Review of Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism.(Book review)

Publication: Early Modern Literary Studies

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2006 Matthew Steggle

Andrew Hadfield. Shakespeare and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. xiii+363pp. ISBN 521 81607 6.

Curtis Perry

Arizona State University

CPerry@asu.edu

Perry, Curtis. "Review of Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism." Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) 15.1-7 .

Andrew Hadfield's important and learned new book, Shakespeare and Republicanism, offers up a slate of bold, interlocking arguments about the nature of Shakespeare's career, the politics of drama, and the political mentality of late Elizabethan England. In each of these areas, Hadfield's arguments will be at once bracing and controversial, and so the book will be widely read and widely discussed by both literary scholars and historians. I hope so, at any rate, since Hadfield's basic call to read Elizabethan fiction as part of a culture of lively constitutional debate is both persuasive and timely, a very useful intervention at a moment when literary critics have for the most part turned away from new historicist concerns with power and the state and historians interested in Tudor and early Stuart politics are increasingly turning toward literary data.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section offers an overview of what Hadfield calls late Elizabethan "republican culture"-the sum total of all the different currents of constitutional speculation and literary representation that can be thought of as republican, either because of their relation to exemplary republican states or because of how they interrogate the limits of royal authority-and the second section...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.