Shakespeare’s Theory of International Relations: Diplomacy, Romance, and Aesthetics [1 ed.] 1527585867, 9781527585867

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Shakespeare’s Theory of International Relations

Shakespeare’s Theory of International Relations Diplomacy, Romance, and Aesthetics By

William M. Hawley

Shakespeare’s Theory of International Relations: Diplomacy, Romance, and Aesthetics By William M. Hawley This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by William M. Hawley All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8586-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8586-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... vi Introduction ............................................................................................... vii Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................... 1 Cymbeline: An Unexpected Song of Peace Chapter 2 ................................................................................................... 24 Pericles: Ethical and Metaphysical Dances Chapter 3 ................................................................................................... 45 The Moral Architecture of IR Theory: The Tempest Chapter 4 ................................................................................................... 67 The Ephemeral Art of IR Theory: The Winter’s Tale Chapter 5 ................................................................................................... 91 The Two Noble Kinsmen: The Art of an Unethical Global System Chapter 6 ................................................................................................. 113 IR Theory in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama Chapter 7 ................................................................................................. 136 Coda: Shakespeare’s IR Debt to Christopher Marlowe Conclusion ............................................................................................... 148 Appendix A ............................................................................................. 154 Notes........................................................................................................ 156 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 168 Index ........................................................................................................ 178

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Malta University Press kindly allowed me to revise completely “Peace, Prestige, and Prediction: Cymbeline as Hermeneutics and IR Theory,” published in The European Mind: Narratives and Identity, vol. 2 of 2, edited by Henry Frendo, Msida, Malta, 2010, which appears in its present form as Chapter 1: Cymbeline, An Unexpected Song of Peace. Philosopher Brayton Polka and the other panelists offered especially keen insights at the ISSEI The European Legacy conference hosted expertly by the University of Malta. Thanks are due as well to the 2011 Comparative Drama Conference in Playa Vista (Los Angeles), California, for permitting me to present my essay, “Anti-Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra and The Blind Beggar of Alexandria.” My remarks at the event hosted by Loyola Marymount University marked the beginning of my thinking about Chapter 6 in its present form. Cover Image: Giovanni Bellini’s Allegoria Sacra shows an East-West diplomatic encounter resembling those depicted in Shakespeare’s romances. Although the painting is replete with symbolism, it presents the first realistic landscape in Renaissance art. Bellini’s scene thus corresponds on a natural level to the realist diplomacy in the playwright’s romances. The chessboard pattern on the terrace at center suggests as well the abstract and analytical components underpinning Shakespeare’s theory of international relations. Image courtesy of the Uffizi Gallery.

INTRODUCTION

This is the first book to treat William Shakespeare’s romances as international relations (IR) theory plays of the highest artistic merit. In presenting the peaceful foreign policy aspirations of diverse states, the romances stage variations on IR theory that necessarily entail the values of philosophical aesthetics. For Shakespeare develops not only the prevailing Renaissance notion of IR classical realism, but he arranges the dramatic action into coherent aesthetic patterns validating some modern concepts about the nature of interstate relations. Shakespeare regards states as being autonomous actors in a relatively anarchic global system, an insight that prevails for good or ill over Renaissance utopian visions of peaceful coexistence abroad. Shakespeare’s IR theory is founded upon “commonsense realism,” to cite Hilary Putnam’s overarching pragmatic philosophy in order to describe standard operating procedure in Tudor-Stuart diplomacy.1 No effective legate inhabits a semiotic world so detached from reality that he or she cannot address the interests of foreign counterparts. Yet the influence of cultural materialism appears in literary critic Timothy Hampton’s antirealist holding that Renaissance diplomacy involves an “exchange of signs” producing a “symbolic political act par excellence.”2 Hampton’s belief in the dominance of cultural signs assumes that proper diplomacy consists in the enactment of rituals reflecting a virtual reality, thereby negating the useful negotiable value of things in the outside world. By contrast, Shakespeare’s romances show characters making painful concessions to reality in order to resolve personal and global conflicts. The playwright enlists aesthetics in the cause of rectifying conceptual international injustices without losing sight of basic IR realist premises. Put in aesthetic terms, Octavius Caesar (in Antony and Cleopatra) poses a marginally greater threat to Egypt than Augustus Caesar (in Cymbeline) does to Britain in part because the latter makes no actual appearance on stage. IR theory and Shakespearean aesthetics overlap in their analysis of the benefits of restraint in global political relations. IR realists treat world affairs with an abundance of caution, shown in U.S. diplomat Charles Hill’s interpretation of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors: “Every reference tells of a world out of order, with no means available to set it right.”3 Hill carefully considers the anamorphic skull (i.e., Time)

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emblazoned diagonally across the lower center of the double-portrait, but Holbein’s ironic image of political actors in the aftermath of a temporary diplomatic impasse does not rule out prudent, long-term accommodations between states that Shakespeare’s IR theories pursue as aesthetic imperatives. To his credit, Hill never discounts Carl von Clausewitz’s insight into successful power politics and war as the timely application of decisive force, in the absence of which some international disputes may never finally be resolved. Still, U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan famously cautioned against relying too heavily upon the foreign policy option of military adventurism, although the sound advice of this artistically sensitive architect of American Cold War realism (who published under his true name as well as his nom de plume “X”) was sometimes ignored amid fears of international communist aggression from 1945-1991. In explaining the design of the global system, IR theory seeks to place a limit on any violent ideological overcorrection, or “recoil,” that might produce unanticipated conflicts overseas (to use Hilary Putnam’s term for my own purposes). 4 If Prospero and Ariel reject the theory of governance espoused by Antonio and Sebastian, who conspire to use assassination as a tool to gain political power, The Tempest lends even less credence to Gonzalo’s brand of experimental communalism. Shakespeare would no doubt have concurred with Elizabeth I that an elite class already exists to preserve the status quo and the peace abroad—namely, European monarchies, “Princes can discuss matters together, as private persons cannot do.”5 The playwright nevertheless shows aristocratic diplomacy to be rudderless in the absence of an aesthetically sophisticated ruler cognizant of moral and realist principles of international relations. For the most part, Shakespeare addresses foreign policy above the transactional level of diplomacy. Most British Renaissance diplomats stationed overseas sold their influence locally in order to improve their living conditions and thus their odds of survival even while promoting their rulers’ policies; however, the plays reveal that the international political system operates as well according to a logic of its own. Caius Lucius seems quite incorruptible as Rome’s special envoy to Cymbeline’s court, but his safety is guaranteed by ancient interstate traditions; therefore, he feels empowered to advise that Britain fulfill the terms of the Anglo-Roman bilateral agreement without his buckling to the taunts of the IR theory neophytes surrounding Britain’s king. On the other hand, Pericles’s search for a suitable political and marital alliance abroad seems to constitute the entirety of Tyre’s initial foreign policy. Tudor-Stuart rulers entrusted sensitive foreign missions to loyalists and coreligionists whenever possible because they lacked the objective intelligence analysis forthcoming from a well-staffed bureaucracy

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like the one serving the Venetian empire. Elizabeth regarded askance two types of diplomatic candidates: holdovers from Mary’s reign for being insufficiently attuned to her interests, and youthful diplomat-adventurers. Young Anthony Sherley parlayed his nomination as Persia’s ambassador into a self-aggrandizing European tour. His assignment to unite Persia and the Continent in an alliance arrayed against the Ottoman Empire yielded him monetary rewards in Spain, although he suffered the consequences of his indecorous behavior by receiving only a polite hearing from James I after being jailed in Venice as a mercenary. In view of the financial hardships incurred in foreign service, Renaissance diplomats accrued wealth by methods that would seem treasonous today, yet they earned the trust of their masters by advocating strenuously (if duplicitously) on behalf of their rulers’ interests abroad. The contingent agreements struck between Renaissance European powers scarcely seem compatible with the notion of enduring cooperation implicit in today’s IR neoliberal theory. The romances generally support Garrett Mattingly’s assertion that the Renaissance state “could only think of itself,” which is in effect a restatement of IR classical realism, although Shakespeare allows for loose temporary alliances within a self-help global system.6 Mattingly sees Renaissance diplomacy through the bipolar lens of the Cold War, when (perceived) dashing diplomatic elites served a knowledgeable bureaucracy in order to pilot fractious states into safe Western harbors. Yet his epitome of diplomatic savoir-faire produced inadequate results for Spain: “Gondomar’s success as a diplomat meant the ruin of his aims as a statesman.”7 Despite Gondomar’s considerable skills, he gained little from James apart from attending endless royal soirées in return for involving Spain in decades of ruinous Continental wars. Not surprisingly, Mattingly regards The Prince as an “embittered pamphlet” facilitating the moral decay and rampant “cynicism and treachery” in Renaissance politics, which, even if true, is rather beside the point of the Florentine political scientist’s analysis.8 Machiavelli shows interstate and feudal systems operating on at least two levels: the players’ personal mores, and the reasonable principles guiding autonomous actors through a crowded anarchic field. James appeared with foreign dignitaries in lavish masques for the entertainment of policy elites, events that showcased not merely the elegance of his court but as well his precepts on morals and pacifism. Legates sparred over perceived slights on these prestigious occasions, although personal disputes exerted little influence over systemic politics, “Jealousy between the Spanish and French ambassadors; insolence of the latter.”9 Recent scholarship on Renaissance foreign relations explores the “sociocultural codes” comprising “another important prerequisite for

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successful diplomacy”; however, the courtesies (and insults) exchanged between diplomats in global capitals bear no necessary relationship to the true state of affairs in the world.10 Untutored British popular opinion often held the international system in its proper regard despite being at times inaccurate as to certain details. In fearing Spain, the public viewed her wrongly out of all proportion to the actual danger she posed after the defeat of the Armada: “They (the English) are in great fear of the [Spanish] galleys and . . . say the galleys will utterly destroy them.”11 Spain deserved respect as the greatest power on the Continent, but she was no longer the constant existential threat to Britain that she once was. France too was in decline, although she continued to use Scotland as a proxy to attempt to influence English politics. Only skillful Dutch merchant seamanship placed Britain increasingly at a disadvantage along vital trade routes. James had to reach the best possible accommodations with foreign partners regardless of the atmospherics surrounding the culture and semiotics of his court; thus, Venetian diplomats were right to take his moral claims with a grain of salt: “The King of England is very prudent, able in negotiation, capable of dissimulating his feelings.”12 Even leaders well versed in IR realism were never above expressing outrage at perceived slights to their dignity. Philip shows his disgust at France’s refusal to grant safe harbor to Armada vessels damaged en route to Britain, “If the [French] King desired to be neutral in this war, it was nevertheless a matter of honour with him and his fortresses, that anyone seeking shelter under his guns should, according to the law of nations, be allowed to do so.”13 Yet the rules of fair play finished a distant last to those based upon the prevailing standards of international law, the laws of war, and the political competition between secure and weaker states and principalities alike. Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza once complained that Elizabeth received him in “an insolent and outrageous manner,” which struck him as an affront to Spanish dignity, but major offenses like Drake’s seizure of a “million and a half” in gold from Spanish vessels returning from South America posed a far greater risk to global peace.14 Mendoza’s sensitivity to English misbehavior seemed to spike relative to the feelings of serenity he enjoyed only a few years earlier in Mary’s subservient attitude toward Spain. Alone among the romances, Cymbeline examines in some depth the duties of the office of the diplomat per se; however, Spanish ambassador Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña (Conde de Gondomar) is roundly satirized in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess for attempting to destabilize Britain in order to advance the cause of Jesuit and Spanish expansionism. Gondomar used his relationship with James to scuttle the careers of a few prominent British rivals, but, in the final analysis, his sole

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major foreign policy accomplishment was to act as a lightning rod for the British public’s distaste for Spain and her representatives. Although envoys played a vital role in conveying state secrets, including news of the location of the Armada, most British legates accepted their appointments ambivalently, chafed at delays prolonging their service abroad, and suffered under the physical toll exacted by travel overseas. Britain posted her least experienced quasi-consular attachés half a world away. Merchants like Richard Cocks were expected to acquire the necessary diplomatic skills on the job in their service to the East India Company. Cocks recalls a “Comoedie (or Play)” on Japanese historical figures showing “the valiant deeds of their Ancestors, from the beginning of their Kingdome or Common-Wealth until this present,” which comprised part of a popular theatrical event hosted by the King of Firando (in contemporary Nagasaki prefecture).15 Because Cocks was unable to form effective ties to the host country, he became depressed by periods of inadequate commerce, lack of support from the EIC and Britain, and unending expenses incurred in his maintaining the trappings of an economic envoy. Lacking the expertise to decipher Japanese domestic politics, he was unable to fulfill adroitly the minimal consular functions expected of him. We learn little of the true state of global affairs from the perspective of such low-level economic and para-diplomatic functionaries; furthermore, New Diplomatic History cannot adequately describe the privileged or relevant socio-cultural facets of Renaissance diplomacy, much less those immured within (alleged) Orientalist discursive formations designed to dominate the East. In their “analysis of social practices,” exponents of New Diplomatic History calculate financial arrangements at a merely symbolic level of importance relative to the robust economies created through the offices of public diplomacy, which alone achieve a scale sufficient to modify the rules of the interstate system.16 Renaissance English and Japanese elites exchanged art and other commodities as a means to improve diplomatic ties. Japan’s Edo ruler asked for “pictures, paynted, som lascivious, others of stories of warrs by sea and land, the larger the better . . . ”; however, EIC captain John Saris’s translation apparently mistakes Japan’s request for Western mythological scenes for portraits of a prurient interest.17 Indeed, on Saris’s definition, it was James who expressed a desire to obtain Edo representations of fleshy subjects. Shakespeare’s depiction and analysis of IR theory soar above the procedural level of diplomacy, although systematic practices are vital to the successful implementation of foreign policy. IR theory and philosophical aesthetics offer the most incisive analytical tools for understanding these late plays because Shakespeare’s global viewpoint is

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far too cosmopolitan to be left to narrow socio-cultural critical devices. This book seeks to engage literary and dramatic critics along with political scientists and art theorists, although the scholarship herein draws most heavily upon the illumination cast by IR theory and philosophical aesthetics. The Shakespearean romance receives moral sustenance for its peaceful interstate resolutions from aesthetics and IR theory.

CHAPTER ONE CYMBELINE: AN UNEXPECTED SONG OF PEACE

Abstract Cymbeline shows a peaceful resolution to a sanguinary conflict between imperial Rome and her British vassal state. This outcome results less from brilliant diplomacy than it does from a conceptual deficiency King Cymbeline detected in international relations (IR) theory. Rome, the greatest sovereign power in an anarchic world system, proves feeble in comparison to the ultimate hegemon, Jupiter, which convinces Cymbeline to observe Jovian rules of respectful diplomacy. Far from staging a political fantasia, the play treats artistic estimations of global affairs as a value added to diplomatic thinking. By pressing IR realist assets into the service of peace, Shakespeare imaginatively modifies foreign affairs by aesthetic means.

King Cymbeline adopts belatedly the aristocratic style of prudent diplomacy that modified international relations (IR) realism in Shakespeare’s Britain. His impolitic demeanor had proven to be a liability in an anarchic global system sensitive to the slightest disruption. Having refused to pay tribute to the Roman Empire, he accedes at last to status quo ante bellum arrangements based upon his perception of a hidden Jovian order. Britain profits politically from Cymbeline’s financial reengagement with Augustus Caesar’s Rome. If Jupiter’s position atop the diplomatic hierarchy would seem to make a virtue of idealism in foreign affairs, aesthetic values combined with fears of divine reprisals prevail in Cymbeline’s decision to take the viam pacis (path of peace).1 Cymbeline tacitly accepts a subordinate role in the top-down global hierarchy ruled by Jupiter. Under the duress of Roman hostility, Cymbeline endorses the god’s implicit command to forgive his devotee (Posthumus), to honor the wayward son-in-law’s lineage, and, in so doing,

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to respect Jovian supremacy. He risks the estrangement of his loyal daughter and the forfeiture of his crown by ignoring the god’s missive, which is rendered spectacularly in metaphysical and musical terms. Rather than offend Jupiter, the repentant monarch conforms to a vertical foreign policy structure distinct from that of the institutional IR bureaus evolving horizontally in Rome and (later) in Venice. For Jupiter, not Augustus Caesar, is the true universal prime mover working his will through Britain’s ruler. Ennobled by his service to Roman divinity, Cymbeline holds his policy cards close to the vest by extending an olive branch to his foes. The aesthetic vision producing his peripeteia differentiates the play from the tragedies (as well as from Troilus and Cressida, with which it appeared in the First Folio of 1623). Shakespeare’s addition of a heavenly power to rule over all earthly authorities revises IR realist theory to the degree that the play distinguishes between normal and heightened levels of aesthetic and diplomatic value governing serious calculations about foreign affairs.

