Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' and 'King Lear' by Leon Harold Craig (review)

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MLR, 99.3, 2004 745 not surprising given the threat of civil unrest in the years of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. Political topicality is evident in all these rewritings of Shakespeare's plays, including Shadwell's The History of Timon ofAthens, theMan-Hater, Ravenscroft 's Titus Andronicus, Otway's The History and Fall of Caius Marius, and Tate's notorious adaptation of King Lear. But even if the preoccupations revealed by these plays are of a more serious nature, they share an important trait with the plays of the 1660s: their verbal 'depictive power' (p. 140) is reinforced by effectivetheatrical images, as the detailed stage directions employed by Restoration adapters indicate. This study analyses a range of primary and secondary material from different perspectives: a rigorous linguistic scrutiny of the play-texts is accompanied by the insertion of Restoration dramatists' and commentators' views on such plays. Attention is also devoted to the plays' critical history. This approach allows Murray to demon? strate that Shakespeare's Restoration adaptations deserve to be treated as literary and theatrical achievements in their own right, rather than being compared unfavourably (as they traditionally have) with the original texts. University of Reading Michela Calore Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' and 'King Lear'. By Leon Harold Craig. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2001. xi + 4o6pp. $70; ?50. ISBN 0-8020-357 i-x. Of Philosophers and Kings combines relatively unproblematic contentions, commonplaces even, with a range of wholly untenable views. Only a reviewer, I suspect, will be subjected to the trials of reading this book in its entirety: for reasons known only to the writer and publisher, 268 pages of digressive text are accompanied by an addi? tional 124 pages of endnotes consisting, in the main, of lengthy quotations from 'the opinions of a select group of scholars, many from an earlier generation' (pp. 11-12). Focusing primarily on Macbeth and King Lear, but with three shorter discussions of Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Measure for Measure, Craig sets out to demonstrate that 'Shakespeare is as great a philosopher as he is a poet' (p. 4). For the reader (Craig is unabashed by this anachronistic category, and has little interest in the verbal text as a medium of performance), the task is one of 'figuring out the plot' with the aim of 'seeing what is really going on and why' (pp. 15-16). The reward will be a 'clear and accurate idea of human nature' as one grasps the 'inner rationale' ofthe plays (p. 17). Craig is hostile towards what he dismisses as narrow, institutional senses ofphilosophy, part of his anxiety about the critical theory he constantly snipes at, settling fora catchall definition that all but makes the word redundant: it is 'nothing more nor less than the rigorous, persistent, thus usually systematic employment of one's natural powers to resolve one's puzzlement' (p. 18). What this amounts to in practice is a reading of the plays that confirms essentialist, neo-conservative beliefs in oppressive cate? gories such as 'truth' and 'nature' as they constitute and protect institutions such as 'marriage' and the 'family'. There is a bewildering intellectual naivety: 'to understand Macbeth', Craig insists, 'to understand it as its author understood it,one must practice [. . .] philosophy' (p. 31) and gain access to 'certain truly timeless questions' (p. 110). Macbeth 'shows not only how invaluable can be a philosopher's understanding of politics', but the relevance to people's lives of 'several of the most challenging meta? physical and cosmological questions'. In King Lear, we see 'philosophy itself arising out of man's [sie] confrontation with Nature' (p. 17). Assertion rather than argument is the style in a book whose energy for lapidary observations rarely diminishes. That Macbeth dramatizes, in part, 'how not to succeed in establishing oneself as a new prince' (p. 34) is hardly open to question, nor is the proximity of Machiavelli to all 746 Reviews this; and Craig explores, interestingly enough, the characters of Rosse and Lenox to suggest that 'Machiavellians' do 'not all get their just come-uppance'. 'Lenox's Machiavellian duplicity', however, is in the 'service of...