As its title indicates, Elizabeth Frazer's Shakespeare and the Political Way argues that politics consumed Shakespeare. She treats most of the tragedies and a few “problem plays” (Measure for Measure and The Tempest), providing detailed and useful plot summaries toward the beginning of each chapter. Frazer does not discuss the English history plays or, with the exception of Coriolanus, the Roman plays, presumably to show that Shakespeare's preoccupation with politics is pervasive, that Lear and Hamlet tell us as much about politics as Henry V and Julius Caesar do. While many critics maintain that “focusing on politics is precisely to miss the drama's main point, as if one stood in front of a great and famous oil painting, and examined only the frame,” Frazer argues that Shakespeare's political settings “signal that a deeper set of puzzles about political power are significant in what follows” (13). Those puzzles usually revolve around issues of race, class, and gender, though Frazer adds a less familiar category in “sovereignty,” which accounts for some of her most interesting commentary. Frazer acknowledges her political interpretations of particular plays can cut against the traditional critical grain. She notes that some contend that the “political setting” in Hamlet “is simply the frame for a tragic psychological and ethical drama, which might just as well take place entirely within the confines of a household and family” (204). Others stress that “focusing on political economy and class struggles misses the point” of King Lear by “marginalizing the centrality of feeling” (137–38). Frazer typically responds that it is not a matter of either/or, a rejoinder which might not fully meet the objections.

While sensitive to context—“we must take care not to attribute to Shakespeare understandings that are the product of twentieth-century experience and thinking” (24)—Frazer mostly engages theorists and critics who lived after Shakespeare, looking to Hobbes, Marx, and Arendt, as well as feminist and materialist critics from the 1980s, to shed light on Shakespeare's plays. The fact that Marx, as Frazer notes, often referred to Shakespeare to illustrate his theory of class struggle (80), and that the late twentieth-century critics she often cites emphasized Shakespeare's political concerns, suggests that Shakespeare has been seen as a political author for quite some time. Despite a few brief references to Allan Bloom, however, Frazer mostly ignores the contributions of Straussian political theorists to Shakespeare scholarship.

While she does “not want to be understood to be asserting that my interpretations of the plays are ‘what Shakespeare meant’” (15), Frazer explicitly rejects the view that authorial intention is irrelevant or unfathomable. She is simply being cautious in light of the fact that editors and directors altered Shakespeare's texts over the years and, in one case (Timon of Athens), that he had a coauthor. Mostly, Frazer seems confident that Shakespeare intended her reactions to particular characters and scenes, and that he shares her political views more generally. Which views, exactly? Frazer writes most passionately about gender inequality and patriarchy, though she devotes equal time to class conflict and oppression; race and ethnicity get less play in her account, as they do in Shakespeare (Othello is black and Shylock a Jew). In siding with the oppressed and alienated, Frazer can occasionally go too far and appear like an apologist for Edmund and Caliban, though her treatment of Shylock is more nuanced. Frazer cautions near the beginning of her book that it can be difficult to discern “where the weight of his sympathy lies”—“reactionary or revolutionary, proto-feminist or standard-issue misogynist”—but she concludes that Shakespeare is a modern thinker who “begins with free and equal individuals” (11, 222). In her chapter on King Lear, Frazer alludes to “Shakespeare's humanist visions of love, his championing of freedom, his questioning of established inequalities” (134). In short, while the categories of race, class, and gender might seem more ours than his, Frazer makes a strong case that Shakespeare was often unsettled by many of the same inequalities that preoccupy us.

She is less certain about inequality of rule, that is, whether Shakespeare preferred republics or monarchies, a distinction she says he was very much aware of and interested in. The plays she treats are about equally divided between the two kinds of regimes, though she does not include a chapter on Julius Caesar, a play about an aristocratic republic that becomes an absolute monarchy, and in which Shakespeare is rather ambivalent (or worse) about the people. This might have provided more clues about his leanings. Monarchy, in Frazer's account, is usually absolute, arbitrary, and oppressive. In fact, it is often monstrous, as her frequent references to Hobbes's Leviathan intend to show. When she discusses republics, Frazer emphasizes the obstacles to freedom—elite manipulation, covert class rule, patriarchal customs—rather than potential flaws, like tyrannical majorities or unwise and shortsighted popular rulers. Moreover, Frazer at least hopes Shakespeare sees things as she does: “who can believe that having no choice, having no real space for dissent, or no prospect that the dissenters might prevail is an acceptable way for human beings?” (220).

Frazer is concerned throughout her book with the issue of “sovereignty,” which she examines in a particularly interesting way in relation to magic in a chapter on The Tempest and Macbeth. By sovereignty, Frazer seems to mean legitimacy: “What form should political power take? Who should exercise it? In particular, how does it and how should it interact with natural and supernatural forces, and the social processes of kinship, friendship, and economy?” (15). Instead of providing definitive answers, Frazer's Shakespeare plays with and puzzles over alternatives, he thematizes, ironizes, and problematizes. He even wonders whether true sovereignty exists, whether, that is, any authority is final or unquestionable apart from the temporary consent or constrained obedience of the people. Politics, in other words, is permanent, but its ideal form or perfect legitimation is ever elusive. Politics is what we make of it, whether we assent to or bridle against the natural rule of fathers, the divine right of kings, the rhetoric of rich and clever nobles, or the (often unheard) cries of the oppressed. Despite her claims that Shakespeare does not come to a conclusion on the meaning or existence of true sovereignty, Frazer ultimately defines politics or “the political way” in terms of democratic decision-making: “‘the political way’” is “the way of people acting in concert, in open process and relations, to bring about change or to stabilize justice” (14). She strongly hints that this is Shakespeare's view as well.