SH A K E SPE A R E A N D E A R LY MODE R N POL I T IC A L T HOUGH T
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SH A K E SPE A R E A N D E A R LY MODE R N POL I T IC A L T HOUGH T
This is the first collaborative volume to place Shakespeare’s works within the landscape of early modern political thought. Until recently, literary scholars have not generally treated Shakespeare as a participant in the political thought of his time, unlike his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. At the same time, historians of political thought have rarely turned their attention to major works of poetry and drama. A distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors examines the full range of Shakespeare’s writings in order to challenge conventional interpretations of plays central to the canon, such as Hamlet ; open up novel perspectives on works rarely considered to be political, such as the Sonnets; and focus on those that have been largely neglected, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a coherent and challenging portrait of Shakespeare’s distinctive engagement with the characteristic questions of early modern political thought: among them, corruption and citizenship, education and persuasion, the hazards of the court and the demands of the commonwealth. is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. is a Scientia Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales and an Honorary Professor at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland. is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney.
SH A K E SPE A R E A N D E A R LY MODE R N POL I T IC A L T HOUGH T DAV I D A R M I TAGE , C ON A L C ON DR E N A N DR E W F I T Z M AU R IC E
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ © Cambridge University Press Th is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Shakespeare and early modern political thought / [edited by] David Armitage, Conal Condren, Andrew Fitzmaurice. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ---- (hardback) . Shakespeare, William, ––Political and social views. . Politics in literature. . Politics and literature–Great Britain– History–th century. . Politics and literature–Great Britain–History–th century. . Political science–Great Britain–History–th century. . Political science– Great Britain–History–th century. I. Armitage, David, – II. Condren, Conal. III. Fitzmaurice, Andrew. . .′–dc ---- hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of contributors Acknowledgements List of citations and abbreviations
page vii x xii
Introduction
David Armitage, Conal Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice
Shakespeare’s properties
David Armitage
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare’s plays
Cathy Curtis
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority
Stephen Greenblatt
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
Susan James
Counsel, succession and the politics of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Cathy Shrank
Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal
Aysha Pollnitz
The corruption of Hamlet
Andrew Fitzmaurice
v
Contents
vi
Unfolding ‘the properties of government’: the case of Measure for Measure and the history of political thought
Conal Condren
Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship: Henry VIII
Jennifer Richards
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
Phil Withington
Talking to the animals: persuasion, counsel and their discontents in Julius Caesar
David Colclough
Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus
Markku Peltonen
Shakespeare and the best state of a commonwealth
Eric Nelson
Afterword: Shakespeare and humanist culture
Quentin Skinner
Index
Contributors
is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. Among his publications are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History () and British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, – (editor, ). He is currently working on a study of the foundations of modern international thought, an edition of John Locke’s colonial writings and a history of ideas of civil war from Rome to Iraq. is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London. Among his publications are Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England () and John Donne ’s Professional Lives (editor, ). He is currently editing volume III of the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I). is a Scientia Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales and an Honorary Professor at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland. His most recent book is Argument and Authority in Early Modern England (). He is currently working on a volume of essays on Shakespeare’s use of the political arguments of his own day, a study of the philosophic persona in English satire and a theoretical model of concept-formation in politics. is an Honorary Associate in History at the University of Sydney. Among her publications are studies of Tudor humanism, of the persona of the early modern philosopher and of Juan Luis Vives. She is currently working on a book-length study of Sir Thomas More. is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Among his publications is Humanism and America (). He is currently completing ‘A History of Terra Nullius’, a study of the understanding of property and occupation in colonial context. vii
viii
Contributors
is the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Among his numerous publications on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature are Shakespearean Negotiations (), Hamlet in Purgatory () and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (). He is also the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio (). is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College London. Among her publications are Passion and Action: The Emotions in Early Modern Philosophy (), Visible Women: Essays in Legal Theory and Political Philosophy (co-editor, ) and The Political Writings of Margaret Cavendish (editor, ). She is currently writing a book about Spinoza’s political philosophy. is Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University. Among his publications are The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought () and an edition of Thomas Hobbes’s translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (). He is currently working on the ways in which the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources transformed political thought in early modern Europe. is Professor of the History of Ideas at the University of Helsinki. Among his publications are Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought – () and The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (). He is currently working on rhetoric, politics and popularity in early modern England. is a Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. She is currently working on a monograph on princely education in sixteenth-century Britain. is Professor of English at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Among her publications are Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (), Rhetoric () and Early Modern Civil Discourses (editor, ). She is currently working on ‘Diet, Dialogue and the Early Modern Body Politic’. is Reader in Tudor Literature at the University of Sheffield. Among her publications are Writing the Nation in Reformation England, – () and the Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, – (co-editor, ). She is currently working on an edition of Shakespeare’s poems and a monograph on non-dramatic dialogues.
Contributors
ix
is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London. Among his publications are The Foundations of Modern Political Thought ( vols., ), Visions of Politics ( vols., ) and, most recently, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (). is Lecturer in Social and Economic History at the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellow of the Economic and Social Research Council. Among his publications are The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England () and Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (coeditor, ). He is currently completing a book about early modernity and society and researching the history of intoxicants and intoxication in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of most of the chapters in this volume were presented at the conference ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’ held at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University. We are especially grateful to the former Director of the Centre, Ian Donaldson, for generously supporting the conference and for energetically joining our discussions. The Centre’s Programs Manager, Leena Messina, and her staff made all the arrangements for the event with exemplary efficiency. Further financial support came from the Australian Research Council’s Network for Early European Research, from the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney and from the British Academy. Conal Condren also wishes to thank the Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library for facilitating his seminar ‘Staging Political Thought’ which carried forward the concerns of our original meeting. We were fortunate that Dermot Cavanagh and Gordon McMullan were present in Canberra: their commentaries on the papers, and on the project as a whole, were indispensable. More recently, Andrew McRae and Markku Peltonen have offered helpful readings of our Introduction. Quentin Skinner’s influence on the project has been palpable throughout: the Afterword is only the latest of his many incisive contributions to our enterprise. We would not have been able to complete the book without the unstinting support of Cambridge University Press. Our thanks go to the Press’s anonymous readers for their comments, to Richard Fisher for his confidence, and to Sarah Stanton and Rebecca Jones for their patience and pertinacity. Paul B. Davis’s editorial assistance was again invaluable, and we must also thank Averil Condren for compiling the index and Chris Jackson for his meticulous copy-editing. Above all, we are grateful to the contributors for their steady commitment to our collaboration. All’s well that ends well. x
Citations and abbreviations
All quotations from Shakespeare’s works are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, nd edn (New York, ), unless otherwise specified. In all quotations from other early modern texts, i, j, u and v have been regularised to conform with modern usage. ODNB:
H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vols. (Oxford, ).
OED:
Oxford English Dictionary.
STC:
A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, –, nd edn, vols. (London, –).
xii
Introduction David Armitage, Conal Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice
Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought is the first collaborative attempt to situate Shakespeare’s works within the landscape of early modern political thought. It brings together intellectual historians and literary scholars to engage in a common enquiry that both sides have, until recently, pursued apart, if they have pursued it at all. Intellectual historians who have followed the so-called ‘contextualist’ method of intellectual history have generally focused their attention on recovering the historical meanings of texts canonically collected under the heading of political theory: that is, for the early modern period, works by such figures as Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas More, Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington and John Locke. This style of intellectual history emerged originally as the means to interpret formal works of political argument, the great majority of which were composed as prose treatises: its first practitioners mostly overlooked other genres of early modern texts that also contain political reflection, most notably poetry and the drama. Literary scholars have generally been more open to applying the findings of intellectual history to their objects of study: indeed, placing works by such canonical figures as Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, John Milton and Andrew Marvell in dialogue with early modern political thought has been one of the major achievements of literary and historical scholarship since the s. However, until very recently one major early
For example, David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (), rev. edn (Oxford, ); Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyle (Oxford, ); Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, – (Oxford, ), pp. –; Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, ); Katharine Eisaman Maus, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton, ); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, – (Cambridge, ); David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, ); Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis, eds., Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke, ); Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford, ).
, , modern writer has not been treated systematically as a participant in the political thought of his time: William Shakespeare. To be sure, Shakespeare criticism has long treated such figures as Machiavelli and Montaigne as the poet’s interlocutors, but rarely has their impact been subject to sustained analysis on the level of political thought. There have been those influenced by the work of the political philosopher Leo Strauss who have aimed to extract timeless political wisdom from Shakespeare’s plays. There was also an influential group of (mostly British) Marxist critics who sought to unmask the politics in the plays under the rubric of ‘cultural materialism’. And a few germinal essays appeared in the s placing Shakespeare’s works within historical discourses of republicanism, monarchism and resistance theory. Shakespeare’s political thought was never entirely neglected during the following quartercentury or so of highly productive work in cultural materialism, New Historicism, the new textual criticism and the new theatre history of performance and production, but it inspired few monographs and almost no collective volumes, in contrast, for example, to studies of Shakespeare’s relation to the religious thought and practice of his time. These religious concerns have given fresh impetus to biographical work on Shakespeare; the closely related questions of political thought have only just begun to inspire similar study and debate.
Allan Bloom with Harry V. Jaff a, Shakespeare’s Politics (New York, ); John E. Alvis and Thomas G. West, eds., Shakespeare as Political Thinker (), rev. edn (Wilmington, Del., ); Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan, eds., Shakespeare’s Political Pageant: Essays in Politics and Literature (Lanham, Md., ); John A. Murley and Sean D. Dutton, eds., Perspectives on Politics in Shakespeare (Lanham, Md., ). Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (London, ). Anne Barton, ‘Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’ (), in Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge, ), pp. –; David Scott Kastan, ‘ “Proud Majesty Made a Subject”: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), –; David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, ), pp. –; Richard Strier, ‘Faithful Servants: Shakespeare’s Praise of Disobedience’, in Strier and Heather Dubrow, eds., The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago, ), pp. –. Exceptions are Blair Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare Survey, (), –; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’, in David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, ), pp. –; and recent work by Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London, ) and Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, ). For the recent interest in Shakespeare’s religious thought see, for example, Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, ); Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester, ); Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard, eds., Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (New York, ); Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago, );
Introduction
To locate Shakespeare’s engagement with early modern political thought, it is important to begin with an understanding that he and his contemporaries inhabited a moral world that was dramatically different from that which followed the American, French and Industrial Revolutions. Elizabethans and Jacobeans were politically closer to the ancient Greeks and Romans more than one thousand years before them than they were to liberal individualism three hundred years later. They took the studia humanitatis, the classical corpus of texts on history, moral philosophy, rhetoric, grammar and poetry as their guide to political life. This classical learning had been revived in the Italian and, subsequently, northern European Renaissance. Thus early modern Europeans were apt to agree with Aristotle that humans are sociable animals who are driven by their nature to live in communities and create cities. These sociable animals, not being born for themselves alone (as Plato put it), were expected to pursue the good of others, the common good. Early modern Europeans also broadly concurred with their Roman predecessors that the aim of political life was honour and glory and that these ends would be achieved through the performance of duties: that is, as Cathy Curtis shows in her chapter in this volume, through an active public life, or the vita activa. In order successfully to pursue that active life and so to realise the common good and achieve glory it was necessary to be virtuous: to exercise such qualities as wisdom, courage, justice and temperance. Virtue, after all, is what allows us to put others before our narrow self-interests; it drives our sociability. Virtue was not, however, believed to be innate or immune from corruption and depravity, neither was what counted as virtue invariant. Indeed, as Conal Condren and Jennifer Richards argue in their chapters, virtue was deeply contested. Following Cicero’s On Duties, Renaissance audiences understood that being virtuous frequently demanded overcoming conflicts between virtues, for example between truthfulness and decorum, so that the exercise of prudence – the art of judging how to act in given circumstances – was essential to virtuous action. It was argued, therefore, that education would be fundamental to the success of this system of politics that placed so much importance on personal qualities.
Jean-Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage (Basingstoke, ); Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare, – (Oxford, ). See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Th ought, vols. (Cambridge, ); J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Th ought, – (Cambridge, ). On the centrality of education in early modern political thought see Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I, pp. –.
, , It was a central argument of classical and Renaissance political thought that virtue had to be instilled in subjects, citizens and, above all, princes. As Aysha Pollnitz shows in her chapter, Shakespeare directly engaged with the question of just what sort of education was necessary for a virtuous prince, although he turned conventional wisdom on its head. This emphasis upon education led many early sixteenth-century humanists, such as John Colet and Desiderius Erasmus, to devote great effort to the foundation of grammar schools with curricula based upon the studia humanitatis. It was from studying the Greek and Roman texts in conjunction with biblical teachings that students were expected to learn habits of virtue. And it was from just these texts that Shakespeare himself received his political education. Elizabethan grammar schools, like the one in Stratford-upon-Avon, helped to establish a widely diffused audience of the educated. Education in the schools encompassed the ‘middling sort’ and the yeomanry, and in some cases the poor. These lower social orders, when adequately instructed, were charged with substantial responsibilities in maintaining the commonwealth. Their education prepared them for the possession of formal offices. Theirs was a political education, but it was also a moral one, for political thought was understood to be a branch of moral philosophy. Importantly, therefore, all moral questions were understood to have political implications. Moreover, the other disciplines of the studia humanitatis, history, poetry and rhetoric, were understood to be vehicles for moral philosophy, and they were all, therefore, organs of political reflection . Here, then, is one of the fundamental distinctions between early modern and modern understandings of political life. From the early modern perspective, it was the character and spirit of those making up the polity that was crucial to its political health. In relative contrast, modern political analysis has put more stress on the institutional and constitutional arrangements of politics. In this sense, early modern politics was particularly personal, whatever its constitutional form. This contrast between modern and pre-modern polities, in their priorities and in their means of conducting politics, was largely shaped by the resources available to
On the grammar school curriculum see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, ), pp. –; T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, vols. (Urbana, ). Th is point is frequently made by reference to the writings of Sir Thomas Smith (see below). See Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I, pp. –; Quentin Skinner, ‘Political Philosophy’, in Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhart Kessler and Jill Kraye, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
Introduction
each. The modern emphasis upon institutions roughly corresponds to the rise of the state. In sixteenth-century Europe, states and their various instruments (of taxation, legal enforcement, policing and so forth) were comparatively weak, sometimes almost non-existent. The participation of people in political life was accordingly necessary for the accomplishment of many tasks that would later be assumed by the state. Indeed, political thought immediately before and during most of Shakespeare’s lifetime focused not upon the state (which was only beginning to demand attention as a subject of political analysis) but on the city or the prince . In addition to emphasising virtue, honour, duty and political participation, early modern political thought placed enormous emphasis upon the role of political counsel and persuasion in the proper functioning of politics, themes David Colclough, Cathy Shrank and Markku Peltonen explore in their chapters. The art of rhetoric was the guide to virtuous persuasion. Persuasion and counsel were the principal means through which personal politics could be conducted; they acknowledged the contingencies in political affairs and provided methods to control them. Moreover, in the absence of divine revelation in guiding everyday life, how best to distinguish between good and bad was itself a fundamentally rhetorical exercise. This faith in the importance of persuasion did not arise from an excessive attachment to pagan sources. Christianity was also defined by the word, and Catholic theologians such as Erasmus, as much as their Protestant counterparts such as Melanchthon, understood that Christian truth could be established only through persuasion. Persuasion and counsel were, as Colclough also argues, the very machinery and stuff of government. Persuasion is of course necessary only where there are different points of view, at least two sides to a question. And throughout Shakespeare’s times, the notion of arguing both sides (in utramque partem) was a fundamental recognition of the contingency of political knowledge. On the Renaissance and especially on the Shakespearean stage, this contingency
On state formation see Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. – (Cambridge, ); David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review, (), –. On persuasion and early modern political thought see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric; Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, ); David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, ). See John W. O’Malley, ‘Content and Rhetorical Forms in Sixteenth-Century Preaching’, in James J. Murphy, ed., Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric (Berkeley, ), pp. –; Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, ).
, , was effectively dramatised through the interplay of characters who could represent different positions, as the chapters by Richards, Peltonen and Condren illustrate. Consequently, drama was one of the main instruments of Renaissance political thinking, even if it later became marginal to the canons of the history of political thought. One of the aims of this volume is to show that Shakespeare’s dramatisation of political debate can deepen our understanding of the texture of early modern political thought. For example, his theatrical presentation of political argument in utramque partem helps us to understand how the form of early modern political thought also shaped its content. Such a deeply personal system of politics was, of course, open to corruption, and a concern with corruption (treated in the chapters by James, Curtis, Greenblatt, Fitzmaurice, Nelson, Condren, Richards and Colclough) was the obverse side of the politics of virtue. Indeed, as the sixteenth century progressed, anxiety about corruption deepened. In mainland Europe the Reformation divided not only the continent but, in decades of chronic warfare including civil war, it divided states, communities and even families. The human toll of the wars of religion was astonishing and remains so even next to the bloody history of the twentieth century. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that these wars shook the foundations of European political thought. The notion of human sociability became increasingly suspect, and that of the common good increasingly contentious. Shakespeare never registered these shocking facts with the immediacy of, say, Christopher Marlowe in his Massacre at Paris, but the shadows of civil war and human unsociability hang over many of his history plays (especially the first tetralogy) and Roman plays such as Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Responding to the wars of religion, Europeans writing about politics increasingly emphasised survival as the goal of political life. The wars of religion did much to guarantee the success of Machiavelli’s writings, although he wrote just prior to the Reformation and was motivated not by religious conflict but by the dangerous and unstable world of Italian city states. For Machiavelli, a prince should be virtuous in the sense that he or she should demonstrate a virtuoso ability to employ deceit, dissimulation
For the use of in utramque partem political argument in Shakespeare’s drama see Jean E. Howard, ‘Dramatic Traditions and Shakespeare’s Political Thought’, in David Armitage, ed., British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, – (Cambridge, ), p. , and Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley, ). J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford, ).
Introduction
and fear to secure his or her own survival and aggrandisement. Following Machiavelli, interest – meaning, variously, self-interest and the interests of state – became increasingly central to political debate in the second half of the sixteenth century. It is true that Cicero and followers of Cicero had emphasised prudence as a quality essential to navigate conflicts between virtues. But Ciceronians had also always insisted that a good citizen or subject must be a ‘good man’, what Cicero himself had called a bonus homo. As prudence became an increasingly valued skill in the sixteenth century, the virtues it was intended to secure became increasingly obscured. For the citizen or subject, self-interest replaced the bonus homo, and the ‘reasons’ or interests of state could be held to compete with the common good as the aims of the government. While virtue had never been monolithic in Ciceronian thought, Ciceronian prudence had given birth to a new form of political thought that was revolutionary in its rejection of what had preceded it. Precisely because rhetoric was understood to be integral to political life, concern with corruption and self-interest extended to the role of oratory. For both classical and Renaissance authors, oratory was not only the means of good government, it was also an opportunity for flattery, dissimulation, demagoguery and tyranny. Self-interest could be cunningly disguised as good counsel. Tyrants could use oratory to control the mob. Rhetorical redescription could transform virtues into vices and vices into virtues. As Colclough argues, rhetoric made for a highly unstable moral world, one in which the participants were trying to navigate without a compass. According to Cicero, who was the Renaissance model for oratory, it was necessary for a good orator to be wise and good. This did not preclude dissimulation for a good end; but Machiavelli, who inverted so much of the moral order of the Renaissance, was necessarily obliged also to invert the rhetorical order. Dissimulation was necessary to the prince’s survival and consolidation of power: ‘one must be a great feigner and dissembler’. A ruler, he observed, need not possess all the political virtues, but ‘he must certainly seem to. Indeed, I shall be so bold as to say that having and always cultivating them is harmful, whereas seeming to have them is useful.’ From a Tacitean perspective, it was necessary for those close to a
For the rise of conceptions of interest in early modern political thought see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government – (Cambridge, ). See Quentin Skinner, ‘Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence’, in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vols. (Cambridge, ), II, pp. –. Cicero, De Oratore, trans. H. Rackham, vols. (Cambridge, Mass., ), . . –. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Russell Price and ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, ), p. .
, , prince to sweat when the prince sweats, laugh when he laughs, and to use flattery and dissimulation to survive. Montaigne, and many of his contemporaries, including Justus Lipsius and Pierre Charron, argued that in a dangerous and corrupt world the virtuous pursuit of politics could lead to self-destruction. Good counsel could be treason and Cicero’s bonus homo a traitor. As Francis Bacon dryly commented in his essay Of Goodness, there are some men who are so good they are good for nothing . Rhetoric could also fail. While Shakespeare inhabited a world that had a profound faith in the power of rhetoric and that saw oratory as the machinery of government, he also explored a breakdown of persuasion, which was of course the breakdown of government. Amid corruption, as both Shrank and Peltonen argue, some subjects could prove so unresponsive to their duty that they would fail to be moved by appeals to their obligations and the virtues. A common cause for such a failure of rhetoric to persuade was perceived to be faction, one of the most corrupting of all political influences, according to Renaissance political thought. It was faction that had caused the decline in the political life of the Italian city republics, dramatised in Romeo and Juliet. Extremes of faction could be found where subjects responded only to their narrow interests, which, Peltonen argues, is the case with the aristocrats and commons in Coriolanus . Living in a world populated by Machiavellian princes and a country rent by religious civil war, Montaigne for one had recognised that the subjects of such princes also needed special skills to survive. He dismissed the idea that it could still be possible for him to live as his father had done, devoted to formal offices, employing his virtue to pursue the common good. As David Armitage argues in his chapter, William Shakespeare similarly appears to have had no interest in holding any of the various public offices that his father John Shakespeare had held. For Montaigne, the Roman philosopher Seneca was one of the best guides to life in the dangerous world of the court, and for Montaigne’s contemporary, Justus Lipsius, much of this wisdom could be gained both from Seneca and from the Roman historian Tacitus, whose works Lipsius edited. Whereas Cicero’s writings had provided the model for a virtuous active life for much of the Renaissance, by the late sixteenth century Tacitus had for
Francis Bacon, The Essays, Colours of Good and Evil, and Advancement of Learning (London, ), p. . Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I, pp. –. See Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp. –; Biancamaria Fontana, Montaigne’s Politics: Authority and Governance in the Essais (Princeton, ).
Introduction
many equalled and even surpassed the authority of Cicero. To survive, one was faced with a choice between the corrupt pursuit of politics and a withdrawal into the contemplative life. For Montaigne, this choice was necessarily self-interested and, as if to underline the point, his contemplative pursuit increasingly consisted of placing himself at the centre of his writing. His literary identity was a means of giving life to a new subject who was self-preserving. Shakespeare likewise seems to have avoided the entanglements of political association, for there is no record of his holding any formal office. He nevertheless engaged political life at one step removed: namely, through verse and drama. In contrast to Montaigne, he also removed himself and almost all traces of himself from the literary record, and he pursued his political identity through the possession of property . Shakespeare, that is, seemingly abandoned the pursuit of his own political identity through office and duty, the dominant political language of the sixteenth century, and embraced a rights-based claim to political identity which, out of the transformations in political thought in his own time, would become fundamental to modern political thought . Sixteenth-century England largely escaped the misfortunes that descended upon the European continent. The ideals of the northern Renaissance had been articulated by Thomas More in Utopia, in which he imagined a society devoted to the common good and driven to a remarkably radical degree by the Renaissance commonplace that virtue was the only true nobility (unsettling the notion that nobility was acquired through birth). Although More was one of the first victims of the English Reformation, his idealism was kept alive by the English commonwealth writers in the relatively tranquil years that followed his death. Chief amongst these mid-century ‘commonwealthmen’ was Sir Thomas Smith, who was able to portray England as a community, or a series of overlapping communities, in which political life was naturally sociable and in which political subjects (many of whom were also understood to be citizens), who were in Cicero’s terms good men, pursued the common good driven by a commitment to virtue and employing the tool of counsel.
Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism and Reason of State’, in Burns and Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, –, pp. –. See Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I, pp. –. On commonwealth writers see ibid., p. . See Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (), ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, ); [Smith], A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (London, ).
, ,
At just the time in the s when Shakespeare began his career, during what has been seen as Queen Elizabeth’s ‘second reign’, English political life was increasingly marked by growing religious tensions, war, impoverishment and mounting anxieties over the succession, anxieties whose effects Shrank and Pollnitz trace in their chapters. This deterioration was accompanied by a growing pessimism and anxiety in political reflection. Not surprisingly, European writers such as Montaigne, who had explored political interest, now found an audience in England marginalising the idealistic images of England presented by the commonwealth writers. Similarly, as on the continent, the classical authors who had most deeply explored interest and corruption, particularly Tacitus and Seneca, were increasingly used to challenge the moral authority of Cicero and Aristotle. This does not mean that the idealism of the vita activa and the virtuous life was altogether extinguished. Rather, what ensued and endured through to the eighteenth century was a complex dialogue between interest and virtue. Shakespeare’s verse and drama were written and performed in the context of that dialogue, and it is within that dialogue that Shakespeare’s political thought acquired its meaning . The concern with interest has been closely identified with the dangerous politics of the court. The culture of the court was devoted to problems of authority, resistance, obedience, legitimacy, prerogative and reason of state. The opaque world of the court was perceived to be disposed to corruption. At the same time, England was described by contemporaries as a republic, or as a ‘commonwealth’ (an Anglicisation of the Latin res publica). It was understood in this way because of the large number of public offices that could be held by men and women at the level of the parish, the city and the state. More than half the male population could expect to hold public office in their lifetime, and the moral language of office-holding spread well beyond formal offices to embrace even the practices of the poet and dramatist. The participation of women was
Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, ); John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, ); John Morrill, ‘Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears the Crown’: Dynastic Crises in Tudor and Stuart Britain, – (Reading, ). J. H. M Salmon, ‘Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’, in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, ), pp. –; Collinson, De Republica Anglorum: or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge, ); John F. MacDiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (Aldershot, ). Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office Holding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c. – (Basingstoke, ), pp. –. For
Introduction
possible but more restricted (see below). The conventions of the studia humanitatis were used to understand and to define the performance of these offices. Good counsel was perceived as crucial to good governance. Citizens were believed to possess liberty through their participation in pursuing the common good. This was what has been described by some political philosophers as the positive liberty of performing duties more than the negative liberty of possessing rights. A generation of scholarship has now excavated an extensive early modern English understanding of citizenship as well as the civic circumstances in which it was practised. These historians have argued that a broad spectrum of early modern English men and women were able to perceive themselves as citizens of the commonwealths of parish, town and state. This scholarship has been so successful that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the politics of early modern England and the republics of Florence and Venice. Certainly, contemporaries often compared England’s government with Venice’s mixed constitution. However Venetian England may have been, Peltonen here argues that citizenship was more contested than we are apt to assume and that all republics were marked by a struggle between aristocratic and demotic interpretations of citizenship. One crucial contest in England, as aired in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, was over who could be a citizen: could citizenship extend beyond the male civic gentry and, if so, what duties might be assumed by a yeoman or even a woman? Far from England’s enjoying a settled politics of city republics, struggles over the extent of citizenship characterised not only the theory but also the practice of politics. A closely related struggle
the range of the vocabulary of office and its implications, see Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge, ). Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, ), pp. –. For a different formulation see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, ). See, for example, Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’; Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic’; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, – (Cambridge, ); Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation – (Cambridge, ); Condren, Argument and Authority; Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freeman in Early Modern England (Cambridge, ); McDiarmid, ed., Monarchical Republic; Jennifer Richards, ed., Early Modern Civil Discourses (Basingstoke, ); Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness; Colclough, Freedom of Speech. For scepticism about this scholarship see Condren, Argument and Authority. On contemporary interest in Venice see Peltonen, Classical Humanism, pp. –, –. The two commonwealths also developed increasingly close ties through their common hostility to the Papacy: see David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge, ) and Noel Malcolm, De Dominis, –: Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and Relapsed Heretic (London, ).
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concerned the duties of the aristocracy and gentry. As Shrank argues in her chapter, the publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets can be understood in this context as a nostalgic appeal to the virtues of aristocratic citizenship. Like so much of Shakespeare’s commentary on commonwealth ideals, the Sonnets lament what is lost. The consciously masculine language of classical and Renaissance political thought limited but did not exclude women from political life, although modern conceptions of the public and private were largely absent. The family and the household, the domain with which women were most commonly associated, were widely regarded as a microcosm of the commonwealth. This point was underlined by Aristotle and Xenophon, as well as being a commonplace of theories of political evolution. In the Renaissance the domestic and political spheres were regarded as so closely intertwined that Jean Bodin criticised even the Greeks for excessively ‘distinguishing Politics from Oeconomics, and the city from the family’. Bodin’s observation has been illustrated by a number of the contributors to this volume (including Condren, Colclough and Withington) who show that our much later distinctions between private and public spheres are problematic when attributed to Shakespeare. Women, however, were obliged to negotiate political life through a language of masculine participation. But in a culture that delighted in paradox, inversion, symbolic meaning and redescription, it was always possible for women to be portrayed in terms of (and to exploit) the masculine language of citizenship, just as it was possible for men to be effeminised. The portrayal of political virtue as masculine almost inevitably meant that the portrayal of corruption was gendered as feminine. Gender was a role to be played rather than a property of man or woman (a point underscored by the use of boys to play the roles of women in the Elizabethan theatre). Shakespeare certainly appreciated this point, and theatre provided the perfect medium for the performance of gender.
Cited in Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. . On rhetorical redescription see Skinner, ‘Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence’. On women, citizenship and corruption, see Patricia Crawford, ‘ “The Poorest She”: Women and Citizenship in Early Modern England’, in Michael Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of : The Army, the Levellers and the English State (Cambridge, ), pp. –; David Norbrook, ‘ “Words More than Civil”: Republican Civility in Lucy Hutchinson’s “The Life of John Hutchinson”’, in Richards, ed., Early Modern Civil Discourses, pp. –; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, ch. ; Rebecca W. Bushnell, ‘Tyranny and Effeminacy in Early Modern England’, in Mario Di Cesare, ed., Reconsidering the Renaissance (Binghamton, N.Y., ), pp. –. For anxieties about corruption raised by boys playing women’s roles see Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Eff eminisation – (Cambridge, ).
Introduction
Withington reveals Shakespeare’s staging of gender in his analysis of The Merry Wives of Windsor. In this play the women perform the office of citizens according to the highest masculine standards of virtue, while the men are satirised as effeminate and therefore failing in their duties to the commonwealth. As Withington points out, this play alerts us to the possibility of a far more extensive understanding of the citizenship of women in early modern England than is commonly assumed. The lighter side of Shakespeare, like the light side of early modern political thought more generally, was balanced by the dark. The portrayal of gender was no exception. Satire always shadowed any positive portrayal of women’s political participation. In Roman satire, for example in Juvenal’s poems, satire was employed to show citizens the faces of virtue and corruption and encourage them on the right path. Like all Renaissance political thinkers, Shakespeare found the gendering of political virtue useful because it could be inverted to satiric effect as virtuous women were employed to shame corrupt men. This gendering of political thought had implications not only for the citizen and commonwealth but also for the court. The change in political context required a different manipulation of gender. But whereas women by and large needed to be gendered as masculine in order to qualify as citizens, whether satirically or otherwise, the gendering of the political thought of the court was in many ways more straightforward. As women were regarded as legitimate participants in court they didn’t need to be portrayed as masculine in order to qualify; indeed, they were able even to play themselves in court masques. By the time Shakespeare wrote, the political health of the court was in question, and it was widely regarded as prone to corruption. In this context, court women could appear as virtuous counterpoints to the corrupting force of tyranny, as Richard’s mother and the widowed Queen Elizabeth do in Richard III. More often, a corrupt court could be represented by a corrupt woman such as Gertrude or by an effeminate man such as Falstaff (as Fitzmaurice and Withington argue in their respective chapters). When the landscape of political thought and of post-Reformation politics shifted away from ideals of Ciceronian virtue and toward a more Machiavellian and Tacitean world, the uses of gender were further complicated. A virtuous woman, such as Miranda in The Tempest, could be
Anne McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, – (Cambridge, ). Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court – (Manchester, ).
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represented as naïve alongside a prince such as Prospero who had been obliged to learn to become Machiavellian. A seemingly virtuous woman, such as Isabella in Measure for Measure, could, according to Condren, be potentially more morally ambiguous than is obvious at first glance. Recent work has suggestively raised the possibility that public space in early modern England was predominantly feminine and private space masculine. One of the hallmarks of princely politics was an emphasis upon the secrets of power, or arcana imperii, underlying a belief that political deliberation was something that should be exercised in private rather than public. Remembering, however, that gender was performed, and also that our conceptions of public and private can only be mapped imprecisely onto early modern conceptions, it would be hasty to conclude that women were excluded from the secrets of power. It would seem, therefore, that English political life during Shakespeare’s lifetime presented two very different faces to the world, one of participation, citizenship and virtue, the other of oppression, corruption and fear. But this characterisation would be greatly to underestimate how close princely and republican cultures were in practice and theory in early modern England. Virtue, the active life and counsel were as much concerns of princely politics as they were of the republic, and republics had their courts with their attendant dangers, moral and physical. Indeed, many early modern commentators in fact emphasised that republics were more inclined to instability and treachery than principalities. (This is one reason many medieval Italian city-states chose to abandon their republican constitutions.) Corruption and reason of state were likewise both republican obsessions and princely concerns. It was this entanglement of republican and princely politics that has led some to describe England, echoing Thomas Smith, as a monarchical republic, although it might just as readily be characterised as a republican monarchy. While in this volume we have divided chapters into sections on ‘The court’ and ‘The commonwealth’ (as well as those that range more widely across the canon), this division should not be seen as a separation. On the contrary, the aim is to show the dialogue between the political ideals which address each cultural environment and to show from that dialogue that court and commonwealth were mutually interdependent in early modern England. Indeed, this was why Smith described England as a monarchical respublica anglorum.
See Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. –. Collinson, ‘Monarchical Republic’; MacDiarmid, ed., Monarchical Republic.
Introduction
Much of what has been written on Shakespeare and political thought has been devoted to the vexed issue of what kind of constitution he endorsed. Some critics have concluded that he was indeed a republican, others that he supported the status quo and others again that he was politically disengaged. While such questions are legitimate, there is an anachronistic element to the collective emphasis upon Shakespeare’s constitutional loyalty, as Eric Nelson argues forcefully in his chapter: constitutional questions were very much in the background of other central issues in early modern English political thought. Most contemporary subjects and citizens would have agreed that it is better to live under a virtuous monarchy than a corrupt or tyrannical republic. More than a generation after Shakespeare died, many supporters of the English Commonwealth realised that republics too could degenerate into tyrannical government. There were, of course, strongly held beliefs that the choice between monarchy or republic was a decision about which constitution was more likely to produce virtuous behaviour, but in either case, the end remained the desire for the rule of virtue, and the constitution was merely one of the means to that end. When early modern writers on politics asked which was the best state of a commonwealth, that goal determined their answers. As the concern with interest and corruption deepened in the sixteenth century, a shadow was cast over the optimism that one constitution or another could guarantee virtue. Political thought increasingly turned to how best to manage interest, self-interest and the interests of the state, whether under a monarchy or a republic or some combination of both. As many of the chapters in this volume reveal, Shakespeare amply shared this concern . This is not to argue, rather tediously perhaps, that Shakespeare held no political position, that he was a political ‘conservative’ (a term that was not in his political vocabulary) or that he was simply placing different political views in conflict with one another. If he seems to have no position, it might well be because we are looking for commitments about
The most extended discussion of Shakespeare as a republican is Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism. For Shakespeare’s political elusiveness, see Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, and Howard, ‘Dramatic Traditions and Shakespeare’s Political Thought’, pp. –. See, for example, Thomas More, Utopia, eds. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge, ), who took the best state of a commonwealth as his subject (p. ) but for whom the best state of a commonwealth was a perfectly virtuous state. On More’s virtuous constitution see Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility’, in Skinner, Visions of Politics, II, p. . See Howard, ‘Dramatic Traditions and Shakespeare’s Political Thought’, and Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’.
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issues that did not necessarily matter or had not taken shape. Collectively, the chapters in this volume show that Shakespeare must be situated amid the fundamental political concerns of his contemporaries: that is, in the milieu of values rather than debates about constitutions. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Shakespeare, refusing to commit clearly either to republican or monarchical government, was simply cynical about politics, that he was (or became) pessimistic to an almost Augustinian extent about humanity generally (as we see, for example, in Hamlet), and that this was why he saw no difference in choosing one constitution over another. Cynicism, however, was a rational response to what was perceived to be a dangerous and corrupt political world. It should not be mistaken for political disengagement, but was instead a form of commitment to survival and self-interest. It is clear, moreover, that through his body of writing Shakespeare dramatised a simple observation originally made in Aristotle’s Politics: namely, that all constitutions are given both to virtuous and corrupt forms – monarchy/tyranny, aristocracy/oligarchy, polity/ democracy. From the perspective of late sixteenth-century political cynicism, Aristotle’s taxonomy might be understood to reveal again that what mattered was not any particular constitution but the patterns of conduct and value that should prevail. Shakespeare showed that the Roman objective which was the same for each constitution – greatness – could only be achieved through the insight into values gained in his own age: that is, through a fine prudential calibration of how best to serve interest through the exercise of virtue. While always elusive in writing about constitutions, Shakespeare’s plays suggest he was sceptical about the idealisation of the common good, that sociability and virtue were no longer possible, and that the world was a newly dangerous and unstable place where interest, self-preservation and survival were a palpable political reality. In this respect Shakespeare shared more common ground with Italian political theorists of his generation, particularly Trajano Boccalini (–), whose life was contiguous with Shakespeare’s, than he did with either the Machiavelli of The Prince or The Discourses. Boccalini’s nostalgia for the rule of virtue combined with a hard-headed exploration of interest caught the attention
In his exploration of these themes Shakespeare was close to his colleague Ben Jonson: see Blair Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, ), pp. –; Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, pp. –. On greatness and glory see Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I; Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, pp. –.
Introduction
of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Florio, amongst others. Indeed, Shakespeare appeared to be wearing the lenses with which Boccalini claimed it was possible to look upon ‘mightie men or great Lords’. Not having this perspective would be a ‘torment and vexation unto an honest minde’ but, with these ‘strange spectacles’ upon his nose, Shakespeare was able to look upon the ‘lothsome and abominable things of this filthe corrupted world’. Shakespeare’s history plays are perhaps the most obvious candidates for the exploration of these themes, and indeed they have been the subject of the greatest share of the interest in Shakespeare’s political thought. Richard III, for example, is a triumph in the exploration of tyranny through the stage image of Machiavellian evil. No other character in the canon surpasses Richard’s depths of dissimulation, shamelessness (‘Conscience is but a word that cowards use’: Richard III, . . ), brutish behaviour (in yet another inversion of classical political thought, Machiavelli counselled the prince to imitate beasts) and naked self-interest. His rule was a fitting climax to the exploration of political thought across the three Henry VI plays. In Richard’s fall and his replacement with the virtuous reign of Henry VII we might be tempted to read a rejection of Machiavellian politics. Importantly, however, Shakespeare’s Richard was flawed as a Machiavellian prince. Machiavelli advised the prince against excess and being brought into contempt, and in this respect Richard was unsuccessful. He is similar to Machiavelli’s Cesare Borgia – spectacularly successful through his boldness but unable to maintain his state. He lacks the timeliness Machiavelli also counselled, and he certainly lacks the prudence recommended by later sixteenth-century writers who explored ‘reason of state’. One might conclude, therefore, that for
Trajano Boccalini, The New-Found Politike. Disclosing the Secret Natures and Dispositions as well of Private Persons as of Statesmen and Courtiers, trans. John Florio, Thomas Scott and William Vaughan (London, ), p. . See, for example, E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London, ); Pierre Sahel, La Pensée politique dans les drames historiques de Shakespeare (Paris, ); Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, N.Y., ); Tim Spiekerman, Shakespeare’s Political Realism: The English History Plays (Albany, N.Y., ); David Bevington, Shakespeare’s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and Earth (Chichester, ), ch. ‘What is Honour? Shakespeare’s Ideas on Politics and Political Theory’. Machiavelli, The Prince, p. : ‘a ruler must know well how to imitate beasts as well as employing properly human means’. Ibid., ch. . On reason of state and prudence see: Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I, pp. –; Burke, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism and Reason of State’, pp. –; Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism; Harro Höpfl, ‘Orthodoxy and Reason of State’, History of Political Thought, (), –.
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Shakespeare Richard III was not excessively Machiavellian – rather, he was not Machiavellian enough. He understood how to seize a state without appreciating how to maintain it. The history plays certainly provide one of the more obvious sources of interest in Shakespeare’s political thought, but a stimulating possibility raised by many studies in this volume is that tragedy provided a particularly appropriate medium for the exploration of the pessimistic politics of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. The emphasis upon the flaws in human character upon which Shakespearean tragedy hinged was ideal for the exploration of virtue and interest, and the weighing of each against the other. Remembering that this was a society in which the character of citizens and subjects was fundamental to political health, tragedy provided an instrument for the profound exploration of how individual failings precipitated social disruption. Again, in this respect drama complemented what could be accomplished in a prose work of political theory, and it thus constitutes a potentially rich resource for historians of political thought. Concomitantly, while literary critics have often been inclined to read the tragedies as moral stories, it is necessary, as Greenblatt argues, that we expand ‘moral’ to its full meaning in early modern Europe. Moral philosophy always led to political conclusions. While tragedy was a particularly useful political genre for any culture that placed a priority on character in political life, comedy, satire and history could all perform moral analysis. However, tragedy excelled where people believed themselves to be living in a torn and declining state. It is notable in this context that Shakespeare’s tragedies and Roman plays were generally written after : that is, later than his English histories. They were written at a time when continental political pessimism was deepening in England, with all the uncertainty associated with the end of one reign and the beginning of another. As Greenblatt observes: ‘Shakespeare’s tragic vision was the consequence of the political defects of his age.’ His contemporaries believed themselves to be living in a dangerous world in which the virtuous must either perish or retire and in which the vicious rule: indeed, Greenblatt argues that ‘in Shakespeare no character with a clear moral vision has a will to power and, conversely, no character with a strong desire to rule over others has an ethically adequate subject’. The tragic emphasis upon moral defects complemented that placed upon corruption in political culture. Indeed, the flaws of staged characters were also blemishes in the patterns of virtue that fitted them for governance or
Introduction
other offices. In this respect, some governors fail because they are tragic heroes, whether Othello, Coriolanus or Hamlet. This central role for tragedy in the exploration of political corruption is found across Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, for example in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, John Webster’s The White Devil and Ben Jonson’s Sejanus. Alongside Tacitus, the Roman imperial writer who most deeply explored a declining state was Seneca; his tragedies proved especially popular in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Seneca’s tragic devices included witches (notably Medea), bloodshed, darkness, portents, murder, treachery and evil. The imprint of Seneca can be found throughout Shakespeare’s tragedies, but the play that has been conventionally regarded as most deeply touched was Macbeth. And it is to Macbeth that Susan James turns to explore a form of corruption that was believed to be so deep that it constituted a disease: namely, superstition. As James reveals, superstition was not simply a religious or moral vice: it was a political vice. Superstition was believed to ‘undermine our capacity to engage with the world’, and in so doing it eroded the most important quality required of both princes and subjects to maintain a healthy political life. This disengagement was expressed both through withdrawal and brutality, and its consequence was tyranny. Superstition could produce terror, a state of self-induced fear that was indicative of the worst symptoms of this disease. Terror was internal, expressive of the most depraved state of the human mind and indicative of the worst form of political disintegration. Nowhere in this volume is the void between modern and early modern understandings of politics underscored more than in this discussion of the meaning of terror. At his darkest, Shakespeare shows what happens when human failing is combined with a Senecan, Tacitean or even Augustinian view of the world, a world in which vice is unavoidable. According to that view, earthly destiny is tragic. Tragedy was no longer a way of pointing out a path to learning and improvement – as was the case generally with satire, history and comedy. Rather, it expressed fatalism before inevitable corruption. Was redemption possible from the unremittingly bleak
On office-holders as ‘governors’ see Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (London, ). See, for example, Seneca his Ten Tragedies, ed. Thomas Newton (London, ); Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven, ); Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford, ). Geoff rey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vols. (London, –), VII, p. .
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political outlook in the tragedies? Greenblatt argues that the tragedies also insist on the inevitability of judgement, not in the next world but this . One form of that judgement is in the black humour of such plays as Richard III and Hamlet. Laughter, as Thomas Wilson pointed out in his Arte of Rhetorique of , was a means by which ‘the fondness, the filthiness, the deformitie’ in the behaviour of others was condemned. Laughter may well have been the only consolation in the face of political depravity. However, it could also have a more sinister aspect harmonious with the temper of the times. For Thomas Hobbes, who was already a young man when Shakespeare’s career was at its height, the contempt and superiority implicit in laughter would be confirmation of his view of humanity as unsociable. Shakespeare’s contemporaries similarly regarded laughter as a form of contempt and their jaundiced view of humanity, while not Hobbesian, was the ground from which Hobbes would draw his own conclusions. For those searching for Shakespeare’s political position, the calibration of interest against virtue may not be particularly satisfying, because it lacks the clarity of doctrine. That question of doctrine brings us again to how the history of political thought can benefit from the study of Shakespeare. We have already noted that the chapters in this volume address the significance of Shakespeare’s texts for our understanding of the history of political thought (for example, in the staging of political argument and the exploration of character) as much as they concern the significance of political thought for our understanding of his texts. There are numerous other particular insights into early modern political thinking to be learnt from this pursuit, but there is another general conclusion to be drawn here. Just as the contextual approach to the history of political thought has much to offer our understanding of Shakespeare, we also find that Shakespeare’s texts reveal some of the challenges in working contextually. The contexts to the genres of poetry and drama are particularly porous, perhaps more so than the prose works of political theory. Such texts highlight problems central to the contextual approach to history: namely, what counts as context depends partly on the questions
On laughter as a form of political judgement see Quentin Skinner, ‘Why Laughing Mattered in the Renaissance’, History of Political Thought, (), –; Wilson is cited from ibid., p. . On Hobbes and laughter see Skinner, ‘Why Laughing Mattered’. On Hobbes’s theory of unsociability as a product of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century jaundice see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, ).
Introduction
we want to answer. As with works of political theory, what we might see as the political modulates into historical, legal, religious, moral and metaphysical discourse, each in turn inviting analysis in a number of different directions. In addition, Shakespeare’s texts lie at the junctions of countless practices, activities and institutions. The logistics of production, the size of companies, the heterogeneity of audience; patronage; the imperatives of commercial success (writing by committee, as Richards discusses, or in a rush) point to a multiplicity of questions to be asked of any play. Then there is the variable importance of prior narratives on which most plays were based. On top of all are the events, texts and issues to which a play might allude. These contexts may all be illuminating, but to what end? When we examine a work of political theory contextually we aim to draw from its contexts an understanding of the particular author’s views on monarchy, resistance, tolerance, rights, duties, reason of state or any number of questions central to political theory. These views are generally found to be sufficiently coherent and to be stated with sufficient force as to constitute doctrines. Most historians, for example, would identify a doctrine of indivisible sovereignty in Jean Bodin’s later works, or a doctrine of representative government in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Turning away from political theory, however, many plays or works of poetry evoke doctrines or what might become doctrines, but do not necessarily use them doctrinally. In this respect, Shakespeare was even more elusive than many of his contemporaries. Reading his works historically requires recognising that there is more to political thought than a history of doctrines, yet it is as an account of doctrines that the history of political thought is still largely studied. Analyses that seek to show where Shakespeare stood on matters of hegemony, social justice, equality and other markers of commitment have themselves largely been exercises of ideological enlistment or subversion. These have frequently been predicated on ahistorical categories or later models of social change and have at best an ambivalent relationship with what is known of Shakespeare’s world, its political resources, priorities and styles of reflection. Some of these studies, for example the post-colonial readings of Shakespeare, have reflected on the rich and fascinating ways in which Shakespeare’s work has been adapted to new contexts, new
Dollimore and Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare; Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, eds., Marxist Shakespeares (London, ) and, to some degree, Catherine M. S. Alexander, ed., Shakespeare and Politics (Cambridge, ).
, , audiences and new political programmes. But anachronism in the study of Shakespeare has not always been the consequence of such conscious reflection. It is true that we have ways of making him speak on issues that are central to our own political lives, for the voices within the plays provide a remarkably accommodating repertoire of sententiae. The emphasis here, however, is on the political issues and intellectual resources of Shakespeare’s own world, resources that in his use of them require that we do not take for granted our own notions of the political.
Contexts
Shakespeare’s properties David Armitage
Shakespeare has long been a byword for elusiveness. In the late seventeenth century, John Aubrey recorded a tradition that ‘he was not a company keeper … wouldnt be debauched, & if invited to writ; he was in paine’. This would seem to conform to the self-image of a writer who lamented in Sonnet that fortune ‘did not better for my life provide / Than public means which public manners breeds’, and there confessed that ‘my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand’. We have no letters from Shakespeare, no books certainly from his library and none of his literary papers, save for the passages attributable to him in the manuscript of The Book of Sir Thomas More. Whether this elusiveness was the result of deliberate evasiveness is more difficult to tell: the evidence is contradictory. For example, Aubrey reported another tradition that Shakespeare was in fact ‘very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth Witt’. The voice in Sonnet might not be Shakespeare’s at all: the poem’s act of self-revelation serves only to conceal the self. And the absence of books and private papers could easily have arisen from accident rather than design. Whatever the reasons, there is general agreement about the impalpability of Shakespeare the For comments on earlier versions of this chapter I am especially grateful to Mike Braddick, Gordon McMullan, Richard Strier and Henry Turner, as well as to audiences at the Australian National University, the University of Chicago, the Huntington Library, the London Shakespeare Seminar, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of York.
John Aubrey, ‘Brief Lives’, in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vols. (Oxford, ), II, p. ; Ian Donaldson, ‘Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Invention of the Author’, Proceedings of the British Academy, (), . Chambers, William Shakespeare, I, p. ; Charles R. Forker, ‘How Did Shakespeare Come by His Books?’, Shakespeare Yearbook, (), –. British Library, Harleian MS ; Nina S. Levine, ‘Citizens’ Games: Differentiating Collaboration and Sir Thomas More’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), –. Aubrey, ‘Brief Lives’, in Chambers, William Shakespeare, II, p. .
man: ‘Alone of the major artists of the Renaissance, Shakespeare has no tangible personality outside his art.’ Shakespeare’s shadowiness presents especially acute problems for students of political thought. The earliest biographical traditions, such as those collected by Aubrey, shed no light on his affiliations. No expressions of allegiance or faith survive from his hand. The variety of voices in Shakespeare’s poetry and the dialogic form of his plays prevent the identification of any of the positions he ventriloquises as being his own. His intellectual commitments remain stubbornly irrecoverable: ‘Why in the huge glorious body of his writing’, Stephen Greenblatt has asked, ‘is there no direct access to his thoughts about politics or religion or art?’ There may be no direct access to Shakespeare’s own thought, political or otherwise. However, in this chapter, I hope to show that it might be approached indirectly. I will examine both biographical and literary evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare’s conceptions of property. I have chosen property as a point of access into Shakespeare’s political thought for three reasons. Firstly, because Shakespeare’s only tangible political identities in Elizabeth and Jacobean England were as a property-holder and, in later life, a gentleman. Secondly, because definitions of property were far from settled during his lifetime: their competing and overlapping meanings can be seen at play throughout his works. And thirdly, because those definitions of property were at once political and theatrical in ways that seem to have made them especially captivating for a dramatist deeply invested in contemporary property relations but otherwise withdrawn from the practice of politics in a corrupted age. Shakespeare was not yet a year old when Sir Thomas Smith, the English ambassador in Paris, put the finishing touches to his contentious account of how ‘Englande standeth and is governed at this day the xxviiii of March Anno ’. By the time Smith’s De Republica Anglorum appeared posthumously in print in , Shakespeare had almost reached the age of majority. The commonwealth Smith had described was the one in which
Blair Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare Survey, (), . Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York, ), p. ; compare A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, ), p. . On the polemical aspects of Smith’s work see especially Anne McLaren, ‘Reading Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum as Protestant Apologetic’, The Historical Journal, (), –, and Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, – (Oxford, ), pp. –.
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Shakespeare grew up and received his political education. It was, of course, a monarchical polity at whose summit sat the Queen herself. But, as Smith’s punning title suggested, it was also a res publica, a participatory political community in which significant numbers of the Queen’s subjects were engaged in active citizenship. Smith divided the polity socially into four ranks of men: ‘gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen artificers, and labourers’. Within each of these ranks ran a still more fundamental social ‘division of these which be participant in the common wealth … one way of them that beare office, and [they] which beareth none, the one be called magistrates, the other private men’. That distinction between office-holders and ‘private men’ transcended social barriers and reached deeply down the scale of ranks. Even the relatively poor and landless could hold office: although they otherwise had ‘no voice nor authorities in our common wealth’, Smith noted, it was still possible that ‘day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marchantes or retailers which have no free lande, copiholders, all artificers’ would ‘be commonly made Churchwardens, alecunners, and manie times Constables’. Almost all adult Englishmen were therefore potentially free in the sense that they could participate in active citizenship by governing their community, whether national or (in most cases) local. Recent scholarship on the political culture of early modern England has amply confirmed Smith’s account of the English commonwealth. Older models of Renaissance politics which focused on the court and on the formal apparatus of authority portrayed a weak state with little coercive power and minimal impact on the lives of most English people. A generation of more recent work by both social and intellectual historians has uncovered a more localised, tentacular and far-reaching dispersion of political power, notably at the level of the town, the borough and the parish: that is, in just the social strata where Smith had found it. This was the ‘unacknowledged republic’ that administered early modern England, a culture of participation in office-holding, citizenship and membership of vestries, guilds, corporations and companies that touched the lives of between and per cent of the adult male population in any given year, or as many as per cent in each decade. As they rotated through their offices, these men – occasionally joined by a few women – formed the
Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (), ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, ), pp. , , –; Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. – (Basingstoke, ), pp. –. Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c. – (Basingstoke, ), pp. –.
bulk of England’s governors: they staffed the state in the localities and manned England’s municipal governments. They were not just ‘the passive recipients of authority’ but often ‘the lesser agents of government’; in this sense, they were citizens as much as subjects and were bound together by the Aristotelian experience of ruling as well as being ruled. Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, was an exemplary citizen of this monarchical republic. His home town of Stratford-upon-Avon had only been incorporated as a borough in , but three years later the elder Shakespeare had already begun his steady ascent up the ladder of local political participation. He started with the lowest offices Smith had described as open even to the landless: in , he became an ale-taster, and two years later he was made a constable. Thereafter, his climb toward greater responsibility was rapid: he was an affeeror (assessor of fines) in , then chamberlain in and by a burgess of Stratford. Until financial difficulties cut short his career, he also held the offices of bailiff, justice of the peace (), high bailiff () and chief alderman of Stratford (). ‘Nobody in Stratford applied himself more devotedly to the responsibilities of local government’ than the elder Shakespeare. John Shakespeare could not have travelled so far, or so fast, without sufficient wealth to qualify him for higher office. He had bought two houses in Stratford just before his marriage to Mary Arden in . Possession of this freehold property brought with it the status of burgess and his first claim to civic authority. The combination of wealth and status conferred by office also provided the springboard to gentility. When John Shakespeare petitioned for a grant of arms in , he offered in justification his office-holding in Stratford, his ancestors’ service to the Crown and his marriage to the well-born Mary Arden, as well as his ‘Landes & tenementes of good wealth and substance’. One version of the
See especially Patrick Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’, in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, ), pp. –; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, – (Cambridge, ); Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. – (Cambridge, ); Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England; Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic’, p. (quoted); Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, ); John F. McDiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot, ). Alan Dyer, ‘Crisis and Resolution: Government and Society in Stratford, –’, in Robert Bearman, ed., The History of an English Borough: Stratford-upon-Avon, – (Sutton, ), pp. –; Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford, ), pp. , –; Robert Bearman, ‘John Shakespeare: A Papist or Just Penniless?’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), –; Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (New York, ), p. (quoted). Chambers, William Shakespeare, II, p. ; Raymond Carter Sutherland, ‘The Grant of Arms to Shakespeare’s Father’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), –.
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family motto that accompanied the resulting Shakespeare arms captured the sense of entitlement shared by father and son alike: ‘Non sanz droict’ (Not without right). Like his father, Shakespeare would in time become eminently well qualified to be in Smith’s terms ‘one of them that bear office’. Their common ancestry and gentility, his father’s decades of service to the borough and the succession of property-holdings Shakespeare accumulated in the late s would together have qualified him for any high office in the borough of Stratford. He bought the large house called New Place in , inherited a share in two other houses in Stratford in , invested in land around Stratford in and , and bought a half-share of the Corporation’s tithe-holdings in . Only at the very end of his life, between and , did he own real estate in London, when he bought a part share in the Blackfriars gatehouse. Yet at no point did Shakespeare assume any local responsibility . Shakespeare remained firmly on one side of the political divide described by Sir Thomas Smith: he never held public office and remained a ‘private man’. This defining, if negative, characteristic of his political personality brings into focus some apparently unrelated features of his life and works. For example, he seems to have had an unusual number of friends and contacts among those who were, like him, both incomers to London’s corporate life and spectators upon it, notably French and Dutch Protestant immigrants. Like these Huguenots and Walloons, Shakespeare seems to have been at once ‘a civic outsider and an urban insider’, and that was just as true of his position in Stratford as it was in London. He was so lax in fulfilling even his passive duties as a member of the urban community that he was cited repeatedly in London between and for failing to pay subsidies. This indifference to civic life may in turn explain the ignorance of the workings of local government evident in his plays and the fact that his portraits of those who ran it – for example, justices Shallow and Slender or constables Dogberry, Elbow
Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, p. ; Robert F. Fleissner, ‘ “Non Sanz Droict”: Law and “Heraldry” in Julius Caesar’, University of Hartford Studies in Literature, (), –. Honan, Shakespeare, pp. –, –; René Weis, Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography (London, ), p. . E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare and London’s Immigrant Community circa ’, in J. P. Vander Motten, ed., Elizabethan and Modern Studies: Presented to Professor Willem Schrickx on the Occasion of His Retirement (Ghent, ), pp. –; Honan, Shakespeare, pp. –; Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London, ), pp. –. John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (Basingstoke, ), p. . Chambers, William Shakespeare, II, pp. –; Honan, Shakespeare, pp. , –.
and Dull – range from the affectionately amused to the downright contemptuous. So conspicuously distant was Shakespeare from contemporary England’s rich and intricate culture of political participation that he might even be called – to borrow a term from Henry Bolingbroke – a ‘caterpillar of the commonwealth’ (Richard II, . . ). Shakespeare’s absence from formal civic life cannot be wholly explained by his being an actor and a playwright. Among his fellow players and dramatists were many who were formally public persons by virtue of their roles as office-holders. For example, Shakespeare’s posthumous editors (and members of the King’s Men), John Heminges and Henry Condell, both served as churchwardens. The theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe collected subsidies, served as a vestryman and churchwarden, and was overseer of the poor in Shakespeare’s own London parish. The playwright Samuel Rowley was variously a constable and a juryman, while his co-author, Thomas Middleton, held a form of literary office, not just as the creator of various Lord Mayor’s pageants but also as London’s city chronologer and ‘chief ideologue’. Other contemporaries of Shakespeare maintained their freedom as members of the London livery companies. Thus, the actor Robert Armin was a ‘Cittizen of … London’ by virtue of his membership in the Goldsmiths’ Company, and Ben Jonson kept up his status in the Tylers’ and Bricklayers’ Company for at least seventeen years: in the Town Council of Edinburgh received him as a fellow ‘burges and gildbrother’. Shakespeare’s absence from England’s corporate culture was not the inevitable product of his profession, but it was both a distinctive and a consistent feature of his political personality . Shakespeare expressed his political freedom in the exercise of his rights rather than through public office. However, this should not be understood anachronistically as a retreat into atomistic individualism. Shakespeare’s property in various forms of possession enmeshed him in an equally varied array of relationships with others. Most of those relationships involved some form of sharing or collective responsibility. For example, he held marital property jointly with his wife, Anne Hathaway.
George W. Keeton, ‘Local Justice in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Keeton, Shakespeare’s Legal and Political Background (London, ), pp. –. ODNB, ‘Henry Condell (bap. , d. )’, ‘John Heminges (bap. , d. )’, ‘Philip Henslowe (c. –)’, ‘Thomas Middleton (bap. , d. )’, ‘Samuel Rowley (d. )’; Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, p. . Jane Belfield, ‘Robert Armin, Citizen and Goldsmith of London’, Notes and Queries, n.s. (), –; Mark Eccles, ‘Ben Jonson, “Citizen and Bricklayer”’, Notes and Queries, n.s. (), –; Ben Jonson, eds. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, vols. (Oxford, –), I, pp. , .
Shakespeare’s properties
He owned the Globe Theatre in common with the other shareholders in the syndicate between and , as he would later divide ownership of the Blackfriars Theatre after and of the Stratford Corporation’s tithes from . He was a member of the joint-stock company that owned the King’s Men and, in the last three years of his life, a co-proprietor of the Blackfriars gatehouse with John Heminges, William Johnson and John Jackson. He also owned moveables, such as those he bequeathed in his will: among them, the notorious ‘second best bed with the furniture’ that went to his wife; his other ‘goodes chattels … plate Jewels & household stuffe whatsoever’; and the sword he left to Thomas Combe as the last remaining index of his gentility . Shakespeare also seems to have been protective of what we would now call his intellectual property. There is circumstantial evidence that he attempted to combat piracy of his works, for he was uniquely well placed to maintain control over his plays and to reap the profits from them, in his unparalleled ‘quintuple role of Globe-sharer, Blackfriars-sharer, Chamberlain’s/King’s Men-sharer, Chamberlain’s/King’s Men-dramatist and actor’. That capacity for control of course ended with his death. ‘It had been a thing … worthy to have been wished that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings’, Heminges and Condell wrote in their preface to the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works: ‘But since … he hath by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain to have published them.’ The political language Heminges and Condell chose to distinguish their role from Shakespeare’s precisely captured the difference between his private right as a property-holder and their public duty (officium) to do what they also called, in their dedicatory epistle in the First Folio to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, ‘an office to the dead’. Shakespeare therefore did possess a tangible personality outside his art. It was a public personality as a rights-bearer but not an office-holder, in later life an armigerous gentleman of property but throughout a man without civic responsibilities. To describe Shakespeare this way is not to
Chambers, William Shakespeare, II, pp. –; Honan, Shakespeare, pp. –. Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds., Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Chicago, ), pp. –; Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as a Literary Dramatist (Cambridge, ), pp. –, ; Grace Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood (London, ), p. (quoted). John Heminges and Henry Condell, ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ and ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’ (), in Shakespeare, The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, nd edn (Oxford, ), pp. lxxi, lxx (my emphases).
make him into a proto-liberal ‘subject’ or ‘self’. It is instead to define him as the type of a particular political personality expressed through rights over things, both tangible (a bed, a sword, a gatehouse) and intangible (theatrical shares, tithes, his literary works). The majority of adult males in early modern England either bore the duties of office or claimed rights of property at some point in their lives; most would have done both. The balance between their duties and their rights, their offices and their properties, composed the elements of political personality in the Elizabethan and Jacobean respublica anglorum. Shakespeare expressed that personality publicly in two ways: through his property relations and by his writing. To understand what he would have meant by ‘property’ we must now turn to the evidence supplied by his works. Around the time that Cymbeline and The Tempest were first being performed at the Blackfriars Theatre and at Whitehall, the lexicographer Randal Cotgrave defined property in his French–English dictionary of : Proprieté: f. A propertie; proprietie; owning, specialtie in; a just and absolute power over, a freehold in; also, the nature, qualitie, inclination, or disposition of; also, a handsome, or comelie assortment; a fit commoditie, or furnishment; and, a roome or place well accommodated or fitted.
Cotgrave’s definition did not distinguish between ‘property’ and ‘propriety’. Indeed, these terms would not become separated from each other until the last decade of the seventeenth century, when John Locke, for one, systematically distinguished between them in the successive editions of his Two Treatises of Government after . During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the two words denoted something peculiar to a person or to an object: what Cotgrave called ‘the nature, qualitie, inclination, or disposition of’ someone or something. It also meant the right possessed over something or even somebody: Cotgrave’s ‘owning, specialtie in; a just and absolute power over, a freehold in’. The civil lawyer John Cowell had expressed this second meaning in his law dictionary, The Interpreter (), just a few years before Cotgrave had offered his definitions:
Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Randal Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, ), sig. Tttir. Compare the texts of the first and third editions of John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London, , ), especially the ‘Errata’, in the latter edition, sig. [A]r.
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Property ( proprietas) signifieth the highest right that a man hath or can have to any thing, which is no way depending upon any other mans courtesie. And this none in our kingdome can be said to have in any lands, or tenements, but onely the King in the right of his Crowne … This word neverthelesse is in our common law, used for that right in lands or tenements, that common persons have, because it importeth as much as (utile dominium) though not ([dominium] directum).
This definition clearly derived from Cowell’s training in Roman law. Property was a right (ius). That right was exclusive. And it was a right to use (utile) for all but the primary owner: that is, the Emperor in Roman law but in English law the King. Cowell’s conception of property was more controversial than original in : many members of the House of Commons judged his lexicon scandalously offensive for promoting James I’s absolute power, while James himself condemned it for too freely discussing the royal prerogative. Cowell’s definition of property was nonetheless compatible with a common-law understanding of land tenure as held ultimately from the Crown. What was missing from this definition, as from Cotgrave’s, was any conception of property as the things over which that right was exercised. ‘Property was a juridical term before it was an economic one’, J. G. A. Pocock has noted; ‘it meant that which was properly one’s own, that to which one properly had a claim, and words such as proprium and proprietas applied as much to the right as to the thing, and to many things as well as the means of subsistence and production.’ This would certainly fit with what we can infer Shakespeare’s understanding of the term would have been. His conception of property, unlike Cowell’s, was not juridical in any technical sense. Shakespeare was of course well-versed in the language of the English law of real property, as the Gravedigger in Hamlet revealed in his tumbling puns on ‘the fine of his fines and the recovery of his recoveries’ and other terms drawn from the jargon of English land law (. . –). There is, however, little evidence that Shakespeare
John Cowell, The Interpreter (London, ), sigs. Fff r–v; G. E. Aylmer, ‘The Meaning and the Definition of “Property” in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, no. (February ), –. S. B. Chrimes, ‘The Constitutional Ideas of John Cowell’, English Historical Review, (), –; J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, –, nd edn (Harlow, ), pp. –, –. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins’, in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, ), p. . Paul Stephen Clarkson and Clyde T. Warren, The Law of Property in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Drama (Baltimore, ).
knew the Roman Corpus Iuris Civilis. He would not need to have read further than the first page of the Digest (. ) or the opening sentence of the Institutes (. . ) to encounter the Roman definition of justice as the constant desire to give each his due (iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi), a definition Henry de Bracton in the thirteenth century had made fundamental to English common law. Precisely that idea appeared in the opening scene of Titus Andronicus, where Bassianus, seizing the unfortunate Lavinia, declares himself, resolved withal To do myself this reason and this right.
Titus’s brother Marcus immediately affirms Bassianus’s right in the language of the civil law: Suum cuique is our Roman justice. This prince in justice seizeth but his own. (. . –)
Shakespeare would have recognised these lines, though almost certainly not as his own, for they appear in a scene more securely attributable to George Peele, the co-author of Titus. His ‘small Latin and less Greek’ was also, in this regard, outpaced by the erudition of Christopher Marlowe, who showed his superior knowledge of ‘the subject of the Institute, / And universall body of the [Roman] law’ – specifically, the Roman law of inheritance – in the opening speech of Doctor Faustus. A brief survey of the word ‘property’ and its cognates in Shakespeare’s works yields two consistent clusters of meaning: anything that is one’s own and something (or somebody) that can be used or instrumentalised. The first meaning was the more common in the language of Shakespeare’s time, as Cotgrave’s definition confirmed. The second meaning was the more idiomatically Shakespearean and could be expressed both as a noun (often in the plural, as in the theatrical term ‘properties’) or as a verb (to be ‘propertied’ or ‘dispropertied’). Shakespeare used it to describe persons as well as objects: to have a ‘property’ in something was, in this usage, to possess something useful, just as to be someone’s ‘property’ was to act as their tool. Shakespeare’s two conceptions of property overlapped at the
Yet for one possible example see Keeton, Shakespeare’s Legal and Political Background, p. (on Coriolanus, . . –, and Institutes, . ). Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Samuel E. Thorne, vols. (Cambridge, Mass., –), II, p. . Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford, ), pp. –; Andrew Hadfield, ‘ “Suum Cuique”: Natural Law in Titus Andronicus, I. i. ’, Notes and Queries, n.s. (), –. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, . . –, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers, nd edn, vols. (Cambridge, ), I, pp. – (paraphrasing Institutes, . ).
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point where whatever was proper to someone could be turned to their use: in short, when they had a right to it and when property transformed that object (or person) into something that could be bent to their purposes. The first meaning, of property as something proper or appropriate to a person, can be found in Shakespeare’s poetry as well as in his plays. For example, when describing love’s dissolution of individuality in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, Shakespeare turned an exquisite paradox around the various meanings of property as unique and defining quality, as identity and as propriety: So between them love did shine That the turtle saw his right Flaming in the phoenix sight. Either was the other’s mine. Property was thus appalled That the self was not the same. Single nature’s double name Neither two nor one was called. (ll. –)
He used the word similarly in the opening scene of King Lear where Lear, in his renunciation of Cordelia, swears to ‘disclaim all my paternal care, / Propinquity, and property of blood’ (King Lear, . . –). The Duke also deploys this conception of property as something unique and defining at the beginning of Measure for Measure when he defers to Escalus in his ability to describe ‘The nature of our people, / Our city’s institutions and the terms / For common justice’: Of government the properties to unfold Would seem in me t’affect speech and discourse (. . –, –)
A few years later, Shakespeare coined a verb that mediated between this first meaning of ‘property’, as quality, and its second meaning, as instrument, when in Coriolanus he had Brutus warn Siculus, We must suggest the people in what hatred [Coriolanus] still hath held them; that to’s power he would Have made them mules, silenc’d their pleaders, And dispropertied their freedoms; holding them, In human action and capacity Of no more soul nor fitness for the world Than camels in their war (. . –)
Compare Philo on Antony: ‘He comes too short of that great property / Which still should go with Antony’ (Antony and Cleopatra, . . –). These lines are the same in both the Quarto History of King Lear () and the Folio Tragedy of King Lear (–?); they are quoted here from the History.
Here, ‘dispropertied’ implies that the people’s freedoms have been deprived of their essential characteristics and that they have been rendered useless or inoperative. It is notable that it does not mean that Coriolanus had deprived the people of their freedoms: in this particular context, the sense of ‘property’ as individual possession is not part of the semantic field surrounding the term ‘(dis)propertied’. Likewise, when Hamlet laments his inability to speak on behalf of his dead father: no, not for a king Upon whose property and most dear life A damned defeat was made (Hamlet, . . –)
he does not imply that Claudius had damnably dispossessed old Hamlet as well as killed him. He means rather that Claudius had assaulted the proper person of the former king, and hence what was essential to him. The sense of ‘property’ as possessions would emerge only later in the seventeenth century, long after Shakespeare’s death. The second Shakespearean meaning of ‘property’, as a tool or instrument, can be found in a variety of contexts across the comedies, tragedies and histories. Thus, in Twelfth Night Malvolio protests to Feste, ‘They have here propertied me, keep me in darkness, send ministers to me, asses, and do all they can to face me out of my wits’ (. . –). That ‘propertied’ here means ‘made into an instrument’ can be confirmed from Antony’s description of the hapless Lepidus – ‘Do not talk of him but as a property’ ( Julius Caesar, . . –) – or the Poet’s sceptical appraisal of Timon – ‘His large fortune … / Subdues and properties to his love and tendance / All sorts of hearts’ (Timon of Athens, . . , –) – but most poignantly from the Dauphin’s protest in King John: I am too high-born to be propertied, To be a secondary at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world. (. . –)
Compare Cleopatra on Antony: ‘His voice was propertied / As all the tunèd spheres’ (Antony and Cleopatra, . . –). William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London, ), p. , note to Hamlet, . . (as the line appears in this edition). Pace OED, s.v. ‘property’, b; Margaret Sampson, ‘ “Property” in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought’, in Gordon Schochet, Patricia E. Tatspaugh and Carol Brobeck, eds., Proceedings of the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, III: Religion, Resistance, and Civil War (Washington, D.C., ), pp. –. Compare Fenton to Anne: ’tis a thing impossible / I should love thee but as a property’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor, . . –).
Shakespeare’s properties
This meaning of ‘property’ as something usable appeared most clearly in the theatrical term ‘properties’. It is used in this sense by Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night ’s Dream – ‘I will draw up a bill of properties’ (. . –) – and by Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor when she orders Page, Ford and Evans, ‘Go get us properties / And tricking for our fairies’ (. . –). Such properties are the material goods with ‘an offstage history, function or owner’ which are transformed into objects ‘belonging to and defined by the dramatic illusion of the … play’. They depend on that illusion for their capacity to represent things other than what they are: a thornbush and a lantern betoken the moon; ‘some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast … signify “wall”’ (Midsummer Night ’s Dream, . . –). They are also tools for sustaining the illusion. By their ability to metamorphose from one thing to another, stage properties challenge the idea of property as an inherent and distinctive quality while affirming the instrumentality of objects. Properties in this sense exemplify what might be called a ‘dramatic’ conception of property in which objects are transformed through their use in the relations between persons. Shakespeare’s staging of property relations in his dramatic work is the subject of the following, and final, section of this chapter . The fundamental mystery of property lay in explaining the ‘very great difficulty how any one should ever come to have a Property in any thing’, in John Locke’s words. God had given the earth to humanity in common, but that condition of negative community, in which no one could exclude anyone else from the earth or its fruits, had somehow been superseded by a regime of private property under which it became possible to assert one’s exclusive rights against all others. By Shakespeare’s lifetime, there was general agreement that primitive communality – in which every person had a right to every thing – was obsolete and illegitimate. As the thirtyeighth of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles affirmed: ‘The riches and goodes of Christians, are not common as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certaine Annabaptistes doe falselie boaste,’ although that fact did not absolve anyone with wealth from their
Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama’, in Harris and Natasha Korda, eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge, ), p. . Locke, Second Treatise of Government, §; Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (Oxford, ), p. ; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la proprieté? (Paris, ), p. .
duty to give charity to the poor. In light of this credal injunction, Timon of Athens might be read as a dramatisation of the dangers of redistributing ‘riches and goodes’ and the fragility of charity, as well as a political critique of noble luxury and extravagance relevant to the opening years of James I’s reign in England. Just how exclusive property had arisen, and why it had displaced communality, demanded explanation. The commonest answer was that humans had made agreements among themselves to secure their rights of exclusive ownership. ‘For at the beginninge all goodes were in comon’, argued the Student in Christopher St German’s dialogue from the late s, Doctor and Student, ‘but after they were brought by the law of man in to a certayne propertye so that every man myght knowe his owne’. Later theorists of natural law, such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf in the seventeenth century, would espouse more complex versions of such contractarian arguments which Locke subsequently replaced with his pivotal account of how ‘Men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to Mankind in common … without any express Compact of all the Commoners’ (nd Treatise, §). What all these arguments shared was a ‘narrative or diachronic explanatory mode’ of solving the mystery of property in their treatment of ‘property regimes as if they had origins and as if their subsequent elements emerged over time’. The foundational narrative of the emergence of property available to Shakespeare appeared in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid described the transition from the golden age to the iron age as a process of moral declension accompanied by the accumulation of human needs and the elaboration of political institutions, most fundamental among which was the transformation of common land into exclusive property. In humanity’s original state of innocence, There was no towne enclosed yet, with walles and ditches deepe. … The fertile earth as yet was free, untoucht of spade or plough, And yet it yeelded of it selfe of every things inough.
