Shakespeare's Universal Wolf

In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare''s image of an universal wolf of appetite power and will represented and critiqued the emerging systems of modernity: mercantile capitalism Machiavellian politics and value-free rationality. Rereading Troilus Othello King Lear and As You Like It Grady finds many parallels between Shakespeare''s criticism and that of such critics as Marx Horkheimer Adorno and Foucault among others. In particular Grady points to Shakespeare''s keen interest in the twentieth-century concept of reification where social systems spin out of control operating under their own autonomous logic beyond the reach of the society which had created them.