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Book Review: Shakespeare’s Political Wisdom3 7 1level to explore their deepest motivations. There are some rare individualsin Shakespeare’s plays, however, who do seem to understand themselvesin a more consistent way. These characters thrive and wield a great deal ofinfluence—even if only in private—because their inner sobriety makes themprofoundly aware of the inadequate self-understanding of those aroundthem. 5 For Burns, the characters of Edgar and Prospero are two such individuals,and they deserve intense scrutiny because they use their understandingin a ministerial capacity. Edgar, for example, engages in elaborate theatricsto give consolation to his troubled father (160–62). He restores his father’sfaith in the justness of the universe: mankind is not the arbitrary playthingof the gods. What is also clear, however, is that Edgar himself has a muchdifferent view of the matter (155–58, 176–82). Burns’s readers will have tomake up their own minds about the plausibility of Edgar’s alternative view,but it is important to see that his educational project comes very close toShakespeare’s own methods. Edgar’s use of artful conventions (compare 12,181, 194, 210) is made all the more powerful because his father is unawareof the deception, but readers can see the truth behind the episode and passjudgment on the understanding that made its resolution possible.Finally, as many others before him have tried to do, Burns turns toProspero as the character who seems to be the most autobiographical inShakespeare’s works. Unlike most of these interpreters, however, Burnsresists the temptation to go whoring for convenient extratextual parallels. 6Rather than assume that The Tempest stands apart from the other plays,Burns takes the fundamental questions of the play to be the same questionsraised throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre. We know, for example, that Prospero’splan is much more elaborate than that of Edgar in King Lear, but theaim and intentions of both seem to be identical. Even if none of the othercharacters in the Tempest is fully aware of the depth of Prospero’s deception,readers are given the opportunity see the unvarnished content of his educationalproject. As horrific as it may sound, all of human life shall dissolve, thegreatest feats of mankind and the hopes that drive us to pursue them are theinsubstantial retinue of a pageant that will fade to nothing. Prospero refusesto console himself with the intellectual palliatives that make life bearable formost of us, but his refusal turns out to be the source of a sobriety that ulti-5Shakespeare often highlights these individuals—e.g., Portia and Edgar—by giving them the abilityto speak in both prose and verse, depending on their audience and purpose.6“The Tempest has sent people whoring after strange gods of allegory” (Frank Kermode, editor’sintroduction to The Tempest [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958], lxxx).