Thinking Through Shakespeare, with David Womersley

Many readers turn to Shakespeare for the beauty of his language or the power of his stories. But in Thinking Through Shakespeare, Oxford scholar David Womersley suggests that the plays offer something else as well: a way of exploring some of the deepest questions about human life.

Womersley looks at tragedies like Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear to show how Shakespeare places audiences inside difficult moral and philosophical problems. The plays raise questions about identity, power, and the tension between doing what is right and doing what is personally advantageous. Rather than presenting clear answers, Shakespeare lets these ideas collide on stage.

In this episode, Womersley explains how Shakespeare’s plays become what he calls “crucibles” for thinking. As characters struggle with competing values and impossible choices, audiences go on that journey with them—testing ideas, reconsidering assumptions, and confronting the same enduring dilemmas that have shaped human thought for centuries.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published March 10, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Paola García Acuña. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services were provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His books include Divinity and State, Gibbon and the “Watchmen of the Holy City” and The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He is also the editor of many books, including the Penguin Classics editions of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and David Hume’s complete essays. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.

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The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: What is Shakespeare for?

At the Folger, we’ve been thinking a lot about that question, not in terms of relevance but use. What do these plays actually help us do? How do they sharpen our judgment or deepen our understanding of power or moral conflict?

David Womersley of Oxford University has written a new book, Thinking Through Shakespeare, which takes up that same challenge. Womersley argues that Shakespeare’s work presents strategies for thinking through larger philosophical questions. But only if we open ourselves up to them.

Womersley turns to Shakespeare’s great tragedies Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear not simply as stories, but as spaces that invite us to wrestle with enduring questions about ambition, loyalty, justice, and the tensions between means versus ends. His message: Shakespeare is here to help.

Here’s David Womersley, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

——–

BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, I want to start with the beginning, with the big idea that you write straight out in your introduction which is that, at least as far as academia is concerned, and this is a quote from you, “The universal Shakespeare has of late gone missing.” It’s a short sentence but a lot to unpack there. Maybe first why don’t you explain for us what you mean by universal Shakespeare?

DAVID WOMERSLEY: That’s kind of a shorthand phrase. I’m using it point towards or to try to revive a way of thinking about Shakespeare that for two hundred years or more after his death was a commonplace way of thinking about him. That’s to say, readers of his works, critics, recognized that his works had a peculiar reach and spoke to people in a particularly emphatic way and they tried to explain that. The explanation they came up with was that Shakespeare was, as they put it, a poet of general human nature. By saying that, they of course were subscribing to the view that there was such a thing as a general human nature.

Recently, I think that way of thinking about Shakespeare has been neglected, partly because the very idea of the general human nature has become, to some extent, discredited. I think wrongly discredited, but nonetheless discredited. And if you don’t subscribe to that idea of a general human nature, then it is nonsense to say that Shakespeare is a poet of general human nature. You have to find some other way of explaining the reach and impact of his work.

So, I am trying to come back to that general position, but in what I hope is a slightly fresh way in that I’m trying color in some of the content of what a general human nature might be and that’s how I’ve organized this book. So, it’s organized into four main chapters and each of those four chapters addresses a particular province, as you might put it, in general human nature.

BOGAEV: You call them durable preoccupations, mainly of philosophers and writers and thinkers, and all in the Western canon.

WOMERSLEY: Yes.

BOGAEV: One is the question of personal identity. Two is the distinction between civilization and barbarism. And three is the purpose and character of political institutions vis-a-vis the church and state.

WOMERSLEY: Yes.

BOGAEV: And four is the tangle of ethical questions surrounding the good and the right. The means versus the ends.

WOMERSLEY: Yes.

BOGAEV: So, you have these four categories. It’s provocative and covers a lot of ground but I am curious how you narrowed them down?

WOMERSLEY: I’m not at all suggesting that this is an exhaustive list, and in mapping out these four, recurrent preoccupations, I haven’t done anything more maybe than just scratch the surface of this topic. But there are some claims that I would make for these four topics.

So, the first is that I find it hard to imagine—although you say quite rightly that all my examples are taken from the Western tradition and that’s simply because that’s what I know—I find it hard to imagine that any human group anywhere on the globe at any time would have been perfectly indifferent to questions of identity, or of questions of how religion or the supernatural connects to questions of social organization, or questions of how you can distinguish between an action which is right or one that is simply advantageous or prudential. Of course, the answers to those questions will vary massively over time and over space. But the preoccupations themselves, I think, are fairly constant, at least as far as I can see.

