In his posthumously published Shakespeare and the world's disorder, the culmination of almost half a century of critical attention to Shakespeare's works, Marienstras analysed the patterns of political disintegration – marked by the arbitrariness of power, the legitimization of violence and the eclipse of the sacred – and "ontological erosion" he considered to lie at the heart of Shakespearean tragedy. He argued that even in the comedies, where tensions are finally resolved harmoniously, one cannot but sense that the reconciliations remain precarious.
