Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes: Dead Body Politics(Politics, Literature, & Film)

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.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Political Power and the Natural Order: Richard III, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. Chapter 2: Shakespeare and the State of Nature: King Lear and Othello Chapter 3: Violence and Politics: Julius Caesar and Lucrece Chapter 4: Faith, Morality, and Contractual Politics: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure Chapter 5: Tyranny and Consent: Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, and Cymbeline

About the Author :
Andrew Moore is associate professor of great books at St. Thomas University.

Review :
Andrew Moore’s book, Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes: Dead Body Politics, is bold and enlightening.... Moore’s important book provides a philosophical framework that prods the careful reader to think more clearly about Shakespeare’s political wisdom. Andrew Moore clearly reveals the overlap between the political and philosophical outlook that Shakespeare expresses in his dramas and the work of Machiavelli and Hobbes. At the same time, he recognizes important differences among them. This original contribution to both modern political thought and Shakespeare scholarship is beautifully written, and deepens our appreciation of Shakespeare’s wisdom. Andrew Moore’s penetration is evident in his recognition that philosophy conducts a continuous rethinking of the meaning of the concept nature. His signal contribution in these interrelated essays is to make us aware that Shakespeare’s plays conduct just such a rethinking. In the course thereof Moore gives us to understand how the playwright reveals the interdependence of moral and political liberty. Is it possible to say anything new about Shakespeare? Some may find it hard to believe. Still from time to time people undertake to write whole books about the Bard and sometimes it is good that they do so. Andrew Moore's book about Shakespeare as a political thinker is among those books. Although it is not entirely new to view the great playwright and his dramas as deeply embedded in the political thought of his age nor to see him as an heir to Machiavelli, Moore's reading of the dramas in the context of the emergent modern political thought from Machiavelli to Hobbes is refreshing and insightful.