Thomas Rogers, The English Creede (London, ), p. . Compare David Bevington and David L. Smith, ‘James I and Timon of Athens’, Comparative Drama, (–), –. Christopher St German, St German’s Doctor and Student, eds. T. F. T. Plucknett and J. L. Barton (London, ), p. ; David J. Seipp, ‘The Concept of Property in the Early Common Law’, Law and History Review, (), –. Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership (Boulder, ), p. . Peter Garnsey, Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, ), pp. –, –.
Shakespeare’s properties
But in the corrupt brazen age, Fayth and Truth were faine And honest shame to hide their heades: for whom stept stoutly in, Craft, Treason, Violence, Envie, Pryde and wicked Lust to win. … and men began to bound, With dowles and diches drawen in length the free and fertile ground, Which was as common as the Ayre and light of Sunne before.
Ovid’s lines would become basic to the story of property told by early modern political thinkers. Thus, Grotius quoted Ovid in his account of how property in land derived from physical possession, and when Locke harked back to ‘the Golden Age (before vain Ambition, and amor sceleratus habendi … had corrupted Mens minds into a mistake of true Power and Honour)’ (nd Treatise, § ), he did so with words drawn from the same Ovidian passage (Metamorphoses, . ). Shakespeare’s use of Ovid’s account subverted its place within a developmental narrative of property’s origins and justification. In The Tempest, Gonzalo fantasises about reverting to a pre-political state in lines that owe more to Ovid than they do to Montaigne, the source usually cited for this vision: Had I the plantation of this isle, my lord – I’th’commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things … … contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation, all men idle, all; And women too – but innocent and pure; No sovereignty … All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour. (. . , –, –, –)
Antonio immediately points out that Gonzalo’s vision of kingship without sovereignty is not so much executed ‘by contraries’ as utterly selfcontradictory: ‘The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning’
Ovid, Metamorphoses, . , –, –, –, in The XV. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London, ), fols. v-r. Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, ed. David Armitage (Indianapolis, ), p. (quoting Metamorphoses, . –); Kirstie M. McClure, ‘Cato’s Retreat: Fabula, Historia and the Question of Constitutionalism in Mr Locke’s Anonymous Essay on Government’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge, ), p. n. . Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, ), pp. –, –.
(. . ). Gonzalo – and, by extension, Shakespeare – takes no position on a question that would later fundamentally divide theorists within the natural law tradition: whether government (‘sovereignty’) preceded property (as Hobbes would argue) or property preceded government (as in Locke’s account). Instead, his speech implies that no developmental narrative can explain or justify property, only that it is indissolubly linked to sovereignty. They rise and fall together. Shakespeare repeatedly affirmed a connection between property and government throughout his plays. He portrayed a range of different property regimes in distinct places and historical periods: for example in republican Rome, medieval England and France, in Venice and on Prospero’s island. These depictions of property cut across the genres of comedy, history and tragedy, but different kinds of property do seem to cluster within specific genres, as the plots of comedies such as The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night ’s Dream and As You Like It turn on questions of marital property. It was in the English history plays, above all, that questions of property rights became most obviously political, a turn Shakespeare signalled by metaphors linking property with sovereignty. Thus, in Shakespeare’s earliest history, Henry VI (), the transfer of territory in France as part of Queen Margaret’s dowry marked the beginning of a chain of causes that led both to York’s challenge for the throne and to Jack Cade’s rebellion, each of which Shakespeare describes in the language of private property rights. He parallels York’s lament early in the play: Pirates may make cheap pennyworths of their pillage, … Whileas the seely owner of the goods Weeps over them, and wrings his hapless hands, And shakes his head, and, trembling, stands aloof, While all is shared and all is borne away, Ready to starve and dare not touch his own. So York must sit and fret and bite his tongue, While his own lands are bargained for and sold. (. . , –)
with the much later encounter between the invasive Cade and the protective landowner, Alexander Iden:
On which see especially Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, ); B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage (Cambridge, ); Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson and A. R. Buck, eds., Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England (Toronto, ). Nancy E. Wright and A. R. Buck, ‘Cast out of Eden: Property and Inheritance in Shakespearean Drama’, in Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham, eds., The Law in Shakespeare (Basingstoke, ), pp. –, –.
Shakespeare’s properties
: Zounds, here’s the lord of the soil come to seize me for a stray for entering his fee-simple without leave … : … Is’t not enough to break into my garden, And, like a thief, to come to rob my grounds, Climbing my walls in spite of me the owner …? (. . –, –)
In the first scene, York laments that his inheritance has been stolen from him, as if by pirates, and with a similar lack of redress. In Iden’s garden, Cade the rebel is reduced to becoming Cade the trespasser: one who aimed to overthrow the established order in the name of a return to primitive community of property (‘All the realm shall be in common … when I am king, as king I shall be … ’: . . –) is reduced to scratching for bare subsistence on another’s land (‘I climbed into this garden to see if I can eat grass or pick a sallet another while … ’: . . –) before being killed by the rightful owner. Iden’s reward is a knighthood from the King, because the defence of his private property rights led to the defeat of a major threat to the sovereignty of the realm. Three years after Henry VI, Shakespeare reversed the connection between the rights of sovereignty and those to property in the metaphorical structure of Richard II (). In this play, Shakespeare has John of Gaunt deprecate Richard in the language of feudal law: And yet, encagèd in so small a verge, The waste is no whit lesser than thy land … Why, cousin, wert thou regent of the world It were a shame to let this land by lease. But, for thy world, enjoying but this land, Is it not more than shame to shame it so? Landlord of England art thou now, not king, Thy state of law is bondslave to the law (. . –, –)
Here, Gaunt continues a line of thought he had begun to unfold earlier in the same scene when, as part of his lament for England’s ‘sceptred isle’, he had charged that ‘this dear dear land, / Dear for her reputation through the world, / Is now leased out – I die pronouncing it – / Like to a tenement or pelting farm’ (. . , –). The comparison reduces the majestic responsibility of kingship to the merely economic transaction of renting land out to others’ use, but it can only work metaphorically because English land-law was based on the assumption that all land was held of the King and that others held their ownership dependently, as Sir Thomas Smith had noted and John Cowell had later affirmed. Richard
J. H. Hexter, ‘Property, Monopoly, and Shakespeare’s Richard II’, in Perez Zagorin, ed., Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley, ), pp. –; Dennis R. Klinck,
himself makes this clear when, after his deposition, he declares, ‘All pomp and majesty I do forswear. / My manors, rents, revenues I forgo’ for his ‘grievous crimes … / Against the state and profit of this land’ (. . –, , ). With this renunciation of his status as sovereign and his rights to property, he fulfils ‘that office of … good will’ York had demanded of him: ‘The resignation of thy state and crown’ (. . , ). To resign both state and crown on the Elizabethan stage would have involved a transfer of property – or, rather, properties. Each was a piece of standard theatrical furniture: the ‘state’ literally so, as the ‘chair of state’ or portable throne that often stood at centre stage. Like all forms of property, they were transformed through use and by the maintenance of a consensual illusion among persons. Shakespeare’s clearest exposure of that illusion, and the parts played by stage properties in maintaining it, came in Henry IV. In the tavern at Eastcheap, Falstaff and Prince Henry mock up a royal court using the homely furniture at hand: : Do thou stand for my father, and examine me upon the particulars of my life. : Shall I? Content. This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my crown. : Thy state is taken for a joint-stool, thy golden sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown. (. . –)
This brief exchange is emblematic of Shakespeare’s understandings of property and politics. It shows the fragility of the illusion that sustains them through collusive agreement. Falstaff appropriates inert objects and, by fiat, demands that they be taken for something other than what they are. His attempt at transformation fails because Hal pierces the illusion and immediately returns the properties to their mundane purposes. Without willing consent, Shakespeare implies, both stagecraft and statecraft are impossible: the joint-stool is still just a joint-stool. The properties of objects remain stubbornly unchanged as they refuse to become
‘Shakespeare’s Richard II as Landlord and Tenant’, College Literature, (), –; William O. Scott, ‘ “Like to a Tenement”: Landholding, Leasing, and Inheritance in Richard II’, in Jordan and Cunningham, eds., The Law in Shakespeare, pp. –. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, –, rd edn (Cambridge, ), pp. –, , –. Compare Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennett, th edn (London, ), p. : ‘Property and Communion are moral Qualities, which do not affect the Th ings themselves, as to their intrinsick Nature, but only produce a moral Effect with regard to other Persons’ (. ). Compare Stephen Dickey, ‘The Crown and the Pillow: Royal Properties in Henry IV ’, Shakespeare Survey, (), –. James Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis, ), pp. –; Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies, pp. –.
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instruments of power or possession. The scene suggests that, in the end, all politics is spectacle, especially when it concerns those objects termed, on the stage as in the state, properties. Yet it would be at once banal and unhistorical to conclude that Shakespeare the man of property withdrew from civic life because Shakespeare the dramatist had exposed the illusory vanity of all political activity . Banal, because it hardly needed the eye of a seasoned playwright to discern the performative aspect of early modern politics; and unhistorical, because his absence from England’s unacknowledged commonwealth can be more idiomatically explained as a strategic choice to withdraw from a corrupted political realm where the forms and processes of governing were things indifferent, but in which a writer might yet fulfil an informal office by staging debate and proffering counsel. Out of that balance of political personality and literary activity emerged the defining features – the distinctive properties – of Shakespeare’s engagement with early modern political thought.
Michael J. Braddick, ‘Administrative Performance: The Representation of Political Authority in Early Modern England’, in Braddick and John Walter, eds., Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic’, p. . On which see especially the chapters by Cathy Curtis, Stephen Greenblatt, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Eric Nelson in this volume.
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare’s plays Cathy Curtis
In As You Like It, the usurped Duke Senior, rusticated by his tyrannical younger brother, speaks to his lords in the forest of Arden of the sweet life they now enjoy away from the ‘painted pomp’ and the perils of ‘the envious court’: Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say, ‘This is no flattery’ – these are my counselors That feelingly persuade me what I am. Sweet are the uses of adversity … And this our life exempt from public haunt Finds tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything. (. . –, –)
To which one of the lords of his pastoral court replies, ‘I would not change it’ (. . ). Nevertheless, at the resolution of the play, when the usurping brother Frederick experiences a sudden conversion of character in the forest, turns to religious life and decides to abandon the pompous court, Duke Senior readily takes back the crown and indicates that he will return to his ducal life. One of the most important and enduring debates of classical and Renaissance political thought was concerned with the relative merits of the active and contemplative lives. Shakespeare’s dramatic engagement with that debate has, surprisingly, largely escaped the attention of critics, even of those dedicated to tracing connections with the ‘political’ and the ‘rhetorical’. This study will demonstrate that many of Shakespeare’s plays, across their generic range and through their chronological extent, are deeply indebted to argument in utramque partem on a perennially troubling and potentially inflammatory topic in the early modern period – one which was connected in contemporary minds with questions regarding the nature of virtue, the connection between the emotions of the individual and civil governance, the provision of counsel, and the distinguishing features of kingship and tyranny. Shakespeare gave full rhetorical
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare
expression to the traditional topos, offering new and gendered emphases, and insisting upon its ambiguities and complexities, while at the same time satirising its earnestness. The first section of this chapter outlines the pedigree and development of the debate, while the second surveys its appearance in a selection of Shakespeare’s plays. The final section reflects upon its significance.
The debate on the respective virtues and benefits of the active and contemplative lives is usually cast as a Greek versus Roman affair. Plato and Aristotle held that the highest and noblest way of life was that of contemplative leisure. In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher-kings of Socrates’ ideal republic naturally seek contemplation of the divine according to their nature; first, however, they must be educated thoroughly so as to attain wisdom, and then serve their time as the guardians who rule the other parts of the city so that each pursues his own business. This necessarily compromises their happiness. Their reward is freedom from wearisome political life in the future and retirement to felicitous contemplation. In The Republic the interlocutor Socrates argued that in cities of less perfect constitution than Kallipolis, however, the philosopher should withdraw quietly from active participation, because he is likely to come to harm rather than benefit his friends or the polis. For Aristotle, the best type of virtue, and hence the foundation of human happiness, lay in the intellectual pursuits of the rational soul rather than in moral virtue. The most perfect of the virtues was the contemplation of the most divine, exalted objects. Therefore, the contemplative life was at all times superior to the moral or active life, requiring no external goods for its operation and severed from the emotions, the baser nature of man; it was instead attached to the intellect, the divine element in man. The Roman view, particularly as articulated by Cicero and Quintilian, maintained rather that man (and it is always a man) is not born for himself, but for his family and country. It is the active life, the vita activa,
Jill Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhart Kessler and Kraye, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, ) pp. –; Plato, The Republic, VII; Timaeus, a; Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. –; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X. –.
that must be pursued, because it serves the common good. The vir civilis performs his duty through active participation in government of the republic, so guaranteeing its liberty against the incursions of others and that of usurping individuals within it. Citizenship is aligned with the life of negotium, active political service, in preference to that of otium, contemplative withdrawal in pursuit of intellectual or religious truth. And virtue is then defined by reference to its practical application to political life and instilled through a proper education. Withdrawal from negotium is regarded as reprehensible, a denial of man’s social nature, and a threat to the preservation of the safety and liberty of the res publica. The Christian, post-Reformation and Renaissance reception of this Platonic and Ciceronian opposition of the contemplative and active lives proved innovative and various. Before the Reformation, the monastic ideal of contemplation was a powerful one and in the Renaissance was sometimes fused with a Platonic ideal of contemplation of the divine as the highest good. Humanists of the Italian city-states, especially in Florence and the Veneto, celebrated the ideal of republicanism with its associated emphasis on citizen participation. In the monarchies of Christian northern Europe, the Ciceronian argument for virtuous engagement could be accommodated so as to remain pertinent. If one were not living in a free republic but under a monarchy, supporters of the argument for the superiority of the vita activa could yet argue that it was vital to the health of the secular and ecclesiastical realm that educated and virtuous Christian men performed their active duty as counsellors, administrators, magistrates, ambassadors and clerics. It offered safeguards against tyranny for subjects and against internal rebellion or foreign attack for monarchs. It protected the liberty of subjects and the integrity of the rule of the monarch. It promised the possibility for reform of commonwealth and church should any corruption take root. In early Tudor England, native conceptions of a mixed government of monarch, privy council and parliament with its insistence on the giving and receiving of frank counsel – as expressed by John Fortescue and Henry de Bracton – existed alongside Italian humanist conceptions of good governance imported in the first years of the sixteenth century, which
Quentin Skinner, ‘Political Philosophy’, in Schmitt, Skinner, Kessler and Kraye, eds., Th e Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, pp. ff. Ibid., pp. –. Cathy Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton: the Laughing Philosopher in the Early Modern Period’, in Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter, eds., The Persona of the Philosopher in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Nelson, Greek Tradition in Republican Thought, pp. –.
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found a particularly receptive audience there. Some of Henry VIII’s servants were educated in the universities of Italy, attended her courts as ambassadors, and were well versed in classical and Italian humanist, republican and conciliar thought. Sir Thomas More, Richard Pace, the visitors Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives, Thomas Starkey and Thomas Elyot are some of the more important commentators on precisely the question of whether the active or contemplative life was superior. Thomas Starkey summarises the characteristic position: one must not live for one’s own profit and pleasure, but for the welfare of the commonwealth. More’s Utopia and his Latin translation of Lucian’s Menippus or His Descent into Hades furnished Shakespeare with the well-recognised Lucianic image of political life as a pageant in which roles and costumes are distributed, and can be reversed unexpectedly during its course to reveal their fundamental similarity – a king can be transformed into a lowly Diogenes. More’s darkly Tacitean History of Richard III was also a source for Shakespeare’s Richard III. In Book I of Utopia we find the debate on the merits of the active and contemplative lives dramatised on both sides of the question. The character of More suggests to the Lucianic traveller and student of Greek philosophy, Hythloday (the purveyor of nonsense), that he should serve in the court of some prince because of his wide experience of the different constitutions of the lands he has visited. Hythloday counters with the Platonic argument that the virtuous citizen who would freely counsel his ruler is prevented from doing so because the courts of northern Europe are so corrupt. More, bound to his offices of lawyer, counsellor and ambassador to his king, presses on with the Ciceronian position – surely it is better to attempt to make things less corrupt, by employing an indirect method of counsel. The dialogue does not resolve or reconcile these competing sets of political perspectives, Greek and Roman. In Book II, which outlines the Utopian government and way of life, Hythloday points out that all are required to engage in communal life, negotium, and all are educated in the virtue necessary for it.
John Guy, ‘Tudor Monarchy and its Critiques’, in Guy, ed., The Tudor Monarchy (London, ), pp. –. Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, – (Cambridge, ). Thomas Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, ). Thomas More, The History of King Richard III: A Reading Edition, ed. George M. Logan (Bloomington, ), p. xv. Thomas More, Utopia, eds. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge, ), pp. –, –.
The historical More, of course, chose the vita activa, and the prefatory letters in the first three editions, including More’s own, are celebratory of his engagement as the civil man. They ironically muse that such a busy servant of the commonwealth found time to compose such a fine humanist contribution, one to rival Plato’s Republic, to the debate on the ideal commonwealth . More humorously discusses his difficulty in performing his various offices, stealing time from sleep and meals to juggle his role as husband, family man, magistrate and counsellor. It is part of one’s civic virtue to maintain familial concord and discharge familial obligations, and More draws attention to this. The related question of what constitutes true nobility, vera nobilitas, was connected with this debate on the side for the active life; it had been in circulation since at least John Tiptoft’s translation of Buonaccorso’s open-ended De vere nobilitate in the s and the secular English drama by Henry Medwell, Fulgens and Lucrece (c. ), which was based upon it. Erasmus and More maintained that it was virtue in itself, not hereditary wealth and lineage, which was the crucial element in civil life (the anti-Aristotelian case). It was the civic virtues which were truly noble. Their humanist friend and servant of Henry VIII, Richard Pace, insisted in De fructu that virtue has its origins in learning, and therefore he advises his student readers to avoid evil company and only associate with the learned and honourable. And if one speaks of the active life, the indispensable skills beyond learning were the arts of eloquence. From Pace to Francis Bacon, English humanists asked these questions: what use is learning if one cannot communicate it, cannot put into action ideas and ideals for the good of the commonwealth? What is more debased than language which has no bearing on everyday life, such as that of scholasticism, or which divides man from man, and so engenders discord in the commonwealth?
More, Utopia, pp. –, –. M. L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, ), pp. –; Howard B. Norland, Drama in Early Tudor Britain, – (Lincoln, Nebr., ), pp. –. Quentin Skinner, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism’, in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Richard Pace, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, ed. and trans. Frank Manley and Richard S. Sylvester (New York, ), pp. –. Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, – (Cambridge, ), pp. – (on Bacon); Juan Luis Vives, Joannis Ludovici Vivis Valentini opera omnia, ed. Gregorio Majansius, vols. (Valencia, –; London, ), V, Book I, pp. –.
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare
Aristotle said little about how one was to combine the active and contemplative lives. Many an English servant of the commonwealth struggled to do so. Erasmus and the Italian humanist Niccolò Leonico Tomeo lamented that the active life compromised the scholarly output and health of such men as More and Richard Pace. Shakespeare and Fletcher allude in their play Henry VIII () to the learned Pace ‘who ran mad and died’ because of the jealousy of Thomas Wolsey: ‘He was a fool; For he would needs be virtuous’ (. . , –). As the Reformation advanced, the vita activa could also bring tensions of service to one’s religion and one’s monarch, as the fate of More and then Wolsey exemplified. Wolsey later remarks that his conscience is relieved on his fall, his former office ‘a burden / Too heavy for a man that hopes for heaven’ (. . –) . English vernacular dialogues on the commonwealth throughout the sixteenth century often debated the relative merits of the active, courtly life and that of rustic withdrawal. For example, in Roger Bayne’s The Praise of Solitarinesse of , the interlocutor Eudoxus argued for the merits of the contemplative life – philosophy was a therapy for the untranquil mind. Courtly life, or social life more generally, was frequently corrupt, and corrupting of those who had contact with it. The strong Lucianic and utopian tradition in English satirical political writings allowed such authors as William Bullein and Ulpian Fulwell, as well as anonymous pamphleteers, to descant on the dangers of courtly life, with its evils of flattery, envy and vanity – all so corrosive of good counsel. Such mixed generic forms, many of which could be classed as Menippean, dramatised the debate, as had More’s Utopia, in a pastoral, rural or utopian setting. Along with Italian hybrid dramas, such forms might have informed Shakespeare’s so-called comedies of mixed generic form, as in The Tempest and As You Like It. Such ambivalent attitudes persisted in England up to the Jacobean period in which Shakespeare composed his last plays. The educational and moral treatises of Tudor England and the practice of servants of the
ODNB, ‘Richard Pace (?–)’. Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford, ), pp. –. Roger Bayne, The Praise of Solitarinesse (London, ); Peltonen, Classical Humanism, pp. –. William Bullein, Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, eds. M. W. Bullen and A. H. Bullen (London, ). W. Scott Blanchard, Scholar’s Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, Pa., ); Craig R. Thompson, The Translations of Lucian by Erasmus and St Thomas More (Ithaca, N.Y., ), chs. and ; Douglas J. M. Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
crown such as William Cecil reveal the ubiquity and importance attached to both sides of the argument. The political life of European courts could present many dangers to those pursuing the active life, especially in times of crises over religion or the succession. Those in the Tudor and Jacobean Commonwealth clearly apprehended this. In response, some political authors turned back to Plato and the historians of imperial Rome to advance the argument that the best course of action in corrupt times may be inaction, may indeed be withdrawal to private study and country pursuits until perhaps there is a change in regime. Vives had argued in his early work for pursuit of the active life in the cause of peace and prosperity throughout Europe. Monarchs fall quickly into tyranny without the help of true counsel to moderate destructive passions, and Vives as much as More severed the office of kingship and the majesty surrounding it from the mere person who occupied it and was inclined to be disappointingly fallible. According to Vives, a prince is merely a man endowed with public power to which God added occult majesty, who must exercise better judgment than an ordinary subject since so many depend on his rule. Therefore counsel from active advisers is indispensable. Vives, however, articulated a more guarded view in his De concordia et discordia in humano genere of which drew heavily on Stoic sources such as Seneca and his own experiences surrounding Henry VIII’s pursuit of divorce from Catherine of Aragon. With Socrates as the model, Vives urged independence and security of spirit in the scholar. He should do what he can to cure discord in others, but if reform is not possible, retirement to the vita contemplativa is justified. In Thomas Starkey’s A Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset (c. –) the interlocutor Pole hesitates to serve Henry VIII, arguing for the need to consider time and place. Plato and Cicero had chanced on times of tyranny and civil war and so could not be of most profit to their polities. Nevertheless, his friend Lupset encourages him to commit himself to service. In the latter years of the sixteenth century some commentators have discerned a Tacitean and neo-Stoic challenge to the praise of the active life which co-existed with the civic humanist position. Recent
Peltonen, Classical Humanism, passim; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, ); Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, – (Cambridge, ). Cathy Curtis, ‘The Social and Political Thought of Juan Luis Vives: Concord and Counsel in the Christian Commonwealth’, in Charles Fantazzi, ed., A Companion to Juan Luis Vives (Leiden, ), pp. –. Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer (London, ), pp. –, . Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, – (Cambridge, ), chs. –.
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare
publications and translations of Seneca and Justus Lipsius, it is argued, could be harnessed to support the contemplative life. The philosopher or learned, virtuous man should leave aside civil business and retreat, seeking freedom from the perturbations of the mind. A man is justified in this passivity. He doesn’t put private good and profit ahead of service to the public good, but wisely remains an observer. Ben Jonson’s Roman play, Sejanus His Fall (), saw this line advanced. But, it must be contended, this line of argument can be found frequently in the earlier sixteenth century, and humanists such as More and Vives were able to draw on Tacitus, among other classical Platonic, Stoic and Ciceronian sources, in addition to Christian sources. The deep ambivalence surrounding the Jacobean court in particular – the perceived servility, favouritism and debauchery, and the civilising model of courtesy and manners that was attached to it – stands against this background.
’
The English debate over the active and contemplative lives had, then, been current since the early sixteenth century at least. In the early modern period, the discharge of the office of the philosopher, poet or satirist was frequently an indirect means of offering counsel and admonition. In the case of Shakespeare, the dramatist discharges his office in a fashion that is neither prescriptive nor admonishing; rather, he ‘represents the city to the city’ in all its multi-faceted complexity. Shakespeare was not university-educated, knew some Latin and less Greek from his grammar-school education, and never occupied a public office or acted as a counsellor at court. He was, however, very much a participant in the life of London as a businessman and playwright who presented a number of his plays at court (such as Hamlet, King Lear and Measure For Measure). He was associated with the Inns of Court and courtly circles, notably that of the earl of Essex. Troilus and Cressida may have been composed for law students. There are a number of well-drawn
Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge, ). I draw here on Simon Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford, ); Roslyn L. Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time, – (Princeton, ); Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, – (New Haven, ). W. R. Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court (Aldershot, ).
courts in his plays – the English courts of the history plays, Elsinore and the French court of All’s Well That Ends Well. Shakespeare’s drama reveals his knowledge of many classical and humanist authors, even if in the many translations appearing from the s, and his acute understanding of the ars rhetorica. It is not surprising, then, that Shakespeare should be concerned with such a live, nuanced debate. It suggested not only rich matter or copia but also creative possibilities for plot, and displays of rhetorical virtuosity in thesis and hypothesis (fleshed out by reference to persons, situations and plot). The debate appears in a number of unconventional and provocative guises. Shakespeare redefines what the life of withdrawal from civil affairs might constitute and probes the motivations of those who voluntarily eschew rule or rule poorly because of their preference for contemplation. The reversal of roles and fortunes which the movement from one to the other necessitates affords enormous dramatic freedom to consider government in its many forms and precisely what it is that delineates office or majesty. The active and contemplative lives are set up in opposition in some plays through the court/country dichotomy, while others seem to invite the interpretation that they are sequential and/or complementary. Shakespeare introduces a gendered consideration to a debate previously cast in masculine terms, especially appropriate in a period of female European monarchs. That the chronological range of the plays which relate to the debate extends from ( Henry VI ) to (Henry VIII ) reinforces my argument that it was a persistent preoccupation of audiences and a sustained source of creative energy for the dramatist. Consider first the curiosity revealed about not only the legitimacy of kingship and resistance to potential and actual tyranny, but also surrounding the burdens of rule, the powerful desire to retreat from those burdens, from the corruption of courts, and the flawed psychology of many within them. Shakespeare also exhibits curiosity about the benefits of suspension from active life for both rulers and subjects. Prospero was usurped as Duke of Milan when he neglected rule to pursue the scholarly life. As You Like It (–) is constructed around the plot of another usurping brother, but in this case Duke Senior was forced to erect an alternative court in Arden, where a time of holiday prevails. The young Hamlet (Hamlet, –), the contemplative university scholar, struggles to act as the revenging son, against regicide, fratricide
Charles Martindale and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London, ); Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor, eds., Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge, ).
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare
and the usurpation of his mother’s bed by the murderous uncle and new king, Claudius. Hamlet does not at any time seek the crown which might naturally fall to him given his popularity with the people under the elective Danish monarchy. The ethically ambiguous character of Duke Vincentio in Measure For Measure () passes his rule on to his untried and uncertain deputy Angelo and the magistrate Escalus temporarily, so as to learn more about the depth of his own misrule. Henry V (Henry V, –), the son of a usurper, Henry IV, would seem the model of the monarch who preserves his rule through decisive action, engaging in a war of questionable legitimacy so as to quell internal faction and establish his rule more firmly. But it might be argued that as Prince Hal he appears to neglect public duty wilfully in favour of the ‘unlettered, rude and shallow’ camaraderie of Falstaff and his Eastcheap companions; he exhibits no virtue, his hours ‘filled up with riots, banquets, sports, / And never noted in him any study, / Any retirement’ from common company (. . –). While much of the abundant mirror-for-princes and courtesy literature circulating in the early modern period has little to say about the (usually hereditary) ruler who either chooses to retire from or abdicate active rule, whether temporarily or permanently, or who is usurped against his or her will and forced to embrace the politically inactive life, there did exist a body of writings which could give Shakespeare powerful images of past notorious or neglectful rule. Machiavelli’s The Prince (), Senecan and fallof-princes narratives, such as John Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes (–), and the Chronicles of Edward Hall () and Raphael Holinshed () are all cases in point. The immensely popular collaborative Mirror For Magistrates () provided a series of poetic narratives spoken by English rulers, nobles and the odd rebellious subject, such as Jack Cade. The didactic aim was to draw knowledge from past failures so as to guide future action. William Baldwin thus prefaced the Mirror, invoking Plato and insisting on the importance of responsible execution of office: Well is that realme governed, in which the ambitious deseyr not to bear office. Wherby you may perceive … what offices are, where they be duely executed: not for gainful spoyles for the greedy to hunt for, but payneful toyles for the heedy to be charged with … there is nothing more necessary in a common weale, than that officiers be diligent and trusty in their charges.
Tom McAlindon, ‘What is Shakespearean Tragedy?’, and David Bevington, ‘Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Career’, in Claire McEachern, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge, ), pp. –, –. William Baldwin et al., The Mirror For Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, ), p. ; Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London, ), p. ; Raphael
But the difficulty is that those who do not seek rule may not be equipped to rule, by virtue of their nature or education. In Henry VI, Shakespeare followed Hall in his characterisation of the king as perceived by those around him as ‘not king, / Not fit to govern and rule multitudes’ (. . –): This yll chance & misfortune, by many mens opinions happened to him, because he was a man of no great wit, such as men commonly call an Innocent man, neither a foole, neither very wyse, whose study always was more to excel, other in Godly livynge & virtuous example, / than in worldly regiment, or temporall dominion, in so much, that in comparison to the study & delectation that he had to virtue / and godliness, he little regarded, but in manner despised al worldly power & temporal authoritie, which syldome follow or seke after such persons, as from them flye or disdayne to take them. But hys enemies ascri / bed all this to hys coward stomack.
Others ascribed it to providence, to God’s punishment for the grandfather’s offence of usurpation. Henry VI’s father, as Prince Hal, knew better; in Shakespeare’s play he ‘obscured his contemplation / Under the veil of wildness’, its rapid increase unseen (Henry V, . . –). When Hal assumes the crown Falstaff is repudiated – the consummate role player banishes the ‘old white-bearded satan’: ‘I will. I do’ ( Henry IV, . . , ). The full extent of Henry’s ability to debate ‘commonwealth affairs’, ‘discourse of war’, to cut through complexities in ‘any cause of policy’ to and to be the rhetorician of honeyed sentences seems miraculous (Henry V, . . , , –). ‘So that the art and practice part of life / Must be the mistress to this theoric’ (. . –). The prince ‘studies his companions / Like a strange tongue’ but is able to throw off the ‘immodest’ part of them when that is achieved ( Henry IV, . . –). Here, then, is an unconventional expression of the unity of or traffic between the active and contemplative lives. The politically active man needs to spend time in scholarly contemplation as usually understood – here, before he assumes rule – as well as study life as lived, and language as commonly spoken, to fully realise the active life as ruler. Hal’s understanding of the political virtue of accommodation to time, audience and place is extremely acute. Hal had, one presumes, been surreptitiously reading his Machiavelli. Even when king, Henry briefly puts aside the garments of kingship and assumes the disguise of a common soldier (a little like Duke Vincentio),
Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. Henry Ellis (London, ); Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke ([London], ). Hall, Union of the Two Noble Famelies, p. CCx v.
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare
so as to walk among his soldiers and hear them freely speak their minds about their monarch’s prosecution of bloody war on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. His conversation with his soldiers, and his soliloquy on the illusory ceremony of kingship, are highly pertinent to the difficulties of the active life for both common subject and soldier, and ruler. To the commoners Bates, Court and Williams, Henry V muses, ‘I think the King is but a man, as I am … All his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man’ (Henry V, . . –). Henry defends the King’s decision as just and his cause as honourable, but Williams sees the implications, the ‘heavy reckoning’ at judgment day if the ‘cause’ be not good (. . –). Henry seeks to deflect the King’s responsibility for the loss of so many souls, arguing that the ‘duty’ of the subject is to serve their king while the ‘soul’ of the subject is the concern of that person only, regardless of whether or not they have been dispatched to war in a just cause (. . –). Alone again, Henry exclaims: Upon the king! ‘Let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, Our children and our sins lay on the King.’ We must bear all. O hard condition, Twin-born with greatness: subject to the breath Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel But his own wringing. What infinite heartsease Must kings neglect that private men enjoy? And what have kings that privates have not too, Save ceremony, save general ceremony? (. . –)
Such ceremony then, ‘creating awe and fear in other men? / Wherin thou art less happy, being feared, / Than they in fearing. / What drink’st thou oft, instead of homage sweet, / But poisoned flattery?’ (. . –). All the ‘thrice-gorgeous ceremony’ does not allow a king to ‘sleep so soundly as the wretched slave’ (. . –). A slave has the advantage over a king who must maintain peace. The burdens of kingship, scarcely discernible to lowly subjects, cast a dark shadow indeed on the Ciceronian imperative of active service. Henry VI inherits an unsure claim to the throne from Henry V and soon loses or relinquishes the territorial gains of his father. Here is the poignant image of the hapless, peace-preferring king who would rather use words and the law than arms to resolve the vengeful battle of the Houses of Lancaster and York and who would agree to pass on succession to York, so disinheriting his own son and sparing them both the yoke of
rule. Here is the king who withdraws from Parliament. ‘Was never subject longed to be a king / As I do long and wish to be a subject’ ( Henry VI, . . –). An incandescent Queen Margaret – the embodiment of action – is only one of a number of characters who refers not only to his wax-like softness and religiosity, but also to his bookishness which has brought ruin upon England ( Henry VI, . . –). Henry VI is virtuous but temperamentally a contemplative. Even with a bloody battle for his crown around him, he is isolated on a molehill. Sent from the fray by Margaret and Clifford who feel they will prosper better without him, he soliloquises, ‘Would I were dead, if God’s good will were so – / For what is in this world but grief and woe? / O God! Methinks it were a happy life / To be no better than a homely swain’ ( Henry VI, . . –). Henry VI envies the shepherd’s simple, contemplative life, contrasting it to his own, waited upon by ‘Care, Mistrust, and Treason’ (. . ). When immured in the Tower after Edward takes the throne, Henry is able to forget his loss of liberty because by living low he is now beyond the play of Fortune and the people ‘may not be punish’d with my thwarting stars’ (. . –). Small wonder that the aged Lear seeks release from kingship, even if he is reluctant to divest himself of the ceremonies and authority of that kingship. King Lear (–) was performed before James VI and I at court as part of Christmas festivities a year after the Gunpowder Plot. The play opens with Lear declaring that ’tis our fast intent / To shake all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we / Unburdened crawl toward death’ (. . –). He divides a united kingdom which he has apparently ruled with some success and on the basis of the flattery of two vicious daughters and against the honest counsel of his third daughter, Cordelia, and loyal courtier, Kent. The kingdom is plunged into terror and war, and his family is a parallel study in discord. Lear’s egocentrism, anger and irrationality could not be further from the classical and Renaissance ideal of the temperate and moderate ruler. But it is only in Lear’s extremity of fear and nakedness on the heath, where he is without any office or shelter, that he contemplates the nature of majesty and recognises his failures of governance. Judges and magistrates get away with crimes that the poor cannot. ‘A dog’s obeyed in office’ (. . ). Lear has taken too little care of the ‘poor, naked Wretches’ unhoused and unfed. ‘Take physic, pomp, / Expose thyself to
Oliver Arnold, The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theatre and the Early Modern House of Commons (Baltimore, ). Margot Heinemann, ‘De-mystifying the State: King Lear and the World Turned Upside Down’, in Catherine M. S. Alexander, ed., Shakespeare and Politics (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare
feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them / And show the heavens more just’ (. . ; –). As also for Henry V, the divesting of the show of majesty and the experience of aspects of the lives of subjects allow Lear to truly empathise and consider the onerous responsibilities of rule. For Prince Hamlet, knowledge of ethics, theology and rhetoric gained from the scholarly life appears to delay rather than assist the conversion of thought into action. Why does Hamlet procrastinate? Hamlet’s soliloquies reveal his intellectual curiosity and philosophical formation. That he studies in Wittenberg suggests a Protestant, humanist education which placed an emphasis on scepticism regarding traditional authorities. Hamlet questions not only his circumstances, but the general condition of man and the nature of revenge. He regards himself as ‘born to set it right’ (Hamlet, . . ), but first requires more proof than that offered by a Ghost who might have malign intent. He scrutinises his own motives – what is done nobly and what in madness? He questions his own virtue and true nobility, as the son of a god-like father but a licentious mother (in his own perception), subscribing to the Aristotelian side of the debate that it is lineage which determines nobility. Hamlet wonders whether to move against Claudius. ‘Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument, / But greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honour’s at the stake’ (. . –). Hamlet’s bouts of melancholic inertia initially bind him to inaction, and he recognises that it renders him less a prince than a slave, lacking the heat and blood required for purposeful and virtuous action. The Stoic constancy of Horatio contrasts with the emotional volatility of Hamlet, the pure action of Fortinbras with the hesitation of Hamlet to avenge his father’s honour. The ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy recalls Henry VI’s plaintive cry to escape the intolerable weight of deciding matters of state – which also encompasses matters of family. Neither Hamlet nor Henry VI commits suicide, but the expression of the ultimate desire for withdrawal conveys how unbearable the demands of action are, especially dishonourable action, on a more naturally contemplative and virtuous spirit. As in Henry VI, this suggests the question whether all rulers are suited by temperament for the office. Hamlet himself muses that virtuous men can carry some single major blemish, some vicious mole of nature that brings them ruin (. . ). Such a blemish becomes apparent in certain
Huston Diehl, ‘Religion and Shakespearean Tragedy’, in McEachern, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. –.
circumstances, to become a true vice. In less corrupt times, a cautious, reflective prince might have served Denmark better. In a corrupt court of intrigue and suspicion, where courtiers will agree that a cloud is very much like a whale, and hot weather is cold and cold hot, Hamlet is unfit for the immense burdens of office. If we turn to consider Prospero, we encounter yet more ambiguities in the debate concerning withdrawal and politically engaged commitment. As Prospero admits to Miranda, his brother (yes, another brother) assumed power while he was ‘neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated / To closeness and the bettering of my mind’ (The Tempest, . . –). His ‘library / Was dukedom large enough’ (. . –). Prospero’s detachment from courtly life leads to his exile on the enchanted island, where he rules his servants Caliban and Ariel tyrannically. Prospero’s reading, presumably in classical and Italian humanism as well as the damnable false arts of magic, has not educated him in the arts of maintaining good government. And his failure in instructing Caliban to curse only, rather than use civil speech, does not reflect well on his capacity as a teacher, nor on his own uncivil speech which dominates and humiliates his island subjects. But paradoxically, it is Prospero’s books, sent with him into exile, which endow him with the power of the magus who can conjure a tempest and bring his enemies and the young Ferdinand to the island. His control of their actions and wills eventually leads to his escape from the island, the restoration of his power in Milan, and the marriage of his daughter Miranda to Ferdinand which unites Milan and Naples. He renounces magic and the desire for vengeance. But whether Prospero will now govern more equitably and conscientiously is unresolved. In the final act he says that he will retire to Milan, where his every third thought will be of the grave (. . –). The play allows the audience its own period of contemplation, of imaginative liberty, in which to consider issues related to the vita activa. Along with Gonzalo, we may think ourselves kings who dream of the possibility of establishing a utopia with no rank, differences in possessions, servitude or labour. And the audience may reflect on the corruption of European courtly government and, again, the problem of misrule by an unsuitable governor. Duke Vincentio in Measure For Measure hopes to reform the corruption in Vienna which his own laxity and neglect have generated, but
Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, – (Cambridge, ), ch. ; Constance Jordan, Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (New York, ).
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare
through the actions of his deputy, who he believes will act severely against corruption. With the Duke’s manipulation of bed-tricks and forced marriages, he allows his form of mercy to prevail over an inequitable agent of justice and reclaims his rule in the end. Whether his government will be improved after this is doubtful. And whether Isabella will return to the contemplative life of the nunnery after her part in the rescue of Claudio or accept the Duke’s offer of marriage is left unresolved. It is not clear whether Shakespeare slights the contemplative ideal or not in the case of Isabella – certainly she learns to speak more persuasively and behave more forcefully when addressing Angelo, but courtly life may indeed require more compromise than the sequestered life of a nun . Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. –), a comedy of ideas which relies as much as any other on the development of themes and displays of rhetorical copiousness and verbal wit, opens with the debate concerning the active versus the contemplative life. On this turns an exploration of human nature, its passions, needs and will, and the working of the intellect. The king of Navarre and his lords swear an oath to spend an austere three years in study, fasting, sleep-deprived and denied the company of women. The court will be a Platonic academy, with the king as its philosopher-king and the lords as its guardian class. These ‘brave conquerors’ in ‘that war against your own affections / And the huge army of the world’s desires’ will make Navarre the ‘wonder of the world; / Out little academe, / Still and contemplative in living art’ (. . –). Such a Stoic pursuit of everlasting fame through the vita contemplativa is held to be the right end of living. As the Lord Dumaine swears his oath, he declares that ‘To love, to wealth, to pomp, I pine and die, / With all these living in philosophy’ (. . –). Yet Biron questions this particular conception of scholarly endeavour (. . –). What if ‘reading’ or ‘studying’ (note that Shakespeare does not use ‘learning’) actually blinds the mind: ‘Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun, / That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks. / Small have continual plodders ever won / Save base authority from others’ books’ (. . –). Of course, and as the king recognises, Biron uses his extensive reading to ‘reason against reading’ in support of ‘barbarism’ against ‘angel knowledge’ (. . , . . –). And what if such arduous study is out of season, if ‘to study, now it is too late, / Climb o’er the house to unlock the little gate’ (. . –)? This appears close to the humanist position that education for civil office must begin early in boyhood and be directed to the good of the commonwealth. Love’s Labour’s Lost supports the union of appropriately timed intellectual contemplation with experience of the world, the humanist value of prudentia.
Two other comedies raise two related issues for the contemplative and active life. All’s Well That Ends Well (–) enacts the debate of true civil nobility and its relationship to courtly life. The virtuous, learned, but lowly born Helena acts to gain what she desires. She cures the king with her skill, and by performing this great public service is ennobled, and granted her wish to choose a husband from the courtiers. Bertram, however, repudiates her as unworthy in degree and avoids consummating the marriage, a religious duty, by seeking honour in a war both messy and unnecessary. Conflicting conceptions of honour and nobility are set up in the play – gendered, military, marital and courtly, and intrinsic or ornamental. Is it blood or public virtue that determines the question? Although physical and moral characteristics can be inherited, virtue in action is the principle supported in the play. The king makes an astonishing statement supporting the notion that action and character, rather than lineage and wealth, determine virtue: ‘From lowest place when virtuous things proceed, / The place is dignified by th’doer’s deed. / Where great additions swell’s, and virtues none, / It is a dropsied honour’ (All’s Well That Ends Well, . . –). This does not necessarily undermine the conception of a hierarchical society: wealth can still enhance virtue. But it does affirm social mobility based on merit. Additionally, the older, wiser members of the court lament the passing of better standards of courtliness as represented by Bertram’s father (. . –). Courtly language is debased – Parolles is a liar whose soul is in his clothes; his companionate influence on young Bertram is pernicious. The Clown describes him so: ‘To say nothing, to do / nothing, to know nothing, and to have nothing, is to be a great / part of your title, which is within a very little nothing’ (. . –). And as the Clown explains to the Countess, any man who ‘cannot make a leg, put off ’s cap, kiss his hand, and say nothing’ can make it at court (. . –). As You Like It is a gentler version of the court-versus-country debate already evoked in Henry VI. The conversation between the shepherd Corin and the courtier Touchstone underscores its relativism. The natural philosopher Corin maintains that ‘good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court’ (. . –). He praises the virtues of common labour and self-sufficiency – although the poverty induced by land enclosures
Muriel Bradbrook, ‘Shakespeare’s Hybrid: All’s Well that Ends Well’, in Muriel Bradbrook on Shakespeare (Sussex, ), pp. –.
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threatens the country idyll. Touchstone argues both sides of the question: he simultaneously praises and dispraises the shepherd’s life (. . –). In his exchange with the melancholic philosopher Jaques, a portrait of the contemplative misanthrope who tearfully moralises the spectacle of a dying deer with a thousand similes (. . –), Touchstone satirises courtly quarrels conducted point by point according to the courtesy manuals – the retort courteous, the quip modest and so on (. . –). The topos of the active versus the contemplative life, then, received a diverse and subtle development in the selection of plays explored here. It has embedded within it a series of interrelated issues regarding the true nature of majesty, the qualities of good and corrupt rule, the connections between the passions and civil life, and the nature of virtue. The plays celebrate the playwright’s rhetorical virtuosity and creativity through the extended literary experimentation with, embellishment of and paradox within these themes. They also deliver a multiple and at times contradictory perspective on sensitive political questions which clearly preoccupied an early modern audience, given their frequent appearance across almost the entire period of Shakespeare’s composition. That audience was made up of many different estates in society, from monarchs to apprentices, and from common lawyers to women. I would argue that it is most useful to consider the dramatist as a rhetorician and unofficial counsellor, revealing aspects of the commonwealth to the commonwealth – rather than as a political theorist of, say, monarchy, or an advocate of some form of republicanism. A more open-ended imaginative – and at times satirical – treatment was at work, which dramatised debate and represented not only those actively or directly involved in governance. While entertaining audiences and sustaining commercial success, the plays bring forth a collection of challenging ideas which were of vital import to all degrees in society, especially compelling because they included the voices of the poor and common soldiers, as well as those of kings and chancellors, in a variety of contexts, and so many of them historically based. Shakespeare’s interactive dramaturgy insists on the interdependence of the roles and offices of those who constitute a realm. That said, it is clear in the plays under discussion that great anxiety surrounds not only usurpation of authority, tyranny and succession crises, but also the dereliction of high office resulting from self-interest, disinclination and/or unsuitability, and the consequences of that dereliction for the
governed. Henry VI’s preference for studious contemplation rather than civil action brings about the loss of his crown and civil war. Prospero loses his office as Duke of Milan for similar reasons. And immoderate passions in a ruler or magistrate (anger, passivity, fear and/or indecisiveness) were thought in the early modern period to corrupt the entire body politic, as did discord between individuals and within families. Shakespeare’s Lear and Hamlet accord with this viewpoint, with their extraordinary expressions of interfamilial dissension coupled with the emotional distemper and volatility that destabilise regimes. Shakespeare’s demystification and desacralisation of monarchy and rule more generally are connected to this. The audience is brought to consider the separation of high office from the person who holds it. This strategy is recognisable in the writings of earlier Tudor writers, especially More and Vives. Shakespeare’s Henry V chooses to briefly divest himself of the attire of majesty in order to gather intelligence on the success of his rule and the justice of his prosecution of the war, while Lear learns the painful truth of his failure to care for his oppressed subjects when he has been stripped of all vestiges of authority. Henry VI experiences a reversal of fortune, from king to prisoner, but like Wolsey in Henry VIII after his fall, feels unburdened and at peace. This may move perception in a number of directions. Monarchy in particular is conceived less as mystical divine right than as the most important among many offices, which must be exercised with extreme care because all subjects are dependent upon it for their prosperity and peace. That it is usually an hereditary office poses substantial risk. And knowledge can be gained to improve rule by a ruler temporarily moving among the common people as one of them, so as to truly understand their lives and the consequences of one’s own misrule – Vincentio presents a case in point. This emphasis on the responsibility of rule also enhances the capacity to perceive rule as constructed, contingent and separable from the mere mortal occupying the office. The regicide of Charles I by some of his parliamentarians and their supporters was only decades away. The remedy to corruption and neglect, as articulated in early modern monarchical and republican political thought alike, was to be found in the cultivation of true virtue and a moderated emotional life in both ruler and subject/citizen, which could be achieved only through the combination of education, adherence to the laws of the commonwealth and respect for their officers, and through the provision of good counsel by those of sound judgment. It is in these that the active life is made possible in the first place, and then sustained. And it is only when these have
The active and contemplative lives in Shakespeare
failed utterly and irrevocably that complete withdrawal to the life of contemplation is thought justified. In the plays surveyed here, though, there is both endorsement and small comfort. In Helena we have an image of true virtue founded on active achievement, while Kent and Cordelia are exemplars of honest counsellors who yet fail to be heard. The debased language and flattery depicted malignly in Hamlet and more gently in All’s Well and As You Like It reveal unreformed courtiers who pervert their proper function of counsel – and indeed communication – and therefore fail to support good governance. If the hazards and burdens of dedication to the vita activa are made evident by Shakespeare, the possibility of renewal is offered by the pastoral idyll and a period of contemplation from which new perspectives can be gained before a return to political life. Duke Senior and his lords in Arden, and Prospero on his magical island, invite the audience’s rethinking of the traditional opposition of the active and contemplative lives. And it is this creative dialogic space that brings so much to bear on the traditional topos. Sweet indeed are the uses of adversity.
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority Stephen Greenblatt
In , a friend of mine, Robert Pinsky, who at the time was serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States, invited me to a poetry evening at the Clinton White House, one of a series of black-tie events organised to mark the coming millennium. On this occasion the President gave an amusing introductory speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poetry came in junior high school when his teacher made him memorise certain passages from Macbeth. This was, Clinton remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics. After the speeches, I joined the line waiting to shake the President’s hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumours of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. ‘Mr President,’ I said, sticking out my hand, ‘don’t you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?’ Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, ‘I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.’ I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth’s anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland’s legitimate ruler: I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself And falls on th’other. (Macbeth, . . –) An earlier version of this chapter appeared in The New York Review of Books , no. ( April ) and is reprinted by permission of author and publisher.
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority
I left the White House that evening with the thought that Bill Clinton had missed his true vocation, which was, of course, to be an English professor. But the profession he actually chose makes it all the more appropriate to consider whether it is possible in Shakespeare to discover an ‘ethically adequate object’ for human ambition. Macbeth himself seems tormented by the question. To be sure, his anxiety derives in part from a straightforward prudential concern, a fear that what he metes out will inevitably be meted out to him, measure for measure. But his queasiness has deeper roots in his sense of ethical obligation, in this case the obligation to obey and serve the king his master. His wife, who knows her husband’s character all too well, has already cannily anticipated his inner struggle: Thou wouldst be great, Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it. (. . –)
Hence, faced with the perfect opportunity to seize the crown – King Duncan is a guest in his castle – Macbeth holds back. He is, he reflects, Duncan’s kinsman and subject, and at this moment he is also the king’s host ‘[w]ho should against his murderer shut the door, / Not bear the knife myself’ (. . –). Above all, there has been nothing in the king’s comportment that would make his murder a remotely justifiable act. (Shakespeare characteristically altered his source in order to eliminate evidence of Duncan’s incompetence and thus to eliminate a rational basis for his assassination.) On the contrary, Macbeth broods, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off (. . –)
‘Meek’ is a strange word to describe a king whom we have just seen conducting a bloody military campaign and ordering the summary execution of his enemy, the thane of Cawdor. But it serves to intensify Macbeth’s brooding on the deep damnation that will befall Duncan’s assassin. The theological language here must, I think, be understood as an expression of the would-be assassin’s inner fears and not as Shakespeare’s own affirmation of the sacredness of kingship. From time to time, of course, we hear such affirmations in his work –
There’s such divinity doth hedge a king That treason can but peep to what it would (Hamlet, . . –)
– but they tend to be treated with deft irony. The stirring words I have just quoted from Hamlet are spoken by the fratricide Claudius, successfully pacifying the enraged Laertes. None of Shakespeare’s plays, not even Macbeth, unequivocally endorses the view that any act of usurpation is automatically evil, and none condemns as necessarily unethical the use of violence to topple the established order. Unlike the most conservative voices in his time, Shakespeare did not position himself squarely against the bloody unthroning even of anointed monarchs. Violence, as he well understood, was one of the principal mechanisms of regime change. Richard III, to take an example from early in Shakespeare’s career, has royal blood and a better lineal claim to the throne than anyone in the realm. (To be sure, he has seen to that by murdering everyone in his way, but ruthlessness was never strictly incompatible with legitimacy.) He is careful to wrap himself in the mantle of moral authority, appearing before the citizens with prayer book in hand in the company of two ‘deep divines’ (Richard III, . . ), and if this show of piety is hypocritical and the popular acclamation manipulated, Shakespeare’s audience easily grasped that such shows were essential elements in the order of things. Some, after all, might have still recalled that Queen Elizabeth ostentatiously kissed a bible during her coronation procession. Yet Shakespeare’s history play never doubts that it is reasonable, sane, even necessary, to rise up on the side of the usurper. The beleaguered king vigorously exhorts his troops to destroy the invading army, ‘vagabonds, rascals and runaways’ led by a ‘paltry fellow’ (. . , ). But the paltry fellow succeeds in killing the king. But if Shakespeare treated the mystical accounts of kingship with relentless irony, he did not endorse any general principle of resistance. Such principles were readily available in a variety of forms: the tyrannicide advocated by George Buchanan; the passive disobedience proposed by Montaigne’s friend Étienne de la Boétie; the oligarchical republicanism articulated by Thomas Starkey. ‘What is more repugnant to nature’, Starkey wrote during the reign of Henry VIII, ‘than a whole nation to be governed by the will of a prince, which ever followeth his frail fantasy and unruled affects?’ The only way to secure the well-being, dignity and liberty of men, he declared, was to hold free elections, the elections that fashioned the greatness of the ancient Roman republic and that accounted in his view for the flourishing success of contemporary Venice.
Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer (London, ), p. .
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority
Deeply invested imaginatively in both Rome and Venice, Shakespeare understood this argument very well, yet he kept a critical, ironic distance from it. There are elections in his work – in Titus Andronicus, for example, and in Coriolanus, Hamlet and Macbeth – but they are all deeply flawed. It is not that the plays are sentimental about the alternative to elections: they offer many variations on a spectacle epitomised by Julius Caesar, surrounded by cynical flatterers, caught up in his own cult of personality and poised to destroy the tottering liberties of Rome. The republican conspirators who determine to rid themselves of this public menace adhere to a moral principle: ‘I was born as free as Caesar,’ Cassius tells Brutus; ‘so were you’ ( Julius Caesar, . . ). But it is not clear that they themselves have the will to govern; after all, Brutus makes clear in his oration that it is precisely the manifestation of this will in Caesar that prompted his murder: As Caesar loved me, I weep for him. As he was fortunate, I rejoice at it. As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him. (. . –)
If the conspirators do nonetheless aim to wield power in the newly restored Roman republic, that aim, as the play shows, is doomed by their own internal disagreements, their total contempt for the will of the people and their fatal errors of judgment. At the close the triumphant Antony briefly pauses to pays homage to what he calls Brutus’ ‘general honest thought’, that is, his ethical motivation – All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar. He only in a general honest thought And common good to all made one of them. (. . –)
Then he and Octavius turn to the serious business of carving up the Roman state. Brutus’ fate is not his alone: in Shakespeare no character with a clear moral vision has a will to power and, conversely, no character with a strong desire to rule over others has an ethically adequate object. Th is is most obviously true of Shakespearean villains – the megalomaniac Richard III, the bastard Edmond (along with the ghastly Goneril, Regan and Cornwall), the Macbeths and the like – but it is also true of such characters as Bolingbroke in the Henry IV plays, Cassius in Julius Caesar, Fortinbras in Hamlet and Malcolm in Macbeth. Even victorious Henry V – Shakespeare’s most charismatic hero – does not
substantially alter the plays’ overarching scepticism about the ethics of wielding authority. No one is more aware than the reformed wastrel, Henry V, that there is something deeply flawed in his whole possession of power and in the foreign war he has cynically launched on the flimsiest of pretexts. On the eve of the decisive battle of Agincourt, he queasily negotiates a settlement with God – ‘Not today, O Lord, / O not today, think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown’ (Henry V, . . –) – and evidently God is at least temporarily won over. At the end of the play Henry proclaims the death penalty for anyone who denies that the victory was God’s alone. But, as the epilogue makes clear, the king’s son and successor soon lost everything that his father had won. And the irony is that this son, Henry VI, is virtually the only Shakespearean ruler with a high-minded, ethical goal: a deeply religious man, he is passionately committed to bringing peace among his fractious, violent and blindly ambitious nobles. Unfortunately, this pious king has no skills at governance whatever. The nobles easily destroy him and plunge the realm into a bloody civil war. If one wants to find genuine skills at governance in Shakespeare, they are most attractively on display in Claudius, the usurper in Hamlet who kills his brother, Hamlet’s father, to become king: Thus much the business is: we have here writ To Norway, uncle of young Fortinbras, Who, impotent and bed-rid, scarcely hears Of this his nephew’s purpose, – to suppress His further gait herein; in that the levies, The lists and full proportions, are all made Out of his subject: and we here dispatch You, good Cornelius, and you, Voltimand, For bearers of this greeting to old Norway; Giving to you no further personal power To business with the king, more than the scope Of these delated articles allow. Farewell, and let your haste commend your duty. (Hamlet, . . –)
Shakespeare risked this uncharacteristically dull speech in order to convey the voice of authority: business-like, confident, decisive, careful and politically astute. And it is, of course, the voice of a murderer, the festering source of all that is rotten in the state of Denmark. It is those who attempt to pull back from power who fascinated Shakespeare at least as much as those who strive to exercise it: the spoiled
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority
dreamer, Richard II, who seems to embrace his fall from the throne, the love-crazed Antony who prefers embracing Cleopatra to ruling the world, Coriolanus who cannot abide the ordinary rituals of political life and old Lear who hopes: To shake all cares and business from our age; Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburthened crawl toward death. (King Lear, . . –)
What all of these very different characters have in common – and we could add Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure and Prospero in The Tempest – is the desire to escape from the burdens of governance. And in each case the desire leads to disaster. For if Shakespeare was deeply drawn to those who want to walk away from positions of authority, he was at the same time convinced that this attempt is doomed. Power exists to be exercised in the world; it will not go away if you close your eyes and dream of escaping into your study or your lover’s arms or your daughter’s house. It will simply be seized by someone else, someone probably more coldly efficient than you are and still further away from an ethically adequate object: Bolingbroke, Octavius Caesar, Edmond, Angelo, Prospero’s usurping brother Antonio. Prospero, ‘rapt in secret studies’ (The Tempest, . . ), loses his dukedom, but, even in exile, he does not escape the authority to which he was culpably indifferent. Instead he finds himself, together with his daughter, on an island that serves as a kind of experimental space for testing the ethics of authority. Prospero possesses many of the princely virtues that the Renaissance prized, but the results of the experiment are at best deeply ambiguous: one of the island’s native inhabitants is liberated only to be forced into compulsory servitude; the other is educated only to be enslaved. Prospero does seem to make one crucial ethical breakthrough: though he has his hated brother and his other enemies under his absolute control, he chooses not to exact vengeance upon them. But this choice is made at the urging of the non-human spirit Ariel who declares what he would do ‘were I human’ (. . ). Perhaps the more striking ethical choice that Prospero makes – and makes on his own, without Ariel’s urging – is to give up his magical powers (the romance equivalent of martial law), take back the dukedom he had lost twelve years earlier and return to the city from which he had been exiled. By doing so he deliberately plunges back into the contingency, risk and moral uncertainty that he had temporarily escaped. And, tellingly, he leaves Ariel behind.
The conclusion toward which these stories tend is not the cynical abandonment of all hope for decency in public life, but rather a deep scepticism about any attempt to formulate and obey an abstract moral law independent of actual social, political and psychological circumstances. This scepticism set Shakespeare at odds with the dominant currents of ethical reflection in his period. It is not that he set out, like Marlowe, to swim against these currents or to stage violent protests against them; rather, he seems simply to have found them incompatible with his art. Renaissance moral thought, like the Christian theology on which it drew, was deeply influenced by what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls the ‘ethicized psychology’ invented by Plato. The idea, against which Williams’ powerful book Shame and Necessity () struggles, is that ‘the functions of the mind, above all, with regard to action, are defined in terms of categories that get their significance from ethics’. Thus psychic conflict, especially that between reason and desire, is mistakenly understood as inevitably an ethical conflict. In this influential but misguided tradition, ‘reason operates as a distinctive part of the soul’ , Williams observes, ‘only to the extent that it controls, dominates, or rises above the desires’. There is a glimpse of this ethicised psychology in The Tempest, precisely in Prospero’s response to the spirit Ariel’s moral advice. ‘Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick’, Prospero says of his enemies, Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury Do I take part. (. . –)
But the play as a whole – and the great body of work of which it is part – resists the idea of a moralised basic structure of the mind and, with it, the search for an intrinsically just conception of responsibility. Prospero’s character is too complex, his relations with Ariel, Caliban and the others too fraught, to be mapped comfortably onto a stable distinction between moral and non-moral motivations. If Shakespeare evidently found this distinction untenable, his problem with it lay in what Williams identifies as its underlying basis: ‘a distinctive and false picture of the moral life, according to which the truly moral self is characterless’. For Shakespeare there was no such thing as a characterless self. His doubts were rooted in his practice; that is, they were inseparable from his power as a playwright. A conception of the moral self as characterless was not for Shakespeare a philosophical blunder so much as it was an undoing or denial of his life’s work.
Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority
Shakespeare’s characters have a rich and compelling moral life, but that moral life is not autonomous. Instead, it is in each case intimately bound up with the particular and distinct community in which the character participates. In Julius Caesar Brutus thinks that he is acting on ethical principles entirely uncompromised by peer pressure, but the audience knows otherwise. ‘Well, Brutus, thou art noble’, remarks Cassius to himself: yet I see Thy honourable mettle may be wrought From that it is disposed. (. . –)
It is his failure to understand the extent to which he is ‘wrought’ – his refusal to register the social influences upon him and his fantasy of absolute ethical autonomy – that dooms Brutus. It would be possible, I believe, to argue that Shakespeare’s tragic vision was the consequence of the political defects of his age. The absence of any conception of democratic institutions and the rule of a hereditary monarch with absolutist pretensions left little or no room to formulate an ethical object for secular ambition. Yet Shakespeare’s own scepticism seemed to extend to the popular voice, so ironically treated in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. That is, when he tried to imagine electioneering, voting and representation, he conjured up situations in which people, manipulated by wealthy and fathomlessly cynical politicians, were repeatedly induced to act against their own interests. Rule in Shakespeare is the fate of those who have been born to it. It is the fate of those as well who have been driven to exercise it out of desperation, forced, like Richmond in Richard III, Edgar in Lear or Malcolm in Macbeth, to confront an evil so appalling that they have no choice but to act. A relatively small number of other characters, generally born in the proximity of power but not its direct heirs, actively seek to seize the reins of government, and a few of these are ruthless or lucky enough to be successful, but Shakespeare inevitably depicts them as eventually broken by the burden they have shouldered. Perhaps this was for him a peculiar form of consolation or hope. Governance, as Shakespeare imagines it, is an immense weight whose great emblem is the insomnia that afflicts the competent, tough-minded usurper Bolingbroke, after he has become Henry IV. There are books now that profess to derive principles of governance from Shakespeare’s works, but the sleeplessness – tormenting, constant sleeplessness – is one of the only principles that he consistently depicts.
There is one other key principle, which will take us back to Bill Clinton’s remark about Macbeth. Macbeth dreams of killing his guest, King Duncan, and seizing power. He wants the assassination to be swift, decisive, oncefor-all: mission accomplished. ‘If it were done, when ’tis done’, he puts it, ‘then ’twere well / It were done quickly’ (Macbeth, . . –). The lure is strong enough, he says, to make him ignore the threat of divine judgment in the afterlife, but still for a fateful moment he holds back: We still have judgement here, that we but teach Bloody instructions which, being taught, return To plague the inventor. (. . –)
This is, I think, Shakespeare’s central perception of governance, and it stands in the place of any higher-minded ethical object. The actions of those in power have consequences, long-term, inescapable and impossible to control. ‘We still have judgement here’ – it is not in some imagined other world that your actions will be judged: it is here and now. Judgment in effect means punishment: whatever violent or dishonest things you do will inevitably serve as a lesson for others to do to you. Shakespeare did not think that one’s good actions are necessarily or even usually rewarded, but he seems to have been convinced that one’s wicked actions always return upon one’s head, with interest. Even in a play haunted, as Macbeth is, by witches and the ghost of a murdered man, this causal order does not signal the existence of any supernatural necessity. There is no position outside the world or outside history from which Shakespeare’s characters can authenticate their actions or secure an abstract, ethically adequate object for their ambitions. Indeed, even the survival of the state itself does not constitute such an object. One final, startling example will serve to make the point. In the wake of Lear’s abdication, the Duke of Cornwall is the legitimate, formally sanctioned ruler of half the kingdom, and yet the play stages and clearly justifies his assassination. The attack comes suddenly and without warning when he is going about the business of statecraft: specifically, he is attempting, by any means necessary, to extract from the Earl of Gloucester certain information vital for national security, information about a French army set upon invasion of the realm. The audience has already learned what Cornwall does not yet fully know: that the invasion is well under way. A few scenes earlier, the banished Earl of Kent, in disguise, has taken a gentleman into his confidence. ‘[F]rom France’, he whispers,
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority
there comes a power Into this scattered kingdom, who already, Wise in our negligence, have secret feet In some of our best ports, and are at point To show their open banner. (King Lear, . . –)
In league with this power, Kent gives the gentleman a token and instructs him to make haste to Dover where he will report to ‘some that will thank you’ (. . ). Kent is not the only high-level collaborator with the invading army. The Earl of Gloucester too has received word, as he tells his son Edmond, that ‘there’s part of a power already landed’ (. . ), and he intends to help them topple Cornwall’s regime. Edmond, however, has his own plans. He gives Cornwall documentary proof of his father’s treasonous conspiracy: ‘This is the letter which he spoke of, which approves him an intelligent party to the advantages of France’ (. . –). Edmond is a swine, of course, but the letter is authentic. When they receive this news, Cornwall and his wife Regan are guests in Gloucester’s house. Ordinarily their behaviour would be strictly bound by this circumstance, but the state of emergency suspends all customary relations and sets the stage for moral and ethical transgression. Cornwall needs to know, and quickly, whatever Gloucester knows about the foreign invasion and why he has sent the old, mad king to Dover. ‘Go seek the traitor Gloucester’, Cornwall orders his servants; ‘Pinion him like a thief, bring him before us’ (. . –). Gloucester is duly apprehended and bound to a chair. There follows a tense scene of interrogation chilling in its realistic representation of bluffing, evasiveness and desperate urgency: : Come, sir, what letter had you late from France? : Be simple-answered, for we know the truth. : And what confederacy have you with the traitors Late footed in the kingdom. : To whose hands You have sent the lunatic King. Speak. : I have a letter guessingly set down, Which came from one that’s of a neutral heart, And not from one opposed. : Cunning. : And false.
The lines appear only in the Quarto version (The History of King Lear, .–); in the Folio the collaboration with the French invasion is less explicit.
: Where hast thou sent the King? : To Dover. : Wherefore to Dover? Wast thou not charged at peril – : Wherefore to Dover? – Let him answer that. : I am tied to th’stake, and I must stand the course. : Wherefore to Dover? (. . –)
This brilliantly written exchange is almost always left out of critical accounts of this scene because of what immediately follows: the horrendous blinding of Gloucester by the fiend-like interrogators. Shakespeare’s audience was far less squeamish about the torture of traitors than we are – or than we were until recently. The use, for the purposes of extracting information to protect the state, of the so-called ‘manacles’ (that is, the strappado), the rack, the thumbscrew and the horrible device known as the Scavanger’s Daughter was a matter of public knowledge and general acceptance. The common law of England forbade it, but Elizabeth and James claimed royal prerogative in ordering its use, upon warrant from the Privy Council. The victims for the most part were Catholics: Jesuits, stubborn recusants and conspirators. The warrant for the Jesuit priest John Gerard explains that the prisoner ‘very lately did receive a packet of letters out of the Low Countries which are supposed to come out of Spain’. The examiners in the Tower are therefore authorised to interrogate him, ‘wherein if you shall find him obstinate, undutiful, or unwilling to declare and reveal the truth as he ought to do by his duty and allegiance, you shall by virtue hereof cause him to be
Officially sanctioned torture in England was at its height during the reigns of Elizabeth and James. ‘In the highest cases of treasons’, Bacon wrote in a memorandum to King James, ‘torture is used for discovery and not for evidence.’ Quoted in John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago, ), p. . Shakespeare seems to take this acceptance for granted at the close of Othello when Iago refuses to explain why he has devised his fiendish plot: Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word. (. . –)
One of the bystanders is morally outraged – ‘What not to pray?’ – but another has a response at least as characteristic of Jacobean England: ‘Torments will ope your lips’ (. . ). To authorise torture, official Council warrants first had to be obtained that specified the names of the victims and listed their alleged offences. ‘The reign of Elizabeth was the period when torture was most used in England. Of the eighty-one documented cases between and , fi fty-three ( per cent) were Elizabethan. Before torture was undertaken at the Tower, and between and at Bridewell in London, where special equipment was available’: John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, ), p. . ‘We suggest that the power to torture did inhere in the prerogative, not affirmatively but defensively. It derived from the doctrine of sovereign immunity. The sovereign was immune from suit in his own courts. Not only were the King and Council immune, they could immunize their agents’: Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof, p. .
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority
put to the manacles and such other torture as is used in that place, that he may be forced to utter directly and truly his uttermost knowledge in all these things that may any way concern her Majesty and the State and are meet to be known’. The spectators of King Lear would have had no occasion to see such a warrant for themselves, but they had recently had a full lesson in how far the government would go, in the hideous, wellpublicised treatment of the Gunpowder Plot conspirator Guy Fawkes. No one ventured to protest out loud. In a company of travelling players in the north of England included King Lear among the plays, for the most part exercises in piety, which they performed at the manor house of a Catholic couple, Sir John and Lady Julyan Yorke. The playing company and its hosts were denounced for recusancy to the Star Chamber. Someone then, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, clearly believed that King Lear, though set in pre-Christian Britain, was somehow sympathetic to the plight of persecuted Catholics. The link is not immediately apparent to modern readers, but perhaps it is in the scene of Gloucester’s blinding that we can most clearly sense it. For in King Lear Shakespeare contrived to represent the practice of torture in such a way as to make it utterly recognisable – the urgent questioning of someone who has been caught conniving with a foreign power to invade the realm and topple the established regime – and utterly unacceptable. He did so by collapsing the hygienic distance that separated the monarch and the privy councillors, cloaked in the mantle of moral authority, from the vicious underlings who carried out their orders. Torture in King Lear is conducted directly by the rulers, Cornwall and Regan, who are depicted as reptilian monsters. Moreover, Shakespeare subtly uncoupled the infliction of torture from the search for information and hence undermined any simple instrumental rationale. Before Cornwall has even got his hands on the high-born traitor, he has declared his intention to injure him, quite apart from the outcome of the process of interrogation: Though well we may not pass upon his life Without the form of justice, yet our power Shall do a curtsy to our wrath, which men May blame but not control. (. . –)
What is at once horrible and familiar about this declaration is its nauseating blend of legalism, sadism and public relations, as if Cornwall were already thinking about how he will excuse the fact that there
Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof, pp. –. John Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and ‘King Lear’ (Athens, Ga., ), pp. –.
were certain regrettable excesses in his otherwise legal treatment of the prisoner. The plucking-out of the Earl of Gloucester’s eyes is an act that seems to have appalled even hardened Jacobean spectators and that the language of the play cunningly anticipates, so as to intensify its horror. This pattern of anticipations culminates in Gloucester’s response to the repeated question, ‘Wherefore to Dover?’: ‘Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes’ (. . –). Cornwall’s response – ‘See’t shalt thou never’ (. . ), he says, gouging out the first of the prisoner’s eyes – provokes a reaction that may, for contemporary audiences, have been more shocking than the act of torture. A nameless servant steps forward and orders his master to stop what he is doing: Hold your hand, my lord. I have served you ever since I was a child, But better service have I never done you Than now to bid you hold. (. . –)
Regan’s exclamation (‘How now, you dog!’ (. . )) and Cornwall’s (‘My villein’ (. . )) both reflect their astonishment at the source of the intervention: not one of Gloucester’s servants (for they are, after all, in Gloucester’s house), but one of their own. In the ensuing scuffle, Regan grabs a sword and stabs the underling in the back – ‘A peasant stand up thus!’ (. . ) – but not before the peasant has fatally wounded the duke. And the audience is manifestly invited to endorse this radical act: the murder of a ruler by a serving man who stands up for human decency. Though his act has important political consequences, the servant is not acting out of political motives, and still less out of personal ambition. He has an ethically adequate object – the desire to serve the duke his master by stopping him at all costs from performing an unworthy action – but no political ambition at all. He does not seek power for himself, nor is there anything to indicate that he supports the French invaders. His dying words to Gloucester – ‘My lord, you have one eye left / To see some mischief on him’ (. . –) – suggest that in his last moments of life the servant has shifted his allegiance from Cornwall to Cornwall’s victim, but this attempt at consolation only leads to further disaster. ‘Lest it see more’, rages the mortally wounded Cornwall, turning back to Gloucester, ‘prevent it. Out, vile jelly!’ (. . ).
