Thinking through Shakespeare, by David Womersley, Princeton University Press, 432 pp, £32, ISBN: 9780-691154107.

David Womersley’s important new book comes after AD Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker and Philip Davis’s Shakespeare Thinking, as well as Julia Reinhard Lupton’s Thinking with Shakespeare. Womersley makes his own case, arguing that Shakespeare dramatises deep and enduring questions of intellectual history, such as the relationship between selves and others. Thinking through Shakespeare also meets a fundamental need to recognise Shakespeare as a thinker, or at least a fruitful resource for thinking. Despite the best efforts of Nuttall, Davis and Lupton, two opposing propositions dominate contemporary Shakespeare studies. One is that Shakespeare is history, so completely embedded in the life of his time as to be essentially separate from us and ours. The other is that he is ‘our contemporary’ (Jan Kott) to the extent of articulating or affording an opportunity to promote our own ideas and values – in the last twenty years overwhelmingly those of liberal identity politics. What slips through the gap is the distinctively creative contribution that Shakespeare, or thinking about Shakespeare, could make to intellectual life.

Lupton cautions that ‘to think with Shakespeare is, ideally, not to instrumentalise the plays in the service of an ideological programme (as one drives in a nail “with” a hammer), but rather to think alongside Shakespeare about matters of shared concern (as one speaks “with” a friend)’; Nuttall calls him a ‘fellow intelligence’. That is too chummy and familiar for the general import that Womersley aims at, but otherwise Lupton’s approach seems close to his. Thinking with Shakespeare and Thinking through Shakespeare engage historically with the Bard while simultaneously demonstrating that he has intellectual significance now. Both books are, in Womersley’s words, ‘trying to reconnect Shakespeare’s plays to the abiding concerns of thoughtful people’. They attest, as Lupton puts it, ‘to the universality of Shakespeare’s plays, not as a thesaurus of eternal messages but in their capacity to establish real connections with the successive worlds shared and sustained by actors and audiences over time’. They are each concerned with what she calls ‘constellations that persist’.

Lupton salvages a memorable description for this approach from the introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations by Hannah Arendt: “What guides this thinking is the conviction that… the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallisation, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and dissolves what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea change” and survive in new crystallised forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who will one day come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as “thought fragments”, as something “rich and strange”, and perhaps even as Urphänomene.’

She brings out the significance of the fact that behind this evocative passage is Ariel’s song from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

These haunting lines, Lupton suggests, may be a prophetic indication of how to read Benjamin, as Arendt claims; but they are much more fundamentally a pointer as to how to read Shakespeare. Indeed, what Lupton intuits but does not quite say is that ‘Full fathom five’ anticipates Shakespeare’s own intellectual bequest to us. Never mind his amazing life; thanks to the rich ‘sea change’ of cultural history, his death has been even more valuable.

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Lupton gives us Ariel’s song as a brilliant epiphany for and summons to thinking with and through Shakespeare, and thereby discovering ‘the constellations’ and deep structures of thought (Urphänomene) ‘that persist’ in part because of him.

Why doesn’t Womersley make common cause with her? We will return to that interesting question at the end of this article.

* * *

Womersley’s title, Thinking through Shakespeare, implies that Shakespeare is a complex puzzle: a conception of their subject that Nuttall, Davis and Lupton all share. Womersley chose his title, rather than, say, Shakespeare’s Thought, to place the emphasis on process rather than its conclusion. In all four books Shakespeare is taken to mean the plays that are central to his literary achievement, rather than the poems that are secondary to it; but Davis especially shows that the language of Shakespeare’s drama is not so much the dress as the very life of his thought. For all four critics, Shakespeare’s plays are understood as thinking – implying, especially to Nuttall, a thinker; and as thinking which can help us think.

