Why are human societies hierarchical? How did centralized political authority originate? Anthropologists tell us that foraging societies are egalitarian compared to their agrarian and industrial successors. So what prompted our foraging ancestors to submit to the authority of big men, chiefs, and kings? And how did the big man once installed in the center maintain his authority in the face of the resentment mobilized against him? Shakespeare’s Exiles addresses these fundamental ethical, political, and anthropological questions by looking at two of Shakespeare’s most eccentric big men. Why does Timon, the once-legendary host of Athens, refuse to return to his beloved city? And why does Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, promise to break his staff and throw his books into the deep blue sea? In this highly original and provocative book, Richard van Oort shows that Shakespeare is not just a dramatist but a philosopher, political scientist, and anthropologist too.

Richard van Oort received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine in 2002, and was visiting assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia until 2007, when he joined the English department at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and Shakespeare’s Mad Men: A Crisis of Authority (Stanford University Press, 2022).