Perhaps Cornwall is thinking about how he will justify torturing an aristocrat, something that was against English practice. Gloucester, however, is not at all Cornwall’s social equal.
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority
In the Folio text of King Lear the scene ends with Regan driving the eyeless earl out of his own house with words almost fantastic in their cruelty – ‘Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell / His way to Dover’ (. . –) – while the bleeding Cornwall disposes of the corpse of the servant: ‘Throw this slave / Upon the dunghill’ (. . –). But the Quarto text has an additional brief exchange between two other nameless servants. They too have no large political agenda or ambition, but, like their slain fellow, they express a fundamentally ethical attitude toward authority: ‘I’ll never care what wickedness I do’, says one of them, reflecting on what he has just seen Cornwall do, ‘if this man come to good’ (History, scene , –). The ruler then serves as a model and a test case: if his actions go unpunished, then, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, everything is permitted. The other servant is thinking not about the husband but about the wife: If she live long And in the end meet the old course of death, Women will all turn monsters. (History, scene , –)
Here again the ruler is a kind of testing-ground, in this case for what it means to be human. The servants’ closing words turn from moral speculation to action. One of them proposes to find someone to lead the blinded earl wherever he wants to go; the other has a more immediate concern: I’ll fetch some flax and whites of eggs To apply to his bleeding face. (History, scene , –)
In the bleak, stripped-down world of King Lear, this simple human response is itself potentially risky. Given the ruthlessness and the fear of Cornwall and Regan, any gesture of kindness toward the traitor may be regarded as treasonous . Gloucester is anxious to avoid drawing anyone else into danger: Away, get thee away, good friend, be gone. Thy comforts can do me no good at all; Thee they may hurt. (. . –)
But the quiet reply recognises Gloucester’s predicament – ‘You cannot see your way’ – and the human obligation to help him. This fundamental ethical responsibility – reduced to the simplest elements, the flax and whites of eggs applied to the victim’s bleeding face – is echoed repeatedly in other moments of solidarity and comfort, all comparably modest: ‘Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?’ (. . );
‘Give me thy hand’ (. . ); ‘In, fellow, there in t’hovel; keep thee warm’ (. . ). These small gestures are the core of the play’s moral vision. Larger ethical ambitions, such as those that motivate Cordelia’s refusal to flatter her bullying father, only lead to disastrous consequences. At the height of the storm scene, the crazed Lear, exposed to the tyranny of the elements, has a fleeting glimpse of a relationship to power different from the one he had embodied: Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. (. . –)
The vision of obligation here is modest enough – ‘shake the superflux’ (i.e. let some wealth trickle down to the wretches at the bottom) – but nothing in the play suggests that it is remotely possible to achieve. Lear lurches instead toward the conviction that there is no significant moral distinction between judges and thieves. ‘See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief’, he tells Gloucester; ‘Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ (. . –). All that secures the difference between them is a monopoly of violence. Have you ever ‘seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?’, Lear asks. When you see the man running away from the cur, you behold ‘the great image of authority. A dog’s obeyed in office’ (. . –). Those in power may loudly declare their compassion for the sufferings of the poor, but inevitably the declarations are mere hypocrisy. ‘Get thee glass eyes’, Lear says bitterly to the blind Gloucester, And like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not. (. . –)
Small wonder that the close of the play is a chorus of renunciation. With Cornwall, Regan, Goneril, Edmond and Cordelia all dead, and with Lear a crazed and broken ruin, the Duke of Albany is the sole legitimate ruler of the kingdom, but he does not want it: for us, we will resign During the life of this old majesty To him our absolute power. (. . –)
A moment later Lear is dead, and Albany is still trying to give up his power. ‘Friends of my soul’, he addresses Kent and Edgar, you twain Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain. (. . –)
Shakespeare and the ethics of authority
Kent too will have nothing to do with rule: I have a journey, sir, shortly to go: My master calls me; I must not say no. (. . –)
The final lines of the play are a famous textual crux, for the Quarto assigns them to Albany and the Folio to Edgar. Since the last words of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies and histories were conventionally spoken by the person in command, the stakes are significant, but here, as none of the survivors actually wants power – as if any desire for power has been stigmatised as vicious – Shakespeare evidently was uncertain how to bring his tragedy to an end. He had begun with a king who wished to withdraw from power and to reassure himself with the comfortable falsehoods he demanded from his children. In the course of the play those falsehoods are all relentlessly stripped away, like the train of followers that had given the imperious Lear a sense of his own worth. But in the wake of the devastation, what is left? Shakespeare’s solution was to turn the closing words of his tragedy away from any assumption of authority and toward the obligation to tell the truth: The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most. We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (. . –)
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition Susan James
Shakespeare’s interest in the supernatural has caught the attention of generations of literary critics. The ghosts, witches and spirits that populate so many of his plays, together with the omens and prophecies that galvanise his plots, are used to achieve particular dramatic effects and make his audiences think and feel. On stage they can be real, like the ghost of Old Hamlet, or hallucinatory, like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands; they can work different effects on different characters, embody fantasy and break the bounds of physical possibility. However, as well as drawing on the resources of the spiritual world to enrich the narratives of his plays, Shakespeare also explores early modern debates about the supernatural itself, probing the ambiguities surrounding it and portraying the passions and convictions that it arouses in his contemporaries. As Stephen Greenblatt writes about the witches in Macbeth, ‘Shakespeare is staging the epistemological and ontological dilemmas that in the deeply contradictory ideological situation of this time haunted virtually all attempts to determine the status of witchcraft beliefs and practices. And he is at the same time and by the same means staging the insistent, unresolved questions that haunt the practice of the theatre.’ Witchcraft is one of several arenas in which Shakespeare opens out the contested meanings attaching to the boundary between the natural and supernatural. Another is superstition. Running through several of his plays is an interest in the power of the imagination to nurture a passion of superstitious fear, which can in turn generate psychological and political crises. As far as I know, the place of this theme within Shakespeare’s work has not been much discussed, although, as I aim to show in this chapter, it has profound political resonances. Standing behind his many excluded or inadequate rulers is an implicit understanding of political
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare Bewitched’, in Jeff rey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds, eds., New Historical Literary Study (Princeton, ), p. .
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
sovereignty as a form of authority that is extremely fragile, threatened from inside and out by the vices of those who hold power, the ambition or lethargy of their subjects and the exigencies of circumstance. And among the forces that can disorder and unseat sovereignty is superstition, as we see most clearly in Julius Caesar and Macbeth. While it may be tempting to dismiss the portents and apparitions on which the actions of these two plays depend, and to view them as pieces of machinery that do not add anything significant to the political content of either drama, this would be a mistake . Both narratives, so I shall argue, are informed by a wellestablished understanding of superstition as a pathological condition to which rulers are especially vulnerable and against which states need to protect themselves. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, being superstitious was not just a matter of holding beliefs of a particular type or engaging in specific social practices. Rather, to be superstitious was to be subject to a complex of feelings, sensations, attitudes and behaviours that together constituted a passion. Passions, as their name implies, are for early modern authors things that happen to us; they are our fluctuating and sometimes overwhelming experiences of the ways our bodies are affected by the external world, and chart the effects of our natural and social environments on our embodied selves. This ancient conception had remained remarkably steady between its Greek inception and Shakespeare’s era, when it continued to provide a framework for successive accounts of the processes on which passions depend. At the end of the sixteenth century several of these were simultaneously in play. Gail Kern Paster has shown how ‘the link between inner and outer is often described in the language of the qualities, since the forces of cold, hot, moist and dry … determine an individual subject’s characteristic humours and behaviour’. And, as we shall see, some authors bring this explanatory apparatus to bear on superstition. But it was not the only theory invoked to articulate and explain the workings of the passions or affects. Non-humoural interpretations of natural sympathies, and early versions of corpuscularianism, were also shaped by the need to account for our affective dispositions and do justice to what Paster aptly calls ‘the psychophysiological reciprocity between the experiencing subject and his or her relation to the world’.
For further discussion of this theme and its central place in seventeenth-century philosophy see Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford, ). Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, ), pp. –. Ibid., p. .
Because the flows or forces that constituted passions were held to circulate freely between one person and another, and to be continually aroused by features of the environment, it was widely assumed that they were an ineradicable aspect of human nature, one that might be controlled but could never be overcome. Superstition is no exception. As Spinoza would later point out, we are all of us vulnerable to it, and our power to resist it varies with our constitutions and circumstances . One may of course wonder what difference this is likely to make to political life, since the fact that ordinary people fall prey to superstition may have no significant effect on the grand scheme of things. But Shakespeare is acutely aware of superstition as one of a range of affective distempers that can transform a capable ruler into a tyrant and can thus be of immediate political import. According to Rebecca Bushnell, a shift occurs in the period between the early sixteenth century, when ‘plays tend to focus on the image of the tyrant torn apart by desire and subject to his own passions’, and the beginning of the seventeenth, when ‘the importance of moral behaviour is increasingly undermined by the claims of legitimacy used to protect tyrannical kings’. By concentrating on superstition, however, we can see that this transition is at best a partial one. Even in his late work, Shakespeare remains deeply interested in the dangers to which an individual ruler’s passions can expose the state, and his explorations of this phenomenon are directed to sovereigns and subjects alike. In an essay published in , Francis Bacon describes superstition as a deformation of true religion. ‘For as it addeth deformity to an ape to be so like a man, so the similitude of superstition to religion makes it the more deformed. And as wholesome meat corrupteth to little worms, so good forms and orders corrupt into a number of petty observances.’ Citing the causes of this distortion, Bacon lists a perplexing variety of attitudes, practices and states of affairs, including pleasing and sensual rites and ceremonies, an excess of outward and pharasaical holiness, an excessive reverence for religious tradition, the stratagems of prelates for their own ambition and lucre, and barbarous times, especially joined with calamities and disasters. Implicit in this assortment is the suggestion that superstitious people yield to some form of passionate extravagance,
Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, trans. Samuel Shirley (Leiden, ), p. . Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, ), p. . Francis Bacon, ‘Of Superstition’, in Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford, ), p. . Ibid., pp. –.
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
whether the sensory delights created by rituals and images, the self-satisfaction of the religious hypocrite, the relief and security brought by rigid adherence to ecclesiastical tradition, the pleasure of being esteemed or just plain greed. Desire for emotional comfort of many kinds can move us to live in superstitious ways, and the existence of a great multiplicity of superstitious practices reflects the diversity of our affective needs. Bacon’s acknowledgment of the passionate dimension of encounters with the supernatural is not in the least unusual. Early modern writers of all persuasions, whether sceptics or believers, charted the affects associated with witchcraft, divination, necromancy, sorcery, prophecy and other such habits, and held competing views about their causal roles. According to those of a more sceptical bent, the affects of superstitious people have natural causes. According to some of their opponents, supernatural beings such as the devil can make us prey to superstition by manipulating our minds in order to create the images and passions out of which it grows. Such conflicting interpretations of the phenomenon were, among other things, contributions to a broader debate about whether and why superstition is dangerous, in which one layer of claims and counter-claims focused on the content of particular practices. If, for instance, many witches are simply deluded old women, the threat they pose is relatively insignificant; but if instead they are pawns in Satan’s campaign to tempt humanity into the jaws of hell, they present a graver challenge. Adopting a case-by-case approach, both sceptics and believers could in principle allow that some superstitions are more menacing than others while continuing to disagree about which are which, and endless disputes along these lines form the mainstay of early modern discussions of the problem. But this preoccupation with specific practices partially obscures a different and more pervasive unease about the harm implicit in superstition of any kind, and this general anxiety is what Bacon expresses when he claims that superstition dismounts sense, philosophy, natural piety, law and reputation, and ‘erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men’. So dangerous is it, he adds, that it ‘hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government’.
For example, this view was defended by the Dominican monks Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger in a work that became a handbook for the Inquisition. See Malleus Maleficarum (), ed. and trans. M. Summers (London, ), Part I, Qn vii, pp. –. For a robust defence of this view see Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (), reprinted with intro. by Brinsley Nicholson (East Ardsley, ), Book I, ch. . King James I had this book burned. Bacon, ‘Of Superstition’, p. .
The force that Bacon is describing is extraordinarily powerful. Superstition cuts us off from the material and immaterial worlds by obstructing crucial and elementary forms of response such as sight, hearing and touch. At the same time, it threatens accepted standards of probity by destroying our susceptibility to natural piety and blunting our concern for reputation. As the grip of external discipline loosens, the threats embodied in the law cease to carry weight, and the universally valid inferences of philosophy can get no purchase on the distempered self. These characteristics enable superstition to destabilise political life and bring about confusion, perhaps exemplified in Bacon’s mind by the repercussions of sixteenth-century outbreaks of witchcraft, or by struggles between churches over the significance of ritual and prophecy. However, the further, underlying power from which such disorders arise is superstition’s capacity to create an ‘absolute monarchy’ in the mind, a rule verging on tyranny in its inability to control itself and its adamant refusal to be checked. A striking feature of this analysis is the marginal position it allots to the epistemological critique of superstitious claims. While nothing in Bacon’s account undermines the standard assumption that the claims made by witches, diviners or sorcerers are also attested by the relevant authorities to be false, this does not in itself make them more threatening than any other kind of error. Instead, what makes superstition so ominous is something about the psychophysiological condition of its victims, namely the rigidity with which they adhere to a particular affective outlook, and the intransigence of the various beliefs and feelings it sustains. Viewed like this, superstition is worlds away from the ignorant misconstrual of nature, or from the cynical manipulation of popular passions for political ends. It is a form of obsession that disempowers the self by shutting down its capacity to modify its own affects and making it resistant to external sources of remedy. Bacon’s list of the causes that contribute to superstition makes its affective profile hard to capture. It is not obvious that there is anything specific about the objects or the quality of superstitious greed, ambition, joy or pride that distinguishes these particular affects from other forms of the same emotions. And in fact, in the writings of a range of classical authors and their humanist descendants, we find the suggestion that the affects on Bacon’s list are only secondary, and flow from a more fundamental and defining passion. The passion in question is fear . In its most naked form, superstition is a species of terror. Perhaps the most vivid and influential account of this phenomenon occurs in Plutarch’s essay on superstition, which first appeared in English
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
in Philemon Holland’s translation of the Moralia. Although error is always to some degree harmful, Plutarch proposes, certain mistakes, such as the belief that atoms are the principal elements of material things, ‘breed no ulcer, no fever causing disordinate pulse in the arteries, nor yet any pricking and troublesome pain’. By contrast, other false judgments should arouse our pity, ‘because in whose minds they are once entered and settled they engender many maladies and passions, like unto worms and such filthy vermin’. Among the affective states included in this latter class of ‘erroneous persuasions’ is superstition, that is to say, an excessive and torturing fear of the gods, which ‘lights on gentle and tender spirits like a moist and soft soil and imprints in the heart of man a certain fearfulness, which doth abate his courage, and humble him down to the very ground’. According to Plutarch, the suffering associated with superstitious fear of the gods is painful in itself; but it is further aggravated by its tendency to maintain and reinforce the mistaken beliefs and feelings around which it is organised. Superstition generates a kind of passionate constancy that lies at the other end of the spectrum from the steadiness purportedly delivered by reasoning. One of the problems traditionally associated with the affects is their volatility, so much so that, as Paster puts it, an explanatory theory such as humouralism ‘finds it much easier to account for a subject’s moment-to-moment fluctuations in mood and action than to account for emotional steadiness and a high degree of psychological self-sameness’. But superstition is an exception to this rule. There is something peculiarly rigid about the way it damages even the everyday capacity to relate means and ends. In most cases, passions are understood to generate desires, such as the desire of the proud for esteem or the desire of the angry to exact vengeance, and someone in the grip of an affect will use their powers of practical reasoning to work out how to achieve whatever goal the affect dictates. Fear, however, ‘carries with it a certain blockishness or stupidity, destitute of action, perplexed, idle, dead, without any exploit or effect whatsoever’. To varying degrees, it undermines our capacity to engage with the world, so that the ability to grapple even with fear of a particular object is hampered by the deadening consequences of the affect itself. In the case of superstition, this general characteristic is exacerbated by the fact that the fear in question lacks a determinate object, so that the
Plutarch, The Philosophie, commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London, ), p. . Plutarch is discussing deisidaemonia, the Greek term most frequently translated as superstition. One of its meanings is ‘fear of the gods’. Paster, Humoring the Body, p. . Plutarch, Morals, p. .
desires to which it gives rise are not sufficiently specific for reason to get to work on them. As Plutarch explains, ‘the superstitious man that stands in fear of the gods, feareth all things, the land, the sea, the air, the sky, darkness, light, silence and his very dreams’. Fearing everything might in principle create a desire to avoid or flee from everything; but since such a desire could never be satisfied, there is something peculiarly paradoxical and self-defeating about superstition. Of all types of fear, ‘there is none so full of perplexitie, none so unfit for action’. A superstitious person who has been brought to a halt by the anxiety that the gods are ‘cruel and tyrant-like’ is vulnerable to a range of characteristic afflictions. Since their malady ‘maketh no truce with sleep, and permitteth not the soul at any time to breathe and take rest’, repose of any kind eludes them. Instead, terrible visions and monstrous fancies of devils, fiends and furies make the ‘sleep of superstitious folk a very hell and place of damned persons’. Desperate to placate the forces they believe to be tormenting them, these same folk habitually resort to ceremonies and rituals, ‘troubling themselves in good earnest’, and ‘spending their substance and goods infinitely upon magicians, jugglers, enchanters, and such like deceivers’. When their efforts fail, they are liable to spiral down into a state of abject servility described by Plutarch as still worse than slavery; for while a slave can hope to escape from servitude and can look on death as a source of relief, people in the grip of superstition can find no rest and envisage terrors stretching to eternity. The misery and implacability of this condition is intensified, according to Plutarch, by the way that superstition weakens anything that opposes it. ‘Thus, unhappy and wretched superstition, by fearing overmuch and without reason, … never taketh heed how it submitteth itself to all miseries; and for want of knowledge how to avoid this passionate trouble … forgeth and deviseth to itself an expectation of inevitable evils even unto death’. Once someone is in this state of mind, circumstances that would not otherwise be particularly damaging come to pose a serious threat, so that rulers or military leaders who fall prey to superstition are liable to behave in one of several destructive ways, all of them verging on madness. Some victims follow Aristodemis, King of the Messians, and commit suicide. Some become incapable of making necessary decisions, like the Athenian general Nicias, whose terror at an eclipse of the moon so distracted him that he was defeated by his enemies. And some, so consumed
Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –.
Ibid., p. .
Ibid.
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
by rage that even music cannot calm them, act out their frustrations by becoming cruel and barbarous . In Plutarch’s account, the unhappiness that accompanies superstition is meticulously itemised in a catalogue of frights, afflictions, torments and miseries, of ghastly ghosts, sorrowful spirits, fiery rivers, hideous darkness and lamenting voices. Part of his motive for emphasising these horrors is dictated by the overall structure of his argument, which aims to challenge what he presents as the standard view that atheists are more unhappy than believers. According to the consensus of Greek opinion, atheists are bound to be made miserable by the worry that the gods may exist after all and may punish them for their impiety. But as soon as we pause to think about it, Plutarch counters, it becomes clear that atheists can live as contentedly as anyone else, and that the people who really suffer are the superstitious. Underlying this inversion is an image of superstition and atheism as two opposing extremes, each representing a form of religious failure. ‘In the one sort we may perceive a sort of senseless stupidity and want of belief in those causes from which proceed all goodness; so in the other we may observe a distrustful doubt and fear of those which cannot otherwise be than profitable and gracious.’ However, while it may be interesting to compare the shortcomings of these two contrasting extremes, Plutarch insists that piety lies somewhere in between, in the feelings of reverence that are due to deities on whom the fates of human beings depend. The assumption that fear of the gods comes in degrees ranging from insensibility at one end of the spectrum to superstitious terror at the other draws in a general way on the Aristotelian understanding of virtue as a mean poised between two opposing vices, one a lack, the other an excess. Virtuous affects and actions conform to the standard implicit in the mean, and never deteriorate into the vicious attitudes and behaviour that lie on either side of it. Applying this model to the case in hand, Aristotle had argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that it is sometimes perfectly proper to feel afraid, as long as one fears the right things in the right way. As John Wilkinson expresses the point in the first English translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, the virtue of prudence dictates that one should fear ‘vices and everything that putteth a man in an evil name. They that be afraid of these are to be praised’, but anyone who fails is ‘shameless and worthy to be blamed’. Flanking prudence is a pair of
Ibid., pp. , . Ibid., p. . Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III. . John Wilkinson, The Ethiques of Aristotle (London, ), p. .
vices, foolish hardiness or recklessness on the one hand and fear or cowardice on the other. ‘The fearful fleeth from everything. And the hardy assaileth everything. Neither in one nor in the other there is no doughtyness, for prudence is in keeping the mean between fear and foolishness.’ Plutarch’s portrayal of superstition as a departure from a virtuous mean enables both classical and early modern readers to place it in a theoretical framework that grounds moral as well as religious evaluation. Just as the Aristotelian vices of cowardice and recklessness are morally wanting, so superstition and atheism fall short of religious rectitude. Considered from a purely moral angle, fearing the wrong things in the wrong way is always less than virtuous; but when the object of fear is the gods, the cowardice described by Aristotle is transformed into superstition and, in addition to its moral shortcomings, becomes open to the charge of impiety. Plutarch acknowledges both these judgments, but treats them relatively lightly. Although he ridicules superstitious people who begrime themselves with dirt, wallow in the mire or give up work on the Sabbath, his tone is on the whole one of compassion for their indignity and suffering, and he does not indulge in moral reproof. Nor is he much interested in identifying the causes that dispose particular individuals or groups to become superstitious, preferring instead to describe and comment on the condition itself. Here, however, he differs sharply from many early modern writers, who tend to become embroiled in discussions about causes and effects, and generate a series of debates as to whether the objects of superstitious beliefs or the beliefs themselves have supernatural causes. Among the contributors to these contests are a number of naturalistically inclined medical writers who take Plutarch to have provided an authoritative account of a phenomenon that stands in need of explanation and who accept his judgment that superstitious fear is a peculiarly insidious passion, capable of producing consequences that are damaging to one’s health, and thus to other people. For example, writing in his Bulwarke of Defence against all Sicknes, Sornes and Woundes, published in , William Bullein describes it as ‘a marvellous monster, an infernal image, and a terrible vision to the soul’, that will ‘try religion, so creep into the conscience that it letteth in despair’, and lead tyrants to suicide. However, drawing not only on Plutarch but also on Galen, they classify the symptoms of superstitious fear as aspects of a different syndrome, namely melancholy.
Ibid., p. . Plutarch, Morals, p. . William Bullein, Bullein’s Bulwarke of Defence against all Sicknes, Sornes and Woundes (London, ). Facsimile edn, The English experience no. (Amsterdam, N.Y., ), fos. –.
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
The link between excessive fear of the gods and melancholy is elaborated in a range of texts and contexts. Philemon Holland makes it explicit when he translates Plutarch as claiming that the superstitious King Midas fell into ‘melancholy and despair’, and Bacon later generalises this observation, remarking that successful monarchs ‘turn in their latter years to be superstitious and melancholy’. Equally, the delusive aspects of superstition are sometimes attributed to melancholy, for instance by Reginald Scot, who characterises certain kinds of witch as ‘poor melancholic women’ and explains how the condition can affect them: The force which melancholy hath, and the effects that it worketh in the body of a man, or rather of a woman, are almost incredible. For as some of the melancholic persons imagine they are witches, and by witchcraft can work wonders and do what they list, so do others troubled with this disease imagine many strange, incredible and impossible things. Some that they are monarchs and princes … some that they are brute beasts; some that they are urinals or earthen pots, greatly fearing to be broken; some that everyone that meeteth them will convey them to the gallows, and yet in the end hang themselves.
In , just two years after Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft appeared, a systematic analysis of melancholy, considered as a disease, was published in London by Timothy Bright. The title page of this treatise describes Bright as a ‘Doctor of Phisicke’, and much of his book is devoted to a discussion of the bodily conditions that give rise to melancholy feelings and behaviour. Humours of the blood ‘shut up the heart as if it were in a dungeon of obscurity’ and affect the brain so that it ‘fancies not according to truth, but … altogether ghastly and fearful’. The result is ‘a certain fearful disposition of the mind’ which alters the common sense, fantasy and memory and destroys the ability to reason, so that instead of weighing two sides of a case, a melancholic will ‘poise it by their fantastical fear’. Here we find the inability to combat anxiety that is such a marked feature of Plutarch’s account of superstition; but as Bright goes on to claim, melancholics also display what is by now a familiar range of further symptoms. Their malady works on the imagination to cause ‘monstrous fictions, terrible to the conceit’. The memory becomes so impaired that it only records ‘darkness, peril, doubts, frights and whatsoever the heart
Plutarch, Morals, p. . Francis Bacon, ‘Of Empire’, in Francis Bacon, ed. Vickers, p. . Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. . Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy (London, ), pp. , . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. Ibid., p. .
of man most doth abhor’. Sleep is broken by nightmares ‘wherein, with some horrible vision in dreams, they are half strangled, and intercepted of speech, though they strive to call’. Thus the heart, but being acquainted with nothing else but domestical terror, feareth everything, and the brain sympathetically partaking with the heart’s fear, maketh doubt, distrusteth, and suspecteth without cause, always standing in awe of grievance: wherewith in time, it becometh so tender, that the least touch, (as if it were one’s nail in an ulcer), gives discouragement thereto, rubbing it on the gale exulcerate with sorrow and fear.
The victims of this bodily onslaught respond in the ways we have already encountered. Some withdraw and ‘betake themselves to the wilderness and deserts, finding matters of fear in everything they behold’. Others try to take their own lives. Where melancholy is mixed with choler, they become prey to rage. And all live miserably, turning ‘hope into fear, assurance into distrust and despair, and joy into discomposure’. Bright’s analysis evidently encompasses the phenomena that Plutarch classifies under the heading of superstition; but it is significant that he does not use this term to describe them. Rather than employing a word spiked with irreligious and impious connotations, he sticks to the bodily discourse of the humours and takes care to acknowledge the limits of his authority by distinguishing melancholy fear from the prickings of a guilty conscience, which require spiritual as opposed to medical treatment. Nevertheless, the boundaries between theological, medical, psychological and moral analysis remain extremely porous, and Bright’s attempt to separate the aspects of Plutarch’s analysis that lend themselves to medical discussion from its religious and moral implications is only a partial success . A number of authors writing in the first half of the seventeenth century continued to combine and juxtapose these elements, and their works kept the interconnections between melancholy and superstition alive. The best-known of these, Robert Burton’s compendious study of melancholy, echoes the view that superstition is a ‘mere madness’ and a ‘perpetual servitude that destroys all tranquillity’, but does not shrink from cataloguing the moral and theological failings that superstitious ‘pseudo-Christians’ habitually display. The leaders of such people are ‘heretics, schismatics, false prophets, impostors, and their ministers: they have some common
Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, eds. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, with commentary by J. A. Bamborough with Martin Dodsworth, vols. (Oxford, ), III, pp. , .
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
symptoms, some peculiar. Common as madness, folly, pride, insolency, arrogancy, singularity, peevishness, obstinacy, impudence, scorn and contempt of all other sects.’ A more systematic reiteration of the harm done by superstitious melancholy, in which Plutarch’s influential contribution is explicitly acknowledged, occurs in Edward Reynolds’s Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man. This work, published in , is designed to establish that a grasp of the physical operation of the passions can enhance both moral and civil philosophy, by showing how our passions can be modified, and casting light on their place in political life. Reynolds takes a fundamentally Aristotelian approach and locates each virtue at the midpoint between two extremes. On either side of the appropriate fears that afflict even the most courageous people are two corrupt forms, one of which consists in having too base a conceit of one’s own strength. A cowardly or timorous man, like someone looking through the wrong end of a telescope, will ‘look on himself with a distrusting and despairing judgment which presents everything remote and small, and on others with an overvaluing and admiring judgment, which contrariwise, presents all perfections too perfect’. Thus afflicted, the mind ‘falleth too soon upon the object, and snatcheth it from the understanding, before it hath duly weighed the nature of it’. It becomes soft and irresolute, tumultuous and confused, ‘and both ways much indisposed and disabled for action’. This degradation of reason brings with it the usual symptoms. Once the mind begins to droop from loss of confidence, situations that would not otherwise have disturbed it are ‘drawn within the compass of presages and emphatical evils’, and as this process gets a grip, the victim loses touch with reality and takes ‘the apparitions of his own brain for real terrors’. A natural caution that should incline one to draw back from danger grows into a disproportionate suspicion, which eventually extends to reason itself and fans the passivity we have already explored. Victims of this ‘melancholic passion’ tend to resort to rituals and ceremonies in the hope of averting evil. Alternatively, they may withdraw into a hermitlike existence or become aggressive. ‘Timorous men’, Reynolds explains,
Ibid., III, p. . Edward Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (London, ), ch. , p. . The pagination of the edition of Reynolds’s work is corrupt. I therefore give chapter numbers and titles as well as page numbers. Ibid., ch. in the Table of Contents, headed Chapter and entitled ‘Of the passion of feare’, p. . Ibid., ch. , p. . Ibid., ‘Of the effects of feare’, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
‘are usually cruel when they gain any advantage, their jealousy teaching them to do unto others what they fear from other men.’ The line of thought that unites these early modern students of melancholy and underlies their conception of superstition begins with the supposition that our passions are natural phenomena that can be inflamed and distorted by physical changes, including those that constitute disease. Adapting a position entrenched in the classical literature, of which Plutarch offers a prime example, they acknowledge that fear presents a grave challenge to doctors, statesmen and moralists alike, because it is particularly destructive of rationality and ‘makes us incapable of counsel’. Once it gets a hold, it can corrupt our capacity to live hopefully and subject us to the suffering associated with superstitious terror. When these writers confront the view that the claims of witches, magicians or prophets should be taken at face value, they remain adamant that a capacity to experience the threats and terrors around which superstition revolves is a feature of certain illnesses, so that some melancholy people subject themselves to the horrors that are integral to their malady. Recognisable forms of superstition therefore have natural causes and can in principle be alleviated by natural means. Because the gravest symptoms of superstitious fear can be both alarming and titillating to observe, they provide promising material for the theatre. Nonetheless, the hallucinations and prostrations of relatively powerless individuals, and the efforts of doctors to cure them , do not in themselves seem to have attracted much interest from Elizabethan or Jacobean playwrights. Instead, what makes superstition rewarding as a dramatic theme is its potential to afflict the great and thus to bear on statecraft. Weaving together the psychological disturbances so vividly portrayed by moralists and doctors with the political upheavals to which they were assumed to give rise, leading dramatists of the period, including Marlowe and Shakespeare, found in the tradition we have been examining a rich seam of words, ideas, images and arguments. And of the various works in which Shakespeare exploits this resource, perhaps the most thought-provoking are Julius Caesar and Macbeth. Unlike the theorists with whom we have so far been concerned, Shakespeare does not approach superstitious fear in order to defend a particular analysis of its ontological status or moral meaning, and it would
Ibid. Leonard Marrande, The Judgment of Human Actions. A most learned and excellent treatise of moral philosophy which fights against vanity and conduceth to the finding out of true and perfect felicity, trans. John Reynolds (London, ), p. .
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
be pointless and wrong-headed to try to identify the spot on which he stands. Rather than aiming to resolve conflicts between competing interpretations of the phenomenon, his interest lies in uncovering their connotations and consequences, including those that bear on political life. As his audiences could and would have recognised, both Julius Caesar and Macbeth dramatise this theme, together with the difficulties and responsibilities faced by the politically powerful. Macbeth is arguably the richest of Shakespeare’s treatments of superstition, and its many meanings evoke a palimpsest of myths and ideas, among them the debates surrounding sixteenth-century witchcraft practices and, as Stuart Clark has recently shown, the Old Testament story of Saul’s encounter with the witch of Endor. However, a further strand of argument attaches to the symptoms of superstitious fear, so meticulously described by Plutarch and the diagnosticians of melancholy, and so floridly displayed by Macbeth. The play is thus, among other things, a study in the course and effects of superstition, in which the emphasis falls not so much on the status of the witches’ prophecy as on Macbeth’s susceptibility to it and the passions it arouses in him. We witness the moment at which his disease begins to take its course when the witches’ prediction induces a strange raptness in the valiant and noble Macbeth, interpreted by Banquo as a sudden alarm. ‘Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?’ (. . –). The possibility that the two men may be suffering from some disorder of the imagination is immediately raised. ‘I’ th’ name of truth’, Banquo demands of the witches, ‘Are ye fantastical, or that indeed / Which outwardly ye show?’ Or is it that he and Macbeth have ‘eaten on the insane root / That takes the reason prisoner’? (. . –, –). His suspicions appear to be confirmed when Macbeth acknowledges a disproportionate and terrifying fantasy that is stronger than his ability to master it. ‘Why’, he asks, ‘do I yield to that suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, / And makes my seated heart knock at my ribs, / Against the use of nature? Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings’ (. . –). Out of this initial disorientation and anxiety develops a full-blown case of superstitious fear. While Lady Macbeth invokes a common association
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Macbeth and Witchcraft’, in J. R. Brown, ed., Focus on Macbeth (London, ), pp. –; Janet Adelman, ‘ “Born of Women”: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth’, in Marjorie Garber, ed., Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance (Baltimore, ), pp. –. Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, ), pp. –.
between masculinity and the ability to control the passions, upbraiding her husband for his cowardice, unmanliness and brainsickliness, he is assailed by false creations or hallucinations ‘proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain’ (. . ). He can find no rest in sleep and takes his nightmares as a sign of guilt: ‘I thought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more! / Macbeth doth murder sleep” – the innocent sleep’ (. . –). The slightest sound unnerves and terrifies him: ‘How is’t with me, when every noise appals me? What hands are there? Ha! They pluck out my eyes?’ (. . –). And, evoking Plutarch’s image of a superstitious man whose limitless fear encompasses the air, land, sky and sea, Macbeth’s dread extends to the very ground on which he walks and the ‘multitudinous seas incarnadine’ (. . ). As the rapacious quality of his affliction would lead the audience to expect, Macbeth begins to display the standard character traits with which it is associated. Becoming brutal and cruel, he arranges the murders first of Duncan and then of Banquo, and when these desperate measures fail to bring him any peace of mind, he withdraws. ‘[W]hy’, asks Lady Macbeth, ‘do you keep alone, / Of sorriest fancies your companions making / Using those thoughts, which should indeed have died / With them they think on?’ (. . –). But isolation does not help. Nightmares continue to torment him: ‘Better be with the dead … than on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy.’ He can find no refuge from his own thoughts: ‘Oh! Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife’ (. . , –, ). His readiness to commit further outrages to protect his line of succession and realise the witches’ prophecy turns him into a tyrant with whom his subjects are at war. And as his authority crumbles, he swings between a kind of desperate boldness and a rage that those around him find hard to interpret: ‘Some say he’s mad; others, that lesser hate him, / Do call it valiant fury: but for certain / He cannot buckle his distempered cause / Within the belt of rule’ (. . –). Macbeth yearns for a physician who can ‘minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet, oblivious antidote, / Cleanse the stuff ’d bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart’ (. . –). Here his desire for his own release mingles with a plea for the state he has ruined, and the doctor he addresses shares the attributes of the counsellor. ‘If thou couldst, doctor, cast the water of my land, find her disease, and purge it to a sound and pristine health, I would applaud thee to the very echo’ (. . –). But
See Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants, pp. –, .
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
in fact, the play concludes, the only way to restore Scotland to health is to replace the superstitious tyrant with a noble king whose passions are healthy and virtuous . Macbeth was first performed shortly after the accession of James I, and many critics have speculated about the local political meanings that may have been placed on it. Perhaps one of these would have derived from the fact that James had himself believed that he was under attack from witches in league with the devil. By the time he became king of England his interest in witchcraft seems to have waned, but at least some members of Shakespeare’s audience would have been aware of James’s earlier obsession, and of the Demonologie he had written by way of a reply to Reginald Scot. Perhaps, then, the play would partly have been understood as the representation of a disastrous course of events from which James had had the strength of character to pull back, and thus as a reminder of his virtue. Had he been like Macbeth, Scotland would have degenerated into tyranny; but as things turned out, the king survived the test of superstitious fear and remained capable of ruling his people . While Macbeth vividly portrays the danger to the state posed by a man who has succumbed to superstition, Julius Caesar offers a more finely balanced and allusive analysis of its potential to wreak political damage. One of the first insights we are given into Caesar’s character is that, although he has a record of great courage, he is eager, and arguably a little too eager, to deny that he is ever afraid. ‘I rather tell thee what is to be feared / Than what I fear. For always, I am Caesar’ (. . –). Furthermore, this self-estimation is immediately challenged by Cassius, who not only claims that Caesar has been known to behave in a cowardly fashion, but also mentions that he has recently become superstitious, ‘quite from the main opinion he held once / Of fantasy, of dreams and ceremonies’ (. . –). Evidence for this latter judgment begins to accumulate when Caesar gives in to what are purportedly his wife’s superstitious fears for his safety and decides not to go to the Capitol (. ). Here again, passionate disorder and effeminacy go hand in hand. Once we take account of the political implications of superstition in a ruler, the suggestion that Caesar is superstitious becomes relevant to the dilemma facing the conspirators: is he or is he not a potential tyrant? So far, as Brutus acknowledges, Caesar’s affections have not run out of
Christina Larner, ‘James VI and I and Witchcraft’, in Alan G. R. Smith, ed., The Reign of James VI and I (London, ), pp. –. For contemporary testimony to this effect see Robert Ashton, ed., James I by his Contemporaries (London, ), pp. –.
control. But ‘Crown him: that! / And then I grant we put a sting in him / That at his will he may do danger with’ (. . –). While the conspirators’ avowed reason for killing Caesar is that he is about to accept the crown, his superstition provides a further, unavowed ground for their action, namely that once leaders are gripped by superstitious fear they are liable to become unfit to govern. On the one hand, they may become excessively withdrawn and passive. On the other hand, they may fall prey to the cruelty and desperation that are among the marks of tyranny. Caesar’s superstition thus strengthens the conspirators’ side of the argument. But Shakespeare also allows us to entertain another possibility, later made explicit by Francis Bacon, who warns that ‘There is superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think they do best when they go furthest from the superstition formerly received: therefore care would be had that (as it fareth in ill purgings) the good not be taken away with the bad; which commonly is done, when the people is the reformer.’ In Julius Caesar the conspirators try to avert the political consequences of superstition; but Shakespeare also endows them with some of the symptoms of this destructive passion, thus allowing the audience to consider whether the conspirators themselves are not afflicted by it. Reports of apparitions during a stormy night make some of them deeply anxious, and even the relatively unshakeable Cassius interprets these as ‘instruments of fear and warning / Unto some monstrous state’ (. . –). In addition, his ‘lean and hungry look’ and mocking smile precisely match the standard physical profile of a melancholic (. . , –). William Bullein, for example, describes the type as pale, with a lean body and straight stomach, and taunting in words. Timothy Bright paints a similar picture of a man who is lean and spare of flesh, hollow around the eyes, uncheerful of countenance and subject to melancholy laughter. Thus, for all his apparent scepticism, Cassius is recognisable as the kind of person who is prone to superstitious fear and liable to exaggerate the risk that Caesar poses. In a well-known passage from his Life of Brutus, Plutarch had described the suspicion that Brutus aroused in Caesar. As Reynolds recounts the episode, ‘Caesar was wont to say that he was not afraid of Antony and Dolabella, bold adversaries, but of Brutus and Cassius, his
Bacon, ‘Of Superstition’, p. . Bullein, Bulwarke of Defence, fol. . Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, pp. –.
Shakespeare and the politics of superstition
pale and lean enemies’. Here, the doubts attaching to Cassius’s melancholy extend to Brutus, who in Shakespeare’s play is acknowledged to have become uncharacteristically withdrawn, and who compares the hours of waiting to ‘a phantasma or a hideous dream’ (. . ). Just as the superstitious Caesar becomes suspicious of Cassius and Brutus, so Brutus falls prey to suspicion, although in his case to suspicion about the harm Caesar may do. ‘And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg / Which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous, / And kill him in the shell’ (. . –). If these passions and reflections are read as indications of superstition, Julius Caesar partly attributes the downfall of Rome’s republican government to the growth of a vicious and disabling kind of fear that afflicts both Caesar and his murderers, and threatens the state in two opposing ways. Caesar’s anxieties may indeed grow to the point where his obsessive terrors makes him tyrannical; but the anxiety and suspicion of the conspirators result in an assassination that does in fact destroy political order. Either way, superstition emerges as a potent force which can become, in Bacon’s phrase, the confusion of states . Like Macbeth, Julius Caesar is not written in the spirit of a political tract, and the theme on which I have concentrated is only one of a number of interpretative strands, which do not combine into an argumentatively harmonious whole. Nevertheless, a sensitivity to early modern analyses of fear allows us to see that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the dangers of superstition do not only, or even primarily, concern religion. Some of its deadliest consequences are in their view political and spring from the fact that, as Bacon puts it, political leaders commonly experience ‘many representations of perils and shadows, which makes their minds the less clear’ . Vulnerable as they are, they can easily become superstitious. In some cases, like those of Caesar, Macbeth or indeed James I, their fears may fix on prophetic practices such as augury or withcraft; but they may equally focus on political dangers such as the ones that preoccupy Cassius and Brutus. Since a vital element of good government must consist in ensuring that the fears of both rulers and citizens remain
Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions, ch. , p. . For the passage Reynolds is referring to, see ‘Dion and Brutus’, in Plutarch’s Lives, vols. (Cambridge, Mass., –), VI, pp. –. North translates Caesar’s remark slightly differently: ‘these fat, long-haired men made him not afraid, but the lean and whitely-faced fellows, meaning by that Brutus and Cassius’: Sir Thomas North, The Lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes Compared (London, ), p. . Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Bacon, ‘Of Empire’, p. .
within the bounds of virtue, medical and moral speculation about ways of dealing with superstition – and indeed with other disorderly affects – acquires an immediate political significance. Politics becomes inseparable from an understanding of the passions, and the arts of the doctor and moralist blend with those of the ruler and the statesman.
I’m deeply grateful to the editors of this volume, the other contributors to the conference out of which it arose, the Cambridge University Press’s anonymous readers and the London Shakespeare Seminar for numerous helpful comments and suggestions. I owe special thanks to Quentin Skinner, and to Cathy Shrank who generously sent me the reference to Bullein.
The court
Counsel, succession and the politics of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Cathy Shrank
At the end of Act of Love’s Labour ’s Lost, the pretentious Spaniard Armado declares his love for the country wench Jaquenetta: ‘Adieu, valor! rust, rapier! be still, drum! for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth. Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for, I am sure, I shall turn sonnet. Devise wit; write pen; for I am for whole volumes in Folio’ (. . –). As he turns his back on ‘manly’ qualities and pursuits (valour and warfare) and embraces the new role of sonneteer, Armado typifies the recurrent presentation of sonneteering as an inconsequential activity, divorced from what early moderns saw as the proper vocation of the educated man, namely ‘to serve abrode [i.e. outside the home] in publik functions of the common weal’. The marginalisation of sonnets is certainly found in The Arte of English Poesie, which lists the functions of poetry in descending order of importance: the chief and principall [subject] is: the laud honour & glory of the immortall gods … Secondly the worthy gests of noble Princes: the memoriall and registry of all great fortunes, the praise of vertue & reproofe of vice, the instruction of morall doctrines, the revealing of sciences naturall & other profitable Arts, the redresse of boistrous & sturdie courages by perswasion, the consolation and repose of temperate myndes.
The final, lowliest category is ‘the common solace of mankind in all his travails and cares of this transitorie life’, which ‘may allowably beare Th is chapter has benefited from the comments of audiences at ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’ (Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University ANU) and the English Literature Research Seminar, University of Sheffield. I am particularly grateful to Sylvia Adamson, Alan Bryson, Goran Stanivukovic and Phil Withington, and to the British Academy for an overseas travel grant to deliver the original paper at ANU.
Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie (London, ), sig. v. [George Puttenham], The Arte of English Poesie (London, ), p. .
matter not alwayes of the gravest, or of any great commoditie or profit, but rather in some sort, vaine, dissolute, or wanton, so it be not very scandalous & of evill example’. Since sonnets later appear in the chapter entitled ‘In what forme of Poesie the amorous affections and allurements were uttered’ (p. ), it is among ‘this last sort being used for recreation onely’ that sonnets presumably belong. From the s onwards (and the beginning of a printed miscellany tradition in England), prefaces to collections of, or containing, sonnets habitually present the works that follow as ‘slender’, ‘triflyng toyes’, depicting them as the product of ‘rechlesse youth’ or ‘the unripe seedes of [a] barraine braine’. Epitomising this triviality and malingering is Philip Sidney’s Astrophil, brazenly disregarding the ‘great expectation’ of his youth, as he fritters away his exemplary education composing love ditties to seduce the delectable, and married, Stella (an enterprise which sets the ‘scandalous & … evill example’ decried by The Arte of English Poesie). Sonneteering is thus frequently depicted as an activity that contributes little, or is even antithetical, to the public life of the polity. Yet flaunting the apolitical or inward-looking nature of sonnets is disingenuous. Astrophil’s lack of interest in the military activities of the Turk or of ‘Polands King’ – expressed in Sonnet – does not banish contemporary affairs from Sidney’s sequence, for instance: it invites them in. This once-promising pupil expresses indifference to no fewer than seven affairs of state topical in the summer of . To do so raises a wry eyebrow over the ultimate effectiveness of Astrophil’s education, conducted as it was in the humanist spirit of equipping students with the requisite skills, ethics and sense of duty for participation in the vita activa. Humanist schooling instils in Astrophil consciousness of his ‘expect[ed]’ role and provides the skills to fulfil it. Humanism cannot guarantee that its students actually do their duty, however, and it is this disjunction that Astrophil – as sonneteer – expresses and that Sidney – as poet – exposes. This question about the efficacy of humanism is far from politically neutral: it is one informing much early modern writing on tyranny, counsel and the proper functioning of the commonweal. The association of sonnets with love poetry
Bartholomew Griffin, Fidessa (London, ), sig. Ar. Thomas Howell, Newe Sonets and Pretie Pamphlets (London, ), sig, Ar. R.T., Laura (London, ), sig. Ar. George Turberville, Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (London, ), sig. Ar. Philip Sidney, Sir P.S. his Astrophel and Stella (London, ), p. (Sonnet ). All quotations are from STC , which differs from STC (also ). See Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, ), p. n. See, for example, Thomas More, Utopia (Louvain, ); Thomas Elyot, Pasquil the Playne (London, ).
Counsel, succession and the politics of the Sonnets
does not empty them of political content, or political potential, as Arthur Marotti’s work on Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella shows by highlighting the use of amorous discourse as a socially and morally acceptable way of expressing ambition in Elizabethan court poetry. This chapter follows Marotti in departing from the predominant tendency of modern critics (inherited from Tudor poets) to focus on the genre as one associated with introspection, interiority and even narcissism. Understanding political in its primary sense (derived from the ancient Greek politikos, ‘concerning the body politic’), it argues that sonnets are often much more politically engaged than is usually recognised. It does so, first, by uncovering the chequered uses to which Renaissance sonnets have been put, before concentrating in the second part on the issue of succession in Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets. The political resonances of love are certainly at play in Love ’s Labour ’s Lost. As we saw at the outset, this comedy deploys sonneteering as shorthand for the archetypal lover; it is also the source for three of the love sonnets which appear – extracted from their somewhat mocking context – in The Passionate Pilgrim in . Yet this play also overturns the stereotype of love as detracting from an educated man’s expected occupation (namely, service of the state). Wooing, and the inevitable sonneteering that results, is not solipsistic, but is undertaken as a shared male activity, similar to the use of sonnet-writing for forging homosocial bonds charted by Wendy Wall. Far from being a retreat from governance, love forces the King of Navarre and his men to start re-engaging with that world, Navarre having previously withdrawn into his royal park to pursue contemplative study, free from the distractions of court life epitomised by banqueting and female company. It is even hinted early in the play that inducing Navarre to fall in love with the Princess of France is politically motivated, part of the French party’s strategy for acquiring Aquitaine, ‘a dowry for a queen’ (. . ). ‘Be now as prodigall of all dear grace’, Boyet advises his royal mistress at the start of her mission, suggesting that she deploy her full attractions to reel in Navarre (. . ). Love ’s Labour ’s Lost
Arthur Marotti, ‘ “Love is not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, ELH, (), –. Cf. Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (Harlow, ). See, for example, Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward ’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago, ); Jane Hedley, ‘Since First Your Eye I Eyed: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Poetics of Narcissism’, Style, (), –. Cf. such phrases as the ‘gnarled introspection’ for which Fulke Greville is admired by Neil Powell, Fulke Greville (Manchester, ), p. . H. G. Liddell, Greek–English Lexicon, rev. edn (Oxford, ). Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authority and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y., ).
is also a play that, for all its sonneteering, has serious political undertones, as it evokes the negotiations about marital reconciliation – also conducted amid what Walter Cohen has described as ‘the festive aristocratic world’ – between Henry IV of France (also king of Navarre) and his estranged wife, Marguerite de Valois, whose relationship was perceived by contemporaries to affect directly the French Wars of Religion. Downplaying the political nature of sonnets in modern criticism is due, in part, to a tendency to conduct selective readings of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse, a key point of departure for both the English sonnet tradition and the secondary literature it has spawned. As far back as , Aldo Bernardo critiqued the way in which the tendency to read certain sonnets in isolation means that ‘mere mention of the [Rime Sparse] ordinarily evokes the conventional image of Petrarch’s unrequited love for Laura’, ‘overlooking the important role played by the non-love poems in the collection’. However, read sequentially, the Rime Sparse reveals the use of sonnets for much more publicly orientated and morally serious purposes than the expression of love alone. The collection includes sonnets of praise for public figures, reflections on fame and the poet’s role in acquiring fame for his patrons, and satirical interventions in contemporary religious politics, through sonnets which castigate the papal court at Avignon as ‘a nest of treachery’ (‘nido di tradimenti’), enriched by ‘making others poor’ (‘per l’altrui impoverir se’ ricca et grande’) and through whose ‘chambers young girls and old men go frisking’ (‘Per le camere tue fanciulle et vecchi / vanno trescando’). This Petrarch, with his acerbic pen and polemical engagement in public affairs, is rather different from the exquisite and introspective love poet who dominates our perception of Petrarchanism. Yet, as William Kennedy has shown, Petrarch’s early modern readers were much more attuned to political interpretations of his work. There were no fewer than ten major commentaries on Petrarch’s poetry produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: ‘these printed editions authorize a succession of ideologically different Petrarchs as remote from the cultural formation of their fourteenth-century author as those fashioned by
Walter Cohen, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds, The Norton Shakespeare, nd edn (New York, ), pp. –. Aldo S. Bernardo, ‘The Importance of the Non-love Poems of Petrarch’s “Canzoniere”’, Italica, (), . Cf. Cathy Shrank, ‘ “Matters of Love as of Discourse”: The English Sonnet, – ’, Studies in Philology, (), – (esp. –). See, for example, Rima on Stefano Colonna the Elder, or Rima , in part a eulogy to Petrarch’s dead patron, Giovanni Colonna. For reflections on fame, see Rime and : Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. Robert Durling (Cambridge, Mass., ). Petrarch, Rima ; cf. Rime –.
Counsel, succession and the politics of the Sonnets
nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars’. The Petrarchs constructed range from a Florentine ‘republican’ Petrarch to the ‘loyal public servant of the Visconti aristocracy’, ‘unapologetically promot[ing] the strong monarchist ideals of Milan’; from proto-Protestant Petrarch ‘imbued with … Reformist ideals’ to Petrarch the ‘sixteenth-century Castiglionestyle courtier, as mindful of the manners of the elite as of the control mechanisms that regulate social behaviour’. Kennedy recovers political readings of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse overshadowed by post-Romantic critical discourse, which ‘continues to ground Petrarch’s lyrics in Romantic notions of interiority, subjectivity, and expressiveness’. This same discourse has influenced the way in which we tend to approach the sonnets of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Whilst much critical ink has been spilt about the politics of Shakespeare’s plays, his sonnets are pretty much exempt from the discussion. In January , if you typed ‘Shakespeare’, ‘sonnet’ and ‘politics’ into the MLA international bibliography, a mere seven items showed up (if you typed in ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘sonnet’, you got ; for ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘politics’, ). Of these seven results, four relate to sexual politics; two to religious politics; and one to transformative readings of Sonnet as an anthem of dissent in Communist Europe. When it comes to staging political readings, that is, Shakespeare’s Sonnets is an as-yet unploughed field – a rare thing in Shakespeare studies. However, if we look at the titles containing the word sonnet printed in the years immediately preceding the publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in , they demonstrate how the genre can be put to far more heterogeneous and political uses than is often acknowledged. Alongside Craig Alexander’s Amorose
William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, N.Y., ), p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Charles Casey, ‘Was Shakespeare Gay? Sonnet and the Politics of Pedagogy’, College Literature (), –; Heather Dubrow, ‘ “Incertainties Now Crown Themselves Assur’d”: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in James Schiffer, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York, ), pp. –; Alison V. Scott, Selfish Gifts: The Politics of Exchange and English Courtly Literature, – (Madison, N.J., ); Bruce R. Smith, ‘I, You, He, She, and We: On the Sexual Politics of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Schiffer, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, pp. –. Claire Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York, ); John Klause, ‘Politics, Heresy, and Martyrdom in Shakespeare’s Sonnet and Titus Andronicus’, in Schiffer, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, pp. –. Manfred Pfister, ‘Route : The Political Performance of Shakespeare’s Sonnet in Germany and Elsewhere’, in Luis A. Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars, eds., Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Newark, Del., ), pp. –. Information from ESTC, http://estc.bl.uk (accessed ..). Search conducted on variants of sonnet in titles –. In addition to the works mentioned here (and Shakespeare’s Sonnets), also published were: Francis Davison, A poetical rapsodie, containing diverse sonnets [etc.] (London, , ); Alexander Garden, A garden of grave and godlie fl owres: sonets, elegies, and epitaphs
songes, sonnets, and elegies () or John Davies’ Wittes pilgrimage (?), containing ‘a world of amorous sonnets’, we have, for example, Thomas Deloney’s Strange histories, or Songes and sonnets, of kings, princes, dukes, lordes, ladyes, knights, and gentlemen. Very pleasant either to be read or songe: and a most excellent warning for all estates (). In a yet more political vein we have the ‘devout catholike sonnets’ annexed to Epitaphs … upon the death of Marie, late queene of Scots (), or the broadsheet To the most irreverend Pope-holy Fathers of the two Seminaries at Rheimes and Rome … containing a messe of spirituall sonnets (?). The subject matter of sonnets is thus broader than is generally recognised (where non-amorous topics are treated as deviations from a norm which – on closer examination – turns out not to be so conventional after all). In Henry V, for example, we find striking evidence of this variety: on the one hand, sonneteering is depicted as amorous, clichéd and inane, used – as in Love ’s Labour ’s Lost – as a form of ridicule (again, of a foreigner). Bourbon (or the Dauphin: it varies between Folio and Quarto) describes how he ‘once writ a sonnet in … praise [of his horse]’, beginning ‘Wonder of nature!’, an opening Orléans remarks upon as being more suitable for a sonnet ‘to one’s mistress’ (. . –). The play ends, though, with an Epilogue in the form of a sonnet spoken by the Chorus, reminding the audience of the transience of glory and of future civil unrest under Henry VI, when ‘they lost France and made his England bleed’ (l. ). This sonnet – like the commendatory sonnets that frequently puff printed works of the period – also acts as a marketing tool, advertising Shakespeare’s first tetralogy ‘which oft our stage hath shown’ (l. ). Henry V is one of seven plays to mention sonnets, the others being All ’s Well That Ends Well, Love ’s Labour ’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona; an eighth – Romeo and Juliet – famously includes a sonnet, shared between hero and heroine at their first meeting. All, with the probable exception of All ’s Well, are late Elizabethan plays, a period when
(Edinburgh, ); Richard Nugent, Cynthia Containing direfull sonnets, madrigalls, and passionate intercourses (London, ). The use of sonnet by Deloney and the ‘irreverend’ broadsheet does not describe a fourteen-line poem, but displays a broader understanding of the term found in many Tudor miscellanies, where works deemed ‘sonnets’ can range from two to over forty lines; see Shrank, ‘ “Matters of love”’. The term remained fluid into the seventeenth century, as demonstrated by the publication of Fulke Greville’s Caelica ‘containing [] sonnets’, few of which are fourteen lines long. See, for example, Walter Raleigh’s commendatory sonnets to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (London, ), p. .
Counsel, succession and the politics of the Sonnets
Shakespeare must have had sonnets on his mind. The general – if vague – consensus regarding the dating of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is that numbers – at least were composed in the s, possibly the first half, but then revised in the s. By , Shakespeare was certainly known as a sonneteer, since in that year he was publicly identified as such by Francis Meres, who describes Shakespeare circulating his ‘sugred sonnets’ in manuscript among his ‘private friends’. Of course, these need not be the Sonnets in their entirety: they could merely be those which appeared the following year in The Passionate Pilgrim (), which included versions of just two sonnets ( and ) from the collection. Nevertheless, evidence of Shakespeare’s undoubted interest in sonnets in the s highlights one of the oddities of the Sonnets: that it was printed in at all, more than a decade after the great sonnet boom had ended, and after Shakespeare himself had recurrently mocked the potentially hackneyed nature of the form in such plays as Love ’s Labour ’s Lost and Henry V. Katherine Duncan-Jones has argued that sonnet sequences maintained their popularity into the first decade of the seventeenth century, when several more were published, but – as Colin Burrow shows – ‘the vast majority’ of these sequences (as opposed to miscellanies) ‘appeared in –’, years that marked the height of the sonnet vogue. It is also notable that the new works printed between and did not originate from London-based poets (as did the majority of those in the mid-s). Two are by Scots (Alexander Craig and Alexander Garden); the third by an Irishman (Richard Nugent). The only other two works containing the word sonnet in the title printed close to Shakespeare’s Sonnets are reprints: Francis Davison’s Poetical rapsodie containing diverse sonnets (), the first edition of which appeared in , and a work, moreover, containing substantial extracts from the archetypically Elizabethan poets Spenser and Sidney; and Thomas Lodge’s A most pleasant historie of Glaucus and Scilla. With many excellent poems, and delectable sonnets (), which had seen two previous editions in and . Linking sonnets and epyllia, Pleasant historie here revisits not just one but two genres whose
See James Schiffer, ‘Reading New Life into Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Schiffer, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, pp. –. Katherine Duncan-Jones is a key exception, arguing for ‘– … initiating an intense period of writing … which may have continued, off and on, until shortly before publication’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones (London, ), p. . Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, ), p. . Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, pp. –; Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford, ), p. n, pp. –. Alexander Craig, Amorose songes, sonnets, and elegies (London, ); Garden, Garden of … fl owres; Nugent, Cynthia.
great heyday had been in the s. There is, in other words, something slightly dated about a collection – or sequence – of sonnets in . At the very least, Shakespeare’s sonnets have two readerships: the one, an Elizabethan coterie, probably London-based, with access to manuscript texts; the other, Jacobean, tied to no particular location, reading printed copies. Kennedy’s work on Petrarch highlights the way in which different readers, in different times and places, could produce radically different readings of the same text . The second half of this chapter considers the potential for finding different political meanings in Shakespeare’s Sonnets by examining the issue of succession in numbers –.
’ :
The theme of succession permeates Shakespeare’s oeuvre. It is predictably central to the tragedies. The bodies that litter the stage in Titus Andronicus (), Romeo and Juliet (c. –), Hamlet (–) or King Lear () represent not just tragic waste, but the extermination of entire dynasties. The histories too recurrently focus on moments of contested succession. More surprisingly, perhaps, succession also forms a frequent concern of Shakespeare’s comedies. In Twelfth Night () the confusion caused by the cross-dressing Viola jolts Olivia and Orsino out of sterile introspection and prevents the withering of their respective houses. In The Tempest (), Prospero works for the restoration of his dukedom and the continuation of his bloodline (which faces extinction should Miranda remain on the island). In The Winter ’s Tale (–), Leontes miraculously has his bloodline restored to him; ditto Leonato in Much Ado (c. ), as his only daughter Hero rises from seeming death, and Pericles in his play (–), fantasies of restoration that also emerge in Cymbeline (–) – classified as a ‘tragedy’ in the First Folio of – where the eponymous king is reunited with his lost heirs. Shakespeare’s concern with succession is also key to his ‘procreation’ sonnets, the first seventeen addressed to the young man. Should the papers that Meres describes circulating among Shakespeare’s ‘private friends’ in have included these sonnets, then reading them must have had a particular edge in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, when the fact that the Tudor dynasty faced extinction was all too worryingly apparent. This is not to say that the Sonnets are about Elizabeth (unlike George Chalmers, who argued exactly that in ). Rather, it is to suggest that during
Schiffer, ‘Reading New Life’, p. .
Counsel, succession and the politics of the Sonnets
these years there must have been an especial frisson to reading sonnets, in manuscript, dedicated to the theme of succession, a topic that had been declared off-limits by the queen herself. This seems most true of Sonnet . To persuade the youth that the adoration of his beauty ‘in middle age’ is transient, this sonnet draws on the analogy of the sun, a familiar image of monarchy (found for example in Richard II, where the king appears a ‘blushing, discontented sun’, . . ), a regal association compounded in Sonnet by the phrase ‘sacred majesty’ (l. ). The ageing, setting sun, however, commands no attention: ‘eyes (fore dutious) now converted are / From his low tract and looke an other way’ (ll. –). The two most recent critical editions of the Sonnets both observe that this is proverbial. Proverbial it may be, but the analogy can be traced at least as far back as Plutarch’s ‘Life of Pompey’ and an anecdote from Sulla’s dictatorship. In Thomas North’s translation: After [his military victory in Africa] Pompey required the honor of triumphe, but Sylla denied it, alleaging that none could enter in triumphe into R but Consulls or Praetors … All this blanked not Pompey, who told him frankely againe, how men did honor the rising, not the setting of the sunne: meaning thereby, how his owne honor encreased, and Syllaes diminished.
Astonishingly, Sulla relented, ‘marvell[ing] at the boldnes of so young a man’, and ‘cried out twise together, let him then triumphe a Gods name’. This is also an incident – as Duncan-Jones’ note indicates – used in Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth, urging against marrying the French Duc d’Alençon in (where Sidney shamelessly reverses the analogy, declaring that Elizabeth need not marry, because even her declining sun will arrest attention). In isolation, then, this sonnet can be seen to invite a distinctly political reading, not least because it can be associated with a much-circulated, and controversial, attempt to intervene in Elizabeth’s marital affairs . However, as Shakespeare’s sonnets have left such minimal manuscript imprints and therefore seem unlikely to have been widely disseminated, it is fairly safe to say that most readers would not have encountered them individually, in manuscript, but long after Elizabeth’s death, as a collection in print
ODNB, ‘Elizabeth I (–)’. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, p. n; Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow, p. n. Thomas North, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (London, ), p. . Philip Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, ). Twenty-five known texts exist in manuscript; none pre-date . See Sonnets, ed. DuncanJones, p. .
and in which Sonnet is one of a group of seventeen addressed to the young man, advising him of the necessity of providing an heir. Within the context of these sonnets, the application of Pompey’s analogy of the sun shows the speaker highlighting an incident in which blunt speech does not cause (the expected) offence, but brings rewards . As such, it becomes a model for the reception of unwanted advice, imparted by the less to the more powerful, and a pattern for the successful functioning of the patronage relationship embodied in these first seventeen sonnets. When it comes to politics, there is a tendency among literary critics to focus on monarchical politics. Politics, though, is not just about kings and queens: it is a commonplace to observe that early modern England was a far from centralised state. As Sir Thomas Smith put it in De Republica Anglorum: the common wealth, or policie of Englande … is governed, administred, & manured by three sortes of persons, the Prince … The gentlemen, which be divided into two partes, the Baronie or estate of Lords: and those which be no Lords, as Knightes, Esquires, and simplely gentlemen. The thirde and laste sorte of persons is named the yeomanrie: each of these hath his part and administration.
Nobility and gentry – deemed by Lawrence Humphrey the ‘piller and staye of all common wealthes’ – were thus expected to assume offices as what Sir Thomas Elyot terms ‘inferiour governours’ or ‘Magistrates’ responsible, for example, for dispensing justice in the regions beyond the metropolis, and to train their sons to do the same (as witnessed by books like Humphrey’s The Nobles, or Elyot’s Governour, which prescribed the form of education believed most suited for achieving this end). Despite Lawrence Stone’s theory of ‘The Crisis of the Aristocracy’ between and , when ‘rarely’ have ‘they … had it so bad’, the upper echelons of society played a defining role in local (as well as national) politics during this period. As Robert Wroth the elder ‘remind[ed] the lieutenants of Essex’ in , it is ‘in the country’ that ‘I ame continually Imployed in her ma[jes]tis s[er]vice’. As a result, the dynastic succession of aristocratic
Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (London, ), pp. –. Lawrence Humphrey, The Nobles (London, ), sig. Ar; Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (London, ), fol. v. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, – (Oxford, ), p. ; for one of many qualifications of Stone’s view, see Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (Manchester, ). Cited in Martin Elsky, ‘Microhistory and Cultural Geography: Ben Jonson’s “To Sir Robert Wroth” and the Absorption of Local Community in the Commonwealth’, Renaissance Quarterly, (), .
Counsel, succession and the politics of the Sonnets
families had potentially as much impact upon local affairs and politics as did that of the monarch – if not more. Remove the procreation sonnets from the context of the dying years of Elizabeth I, therefore, and they still retain a political dynamic. Biographical readings of the Sonnets are problematic. As Park Honan has argued, ‘too-close connection is often supposed to exist between Tudor poets and patrons’, the result of ‘mistaken’ interpretations, conducted ‘in the light of Romantic or Wordsworthian criteria such as directness, candour, and reportorial fidelity’. Notwithstanding, the two most ‘favoured’ candidates for the young man – and dedicatee – of the Sonnets are Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton (–) and William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke (–). Whether or not Thomas Thorpe would have really breached decorum in addressing a nobleman as ‘Mr’ in his dedication is just one stumbling-block to biographical readings. Nevertheless, Herbert and Wriothesley are useful demonstrations of a crisis of infertility that could be seen to face some scions of the late Tudor peerage almost as much as it did their monarch. Both men were from relatively ‘new’ families. Herbert’s grandfather was ennobled in . Wriothesley was likewise ‘third generation’: his grandfather was a successful bureaucrat, rewarded with an earldom at Edward’s accession. Neither came from prolific families: Herbert’s grandfather and father both had only two surviving sons (and one daughter); and it took his father no fewer than three marriages to acquire his heir. Wriothesley’s family were even thinner on the ground, Wriothesley being the only surviving son of an only surviving son. If Wriothesley and Herbert did not marry and produce an heir – and both were notorious bachelors – they were putting their family line at risk: Wriothesley’s line did indeed die out within one generation. Thinking about the procreation sonnets in the light of fragile dynastic succession reminds us of their political dimension: that they are a representation of counsel, given by a social inferior to a social superior, with an eye to remedying the as-yet unfulfilled responsibility of the latter to further his own line, a duty owed not just to himself, but to his family and locality. For their persuasive powers, the procreation sonnets are heavily reliant on various types of amplification, which – according to Thomas
ODNB, ‘Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton (–)’. ODNB, ‘William Herbert, first earl of Pembroke (/–)’. ODNB, ‘Thomas Wriothesley, first earl of Southampton (–)’. Contrast, for example, Thomas Howard, first earl of Suffolk, who had seven surviving sons (abundance which caused its own financial problems).
Wilson – ‘among all the figures of Rhetorique’ most ‘helpeth forwarde an Oracion’. The sequence begins with what Wilson calls ‘the thirde kinde of Amplifiynge … when wee gather suche sentences as are communely spoken, or elles use to speake of suche thynges as are notable in thys lyfe’ (fol. r). Sonnet thus opens with a statement that takes authority from its evocation of communal wisdom, drawn in part from the use of the first person plural: ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’ (l. ). This pronouncement is then used to chide the young man, who is introduced rather reproachfully at the beginning of the second quatrain, excluded from the communal ‘we’ by the second person singular and adversative conjunction ‘but’: ‘But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes, / Feed’st thy light’s flame with selfe substantiall fewell’ (ll. –). The weight of generalised wisdom thus licenses some fairly direct talking on the part of the poetic speaker, plain speech that is sustained throughout the seventeen sonnets, with their frequent use of imperatives (the number of which peak – at six – in Sonnet ) and recourse to other modes of amplification, in particular the propensity to employ adjectives and intensifiers (which, in Wilson’s words, ‘serve muche to make our talke appear vehemente’). In Sonnet , for instance, Time is ‘never resting’ (l. ); winter is ‘hidious’ (l. ), an adjective which Shakespeare does not use lightly; ‘lustie leav’s’ are not just gone, they are ‘quite gon’ (l. ); and so on. In these ways, the poems hammer home the relentless and inevitable march of time, with its ability to ‘un-fair’ that ‘which fairly doth excel’ (. ) – the Shakespearean coinage ‘un-fair’, containing at its root the very quality (fair) that Time negates, a stark reminder of its destructive powers. The sequence of these seventeen sonnets, all dwelling on the same point, explicating it in multiple ways, is itself a form of amplification as, in Wilson’s words, ‘we encrease our cause by heapyng of wordes & sentences together’. Sonnets – harp on the same theme, over and over and over again. Two sets of paired sonnets ( and ; and ) are obviously linked, but all seventeen are intermeshed, echoing ideas and phrases. It is as if the speaker is standing at the young man’s shoulder, losing no opportunity for scoring a point, making an analogy and forcing the marriage issue, be it proximity to a mirror (Sonnet ), listening to music (Sonnet ), the lessons of nature on view outside (multiple sonnets) or – as we shall see – the architectural fabric of the house, a motif that, within the context of
Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, ), fol. r. Ibid., fol. v. Cf. ‘hideous death’ (King John, . . ); ‘hideous god of war’ ( Henry IV, . . ). Wilson, Arte, fol. v.
Counsel, succession and the politics of the Sonnets
the familial duty promoted by the speaker, carries particularly emotive appeal, bringing extra weight to the images of waste and money that run through these poems. Within Sonnets –, the young man is periodically constructed in architectural terms as a country house, as in the first line of Sonnet , which describes the youth’s beauty as ‘frame[d]’, key meanings of which include ‘to construct’, or ‘to prepare (timber) for use in a building’. In Sonnet the youth’s eyes are ‘windowes’ through which he looks (l. ). The counterpoint to the idea of eyes as windows of the soul, through which an outsider looks in, the youth is in this case master of, and resident within, the house of his body, through whose portals he peers. This is a mansion, though, that shockingly he neglects. In Sonnet , he is accused of ‘seeking that beautious roofe to ruinate, / Which to repaire should be thy chiefe desire’ (ll. –); similarly, in Sonnet , there is criticism of he ‘who lets so fair a house fall to decay, / Which husbandry in honour might uphold’ (ll. –). House here calls up the dual meaning of both building and lineage – strictures that have strong echoes of Erasmus’ letter on marriage, as filtered through Wilson’s translation in The Arte of Rhetorique. From the outset, this sonnet stresses the fact that the youth’s period of occupation is finite: ‘love you are / No longer yours, then you your selfe here live’ (ll. –). Youth, beauty, even self are thus likened to the family seat, held ‘in lease’ (l. ), temporarily: something that the youth does not own outright, but that he is charged to keep in trust for the next generation. To a landowner, the word lease would no doubt ring particularly loudly, this being a period when many tenancy agreements were being altered from copyhold to leasehold; the word itself thus evokes not merely transience, but estate business. In this way, the procreation sonnets can profitably be put alongside the genre of fathers’ advice to their sons, such as those written in the second half of the sixteenth century by William Cecil and Walter Raleigh, which emphasise the son’s duty to future generations and the fact that the social position and worldly goods he enjoys are not for his own use alone, to dispose of as he wishes. ‘Thy house and estate, which liveth in thy son and
OED, ‘Frame’, v., , . Cf. ‘Some beauty peept, through lettice of sear’d age’, Shakespeare, A Lovers Complaint, in Sonnets, sig. Kv. Cf. Sonnet , which calls upon the youth to renew ‘repaire’ (l. ). See Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow, p. n. Stone, Crisis, pp. –.
not in thy wife, is to be preferred’, notes Raleigh, for example, explaining why a widow should not inherit the family home. Like the word house in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the word estate – meaning both status and property – here serves a usefully ambiguous purpose, the one (status) being dependent upon the other (property). As Cecil the self-made man explains in his advice: ‘that gentleman which … sells an acre of land loses an ounce of credit, for gentility is nothing but ancient riches’. The rhetoric used to persuade the youth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is therefore not neutral: it is designed to appeal to a sense of family duty (you should no more seek to annihilate your family line than you would corrupt its name or neglect the fabric of the family seat). Despite his social inferiority, the speaker of the Sonnets thus acquires a generational authority, endorsing the typical views of the paterfamilias. The construction of the addressee as a house is not new to the sonnet tradition: it is found, for example, in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, where Sonnet builds an elaborate description of Stella as ‘Queene Vertues Court’: her forehead is ‘of Alabaster pure’; her mouth, a ‘Red porphire’ door, locked with pearl; her ‘chekes’, marble porches ‘mixt red and white’, and so forth. Sidney’s architectural conceit is more sustained than those snatches of imagery found – emerging periodically but regularly – through Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets. Sidney’s conceit also acts as a blazon, praising the female form by breaking it into its constituent parts and comparing these to inanimate objects. The extremes to which the conceit and blazon are taken verges upon parody, indicative of the sequence’s on-going concern with poetic innovation, its emulative relationship with Petrarchanism and its desire to distinguish its creator from hackneyed poets – those ‘that poore Petrarchs long deceased woes / With new-borne sighes and denisen’d wit do sing’ (Sonnet ). The impetus behind Sidney’s architectural imagining of Stella is thus designed to reflect self-consciously on the poet’s relationship with a poetic tradition. Sidney’s meta-poetic use of the architectural motif points up the political potential of Shakespeare’s deployment of the metaphor, a propensity epitomised by a crucial difference between the ways in which the two poets figure their addressees as inhabitants of their respective mansions. Sidney’s is a ‘heavenly guest’, looking out from the windows, with no responsibilities to the fabric of the place she inhabits. Not so Shakespeare’s
Louis B. Wright, ed., Advice to a Son: Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francis Osborne (Ithaca, N.Y., ), p. . Ibid., p. .
