“I would fain learn to lie,” says King Lear’s Fool in I, 4. The character that often offers his master brutally honest assessments tells Lear that he wishes for lessons in deceit to better equip himself for the new treachery at court. Two scenes prior, Gloucester’s derided bastard son Edmund plots against his family members, his brother first: “Whose nature is so far from doing harms/ That he suspects none, on whose foolish honesty/ My practices ride easy.” These and many other moments in Shakespeare’s work remind us of the negative impression it is—or, more aptly, what it takes—to “be politic.”

Elizabeth Frazer’s book draws on recent traditions looking to revive political life, with, if not always true to, Hannah Arendt. Her claim is to find a sometimes ally in Shakespeare. Less allergic than Arendt to linking political contestation with power seeking, Frazer sees “the political way” as something both larger and smaller than the state and as a sphere that is “put in contest with other ways—the military way … ways of market relations, trade, … the life of taverns … religious authority, the alleged standards of nature, royal court life, heroism, and love.” In its distinct way, she writes, political power is “the power we summon up when we not only resist authority, but argue about the grounds of it” (pp. 6–7). It is an argument that does not end, and she concludes, we must live with that.

Shakespeare has long been public property, an intellectual commons that accommodates herds driven long distances. Academic locals must welcome strangers. Political theory arrives by multiple, nonexclusive paths. One path asks how Shakespeare’s work exemplifies a certain politics: In what contexts did he dwell, and how does his work intervene? This question is not entirely absent, but it is not near the core of Frazer’s efforts. Nor is she interested in putting Shakespeare on trial today. She abjures holding up “modern or post-modern feminisms, socialism, or theories of freedom” and asking why Shakespeare falls short (p. 11), although contrasts from contemporary standards, especially those touching on gender, are both marked and integral to her arguments. Shakespeare lands on too many registers, and he has “an undoubted sensitivity to power and … insight into the paradoxes and puzzles of political rule” (p. 11). This premise/defense brings Frazer closer to another trope in the political appreciation of literature: asking how a brilliant writer plumbs and illuminates a given political question, a question that is often seen as enduring. In this case, the central question is not a specific issue or contention but the broader question of politics itself. Shakespeare shows us rival ways of being political, and how political ways stand threatened by other ways, including that of the market, religion, martial life, and love.

At this level of abstraction, Frazer is fleet afoot. In Othello, for example, the politic trickster extraordinaire, Iago, can be ruled out of “genuine” politics because his way makes no room for “genuine assent, and continued dissent.” Instead his way in politics aims to make others the victim of his violence and trickery (p. 34). Desdemona and Othello—the latter blinded by his skepticism of her virtue, by patriarchy, by his own internalization of racial prejudice, and by Iago’s deceits—are not for Frazer the play’s only tragic figures. Another tragedy is embodied by Emelia, Iago’s wife, as she faces a realization about her husband’s ways. She dies trying to inform Venice of the truth: “`Twill out, `twill out: I peace! No, I will speak as liberal as the north; let heaven and men and devils, let them all, all, all cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak” (V, 2). That tragedy, writes Frazer, “lies as much in the failure of a formation of political authority to recognize and empower all who should be able to exert political agency” (p. 38).

Characters in Measure for Measure like authoritarian Angelo are obvious objects of dispraise, but in Frazer’s interpretation, sly Machiavellian tactics and trickery sink even those who have drawn praise or sympathy. Vincento’s surveillance and his use of pardon powers—especially for those who should not have been in need of his personal forgiveness—make him no model for political authority. Even truth-speaking Isabella is compromised by being mixed up in tricks. Their actions all fall short of “political conduct as we know it ought to be” (p. 61). What is most interesting for political theory is not Isabella’s merits or demerits, but the way that the play shows the “close intertwining of the social relations of sex, and the power to govern within those relationships, and the power to govern at the level of society and state” (p. 55). This pattern applies to other, sometimes lauded, tricksters as well. Portia in The Merchant of Venice is one. Turning the tables on Shylock allows deceit and Machiavellian ways to defeat “open political negotiation of social relations” and to undermine republican ideals of a community based on “friendship and civility” (p. 155).

The things that threaten political ways are also cataloged in Coriolanus, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, The Tempest, and, finally, Hamlet. Sovereignty—“nothing more or less than the power to organize power” (p. 194)—is an ongoing subject of investigation. Sovereignty gained or maintained by magic, for example, is antithetical to political legitimacy, be it republican or authoritarian. Macbeth’s tortured but sometimes emboldening connections to the supernatural sow confusion where there ought to be clarity about the material conditions of political order and hierarchy. Magis Prospero’s heavy-handed governance of the island is likewise noted for the absent political work of sustaining actions in concert. There is a lesson for contemporary political magicians: “if people are obedient because of magic that’s a failure of authority.” So “voodoo economists and political wizards”—including the magic of charismatic leaders—do harm. They pursue shortcuts to legitimacy, says Frazer, and undermine the very relationships on which legitimate authority ought to rest. And yet, Frazer notes a tension: the spontaneity, the magic of movement politics, is a resource she wishes to acknowledge as a force that has done good, even if there is “nothing magic” about “human, social, normal, power” that makes up everyday political rule and its contestation (pp. 175–77, 187–93).

This admirable survey of political ways and our failure to achieve a better politics through Shakespeare will animate further discussions, and Frazer distributes many fine turns of phrase throughout. She takes a risk, however, in covering so much at this level of abstraction. Room for contestation is not large when it must compete for space with broad plot-line summaries and bottom-up explanations of insights from fellow political theorists. Her sheep graze on the commons’ grass, but she does not lead her goats into the weeds. We are rarely immersed, as in many works of interpretation, in sustained exchanges between characters. Historical points of connection are passed over quickly. She may leave some readers wondering if the delineation of a better politics did not sometimes displace the politics of scholarly debate. Her ultimate plea, however, is that we learn to live with the frustrations that politics brings, and on this score she puts Shakespeare to good use.