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Students read Shakespeare's plays to learn about politics and office, love and friendship, and other great themes of human life. This education is the core of the 'Shakespeare myth,' which is that Shakespeare educates the complete human being-man, woman, and citizen. In this paper, I provide support for the truth of this myth by challenging the suggestion that the Shakespeare of the 1590s is a traditional theist who accepts the divine machinery of providential history, a secularizing Machiavel, or a protorepublican advocating living together as equals under the rule of law. Instead of these Shakespearian simplifications, I present Shakespeare as a philosophical liberal who is interested in legitimacy, stability, participation, security, and the place of the individual within society, but not in a way that requires the complete enlightenment of his age's political forms and religious life, or that denies enlightenment altogether. Adapted from the source document.

Elizabeth Frazer presents an examination of Shakespeare's thoughts and views on politics as expressed through many of his major plays, particularly the tragedies.

Although writers of the English Restoration tragedy were not able to continue the path of the magnificent Renaissance tragedy and to become the worthy heirs of Shakespeare, they were experimenting with the verse and themes leaving a few impressive tragic scenes. Therefore, the heroic tragedy, as a dramatic kind, did not achieve an enviable aesthetic value. On the other hand, writers of comedies have managed to adjust the traditional elements to the new literary trends and to the atmosphere of the epoch. They have created a comedy of character and humor with an appropriate and realistic prose dialogue full of wit and refined language which was the best media for depicting cheerful and immoral aristocratic life of that time. Preserving and highlighting these dramatic elements, the dramatists of the Restoration have influenced the successors of a typical British comedy that will come to life again, in its true and pure comic form, in the works of Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

'Township Plays,' 'Port Elizabeth Plays,' and 'Interior Plays' by Anthol Fugard are reviewed.

A phenomenological analysis of Shakespeare's plays suggests that characters who testify after having witnessed intolerable conditions cause significant change by interrupting the actions of other characters and thereby enhancing the possibilities for egalitarian practices in the world of the play. The desire to testify is great enough that when public realms do not permit open disclosures, characters invent methods to give accounts of themselves or to bring their knowledge into discussion, either in soliloquy or through prompts to other characters. When possible, characters offer their personal narratives. With each divulgence, characters create greater access to information and present possibilities for alternate choices to participate in their communities, including deliberation and mutual disclosure, making it possible for others to see and recognize them, strengthening their public realms by rendering them more inclusive, and creating the potential for further disclosures. In III Henry VI, King Henry is brought to awareness of his role in England's civil war by the anonymous testimony of two soldiers and attempts to rule wisely thereafter. In Much Ado about Nothing, Dogberry employs the speech tools of the disenfranchised to disempower the homosocial and intolerant nobility without calling attention to himself. In Pericles, Marina deliberates with her interlocutors so they can understand their actions from her point of view. When she is prompted to share her personal narrative, she and her father, Pericles, understand that their isolated views of their lives were mistaken; they are characters in a single story that binds them to one another. The characters thereby uncover the meaning-giving nature of narrative: It enables a person to recognize what she or he has never known. The role of Gower augments the performative effect of wonder aroused by the reunion of Marina and Pericles by wielding the tools of narrative, which include imagining, predicting, and wishing.

When Ibsen was first introduced to the audience, few might have thought that a new wit is coming up in the world theatre. His plays soon started to touch sharp social topics stigmatizing the political values of the leading class. This article analyzes the aspects that Ibsen's plays more often offered to the reader and to the audience: the socio-political ones. The plays taken into consideration are the most notable of the playwright, A Doll's House, Ghosts, Pillars of Society. The socio-political aspect in these plays is clearer and marks the starting point of a new epoch in which the writers began bringing to light real problems to the real world.The reader or the audience becomes a witness of the moral intrigue development; of the farce identity; where the high building of lies slowly begins to fall apart like a card-house. This article brings to comparison the main characters of these plays, the Ladies, respectively Mrs. Helmer, Mrs. Alving and Mrs. Bernick, which might have not been considered as the protagonists, but surely their position in the plays has been crucial in the tide of the events and in our analysis of the social and political aspect of Ibsen's plays. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n11p676