A note on editions; Preface; 1. Literature as history: with some questions about 'historical imagination'; 2. Dramatist as jingoist: The Massacre at Paris; 3. Dramatist as realist: the Jew of Malta; 4. Machiavelli and the crisis of Renaissance political consciousness; 5. Providence and policy in Richard III; 6. Providence and history in Elizabethan thought; 7. History without morality: Edward II; 8. Shakespearean history: critique of 'Elizabethan policy'; 9. Shakespeare's political agnosticism: Richard II; 10. Supernature and demonism in Elizabethan thought; 11. The new wine and the old bottles: Doctor Faustus; 12. Marlowe and the Calvinist doctrine of reprobation; 13. 'An unknown fear': The Tragedie of Macbeth; 14. Macbeth and the theology of evil; 15. Artist and ethos; Appendices; Notes; Index.