The prevailing winds of ideology are sweeping through the cultural world today and stirring up the currents of Shakespeare criticism. A good example is Elizabeth Frazer’s new book, Shakespeare and the Political Way. Her goal is admirable. Although she does not regard Shakespeare as a political thinker in his own right, she does believe that we can learn about politics from studying his plays. Contrary to many traditional commentators from English departments, she does not adopt a strictly aesthetic perspective and treat politics as a sordid subject, well beneath Shakespeare’s lofty concerns as a great poet. As a political scientist, Frazer understands public life as something more than just a field in which narrowly partisan interests contend. Taking a cue from Aristotle, she views politics as one of the broadest and most significant fields of human endeavor. Accordingly, Frazer recognizes that political life is important in the world of Shakespeare’s plays. But so are other ways of life, and Frazer sees that much of the drama in his plays stems from the complex way in which the legitimate demands of politics repeatedly clash with the legitimate demands of other sources of commitment in human life, among them, the family, romantic love, and religion.
