In his latest book How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Play, Peter Lake offers a topical reading of a selection of Shakespeare's plays. As the book's subtitle suggests, he frames his subject: “chronologically and thematically” by the succession issue at the turn of the seventeenth century and “generically” by the history plays defined as plays about any event “that contemporaries would have regarded as historical” (60, 59). What links the plays is Lake's claim that all respond to what he calls the Essexian project (28–30): the Earl of Essex's bid, on the strength of personal military prowess, honor, and virtue, to build public support for his leadership in resolving the succession issue on the grounds of strict hereditary right. For Lake, the English history plays reflect Shakespeare's “buy in” to the project while the three other plays, written amidst or following the fall of Essex, constitute “critique” (31).

In the first part, “Context and Structures,” Lake describes his point of departure: Catholic and Protestant political pamphlets which used English and Roman history to support their claims; defends his approach from the charge of being “irredeemably reductive” (15); and discusses the Elizabethan stage and censorship to show how plays could stir subversive thoughts without breaking the law (57). Subsequent parts present his Essexian reading of Shakespeare's history plays with the exception of part 4, which Lake devotes to The Merry Wives of Windsor and the non-Shakespearean play Sir John Oldcastle. Both are read for evidence of Shakespeare's involvement in “contemporary court and factional politics” (432).

In parts two and three, Lake analyzes the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI and the First Part of Henry VI, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus, respectively, as presenting the dangers foreseen by Essex in the current state of Elizabethan court politics and possible “happy endings” (123). The danger is neglect of good counsel (Burghley as Gloucester) and female rule (Elizabeth as Margaret); the happy ending is victory over popish forces in foreign wars (Essex as Talbot, in this version not abandoned) and salvation from abroad (James VI of Scotland as Richmond or Lucius).

Parts four and five, in which Lake deal's with King John and the second tetralogy, are the heart of the book and contain some of Lake's most insightful observations. He reads King John and Richard II as a pair depicting the loss of legitimacy through usurpation and tyranny (238); the other three plays depict its restoration (277). Prince Hal's staged reformation is seen as a successful effort to “resacralize the power and person of an earthly prince” (324). Restoration of legitimacy or at least its “effect” (384) is accomplished by Henry V in a manner Lake describes as “an image of a distinctly Essexian modus operandi,” involving “the politics of popularity and of martial honour” (387). Lake joins the debate over Shakespeare's presentation of Henry V with his thesis of the “tragic view of kingship”: to be successful, “princes have inevitably to commit [mortal] sin” (383).

What is most interesting about this discussion is Lake's equation of illegitimacy with a politics driven by what the Bastard in King John calls “commodity,” “the narrow pursuit of material self-interest usually deployed in direct contrast to the defence of the common good” (204). The restoration of legitimacy, then, requires putting politics on a different footing. But Henry, Lake claims, in Shakespeare's depiction, has restored legitimacy by practicing the politics of commodity, albeit, “without ever quite becoming contained within or reduced to” such a politics (386). Thus a Machiavellian vision of politics renders authority illegitimate but legitimacy is to be restored only by Machiavellian means. As he says, this is a “fantasy” (386) and the reader may wonder if Shakespeare has something better to offer. This discussion is weakened by an unsatisfactory treatment of what Machiavelli the thinker, not the Elizabethan stage villain, stands for and how we are to understand the alternative.

King John and Richard II were both written around the same time that Robert Parsons's Conference about the next succession was in wide circulation, 1595, and Lake sees both plays contesting Parsons' claim that the reigns of these kings proved England was an elective monarchy. For Richard II his argument hinges on the claim that the stage direction for Act 4, “enter as to Parliament,” means “that Bolingbroke and his clique are on the way to Parliament” contrary to the traditional interpretation, from 1608 to the present, that the events occur in Parliament (272). Whatever Shakespeare meant to convey by setting the scene in Parliament, the claim that he did not set the scene there is implausible.

Lake treats the last three plays discussed as commentary on Essex's rebellion and the failure of his project. In Julius Caesar Cassius' seduction of Brutus to join Caesar's assassins is read as the seduction of Essex by radical members of his circle to rebel against Elizabeth (502–3). Hamlet and Laertes, the former as constrained by conscience, the latter as driven by the desire for revenge, are good and bad versions of Essex (528). In Troilus and Cressida, Hector and Achilles are bad and worse versions respectively, the former sacrificing virtue to honor and the latter, honor to popularity (559–60). Lake takes his “warrant” for his topical approach from the passage where Hamlet describes the players as “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (533). The reader will note, however, that Hamlet speaks of the players finding contemporary relevance at the time of their performance not the playwright commenting on events at the time of his writing.

Reading him as a proponent of the Essexian project, Lake concludes that “Shakespeare got things spectacularly wrong” (602). Reading him as someone whose “plays raise and address the sorts of formal issue at the centre of the modern study of Political Thought” or, for that matter, at the center of political philosophy, he regards him as “something of a bust” for “having nothing very novel to say” (44). Readers must judge for themselves the merits of either measure in appreciating Shakespeare's contribution as a political thinker.