The second thing I’d say about them is we’re divided by all these questions, and so, they are intrinsically dramatic questions, I think.

BOGAEV: Yes, and that gets really to your title because you’re talking more about the process that we might all as humans have in common of pondering these things, right? As opposed to whatever solutions or answers we arrive at.

WOMERSLEY: Absolutely, yes. I mean, what I’m not saying is that the plays offer us absolute conclusions on any of these questions. It’s impossible to think of any of these questions being absolutely concluded. But what I do think you can see is that Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination was captured by the ambivalence in these questions. And so, one of the things that I think is particularly striking about the sequence of his plays is how often he will write a play which seems to take one side of one of these questions and then will immediately write a play which seems to take another side. He’s not interested in promoting a particular view. But he is incredibly alert to the dramatic potential in certain ideas and certain positions on important topics.

BOGAEV: Great. Well, let’s talk about that then, how Shakespeare does this. You examine how Shakespeare explores questions of personal identity first by looking at Othello. One of the examples you cite is Shakespeare’s use of exact repetition of one word or iterance in the conversation between Othello and Iago in Act 4, Scene 1.

[CLIP from the Folger Audio edition of Othello, with Ian Merrill Peakes as Iago) and Owiso Odera as Othello]

IAGO: Will you think so?

OTHELLO: Think so, Iago?

IAGO: What,
To kiss in private?

OTHELLO: An unauthorized kiss!

IAGO: Or to be naked with her friend in bed
An hour or more, not meaning any harm?

OTHELLO: Naked in bed, Iago, and not mean harm?

IAGO: So they do nothing, ‘tis a venial slip.
—Othello, Act 4, scene 1

BOGAEV: So, how does this literary technique of iterance work to universalize Shakespeare for us?

WOMERSLEY: Well, what is happening here is something so much richer and stranger than just the Machiavellian Iago entrapping the gullible Othello because there is this sort of strange dreamlike quality to the dialogue, I think, and that dreamlike quality is brought out by this handing of words between one man and the other. In particular, in that scene, Iago is putting words in Othello’s mouth, Othello is putting words in Iago’s mouth, and it seems to me that what is happening there is something like the sort of hard edges of identity being made porous or permeable. Shakespeare has prepared for this through the comedies that he has written earlier in his career. Othello draws on many of those earlier comedies but then takes, as it were, that material or that skill that Shakespeare’s acquired in writing comedy and then puts it into a very different setting where it emerges in a completely different way.

BOGAEV: You say Iago and Othello create a world together, and so, what do you mean by that and what’s the significance?

WOMERSLEY: So, the material that Shakespeare gets from Cinthio is very simply a story of how a very clever Venetian outwits a very foolish North African. What Shakespeare does, I think, is enrich that by making firstly Iago’s motivation much more obscure—obscure even to him.

Also, through these extraordinary dialogues that they have where they are, as I say, I think creating an imaginative world together. A terrible world, an awful world. But nevertheless, it is an act of creation that, I think, takes it beyond simply, a kind of bitterly comic story of deception.

What Shakespeare’s doing in Othello is taking this comic material and making dramatic potential out of all the kinds of problems that we have about identity. Whether or not we’re the same person now as we were yesterday. Whether or not I’m different from the person who’s sitting in the same room with me now. All these different questions that hedge around the idea of identity are active, chiefly through these dialogues between Iago and Othello.

BOGAEV: Ah, okay. Well, moving on, why don’t we look at Hamlet as an example of your second category of universal preoccupations: barbarism versus civilization. And before we begin with Hamlet, maybe you could tell us more about those categories.

WOMERSLEY: Yes, so, barbarism is a category that goes right back to the ancient Greeks. But it’s not a stable category. So, for the ancient Greeks, the barbarians were the Persians, and for the ancient Greeks, the Persians were barbarians because they didn’t speak Greek. But they were also politically different. They were inclined towards despotic monarchies rather than republics. And they were far more materially advanced than the Greeks, given to luxury, etc.

By the time we get to Rome, there are again barbarians but they’re not in the East. They’re in the North. They’re not cultured, rather they’re immiserated. And they’re not despotic, they have a kind of boisterous liberty to them.

So, already in antiquity, the categories of barbarian and civilized are variable. And also, as we move into the early modern period, the barbarian becomes not someone present at the same time, as it was for the Romans and the Greeks, but something buried in the past.