I. Comparative IR Realism in British Diplomacy King Cymbeline sets the standard for British diplomatic relations, although Tudor-Stuart monarchs managed a far more diversified global portfolio. English Renaissance political moguls determined overseas strategy to the extent that diplomacy had become choreographed, shown in Nicholas Throckmorton’s May 10, 1559, letter to Secretary William Cecil, in which he asks for guidance on the subliminal tone he should set for his upcoming meeting with French and Scottish officials, “Requests to be furnished with instructions how to behave himself.”2 Similarly, most Shakespearean envoys behave like dutiful factors, not political operatives (Wolsey in Henry VIII being a cautionary example of the latter), which reduces in due proportion their dramatic significance. But only the crown’s most trusted advisors were allowed to improvise in policy discussions abroad. Professional exclusivity is required because elite amateurs like Cloten and Posthumus display no aptitude for diplomacy. In contrast to Cloten, Posthumus is deemed a paragon of virtue, yet even he is gulled by Iachimo, an obvious confidence man. If Cymbeline’s passivity throughout the Roman parley sets British affairs adrift, his volte-face produces such a victory that he can declare magnanimously a holy day of celebration while preempting calls for reprisals against the enemy. Cymbeline’s peace plan assumes the existence of a higher authority possessing strength greater than that wielded by Augustus Caesar, a belief that compensates him perforce for his inability to nullify Rome’s suzerainty over Britain. The king’s discovery places Britain in a stronger (because wiser) position vis-à-vis Rome. He could never behold the new

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era without resuming payments to Rome, which remains the sole unconquerable land power; however, the benefits of Roman colonialism far outweigh their costs to Britain’s ruling class. Cymbeline derives his authority via Roman fiat, but he owes true fealty to Jupiter, whose somewhat obscure logic conjoins the aspirations of IR idealists and the constraints of IR realism. Yet Cymbeline commits blunders as a fledgling IR theoretician commensurate with Elizabeth I’s errors in her maiden foreign policy initiative over Calais at the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559). Both monarchs face stinging rebukes from Continental foes for claiming sovereignty over justly disputed holdings (Britain and Calais, respectively). The play accords all due honor to Cymbeline for his statecraft, whereas the historical record puts Elizabeth at a disadvantage. Her retreat from the negotiations over Calais ensured that her participation in the talks would remain an embarrassing footnote to Spain’s successful enlargement of Italian territory; however, in each case, Britain profits in the long run by preferring peace to the risks of war waged according to an IR structuralist’s notion of correct global protocol, which rejects as an idle dream any aesthetically nuanced conception of peace and national security. Caius Lucius discharges perfectly his mission to convey to Britain the seemingly incontrovertible political necessity of her obedience to Rome. His embassy fails only because British leadership and interests are divided, an impairment that would have undermined any similar ministerial initiative. For even ideal speech situations are in themselves no guarantee of an envoy’s success. Ironically, Elizabeth’s rigid control over her legates in France handed the negotiating advantage to Spain, her primary threat. British “liegers” in situ could not exploit propitious bargaining opportunities for fear of contradicting the crown’s standing policy.3 As a consequence, Spain humiliated the British envoys by sweetening the terms of the peace proposal at regular intervals, secure in the knowledge that Elizabeth’s emissaries would suffer extreme mental anguish in having to decline all of Philip’s increasingly tempting offers. Elizabeth avoided a potential foreign policy disaster by restricting her legation’s options, but she ensured thereby an unsatisfactory and needlessly delayed result. If Spanish jocularity over British bargaining inequalities reached the heights of hubris, Caius Lucius maintains a taciturn demeanor in dismissing equally impertinent counteroffers from Cloten and the Queen, who pursue Cymbeline’s interests only insofar as they might profit by them. The Roman Empire remains the nominal world hegemonic power despite making unexpected concessions to Britain. Augustus’s halfmeasures dilute his invasion force, thereby increasing the cost to Rome of a final settlement. He discounts the natural obstacles impeding his reconquest of the distant island, including high seas and rocky shores, that allow a

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weaker but highly motivated defender to outlast the stronger foe. British audiences would have understood too the rationale behind Spain’s failure to seize the advantage in Calais, a perfectly viable if somewhat déclassé Channel port. Philip had eyes only for his forthcoming Italian prizes, whose value exceeded by far the price of a French saltwater gateway that could have been won merely by betraying his Cateau-Cambrésis treaty partner (France). Spain may have been slightly deterred by the very nautical barriers complicating Elizabeth’s evaluation of the port’s susceptibility to a successful invasion. Above all, Rome and Spain miscalculate the depth of Britain’s fighting spirit, which produces hard-won victories for Cymbeline and Elizabeth (in 1589). Not even Jupiter attempts to outlaw the natural right of self-preservation governing IR theory. IR theory has only rarely been so ambitious as to formulate grand theories of historical change rising to the level of Hegelian excellence, yet historian John Watkins traces the birth of Continental transnationalism back to the “tangled dynastic lines of the late Middle Ages,” wherein he detects “the emergence of the modern state from its medieval antecedents” in Elizabeth’s reticence to sign the retrogressive Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis.4 This treaty conflicted with her independent outlook, besides having consecrated but a few politically ineffectual French marriages. Under the aegis of neoliberal modernity preferred by Watkins, states are meant to pursue noble ideas, such as the promotion of regional peace, not to endure servitude in the prison-house of arranged matrimony. The Westphalian Peace (1648) interrupted Watkins’ neoliberal conception of history whereby decrepit dynasties become transformed into vital cooperative states, but the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis was not finalized on the basis of a protoWestphalian rejection of neoliberal institutionalism. Such ideological conflicts ripen only under the illusions of old and new historicism. As Shakespeare proves, British rulers forever pursue British interests. Elizabeth never abandoned her search for means to recover Calais, albeit at a gradually reduced level of urgency. Notwithstanding his occasional breach of social decorum, Cymbeline honors a pact with Rome that seems to foretell of universal political forbearance upon the Incarnation of the Prince of Peace. The continuity in Augustus’s receipt of British tribute survives an accident of history in the form of Rome’s embarrassing military defeat, yet Cymbeline’s victory cannot be attributed solely to self-help foreign affairs (given timely assistance from Wales), nor to the interdependence of neoliberalism (given persistent Continental hostility toward Britain). Cymbeline prospers due to the heroism of his subjects, while Elizabeth earned a reputation for defensive prowess in presiding skillfully over the rout of the Spanish Armada. In each case, diplomatic success demands

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more than public recitations of British rights as recorded in ancient treaties. Even the chaos descending upon Paris after Henri II’s death in a jousting match celebrating the signing of the Peace failed to provide Elizabeth sufficient justification to absorb Calais. Elizabeth’s credibility in foreign affairs depended upon her reasonable avoidance of a military debacle overseas. Yet her policy conservatism was laced with a strain of combativeness characterizing not only Cymbeline but James I, who burnished assiduously his credentials as a peacemaker on the Continent despite approving the use of force against erstwhile European partners in the Far East. Shakespeare’s conceptual diplomatic innovation lies in his discovery of the value of a new regime of global relations transcending mere territorial acquisition. The benefits of peaceful alliances to Britain more than compensate her for her subventions to Rome. By the same token, renouncing IR realist practices altogether would have seemed a flight of fancy to all of the diplomats charged with disposing of Calais, each of whom understood Machiavelli’s precepts at least as well as Iachimo: “Mine Italian brain / ‘Gan in your duller Britain operate” (5.4.197-198). Quite self-servingly, Philip regarded Elizabeth’s loss of Calais as being her “own fault” due to “carelessness”; however, more so than Augustus Caesar, Spain rather consistently sought to appease the British public, estimates of whose opinion the ambassador, the Duke de Feria, secretly transmits in cipher, “They say that it is through your Majesty that the country is in such want and that Calais was lost.”5 Remarkably, both Renaissance Spain and classical Rome (on Shakespeare’s view) weighed adverse British sentiments in their strategic calculations, if only at the margins. Shakespeare takes the long view of British foreign policy by holding that global aggression counts for nothing against the virtue of a people destined to be blessed by the Savior. For the first time, English IR theory considers mere popular resistance to great power belligerence to be a minor foreign policy deterrent; moreover, Jupiter’s intervention raises normal ethical standards to the level of moral imperatives in the global system. Not only does the untamed Welsh countryside nurture the aspirations of characters uncorrupted by ambition, but Jupiter reciprocates the devotion of his followers with a limited guarantee of security and safety. Rome accepts Cymbeline’s terms for the restoration of British relations (by all outward appearances); indeed, diplomatic sociality attains such a high level of ontological appeal that even Iachimo feels obliged to repent of his sins. Britain’s financial concession to Rome scarcely registers in the grand scheme of wealth creation because the costs (and carry) of tribute will be dwarfed by future returns.

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The peace pact makes Cymbeline, not Augustus Caesar, the clear protagonist. In dramatic terms, the Roman emperor is a distracted antagonist lodged at a great remove; therefore, Cymbeline alone consecrates “peace and plenty” in obedience to Jupiter (5.4.459). Britain undermines (paradoxically) the IR realist axiom that weaker states must submit to the threats of hegemons. Cymbeline’s glimpse into a previously unseen celestial order, one revealed solely by art, justifies his unique resolution of a crisis in IR realism, for, as IR theorist Kenneth N. Waltz holds, “A structural change is a revolution, whether or not violently produced.”6 Unable to decipher the Queen’s motives, therefore incapable of unmasking the plotters (due partly to the effect of poisons administered by implacable foes), Cymbeline nevertheless realizes that he diminishes Rome’s relative standing in the world by upholding the metaphysics of Roman divinity. Shakespeare pens no florid encomiums for Cymbeline, but he endows proper diplomacy with a theatrical grandeur appropriate to its revolutionary conceptual influence upon IR theory.

II. Putting IR Realism in its (High) Place Cymbeline upends received IR realist hierarchies by lifting the curtain on British resistance to Roman colonialism. Jupiter’s supremacy diminishes Rome’s status by negating the concept of thoroughgoing global anarchy that is foundational to IR realism; however, Cymbeline’s moral revival restores an equally vital ethical pillar supporting IR classical realism. The crown perseveres despite the misguided attempts of dilettantes (Posthumus, Cloten, etc.) to join the so-called great game of diplomacy. True, Cymbeline flouts IR decorum, but the Roman parley is negotiated in bad faith based upon Britain’s presumed inferiority. Caius Lucius merely adds wise counsel to his restatement of Augustus’s inviolable terms, principles that had been espoused long before by Thucydides in the Melian Dialogue. The envoy claims the traditional right of the strong (Rome) to do as it wishes to the weak (Britain), with each side proposing optimistic scenarios for victory that disallow reasonable concessions. Yet Cymbeline’s peace pact relegates IR realism to a position of dependence within Rome’s polytheistic order. IR realist theory endures because states receive mortal threats from abroad, although IR social constructivist Alexander Wendt discounts the problem, “Thus, in contrast to Classical Realists who would posit fear, insecurity, or aggression as essential parts of human nature, I am suggesting these feelings are effects of unmet needs and therefore contingent.”7 Wendt’s influential book appeared in the relatively idyllic decade following the collapse of Soviet communism but before the absolute terrorism of 9/11.

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He assumes confidently that “it would be crazy today for Norway and Sweden . . . to represent each other as enemies,” even though, in the nottoo-distant past, Axis Germany’s occupation of Norway changed Sweden’s perception of her Nordic neighbor.8 Wendt sees no obstacle to cultural activity shaping global relations all the way down, to invoke his oftrepeated expression, in an argument proceeding almost point-by-point in opposition to Waltz’s IR realist views. For Waltz had the temerity (on Wendt’s view) to believe that states exist ontologically prior to the system of states, due to which conceptual failing Wendt exiles him to the IR nether world, presumably for exhibiting neorealist tendencies. Wendt treats Waltz’s moral substance as a false front for materialism; however, he concedes that Waltz is “defensive and cautious,” which would make Waltz a defensive realist with the moral outlook of an IR classical realist—hardly an IR neorealist.9 Shakespeare and Waltz paint a complete picture of IR realism. Even at his lowest ebb, Cymbeline protects Caius Lucius so long as the envoy acts in his official capacity. For her part, Rome is required to smooth over her differences with Britain, having failed to decapitate the tributary state. Paradoxically, Britain defends both her national security and her identity by making accommodations in order to reaffirm the unequal alliance, whereas a constructivist resolution on Wendt’s terms would turn Britain’s gains into losses by misestimating the aesthetic values accruing to Cymbeline’s advantage. Neither Shakespeare nor Waltz is a status quo IR theorist. Without having studied Cymbeline professionally, Waltz as much as sounds the bottom of Shakespeare’s metaphysical discovery: “Self-help systems are transformed if their organizing principle shifts from anarchy to hierarchy.”10 The revolts of Pannonia and Dalmatia in the East and of Britain in the West vindicate Jupiter’s interest in reforming the anarchy in the system. Waltz is a mid-twentieth-century IR classical realist who understands perfectly that global anarchy encourages acts of revisionism, which was Germany’s profoundly immoral, hyper-aggressive modus operandi throughout World War II. Waltz would likely have regarded as foolhardy Cymbeline’s attempt to apotheosize Britain’s global profile in the absence of effective security planning against the Roman threat; nevertheless, Shakespeare sees the value in granting interested actors within or without government unlimited scope to contribute to the moral development of foreign policy. British art, spirituality, and autochthonous fecundity draw from the fountainhead of Roman inspiration without connoting a cultural deficiency. The isle’s investment in Roman art alone makes her an affiliate of the empire. The Italianate art in Innogen’s chamber confirms Britain’s affinity with the Continental hegemon. On the fateful night of Iachimo’s visit,

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Innogen falls asleep reading (ominously) Ovid’s narrative on Philomena’s ravishment by Tereus. Caius Lucius takes into the account the states’ prior cordial relationship in conducting himself as if British misbehavior might moderate. Wartime refrains of sauve-qui-peut seem misplaced given the parties’ previous amity, yet peace emerges finally not due to shared values but rather to Jupiter’s intervention, which stuns the system; therefore, Wendt’s analysis is based on a category error: “The problem with Realism is its individualist and materialist ontology of structure. . . . ”11 Far from hewing to materialism and atomism, IR realists like Waltz and Shakespeare view the world in diachronic and partly metaphysical terms. Shakespeare’s use of “Statist”—alone in the canon—situates diplomats historically in the sovereign entities they represent (2.4.16). The imperial ties between Rome and “Lud’s Town” (London) relax but never dissolve in the pre-Christian era, a consideration Wendt discounts (5.4.479). Wendt assumes mistakenly that a perceived sequence in the much-disputed history of ideas (Hobbes— Locke—Kant) validates by not ruling out the very intellectual progression underwriting his constructivist IR theory: realism—liberalism— constructivism. Wendt dallies with the concept of border nullification notwithstanding his remonstrations, “No territory, no state.”12 He downplays as a necessary but insufficient condition the socio-psychological effect of national boundaries on Canadian identity since 1867, “which, despite a 100 percent turnover in membership, helps to explain aggregate continuities in its citizens’ behavior—obeying Canadian laws, fighting Canadian wars, honoring the Canadian flag. . . . ”13 A further diminution appears in his holding that IR realism itself is a free-rider on cultural constructivism to such a degree that aggressors “let” weak microstates like Singapore and Monaco live in peace.14 But these city-states were invaded and liberated at a terrible cost in the post-Westphalian era, suggesting that bad actors are deterred by reinvigorated international alliances; indeed, Wendt unintentionally affirms the validity of Waltz’s axiomatic holding that IR realist principles tend to restrain, not exacerbate, global violence. Wendt depreciates IR theories with the slightest toehold in political realism by proclaiming that culture forms “the central battleground” of global interests.15 Cymbeline however brings to bear upon IR theory more levels of foreign policy analysis than Wendt imagines. Cloten and the Queen contemplate the defeat of the Roman interloper by dismissing fancifully all obstacles to their attempted coup d’état, yet the properties of materialism work both for and against them. Rome must alight her forces in distant Milford Haven due to geographical restrictions, but British heroics in the “narrow lane” (another geographical impediment) allow Cymbeline in victory to split the difference between IR sociality and IR realism