Counsel, succession and the politics of the Sonnets
young man. Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets can here be aligned with the country-house poem, a genre with roots in the classical poetry of Horace and Martial, which was revived by such writers as Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson in the early s, shortly after the publication of the Sonnets. Like Jonson’s country-house poems in particular, Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets present a sustained critique of waste, to which the well-maintained, well-husbanded country seat serves as the antithesis. As in the country-house genre, the affairs of the landlord affect the wider community. In Sonnet , for instance, the youth’s narcissism is initially critiqued as self-consuming – self-absorption mirrored in the recurrent alliteration and assonance: ‘But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes, / Feed’st thy lights f lame with selfe subst antiall fewell’ (ll. –), lines that themselves echo Ovid’s – and Golding’s – treatment of the tale of Narcissus: ‘He is the flame that settes on fire, and thing that burneth tooe.’ Yet, building on the hint of property latent in ‘substantial’ (derived from substance), this self-annihilation is immediately recast in terms of bad husbandry – ‘making a famine where aboundance lies’ (l. ). The ramifications of self-love are then rendered farther-reaching still, as the young man is instructed to ‘Pitty the world, or else this glutton be, / To eate the worlds due, by the grave and thee’ (ll. –). The youth’s responsibilities are not to himself alone, and the effects of neglecting them extend beyond self-ruin. Depicting the country seat as not just somewhere that gives honour to its inhabitant, but also carries obligations, Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets – like country-house poetry – betoken a concern about the perceived decline of ‘country hospitality’, articulated at least as early as November in a proclamation ‘Enforcing orders against dearth; ordering hospitality kept in country, and defenses maintained’. Th is addresses those ‘of covetous mind’ who had broken up their country households and repaired to London, or were intending to do so, during a time of economic hardship. It orders them ‘to return to their houses again without delay’ and ‘there in charitable sort to keep hospitality’. Whilst this Elizabethan proclamation can be seen to react to a specific crisis, concern about the aristocracy’s absence from their country seats, and subsequent
Aemilia Lanyer, ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’, in Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (London, ); Ben Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’, ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, in Jonson, Workes (London, ). See Sonnets , , , , , . Arthur Golding, The XV. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis (London, ), fol. r. Tudor Royal Proclamations, Vol. III: The Later Tudors (–), eds. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven, ), p. .
neglect of their duties there, continued into the early seventeenth century, when – as Martin Elsky and Leah Marcus have both pointed out – ‘the literary representation of the country promoted James’s policy of “repastoralization,” a policy aimed at keeping the gentry in the country so they could provide hospitality instead of seeking city pleasures’. As James himself wrote in his Horatian ‘Elegy’, probably composed in the early s: ‘The country is your orb and proper sphere / There you revenues rise; bestow them there.’ This is not to suggest that Shakespeare’s poems are consciously assuming a position on James’ policies, which only crystallised after their publication. What Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets do is evoke the image of the family seat as a rhetorical device, harnessing current concerns – about occupation, about good estate management – designed to work upon their aristocratic addressee. And here Shakespeare’s choice of analogy is particularly biting in a period between and that had seen a marked increase in the sale of manor houses by aristocratic families, whilst the corresponding amount of purchases was notably small, especially in the decade –. Although, as J. H. Hexter notes, ‘the appalling rapidity of the dispersion of landed assets by [a] cluster of peerage families’ was ‘as narrow as it was shortlived’, the financial difficulties that this disinvestment signalled for these peers must have been starkly and worrying obvious to them, others of their rank with whom they mingled at court, their families, confidantes and retainers. The politics of repastoralisation is, of course, nostalgic, harking back to a mythical feudal harmony. Invoking this ideal as a rhetorical strategy is entirely in keeping with the conservatism of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Despite the unusualness of having a male addressee, the subverting of the usual Petrarchan blonde and blue-eyed goddess (through the person of the ‘dark lady’), and its metaphorical inventiveness, Shakespeare’s volume is not formally innovative, in the way that many of those by his contemporaries strove to be. Unlike, for example, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella
Elsky, ‘Microhistory’, p. ; cf. Leah Marcus, ‘Politics and Pastoral: Jonson, Herrick, Milton and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford, ), pp. –. Cf. Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, ). Cited in Marcus, ‘Politics and Pastoral’, p. . Stone, Crisis, p. ; for a critical analysis of Stone’s interpretation of this data, see J. H. Hexter, ‘The English Aristocracy: Its Crises, and the English Revolution, –’, Journal of British Studies, (), –. Hexter, ‘English Aristocracy’, , . The only other known collection that has a male addressee is Richard Barnfield’s homoerotic Cynthia (London, ).
Counsel, succession and the politics of the Sonnets
or John Donne’s Holy Sonnets (most of which were probably written c. –), Shakespeare’s Sonnets displays little experimentation with rhyme-scheme or syntactic structure, making scant use of enjambment, so that units of grammatical sense generally map exactly onto the units of rhyme. Instead, Shakespeare follows, to the letter, the guidelines laid down by George Gascoigne’s ‘Certayne Notes of Instruction’ in , that ‘Sonets … are of fourtene lynes, every line conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve do ryme in staves of four lines by crosse metre, and the last twoo ryming together do conclude the whole.’ The old-fashioned impression made by the versification in the Sonnets is compounded by the simplicity of its title-page, with its minimal ornamentation, pared-down information and extensive white space, reminiscent of sixteenth-century miscellanies, such as Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes or the first edition of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Shakespeare’s is, in short, a profoundly Tudor volume. Literary revivals in the early modern period were rarely politically neutral. Take, for instance, the vogue for ploughman writing during the reign of Edward VI, and its subsequent revival in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, when its focus on the commonweal had something very specific to say about the political participation of adult men in periods of minority or female rule. Or we have the politics of Jacobean Spenserianism, which – as Michelle O’Callaghan has shown – promoted ‘new languages of citizenship’ and was averse to James’ ‘regicentricity’; these oppositional strains were in turn expunged from later flurries of Elizabetheana during the Civil War and its aftermath, as exiled royalists found consolation in rewritings, and whitewashings, of Sidney and Spenser. There is therefore something rather suggestive about what looks like a miniature Elizabethan revival towards the end of the first decade of James’ reign (witnessed by the printing or reprinting of such texts as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Lodge’s Pleasant historie or Davison’s Poetical rapsodie, with its dependence on Sidney and Spenser). Prince Henry, for instance, seems at this time to have cultivated comparisons to
ODNB, ‘John Donne (–)’. George Gascoigne, The Posies (London, ), sig. Uv. Only three sonnets out of Shakespeare’s vary from this: Sonnets (fifteen lines), (six couplets and two pairs of empty parentheses) and (octosyllabic). See Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, pp. –. However, Eld seems to have specialised in these sparse title-pages; see, for example, his edition of George Chapman’s Tragedy of Byron (London, ), also printed for Thorpe. Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, – (Oxford, ).
Sidney through ‘Elizabethan-style rites of knighthood’, becoming a focus for ‘a resurgent war party frustrated by James’s pacific policies’. Whether or not the old-fashioned feel of the Sonnets was interpreted as political by its Jacobean audience is contingent on individual readers; there is little within the text itself to invite a critique of the current regime. There is, however, a further way in which the ‘Tudorness’ of the text does engage directly with the affairs and administration of the state – and in a strikingly similar way to that outlined by David Colclough in this volume in relation to Julius Caesar. As discussed at the start of this chapter, English humanism laid great store by the practical application of its teaching: that its students would use their education to serve the commonweal. Indebted as it was to Cicero’s writings, humanism naturally advocated eloquence as a crucial skill for effective government. Like Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, though, Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets demonstrate the flaws of a humanist belief in the powers of rhetoric. The poetic speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnets harnesses all his persuasive powers: he conjures speaking pictures; draws on authorities such as Erasmus; amplifies his words with proverbial wisdom; and demonstrates his proficiency in copiousness (commended in the Tudor schoolroom) by imparting the same message – ‘Have children!’ – in at least seventeen different ways. Yet the sequence of sonnets – whether arranged by author or printer – demonstrates the utter failure of eloquence and consequently the counsel that depends upon it. After Sonnet , the poetic speaker abandons all attempts to convince the youth to produce an heir. Thereafter, whenever some kind of afterlife is offered, it is one in verse alone: ‘So long as men can breath or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (. –). Tellingly, in the light of the architectural motifs discussed earlier, the only building that features in the last of these seventeen sonnets is ‘a tombe’, created by poetry ‘Which hides your life, and shewes not halfe your partes’ (. –). The sterility of the poetic rhetoric mirrors that of the youth. Both poet and addressee have failed in their duty: the one to persuade, the other to listen.
ODNB, ‘Henry Frederick, prince of Wales (–)’. See, for example, the prefatory material of Wilson’s Arte, discussed in Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, – (Oxford, ), pp. –.
Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal Aysha Pollnitz
In the final years of the sixteenth century, speculation as to the identity of England’s future ruler was both forbidden and rife. In , Peter Wentworth was arrested for discussing the succession with fellow members of Parliament. In , Robert Parsons’ treatise A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland had been provocatively dedicated to the earl of Essex as the man likely ‘to have a greater part or sway in deciding of this great affaire’. Indeed, William Camden claimed, perhaps unfairly, that the earl’s followers spent much of declaring his own right to the crown. As Peter Lake has argued, however, Parsons had a bigger target in his sights than the self-promoting earl. His intention was to ‘create a sense of confusion and impending crisis’ around the claim of the more established candidate, James VI of Scotland. There is some evidence to suggest the Jesuit’s success. His intervention triggered a flurry of treatises, including the posthumous publication of Wentworth’s Pithie Exhortation to her Majestie (). By , Thomas Wilson pronounced that while the crown was ‘not like to fall to the ground for want of heads to wear it’, quite who would succeed ‘is by many doubted’. The author would like to thank Dr Richard Serjeantson and Dr Rebecca Beale for their acute comments on earlier drafts. She is also grateful to the participants at the ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’ conference in Canberra, July for their insightful questions.
ODNB, ‘Peter Wentworth (–)’; Robert Parsons, A Conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (Antwerp, ), sig. *r. William Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of that Famous Princesse, Queene Elizabeth (London, ), p. ; Peter Lake, ‘The King (the Queen) and the Jesuit: James Stuart’s True Law of Free Monarchies in Context/s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, th ser., (), . Susan Doran, ‘Revenge Her Foul and Most Unnatural Murder? The Impact of Mary Stewart’s Execution on Anglo-Scottish Relations’, History, (), –; Peter Wentworth, A Pithie exhortation to her Maiestie for Establishing her Successor to the Crowne Whereunto is Added a Discourse Containing the Authors Opinion of the True and Lawful Successor to her Maiestie (Edinburgh, ); Thomas Wilson, The State of England, AD , ed. F. J. Fisher, Camden Miscellany, rd ser., (London, ), p. .
While English subjects speculated about their future ruler, William Shakespeare created two very different potential monarchs for the public view: the eponymous prince in Hamlet, which was probably written in –; and Prince Hal of the second tetralogy. Henry IV was entered on the Stationers’ Register on February . Henry IV was first staged in the later part of the same year, and Henry V was probably performed in the new Globe Theatre in September . Like the candidates lining up to follow Elizabeth, both Shakespeare’s fictional princes had question-marks hanging over their successions. Prince Hal was the heir-presumptive, but Henry IV’s displeasure at Hal’s wild and popular behaviour had threatened his status. In Hamlet the prince’s succession had been suspended by Claudius, who had murdered Old Hamlet and ‘popped in between th’election and [Hamlet’s] hopes’ (. . ). Certainly Claudius named the prince as the man ‘most immediate to our throne’ (. . ). Yet Elizabethan audiences had heard their own queen protest that Mary Queen of Scots was her ‘cousin and next kinswoman’. They knew how little such assertions could mean. In setting Hamlet and Hal upon the public stage, Shakespeare drew the eyes of all beholders to the anxieties and possibilities of an unsettled succession. In determining the nature of the playwright’s treatment of England’s ‘great affair’, a number of scholars have constructed ingenious parallels between Shakespeare’s art and late sixteenth-century politics. Hamlet, a scholarly prince revenging his slain parent, has been identified with James. Hal, the popular warrior, is said to have evoked the earl of Essex. Shakespeare did make a direct comparison in Henry V between the victorious Hal returning from France and the prospective triumph of Essex’s homecoming from Ireland (. . –). With the exception of this reference, however, such identifications are often made from circumstantial rather than textual evidence. It is entirely possible that Shakespeare did mean to add topical bite to his plays with a few subtle allusions . Even Andrew Hadfield concedes, however, that some of the associations that
Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London –, ed. Edward Arber, vols. (London, ), III, p. . ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Conversations with the Scottish Ambassador, William of Maitland, Laird of Lethington, September and October ’, in Elizabeth I, Collected Works, eds. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago, ), p. ; see also ibid., pp. , , , . Lillian Winstanley, ‘Hamlet’ and the Scottish Succession (Cambridge, ); Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, ), pp. –, –; Stuart M. Kurland, ‘Hamlet and the Scottish Succession’, Studies in English Literature, –, (), –; Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, ), pp. , –; James Shapiro, : A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London, ), pp. –.
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modern scholars have drawn between art and sixteenth-century statesmen may ‘seem rather forced’. Rather than searching for James and Essex in these plays, then, we might ask whether Shakespeare’s exploration of the succession question took place on a more analytical level. Specifically, was the playwright engaging with contemporary political debates on the best way of securing good monarchical rule? Gordon Ross Smith, Howard Erskine-Hill and Hadfield have argued that Hamlet and the second tetralogy were considerations of radical approaches for obtaining good rulers, including elective monarchy and tyrannicide. These drastic measures were explored in a number of contemporary humanist treatises, but they were usually twinned with the more moderate strategy of preaching the importance of careful princely education. Even George Buchanan, who was prepared to endorse single-handed tyrannicide to remove a bad king, argued that cultivating a good one was a matter of educating him assiduously. Indeed, since Erasmus had presented Henry VIII with his Institutio Principis Christiani () in , Tudor apologists had used the idea of education to resolve problems with the succession: Hugh Latimer argued that Edward VI’s learning overcame the disadvantage of his minority government, and John Aylmer appealed to Elizabeth I’s erudition to justify female sovereignty in . Both followed Plato’s argument in The Republic that virtuous rule depended on cultivating a philosopher-king. Did Shakespeare endorse the more politically conservative strategy, as James Philips and Lily Campbell argued he did on other occasions, or was he prepared to consider radical options for securing good government? Like these sixteenth-century humanists, Shakespeare mixed his discussion of succession dilemmas in Hamlet and the second tetralogy with
Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, p. . Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford, ), pp. , –; Gordon Ross Smith, ‘A Rabble of Princes: Considerations Touching Shakespeare’s Political Orthodoxy in the Second Tetralogy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, (), –; Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. –. George Buchanan, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship: A Critical Edition and Translation of George Buchanan’s ‘De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus’, ed. and trans. Roger A. Mason and Martin S. Smith (Aldershot, ), pp. –. C. H. Clough, ‘A Presentation Volume for Henry VIII: The Charlecote Park Copy of Erasmus’ Institutio Principis Christiani’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, (), – ; Hugh Latimer, Seconde Sermon of Master Hughe Latemer (London, ), sigs. Cb-C a; John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes Agaynst the Late Blowne Blaste, Concerninge the Gover[n]ment of Wemen (London, ), sigs. Dr, Nv; Plato, The Republic, d–e, b–c. James Philips, The State in Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman Plays (New York, ); Lily Campbell, Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif., ).
a concern for education. A possible source for Hamlet was the story of Amleth in Books III and IV of Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum (written in the early thirteenth century, printed in ), which François Belleforest retold in his Histoires tragiques (). One of the differences between the tale of Amleth and Shakespeare’s Hamlet was the story’s relocation to a sixteenth-century court that had embraced humanist pedagogy: Elsinore contained a young gentleman travelling to Paris to complete his education and a learned counsellor who filled his children’s ears with commonplaces. Shakespeare introduced Prince Hamlet to the audience as an erstwhile student at the University of Wittenberg (. . ) and made his friends Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and above all, Horatio, his fellow-scholars. In and Henry IV and Henry V, on the other hand, the liberal arts and sciences were explicitly depicted as overshadowed by the clouds of war. The duke of Burgundy lamented the cost of armed conflict to France: our houses and ourselves and children Have lost, or do not learn for want of time, The sciences that should become our country But grow like savages – as soldiers will (Henry V, . . –)
Nevertheless, as Irving Ribner argued, education was thematically important in the second tetralogy. In Henry IV Shakespeare made Hotspur, who was in fact older than Henry IV, of an age with Prince Hal. The playwright’s departure from both Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (nd edn, ) and the anonymous s play The Famous Victories of Henry V (printed in ) served to emphasise comparisons between the two young men as they learnt the art of chivalry. In Henry V the study of modern languages became an integral part of the reconciliation process between England and France: Princess Katherine practised her newly learnt English, and Hal, in his turn, begged her ‘to teach a soldier terms / Such as will enter at a lady’s ear’ (. . –). The peace between the two nations would subsequently depend on, as well as allow, those arts and sciences ‘that should become our country’ (. . ). Education, then, was explicitly considered in these plays. A more specific consideration of contemporary humanist discussions of the relationship between learning and good government, however, may help to elucidate the contours of Shakespeare’s representation of princely pedagogy in Hamlet and the second tetralogy.
Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, ), pp. , –.
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- Indeed, Shakespeare was writing at a significant moment in the evolution of this discourse in northern Europe. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a number of authors, including James VI of Scotland and Michel de Montaigne, had begun to question the prescriptions of earlier northern humanists such as Erasmus and Thomas Elyot. Erasmus’ Institutio Principis Christiani and Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour () were deeply influential in shaping English attitudes towards the education of its royal children. Erasmus and Elyot agreed that the best prince combined the cardinal virtues with sincere piety, mercy and benevolence, and that the most effective method for shaping such a paragon was to give him a liberal education. Towards the end of the century, however, some northern humanists began to question what constituted a good ruler and whether the liberal arts and sciences provided the best method for fashioning him. One of the questions debated by humanist pedagogues was whether the education of a prince differed from that of his subjects. Erasmus’ prescriptions for John Colet’s school at St Paul’s were very similar to the curriculum that the humanist would propose for future rulers in his Institutio Principis Christiani. For both schoolboys and princes Erasmus argued that the purpose of studying scripture, grammar, rhetoric and moral philosophy was to learn to live as a philosopher, which he explained meant living as a good Christian. Indeed, for Erasmus, the main difference between educating a monarch and a subject was the greater onus on the ruler to internalise the moral precepts of his schooling. In The Boke Named the Governour, Thomas Elyot proposed that princes read those classical authors recommended by Erasmus. Yet Elyot also suggested that future rulers study precisely those courtly and chivalric exercises which Erasmus had condemned. Hawking, hunting, dancing and studying music were activities particular to aristocratic children, and Elyot claimed that they were useful in inculcating the virtues necessary to
Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (), trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath, ed. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (), ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft, vols. (London, ), I, pp. , –. Erasmus, Literary and Educational Writings II: de Copia, de Ratione studii, trans. Betty I. Knott and Brian McGregor, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto, ), pp. , –, ; Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, pp. –; T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, vols. (Urbana, ), I, pp. –, –, –, –. Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, pp. , –, .
govern the public weal. In c. Humphrey Gilbert shifted the balance by arguing that while the universities were suitable for scholars, future statesmen needed a broader, more active education. Montaigne concurred. Studied in isolation, he claimed, the ‘sciences doth more weaken and effeminate mens mindes, then corroborate and adapt them to warre’. In his Basilikon Doron ( and ), James VI of Scotland pushed the argument further. He insisted that his son Henry should not be ‘preassing to bee a passe-master’ of the liberal arts since they might distract him from his princely duties. Rather, he urged Henry to study theology, law and military logistics in order to extend his monarchical authority. According to James, the education of a ruler differed from that of his subjects. The question as to whether it was more important for a prince to excel in learning or chivalry persisted in the seventeenth century. In James scolded his eldest son, Prince Henry, for failing to make satisfactory progress at his lessons. Henry’s response was defiant: ‘I know what becomes a Prince. It is not necessary for me to be a professor, but a soldier and a man of the world.’ Many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries resolved the dilemma of what ‘became a prince’ simply by praising royal children for excelling in all capacities. When Shakespeare was crafting the characters of Prince Hal and Hamlet, princes were typically judged by their juvenile achievements, but whether excellence in learning or chivalry foretold a greater reign was contested. In addition to being the reluctant bedfellow of chivalric exercises, liberal education was facing scrutiny on its own terms. In a neglected Latin oration on princely education, the same Prince Henry had put the orthodox case for royal rhetoric. Eloquence helped a prince to persuade his judges, council and parliament to honest actions and to restrain the passions and seditious tendencies of his subjects. In war, on the other hand, rhetoric enabled the ruler to ‘impress courage and military strength on his people’. In the Basilikon Doron, however, James complained that
Elyot, Boke Named the Governour, I, pp. –, –, –; Humphrey Gilbert, Queene Elizabethes Achademy (c. ), ed. Frederick James Furnivall (London, ), pp. –, ; Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Pedantisme’, in Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses, trans. John Florio (London, ), p. ; James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, in James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Somerville (Cambridge, ), p. . Nicolo Molin, ‘Report on England Presented to the Government of Venice in the Year ’, calendared in Calendar of State Papers Venetian, X, ed. Horatio F. Brown (London, ), no. , p. . ‘In consultationibus, in iudiciis, in Senatu, in Comitiis vult quae iusta, quae honesta, quae salutaria suadere, a seditionibus, a factionibus, ab intestinis dissidiis concitatos populi animos revocare? In bello rursum fortitudinem et militare robur suis imprimere, metum periculorum etiam
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the art of rhetoric had become overly polished. He cautioned his son that a ‘naturall and plaine forme’ of speech, ‘not fairded with artifice’, ‘pen and ink-horne’ or ‘effoeminate tearmes’, was most suitable for princes. In Shakespeare’s England there was a growing tendency to separate eloquence from royal authority and action. Dialectic was also under suspicion. In the Institutio Principis Christiani Erasmus had argued that ‘by giving arguments for both sides of a question’ dialectic could make ‘judgements about right and wrong less secure’. Nevertheless, Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Peter Mack have shown that, in its humanist manifestation, dialectic continued to hold a central place in the Elizabethan universities. Edward VI and James VI certainly studied it. As an adult monarch, however, James warned his son to employ dialectic only when he was reasoning ‘like a private man and a scholer’. If a prince used it when discharging his ‘wil in judgement’ or ‘the points of [his] office’ it ‘diminisheth the majestie of [his] authoritie’. Being in two minds was suitable for scholars, but it could spell disaster for a prince. Part of the problem was, of course, the schoolmasters who imparted this curriculum. For most of the sixteenth century there had been a consensus that the royal schoolmaster’s function was to shape his pupil ‘that [the king] may beco[m]e profitable to all’. Montaigne pilloried this proposition in his Essayes: while humanist schoolmasters ‘are those that promise to be most profitable unto men’ they discharged their duty by filling their pupils’ heads with useless commonplaces. Not only did they ‘amend not what is committed to their charge, but [they] empaire and destroy’ their students’ intellects. These pedants, and those pupils they infected, were ‘neither wise nor prudent’ in using their learning. Such fruits of a
mortis demere, generosum animum ad gloriam inflam[m]are, abiectos timidosq[ue] spiritus excitare? … Haec ministrabit Eloquentia’: Prince Henry, ‘Oratio Serenissimi Principis ad Regem’, British Library, Harleian MS , fols. v–r. James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, pp. , . Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, p. ; Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book Lists from Vice-Chancellors’ Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, vols. (Cambridge, ), I, pp. , , , –, , , –, –; Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch.F.e., fol. v; George F. Warner, ed., ‘The Library of James VI, –: From a Manuscript in the Hand of Peter Young, His Tutor’, in Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, (Edinburgh, ), p. lxvii; James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, p. . Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth (London, ), fol. v, citing Plutarch, Moralia, D; Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, p. ; Elyot, Boke Named the Governour, I, pp. , –. Montaigne, ‘Of Pedantisme’, in Essayes, pp. , ; Warren Boutcher, ‘Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the Continental Book and the Case of Montaigne’s Essais’, in Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke, ), pp. –.
liberal education, Montaigne suggested, would prove unripe for serving the commonwealth. Debates regarding the management of princely education related to the question of its purpose. Erasmus desired a prince who possessed ‘wisdom, a sense of justice, personal restraint, foresight, and concern for the public well-being’. Monarchs should pursue the good of their subjects ‘regardless of personal feelings’, he claimed. For a well-schooled prince, the humanist continued, even death was ‘not to be feared nor the death of others to be deplored’. Care for the common weal came at the expense of repose. Erasmus referred to Homer’s Iliad: ‘The man entrusted with a nation and its heavy business / Should not expect to enjoy a full night’s sleep.’ It was this moral responsibility for the welfare of his subjects that set the prince apart, Erasmus claimed, rather than a chain, a sceptre and robes of purple. For Erasmus, the alternative to the well-educated prince was an ignorant, corrupt tyrant. An uncultivated royal child would spend: his youth among whores, degenerate comrades … drinkers, gamblers and pleasure-mongers as foolish as they are worthless. In this company he hears nothing, learns nothing, and takes in nothing except pleasure, amusement, pride, arrogance, greed, irascibility and bullying … If as boys they did nothing but play at tyrants, what (I ask you) are they to work at as adults except tyranny?
Equally of concern, Roger Ascham added, were those who were well taught as boys but given ‘licence to live as they lust’ in adolescence. Once corrupted, a youth’s mind would ‘sone vomet … all the holesome doctrine, that he received in childhoode’. In (nominally) hereditary monarchies, these pedagogues argued that education was necessary to reconcile nobility of birth with virtue. Humanists drew on Plutarch’s and Cicero’s agricultural metaphors to describe this process of cultivation. Erasmus insisted that ‘the seeds of morality must be sown in the virgin soil of [the prince’s] infant soul so that … [they] may be rooted in him throughout his whole life’. Indeed, a prince’s cultivation was especially difficult, since the richer the soil ‘the more readily the ground is … taken over by useless grasses and weeds’. It
Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, pp. , –, , , ; Homer, Iliad, . –. Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, pp. –. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster or Plaine and Perfite Way of Teaching Children to Understand Write and Speake the Latin Tong (London, ), sig. Fr–v. Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, pp. , ; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, . iv. ; Plutarch, Moralia, E, C.
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was a fate that Plutarch had ascribed to Coriolanus, who possessed ‘a rare and excellent witte untaught’ but one that brought ‘forth many good and evill things together: like as a fat soile bringeth foorth herbes & weedes that lieth unmanured’. Elyot and Ascham similarly compared young nobles to plant-life requiring a skilled gardener. Montaigne, however, expressed doubt as to whether this process of cultivation was reliable. Before a child ‘come to ripeness’, he explained, ‘much adoe, and great varietie of proceeding belongeth to it’. He pointed to two Athenian noblemen, Themistocles and Cimon, who, according to Plutarch, had led debauched youths but then ‘falne [fallen] from themselves, and deceived the expectation of such as knew them’ by becoming great military leaders and statesmen. Thomas North’s Plutarch makes it clear that Themistocles’ and Cimon’s youthful reputations had suffered from their lack of aptitude for liberal education and their tendency to live as they lusted. Once they had the opportunity to prove themselves in war and ‘matters of state’, however, they flourished. Montaigne argued that these histories proved that juvenile accomplishments in the liberal arts and sciences offered only ‘deceiving prognostikes’ of future worth . He complained that Plato’s connection between a careful, liberal education and philosopher-kings had been given ‘too-too much authoritie’ by pedagogues. By the time Shakespeare was writing the second tetralogy, not only was Erasmus’ direct link between a prince’s careful upbringing and good rule being questioned, but the ideal of the peaceful, stoic philosopher-king was being besieged by Plutarch’s – and Justus Lipsius’ – prudent military commander . It is not my intention to suggest that Shakespeare had direct knowledge of all these texts, but he was certainly familiar with some. As Thomas Baldwin and Emrys Jones have argued, Shakespeare’s grammar schooling owed a great debt to Erasmus. In Henry V the playwright reworked the fable of the bees (. . –), which was used in both Erasmus’ Institutio Principis Christiani and Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour. Henry IV also contains a reference to Prince Hal’s apocryphal arrest and appearance before a magistrate, which had been narrated for the first time
Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared, trans. Thomas North (London, ), p. ; Elyot, Boke Named the Governour, I, p. ; Ascham, Scholemaster, sig. Dr. Montaigne, ‘Of the Institution and Education of Children’, in Essayes, p. ; Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, pp. , –. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine, passim; Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford, ), pp. –; Claudia Corti, ed., Silenos: Erasmus in Elizabethan Literature (Pisa, ).
in the second book of Elyot’s work (. . –). Finally, as Geoffrey Miles has argued, Shakespeare may have seen drafts of John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essayes prior to its publication in . More generally, these humanist discussions regarding princely education were part of Shakespeare’s intellectual milieu, and he shared their authors’ literary habits. He was familiar with many of the loci communes and sententiae that structured the humanists’ treatises, along with the idea that these authorities should provide the hidden foundations of his own compositions. In the course of his education, however, Shakespeare also acquired the capacity to argue in utramque partem (on both sides of a case). For one with such rhetorical training, a classical or contemporary authority was not really authoritative but represented one side of a potential debate. This turn-of-the-century argument about princely education , conducted in humanist pedagogical literature, offered the playwright a ready-made disputation to exploit in his plays, and one that had relevance to the succession crisis. It was a debate that Shakespeare played out through the characters of Prince Hal and Hamlet .
Rather than being mocked as comic pedants, both Hamlet and Prince Hal were praised for their learning. In Ophelia’s description of Hamlet’s once ‘noble mind’, she claims he had previously possessed ‘The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword’ and had been ‘Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state’ (. . –). Hamlet is said to have had potential, but the Archbishop of Canterbury in Henry V claimed that Prince Hal had become a mirror of learned monarchy: Hear him but reason in divinity And, all-admiring, with an inward wish You would desire the King were made a prelate; Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs, You would say it hath been all-in-all his study;
Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, p. ; Elyot, Boke Named the Governour, I, pp. –; II, pp. –; Seneca, de Clementia, . . –; Pliny, Naturalis Historia, . . Geoff rey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford, ), pp. –. Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley, ), pp. –, –; Tim Spiekerman, ‘The Education of Hal: Henry IV, Parts One and Two’, in Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan, eds., Shakespeare’s Political Pageant: Essays in Literature and Politics (Lanham, Md., ), pp. –; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’, in David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, ), pp. –; Colin Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and Humanistic Culture’, in Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor, eds., Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
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List his discourse of war, and you shall hear A fearful battle rendered you in music; Turn him to any cause of policy, The Gordian knot of it he will unloose, Familiar as his garter – that when he speaks, The air, a chartered libertine, is still (. . –)
Like the monarch James VI described in his Basilikon Doron, Hal’s learning pertained to his princely office and extended his monarchical authority. In both these passages Ophelia and the Archbishop praised the princes for their superior pens and swords. In both instances, however, as in the case of the real Prince Henry, one capacity actually dominated. For Hamlet it was his scholarly eye and for Prince Hal his discourse of war. In both cases, moreover, these character descriptions further just one side of Shakespeare’s dramatic disputation. The playwright left questionmarks hanging as to whether education had prepared either prince for royal government. The relationship between Henry V and Erasmus’ Institutio Principis Christiani has long been posited by scholars, including the play’s Arden editor, J. H. Walter, and recently by Marcella Quadri. Similarities between Hal and Erasmus’ ideal monarch certainly exist. In Henry V, the prince proclaims himself to be ‘no tyrant, but a Christian king, / Unto whose grace our passion is as subject / As is our wretches fettered in our prisons’ (. . –). In judging the traitors Scrope, Grey and Cambridge, Hal does not seek revenge for the attempted injury to his person, but acts only for his ‘kingdom’s safety’ (. . –). As Erasmus and Homer had instructed, the prince’s concern for his subjects leaves him awake and pondering ‘What infinite heartsease / Must kings neglect’ on the night before Agincourt. Hal understands that the ‘idol ceremony’ of ‘the balm, the sceptre, and the ball’ has no bearing on his true office (. . –, , ). Finally, he answers ambassadors and persuades his troops with (what even his enemies concede is) ‘a princely tongue’ ( Henry IV, . . ). Shakespeare’s Hal certainly possesses the stoicism and concern for the commonwealth that Erasmus had emphasised. There are problems, however, for those like Quadri who would make the prince into the very image of Erasmus’ template. The first, of course, is Hal’s blatantly un-Erasmian militarism. The second difficulty is that and Henry IV show that the prince had precisely the sort of upbringing
J. H. Walter, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. J. H. Walter (London, ), pp. xvi–xviii; Marcella Quadri, ‘Erasmus’ Prince and Shakespeare’s King: the Case of Henry V ’, in Corti, ed., Silenos: Erasmus in Elizabethan Literature, pp. –.
that Erasmus had claimed would fashion only idle bullies and tyrants. In Henry V the Archbishop of Canterbury wonders quite ‘how his grace should glean’ the art of kingship, given that in his youth: his addiction was to courses vain, His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow, His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports, And never noted in him any study (. . –)
Hal, it seems, had spent more time on the art of carousing (e.g. Henry IV, . . –) than learning. In his opening soliloquy in Henry IV, the prince acknowledges as much but promises to redeem himself (. . –). According to Ascham, however, it was impossible to reform a youth once corrupted: Hal was a fallen man. Indeed, Henry IV, like Montaigne’s anxious parents, interprets his son’s lack of princely potential based on these ‘deceiving prognostikes’. In Henry IV the king becomes so incensed with his son’s ‘vile participation’ that he expels him from his Privy Council (. . and –). On the eve of the battle of Shrewsbury, however, Hal announces that he has ‘a truant been to chivalry’ (. . ), but that he intends to reform. Then the prince gradually jettisons the occupations and fellows of his youth to become the successful monarch of Henry V. In delineating various perspectives regarding Hal’s princely potential, Shakespeare echoed humanist pedagogues in his use of agricultural metaphors. The character of Henry IV colours his account of his son’s delinquency with cultivation imagery: Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds, And he, the noble image of my youth, Is overspread with them ( Henry IV, . . –)
The king regards Hal’s princely potential as spoiled, like Plutarch’s Coriolanus. Yet other characters in the tetralogy use the same metaphor to argue that Henry IV’s judgment is premature. In Henry IV Falstaff inverts the king’s assessment, claiming that Hal had flourished precisely because he had ‘manured, husbanded, and tilled’ his ‘sterile’ soil with drinking (. . ). In Henry V the Bishop of Ely accredits Falstaff himself with nurturing the prince’s coming to ripeness. Just as ‘The strawberry grows underneath the nettle, / And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best / Neighboured by fruit of baser quality’, Hal’s faculties have been strengthened by the ‘veil of wildness’ he had assumed in order to interact with his lewd companions (. . –).
Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal
Therefore the second tetralogy offers (at least) two conflicting explanations for Hal’s mature military prowess, stoicism and concern for the commonwealth. Either his capacities were always present but dissembled behind ‘base contagious clouds’ ( Henry IV, . . ) or drink, his tavernmates and licentiousness have actually taught him to ‘command all the good lads in Eastcheap’ (. . –). Extensive scholarly controversy persists as to whether Hal was reformed and ‘educated’ during the course of the tetralogy, or whether he is one who has seen from the beginning that qui dissimulare nescit, regnare nescit. Yet Shakespeare’s very ambiguity on this issue points to his underlying, negative argument. The playwright was not insisting on a single account of what made a good king. Rather like Montaigne, he used the character of Hal to question the humanist orthodoxy that princely potential could be gauged by juvenile moral rectitude and application to the liberal arts and sciences. Against Erasmus, Elyot, Ascham and ultimately Plato’s recipe for good kingship, Shakespeare presented Prince Hal as a ruler in the vein of Montaigne’s Cimon and Themistocles. When dynastic and national security demanded it, Hal rose to the occasion and displayed military prowess and a practical knowledge of statecraft. In the first soliloquy of Henry IV, Hal had promised no less: So when this loose behaviour I throw off, And pay the debt I never promisèd, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes (. . –)
When Hal bettered his word before the battle of Shewsbury, it did indeed ‘deceive the expectation’ of those who knew him. The rebel Vernon marvelled that the prince could vault fully armoured onto his horse despite his reputation for idleness (. . –). Hal’s enemies – notably Hotspur and the Dauphin – were disadvantaged when they judged the prince by his salad days. Overall Shakespeare presents Hal as a successful king: stoic, prudent, devout, careful of his subjects’ welfare, persuasive and conquering. While the playwright leaves the manner in which he acquired these capacities
Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York, ), pp. –; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London, ), pp. –; Ribner, English History Play, pp. –; David Berkeley and Donald Eidson, ‘The Theme of Henry IV, Part ’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), –; Grace Tiffany, ‘Shakespeare’s Dionysian Prince: Drama, Politics and the “Athenian” History Play’, Renaissance Quarterly, (), –.
obscure, it is clear that the prince’s youthful licentiousness and lack of attention to the liberal arts and sciences have not made him an idle bully or a tyrant. He is the mirror of a prince whose un-Erasmian cultivation has fitted him for action.
If Henry V is a man of action, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is famous for his lack thereof. There has been a long and glorious tradition, running back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at least, of debating the cause of Hamlet’s delay in revenging his father’s murder. Later twentieth-century scholars may have been wise to call for a veto of further consideration of the question. Hamlet himself, however, offers us a compelling example of how one may see a trap laid and walk into it anyway. Besides, recent discussions in breach of the embargo demonstrate the fruitfulness of examining Hamlet’s delay with reference to the ethical tensions that existed in sixteenth-century humanism. Considering the student-prince’s learning in view of contemporary humanist pedagogical debates suggests that education was a force retarding his capacity to act. According to Ophelia, the shape of Hamlet’s schooling had reflected the curriculum described by Thomas Elyot: the prince had had a formal liberal education combined with some chivalric and courtly exercises (. . –). Hamlet’s instructions to the players on how to speak verse show that, like James VI, the prince preferred a modest, decorous form of oratory (. . –). Yet while Hamlet has some of the courtly polish recommended by princely pedagogues, much of his education had taken place at a university. Claudius emphasises the gap between campus and court life when he entreats Hamlet not to go ‘back to school in Wittenberg’ but to remain in Denmark as his ‘chiefest courtier, cousin, and … son’ (. . , ). The manner of Hamlet’s education had hitherto kept him from participating in public life. Shakespeare’s decision to send his prince to university was an unusual one. English and Scottish princes were typically educated in their own household with a select group of noble youths. The exception to this practice occurred in September , when James VI and I’s son, Prince
Barbara Everett, ‘Hamlet: A Time to Die’, Shakespeare Survey, (), –; Ruth Nevo, Tragic Form in Shakespeare (Princeton, ), pp. –. Ronald Knowles, ‘Hamlet and Counter-Humanism’, Renaissance Quarterly, (), –; Rita A. Terry, ‘ “Vows to the Blackest Devil”: Hamlet and the Evolving Code of Honour in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, (), –.
Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal
Henry, matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford. The prince did not actually study in the University, however, nor did James permit Henry to take an honorary Master of Arts: that would have shown that he was ‘preassing to bee a passe-master’ rather than a good monarch. By sending Hamlet to school, then, Shakespeare was making a clear statement that the prince’s education was largely congruent with a scholar’s, as Erasmus had proposed it should be. In the course of Hamlet’s schooling he had learnt to ‘write fair’ like a common scribe (. . ), and his closest friend was Horatio, a student with ‘no revenue’ but his ‘good spirits / To feed and clothe’ himself (. . –). In Erasmian terms, the main difference between Hamlet and other scholars was the prince’s duty to take the moral implications of his studies more seriously. Shakespeare provided several indications that Hamlet had followed Erasmus’ prescription to internalise the ethical dimension of his schooling. The prince praises Horatio for his stoicism, indicating that he too strove to govern his passions with reason (. . –). Like Erasmus’ model ruler, Hamlet disdains carousing (. . –. , Q) and shows contempt for ceremony (. . –). Hamlet’s criticisms of Claudius – that he ‘plays the king’, and a king of ‘shreds and patches’ at that (. . , . . ) – indicate that he understood Erasmus’ distinction between a true prince and an actor. Shakespeare asked his audience to compare Hamlet’s genuine attempts to live as a philosopher at court with the empty platitudes proffered by Polonius and Laertes. Like Montaigne’s schoolmasters, they showed others ‘the steep and thorny way to heaven’ but did not use their learning to school their own conduct (. . ). Claudius also offers empty advice to Hamlet, more specifically consolatio, after his father’s death. He insists that the prince’s grief shows: A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, An understanding simple and unschooled (. . –)
For all Claudius’ hypocrisy, he is right to assert that bereavement has shaken Hamlet’s philosophy. At the beginning of the play, melancholy prevents Hamlet from following Erasmian prescriptions unquestioningly. He debates with himself on two occasions whether Christian or Roman stoicism is nobler: misery on earth or self-slaughter and misery thereafter (. . – and . . –). Hamlet’s self-examination and probing of
Cambridge, University Library, Additional MS , fols. r-v; British Library, Harleian MS , fols. r –r. Benjamin Boyce, ‘The Stoic Consolatio and Shakespeare’, PMLA, (), .
principle reveal him to be a better man than Polonius and Laertes for all their loci communes and sententiae. Yet A. C. Bradley was right to insist that Hamlet’s actions were not consistently hampered by reflection and conscience. The prince attempts to throw off his learnt, probing stoicism after his encounter with the Ghost. At that moment, he explicitly dispenses with the discipline and moral scruples of his liberal education: Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain (. . –)
Hamlet’s vocabulary is revealing. In his sixteenth-century handbooks on rhetoric and logic, Thomas Wilson used the word ‘sawes’ to refer to commonplaces and ‘forms’ to mean the arrangement of syllogisms. Moreover, Hamlet’s contemporaries in the grammar schools and universities took down morally improving sententiae and did their preliminary working for syllogisms on erasable table-books, which they would later transfer to copy-books (‘records’) or commit to memory. Indeed, Hamlet’s phrase ‘all pressures past’ refers to this process of storing and transferring information. Yet the passage also alludes to an image drawn from Plutarch’s de Liberis educandis, which was used by sixteenth-century humanists to compare notes on wax to the moral impression left by liberal education on a child’s mind. Part of schooling the memory was inculcating it with good principles. For Hamlet, then, throwing off his training in rhetoric and dialectic equated with wiping away much of his stoicism. His new lessons, Hamlet says after meeting the Ghost, will be in the courtly arts of simulation and madness. The accompanying stage direction to this passage indicates that ‘he writes’, probably with a stylus or graphite pencil on an erasable table-book like that of which he has just spoken: My tables – meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain (. . –)
A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on ‘Hamlet’, ‘Othello’, ‘King Lear’, ‘Macbeth’ (New York, ), pp. –, –. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique for the Use of All Soche as Are Studious of Eloquence (London, ), fol. ; Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason, Conteinyng the Arte of Logique (London, ), sig. Ur. Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, John Franklin Mowery and Heather Wolfe, ‘Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), –. Ascham, Scholemaster, sig. Ev; Plutarch, Moralia, F.
Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal
Hamlet proposes that to rid Denmark of Claudius and avenge his father, he must turn from philosophy to the practices of the court. Abandoning philosophy might make you an avenger, but it can also make you a man without self-control. When Hamlet tries to drown his books he actually makes passionate, destructive and – in Erasmian terms – tyrannical attacks on Ophelia, Gertrude and Polonius. In such moments, the virtues are no longer ‘grafted’ onto his stock: ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious’, he rages, ‘with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in’ (. . –). The unschooled Hamlet of these moments does not show great princely potential. Try as he might to give his revenging passions free rein, Hamlet eventually acknowledges that he cannot shed his learnt reason and self-control completely. When confronted by the unfamiliar, his first resort is inevitably to the methods of his education: he turns to philosophy to ‘find it out’ (. . ). Upon seeing the advancing Norwegian army under their ruthless commander, Hamlet acknowledges himself hampered by ‘some craven scruple / Of thinking too precisely on the event’ (. . . –). Nevertheless, he cannot help but think that such well-cultivated scruples are ultimately worth respecting: he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused. (. . . –)
As I have argued, Hamlet’s capability for ‘god-like reason’ is shaken or repressed at points in the play. Nevertheless, the prince’s learnt capacity for ‘discourse’ and judgment keeps reasserting itself against his emotion. He cannot let ‘the soul of Nero’, that well-educated prince who still fell prey to desire, ‘enter [his] firm bosom’ (. . ). When the Ghost returns to chide Hamlet for his tardiness, the prince confesses that he has indeed ‘lapsed in time and passion’ (. . ). For most of the play, then, Hamlet’s adherence to the forms of his education prevents him from sustaining an impassioned state long enough to kill Claudius. To see how Hamlet’s scholarly education interferes with his promise to exact revenge, let us turn to his best opportunity in the first four acts. The prince comes across Claudius, unprotected, appearing to pray in the royal chapel. Hamlet has just claimed in soliloquy that he is girded to ‘drink hot blood’ (. . ), yet as soon as he spies Claudius, he pauses and makes a logical division. The act of killing his uncle while he is praying, Hamlet says, ‘would be scanned’:
A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven. O, this is hire and salary, not revenge! (. . –)
Hamlet spots a fallacy in this double proposition and delays acting once more. The audience knows, however, that Claudius has been unable to repent his offences and pray whole-heartedly. Had Hamlet struck his uncle in the church, as the less philosophical Laertes insists he would do to avenge his father (. . ), then Claudius would have died unshriven and Hamlet’s revenge would have been complete. Too much dialectic, James VI warned in his Basilikon Doron, made one think like a private man and a scholar, not act like a prince. It is difficult to determine whether Shakespeare considered revenge to be a princely act. Certainly a brisker avenger than Hamlet would have preserved both his dynastic line and the independence of Denmark from Norway (admittedly at the expense of the play). To show the other side of the case, Shakespeare surrounded Hamlet with avenging sons who have no craven scruple in committing proud and ambitious acts: Fortinbras, Laertes and Pyrrhus. By their code ‘rightly to be great’ is ‘greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honour’s at the stake’ (. . . –). Even the destruction of Ilium or Denmark’s royal family causes them only a moment’s pause (. . –). Hamlet is able to kill Claudius only when the demands of a court duel and his own imminent demise revive the minor, chivalric strand of his schooling. Temporarily, he becomes one of these soldier princes, like his adversary Laertes (. ). That said, even when Laertes has the rabble baying for his election (. . –), he does not seem any more likely to rescue the rotten state of Denmark than its philosopher prince. In the final scene of the play, however, Fortinbras demonstrates the capacity to act with political prudence as well as courage. Hamlet might have chosen scholars for his friends, but with his ‘dying voice’ he nominates a soldier-king to rule Denmark (. . ). He recognises that states need prudent, ruthless rulers to survive. Fortinbras’ militaristic epitaph for Hamlet confirms his belief in Montaigne’s argument that a statesman’s character could be determined only when he was ‘put on’ by circumstances of government or war (. . –). It was a claim that repudiated both Ophelia’s earlier praise of Hamlet and the scholarly quality of the prince’s cultivation. Shakespeare’s point in portraying Hamlet as a student prince, then, seems to have been a negative one. Where great care was expended on a prince’s
Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal
education – either through a strict Erasmian curriculum or through the liberal arts and sciences balanced with courtly exercises – the result was not necessarily dynastic or national security, as humanists had claimed. The playwright even seems to echo Montaigne’s view that when men were educated to be philosophers, their capacity for action was irreparably diminished. In Shakespeare’s Elsinore there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophy – and these matters require a decisive, princely response. Until the final years of the sixteenth century, northern humanists had insisted that Erasmian princely cultivation provided for good rule, dynastic stability and even national independence. The key to creating a good ruler was to imprint learning, virtue and concern for the commonwealth onto the wax-tablets of young princes’ minds and souls. In the context of the succession crisis that many feared would attend the death of Elizabeth I, however, voices like those of Montaigne and James VI sounded loudly in England, and raised serious concerns as to whether Erasmus’ prescriptions could provide for the succession. Shakespeare has been described as a Tudor apologist (or simply as a political reactionary) on the grounds that his plays appear to have endorsed sixteenth-century pieties regarding obedience and the proper use of secular authority. In the second tetralogy and Hamlet, however, Shakespeare’s scepticism regarding a widely held doctrine – the desirability of carefully educated princes – was expressed at least as forcefully as Montaigne’s criticisms had been. In Prince Hamlet, the playwright presented a universityeducated scholar whose learning impedes him from acting or ruling. In Prince Hal, he showed Hamlet’s counter-point: a predominantly virtuous, pragmatic and successful prince who had spent his youth in dissipation. While Shakespeare leaves question-marks hanging over both potential rulers, Hamlet is probably the better man; Hal is probably the better monarch. Conclusions as to their princely promise cannot be accurately drawn from their juvenile inclinations. So in these plays was Shakespeare proposing more radical solutions than princely education for securing the succession? He certainly leaves his audience at liberty to consider the question, but it is far from clear that he endorsed dynastic rupture, election or the removal of (perceived) tyrants whole-heartedly. This void of positive theory could reflect the point where the dramatist and the political thinker in Shakespeare
part company. In Hamlet Rosencrantz makes it clear that a play is an ‘argument’ and a ‘question’ (. . , ) rather than a treatise. Yet Shakespeare’s scepticism was actually congruent with the aesthetic adopted by that important political theorist, Michel de Montaigne. Both Shakespeare’s engagement with the subject matter of the succession controversy and the manner in which he conducted his inquiry offer ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time’ (Hamlet, . . ) when dynastic uncertainties seemed impossible to resolve by traditional authorities, political or pedagogical.
The corruption of Hamlet Andrew Fitzmaurice
Modern criticism of Hamlet has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been dominated by the idea of Hamlet’s modern subjectivity, expressed (or, unexpressed) through his interiority. Immanuel Kant’s influence looms large in this critical tradition. Samuel Taylor Coleridge introduced Kant to Hamlet, figuratively speaking, and they have subsequently been almost inseparable. Coleridge was profoundly moved by Kant’s account of the creative imagination, and in turn he revealed Hamlet’s self-reflexive life of the mind. Early twentieth-century discussions of Hamlet remained equally concerned by Hamlet’s inner life. This critical preoccupation with Hamlet’s interiority has only intensified in the historicist studies of Shakespeare of the past twenty years. Following Stephen Greenblatt, critics such as Francis Barker have used Hamlet’s interiority to reveal modern subjectivity as emergent rather than given. The main challenge to this
Coleridge claims that Hamlet drove him to philosophy and so to Kant. Reading Kant in turn allowed Coleridge to perceive ‘Shakespeare’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Notes on Hamlet’, in Critical Responses to ‘Hamlet’: –, ed. David Farley-Hills, vols. (New York, ), I, p. . According to Coleridge, Kant ‘took possession of me as with a giant’s hand’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, vols. (Oxford, ), I, p. . See also Margreta de Grazia, ‘When did Hamlet become Modern?’, Textual Practice, (), –, for an extended analysis of the links between Coleridge, Kant and Hamlet. De Grazia, however, embraces the anachronism generated by those influences, arguing that ‘Hamlet remains at the extreme limit of what we know about interiority’ (p. ). In different ways Hamlet’s interiority was a focus for both T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London, , reprinted ); and Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Crick (Oxford, ), p. . Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Hamlet’, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, nd edn (New York, ), p. : ‘Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare’s own career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity’; Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London, ); Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford, ), pp. –; Ronald Knowles, ‘Hamlet and Counter-Humanism’, Renaissance Quarterly, (), –. Harold Bloom argues that Hamlet revealed an ‘internalisation of the self ’ before ‘anyone else was ready for it’, Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York, ), p. .
notion of subjectivity has come from feminist critics. But these critiques have added that the play Hamlet also describes an emergent gendered subjectivity. They have not questioned the notion of an emergent modern subjectivity itself, rather they have strengthened it. I will argue that Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have seen Hamlet not as a modern subject but as a man who withdraws from the corruption of political life. Hamlet is a play profoundly concerned with corruption and its impact upon self-understanding and political self-presentation. Readers of Hamlet have not failed to notice the commentary on corruption: it is surely one of the more obvious themes of the play. My aim here, however, is to place that concern in the context of early modern political thought. For contemporaries, corruption was believed to be one of the most disturbing political problems of late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. My focus is, therefore, upon this political dimension: that is, upon Hamlet’s political subjectivity. Discussions of Hamlet’s subjectivity have focused upon what in the Renaissance would have been regarded as moral questions: that is, on questions about what kind of life is best, on questions of interiority, psychology and character, and not specifically upon his political character, or his engagement with the problem of the best form of commonwealth. It is widely recognised that sensitivity to corruption was fundamental to Renaissance political cultures in which the health of politics was believed to rest more upon the character and spirit of citizens and subjects than upon the strength of political institutions. And yet corruption has, I believe, been neglected in histories of early modern political culture in the recent past. The past twenty years has seen the publication of a series of studies that have reconstructed the social contexts for early modern political thought, putting flesh on the history of political thought and seeking to reconcile social and intellectual history. These studies have revealed the
See especially Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (London, ), but also Jacqueline Rose, ‘Hamlet – the Mona Lisa of Literature’, Critical Quarterly, (), –; and Patricia Parker, ‘Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying and the “Secret Place” of Woman’, Representations, (), –. See, for example, Greenblatt, ‘Hamlet’, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Greenblatt et al., pp. –. I am interested, therefore, in what ‘political’ meant to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In the Renaissance, political philosophy, which addressed the question ‘What is the best form of government?’, was generally regarded as a branch of moral philosophy, which addressed the question ‘What is the best life?’ Th is taxonomy followed Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics; see Jill Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhart Kessler and Jill Kraye, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, ), pp. –. The other two branches of moral philosophy were ethics and oeconomics.
The corruption of Hamlet
extraordinary social depth of what has been described variously as civic humanism, the monarchical republic and the public sphere. Importantly, the non-textual dimension of the culture of participation, office-holding and duty now has a prominence that is at least equal with the textual. There is a danger, however, that this focus can lead to a reification of political participation. This danger is particularly evident when we consider the perception of corruption. The reification of participation is perhaps one reason that corruption has been overlooked in recent work on the political culture of early modern England. Corruption has no office: it is a failure of office. Evidence of corruption was overwhelmingly a matter of opinion and perception, and for historians that evidence will therefore be fundamentally textual. This is one reason that I will be using Hamlet to examine the contemporary perception of corruption. In late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, for each office performed another was believed to have been failed. As Hamlet observed of the customs of Denmark, they were ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’ (. . ). The widespread concern with non-participation, with the failure of duty, does not necessarily suggest a limit upon early modern civic culture. Rather, it reveals that the extent of the culture of participation was far greater than we would conclude if we limited our focus simply to the performance of duties. This is because the perception of corruption was an extension of the understanding that political health rests in the character and spirit of the people. Late Elizabethans, like most post-Reformation Europeans, believed that the world they inhabited was in decline, that it had abandoned virtue and given itself over to the treacherous politics of the court. The wars of religion had eroded the notion of a common good, Europeans increasingly abandoned humanist teaching that emphasised virtuous action undertaken for the common good and they sought the wisdom of Tacitus and
Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, (), –; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, – (Cambridge, ); Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c. – (Basingstoke, ), pp. –; Markku Peltonen, ‘Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England’, in Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vols. (Cambridge, ), I, pp. –; Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, – (Cambridge, ); Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, ); David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, ); Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, ); Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England (Cambridge, ); and John F. McDiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (Aldershot, ).
Seneca and their recent interpreters, including Lipsius and Montaigne, as guides to how to survive in a world abandoned by virtue. As the merchant and London alderman Robert Johnson observed, writing in , the year before Hamlet was first entered in the Stationers’ Register: I prefer Tacitus as the best that any man can dwell upon: Hee sheweth the miseries of a torne and declining state, where it was a capital crime to be virtuous, and nothing so unsafe as to bee securely innocent: where great mens gestures were particularly interpreted, their actions aggravated, and construed to proceed from an aspiring intent: and the Prince too suspitiously jealous touching points of concurancy, suppressed men of great desert, as competitors with them in that chiefest ground, the love of the people.
Hamlet advises Polonius to ‘use well’ the players visiting the court, because they are ‘the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’, leaving us with the understanding that the play Hamlet is itself a chronicle of its time (. . –). The play chronicles a declining state. When the ghost of King Hamlet first appears in the first Act, Horatio worries that ‘In the most high and palmy state of Rome, / A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, / The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets’ (. . . –). The Denmark of Claudius mirrors post-republican Rome. The virtuous rule of King Hamlet has been replaced by a corrupt court and by Claudius, that ‘canker of our nature’ (. . ), a ‘Vice of Kings’ (. . ). The audience could only draw the conclusion that this play is a chronicle of a kingdom that has passed from a state of republican-like virtue to imperial corruption. Significantly, this passage on the fall of the Roman republic was added to Q, first published in , when the new rule of James was even more deeply marked by concerns about corruption. The idea of a shift from one epoch to another was already present in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign but could now be reflected in the change from one monarch to another.
Th is places Shakespeare, and specifically the concern with corruption in Hamlet, in the context of what has been called the ‘new humanism’. One of the few discussions of this new humanism in relation to Shakespeare’s work is Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’, in David Scott Kastan, A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, ), pp. –. It should be noted, however, that there is a difference between the late Renaissance concern with corruption, largely explored through the works of Tacitus, and the rise of scepticism that has been the subject of a number of studies of Hamlet. Scepticism was an epistemological vogue of the late sixteenth century; it developed within the larger humanist culture that fed the political concern with corruption. Indeed, much that has been attributed to scepticism in Hamlet might more meaningfully be understood in terms of a larger concern with political corruption. See Quentin Skinner, ‘Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Eloquence’, in Skinner, Visions of Politics: II, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, ), pp. –, on the overemphasis upon Renaissance scepticism at the expense of the rhetorical and political context from which it sprang. Robert Johnson, Essaies (London, ), sig. Dr.
The corruption of Hamlet
This contrast in Hamlet between republican and imperial Rome is clearer when compared with the story of Amleth recounted by François de Belleforest which he first published in his Histoires tragiques in . Belleforest’s Amleth was a version of a story from the Dane Saxo Gramaticus in his Gesta Danorum (early thirteenth century). Amleth was not translated into English until , but it is acknowledged to have been, directly or indirectly, an important source for Shakespeare’s version of the story. Belleforest was faithful to Saxo’s version of Amleth, but he prefaced an ‘Argument’ to the account which is concerned primarily with the light that Roman history sheds on the scandalous story. According to the translation of Belleforest, after the Roman people were deprived of that libertie of election, and that the empire became subject to the pleasure and fantasie of one man, commanding all the rest … look into the meanes used by the most part of their kings and emperours to attaine to such power and authoritie, and you shall see how poisons, massacres, and secret murthers, were the means to push them forwards.
In contrast to Hamlet, however, there is no sense of a golden age that preceded imperial corruption. Tarquinius assassinated Servius Tullius, his father-in-law, simply out of his ‘unbridled desire to be commander over the city of Rome’. And this practice continued ‘as long as [Rome] was governed by the greatest and wisest personages chosen and elected by the people; for therein have been seen infinite numbers of seditions, troubles, pledges, ransommings, confiscations and massacres’ which arise from men’s desire ‘to be heads and rulers of a whole common wealth’. According to Andrew Hadfield, ‘Belleforest’s version [of Amleth] has a pronounced republican theme’. He argues that Belleforest’s account of Roman politics in his ‘Argument’ is ‘taken from Livy’, insofar as it represents a cycle in which the tyranny of the Tarquins was replaced by the ‘desirable constitution of the republic’, only to return once again to tyranny. Hadfield further claims that Belleforest used his potted history of Rome merely as a ‘guise of declaring that nothing ever changes’, and behind this guise he reveals that the Roman republic was preferable to the empire. But it is difficult to see where the guise is in Belleforest’s account of Roman history. Indeed, Belleforest’s description of Cicero as the ‘ambitious and seditious Orator of Rome’ who believed the ‘wayes
Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques were published in six editions between and ; see Geoff rey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vols. (London, ), VII, p. . The hystorie of Hamblet (London, ), reprinted in Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VII, p. . Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, p. . Ibid., pp. –.
to vertue’ consisted in ‘treasons, ravishments, and massacres’ hardly fits the Renaissance image of Cicero as the spokesman of republican ideals. Belleforest was attacking Cicero’s praise of Romulus in this passage on the Paradoxa Stoicorum. Cicero’s topic was that what is good is ‘only what is right and honourable and virtuous’, and he used Roman history, starting with Romulus, to illustrate his point. Belleforest’s condemnation of Cicero is all the more startling for its rejection of Cicero’s republicanism in one of his most pious moments. For Belleforest, the difference between republican and monarchical rule is that under republican government a large number of people employ brutal means to attain power, whereas under courtly government a small number of people employ brutal means to achieve their ends. It would seem that for Belleforest, politics, as Eric Nelson argues regarding Shakespeare in this volume, remains the same under any form of government. Belleforest’s account of Roman history needs, as Belleforest himself stressed, to be placed in the context of the French wars of religion and in particular Calvinist and Catholic resistance to the French crown. According to Belleforest, his desire was to write about the ‘tragedies of this our age’, but he realised that his account would be dangerous ‘touching many personages whom I would not willingly displease’, and it is for this reason he turned to Amleth. In this context, Belleforest’s ‘Argument’ which attacks the overweening ambition of republicans and princes is clearly an attack upon the republican pretensions of Calvinistic resistance theory on the one hand and upon the disobedience to the monarchy by France’s catholic nobility on the other. Catholic disobedience culminated in Henri de Guise’s foundation of the Catholic League in , which was a platform for his own attempt on the monarchy (Shakespeare was probably using either the edition or the text of Belleforest). Belleforest was clearly, therefore, no apologist for republicanism and might rather be placed in the context of his contemporary countryman Jean Bodin, who also condemned both Calvinist and Catholic disobedience to the crown, notably in the publication of the Six livres de la république also in . Hamlet is distinguished, however, by Shakespeare’s rejection of Belleforest’s condemnation of both princely and republican politics. In Hamlet Shakespeare chose to retain the comparison between Rome before
Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VII, p. . Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., ), pp. –. Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VII, p. . On the edition of Belleforest used by Shakespeare, see: Ibid., VII, p. .
The corruption of Hamlet
and after the death of Julius Caesar. For this reason Hadfield argues that Hamlet ‘stands as a distinctly republican play’ which engages with the republican response to tyrannical rule. This argument would suggest, however, that the play holds out some hope for reform and that it allows the audience to consider how they would act when confronted by tyranny. But there is no such hope offered in the play. It is deeply permeated by Tacitean pessimism, and the distinction between the Roman republic and empire is made in order to advance the nostalgia for a golden age which so frequently accompanied the Tacitean view of politics . There is no doubt, however, that this golden age is irretrievable. Shakespeare’s engagement with republicanism in Hamlet is very similar to that found in the writings of contemporary Venetians (with whom the English increasingly identified), particularly Trajano Boccalini (–). Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso () was a product of late sixteenth-century Tacitism which was published too late for Shakespeare to use and was translated by John Florio, amongst others, in . However, in Hamlet Shakespeare shares Boccalini’s attitude to republicanism. Boccalini ‘wrote with intense and unrelieved irony’ at the idea of hoping to ‘regenerate the totally corrupted world’. Shakespeare was not trying to present a republican dilemma for action to his audience: he was, like Boccalini, ‘picking his way amidst the ruins of the Republican tradition’. For the usurping King of Denmark, Shakespeare chose the name of one of the Roman Emperors most closely associated with corruption. Tacitus was particularly merciless in his judgement of Claudius’ rule. Claudius was ugly, uxorious, cruel, and addicted to drink and gaming. He was also the second husband of Julia Agrippina, with whom he was in an incestuous marriage. She was his brother Germanicus’ daughter. The parallels of incest and corruption between Tacitus’ account of Claudius and Shakespeare’s Claudius are unmistakable. Importantly, however, King Claudius is no monster. Shakespeare’s concern is to show how people who are ‘middling virtuous’ or ‘indifferent honest’ (as Hamlet describes himself) can be infected by corruption. As the ghost of King Hamlet reminds us, even an angel can end by preying on garbage (. . ).
Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, p. . Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vols. (Cambridge, ), I, p. . Ibid., I, p. . Tacitus, The Histories and The Annals, trans. Clifford H. Moore and John Jackson, vols. (Cambridge, Mass., ), Books XII and XIII. See Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VII, pp. – for a discussion of the parallels between Tacitus’ Claudius and Shakespeare’s Claudius.
It was accordingly possible for Claudius to win ‘to his shameful lust / The will of my most seeming-virtuous Queen’ (. . –). This is how Tacitus was understood in early modern England: namely, as a guide to how virtue can be corrupted by what is near to it. Virtue and vice were not Manichaean opposites but near neighbours, and it was this proximity that makes corruption all the more dangerous. According to Hamlet, the ‘heavy-headed revel’ of Claudius’ court makes Denmark ‘traduced and taxed of other nations’ (. . . –). He complains that ‘rank corruption, mining all within, infects unseen’ (. . –). ‘To be honest’, he advised Polonius, ‘is to be one man picked out of ten thousand’ (. . –), later adding ‘use every man for his desert and who shall escape whipping’ (. . –). He employs the Tacitean commonplaces that ‘in the fatness of these pursy times virtue itself of vice must pardon beg’ (. . –) and calling ‘virtue hypocrite’ (. . ). Even Claudius admits that ‘in the corrupted currents of the world / Offences guilded hand may shove by justice’ (. . –). Hamlet assures Gertrude that she lies in ‘the rank sweat of an enseamed bed / stewed in corruption’ (. . –). The breakdown in the relationship between Hamlet and his mother and between Hamlet and his former friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, signifies the corruption of the most fundamental social relations, of family and friendship. In the Renaissance, these were the ties that were understood to be the basis of sociability, the basis of successful societies, and these were the ties that followers of Tacitus believed had been most damaged by the Reformation’s aftermath. The breakdown of these ties in Hamlet’s Denmark is indicative of the depth of the corruption in the kingdom as a whole. The preoccupation with corruption finds a parallel in the natural world. The play begins with Hamlet’s lament that the world is an ‘unweeded garden’ entirely possessed ‘by things rank and gross in nature’ (. . –). He tells Claudius that ‘We fat ourselves for maggots’ (. . ). The natural figures of corruption multiply to the point in the fifth Act where natural and moral corruption join in the graveyard. Hamlet sits amongst the rotting corpses and contemplates office. Asking the gravedigger how long it takes a body to rot, the digger responds with his customary precision that it depends on how rotten the person already was when he or she died (. . –). The digger’s careful weighing of his words is in sharp contrast
Rhetorical figures such as paradiastole exploited this proximity by transforming virtues into their neighbouring vices and vices into virtues. It was because virtues and their corresponding vices were not opposites that this transformation was possible. On the notion that virtues and vices stood ‘in a relationship of proximity with each other’, see Skinner, ‘Moral Ambiguity’, p. .
The corruption of Hamlet
with the courtiers. Contrary to many of Shakespeare’s other plays, the lower orders in Hamlet do not mirror the corruption of the higher orders. The players and soldiers, like the gravediggers, are not overtly corrupt, underlining the concern with courtly corruption. At the same time, this is an upside-down world. Hamlet complains, like Sir Thomas Smith in The discourse of the commonweal, that one of the greatest challenges to virtue is that the distinction between the lower and upper orders is breaking down. Just as the courtiers do not merit honour, the lower orders behave above their station: ‘the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe’ (. . –). Virtue does indeed appear to be the only true nobility, but it is a fact to be lamented. Hamlet does not exclude himself from the rot that is Denmark. He describes himself as ‘indifferent honest’ yet capable of ‘such things that it were better my mother had not borne me’ (. . –). He later confirms he could ‘do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on’ (. . –). Before speaking with his mother he must persuade himself ‘Let not ever the soul of Nero enter this firm bosom’ (. . –). According to Tacitus’ account, to which Shakespeare is clearly referring, Nero had his mother Agrippina stabbed to death (after a couple of attempts on her life). Hamlet steps back from this extreme: ‘I will speak daggers to her but use none’ (. . ). The corruption of the Danish court is particularly evident in the depth of dissimulation employed by the courtiers. Both Polonius and Osric are dissimulators who sweat when the prince sweats, laugh when he laughs. Hamlet plays with them, revealing Osric’s deceit through his redescription of hot as cold and then as hot again (. . –), and having Polonius describe a cloud first as a camel, then a weasel and finally a whale (. . –). The dissimulation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is more deadly (although it is true that Polonius pays for spying with his life). Hamlet reproaches Guildenstern: ‘do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe!’ (. . –). And he tells Rosencrantz that he is a sponge, so that when Claudius ‘needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you’ (. . ). When Hamlet makes Gertrude conscious of the corruption in which she has acquiesced she must thereafter feign ignorance of this knowledge before Claudius to preserve her own life. Hamlet himself must assume an
[Thomas Smith], The Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville, ), pp. –. See Tacitus, Annals, XIV, .
‘antic disposition’ to preserve his life, and he continues this pretence even after he has become aware of Claudius’ attempt on his life . Such dissimulation for self-preservation was a commonplace of late Elizabethan and Jacobean political life. Robert Johnson even advised precisely this behaviour in an observation on Nero’s attempt on his mother’s life, upon which Shakespeare also commented in Hamlet : ‘If one play false, the best rule is, to seeme not to perceive it, and if (hee begin (as suspected) to cleere himselfe) to semble never to have doubted his fidelity … Therefore Agrippina in Tacitus knowing her life attempted by Nero, knew well, that her onely remedy was to take no notice of the treasons.’ Nourishing this exploration of corruption, Hamlet makes a sustained examination of the misery of man. Luther and Calvin revived this Augustinian theme against the early Renaissance optimism in the dignity of man. It has been remarked that the Reformation prepared the success of Tacitus and Seneca because the wars of religion eroded the bonds of community. But the Reformation prepared the reception of Tacitus and Seneca in a further way: namely, through an insistence upon the inherent sinfulness and misery of man. Hamlet follows this transition from the optimistic emphasis upon the dignity of man in the early Renaissance to the misery of man in the post-Reformation Renaissance, making an ironic speech on the dignity of man, ‘What a piece of work is a man’, in which he appeals to the commonplaces of the dignity-of-man genre – ‘noble in reason’, ‘infinite in faculty’, ‘in apprehension like a god’ – only to dismiss all of these qualities as ‘quintessence of dust’ and to conclude ‘man delights me not’ (. . –). All that I have said up to this point would not resolve the problem over which so much Hamlet criticism stumbles: namely, unlike Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy upon which it draws, Hamlet is not a straightforward revenge tragedy. The problem for critics is that revenge does
Johnson, Essaies, ‘Of discretion’, sig. Fr. See also Tacitus, Annals, XIV, , observing that Agrippina, after her son Nero’s first attempt on her life ‘glanced simultaneously at her own wound, and realized that the one defence against treachery was to leave it undetected’. Accordingly she sent word to her son that she had ‘survived a grave accident’. See Knowles, ‘Hamlet and Counter-Humanism’, who also places the play in the context of ‘counter-humanism’ and the misery-of-man genre but sees this new humanism as the basis of modern subjectivity. See, for example, Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism and Reason of State’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Th ought, – (Cambridge, ), p. . Alan Sinfield discusses the proximity of ‘neo-stoic’ and Calvinist thought in Hamlet in Faultlines, pp. –. See also Knowles, ‘Hamlet and Counter-Humanism’, on the misery of man in Hamlet.
The corruption of Hamlet
not explain Hamlet’s motivations. On the contrary, the remarkable feature of Hamlet’s disposition is his inaction: he is unable or unwilling to act. Why? Most modern critics have responded by appealing again to Hamlet’s psychology, or to his ‘interiority’. Their answer is broadly moral rather than specifically political when judged in Elizabethan and Jacobean terms. According to T. S. Eliot, Hamlet simply had inside himself something that Shakespeare failed to get out. According to Freud and his psychoanalytic followers, Hamlet is an hysteric, paralysed by disgust for his mother and the spectacle of Claudius fulfilling Hamlet’s own Oedipal fantasy (so that Hamlet’s uncle usurps his role in more than one sense). Francis Barker has attributed Hamlet’s inaction to his struggle with his emergent modern subjectivity. Even Ronald Knowles, who carefully reconstructs Hamlet’s motivations and his paralysis in the context of what he describes as ‘counter-humanism’, does so in order to provide a contextual reconstruction of the emergence of modern subjectivity. Knowles argues that ‘In the development of Western culture Shakespeare’s discovery of subjectivity in Hamlet is as momentous as the Renaissance discovery of perspective in art.’ It is possible, however, to understand Hamlet’s paralysis as having a form that would be more recognisable to his contemporaries than if we were to tell them, if we could converse with them, that they were witnessing the emergence of modern subjectivity. It is also possible to understand the problem as political – relating to the best form of government – and not only as moral. Hamlet’s problem, as he acknowledges, is that he is a slave: ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ (. . ). By this he means he is subject to the will of others. His political self is subject to others, and his moral self, his tranquillity and constancy of mind, is subject to others. Hamlet would like to be the ruler of himself in both these senses. But what is worse, and what causes Hamlet so much angst, is that his subjection is voluntary. He need only act, to shrug, to speak, and he would free himself. To understand this state we need to turn to Étienne de la Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire. La Boétie completed this work in the early s, but it was first published in and then again in in Geneva, in collections of Huguenot resistance tracts.
Eliot, The Sacred Wood, pp. –. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. . See also Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (London, ). Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, pp. –. Knowles, ‘Hamlet and Counter-humanism’, p. . One of the few dicussions, if not the only one, of La Boétie in the context of Shakespeare’s works is in Stephen Greenblatt’s tantalising reference in Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, ), p. .
