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The turn to political concerns in Renaissance studies, beginning in the 1980s, was dictated by forms of cultural materialism that staked their claims against the aesthetic dimension of the work. Recently, however, the more robustly political conception of the aesthetic formulated by theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière has revitalized literary analysis generally and early modern studies in particular. For these theorists, aesthetics forms the crucial link between politics and the most fundamental phenomenological organization of the world, what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible.”

Taking up this expansive conception of aesthetics, Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare suggests that the political stakes of the literary work—and Shakespeare’s work in particular—extend from the most intimate dimensions of affective response to the problem of the grounds of political society. The approaches to aesthetic thought included in this volume explore the intersections between the literary work and the full range of concerns animating the field today: political philosophy, affect theory, and ecocritical analysis of environs and habitus.

King Lear is perhaps the most fierce and moving play ever written. And yet there is a curious puzzle at its center. The figure to whom Shakespeare gives more lines than anyone except the king—Edgar—has often seemed little more than a blank, ignored and unloved, a belated moralizer who, try as he may, can never truly speak to the play’s savaged heart. He saves his blinded father from suicide, but even this act of care is shadowed by suspicions of evasiveness and bad faith.

In Poor Tom, Simon Palfrey asks us to go beyond any such received understandings—and thus to experience King Lear as never before. He argues that the part of Edgar is Shakespeare’s most radical experiment in characterization, and his most exhaustive model of both human and theatrical possibility. The key to the Edgar character is that he spends most of the play disguised, much of it as “Poor Tom of Bedlam,” and his disguises come to uncanny life. The Edgar role is always more than one person; it animates multitudes, past and present and future, and gives life to states of being beyond the normal reach of the senses—undead, or not-yet, or ghostly, or possible rather than actual. And because the Edgar role both connects and retunes all of the figures and scenes in King Lear, close attention to this particular part can shine stunning new light on how the whole play works.

The ultimate message of Palfrey’s bravura analysis is the same for readers or actors or audiences as it is for the characters in the play: see and listen feelingly; pay attention, especially when it seems as though there is nothing there.

Most of us can recall with clarity a favorite scene from Shakespeare. But call to mind the playwright’s appearance and there are many depictions to choose from with few widely accepted. Shakespeare himself left no description of his appearance nor can any evidence be found that he commissioned a portrait.

With Portraits of Shakespeare, Katherine Duncan-Jones poses a series of questions about the mysterious physical appearance of the brilliant writer of plays, poems, and sonnets: Why is it so difficult to find images of Shakespeare that were made during his lifetime? Which images are most likely to have been made by those close to the writer? And why do newly discovered images emerge with such startling regularity? With an eye toward answering these questions, the book begins with a broad analysis of the tradition of the “author portrait” before, during, and after Shakespeare’s lifetime. Duncan-Jones provides a detailed critique of three of the most widely accepted portraits: the engraving facing the First Folio’s title page; the sculptured stone bust that adorns Shakespeare’s funerary monument at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon; and the “Chandos portrait,” an early seventeenth-century painting on canvas which is widely recognized as the best image. Through a painstaking historical analysis of the painting’s early history and provenance, Duncan-Jones arrives at a plausible new identification of both the artist and the artist’s personal connections with Shakespeare. Finally, taking the book into the present, she considers the afterlife of all three images in memorials, advertising, and in graphic art—all evidence of a continuing desire to put a face to one of literature’s most famous names.