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(5.3.52). No competent British regent could afford to reject out of hand a modus vivendi with Rome, whose ties to the island cannot be reduced to mutually constructed values. As well, the play forestalls Wendt’s argument by lodging Jupiter’s metaphysical objections to Rome’s attempted pacification of Britain. Wendt renders unto Waltz only what he claims is Waltz’s—anarchy as an empty IR vessel—while rendering unto constructivism all of the vessel’s priceless contents, including, in the play’s terms, the refined qualities of Innogen herself. One artistically inclined prime minister discerns a pattern in Tudor-Stuart diplomacy: “ . . . the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest . . . Power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries falling into the hands of such a Power.”16 Winston Churchill observes that Britain aligned with lesser states in addition to the Low Countries in order to restrain the reigning Continental hegemon, yet distinct IR realist tactics (Philip’s mediation, Churchill’s balancing, Cymbeline’s sociality) are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Axis Germany balked at invading England due in part to Churchill’s engagement with prospective allies. Cymbeline successfully proposes bilateral peace backed by a higher authority (Jupiter) surpassing by far the combined might of all terrestrial actors. Although the historical record reveals no partner with whom Cymbeline might have bonded in order to neutralize Roman militarism, he attracts champions from abroad to defeat the invader. Small wonder that Cymbeline treats IR offensive realism as a paean to boundless ambition. Just as no sensible ruler forgets the beneficial codicils of old treaties, few self-respecting leaders dare to vitiate fruitful IR partnerships, which Cymbeline must acknowledge exists vis-á-vis Rome. Not only does Cymbeline’s respect for the Roman emperor (and his fond recollection of Julius Caesar) make a distasteful rapprochement seem somewhat more palatable, but the play’s showing of a new Anglo-Roman era of reasonably good feelings repudiates IR dynastic triumphalism of the kind celebrated brilliantly in Henry V. Crucially, Cymbeline’s internal conflict remains the decisive unknown quantity in British diplomacy, just as it had been in Elizabeth’s case. Elizabeth could have accepted Spain’s eleventh-hour gift of Calais at the greatly reduced price of allowing a panel of Continental arbiters to assess the legality of her rule, yet she spurned the glory of a certain diplomatic coup in order to conceal her sensitivity about her legitimacy, a problem of IR identity so seemingly ephemeral as to be insubstantial. Cymbeline nullifies his embargo of Roman tribute in order to promote peace, but his quest for autonomy had always been as quixotic as Elizabeth’s wish to be deemed universally as legitimate given Britain’s insuperable sectarian divisions. He finds overriding value in returning to

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the diplomatic fold, she in suffering the loss of Calais. Each sacrifices a modicum of international prestige in order to retain the crown, but neither pays in full the penalty some IR theorists insist upon levying against rulers who shrink from using force. Yet many IR neorealists would bar foreign accords due to their risk-aversion to the slightest paper loss, which they calculate according to the distribution of relative capabilities inhering in rather clichéd self-help aggressors and anxiety-ridden pacifists; however, the policy effect of Cymbeline’s temporarily impaired mind defies explanation solely on the basis of microeconomic analysis. For Jupiter’s intervention in world affairs entails relatively more art than social science in his bending of IR realism to his will.

III. Relative Aesthetic Values in Cymbeline One would expect the play’s artistic devices to show objective evidence of the dawning of Jovian supremacy (if true) short of a literal explication of Shakespeare’s IR theory; furthermore, an inquiry into Cymbeline’s artistic and IR unity (or disunity) might disclose the broad outlines of Shakespeare’s overall aesthetic conception, assuming as a given that the high artistic standards of English Renaissance theatre were neither static nor consistent. Such an analysis (notably on the element of music) might reveal the degree to which aesthetics contribute to Shakespeare’s foreign policy calculations. Some of the play’s artistic adornments provoke little aesthetic controversy. Although their physical presence is not required, the decorative works in Innogen’s chamber (e.g., the arras, the andirons, etc.) are related aesthetically by virtue of Iachimo’s art-critical description; moreover, his curation unwittingly affirms Innogen’s artistic sophistication. In attempting to cash in her maximum aesthetic value, Iachimo rhapsodizes over his own countrywomen in order to raise the stakes of a bet that he believes he will win, unfairly if necessary. The false image he plants in Posthumus’s mind of an immoral act consecrated with Innogen’s blessing is no different in referential terms than Hamlet’s observation on the sky as a polluted canopy hanging over the theater, which the Danish prince cites in order to declaim against the vicissitudes of the world. Yet no moral philosopher would allow Iachimo’s duplicity to escape scrutiny, although the self-same heavens in Cymbeline sparkle like a “palace crystalline” in a “radiant roof” (5.3.177, 185). Shakespearean metaphors are abstract types involving ontological tokens, whether apprehended in the theatre or in one’s private study. Similarly uncontroversial is Posthumus’s epistolary art, which suffers from an abusively officious style. In a letter adopting the tone of a

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diplomatic memorandum, Posthumus invites Innogen to join him in Milford Haven in order that he might exact his private revenge. His command that she “take notice” of his presence in Cambria shows all the sensitivity of a royal démarche (3.2.47). In his eyes, she magnifies her presumed iniquity by remaining at court, whereas her escape to Milford Haven would constitute but one more cynical attempt to conceal her lechery. Far from expressing joy at the prospective conjugal encounter, he portrays her as the paradigmatically fickle mistress of the sonnet cycle (seen in the Renaissance as the highest literary form), who intentionally wounds her faithful lover by withdrawing from view. His wager is predicated foolishly upon a calculation of risk and reward so unpropitious that he all but invites Iachimo to assault her, which presages metaphorically Rome’s attack on Britain. We see the irony in Innogen unburdening her (defensive) stomacher of his letters as a consequence of his accusations of infidelity. His violation of the civility of the epistolary form confirms his reckless disregard of their marital bonds; nevertheless, his devious writings fit seamlessly within the normal aesthetic boundaries of Shakespearean theatre. Jupiter’s tablet displays a rather more elevated level of craftsmanship in the epistolary arts, although cries of malfeasance prompt the god to descend from the theatrical heavens “in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle” (5.3.157). Theatrical shows, including pyrotechnic displays of sound and light, signal the appearance of the divine onstage. Cymbeline accepts as dispositive the Soothsayer’s interpretation of Jove’s tendentious, if curiously wrought, text; however, respect for written precedent, diligent research, voluminous records, and professional staffing was deeply ingrained as a best Renaissance diplomatic practice. So loath were Tudor-Stuart-era envoys to violate precedent that even Philip’s representatives at Cateau-Cambrésis rejected cutthroat French entreaties to seize upon Queen Mary’s demise as an excuse to ignore British treaty claims, “Even if the Queen were dead yet is the treaty not expired.”17 Augustus Caesar appears only through his communiqués, yet he behaves as if he too were constrained by normal Renaissance IR protocols. Posthumus declines to judge the tablet solely by its “rare” cover, but his reformation is far from complete: in striking the Page, he unwittingly batters Innogen (5.3.197). He is morally the wiser but politically the loser under the restored line of succession. Cymbeline’s peace plan secures the common good (commune bonum), the Catholic doctrine by which Cardinal Wolsey tacitly directed foreign policy; however, Jupiter betrays a deficit of compassion for nonbelievers, making divine rule but a partial blessing. IR policy professionalism reduces further the role of popular participation in global politics even allowing for the tablet’s elaborate edict. Still, Britain’s survival depends upon a credible

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interpretation of the prophecy; therefore, the Roman Soothsayer offers for domestic British consumption a plausible—even inspired—benediction attesting to the validity of England’s reformed royal lineage by conceiving of Jove’s work of art as a transcendental vision of peace fit for the gods. On roughly the same aesthetic level, Arviragus and Guiderius resolve simply to “speak” their chant funèbre: “Fear no more the heat o’th’sun, / Nor the furious winter’s rage” (4.2.241, 257-258). If the musicians’ aubade for Innogen tells of fecundity under the orbit of the earth’s diurnal star, the young men find consolation in “common-kissing Titan” no longer exposing Fidele to the oppressive rays of divine tyranny (3.4.162). Having decided to “word” the song rather than render it in a musical theater or actor’s voice, they pronounce the threnody forthrightly, if not altogether convincingly on the purest musical level, before soldiering on to achieve greatness in the narrow lane, armed only with their customary acting talents (4.2.239). In view of the musicians’ special skills, the funeral elegy proceeds at a pace and pitch consonant with their abilities qua professional actors. If the sons demonstrate such pure musical (e.g., protooperatic) savoir-faire in singing the coronach that they seem to unbalance the aesthetic dynamics of the performance, a new artistic complexity would be introduced, albeit one that could (no doubt) be easily rationalized by the audience. In none of these cases does the performance rise above the already high Shakespearean aesthetic levels of musicality and artistry, but the play breaks new artistic ground in the aubade and in important aspects of the ghostly Jacobean masque choreographed to rally Posthumus’s flagging spirits.

IV. Aesthetic Absolutism in Cymbeline: The Aubade and the Masque The King’s Men traverse the very highest aesthetic peaks by featuring virtuosos in their production—"Enter Musicians”—an artistic addition designed to increase the audience’s enjoyment (2.3.12). The aubade surpasses by far the play’s prevailing musical standards: “Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings, / And Phoebus ‘gins arise” (2.3.17-18). The leading musician, possibly the Lord Chamberlain’s lutenist and composer, Robert Johnson, fills the role of Shakespeare’s guest star by performing the song with a consort.18 The musicians draw inspiration from Italian-derived monodies and airs, which are lyrical vocal parts accompanied by the rhythms of stringed instruments. Monodies treat a range of topics and occasions, including the somber themes in funeral songs. Although it is doubtful that Robert Johnson and his peers possessed the acting talent of the company’s sharers, the musicians’ reactions to Cloten’s maladroit

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instructions would have been noted by the audience. Nor would the troubadours have aggrandized the Globe stage in the manner of Shakespeare’s bêtes noirs: those comedians who could not abide speaking the playwright’s speeches as written. In an acknowledgement of their special status, Shakespeare creates a narrative cover story for his luminaries by casting them as innocent for-hire champions commissioned by Cloten in furtherance of his scheme to charm Innogen away from the path of righteousness. Philosopher Roger Scruton differentiates “programme music” from “absolute music” with respect to the possible referential value of melodic airs.19 The former category involves (narrowly) a lyrical representation of things in the world, as well as (broadly) any musical association with things or events in the outside world, such as the “Solemn music” introducing Posthumus’s masque (5.3.124), or (in a different context) “The Star Spangled Banner.” By contrast, absolute music appears on the level of selfreferential artistry by eschewing exogenous denotations, including for example the unworldly sound from Belarius’s “ingenious instrument” (4.2.185), or (in another setting) a free jazz saxophone solo. Absolute music ranges solely throughout an esoteric sonic universe, although related concepts and abstractions (e.g., mathematical progressions) might also qualify. The performance of “Hark, hark” fits Scruton’s definition of programme music because of the song’s referential lyrics, yet I would suggest additionally that the very sonority of the instruments and of the singers’ trained voices might well transport the audience into the realm of absolute music; however, Scruton does not make this claim. The nuances of philosophical aesthetics have not graced recent Shakespearean scholarship on music, although the literature has benefitted from developments in music theory as well as from in-depth studies of the Tudor-Stuart theatrical repertory. On the level of theatre history, but without recourse to aesthetics, Katherine Hunt considers the intrusive effect on British Renaissance performances of the ambient sound of London’s church bells, whose tones were interpreted either as a sign of moral fidelity or of ethical “Jangling.”20 The bells pealed in furtherance of a normally mild sectarian competition to determine which faith might prevail based upon the intensity and quality of the sound. Tudor-Stuart theatre practitioners had no ready means to prevent extraneous tones from marring open-air or other public performances. By contrast, a 1952 avant-garde art experiment celebrated the very absence of performed music. Composer John Cage highlights ambient noise in “4:33,” a pianistic nonperformance in which an artist sits attentively at the instrument, hands poised forever at the ready, but to no musical avail, unless we are said to hear the music of the spheres internally, like Pericles.

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Cymbeline includes songs intended to be “regarded-as-art” on their own merits, to borrow the terminology of philosopher Jerrold Levinson, “An artwork is a thing (item, etc.) that has been seriously intended for regard-as-a-work-of-art, i.e., regard (treatment, etc.) in any way preexisting artworks are or were correctly regarded, so that an experience of some value be thereby obtained.”21 He attaches historical and institutional (but not necessarily moral) categories to Scruton’s precise analytical definition. Like Scruton, Levinson situates aural art on points along a scale ranging from music-for-music’s-sake art, to music indicating even if metaphorically a reality beyond the theatrical apron. Levinson’s overriding requirement is that the work reflect the artist’s intentional relationship to the relevant aesthetic legacy. Given the widely acknowledged excellence of “Hark, Hark,” the musicians add a purely artistic dimension to Cymbeline in performance distinct from normal theatrical standards, albeit without threatening to turn the event into a recital, entr’acte, or variety show.22

V. Beyond Materialist Aesthetics Philosophers doubt neither the materiality nor the ethereality of music; however, modern aestheticians see scant returns flowing from a major reinvestment in artistic materialism. Yet, as always in aesthetics, all writers tread Calliope’s path with humility by recalling Tolstoy’s (humorously overstated) bon mot that, where music is concerned, “Critics are the stupid discussing the clever.”23 Cymbeline is far from alone in Tudor-Stuart dramatic art in employing musical shows to reflect alternate levels of reality or beauty in keeping with the playwright’s aim, but few Renaissance artworks are created according to the specifications of the “magical epistemologies” noted by Gary Tomlinson in cataloguing Caliban’s and (by inference) Shakespeare’s musicology in The Tempest, a viewpoint disproven in Cymbeline, as I see it.24 Tomlinson performs a valuable service in advocating on behalf of the restoration of instrumental music to a position of equality with lyrics, yet the thaumaturgical properties in his Foucauldian thesis on Caliban’s mores seem to accrue to the benefit of cultural materialism. If he discounts effectively the pertinence of Cartesian dualism to Renaissance theories of art, he succeeds mainly because Descartes’s œuvre all but postdated Shakespeare’s life in the theatre. Aestheticians would have noted out of fairness that Cartesian musical aesthetics are pluralistic in nature, whatever their obvious defects. Descartes evolved aesthetically in part because of his youthful immersion in musical expression, including its emotional and mathematical dimensions. Tomlinson overlooks Descartes’s observations on musical aesthetics, “Hence comes it, (for instance) that the noise of Thunder, and the report of

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Guns are not convenient to Musick: because they offend the Ear, as the too great splendor of the Sun doth destroy the sight.”25 Far from having revolutionized aesthetics by declaring in rather pedestrian fashion that too many notes jar the hearer, or that slow music renders the listener lethargic, Descartes shows an advanced understanding of musical structure and arithmetic logic in notation. Some of Descartes’s holdings have been roundly and justly disproven, including his famous theory on the role of the pineal gland in our understanding of mind/body dualism, but Tomlinson presents Ficino not merely to oppose Descartes but to allow materialist epistemologies to bask in the spotlight while relegating musical aesthetics to the backdrop. His estimation of Caliban’s flights of musical fancy in The Tempest is predetermined because, in treating the helot’s pursuit of “riches / Ready to drop upon me,” he preemptively accuses the disgruntled servant of thirsting only after ready money rather than of questing high-mindedly after the delicate fruit of rarified beauty (3.2.140-141). In an apparent rejection of Ficino’s sense of equipoise in aesthetic transubstantiation, Tomlinson rules musical idealism and abstraction out of court by attempting to stamp them eternally with the ineradicable imprint of cultural materialism in his concessions to the thought of Michel Foucault. Tomlinson instead asks epistemology to do the critical work properly assigned to aesthetics, although didactic treatises on music theory have always had limited appeal in art, apart from a few notable exceptions (including the drama of Bertholt Brecht). Rather than proposing that Prospero and Ariel unite worldly and spiritual things comprehensively despite Neoplatonic musical theory, Tomlinson privileges the materialism of the occult powers by attributing Caliban’s addiction to the island’s sounds to his scurrilous intent to transmute the noble coin of idealism into the base metal of the realm. Tolstoy’s famous distinction between counterfeit and true music thereby applies perfectly to the internal divisions marking Caliban’s aesthetics given that Prospero’s drudge is so deeply infected (to use the Russian writer’s favorite art-critical term) by pious attitudes toward actual ditties, catches, and aural fragments. Far from denying materialism’s role in music, aestheticians are notably reluctant to oversimplify songs through a heavy-handed approach to the history of philosophy. The vast range of Shakespearean musical values alone contradicts Tomlinson’s unitary holding on artistic criteria: “There is no epistemological distinction, if one exists at all, between the meaningfulness of words, of songs, of images.”26 He ignores certain subtleties in philosophical aesthetics by assuming that distinct media formats convey identical referential values, which not coincidentally accommodates a strict Foucauldian theory of order and discipline and, consequently, of new