La Boétie’s Servitude volontaire was read widely throughout Europe, particularly in Protestant Europe, and certainly anyone who read Montaigne’s Essaies would have been aware of La Boétie’s work. He was the subject of Montaigne’s essay ‘De l’amitié’ in which Montaigne discussed Servitude volontaire at length. The problem that La Boétie poses for his readers is why we would subject ourselves to an unjust ruler or, for that matter, to any ruler. As Montaigne dryly remarked, La Boétie would have been happier if he had ‘been born at Venice than at Sarlat; and he was right’. Why, La Boétie asked, does not just one person but a multitude subject themselves? We could understand this phenomenon, he argues, if there was something to fear from the ruler. But, he reasons, we are faced by a single figure, a single man, a ‘homunculus’, a little man, often ‘the most cowardly and effeminate in the nation’. What, he asks in astonishment, do we call it when we fail to act against such a person? Can we call it cowardice, he asks repeatedly: ‘Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? … Is it cowardice?’ No, he replies, because all that is required for us to liberate ourselves from this ‘little man’ is to refuse our consent: ‘there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself’. ‘What monstrous vice, then’, La Boétie continues, ‘is this which does not deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name?’ The vice is voluntary servitude: ‘It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or rather, bring about, their own subjection.’ La Boétie writes at great length and with great repetition about his loss of words to express his horror for this vice: ‘But O good Lord! What strange phenomenon is this? What name shall we give it? What is the nature of this misfortune? What vice is it, or rather, what degredation?’ Hamlet similarly speaks at great length about his inability to express the nature of his problem. He assures Guildenstern ‘Call me what instrument you will, / though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.’ You cannot know me. You cannot, as he puts it, ‘pluck out the heart of my mystery’ (. . –). Similarly, he protests that all the ‘forms, moods, shows of grief’ cannot ‘denote me truly’, and that he has ‘that within that passeth show’, that exceeds language and outward visible signs
Michel de Montaigne, Œuvres complètes, eds. Albert Th ibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris, ), Book. I, ch. , p. . Étienne de la Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, introduction by Murray N. Rothbard, trans. Harry Kurz (New York, ), p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .
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(. . –). Critics have seen this loss of words as a measure of the depth of Hamlet’s inner life and as an indication of an ideological fissure, a moment at which the modern identity buried in Hamlet’s interiority struggles to emerge. In an ingenious reading of Hamlet, Francis Barker argues: ‘In the interior of his mystery, there is, in short, nothing. The promised essence remains beyond the scope of the text’s signification.’ The text ‘gestures towards a place for subjectivity’, but this place belongs to an ‘historical order whose outline has so far only been sketched out’. But as La Boétie reveals, Shakespeare was not the first person to employ paralipsis in order to draw attention to a problem. George Puttenham described ‘Paralepsis’ in as ‘when we will not seeme to know a thing, and yet we know it well inough’. The use of this figure suggested not a void, verbal or ideological, but an abundance of thought on a matter. I would suggest that Shakespeare and Hamlet knew well enough the nature of Hamlet’s problem. What Hamlet is drawing attention to is his servitude – his lack of liberty – or what he also repeatedly describes as his imprisonment. Hamlet suffers from precisely the condition that La Boétie described. His enslavement is a self-enslavement, it is not at all based upon fear or cowardice. He declares ‘I do not set my life at a pin’s fee’ (. . ). In his soliloquy in Act , he describes his self-subjection, demanding what any other person would do: Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears, And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculty of eyes and ears. Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing (. . –)
Barker, Tremulous Private Body, p. . T. S. Eliot’s argument that Hamlet fails his test of the ‘objective correlative’ similarly rests upon Hamlet’s supposed inability to express himself in a way that is equivalent to his situation: Eliot, Sacred Wood, p. , ‘Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.’ George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds. G. D. Wilcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, , reprinted ), p. . On paralipsis, the figure by which ‘we say that we are passing by, or do not know, or refuse to say that which precisely now we are saying’, see Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. and ed. Henry Caplan (London, ), IV. . For another English Renaissance account of the same figure, see also Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, ), sigs. M v– Mr, who prefers the term aporia for ‘when we shewe that wee doubt … what to say, or doe, in some straunge and doubtfull matter’.
Saying, or ‘a simple act of the will’, according to La Boétie, is the only step needed to win freedom: ‘In order to have liberty nothing more is needed than to long for it.’ Hamlet then poses precisely La Boétie’s question – ‘Am I a coward?’, he asks – and he makes the same response to that question as La Boétie: namely, that he has enslaved himself to someone whom he has no reason to fear. ‘Who calls me a villain, breaks my pate across, / Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face, / Tweaks me by th’nose … Who does me this?’ (. . –). As La Boétie put it: ‘Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant … If it cost the people anything to recover its freedom, I should not urge action to this end.’ Hamlet has not been subjected by others but by his own will. He has enslaved himself. Like La Boétie, Hamlet expresses contempt for the sovereign. One of La Boétie’s principal concerns, in agreement with Machiavelli, was to reveal that princely power is consolidated through a mystique of grandeur. But unlike Machiavelli, and in the vein of Marcus Aurelius, La Boétie seeks to strip away that mystique and to reveal the prince as a person like any other. Hamlet exposes Claudius as ‘a paddock … a bat, a gib’ (. . ). He repeatedly ridicules Claudius to his face, for example in his observation that ‘Your worm is your only emperor for diet’ (. . ). This insult, as a number of critics have commented, seemingly borrows from Montaigne’s Apologie de Raimond Sebond in which Montaigne humanised grandeur in his observation that ‘the heart and life of a mighty and triumphant emperor is but the break-fast of a seely little worme’. When La Boétie sought to explain voluntary servitude he identified corruption in various guises as the problem. Much of Servitude volontaire is devoted to an analysis of the corruption that diverts us from freedom. One of the principal problems, ‘the support and foundation of tyranny’ as La Boétie sees it, is the development of dependent relations. La Boétie anatomises the process by which each person in a hierarchy forfeits his or her natural freedom in order to profit from an all-pervasive system of patron–client relationships. La Boétie’s treatise has been described as ‘anarchist’ and as underpinned by ‘anarchist premises’, and it attracts a readership amongst modern anarchists. But his analysis of freedom as non-dependence or independence is not anarchist. Rather, it is derivative
Boétie, Politics of Obedience, p. . Ibid. On Montaigne and Hamlet, see Knowles, ‘Hamlet and Counter-humanism’, p. . Boétie, Politics of Obedience, p. . Ibid., pp. –. See, for example, Nannerl O. Keohane, ‘The Radical Humanism of Étienne de la Boétie’, Journal of the History of Ideas, (), .
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of Renaissance republicanism, and his exploration of freedom as nondependence is one of the most extensive in Renaissance political thought. The system of dependence, La Boétie argues, is kept in place by the use of entertainments to dull the minds of the subjects. He had not met anyone, he wrote, who ‘on hearing the mention of Nero’ did not shudder at the name of that ‘hideous monster’. And yet ‘Cornelius Tacitus, a competent and serious author, and one of the most reliable’ tells us that when this ‘savage beast’ Nero died, the Roman people wore mourning for him because they recalled his games and festivals. La Boétie differed from the republican writers he drew upon in that while he was a champion of liberty he despaired of its realisation. Hamlet similarly explained his voluntary servitude as having being caused by corruption. He too is imprisoned, as he puts it, by corruption. And the courtly world in which he lives is dominated by patron–client dependence. It is with unconscious irony that Guildenstern declares his duty to Claudius by promising ‘To keep those many many bodies safe / That live and feed upon your majesty’ (. . –). Claudius exploits this system to maintain his power, and he also employs courtly entertainments and revels that, as Hamlet observes, far exceed those previously employed in the kingdom (. . .–). It was not always the case that Hamlet was subject in this way. Ophelia tells us that he had once represented all the courtly ideals (. . –). Hamlet has become, if not corrupt, then shackled by corruption because, when faced with the corruption of Denmark, he takes the Senecan path. He withdraws. As Tacitus observed, when faced with a corrupt court, an honest person can continue to participate in political life only at the risk of having his or her virtue interpreted as treason, and therefore at the risk of death. Otherwise, he or she can withdraw into a contemplative life and so survive. The contemplative route was, by the standards of vigorous Ciceronian humanism, a failure of duty. Yet this is the path chosen by Hamlet, and his knowledge of his own corruption, as he says, mines him from within. The tensions in Hamlet’s inaction are tensions between a life of political engagement and the life of contemplation. These tensions are in turn created by the decline of a culture of political participation and the rise of the culture of the court – both within the dramatic structure of the play and in the realworld context upon which the play comments. The choice facing Hamlet,
On republican liberty as non-dependence, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, ). Boétie, Politics of Obedience, pp. –.
from La Boétie’s perspective, is between freedom and slavery, but this choice is also largely illusory and subject to relentless irony. Hamlet’s consciousness of his slavery implies a desire for freedom, although he would not seem to be the most likely exponent of republican liberty. It is important, however, to recall that the republican ideal of self-rule, the notion that a city and its citizens could be sibi princeps, or rulers unto themselves, drew upon the broader ambition in medieval and Renaissance moral philosophy that each individual should strive to be a ruler of his or her self. This moral ambition that each person should achieve self-rule was not specifically republican, although it nourished republican political thought. Hamlet expresses no desire for republican rule (although he condemns tyranny), but his pursuit of self-rule, particularly in the context of perceived corruption, was symptomatic of the unresolved tensions between monarchical rule and republican culture. Moreover, the latent republicanism in Hamlet’s struggle against self-enslavement sheds greater light on Shakespeare’s choice to dramatise the Amleth myth which in turn echoed Livy’s legend of Lucius Junius Brutus. Brutus too saw his father murdered and had to pretend to be an imbecile to escape the same fate. After the rape of Lucrece he expelled the Tarquins and established the republic. Shakespeare had more to say about the foundation of Roman republicanism in his own Rape of Lucrece, but Hamlet offers an oblique although despairing commentary on the myth, and whatever republicanism there is in Hamlet’s struggles is hopelessly nostalgic. Hamlet debates his withdrawal throughout the play, notably in the ‘To be or not to be’ speech (. . –). It is striking that a number of modern commentators take this speech as a meditation on suicide. Interpreted in this way, ‘To be or not to be’ is consistent with Hamlet’s exploration of his interiority through a contemplation of life and death. Again, this interpretation reflects a broadly moral, rather than political, understanding of Hamlet’s motivations. He certainly does discuss suicide once or twice, perhaps even in this speech, but he only ever does so in order to dismiss that course as the surest way to lose his soul: ‘that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!’ (. . –). ‘To be or
For the notion of sibi princeps expressed in the writings of the fourteenth-century jurist Bartolus of Saxoferrato, see Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I, pp. –. On Hamlet and the legend of Brutus, see Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources for Shakespeare, VII, pp. –. Cathy Shrank makes a similar argument in this volume regarding the nostalgia of Shakespeare’s sonnets. See, for example, Greenblatt, ‘Hamlet’, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Greenblatt, et al., p. .
The corruption of Hamlet
not to be’ is not a choice about suicide but a choice about whether to be actively engaged in political life. To retreat into retirement, as Hamlet has done, is to ‘suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ without being able to resist them (. . –). To be engaged in political life, as virtually every classical and Renaissance moralist observed, is to ‘take arms against a sea of troubles’ (. . ). It was also, in a courtly world, a quick route to death, or ‘by opposing’, as Hamlet observes, to ‘end’ (. . ). It is in this sense that the speech presents a choice between life and death. Andrew Hadfield has also rightly argued against the soliloquy as a meditation on suicide. But in presenting it as contemplation of tyrannicide he has confined it too narrowly, when it clearly addresses the dilemma of political engagement more generally. It is not a failure to kill bad kings that has led to the current rotten state of Denmark but a failure in the performance of political duty more generally. In Hamlet, Shakespeare was not concerned with tyrants and how to get rid of them. He was not working with that aspect of monarchomach or resistance theory. Rather, he was exploring the deeper problem analysed by La Boétie: namely, why was it that the republican tradition was in ruins and beyond repair, and why is it that we get tyrants as rulers in the first place? In Hamlet, we learn that tyrants or tyrannical behaviour are not the cause of tyranny (and in this respect the play explores tyranny in greater depth than Richard III or Macbeth). Rather, we discover, as La Boétie argued, that tyranny is caused by the corruption of the character and spirit of the subjects. There has been a vigorous debate within the history of political thought about the nature of the change represented by the growing popularity of Tacitus and Seneca in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. According to one account, these authors and their commentators were employed to break with humanist moral philosophy. This so-called ‘new humanism’ abandoned the commitment to virtuous action in the pursuit of the common good and elevated survival and self-interest as guides for the behaviour of subjects. The argument offered against this view is that Tacitism was an extension of the values of the early Renaissance because it was nostalgic for the rule of virtue. One way to judge this debate is to examine a similar division of opinion in early modern England about
Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. –. For a fascinating discussion of the monarchomach context to Hamlet see Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. –. The leading study is Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, – (Cambridge, ). See, for example, Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, ch. .
the significance of Tacitus. Returning again to Robert Johnson’s Essaies, Johnson speculated on whether ‘the conversing in Tacitus’ led to evil or virtue. ‘Here some infere’, he observed, ‘that the knowledge of evil’ acquired from reading Tacitus would lead to the ‘imitation of evil’. But he pointed out that this is no reason to reject Tacitus, because ‘such corrupt mindes may also suck venome out of the most wholesome flowers’. He then defended Tacitus, arguing that his actors are ‘governors of necessity, rather directing than obeying the vexatious’. This is not a defence of virtue but rather a justification of behaviour based on interest and necessity. Tacitean policy did not eclipse Ciceronian perspectives (as Markku Peltonen has shown), but the profound perception of corruption in early modern Europe did mark a change in the understanding of the political subject. It is true that Classical and Renaissance moral philosophy was deeply concerned with self-interest, but this concern was directed toward overcoming corruption. It came increasingly to be accepted that interest and corruption would not be overcome and, as Johnson put it, either had to be directed or had to be evaded by withdrawal from political life. Hamlet pursues both of these responses. Much of his angst, as I have said, is motivated by his withdrawal, but he shows also, for example in sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, that he is skilled at directing the vexatious (. . –). While skilled in this sense, he is not skilled at making himself free, and he is ultimately unable to overcome his environment. He shares La Boétie’s despair, but he is restrained by Tacitus’ pessimism. I began by observing that Hamlet is not a figure of modern subjectivity but a player in a corrupt court. He is not an emerging modern but a corrupt and declining ancient. The corruption of the court did, however, help to produce the self-interested subject. Hamlet is no less obsessed with himself than is Montaigne. This self-interested subject is not, however, a post- Kantian autonomous agent. He is not the ‘modern’ self that, nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century studies of Hamlet would like to find. But nor is he a virtuous citizen of the Italian republics, nor the virtuous subject of the Northern Renaissance. Claudius justly described him as ‘our chiefest courtier’ (. . ).
Johnson, Essaies, sigs. Dv–Dr.
Unfolding ‘the properties of government’: the case of Measure for Measure and the history of political thought Conal Condren Measure for Measure appears to have been a Christmas play for James VI of Scotland, and new king of England, one attracted to staged spectacle. The occasion of its first known performance in suggests an unusually resonant context: the court, so presumably the audience on that festive occasion, was fluid and confessionally divided with distinct foci of attention, the Queen, Prince Henry and James himself. Prior to the play’s performance its suitability would have been vetted by officials and perhaps its text amended, possibly from a staging earlier in the year when the Globe had re-opened after plague. There is no text prior to the Folio, so all this is conjecture, but rushed writing for different occasions might explain the play’s elliptical indeterminacy. Yet it is decidedly about political issues of interest to James, and retrospectively it may be seen as bringing Shakespeare and the history of political thought into alignment. James was a theorist of his own position, something of a philosopherking: a contemplative man of action. Moreover, he was a new prince in a double, even Machiavellian, sense: new to the throne, and a foreigner to boot, with no automatic entitlement of succession, a source of suspicion as well as hope. The suspicions concerned his unfortunate Scottishness, his Roman conception of law and ignorance of England, sources of discomfort hardly allayed since his coronation. By , James was already I am grateful for the comments of the anonymous readers and the less than anonymous criticisms of my fellow editors.
Alvin B. Kernan, The King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court (New Haven, ); Linda Levy Peck, ‘Introduction’, in Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, ), p. ; Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, ), pp. –. J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca, N.Y., ), pp. –; John H. Astington, ‘The Globe, the Court and Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey, (), –; Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, ), p. . Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, p. ; on the succession, see for example, John Morrill, ‘Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears the Crown’: Dynastic Crises in Tudor and Stuart Britain, – (Reading, ), pp. –.
giving attention to the laws and privileges of London and fretting over legal laxity. He had attempted to disbar an elected debtor from the Commons, provoking Parliament’s Apology and Satisfaction, an assertion of its independent office of counsel, which he appeared not to understand, being the victim of ‘sinister misinformations’. That early abrasion of official boundaries has been enough to suggest that Measure for Measure is a sort of ur-text for the Civil Wars and Angelo an allegorical figure of an ideology of parliamentary sovereignty. Yet some of those Catholics excluded by the Elizabethan Settlement were optimistic about James. One enthused that now ‘we have a Kinge [who] will restore … our rights’; the Jesuit Henry Garnet heralded ‘a golden time of unexpected freedom’. It was a brief misjudgement. The very possibility was just as disturbing for many Protestants. James had endorsed the Settlement after the Hampton Court conference earlier in , but was easing its rigours. His cautious policy thus encouraged recusant expectations, but arguably provided an incitement for the Gunpowder Plot of . Alexis de Tocqueville might have taken it as confirming his view that the most dangerous times for repressive regimes were when they sought to reform. These indications of the uncertain tides of policy offer some bearings for understanding the play: the Duke sets the direction from the outset, in proclaiming that it is about ‘government the properties to unfold’ (. . ). The questions before us are just what is being unfolded and how. The answers are not self-evident. In the early seventeenth century, ‘government’ referred to more than the political as it might narrowly be construed, its properties spreading beyond what, with a certain retrojecting tidiness, we now call political theory; additionally, the play’s treatment of those properties is oblique, even disingenuous. As some critics have recognised, to unfold those properties before the King was not necessarily to lecture or theorise.
Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London, ), p. ; Paul Hammond, ‘The Argument of Measure for Measure’, English Literary Renaissance, (), –. Louise Halper, ‘Measure for Measure: Law, Prerogative, Subversion’, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, (), ; Apology and Satisfaction (), in J. R. Tanner, ed., Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I, – (Cambridge, ), p. . Halper, ‘Measure for Measure’, –; cf. Paul Christianson, ‘Royal and Parliamentary Voices on the Ancient Constitution’, in Peck, ed., The Mental World of The Jacobean Court, p. . Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London, ), pp. , ; see also [John Lecey] A Petition Apologeticall, Presented … by the Lay Catholikes of England (London, ). W. Brown Patterson, James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, ), pp. –, –. Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, p. . Ibid., p. ; Rosalind Miles, The Problem of Measure for Measure: A Historical Investigation (London, ), pp. –; Hammond, ‘The Argument of Measure for Measure’, –.
Unfolding ‘the properties of government’
Indeed, what Dr Johnson would criticise as Shakespeare’s lamentable failure to edify and wag the admonitory finger has now emerged as a major virtue and, with respect to Measure for Measure, a characteristic that does much to explain the attention it receives. It is, as Walter Pater put it, suggestive, bringing into shape the reader’s diffuse imaginings. These, however, can often be historically implausible. Once an evocative symbolism is recognised, re-encoding the play’s politics in the name of de-coding its real meaning becomes easier in the absence of a directive authorial voice to restrain our flights of fancy. Instead, our own preconceptions of political issue-saliency are likely to leave an indelible imprint on the whole. Most obviously with Shakespeare, there is a predilection for passing judgement in order to enlist or subvert the kudos of his words; but such iconic imperatives are only the rather wearing consequence of our often unreflective processing of the past through perspectives taken for granted. So the play is read as turning on the tensions between the public and the private spheres, thereby relying on conceptions of the distinction between the words ‘public’ and ‘private’ that would have made little sense in Shakespeare’s times. Angelo has been made to signify parliamentary sovereignty theory well before it was articulated, Pompey a farewell to the republican moment, or a figure of Brechtian insight into hegemony when such Shakespearean perceptions depend upon more recent theorisation. Greater awareness of what were issues in Shakespeare’s day still fails to insure against oversimplification. The brothels are court corruption, or conversely, oppressed conventicles. The play has certainly been over-subject to allegorical patterning, and passing allusions become pegs on which to hang theories of Shakespeare’s engagement with our concepts. In the absence of the author’s credal forthrightness, we have, then, a crucial condition for the political rehabilitation
See, for example, Blair Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare Survey, (), . Walter Pater, Appreciations (London, ), p. , discussed by Kiernan Ryan, ‘Measure for Measure, Marxism before Marx’, in Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow, eds., Marxist Shakespeare (London, ), pp. –, . Miles, The Problem of Measure for Measure, p. . Stacy Magedanz, ‘Public Justice and Private Mercy in Measure for Measure’, Studies in English Literature, (), –; Ryan, ‘Measure for Measure’, p. ; for early modern understandings of the distinction between public and private, and Shakespeare’s use of the terms, see Conal Condren, ‘Public, Private and the Idea of a “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England’, Intellectual History Review, (), –. Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, p. ; Halper, ‘Measure for Measure’, –, . Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, pp. –; Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington, Ky., ), pp. –.
of a once unpopular play. Its striking openness is widely accepted, but often as a challenge. Mine is to keep the play and the history of political thought in a tensile alignment by exploring the mechanisms of its doctrinal slipperiness: to elucidate what beyond the stage might take shape as political, moral, legal and philosophical theories but within it structure a dramatic development. There are several interlocking aspects of the play’s adventitious or structured open-endedness. Leaving aside the distance created by having the play set in a mythic Vienna, the characters are not mere allegorical figures; and there is no neat analogue for James. This alone deters ready identification of the monarch with the Duke, and hence should forewarn against treating his, or any other character’s, words as carrying an overarching message. As the play is about the properties of government, a preliminary comment is warranted on the relative absence of the inherently problematic, hence dramatically enticing, relationship between rule and counsel. There are glimpses of what Shakespeare had explicitly dramatised in Henry V and I Henry VI. But given Parliament’s Apology and the uncharted tensions at court, counsel might have been too tricky a theme on which to have characters expatiate, although its difficulties are shown in what they do. Crucially, the Duke by-passes the worthy counsellor Escalus, who is later seen to function adequately, instead promoting Angelo to an absolute authority in his absence; without that device of alienation there would be no problem, no play. Most important, however, is the dramatic employment of argumentum in utramque partem, the conciliar and persuasive art, extensively theorised
Phillip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences (Berkeley, ), esp. p. xiv; E. L. Rocklin, ‘Measured Endings: How Productions from – Close Shakespeare’s Open Silences in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey, (), –. See Miles, The Problem of Measure for Measure, pp. –; M. C. Bradbrook, ‘Authority, Truth and Justice in Measure for Measure’, Review of English Studies, (), –; Roy Battenhouse, ‘Measure for Measure and the Christian Doctrine of the Atonement’, PMLA, (), –. N. W. Bawcutt, ‘ “He Who the Sword of Heaven Will Bear”: The Duke versus Angelo in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey, (), . Th is was no deterrent to F. R. Leavis, for whom the Duke was obviously James: Leavis, ‘The Greatness of Measure for Measure’, Scrutiny, (), –; see also Jocelyn Waters Bennett, Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment (New York, ). On counsel, see David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Peter Lake, ‘Ministers, Magistrates and the Production of “Order” in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey, (), ; Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, pp. –. But then again, Henry V was re-staged about the same time for James, a proud descendant of the victor of Agincourt: see Bennett, Measure for Measure, p. .
Unfolding ‘the properties of government’
in antiquity, of stimulating judgement by putting both sides of a case, a trope central to probabilistic reasoning and closely related to aposiopesis – the absence of a lurking conclusion. But this itself could be less than straightforward. An unstated implication, even when both sides had been put, could be as obvious as a music-hall double entendre; yet aposiopesis might leave us genuinely adrift between opposing possibilities. Unclosed argument had been the hallmark of More’s unfolding of the properties of counsel in Utopia. It was, in terms More later used, a discourse according to the open palm of rhetoric rather than the closed fist of dialectic. Jocelyn Bennett has doubted that Shakespeare intended any indeterminacy; Hammond has argued that he did and that it is a feature of the text. Balancing polar positions, however, was more than a strategy of formal rhetoric and logic appropriate to counsel that Shakespeare may have got from a wealth of educational texts on eloquence: it was a dispersed feature of discourse, ripe for use on the stage. Montaigne had come close to seeing the under-determination of meaning as characteristic of the printed word that thus always required additional work from the reader; his essays would be re-fashioned in reception, as he inescapably had re-worked the ancients who guided him in writing. Such an awareness informs the Prologue to Henry V – the audience’s imagination must finish what the ‘wooden O’ could not encompass; it will conclude As You Like It, in which women, then men are invited to take what they want from the play. Beyond the stage, the invitation to respond independently to juxtaposed propositions was central to paradox literature. Donne called his paradoxes ‘swaggerers’ because the reader was supposed to resist their braggart contradictions. Such studied modes of indeterminacy point also to Shakespeare’s use of the anti-dogmatics of pyrrhonist scepticism. Most writings exhibit scepticism to some extent about something, and so scepticism easily
Aristotle, Rhetoric, a; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Peter G. Platt, ‘Shakespeare and Rhetorical Culture’, in David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, ), pp. –. See Damian Grace, ‘Utopia: A Dialectical Reading Interpretation’, in Clare Murphy, Henri Gibaud and Mario De Cesare, eds., Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’ hadour (Binghamton, N.Y., ), pp. –; and Grace, ‘Utopia and Academic Scepticism’, in A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace, eds., More’s Utopia and the Utopian Inheritance (Lanham, Md., ), pp. –. Bennett, Measure for Measure; Hammond, ‘The Argument of Measure for Measure’, –; Rocklin, ‘Measured Endings’, –. Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’, in Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare, pp. –. John Donne, Paradoxes and Problems (c. ?), ed. Helen Peters (Oxford, ), ‘Introduction’, p. xxvi.
becomes an over-extended notion. Pyrrhonist scepticism, however, was more precise, less a global epistemological doubting (the very notion of epistemology in relation to ontology was yet to be securely established) than a means of argumentative manoeuvre. Its intellectual environment is formally more rhetorical than metaphysical. Henricus Stephanus’ edition of Sextus Empiricus’ Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes had been available since . Many features of the work, as Robert Pierce has argued, were popularised by Montaigne, but would have been broadly familiar from Cicero (pyrrhonist technique was invaluable in legal argument) and from Tacitus, Machiavelli, Erasmus and More with their explorations of the differences between appearance and reality. Those who used pyrrhonism do not necessarily evidence any distinct ideology. As Henry St John later remarked, the pyrrhonist is against all philosophy, and all are against him. Certainly pyrrhonism is not to be conflated with Tacitean moral critique to create an emerging ideology of ‘new humanism’. Its employment was largely a tactical means of expressing selective doubt, a rich and widely available resource for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I want now to touch on the use of pyrrhonist sceptical commonplaces, the procedural or dramatic principles of argument on both sides with its termination in differing degrees of aposiopesis as they operate with respect to the well-recognised governmental properties of law, prerogative and mitigation. Expression of a measured scepticism and the scope left for judgement on these matters is a compliment to James and his widely available writings. The distinct voices of the Duke, Isabella and Angelo seem to allude by turns to aspects of James’s own theories of sovereignty; the Duke’s power is called, in James’s terms, absolute. Equally, however, much seems to echo Justus Lipsius’ Sixe Bookes of Politickes, a work it is difficult to imagine Shakespeare not mining .
Quentin Skinner, ‘Moral Ambiguity and the Renaissance Art of Rhetoric’, in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vols. (Cambridge, ), II, pp. –. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhoniarum Hypotyposeon, libri III, reprinted with Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos (Paris, ); English title Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes. Robert B. Pierce, ‘Shakespeare and the Ten Modes of Scepticism’, Shakespeare Survey, (), –; Grace, ‘Utopia and Academic Scepticism’, pp. –; for the Tacitean, see for example Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, – (Cambridge, ). Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, ‘Fragments or Minutes of Essays’, in Bolingbroke, Philosophical Works, vols. (London, ), IV, p. : ‘hostis philosophici generis’. Cf. Dzelzainis, ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’. Bennett, Measure for Measure, pp. –. Richard Field printed William Jones’s translation of Lipsius and Shakespeare’s early poetry under his emblem of the ‘anchora spei’. Field also came from Stratford: see R. B. McKerrow, ed., A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, – (London, ), pp. –.
Unfolding ‘the properties of government’
What does not follow from this is that the play really subverts absolutist ideology by confronting James with Vienna’s ebullient lower orders – a reading that owes more to Brecht and Bakhtin than to Shakespeare. But once we reduce the political to doctrinal advocacy, what’s not endorsement has to be subversion. As if James (he’s from Scotland) needed telling that the world is unstable, the court that after Elizabeth, England could have become a republic. As if the properties of government per se, regardless of the subordinate issue of institutional form, could be unfolded without some inkling of its purposes and scope. The worlds of the court and city exist in the play in counterpoint, certainly, but the circumscription of phenomena in mutual relationship had become pervasive in argument, from its formulation of the Eighth Mode, or topos, of scepticism. In fact, if we put behind us ideologies of absolutism, largely shaped in the wake of later parliamentary hostility, then rather than the presence of Vienna’s decadent underside subverting absolutism the picture Shakespeare gives is closer to the reverse: it is the Duke’s neglect of his absolute rule that has created the corruptions of the city; and it is what James had insisted was a central feature of his own absolute power, his freedom, on which I will touch below, that informs the plot in a largely positive light. But there are no simple answers. Each of the main characters is a moving balance of vice and virtue and, for many, each has found a way of repulsing sympathy. They are figures, not arguments on both sides of the question of what sort of persona is needed for an office, especially that of rule; government is, after all, about dealing with, by and for the fallen. As the percipient Servant puts it in Timon of Athens: ‘The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic’ (. . –). As I shall illustrate, structurally, the play reinforces this concern with the dissonances between office and office-holder through its persistent substitutions, mutations, its preoccupation with appearance and reality, the ‘seeming’ so important to sceptical styles of thought beyond mere suspicions of hypocrisy and the easy accusations levelled at ‘puritans’. Personae are neither fixed nor fitted
For variations of this position see Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. –; Halper, ‘Measure for Measure’, –; Lake, ‘Ministers, Magistrates and the Production of “Order”’, . Some had thought it already close to this: Charles Merbury, A Briefe Discourse of Royall Monarchie (London, ); Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth & Government of Venice (London, ), on Shakespeare’s use of which see Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, p. . Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhonian Hypotyposeon, I, p. ; Adversus mathematicos, pp. –. Hammond, ‘The Argument of Measure for Measure’, p. . Anna Kammaralli, ‘Writing about Motive: Isabella, the Duke and Moral Authority’, Shakespeare Survey, (), ; Pierce, ‘Shakespeare and the Ten Modes’, pp. –.
neatly to their positions. It is the substitute ruler Angelo, not the Duke, who is a new prince and so uncomfortably in a situation like that of James. Although the Duke has personal proclivities at one with James, he has characteristics inappropriate to his position. Apparently aware of Angelo’s unsuitability to rule, he elevates him nonetheless. This is ostensibly in order to get to know his own people (after fourteen years, better late than never), like the more obviously heroic Henry V moving incognito among his troops. Effectively, the disguise allows the Duke’s metamorphosis into something suggestive of an Ovidian Orpheus, descending into the moral darkness of a city prison to rescue the condemned. Meanwhile, the promotion of Angelo, albeit also in order to expose the hypocrisy of ‘the seemers’, was the sort of practice against which James had dutifully warned his son in Basilikon Doron: ‘make none over greate, but according as the power of the cuntrie may beare’. Further, Norman Holland has drawn attention to a striking analogy between the Duke’s delegation of authority and Machiavelli’s anecdote about that most notorious of new princes, Cesare Borgia, who sent his brutal underling Remirro de Orco to quell the Romagna and then summarily executed him when the bloody work was done, thus with an evil elegance bringing his acquisition to heel and seeming to establish himself as a liberator. This story, prominent in Innocent Gentillet’s AntiMachiavell, may even have furnished some of the reasoning behind the Duke’s cunning plan to make Angelo a tyrant in his stead (. . –). If so, we have Machiavelli used not as a source of advice, but as a morally ambiguating plot mechanism. If we turn directly to the Duke’s domain, it is clear that Vienna is licentious, with laws ‘Which for this fourteen years we have let slip’ (. . ). Again, it was the sort of irresponsibility against which James had already warned . The result, semantically encapsulated in the play, is that the
Bennett, Measure for Measure, p. ; Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, p. . Bennett, Measure for Measure, p. . On the Ovidian theme see David Armitage, ‘The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Mythic Elements in Shakespeare’s Romances’, Shakespeare Survey, (), –; more broadly, Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, ), but with only passing reference to Measure for Measure. James VI, Basilikon Doron (Edinburgh, ), p. ; Justus Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes, trans. William Jones (London, ), p. : ‘Advance none to overhigh dignitie.’ Norman Holland, ‘Measure for Measure: The Duke and the Prince’, Comparative Literature, (), ; Innocent Gentillet, Anti-Machiavell (), Eng. trans. (London, ), pp. –; Measure for Measure, . . . Halper, ‘Measure for Measure’, citing Basilikon Doron, pp. –; Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Sussex, ) pp. –, drawing on Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, ), for a catalogue of the Duke’s inadequacies.
Unfolding ‘the properties of government’
liberty of the people is spoken of as licence. The terms liberty, scope, freedom extend to their common moral antonym. There has been ‘too much Liberty’, remarks a rueful Claudio, every ‘scope’ has had ‘immoderate use’ (. . –). And as the Duke confesses to Friar Thomas, ‘Liberty plucks Justice by the nose / The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum’ (. . –). When Hobbes explicitly collapsed the moral opposition between liberty and licence a generation later, it was partly to subvert the heady rhetorics of liberty. Within the play, the indiscriminate range of the word ‘liberty’ symbolises the absence of government . This is not quite a natural condition of the sort dramatised in the storm scenes of Lear and The Tempest, but Pompey sees in his wayward world one of the features Hobbes would insist upon: the arbitrariness of what is called good and bad. Pompey and Abhorson are additionally used to point to the nugatory inflation of claims to be holding an office, for which the term ‘mystery’ was a near synonym. Punning provides the easy means of trivialising office-holding. Painting is a mystery, says Pompey, ‘and your whores, sir, being members of my occupation, using painting, do prove my occupation a mystery; but what mystery there should be in hanging … I cannot imagine’. Abhorson insists that the hangman’s job is a mystery. Asked for proof, he embarks upon an obscurely muddled syllogistic defence, left open in being interrupted by the entry of the Provost (. . –). In a world in which officia were ethical categories providing the licit scope of social activity, and the criteria by which proper conduct was assessed (liberty distinguished from licence, authority from oppression), Shakespeare gives a glimpse of a concomitant fear of the promiscuous employment of the vocabulary of office, effectively collapsing moral order and the distinct registers of vice and virtue. Sexual licence is an issue, touching contemporary concerns associated with those called ‘puritan’; but it also stands for a wider, if under-specified range of problems summarised in that defining contrast to the proper exercise of office, corruption, that irresistible source of dramatic tension. Here, then, is the gist of the anticipated properties of government that the play unfolds. It seems presupposed, on medieval precedent, that laws must suit a people, otherwise enforcement is impossible and law itself becomes disreputable. What this might have meant more precisely,
Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, pp. –; the associations of sexual with political corruption were well established: Lake, ‘Ministers, Magistrates and the Production of “Order”’ at length, on the puritans and sexual mores. See also Andrew Fitzmaurice’s chapter in this volume.
however, is another question: it might have intimated something of the new King’s own situation and the fear of his bringing Scottish law into foreign climes, that he might tinker with wild and jealous London, or impose an unworkable uniformity on religious practice; or perhaps most banally, it might only have been to affirm no law can be made that assumes human perfection. Using the resonant issue of fornication, Shakespeare’s focus is upon the tyrannous abuse of law in a double sense, each helping to show by contrast the limits of the proper exercise of office. On the one hand, tyranny could be the familiar destructive rapacity of untrammelled will, what Macduff in Macbeth would call ‘Boundless intemperance in nature’, a defining moral licence, an over-reaching ( pleonexia) that, however cruel, makes the tyrant its first victim. On the other, tyranny could be, for us, the less familiar relentless legalism that refuses to exercise prerogative right, what Charles I would later condemn in Eikon Basilike as ‘legal tyranny’. In Measure for Measure, several characters allude to such zealous lack of moderation. Angelo comments that Isabella has seemed to make the law a tyrant (. . ); Isabella had earlier accused him in similar terms (. . –); and the Duke refuses to compensate for his previous laxity by becoming a tyrant through strict application of the laws (. . –). If the city exhibits the licentious tyranny of desire, Angelo provides a brittle contrast as one who denies the moderate exercise of natural desire; he is but a virtuous man by the book. In Lipsius’ terms he is obstinate more than constant because he lacks the prudent flexibility that ruling office demands. As Plato had argued in The Republic, it is the merely conventionally just man who most easily becomes tyrannical. Angelo makes this explicit, displaying in turn each aspect of tyranny circumscribing his office. Yet, as I shall indicate, if he is not quite the redemptive figure A. D. Nuttall has described, or the hero that Davenant made him in The Law Against Lovers (), he too has saving graces warranting some mercy . The theme of mercy has several aspects. Appropriately for Christmas, it is New and not Old Testament justice that ultimately counts, (Matt. . ).
Shakespeare, Macbeth, . . The scene provides one of the most succinct rehearsals of this commonplace Platonic understanding of tyranny. Charles I (?), Eikon Basilike (London, ), p. . Bawcutt, ‘He Who the Sword of Heaven Will Bear’, . Brian Gibbons, ed., Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (Cambridge, ), ‘Introduction’, pp. –; Lipsius, Sixe Bookes, I, ch. , pp. –; III, chs. –, pp. –. A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, ), pp. –; Sir William Davenant, The Law Against Lovers (, ), on which see Frederick W. Kilbourne, Alterations and Adaptations of Shakespeare (Boston, ), pp. –.
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This, however, is not simply a general or private moral virtue, or a redaction of the Sermon on the Mount. Rather, as James himself had already theorised the matter at length in The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (), the prerogative of mercy was a necessary corrective attribute of sovereign office, expressing his freedom as an absolute monarch; as Isabella puts it, ‘authority, though it err like others, / Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself’ (. . –). James’s peroration to Basilikon Doron, echoing the Sermon on the Mount, had emphasised the duty to balance disinterested punishment only for specific crimes with proportionate response: ‘And above al, let the measure of your love to every one bee according to the measure of his vertue.’ The central contrast between strict application and prudent proportionality that often centred on mercy can be placed in overlapping contexts of political, legal and moral reflection. The clash between James and the common lawyers was in part becoming a matter of to whose office belonged equity, the prerogative to relax the application of laws and so avoid one form of tyranny. Was it within the scope of the law, or was the monarch beyond the law the ultimate source of equity? James had been unequivocal on the issue, and the existence of a Royal Court of Chancery gave his notion of being a free monarch an ambivalent purchase in England. His being above the law made him in theory a voluntaristic god on earth, but he was shortly to adumbrate a modified degree of what Phillip Hunton would refer to as a ‘moral absoluteness in rule’ (not anything as ideologically tidy as absolutism). Normally, James would reassure Parliament, a monarch, though initially free, lives by the laws, departing from them and exercising his liberty of office only in abnormal cases. This
James VI and I, The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (Edinburgh, ); Josef Kohler, Shakespeare vor dem Forem der Jurisprudenz (Würzburg, ), discussed in George W. Keeton, Shakespeare’s Legal and Political Background (London, ) pp. –; Lipsius, Sixe Bookes, II, chs. –, pp. –, who argues that absoluteness in rule is a condition for clemency and justice. James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, p. . See Christianson, ‘Royal and Parliamentary Voices’, pp. –; Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, ). Phillip Hunton, A Treatise of Monarchie (London, ), p. ; Linda Levy Peck, ‘Kingship, Counsel and Law in Early Stuart England’, in J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer, eds., The Varieties of British Political Thought, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, ), esp. chs. –; Christianson, ‘Royal and Parliamentary Voices’, p. ; cf. Johann Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, – (London, ); modified in Sommerville, ‘Absolutism and Revolution in the Seventeenth Century’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
Jacobean turn was the attempted reconciliation of a voluntaristic god (out of Duns Scotus) with the authority of Thomistic natural law. This issue is canvassed in the play, showing the questions of prerogative easing of strict legality to be subsumed by the more general moral imponderable of casuistic advice, the art of judgement and mitigation in conscience-testing circumstances. Shakespeare’s use of casuistry is at one with the commonplaces of pyrrhonist scepticism, specifically the fourth and fifth topoi, stressing that what might seem right could change with perspective or circumstance. Yet the possibility was worrying precisely when the assurance of moral truths was needed, a point underlined in the anecdote about the ‘sanctimonious pirate’ who goes to sea with nine of the Ten Commandments, having erased ‘Thou shalt not steal’ (. . –). Thus, any casuistic qualification of moral imperatives could briskly be condemned as laxity, corruption and the evil exercise of arbitrary will. Lucio introduces Mistress Overdone as ‘Madam Mitigation’. In her house, he reflects, he had caught several diseases (. . ), an expression of the fear that one mitigating step could lead to the licence that had blossomed with the Duke’s indolence. It is the licence that makes Lucio’s slanderous incontinence concerning the Duke close to the language of a natural condition. Almost routinely, the casuistic impulse that evoked such extremes was condemned through citing the biblical locus, ‘Do not evil that good may come of it.’ James had used the tag to combat Buchananesque and Parsonian Jesuit casuistries of resistance to free monarchs; but it carried the additional reassurance that James’s own high prerogative, his freedom, was not a form of licence but a liberty entailed by his duty. Again, rather than endorsing or discrediting a doctrine, the play displays contrasting examples of its character, re-dramatisations as much as the re-descriptions of tyranny, prerogative and mitigation. While Angelo becomes tyrannical by refusing to exercise the prerogative of mercy, Isabella pleads that God’s grace is the very model of mitigation to be followed (. . –). Angelo is unswayed but comes to believe that he has been corrupted by her purity: ‘Oh cunning enemy that, to catch a saint, / With saints doest bait thy hook!’ (. . –). He then misuses mitigation in trying to corrupt Isabella, after her own words had inadvertently
James VI and I, ‘A Speach to … Parliament at White-hall’ ( March –), in The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, James, ed. James Montagu (London, ), pp. –; but see also True Lawe, ibid., p. ; Burgess, Absolute Monarchy, pp. –, –. Pyrrhonian Hypotyposeon, I, pp. –; Adversus mathematicos, pp. –; Pater, Appreciations, pp. , , notes but does not explore the centrality of casuistry to the play. James VI and I, True Lawe, in Workes, p. .
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planted the idea of bargaining her chastity for her brother’s life. She begins the second interview with the infelicitous ‘I come to know your pleasure’ (. . ) and later exclaims: : Hark how I’ll bribe you – good my lord, turn back. : How? Bribe me? : Ay, with such gifts that heaven shall share with you. (. . –)
Lucio’s immediate aside, ‘You had marred all else’ (. . ), underscores the significance of the exchange. It would be, Angelo will claim, a form of charity to have sex with him, what might seem a vice is the exercise of an adjacent virtue (. . –). It was the sort of moral re-description for which casuiste was already being used. Later, Angelo acts in more conventionally tyrannical mode by breaking his promise to let Claudio live, and Isabella abandons God as the casuistic model, insisting on a rigid execution of ‘justice’, and thrice times justice (. . ). The Duke is also used to present contrary facets of casuistic mitigation. His understanding of prerogative appears indiscriminate. He gives mercy to Angelo and pardons an unrepentant murderer, so exhibiting what Elyot had called ‘vain pity’. Here we are placed between another double-sided issue. The medicine of mercy is no less problematic when randomly dosed out than is rigid legality; but then again, what therefore seems irresponsible might be re-couched as unqualified divine love. Do the alternatives suggest an Averroistic morality? Is the dispensation of a systematic Christian forgiveness unfitting in a political world? Given that the play is, at one level, about fornication, there is a tawdry decorum in the bed trick. The substitution of the jilted Mariana for the virginal Isabella balances the substitute head for the repentant Claudio again, the seeming of appearance, not the reality, drives the plot. The Duke’s stratagem depends upon his seeming to be a friar and exercising
Gibbons, ‘Introduction’, pp. –; Bernice Kliman, ‘Isabella in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Studies, (), –, for discussions of the mechanisms of verbal mishap. For Andrew Hadfield, Angelo is a failed Tarquin, a point that allows him to see the plot as analogous to a foundation myth of republican Rome. From there the long bow twangs, the play becomes a discourse on republicanism: Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. –; Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, pp. –. Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London, ), pp. –. Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, . , pp. –; see Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism, pp. –. The Pomponazzi controversies during the early sixteenth century did much to re-advertise such possibilities, if only from the implications of metaphysics.
a bogus spiritual authority. If read allegorically, this might be taken as a particularly courageous re-affirmation of Catholicism. Irrespective of hunting down this particular hare, it is certainly debatable whether we have a dubious case of the ends justifying the means, or whether the means is in accordance with the proper ends of the office. As I have noted above, officia were central to the moral structure of society. Every office, from those of ruler and priest to that of parent, had a conception of its end, or telos, the moral function by which mitigation could be judged, for any office-holder needs must serve the office. ‘Let the end try the man’, as Hal insists ( Henry IV, . . –). The problem is that the Duke is acting as a fraudulent persona towards the innocent Isabella but a licit one with respect to the knowing audience, a tension created by what in Greek tragedy was termed graphos. Casuistic extenuation is, then, crucial to the turning of the plot: most synoptically, Angelo’s casuistry promises tragedy, the Duke’s pulls the comedic rabbits out of the hat. The problems of rule-relaxation had a pointed relevance in , and these may have been under-explored because of our taking to the play too secular and modern a set of political expectations. From reliance on mitigation had become particularly visible as Catholics battled persecution while trying to influence the succession, in the context of which James’s insistence on prerogative power as entailed by his office had disturbing ramifications. For the royal prerogative of mercy was itself an acceptance that good laws were subject to prudence. In the play, this applies to spiritual and temporal conduct. The Duke as friar, standing between Angelo and Isabella, is both an uneasy amalgam of spiritual and temporal authority, and the voice of mitigation as it might be appropriate across both spheres. So too, in his past, he has been a figure of mitigation’s feared corrupting consequence, laxity, something increasingly associated with those demonised casuistic emblems, the Jesuits and their doctrines of equivocation and philosophical sin. The latter allowed even the fattest camels to sidle through the eye of the needle. The former, equivocation, even seems hinted at by the Duke’s own duplicitous disguise, to ‘Pay with falsehood false exacting’ (. . ) – a doing of evil, that good might come of it .
For a corrective, see Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution, pp. –. On philosophical sin see John Kilcullen, Sincerity and Truth: Essays on Arnauld, Bayle and Toleration (Oxford, ), pp. –, a doctrine, he points out, that goes back to Abelard and Anselm; see in particular Peter Abelard, Scito Te Ipsum, in Peter Abelard’s Ethics, ed. and trans. David Luscombe (Oxford, ), pp. –. The controversies, however, post-date Shakespeare. Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, pp. –. Discussions of equivocation were stimulated by Henry Garnet, A Treatise of Equivocation (), a response to the trial of Shakespeare’s
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Here, then, is an implicit if gratuitous reminder that the King’s prerogative could allow him to ease the laws against those marginalised by the Elizabethan Settlement. Yet the range for this exercise of sovereign freedom (or, if mis-liked, exercise of arbitrary will) is itself tantalisingly unspecific. Donna Hamilton has argued that the implication is really support for marginalised non-conformists; Peter Lake the opposite. Pinning it down in this doctrinal fashion goes beyond what the text will bear, and as good or bad a case could be made for seeing conforming Catholics as those in need of relief. An early allusion by a Gentleman to the confessional cleansing of the King of Hungary, with whom, Lucio implies, the Duke is at odds, prepares the ground for either or both unstated possibilities: : Heaven grant us … peace, but not the King of Hungary’s! : Amen. (. . –)
Unfolding a rationale for a policy of accommodation for some beyond the terms of the Settlement could have touched a sympathetic nerve in a king already positioning himself as a moderator between extremes. The play certainly puts a Catholic community full square into James’s court, and the puritan Angelo, a man of precision, the ‘seemer’ and the self-describing ‘saint’, on centre stage. He is not such an unmitigated Tarquinian tyrant that our critical attention should wilt into an easy condemnation. Aware of his inexperience and ill-preparedness, he is unwilling to rule and asks, responsibly, to be tested first – to which the blunt response, ‘No more evasion’ (. . ). So, obedient to the Duke, he tries. In both obedience and self-knowledge lies merit that places him between the devil and the deep blue sea when required to do the impossible; he is a challenge to the Platonic and Ciceronian nostrum that those reluctant
kinsman, Robert Southwell. On the heated debates see Johann Sommerville, ‘The New Art of Lying’, in Edmund Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England, pp. –; Lake, ‘Ministers, Magistrates and the Production of “Order”’, –. A possibility curiously overlooked in Richard Wilson’s assiduous construal of Shakespeare as a Catholic politique: Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester, ), esp. pp. –. The Duke is clearly a lesser prince within the Empire as well as being an absolute ruler. Patterson, James VI and I, ch. , esp. pp. –, and ch. . Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, pp. –; Lake, ‘Ministers, Magistrates and the Production of “Order”’, pp. –. Cf. Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, .
to rule are less likely to be corrupt than seekers after power. There is no such easy sign of a good fit between persona and office . In his egregious legalism, Angelo is also correspondingly aware that laws can only work if applied with disinterest and irrespective of the incidental moral failings of the executioners. Law applies to all not because of their motivations, but because of their actions as and when they are brought before it (. . –; . . –). He may have been a hypocrite, but not through this reasoning, which is here as much at one with James’s jurisprudence as is Isabella’s insistence that the law concerns acts and not thoughts. Angelo is equally aware of his crimes once committed and consistently demands his own punishment. There is reason for showing him mercy, albeit at a probable cost to the loving Mariana. God’s grace extended to all Christian souls (quoth Lucio), and even a rebel, quoth James, is not an ‘utter enemy’. Now in there was talk of a qualified toleration for quiescent Catholics. One recent and probably hostile pamphlet had nevertheless put both cases at length in utramque partem. More secretly, Bishop Bancroft, with James’s complicity was working on oaths of allegiance that Catholic priests might be able to swear in return for greater latitude of conduct. The emphasis on rule’s different relationship to souls and bodies would shortly be a mainstay of James’s own theoretical justifications of his treatment of Catholics after the Gunpowder Plot. In such a context, it is important that the play allows an authenticity for the religious contemplative life, a tending to the well-being of the soul, irrespective of confessional allegiance, if within the ambit of temporal law. The contemplative ideal had been familiar since antiquity, but as Cathy Curtis argues in this volume, its defining contrasts with the active life were variable. The ancient associations of contemplation with philosophy had become overlaid with connotations of monasticism. Thomas Aquinas, for example, had urged that it was only through Christian monasticism that the pagan ideals of contemplative wisdom could be fulfilled. This, challenged before the Reformation by Lorenzo Valla and Leonardo Bruni, had become a subject of Lutheran denigration. Other plays, for
James VI and I, True Lawe, in Workes, p. . [Gabriel Powel,] The Catholikes Supplication unto the Kings Majestie; for Toleration of Catholike Religion in England (London, ). Patterson, James VI and I, p. . For discussion see Peter Harrison, ‘The Natural Philosopher and the Virtues’, in Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter, eds., The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Lorenzo Valla, De professione religiosorum, Opuscula tria, in Opera omnia, vols. (Turin, ), II, pp. –; on Luther, see Harrison, ‘The Natural Philosopher’, pp. –.
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example Hamlet and Love ’s Labour’s Lost, have characters slighting the contemplative ideal (religious or philosophical), but this is not the case in Measure for Measure, which puts before us an expression of the contemplative life as a religious vocation. Isabella is a personification of contemplative priorities, armed with all the principled inflexibility of More’s philosopher Hythloday. Her virtues are more appropriate to the life of regimented seclusion she seeks than to the compromises of action in which she is ineptly involved with Angelo. Her chastity then, is not merely ‘strident, even hysterical’. It must be maintained so uncompromisingly because she is about to take on the full persona of a nun in marriage to Christ, a withdrawal not to any ‘private sphere’ beyond official responsibility but to the black-letter rigours of a devotional office. Given this calling, her chastity is more important than even a brother’s life; its protection is a fear for her soul. Whatever our reactions (Isabella has run the gamut from adorable to nauseating), contemporaries might have seen her either as commendably pure or as expressing a dogmatic and disproportionate rectitude. Standing by the principles required by one’s vocation was normally virtuous; but the cult of virginity was under question in the early seventeenth century. For Donne, it was a vice beyond avarice and unfit for the commonwealth of nature – Elizabeth’s had not been seen as uncontentiously responsible for the commonwealth of England; and for many Protestants, virginal nuns could themselves symbolise ‘The Whore of Babylon’. It would, moreover, have taken only an apprentice Jesuit to argue for mitigation given the invidious choice with which Isabella is confronted. Isabella, then, takes on some of the uncomfortable ambivalence that surrounded principled obstinacy. She is, additionally, unworldly in her surprise that her condemned brother cannot share her priorities – a point that, once unfolded, puts before James the niceties of judging between incommensurable commitments uncompromisingly held: is it Claudio who is squeezed between exercises in legal tyranny? Not if a contemplative ideal is held as sacrosanct, quite possibly if it is losing its lustre. So, the point is reinforced by the interstitial Duke/ Friar that judgement and mitigation may, sometimes, be required across the rules defining the spiritual and temporal dimensions of government. The Duke exemplifies the active life, busying himself about the city and ultimately righting wrongs by authoritative decree and using what
Lake, ‘Ministers, Magistrates and the Production of “Order”’, ; Kamaralli, ‘Writing about Motive’, pp. –; Kliman, ‘Isabella’, for whom the issue is attempted rape, pp. –; cf. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, p. , for the act of rape. William C. Carroll, ‘The Virgin Not: Language and Sexuality in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey, (), –; succinctly see Donne, Paradoxes, XII, pp. , .
we might see as a Machiavellian reason of state for good ends, as Richard Beacon had argued casuistically (but, note, on Cicero’s, not Machiavelli’s, authority); for the purposes of good government, strict law might be put aside. It was a point the Duke hardly needed teaching. At the end, without warning, he asks for Isabella’s hand in marriage; it is a fitting point of aposiopesis. The most famous thing about the play is what’s not there – her response. Yet it is too frequently taken for granted, for with it we reach a genuinely open form of aposiopesis, appropriate to the intellectual ethos of the play. In contrast to the over-responding in the earlier parts (Lucio is responsible for much of it), the last eighty lines are marked by ellipses affording some preparation for what is not to come. The play leaves Isabella’s answer in our hands. In doing so, it requires a judgement about what can happen in such a world as it has portrayed. Is there, for example, to be a consummation between the active and contemplative lives? Would someone like a philosopher-king James be an outcome? Again, is principled adherence to law to be married to the easy exercise of prerogative; will it hold against slippage into tyranny and licence? Put slightly differently, is Isabella and the inflexible austerity of the contemplative ideal part of the problem, or does she stand as a median way between the strict application of the law and the too convenient neglect of its requirements? Is her rectitude as much in need of casuistic easing as Angelo’s initial tyranny; or does she stand as a way between tyranny and licence? As Vienna has veered between such extremes, the future might hold hope of some navigated course, for James succeeds the rigid policy of the Virgin Queen that itself came after the mooted laxity of pre-Reformation England. Could he contemplate relaxation from his predecessor’s tightly fisted and divisive settlement? If my reading is along the right lines, commentators who take for granted Isabella’s acceptance of the marriage offer, or even attribute it to the text, have quite missed the point; directors who so tidy things up try to think for us, forming a gold-ringed fist of doctrinal conclusion from the more inviting hand of rhetoric. What, then, precisely was unfolded before James that Christmas? It was not a manual, a sermon, an ideology, an endorsed or discredited theory, or anything as specific as a discourse on failed republicanism, or
Richard Beacon, Solon His Follie (Oxford, ), p. . Rocklin, ‘Measured Endings’, –. For example, Magedanz, ‘Public Justice’, ; and seemingly Lake, ‘Ministers, Magistrates and the Production of “Order”’, –. Rocklin, ‘Measured Endings’, –.
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a prophecy of civil war. Instead, expressed fancifully, the Duke unfolds the play as a periplous, a navigational aid, something fit to put before a new king in an age of adventure; a map showing the shoals and rocks of licence and tyranny that will help orientate the helmsman and by contrast delineate the properties of rule but without any sure guarantee of success. Blair Worden has claimed that Shakespeare gives us maps more than directions. The generalisation holds for this play. In mapping the difficult and dangerous, Measure for Measure is in large measure a dramatic descant on the persuasive principle of argumentum in utramque partem – putting the audience between the different sides of a question, so that, as proclaimed at the beginning of Henry V, its members have to use their imaginations and complete things for themselves, even reaching beyond the play’s explicit scope. To know the play historically requires that we too map the resources in terms of which responses would have been shaped; but sticking to such a black-letter authenticity in performance can become itself an Angelic tyranny, against which must be balanced the mitigations of a director’s prerogative power , licensing fresh realisation.
Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, . Pater, Appreciations, p. .
Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship: Henry VIII Jennifer Richards
Henry VIII or All is True () may seem an unpromising choice for a study of Shakespeare’s political thought: in the first place, it is not entirely Shakespeare’s work and, in the second, many would argue that it is far from the most successful example of it. Brian Vickers summarises this enduring dissatisfaction with a work that has, unfortunately, two authors. He concludes that for ‘Shakespeare this collaboration, working together with [John] Fletcher throughout a whole play … may have cost him more than he had expected’. This view presents us with a disjointed play the emphases of which change from scene to scene as the work was exchanged between its two writers. One scene that provides an important test-case of this problem is . , in which Katherine and her gentleman usher Griffith reflect on the fall of Cardinal Wolsey. Katherine reiterates criticisms we have heard since the beginning of the play: that Wolsey is dishonest, greedy and selfaggrandising. Griffith, rather surprisingly, offers a more generous view. He takes into account Wolsey’s impressive social advancement and commends his bounty. To many critics Griffith’s judgement reads oddly, but so too does Katherine’s immediate acceptance of it: Whom I most hated living, thou hast made me, With thy religious truth and modesty, Now in his ashes honour. I would like to thank the Australian National University and the British Academy for supporting the presentation of this argument at the ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’ conference. I owe a special thanks to all those attending the conference for their questions and responses, and to Dermot Cavanagh and Mike Pincombe for invaluable comments and suggestions which helped to turn the paper into a chapter.
Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford, ), p. . William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King Henry VIII (All is True), ed. Gordon McMullan (London, ), . . –. All citations from the play are from this edition.
Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship
A reason for disbelief is that Katherine opposes Wolsey as ‘mine enemy’ from early in the play (. . ). This is important, because it gives her moral stature. Unusually, it is Katherine, a catholic queen, who comes to represent the safeguarding of public interest over and against pursuit of personal advantage, most notably when she intercedes on behalf of the commons who are refusing to pay the taxes levied upon them by Wolsey in the king’s name (. ). Scenes such as this one, which represent Katherine at her most eloquent and embattled, are usually celebrated as Shakespeare’s work. As soon as Katherine passes into Fletcher’s hands, she is deemed to speak out of character. Commenting on . , Vickers endorses the concerns of an earlier generation of critics, including the editor of Fletcher’s works, Fredson Bowers, who baulks at what he sees as Katherine’s ‘unmotivated instantaneous capitulation’ when she commends the generous Griffith as an ‘honest chronicler’ (. . ). These changes, Bowers argues, are ‘characteristic of Fletcher’s facile methods to the highest degree’. Finding a coherent political purpose in such a contingently and perhaps hurriedly produced work as Henry VIII seems rather unlikely. Consequently, an important mode of its interpretation lies in the attempt to reconstruct which author was responsible for which part. This is necessary if we want to ensure, as Vickers does, that each writer is given his ‘due’. Nonetheless, the confidence with which this proceeds ignores an unsettling fact about its process of composition that we cannot recover: the extent to which Shakespeare and Fletcher really did collaborate, working across the play together, discussing their work and sharing their ideas about it. This speculation invites us to pose a new question that contributes to a different way of thinking about Henry VIII: is the play really such a fractured text, or does it evidence a consistent thematic as well as political concern that unites its different elements? In short, should we see it as a successful collaboration? Although there is no external evidence to confirm that Henry VIII is a co-authored play – it first appears as one of Shakespeare’s histories in the First Folio – several generations of critics have been confident that Fletcher is its other author and have reached some consensus about which scenes he is responsible for. The contributions to scenic attribution, which range from the ‘intuitive’ approach of James Spedding in to Jonathan Hope’s socio-historical linguistic analysis in , is summarised usefully
Fredson Bowers, ‘Textual Introduction’, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Bowers, vols. (Cambridge, –), VII, p. , cit. Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author, p. .
by the text’s most recent Arden editor, Gordon McMullan. Nonetheless, despite broad agreement among these very diverse scholars, and despite the fact that acknowledgement of the play’s two authors is now commonplace in its citation, very little attention is paid to its co-authorship in critical work. Even authors who are interested in collaborative composition can still betray the residual assumption that it is, primarily, ‘Shakespearean’. My argument focuses on this problem by beginning with a speculative question: if we accept the attribution of scenes established through stylistic and linguistic analysis, and if we look for a pattern of argument across these that might suggest the possibility of Shakespeare and Fletcher collaborating, then what do we find? We are unlikely to be surprised. As critics have already noted, Fletcher treats Wolsey much more generously than Shakespeare does, and not only in . . The two opening scenes of the play, in which Buckingham attacks the Cardinal’s ambition and greed, are usually assigned to Shakespeare. In . , the first scene assigned to Fletcher, we are given such a strikingly different account of Wolsey that it is tempting to read it ironically. This scene presents a dialogue between the Lord Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Lovell and Sir William Sandys, all three of whom have been invited to a feast by the Cardinal. In conversation these characters emphasise Wolsey’s ‘nobility’, while his lavish expenditure is redescribed as an example of generosity that befits his status. Anyone who says otherwise, the Lord Chamberlain suggests, has a ‘black mouth’ (. . ). Arguably, this confirms my opening concern, that Henry VIII is a bad choice for a study of Shakespeare’s political thought. But this is to suppose, of course, that any of Shakespeare’s plays might reveal his beliefs, political or otherwise. Recent literary scholarship is uncomfortable with this assumption, and attempts to establish Shakespeare’s (Catholic) confessional identity from textual evidence have been keenly refuted. Thus, Jeffrey Knapp returns us to an older mode of scholarship dating from the nineteenth century that acknowledged, or even celebrated, the difficulty of locating Shakespeare’s beliefs. In so doing, Knapp makes Shakespeare,
McMullan, ‘Introduction’, in King Henry VIII, ed. McMullan, pp. –; see also Appendix , ‘Attribution and Composition’. See James Spedding, ‘Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Henry VIII?’, Gentleman’s Magazine, (), –, and Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-linguistic Study (Cambridge, ). Shakespeare and Fletcher, King Henry VIII, p. , nn. –. Studies that argue for Shakespeare’s Catholicism from biographical evidence include E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ (Manchester, ); Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, – (New Haven, ); and Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester, ). For a different emphasis on Shakespeare’s religious toleration see Jeff rey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago, ), pp. –; see also Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s
Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship
not a playwright for all time, but one who is unwilling to take up a partisan position. On this view, Henry VIII can be read as making dramatic play out of a refusal to pronounce religious truth. More recently still, Debora Shuger discovers in the double description of Wolsey in Henry VIII evidence of Shakespeare’s ‘charitable hermeneutics’, a dramatic working-out of the mitior sensus, the rule applied in English defamation law that required the generous interpretation of ambiguous statements (so, the insult ‘poxy’ should be taken to refer to smallpox, not venereal disease). The same rule, she argues, shaped Shakespeare’s earlier historical drama, and it reflects his longstanding reluctance to ‘transmit parti pris defamatory rumors’. This supports a new reading of . , which allows that Griffith’s ‘restraint’ restores ‘the bonds of charity’ that Katherine’s criticism threatens. Yet neither Knapp nor Shuger is interested in Henry VIII as a collaborative play. This is the crux of the problem: that Shakespeare’s collaboration in this play, and indeed throughout his career, is all too easily set aside. What difference might this make to a study of Shakespeare’s political thought? To begin with, we may need to acknowledge that some key ideas are not Shakespeare’s, or rather that they are his only by negotiation. Indeed, had Knapp and Shuger been interested in this problem they would have needed to note that this play’s defence of moderation belongs to Fletcher. An early example of this is . , the scene of Wolsey’s fall. In the second half of this scene, assigned to Fletcher, the nobles vent their anger on Wolsey as soon as he has been disgraced. The fury of Buckingham’s attack on Wolsey in . – ‘This butcher’s cur is venommouthed … / … A beggar’s book / Outworths a noble’s blood’ (. . –) – is repeated in . by his kinsman, Surrey. ‘Thy ambition, / Thou scarlet sin’, Surrey spits, ‘robbed this bewailing land / Of noble Buckingham, my fatherin-law’ (. . –). Very quickly, though, this attack is corrected by the Lord Chamberlain: : O my lord, Press not a falling man too far. ’Tis virtue. His faults lie open to the laws: let them, Not you, correct him. My heart weeps to see him So little of his great self. (. . –)
This clearly anticipates Griffith’s correction of Katherine in . .
Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (Aldershot, ) and Jean-Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage (Basingstoke, ). See especially Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, p. . Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia, ), pp. , . Ibid., p. .
This is not to argue that the best bits of Henry VIII are by Fletcher. On the contrary, this defence depends on both authors. Indeed, this is already taking shape in Shakespeare’s opening scenes. In . there is a suggestion that those who find fault are also at fault especially when their criticism is the product of excessive choler. When Buckingham discovers that Wolsey is behind the extravagances of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he berates his intemperance whilst also exemplifying it. ‘Ask God for temperance’, Norfolk pleads with him, ‘that’s th’appliance only / Which your disease requires’ (. . –), although this good advice goes unheeded. ‘Take good heed / You charge not in your spleen a noble person / And spoil your nobler soul’, Katherine warns Buckingham’s accuser (. . –). However, I am suggesting that Fletcher is taking the lead. Shuger may be right that the ‘complex image’ of Wolsey that emerges in . is very ‘Shakespearean’, but this does not mean that it is authored by Shakespeare. If we accept . as the moral centre of the play, which I do, then it is the restraint articulated by Griffith (and even earlier by the Lord Chamberlain) that makes this play an ‘honest’ chronicle. ‘Honest’ is the keyword here. Scenes by Shakespeare worry about the ‘truth’ of accusation. It is never clear, for instance, whether the charge against Buckingham in . has any substance, or whether Anne Bullen is telling the truth about her honesty (chastity) and lack of ambition: ‘By my troth and maidenhead, / I would not be a queen’ (. . –). But in scenes by Fletcher we see a new ethic gradually emerging, an argument which seems counter-intuitive to us, that ‘honesty’ is more reliable, more trustworthy, than the plain ‘truth’. This is to understand ‘honesty’ in its early modern sense of moderation, decency, decorum (OED ), a sense explored in a text with which every Tudor schoolboy was familiar, Cicero’s De officiis (On Duties). In this way Fletcher answers the problem posed by Shakespeare at the start of the play: how can we indict the intemperance of others without espousing what we condemn? This chapter explores how concern about discovering the truth in the slanderous world of the court early in Henry VIII is replaced later in the play by a defence of ‘honesty’ as a means to avoid sectarian tragedy. However, I am also interested in how this shift of emphasis, from ‘truth’ to ‘honesty’, affects our experience of this collaborative drama . Does this focus on Fletcher’s keyword, honesty, enable us to understand co-authorship as an intellectual project rather than an
Ibid.
Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship
economic necessity, and so prompt us to search for the textual evidence for Shakespeare and Fletcher’s political thinking in Henry VIII ? Annabel Patterson turned to a different collaborative project and an acknowledged source for Henry VIII, Holinshed’s Chronicles, for inspiration. Thus, she argues that the contradictions in the representation of political figures in this multi-authored work are reproduced in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play, and serve the purpose of underscoring the contingency of historical ‘truth’. But my argument is different, and to underscore this I will turn to a less well acknowledged source for this play, a collaboration that extended over several decades, A Mirror for Magistrates (–). The Mirror is unusual in that it dramatises the process of collaboration: it depicts the authors of its complaints reading and discussing their sources, and this has important ramifications, I will suggest, for how this work’s moral-political argument – its understanding of ‘justice’ – is worked out. William Baldwin, this work’s original compiler, makes retributive justice its moral. But not only is this hard to sustain in a collaborative work that represents different voices, but the compiler of the edition, John Higgins, tempers this in a new preface. To illustrate how hard it is to apply Baldwin’s moral I will offer one example, the ‘Tragedie of Cardinal Wolsey’ () by Higgins’ close friend, Thomas Churchyard, who will not let us condemn this compromised figure.
Shakespeareans are not unfamiliar with the suggestion that Henry VIII may in fact be a very successful collaboration, or with the appeal to historical sources to support this. Annabel Patterson’s re-evaluation of Holinshed’s Chronicles (, ), a collaborative British history on a massive scale, led her to a rather different appreciation of Henry VIII from
One explanation for the practice of collaboration is the ‘competitive pressures’ of the Jacobean theatre. See Philip C. McGuire, ‘Collaboration’, in Arthur F. Kinney, ed., A Companion to Renaissance Drama (Oxford, ), p. . The Mirror is not usually considered a source for Henry VIII. It is not included in McMullan’s very comprehensive survey of the influences on the play, in Shakespeare and Fletcher, King Henry VIII, pp. –. While Frederick Kiefer’s suggestion in that the play is indebted to Thomas Churchyard’s ‘Tragedie of Cardinal Wolsey’ () is flatly dismissed by Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven, ), p. , n. . An exception to this is Paul V. Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and the de Casibus Tradition (Toronto, ), pp. –. Lily B. Campbell, ed., The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge, ). All references will be to this edition unless otherwise stated, and by page-number within the text.
the one with which we began. Reading Holinshed ’s Chronicles () takes issue with earlier literary historians who had dismissed the Chronicles as, on the one hand, ‘baggy and undisciplined’ and, on the other, boring Tudor propaganda. This work is one of the most famous of Elizabethan collaborative projects, and it involved many contributors who held not only different beliefs and allegiances but opposing ones. For example, two contributors, Edmund Campion and Richard Stanyhurst, were catholics, the former becoming a famous martyr whose execution was recorded in the edition of the work, and yet their material is included alongside contributions by the evangelical protestants William Harrison and Abraham Fleming. This is not evidence of ‘gratuitous duplication’ deriving from editorial laxity, Patterson argues, but ‘a deliberate policy’ which ‘shoulders the responsibility of representing diversity of opinion’. The Chronicles are committed to multivocality and to ‘the idea of collaboration as an agreement to disagree’; they shape a reader who is willing ‘to be his own historian’, engaging sceptically with evidence and recognising that there is always another side. Since the Chronicles is also the main source for Henry VIII, it is hardly surprising that it should inspire a different approach to this play’s seeming lack of coherence, or that Patterson should attempt this. Her reading of Henry VIII turns upon its insistent and ironic use of the terms ‘true’ and ‘truth’, a feature emphasised by the play’s alternative title, All is True, and she connects this to the preoccupation in the Chronicles with the problem of historical representation. Specifically, the Chronicles offers Shakespeare and Fletcher ‘a lively representation of how historians diverge in the issue of evaluation, and how strenuous is the pull of ideological bias’. This is caught in Henry VIII in the representation of contrary responses to Wolsey. Thus, Patterson discovers in . , the dialogue between Katherine and Griffith, a deliberate piecing together of Holinshed’s and Fleming’s very different understandings of Wolsey’s history in the Chronicles. Discrepancies in the representation of the Cardinal inform her argument that ‘Shakespeare’ is self-consciously aware of how
Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed ’s Chronicles (Chicago, ), pp. –. Ibid., pp. –. Annabel Patterson, ‘ “All is True”: Negotiating the Past in Henry VIII’, in R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner, eds., Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum (Newark, Del., ), pp. –, . On ‘true’ and ‘truth’ as keywords in the play see also Anderson, Biographical Truth; Lee Bliss, ‘The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare’s King Henry the Eighth’, ELH, (), –; and Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith, chap. . Patterson, ‘“All is True”’, p. .