So, a problem that arises in Shakespeare’s day, or is emerging in Shakespeare’s day, is the whole question of what has been the barbarian contribution to civilization? That is a massive question that runs all the way through into the 19th century, really.

Let me turn now to Hamlet, having set the scene in that sort of crude way. In Hamlet, we see the transition from barbarism to civilization happening in an incredibly speeded-up way.

So old Hamlet, Hamlet’s father, is clearly a northern barbarian. He’s a warrior chieftain. He sleeps in his orchard in the afternoon, as Tacitus tells us the ancient Germans used to do. He is murdered, and his place is taken by Claudius, who is a completely different kind of king. Claudius is a bureaucrat. He works through proxies. We know that Old Hamlet would engage in single combat. Claudius will never engage in single combat. He always uses other people to do his dirty work.

So, we can see in just that transition from old Hamlet to Claudius, Denmark in Shakespeare’s play being catapulted from a condition that has characteristics in common with barbarism to a kind of bureaucratic, prosthetic, civilized state under Claudius.

And the question then is, well, how does young Hamlet respond to that? And this raises the whole question of whether or not civilization actually is a boon or a curse.

BOGAEV: Oh, and this is where we get to Freud and civilization and—

WOMERSLEY: Civilization and its discontent.

BOGAEV: Yes, because Hamlet—all his ethical inquiries are pathologized, you say, and evidence, supposed evidence, of a tormented and diseased mind. The restless anxiety that Freud identified with civilization.

WOMERSLEY: Yes, and you know, for Hamlet, these questions, at least in the first three or so acts of the play, need to be pursued to the last detail, whereas, at the end of the play, when his character has changed, interestingly, he becomes much more indifferent and much more relaxed.

But yes, I think that what Freud says about civilization when he advances the idea that civilization is perfecting of a previous state of barbarism and that’s just a prejudice, or an “enthusiastic prejudice,” as he calls it, and he says, “Well, actually, you know, there are things we like about civilization and things we don’t like about it, that irk us.” I think that in Hamlet you can see some of that irking being acted out.

BOGAEV: And so, this is why we identify with him as such a modern protagonist. You’re saying this is how you bring the preoccupation of barbarism versus civilization into the modern context.

WOMERSLEY: Gosh, I wouldn’t say I identify with him. [Both laugh.] But I think it’s why we find him so absorbing.

BOGAEV: Well, it’s a big book, so we have to motor on. Let’s turn to the political, which you headline as “Throne and Altar.”

WOMERSLEY: So, the starting point of that—in relation at least to Macbeth which is the play that I think about—is the extraordinary image that we have after the murder of Duncan of his body, and it seems to me that this is a perfectly ambivalent image. On the one hand, you can see it as some kind of idol which has been desecrated, or you can see it as also an idol which has been deservedly destroyed. So, the question is, which of those two sharply contrasting points of view is dominant? My answer is that neither of them, in fact, is dominant. The play wants to hold in intention, both very monarchical views of kingship and politics and also republican views of politics.

BOGAEV: And you were talking about Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3, about Duncan and the divine right of kingship and how he’s both—as you said, Macbeth is holding two ideas in his mind at the same time, two opposite ideas, a divine versus an earthly authority.

[CLIP from the Folger Audio edition of Macbeth, with Ian Merrill Peakes as Macbeth]

MACBETH: Who can be wise, amazed, temp’rate, and furious,
Loyal, and neutral, in a moment? No man.
Th’ expedition of my love
Outrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood,
And his gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature
For ruin’s wasteful entrance; there the murderers,
Steeped in the colors of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breeched with gore. Who could refrain
That had a heart to love, and in that heart
Courage to make ’s love known?
—Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3

BOGAEV: Macbeth alleges you can’t hold the opposites together, but then he does just that, right?

WOMERSLEY: And is destroyed by trying to do that, I think. But yes, one of the things that I wanted to try to do in that chapter was to clarify a little bit about the divine right of kings and what it meant and how it had been used and how it arose as a doctrine. It’s often taken now to be the outer limit of the lunacy of monarchy, that’s to say, who could possibly believe that a king had a divine right and that it’s making some kind of mystical claim about kingship. In fact, it originated as a doctrine to try to push back against another claim of divine right, namely the divine right of the popes. And so, in fact, the divine right of kings is, although it has the word “divine” in its label, if you like, it is an extraordinary secular doctrine. It’s very much about the right of kings to rule in their own land but it by no means meant that kings were to be worshipped, although some later kings who misunderstood it tried to make it seem that. So, at the time that Shakespeare’s writing Macbeth, James I is on the throne, who has a very extreme interpretation of what the divine right of kings means. But in fact, the doctrine itself was forged to do quite different work.