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historicist theory in the bargain. On a philosophical level, the music in The Tempest is rather less aesthetically disruptive than are the songs in Cymbeline, which is by no means to rank qualitatively one play over another. The difference arises necessarily because The Tempest assumes the synthesis of art and sound under Prospero’s administration of the island, where clear but not always intertwined and determinative lines of aesthetic and political authority negate any possibility of Caliban’s attending raptly to free musical beauties of pre-Kantian derivation; nevertheless, artistic value obtains just as profoundly if the island’s aesthetics are seen to have been stage-managed under a less superficially politicized regime than the one imagined by new historicists. For Cymbeline proves that Shakespeare uses music to introduce complications in extant IR realist theory and foreign relations. Tomlinson sees music’s very materiality as having been widely suppressed (which few aestheticians believe); therefore, he feels obliged as a cultural materialist to mortgage the idealistic equity in Ficino’s worldview in order to inflate the hard currency of musical materialism. Yet Jerrold Levinson has long held that musical works may possess a certain degree of “nonphysicality . . . without undermining their objectivity.”27 Indeed, aestheticians have always defended the material presence in music (pitch, phrasing, instrumentation, composition, acoustics, dynamics, notation, referential sounds, the sonic gifts of the singer, etc.) while accounting for creative expression and other more ephemeral products of musical labor throughout history. Most disconcertingly, Tomlinson misconstrues the consequences of privileging the materiality in songs possessing ethereal qualities as well. He emphasizes Ficino’s concatenation of “music, musical effect, words, magic and demons” in the spiritual domain (which is situated below the level of the soul) in holding that the spirit retains its capacity to ensnare the soul by virtue of its more powerful aural rather than visual spells.28 But Tomlinson defends music’s debt to materialism (presumably to recognize marginalized theories and customs) by citing the arguments of an Idealist straw man in decrying the “narrow, exclusionary currency of its modern Western usage.”29 On this holding, Tomlinson simply tilts at windmills on behalf of magic and cultural materialism. Hilary Putnam reflects upon the consequences for materialists of this kind of outcome, albeit in a different context, “I think Diderot and Descartes were both wrong in assuming that if we are matter, or our souls are material, then there is a physical explanation for our behavior.”30 For Tomlinson imagines a circular, apolitical process involving “metatechnology” yoking materiality to immateriality pace Ficino.31 But Tomlinson sees Caliban associating magic with the values of the age of reason; therefore, (on his view) Shakespeare’s rude villein must

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forever be chastened according to the dictates of an impoverished Cartesian (not British Renaissance) worldview. Consequently, as a (perceived) ineducable theatrical fool, Caliban might never so much as hope to let slip the iron shackles of Prospero’s (presumed) Western brutality. Tomlinson reasons from one level of materiality to another, which misses the epistemological mark, as Putnam might have declared (relative to a different problem): “What makes you call this deduction an explanation?”32 Tomlinson would diminish musical idealism via Foucauldian fiat. Tomlinson thus makes an interpretive error in requiring that all musical meaning fit a narrow materialist epistemological category. For philosophical aestheticians are perfectly willing to allow great abstract music like “Étude Op. 10, No. 3” (which its composer viewed as an unalloyed triumph) to be pulled into the material realm of programme music solely on the basis of the commendatory title by which Chopin’s work of art became known as a result of its overwhelmingly positive critical reception: “Tristesse.” Similarly, far from seeking to preserve Western cultural hegemony under Cartesian domination, philosophical aestheticians view with reasonable serenity any justifiable recalibration of a work’s status to include both objectively real and immaterial components that the composer could neither reasonably have foreseen nor necessarily have desired. Philosophers do not preemptively discount artworks on the basis of mindbody or similar disputes, but they would regard Tomlinson’s emphasis on musical materialism to be excessively downbeat. After all, his commentary relies partly upon the diverse benchmarks established by philosophical aestheticians.

VI. The Philosophical Value of Cymbeline’s Aesthetics While Tomlinson treats Shakespeare’s music on the basis of somewhat extraneous neoclassical principles, philosophical aestheticians mine artistic gold in their ontological and metaphysical inquiries. As a testament to the vitality of philosophical aesthetics, even seemingly elementary artistic issues have never been put to rest, including whether music should be defined by the notation on paper or the sound in performance. A standard philosophical method of proof in the form of a hypothetical may help us see more clearly how musical values are ranked in Cymbeline. The play creates episodes of pure musicality (facilitated by lutenist Robert Johnson or his artistic equal) in order to highlight by aesthetic analogy the disparity between Jovian heights in IR theory and Rome’s politics of brutal domination; moreover, the sons’ dirge is to the professionals’ aubade as a fine popular song is to a classical work of exquisite beauty, although

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Shakespeare requires that the element of music fulfill its proper dramatic function. Shakespeare presents quite nuanced views of IR classical realism in part by setting forth the range of differences between pure musical aesthetics (reflected in the consort’s performance) and Cloten’s debased artistic values (notwithstanding his employment of professional musicians to perform the aubade). The playwright suggests a hierarchy of musical levels so that we are better able to comprehend by analogy Jove’s new order in terms of its qualitative aesthetic superiority relative even to the old Roman order, which depends for its global supremacy upon its military dominance. Aestheticians today mainly find the legitimacy of music residing in the beauty of its sounds rather than in the validity of the score on paper. Philosopher Nelson Goodman holds that no valid instance of music exists by virtue of the notation alone, “In music, only performances, not inscriptions, count as instances of the work.”33 Even so, he finds that allographic notations establish an identity between autographic interpretations: “ . . . two musical performances that differ drastically are nevertheless performances of the same work, if they conform to the same score.”34 Goodman mainly affirms Shakespeare’s essential point (with suitable academic polish) concerning the validity of musical forms as properly performed. Yet Jerrold Levinson conditions musical authenticity upon the composer’s intentional relationship to the relevant historical legacy, although he agrees with Goodman on the primacy of sounds over scoring: “Sound structures per se are not created by being scored—they exist before any compositional activity.”35 Levinson means that (e.g.) B-flat existed immaterially before a composer first inscribed the sound in his or her score. Shakespeare’s view of musical transcendence is taken up coincidentally in Levinson’s axiomatic holding that composers must acknowledge the song’s place within the musical tradition on the occasion of its composition, or, in other words, of seeing “art now in terms of art until now.”36 Cymbeline’s very casting of established musical professionals settles the question of Shakespeare’s overriding interest in elevating our aesthetic perceptions within a given musical tradition. The play’s stage direction for a professional musical interlude is a concession to the reality of the need to augment the already considerable sonic talents embodied in a theatrical company in Tudor-Stuart London. As well, the musicians’ presence signifies the playwright’s intent to treat aesthetics as a means to define the play’s overarching theory of global politics. If the aubade and the dirge occupy slightly different points on the aesthetic scale, their sounds are undoubtedly meant to please (notwithstanding Cloten’s ignoble intent);

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therefore, a mediocre performance of the aubade would detract greatly from our understanding of the play. The performers may play/strike every indicated note, and speak/sing every word in the correct order, and hit the marks on the stage or page as indicated by the notations of the playwright/composer, but a satisfying performance may not result given the absence of the requisite (and perhaps unspecified) artistic inspiration. For mainstream aestheticians after Goodman generally affirm that music may transport an audience even if a performance adds or subtracts a tone or two from the printed notation. Given the historical and other contingent demands determining musical validity, Levinson requires at bottom the artist’s at least momentary critical reflection upon his or her musical legacy. On his defense of artistic inspiration, a musical performance that omits by chance a word or note would not necessarily be rejected as invalid, particularly if it qualifies as being in some respects exceptionally moving or insightful. By contrast, Goodman holds that even an inspired performance that drops part of the notation forfeits its claim of authenticity. In view of the importance of the inspirational and improvisational values in Shakespeare’s lofty notions of aesthetic validity, not only would a dropped word or musical note not nullify the performance’s value (the notation being, frankly, irrelevant to one’s appreciation of the theatrical performance), but it might signify a transcendentally supreme version. Similarly, it is doubtful (if unproveable) that Shakespeare would have disqualified as invalid a performance of Cymbeline on the basis of an accidental omission of a word or two. Although his musical taste is sublime and his sense of history and aesthetics profound, Goodman’s strict definition discounts the inspiration and moral suasion imparted by brilliant performances that nevertheless fall short of executing the complete score with unerring precision. Cymbeline’s moral imperative outweighs too the modest ethical component in Noël Carroll’s moderate moralism, “A moral virtue in an artwork never adds to the aesthetic value of the work.”37 Carroll asserts rightly that art is bound by certain moral conventions, e.g., it would be an obvious aesthetic error for a narrative to equate a trivial faux pas to the horrible crime of cold-blooded murder. No can one be expected to abide the finer points of a novel if the requisite literary expectation is that the reader acquiesce to a moral or aesthetic non sequitur, much less to a moral outrage; however, in being highly attuned to the slightest musical variations, Shakespeare seems to suggest that the metaphysical basis for his song boasts of qualities that might not be taken into consideration adequately by those who do not have ears to hear, so to speak. For the play treats the moral element to be as pertinent to artistic creativity as the aesthetics of a song, a consideration that Carroll (apparently) does not regard as being

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altogether felicitous. The relationship between Jupiter and his earthly followers is analogous to Cymbeline’s implied hierarchical ranking of works with varying degrees of artistic and spiritual merit. The professional musicians no doubt performed their aubade skillfully in the King’s Men’s performance of the play, although, through no fault of their own, they served a cause detrimental to Innogen’s safety. Cloten’s desires are gauche and immoral due to his extremely crass romantic technique. His indelicacy threatens to unbalance the play’s aesthetics, but Shakespeare discloses humorously the political pretender’s intentions through crude wordplay. No wise counsel suffices to restrain Cloten, which places the would-be statist in a category apart from the Duke of Anjou, whose hopes of marrying Elizabeth in 1581 were blocked by prior treaty obligations. Secretary Francis Walsingham consoled the Frenchman by noting that it is “hard to give Law to affection,” advice that conveys perfectly the practical wisdom embodied in IR realism.38 In aesthetic terms, the professional musicians’ uplifting performance of the aubade greatly outstrips in qualitative terms Cloten’s violation of the mores of an appropriate mating ritual, whereas Arviragus’s and Guiderius’s perhaps less than ideal artistic execution of their spoken dirge in solicitation of divine mercy and heavenly peace is nevertheless suitable for their purposes. One can only assume that Shakespeare did not require that the music professionals play all of the songs in addition to performing in the masque because he saw it to be more fitting to the action that Cymbeline’s lost sons speak/sing in memory of Fidele/Innogen. Similarly, it is logical that Cloten hires the finest musical experts as proxies in order to attempt to bring his amorous assault upon Innogen to a successful conclusion by his lights. The relationship between artistic excellence and IR preeminence holds insofar as a correctly notated instance of a song that is delivered accurately in formal terms may yet be invalidated by the impure motivations of the performer. The moral basis of Cymbeline’s political reversal is so transcendent that the play’s attendant aesthetic values must be acknowledged. If, due to some misguided directorial conception, the sons were to mumble their song soporifically, or if, in the unlikely instance that they were to be played as insolent materialists, they were to mangle the vocals in order to suppress the song’s spiritual value, the resulting aesthetic travesty could not produce a valid instance of the dirge no matter its accuracy on a formal notational level. The play depicts the contrast between absolute music (heard in the musical instruments and in the purity of the consort’s voices) as against the no doubt impressive (if not professionally musically trained) voices of the actors, in order to present an aesthetic corollary to the play’s nonreducible idea of a benign or oppressive

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IR celestial hierarchy. As well, musical virtuosos display the virtue of hardwon technique, evidence of which validates the good and the necessary in foreign relations conceived in the most universal possible terms, which is one major philosophical aim of Shakespeare’s play. Crucially, the ethos of the musicians counts in our overall aesthetic evaluation of the songs, just as Cymbeline’s moral and artistic affirmation of Jupiter’s supremacy validates the new order of divine sociality instituted by the god’s brief appearance on stage. Garrett Mattingly argues that Renaissance Europe reacted to incessant Italian strife by practicing the “new diplomacy,” whereby sovereign states pursue their own interests, not impossible quests for ideal outcomes; however, Cymbeline presents Jovian IR sovereignty by showing the god’s absolute aesthetic ascendancy.39 The action suggests an aesthetic hierarchy ranging from top to bottom: Jupiter—the consort—Cymbeline’s lost sons—Cloten. Just as the professionals’ transcendent musicality surpasses even the sonic capabilities of skilled actors, Shakespeare as much as composes an intervention of divine sociality and artistry in order to resolve Cymbeline’s diplomatic failures, which had resulted in heavy British casualties in battle. The play yields an array of aesthetic values despite any limitations placed upon its endowment of artistic features as compared to other works in the canon (the florid sounds of Illyria in Twelfth Night come to mind); however, the artistic elements as presented display a conceptual understanding of IR theory appropriate to Shakespeare’s transcendent philosophy of universal peace.

VI. Conclusion: Cymbeline’s IR Realist Peace Cymbeline’s IR philosophy joins aesthetic absolutism with near-absolute morals. Religion per se is invoked by necessity only insofar as it engages the popular imagination; therefore, the play’s sole aesthetic requirement is to affirm (by analogy) the musical validity of, say, Handel’s The Messiah, not The Messiah. In treating aesthetics, Shakespeare balances his understanding of IR classical realism and diplomatic sociality along slightly more inclusive lines than Kant, who (fairly) divides the era of modern religion from that of ancient myth, “The divine guardian of morality does not yield to Jupiter (the divine guardian of violence), for the latter is still subject to fate.”40 On Shakespeare’s diachronic historical perspective, Christianity annexes classical Roman mythology by transforming its values, although Rome’s empire and Cymbeline’s Britain align differently before the symbols of a commonly held belief system. Rome identifies aggressively with Jupiter’s thunderbolt, whereas Britain seeks protection (wisely) under the god’s wing. Using perfect logic, Shakespeare spares

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Iachimo, while the source character (Ambrogiulo) in Boccaccio’s Decameron is tortured to death for his deceptions. In the new spirit of divine forgiveness, King Cymbeline resolves in one fell swoop the play’s outstanding crises, poisonings, kidnappings, spousal assaults, slanders, accidental deaths, deaths in war, a coup d’état, threats of Roman reprisals, and the intervention of an omnipotent god. Shakespeare creates a ruler amenable to political sociality so that Britain might enjoy peace despite inherently inequitable international rules and practices; thus, his depiction reimagines the historical Kymbeline, an aggressive IR offensive realist who lost his son, Guiderius, in battle. By no means could King Cymbeline be mistaken for a moral philosopher because he deflects blame for domestic turmoil onto his “wicked Queen” (5.4.464). If divine sociality reduces the incidence and severity of global conflicts, the “in state” reception for Caius Lucius demands a showing of tactical diplomatic prowess beyond the ken of Cloten and the enfeebled king (3.1.1). Cymbeline recovers just in time to realize that the IR ground has shifted under his feet. For, in pardoning Iachimo, Posthumus has already put to rest any IR theory of condign retribution—evil for evil, even to the extinction of the state. In the same spirit, the play’s IR theory admits of philosophy all the way down, from metaphysics to materialism, because constructivism never reaches the apogee in Shakespeare’s ranking of IR theories. The relative absence of metaphysics in modern debates on musical aesthetics clears the way for aesthetician Peter Kivy to hold that there is no affective content in instrumental sounds, a position that, if true, would implicitly limit music’s value in Cymbeline. He grants that the public might respond emotionally to music (e.g., with sadness or elation), but in his view the notes and the tones of the song itself have no mentality or consciousness capable of producing or retaining such emotions. His reasonable claim that “there is no ‘metaphysical’ problem there,” means that there is no doubt as to the absence of metaphysics in musical notations or material sounds.41 His position derives in part from the legacy of Eduard Hanslick, whose 1854 book sought “to overthrow the emotive-content theory of music and prove its autonomy as an art-form.”42 While Kivy’s argument does not apply to Shakespeare’s lyrics, which fit the category of programme music due to their references to the outside world and ideas, the philosopher places no critical weight at all on the players and musicians as performers, each of whom is blessed with a full measure of human consciousness in sounding his or her notes. Crucially, Jupiter answers all outstanding metaphysical and aesthetic questions by issuing a stupefying (thus partly materialist) decree castigating would-be disturbers of global peace. Such recreants would do well to feel disarmed by the god’s virtuosic pyrotechnic display;

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therefore, apart from the views of IR classical realists, Cymbeline contradicts modern IR theory’s anti-metaphysical and amoral emphasis as revealed in part by the rise of IR constructivism because the play would reject the current aesthetic bias in favor of cultural materialism in order to defend far nobler imaginative properties. Shakespeare’s exalted artistic creation (Jupiter) uses ornate artworks (the masque and tablet) to proclaim plausibly a peaceful new order that subsumes IR realist theory under divine authority. Jupiter’s philosophical realism (which posits the objective reality of universals) diminishes IR neorealism (which posits the structural materialism informing independent states in the global system) and discounts IR neoliberalism (which posits the structural interdependence of international institutions in the materialistic global system). IR realists agree to formal peace treaties only if they see value—including (at the margins) aesthetic value—accruing in addition to rational security arrangements. The play too holds diplomatic sociality as such to involve aesthetics on many levels, but Shakespeare modifies IR realism altogether by assigning to it a dominant new divine property of peace revealed solely by aesthetic means, even if the play’s profound expression of a revolutionary (because peaceful) political philosophy is based upon old universal truths shrouded in seemingly impenetrable theatrical mysteries.

