Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare's stage

by Richard Wilson

Free Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage is a study of theatre and sovereignty that situates Shakespeare’s plays in the contraflow between two absolutisms of early modern the aesthetic and the political. Starting from the dramatist’s cringing relations with his princely patrons, Richard Wilson considers the ways in which this ‘bending author’ identifies freedom in failure and power in weakness by staging the endgames of a sovereignty that begs to be set free from itself. The arc of Shakespeare’s career becomes in this comprehensive new interpretation a sustained resistance to both the institutions of sacred kingship and literary autonomy that were emerging in his time. In a sequence of close material readings, Free Will shows how the plays instead turn command performances into celebrations of an art without sovereignty, which might ‘give delight’ but ‘hurt not’, and ‘leave not a rack behind’.

Free Will is a profound rereading of Shakespeare, art and power that will contribute to thinking not only about the plays, but also about aesthetics, modernity, sovereignty and violence.

480 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2014

About the author

RICHARD WILSON is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Lancaster and Visiting Professor of Shakespeare at The Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III). He is the author of Will Power: Essays in Shakespearean Authority and a study of Julius Caesar and has edited collections on New Historicism and Renaissance Drama and Christopher Marlow.