A second implication of the title is that Shakespeare is a filter for thought. This might be positive, heightening thought, making it more vivid by literary and dramatic means. But from contemporary social media we know that filters – especially in selfies – can be fake and vulgarising, eliminating signs of ageing, bringing faces and figures into de-individualised conformity with market-driven stereotypes. And thinking through Shakespeare can work in that destructive way. Shakespeare is over familiar and dominant in our culture, partly because of the imperial history of English studies and the English language; partly because of the advanced disintegration of the canon in our times. In the triply damaging context of politically-motivated canon busting, the decline of reading and the demise of arts and humanities subjects, Shakespeare increasingly functions as the canon. And capacious though he is, Shakespeare can’t, on his own, make up for that loss of breadth. Thinking through Shakespeare alone is inevitably limiting. And Shakespeare is often invoked – in public life, for example – as a substitute for thought, conferring an aura of profundity that hasn’t been earned. Davis comes up with the striking idea of ‘the Shakespeared brain’ but in the unfortunate situation I am now outlining that suggests an image of a brainpan or cage, sitting on top of and bridling intellection.

All four authors mentioned hold to and advocate intellectual liberation through Shakespeare. Shakespeare is not so much a filter for Womersley as an enabling cognitive interface or engine and a way of thinking better, more, farther. Thinking through Shakespeare also implies a before and after: ongoing intellectual history. And range is a particular strength of Wormsley’s book. Even while it ‘thinks through’ the ways in which Shakespeare illuminates a specific set of general concerns, it does not remove him from history. At the risk of sounding like Polonius – always a risk for academics – classical, German, political, philosophical: the whole panoply of thought is here, and Shakespeare is richly returned to it. In respect of a rapidly shrinking canon, Thinking through Shakespeare performs a major service by putting Shakespeare back into dialogue with the great historical writers and thinkers who, in the past, at least in theory constituted a great intellectual commonwealth. One of the real pleasures of reading the book is, for example, contemplating Othello alongside Goethe’s Elective Affinities or Conrad’s Lord Jim, or thinking about King Lear while considering John Rawls’s Theory of Justice.

Womersley’s method of establishing this rich context, over about 30 pages in the first two chapters and about 50 pages in the remaining two, threatens, at times, to overwhelm the plays with ‘the pale cast of thought’. It mislays what Davis, in an earlier book, called ‘sudden Shakespeare’: ‘thinking that happens in the living moment of its performance, in quickly passing process.’ It equally neglects to ‘think through’ the fact that Shakespearean thinking always is, as Lupton suggestively writes, embodied in ‘the living being of the actor, all blood, sweat and tears’. She goes on to open up the truth of the common-sense notion that a play ‘comes alive in performance’, describing how, in Shakespeare, ‘the signifying capacities of somatic existence are excited into speech and drawn on to the stage of public life’. In this suggestive formulation, Shakespearean thinking is roused not just in the body but into being – and not just individual being. Before our eyes, the actors’ bodies speaking Shakespeare’s script become human beings with an immediate, material and urgent bearing on the social world they constitute, which is also embodied in the audience.

And Shakespeare also has the capacity to disturb and revitalise thinking, as Davis explains, because ‘in Shakespeare it is not character that speaks, originally or finally, but a life force as anterior to character as it is prior to explicit theme or conceptualised agenda, which is entrusted to work itself out’. Womersley recognises something like this in his searching and disturbing reading of how the identities of Othello and Iago, protagonist and antagonist, are ‘qualified and merged’ in their increasingly ‘strange, dazed hypnotic dialogue’ as ‘the carapace of personality that keeps us distinct from one another in ordinary life starts to crack’ and together they ‘create a world’ in which ‘what is pure is desecrated and what is good destroyed’. (I hope these quoted phrases give an idea of how simultaneously exact and suggestive his critical writing can be.) But what Womersley does not recognise, and Davis does, is that this strange convergence of Iago and Othello is but one, and a very negative, instance of a more general process by which all of Shakespeare’s plays deploy the power to shape and unshape the characters whose life they provide and exceed. ‘The interim is mine,’ says Hamlet movingly. ‘And a man’s life no more than to say “one.”’ And so it proves: try though he might to spin out and extend the time he has, the play nevertheless overwhelms and does what it will with its prince in the end.

