"A brilliant, timely, and richly learned book. Womersley zooms out with exhilarating panache from the rabbit holes of scholarly specialism; his Shakespeare is an orchestrator of grand debate, a virtuoso of antithesis and contradiction, articulating many competing ideas, enduringly captured by none." --Thomas Keymer, University of Toronto "In this erudite, lively and elegantly written book, David Womersley invites us to reflect deeply on Shakespeare's thoughts about identity, order, chaos, ethics and politics. As we struggle daily to make sense of a world where barbarous behaviour claims the mantle of acceptability, Thinking Through Shakespeare offers compelling proof of Ben Jonson's famous observation that Shakespeare 'was not of an age, but for all time!'" --David Dean, author of Performing Public History "David Womersley has written a profoundly insightful book on the universal relevance of Shakespeare--a playwright and poet whose ability to illuminate the essentials of the human condition was second to none. Much more than a book about Shakespeare, this is a book about human nature and the Western tradition--almost as sweeping in its scope as the plays of the omniscient Bard himself." --Niall Ferguson, author of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe "A powerful defence of the 'universal Shakespeare' with an intellectual breadth to match. Beholden to no one discipline, Womersley is a master of many and has summoned an extraordinary team--ranging from Plato to Coetzee, Rousseau to Rawls, Machiavelli to Mann--to help him think through what Shakespeare thinks about that real yet elusive thing: human nature. The result is a deeply intelligent meditation on our constitutive contradictions and enduring strangenesses--wherever, whenever, whoever we are.

" --David Dwan, author of The Good Life and Other Fictions "Samuel Johnson said of Shakespeare that he is 'above all writers . the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.' For two hundred years thereafter that idea of universal genius predominated, among critics as among audiences, only to go missing over the past few decades amid the rise of modern literary theory. In this remarkable book, David Womersley recovers and revitalises that great Johnsonian tradition. Through a dazzling series of new readings, drawing on sources from ancient Rome to modern philosophy, he breathes life again into our understanding not only of Shakespeare's plays, but of the often-conflicting dreams and hopes and passions and ambitions of the human nature that they so brilliantly illuminate." --Jesse Norman, author of Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why It Matters.