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dispute and debate inform collaborative historical work, and the resulting play invites the audience to think on different sides of a problem. What exactly is true is open to competing readings of facts and motivations. The ‘Shakespeare’ of Henry VIII is just ‘one of a series of collaborators in a never-ending process of history writing’. This is a suggestive argument, and Patterson rightly points to the preoccupation in this play with veracity . For example, in the treason trial of Buckingham, which overtakes the duke’s attempt to bring down Wolsey, we simply do not know who is telling the truth, and this is never resolved. The promise of Buckingham’s accuser that ‘I’ll speak but truth’ (. . ) only serves to alert us to this problem, especially since his self-interest has just been highlighted by Katherine: ‘If I know you well, / You were the Duke’s surveyor, and lost your office / On the complaint o’th’ tenants’ (. . –). Henry VIII is closely engaged with the question ‘what is true’ and this illuminates its commitment to fostering debate about the obligations of rulers and its shaping of an audience as independent and sceptical historians. However, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play also asks another question with equal intensity: what is honesty, or rather, what is morally proper? Both these interests are expressed strikingly in the play’s verbal texture: the term ‘true’ is cited nineteen times and ‘truth’ twenty four; ‘honest’ appears thirteen times and ‘honesty’ eight. Identifying how much this second term also matters in Henry VIII will lead to a different way of thinking about the coherence of the play and its political idiom. What matters here is not so much that different viewpoints are expressed across the play but rather how they are managed. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word ‘honesty’ first acquired its prevailing modern connotation of truthfulness and straightforwardness in the sixteenth century (OED d), and it is used in this sense throughout Henry VIII. Wolsey is repeatedly accused of being dishonest or untruthful. Katherine draws our attention to this early in Act : ‘Pray speak in English’, she says bluntly, interrupting Wolsey’s Latin salutation, ‘Here are some will thank you, / If you speak truth, for their poor mistress’ sake’ (. . –). This insinuation of Wolsey’s dishonesty pervades the scene. Katherine is unpersuaded by Wolsey’s promise that he and Campeius have come to deliver their ‘just opinions’ on the divorce question ‘Like free and honest men’ (l. ). Her private view remains that Wolsey means ‘To betray me’ (l. ). Given this, her acquiescent response
Ibid., p. .
to both cardinals, ‘Ye speak like honest men’ (l. ), is ironic. Wolsey’s truthfulness is then questioned again in the next scene by Surrey, who presses him to own up to his corruption: ‘Now, if you can blush and cry “Guilty”, Cardinal / You’ll show a little honesty’ (. . –). However, in this exchange with Surrey Wolsey plays upon a different resonance of honesty that becomes increasingly important in the course of Henry VIII, notably in scenes attributed to Fletcher. ‘Thy ambition, / Thou scarlet sin’, Surrey goads the disgraced Wolsey, ‘robbed this bewailing land / Of noble Buckingham, my father-in-law’ (. . –). ‘If I loved many words, lord’, Wolsey retorts, ‘I should tell you / You have as little honesty as honour’ (ll. –). A few moments later, when Surrey suggests that Wolsey would ‘show a little honesty’ if he blushed for his sins, Wolsey quickly responds: ‘If I blush, / It is to see a nobleman want manners’ (ll. –). Wolsey’s responses point to a different understanding of honesty that he implies Surrey lacks: decency, decorum, comeliness (OED ). This now obsolete sense was well established before the sixteenth century; but its resonance was extended in this period thanks to the reengagement with Cicero’s De officiis, a core text of the Tudor grammar school system. Honestas is the fourth part of moral virtue (honestum), according to Cicero, and by far the most difficult to explain. Cicero attempts to define honestas by offering a cluster of associated terms, propriety or decorum, shamefastness (verecundia) and control of the passions (moderatio). In this sense, honesty might be broadly understood as temperance or moderation. It is concerned with the restraint of the passions, with the regulation of one’s conduct in the company of others. Thus, under this heading Cicero advises that ‘chyding’ should ‘be clere withoute anger: wherwith nothing rightly, nothing discreetely can be done’ (Gr). Wolsey means honesty in this sense when he rebukes Surrey in . . In the first exchange between them, Wolsey suggests that Surrey is not telling the truth: he is not responsible for the fall of Buckingham. But his phrase ‘little honesty’ also glances at Surrey’s intemperate mode of address (‘Thou scarlet sin’), and this is developed more explicitly a few moments later: ‘If I blush, / It is to see a nobleman want manners.’ This usage of honesty deflects criticism of Wolsey’s untruthfulness, but it does so not in order to hide it but to draw attention to a different
For a fuller discussion of Tudor interest in honestas see Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, ). Cicero, Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties, turned oute of latine into english, trans. Nicholas Grimald (London, ), sig. Ev–H v.
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moral ethos: honesty is valued over truthfulness. Undoubtedly, one can be truthful and honest. This is recognised by Wolsey when he describes Cromwell’s sorrowful words as ‘honest truth’ (. . ). Cromwell’s response to Wolsey’s fall – ‘Must I needs forgo / So good, so noble and so true a master?’ (. . –) – is contrasted sharply with the nobles’ taunts. At the same time, however, sometimes telling the truth – or speaking too plainly – is dishonest. Moreover, for Cicero, honesty also has a rational or discriminating aspect; it involves knowing what is the proper thing to do (Gr), and of course this can change depending on particular circumstances. In this respect, honesty is central to all the moral virtues, including justice. ‘[O]ften ther befall seasons’, Cicero explains when discussing the virtue of justice, ‘that those duties, which seeme to be moste meete for a just man, & him, whome we call a good man, be chaunged, and become contrarious.’ For instance, we know that it is right to honour a promise, unless this should prove detrimental in particular circumstances. Meanwhile, in some cases it may become right and proper ‘to denie those thinges, which concerne ones trouth and honestie [veritatem et ad fidem]’ in order to ensure that the principle of justice – ‘that no man be hurt’ – is upheld (Bv). Moreover, we need to recognise that ‘ther be certein duties also to be observed even toward them, of whom you have received wronge’, especially when a wrong-doer has repented (Br). The point to emphasise is that there is a difference between the conception of a virtue in principle and its practice. The virtuous or honest man is able to negotiate this flexibly and so protect social bonds . Readings of Henry VIII that focus only on the keyword ‘truth’ and its cognates tend to emphasise contingency of meaning. In . , Katherine’s praise of Griffith as an ‘honest chronicler’ is seen to highlight the unreliability of historical representation: we have been presented with so many different versions of Wolsey that we cannot know which one is true. But if we understand Katherine’s term of appraisal differently, as connoting moderation, then we discover that Griffith has something significant to say about the need to reflect on the language that exposes excesses of behaviour. Katherine is associated with decorous speech throughout the play, from her concern to discover the cause of the ‘Language unmannerly’ of the commons, prompted by Wolsey’s taxes (. . ), to her warning to Buckingham’s accuser to ‘Deliver all with charity’ (. . ). The promise of her epitaph on Wolsey is consistent with this when she avows to speak of him ‘with charity’ and wishes that ‘his faults lie gently on him’ (. . –). Yet this promise comes to nothing. Rather, she offers a
catalogue of Wolsey’s viciousness in the manner as well as the object of its vituperation, and in this respect she echoes Buckingham and Suffolk. It is this excess of Katherine’s that is corrected in . by Griffith who, in the tradition of in utramque partem, provides another view of Wolsey’s unboundedness and, at the same time, acknowledges for the audience the significance of Wolsey’s repentant advice to Cromwell: ‘I charge thee, fling away ambition. / … Corruption wins not more than honesty’ (. . –). In . Katherine complains that Wolsey ranked ‘Himself with princes’ (ll. –), but Griffith suggests instead that Wolsey was, fittingly, ‘most princely’ in his gift-giving. His final assessment of Wolsey is worth quoting in full since it provides a generous and rounded summation of the two perspectives we have been offered on him in the play, especially in Act . : May it please your highness To hear me speak his good now? : Yes, good Griffith; I were malicious else. : This Cardinal, Though from an humble stock, undoubtedly Was fashioned to much honour. From his cradle He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one, Exceeding wise, fair-spoken and persuading; Lofty and sour to them that loved him not, But to those men that sought him, sweet as summer. And though he were unsatisfied in getting – Which was a sin – yet in bestowing, madam, He was most princely: ever witness for him Those twins of learning that he raised in you, Ipswich and Oxford – one of which fell with him, Unwilling to outlive the good that did it; The other, though unfinished, yet so famous, So excellent in art, and still so rising, That Christendom shall ever speak his virtue. His overthrow heaped happiness upon him, For then, and not till then, he felt himself, And found the blessedness of being little. And, to add greater honours to his age Than man could give him, he died fearing God. (. . –)
The fact that Katherine accepts this correction is a sign that she remains at the moral centre of the play . Truth and honesty overlap in meaning in some scenes, but more often than not they are in conflict, and this exposes a key concern of the
Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship
play: the unmannerliness of those who lay claim to represent the ‘truth’ and the dangers this poses to the commonwealth during a period of crisis. From the beginning of Henry VIII, prior to the hint of the Reformation to come, there is an understanding that characters who insist they speak the truth may lack honesty. For example, the promise of Buckingham’s surveyor in . to ‘speak but truth’ (. . ) constitutes an evasion of Katherine’s advice not to speak intemperately, out of ‘spleen’: If I know you well, You were the Duke’s surveyor, and lost your office On the complaint o’th’ tenants. Take good heed You charge not in your spleen a noble person And spoil your nobler soul. I say, take heed – Yes, heartily beseech you . (. . –)
This is a recurring theme throughout the play, but it is given its fullest treatment in the penultimate scene, attributed to Fletcher, which anticipates the more dangerous age ahead. Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is stripped of his office by the King’s Council so that he can be tried as a ‘private man’ (. . ). Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, suggests that without the protection of his office Cranmer will discover that there are ‘many dare accuse [him] boldly’ (l. ). The accusation against him is that he has promoted the protestant cause. The Lord Chancellor first advances this claim, complaining that he has filled the realm ‘with new opinions, / Diverse and dangerous, which are heresies / And not reformed, may prove pernicious’ (ll. –). Developing this, Gardiner urges ‘sudden’ reformation of these heretics (l. ), in the same manner as those who tame ‘wild horses’: they ‘stop their mouths with stubborn bits and spur ’em / Till they obey the manage’ (ll. –). Otherwise, the realm will be plagued by ‘Commotions, uproars’ just like ‘upper Germany’ (ll. –). In this exchange, Gardiner casts himself as a plain speaker seeking to expose deceit and corruption. When Cranmer complains of his treatment at their hands, insisting that he has sought ‘ever to do well’ (l. ) and reminds Gardiner that ‘Love and meekness … / Become a churchman better than ambition’, the Bishop of Winchester loses patience (ll. –): : My lord, my lord, you are a sectary. That’s the plain truth. Your painted gloss discovers, To men that understand you, words and weakness. (ll. –)
There is an uncanny echo of . . Cranmer is exposed and taunted by his enemy; meanwhile, Gardiner’s sharpness prompts Cromwell to intervene
just as the Lord Chamberlain sought to deflect or mitigate Surrey’s unremitting attack on Wolsey: : My Lord of Winchester, you’re a little, By your good favour, too sharp. Men so noble, However faulty, yet should find respect For what they have been. ’Tis a cruelty To load a falling man. (ll. –)
This time, however, the fall does not happen. This is because Cranmer’s honesty, and the dishonesty of Gardiner and the councillors by comparison, is recognised by the king. ‘I had thought / They had parted so much honesty among ’em – / At least good manners’, says Henry at the outset as he overlooks the scene, ‘as not thus to suffer / A man of his place, and so near our favour, / To dance attendance on their lordships’ pleasures’ (ll. –). This lack of decorum is emphasised again later when Henry intervenes directly: Was it discretion, lords, to let this man, This good man – few of you deserve that title – This honest man, wait like a lousy footboy At chamber door? And one as great as you are? (ll. –)
Cranmer’s honesty is on display throughout. ‘Win straying souls with modesty’ (l. ), he advises Gardiner, who is urging ‘sudden’ and sharp reformation. He also refuses to respond in kind to Gardiner’s taunts: ‘reverence to your calling makes me modest’ (l. ). Once Cranmer produces the King’s ring, a sign of the favour in which he is held, Cromwell quickly recognises that they have made a mistake in seeking ‘tales and informations / Against this man, whose honesty the devil / And his disciples only envy at’ (ll. –). In contrast, the plain-speaking Gardiner is exposed as unmannerly. When Cromwell urges restraint, Gardiner turns on him: ‘Do not I know you for a favourer / Of this new sect? Ye are not sound’ (ll. –). ‘Would you were half so honest’, Cromwell sharply responds (l. ). This is not to make Henry VIII Fletcher’s play. Not only does . return us to the problem posed in Shakespeare’s opening scenes – how can we indict the intemperance of others without espousing what we condemn? – but it is supported, after all, by the preceding scene, attributed to Shakespeare. In . the king reveals to Cranmer the plot against him, testifies to his ‘truth and honesty’ and, with rare insight, acknowledges that those telling the truth do not always win in debate: that ‘not ever / The justice and the truth o’th’ question carries / The due o’th’ verdict with it’
Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship
(. . , –). Like Fletcher’s ‘Wolsey’, Shakespeare’s ‘Henry’ recognises that truth and honesty can co-exist; however, we are also about to watch a scene that represents the other argument of this play, as a character who claims to represent the ‘truth’, yet who lacks honesty, almost wins . Scenes such as these make Henry VIII a Reformation play in a very particular sense: it offers less a celebration of the protestant Reformation – a reading apparently invited by Cranmer’s prophecy of the baby Elizabeth’s triumphant reign in the final scene – than a reaffirmation of the value of ‘modestie and temperance of speech’ in political debate that midTudor humanists arguably sought to inculcate . Indeed, in the context of a play that makes ‘truthfulness’ suspect, Cranmer’s final promise that ‘Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror [my italics]’, the ‘servants’ to Elizabeth I, will also wait on her successor, James VI and I, becomes an uncomfortable reminder of the persecution attendant on the not-so-peaceful Reformation (. . –).
‘Collaboration’, argues Jeffrey Masten, ‘was the Renaissance English theater’s dominant mode of textual production.’ This is no doubt an exaggerated claim, as Jeffrey Knapp complains, because there is so little evidence to support it. The King’s Men, the company that produced Henry VIII, is unusual in supporting more co-authored than sole-authored plays over its ‘lifespan’. To ignore this detail is to ignore the ‘ways in which co-authorship was actually conceived during the period’, and the records show, Knapp argues, that contemporaries ‘found single authorship far easier to conceptualize’. This may be true if we take as our starting-point the title pages of printed plays. Yet outside the theatre there is plenty of evidence to suggest that co-authorship was widespread, and some of these works provided inspiration for dramatic writings. Holinshed’s Chronicles is one example already cited, but there are several others, including the one which I propose to consider here: The Mirror for Magistrates. Can this project help us to understand how co-authorship might contribute to Henry VIII ’s defence of moderation? I suggest that it can. The Mirror endured as the period’s most influential example of the de casibus tradition, the tragic form that moralises the rise and fall of corrupt
Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum () (Menston, ), sig. Fv. Jeff rey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, ), p. . Jeff rey Knapp, ‘What is a Co-Author?’, Representations (), .
rulers, and it is this form that Henry VIII, with its actual and anticipated falls, reanimates. However, I am less interested in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s revival of this pattern than with how attention to the textual problems posed by this collaborative work can help us to resolve the difficulty of Henry VIII . In this final section I will turn to the Mirror, and especially to its representation of Cardinal Wolsey, considering it not so much as a source, although too little has been made of Shakespeare’s interest in it, but as an analogous work whose practice and representation of collaboration illuminates precisely the significance of the tempered or temperate understanding of history commended by Shakespeare and Fletcher. The status of the Mirror as a collaboration is highlighted in the second of two prefaces to the printed edition of . In this, William Baldwin, the project’s original compiler, tells us that the idea for this work originated with the printer John Wayland, who was planning a new edition of John Lydgate’s translation of Boccaccio’s Fall of Princes and who had been counselled to commission a continuation of this, extending it ‘unto this presente time’. Baldwin, who was approached by Wayland, ‘refused utterly to undertake it’ without any ‘helpe’, and confesses that he hoped ‘even so to shift my handes’ (). But Wayland was not to be beaten. He found Baldwin seven collaborators who ‘throughe a generall assent at an apointed time and place gathered together to devise’ this continuation. Together they reviewed Boccaccio’s work and then ‘opened suche bookes of Cronicles as we had there present’. It is George Ferrers, one of the named co-authors, who suggests that they should begin ‘where Bochas left, whiche was about the ende of king Edwarde the thirdes raigne’, and who then starts them off by taking ‘upon me the miserable person of sir Robert Tresilian chiefe Justice of Englande’ (, ). The Mirror is represented as a collaborative work in a particular sense: each author assumes the persona of an historical figure agreed upon in advance from the collective reading of different chronicle sources. This is recorded in the prose links between the tragedies of the early editions of the Mirror. However, the Mirror is also a collaborative work in a different way. Like Boccaccio’s Fall of Princes, it is an unfinished work, a sprawling project that requires more collaborators than Baldwin and Wayland are able to find. Indeed, Baldwin explains that he had intended that the Mirror would extend to ‘Quene Maries time’ but was ‘faine’ to have ended ‘it much sooner’ for lack of help. For this reason, he says, the Mirror should stand as ‘a patarne’ until the remaining tragedies ‘be ready’ (). In Baldwin oversaw the publication of a second edition which included eight more
Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship
tragedies, while significantly expanded editions appeared in subsequent years under the direction of new compilers. This second edition includes John Higgins’ The First Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates in , which covers ancient British history, and the composite Mirror of , also overseen by Higgins, and which includes new complaints, among them Thomas Churchyard’s ‘Tragedie of Cardinal Wolsey’. This makes for a complex process of revision and extension. Yet scholarly work on the Mirror tends to focus on the first editions of and , often conceived as ‘Baldwin’s Mirror ’. This is not just a matter of expediency. ‘Baldwin’s Mirror ’ is deemed the true work because it offers a coherent moral-political argument. According to Lily B. Campbell, its thesis is that magistrates who fail to curtail their private will, and so offend in their office, which is the administration of justice, are justly punished by God: For as Justice is the chief vertue, so is the ministracion thereof, the chiefest office: & therefore hath God established it with the chiefest name, honoring and calling Kinges, & all officers under them by his owne name, Gods … God can not of Justice, but plage such shameles presumption and hypocrisy, and that with shamefull death, diseases, or infamy. ()
Of the later compilers, John Higgins (–c. ) is singled out for particular criticism. Campbell, this work’s indefatigable and only modern editor, describes him as a bad poet – or rather, a poet only ‘by selfdetermination’ – and one of Baldwin’s ‘worst readers’. The problem is that Higgins misunderstood the political argument of the Mirror. In his new edition, Higgins replaced the prose frame providing moral commentary with ‘poetical lenvoys’, which are ‘devoted to purely narrative and descriptive detail’ (). An example of this is Churchyard’s ‘Tragedie of Cardinal Wolsey’. In place of the co-authored commentary, this tragedy begins with a lenvoy in which the character invokes the ‘noter’s’ sympathy (). Moreover, moral commonplaces announced early in this history are not reinforced by the narrative that follows. ‘Fye on prowde pompe, and gilted bridels bosse’, Wolsey asserts, ‘O glorious golde, the gaping after thee, / So blindes mens eyes, they can no daunger see’ (). Yet in the narrative that follows we are not straightforwardly told why Wolsey ‘hath bene punished’ for the reader’s ‘soner amendment’.
See Lily B. Campbell, ed., Parts Added to The Mirror for Magistrates by John Higgins and Thomas Blenerhasset (Cambridge, ), introd.; see also Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, ). Campbell, ed., Parts Added, pp. , .
‘This tragedy is not going to be about some precept that Wolsey demonstrates’, Lawrence Green complains. ‘It is going to be an adventure story in an exciting world.’ Yet Baldwin’s preface is a misleading starting-point. It gives coherent purpose to a project that represents, as well as worries about, diversity of opinion. Quite simply, not all of the tragedies illustrate Baldwin’s moral straightforwardly, even in the early editions. Part of the problem is the decision to make the fallen speak in the first person; consequently, they are unnerving and slippery moral commentators on their own actions. However, another problem is the emphasis on this as a work of collaboration. Rarely is Baldwin’s moral easily located. Indeed, his coauthors represent a variety of responses to the complaints, from righteous anger (‘Every man rejoyced to heare of a wicked man so marvaylously well punished’ ()), to sympathy (‘This straunge adventure of the good erle drave us al into a dumpne, inwardly lamenting his wofull destynye’ ()). They also often introduce further doubts. To take one example, it is never clear whether Jack Cade is guilty of ambition, as his ghost confesses (–), or whether he is the scourge of an unjust king, Henry VI, as one of the commentators suggests (). Even among themselves, the commentators cannot agree on what kind of man Cade really was. According to one, he is a man ‘base borne, of no abilitye’ (), but for another he is undoubtedly ‘a gentylman by his learnyng’ (). Discrepancies such as these lead Jessica Winston to read the Mirror much as Patterson does the Chronicles, as a work that ‘helped to promote a public discourse about governance in Elizabethan England’. But I would go further than this: this work also reflects on the conduct of that debate, and this entails revising Baldwin’s moral frame. Later contributors like John Higgins do not just add more tragedies to the Mirror : they also modify and clarify its original argument. In The First Parte of the Mirour for Magistrates, Higgins initially follows Baldwin’s preface almost word for word; however, it quickly becomes apparent that he is shifting its moral focus. Higgins has nothing to say about divine punishment. He is interested in worldly justice and its relationship to the other virtues identified in Cicero’s De officiis as essential to the functioning of the commonwealth. There are four cardinal virtues, Higgins notes, paraphrasing Cicero, and
Lawrence D. Green, ‘Modes of Perception in the Mirror for Magistrates’, Huntington Library Quarterly, (–), . Campbell, ed., The Mirror for Magistrates, pp. , . Jessica Winston, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and Public Political Discourse in Elizabethan England’, Studies in Philology, (), .
Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship
each has a relationship to the others. This means that justice is no longer the leading virtue; it depends on the other virtues for its enactment: though Justice that incomparable virtue, as the auncient Civilians define hir, be a perpetuall and constant will which geveth to every man his right. Yet if she be not constant, which is the gift of fortitude, nor equal in discerning right from wrong, wherin is prudence, nor use proportion in judgement and sentence which pertaineth to temperaunce, shee can never be called equitie or Justice, but fraude, deceate, injustice and injurie.
Th is is a significant change in focus, but one, I would argue, that foregrounds and clarifies the problems of interpretation posed by the Mirror ’s early co-authors. With the loss of the prose frame in the later editions, readers are encouraged, not to fit tragedy to a broad moral argument, but rather to ‘use proportion in judgement’ to ensure that justice is done. Arguably, this emphasis is represented positively in Churchyard’s ‘Tragedie of Cardinal Wolsey’. Churchyard’s ‘Wolsey’ usefully puts us through our paces. In the second half of the tragedy he moralises his pride, but in the first half he offers a slightly different perspective, implying that he ‘could excuse, right much of mine offence’ (). For example, he commends to our attention his generous treatment of his servants: ‘I joyde to see, my servantes thrive so well, / And go so gay, with little that they gote’ (). It is difficult to decide on the ‘right’ response to this tragic protagonist. Should we sympathise with his fall, as he clearly invites us to do in the prose preface (), or should we join in the condemnation of his corruption? There is a suspicion that Wolsey is perhaps too eloquent an advocate in his own cause. In the first half he displays his pride in his achievements: a poor man’s son who excelled as a scholar and became the king’s confidante. He is a self-declared ‘suttell fox’, who reveals how he used his talents to win favour: ‘Wee worke with wiles, the mindes of men like wax, / The fawning whelp, gets many a peece of bred’ (). Could he be working his wiles on the ‘noter’ of his ‘calamity’, Churchyard, who has sympathised with and recorded his tale, and thus on us ()? This suspicion is certainly raised. Yet, at the same time, the question of who is to blame, raised by Wolsey, is never fully resolved: ‘The Pope, or pride, or peevish parts of mine, / Made King to frowne, and take the seale from mee’ (). The King’s reasoning remains mysterious. Meanwhile, Churchyard also uses ‘Wolsey’ as a positive example to draw attention to the failings of his wealthy noble peers:
Campbell, ed., Parts Added, p. .
More houses gay, I builte, then thowsands do That have enough, yet will no goodnes shoe: And where I built, I did maintaine it to, With such great cost, as few bestowes I troe. ()
We are invited to engage critically with the excuses Wolsey offers, but ultimately he is represented as a flawed character who carries this mirror’s moral argument. Henry VIII, I am suggesting, is similarly putting us through our paces, making us ‘use proportion in judgement’ to see that justice is done. We are asked to use moderation repeatedly in judging fallen characters: this extends to Buckingham as well as Wolsey. Until . , there is a suspicion that the case against the duke of Buckingham has been concocted by Wolsey. Buckingham’s surveyor testifies that the duke has been overheard promising to play ‘ “The part my father meant to act upon / Th’usurper”’, Richard III (. . –), but there is no evidence to support this, and Katherine is quick to cast doubt on the integrity of the surveyor, as we have seen. Even in . the suspicion persists, as Buckingham magnanimously forgives all his enemies and prepares for his death. Yet his de casibus speech is also notoriously troubling, since the advice he offers to those he leaves behind is incriminating. Like his father, he argues, he has fallen at the hands of his servant, and then advises others thus: ‘Where you are liberal of your loves and counsels / Be sure you be not loose’ (. . –). Is this a tacit admission of his guilt? Was the surveyor speaking the truth after all? This is never resolved. But moderation is exercised across the play more generally, by Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s contrasting representations of Wolsey, as well as by the compromised moral stance assumed by Wolsey’s accusers in scenes by both authors. These shifting perspectives make this a coherent drama in terms of its moral-political purpose, although it may not be pleasing to critics who value believable characters, or satisfying to scholars who still seek evidence, inside or outside the text, of Shakespeare’s ‘beliefs’.
The commonwealth
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy Phil Withington
At first glance, The Merry Wives of Windsor, described by H. J. Oliver as a ‘portrait of life in an English country town’, is not Shakespeare’s most obviously ‘political’ play. With the exception of Falstaff, the play’s characters are almost invariably reduced by critics to their social and economic functions. For example, in her excellent article on ‘Falstaff and the Comic Community’, Anne Barton convincingly traces the genealogy of Falstaff back to Aristophanes while somewhat lazily depicting the indigenous community of Windsor as ‘small town’, ‘middle class’ and ‘bourgeois’. This echoes George K. Hunter’s description of the comedy as quintessentially ‘bourgeois’ and Oliver’s influential characterisation of the play as a ‘citizen comedy’ in the manner of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Massinger. Of course, the major difference between The Merry Wives of Windsor and (for example) The Shoemaker ’s Holiday, Eastward Ho!, A Chaste Maid of Cheapside or The City Madam is that city comedies are invariably situated in London: that is, in a ‘real’ city with ‘real’ citizens. Shakespeare, apparently perversely, set his only attempt at the most popular and commercially successful genre of the day in a provincial town of a few thousand souls. Even as a commentary on nascent capitalist and class antagonisms, the play seems half-baked and anomalous. Recent developments in the historiography of early modern England make such dismissals of the play not only less plausible but also
H. J. Oliver, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Oliver (London, ), p. lxvi. Anne Barton, ‘Falstaff and the Comic Community’, in Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Since at least the work of J. Dover Wilson it is more usual for critics to simply ignore the play entirely: J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge, ), p. . George K. Hunter, ‘Bourgeois Comedy: Shakespeare and Dekker’, in E. A. J. Honigmann, ed., Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison (Manchester, ), pp. –; Oliver, ‘Introduction’, p. lxvi. Barton, ‘Falstaff and Comic Community’, pp. –.
anachronistic. The first of these is the well-known interest in popular political consciousness and agency beyond the ‘summit’ of ‘court’ and ‘county’. One driver of this trend has been a social historiography interested in the extent and nature of political power across England’s variegated local communities. Another has been the exploration by literary and intellectual historians of the wider promulgation of values, knowledge and beliefs through different kinds of oral and written media. A second historiographical development involves a shift in the way historians now approach early modern cities and towns. As Patrick Collinson and John Craig put it, ‘the history of towns’ has traditionally been regarded as ‘essentially infrastructural, a matter of demography, distributive economics and consequential social arrangements and readjustments’. It is only relatively recently that historians have become interested in exploring the ‘distinctive urban culture’ of the period. Different historians have inevitably unpacked this ‘culture’ in different ways. For example, Collinson has been interested in the religious dynamics of the English ‘Protestant town’. Robert Tittler has explored the ‘political culture’ constructed by post-reformation urban elites through their use of architecture, history, law and portraiture. Jonathan Barry has considered the tenets of
Patrick Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’ (), in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, ), p. . Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ (), in Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, pp. –; Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle, eds., The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, ); Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. – (Cambridge, ); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. – (Basingstoke, ); Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: The Swallowfield Articles of ’, The Historical Journal, (), –. Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office-Holding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c. – (Basingstoke, ), pp. –; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, – (Cambridge, ); Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England (Oxford, ); Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, – (Cambridge, ). Patrick Collinson and John Craig, ‘Introduction’, in Collinson and Craig, eds., The Reformation in English Towns, – (Basingstoke, ), p. . Jonathan Barry, ‘Introduction’, in Barry, ed., The Tudor and Stuart Town: A Reader in English Urban History, – (Harlow, ), p. . Patrick Collinson, ‘The Shearmen’s Tree and the Preacher: The Strange Death of Merry England in Shrewsbury and Beyond’, in Collinson and Craig, eds., The Reformation in English Towns, pp. –; Collinson, ‘The Protestant Town’, in Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, ), pp. –. Robert Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c. – (Oxford, ); Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. – (Oxford, ).
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
‘civility’ and ‘freedom’ that characterised the associational cultures of England’s urban ‘middling sort’. What all these accounts show is the political nature of urban citizenship in the age of Shakespeare – be it in the struggle over religious ideology and practice, the legitimisation of (and resistance to) new kinds of rule, or the inculcation of social codes and conventions. More to the point, this urban citizenship was not restricted, as certain critics have assumed, to London, but also characterised the expanding network of cities, boroughs and corporate towns across provincial England. Viewed in these terms The Merry Wives of Windsor – a play that is nothing if it is not about urban citizenship – can be considered in new and interesting ways . As importantly, the concept of urban culture to emerge from these accounts is surprisingly stable and tends to involve one of three analytical aims. These include attempting to recover the experiences and identities of urban inhabitants; recognising the institutional structures and practices that shaped and reproduced these experiences and identities; and understanding those experiences and identities according to the vocabularies of the time. This approach to culture has allowed urban historiography to outgrow the functional sociology of its formative years without jettisoning its fundamental concern for social structures and practices. As Barry suggests, it was by participating in the ‘institutions and practices embedded in urban life’ – the assemblies, courts and councils of corporate life – that inhabitants developed their personal and public identities. Particularly relevant to the current discussion is that the same institutions and practices provide an important and largely neglected context for understanding the circulation and performance of literary texts more usually associated with early modern culture – not least treatises and discourses that theorised political power and works of ‘poesy’ that dramatised its practice. It is, of course, with the textual interconnections between politics and poesy that this volume is concerned: the manner in which one kind of genre provided
Jonathan Barry, ‘Bourgeois Collectivism? Urban Association and the Middling Sort’, in Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds., The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics, – (Basingstoke, ), pp. –; Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture in Early Modern England: The Meanings of Urban Freedom’, in Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack, eds., Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Th omas (Oxford, ), pp. –. John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (Basingstoke, ), pp. –. Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth. Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, ), pp. –. See Christopher Brooks, ‘Apprenticeship, Social Mobility and the Middling Sort, –’, in Barry and Brooks, eds., The Middling Sort of People, pp. –. Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture’, p. .
meaningful contexts for the other. The underlying point of this contribution is that, insofar as The Merry Wives of Windsor is concerned, the realm of social practice offers as important a context in which to place and explore the political vocabulary employed by Shakespeare as the more conventional political treatises valorised by historians of political thought. Indeed, because Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were first and foremost texts to be performed in front of large and socially diverse audiences, this wider sense of context is not only desirable but imperative if the full possibilities of meaning and appropriation are to be appreciated. This chapter suggests that while the textual interconnections between Shakespeare’s history or Roman plays and the work of Machiavelli or Hobbes are important and intriguing, so too are those between a comedy like The Merry Wives of Windsor and the everyday experiences and expectations of its provincial and metropolitan audiences. That is not to say that recovering such contexts takes us beyond or outside texts: most evidence of early modern social practices is, by definition, textual in nature. Moreover, the kinds of text most likely to illuminate social conventions and attitudes come with their own interpretative problems. Administrative records tend to prescribe rather than describe procedures and underlying assumptions: they are often as ideological in their intent as more conventionally political documents such as treatises and pamphlets. Likewise, legal records – an extraordinarily rich source for social historians – by their very provenance accentuate moments of conflict and are themselves shot through with the language and perspectives of legal professionals. Yet if the generic and literary qualities of such material pose significant challenges, then they also offer interpretative possibilities. Most importantly, as ideological and literary constructions they are open to the kind of analyses usually reserved for more literary writing. In particular, the use of language in administrative and legal records can be quite as telling as political treatises or works of poesy. It follows that evidence of the same terms and vocabularies in (for example) civic ordinances, translations of Cicero and city comedies provide one means of tracing a particular discourse (by which is simply meant a bundle of terms and associated practices) between different contexts: the council chamber, the grammar school, the theatrical stage. It is precisely this kind of discursive resonance between social life and literary performance that this chapter describes. The discourse in question can be closely linked to an ethos of urban citizenship increasingly familiar to the ‘middling sort’ within England’s
Peltonen, Classical Humanism, especially ch. , is a notable attempt to widen the contextual net.
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
boroughs and cities over the course of the sixteenth century, and which was characteristic of precisely those institutional topographies described by Tittler and Barry. However, Shakespeare is by no means straightforward in his representation of this ethos – not least because in the course of The Merry Wives of Windsor it is female rather than male householders who emerge as the true practitioners and guardians of what is ostensibly a masculine political culture. In this sense, twentieth-century editors’ inclusion of Mistress Margaret Page and Mistress Alice Ford among what they called the ‘citizens’ in the play’s dramatis personae is neither incidental nor accidental: rather, it is indicative of the strain in the play that seems to show that, in Windsor at least, women could attain what were largely regarded to be masculine attributes and virtues. As importantly, these attributes are enacted not in the masculine spaces of common council and guild assembly but in domestic sites controlled by women. It is here rather than the town hall that Falstaff, the embodiment of dissolute gentility and incivility, is manipulated and humiliated by the very (female) citizens he seeks to exploit. The argument is made in three stages. The next section briefly outlines what contemporaries meant by urban citizenship and how Windsor in the late sixteenth century – like the Stratford-upon-Avon of Shakespeare’s childhood – epitomised that culture . The second half of the chapter then considers The Merry Wives of Windsor in relation to the civic life of the borough and concludes by demonstrating how it is Mistress Ford and Mistress Page (rather than their husbands or, indeed, Falstaff ) who personify many of the values central to good citizenship. In this way, the play raises questions not only about the efficacy and possibility of good citizenship in England’s cities and boroughs, but also its relationship to gendered roles and identities. England underwent an intense and largely underestimated process of urbanisation in the hundred years after – so much so that by the time of the outbreak of civil war in there had emerged what might best be described as an ‘English corporate system’. This urbanisation
See, for example, ‘The Persons of the Play’, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, nd edn (New York, ), p. . There is no list of dramatis personae in either the Quarto or Folio texts of the play. Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. –; Tittler, Architecture and Power, pp. , –; Paul Slack, ‘Great and Good Towns, –’, in Peter Clark, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume II, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
was as much institutional and cultural as demographic in nature, and was structured first and foremost by royal charters of incorporation. This involved towns and cities of all shapes and sizes petitioning the Crown – often over decades – for various rights, privileges, offices and liberties to be confirmed and/or invented; for the community to take on a fictional legal identity that could be represented in parliament and court of law; and for these substantial economic, legal and political gains to be recorded on legal parchment. The fact of this process is undeniable. In there were incorporated cities and boroughs in England (compared with royal burghs in Scotland). By the number had risen to (compared with only in Scotland). The creation of a nationally extensive and systemic corporate culture was part of a much larger, complex and variegated process by which (among other things) a culture of citizenship was promulgated across England. This was a culture that, while ostensibly linked to medieval notions of social corporeality and corporatism, was simultaneously infused with – and indeed enthused by – sixteenth-century Ciceronian humanism. The point of convergence was the early modern concept of ‘commonwealth’. The corporate system was one means by which England’s burgeoning ‘middling sort’ participated in, and were increasingly conscious of, the public life of the commonwealth at the local level, in the form of what they termed their ‘city commonwealths’, and at the national level, as participants in the respublica anglorum: the ‘commonwealth of Englishmen’. As such, the terms ‘freemen’, ‘burgess’
Jan de Vries, European Urbanisation, – (London, ), pp. –; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. –. G. H. Martin, ‘Introduction’, in H. A. Mereweather and A. J. Stephens, The History of the Boroughs and Municipal Corporations, ed. G. H. Martin, vols. (London, ), pp. vi–x; Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns, ch. ; Catherine F. Patterson, Urban Patronage in Early Modern England: Corporate Boroughs, the Landed Elite and the Crown, – (Stanford, ); Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. –. Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, p. . Robert Tittler, ‘The Incorporation of the Boroughs, –’, History, (), –. Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, ), p. ; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, – (Cambridge, ), pp. xii–xvii; Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, – (Cambridge, ); Cathy Shrank, ‘Rhetorical Constructions of a National Community: The Role of King’s English in Mid-Tudor Writing’, in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, eds., Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, ), pp. –; Shrank, Writing the Nation, especially ch. , ; Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, ); Peltonen, Classical Humanism; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, ch. . Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, ch. ; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (Yale, ), pp. –. Thomas Wilson, The State of England anno. Dom. , ed. F. J. Fisher, Camden Miscellany, XVI (), p. ; Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (London, ).
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
and ‘citizen’ were not, as historians have often assumed, simply economic labels or signifiers of status and residence (although citizenship certainly involved all of these things). Rather they were also designations of increased levels of public consciousness, participation and power outwith the monarchical court. Such designations were closely linked to those (familiar) institutions around which citizenship and freedom were based and which were standardised by the incorporating process. These included economic companies and guilds (for economic management), common councils and aldermanic benches (for urban decision-making), juries and quarter sessions (for civic magistracy), and parliament. By , per cent of MPs were elected by incorporated ‘city commonwealths’ – more than twice the number elected by corporate communities sixty years earlier. However, the labels ‘freeman’, ‘citizen’ and ‘burgess’ also came to prescribe the personal and ‘civil’ qualities that should be common to each individual within the city commonwealth. These included discretion, wisdom, honesty, decorum, and an awareness of and responsibility towards the public good: attributes that classical authors conflated into the concept of honestas. These qualities enabled citizens to converse and communicate together – to live in communities – successfully. They were also the reason some of the ‘better’ citizens should and could rule over others: they had the personal ‘abilities’ (as contemporaries described them) to do so. In the hundred years after , therefore, an English version of civic aristocracy (in the Aristotelian and Ciceronian sense of merit popularised by Erasmus) was disseminated by the Crown and appropriated by townsmen as the best means to govern their city commonwealths. This civic aristocracy became the prevailing political culture from Penzance in Cornwall to Newcastle-upon-Tyne in Northumberland; from Ludlow in the Welsh Marches to Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast; and from
For dismissive accounts of civic designations see Michael Walzer, ‘Citizenship’, in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, ), p. ; Conal Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke, ), pp. –; Keith Wrightson, ‘Estates, Degrees and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Penelope J. Corfield, ed., Language, History and Class (Oxford, ), p. . Phil Withington, ‘Two Renaissances: Urban Political Culture in Post-Reformation England Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal, (), –. Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, p. . Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, pp. –; Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture’, pp. –; Brooks, ‘Apprenticeship’, pp. –; Slack, ‘Great and Good Towns’, p. ; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, p. . Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, p. . Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, ); Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. –.
Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire to the New Borough of Windsor in Berkshire. Indeed, Windsor was a typical ‘city commonwealth’ for a number of reasons. First, it was located in an area – along the Thames Valley – where the process of urbanisation was particularly intense. Second, its burgesses were known to have coveted and petitioned for a charter for at least thirty years before they finally secured one in : indeed, the first performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor (in ) and publication of the text (as a Quarto in ) coincided with sustained lobbying on the part of the townsmen. Third, this persistence was fuelled in part by the fact that the corporate community had quite formidable urban rivals, in the form of the Castle and Dean and Chapter, to contend with – institutions and attendant populations that, like universities and cathedrals, challenged civic authority and control of urban resources on a regular basis. Fourth, in Windsor as elsewhere the pursuit of incorporation – and the relative autonomy and empowerment it provided – drew burgesses into patronage networks with legal counsellors and courtiers: men with skills and access that allowed them to solicit and represent the borough’s interests in London. Finally, there was a self-conscious effort to reform the ‘city commonwealth’ into a place of ‘comely order’ even before incorporation was achieved – in part to justify the powers and privileges that followed, in part because ‘civility’ was at the heart of any ‘urbanity’ inspired by civic humanism. It was less typical, of course, that Shakespeare should write a play about the citizens of Windsor at precisely the moment when the campaign for incorporation was reaching a climax. In this, Windsor was unique, although Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abingdon (published as a Quarto in ; the borough was incorporated in ) was, as we shall see, a play that scrutinised many of the same issues as The Merry Wives of Windsor from the other end of the telescope. Therefore the starting premise of this chapter is that although The Merry Wives of Windsor is most certainly about ‘life in an English provincial town’ and retains, in the words of the Norton Shakespeare , ‘a contemporary,
Withington, Politics of Commomwealth, pp. –. Bodleian MS Ashmole , ‘Collections for the History of the Town of New Windsor’, fols. r–v, v, r; Robert Richard Tighe and James Edward Davis, eds., Annals of Windsor, Being a History of the Castle and Town (London, ), pp. –, . Catherine Patterson, ‘Corporations, Cathedrals, and the Crown: Local Dispute and Royal Interest in Early Stuart England’, History, (), –. Phil Withington, ‘Edward Hake’s Oration before Queen Elizabeth I, August ’, in Court and Country in the Reign of Elizabeth I: A New Critical Edition of John Nichol ’s ‘Progresses’, eds. Jayne Archer, Elizabeth Clarke and Elizabeth Goldring (Oxford, forthcoming). ‘Collections for the History of the Town of New Windsor’, fols. , , . Walter Cohen, ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard and Maus, p. .
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
domestic, and non-aristocratic feel unique in Shakespearean drama’, it is quite as saturated with political processes and culture as the dynastic struggles recorded in Henry IV and Henry V (plays in which, according to critical consensus, the ‘real’ Falstaff ’ stands up); the explorations into magistracy and justice in Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice (written around the same time as The Merry Wives of Windsor); or the representations of republicanism found in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. However, in this instance the ‘city’ in question is not Vienna, Venice, Rome or even London. Rather, it is the English ‘city commonwealth’: precisely the kind of place in which Shakespeare himself was educated and grew up; to which he subsequently returned in later life; which he knew intimately through personal experience rather than historical treatises and translations (his father was an alderman of Stratford-upon-Avon); and of which, if his idealisation of the ‘citizens of Windsor’ is anything to go by, he was rather fond. As Leah S. Marcus has observed, the generic qualities of the ‘city’ in The Merry Wives of Windsor are especially pronounced in the Quarto version of , in which local references are so minimal that, saving the title, the ‘merry wives’ could be anywhere. However, even in the fuller Folio text, which takes the time to establish Windsor as a place with its own topography and social dynamics, ‘local’ characters and action continue to illuminate some of the more prevailing and generic concerns of urban citizenship as it had developed in England over the previous seventy years. It remains for the rest of this chapter at once to highlight these concerns as they are represented in the play and, where possible, contextualise them within the recent history of both the local and national commonwealth. At about the time Shakespeare’s company were first performing The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry Manship was circulating his The History of Great Yarmouth among his fellow burgesses. In it he defined the ‘city commonwealth’ as: a certain community or Society, both of life and goods, which makes a civil body, formed and made of divers members, to live under one power, as it were under one head and spirit, and more profitably to live together in this mortal life, that they may the more easily attain unto life eternal for ever.
Leah S. Marcus, ‘Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), . Henry Manship, The History of Great Yarmouth, ed. Charles John Palmer (Great Yarmouth, ), p. .
There is little doubt that Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, the merry wives and heroines of Windsor, would have recognised their own community in that description . What The Merry Wives of Windsor dramatises above all else is their admirable defence of their city commonwealth from the dangerous and parasitic encroachments of two kinds of false gentility: the dissolute egotism of Falstaff; and the initially roguish – although latterly honest – chivalry of Fenton. Moreover, in sharp distinction to contemporary city comedies in general – and the Two Angry Women of Abingdon in particular – the play idealizes, rather than satirises, the femininity it scrutinises. It does so through the idiom of urban citizenship, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford resembling exemplary citizens. Barton has suggested that the two wives have all the typical traits of Shakespearean heroines transposed into an unlikely – and certainly un-heroic – setting. Crucially, their ability to humiliate Falstaff is based on precisely the civil qualities required of and vested in urban citizenship: discretion, discourse, wisdom, self-knowledge, and honesty. This becomes clear as soon as they separately receive identical love letters from Falstaff in the pivotal scene at the beginning of Act : : … What a Herod of Jewry is this. O, wicked, wicked world! Why, I’ll. O God, that I knew how to be revenged on him! For revenged on him I will be, as sure as his guts are made of puddings. Enter Mistress Ford : Mistress Page! By my faith, I was going to your house. : And by may faith, I was coming to you. You look very ill … (. . –) : … … : What’s the matter, woman? : O woman, if it were not for one trifling respect, I could come to such honour! : Hang the trifle, woman; take the honour. What is it? Dispense with trifles. What is it? : We burn daylight. Here: read, read. She gives Mistress Page a letter. Perceive how I might be knighted. Mistress Page reads. I shall think the worse of fat men as long as I have an eye to make difference of men’s liking. And yet he would not swear, praised women’s modesty, and gave such an orderly and well-behaved reproof to all uncomeliness
Barton, ‘Falstaff and the Comic Community’, p. .
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
that I would have sworn his disposition would have gone to the truth of his words. But they do no more adhere and keep place together than the hundred and fifty psalms to the tune of Greensleeves … (. . –) : Why, this is the very same: the very hand, the very words. What doth he think of us? : Nay, I know not. It makes me almost ready to wrangle with mine own honesty. I’ll entertain myself like one that I am not acquainted withal; for, sure, unless he know some strain in me that I know not myself, he would never have boarded me in this fury. (. . –)
This long scene is crucial in establishing the civility of the central female protagonists. In the first instance, the audience is presented with Mistress Page’s astonishment at Falstaff ’s wilful misreading of her ‘conversation’ and her corresponding confidence in what she is and how she communicates. She notes the ‘unweighed behaviour’ of ‘this Flemish drunkard’ and that ‘he hath not been thrice in my company. What should I say to him? I was frugal in my mirth, heaven forgive me’ (. . –). For a time, the inappropriateness of Falstaff ’s behaviour makes Mistress Page ‘almost ready to wrangle with mine own honesty’. However, her equilibrium returns: she notes, ‘I’ll entertain myself like one that I am not acquainted withal; for, sure, unless he know some strain in me that I know not myself, he would never have boarded me in this fury’ (. . –). Here, the word ‘honesty’ implies much more than what Laura Gowing defines as ‘sexual honour, the system in which honesty had meaning’. Rather it denotes the complete manner in which Page presents herself socially and the skills – the honestas – by which she does so. Her acute self-knowledge contrasts with Falstaff ’s own misconception of his own mental and bodily self: ‘One that is well-nigh worn to pieces with age, to show himself a young gallant!’ (. . –). It also accentuates the dissonance between Falstaff ’s prior conversation, which had impressed the merry wives as ‘orderly’ and ‘well-behaved’, and the reality of his ‘disposition’ (. . –). No matter his undoubted skill with words, he has revealed himself as dishonest: what he says and what he really thinks and does ‘no more adhere and keep place together’ than the psalms and Greensleeves (. . ). In confronting this incongruity between Falstaff ’s words and intentions the merry wives almost instinctively resort to a political vocabulary – Mistress Page threatens to ‘exhibit a bill in the Parliament for the putting down of men’; Miss Ford gesticulates ‘O Mistress Page,
Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, ), p. .
give me some counsel’; and both assume that the problem of Falstaff (experienced individually in the first instance) should be immediately discussed and confronted communally (. . ; . . ). This is allied to an ability to reach a policy decision quickly and without conflict. As Mistress Page, the dominant of the two, concludes: ‘Let’s consult together against this greasy knight. Come hither’ (. . –). Fifty lines later, their counsel is extended to incorporate another female character, Mistress Quickly (Mistress Page: ‘Go in with us and see. We have an hour’s talk with you’ (. . –)). By Act Scene , when the nature of their campaign against Falstaff has become common knowledge and the whole community is preparing for the ‘public sport’ of his final humiliation (. . ), Sir Hugh Evans acknowledges that ‘’Tis one of the best discretions of a woman as ever I did look upon’ (. . ) and Master Ford concedes ‘There is no better way [of dealing with Falstaff ] than that they spoke of ’ (. . ). The skill with which Mistresses Page and Ford devise, implement and conclude their ‘plot’ against the knight, in conjunction with their advanced discretion and self-knowledge, exposes the courtly gentility articulated by Falstaff as fraudulent even as it demonstrates their own civility. Revenge against Falstaff must be achieved not at the expense of honesty so much as by and through the conventions of civility: as Mistress Ford concludes, ‘Nay, I will consent to act any villainy against him that may not sully the chariness of our honesty’ (. . –). In contrast, the wives’ playful exchange over the ‘honour’ of being courted by a knight reveals an underlying contempt for the alternative gentility of courtliness: : If I would go to hell for an eternal moment or so, I could be knighted. : What? Thou liest! Sir Alice Ford? These knights will hack, and so thou should not alter the articles of thy gentry. (. . –)
The concern for conversation, honesty and counsel displayed by the wives resonates with the contemporary language of citizenship . As Manship explained to the burgesses of Great Yarmouth, ‘counsel is, as says Socrates, a sacred thing; and as Plato calls it, the anchor of the whole city … and hath the same place in the commonwealth that the soul hath in living creatures’. He assured them that ‘The commonwealth does chiefly depend on counsel and judgment, according to the disposition of which the affairs of the state are well or ill handled.’ After all, ‘It is on counsel that all the rest of public government depends … and it is by Cicero called the soul, reason and understanding of the commonwealth’ whereby ‘it is
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
very meet that there should be in every great city and town, a competent number of senators elected (but not too many, for that is very dangerous) who are to have a place convenient appointed, where they may all assemble and meet together either for service of the state in general, or for the benefit of the town in particular’. Closer to home in Windsor, the second half of the sixteenth century saw a concerted attempt on the part of inhabitants to ensure these principles formed the basis of urban governance. Although civic records for Windsor only survive consistently from the middle of the seventeenth century, in April an attempt was made to collate existing ordinances and statutes in preparation for incorporation. This survives in the Bodleian Library, and the first entry notes that ‘it is established and agreed that there shall be or of the most substantial and wisest men of the same Borough to be of our fraternity of the guildhall’. The ‘brethren’, who were to supply the offices of aldermen, mayor and bailiff, were to be drawn from ‘the wisest and honest persons commoners of the same town’ as well as ‘any gentleman, learned man or able person not inhabiting within the said borough whom the said Mayor and Burgesses shall think meet and able in respect of their power, wisdom and authority to be aiding, beneficial or assistant to the inhabitants of the same borough’. Electoral procedures and oaths were also collated, along with an order for ‘Consultations and of assembling of the Brethren thereunto and how they shall behave themselves being assembled’. Th is: ordered established and decreed that it shall be lawful to the Mayor and his deputy at any time to command the Burgesses [i.e. the ] to come to the Guildhall or any other decent and convenient place to consult and counsel take with the said Brethren of any matter cause or business as well for the preservation of the Queen’s peace, tranquillity and concord of her highnesses subjects As also for the good order profit and maintenance of the said borough.
The process by which such consultation should take place would have met with the approval of Mistresses Ford and Page. It was decreed that ‘At which meeting the said Mayor shall propound and the said Brethren shall lovingly reverently and orderly debate reason and declare their wisdoms and knowledge in the matter propounded.’ It was only ‘after such reasoning and debating by the said Brethren’ that ‘the Mayor and Aldermen shall order determine finish and conclude all the matter and causes and businesses as to their wisdoms and discretions shall be thought most requisite and meet’. It was also agreed that ‘If any brother of the guildhall do
Manship, History, p. . ‘Collections for the History of the Town of New Windsor’, fol. r. Ibid., fols. r– v.
tell abroad or discover to any stranger any of the counsels consultations or speeches had or to be had in the same hall to the damage displeasure or hindrance of this incorporation or of any Brethren thereof’ they were to be fined (s for first offence, s for second) and on third offence be ‘thrust out of this company and brotherhood of this guildhall’. This was no empty threat. In June , for example, the draper Philip Stockwell was ‘expelled from the fellowship and utterly disenfranchised’ for ‘slanderous reports and false surmises’ against the Mayor and others. He was restored to the liberty of the borough nine months later. There was nothing exceptional about these orders. On the contrary, similar ordinances were established and collated for most English towns in the second half of the sixteenth century. How such prescriptions were implemented in practice remains, of course, a moot point. What is clear is the relationship drawn between political decision-making and authority and the conversation, discretion, wisdom, and honesty of citizens . There is, of course, an obvious incongruity between the scraps of surviving evidence depicting civic life in Windsor and Shakespeare’s play. The former is couched in a language of ‘fraternity’ and ‘brethren’: over the course of the manuscript there is not one reference either to a real female inhabitant of Windsor or (what sixteenth-century people would have regarded as) a feminine concept. Shakespeare, in contrast, has two citizen-wives taking on the responsibility of protecting their commonwealth. They do so not in the guildhall or with the company of brethren but rather in quintessentially feminine spaces of the household, doorstead and street; with the counsel of (female) neighbours; and with the labour of servants and apprentices. Within these settings and relationships they nevertheless behave like Manship’s ‘senators’ or Windsor’s ‘wisest and honest persons’: indeed, because of Master Ford’s irrational jealousy towards his wife, Mistresses Ford and Page are compelled to keep their deliberations as secret as any civic assembly. Falstaff, in contrast, is relentlessly effeminised over the course of the play. In his first humiliation he is bundled out of the house in the dirty washing and thrown into the Thames (washing being archetypal female work and drudgery). In the second he is forced to disguise himself as an old aunt and is beaten
Ibid., fol. r. Ibid., fol. r. Marcus, ‘Levelling Shakespeare’, p. .
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
by Ford as a cunning woman and the Witch of Brainford (a pejorative female stereotype). And in the final humiliation he undergoes a ‘ shaming’ akin to ‘rough music, charivari, or skimmington’: the typical punishment of the (female) gossip and scold. Falstaff becomes, in effect, a conflation of three of the most pejorative female stereotypes available: an embodiment of what Barbara Correll has called ‘the horror of effeminacy’ which humanists looked to civility to contain. In contrast to Falstaff, the wives of Windsor are not only ‘merry’ but also paragons of civic virtue: their honesty cannot be reduced to their sexual probity, as critics usually assume, but also involves the kind of discretion, discourse and social agency associated with civic humanism. That Shakespeare took the opportunity of a city comedy like The Merry Wives of Windsor to transpose, without apparent irony, the prescribed skills and values of the council chamber onto the household and neighbourhood is, perhaps, surprising. It is certainly in contrast to the comedies of Ben Jonson who, drawing on ‘New Roman’ rather than ‘Old Greek’ conventions, not only denied the possibility of citizens (male or female) ever achieving civility, but also used female characters to personify its opposite. For example, in Bartholomew Fair Ursula stands as ‘the seedy metropolis in microcosm’, and it is the drunkenness and sexual incontinence of Mistress Overdo that is the final undoing of her pompous husband, the unreflective and Cicero-quoting London magistrate, Overdo. Thomas Middleton, chronicler of London and a Jacobean theorist of urban citizenship if ever there was one, reserved his idealism for city pageants and used his comedies to satirise the kinds of behaviour – sexual, economic – that made such ideals socially necessary. Likewise Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abingdon (published two years before The Merry Wives of Windsor) examines the destructive power of female incivility and implicitly suggests the need for its control and reform. Whereas we first meet Mistresses Page and Ford counselling each other about the threat of Falstaff, crystallising a sense of city commonwealth as they do so, in the
Ibid.; Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘‘Reform of Popular Culture’’ in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, (), –. Barbara Correll, ‘Malleable Material, Models of Power’, ELH, (), . Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London, ), ; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. –; Andrew McRae, ‘ “On the Famous Voyage”: Ben Jonson and Civic Space’, in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, eds., Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, ), p. . David M. Bergeron, ‘Middleton’s Moral Landscape: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and The Triumphs of Truth’, in Kenneth Friedenreich, ed., ‘Accompanyinge the Players’: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, – (New York, ), pp. –; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. –, .
Two Angry Women of Abingdon the wives of the title, Mistress Barnes and Mistress Goursey, are locked in a verbal conflict that undermines first a dinner between neighbours and hence the ideal of ‘familiar neighbourhood’ that their husbands are attempting, for ulterior motives, to construct. Master Barnes notes that ‘my wife’s jests grow too bitter / Plainer speeches for her were more better / Malice lies embowelled in her tongue / And new hatched hate makes every jest a wrong’ (Br). Mistress Goursey consoles him with the observation that for women ‘tongues are weapons, words their blows of war’ (Br); and Barnes later asks his wife not to ‘set the organ of thy voice / On such a grunting key of discontent / Do not deform the beauty of thy tongue / With such misshapen answers, rough wrathful words’ (Cr). However, his attempt to persuade her to ‘be good friends with Mistress Goursey’ merely reveals the limits of his authority, their discussion culminating with the following exchange: : O Black mouthed rage, thy breath is boisterous And thou makest virtue shake in this high storm She’s of good report, I know thou knowest it. : She is not, nor I know not, but I know That thou dost love her, therefore think so Thou bearest with her because she beares with thee: Thou maist be ashamed to stand in her defence, She is a strumpet and thou art no honest man To stand in her defence against thy wife If I catch her in my walk now by Cockes bones I’ll scratch out both her eyes. (Dr)
The idealisation of female citizenship in The Merry Wives of Windsor extends, finally, to its treatment of ‘will’. A commonplace of civic humanism was that public agency should not be dictated by personal will. The ill-disciplined or unreformed will of the person was antithetical to the public or common good; and public structures and procedures were needed largely to mediate the ‘will’ of individuals or factions from exploiting or endangering others. This was certainly true for councillors and office-holders. When John Bradford and other freemen of Ludlow petitioned in the s that their governors had become oligarchs, they stressed that they now governed ‘to effect their own wills and purpose’ and that they used ‘the common seal of the said corporation at their wills
Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture’, in Burke, Harrison and Slack, eds., Civil Histories, p. ; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. –, –; Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, p. .
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
to the great oppression of the rest of the burgesses’. In The City Madam, Philip Massinger’s ‘city’ version of Measure for Measure, Luke Frugal is first revealed as the antithesis of civil society by uttering, on learning that he has inherited his brother’s trading empire, that ‘My will is still the same’ (. . ). By subsequently acting according to his unreformed will, Luke destroys all the contracts and bonds that made society civil – those of credit, contract and patriarchy. For male commentators the will of women carried extra problems, especially when they enjoyed political place and power. When Mary Tudor spoke to the citizens of London in she declared that ‘concerning the marriage … I assure you, I am not so bent to my will, neither so precise, nor affectionate, that either for mine own pleasure I would choose where I lust, or that I am so desirous, as needs I would have one’. Nicholas Bacon praised Elizabeth in as a queen ‘that is not, nor never meaneth to be, so wedded to her own will and fantasy that for the satisfaction thereof she will do any thing that were likely to bring any bondage or servitude to her people’. However, the conviction that women were wilful (in the sense of both being ‘full of will’ and behaving publicly on that basis) was widespread, serving as an important justification for patriarchal authority. When Master Barnes of Abingdon’s attempts to persuade his wife to end her irrational jealousy towards Mrs Goursey and rediscover ‘the rules of love and neighbourhood’ are rebuffed, he pleads: : Could you but show me any grounded cause. : The grounded cause, I ground because I will not. : Your will has little reason then I think. : Yes sir, my reason equals my will. : Let’s hear your reason, for your will is great. : Why for I will not. : Is all your reason for I will not wife Now by my soul I held ye for more wife, Discreet, and of more temperance sense, Then in a sullen humour so affect. (Dr)
The National Archives, E/ and Elizabeth/Mich. , items , ; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, p. ; Penry Williams, ‘Government and Politics in Ludlow, –’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological Society, (), –. Philip Massinger, The City Madam, ed. Cathy Shrank (London, ). Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. –. Cited in Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender and Representation (Chicago, ), p. . Ibid., p. .
In The Merry Wives the stereotype is inverted by both Mistress Ford and Mistress Page; although the inversion is different in each case. In the Ford household it is Master Ford who is wilful, consumed by an irrational jealousy of his wife that overrides his discretion and judgment on a number of occasions. Convinced he is caught in ‘the hell of having a false woman’, his attempts to catch his wife in a compromising position with Falstaff not only drive the narrative of the play but also leave the masculinity of the husband as compromised as the erstwhile lover. Even though it is Ford who inflicts beatings on Falstaff, he does so unwittingly and through the machinations of his wife: while he attempts to test the sexual honesty of his wife, it is nevertheless Mistress Ford who possesses the full complement of honestas (. . , . . ). Just as his wife comments that ‘I know not which pleases me better: that my husband is deceived, or Sir John’ (. . ), so the final humiliation of Falstaff is preceded by humility and belated self-knowledge on the part of Ford: ‘Pardon me, wife. Henceforth do what thou wilt. I rather will suspect the sun with cold than thee with wantonness’ (. . –). Th is rejection of the Augustinian view of the fallen and irredeemable nature of man echoes the conjugal relationship of Mistress and Master Page – the household at the very heart of the city commonwealth idealised by Shakespeare. Husband and wife respect and trust each other completely; indeed, Mistress Page is at liberty to act according to her will precisely because it is reformed, civil and a conduit of reason. The relationship is mischievously captured by Mistress Quickly as she entices Falstaff, at the request of Mistresses Ford and Page, into pursuing romance: Mistress Page would desire you to send her your little page of all loves. Her husband has a marvelous infection to the little page; and, truly, Master Page is an honest man. Never a wife in Windsor leads a better life than she does. Do what she will; say what she will; take all, pay all; go to bed when she list; all is as she will. And truly, she deserves it, for if there be a kind woman in Windsor, she is one. You must send her your page, no remedy. (. .–)
In this instance ‘a better life’ carries two possible meanings: there is the attractive notion of unfettered will (which for Falstaff, with Quickly’s encouragement, implies sexual incontinence and opportunity); and there is the idea of possessing the requisite personal qualities to choose to live well. While the one is licence, the other is liberty: a contrast that John
Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Transalpine Humanism’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, – (Cambridge, ), p. .
Putting the city into Shakespeare’s city comedy
Cheke, Cambridge humanist and tutor to Edward VI, extolled to his wife in a series of correspondence between their marriage in and . Cheke noted three ways in which subordinates could obey the strictures of (patriarchal) authority: Those that do not as they be commanded be beasts and no women, brute and savage, and not discreet and skilful, they that do things only because of commandment, would rather seem good than be good, and have the opinion of men and not honesty itself, but they that see by reason what is to be done, and by duty follow reason afore commandment, be sober and honest, and to be had a good opinion of.
It was into the third category that Shakespeare had placed his merry wives. Both Two Angry Women of Abingdon and The Merry Wives of Windsor represent the sixteenth-century promulgation of civic humanism as it was experienced in England’s ‘city commonwealths’. In so doing they indicate how the households and neighbourhoods of urban England were on a discursive continuum with common councils and guildhalls: that, in terms of its requisite qualities and attributes, ‘private’ and ‘public’ civility was part of the same political process. However, the plays are also different in important respects. Two Angry Women of Abingdon presents women as ‘the essential negative, to be overcome by civilising labours and the educational process, a constructed threat’. It is a representation that sits relatively easily with that strand of social and gender historiography that highlights the blatant inequalities of early modern patriarchy, the structural and ideological subordination of women, and the characterisation of women as first and foremost sexual beings – with all the power and vulnerability that suggests. In contrast, the merry wives of Windsor emerge as two women whose sexual honesty and reputation were only one aspect of a much wider repertoire of civil skills and attributes. It is a representation of gender relations that sits well with the insight of social
British Library Additional MS ,, ‘Harington Prose II’, r. I’d like to thank Cathy Shrank for this reference. Correll, ‘Malleable Material’, . Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, – (London, ); Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford, ), ch. ; Steve Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, (), –; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, pp. –.
historians that ‘family relationships in the middle and lower ranks of society were more affectionate and less authoritarian’ than its ideology might suggest. It is a depiction that is also consistent with Shakespeare’s more general comedic portrayal of women, James P. Bednarz noting that ‘from The Comedy of Errors to As You Like It Shakespeare predicates feminine constancy as an absolute against which to measure masculine betrayal’. What is particularly interesting about The Merry Wives of Windsor is that Shakespeare roots not only the ‘honesty’ but also the agency of ordinary women in the civic humanism that was current at the time. In this respect it is a quintessentially political play. Anne Page and Alice Ford do not merely share, but rather excel in, the humanist project as it was disseminated across the English corporate system, proving themselves far better citizens than their husbands (or indeed Falstaff ) in the process. Their social acuity undermines the civic pretensions of their husbands, who take on the feminine characteristics of passivity and jealousy over the course of the play, and jeopardises Falstaff, the courtier who has forgotten that true gentility must be constantly earned rather than simply assumed, and who is ritually humiliated, as a woman, as a result. Although gentler in its satire than the ‘Roman’ comedies of Jonson and Middleton, the accomplishments of Shakespeare’s eponymous heroines nevertheless cast the masculine worlds of city and court in a critical and questioning light. They also demonstrate what Elizabethan audiences – not least Elizabeth herself, who most probably saw the play performed – must have known and recognised: that while the qualities of citizenship might be characterised by contemporary male writers as masculine, in practice they were by no means the preserve of men.
Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, – (Oxford, ), p. ; Keith Wrightson, English Society, – (London, ), ch. . James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York, ), p. .
Talking to the animals: persuasion, counsel and their discontents in Julius Caesar David Colclough
It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal. Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr W. H.
Julius Caesar is concerned with what could be called, to borrow the title of Judith Ferster’s excellent book, fictions of advice. This means that it is also, to invoke another important work on medieval literature and politics, a play of persuasion. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is in the competing funeral orations delivered by Brutus and Mark Antony in Act Scene , and I will return to them in due course. But even leaving that scene aside, it is impossible to read or watch the play without being struck by the frequency of moments of advising or persuading, be it Cassius’ campaign to persuade Brutus to join the conspiracy, Decius Brutus’ persuasive reinterpretation of Calpurnia’s dream, or Antony’s advice to Caesar that Cassius is ‘not dangerous’ but ‘a noble Roman, and well given’ ( Julius Caesar, . . –). In the course of this chapter I want to look at these acts of persuasion and the fictions of advice depicted in Julius Caesar as they accrue around a set of important themes and also around various kinds of action. The themes that interest me here are those of counsel and flattery – concepts that occupy a central place in early For valuable comments on earlier versions of this chapter I am indebted to participants at the conference ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’ held at the Australian National University – especially Conal Condren and Cathy Curtis – as well as to Jerry Brotton, Katrin Ettenhuber, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Lucinda Platt and the anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press. I owe my epigraph to Chris Wortham.
Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, ). Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, ). For Decius’ reinterpretation of the dream see Julius Caesar, . . –.
modern discussions of politics, and that concern the willingness or ability to offer and to hear advice. And the actions that I will be discussing are the various ways in which such advice (the very stuff of government in this period) is delivered or enacted, especially in the forms of public discussion, the posting of bills and the presentation of petitions. I will explore these issues by looking in some detail at crucial dramatic moments, by thinking again about Shakespeare’s use of his sources (especially North’s Plutarch) and by suggesting a source for one of the most famous – and often-cited – exclamations in the play. My argument (one that is consonant with that of Eric Nelson’s chapter in this volume) will be that in Julius Caesar we see the forms and processes of counsel submitted to an almost unremittingly bleak scrutiny. Shakespeare’s relation to political thought, in this play at least, is shown to be a highly sceptical one, which leaves none of the available forms of political action unscathed. The importance of the idea of counsel to early modern political thought hardly needs restating. As is well known, in medieval poems and treatises, in humanist works of moral philosophy and in drama, the message that good counsel was fundamental to good governance was constantly reiterated. Drawing on a central corpus of source texts – including Cicero’s De officiis and De amicitia, Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics, the pseudoAristotelian Secreta secretorum, and works by Isocrates and Plutarch – writers who frequently had close personal experience of the potential and the pitfalls of counselling princes emphasised its necessity. Whether addressing the question from the perspective of the counsellor or the counselled, they stressed the importance of a multitude of counsellors, of their wisdom and experience and, perhaps most frequently of all, of the dangers of flattery – especially of flattery cunningly disguised as frankness. This,
My argument in this chapter is concerned exclusively with the treatment of counsel and advice in Julius Caesar, partly through constraints of space and partly because, to my mind, the play stands out in its suspicion of these aspects of politics. Similar concerns can, however, be discerned in The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus (on which see Eric Nelson’s chapter in this volume), and in Richard II, whose treatment of the pitfalls of counsel merits further study. Among the considerable critical literature on this subject see especially Stanford E. Lehmberg, ‘English Humanists, the Reformation and the Problem of Counsel’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, (), –; John Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Dale Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Linda Levy Peck, ‘Kingship, Counsel and Law in early Stuart Britain’, in J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer, eds., The Varieties of British Political Thought, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Th ought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, ), pp. –; A. N. McLaren, Political Cuture in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, ); David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, ), pp. –. See further the chapters by Cathy Curtis and Cathy Shrank in this volume.
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indeed, was the theme of the enormously influential essay from Plutarch’s Moralia, ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend’. Flatterers were parasites intent only on their own safety and advancement (the ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’ referred to in Richard II (. . )), elevating private over public interest and having no concern for the state of the nation. In a potent metaphor used by Erasmus and John Webster among others, the flatterer is one who poisons the public well, causing death and disease by infecting what should be the source of health and well-being. In Julius Caesar, while counsel is – importantly, I will argue – presented as fragmented and fractured rather than as institutionally established, the threat of flattery hovers constantly on the margins of almost every personal interaction between the main political actors. It is continually associated with scenes of advising and with characters’ attempts to ‘move’ someone to a particular way of thinking or acting. In his first approach to Brutus in Act Scene , Cassius establishes his ethos as a friend offering disinterested counsel by reminding Brutus that he is not known as a two-faced flatterer: Were I a common laughter, or did use To stale with ordinary oaths my love To every new protester; if you know That I do fawn on men, and hug them hard, And after scandal them; or if you know That I profess myself in banqueting To all the rout, then hold me dangerous. (. . –)
The other most striking mentions of flattery come in relation, unsurprisingly, to Caesar himself. It is Decius who tells us that Caesar is prone to flattery, predicting accurately that he will be able to persuade him to go to the Capitol: he loves to hear That unicorns may be betrayed with trees, And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,
See Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, vols. (London, ), I, pp. –; Plutarch, The Philosophie, commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London, n.d. [?]), pp. –. Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince and Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria, trans. Neil M. Cheshire, Michael J. Heath and Lisa Jardine, ed. Jardine (Cambridge, ), p. (taken from Plutarch, Moralia D); the same aphorism appears at ibid., p. ; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (), ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (London, ), . . –, p. . On flattery in Shakespeare (though not Julius Caesar) see Blair Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare Survey, (), . Tellingly, it is Cassius who first uses the epithet ‘dangerous’ to refer to himself here – the word that will be echoed by Caesar and Mark Antony in successive lines when discussing him later in the scene (. . –).
Lions with toils and men with flatterers. But when I tell him he hates flatterers, He says he does, being then most flattered. (. . –)
This takes up explicit statements in Plutarch’s lives of Caesar and Brutus about Caesar’s flatterers but, in a move that is typical of the play’s treatment of its primary source, adjusts them in order to make this flattery part of an act of persuasion rather than simply a fact about Caesar’s ‘party’ or supporters in Rome. And it culminates in the horrible irony of Caesar accusing Cimber and the conspirators of using fawning flattery to ‘move’ him to repeal a sentence of banishment after he has been ‘moved’ from his house to the Capitol in order for the assassination to be effected: I must prevent thee, Cimber: These couchings and these lowly courtesies Might fire the blood of ordinary men, And turn pre-ordinance and first decree Into the law of children. Be not fond To think that Caesar bears such rebel blood That will be thawed from the true quality With that which melteth fools – I mean sweet words, Low-crooked curtsies and base spaniel fawning. Thy brother by decree is banished. If thou dost bend and pray and fawn for him I spurn thee like a cur out of my way. (. . –)
For the conspirators, this ‘fawning’ is merely a means to an end: a way of getting close to Caesar in order to murder him. They pragmatically adopt the posture of their enemies (Caesar’s flatterers) so as to put an end to a rule that they consider (regarding their plot in its best light) as likely to descend into despotism shored up by unquestioning and slavish bondsmen who have lost their Roman honour and sense of liberty. In his final reference to the assassination, though, Antony will echo both Casear’s and Cassius’ words and insultingly suggest that this was the ultimate act of cowardly dissimulation: the true behaviour of courtly flatterers. Replying to Brutus’ sneering observation that ‘you … threat before you sting’ (. . –), Antony retorts: Villains, you did not so, when your vile daggers Hacked one another in the sides of Caesar. You showed your teeth like apes, and fawned like hounds,
On Caesar’s flatterers see Plutarch, ‘The life of Julius Cæsar’, in Sir Thomas North, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared (London, ), STC , sig. Vvir; ‘The life of Marcus Brutus’, sig. Viir.
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And bowed like bondsmen, kissing Caesar’s feet, Whilst damnèd Casca, like a cur, behind, Struck Caesar in the neck. O you flatterers ! (. . –)
In all of these cases, the set of problems addressed is the usual one of how best to couch advice and how to have it heard, on the one hand; and, on the other, how to distinguish between good and bad counsel. But there is no normative standard established for the exercise of such judgement, and my examples have all been of interested or false counsel . Two other instances of advising and hearing are flawed in rather different ways. The Soothsayer is, of course, the first to offer advice to Caesar (. . , ) when he tells him, twice, to beware the Ides of March. The problem here is not just in Caesar’s imperious dismissal (‘He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass.’ (. . )), but in the quality of the advice, which is – to say the least – unhelpful in its generality. Gnomic, and unspecific about the nature of the danger posed by the Ides, it requires further engagement and interpretive effort on Caesar’s part – which he is both unwilling and, it seems, unable to provide. It is in this encounter that we get the first hint of Caesar’s symptomatic disability: his deafness. He announces that he is ‘turned to hear’ (. . ), and it is only a couple of hundred lines later that he asks Antony to ‘come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf’ and tell him what he ‘truly’ thinks of Cassius (. . –). As has been noted, this deafness is Shakespeare’s invention: it reinforces our sense of Caesar as someone who both aspires to divinity and suffers more than the usual amount of human failings (he also suffers from the aptly named ‘falling sickness’ (. . , –), and Cassius details his physical weaknesses (. . –)). But here it mainly implies that Caesar can hear only partially; like Cassius’ ‘thick’ sight (. . ), it stands for a failure, as well as an inability, to perceive what is really going on. The one striking instance of honest counsel in this part of the play is, interestingly, delivered by a woman – but even that is fatally undermined by its source, its context, Caesar’s pride and susceptibility to flattery, and by an expert piece of reinterpretation. I refer, of course, to Calpurnia’s appeal to her husband that he ‘shall not stir forth out of your house today’ (. . ). Neatly balanced against Portia’s appeal to Brutus to ‘tell me your
On Caesar’s deafness, as well as on his physical frailty more generally, see William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (Walton-on-Thames, ), pp. –; Geoff rey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford, ), p. ; R. A. Foakes, ‘An Approach to Julius Caesar’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), –; Mark Rose, ‘Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in ’, in Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry, eds., True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age (Urbana and Chicago, ), p. ; James Shapiro, : A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London, ), p. .
counsels’ in the previous scene (. . ), this is far from being a mere domestic interlude. Like Pilate’s wife, Calpurnia urges Caesar to have faith in the violent vision of her dream and in the portents that have been assailing Rome. Yet it is only when she kneels and makes a direct personal appeal on her own behalf that Caesar yields: he is unpersuaded that the portents apply to him and substitutes his own reading of the augurers’ sign for their confirmation of danger. Even when he agrees ‘for thy humour’ to stay at home (. . ), he goes back on his original agreement to let it be known that he is ill, informing Decius Brutus first that he simply wills it, and then that he has given in to his wife’s demands. From here it is a simple matter for Decius, as one who knows Caesar’s susceptibility to flattery disguised as frankness, to attack his pride. Not only is Calpurnia’s dream ‘all amiss interpreted’ (. . ), but the very notion of acting according to a woman’s whim should be a source of shame (packing in as much as he can, Decius also dangles the prospect of being offered a crown before Caesar) (. . –). As with Caesar’s response to Artemidorus, who appears in the next scene, this scene places him in a classic double bind: early modern works of political thought would have agreed with Decius that a ruler should not be ruled by his wife ( Charles I’s apparent willingness to be counselled by Henrietta Maria was a source of ridicule in the Civil War), and that decisions should be taken on pragmatic and reasoned grounds, not on the basis of ‘humour’. Yet Calpurnia and the augurers are right to fear for Caesar’s safety, and their superstition-based counsel is more trustworthy than Decius’ apparently reasoned persuasion . The instances of oral persuasion and flattery that I have examined so far represent only one aspect of the play’s treatment of counsel. Two other ways of delivering opinions, this time by written means – the presentation of formal petitions and the dissemination of ‘bills’ or libels – are equally important to the way in which it exerts pressure on the concept of good advice and would have had strong resonances for an Elizabethan audience. The presentation of petitions was a commonly accepted way of counselling and of expressing grievances in early modern England. They could be
See Matt. .; Julius Caesar, ed. Daniell, gives the quotation from the Geneva Bible at p. , n. Decius concludes with a classic piece of false parrhesia, excusing an imaginary boldness: ‘Pardon me, Caesar; for my dear, dear love / To your proceeding bids me tell you this, / And reason to my love is liable’ (. . –). On parrhesia as the rhetorical colouring of frankness, see Colclough, Freedom of Speech, pp. –.
