Shakespeare

1. Shakespeare

2. Shakespeare • His history plays examine the machinations of personal drives and passions determining political activity • Many of the tragedies such as King Lear and Macbeth dramatize political leadership and complexity subterfuges of human beings driven by the lust for power; • Class struggle in the Roman Republic is central to Coriolanus

3. Shakespeare is fascinated by politics, charting the world of secular power with an avid curiosity, showing a very highly developed sense of the workings of bureaucracy and power. No one who has brushed against the world of realpolitik in any government of any colour could fail to recognise Polonius, and Elsinore will be immediately identifiable to anyone who visited or lived in Eastern Europe under Communism. The world of bugged hotel rooms, the ever-present secret police, the smug strutting arrogance of the Party's apparatchiks, the friends who lower their voices and look about them before speaking, the fear of prison, the familiarity with those who have experienced it, the swaggering display of the privileges of the nomenklatura, these all belong to the world that Hamlet finds so 'out of joint.' • In his book, SHAKESPEARE'S POLITICS, Professor Allan Bloom takes the classical view that the political shapes man's consciousness. Bloom considers Shakespeare as a profoundly political Renaissance dramatist and argues that Shakespeare's ideas and beliefs need to be recognized in today's society as a source for the serious study of moral and political problems.