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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - Sovereignty and Security Dilemmas in William Shakespeare’s History Plays

  • David Glimp, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Security, Fiscal Policy, and Sovereignty in Renaissance English Literature
    Published online:
    04 September 2025
    Print publication:
    18 September 2025, pp 92-126

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 explores how fiscal policy and questions of national security play on stage. Fiscal concerns pervade Shakespeare’s history plays. All of his sovereigns wrestle with the need to fund security in the face of ongoing domestic and international threats, and all of them have to confront ongoing fiscal discontent. This chapter shows how security dilemmas are at the heart of controversies that drive English history as Shakespeare understands it. Rulers’ ongoing efforts to cover the expenses associated with implementing security coupled with subjects’ resentment at having to pay for their sovereign’s decisions opens up the terms of security and collective wellbeing for collective scrutiny. By depicting a multiplicity of voices and perspectives on collective existence, Shakespeare foregrounds fiscal controversies and the alternative visions of security and collective life such controversies prompt. These plays immerse theatergoers in an underdetermined world defined by antagonism, conflict, geopolitical struggle, and political inventiveness.