This paper sets out diverse ways that Shakespeare's dramas can be read politically. Critics and political theorists have often concentrated on what Shakespeare said about politics—whether he was broadly republican or monarchist, protofeminist or a patriarchalist—as well as concentrating on his references to political themes of his day. Focusing on political readings of Merchant of Venice and Othello, I argue that, rather, we should pay attention to how Shakespeare plays with numerous styles of political action and role, from statesmanship and the competiton for state office or for sovereignty, to the everyday relations of kinship and friendship that interact with state government and law, and to individuals' struggles against politically established power—patriarchy, class, state law—that constrains or oppresses them. The figure of the Machiavellian political operator, whether acting for good or for ill, is contrasted with the open speaker of truth in public.

Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is a notoriously bleak and problematic play: a dark comedy, a witty tragedy, an X-rated romance. A love story set during the Trojan War, the play appears to treat both love and war with utter cynicism. Ulysses drives the plot, craftily luring a despondent Achilles back onto the battlefield, and exposing Troilus to the betrayal of his beloved Cressida. A world-class manipulator and debunker of love and honor, Ulysses casts a shadow over this sour play, though he seems curiously unaffected by his skeptical outlook. A few critics have argued that Ulysses is the hero of Troilus and Cressida, a clear-sighted philosopher who may well speak for Shakespeare himself. I will argue against that view. I will also suggest that Troilus, if not the hero of this play, is perhaps its only sympathetic character.

Pericles famously described the Athenians as “lovers of the beautiful with thrift, and lovers of wisdom without softness.” Yet he cautioned that Athens's pursuit of boundless empire and glory could corrupt the citizens and destroy Athenian brilliance. Timon of Athens, the counterpart of A Midsummer Night's Dream, depicts what Pericles had warned against. The Athenians' love of the noble has given way to a voracious love of gold. With artists looking upon their work as merchandise to be sold at the highest price, the only thing considered beautiful is a line of salacious chorus-girls. Flattery and utility prevail throughout. The lowest form of friendship is thought to be the highest. Athens has disintegrated as a community of citizens sharing a common heritage. And philosophy, no longer a speculative inquiry, has become a shameless way of life, based on a fixed doctrine and virtually indistinguishable from misanthropy.

This essay provides a contextual reading of Titus Andronicus, paying close attention to the play's collaborative authorship. Peele and Shakespeare are shown to have manufactured a superficially compelling but in reality utterly fake image of the Roman state as an imaginary laboratory for political ideas, especially the elective principle. Topical allusions and deliberate anachronisms encourage the audience to relate the subject matter to the present, viz., late Elizabethan England in the throes of a succession crisis and rent by confessional divisions. Unlike Peele's solo works, which exhibit a potent anti-Catholic bias, Titus remains confessionally elusive. The play invites the audience to reflect on the viability of particular modes of succession without committing itself either way, and shows that it is not institutional structures and processes but those who use and abuse them that make the difference to the state of the polity.

Shakespeare's plays are best studied in clusters if we want to understand the political thought and preoccupations which inform their action rather than, as has been more usual practice, their generic identity. Plays written around the time of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) and the subsequent imposition of the Oath of Allegiance share common concerns regarding the swearing of oaths, honest speech, trustworthiness, and loyalty—issues that transcend distinctions between tragedies, comedies, histories and Roman Plays. I explore the relationship between political language and ideas in Coriolanus and All's Well That Ends Well, plays that are rarely analyzed together yet which use similar language, represent related issues, and address similar anxieties. Both are part of a larger group—including Othello and Macbeth—which engage a contemporary audience of London citizens, representing the difficulty of life in times of acute paranoia.

As in all or almost all Shakespeare plays the opening scenes of Macbeth are key to setting up the problem the play addresses. In his Scottish play Shakespeare uses the opening scenes to set the two main contexts in which the regicide, usurpation, tyranny, and fall of the tyrant occur. The two are, we might say, the earthly or political context and the cosmic or superhuman context represented by the witches. In presenting these two contexts Shakespeare appears to be engaging in a dialogue with Machiavelli's Prince, taking cues from Machiavelli's political analysis on how to understand the political character of Scotland and taking issue with Machiavelli's ultimate agenda of a conquest of Fortuna.

Shakespeare's most innovative genre was the history play, because it has no precedent in either classical or medieval tradition. In contrast to the focused teleology of Christian medieval drama, Shakespeare's history plays manifest an implicit idea of history that was secular, political, and open-ended. They emphasize human action in a political arena, where the criterion for success is the ability to act in time, without regard to one's spiritual state. Time determines royal succession, which is the focus of all Shakespeare's history plays, as it was the focus of political concern in England in the 1590s, when the plays were written. His emphasis on time and royal succession distinguishes his implied political theory from the moralism and authoritarianism of official Tudor state doctrine on one hand and from the pragmatism of Machiavelli on the other.

Many readers have taken the garden scene in Richard II and the voice of its Gardener to constitute a relatively straightforward statement of Shakespeare's notions of good government and constancy in political conduct, in stark contrast to the political disorder depicted in the play. I argue, however, that read in the context of the political and moral issues Shakespeare explored, its value or even relevance to his political world is questionable. The choric voice of the Gardener was not necessarily Shakespeare's. The dramatic point may have been to present, without resolving, the dissonance between the Gardener's vision and the imponderables of political conduct lying beyond his tiny realm.

Why does Shakespeare link the psychological disintegration of Hamlet with the political disintegration of Denmark? This essay answers that question by comparing Shakespeare's tragedy to his later history plays, which foreshadow the “antic” Prince Hamlet in the “frantic” King Richard II and the “madcap” Prince Hal. All of these plays insist that a monarch pays a heavy price for claiming that he represents and even embodies the people he rules: he comes to feel internally divided, multiplicitous, populous. But the plays also cast doubt on the ability of the people to achieve any greater coherence as a sovereign power. Through Henry V and Hamlet in particular, Shakespeare offers the theater as a model of power sharing among diverse forces: not only the monarch and the people, but also the actors, the audience, and the author.

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.

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.