In his 1771 letter to Robert Skipwith, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written." It is in this spirit that the Thomas C. and Romona E. McDonald Center at Mercer University collected these twelve essays based on papers presented at the 2024 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the theme of which was Shakespeare's Politics. Shakespeare makes a "lively and lasting" impression on all who appeal to him for an understanding of human things. What is the public good? How can we know it? How can we pursue it? What does it mean for our lives, individually and collectively? How does Shakespeare lead us into and through these inquiries in his plays, and what pitfalls must we watch out for when we read his works with questions such as these in mind? From Deneen M. Senasi's literary approach in "'A King of Shreds and Patches': A Fragmentology of Shakespeare and the Public Good," to Stuart D. Warner's philosophical approach in "Questions, Questions, Questions: Shakespeare’s Ambiguous Winter’s Tale," to Vickie Sullivan's approach through political theory in "Transcendent Ambition: Machiavelli and Shakespeare on Coriolanus and Julius Caesar," each author included in this volume comes to Shakespeare’s thought from their disciplinary perspective but also from an interpretive stance that transcends disciplinary difference. Other contributors include Clinton Allen Brand, Sheila T. Cavanagh, Kevin M. Cherry, Bernard Dobski, Khalil Habib, L. Joseph Hebert, Sujata Iyengar, Carol McNamara, and Gary Taylor.