ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the development of political approaches to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays were written in a highly political context, and he had to please those in authority while still courting a popular audience which harboured much less reverence for authority in some of its members. Shakespeare created his works in the capital city of a modernizing monarchy very much interested in controlling public opinion, but lacking many of the tools used by subsequent authoritarian regimes to do so. In the years between his death and the beginning of the Civil War period in England, Shakespeare's works underwent a period of relative neglect, as is common in the case of many other great artists. Academicization produced an ideology of professionalism which deliberately distanced itself from the overt political dimensions of the discussions of Shakespeare in the public sphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shakespeare has always been a political subject, and he will continue to be in the future.
