How strange the idea, and yet how compelling, that our greatest poet could also be our greatest teacher. These excellent essays return us to the problem of combining honor and love, the demand for dignity with the longing for something better.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University

The essays in this collection artfully bring together careful readings of the Shakespearean texts and some of the enduring issues of the political philosophic tradition. Serious students from both sets of disciplines will find in these fruitful encounters much food for thought.

Jules Gleicher, Rockford College

This engaging collection of essays looks intently at conflicts of honor and eros in Troilus and Cressida, friendship and love in Henry V, love and sex in Romeo and Juliet, nature and convention in As You Like It, moral absolutes and political relativities everywhere, and much more. This highly readable book helps clarify why Shakespeare remains top billing not just in high schools and universities but in the popular imagination.

David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago

The editors of Souls With Longing advance the notion that Shakespeare advocates a model of honor and love through his plays. In this conception, we are souls who long for love and honor; Shakespeare demonstrates how we can reach those goals....The essays very effectively make a case for a place at the Shakespearean table for readings that presume plenitude and desirability in ideas such as honor, love and Christian spirituality; one hopes for a book that more seriously accomplishes this task.

Sixteenth Century Journal