Politics & Power Quote by Alex Cox

Cox is doing two things at once: paying dutiful tribute to the cultural deity (yes, Shakespeare) while yanking him back into the grime of actual history. The line flatters the canon, then immediately punctures the modern habit of treating “greatest writer” as synonymous with “timelessly progressive.” It’s a director’s move: praise the brand so the audience leans in, then cut to the complicating angle.

The key phrase is “probably,” a small hedge that signals Cox isn’t worshipping at the altar so much as staging a conversation about power. Shakespeare “lived in a time that was politically very conservative” is less a classroom fact than a warning about how art survives. Elizabethan and Jacobean theater wasn’t a TED Talk for dissent; it was entertainment under surveillance, operating inside patronage networks and censorship regimes. That pressure doesn’t just shape what gets said, but how it gets smuggled: coded irony, mistaken identities, fools who tell the truth, villains who speak too well.

Cox’s subtext is about reception as much as authorship. When we mine Shakespeare for liberation narratives, we’re often reading against the grain of a world that prized hierarchy, legitimacy, and social order. The plays can feel radical because they dramatize chaos and desire so vividly, but the machinery frequently snaps back toward restoration: crowns returned, marriages sealed, “order” reasserted. Cox isn’t canceling Shakespeare; he’s insisting that greatness doesn’t float above politics. It’s forged in negotiation with it.