Radical or conservative - how political is Shakespeare?
With plays like Hamlet and King Lear, modern readings often stress the familial and personal rather than the political. Yet, the author argues, this downplay the more political understandings of these plays at the time. Likewise, with Shakepeare's political stance, across the whole specturm of plays reading have varied over time, according to the preoccupations of the societies in which they are watched or read.