Although he is considered to be the world’s greatest dramatist, Shakespeare seems to have escaped the detection of thinkers on politics and the philosophic tradition of thought on man. Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ with ‘The Tempest’ is Mark McDonald’s inquiry into the political philosophy of William Shakespeare through a reading of King Lear with reference to The Tempest. McDonald follows an argument connecting King Lear to the question of natural right and to changes in the orders of the western world at the beginnings of modernity.