Survival strategies: Shakespeare and Renaissance truth-telling

Shakespeare repeatedly grappled with a question that haunted him but that could not be openly discussed with reference to any of the key figures in contemporary English affairs: why do communities of free men and women, people who have every reason to look out for their own interests, succumb to those who have no regard for the common good? Master of the oblique angle, the playwright prudently projected his imagination away from his immediate circumstances and explored in ancient Rome or pre-Christian Sicily or medieval England the territory he could not safely enter in his own world.