What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? Such questions--bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life--animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has often been obscured. Julia Reinhard Lupton gently dislodges Shakespeare's plays from their historical confines to pursue their universal implications. From Petruchio's animals and Kate's laundry to Hamlet's friends and Caliban's childhood,...