William Shakespeare in Haverford Special Collections (HC)

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. 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.

"How was Shakespeare transformed from being a talented poet and playwright to become one of the greatest writers who ever lived? In this one exhilarating year we follow what he reads and writes, what he sees, and whom he works with as he invests in the new Globe Theatre and creates four of his most famous plays - Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet"

This Companion to Shakespeare is an indispensable book for students and teachers of Shakespeare, indeed for anyone with an interest in his plays.

Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Greenblatt shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. [adapted]