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delivered to parliament or directly to the monarch – we are all familiar with the scenes of Elizabeth on her progresses and James out hunting being approached by importunate petitioners. Charles I, that notoriously unapproachable king, even employed two gentleman ushers to go before him and ‘see that none thrust petitions in his hand’. But petitions, as well as being the more or less spontaneous expressions of personal or local grievance, could be – and were – stage-managed. Thomas Cromwell organised the Commons’ ‘Supplication against the Ordinaries’ in , while in – and again in model petitions were drafted for the godly to send to Westminster or to their local governors. We see both of these kinds of petition in Julius Caesar – the honest and the false – and the way in which they are presented and the responses they meet with shed significant light on the way in which the play treats the problems of advising. The Soothsayer’s warning is itself a kind of petition – presented in the street directly to Caesar as he participates in a civic gathering (the feast of Lupercal and his triumph yoked together in an uncomfortable combination of the old holiday and the shocking new festival of a Roman triumphing over a fellow Roman). I have already glanced at the problem with the Soothsayer’s advice, and with Caesar’s response to it: it would be all too easy to dismiss such spontaneous warnings from independent prophets with no warrant for their speech (Caesar is more than willing to consult his own augurers, however dismissive he is of their warning, but the Soothsayer is another matter). But the act of petitioning that echoes Tudor practices most clearly is that of Artemidorus on the day of Caesar’s assassination. He waits for Caesar to pass by on the way to the Senate in order to present him with a warning about the conspiracy: ‘Here will I stand till Caesar pass along / And as a suitor will I give him this’
See, e.g., J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (London, ), p. and, for a Jacobean example, Thomas Bywater’s presentation of a petition to James when the king was hunting at Ware in February (Colclough, Freedom of Speech, p. ). Such scenes were even incorporated into Eliabethan entertainments; see Frances A. Yates, ‘Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, (), –. Quoted in David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, ), p. . Zaret, Origins, p. ; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford, ), p. . On Caesar’s celebration of Lupercalia as a means of associating him with Romulus see Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge, ), p. . Miola notes that this parallel was suggested by Plutarch, Appian, Ovid and Virgil. For the augurers and Caesar’s Decius-like re-interpretation of the sign they discover (‘they could not find a heart within the beast’), see . . – (quotation at l. ). On the pervasive and dangerous sway of superstition in the play see Susan James’ chapter in this volume.
(. . –). The term ‘suitor’ places Artemidorus in precisely the position of those clamouring petitioners I have mentioned, taking advantage of the prince’s public procession. He urges Caesar to read his ‘schedule’ and, when Decius steps in with a distracting (and probably non-existent) competing suit from Trebonius, attempts to have his paper read by emphasising its importance to Caesar personally. Caesar, performing (or even, briefly, being) the model prince who puts others’ interests before his own, makes a fatal misjudgement: : O Caesar, read mine first, for mine’s a suit That touches Caesar nearer. Read it, great Caesar. : What touches us ourself shall be last served. (. . –)
This scene sums up a great deal of the play’s attitude towards the processes of counselling and advising, an attitude that is deeply troubled and troubling, and that subjects almost everything it regards to a dark irony. Whether or not Caesar is simply performing the role of a selfless prince, his action is fatal – even though judged by the criteria of early modern works on counsel and government it is correct. In contrast to his dismissal of the Soothsayer, there is no hint of imperiousness here. In addition, Artemidorus’ ‘schedule’ interprets the conspiracy as an act of faction, the settling of personal scores, and the result of ‘emulation’: ‘Decius Brutus loves thee not. Thou hast wronged Caius Ligarius … My heart laments that virtue cannot live / Out of the teeth of emulation’ (. . –, –). This gives a very particular steer to the audience’s reading of the conspiracy: we have seen the ailing Ligarius persuaded by Brutus that Caesar must be resisted in a scene that invoked Brutus’ republican forebears and the criterion of ‘honour’ (. . –), but here he is presented as having a personal grievance against Caesar. However accurate Artemidorus’ warning is, it is still an expression of faction rather than of general grievance; however dangerous Caesar’s dismissal of him is, it is still the ‘right’ thing for him to do. Where, then, can one find criteria for right action? Typically, things get even darker when Cassius pretends to demand a stricter adherence to decorum: ‘What, urge you your petitions in the street? / Come to the Capitol’ (. . –). This suggests that the proper forms of counsel and advice will be followed, in the appropriate forum; and it is through the presentation of a sham petition on behalf of Cimber’s brother that the conspirators manage to approach Caesar closely enough to slaughter him.
Plutarch specifically calls the conspirators’ pleas in support of Cimber ‘petitions’: ‘The Life of Julius Cæsar’, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared, sig. Xir–v.
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Petitioning, one could say, has been hijacked – but I would go further and argue that the play gives no indication that there is in fact a ‘true’ form being deviated from. Rather, petitioning is depicted as being inherently unreliable, untrustworthy and dangerous. It is telling here, as in many places, to compare Shakespeare’s treatment of Artemidorus’ petition with that of his source, North’s Plutarch. There, not only is Artemidorus’ only one of many petitions delivered to Caesar (thereby normalising the process), but Caesar’s failure to read it is the result of the size of the crowd rather than of a mistaken sense of priorities: [Artemidorus] came & brought [Caesar] a little bill written with his owne hand, of all that he ment to tell him. He marking howe Cæsar received all the supplications that were offered him, and that he gave them straight to his men that were about him, pressed neerer to him, and sayed: Cæsar, reade this memoriall to your selfe, and that quickely, for they be matters of great waight and touch you neerely. Cæsar tooke it of him, but coulde never reade it, though he many times attempted it, for the number of people that did salute him: but holding it still in his hande, keeping it to him selfe, went on withall into the Senate house. Howbeit other are of opinion, that it was some man else that gave him that memoriall, and not Artemidorus, who did what he could all the way as he went to geve it Cæsar, but he was alwayes repulsed by the people.
Shakespeare’s transformation of this scene highlights both the impossibility of making the right decision and the personalised nature of Artemidorus’ schedule, in place of Plutarch’s stress on the effects of contingencies. We see here a further, almost vertiginous undermining of the possibility of judging or acting correctly – and of determining the outcomes of one’s judgements or actions. Shakespeare deliberately inserts Caesar’s claim to selflessness only to show that virtue itself, however motivated, can be treacherous. As a consequence, the characters and the audience are left without any kind of moral compass to guide them through the political landscape, and any kind of action in that landscape is doomed to have consequences beyond the intention or control of its originator. Related to the presentation of petitions, but a less formal means of proffering advice or counsel in early modern England, was the posting of bills or libels. A good deal of excellent work has been done in recent years on the way in which such ‘casting abroad’ of papers containing vituperative attacks on, or exhortations to, public persons contributed to the political culture of Tudor and Stuart England. During the Pilgrimage of Grace in – such ‘bills’ served to popularise the rebels’ demands and to muster
Ibid., sigs. Xir–v.
their forces, while in , the year of Julius Caesar ’s composition and first performance, libels ‘against the state’ were posted in the name of the Earl of Essex by his enemies and discussed in Star Chamber by Lord Keeper Egerton. Meanwhile, a more classically humanist version of this practice existed in the form of the messages attached to the Roman ‘speaking statues’ of Pasquino and Marforio, the implications of which have been richly explicated by Catherine Curtis, and which were well known in England. These bills aspired to the status of vox populi, lending a voice to those who had few means of being heard and protecting their authors with the mask of anonymity (or pseudonymity). These bills play a crucial part in Cassius’ attempt to attract – or ‘move’ – Brutus to join the conspiracy. After having acted as Brutus’ (none-tooreliable) ‘glass’ or mirror in an act of person-to-person persuasion (. . –), Cassius announces that he: will this night In several hands in at his windows throw – As if they came from several citizens – Writings, all tending to the great opinion That Rome holds of his name, wherein obscurely Caesar’s ambition shall be glancèd at. (. . –)
He later instructs Cinna to put further papers on the Praetor’s chair and on ‘old Brutus’ statue’; that is, Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of
Zaret, Origins, p. ; Fulke Greville, ‘A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’, in The Prose Works of Fulke Greville Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford, ), p. ; M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge, ), pp. –. See also Shapiro, , p. . On bills (and the related form of libels) more generally, see Alastair Bellany, ‘ “Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse”: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, –’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, ), pp. –; Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground Verse and the Transformation of English Political Culture’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark Kishlansky, eds., Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, ), pp. – ; Andrew Gordon, ‘The Act of Libel: Conscripting Civic Space in Early Modern England’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, (), –; Colclough, Freedom of Speech, pp. –; Andrew McRae, ed., ‘Railing Rhymes’: Politics and Poetry in Early Stuart England, special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, : (). See Catherine Mary Curtis, ‘Richard Pace on Pedagogy, Counsel and Satire’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (), esp. pp. –; Mary Lahan, Pasquin et Marforio (Paris, ); R. and F. Silenzi, Pasquino. Cinquecento pasquinate (Milan, ); Mario dell’Arco, Pasquino e le pasquinate (Milan, ); Anne Reynolds, ‘Cardinal Oliviero Carafa and the Early Cinquecento Tradition of the Feast of Pasquino’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, A (), –; Reynolds, ‘The Classical Continuum in Roman Humanism: The Festival of Pasquino, the Robigalia, and Satire’, Bibliothèque d ’Humanisme et Renaissance, (), –; Claudio Rendina, Pasquino statua parlante. Quattro secoli di pasquinate (Rome, ). Cassius’ ‘papers’ are called ‘seditious billes’ and ‘bills’ by Plutarch in ‘The life of Julius Cæsar’ and ‘The life of Marcus Brutus’, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, sigs. Vvi v and Viir.
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the republic and deposer of the Tarquins, later referred to in the exchange between Brutus and Ligarius (. . –) – an especially ironic location for a bogus popular statement. This cynical act of manipulation reinforces the factional aspect of the conspiracy and its dependence on individual grievance rather than a political process or the exercise of public reason. And it does so, once again, in a crucial modification of Plutarch’s account, where the bills are spontaneously posted by ‘they that desired chaunge’, Brutus’ ‘frendes and contrie men’. In Plutarch, too, the bills neither require nor receive any further interpretation, whereas in Shakespeare’s play we observe Brutus teasing out their implications: ‘ “Shall Rome, et cetera?” Thus must I piece it out: / Shall Rome stand under one man’s awe?’ (. . –). Action becomes dependent upon an individual’s interpretation of a gnomic message, and when this happens in Julius Caesar there is always something wrong. As Ian Donaldson has written, Titinius’ exclamation over Cassius’ corpse – ‘Alas, thou hast misconstrued everything’ (. . ) – could stand for a general comment on the play’s action, and the word ‘construe’ echoes throughout it, from its first occurrence in Act Scene to the horribly ironic scene of Cassius relying because of his own flawed (or ‘thick’) sight on a proxy to interpret events for him. In all of the examples I have looked at so far, the delivery, reception and interpretation of advice are fatally flawed. It is not simply that we see principles being perverted, or forms of political advice or action being diverted from their proper course; rather, the play suggests that there are no stable criteria for their exercise. To this extent, the difficulty of deciding whether Brutus’ self-conviction is admirable or of choosing between his and Antony’s interpretation of the assassination is not reducible to Shakespeare’s creation of a ‘functional ambiguity’ designed to palliate a quasi-republican text, or even, I think, to the notion that Rome is at a point in its history between ‘decayed republic and emergent tyranny’. The absence of any common language or any solid premises to which
See Plutarch, ‘The life of Julius Cæsar’, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared, sig. Vviv and ‘The life of Marcus Brutus’, sig. Viir. Note Brutus’ characteristic self-persuasion here: ‘Thus must I piece it out’ (my emphasis) – must he? Are there no other possible interpretations of the fragmentary question? Of course there are, but he is already primed, both by his own inclinations and by Cassius’ conversation with him, to complete it as he does. Th is is a classic piece of rhetorical persuasion, leaving Brutus convinced that he has ‘found’ a meaning that he has in fact been provided with. See Ian Donaldson, ‘ “Misconstruing Everything”: Julius Caesar and Sejanus’, in Grace Ioppolo, ed., Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes (Newark, ), pp. –. ‘Construe’ occurs at . . (Brutus); . . (Cicero); . . (Brutus); . . (Titinius). A reading of the play suggested in Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, ), p. . For an interpretation of the play that shares my wariness of reading it as a
characters may appeal calls into question the whole sphere of political life. This is evident from the constant alternation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ concerns: characters have private cause for their grievance or claim that they will offer ‘public reasons’ for their actions. But there is no proper division of these parts of life, and no clear notion of how actions in either should be judged. It is evident too from Shakespeare’s treatment of the Senate and people of Rome (the city’s defining public bodies): the people’s reduction to an unthinking rabble has often been remarked upon, while, in contrast to Plutarch, where the Senate meets to respond to the assassination and later gives authority to Octavius Caesar, the Senate in Shakespeare is simply the scene of a murder and a place from which its officers flee. Finally, then, and with the people in mind, I want to turn to the most celebrated act of persuasion in Julius Caesar : Antony’s funeral oration. By looking briefly at one moment in this speech I will conclude this argument for the sceptical nature of Shakespeare’s treatment of political persuasion and of his sources. Throughout his speech, Antony uses the demagogue’s wiles alternately to cajole, insult and flatter his audience, referring to their reason while exciting their passions. The key rhetorical figure here is
statement about republicanism, and that offers an instructive contrast with Jonson’s Sejanus, see Donaldson, ‘ “Misconstruing Everything”’. Cf. Julius Caesar, ed. Daniell, p. . On the manipulation and inversion of morally evaluative language see also Quentin Skinner, ‘Paradiastole: Redescribing the Vices as Virtues’, in Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber, eds., Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, ), pp. –. See . . (Caesar explains his reasons for not attending the Senate for Decius’ ‘private satisfaction’); . . (Brutus promises to give ‘public reasons’ for Caesar’s death); . . , (Antony alludes to the conspirators’ ‘private griefs’ and refers to Brutus having given him ‘public leave’ to speak). See Plutarch, ‘The life of Marcus Brutus’, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared, sigs. Viv r, Vvir. Plutarch stresses the highly rhetorical nature of Antony’s speech, stating that ‘he mingled his oration with lamentable wordes, and by amplifying of matters did greatly move their harts and affections unto pitie & compassion’, ‘The life of Marcus Antonius’, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared, sig. Niiv (my emphasis). On Shakespeare’s representation of the dangers of popular oratory see further Markku Peltonen’s chapter in this volume; on Julius Caesar and the dangers of popularity more generally see Shapiro, , p. . The two competing funeral orations form an exercise in arguing in utramque partem, a form central to grammar-school and university education in Tudor England (and the rights and wrongs of the assassination were a set topic for such debates; see Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, p. ); that Antony’s
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litotes, or denying the contrary (‘I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts. / I am no orator as Brutus is’, etc. (. . –)). Wondering why, if the people loved Caesar, they will not mourn for him (a striking case of introducing a deniable major premise), Antony exclaims ‘O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts / And men have lost their reason!’ (. . –). This tag was notoriously mocked by Ben Jonson in Every Man Out of His Humour (), but I do not know of any attempt to trace its pre-Shakespearean origin. There is, however, a curiously similar form of words in a text that speaks very directly to the issues of tyrannicide and resistance addressed by Julius Caesar. Discussing the effects of tyrannical rule, the Marian exile Christopher Goodman writes, in his How superior powers oght to be obeyed of , that the people: oght not to suffer all power and libertie to be taken from them, and therby to become brute beastes, with out judgemente and reason, thinking all things lawfull, which their Rulers do without exception, commande them, be they never so farre from reason or godlynesse: as thoghe they were not reasonable creatures, but brute beastes: as thoghe there were no difference betwixt bonde slaves, and free subjectes. success depends in no small part on his having the last word is testified to by an early response to the play: The many-headed multitude were drawne By Brutus speech, that Cæsar was ambitious, When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious: Mans memorie with new forgets the old, One tale is good untill another’s told.
(John Weever, The Mirror of Martyrs, or The life and death of that thrice valiant Capitaine, and most godly Martyre Sir John Old-castle knight, Lord Cobham (London, ) STC , sig. Av). See Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, . . –: ‘reason is long since fled to animals, you know’; in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, vols. (Oxford, –), III, p. . Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd of their Subjects: and wherin they may lawfully by Gods worde be disobeyed and resisted (Geneva, ), STC , sigs. kv–kr. Expanded contractions are indicated by underlining. On Goodman see ODNB ‘Christopher Goodman (/–)’; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vols. (Cambridge, ), II, pp. –; McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. –, ; Dan G. Danner, ‘Christopher Goodman and the English Protestant Tradition of Civil Disobedience’, Sixteenth Century Journal, (), –; David H. Wollman, ‘The Biblical Justification for Resistance to Authority in Ponet’s and Goodman’s Polemics’, Sixteenth Century Journal, (), –. On Goodman’s influence in Elizabethan England see Michael McGiffert, ‘Covenant, Crown, and Commons in Elizabethan Puritanism’, Journal of British Studies, (), – and, especially on Sidney and his circle, James E. Phillips, ‘George Buchanan and the Sidney Circle’, Huntington Library Quarterly (–), –, esp. –, ; Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New
Earlier he has emphasised that rulers ‘shulde understand that their subjectes be no more as it were brute beastes with out sense or judgement: but that they know wherein, and how farre they owe obedience’ (gv). It must be admitted that references to brute beasts are not especially hard to find in either early modern texts or one of their main sources – Scripture. Indeed, in North’s Plutarch Caesar calls the pirates who capture him ‘blockeheades, and brute beastes’ for not appreciating his poetry and orations, and refers to the people as ‘Bruti, and Cumani, to witte, beastes, and fooles’ for supporting Flavius and Marullus. But the similarity in phrasing between Goodman and Shakespeare, and their common association of the words ‘judgement’, ‘brute beasts’ and ‘reason’ here are striking. Along with Goodman’s regular references to slavery, his accusation that the people are ‘willingly become, as it were, bondemen’ (shades of Cassius’ ‘willing bondman’? (. . )) and even his slighting mention of worshipping ‘stocks and stones’, this should surely make us wonder whether Shakespeare had read and inwardly digested Goodman’s call for the assassination of the tyrant Mary I before he wrote about the assassination of the tyrant Julius Caesar – both of them, to their critics, notorious innovators.
Haven, ), pp. –, . Although copies of How superior powers may have been scarce, its influence continued to be felt: Goodman is attacked in John Donne, Ignatius his conclave (London, ) STC , sig. Fr, and quoted directly by John Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (); see Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge, ), pp. –. On Shakespeare and resistance theory more generally see Gordon Ross Smith, ‘A Rabble of Princes: Considerations Touching Shakespeare’s Political Orthodoxy in the Second Tetralogy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, (), –. Pet. : ; Jude . Also notable are two instances from near-contemporary plays: Mucedorus’ description of the lawless ‘state of nature’, in which men lived before Orpheus drew them together into societies, in A Most pleasant Comedie of Mucedorus (London, ), STC , sig. Ev: In time of yore when men like brutish beasts Did lead their lives in loathsom celles and woodes And wholly gave themselves to witlesse will, A rude unruly rout, then man to man became A present praye, then might prevailed, The weakest went to walles, Right was unknowen, for wrong was all in all.
And Locrine’s threat to revenge himself on his invaders in W. S., The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine (London, ), STC , sig. Gv: ‘they are beasts that seeke to usurp our land, / And like to brutish beasts they shall be serv’d’. It is perhaps worth observing that Locrine is devoted to the myth of Brutus’ foundation of Troynovant. Plutarch, ‘The life of Julius Cæsar’, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared, sigs. Siv v, Vviv. Caesar is taking up and inverting the language of the ‘people’, who, Plutarch tells us, ‘called [Flavius and Marullus] Brutes: because of Brutus, who had in old time driven the kings out of Rome, & that brought the kingdom of one person, unto the government of the Senate and people’ (sig. Vviv). On slavery, see Goodman, How Superior Powers, sigs. f v and passim; on willing bondmen, sig. gr; on stocks and stones, sigs. lv–lr. He attacks flatterers at sig. iv.
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What, though, are the implications of this allusion (if allusion it is)? Goodman is saying that when they are allowed too much liberty and so become tyrants, rulers act as if the people were brute beasts without judgement or reason, whereas they are in fact reasonable and should enjoy liberty (to a certain extent). His use of the phrase occurs, therefore, in a context where he is urging the people to use their judgement and reason to resist tyranny and see how they are being treated like beasts. Antony, by contrast, uses it to say that if the people had their reason they would realise that having celebrated Caesar they should now mourn him. He presents it as an exercise of a reasoned thought (if you praised this man, then you should mourn his death), but in fact it is part of his larger attempt to rouse the people’s (unreasoning) passions to act like a mob – to ‘move’ them in the direction he wants to. He is firmly convinced that the people are beasts and that he can drive them anywhere he wants. Yet the force of Antony’s exclamation is still more complicated: by announcing that judgement is ‘fled to brutish beasts’ he implies both that the arch-brute Brutus and his fellow conspirators have hijacked the ability to make judgements and that if the people he is addressing can judge his speech, then they are in the position of beasts. What we see happening here, in a way that I have suggested is characteristic of the play as a whole (and notably its treatment of Plutarch’s narrative), is the mobilisation of a text concerned with principles and collective action in a context that allows no space at all for such principles or action. If Shakespeare is, as I suggest, alluding here to Goodman’s work of resistance theory, this has considerable implications and raises a number of important questions. Among the implications is that, as has been argued by a number of critics, his reading extended well beyond the core texts of the grammar-school curriculum. Some of the most striking questions have to do with the possible effect of quoting Goodman in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when, as we have seen, he was a byword for sedition and regicide as much as a symbol of the Protestant resistance to Marian rule. Archbishop Parker and others believed that How Superior Powers could inspire acts of rebellion against ministers of the state; so would an allusion to the book imply fellow-feeling with those committed to the deposition of Elizabeth? Or, on the other hand, is invoking a text by a Marian exile not a rather curious thing for a supposed crypto- Catholic
See n. above. See Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. –; John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, vols. (Oxford, ), I, p. .
(as Shakespeare has been recently described) to be doing? This chapter does not allow space for me to pursue these questions in any detail . They do, however, intersect with some points raised in important recent treatments of the relation between Shakespeare’s work in general, and Julius Caesar in particular, and the political thought of early modern England; and it is with a brief discussion of these that I will conclude. Critics have been keen to find in Julius Caesar signs of Shakespeare’s attitude towards the political culture of his time, generally taking one of two routes – either investigating the ways in which the play takes up and intervenes in traditions of political thought such as classical republicanism or the tyrannicide debate, or exerting pressure on its most local contexts, the events and personalities of the year of its composition and first performance. Many of these studies have yielded valuable insights into the play, and together they have vastly enriched our sense of its complexity, as well as its embeddedness in the living debates of the late sixteenth century. Yet when they attempt to extract a position on any of these topics from the play the result tends to be frustration or imprecision, or an appeal to categories such as ‘strategic ambivalence’. The reason is not, I suggest, because Shakespeare was prevented from making his views known by the threat of censorship or punishment; still less is it because the play as an aesthetic object resists being associated with sordid and occasional political questions. Nonetheless, however much it might allude to concerns and events of the s, Julius Caesar does not provide direct (or even much indirect) comment on late Elizabethan politics, or treat seriously republican thought in either its Roman or its early modern manifestations. Instead, as I have shown, it ruthlessly exposes the limits
On Shakespeare’s Catholicism, see E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: ‘The Lost Years’ (Manchester, ); Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson, eds., Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester, ); Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester, ); Peter Milward, Shakespeare the Papist (Naples, Fla., ); Michael Wood, Shakespeare (New York, ); Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York, ). For the first, see especially Robert S. Miola, ‘Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate’, Renaissance Quarterly, (), –; Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. –; Rebecca W. Bushnell, ‘Julius Caesar’, in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, eds., A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. I: The Tragedies (Oxford, ), pp. –; for the second, Shapiro, , pp. –; Rose, ‘Conjuring Caesar’, pp. –; Wayne C. Rebhorn, ‘The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar’, Renaissance Quarterly, (), –. For a different, and intriguing, take on Julius Caesar’s local contexts see Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre, (Manchester, ) Rose, ‘Conjuring Caesar’, p. .
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on political advice and action. Counsel is ill-intentioned, or goes astray, or both; the meaning of every phrase and every event is up for grabs and open to interpretation ; and the image presented of those doing the interpreting is far from flattering (whether they are the common people or the political elite). What we are left with is a world in which having the last word, in the ‘common pulpit’ or on the battlefield, is all that really matters .
Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus Markku Peltonen
This chapter examines the role of political rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. It argues that active citizenship and political rhetoric play a central part in the play; above all, the ars rhetorica helps us understand the conflict between the common people and the patricians in the play. There is a highly interesting early modern precedent for such a contextualisation. Christopher Hegendorff ’s Methodus conscribendi epistolas () contained, as an example of demonstrative epistles, a short panegyric on Hannibal. When the author and literary editor Abraham Fleming included an adaptation of Hegendorff ’s manual in his own letter-writing guide, A panoplie of epistles in , he replaced Hegendorff ’s short eulogy by a much longer one for Coriolanus. Let me begin with a brief account of that laudatio. ‘In the course of [Coriolanus’] whole life’, Fleming tells us, ‘there was nothing to be noted which deserved reprehension or dispraise.’ Yet he had one particular quality that outshone the rest – eloquence. According to Fleming, ‘like streames of honie [Coriolanus’] … words should flowe from his mouth, and with the wonderfulnesse of his wisedome, and excellencie of his eloquence, all that heard him should be inchaunted and bewitched’. Underlying such exceptional powers of eloquence was Coriolanus’ wide learning: there was no ‘art or profession … wherein hee had not sufficiencie both of knowledge and also of judgement’. Little wonder, then, that already in his youth ‘when hee spake, hee seemed to move senselesse stones, much more reasonable men’. But as soon as Coriolanus reached adulthood his rhetorical powers reached new heights. His voice was ‘angelicall’, his words ‘Oracles’: His counsell in matters of importance was as necessarie, as the use of an Anchore in tempests outragious. The principalls of ech Province, stayed themselves, upon his determination. Magistrates of eache vocation and function, subscribed to his
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arbitrement. Commoners made accompt of his wordes, as of matters most religious, and in no point to be violated.
It is pretty obvious that any attempt to see Fleming’s Coriolanus as a close model for Shakespeare’s would be an uphill battle, and I am not, I should hasten to add, going to wage such a battle. Nevertheless, even if Fleming’s laudatio would be difficult to reconcile with Shakespeare’s portrayal, the former, however inadvertently, suggests the centrality of rhetoric in Coriolanus’ life. As many recent scholars have argued, Coriolanus is a highly political play, where ‘private moments and private settings’ are ‘completely’ excluded. Although some scholars still argue for the passive acquiescence of the people in Coriolanus, it is much more common to emphasise the people’s civic and political activity. In contextualising this civic activity, scholars have, broadly speaking, followed two distinctive paths. First, they have read the play in the context of early Jacobean politics and parliament – the Midland revolt, the question of franchise and the first parliament of James’s reign. The king and Salisbury’s identification of certain MPs with the tribunes of the people resonates in the play. Another similar passage is Sicinius’ account of Martius: ‘when his soaring insolence / … / … will be his fire / To kindle their [ie. the people’s] dry stubble, and their blaze / Shall darken him for ever’ (. . –). This passage echoes James’s criticism in May of those MPs who had questioned his Union project (and who had used James’s earlier words for that purpose): ‘Upon my speech some have builded … Hay and Stubble: I must be as a Fire to consume and burn up the Hay and Stubble.’ Secondly, to complement such topical readings, many recent scholars have also read the play in the context of early modern political thought. Christopher Hill suggested that since ‘Shakespeare had clearly heard communist propaganda’ the play should be seen in the context of the prehistory of the Leveller movement. But the majority of scholars follow Anne Barton and Patrick Collinson and place Coriolanus in the context
Abraham Fleming, A panoplie of epistles, or, a looking glasse for the unlearned (London, ), sig. Aiv–ijr; Christopher Hegendorff, Methodus conscribendi epistolas, in Georgius Macropedius, Methodus de conscribendis epistolis (London, ), sig. [Oviv–Oviiv]. Gail Kern Paster, ‘To Starve with Feeding: The City in Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Studies, (), . Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, ), pp. –. W. Gordon Zeeveld, ‘ “Coriolanus” and Jacobean Politics’, Modern Language Review, (), –; Lee Bliss, ‘Introduction’, in Coriolanus, ed. Bliss (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Journals of the House of Commons, –, vols. (London, –), I, p. . Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth, ), p. .
of the humanist notion of active citizenship. Such a theory of citizenship, as Quentin Skinner has demonstrated, grew out of the educational programme of humanism, which was overwhelmingly linguistic in character – concentrating on ‘the two linguistic elements in the studia humanitatis, the ars grammatica and the ars rhetorica’. My point of departure is the idea that whilst it was widely agreed in the early modern period that rhetoric was central to active citizenship, there was much less unanimity about its social depth and thus about its precise nature. At one end of the spectrum was the conviction, upheld by many humanist scholars and schoolmasters, that active citizenship should be socially relatively wide and inclusive – that the duties of the citizen in general and his oratorical power in particular concerned a large body of the people. At the other end was a growing body of literature which maintained that these duties and the usage of the powers of the ars rhetorica in particular should be limited to a more exclusive body of councillors and nobles. According to this aristocratic interpretation of citizenship, there was nothing that put the commonwealth in graver danger than the mighty weapon of eloquence in popular hands. It is a striking fact that the humanist schoolmaster played a key role in turning early modern subjects into citizens. Irrespective of whether the schoolmaster taught in London, Tonbridge or Plymouth, he emphasised that even the elementary school education was there to bring up future citizens and statesmen. As William Kempe, the headmaster of Plymouth Grammar School, noted in , his school would produce both ‘wise Councellers’ and ‘Rulers in the Common wealth’. These would-be citizens included merchants and other common people, and Kempe attempted therefore to ‘make the argument more popular’, to which end he ‘prefixed’ to his educational treatise ‘a necessarie exhortation for all other sort of people’.
Anne Barton, ‘Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Survey, (), ; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, (), . Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, ), pp. , . See my ‘Rhetoric and Citizenship in the Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in John McDiarmaid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I (Aldershot, ), pp. –. William Kempe, The education of children in learning: declared by the dignitie, utilitie, and method thereof (London, ), sig. Er. Ibid., sig. Ar.
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A graphic testimony to Kempe’s socially inclusive assumptions was his use of the Gracchi brothers as one of his main classical examples of eloquence. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and his younger brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus had not only been members of one of the most notable Roman plebeian families and served as plebeian tribunes: above all, they were also famous for their fight for social reform against the senate. The early seventeenth-century schoolmaster of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, John Brinsley, wrote A consolation for our grammar schooles () for giving directions how to organise such schools ‘for all those of the inferiour sort, and all ruder countries and places’, which included ‘Ireland, Wales, Virginia, with the Sommer Ilands’. Brinsley had thus ‘the weakest, & for the common countrye Schooles’ or ‘our meaner & ruder schooles’ in mind. Although he applied Erasmus, Johann Sturm and Roger Ascham’s pedagogical writings, he was painfully aware that he was planning a far more elementary curriculum than those of such top grammar schools as ‘Westminster, Eton, Winchester’. Yet he was convinced that even those elementary schools produced not only ministers for the ‘Church’ but active citizens for the ‘Common wealth’. Hence he argued that ‘a wise and an understanding people’ would produce ‘a glorious nation’ and reminded his readers of Cicero’s teaching that they had chiefly been born for their country. It followed, he continued, that ‘all the flower of our Nation, and those who become the leaders of all the rest, are committed to our education, and instruction’. What Brinsley mainly had in mind was local governance; that is to say, his pupils would become leaders in ‘townes and countries where they are’. There were two central characteristics in early modern grammarschool training in rhetoric that need to be emphasised. First, this training was intensely political in character. Given the fact that the purpose of early modern schooling was said to be the formation of active citizens, it should be no news that schoolboys were expected to speak or write on civic and political topics. There was a standard list of political themes that early modern rhetoricians adopted from their classical sources. William
Ibid., sig. E r. John Brinsley, A consolation for our grammar schooles (London, ), title-page. Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , , . Aristotle On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, ed. and trans. George A. Kennedy (Oxford, ), b–a; Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi, trans. Harry Kaplan (London, ), . . ; Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, vols. (London, ), . . ;
Pemble, for instance, argued in his Enchiridion oratorium that schoolboys should speak about ‘all in which the commonwealth and republic consists of … [i.e.] welfare and liberty: making the laws, means of obtaining money, war and peace and the instruments of both’. Similarly, the most popular early seventeenth-century school textbook on rhetoric, Thomas Farnaby’s Index rhetoricus, explained that in the field of deliberative rhetoric schoolboys should be able to ‘persuad[e] or dissuad[e] about things which are contingent and in our power’. Such things included ‘public wealth, that is subsidies, peace and war, the defence of borders, what is exported or imported, laws’. This list was especially prominent in those rhetoric manuals intended for classroom use. It follows that early modern schoolboys at the age of or were expected to speak regularly, and on both sides, about taxes, laws, foreign trade and foreign policy. The second important characteristic that early modern rhetoricians adopted from their classical precedessors was the fact that rhetoric was seen as a popular art. Cicero had emphasised throughout his rhetorical corpus that the people – the multitude – were the orator’s chief audience. The early modern rhetoricians concurred. Of course, the possible places where the orator could apply his skills included the council and diplomatic missions, but practically all rhetoricians put much more emphasis on popular assemblies and the people at large. Many school textbooks assumed that the orator would address the people. For Leonard Cox, the author of the first English treatise on rhetoric, eloquence was highly useful not only in counselling the prince, in acting as an ambassador and in being ‘techers of goddes worde’, it was equally beneficial ‘to all them havynge any thyng to purpose or to speke afore any companye’ – ‘to the
Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell, in Cicero, De inventione, De optimo genere oratorium, Topica (London, ), . . ; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, vols. (London, –), . . . William Pemble, Enchiridion oratorium (Oxford, ), p. : ‘haec sunt omnia in quibus consistit civitatis & reipub … salus & libertas: leges ferendae, pecuniarum parandarum ratio, bellum et pax, instrumenta utriusque.’ Thomas Farnaby, Index rhetoricus, scholis & institutioni tenerioris aetatis accommodatus (London, ), p. : ‘Deliberantur, id est, suadentur aut dissuadentur res quaelibet contingentes, & positae in nostra potestate: Publicae verae, Pecuniae seu vestigalia, Pax & Bellum, regionum Presidia, Que exportantur aut importantur, Leges.’ Cicero, De oratore, . . , ; Cicero, Brutus, trans. G. L. Hendrickson, rev. edn, in Cicero, Brutus, Orator (London, ), . ; Cicero, De partitio oratoria, trans. H. Rackham, in Cicero, De oratore III, De fato, Paradoxa Stoicorum, Partitio oratoriae (London, ), . . See e.g. Cornelius Valerius, In universam bene dicendi rationem tabula (London, ), pp. , –; [Hugh Robinson], ‘Rhetorica brevis ex valerio et taleo maximam partem constructa’, in I. Preces. II. Grammaticalia quaedam. III. Rhetorica brevis (Oxford, ), pp. –, at p. ; Thomas Vicars, Cheiragogia. Manuductio ad artem rhetoricam (rd edn, London, ), pp. –.
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multitude’. A consummate orator, according to Thomas Wilson, could lead ‘a whole multitude … which waye he liketh best to have them’. Wilson’s volume was thus meant not only for those who ‘either shall beare rule over manye, or muste have to do wyth matters of Realme’, but also for anyone who ‘exhorte men in open assemblies’. If eloquence was above all about speaking to the people, it followed that it could be described as popular. Distinguishing dialectic and rhetoric from one another, one rhetorician defined dialectic as ‘brief and subtile’ and rhetoric as ‘copious and popular’. Francis Bacon famously argued that ‘although in true value’ rhetoric ‘is inferiour to Wisedome … Yet with people it is more mightie’. It followed, Bacon went on, that ‘Rhetoricke handleth it [i.e. reason], as it is planted in popular opinions and Manners’. Farnaby exhorted the orator to give his speech a ‘popular appearance’. In his definition of rhetoric, Pemble constantly harped on its popular character. ‘Rhetoric’, he defined in the opening words of his manual, ‘is an art of speaking on whatever material ornately and copiously for popular conception and persuasion.’ It followed that the orator aimed ‘to teach popularly’. His ultimate end was thus the ‘popular instruction of the mind and stirring up of the emotions’ . Many humanist schoolmasters could argue for a wide dissemination of the ars rhetorica and the concomitant notion of active citizenship, but such an inclusive concept of citizenship and its underlying notion of popular eloquence was not universally embraced. Archbishop John Whitgift, for instance, told Parliament in that one of the ‘causes of troubles in kingdomes’ was ‘many orators’. Although humanist scholars and schoolmasters insisted that the formidable powers of eloquence could be employed by anyone who had received a training in the ars rhetorica, many
[Leonard Cox], The art or crafte of rhetoryke (London, [c. ]), sigs. Aiiv, Aiiir. Thomas Wilson, The arte of rhetorique (n.p., ), sigs. Aiiiiv, Aiv, fol. r. Valerius, In universam, p. : ‘brevem & subtilem Dialectico, Rhetori copiosam & popularem’. See also p. . Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (), ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV (Oxford, ), p. . Farnaby, Index rhetoricus, p. : ‘ad populum habita’. Pemble, Enchiridion, p. : ‘Rhetorica est ars de quavis materia ornate & copiose disserendi ad popularem notitiam & persuasionem’; ‘docere populariter … Externus autem & ultimus finis, est popularis instructio mentis & concitatio affectuum.’ Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, ed. T. E. Hartley ( vols. Leicester, –), II (–), pp. –.
of them simultaneously emphasised that active citizenship was in fact a particular province of the aristocracy and the gentry. The first master of Merchant Taylors’ School, Richard Mulcaster, held that the education of the commons and of gentlemen should be essentially the same, but he also argued that the gentlemen’s education should be specifically geared to the fact that ‘they be to governe under their prince in principall places’ . Many humanists directed their accounts of citizenship and eloquence exclusively to the nobility and the gentry. This was true with the most famous early Tudor exposition of humanist political argument – Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governour, first pubished in and reprinted at least eight times before the end of the century. A very similar principle guided the German humanist Johann Sturm’s treatise on nobility, published in English in , and his epistolary friend Roger Ascham’s tract on the education of the nobility and gentry – The scholemaster, likewise published in . Moreover, an even more aristocratic interpretation of rhetoric was expounded in many translations of originally continental treatises on nobility and aristocratic republicanism. In these treatises eloquence was seen as a means of conducting political debate amongst the nobility, but when directed towards the people it was above all a way of exercising power. The aristocrat was a ruler who governed and controlled his audience – the people – who were thus subjects rather than active citizens. Many of the advocates of such an aristocratic notion of eloquence argued that since the common people were inherently unruly, it was a principal task of the noble citizen to use his power of eloquence to suppress these unruly people. Francesco Patrizi wrote, for instance, that the nobility could by ‘the force of eloquence’ govern and ‘brydle the raginge and furyous common people’. An even blunter way of putting this was to insist that the nobility needed eloquence before everything else for quelling tumults and seditions. ‘In time of tumults and commotions’, one of these aristocratic treatises asserted, ‘the eloquent counseler with his authority & good
Richard Mulcaster, Positions wherin those primitive circumstances be examined, which are necessarie for the training up of children (London, ), p. . See also Richard Rainolde, The foundacion of rhetorike (London, ), fol. ix r. Johann Sturm, A ritch storehouse or treasurie for nobilitie and gentlemen, trans. Thomas Browne (London, ); Roger Ascham, The scholemaster (London, ), sig. Hiiir. Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, ), pp. –, –; Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, ), p. . Francesco Patrizi, A moral methode of civile policie, trans. Richard Robinson (London, ), fol. r.
Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus
perswasion, maye cause much quietnesse, and profite the common wealth dyvers wayes.’ According to this aristocratic notion of rhetoric, the ars rhetorica was thus highly beneficial in the hands of the noble orator. At the same time, however, it was urged in a Tacitean manner that in the hands of the common people eloquence would become a highly destructive weapon. There was nothing more dangerous than the power of eloquence being wielded by or even for the common people. It would lead, willy-nilly, to sedition. The most potent example of the calamitous consequences of the power of the common people in the Portuguese humanist Jerónimo Osório’s treatise on nobility was the sudden destruction of the efflorescence of ancient Rome. This had occurred as soon as the common people had been charmed to a rebellion ‘agaynste their rulers and princes’ by the powers of eloquence – ‘when the unsatiable desire of the frentike people waxed so extreme & outragious, that it coulde be kept under by no lawful government and pollitike counsel & was geven in hope of pray to uprores through the seditious orations of people pleasers’. The main blame for all this Osório laid at the door of ‘the Tribunes’: by being ‘seditious’ they had caused all ‘hurliburly’ in Rome until ‘the governemente came to Julius Caesar ’. The Polish humanist Laurentius Grimaldus Goslicius, whose treatise, The Counsellor, was published in London in , concurred. In ‘a popular government’, he argued, ‘wherein the multitude hath authoritie to heare all matters, and determine all lawes, many contentions and discords doe there ensue’. Underlying this, Goslicius believed, was the popular use of eloquence. It was often the case, he wrote, that ‘seditious subjectes’ pretended ‘the patronage of liberty, by publique perswasion and furie’, stirred ‘newe troubles and alterations in the state’ and did ‘perswade the people to discorde and sedition’. Goslicius’ example was also ancient Rome, where ‘the multitude not induring the dignitie of the Senate, made manie motions, and in the ende created Tribunes, by whose furie and insolencey, the authoritie of the Senate was diminished, and by sedition and troubles brought the state to utter destruction’.
Fadrique Furio Ceriol, A very briefe and profitable treatise declaring howe many counsells, trans. Thomas Blundeville (London, ), sig. Ev. Jerónimo Osório, The five bookes of the famous, learned, and eloquent man, Hieronimus Osorius, containinge a discourse of civill, and christian nobilitie, trans. William Blandie (London, ), fol. v; Tacitus, Dialogus de oratoribus, trans. W. Peterson, rev. M. Winterbottom, in Tacitus, Agricola, Germania, Dialogus (London, ), . . Laurentius Grimaldus Goslicius, The counsellor, trans. [anon.] (London, ), pp. –, . Ibid., pp. –.
To portray the tribunes of the people as populist orators was thus highly topical in early modern England. Far from being confined to the King’s criticism of recalcitrant MPs, it had a much wider resonance in the political thought of the period. It was a chief means of questioning popular participation in politics . Such views were not restricted to translations of continental works. One English author who agreed with their analysis was the poet and playwright Barnabe Barnes who, in his Foure bookes of offices (), not only discussed at length the benefits eloquence could bring about, but also dwelled on its highly dangerous consequences in popular hands. ‘Luxurious eloquence’, Barnes wrote, ‘is the nurce of licence; the companion of seditions, the spurre which pricketh forth unruly people … it is stubborne, rash, arrogant, and never bred or nourished in any well ordered cities.’ Another originally English work from the early seventeenth century that offered a Tacitean analysis of popular rhetoric is a collection of essays entitled Essaies politicke and morall published in by Jean l’Oiseau de Turval, a Church of England clergyman of Huguenot origin. He insisted that rhetoric was prominent only in weak commonwealths. ‘We shal find’, he wrote, ‘that it hath flourished where quietnes of government hath been most impoverished, as in those Common-wealthes, where either the people, or the ignorant, or all, have borne all the sway.’ Turval presented Athens and republican Rome as his examples of commonwealths where rhetoric had held sway. Conversely, he concluded, ‘in better established Governments, as those of Sparta, and of Crete, it was never had in any great account, or estimation’ . For a particularly striking example of how these two competing interpretations of eloquence could be juxtaposed we have to meet the Raellyans. It may be that not everyone has heard of the Raellyans. They were a people of Scythian origin who were banished to Assyria, where, through commerce, they became wealthy and bought their freedom from Assyria. As soon as they had purchased their freedom, some noble Raellyans suggested that they should ‘choose a King’. But many, especially amongst ‘the common people’, asked: ‘why should we so greatly abandone our great libertie?’
Barnabe Barnes, Foure bookes of offices (London, ), p. . [Jean l’Oiseau de Turval], Essaies politicke and morall (London, ), fol. r–v. James Glaucus, A knowledge for kings, and a warning for subjects, trans. William Clever (London, ), sigs. Biir–Biiir.
Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus
What is most striking about the story of the Raellyans is the fact that it was neither classical nor, apparently, continental, but was concocted by a humble schoolmaster in Buckinghamshire called William Clever and published in . But how did the Raellyans solve what Clever called the ‘wounded controversie’ between ‘the commen people and the prudent elders’ whether or not to elect a king? They sought the solution from the powers of the ars rhetorica – both sides, in other words, would choose an ‘Orator’ to present their case and, having heard these two deliberative orations, they would then make the final decision. In the subsequent war of words, the advocate of the common people strongly defended liberty and self-government, and exhorted the common people not ‘to thrust their neckes under the yoake of obedience to be ruled’ by a king. Conversely, his adversary, the advocate of monarchy, identified popular eloquence as the chief problem of the republican form of goverment. He thus described his opponent as ‘a flatterer’ and one amongst ‘flattering Oratours’ whose only aim was to foment a sedition. ‘Such greedie Oratours’ as his popular opponent ‘doo blowe in the eares of the common people’ in order to raise ‘tumults’ and ‘to set up one against another, at civile dissentions’. The Raellyans, their ‘wounded controversie’ and its outcome – they elected a king who turned out to be a cruel tyrant and their independence was subsequently destroyed by this tyranny – was a particularly dramatic version of the conflict between popular and aristocratic eloquence. There are some similarities between Clever’s story and Shakespeare’s play. In both of them the orators defending the common people argue against the nobles who pursue ‘one sole throne / Without assistance’ (. . –, also . . –, –); in both, peace, harmony and prosperity flourish when the danger of autocracy has been warded off . More importantly, I would like to suggest, these two competing views of the ars rhetorica, so powerfully depicted by this humble schoolmaster, provide an important context that helps us understand Coriolanus. The play fully endorses, as Cathy Shrank has recently pointed out, the humanist idea of the close relationship between public speaking and civic action. The power of words is central to the whole play. This can be seen in two important scenes. First, Martius is moved to abandon his plan
Ibid., sigs. Biiiir–Bv r. Ibid., sigs. Bv r–Bviiv. Ibid., sigs. Bviiiv, Cir, Ciiv. Cathy Shrank, ‘Civility and the City in Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), –.
to attack Rome by the powers of eloquence. In this scene, the tribunes emphasise that eloquence can be a mightier power than the sword; thus Sicinius encourages Menenius to go and persuade Martius to give up his plan by claiming that: if you Would be your country’s pleader, your good tongue, More than the instant army can make, Might stop our countryman. (. . –)
Martius at first disagrees. When Menenius tries to persuade him, he easily withstands his words and responds, ‘Mine ears against your suits are stronger than / Your gates against my force’ (. . –). Yet, although both Cominius and Menenius fail to persuade Martius, it is, of course, Volumnia who finally succeeds in her persuasion. She is able to move her son by using honour as her only argument, which perfectly suits a deliberative speech addressed to a noble, and also by appealing to his emotions, especially with the help of his son, of whom she says ‘Speak thou, boy. / Perhaps thy childishness will move him more / Than can our reasons’ (. . –). Although she is responsible for Martius’ military (rather than liberal) upbringing, she understands the mighty power of words and tells Martius that towns could be won ‘with gentle words’ (. . ). Second, the ordinary citizens are equally aware of the potency of eloquence. When the news breaks that Caius Martius is about to attack Rome, Menenius accuses the ordinary citizens of having caused this. But the third citizen responds that ‘That we did, we did for the best, and though we willingly consented to his banishment, yet it was against our will’ (. . –). So, the third citizen distances himself and his fellow citizens from the decision to banish Caius Martius by claiming that it was the power of eloquence that caused them to banish him. As Thomas Wilson explained this power, ‘suche force hath the tongue, and such is the power of eloquence and reason, that most men are forced even to yelde in that, whiche most standeth againste their will’. The controversy in the play between the common people and the patricians, or what the Roman traitor Nicanor calls ‘strange insurrections: the
Wilson, The arte, sig. Aiiiv.
Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus
people against the senators, patricians, and nobles’ (. . –), is highly rhetorical. There are of course several important scenes where the senators and the common people or their orators – the tribunes – confront each other in a war of words. Furthermore, their respective notions of eloquence closely follow the models I have sketched. The patricians in the play uphold the aristocratic notion of rhetoric. In their deliberative speeches they invariably appeal to honesty and virtue and disparage arguments based on utility. When Cominius argues for Martius’ consulship he emphasises the importance of honestas and insists that ‘valour is the chiefest virtue’ (. . ). Similarly, another senator claims that ‘He cannot but with measure fit the honours / Which we devise him’ (. . –), whilst Menenius exclaims, ‘Worthy man!’ and ‘He’s right noble’ (. . , ). They also share the same view of the common people, who for them are simple-minded fools. Thus, it is not only Martius who holds such a view (he contrasts their complete ‘ignorance’ with the senators’ virtue, wisdom and reason): Menenius’ views are strikingly similar. According to him, the common people ‘abundantly lack discretion / Yet are they passing cowardly’ (. . –). They are, he later points out, ‘beastly plebeians’ (. . ). Nor are their views of the tribunes much different. Menenius says that their abilities are ‘infant-like’ (. . ) and they themselves ‘ridiculous subjects’ (. . ). Just as Martius refers to the common people as the tribunes’ ‘herds’ (. . ), so Menenius tells the tribunes that they are ‘the herdsmen of the beastly plebeians’ (. . –). Since, for the senators, the common people are completely ignorant and they themselves wise and virtuous, it follows that they perceive only themselves as active members of the commonwealth. The common people, by contrast, should passively wait for the good to radiate from above. Martius insists that the plebeians are expected to sit passively while the senators debate politics, ‘to show bare heads / In congregations, to yawn, be still, and wonder / When one but of my ordinance stood up / To speak of peace and war’ (. . –). Again Menenius agrees. He reminds the common people in the opening scene of the play that ‘most charitable care / Have the patricians of you’ (. . –). Later in the same scene he dwells on the same point at greater length. The senators’: counsels and their cares, digest things rightly Touching the weal o’th’common, you shall find No public benefit which you receive But it proceeds or comes from them to you And no way from yourselves. (. . –)
Such convictions entail not only that eloquence is a means of conducting political debate amongst the nobility, but also that when directed towards the common people it was above all a way of exercising power. Thus, when the senators debate and decide to elect Martius a consul, one of them tells the tribunes that they should pass the message to the people so that they might simply ‘yield what passes here’ (. . ). The senators are convinced that anyone who speaks to the common people has to use flattery. Martius’ very first words directed to the common people are: ‘He that will give good words to thee will flatter’ (. . ). When the two officers discuss in Act Scene , the forthcoming war of words between Martius and the tribunes, they agree that flattery is a necessity if one is to persuade the common people: there hath been many great men that have flattered the people, who ne’er loved them; and there be many that they have loved, they know not wherefore (. . –)
As we have seen, the numerous aristocratic accounts of popular rhetoric always described popular orators as flatterers. So when Martius repeatedly insists that he is not ready to flatter the people, he makes this aristocratic assumption of popular rhetoric as mere flattery. The aristocratic conception of rhetoric entailed that in noble hands eloquence was a potent means to ‘brydle the raginge and furyous common people’, but that in popular hands it became a seditious weapon. We can now see that Menenius emphasises the first assumption. He relies on eloquence in his attempt to suppress the tumult of the common people and sternly advises Martius to do likewise. Martius, however, emphasises the second assumption that in popular hands eloquence foments tumults. When Martius tells Menenius that the common people were granted ‘Five tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms’, he immediately predicts that ‘it will in time / Win upon power and throw forth greater themes / For insurrection’s arguing’ (. . , –). To flatter the people, Martius later insists, is to nourish ‘rebellion, insolence, sedition’ (. . –). Popular exercise of rhetoric, in other words, amounts to inciting seditions. Of course, there are two scenes where Martius is able to use eloquence. First, in the battle scene in Act he easily wins over his auditors. And in doing this he is not only ready to employ highly emotional language:
Patrizi, A moral methode, fol. r.
Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus
if any fear Lesser his person than an ill report; If any think brave death outweighs bad life, And that his country’s dearer than himself (. . –)
He also, just as many authors of rhetoric advise, turns his auditors into spectators and uses himself – the signs of the earlier battle being writ large on him – as ‘this painting’ to stir up their emotions further (. . ). The second scene where Martius persuades his audience – at least momentarily – is of course Act Scene , where he confronts the tribunes in an oratorial competition in utramque partem. In this scene he is ready, however reluctantly, to use some basic skills of the ars rhetorica. Although this time he does not turn his listeners into spectators (and does not show his wounds), he uses some elementary methods of actio: ‘I will practise the insinuating nod and / be off to them most counterfeitly’ (. . –). Similarly, he is now ready to ‘flatter my sworn brother, the / people, to earn a dearer estimation of them’ (. . –). No matter how poorly he can use the ars rhetorica, he manages to persuade the citizens to his side. Nonetheless, the victory is, of course, short-lived. On the whole, it is not only that Martius thinks that popular eloquence leads to sedition: he simply abhors rhetoric in all its forms and is convinced that it is necessarily popular. He equates all use of rhetoric with flattery and thus with popular eloquence. Underlying this is the fact that he had received a military, rather than a liberal, education: ‘He had rather see the swords and hear the drum than look upon his schoolmaster’ (. . –). As Menenius says, he ‘is ill-schooled / In bolted language’ (. . –). Given that Martius has had no liberal education and that such an education was considered indispensable for citizenship, it is hardly surprising that Martius says that he ‘fled from words’ (. . ) and acknowledges that he is unable to act as a statesman and ‘put on the gown’ (. . ). For him, action and speech were opposite rather than complementary qualities (. . –). He constantly juxtaposes flattering eloquence with talk that comes directly from the heart: ‘Let them accuse me by invention, I / Will answer in mine honour’ (. . –). When Menenius and Volumnia desperately try to teach him some elementary skills in rhetoric in the critical moment of Act Scene , she tells him that he must speak: to th’people, Not by your own instruction, nor by th’matter
Which your heart prompts you, but with such words That are but roted in your tongue, though but Bastards and syllables of no allowance To your bosom’s truth. (. . –)
She tells him, in other words, that eloquence does not mean uttering one’s conviction but being ready to use rhetorical means (flattery, if you like) to win your case . Furthermore, Volumnia also suggests that Martius should follow some basic rules of actio and behave humbly, ‘for in such business [Volumnia tells her son] / Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ignorant / More learned than the ears’ (. . –). But Martius’ response is entirely negative. He contrasts ‘my base tongue’ with ‘my noble heart’ (. . –). More importantly, although in exhorting his soldiers to follow him in the battle scene Martius was prepared, as we have seen, to employ highly emotional language and even to use himself as ‘this painting’ to stir up their emotions, now, in the political scene, he abhors the idea of using his body as imagery – to show his scars would be nothing but ‘To brag’ (. . ). And so would be actio as a whole: ‘Must I go show them my unbarbed sconce?’ (. . ) . The aristocratic interpretation of rhetoric is not the only one that can be found in Coriolanus. First, the common people have, of course, their own orators – the tribunes. When the tribunes prepare themselves in Act Scene for their confrontation with Martius, they are perfectly aware that they have a difficult task on their hands. Brutus affirms that ‘all tongues speak of him, and the blearéd sights / Are spectacled to see him’ (. . –). Sicinius agrees, exclaiming that ‘On the sudden, / I warrant him consul’ (. . –). Therefore, they carefully construct their speech along the lines of a deliberative oration. They decide to open (as all the authorities on rhetoric advise) by bringing their adversary into hatred and contempt. ‘We must’, says Brutus, ‘suggest the people in what hatred / He still hath held them’ (. . –). Again Sicinius concurs and notes that by telling the people about Martius’ ‘soaring insolence’ (. . ) they can set their emotions ablaze against him. They decide to make no mention of honour or virtues but instead to appeal to utilitas – to tell the people how under Martius’ consulship they would be like ‘mules and camels’ who are used ‘Only for bearing burdens and sore blows’ (. . ). Furthermore, they resolve,
Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus
just like the defender of the common people amongst the Raellyans, to remind the common people of the dangerous jeopardy Martius’ consulship would put their ‘freedoms’ (. . ). Popular rhetoric, the pleaders of the common people argue, would likewise be ‘silenced’ as soon as Martius became a consul (. . ). When they actually speak to the common people in Scene , they carefully follow their earlier plans. So Brutus points out to the people that Martius ‘ever spake against / Your liberties and the charters that you bear / I’th’body of the weal’ (. . –). But the situation has dramatically changed in the time that has elapsed between their plans and their speech. Meanwhile, Martius has, of course, managed to persuade the people onto his side. The tribunes find themselves in a situation where they can demonstrate their power of eloquence – to move the audience, which the adversary has already persuaded, onto their own side. This prompts the tribunes to denigrate Martius even more strongly than they had planned. They dwell on Martius’ ‘malice’ and ‘free contempt’ towards the ordinary people and make it clear to the citizens what kind of ‘Fast foe to th’plebeii’ Martius has been and would continue to be if he became a consul (. . , , ). At the same time they carefully act on the advice of rhetoric textbooks about insinuation as the exordium of their speech. One of the suggestions Cicero and others made if the adversary’s speech had won conviction was to express doubt and astonishment. ‘How now, my masters’, asks Sicinius, ‘have you chose this man?’ (. . ). And Brutus continues: ‘We pray the gods he may deserve your loves’ (. . ). This has the desired effect, and the citizens start to doubt their earlier conviction, and soon they admit that they assented far too readily. Second, in addition to having their own orators – the tribunes – the ordinary citizens themselves follow their schoolmasters’ advice and use the ars rhetorica. Some scholars see the people in the play as thoroughly passive, easily manipulated by the tribunes for their own purposes. Yet, as Cathy Shrank has recently reminded us, ‘from the outset of Coriolanus we are introduced to Rome and its inhabitants as political beings’. They are, even by Martius’ condescending testimony, keenly interested
Ad Herennium, . . ; Cicero, De inventione, . . . Shrank, ‘Civility’, pp. –.
in politics – ‘What’s done i’th’Capitol’ (. . ). Throughout the play, the people are referred to as citizens. This is highly polemical, especially when we remember that the only occasion the people are called citizens (rather than subjects) in The trew lawe of free monarchies is when James describes one of his adversaries’ arguments in blatantly Ciceronian terms: ‘good Citizens will be forced, for the naturall zeale and duety they owe to their owne native countrey, to put their hand to worke for freeing their common-wealth from … a pest [of tyranny]’. Although they conduct rhetorical debates in several scenes, perhaps the most important of these debates occurs in the very first scene. It opens, of course, with the first citizen’s deliberative speech in which he guarantees that every citizen is persuaded of their mutinous cause. And his short speech, as befits a deliberative oration directed to the ordinary people, is founded on utilitas rather than honestas. The speech is dominated by the patricians’ ‘abundance’ and the poor citizens’ hunger, scarcity and ‘sufferance’, which are said to be ‘a gain’ to the patricians (. . –). Moreover, the citizens’ debate centres around the question of whether Martius has served the public good or has merely sought his own private good (i.e. pride). When Menenius appears, his task is to argue against the first citizen and to persuade the citizens to abandon their mutinous cause. He therefore commences his speech by endeavouring to win benevolence, addressing the citizens – in striking contrast to his views elsewhere in the play – as ‘masters, my good friends, mine honest neighbours’ (. . ). At the same time he tries to convey an equally benevolent picture of himself and other patricians, claiming that ‘most charitable care / Have the patricians of you’ (ll. –). But his argument that the citizens ought to look to the patricians for their utilitas is met with the second citizen’s counter-argument. Menenius, when he realises that he has failed to move the citizens with his arguments, tells his famous fable of the ‘belly’. Fables were thought to be a particularly forceful way of persuading a popular audience. The belly fable was of course an early modern commonplace and was often used on behalf of an ordered, hierarchical polity. Yet the fable
James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, ), pp. –. See e.g. Wilson, The arte, fol. v; Reinhardus Lorichius’ comments in Aphthonius, Sophistae progymnasmata, trans. Rodolphus Agricola and Joan Maria Cataneo (London, ), pp. –, where Menenius’ fable is given as an example. See especially Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, pp. –, to which account I am greatly indebted.
Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus
could be used for much less conformist purposes. In James Harrington’s version of the story, as Eric Nelson has recently pointed out, the patricians took ‘the meat … out of the people’s mouths’ but did not turn all nutrition back to the commonwealth. Similar readings can be found from the sixteenth century. In The foundacion of rhetorike (), Richard Rainolde identified the common people as ‘the vilest parte of the bodie’ but ‘so necessarie, that the whole bodie faileth and perisheth’ if it is taken away; his rendition of the fable thus defends ‘the moste meane and basest state of man’ as an essential part of the commonwealth. Thomas Wilson briefly rehearsed the story as part of his analysis of the rhetorical use of fables. Wilson argued that fables were the best means to prompt the common people ‘to learne more weightie & grave matters’. If someone spoke ‘of moste grave matters, or depely searche out the ground of thinges’, the common people would ‘either fal a slepe, or elles bid you farewel’. Hence ‘the multitude must needes be made mery: & the more foolish your talke is, the more wise wil they counte it to be’. Despite all this, however, Wilson did not adopt a strongly aristocratic notion of rhetoric. On the contrary, he insisted that ‘it is no foolishnesse, but rather wisedome to winne men by telling of fables’. Moreover, although he briefly mentioned the belly fable, he went on to dwell at much greater length on another fable where the patricians, in Wayne Rebhorn’s words, were ‘sucking the blood of the people rather than supplying them with its nutrients’. It is important to note that in striking contrast to one of his main sources, William Averell’s A mervailous combat of contrarities, Shakespeare puts the fable in a strongly rhetorical context. Averell, in fact, used the story as a severe critique of popular rhetoric. In his rendition of the fable, the tongue confessed: ‘I counterfait Lawes, I tell lyes, I sewe seditions, I stirre up Traytors, I slaunder Princes, under cullour of trueth I beguile and deceive.’ By contrast, in Coriolanus the fable is used in a rhetorical argument. Just as rhetoricians like Wilson and others explain, Menenius is using the fable in its ordered and hierarchical sense to persuade the common people. But not only is the fable employed as a rhetorical argument, Shakespeare also enhances the rhetorical effect of the fable by offering two contradictory interpretations of it. Before Menenius manages to
Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, ), p. . Rainolde, The foundacion, fol. viv. Wilson, The arte, fols. v–r; Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, pp. –. William Averell, A mervailous combat of contrarities (London, ), sig. Av. For the fact that this is the source from which Shakespeare ‘borrowed most’ see Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Sources, I: Comedies and Tragedies (London, ), p. .
give his hierarchical account of the fable, the second citizen has already given his own account in which the belly, just as in Rainolde’s version, is compared to the common people. Most strikingly of all, Shakespeare leaves the debate open-ended. Neither the democratic nor the aristocratic rendering of the fable manages to move the opposite side. Menenius confesses as much himself. When Martius suggests that he can solve the mutiny with his sword, Menenius counters him: ‘Nay, these are almost thoroughly persuaded’ (. . ). Thus, he confesses that he has not been able to move them onto his side. As well as emphasising the open-ended character of any rhetorical debate, Shakespeare’s depiction of the Menenius fable can also be said to stress the limits or even the ultimate failure of the power of rhetoric. If neither side is able to move the other through rhetoric, then eloquence is far from omnipotent. Shakespeare’s Caius Martius clearly does not share the oratorial powers of Abraham Fleming’s Coriolanus. Yet the play not only emphasises the importance of civic themes in Elizabethan and Jacobean political culture, but also demonstrates in dramatic fashion how many of these themes centred around the different interpretations of the relationship between citizenship and rhetoric. Menenius and Caius Martius represent different aspects of the aristocratic notion of rhetoric, and the way in which the ordinary citizens use the power of the ars rhetorica reminds us of the humanist schoolmaster’s insistence that every member of the commonwealth should use the power of eloquence ‘to inforce a good cause, and … to impugn an ill’. At the same time, Coriolanus also brings out the limits of the power of rhetoric. Although on numerous occasions in the play eloquence demonstrates its potency, this potency is ultimately limited. Neither Menenius nor any other aristocrat, neither the ordinary citizens nor their tribunes can genuinely persuade one another. No real consensus is reached, and the ordinary people and the senators remain divided.
Alexander Silvayn, The orator: handling a hundred severall discourses, in forme of declamations, trans. Lazarus Pyott (London, ), sig. Aiv r.
Shakespeare and the best state of a commonwealth Eric Nelson
Political thought in Shakespeare’s Europe organised itself to a significant degree around the question of what constituted, in Cicero’s words, ‘the best state of a commonwealth’. Thomas More famously offered his Utopia as a meditation upon this question, entitling the book De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia (‘On the best state of a commonwealth and the new island of Utopia’), and virtually every other humanist author had something extensive to say on the subject. In this respect, the early modern period was hardly unique; political writers had been interested in this question long before Plato raised it in the Republic, and they would continue to be interested in it even after Tocqueville declared the question dissolved in . What distinguishes the early modern period is rather the astonishing degree to which political writers of the age agreed that the answer to this question was to be found in the study of Roman history. To compare the relative merits of monarchy and civic self-government during this period was unavoidably to ask whether Rome had reached its zenith before or after the rise of the Caesars. Machiavelli, following in the footsteps of Leonardo Bruni and the other civic humanists of the Quattrocento, argued that the transition from republic to principality had been responsible for Roman decline. In Book II of the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli announces that ‘experience shows that cities have never increased either in dominion or wealth, unless they have been free’, and that Rome attained its ‘greatness’ ( grandezza) as a free state. The reason,
See, for example, Cicero, De legibus . . Cicero, De republica, De legibus, ed. and trans. C. W. Keyes (Cambridge, Mass., ), p. . Tocqueville argued that the rise of democracy was ‘fated’ and that, accordingly, the only relevant question was what kind of democracy one should wish to create. See Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. André Jardin, vols. (Paris, ), I, p. ; II, p. . ‘si vede per esperienza le cittadini non avere mai ampliato né di dominio né di ricchezza se non mentre sono state in libertà’. See Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Giorgio Inglese (Milan, ), p. . English translations of the Discorsi are largely taken from Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. and trans. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth, ).
he insists, is straightforward: ‘it is not the well-being of individuals that makes cities great, but the well-being of the community; and it is beyond question that it is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly in that all that promotes it is carried out’. In support of this claim, Machiavelli invokes a famous argument of the Roman historian Sallust, namely that a prince ‘cannot bestow honours on the valiant and good citizens over whom he tyrannizes, since he does not want to have any cause to suspect them’. Virtue is actively repressed in principalities, and since commonwealths cannot prosper without the efforts of virtuous men, rule by the many is clearly superior to rule by one alone. The contrary position was, however, far more popular during this period. Jean Bodin, to take just one example, answers Machiavelli directly in his Six livres de la république (). He begins with a summary of his antagonist’s view, writing (in the English translation of Richard Knolles) that: There is one point that seems very considerable, to shew that a popular estate is the goodliest, the most excellent, and the most perfect, which is, That in a Democracy there have alwaies been greater commanders in armes, and worthier men in lawes, greater orators, philosophers and handicraftsmen than in the other two estates [i.e. monarchy and artistocracy]: whereas the faction of few great men among themselves, and the jealousie of a Monarcke keepes the subjects from all noble attempts.
But, he continues, ‘Machiavel is much deceived, to say, That a Popular estate is best.’ Bodin defends this claim by offering an ingenious inversion of Sallust’s argument: For the preservation of a Popular estate (if we shall beleeve Xenophon) is to advance the most vitious and unworthy men to offices and dignities. And if the people should be so ill advised, as to give offices of honour unto vertuous men, they loose their power: for that good men would favour none but the good,
Ibid.: ‘non il bene particulare ma il bene comune è quello che fa grandi le città. E senza dubbio questo bene comune non è osservato se non nelle republiche; perché tutto quello che fa a proposito suo si esequisce.’ Ibid.: ‘non può onorare nessuno di quegli cittadini, che siano valenti e buoni, che egli tiranneggia, non volendo avere ad avere sospetto di loro.’ See also Sallust, Bellum Catilinae : ‘Nam regibus boni quam mali suspectiores sunt semperque eis aliena virtus formidulosa est.’ Sallust, Works, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., ), p. . The Six Bookes of a Common-weale. Written by I. Bodin a famous lawyer, and a man of great experience in matters of state. Out of the French and Latine copies, done into English, by Richard Knolles (London, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Th is is Pseudo-Xenophon, or the ‘Old Oligarch’, writing in the Athenaion politeia. Xenophon himself actually anticipates the Sallustian argument in Hiero . –.
Shakespeare and the best state of a commonwealth
which are alwayes fewer in number: and the wicked and vicious (which is the greatest part of the people) should be excluded from all honour, and by little and little banished: so as in the end wise men should seize upon the estate, and take it from the people.
It is, according to Bodin, in the nature of republics, rather than monarchies, to repress virtue, because the rise of a virtuous man is a threat to the rule of the mediocre. ‘They which doe so highly commend the Popular estate of the Romans’, he insists, should recall how common it was for ‘the furious Tribunes with their turbulent Orations, to threaten death or banishment to the best citizens’, whereas ‘Augustus maintained them [the Romans] quietly in peace almost fiftie yeares, the which continued long after his death’. Roman greatness came with the end of the republic. Accordingly, Bodin concludes that ‘a pure absolute Monarchie is the surest Commonweale, and without comparison the best of all’. Not all early modern thinkers agreed with Machiavelli and Bodin that one could identify a single ‘best state of a commonwealth’. But even those who were dubious about this proposition nonetheless tended to agree that, for any given commonwealth, there was always one regime to which it was best suited – and they used the Roman example to make this point. Thomas Smith, for instance, emphasised in his De Republica Anglorum () that the key task of constitutional design was to make sure that ‘according to the nature of the people, so the Common-wealth is to it fit and proper’. In his view, monarchy, aristocracy and Aristotle’s ‘polity’ were all ‘naturall’ forms of political organisation, and ‘when to each partie, or espece and kind of the people, that is applied which best agreeth, like a garment to the bodie, or shooe to the foote, then the bodie Politicke is in quiet, and findeth ease, pleasure and profit’. But when ‘a contrarie forme be given to a contrarie manner of people, as when the shooe is too little or too great for the foote, it doth hurt and incumber the convenient use thereof’. The case of the ‘Romanes’ in particular demonstrates that ‘the free people of Nature tyrannized or ruled by one against their wils, were hee never so good, either faile of courage and waxe servile, or never rest untill they either destroy the King & them that would subdue them, or bee destroyed themselves’. Rome, as a nation of freemen, predictably
Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-weale, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . The text was, however, completed by and circulated widely in manuscript. Thomas Smith, The Common-wealth of England By The Honourable Sir. Tho; Smith Knight, Newly Corrected & Amended (London, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid.
declined once brought under a princely form of government. Her virtue could simply not survive the inappropriateness of this arrangement. We see, then, that the political writers who furnished the intellectual background of Shakespeare’s age were in fundamental agreement that there was a best regime for any given community, and that it was a matter of moral urgency to identify and institute it. When a commonwealth was governed according to this design, it would be virtuous and great; when it was governed according to any other design, its virtue and grandeur would be diminished. And they also agreed that Roman history provided the definitive proof of this conviction. Shakespeare himself wrote four plays about the Roman experience, following the fortunes of the city from the earliest days of the republic (Coriolanus) through to the travails of the late empire (Titus Andronicus). He also wrote a lengthy poem, The Rape of Lucrece, on the famous event that prompted the banishment of the first Roman kings. Scholars have, therefore, understandably expected to find within this oeuvre an intervention in the canonical early modern debate about the ‘best state of a commonwealth’. After all, to write Roman history during this period (or to write dramas about it) was itself to take a position on this vexed question. Surely Shakespeare must have had a view about the best constitution (either the best absolutely, or at least the best for Rome); surely his Roman works must show us a Rome that is virtuous when governed correctly, and corrupt when governed incorrectly? Yet the striking fact about the Roman plays is that this is not so. The Shakespeare of the Roman plays emerges neither as a nostalgic partisan of the republic, nor as a defender of the imperial pax romana. Quite to the contrary, he seems insistently to deny the orthodoxy that different constitutions yield different levels of virtue and greatness. Writing centuries before Democracy in America, Shakespeare offers a view of Roman history that dissolves the question of ‘the best state of a commonwealth’ – not because he believes, like Tocqueville, that there is no choice to be made among the various regimes, but rather because he believes that the choice does not matter. It should be helpful to begin by following a clue from Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece, which he composed for his patron the earl of
For the political valences of the large number of Roman plays written in English between and , see George Hunter, ‘A Roman Thought: Renaissance Attitudes to History Exemplified in Shakespeare and Jonson’, in Brian S. Lee, ed., An English Miscellany: Presented to W. S. Mackie (Oxford, ), pp. –. The marked increase in the number of such plays reflected the sudden proliferation of English translations of ancient Roman histories, chiefly Plutarch’s Lives (), Tacitus’s Histories (), Tacitus’s Annals () and Livy’s History ().
