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.

What were Shakespeare's politics? As this study demonstrates, contained in Shakespeare's plays is an astonishingly powerful reckoning with the tradition of Western political thought, one whose depth and scope places Shakespeare alongside Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. This book is the first attempt by a political theorist to read Shakespeare within the trajectory of political thought as one of the authors of modernity. From Shakespeare's interpretation of ancient and medieval politics to his wrestling with issues of legitimacy, religious toleration, family conflict, and economic change, Alex Schulman shows how Shakespeare produces a fascinating map of modern politics at its crisis-filled birth. As a result, there are brand new readings of Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Richard II and Henry IV, parts I and II , The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.

Offers new insights into the works of Machiavelli, Shakespeare and especially Hobbes by focusing on their use of rhetoric.

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

This volume presents a series of essays in honor of noted scholar of political theory, Mary P. Nichols. The essays reflect Nichols’ pathbreaking work in ancient Greek political thought, as well as her influential treatments of works of literature and film in conversation with political theory. Part I: Conversations Concerning Love and Friendship features essays about the philosophical meaning of human connection and affection. Part II: Conversations Between Politics and Poetry looks at the political significance of art, and the ways in which political rule can be understood to be “artistic” or poetic. Part III: Conversations from Tragedy to Comedy considers whether the human need for community is something to be lamented or celebrated. Broad in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, the essays in this volume address authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Mary Wollstonecraft, G.W.F. Hegel, Jane Austen, Henry James, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, as well as the films of Woody Allen and Whit Stillman.

It seems we are awash in information. From the moment we wake until we turn over our phones at night, we are bombarded with images and messages, news and information from a confounding number of sources. But as the amount of information available to us increases ever more rapidly, its quality and reliability seem less credible. Russian troll bots, 4chan, Breitbart, and Rebel Media, challenge our credulity, but they do so by mimicking aesthetic registers consumers expect of “traditional” media outlets. Moreover, traditional news sources, both privately owned and public broadcasters, already weakened by eroding revenue, cuts to budgets, and shifting demographics, are under sustained attack from those who wish to damage their ability to hold powerful people to account. Instead of a multi-perspectival approach, which seeks to report to the public the many ways to address a particular issue, taking the reporter’s role as neutral with regard to outcome, “fake” or “ideologically” driven news sources compete for audience attention and faithfulness, often using emotion to rally people toward a certain political cause or issue. Academics, meanwhile, have their work attacked and undermined by people or groups seeking to advance political or economic interests. They are told they too are political actors, one more voice in a messy public arena instead of a font of reliable information and knowledge. While academics continue to believe that their work, at least in part, enhances our understanding of the world and informs debate, how do we know that their conclusions are indeed more reliable than their critics in the “post-truth” era? ‘Between Truth and Falsity: Liberal Education and the Arts of Discernment’ will aid academics and students seeking to better grasp the value of liberal education within this post-truth era. It seeks to advance pedagogical ideas in order to fight factual erosion and reinforce intellectual capacities that are able to critically assess the chaos of information enveloping all segments of society. This volume will therefore be of particular interest to academics and university educators working in higher education, graduate students theorizing the nature of media and the role of higher education, undergraduates studying liberal education and the nature of the university, and those thinking about liberal education.

Taking into consideration the political and literary issues hanging upon the circulation of Machiavelli's works in England, this volume highlights how topics and ideas stemming from Machiavelli's books - including but not limited to the Prince - strongly influenced the contemporary political debate. The first section discusses early reactions to Machiavelli's works, focusing on authors such as Reginald Pole and William Thomas, depicting their complex interaction with Machiavelli. In section two, different features of Machiavelli's reading in Tudor literary and political culture are discussed, moving well beyond the traditional image of the tyrant or of the evil Machiavel. Machiavelli's historiography and republicanism and their influences on Tudor culture are discussed with reference to topical authors such as Walter Raleigh, Alberico Gentili, Philip Sidney; his role in contemporary dramatic writing, especially as concerns Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, is taken into consideration. The last section explores Machiavelli's influence on English political culture in the seventeenth century, focusing on reason of state and political prudence, and discussing writers such as Henry Parker, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes and Anthony Ascham. Overall, contributors put Machiavelli's image in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England into perspective, analyzing his role within courtly and prudential politics, and the importance of his ideological proposal in the tradition of republicanism and parliamentarianism.