Shakespeare’s medium is dialogue, and Nuttall and Womersley rightly insist that he is never dogmatic. That is why Womersley brings him into conversation with specifically dialectical themes of ‘Selves and Others’, ‘Barbarism and Civilisation’, ‘Throne and Altar’ and ‘Means and Ends’. A commonplace of Shakespeare criticism is that the dramatist learned one of the tricks of his trade in school: arguing on both sides of the question – in utramque partem. Opposition is inherently dramatic. It is a technique of which Shakespeare often availed himself, moving between the country and the city, court and tavern, Rome and Egypt; counterposing such figures as Cleopatra and Octavia, Richard II and Bolingbroke, or – and this time in the same person – Cesario and Viola. The oppositions of self and other, means and ends, etc, mark the scope of the questions Womersley is interested in. In his later chapters he demonstrates how the plays mine but also undermine and complicate such oppositions, oscillating between them, keeping both terms in play. His book is at its best when it draws us into this drama of ‘ethical unfixedness’, which may be ‘scandalous for the philosopher’ but is ‘useful for the dramatist’, and vitally compelling for audiences and readers.

In one illuminating passage, Womersley shows how the villainous Edmund in King Lear is initially ‘presented to us as a character in the mould of ‘the sceptical, disengaged, witty choric figures of the comedies’ – ‘Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps even Rosalind in As You Like It’ . These are figures, Womersley reminds us, ‘whom Shakespeare’s first audiences would have trusted and liked’. Only after the play has brought forth horrors from Edmund’s ‘high-spirited invention’, ‘do we form a more severe judgement’. As an audience, we enjoy ‘no impregnable superiority of moral insight over that bestowed on the characters’: Lear, Gloucester and Edgar ‘make errors of moral judgement, and so do we’. Shakespeare productively disturbs moral confidence or complacency. He teaches that moral life is inherently dramatic, always and necessarily lived in a complex, developing human situation.

The whole effort of Womersley’s book is to keep big questions open. Are we autonomous individuals? Can we ever be truly secular? Is idealism possible? How civilised are we, really? But a touch of the schoolroom returns in his insistent mobilisation of his dialectical themes. By packing them in before the ‘big four’ Shakespearean tragedies he pegs them to – Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear – he ensures they dictate the terms of engagement. After 50 pages of intellectual history on the subject, it’s more reasonable to read Macbeth in terms of the struggle between secular and religious authority than it would otherwise have been. Without a further 50 pages on means-based pragmatism as opposed to ends-focused idealism, it is hard to believe anyone would identify the tension between means and ends – rather than, say, suffering – as the main element in King Lear. When Womersley concludes that Shakespeare’s tragedy is ‘ultimately a Kantian play’ in which ‘the honestum (or right)’ takes precedence over ‘the utile’ (or expedient)’, it is difficult not to feel that ‘thinking through Shakespeare’ has become a rather denaturing process. And given Womersley’s fundamental commitment to opening up vistas of thought, the fact that he steps back, in each of his long chapters, from a complex exploration of his given theme in one of the great tragedies to its clearer and simpler instantiation in a ‘lesser’ play or plays has the unfortunate effect of closing things down.

But then, as the Australian Shakespearean Peter Holbrook encourages us to ask, is Shakespeare really a thinker? The non-academic, but not insignificant, answer is no. Shakespeare is a playwright, and a poet – as well as, during his lifetime, a shareholder in a theatre company and building and, after 1603, a member of the royal household: a king’s man. What justifies approaching him as a thinker is the recognition that his dramatic art is so intellectually rich as to provide food for thought for anyone, including the most serious and creative professional thinkers.

Nevertheless, as Holbrook says, ‘it is surely not cleverness that has drawn hundreds of millions of people to Shakespeare over the centuries; or if it is some aspect of cognition that has attracted them, it is more likely something like wisdom allied to deep feeling’.

Shakespeare, in short, is never just a thinker. And this is because drama is always something substantially other and more than just a medium for thought. Insofar as Shakespeare is a thinker, the medium is the message. Disembodied thought is enriched and disciplined by the wider purview of the plays. According to the pioneering Irish Shakespearean, Edward Dowden, ‘abandonment to brooding thought’ is a manifestation of ‘the supreme crime’ in Shakespeare: ‘want of fidelity to fact’, which for Dowden (following Carlyle) is as much a moral as a scientific term. Hamlet represents the temptation of ‘infinite thought’ which ultimately breaks on the rocks of the more limited but also broader, more actual realities of drama.