Shakespeare and the best state of a commonwealth
Southampton in . Because the poem treats the crime that provoked the fall of the Roman monarchy and the rise of the republic, it has understandably been given pride of place in recent scholarship on Shakespeare’s relationship to the republican tradition. One reputable view, put most emphatically by Andrew Hadfield, is that Lucrece is a straightforward declaration of republican principles; it is a reproach against the unrestrained lust and cruelty of monarchs, and a paean to the temperance and dignity of self-government. There are, however, several features of the poem that sit uncomfortably with this reading. First, and perhaps most obvious, is the fact that Shakespeare makes no mention in the poem of his story’s political consummation: the foundation of the Roman republic. Lucrece simply ends by noting that ‘The Romans plausibly did give consent / To Tarquin’s everlasting banishment’ (ll. –) – it neglects to narrate the establishment of the consular office. This would be an astonishing omission if Shakespeare had truly intended the poem as a triumphal aetiology of the vivere civile. Indeed, the fact that the ‘Argument’ that prefaces the poem in the Quarto, unlike the poem itself, describes how ‘the Tarquins were all exiled and the state government changed from kings to consuls’ has been seen by some as good evidence that Shakespeare did not compose the Argument. Moreover, the republican reading is
Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, ), pp. –. An earlier approximation of Hadfield’s republican reading of the poem (and Titus Andronicus) can be found in Clifford Chalmers Huff man, Coriolanus in Context (Lewisburg, ). See also Michael Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare, rev. edn (New York, ), esp. pp. –; Platt, ‘The Rape of Lucrece and the Republic for Which It Stands’, Centennial Review, (), –; and Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (London, ), pp. –. It is perhaps worth stating at the outset that this chapter assumes that Shakespeare himself was the author of the works discussed, and that he regarded himself, in Lukas Erne’s terms, as a ‘literary dramatist’ – that is, he paid close attention to the literary form of his dramatic output. See Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge, ). The only exception is Titus Andronicus, which Shakespeare may have written with the collaboration of George Peele (although the dominant view among contemporary Shakespeareans is that he did not; see, for example, Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Alan Hughes (Cambridge, ), esp. pp. –). See James M. Tolbert, ‘The Argument of Shakespeare’s Lucrece: Its Sources and Authorship’, The University of Texas Studies in English, (), –. Tolbert notes several discrepancies between the Argument and the poem, and argues that whoever wrote the former was probably paraphrasing a Latin epitome of Livy. He also notes that the inclusion of the Argument in the Quarto appears to have been an afterthought, since ‘we know that the Argument was printed after the poem was set in type’. Others, however, have contended that the question remains open. See, for example, Catherine Belsey, ‘Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (), –. One argument often made against Shakespeare’s authorship is clearly mistaken, namely that since Shakespeare describes Lucrece in the dedication as ‘this pamphlet without beginning’, he himself could not have provided a prologue. But, as the Norton editors point out, Shakespeare’s description almost certainly refers to the fact that the poem begins in medias res: see The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus, nd edn (New York, ), p. n. ; the Argument appears on pp. – of this edition.
further complicated by the poem’s characterisation of Lucrece’s own political allegiances. She is no republican. Her posture, when pleading with Tarquin to spare her from outrage, is that of a committed monarchist. She begins from the premise that ‘kings like gods should govern everything’ (l. ); her complaint to Tarquin is that, in his current course of action, ‘thou seem’st not what thou art, a god, a king’ (l. ). She chides him for adopting Machiavelli’s advice to be ‘only loved for fear’ precisely because ‘happy monarchs still are feared for love’ (ll. –). And her final argument is that Tarquin should desist because ‘princes are the glass, the school, the book / Where subjects’ eyes do learn, do read, do look’ (ll. –). Lucrece, in short, does not regard Tarquin as a representative of the monarchical tradition, but rather as a transgressor against it. As she puts it, ‘I sue for exiled majesty’s repeal’ (l. ), not for its banishment. All of this could, of course, be dismissed as a strategic ploy; Lucrece, after all, is pleading with a prince, and at such times, one might suppose, a little monarchism goes a long way. Moreover, even if we were to regard Lucrece herself as a genuine monarchist, we would rightly resist the notion that the position of any single character in the poem ought naively to be equated with the author’s own. But, for all this uncertainty, there is nonetheless one respect in which Lucrece’s posture incontrovertibly undermines the republican reading of the poem – and here we reach the clue to which I alluded at the outset. After the rape, Lucrece, dreading what will happen when morning comes and Tarquin’s deed is revealed to the world, bemoans her fate in the following lines: The nurse, to still her child, will tell my story, And fright her crying babe with Tarquin’s name; The orator, to deck his oratory, Will couple my reproach to Tarquin’s shame. (ll. –)
The key feature about this passage is its tone of regret. Lucrece dreads the break of day because she recognises that she is about to become a byword. The interesting turn of phrase for our purposes is the claim that ‘the orator, to deck his oratory’ will use her story to attack the monarchy. Lucrece’s prophecy here seems to operate on two levels. The first level is
Machiavelli famously argues in ch. XVII of The Prince that ‘if one has to choose, it is much safer to be feared than to be loved’ (risulta molto più sicuro, dovendo scegliere, esser temuti piuttosto che amati). See Machiavelli, Il principe, ed. Pietro Melograni (Milan, ), p. . On this see Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucrece (Oxford, ), pp. –. It is worth noting that this passage is entirely Shakespeare’s invention – it has no analogue in his two principal classical sources (Livy I. –; Ovid, Fasti II. –). For Shakespeare’s use of these texts and others see T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere’s Poems & Sonnets (Urbana, Ill., ), pp. –.
Shakespeare and the best state of a commonwealth
the more explicit: she looks proleptically toward the end of the poem, after her suicide, when Brutus will seize on her tragedy to advance his own political agenda in what the Argument calls his ‘bitter invective against the Tyranny of the King’. ‘By all our country rights in Rome maintained’, he cries, ‘And by chaste Lucrece’ soul that late complained / Her wrong to us’, he urges a republican revolt. In other words, Lucrece is predicting the ideological use of her misfortune by Junius Brutus, and the political consequences of that use. But it does not seem unreasonable to add to this first level of meaning a second; the passage, after all, does not appear to refer only to one single act – one single oration – but, rather, to the formation of a rhetorical commonplace. Lucrece is predicting (correctly) that her rape will become a standard part of the republican arsenal, that it will be deployed repeatedly for persuasive purposes. She is lamenting her absorption into a strand of political propaganda – one with which, as the reader has been made aware, she herself does not sympathise. There is, in short, a palpable tension in the poem between Lucrece’s own political allegiances and the political use to which her story is put. Shakespeare’s cultivation of this dissonance has the effect of precluding a naive reading of the poem’s political sensibilities. Just as the sheer brutality of Tarquin undermines Lucrece’s pious monarchism, Brutus’s opportunistic use of her tragedy taints his republicanism. Similar devices are on display throughout Shakespeare’s Roman plays: he routinely forces his reader into a posture of sceptical detachment from the allegiances on offer, either by emphasising the disingenuousness of the speaker or by constructing events so that they stand in a self-evidently dissonant relation to the speaker’s convictions. The reason, I want to suggest, is that Shakespeare himself is highly dubious that constitutional form matters much at all, either for Rome or for any other commonwealth. Consider the manner in which Brutus is introduced to the reader at the end of the poem. We are told that, after seeing Lucrece’s wound, he puts aside ‘his folly’s show’ – the pretence of stupidity that he had adopted for strategic purposes. Shakespeare then adds the following observation: ‘He with the Romans was esteemèd so / As silly jeering idiots are with kings, For sportive words and utt’ring foolish things’ (l. ). The striking fact
Oliver Arnold’s recent book reaches a similar conclusion for rather different reasons: see Arnold, The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (Baltimore, ), pp. –. The book was published while this volume was already under consideration with Cambridge University Press, so I was unable to take full account of its arguments. Th is too is absent from Shakespeare’s sources. Livy, for example, simply writes of Brutus’s speech that ‘ibi oratio habita nequaquam eius pectoris ingeniique quod simulatum ad eam diem fuerate’. Livy I. . –.
about this description is the precise parallel it draws between princes and peoples. They both value ‘silly jeering idiots’ and the foolishness they spout; scorn for the wise and the embrace of fools is, for Shakespeare, a problem about rulership itself, not about one kind of rulership or another. In Shakespeare’s darkly radical portrait of the political world, the only thing that seems to distinguish one regime from another is the relatively unglamorous matter of whose ambitions are served. This posture of Shakespeare’s emerges perhaps most clearly from the first and most neglected of his Roman plays, Titus Andronicus, which first appeared in print in the same year as The Rape of Lucrece. The plot of Titus, which is set in the late imperial period, is almost wholly Shakespeare’s own invention, and for that reason it comments less directly than his later efforts on the historical experience of republican decline. But scholars have nonetheless seen amidst the general grotesquery of Titus a further indication of Shakespeare’s republican sensibilities. The play opens with what appears to be an election of sorts; the emperor has died, and the various contenders for his office present their case to the public. The first speech is given to the heir apparent, Saturninus: Noble patricians, patrons of my right, Defend the justice of my cause with arms. And countrymen, my loving followers, Plead my successive title with your swords. I am his first-born son that was the last
T. J. B. Spencer disputes this, arguing instead that the play ‘cannot be placed at any known period in Roman history’ and that ‘it is not so much that any particular set of political institutions is assumed in Titus, but rather that it includes all the political institutions that Rome ever had’: Spencer, ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans’, Shakespeare Survey, (), – (esp. ). It seems to me, however, that the play clearly assumes the structure of imperial Rome (during which the Senate and tribunate continued to exist), and is set during the late fourth century (and foreshadows Rome’s approaching destruction by the Goths). Here I agree with Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Titus Andronicus’, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Greenblatt et al., p. . It has been claimed that an eighteenth-century prose work, The History of Titus Andronicus, was a late version of Shakespeare’s initial source text – but the question remains open. The first statement of this position was R. Sargent, ‘The Source of Titus Andronicus’, Studies in Philology, (), –. If, as we suppose Titus was composed during –, this scene would have had a very particular contemporary resonance. The uncertain English succession was a subject of intense debate; it was, for example, in this year that Peter Wentworth once again found himself imprisoned in the Tower for raising the issue of the succession in Parliament. I am grateful to Paulina Kewes for prompting me to focus on this point.
Shakespeare and the best state of a commonwealth
That ware the imperial diadem of Rome. Then let my father’s honours live in me, Nor wrong mine age with this indignity. (. . –)
Next Bassianus, the emperor’s second son, speaks: Romans, friends, followers, and favourers of my right, If ever Bassianus, Caesar’s son, Were gracious in the eyes of royal Rome, Keep then this passage to the Capitol, And suffer not dishonor to approach The imperial seat, to virtue consecrate, To justice, continence, and nobility; But let desert in pure election shine, And, Romans, fight for freedom in your choice. (. . –)
Lastly, Marcus, brother of Titus and tribune of the plebs, addresses the crowd and the other candidates: Princes, that strive by factions and by friends Ambitiously for rule and empery, Know that the people of Rome, for whom we stand A special party, have, by common voice, In election for the Roman empery, Chosen Andronicus, surnamed Pius For many good and great deserts to Rome: A nobler man, a braver warrior, Lives not this day within the city walls: … And now at last, laden with honour’s spoils, Returns the good Andronicus to Rome, Renowned Titus, flourishing in arms. Let us entreat, by honour of his name, Whom worthily you would have now succeeded, And in the Capitol and senate’s right, Whom you pretend to honour and adore, That you withdraw you and abate your strength; Dismiss your followers and, as suitors should, Plead your deserts in peace and humbleness. (. . –)
With that, Saturninus and Bassianus agree to disband their followers, and the crown is ultimately offered to Titus – who disastrously declines it in favour of Saturninus. There is quite a lot to be said about this exchange, but it is perhaps best to begin by noting the implausibility of the view that it displays a republican commitment on Shakespeare’s part. Turning once again to Hadfield’s admirable recent book, we find the claim that in this scene
Bassianus stands for ‘the ideals of the republic’, while Saturninus represents corruption and ‘the autocratic drift of Roman society’. The tragedy of Titus is, then, the failure of the people (and later of Titus himself) to endorse the humanist piety that virtue, not birth, is the only just claim to political authority, and to embrace the ‘freedom’ that Bassianus promises. The play should therefore be seen as a ‘republican morality tale’ which makes the case that ‘a more constitutional form of government, which relies on greater participation from a wider political class than is currently involved in making decisions, would be of benefit to any regime’. There are, it seems to me, several problems with this view. The first and most important is that it fails to notice the evident self-interestedness of the three arguments presented in the opening scene. We are not being invited to meditate in abstract terms on the respective merits of birth, virtue and military prowess as claims to political authority. We are, rather, being asked to recognise that it is not accidental that we hear the argument for primogeniture from an eldest son, the argument for virtue from a younger son with no military record, and the argument for military prowess from the brother of Rome’s victorious general. How interesting, Shakespeare seems to be saying, that each of the three men emerges with precisely the political ideology that best advances his own bid for rulership. The instrumental and disingenuous character of Bassianus’s republican rhetoric is further suggested by the fact that, like Saturninus, he has come to the forum armed. This is, pace Hadfield, no ‘free election’, but rather a military manoeuvre. Marcus asks the two brothers, who are ‘striving by factions and by friends’, to ‘withdraw you and abate your strength’ – that is, to dismiss their armed bands, who have come with them to the Capitol, as Shakespeare tells us, ‘with drum and colours’ in the manner of armies. Indeed, despite their pose as supplicants, both Saturninus and Bassianus are evidently unwilling in the first instance to entrust their cause to ‘the people’s favour’ (l. ). Marcus says as much when he asks the two to retire in the name of ‘the Capitol and Senate’s right, / Whom you pretend to honour and adore’, and to behave as true ‘suitors’ of the
Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, p. . See also Huff man, Coriolanus in Context, pp. –. It is also worth pointing out that one could certainly endorse the humanist piety that virtus vera nobilitas est without being any sort of ‘republican’ in Hadfield’s sense. Th is recalls an observation offered by Blair Worden in response to E. M. W. Tillyard. Acknowledging that Shakespeare’s kings frequently argue for ‘unhesitating obedience to God’s anointed rulers’, Worden notes, ‘but then they would, wouldn’t they?’ See Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare Survey, (), .
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public trust. In short, Bassianus’s words do not match his actions (he is, after all, seeking a throne), and the resulting dissonance taints his republicanism, just as Brutus’s opportunism undermined his own rhetoric in Lucrece. Republicanism appears in Titus not as the author’s preferred constitutional position, but rather as yet another device for the advancement of personal ambition. There is, however, a second, more basic difficulty involved in reading this scene, and the tragedy which develops out of it, as an endorsement of republicanism over monarchy – namely the fact that Shakespeare’s portrait of Rome in Titus appears to collapse the distinction between republic and empire altogether. The mob still rules in Titus’s imperial Rome, just as it did in earlier days (and just as Shakespeare would show it ruling in Coriolanus and Julius Caesar), and the mob is every bit as easily manipulated. Octavian’s conviction in Antony and Cleopatra that the ‘common body, / Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream, / Goes to, and back, lackeying the varying tide, / To rot itself with motion’ (. . –) applies equally powerfully to the Roman populace of the late empire, as Shakespeare envisions it. No one recognises this better than Titus himself, who bemoans the fact that he ‘threw the people’s suffrages’ on to the very same Saturninus who now ‘doth tyrannise’ over him (. . –). That is, he recognises that it was he himself who engineered his tormentor’s rise to power, not any ‘pure election’, and that the fundamental source of power in the city remains ‘the people’s suffrages’. Both republican politics and its opposite, in other words, amount to the skilled direction of the mob by ambitious men – only the names have changed. Moreover, as in the republic, many of the central players in this game of manipulation are tribunes, popular magistrates who, as it turns out, exhibit all of the same vices as Saturninus and the Tarquins. Indeed, when one considers the extreme depravity exhibited by Saturninus, Tamora, her sons and her slave lover Aaron, it is surely a significant fact that perhaps the most pathos-filled speech in the entire play is directed not at them but rather at the cruel, unfeeling tribunes. At the start of Act , Titus pleads in vain for the lives of his ‘condemnèd sons’, who have been unjustly accused of murder. The tribunes ignore him and leave the stage, but he continues
Anne Barton argues that Shakespeare’s portrayal of the mob is more admiring in Coriolanus than it is in any of the earlier plays. In particular, she claims that here Shakespeare allows his citizens to think on their own. Yet it is hard to deny that they remain firmly under the control of the tribunes. See Anne Barton, ‘Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’, in Catherine Alexander, ed., Shakespeare and Politics (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
to address them as if they were still present. His remaining son, Lucius, interjects, ‘O noble father, you lament in vain. The Tribunes hear you not. No man is by, / And you recount your sorrows to a stone’ (. . ). The dialogue proceeds as follows: : Ah Lucius, for thy brothers let me plead. Grave Tribunes, once more I entreat of you – : My gracious lord, no tribune hears you speak. : Why, tis no matter, man; if they did hear, They would not mark me, or if they did mark, They would not pity me, yet plead I must; Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones; Who, though they cannot answer my distress, Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes, For that they will not intercept my tale: When I do weep, they humbly at my feet Receive my tears and seem to weep with me; And, were they but attired in grave weeds, Rome could afford no tribune like to these. A stone is soft as wax, – tribunes more hard than stones; A stone is silent, and offendeth not, And tribunes with their tongues doom men to death. (. . –)
The tribunes, paradigmatic republican magistrates, are here compared unfavourably to stones; their cruelty and hard-heartedness are worthy of Saturninus and, for that matter, of Tamora, who likewise relates to Lavinia’s tears as ‘unrelenting flint to drops of rain’ (. . ). The description also immediately calls to mind Shakespeare’s characterisation of the tyrant Angelo from Measure for Measure, written ten years later. Angelo ‘scarce confesses / That his blood flows; or that his appetite / Is more to bread than stone’ (. . –); he is ‘a marble to [Mariana’s] tears, / is washed with them, but relents not’ (. . –). It is not that tribunes are worse than kings; it is, rather, that power brings vice, no matter the constitutional arrangement. As the virtuous servant puts it in Timon of Athens, ‘The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic’ (. . –). This meditation on the kingly vices of tribunes becomes even more pronounced in Shakespeare’s last Roman play, Coriolanus (). Indeed,
Cymbeline (probably composed in –) is set during Roman times, but does not take place in Rome and so does not treat the Roman constitution.
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the institution of the tribunate following the secession of the plebs in furnishes the occasion for the tragedy (although it must be said that Shakespeare conflates this insurrection with the corn riots that occurred three years later). In the very first scene, the proud Coriolanus announces that, following their sedition, the plebs have been granted ‘five tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms’ and prophesies that this magistracy will in time ‘win upon power and throw forth greater themes / For insurrection’s arguing’ (. . –). The collision of the ‘absolute’ and domineering patrician ethos of Coriolanus with the desire for liberty among the plebs constitutes the central thematic axis of the play, and I cannot hope to do it justice here. I only want to point out that Shakespeare goes to considerable lengths to assign to his tribunes all of the pride and Machiavellian caprice that we associate with Saturninus, Richard III and Shakespeare’s other royal villains. Here again, I would suggest, we confront Shakespeare’s deep scepticism that there is anything fundamental separating different political regimes. In this connection, it is first of all worth noting that the more prominent of the two tribunes in the play is given the name Junius Brutus – that is, the name of the revolutionary founder of the Roman republic, and the author of the ‘bitter’ and calculating invective that appears at the end of The Rape of Lucrece. Shakespeare does have a classical warrant for this gesture: Plutarch’s life of Coriolanus identifies the first two tribunes as Junius Brutus and Sicinius Vellutus, a detail he seems to have taken from Dionysius of Halicarnassus (it is not attested in any other source). And it was well known that the revolutionary Brutus was a patrician and first consul of the republic, while tribunes were representatives of the plebs; as a result, the audience would probably not have been confused between the two. But the force of the gesture is undeniable all the same. The great villain of the play, who ejects Coriolanus from Rome, is associated with the conniving figure who ejects Tarquin from the city in Shakespeare’s poem (the two events, it is worth noting, are only separated by fifteen years). The association becomes even more pronounced if we recall that ‘Junius Brutus’ was also the pseudonym of the author of the famous monarchomach pamphlet, Vindiciae contra tyrannos ().
See Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, ), pp. –. The episode is recounted in Livy II. ; Plutarch, Coriolanus ; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities VI. . Plutarch, Coriolanus . Dionysius, Roman Antiquities VI. . Authorship of the pamphlet has been much disputed, but the scholarly consensus now regards the work as a collaborative effort undertaken by Hubert Languet and Philippe du Plessis Mornay. See Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, ed. and trans. George Garnett (Cambridge, ), pp. lv–lxxvi.
Once again, Shakespeare does not mean to deny the obvious faults of Tarquin, or even of Coriolanus, whose pride makes him unable to ‘temporize’ with objectionable circumstances (. . ), and who regards the city as an instrument of his own personal glorification and advancement. The point, rather, is that in each case the ejector is every bit as ambitious and self-interested as the ejectee. Shakespeare dramatises this most extensively in the lengthy dialogue between Menenius (the moderate patrician who resolves the secession of the plebs) and the two tribunes at the beginning of Act – a scene that has no analogue in Plutarch and is wholly Shakespeare’s invention. Brutus and Sicinius begin by lambasting the prideful conduct of Coriolanus, who wishes for the ‘throne’ that he views as his right. Menenius counters as follows: ‘You talk of pride: O that you could turn your eyes toward the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves! O that you could!’ (. . –). When the two tribunes respond by asking, ‘What then, sir?’, Menenius answers: ‘Why, then you should discover a brace of unmeriting, / proud, violent, testy magistrates, alias / fools, as any in Rome’ (. . –). The tribunes, who correctly detect pride in the figure of Coriolanus, stand accused of precisely the same vice. They are ‘violent’ and ‘testy’; they are indeed ‘fools’, a description that calls to mind Shakespeare’s observation in The Rape of Lucrece that both kings and peoples esteem ‘silly jeering idiots’ who ‘utter foolish things’. Such behaviour, Shakespeare reminds us, is what endeared the first Junius Brutus to the mob. Menenius continues by identifying the tribunes as ‘wealsmen’, that is partisans of the republic, although he hastens to add that they are no ‘Lycurguses’ (. . ). There are, he acknowledges, those who say that Brutus and Sicinius are ‘reverend, grave men’, but Menenius insists that this is not the case. He continues with an unrestrained polemic against the capricious, dilatory and selfish conduct of republican magistrates: You know neither me, yourselves nor any thing. You are ambitious for poor knaves’ caps and legs: you wear out a good wholesome forenoon in hearing a cause between an orange wife and a fosset-seller; and then rejourn the controversy of three pence to a second day of audience. When you are hearing a matter between party and party, if you chance to be pinched with the colic, you make faces like mummers; set up the bloody flag against all patience; and, in roaring for a chamber-pot, dismiss the controversy bleeding, the more entangled by your
Paul Cantor notes this fact: see Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, ), p. .
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hearing: all the peace you make in their cause is, calling both the parties knaves. You are a pair of strange ones. (. . –)
On this account, the tribunes are low and callous, prideful and supremely self-interested. They hunger for recognition just like Coriolanus – they are ‘ambitious for poor knaves’ caps and legs’, that is, for doffed caps and genuflection. They dismiss serious proceedings if they feel the slightest personal discomfort. They are, as Titus would have put it, ‘more hard than stones’. But they are also calculating and cynical, making use of all the machinations of tyrants. Their true preoccupation is not freedom, but power: their worry about Coriolanus, as they make clear in Act II, is that their ‘office may, / During his power, go sleep’ (. . ). He must be destroyed, they agree, ‘or our authority’s for an end’ (. . ). They resolve, accordingly, on a scheme to provoke both Coriolanus and the plebs into fiery confrontation. They will tell their constituents that Coriolanus means to enslave them, ‘holding them, / In human action and capacity, / Of no more soul nor fitness for the world / Than camels’. They will warn of ‘dispropertied’ freedoms, and call their foe ‘a traitorous innovator, / A foe to th’public weal’ (. . –). In other words, they know very well how to speak ‘republican’. When the plebs react with anger to this strident rhetoric and confront Coriolanus, his pride will burst forth and ignite the blaze: This (as you say) suggested At some time when his soaring insolence Shall touch the people – which time shall not want, If he be put upon’t, and that’s as easy As to set dogs on sheep – will be his fire To kindle their dry stubble; and their blaze Shall darken him for ever. (. . –)
Yet they themselves do not wish to be identified as the authors of the ‘mutiny’; they are both too cowardly and too clever for that. Rather, they urge their followers to tell Coriolanus that they had actually urged his case, lecturing the plebs on ‘How youngly he began to serve his country, / How long continued, and what stock he springs of’ (. . –). They hatch their scheme in due course, and Coriolanus promptly walks into their trap. He throws a tantrum and publicly urges the repeal of the tribunate. Sensing their opportunity, Brutus and Sicinius pounce. They conspire to assemble an angry mob which is programmed to accept by acclamation any decision the tribunes reach on the fate of Coriolanus; and they further instruct their aedile minions to keep the commotion
going so that the sentence can be executed instantly, without any opportunity for recourse or review: : Assemble presently the people hither; And when they hear me say ‘It shall be so I’the right and strength o’the commons,’ be it either For death, for fine, or banishment, then let them If I say fine, cry ‘Fine;’ if death, cry ‘Death’. Insisting on the old prerogative And power i’the truth o’the cause. : I shall inform them. : And when such time they have begun to cry, Let them not cease, but with a din confused Enforce the present execution Of what we chance to sentence. : Very well. : Make them be strong and ready for this hint, When we shall hap to give’t them. (. . –)
Having procured the exile of Coriolanus with their little scheme, the tribunes, like good Machiavellians, recognise the need to shift tactics: ‘Now we have shown our power, / Let us seem humbler after it is done / Than when it was a-doing’ (. . –). Brutus and Sicinius rule Rome by manipulating the mob , just as Titus did (and just as Antony would in Julius Caesar). Indeed, the obvious similarities between Shakespeare’s portrayal of Roman politics in Coriolanus and his portrayal in Titus Andronicus are deeply significant. The former play, after all, takes place at the very beginning of Roman republican history, while the latter takes place at the end of the imperial period. A standard view of the relation between them is, unsurprisingly, that Coriolanus displays an uncorrupt Rome, while Titus shows a degenerate Rome still reeling from the moral consequences of republican collapse. This view casts Shakespeare as an altogether more conventional Renaissance figure, one who uses the dramatisation of Roman history to defend a particular view of the optimus reipublicae status – namely, that virtue cannot survive in the absence of republican government. Yet, as we have seen, this may well be too hasty. The titles have surely changed, but politics, Shakespeare seems to be saying, is politics.
Th is is Cantor’s view: Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire. See also Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. –.
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The tribunes in Coriolanus use force and fraud to preserve their power, masking their pursuit of private interest with high-sounding speeches about freedoms and civic rights . In this they strongly resemble the figure of Junius Brutus in The Rape of Lucrece and call to mind the self-interested deployment of political rhetoric in Titus. But they are certainly not the only ones, and that is, after all, the central claim I want to make. The portrayal of the tribunes in Shakespeare’s Roman plays is not ‘anti-republican’ any more than the portrayal of Saturninus, Richard III, Macbeth or Angelo – or, indeed, of Julius Caesar – is ‘anti-monarchical’. Shakespeare’s concern is with power and its consequences. His fundamental conviction is that the pursuit of personal ambition, and the preparedness to use all means necessary to preserve the power we have amassed, is a great human constant. It organises the political sphere in every regime, which suggests that the whole question of the best regime is a red herring. Political ideology, on this account, is not concerned with value, but with interest. It provides a patina of legitimacy for actions that would otherwise be clear for what they are: naked attempts to advance the interests of specific political actors. This is not, of course, to suggest that Shakespeare denies the possibility of genuine virtue. Indeed, for every Tamora in Shakespeare’s world there is a Lucrece; for every Tarquin there is a Menenius. What Shakespeare seems to dispute is that the level of virtue in a particular commonwealth depends on the status reipublicae. Republicanism, as it appears in the Roman plays, is neither better nor worse than its ideological rivals. It is, on the contrary, just more of the same. It is only from this perspective, it seems to me, that we can appreciate the true poignancy of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Marcus Brutus in Julius Caesar. Brutus is undoubtedly Shakespeare’s great republican hero, but it is worth paying attention to the precise reason for which Shakespeare admires him. Consider Antony’s famous speech at the play’s conclusion: This was the noblest Roman of them all: All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar; He only, in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them. His life was gentle, and the elements
See the wise comment on this point in Robert Miola, ‘Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate’, Renaissance Quarterly, (), – (esp. ). George Hunter observed that Shakespeare casts Brutus as the embodiment of ‘the ethical splendours of Romanitas’. See Hunter, ‘A Roman Thought’, .
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world ‘This was a man!’ (. . –)
Brutus is unique, not because he is right, but because he is ‘noble’. When Cassius prates on about slavery and invokes the memory of the first Brutus ‘that would have brooked / Th’eternal devil to keep his state in Rome / As easily as a king’ (. . –), Shakespeare reminds us that it is ‘envy’ talking. This reference to Junius Brutus is, then, deliciously ironic, since it is Cassius, not Marcus Brutus, who is truly cut from the same cloth as the coup leader in The Rape of Lucrece. It is Cassius who drapes personal ambition in the lofty garb of republican rhetoric. Brutus, on the other hand, is unique because he does not do so. He acts, rather, out of ‘a general honest thought / And common good to all’. What distinguishes Brutus is his honorable commitment to act in the service of true principles. But his tragedy is that the principles for which he acts are no more true or false than any other. He is nostalgic for a Rome that never existed and is martyred for a regime that does not save.
For Shakespeare’s relentlessly negative characterisation of Cassius’s motives, see Miola, ‘Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate’, .
Shakespeare and humanist culture Quentin Skinner
Although this volume includes chapters by a number of distinguished literary critics, most of the contributors are better known as students of the history of philosophy, and in particular of the history of political thought. According to the canons of post-modernism, this blurring of disciplinary boundaries ought not to cause the least anxiety, and ought indeed to be welcomed. After all, we are urged to recognise, students of philosophy no less than of literature – and indeed of music and painting too – are all concerned with the interrogation and appraisal of texts. Despite such reassurances, it is hard not to feel that life is somewhat more complicated. Students of philosophy typically operate with the assumption that the propositions contained in the texts they analyse can also be treated as statements of belief. This is not to deny that philosophical works may often be suff used with obliqueness in the form of irony, parody and other hidden literary codes. It is simply to claim that, if our aim is to identify and elucidate the specific arguments being put forward in such works, it will be best to begin by assuming that their authors meant what they said and said what they meant. This seems a virtually inescapable principle of interpretation in the case of philosophical texts and is undoubtedly one reason it has proved so difficult for historians of philosophy to endorse without reservation the idea of the death of the author. It would be extremely unwise, however, to make any comparable assumptions about Shakespeare’s texts. There is almost no evidence outside his works that would enable us to corroborate any claims we might feel inclined to make about his plays and poetry as statements of his beliefs. As David Armitage puts it, Shakespeare has long been a byword for elusiveness. By contrast with his father, who played a prominent role in his local community, Shakespeare never shouldered any civic responsibilities and was remiss in discharging even such basic duties as paying his subsidies. None of his manuscripts survive, and there is only one moment
in the historical record when he speaks in his own name, the occasion when he was cited as a witness in a matrimonial dispute in . While his deposition contains some nice touches of amplificatio, it is largely formulaic in character and less than completely helpful in content. He appears anxious to scribble his signature and make his exit with as little fuss as possible. A further reason it would be misguided to treat Shakespeare’s works as direct evidence for his beliefs is that he was living and writing in a literary culture profoundly shaped by the rhetorical arts. The Ars rhetorica was the main discipline taught in the Elizabethan grammar schools, such as the one attended by Shakespeare in the s. One of the most valued skills that students of rhetoric were expected to acquire was that of arguing in utramque partem, on either side of any given case, thereby showing that it is possible to speak ‘winningly’ in favour of even the most unpromising cause. During the s, several volumes of model declamations appeared in which rival viewpoints were debated pro and contra in precisely this style. Alexander Silvayn’s collection, translated by Lazarus Piot as The Orator in , contains a series of speeches suitable for delivery in prosecution or defence. One of these (number ) concerns the case of ‘a Jew, who would for his debt have a pound of the flesh of a Christian’. First, the Jew speaks in affirmation of his contractual rights, then the Christian responds with a denunciation of the Jew’s cruelty and lack of faith. Sometimes these rhetorical exercises were carried to paradoxical heights, as in the instance of the Italian collection translated by Anthony Munday and published as The Defence of Contraries in . Here we are shown how to defend propositions such as that ‘it is better to be poore than Rich’, that ‘it is better to be sicke, then alwaies healthfull’ and that ‘it is better to be fowle than faire’ (so that fair is foul and foul is fair) . A number of standard rhetorical topoi found their way into humanist works of moral and political theory from an early stage. As Cathy Curtis emphasises, a favourite topic for discussion in utramque partem was the question of the best or most suitable form of life. Should we embrace the vita contemplativa, the life of contemplation based on the intellectual virtues, as Plato had urged? Or should we prefer the vita activa, the life of active citizenship based on the moral virtues, as Cicero had replied?
Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London, ), pp. –. Alexander Silvayn, The Orator: Handling a hundred severall Discourses, in forme of Declamations (London, ), p. . Anthony Munday, The Defence of Contraries. Paradoxes against common opinion (London, ), pp. , , .
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We find the issue debated as early as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia of , in which the traveller to Utopia, Raphael Hythloday, defends the Platonist viewpoint, while the figure of More counters with a Ciceronian response. A second and associated topos concerned the best state of a commonwealth. Is it preferable to live as the subject of a monarch or as the citizen of a republic or ‘free state’? The question is posed in the title of More’s Utopia, which tells us that the book will consider the problem of the optimus status reipublicae, and in the course of the argument More presents us with a virtuoso display of paradoxes on either side. A more measured discussion can be found in Book IV of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano, which first appeared in English in Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of . Ottavio Fregoso begins by expressing a strong preference for monarchies, to which Pietro Bembo responds by putting the case in favour of free states, thereby prompting Fregoso to restate and extend his argument on the other side. Still more popular as a topic in humanist dialectic was the question of vera nobilitas. Is it sufficient to possess honestas – the sum of the virtues according to Cicero – in order to qualify as truly noble? Or is it also necessary to possess the traditional and more visible attributes of nobility in the form of ancient lineage and wealth? These questions entered English moral theory as early as John Tiptoft’s translation of Buonaccorso’s dialogue De vera nobilitate, which was printed by Caxton in . They recur in Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucrece, his ‘disputation of nobleness’ of , and again in Book I of Castiglione’s Cortegiano. There the Count of Canossa opens the conversation by announcing that ‘I wyll have this our Courtyer therfore to be a Gentleman borne and of a good house’, only to be met with Gasparo Pallavicini’s objection that ‘this noblenesse of birth is not so necessarie for the Courtyer’, a reaction to which the Count offers a strong if somewhat repetitious retort . The habit of arguing in utramque partem may well have played a significant role in the rise of the drama to such unparalleled efflorescence towards the end of the Elizabethan age. A number of Quaestiones that in earlier generations had formed the substance of dialogues were now debated by contrasting characters on stage. Shakespeare dramatises some
Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtyer … done into Englyshe by Thomas Hoby (London, ), sig. Oo, r to sig. Pp,r. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Thre bokes of duties … turned oute of latine into english, by Nicolas Grimalde (London, ), fol. r. Castiglione, The Courtyer, sig. C, v; sig. C, r–v. For this suggestion see Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley, Calif., ).
of the most familiar of these arguments pro and contra, including several meditations on the rival merits of the active and contemplative life. As Cathy Curtis points out, Love ’s Labour ’s Lost begins with just such a dispute. The king of Navarre announces that for three years his court will become ‘still and contemplative’ (. . ). Biron immediately puts the contrary case, speaking against those who wish ‘to pore upon a book’ (. . ) and engaging in a sharp exchange before yielding to the king’s decree. A later and deeper consideration of the same theme, as Conal Condren notes, can be found amid the many and turbid complexities of Measure for Measure. On one side stands duke Vincentio, who begins by handing over his authority, but continues secretly to observe and judge the workings of political power. On the other side stands Isabella, who is about to enter a nunnery, and who appears to personify the values of the contemplative life. Shakespeare also engages with the problem of whether a republican or a monarchical form of government should be preferred. It was widely agreed, as Eric Nelson explains, that the best means of putting this dilemma to the test was to examine the history of Rome. Did the city attain its greatest glory under the republic or under the Empire? The question is implicit in each of the four plays that Shakespeare devotes to ancient Rome, in which he encompasses the whole story from the early days of the republic in Coriolanus to the bloodstained period of the declining empire in Titus Andronicus. The issue is most explicitly considered in Julius Caesar, in which Brutus succeeds in convincing himself that monarchies are so prone to slide into tyranny that it may be justifiable to assassinate Caesar on the mere suspicion that he is seeking to be crowned. Among these standard rhetorical topoi, the one that evidently struck Shakespeare as having the greatest dramatic potential was the question of true nobility. He writes about the issue in several different registers, beginning with a purely comic treatment in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Although the figure of Falstaff, in the words of citizen Ford (. . –), is a ‘court-like’ gentleman ‘of excellent breeding’, he is shown to be wholly lacking in the honest attributes required for true nobility. The further and connected question as to whether the possession of honestas is sufficient for vera nobilitas is later examined more seriously in All ’s Well That Ends Well. Helena, the bearer of a ‘low and humble name’ (. . ) is spurned by Bertram, the Count of Rousillon, who objects that marriage to Helena would ‘bring me down’ (. . ). But her cause is vehemently supported by the king of France, who declares that she is ‘all that is virtuous’, insists that ‘Good alone / is good without a name’ and forces Bertram into the
Afterword
marriage against his will (. . , –). The same question surfaces yet again in Cymbeline, at the beginning of which we learn that the king has imprisoned his daughter for marrying ‘a poor but worthy gentleman’ (. . ) when he had intended her for someone who, although of higher standing, is so lacking in virtue that he is said to be ‘too bad for bad report’ (. . ). Is it possible to say that, in dramatising these familiar topoi, Shakespeare also presents them in such a way as to take sides, thereby disclosing where he himself stands on the moral issues involved? The consensus among the contributors to the present volume is clear: Shakespeare seems actively anxious, in keeping with his rhetorical training, to stand back from endorsing any one side in the arguments in utramque partem that he likes to stage. Consider, for example, his handling of the question of the optimus status reipublicae. It is Eric Nelson’s contention that, although Shakespeare in effect raises this question in each of his Roman plays, he never answers or even directly engages with it. If, Nelson suggests, there is any positive conclusion to be drawn from Shakespeare’s refusal to say whether any specific form of government enabled Rome to flourish most effectively, it may be that he took the question to have little political significance. A comparable claim can be made about Shakespeare’s discussion in Measure for Measure of the best or most human form of life. The play comes to a close when Vincentio, having resumed his position of power, suddenly proposes marriage to Isabella, although she has given no signs of wishing to renounce the religious life. Is Isabella being drawn into the vita activa, and are we being invited to agree that, as the duke assures her, this change of commitment ‘much imports your good’ (. . )? Or are we to understand that their marriage would somehow bring together the rival ideals that they had earlier appeared to symbolise? As Conal Condren argues, we simply cannot say; Isabella neither accepts nor refuses the duke’s offer, and the play ends in such a way as to leave us arguing in utramque partem for ourselves. Phil Withington’s chapter, which focuses on The Merry Wives of Windsor, argues in similar vein that Shakespeare handles the theme of vera nobilitas in a deliberately provocative and paradoxical style. As we have seen, much of the comedy turns on the irony that the ‘court-like’ Falstaff wholly lacks the honest attributes of courtliness. However, the contrast drawn in the play is not between Falstaff ’s absence of honestas and the possession of this quality by Masters Quickly and Ford. Master
Ford likewise possesses no honestas at all. One of the main characteristics of an honest person, Cicero had argued, is a sense of justice . But Ford is basely unjust to his wife, whose faithfulness he doubts without the least evidence. The other principal elements of honesty, Cicero had added, are decorum, moderation and an ability to keep the passions under control. But Ford has no such control; as he confesses himself, he is ready to crack with impatience (. . ), and he is possessed, according to Falstaff, by a mad devil of jealousy (. . ). The contrast Shakespeare draws is, rather, between the lack of honestas displayed by the menfolk and the possession of this quality by the merry wives. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are both honest in the special sense of being sexually faithful, and the latter is proud to boast that she is immeasurably far from giving her husband any cause for jealousy (. . ). But they are also honest in the broader Ciceronian sense that Withington singles out. They deal justly with Falstaff, who gets what he deserves, and they uphold their decorum while behaving with resourcefulness. But herein lies the paradox. Cicero had declared in De officiis that the practice of honestas not only makes for true nobility but for excellence of citizenship as well. What Shakespeare shows is that the merry wives, who have no pretensions to nobility and are not even eligible to serve as citizens, nevertheless embody the qualities of honestas in the highest degree. As several contributors to the present volume point out, Shakespeare’s interest in arguing in utramque partem is not confined to his treatment of the standard rhetorical topoi I have so far discussed. More arrestingly, he maintains a similar stance in scrutinising some of the most cherished political assumptions in the humanist culture of his day. It is to this aspect of his dramaturgical practice that I next want to turn. One pivotal assumption of Tudor humanism was that the right form of education, especially for young nobles and princes, is of paramount importance for the welfare of the commonwealth. Perhaps the most influential outline of the curriculum that the humanists hoped to inculcate can be found in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governour, a work well known to Shakespeare, which was first printed in . According to Elyot, the children of the nobility ought to begin receiving an education in good letters from the earliest possible age. They need in particular to be instructed in the full range of the virtues, the elements of which are
Cicero, Thre bokes of duties, fols. v, r. Ibid., fol. r. Ibid., fol. r. Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida . . – and . . – quotes Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (London ), sig. A, r–v.
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duly listed, subdivided and explicated throughout the book. If we instead allow such tender buds to become infected with the vices, ‘the frute may growe wilde, and some time conteine in it fervent and mortal poison to the utter destruction of a realme’. Given the prevalence of these beliefs, it is striking that Shakespeare appears more than a little sceptical about their cogency. As Aysha Pollnitz notes, the budding prince Hal can scarcely be said to have received any formal tutoring at all. His early education was centred less on letters than on arms and had no effect in dissuading him from falling into a dissolute way of life. Any humanist pedagogue, as Pollnitz remarks, would have expected him to become an unregenerate bully and a tyrant. But in fact Shakespeare shows that Hal was not only capable of reform, but managed to fashion himself into an impressive king, prudent, courageous and ultimately glorious, a paragon of the virtues. So much, it seems, for Sir Thomas Elyot’s earnest anxieties and advice. A further and related question raised by many humanist writers on government was – to cite Machiavelli’s way of expressing it – ‘in what ways a ruler should act with regard to his subjects and allies’. Machiavelli had advanced the disturbing suggestion that princes may sometimes find it necessary to engage in deceit and refuse to honour their word. If we turn, however, to the humanist moral writers whom Shakespeare is known to have read, especially Elyot and Castiglione, we find them emphasising with the greatest vehemence that princes must tell the truth and keep their promises at all times. Castiglione brings his treatise to a close by arguing that ‘the end of a Courtier’ is to counsel and advise his prince, and that with this goal in mind he must ‘alwayes enfourme him francklie of the trueth of everie matter’ without allowing himself the least flattery or compromise. Here too it is striking to observe how quizzically Shakespeare treats these pieties. As Jennifer Richards shows, the issue of truth-telling is extensively explored in Henry VIII, the alternative title of which is All Is True. Richards proposes that Shakespeare’s collaborator, John Fletcher, probably took the lead in suggesting that the encouragement of ‘honest speech’ may often be preferable to a rigorous inquisition into men’s beliefs. To lay claim to a monopoly of truth may be politically divisive.
Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, sig. C, r. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Russell Price and ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge ), ch. , p. . Ibid., ch. , pp. –. Castiglione, The Courtyer, sig. Mm, v.
To prefer the values of honestas – and thus of decorum and moderation in speech – may sometimes be of greater benefit to the commonwealth. We are left to ponder the possibility that the value of ensuring that ‘all is true’ may be overestimated. Of all the political pieties of Shakespeare’s age, none ran deeper than the belief that divinity doth hedge a king, and that anyone who resists established authority must expect damnation. Nothing is more remarkable, as Stephen Greenblatt stresses, than Shakespeare’s willingness to step back from endorsing even these beliefs. He handles the mystical elements in kingship with relentless irony and refuses to take a principled stand even on the illegitimacy of using violence to topple the powers that be. Brutus’s willingness to join the conspirators in Julius Caesar is by no means validated, but nor is it explicitly condemned. Rather, his confrontation with Mark Anthony, as they make their rival speeches to the populace, presents us with yet another instance of an argument in utramque partem, in which the citizens vociferously support first one side and then the other . It is important, however, not to carry too far the suggestion that Shakespeare simply stages political arguments without ever taking sides. If we nail our colours too firmly to this post-modernist mast, disjoining the texts from any authorial voice, we may incur the ironic danger of associating ourselves with a romantic and old-fashioned view of Shakespeare’s art. We may appear to be saying that he was so much a man for all seasons that it would be an insult to his genius to suggest that he harboured any serious interest in the local political issues of his day. To steer away from this danger is not to affirm that Shakespeare was in any straightforward sense a political writer after all. Most contributors to the present volume take it for granted that it would be little better than absurd to piece together the scattered observations in his oeuvre in such a way as to equip him with a settled body of political beliefs. It would be no less absurd, however, to fail to acknowledge that many of his plays abound in political reflections and arguments, and may even be said to display a political sensibility of a distinctive kind. Among Shakespeare’s political reflections some of the most recurrent concern the almost insupportable burden of public life. As Stephen Greenblatt remarks, the list of Shakespeare’s rulers who exhibit a strong desire to escape from the demands of leadership is a long one, including Vincentio and Prospero, as well as Lear and Richard II. Those in high office are regularly shown to suffer from intense anxiety and sleeplessness. They are also shown, as Susan James brings out, to be particularly prone
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to superstitious fear, the political effects of which are invariably taken to be disastrous. We need only turn to Macbeth, as James demonstrates, to find a terrifyingly clear case. The more that Macbeth’s superstitious fantasies cut him off from the ordinary world, the more he evinces loss of control and a refusal to be checked, lurching from murder towards tyranny as his powers of reasoning are increasingly undermined. Some contributors go further, seeing in several of Shakespeare’s works a willingness not merely to ruminate on political issues, but to offer words of counsel and even warning to the princes and other ‘governors’ of his age. It is true that such advice rarely appears on the surface of his texts. But it is certainly suggestive, as Conal Condren points out, that Measure for Measure was first acted before King James I in the opening year of his reign. The realm has lately been corrupt, Shakespeare may appear to be saying, but great care must be taken to ensure that the power to bring about reformation is not placed in the wrong hands. It is no less striking, as Susan James observes, that Macbeth was likewise performed for the first time before the new king, who at an earlier stage in his life had taken a deep interest in demonology and had even felt himself to be possessed. To allow such anxieties to seize control of the imagination, Shakespeare may in this case appear to be saying, can be dangerous to political judgment and hence to the safety of the state. We can go further, Cathy Shrank suggests, and add that there is at least one text in which Shakespeare proffers advice not in an oblique but in a direct and almost strident style. He does so, Shrank maintains, in the Sonnets, and especially in the opening sequence of seventeen poems in which an unknown young nobleman is repeatedly urged to marry and ensure the continuation of his line. Here we seem to be listening to a clear authorial voice. The poems are filled with imperatives as the poet upbraids the young man for neglecting his duties and leading a wasteful life, and they are pervaded at the same time by a sense of imminent loss. The loss chiefly feared by the poet is the destruction of a noble house, but he also warns the youth to expect a diminution of happiness, of wisdom and even of truth. There is a strong convergence between Shrank’s argument and that of several other contributors who focus on the theme of counselling. They all agree that Shakespeare seems to entertain grave doubts as to whether the offering of candid advice can ever hope to be of much use. As Shrank emphasises, it is important to the organisation of the sonnets that the advice supplied to the young nobleman falls on deaf ears, thereby forcing the poet to move on to a different theme. With sonnet , perhaps the
most famous in the series, the poet begins instead to speak of the immortality that stems from being celebrated in verse. He concedes, in effect, that the soaring rhetoric of his opening sequence has completely failed. If there is to be any prospect of the young nobleman’s line continuing after his death, it will have to be in the lines of the sonnets themselves . Markku Peltonen finds a comparable preoccupation with the futility of counselling in Coriolanus. Menenius’s aristocratic rhetoric has no power to persuade the people, while the tribunes of the people have no greater success in winning round the aristocratic leadership. David Colclough similarly underlines the many failed attempts to offer advice in Julius Caesar. Caesar himself – in a symbolic touch that Shakespeare adds – is deaf in one ear, and accordingly finds it impossible to hear arguments on both sides. When the soothsayer warns him to beware the Ides of March, Caesar dismisses him as a dreamer. When Calpurnia warns him not to go to the Capitol, he is flattered into dismissing her doubts by Cinna, who is one of those plotting his death. As Colclough concludes, the whole process of counselling is treated throughout the play with an unremitting bleakness of tone. These and related considerations lead a number of contributors to propose that, even if Shakespeare cannot be associated with any specific political doctrines, he may nevertheless be said to articulate a distinctive political outlook. What, then, does it amount to? Any attempt at a summary would be unbearably crude, but several chapters converge on the suggestion that, in reflecting on contemporary political values and practices, Shakespeare often appears to view them with darkly sceptical feelings of doubt. More particularly, several contributors add, he appears to share the feeling, widespread in his time, that he was living in an age from which virtue had fled. This is hardly the sensibility that we encounter in Twelfth Night or As You Like It or A Midsummer Night ’s Dream. If we think about the tragedies, however, or even about some of the more ambiguous comedies, it is hard to dispute the darkness of the political vision they reflect. When the ordinary populace contribute to the action, as they do in Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, they appear as little better than a fickle mob; and when the action revolves around princes and nobles, they are often represented as even more self-interested and corrupt. Duke Vincentio presides over a city in which the laws have for years been licentiously ignored with his own connivance. The figure of the bastard in King John points to the triumph of interest over virtue and the willingness of kings to ‘break faith upon commodity’ (. . ). Timon of Athens buys the loyalty of his followers
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with reckless extravagance and finds himself abandoned as soon as his fortune gives out. Hamlet lives in a court in which he is surrounded by gluttony, abject flattery and the treachery of former friends. If we wish to understand Hamlet’s delay in exacting his revenge, Andrew Fitzmaurice submits, we need to see him as a man so disgusted with the sea of corruption engulfing him that he cannot rouse himself to take arms against it. He has no alternative but to withdraw from the court’s noxious influences, and when he returns it is only to be caught up in the sudden and vengeful events that culminate in his death. The foregoing chapters approach Shakespeare’s politics from many contrasting angles, and this variety greatly contributes to the strength and interest of Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought. As I have intimated, however, there is at least one generalisation towards which many contributors edge. For Shakespeare, they suggest, the world of politics and the life of virtue appear to be largely incompatible. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, Shakespeare’s universe is one in which ‘no character with a clear moral vision has a will to power’. The observation might stand as an epigraph for the volume as a whole.
Index
absolutism, , ; see also rule academic disciplines, action, and judgement, ; see also prudence active/contemplative life, , –, –, –, –, –, ; in European polities, –; preparation for, actor/dramatist as holder of public office, afterlife/immortality, Aldo, Bernardo, All’s Well That Ends Well , , , anachronism, , Antony and Cleopatra , Aquinas, St Thomas, Arden, Mary, argumentum in utramque partem , , , , –, , , , , – aristocracy, , –, , ; civic, –; from merit, ; obligations of, –; and rhetoric, –; Roman patricians as, ; see also gentility; true nobility Aristophanes, Aristotle, , , , , ; and virtue, , , ; Politics, , Armin, Robert, Armitage, David, , As You Like It, , , , Ascham, Roger, , , Aubrey, John, audience, Shakespeare’s, , Averell, William, Aylmer, John, Bacon, Nicholas, Bacon, Sir Francis, , , –, , , , Bakhtin, Mikhail, Baldwin, Thomas, Baldwin, William, , , –, see also Mirror for Magistrates Bancroft, Bishop Henry, Barker, Francis, , , Barnes, Barnabe, Foure Bookes of Offices,
Barry, Jonathan, , Barton, Anne, , , Bayne, Roger, Beacon, Richard, Bednarz, James, Belleforest, François de, Amleth, ; Cicero in, ; as republican, –; as source for Hamlet, , – Bennett, Jocelyn, Boccalini, Trajano, , Bodin, Jean, , , , Boétie, Étienne de la, , –, Book of Sir Thomas More, The, Borgia, Cesare, , ; see also Gentillet, Innocent Bowers, Fredson, Bracton, Henry of, Bradley, A. C., bread and circuses, Brecht, Berthold, Bright, Timothy, – Brinsley, John, Bruni, Leonardo, brute beasts topos, –, , Brutus, Lucius Junius, Buchanan, George, , , Bullein, William, , Burrow, Colin, Burton, Sir Richard, Camden, William, Campbell, Lily, , Campion, Edmund, Castiglione, Baldassare, , casuistry, – Catholicism, , , –, ; see also Elizabethan Settlement; Jesuits; religion Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, , Chalmers, George, Chancery, Royal Court of, Charles I, King, , ; Eikon Basilike,
Index Charron, Pierre, Cheke, John, Churchyard, Thomas, ; Tragedie of Cardinal Wolsey, – Cicero, , –, , , , , ; and bonus homo, –; and counsel, ; and oratory, , , ; and prudence, –; translations of, ; De officiis, , , –, , , , citizenship/civic life, –, –, , , , –, , ; active, –; civic incorporation, ; culture of, –; and guilds, ; as political, –; terminology of, ; see also Windsor city comedy, civil war, ; English, , , , ; French wars of religion, , , , ; Wars of the Roses, Clever, William, ; Raellyans, the, – Clinton, William Jefferson, Cohen, Walter, Colclough, David, , , , Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Colet, John, , collaboration, as literary technique, Collinson, Patrick, , Combe, Thomas, commonwealth, best state of, –, –, –, ; see also England Condell, Henry, , Condren, Conal, , , , , Coriolanus, , , , , –, –, ; civic activity in, , –; confrontation scene, –; context for, , –; as political, ; as public, ; rhetoric as central to, –; and fable of belly, ; Characters in: Caius Martius (Coriolanus), ; Cominius, ; Menenius, –, –, ; Volumnia, , ; Roman populace, , –, ; tribunes, –; Brutus –, ; Sicinius, –; see also Fleming, Abraham; Rome Correll, Barbara, corruption, , , , , –, , ; and education, –, –; and gender, –; and political power, , –, ; see also court Cotgrave, Randall, counsel, , , , , –, , , , , , –; as community discussion, –, ; and commonwealth, ; criteria for, –; flattery, , , –, –; as persuasion, ; as petitioning, , –; as posting of bills and/or libels, , , –; as vox populi, ;
see also rhetoric country house poem, court/courtly life, , , , –, , , , , , ; courtliness, –, ; courtly and chivalric exercises, ; and gender, , ; Papal, ; see also corruption Cowell, John, , Cox, Leonard, Craig, Alexander, , Craig, John, Cromwell, Thomas, Curtis, Cathy, , , , Cymbeline, Davenant, William, Law against Lovers, Davies, John, Davison, Francis, de casibus writing, as genre, Deloney, Thomas, democracy, , dialectic, , Dionysius of Halicarnassus, dissimulation, , Donaldson, Ian, Donne, John, , ; Holy Sonnets, drama, development of, Duncan-Jones, Katherine, , Edgerton, Lord Keeper, education, , , –, , –; agricultural metaphors for, , ; and ars rhetorica, –; grammar schools, , –; for office, , , , ; of princes, –; purpose of, –; studia humanitatis, –, , –; of subjects, ; see also humanism; Montaigne Edward VI, King, , , elections in Shakespeare’s works, , Eliot, T. S., Elizabeth I, Queen, , , , , , , ; succession to, , –, –, , Elizabethan Settlement, , ; see also Catholicism Elsky, Martin, Elyot, Sir Thomas, , , –, , , , England, , , ; middle classes in, , , , ; governance of, –, ; as commonweal, , , , –, ; as republic, , , –, ; local government, , ; mixed government, ; political culture of, ; urbanisation of,
equivocation, Erasmus, Desiderius, , , , , , ; and education, , –, ; Institutio Principis Christiani, , –; and Henry V, – Erskine-Hill, Howard, Essex, Robert Devereaux, nd Earl of, –, ethics, ambition and, , –; as common humanity, ; motivation and, –; psychology of, Europe, early modern, fable of the belly, –; see also Coriolanus Famous Victories of Henry V, The, as source, Farnaby, Thomas, , Fawkes, Guy, ; see also torture fear, –, ; and effeminacy, , ; of the gods, –; ‘proper fear’, , ; see also superstition Ferrers, George, Fester, Judith, feudalism, Fitzmaurice, Andrew, Fleming, Abraham, ; A Panoplie of Epistles, eulogy for Coriolanus in, –, Fletcher, John, –, ; see also Henry VIII Florence, , , Florio, John, , , ; see also Montaigne freedom, see liberty Freud, Sigmund, Fullwell, Ulpian, Galen, Garden, Alexander, Garnet, Henry, SJ, Gascoigne, George, gender, –, , , gentility, , ; see also aristocracy; true nobility Gentillet, Innocent, ; see also Borgia, Cesare Gilbert, Humphrey, Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, Goodman, Christopher, How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd , – Goslicius, Laurentius Grimaldus, government, –, Gowing, Laura, Green, Lawrence, Greenblatt, Stephen, , , , , , , Grotius, Hugo, , Gunpowder Plot, , , ; see also Catholicism; James VI and I
Hadfield, Andrew, , , , , , Hall, Edward, The Union of…York and Lancaster, Hamilton, Donna, Hamlet, , –, , –, , , , ; criticism of, , ; feminist, ; modern, ; Denmark in, , , ; dissimulation in, –; natural world, corruption of, ; as republican, ; as Tacitean, –; Characters in: Claudius, , , , –, , ; courtiers, ; Fortinbras, ; Gertrude, , ; Ghost of Old Hamlet, ; Gravedigger, , ; Prince Hamlet, , , , , , –, , –; as courtier, ; education of, ; inaction of, , –, –; subjectivity of, modern, , –; political, ; soliloquy, ‘To be …’, ; vocabulary of, ; Horatio, , ; Ophelia, ; Osric, ; Polonius, , , ; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, , Hammond, Paul, Hannibal, Harrington, James, Harrison, William, Hathaway, Anne, Hegendorff, Christopher, Methodus conscribendi epistolas, Heminges, John, , Henri de Guise, King of France, Henry IV Pt , ; Pts and , –; Pt , ; Characters in: Falstaff, ; Prince Hal, , , , ; youth of, –; King Henry, ; Hotspur, ; see also Second Tetralogy Henry V, –, , , , ; modern language in, ; Prologue, ; sonnets in, ; Characters in: Falstaff, ; King Harry, , –, ; Princess Katherine, ; see also Second Tetralogy Henry VI, Pt , –, , , ; Pt , ; Characters in: King Henry, ; Queen Margaret, Henry VIII, ; as collaboration, –; moral centre of, ; as political, ; and Reformation, , ; and truth/honestas, –, ; Characters in: Anne Bullen (Boleyn), ; Buckingham, , , ; Cranmer, –; Cromwell, , –; Gardiner, Archbishop of Canterbury, –; Griffith, , , –; King Henry, –; Queen Katherine, , , , ; Surrey, Earl of, ; Wolsey, , –; two versions of,
Index Henry VIII, King, , , , , Henry, Prince of Wales, , – Henslowe, Philip, Hexter, J. H., Higgins, John, , –; see also Baldwin; Mirror for Magistrates Hill, Christopher, Hobbes, Thomas, , , Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles, , , ; collaboration in, –; as source for Henry VIII, , Holland, Norman, Holland, Philemon, , Homer, ; Iliad, honestas, , , , , , ; as civic humanism, –; as civic virtue, –, ; as sexual probity, , , ; as virtue, –, –; see also utilitas Hope, Jonathan, human nature, –, , humanism, , , , ; and educational practice, –; see also education; political theory humours, theory of, , , –; choler, as fault, – Humphrey, Lawrence, Hunter, George K., Hunton, Philip, Inns of Court, Jackson, John, James VI and I, King, , , , , –, –, , ; and court, , ; and education, –, ; and Midlands Revolt, ; and oath of allegiance, ; and Parliament, ; performances before, , , –, , ; repastoralisation policy of, ; and witchcraft, ; Works: Basilikon Doron, –, , , ; True Lawe of Free Monarchies, , ; see also absolutism; prerogative James, Susan, , , Jesuits, Johnson, Dr Samuel, Johnson, Robert, , , Johnson, William, Jones, Emrys, Jonson, Ben, , , , , Julius Caesar, , –, –, , , ; bill-posting in, ; funeral oration in, –; misconstrual in, ; petitioning in, –; Characters in: Artemidorus, ; Brutus, , , , , ; as brute, ; as melancholic, ; Caesar, , ; as deaf,
, ; as prince, ; as prone to flattery, –; Calpurnia, , ; Cassius, , , , ; as melancholic, ; conspirators, –; Decius, , ; Mark Antony, , , , , –; Roman populace, –; soothsayer, justice, Kant, Immanuel, , Kempe, William, Kennedy, William, King John, , King’s Men (Acting Company), , , Knapp, Jeff rey, , Knolles, Richard, Knowles, Ronald, Kyd, Thomas, Spanish Tragedy, Lake, Peter, , Lanyer, Aemilia, Latimer, Hugh, laughter, law, , –; common, , , ; defamation and mitior sensus, ; landholding of England, ; natural, ; moral, –; Roman, – Lear, , –; and Catholicism, ; conclusion of, ; storm scene in, ; Characters in: Albany, ; Cordelia, ; Cornwall, –; Edmund, ; Gloucester, ; blinding of, –; Kent, ; Lear, , ; Reagan, – Leedham-Green, Elisabeth, Leonico, Niccolò, Levellers, the, liberty/licence, –; as participation in civic life, ; as self-rule, ; sexual licence, , Lipsius, Justus, , , , ; Six Bookes of Politickes, literary revivals, as political, Livy, ; Brutus, Locke, John, , , , , , Lodge, Thomas, London, , , , , ; culture of, –; Livery Companies, ; pageants, , ; privileges of, love as political, Love’s Labour’s Lost, , , , –, ; King of Navarre, ; political context of, ; sonnets in, Lucian, ; see also satire Ludlow, Lydgate, John, ; and Boccaccio, Fall of Princes,
Macbeth, , , , –, , ; Characters in: Duncan, ; Lady Macbeth, , ; Macbeth, , – Machiavelli, Niccolò, , , –, , , ; Discourses, ; Prince, , , Mack, Peter, magistrates, civil, Manship, Henry, History of Great Yarmouth, –, Marcus, Leah, , Marlowe, Christopher, , , , Marotti, Arthur, Mary I, Queen, , Mary, Queen of Scots, Massinger, Philip, The City Madam, Masten, Jeff rey, McMullan, Gordon, Measure for Measure, , , , , , , , , ; bed trick in, ; open-ended structure of, –, ; as periplous, ; symbolism/allegory in, ; Vienna in, , ; Characters in: Abhorson, ; Angelo, –, , , –, ; as puritan, –; as symbol, ; Claudio, ; Duke, , , , –, –, ; as Friar, –; Escalus, ; Isabella, –; Mistress Overdone, ; Pompey, Medwell, Henry, , melancholy, , , –, ; see also superstition Melanchthon, Philip, mercy/mitigation, ; as royal prerogative, – Meres, Francis, , Merry Wives of Windsor, , , –, ; as city comedy, ; English country town in, –, ; female citizenship, , –, –; first performance of, ; and modern criticism of, , ; as political, , , ; Windsor in, , ; Characters in: Falstaff, , , –, , , , ; and rough music, ; Fenton, ; Ford, , , ; Mistress Ford, –; Mistress Page, –, ; Mistress Quickly, Middleton, Thomas, , Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, Miles, Geoff rey, Mirror for Magistrates, as collaboration, , –; justice in, ; coherence of, –; Characters in: Jack Cade, ; Wolsey, , mirror for princes, genre,
moderation, –, ; lack of, ; as political, ; as virtue, – Montaigne, Michel, Comte de, , , , , ; and education, –, , ; interest theory and, ; and virtue, ; Works: Apologie de Raimond Sebond, ; Essais, –, , ; see also humanism; education; Florio; John morality, –; as political, More, Sir Thomas, –; History of Richard III, ; Utopia, , , , , , , Mulcaster, Richard, Munday, Anthony, In Defence of Contraries, narrative dissonance, Nelson, Eric, , , , , , , North, Sir Thomas, see Plutarch Norton Shakespeare, Nugent, Richard, Nuttall, A. D., obedience, , O’Callaghan, Michelle, office, , –, , , , ; corruption as failure of, , ; of dramatist, , ; fitness for, , , –, , , ; lack of, ; obligations to hold, , ; participation in, ; liberty of, , –; separation of holder from, ; vocabulary of, Oliver, Harold J., Osorio, Jeronimo, Ovid, Metamorphoses, – Pace, Richard, , paradox, , Parker, Archbishop Matthew, Parliament, , , , , , , , , ; see also England Parsons, Robert, SJ, , Passionate Pilgrim, The, , passions, –, –, ; environment, effects on, –, , ; as extravagant, –; as natural phenomena, Paster, Gail Kern, Pater, Walter, paternal advice, as genre, patriarchy, ; and female irrationality, , ; see also gender patronage, , Patterson, Annabel, Peele, George, Peltonen, Markku, , , , , , Pemble, William, , Pembroke, William Herbert, rd Earl of,
Index
people, common, , ; and rhetoric, –, , –; as inherently unruly –; see also Rome; populace of persuasion, see counsel Petrarch, Francesco, , ; Rime Sparse, Philips, James, Phoenix and the Turtle, The, Pierce, Robert, Pilgrimage of Grace, Plato, , , , ; and active/contemplative life, –, –, ; and office, ; Republic, , , , ; see also active/ contemplative life ploughman writing, as genre, Plutarch, , ; North’s translation of, , ; Lives: Brutus, ; Coriolanus, , ; source, ; Julius Caesar, , , , ; pirates as beasts, ; Senate in, ; Pompey, ; Moralia, –, Pocock, J.G.A., poetry, functions of, – political, as term, ; vocabulary of, political theory, early modern, , , , , , , , ; European, ; history of, –, , , ; and history of philosophy, ; humanist, –, , , –; and interest theory, –; and intellectual history, ; modern, ; Renaissance, Pollnitz, Aysha, , , Porter, Henry, Two Angry Women, , , , prerogative, royal prerogative, , , ; see also mercy propaganda, property, , ; definitions of, –; dispropertied, , ; as exclusive, –; as mystery, –; primitive communality of, , prudence/prudentia , , , , ; see also action public/private, –, , , ; and personal will, –; self-interest and, , , , , –, – Pufendorf, Samuel, Puttenham, George, ; Arte of English Poesie, –
Rape of Lucrece, , , , , , ; prefatory Argument to, ; as republican, –; Characters in: Brutus Junius, ; Lucrece, –; Tarquin, – reason, , , ; see also superstition Rebhorn, Wayne, Reformation, , , , , , ; English, religion, , , , , , ; and atheism, ; and property, ; sectarianism, ; see also Catholicism Renaissance, , , , ; drama, ; and republicanism, –; Shakespeare as typical of, republicanism, , –, , –, ; see also Commonwealth; England; Rome Reynolds, Edward, , rhetoric, ; and amplification, –; and aposiopesis, , ; and aristocracy, –; as dangerous, –; as eloquence/persuasion, , , , , , , ; failure of, , ; as humanist discipline, –, –; and litotes, ; as oratory, , ; and paralipsis, ; as political, Ribner, Irving, Richard II, –, , ; King Richard, Richard III, , ; King Richard, ; see also Shakespeare; Works; villains Richards, Jennifer, , , rights, , , Rome, –, –, , –, , ; citizens of, –; Gracchi, ; government of, , –, ; populace of, –; Tribunate, , Romeo and Juliet, Ross-Smith, Gordon, Rowley, Samuel, rule, burden of, , ; as insomnia, , , , ; office of, –, –, –, , , , ; effects of superstition on, , –; ethics and, ; fitness for, –, ; as fragile, ; as misrule and tyranny, , –, , –, , ; monarchy as, , , –, , –, , –; republican, ; as sacred, –, ; see also absolutism
Quadri, Marcella, Quintilian,
Sallust, satire, , , scepticism: Pyrrhonist, –, ; in audience, ; and Shakespeare, –, , –, –, , ; and effectiveness of counsel, –
Raellyans, – Rainolde, Richard, Raleigh, Sir Walter,
scholasticism, , Scot, Reginald, , Second Tetralogy, –, , ; Prince Hal, , –; two versions of, ; see also Henry IV and V Secreta Secretorum, self, as morally autonomous, Seneca, , , , , , Sextus Empiricus, Shakespeare, John, , –, , Shakespeare, William, biography: as co-author, –; beliefs of, –, ; confessional identity of, , ; education of, , , ; in historical record, ; participation in public life, –, –, , ; personality of, , ; political thought of, –, , , –, , ; and post-modernism, ; and property, , –, –; real estate of, , ; strategic ambivalence of, ; and Stratford, ; Works: and black humour, ; as counsel, –; dramatic scope of, ; as intellectual property, ; First Folio, ; and literary criticism, ; as political, –; supernatural in, –; villains in, , , ; Comedies, , , ; History plays, , , –; last plays, ; Roman plays, , , –, , ; Tragedies, –, Shrank, Cathy, , , , , , , – Shuger, Deborah, , Sidney, Sir Philip, Astrophil and Stella, , , ; architectural imagery in, ; as parody, ; Letter to Queen Elizabeth, Silvayn, Alexander, The Orator, ; as source for Shylock, Skinner, Quentin, Smith, Sir Thomas, De Republica Anglorum, , –, , , , society: social history, –; administrative records and, ; legal records and, ; social practice, ; social relationships, , , , ; social structure, mediaeval, sonnet, as genre, –; in Shakespeare’s plays, Sonnets, , ; audience of, ; biographical readings of, , ; as conservative, ; Dark Lady of, ; date of, ; as political, ; as Tudor, ; Sonnets –; architectural imagery in, –, ; consistency of, –; and procreation, ; rhetoric in, ; young man in, –;
waste imagery in, ; Sonnet , , ; Sonnet , ; Sonnet , –; Sonnet , ; Sonnet , ; Sonnet , ; Sonnet , sonnets, anonymous political, soul, , , , – Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, rd Earl of, , sovereignty, see absolutism; rule; office of Spedding, James, Spinoza, Benedict, St German, Christopher, St John, Henry, Lord Bolingbroke, Stanyhurst, Richard, Starkey, Thomas, , , state, reason of, ; rise of, stoicism, , – Stone, Lawrence, Stratford-upon-Avon, –, Strauss, Leo, Sturm, Johann, subjection, as slavery, , ; as voluntary, –, succession theme, in Shakespeare’s works, , –, , ; see also Elizabeth I; James VI and I supernatural, , –, , ; and magic, , ; in Old Testament, ; and witchcraft, , , superstition, , –, –, ; causes of, –; dangers of, –, , –; epistemology and, ; and insomnia, , , ; medical causes for, –, ; typology of, ; see also rule Tacitus/Tacitean, , , , , –, ; and rhetoric, , ; Histories : Agrippina, –; Emperor Claudius, Tempest, The, , , , ; Prospero, , , texts, appraisal of, , ; as evidence, – theatres, Blackfriars, ; Globe, , ; theatrical properties, , Thorpe, Thomas, Timon of Athens, , ; Timon, Tiptoft, John, and Buonaccorso, De vera nobilitate, , Tittler, Robert, , Titus Andronicus, , –, ; Roman mob, –; Characters in: Bassianus, –; Lucius, ; Marius, –; Saturinus, ; Tamora, ; Titus, –; tribunes, –
Index Tocqueville, Alexis de, , ; Democracy in America, torture, –, see also Lear tragedy as genre, – Troilus and Cressida , true nobility, , , , , , , , ; see also virtue Turval, Jean l’Oiseau de, Twelfth Night, tyranny, see rule; office of unfeeling stones topos, , universities, , , utilitas, , ; see also honestas Valla, Lorenzo, Venice, , , , vernacular dialogue, English, Vickers, Brian, – Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, virtue, –, –, –, , –, , , , –, ; as Aristotelian mean, ; principle and practice of, –;
see also Aristotle; casuistry; corruption; honestas Vives, Juan Luis, , Wall, Wendy, Walter, J. H., Wayland, John, printer, Webster, John, Wentworth, Peter, Whitgift, Archbishop John, Wilkinson, John, Williams, Bernard, Wilson, Thomas, , –, , , , , Windsor, incorporation of, –, –; in Shakespeare, ; see also citizenship Winston, Jessica, Withington, Phil, , Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, ; see also Henry VIII; Mirror for Magistrates Worden, Blair, Wroth, Robert,
