare's political dramas as narrow reflections of his time, the author maintains that Shakespeare's political vision is wide-ranging, compelling, and relevant to modern audiences. Paying close attention to character and context, as well as to Shakespeare's creative use of history, the author explores Shakespeare's views on perennially important political themes such as ambition, legitimacy, tradition, and political morality. Particular emphasis is placed on Shakespeare's relation to Machiavelli, turning repeatedly to the conflict between ambition and justice. In the end, Shakespeare's history plays point to the limits of politics even more pessimistically than Machiavelli's realism.

It is part of Shakespeare's extraordinary contribution to our culture that, through his dramas based on English history, he played a unique part in forming our view of ourselves and our nationhood. From King John, in which through Magna Carta the king's absolute power was first limited and the people's freedoms assured, to--almost in his own lifetime--Henry VIII, Shakespeare wrote a series of ten plays portraying the course of history. It represents almost one third of his entire dramatic output. The overarching theme of these plays is the vital importance of the sovereign's legitimacy if the nation is to be stable. They cover revolutionary times and events--the deposition and murder of Richard II, the Wars of the Roses, the usurping of the throne by Richard III--but they always affirm the principle that a legitimate king, circumscribed by an agreed constituion, is the only proper guarantee of the nation's liberties. There are many other ways in which Shakespeare's patriotism has become definitive. In Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech to the troops before Agincourt, for example, or John of gaunt's 'scepter'd isle' speech, a sense of Englishness is expressed which still lives in English minds today. The E;izabethan's pride in nationhood was perfectly embodied by Shakespeare, but the poetry of it transcends its own time. In this edition the history plays are brought together with a large group of illustrations which echo and amplify their themes. Gloriously vivid images of England's story are presented here, putting the great plays in a magnificent setting.

Even the most explicitly political contemporary approaches to Shakespeare have been uninterested by his tyrants as such. But for Shakespeare, rather than a historical curiosity or psychological aberration, tyranny is a perpetual political and human problem. Mary Ann McGrail's recovery of the playwright's perspective challenges the grounds of this modern critical silence. She locates Shakespeare's expansive definition of tyranny between the definitions accepted by classical and modern political philosophy. Is tyranny always the worst of all possible political regimes, as Aristotle argues in his Politics? Or is disguised tyranny, as Machiavelli proposes, potentially the best regime possible? These competing conceptions were practiced and debated in Renaissance thought, given expression by such political actors and thinkers as Elizabeth I, James I, Henrie Bullinger, Bodin, and others. McGrail focuses on Shakespeare's exploration of the conflicting and contradictory passions that make up the tyrant and finds that Shakespeare's dramas of tyranny rest somewhere between Aristotle's reticence and Machiavelli's forthrightness. Literature and politics intersect in Tyranny in Shakespeare, which will fascinate students and scholars of both.

Human life is susceptible of changing suddenly, of shifting inadvertently, of appearing differently, of varying unpredictably, of being altered deliberately, of advancing fortuitously, of commencing or ending accidentally, of a certain malleability. In theory, any human being is potentially capacitated to conceive of—and convey—the chance, view, or fact that matters may be otherwise, or not at all; with respect to other lifeforms, this might be said animal’s distinctive characteristic. This state of play is both an everyday phenomenon, and an indispensable prerequisite for exceptional innovations in culture and science: contingency is the condition of possibility for any of the arts—be they dominantly concerned with thinking, crafting, or enacting. While their scope and method may differ, the (f)act of reckoning with—and taking advantage of—contingency renders rhetoricians and philosophers associates after all. In this regard, Aristotle and Blumenberg will be exemplary, hence provide the framework. Between these diachronic bridgeheads, close readings applying the nexus of rhetoric and contingency to a selection of (Early) Modern texts and authors are intercalated—among them La Celestina, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Wilde, Fontane.

A New York Times-bestselling author presents a provocative new interpretation of The Prince The Prince, a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli, is widely regarded as the most important exploration of politics—and in particular the politics of power—ever written. In Garments of Court and Palace, Philip Bobbitt, a preeminent and original interpreter of modern statecraft, presents a vivid portrait of Machiavelli's Italy and demonstrates how The Prince articulates a new idea of government that emerged during the Renaissance. Bobbitt argues that when The Prince is read alongside the Discourses, modern readers can see clearly how Machiavelli prophesied the end of the feudal era and the birth of a recognizably modern polity. As this book shows, publication of The Prince in 1532 represents nothing less than a revolutionary moment in our understanding of the place of the law and war in the creation and maintenance of the modern state.