Shakespeare is revered as the greatest writer in the English language, yet education reform in the English-speaking world is informed primarily by the market order, rather than the kind of humanism we might associate with Shakespeare. By considering Shakespeare s dramatisation of the principles that inform neoliberalism, this book makes an important contribution to the debate on the moral failure of the market mechanism in schools and higher education systems that have adopted neoliberal policy.

The utility of Shakespeare s plays as a means to explore our present socio-economic...