BOGAEV: Okay, now I have a million questions. I’m just going to fire them at you all at the same time.

WOMERSLEY: Good.

BOGAEV: So, bringing this up to the modern day, the universality of these ideas and why we relate to them now.

WOMERSLEY: Yes.

BOGAEV: Is it this idea, very modern idea, does Macbeth’s journey help us think with more subtlety about opposing ideas and the gray area? Or does it help us think with more subtlety about what it is to grasp moral relativity? Or is it about political legitimacy, where we gain a foothold in these stories from Shakespeare’s time?

WOMERSLEY: Very, very good questions and completely on the point. So, what I’m trying to do in what I say about Macbeth is that the play, which has been discussed relatively recently as a republican play rather than a monarchical play, what I want to say, by contrast, is that the play doesn’t settle on either side of that line. It vibrates between these possibilities and the way that it vibrates between these possibilities, I think, encourages us to reflect on the way in which, even today, we need political arrangements to pray in aid, if you like, sanctions or authorities that are not really, not strictly political.

So, you know, if one thinks about all the ceremonies that surround our political life, all of these are completely unnecessary. But equally, they are vital in order that society should feel that something significant has happened and that these arrangements have been set in place or put in place with the right degree of solemnity and authority. So, we’re always, although all we really want from our political arrangements, I guess, is that they should make for human flourishing now, in fact, in order that they should do that, they have to be surrounded by this kind of nimbus of almost supernatural sanction.

BOGAEV: And do you see this playing out in American politics today?

WOMERSLEY: I think that America is a very interesting case, and actually, I talk about in the book, just glancingly, the fact that every president is sworn in on Abraham Lincoln’s bible. And the question there is, is it the fact that it’s the bible or is it the fact that it belonged to Abraham Lincoln?

BOGAEV: It’s both.

WOMERSLEY: It’s both, of course. Of course, it’s both and that’s exactly my point. These are ceremonies and rights as much as legal acts of the transference of power.

BOGAEV: Well, this really leads straight to your last category, the means and ends. I think it does flow pretty naturally out of the tension between divine and earthly authority, and throne and altar, and the question is of the expedient versus the right or the just. You argue that Shakespeare dramatizes this fundamental human preoccupation by action involving substitutions. And you look to Lear, among other plays, to discuss this. So, that was a big mouthful. First, by substitutions, do you mean everything from bed tricks and gender switching of the comedies to confusions of identity, and even royal deposition in the history plays?

WOMERSLEY: Yeah, so I think that those are all forms of dramatic action that involves substitution. In the case of Lear, there’s a big division between those characters who think that people are interchangeable—Edmund would be the key example of that when he’s debating at the end of the play, “Who shall I have? Goneril. Regan. Either, neither, both.” You know, they’re perfectly interchangeable in his mind. —and those other characters who recoil from that way of thinking about people.

I tried to situate that in this debate between the utile and the honestum, the right and the expedient, by exploring how utilitarianism tends to view people as interchangeable. So, the key thing about utilitarianism that everybody knows is the philosophic calculus. How should I know what to do? I do the thing that leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But it doesn’t matter who those people are that make up the greatest number. Could be you, could be me, could be anyone. We’re all interchangeable. We all count for one, and no one counts for more than one, and that way of thinking about how you might decide what is a good or a less good action flies in the face of a different way of thinking about moral action, which is that people are not interchangeable.

BOGAEV: In Lear’s case. It’s the trolley question for us, I guess, in modern terms.

WOMERSLEY: Oh, right, right.

BOGAEV: And in Lear’s case, it’s the love test for his daughters.

[CLIP from King Lear, with Ian McKellen as Lear]

LEAR: Now, tell me, my daughters—
Which of you shall we say doth love us most,
That we are our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.
—King Lear, Act 1, scene 1

WOMERSLEY: Yes, and what of course is interesting about the language of the love test is that as Lear asks it, it’s perfectly ambiguous. What he says is, “Which of you three shall we say doth love us most?” What does he mean by most there?

BOGAEV: Right. You say in the book there’s an essential ambiguity there. Is it volume of love or ranking?