CHAPTER TWO PERICLES: ETHICAL AND METAPHYSICAL DANCES

Abstract With the aid of the goddess Diana, an IR realist system of weak anarchic states in the Eastern Mediterranean produces a sustainable form of constructivism. Pericles affirms the audience’s belief in philosophical realism with displays of perfection in the arts, notably the dance. The play draws from the divine wellspring of aesthetic virtuosity in order to compensate victims of interstate violence for their suffering abroad.

Pericles never refers to colonialism in the Near East as a Renaissance British failing because such an allegation would be ahistorical, therefore false. Shakespeare’s concepts of East and West are related productively insofar as they approximate distinct realms. If Western aesthetic values translate seamlessly to the East (and vice-versa), the play’s horizontal global structure of weak self-help states encourages rulers to improvise— sometimes ineptly or criminally—in pursuit of their interests without apparent fear of reprisal. Yet the “delightful pleasing harmony” of art finally indemnifies the victims of dissolute rulers.1 Far from indulging in “faëry-lore” or “utopian desire,” the playwright would instill moral realist values in governance by virtue of the protagonists’ inspired aesthetic movements between the grave and the stage.2

I. An Ethical Addendum to the Diplomatic Record Edward Said’s renowned holding on Orientalism fails to demonstrate the “positional superiority” of Tudor-Stuart policymakers in their presumed denigration and domination of the East “during the period of extraordinary European ascendency from the late Renaissance to the present.”3 Said (unintentionally) lifted international relations (IR) constructivism out of the doldrums, but he would negate lawful IR borders by critiquing the Orient as “a constituted entity” in the discourse of political elites.4 In proposing to nullify established IR territories, he too promotes a literary critical “world

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of cultural hegemony,” whose professoriate is his target audience.5 Said’s stated goal is to “convince my literary colleagues” that a Manichaean system of global relations (e.g., hegemons vs. helots) determines not only the politics of the modern era but of Renaissance England and Turkey as well.6 Yet for every approving reference to religious strife in, say, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, far greater numbers of merchant adventurers plied their trade respectfully in Constantinople and other Eastern ports. Said was extremely effective at shifting blame for perceived IR hostility toward marginalized peoples to an earlier generation of historians, whom he saw as creating an insidious parallel world bereft of historical value: “Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors.”7 If the West inflicts a “uniquely punishing destiny” upon Palestinians, proof of which depends upon its validation by his allies in “society and literary culture,” then even violent countermeasures may (inadvertently) be rationalized.8 He discounts U.S. support for the very peoples he professes to defend via an influential group of “State Department Arabists” from roughly the mid-1930s up to the date of his book’s publication.9 He unfairly charges Middle East policy-friendly U.S. diplomats, including William Phillips, with having served imperialist and racist causes, which makes the liberties Said takes with the diplomatic record extremely difficult to countenance.10 Said’s Orient may be inflated on demand to envelop Russia or be deflated to address local (e.g., Arab-Israeli) tensions. His perspective is marked at times by generalizations: “‘East’ has always signified danger and threat during this period,” although U.S. diplomatic opposition to communism in the 1950s was tempered by rather level-headed regionalists.11 In paying tribute to Raymond Williams, he advocates the “’unlearning’” of dominant history by using Williams’ Orwellian turn of phrase, a method producing extreme reversals, not historical balance.12 Said reacted as a partisan to Middle East infighting in the late 1970s that grew to such severity that the U.S. elected to bolster Israeli security. He rejects this prudential rebalancing of U.S. foreign policy as proof of the West’s eternal enmity toward the Arab peoples. No reasonable diplomat could finally pass his ideological test. The Renaissance Silk Road functioned as a two-way street, like most of the foreign trade depicted in Pericles, but Said’s audience appropriated his notion of Orientalism as a form of Western (i.e., racist, hegemonic) power in treating him as an authority nonpareil in literary IR scholarship.13

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II. The Global Exchange of IR Commodities Pericles decries global human trafficking (irrespective of race or creed) as a form of enslavement, although the practice was known as an open secret to traders abroad. Consular reports occasionally list its victims, including Britain’s “trade of a ‘Chinesa’” in Bantam.14 Shakespeare opposed the slave trade well before the first human rights theorist, Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, counseled that “better” nations should voluntarily disavow it as well as any related criminal activity.15 Marlowe’s Tamburlaine recounts with unflinching realism the barter of prized captives as commodities, but King Pericles renders assistance to desperate souls in Tarsus, his generosity partly offsetting in conceptual terms the treachery Marina endures in ports of call both East and West. The deference shown to Asian rulers by British traders was the rule at the time of Pericles’s staging; moreover, Shakespeare defends without reserve the high rate of exchange he sets for Marina’s deeds well before Marx and J. S. Mill published their economic findings.16 No matter the precipitous increase in her relative compensation in wages, she creates surplus-value (price minus cost of labor) accruing to Miteline’s benefit, a formula Shakespeare conceives without recourse to Marxist or capitalist manifestos. Marina’s very avoidance of forced participation in degrading acts shows the playwright’s interest in the theatre’s commercial and priapic origins in the stews, contrary to Steven Mullaney’s holding. Mullaney views Pericles as the playwright’s sole attempt to “dissociate the popular stage from its cultural contexts and theatrical grounds of possibility” by obscuring the connection drawn between charity and ill-gotten lucre in Laurence Twine’s The Patterne of Painfull Adventures, one of Pericles’s likely sources.17 Shakespeare leverages Marina’s charitable donations into the expropriation of an exponentially greater virtue—her testimony in the bawdy house. The play assigns a value to moral art exceeding the profit in the commodification of labor undergirding Mullaney’s appraisal of the Elizabethan theatre’s original means of subsistence. Shakespeare shares Marx’s disgust with the “crudeness” of prostitution as a transaction doing “away by force with talent, etc.,” but the playwright would have assailed as obtuse the Communist avatar’s relaxation of human rights protections based solely on the mere promise of ethical transformation inhering in the proletarian revolution.18 Shakespeare justifies the priority he assigns to human rights by estimating the total value of licit and illicit traffic (inclusive of the art trade) to exceed by far the bankable wealth of nations. Yet Mullaney treats as homologous conceits Gower’s claim of having direct access to the redemptive truth in art and Shakespeare’s supposed wish to create artutopian other-worlds ruled by author-kings. Equally curiously, socialist critics like Walter Cohen rest their case against Shakespeare’s allegedly

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misplaced priorities on ideological errancy rather than on the play’s presumed idealization of Miteline’s brothel traffic: “Pericles’s—and Pericles’s—sufferings retain a contingent feel, an unexplained character” because the “political efficacy” of the protagonist’s revival (along with the restoration to power of the other surviving rulers) is “uncertain.”19 Pericles does not set out to repudiate pre-capitalist or mercantile economics so much as examine regional finances with refreshing comic clarity. As much as cultural materialists might wish to unearth a choric episode or two affirming their positions, the Third Fisherman’s dramatic significance is not that he “denounces” plutocrats but rather that he comments wryly upon quotidian hardships faced by commoners like himself.20

III. IR Traffic in the Art of the Orient British Renaissance courtiers and diplomats enlisted foreign counterparts in their acquisition of Middle Eastern, Asian, and increasingly accessible Venetian art. Walter Cope informs Dudley Carleton that “purchases of old paintings, at a reasonable rate, would be acceptable to the Prince (Henry) or the Lord Treasurer.”21 A similar report indicates Robert Carr’s burgeoning investments in Venetian art: “Note of consignment to the Earl of Somerset of sundry pictures, painted by Tintoretto, Paul Veronese, Bassano, Titian, and Schiavone.”22 Venice’s prolific output made the city a clearinghouse for paintings as well as a congenial diplomatic and world trade center buttressing her inexorably fading empire. Global commerce became embroiled in such a competitive frenzy that James sought means to enable Britain to navigate safely throughout the Far East, shown in the “launch of the Great Indian ship, newly built.”23 Miniature portraiture enjoyed broad appeal during Elizabeth’s reign, but large oil paintings of political dignitaries served as impressive gifts for rulers abroad, including Sir Thomas Roe’s presentation to the Mughal court in 1616 of “pictures of King James and his Queen” as well as “one that will content the Mogul above all, the ‘picture of Tamberlaine, from whence he derives himself’.”24 Pericles solemnizes foreign relations with extravagant displays of art, yet Jacobean elites viewed the artworks themselves as inducements to global trade. British stakeholders in foreign affairs, including Lord Dudley Carleton, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and Venetian ambassador Sir Henry Wotton, sought out Italian High Renaissance art. In so doing, they acculturated themselves to Asian officials and the art of the Orient. The Arundels visited Italy with Inigo Jones from 1613-1614 to draw upon his expertise in augmenting their fine art collection. Wotton received advice on the purchase of art from Venetian Filippo Burlamacchi. Carleton’s

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selection of artworks for Robert Carr was divided between Arundel and Lord Danvers upon receipt of the shocking news of the Earl of Somerset’s fall from grace. British aesthetes evolved to embrace the standards of Venetian artistry, but Indian royalty required foremost that depictions of eminent subjects in portraiture should bear a close correspondence to reality; otherwise, the subject matter of art sent abroad could vary extensively: “ . . . the picture of Venus and a satyr, if it be excellent work, the price is great, but if the art answer it not it is here despised. The picture of the fair Lady. The King’s picture . . . all of the pictures will sell best here of any part in the world.”25 Indian rulers demanded above all the highest level of craftsmanship in art. Having grown weary of the exertions of an unnamed British amateur, the Mogul in Ajmere doubly appreciated James’s gift of virginals because a new performer accompanied the arrival of the instrument, whereupon “the King caused the musician to play on the virginals, which gave him good content.”26 James hoped that commerce with the Levant might flourish, a sentiment reinforced by Turkey’s gift of “a pair of partridges” to the British king.27 James intervened to promote Asian trade in December 1610 by giving merchants to Japan a letter of commendation facilitating the “enterchaunge” of “comodities as may be of most use to each other’s countreys.”28 The crown saw the Eastern market more as a source of new revenue than as a power to balance against Continental foes. Asia in toto presented a political environment favorable to trade apart from random acts of piracy, crimes that were not exclusive to the region. A few of its rulers may have harbored suspicions of Britain due to prior negative experiences with European agents, but Eastern economic policies were characterized by fair trade. Above all, Britain sought to profit from Asian IR realism, which explains Shakespeare’s generally benign view of Eastern affairs.

IV. Gower’s Virtuous Aesthetics Gower issues two major edicts on moral and aesthetic realism in art. First, he asserts not only that old art is superior per se but, as well, the older the good art the better, perhaps because it is nearer the original spoken Word, “Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius” (Prol. 10). Second, he claims (surprisingly) that artists are the best judges of excellence in the field. As a rule, the second axiom does not follow necessarily upon the first, which testifies to his complexity. The first axiom implies that moral philosophers are best positioned to expound upon the value of art in view of their devotion to the study of ancient mores, but the second demands that art be evaluated by elite practitioners, whatever their association with morals and governance. Pericles raises aesthetic issues in addition to those presented

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by Gower, but the play’s chorus foregrounds the debate in a manner quite unlike the case in Cymbeline, a play that takes the audience by surprise with forceful artistic demonstrations. Gower’s first axiom on moral absolutism nonetheless allows unfettered consideration of his second axiom on aesthetic relativism. Gower does not advance the hackneyed claim that moderns lack moral and intellectual fiber relative to the ancients; instead, he argues merely that his proximity to original art gives him the upper hand. Being thus endowed with aesthetic wisdom, he holds himself out as proof that artistic sublimity shows all the more in virtue of his self-sacrificing, shapeshifting appearance on stage. For he is in himself the genuine article; therefore, he cannot help but reflect time-honored properties of restorative excellence adequate to the task of impressing the subtleties of poetics upon his audiences, who in Platonic terms seem but as mere wraith-like shadows compared to his substantial traditionalism. Ironically, he appears unperturbed by the apparent contradiction in his onstage appearance as a shadow endowed with only contingent solidity because his liminality has salutary effects in its very wasting “for you, like taper light” (Prol. 16). Gower estimates his essential value in terms akin to a numbered, signed, limited edition print—far from an outlandish claim. In printmaking, the early numbers bear the closest resemblance to the founding artistic concept, whereas the product loses its luster at the tail end of an open edition due to the gradual reduction in image-transfer quality. This leaves aside the issue of artist’s proofs, which increase in value due to their rarity in having passed through the artist’s hand; nevertheless, the accuracy of their reproduction of the intended image is not guaranteed because they owe their existence to the artist’s need for a preliminary quality-assurance test prior to the start of the official run. Given Gower’s status as an autographic original with certified value, audiences could count themselves lucky to bear witness to a performance that would only redound to their benefit. His axioms are meritorious in dramatic terms as well because productions tend to lose focus with the passage of time, whereas group cohesion is at its peak on opening night, assuming that the theatrical presentation had achieved unity of purpose. The influence of the presumptive guiding voices of authority (e.g., the author, the actor-manager) diminishes the more the players make the work their own, for better or worse, although some productions improve in other respects as well with repeated public performances, particularly those earning positive early notices. Gower treats artistic judgment as a primary aesthetic virtue in showing the evidentiary value in artworks to be worthy of special scrutiny. He foresees our contemporary philosophical emphasis on the visual arts. If granting the audience the right to appraise his work causes him any

