David Womersley. Princeton University Press, 2026
Oxford English literature professor David Womersley steps into the crowded, often highly specialised and historicised field of Shakespeare scholarship with Thinking Through Shakespeare. His starting point is Samuel Johnson’s famous claim that Shakespeare is “the poet of nature,” holding up “a faithful mirror of manners and of life,” a view that remained broadly dominant until the late twentieth century’s growing scepticism about the idea of a general human nature. Womersley’s book is, in a sense, an apologetic, making the case for Shakespeare to be read once more as the poet of human nature. It explores how the plays engage with central problems of the human condition.
Twentieth-century criticism marginalised the question of Shakespeare’s appeal to human continuities, treating the plays as products of their specific historical, political and social conditions rather than as reflections of a permanent human nature. Womersley argues that Shakespeare uses drama to think through perennial problems, organising his book around four: identity, civilisation, power and authority, and moral reasoning, each explored through a major play. He does not claim that Shakespeare offers answers, but that the plays themselves are forms of inquiry.
Womersley begins with Othello, using it to explore the instability of personal identity and the extent to which the self is shaped through its relation to others. He moves on to Hamlet and the thin line between civil order and violence—thinking through the fragile foundations of civilisation. Macbeth is an exploration of political power and its legitimacy, through the lens of the relationship between divine monarchy and republicanism. In King Lear, Shakespeare examines the instability of moral judgement, as individuals make their decisions about means and ends.
So the question is, how far does Womersley’s argument convince? His claim that Shakespeare engages with enduring human concerns is not new, but it has been largely absent from recent criticism. What distinguishes this book is the confidence and clarity with which it restates that case. The argument is persuasive because it is demonstrated through attentive readings of the plays rather than asserted in the abstract, and because Womersley avoids the trap of naïve universalism. His elegant prose is a further strength, and the combination of long intellectual arcs with close textual analysis gives the book both depth and immediacy. It stands apart from current fashions by addressing enduring human questions rather than merely historical contingencies, and most impressively, Womersley uses historical scholarship as a scaffold rather than a cage.
This is a significant book. Womersley reopens the question of Shakespeare’s relation to human nature with clarity and authority, restoring to Shakespeare criticism a sense of purpose too often dissipated by narrower concerns. He asks us to reconsider what Samuel Johnson saw so clearly: that Shakespeare’s genius lies in his capacity to engage with the enduring patterns of human experience, and he makes that case with a force and lucidity that are difficult to ignore.
