The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

The Afterword turns to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to reflect upon the broader significance of Shakespeare’s negativity in inspiring our literary and political imaginaries. To break from tragic law, to experience freedom, is to suffer the fear and trembling of becoming something other. It is to experience a transformative mode of thought that opens us imaginatively to what is not – but might be. The negative – this “not” – alienates the divinity of the moment, be it the divine right of kings or more contemporary mystifications of power, and offers a perspective that is in some sense from “beyond”. Negative theology, too, reaches for “something more” as the locus of value and meaning, as the judge of what is. That is why it has a radical political potential. What we usually take “being” to be does not exhaust Being. This is something that negative theology, philosophy, and poetry have always told us. The negative brings us beyond ourselves. Beyond, also, the confines of our own political worldviews, often dominated by modern versions of appropriation and calculation. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our political philosophies.

Julius Caesar presents the theatrical creation of “the spirit of Caesar”. The chapter turns to Hobbes to help articulate how Shakespeare captures the role of the popular imaginary in the generation of the sovereign spirit, the Leviathan that subsumes the raucous multitude. Negation is here central. First, the spirit of Caesar is raised in and through his sacrificial death. Second, we see the power of the people (deciding Rome’s fate) as it is not seen, as it is lost, as it is given away to Antony’s manipulative theatricality and all the future Caesars. The play’s conclusion also reveals what haunts monarchical sovereignty: “a man”. Brutus is negated, but the negation, like Caesar’s before him, raises him to spiritual status. The spirit of Brutus becomes an imaginary rival to the victorious spirit of Caesar. It raises a haunting republican “what if”, a spectral, negative carrier of justice or the common good. Brutus becomes our spirit in the second circle of the audience. The audience is constituted as an alternate crowd, an overarching seat of judgment, able to see the potentially radical implications of this sceptical play: that supposedly divinely ordained sovereignty is an imaginative creation of the theatrical crowd.

The Tempest throws us into the midst of a world of tragic repetition, in which usurpation, oppression, and the drive for mastery repeat themselves again and again. The chapter argues that it also offers a precious, if tenuous, escape from tragic history, by calling for a politics of humble disappointment. This tentative path runs through abjuration or negation. The play consistently stages violent and intrusive spectacles that break the characters (and the audience) out of their initial subject positions and into a more outward-looking mode. Such interruptions connect to the tradition of negative theology, in which poorness or nothingness “is the ultimate state of receptivity” (Meister Eckhart). They offer a breath of air from outside the masterful self, a sliver of distance from the tragic past. In particular, the play institutes a theatrical form of collectivity through the isle’s inclusive dramatic “air”. It draws us, as well as the sovereign figure of Prospero, into a broader dramatic life-force or “intersubjective phenomenology” (Schalkwyk). Indeed, in the Epilogue, the sovereign power is subject to the many; subject to audience’s judgment, pleasure, and approval. It is this recognition of mutual need (Plato) that opens the vision of a renewed political community.

The book looks to the creative potential of experiences of failure, haunting, estrangement, impasse, or dream in Shakespeare. The focus is not just on what the plays represent but on what they do and how they inspire and unsettle the political imaginations of their audiences. The Introduction sets out the intellectual heritage underpinning this approach, including the tradition of negative theology and subsequent philosophies of the negative (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Badiou). It thereby establishes a negative political theology that challenges the official (or positive) political theology that sacralises power. By outlining “the disruptive spirit of negativity”, it shifts critical focus from the mimetic to the affective and opens new and more nuanced readings. The approach builds on the work of critics such as Annabel Patterson, Andrew Hadfield, and Chris Fitter, who have highlighted the anti-monarchical or popular political forces at play during the period. In the via negativia, however, it explores a very different origin and mode of egalitarianism. It focuses on the way negativity and unsettlement imaginatively transform political thought and relations. Shakespeare’s drama opens up visions of something other, including radical experiences of the “perhaps” or “what if”, that deepen the audience’s political thought.

Coriolanus manufactures his unbending martial spirit through both a life-and-death struggle for recognition (Hegel) against Aufidius and a life-defining opposition with the masses. Both oppositions seek to annul the other. By alienating our sympathies, first from Coriolanus and then the people, the play calls for our dialectical political thought. It asks us to see a mutuality, and hence a vision of justice (Plato), that those onstage cannot. We see them in failure and deadlock. His family’s love invades Coriolanus as a foreign force and shatters his self-sufficient oneness. He “melt[s]” before his wife’s silent “dove’s eyes”. In such moments, the subject (indeed the sovereign) becomes an other to itself. It observes itself from a point of estrangement and sees a previously obscured truth. Coriolanus breaks from his warrior-god role (and the master-slave deadlock) and is opened to something intersubjective: he is “not / Of stronger earth than others”. In Hegel’s terms, the masterful subject endures an experience of bondage, whereby “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations”. The chapter argues that Shakespeare turns his alienated audience into the “bondsmen” (or “slaves”) who must “work” on the play and think through its estranging oppositions.

Hamlet is thrown into a state of uncertainty about the eternal. Indeed, his famed “delay” is a response to the thought of eternity. He is given “pause” by imagining “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”. The eternal is the “rub”. The chapter tackles this obscure rub by turning to Soren Kierkegaard, who references Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in his Philosophical Fragments. Resurrection, for Kierkegaard, is a movement through non-being to being. Negativity here plays a critical role. To be “born again”, the learner must “become[] nothing and yet … not [be] annihilated”. Hamlet’s struggle with the eternal opens him to an expansive view of humanity that goes beyond Claudius’s will to power or Laertes’s customary honour. It brings him to a new political vision, outside the violent and reductive dynastic politics of Denmark. Hamlet seeks what would seem impossible within revenge tragedy: the incalculable. The “eternal” is here used in an inclusive sense to show how the obscure but liberating thought of the timeless or untimely allows ideas of justice, charity, equality, and forgiveness to enter the play. The eternal suggests an imaginary perspective that negates our current preoccupations and political economies.