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trepidation, he shrugs off his doubts with alacrity, “To the judgement of your eye / I give my cause who best can justify” (Prol. 41-42). The traditional style that he brings to the court of theatrical opinion has perforce to be litigated before paying audiences, such as their knowledge might be, yet he puts on a brave face by promising that time whiled away in the theatre will be time spent well. Although he relies on his audience’s ocular discernment, some of the artforms he curates (lays, dances, sculpture, etc.) involve other physical manifestations. His art thrives on “ember-eves and holy days” in part because of the ethics inherent in its ancient prosody, “Accept my rhymes / And that to hear an old man sing” (Prol. 6, 12-13). Gower wishes the audience to validate his moral absolutist holdings that upon closer inspection seem rather more inclined toward aesthetic relativism than he discloses initially. Gower’s turn to relativism in his second axiom marks a daring nod to modernity. The old English poet’s revised standard abjures aesthetic absolutism while remaining exacting as to artistic excellence, a condition restated by Simonides, “In framing an artist, art hath thus decreed / To make some good, but others to exceed; / And you [Pericles] are her labored scholar” (2.3.14-16). The reiterated point confirms Shakespeare’s intent to open an aesthetic debate. Neither Simonides nor Gower suggests that the artistic power of one like Michelangelo emerges through diligence alone. They merely take ethics to be a component of art insofar as morals inform a work’s logical, expressive foundations (see Noël Carroll) or conform to its primary cultural influences (see Joseph Margolis). Carroll holds that emotional responses are proper to works of art, as in our reading of a novel. He believes that effective novels are structured to evoke appropriate emotional rejoinders, their success in this regard being one sign of their artistic prowess. Carroll does not find that the printed words themselves contain emotions to be absorbed from the physical book by the reader as if by osmosis, only to be reflected back on cue. Nor does he take a metaphysical position on whether emotion is intrinsic to art, as if art itself could be in possession of morals or feeling, but a fine novel’s engendering of the correct response at the proper time is an essential aspect of its raison d’être: no appropriate emotional reverberation—no literary value. Carroll takes a laissez-faire approach to resolving questions of how moral flaws in art entail corresponding aesthetic defects. He claims that this logical consequence applies only “in some instances,” but in disproving the tenets of aesthetic absolutism (that bar all ties between art and morals), he implicitly makes a general case for addressing “why moral defects count as aesthetic defects.”29 A purely abstract sculptural work may become endowed with previously undetected moral virtues or deficiencies, an

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eventuality attaching no blame to aestheticians, who would no doubt thereupon wish to undertake a reinterpretation of the piece from its very inception. Aesthetic analysis should not be restricted to moral principles, but neither should Carroll’s “moderate moralist” overlook the most searching metaphysical proofs by addressing instead a work’s most evident aesthetic properties as if they were first principles.30 Having (fairly) resisted taking up the cudgels of a moral absolutist, he warns that a work’s ethical flaws may be so well disguised as to have escaped public notice. Yet rather than play the moral authoritarian, he allows vital moral and artistic issues to be resolved in the marketplace of ideas. Carroll does not see emotional content as a property to be expended as if on loan from art, nor is it a quantity to be consumed and reissued by the sentient reader in a communicative loop: “Audiences must also fill in the novel with the appropriate emotional responses, if they are to follow it correctly.”31 Lack of responsiveness to the valid affective prompting of the novel would owe to a readerly fault (e.g., inattention, resistance to art, absence of innate feelings, etc.); however, the novel must solicit constructive moral feedback without making improper requests. It cannot demand that the general audience react with moral outrage at the untimely demise of a limp protagonist. Pericles elicits an emotional discharge at the reunification of the ruler’s family to the degree that the scene has been deemed to be one of Shakespeare’s finest dramatic accomplishments. In Carroll’s terms, Pericles, Marina, and Thaisa earn our respect and admiration such that the playwright rewards us with a climactic scene of joyous concord after agonizing losses have reduced them (as well as, perhaps, some in the audience) to abject despair. Rather than applying the brakes to the moral emotions or other complicated affects at crucial moments, the play fairly bristles with emotional accelerants redounding to its aesthetic advantage. Had Cleon and Dioniza been fêted for hewing unrepentantly to sin, we would reject the play as a failure for its having misconstrued the most effective means by which to channel the audience’s emotional reservoirs. Far from disparaging the affective content in art, Carroll includes sentiments from outside the text (as, he notes, a formalist might say) to establish the proper foundation for our aesthetic attitude, although absolute music might at first engender only delayed or diffused moral sensations. The relationship between art and morals thus appears as a function of philosophical discretion, even if few artists apart from George Bernard Shaw attempt moral proofs with the detail if not the accuracy we expect in an aesthetician’s treatise. In a similar vein, Margolis goes outside the text (so to speak) in search of cultural predicates shaping art above and beyond the creator’s solely autographic contribution. Margolis holds the dance to

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be primarily autographic, not merely a form responsive to allographic marks. He knows that no two skilled dancers could likely perform a complicated work identically because lifelong cultural influences mold the artist’s movement and gestures. On this basis, Thaisa finds Pericles’s talents in the dance to be additionally satisfying in proving his competency as a prospective marital partner. Marina’s dances reform the culture all the more by affirming her desire to cleanse the Augean stables of Miteline’s corrupt bawdy house; therefore, Margolis and Carroll are moderate in professing that values intervene only to the extent of fulfilling higher aesthetic priorities. Shakespeare however extends the sum total of ethics and emotions far beyond the level of moderation to that of moral absolutism, all while sowing the seeds of the play’s aesthetic fecundity. Gower defends his aesthetic evolution via a two-pronged maneuver in which he attempts to outflank moral absolutism with common-sense artistic relativism. The old rhapsodist seems reticent to assert as a settled fact that the immolation of Cleon and Dioniza is an arrangement dictated from on high, although he implies divine involvement short of providing convincing proof. To inquire more deeply into moral causation would be in his view to probe unnecessarily, as he might claim pace Carroll. Gower undersells his halting verse in conceding that it is dated by the standards of the age despite his appeals to diverse authorities in seeking to distinguish his craft from the very classical ideals created (ironically) to facilitate his aim to teach and delight. He makes compromises by yielding to perceived theatrical realities that risk impeding the action he seeks to advance, including his curation of dumb shows requiring him to divest himself of his choric function, “Pardon old Gower, this longs the text” (2.0.40). He poaches upon the relativistic aesthetic arguments of others in an attempt to win his case by philosophical addition. He might have chosen to defend moral realism to the bitter end, come what may; instead, he accumulates aesthetic positions in order to flood the market with an entire portfolio of his investments in his audience’s “imagination” (3.0.58). His stature as a pre-Hegelian moral visionary upholding the rule of ideas throughout art history gives way to his justifications for attending to the more pressing artistic demands of the moment; nevertheless, he advocates on behalf of the highest ideals of art while making reasonable allowances for historical fluctuations in the expectations of audiences.

V. Healing Aesthetics in Pericles Gower’s capitulation to more modern aesthetic tastes is prudential but premature because, at a minimum, he piques the audience’s antiquarian curiosity in the “lame feet of my rhymes” (4.0.48). He extends his prosody

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so far as to employ pentameters in rhapsodizing over Marina’s acknowledged expertise in art, crafts, and “admirèd lays” (5.0.4). In my view, he concedes too much to current aesthetic norms in denying artistic merit to a few of his fellow performers. He penuriously grants Cerimon’s knowledge of “physic” but not of airs, which the doctor causes to redound to life-saving utilitarian ends by reviving Thaisa with the aid of his “rough and / Woeful music” conducted according to medically suitable spiritual and tonal remedies (3.2.85-86). Cerimon’s sonic cures assume his knowledge of regular harmonies in the instrumental music with which his audience would have been familiar. Modern aestheticians would credit Cerimon’s urgent request for the intonation of “the viol once more” as being medically and aesthetically meritorious (3.2.87). He demonstrates his proficiency in that which aesthetician Peter Kivy doubts—“how the emotion can be in the music.”32 In order to awaken Thaisa, Cerimon requires that an unnamed King’s Men’s musician produce tones from the viol in presumed imitation or echo of the vibration of “disturbances” rebounding throughout the universe, including in the recovering patient herself, whom the doctor addresses endearingly as “thou block” (3.2.87, 34). An additional esoteric link between aural vitality and stage-directed “music” is revealed in Marina’s spiritual resuscitation of Pericles with harmonious ditties; moreover, alone among those on stage, Pericles apprehends “the music of the spheres,” signifying the dawning of his realization of Thaisa’s true identity (5.1.75, 223). The audience hears heavenly song in this case not because Pericles imagines that which is unreal or false; rather, the orchestration issues as a prelude to the appearance of the goddess Diana. On the play’s metaphysics, natural sounds aid in stimulating emotional states via noetic and stage activity. In commendation of the ancients, and for the edification of the moderns in the audience, Shakespeare shows solely for our delight identical spiritual insights and affects reverberating sonically both in nature and within the soul of Cerimon’s sea-borne houseguest, Thaisa. Gower defines the play’s metaphysical agenda as one of claiming an identity between nature, art, and morals extending to the brightest star and dullest stone. In this respect, the aesthetics of Shakespeare differ from those of Kivy, who holds that music cannot possess sentiments in the metaphysical sense that people have affects. Kivy places emotions in a category distinct from “properties” embodied in music for much the same reason that “weeping willows cannot experience emotions.”33 If willows seem sad to us, it is not because we believe wholeheartedly that veritable groves abide in full consciousness of their delicate melancholia; however, Pericles represents and vindicates Eastern and some Western philosophical beliefs in the universality of sympathetic motion or emotion in song,

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meaning that where natural kinds are concerned, “ . . . it’s sentience all the way down.”34 Kivy by no means claims that the very sounds moving obdurate things might also possess the intention necessary to awaken the most vibrant essences of human consciousness, yet this is precisely the bold metaphysical idea that Shakespeare entertains for our amusement. For the play is not staged to favor either East or West but rather to consider the infinitude of the metaphysical reach of art and of the attendant visceral needs that Shakespeare endeavors to portray, irrespective of any desire he might have to champion the norms of Renaissance and modern Western philosophy. The play adds levels of aesthetic analysis overlooked by Gower, but it does not do so in rebuke because the role shows him to be reasonably current in the arts. Pericles holds firm in defining music’s emotional properties as reflections of a sophistication consonant with its IR insights, whereas Kivy sees music as an opaque “’black box’” whose inner workings are destined to remain utterly mysterious even to experts.35 The aesthetic philosopher offers a rather mechanistic proof of music’s “garden-variety” affective representations in holding that complicated states of consciousness may scarcely be replicated by mere ink, reeds, and catgut.36 Having despaired of determining with specificity the key to music’s rudimentary emotional “’contour’,” he remarks upon its relative detachment from our subjective properties.37 Kivy cites as major category errors our off-the-cuff remarks on music’s affective quality in terms applicable to culture, community, health, and pleasure. Our casual descriptive references to sad music should in his view be amended forthwith to indicate merely that certain pieces seem to make us feel sad; however, Pericles endows music with a legacy having far more purchase on our feelings than modern aestheticians like Kivy seem willing to concede. Kivy is justified in attributing to Hegel the most expansive possible understanding of the significance of expression in art, including music, if indeed what Kivy means is that such emotion seeks the spiritual realm, “ . . . absolute music without spiritual content is not fine art.”38 Kivy believes that Hegel prefers programme music to absolute music, a distinction that would not have confounded Shakespeare in the least. Pericles defends sonic spirituality regardless of its vocal or instrumental instantiations. As well, Hegel claims that Christian-inspired sculpture conveys emotions outstripping the representational skills of even the most renowned classical artists with the exception of a Michelangelo, “The direction as a rule of the Christian emotion, where the religious point of view and idea are paramount, is not toward the Classical form of ideality.”39 Hegel sees Romantic art as being superior in this spiritual respect; thus, perhaps, in order to convey the ideas and emotions proper to Pericles, Shakespeare

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employs a dramatic structure apart from the classical style favored (fairly enough) by Ben Jonson, among others, even if the outcome might not attain the perfection Hegel finds (reasonably enough) in ancient Greek sculpture and Italian High Renaissance painting. Even so, the play resists distorting along Romantic lines the idealized value of classical forms as expressions of the most extreme emotions, except in crucial instances, “Pericles makes lamentation, puts on sackcloth, and in a mighty passion departs” (4.4.23). For the playwright seems to regard the arts, including those in Marina’s areas of expertise, as reflecting the ultimate refinement of emotions in a few gifted souls, who receive as if from the gods the lion’s share of aesthetic and moral inspiration relative to their peers. The more Gower revises his aesthetics out of respect for the audience, the more he declines to promote metaphysical standards of fine art. The choric figure upholds the highest artistic values of pre-Hegelian metaphysical emotion, as Hegel refers to the workings of spirit, in his seemingly autographically inspired performance. What is more, Gower’s reinvention of his artistic identity is a reflection of reality, not a craven concession to private or parochial interests, so much so that he salutes Marina’s artistic excellence as being metaphysically “absolute” (4.0.31). She in turn pays tribute indirectly to his theory of aesthetic relativism in her very unwillingness to establish a ranking of her many skills, “I can sing, weave, sew, and dance, with other virtues I’ll keep from boast . . .” (4.5.159-161). To his credit, Gower makes his defense of moral realism a condition of his selfless abandonment of the principle of aesthetic absolutism. Simonides’s cheerful exhortation to the assembled knights to “dance” lacks urgency only in view of the minimalist stage direction (2.3.101). He may well have suspected that Pericles harbors dance skills in view of his upbringing in Tyre, but Shakespeare shows no inclination to dilate in verse upon the rules of rhythmic movement. The dance involves analytical complexities acknowledged by the finest specialists in the field today, none of whom face simultaneously the demands of staging a coherent theatrical event. The play justifies Simonides’s observation on the amount of “practice” needed to demonstrate an even minimal level of proficiency in accented “measures” (2.3.98). The harmonious performance he oversees requires a showing of dance prowess in drama at least approaching the sophistication of Thaisa’s aesthetic insights and Marina’s celebrated talents. Marina increases her artistic output in Miteline specifically in order to maximize social benefits and to minimize her pain; however, she too does not so much as attempt to open a metaphysical or moral debate on syncopated footwork in the theatre, whereas Shakespeare adds a few verses to remark expressly upon the mute arts of sculpture and the dance.

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The application of universal morals to particular arts shows in the play’s living tableaux, which achieve their greatest dramatic effect in familial gatherings, although Hegel finds the “inmost reconciliation of Spirit with the Absolute” to be most consonant with Romantic art.40 One grouping portrays Pericles’s despair over the loss of his wife and daughter, complicating which are his self-recriminations over his inability to secure their safety. Bookending his anguish is a tableau reflecting his utter joy in celebrating “Thaisa with child” (3.0.14). Putting aside the question of whether the visual arts are an adequate substitute for verse, they extend aesthetic understanding universally, although they remain susceptible to the transmission of falsehoods by bad actors. Tarsus’s rulers deflect blame for their (attempted) murder of Marina by etching commendatory rhymed couplets into her monument, an artistic addition designed to bolster their credibility while perpetuating their outrageous deception of a potential IR competitor in Pericles. The statue cannot be presented on stage in a format worthy of Pericles’s munificence, yet Shakespeare downplays Twine’s description of the artistic rendering—the hero standing erect in a chariot, arms overflowing with the gift of plentiful corn. Twine’s account more than suffices to honor Pericles, although Gower reduces his accolades to a mere couplet, “And to remember what he does / Build his statue to make him glorious” (2.0.13-14). If the verses nonetheless convey what we surmise about Pericles’s mission of mercy, effectuated amid his flight in selfdefense, the betrayal involved in commissioning Marina’s tomb requires the cover of feigned praise, “The fairest, sweetest, and best lies here . . . ” (4.4.34). The implicitly classical style in the (imagined) rendering of the monuments connotes falsely in their ideal proportions their fidelity to transcendental truths. Whereas The Winter’s Tale upholds for all to see a novel solution to the ontological ambiguity of sculpture in Hermione’s deliverance from the form’s cold embrace, Shakespeare here treats classical sculpture with somewhat less aesthetic respect than it generally receives given its ideals as Hegel defines them, although the dramatic use to which Hermione puts trompe l’oeil sculpture resolves forever the moral dilemmas (e.g., to punish or to instruct) resulting from Leontes’s tirade. In support of Gower’s aesthetic relativism, Pericles defines sculpture per se as being inherently less resistant to the virus of deceit than the playwright’s polysemous verse.

