In considering the relationship of Shakespeare's plays to the republican tradition, two recent books argue opposite positions. Andrew Hadfield's Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005) has been acclaimed by reviewers as ‘an important and even groundbreaking book … showing how significant and prevalent republican discourses were in the Elizabethan theater’. To Hadfield, Lucrece and Titus Andronicus demonstrate ‘Shakespeare's decision to fashion himself as a republican author’. In Hadfield's reading, the republican allegiances of the early Shakespeare are straightforward. ‘The most significant aspect’ of Titus Andronicus ‘is its republicanism’, and Lucrece's resistance to Sextus Tarquinius illustrates ‘a political awakening’ on her part, the inevitable conclusion that the Romans ‘would be better off without kings ever again’. One work after another by Shakespeare and his contemporaries reveals ‘how clearly republicanism had set the political agenda in Shakespeare's England’.

A very different Shakespeare emerges from the essays in Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (2009). In the editors' introduction and in essays by Conal Condren, David Colclough, and Eric Nelson, Shakespeare is presented as deeply sceptical about some of the principal tenets of republican thought or even as hostile to republicanism. As Quentin Skinner says in the Afterword, ‘for Shakespeare … the world of politics and the life of virtue appear to be largely incompatible’. According to the introduction: