Private and Public: Rulers, Kings, and Tyrants in Plato, Aristotle, John of Salisbury, and Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Abstract

The concern with private and public, with rulers, kings and tyrants, is much evident in Plato and Aristotle, figures so influential in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. All these dimensions of the personal and the political are intertwined. Whereas Plato and Aristotle discuss ideas (the one in dialogue and the other in the monological mode of argument), poets and playwrights during the early modern period represent, through characters and in fictional interaction or dialogism, the contours of kings and tyrants and different relations among individual, family and state in concrete ways. John of Salisbury, writing in the Middle Ages, shares some of the concerns of kingship and tyranny that classical and Renaissance writers do. William Shakespeare, his predecessors, contemporaries and successors, Thomas Norton, Thomas Sackville, Thomas Preston, Thomas Legge, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, all give a multidimensional representation of the private and public elements of the lives of rulers, kings and tyrants.