VI. Pericles’s IR Constructivism Pericles presents valid perspectives on IR theory and philosophical aesthetics from a standpoint of relative political weakness, notwithstanding

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their proponents’ elevated stations in life. For Pericles, Marina, and Diana abide by humane principles, which they typically express sotto voce within their respective orbits. Diana displays an especially ethereal calm in her ministrations. Her entrance, albeit timely and helpful, is nevertheless rather piano in asserting her IR authority, whereas Cymbeline shows Jupiter’s utter domination of a globe he rules as his personal domain. The goddess boasts of no obvious power to decide the fate of nations in rendering personal assistance to Pericles in the form of advice that he observe sacrificial proprieties and deliver fulsome testimony in Ephesus. The faithful recounting of tales of woe by Pericles and Marina is meant to unearth old memories in the goddess’s votary, Thaisa, as one link in a chain of causation yielding a joyous reunion. Modern editors opine that Diana descends from the heavens—a perfectly reasonable argument—but her unassuming mien suggests that a humbler arrival might well be justified. The stage direction simply records her name, “Diana,” in confirmation of her onstage manifestation (5.1.231). Pericles’s references to her “argentine” color and “celestial” habitation could imply a more otherworldly entrance, yet, upon having provided Tyre’s ruler with the essential clue as to Thaisa’s whereabouts, Diana seems disinclined to adopt an ostentatious style and correspondingly imperious IR theory reflecting the metaphysical certitude of one like G. Wilson Knight in conceiving of the play as “poetry, as it were, writing itself.”41 Pericles’s theory of global politics depends upon at least two crucial theses: A) relations between states must be shown to rise to a level of formality befitting the status of IR theory; and B) the global system, such as it is, must be shown to be sufficiently attuned to power politics to account for IR hostilities between distant unitary states. The play vindicates A on its own terms, but any final determination as to B requires some philosophical elaboration. As to A, King Pericles tacitly assumes the existence of formal IR imperatives in beating a hasty retreat from Antioch. That Antiochus seeks to eliminate with minimal international disturbance the one possible source of his public discomfiture is an outcome upon which Pericles could not be expected to rely. Antiochus might just as easily have launched a punitive invasion against Tyre, which was Pericles’s expectation, as hire a stealthy assassin to attempt to bury the former suitor for his daughter’s hand in a watery or earthly grave along with his fell secret. Pericles overestimates Antiochus’s reaction, but he correctly fears the worst of an evidently more powerful foreign adversary; thus, Pericles easily passes the theoretical test posed by A on the level of IR realism. More complicated questions arise as to B concerning either the moral or transactional nature of Shakespeare’s IR system, both viable theoretical alternatives. IR theorist Richard Ashley holds that neorealism

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rejects social and subjective values with an intensity unimagined even by classical realists, who surely prize reason and objectivity above all else. Neorealism eliminates altogether the moral quotient in realism by estimating global power according to microeconomic principles, thereby substituting, as it were, the neorealist’s green eyeshades for the bishop’s miter of IR realism. In rightly opposing great power domination of the weak, Ashley sees international politics in terms of the pageantry of cultural and historical evolution; moreover, in dismissing IR neorealism’s and realism’s foundational concept of the “state-as-actor,” he demands that full consideration be given to intersubjective judgments in the international arena, thereby invoking distant echoes of Hegelian philosophy.42 For Pericles provides clear evidence of the relative stability and currency of moral constructivist ideas shared by independent states because the global citizenry proves more than willing to overthrow misleaders like Cleon, Dioniza, and Antiochus in order to restore the system’s ethical balance. Ashley’s holding on intersubjective values has some purchase on B, but his ideological stance reduces the possible breadth of the acceptance of his proposed IR theory. A functioning IR system worthy of the name demands our verification of the fulfillment of both A and B, the latter resulting as a consequence of the former. Antiochus’s hostile foreign policy could be said to derive solely from traditional dynastic revenge, a time-honored motivation extending back to the origins of European aristocracy; however, such a mistaken historical attribution imposes in this case no obligation whatsoever upon IR theory. Antiochus’s presumed vengeance would amount to no more than pre-theoretical interstate violence because A necessarily combines both pacific and aggressive strains of IR unilateralism. Ashley’s theory, if true, might safely navigate around the rocks of neorealist market economics before running afoul of B due to his refusal to pay proper respect to the implicit value of morals in realism, whereas an unqualified acknowledgement of realist ethics would show him a clear pathway beyond maxims A and B. Indeed, Ashley’s position not only never threatens realism, it never entirely debunks neorealism, the latter being the bête noir of any progressivist’s critique, “Neorealist structuralism is a historicism of stasis.”43 Ashley’s (roughly stated) constructivist position, retrospectively applied, serves as a fair description of his global outlook as a progressive IR globalist. Ashley’s populist march astride important historical and subjective values would nullify the state-centric model in global affairs, yet the grudging respect he accords to IR realism seems, however generous in spirit, decidedly incommensurate to his task. In promulgating articles of impeachment against the unitary state and systemic anarchy, he shows

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himself to be a more effective critic of neorealism than of realism. He freely acknowledges the polemical nature of his argument, which declines to treat as legitimate the possibility that any objective IR system might be worthy of salvation. Realism’s mighty opposites (morals vs. systemic anarchy) might have formed the basis of a reasonable appeal to the virtues in Hegelian philosophy, but Ashley would seem to banish metaphysics from the roster of valid IR theories. Yet the Hegelian dialectic in aesthetics pairs philosophical idealism with an historical vision of struggle over the plasticity of artistic matériel, a partly constructivist ethical notion that Shakespeare presents with consummate facility in Pericles. Such is the high literary quality of his argument that Ashley sees IR neorealists as adopting the worst features of structuralism: synchronic history and the independent state. Ashley’s rejection of neorealism owes to its nullification of intersubjective values that are contrary to those of classical realism (on his view). Ashley defends the ethical element of selfhelp realism on a solely contingent basis despite his belief that its moral investments fall short of returning face value upon their date of maturation, but he rejects neorealism outright on the grounds of its eager perpetuation of global anarchy, which logically necessitates his rejection of realism as well. His faint praise of realism seems at last but a tactic to slay neorealism. He ultimately spurns a wholesome alliance with historically informed, preconstructivist emotions in aesthetics as per Hegel that would give him leave to sign a non-aggression pact with realism for the betterment of his progressive IR constructivism. For Hegelian aesthetics associate spiritual values, fully formed or not, with objective elements, pleasing or not, for the enrichment of some of the very intersubjective qualities Ashley prizes, if at the price of strenuously disavowing revolutionary political agendas employing violent tactics in favor of the peaceful accommodations surrounding “the union of humanity with the humanity of God.”44 Ashley remains a deeply informed and spirited proponent of his cause to overturn the IR realist paradigm, but his intersubjective holding could never abide so much as a competing realist or neorealist theory or even a complementary Hegelian one. Having created dramatic action consonant with A, Shakespeare finds means to justify B. Ashley’s claim to have pursued value outside of the “objective logic of technical rationality” is but a device meant to exclude objective science in favor of Continental phenomenology even if he eschews imprudently the new science embodied by Vico’s intersubjectively compatible gente.45 For Ashley believes that the academy roundly suppresses his views: “We are given to feel that our complaints have no scientific standing.”46 He treats “the balance-of-power regime” as the false paradigm of modern IR theoreticians, who embrace “capitalist relations of

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production and exchange”; therefore, Ashley’s progressivism emerges as his primary rationale for opposing IR neorealism and realism, shown in the (brilliant) theoretical brushfires he scatters to tamp down IR realist concepts of anarchy and unitary states.47 The class struggle itself, stripped of all its varnish, outweighs all other theories of interstate conflict as the animating force behind his resistance to neorealism—the very dialectical materialist perspective undergirding some new historicists in their critique of Pericles. Ashley proposes insightfully that “collective improvisations” be orchestrated to resolve crises in a global system that he sees fragmenting along the lines of identity, religion, race, etc.48 In thus having disposed of the foundational IR realist axiom of systemic anarchy, Ashley offers consolation and remediation to victims of the class struggle; however, IR theory has long since proven decisively that one’s mere allegiance to humanitarian principles does nothing to prevent the majority of weaker states from being forced into positions of servitude before shrewdly aspiring great powers (e.g., contemporary communist China vis-à-vis her smaller Far Eastern neighbors and tiny contested city-states like Hong Kong). Ashley’s analysis of neorealism produces critical gold; however, his partisan argument leaves him open to rebuttal. Yet IR realism proceeds apace because it too invokes moral stipulations.

VII. Pericles’s Aesthetic Pluralism Gower holds IR moralist views involving flexible ideas about aesthetic value, but Pericles believes that moral realism inheres in the objective evidence of his family reunion and in his consequent recovery from the depredations of despair. In his (renewed) attunement to heavenly choruses, he accepts moral retribution by divine agents as a fact, a view unlike Gower’s more moderate holding: “The gods for murder seemèd so content / To punish, although not done, but meant” (Epi. 15-16). Far from wading into the muddy pools of causation, Pericles affirms the heavenly order outright, although he fixes his attention upon his loved ones. His difference of opinion with Gower in no way undermines the play’s moral absolutism; instead, each character draws reasonable conclusions from the same evidence. Gower speaks more like an Hegelian aesthetician, Pericles more like an Hegelian theologian (insofar as the roles are separable); nevertheless, both associate IR theory with aesthetics. If Gower finds that Hellicanes and Cerimon restore the audience’s faith by exemplifying classical virtues, Pericles abides by a pre-Romantic moral hierarchy that engages the emotions of music and the dance. Both adhere to related aesthetic standards given the looming, proto-Hegelian IR resolution.

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Shakespeare considers constructivist, pre-Romantic aesthetics to be the best template by which to evaluate Pericles, in my view. Hegel’s definition of classicism helps to explain the play’s delight in natural forms, although its aesthetics seem to take a more pre-Romantic detour. Hegel’s historical and artistic insights clarify the value of Romanticism’s negation of classical beauty by revealing Greek sculpture to be inadequate to the task of reflecting the subjective spirit (Mind) of characters deemed by some to be insufficiently developed. Hegel’s bright lines of morality highlight the special ethical favor granted to Hellicanes and Cerimon, with Antiochus et fille and Cleon et femme being relegated to the torrid zones of Hades; meanwhile, Pericles is capable of attending only to Thaisa and Marina. Far from claiming that human aspirations have reached an impasse (see Edgar’s sober observation in King Lear: “ . . . we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long”), Gower maintains that Hellicanes extends Pericles’s rule with enviable political sagacity, just as Cerimon practices medicine with unsurpassed élan. 49 The aura of pre-Romantic subjectivity and intersubjectivity illuminating Pericles and his family finds its objective expression in universally appealing works of art and in IR standards of cooperative authority. King Pericles earns his noble status through deeds and accumulated wisdom. The hero traverses the Mediterranean from Greece to the Levant, from “bourn to bourn, region to region,” with locations in modern-day Turkey (Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, and Ephasus) as well as in Greece (Miteline and arguably Pentapolis) (4.4.4). He shares with the region’s inhabitants a command of the analysis and execution of art and commerce. A fine dancer in Tyre performs as skillfully as one in Pentapolis; a beautiful song in Tarsus sounds as sweet in Miteline. King James monopolized certain arts for his courtly entertainments, but Pericles treats all art forms as being worthy of general dissemination, a convention extending readily to costume. Ambassador Edward Barton reports in 1590 that dignitaries in Istanbul appeared “in mocado or silks of diverse colours like our English players.”50 As a conceptual matter, Shakespeare’s players would therefore have been at least minimally cognizant of Eastern attire in their attempt to costume themselves in such a way as to meet the grandest expectations on stage. The play’s orientation toward ancient Greece and the Middle East is justified on grounds apart from the journeys recounted in the biblical record. British Renaissance elites applied the data they received on Eastern costumes to royal masques. Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei describes Lords dressed in “Persic crowns” and habiliments “taken from the antique Greek statue, mixed with some modern additions.”51 The Ladies’ rich garb draws inspiration from the styles in classical Greek mythological scenes. The set

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of participants in the masques fits precisely the subset of the populace enacting British IR policy. Ben Jonson insists upon seasoning the wretched excesses of the entertainment with the spice of reason, the former being the court’s primary investment in the event; nevertheless, he displays his studies to excellent effect on a scholastic if not on an IR level. Jonson devotes a play to chastening ersatz diplomats like Sir Politic Would-Be, but Shakespeare associates the philosophy of art with IR theory with far greater sophistication. Hegel stresses the logical dependence of sacred locales upon sculpture that imbues religious and secular sites in a profound spirituality. He sees sculpture to be an appurtenance to formal public settings and religious architecture, implying that such works may scarcely be relocated without damaging the original artistic meaning. Hegel takes into consideration the vast scale of expressionistic statuary (notably ancient Egyptian art), but he finds its symbolism to reflect the least compelling style among artworks enjoying world-historical prestige. He finds the representation of “our spiritual content as such” in the subjectivity of aesthetic Romanticism, which departs from the idealized classical norms of “bodily form.”52 The portability of statues has increased greatly, both in terms of the modern technical capacity to reposition massive objects of art as well as in the development of ever-lighter composites out of which to fabricate sculptural works; however, Shakespeare produces his own aesthetic variation on statuary by imagining the very creation of cenotaphs for still-living characters, Marina and Pericles. He adds an emotional aesthetic dimension, or doubling, to his protagonists’ ethical monumentality: Pericles’s heroic stance in rescuing Tarsus, Marina’s intellectual integrity in fending off sexual assault in the brothel. Pericles and Marina by no means function aesthetically as immaterial ideas—quite the opposite—because they are required to suffer the effects of the harsh gravity (as Hegel would say) of the world while expressing their enduring artistic gifts. Hegel believes that classical sculpture achieves the most exacting virtue of “loftiness” in its depictions, meaning that its aesthetics depend upon the unity of bodily form and the spiritual.53 Gower’s presence is thus required to give classical values the full honor they are due in view of Pericles’s passion and his Romantic, or spiritual, ruminations. The role of Pericles presents perhaps the greatest acting challenge but returns the greatest dramatic reward in showing the pre-Romantic unity of the universal and the individual. Pericles’s loss of classical deportment never threatens his moral absolutism despite his “personal withdrawal of the self into its own realm from the external world,” as Hegel describes the peregrinations of Romantic subjectivity.54 Pre-Romantic aesthetics stand the best chance

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of vindicating Ashley’s intersubjective, historical, and cultural constructivism, given the play’s insight into subjectivity. IR theory thus overlaps with the (presumably) theoretically slighter arts—of the dance, in particular, because of its movement—as opposed to the immobility of sculpture, although modern sculptors like Alexander Calder have created mobile sculptures to great acclaim. The notionally inferior arts (e.g., needlework, the dance) increase in value all the more relative to the stationary (or sculptural) agony of Tyre’s despairing king, who appears to be little more than an inert, disheveled mass upon his arrival aboard ship in Miteline’s port. In preserving the play’s moral foundation, these distinctly ephemeral arts comprise an essential part of the culture Ashley defends. Pericles’s dances are culturally productive, not wasting assets like the choreographed steps in formal state celebrations like Tudor-Stuart royal masques, at least as Ashley’s constructivist view might have it; moreover, the procession of knights, each bearing a quasi-Jonsonian didactic motto, preserves cultural values under the aegis of IR right rule. Hegel’s understanding of the dance as an art form is perhaps deficient relative to our own given that he sees the most athletic dances, such as the kind we approve in Nureyev and Baryshnikov, in terms of their mere ardor, “Man is also prompted by a desire to leap and sing . . . but speech, leaping, shouting, and singing are not as yet poetry, the dance and music.”55 He seems to prefer the restrained regularity of a corps de ballet to the virtuosic solo performances emerging from folk traditions, which interact with the classical aesthetic standards of the dance over time. By contrast, Pericles vindicates through aesthetics many of the very affective and constructivist values with which Ashley is aligned despite his borderline political activist rhetoric. Francis Sparshott laments fairly that the dance is the “missing art” in philosophical aesthetics.56 Blame for the relative neglect of the dance cannot be laid at the feet of Hegel, who elevates it as a value added to poetry as part of the ancient Greek drama. Dance choreography today predominates in broad swathes of popular entertainment, contemporary music, and even Olympic spectacles including gymnastics and ice skating, however debased the principles of rhythmic movement may become in being thus translated; therefore, Hegel is prescient with respect to the dance’s societal influence, although he errs slightly in seeing it primarily as but the occasional expression of pathos, spontaneous jubilation, formal lamentations, and so on. Modern and contemporary dance became coterie art forms in courageously pursuing experimental and avant-garde aesthetic theories including symbolism, Dadaism, expressionism, etc., throughout the twentieth century. Although modern dance boasts of well-informed aficionados, it limits its possible universal acclaim because of its

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occasionally esoteric staging concepts. Its greatest performers enjoy a relatively short artistic lifespan due to the tremendous exertions involved in plying their craft. The tradition of state-sponsored dance excellence in Russia imploded along with the Communist system funding it, taking with it an historically and aesthetically rich sub-culture devoted to its survival, which alone goes some way toward validating Ashley’s insightful IR stance (although redemption is by no means required on his part). Pericles endorses the dance above all other arts in the protagonist’s decision to return with Thaisa to Pentapolis, the scene of their first moving artistic collaboration, and host to the well-regulated parade of ethically motivated knights. Joseph Margolis’s cultural aesthetic analysis seems astute in disputing Nelson Goodman’s justly famous definition of the dance as an allographic art dependent upon notation rather than as an autographic form like sculpture. Dancers seem after all superbly well equipped to convey a range of ideas as well as of emotions like delight and sadness; indeed, Margolis holds that dance notation might well be entirely beside the point because the means to access (or read) its artistic expression is not by appeal to symbols or metaphor but through the coryphée’s movement itself, which “points directly to the sui generis nature of the art of dance.”57 The personal and “historically contingent” cultural ingredients of the dance are thus of the utmost importance, suggesting further that the most astute analysis of artistic movement requires the eye of a constructivist aesthetician.58 Crucially, Pericles’s subjective pre-Romantic aesthetic achieves its proper unifying resolution only in concert with the addition of classical realist and constructivist IR theories and objectively realized artistic values. Taken together, these graceful choreographed steps and newly emerging political standards produce dramatic action of unsurpassed merit within the limits of reasonable diplomacy and IR theory, qualities transcending by far all selfinterested claims of IR oppression.