The varied means of Shakespeare’s theatre include embodiment or incarnation, world-building, vision, lyricism and terror, all of which are irreducible to Womersley’s dialectical debates and the terms they mobilise. Womersley knows this, of course. One of the highlights of his book is the repeated and illuminating return, in his Macbeth chapter, to the murderer’s impassioned recollection of the dead Duncan as simultaneously and unstably an epiphany of the divine-right of kings violated and an expression of republican ecstasy. Characteristically, Womersley refuses to choose between these two. But the plays remain too varied and concrete to be reduced to any such opposition. They are, Nuttall insists, like ‘Ockham’s beard’ before ‘the famous razor’: ‘golden, luxuriant, happily unsubdued’.

Drawing on Max Nordau’s Degeneration, the fiction of Thomas Mann (particularly Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, and especially Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents, Womersley offers a particularly interesting reading of Hamlet as ‘a dramatic meditation on civilisation understood as anxiety, ailment, dis-ease, and disquiet’. He reads the motif of insistent eruption in the play’s early scenes in terms of ‘catastrophic change, in respect of both individuals and whole societies’: a crisis the play dramatises as the acquisition of ‘a heightened but diseased ethical awareness’. Where Dowden argues that the tragedy breaks Hamlet into the real world, Womersley suggests it portrays an existentially diminishing transition into modernity. He sees its last act as ‘a depletion of intellectual energy, an exhausted retreat from the pitch of ethical scruple that civilisation demands’. That this is a strong, illuminating interpretation is borne out by the fact that one can readily imagine a compelling theatrical production that embodies it.

Others of Womersley’s readings do not resonate so successfully. It’s true when he says, of Timon of Athens, that ‘Timon’s misanthropy is, despite its rejection of civilisation – indeed, precisely because of that rejection – a state that could only arise within civilisation’. But that is the play’s starting point. What it explores dramatically – what it’s about, if you like – is the complications this entails. Consider the following snatch of dialogue between Timon, his flatterers, and the critical Apemantus:

TIMON
Why, I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort ’tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another’s fortunes! O, joy’s e’en made away ere’t can be born: mine eyes cannot hold out water, methinks. To forget their faults, I drink to you.

He drinks, weeping.

APEMANTUS
Thou weep’st to make them drink, Timon.

SECOND LORD (to Timon)
Joy had the like conception in our eyes,
And at that instant like a babe sprung up.

APEMANTUS
Ho, ho, I laugh to think that babe a bastard.

What is absorbing in this passage – and the play of which it is a part – is the intimate weirdness, which Womersley’s rationalisation doesn’t broach. Timon begins with a touching, albeit extreme and unworldly effusion of fellow-feeling: ‘I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you.’ His maxim, ‘we are born to do benefits’, is lucidly formulated and, in combination with his vision of generously reciprocal fraternity, ethically impressive. But when he dissolves into tears, a neurotic element is introduced. Faults are mixed with virtue, grief overwhelms joy. Apemantus observes that Timon is, in effect, forcing his false friends to drink his tears: an image of his complicity in their treachery to him, and of the draining away of his credit; but also of his forcing himself – and his bodily fluids – on them in an obscene, obscurely sexual way. This queasily libidinal note is compounded when the Second Lord crows in response to Timon about the ‘conception’ of joy that springs instantly like a babe in the eyes of his hangers-on, while Apemantus laughs bitterly and condemns it all as illicit, illegitimate and fake.

Where good instincts like ‘we are born to benefits’ are so readily perverted, it is no wonder that Timon gives way to disgust, determining to sweep it all away; snarling, ‘Uncover, dogs, and lap’, as he reveals a banquet of ‘steaming water and stones’ to his former false friends; and commanding the city wall to ‘dive in the earth’, leaving Athens to the wolves. But the decorum and formality of a restrictively intellectual approach prevents Womersley from getting to grips with such intimate complexities.

* * *

The same is true of his treatment of Macbeth. Noting that the protagonist associates himself with Tarquin, Womersley observes ‘that Macbeth should make such a long arm into early Roman history and compare his own imminent regicide with the rape which led to the expulsion of kings from Rome unfolds its implications in a variety of directions’; but those directions all pertain to political history. Womersley politely avoids the troubling connection between rape and the murder of Duncan. But Shakespeare insists on it. Macbeth hurries towards Duncan’s bedchamber ‘with Tarquin’s ravishing strides’. And the passage that Womersley quotes more than any other is full of sexual implications. Macbeth is ostensibly talking about the killing of the grooms he and his wife have framed for the murder, but we know that he killed Duncan and so we should feel an extra chill when, having already associated himself with an antique racist, he now says: ‘Th’expedition of my violent love / Outran the pauser, reason.’ And our flesh should creep further when he cherishingly pictures the ruptured corpse, ‘his silver skin laced with his golden blood’ and ‘his gashed stabs’ looking ‘like a breach in nature / For ruin’s wasteful entrance’. By the time he says, ‘who could refrain / That had a heart to love, and in that heart /Courage to make’s love known?’, we surely know that eros is deeply mixed up in the murder.

Of course, it’s deeply unsavoury; but this is a deeply unsavoury play. Lady Macbeth tempts her husband to do the deed by presenting it as the fulfilment of his manhood and the consummation of their marriage. They seduce Duncan into a kind of threesome. Duncan is what they do in the bedroom and behind closed doors: we never see into the murder chamber. He is what they do instead of sex.

And if eros is implicated in regicide, it is also implicated in the regicide’s undoing. Womersley also quotes the passage when Macbeth is afflicted with the ‘horrible sight’ of a ghastly procession of Banquo’s future heirs ‘that two-fold balls and treble sceptres carry’ while ‘the blood-boltered Banquo smiles upon me, / And points at them for his’. It is true, as he observes, that ‘two-fold balls and treble scepters’ is ‘a complimentary reference to the complex royal title James had acquired after his accession to the English throne in 1603 and glances at the fact of his double coronation at Scone and Westminster’; but, to Macbeth, it is a horrible, tauntingly naked experience of the phallic potency of his red-blooded rival even beyond the grave.

‘Make the gruel thick and slab’, as the weird sisters say: that is what Shakespeare does by stirring all the suggestiveness, density and complexity of poetry into his drama, and we need to think this through if we are to puzzle him out.

If the poetry of the plays keys us into an order of vitality that subtends rational thought and polite notice, it also points beyond the frame of the plays in a way that eludes Womersley. Hamlet gestures towards its own outside by speaking of ‘a special providence’, a god of ‘rashness’, which (or who) delivers the prince to his fate. And Shakespeare makes what is outside the plot still more suggestively central in The Tempest.

Womersley writes: ‘If Timon of Athens is Shakespeare’s Rousseauvian satire on the poisonous inauthenticity of civilisation, then The Tempest is his Smithian riposte to that earlier play.’ He proceeds to read Shakespeare’s last solo-authored drama in terms of Adam Smith’s supposition that ‘were we to live “in the eyes of others” without reservation, the result would be morally salutary’. This facilitates interesting observations on the moral primacy of our visual sense, but it is far too straightforwardly aligned with Prospero’s plot to bring his enemies to book and reclaim his dukedom. And Womersley far too dismissively writes that Caliban ‘serves as a standing and vivid reminder in The Tempest of what human savagery is really like’. Even if we discount decades of postcolonial criticism, this misses the irony that The Tempest takes place on an island far from Milan and the nostrums of western civilisation. It also overlooks the strange agency of the island that cannot be overmastered or authoritatively known but transpires differently from a series of ‘odd angles’ irreducible to Prospero’s plot. The scene or environment of action challenges action as a maker of meaning in The Tempest. The flamboyance with which Ariel fulfils Prospero’s commands gestures towards an order of reality which exceeds them. ‘I flamed amazement’, Ariel says; (s)he flames ‘distinctly’ in different places and then ‘meets and joins’. ‘Where the bee sucks there suck I’ is a song that creeps into the consciousness of an insect small enough to savour life’s worlds within worlds. ‘ Merrily, merrily shall I live now / Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.’

To recognise such ‘subtleties o’th’isle’ – to hear its music, as Caliban does – is to be drawn away from Prospero’s moral and political machinations into a ‘brave new world’ beyond them to which we mysteriously belong.

