Shakespeare's Politics: A Contextual Introduction

Description

Shakespeare's Politics is an invaluable introduction to the political world of Shakespeare's plays. It includes passages from the plays together with extracts from contemporary historical and political documents. The clear, jargon-free narrative introduces and explains the extracts and provides an overview of the key political issues that were debated in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England. The introduction outlines the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote and explains the intellectual principles that informed early modern thinking about politics. By reading Shakespeare alongside contemporary documents students will be able to develop their own informed critical interpretations of the plays. Shakespeare's Politics is essential for anyone studying Shakespeare while tutors and postgraduate students will find the book's up-to-date survey of modern Shakespeare criticism useful and provocative.

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 Mentioned in Bookseller Buyers Guide, 1 January 2008