Shakespeare and Theories of Political Theology

Sandra Logan’s Shakespeare and Theories of Political Theology provides a clear, nuanced explication of modern theories of political theology and the early modern theories that ground them. This accessible overview shows how these theories have contributed to new ways of interpreting Shakespeare’s works. Logan demonstrates the centrality of political theology to our understanding of sovereign authority across history, tracing debates about political theology and modern sovereignty through Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben, alongside its early modern aspects through Luther, Calvin, de Vitoria, Smith, and Bodin.

She then turns to Shakespearean scholarship to reveal how scholars have employed those theories to show that Shakespeare himself drew on and critiqued concepts of political theology through his plays, such as sovereign authority and impunity, sovereign/subject relations, questions of obedience and resistance, and conditions of exceptionalism and banishment. Plays covered include Hamlet, Macbeth, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale. Logan also offers a bold new interpretation of Shakespeare’s Richard II that is rooted in political-theological theories of resistance to tyranny and Benjamin’s concept of messianic history. Shakespeare and Theories of Political Theology serves as a powerful tool for understanding theories of political theology and richly demonstrates how such theories have been taken up by the field.