* * *

I admire Wormsley’s book. I don’t think that any of the questions, and associated dialectical oppositions, with which he matches up the great tragedies adequately characterise those plays. I don’t even think they are central to them. Womersley says of Shakespeare that ‘in his hands, drama itself became a forensic instrument, whereby such issues might be probed and rival views about them set in motion’. But that seems to me too scientific, medical, analytical and procedural an account of what Shakespeare is doing. It is more the case that in Womersley’s hands Shakespearean drama becomes a forensic instrument for probing fundamental issues and mobilising different views. His book represents the value of thinking through Shakespeare in that sense. And that is no small achievement, particularly as it involves thinking at full stretch and as informed by great swathes of intellectual history. A final implication of his title that I wish to draw out is that Thinking through Shakespeare also involves leaving Shakespeare behind. And that’s okay. Such thinking transposes literature into thought; it exploits literature’s potential for thought. ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes.’

And yet in certain important respects Womersley casts new and needed light on Shakespeare’s intrinsic meaning and significance, above all as regards Shakespeare’s ‘ethical unfixedness’ or moral flexibility.

I promised to return at the end of this article to the question of why Thinking through Shakespeare doesn’t engage with Lupton’s Thinking with Shakespeare, with which it has so much in common. Even if this is just an oversight, I believe it’s a telling one, and one which relates to the ethical unfixedness that Womersley finds in Shakespeare. Lupton characterises her method of ‘thinking with Shakespeare’ as dialogue. In the spirit of conversation, she refuses to impose contemporary values on Shakespeare; but the dialogue she has with him does bring Shakespeare to bear on ‘contemporary problems’, which are insistently, albeit implicitly, bracketed by Womersley. Lupton thinks with Shakespeare to make a positive and progressive contribution to progressive thought. The cover of her book features Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet holding not Yorick’s skull but Shakespeare’s head. She thinks and writes as a feminist not just in chapters on The Taming of the Shrew or consent in All’s Well That Ends Well but in concerns pursued throughout her book with rights and care, hospitality and homemaking. Her epilogue is playfully but seriously entitled ‘Defrosting the Refrigerator with Hannah Arendt’. But if this is identity politics, it is identity politics that extends deeply and deliberately into the life we share in common; her subtitle is ‘Essays on Politics and Life’.

Womersley apparently sidesteps identity politics, though his book is a significant critique of reading Shakespeare in those terms. His treatment of Othello brackets race: I felt as though Othello were whispering with increasing intensity in my ear, as I read, ‘Haply, for I am black’. Womersley’s subsequent chapter, on ‘Civilisation and Barbarism’, brackets Othello. Yet that play much more obviously and pointedly dramatises his theme than Hamlet does. ‘For Christian shame,’ Othello says, ‘put by this barbarous brawl.’ And, at the end of the play he takes himself out as the barbarous enemy of a civilisation he has both coveted and betrayed. Explicitly removing race from Othello, then removing Othello from debates about barbarism and civilisation, would be anathema to contemporary Shakespeare critics. But by quietly ignoring the issue Womersley is free to insist that there are others than those with whom contemporary criticism is fixated; that we all of us, as we attempt to forge and shore up our identities and lives, are involved in a dramatic dance with others; and that the tension between civilisation and barbarism is internal to civilisation, not just an effect of modern imperialism. Womersley’s third chapter, ‘Throne and Altar’, sounds the most innocuously antiquarian, but this is where he shows his hand. The culturally confident and sophisticated tone of Thinking through Shakespeare in combination with its unashamed focus on ‘the big four’ tragedies, imply a conservative temperament. But this chapter evolves into an expressly right-wing critique of the degradation of the reverence for God, king and what, in the modern period, Walter Bagehot nominates ‘the dignified parts of government’ into ‘proxy-religions or creeds’ such as identity politics that ‘mop up the surplus credulity that decaying religion can no longer absorb and engage’. Womersley waves away these shibboleths of bien-pensant politics as ‘nothing more than the ideological burrs on which the thistledown of our credulity happens for the time being to have snagged’. To my mind, that is too dismissive, albeit eloquently expressed. And yet this dismissal allows other things to emerge. Thinking through Shakespeare opens up deeper, more general questions and traditions. Its final substantial chapter, on means and ends, offers an implicit critique of the idealistic moralism of current thought. Womersley demonstrates how, in Shakespeare and the complex scenarios he dramatises, the moral life involves shifting between idealism and pragmatism. His book thickens the brew of contemporary Shakespeare criticism. By turning aside from more fashionable concerns, he shows how Shakespeare honours and enriches the complex business of living.