Writing at Salon, Colin MacDonald urges us to dispense with the “myth” of the conservative Shakespeare, the Shakespeare who endorsed the divine right of kings and genuflected to his royal patrons. To MacDonald, a poet who has Lear say, “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!” must be an “egalitarian,” and a “radical” one at that. It doesn’t occur to him that Shakespeare drew from a political tradition that harmonized hierarchy with charity. The Bard must have felt the Bern, because the only alternative is that he was a Cheney Republican.