WOMERSLEY: Yeah. It’s a ranking versus a volume, and it’s interesting that the three sisters interpret the question quite differently in a way that reveals their underlying moral commitments. So, Goneril and Regan, both treat it as a volume question, and Cordelia treats it as a ranking question. If you treat it as a volume question, you are moving down a path towards a utilitarian conception of morality. If you treat it as a ranking question, you are moving down towards an intuitive or Kantian moral position where people have dignities but not prices. Eventually what happens in King Lear, I think, is that the whole cast is divided into these two camps: those who think that people have dignities and those who think that people have prices.

BOGAEV: Interesting. You do this with Hamlet, but here with Lear, you also look to the changes that Shakespeare made to his source material, which in this case was The True Chronicle History of King Leir. And you ask why? Why did he change it?

So, what answer do you come up with and how does that relate to your ideas about general human nature or the universality of his plays?

WOMERSLEY: What Shakespeare has done in massively compressing the material that he inherits from The True Chronicle History is to tempt us in the early scenes of the play to subscribe to or to associate ourselves with a utilitarian moral position that we will eventually have to repudiate.

So, one of the reasons why I think Lear is such an extraordinary experience as a play is that every time you see it you live through this process of moral education. One is initially, of course, attracted by Edmund. One is initially irritated by Lear. One perhaps thinks that Cordelia is stiff and somehow ungenerous. And yet, as we get to the end of the play, we realize that the moral position into which we have been tempted brings with it terrible consequences that we have actually to repudiate at the end of the play.

BOGAEV: Yeah, I think you say, “Shakespeare crafts the action of Lear to produce the effect of ethical unfixedness.” That moral identities are not fixed.

WOMERSLEY: Yes.

BOGAEV: And this reminded me of your title actually. Because when I first read it, I thought it was like some other books I’ve read in which the authors analyze how Shakespeare helps us think by using different techniques of drama, you know, rhetoric and whatever. But I think you mean something deeper there: that we go on this journey together in the play where we experience these changes.

WOMERSLEY: Well, that’s certainly what I do think so I’m glad that you read it that way. I mean that’s very reassuring to me. But yes, I mean, I certainly wasn’t hoping to write a book about, you know, how Shakespeare will help you think better. [Both laugh.]

BOGAEV: No, that was not what I meant. [Laughs.]

WOMERSLEY: What I was hoping was to write about how Shakespeare’s plays become crucibles really, you know, within which these fundamentally human dilemmas are both explored and clarified and sometimes tested to destruction only, of course, to rise, rejuvenated phoenix-like in the next play he writes.

So, you know, at the same time as he’s writing King Lear, more or less, he’s writing Measure for Measure—and Measure for Measure is just the inverse of King Lear. So, whereas in King Lear, it was, you know, the utilitarian moral position of a character like Edmund that led to disaster, in Measure for Measure, it’s the kind of intuitive moral position that leads to an extraordinary impasse that has to be released through a kind of relaxation that’s brought about precisely by people thinking about putting themselves in the position of the other. Substituting themselves for the other person. Mariana asks Isabella to take her part in front of the Duke in order to evade the terrible conclusion that seems to be in the offing.

BOGAEV: So, in the end, you seem to say that Shakespeare holds a special place by dramatizing these ideas that go very deep throughout history in our psyche—these conflicts, these unresolvable questions, and oppositions—and that he does it with just a surpassing versatility of mind?

WOMERSLEY: A versatility of mind, but also, a kind of rather cold indifference as to what might be the truth, I think.

BOGAEV: Cold?

WOMERSLEY: Well, you know, there is something disengaged about Shakespeare. I think that, you know, if you were to ask someone, “What do you think Ben Jonson thought about X?”, they could come up with a fair stab at what he thought about X.

But Shakespeare is very elusive. And I think that this is because he is, in some ways—it’s an odd word to use of Shakespeare because I’m astonished by the technique of the plays—but there is a kind of shallowness to his commitments. I think that one thing, one reason, that explains the perennial interest is that Shakespeare had a kind of an unerring nose for what is really important but then he also—and this is extraordinary—did not feel obliged to commit himself on either side of those questions but was fascinated by the dramatic potential in both sides of those important questions.

BOGAEV: Well, this has been so interesting. Thank you very much, and thanks for the book.

WOMERSLEY: Well, thank you very much for inviting me to take part.

———————-

KARIM-COOPER: That was David Womersley, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Thinking Through Shakespeare is out now from Princeton University Press.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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