Shakespeare's Political Wisdom

Winner of 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award, Shakespeare's Political Wisdom offers careful interpretations of five Shakespearean plays –Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and The Tempest–with a view to the enduring guidance those plays can provide to human, political life. The plays have been chosen for their relentless attention to the questions that, for Shakespeare, form the heart and soul of politics: Who should rule, and what is justice? Burns provides an original reading of the plays through the lens of political philosophy rather than Theatre or Renaissance Studies. Shakespeare's wisdom found in these five plays, Burns concludes, provides a deeply relevant critique of our contemporary civic culture.

Timothy Burns is Professor of Government at Baylor University, USA. He is co-author (with Thomas L. Pangle) of Introduction to Political Philosophy, editor of After History? Francis Fukuyama and his Critics, and editor of Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle. He is translator of Marcellinus' "Life of Thucydides," and author of articles on Homer, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Hobbes, Shakespeare, Strauss, Fukuyama, Putnam, Chesterton, and modern liberal republican theory.