CHAPTER THREE THE MORAL ARCHITECTURE OF IR THEORY: THE TEMPEST

Abstract Prospero overturns his most cherished aesthetic rulings in conceding at last that his island safe-haven is nothing more than a bare stage; however, The Tempest cannot negate the very disbelief upon which it depends for its two hours’ traffic on the boards. Shakespeare keeps Prospero’s seascape refuge afloat with novel investments in ethical international relations (IR) theory and philosophical aesthetics, assets that are not as easily divested as the newly restored duke believes.

The Tempest’s modernist conception of philosophical aesthetics and international relations (IR) theory is provocative even by the literary utopian standards of its genre. Shakespeare negotiates the terrain skillfully due in part to his experience writing speeches as Hand D for the eponymous hero of Sir Thomas More (c. 1592), who, like Prospero, combines moral principles with political improvisation. Yet The Tempest raises aesthetic and IR questions never contemplated by the Elizabethan play: A) in conditioning his political restoration upon his abjuration of art, does Prospero distrust properties embodied in himself or in aesthetics; and B) in view of Antonio’s treacherous solicitation of Alonzo’s aid, on whose authority might the rulers of Milan, the isle, and Naples proclaim their autonomy in a region noted for the politics of expedient alliances? Answers to these questions as well as to Miranda’s inquiries into the cause of her plight require Prospero to revisit the “dark backward and abysm of time.”1 She finds vindication for their travails prospectively in a “brave new world,” which effectively divides the audience’s attention between past and future (5.1.183). Shakespeare extends the pattern of philosophical bifurcations by making each ruler a devoted IR realist, and each artist an introverted Hamlet. The play assumes no capacity whatsoever on the part of elites to “work a peace of the present” because, in the midst of the storm, the harried Boatswain’s caustic observation on prevailing

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diplomatic ineptitude goes completely over Gonzalo’s head (1.1.19-20). Nor does Ariel find his aesthetic exertions to have quenched his own thirst for freedom, although the flighty spirit presupposes utopian aesthetics to be the sole noetic tool capable of blunting the sword’s edge of tyranny.

I. The Tempest’s IR Theory Configuration Prospero affirms the real existence of the stage at the exact moment the play’s illusory action has been “all o’erthrown”—a more peaceful coup than the one precipitating the duke’s removal from Milan (Epi. 1). In seeking to institute a nullification of aesthetics at the close, the chastened ruler imposes an IR realist standard upon a global system he sees as corrupt, but an analytical model based upon locale is proposed by the redoubtable Indian scholar and statesman M. Ruthnaswamy, whose Mandala theory of global affairs is under-appreciated, “Foreign alliances and coalition are based on a pattern of concentric rings of natural enemies and allies: each king to regard his own sector as being located at the centre.”2 The conceptual elegance of the Mandala theory fits the play given its relatively small set of political entities, whose borders are formed under IR realist pressure. The dukedom in the bull’s-eye owes its position to the point of view of its ruler, placing the home city-state in the center, the next nearest power in the second ring, and the hindmost in the outside ring. Antonio sees Milan occupying the bull’s-eye of the target, with the adjacent concentric ring encompassing Naples, while Prospero’s island falls within the third ring. From Prospero’s marooned perspective, the target pattern shows from inmost to outermost: the isle—Naples—Milan; and from Alonso’s viewpoint: Naples—Milan— the isle. If required, Tunis readily appears in a fourth ring. Upon Prospero’s departure (to a Milan free of magic and aesthetics), the isle may well retain a place on the target despite its reduced status under Caliban’s rule. The blue-water property earns consideration for permanent standing despite its imminent loss of political firepower because it has long been an influential wellspring of memorable artistic creativity.

II. An Addendum on Sir Thomas More Miranda revives at least two core utopian (and religious) values found in Sir Thomas More: 1) we must treat the downtrodden as equals, and 2) we all possess a spark of divinity. St. Thomas More observes the golden rule (to treat others as we would have others treat us) in quelling an uprising by established London tradesmen and clownish commoners resentful of the presence of immigrant workers and merchants. London’s burghers claim that alien “strangers” enrich themselves on England’s bounty, discourage

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trade with their unkempt appearance, and reduce the city’s profit margins by offering marked-down goods at cut-rate prices.3 More restores order with moral orations rather than reprisals by noting that the very economic dislocations causing migrants to alight in England might one day force the London rioters to depart for foreign lands, where they would undoubtedly hope to be greeted hospitably. More’s forensic displays in the bustling public square are far removed from the quietude of the private study to which Shakespeare’s reclusive Milanese duke habitually repairs. More attributes the Londoners’ dissatisfaction to class divisions, prejudice borne of ignorance, and the inequitable distribution of wealth. He decides a criminal case in favor of a cutpurse by blaming the aristocrat for his opulent attire, not the thief’s actus reus, “ . . . a man that goes abroad / With an intent of truth, meeting such a booty, / May be provoked to that he never thought.”4 More appeals to his urban cohorts to rekindle their communal spirit on behalf of a social constructivist vision of civil society of the kind endorsed by Raphael Hythloday in Utopia, “Though no man has anything, yet all are rich.”5 More’s peaceful suppression of the riot earns him a promotion to the rank of Lord Chancellor at the court of Henry VIII, an arena hostile to idealism, as his character on stage observes presciently, “Life whirls ‘bout fate, then to a grave it slides.”6 As to Marina’s second utopian principle (we are all blessed with a touch of divinity), More exhorts Londoners to cease their rebellion on the grounds that it offends God by insulting the king, who is the Lord’s representative. Violent rebellions sever the divine connection linking one to all; therefore, social disturbances are self-defeating, “What do you to your souls / In doing this, O desperate as you are?”7 More leavens his homilies with good humor because his life seems but a succession of benign moral revelations. On the eve of Erasmus’s visit, More exchanges cloaks with his manservant to determine if the famous Dutch humanist can spot true sophistication beneath humble attire. Erasmus, of course, passes the test. On another occasion, More arranges an edifying theatrical entertainment for his dinner guests, but the unexpected absence of a cast member requires the host to take the part of Good Counsel. More delivers extemporaneous lines in character that are so sensible that they duplicate precisely the words set forth in the script. He is portrayed as remaining jovial even in the face of his own execution. If Shakespeare and his fellow scribes emphasize More’s juridical and intellectual gifts, the playwright mentions the moral jurist only in passing in Henry VIII as being a worthy successor to Wolsey as Lord Chancellor. Like More, Prospero governs as an idealist at home, but the ruler-magician becomes a convert to IR realism in exile.

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III. On the Aesthetics of The Tempest Regarding question A above (on his abjuration of art), Prospero distrusts his own embodiment of aesthetic values in blaming art vicariously for its incompatibility with politics, in my view. The duke’s well-meaning benediction negates the validity of all metaphorical references to the aesthetics of architecture, yet audiences have ample occasion before curtain to contemplate a denuded stage more to Prospero’s liking. We may well have noted the arrangement of the stage lights in the heavens, or the wear of the boards on the stage floor, before turning our attention to live dramatic action of far greater interest. Prospero insists rather abruptly upon hewing to the virtues of philosophical realism by urging us to see the world his way rather than in our alleged state of aesthetic derealization. We are better advised to view the totality of the performance in terms of Renaissance and postmodern architectural aesthetics (the latter not being an oxymoron, according to reliable sources). We never necessarily discount the physical plant of the theatre, although this is what Prospero requires in bidding us adieu. We need no more deny the value of stage architecture than we do the foundations supporting our dwellings, be they great or humble. Even if we acknowledge his skill in the art of the popular stage, we may fairly dispute his final aesthetic judgment while granting him leave to manage practical politics according to the stern dictates of reason. Prospero’s slightly presumptuous claim of being endowed with absolute artistic awareness is falsifiable less on the level of IR theory than on that of philosophical aesthetics. Owing to his excitement at having ensnared his mortal enemies, he implies that he endows Ariel with a comprehensive blueprint for his impersonation, “Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou / Performed, my Ariel; . . . / Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated / In what thou hadst to say” (3.3.83-86). Such remarks must puzzle Ariel, whose original artistic contributions are enormous. Ariel surely believes that he delivers a rich performance effectuating the spirit and letter of Prospero’s request by elaborating helpfully upon it in furtherance of producing a credible portrayal. The relative weight normally assigned to the views of the master as against those of the apprentice might go some way toward explaining Prospero’s misapprehension, but it does nothing to invalidate Ariel’s fulfillment of a contract granting him his freedom upon his completion of the terms of his service, which Prospero denies peremptorily. Ariel brings Prospero’s general conception to precise realization, yet the duke fails to recognize his minion’s full artistic merit. Prospero fancies himself to be Ariel’s superior because he alone draws upon a power sufficient to have extricated the imp from twelve-year’s imprisonment in a

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cloven pine tree by order of Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, since deceased. If Prospero’s supernatural gifts are the basis of his slightly haughty demeanor, the play encompasses extant definitions of artistry to include not only the dark arts of magic but refined technological prowess and fine art as well.8 In accusing his personal assistant of ingratitude for (rightly) seeking unconditional release from servitude, the duke revises his position based upon new political exigencies. In short, Prospero behaves like an IR realist, whereas Ariel believes that his demonstrated artistry eliminates all doubt as to his right to receive a favorable judgment. The diminutive artisan is undoubtedly shocked to be so rudely disabused of the notion that a nearly telepathic aesthetic relationship had foundered over the master’s sudden affliction with an onset of dystopian neurosis upon the arrival of the hostile Neapolitan vessel. Ariel’s very incredulity indicates the need for an examination of aesthetics via its origins in architecture along the lines suggested by Hegel, particularly given the play’s extensive references to habitation. Prospero remains scandalized by Caliban’s improper advances toward Miranda in “mine own cell” (1.2.348). Miranda voices her enthusiasm for Ferdinand by dint of residential allusions, “There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. / If the ill spirit have so fair a house / Good things will strive to dwell with’t” (1.2.456-458). Prospero wishes to be relieved of the requirement to “dwell / In this bare island” for want of the audience’s charitable applause (Epi. 7-8). Ariel takes care to lodge the shipwrecked sailors “under hatches stowed,” as if they had pre-paid for the emoluments of a five-star Mediterranean resort, complete with complimentary beverages and laundry service (1.2.230). Even these luxurious digs cannot surpass the “cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temple,” to which Prospero refers in a pre-Romantic epilogue to his masque featuring natural divinities (4.3.152). As well, on an unavoidably practical level, Prospero orders Caliban to carry out all of the menial household functions: “Fetch us in fuel” (1.2.326). Caliban expresses his aesthetic preferences in concert with fullthroated affirmations of his desire to reclaim his prior unfettered condition. His tastes run more to music and the island’s varied environmental attributes than to the quality of local dwellings. By contrast, Prospero’s architectural aesthetic seems classical by Hegelian standards, although his domicile apparently lacks such decorative elements as weight-bearing Doric columns. His cell overlooks the surrounding landscape with an open concept and horizontal layout in the finest classical tradition. Prospero has not seen fit to invest the resources needed to construct a Gothic mansion replete with an inward-looking forest of interior columns ascending vertically in moody Romantic withdrawal from the world around him. Nor

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is it symbolic in pledging allegiance to the esoteric natural emanations of obelisks or pyramids; instead, his abode reflects the spartan values of classicism in affording its guests an unobstructed prospect of the veldt. Prospero believes that his imaginative construct of the harpy is as much as metaphysically real, which per se demands Ariel’s respect for its original authenticity. In this respect, Prospero’s belief in idealist art is absolute. Insofar as the image is portrayed effectively, it is all more authentic by virtue of an historical artistic affiliation essential to Hegel’s philosophy. In taking up this Hegelian legacy in philosophical aesthetics, Peter Kivy holds that there is no relevant or “discernible difference” between historically authentic performances and historically informed ones because they derive from the same meaningful source (in this case, Prospero himself, although Kivy does not address The Tempest).9 The issue Kivy raises has long vexed theatre practitioners, who always face tough questions about aesthetic validity in restaging the classics. Kivy’s general view is that defenders of both the historically authentic and historically informed performance perch precariously on the same slippery slope before sliding into one another’s embrace. In adhering strictly to idealist or historicist templates, such performances all but moot the actors’ creative contributions. As a practical matter, few good composers or playwrights demand robotic compliance from players; instead, they achieve better results by working collaboratively. Even if they ask the artists to hit the right notes, they often allow the performers to determine how the notes are struck. Interpretative nuances may be settled amicably ahead of time in rehearsal; therefore, advocates of the historically authentic performance are forced to edge closer to the position taken by proponents of the historically informed performance to avoid being seen as impossibilists, to invoke one of George Bernard Shaw’s favorite expressions. The historically informed performance depends upon the player’s educated mental state; therefore, Kivy rules it out too because, by definition, mental states as such cannot be materialized on stage. Proponents of historically authentic portrayals (down to the last raised eyebrow) and historically informed performances (by borrowing selectively from old ideas) simply use different terminology to produce the same outcome, whereas Prospero achieves artistic excellence by controlling almost obsessively the action on the island stage; nevertheless, the play takes on a life of its own despite his solipsistic conceptions of aesthetics and IR theory. The historically authentic performance falls victim to a false analogy obtaining between it and an “archaeological project.”10 As Kivy suggests, contemporary audiences attuned to current sonic values might well regard a crescendo from Beethoven’s smaller company to be but a mouse-like squeak in comparison to the lion’s roar elicited by a modern

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orchestra. One wonders how the original sound effects for the storm scene in The Tempest would have fared in today’s amplified theatres—perhaps they would mark an improvement. Kivy raises another problem: an historically informed performer—e.g., Laurence Olivier, Yo-Yo Ma—might elect to perform a classic work in an utterly new style for perfectly good aesthetic reasons, thereby overriding his or her historical wisdom and access to archival data. Kivy believes correctly that mere fidelity to historical or metaphysical originals is no assurance of artistic merit. Upon closer inspection, however, proponents of the historically authentic performance are not just unwitting advocates of historically informed performances, and vice-versa. There is broad daylight between the two positions Kivy cites because The Tempest, for example, is historically authentic as written without necessarily being historically informed. The characters have no counterparts in the historical record; indeed, some possess supernatural powers, further discrediting the play’s naturalistic credentials. The location of Prospero’s island is nowhere charted, therefore fanciful. The Tempest shows the performance itself to be the pattern for its own history, indicated by the play’s many references to the passage of time as the action unfolds, “The minute of their plot / Is almost come” (4.1.141-142). The performance’s elapsed time marks precisely the progress of its history, which naturally varies slightly from show to show. Shakespeare relaxes his conception of the unity of time relative to that of place, but the play nonetheless fulfills its own historical prophecy not because it represents an ideal conception in staging or politics in Prospero’s view, but because it gains historical authenticity by virtue of its self-consciousness as to its duration. If a performance of The Tempest is, after all, historically authentic by Hegelian standards, any suggestion that it might be historically informed as well is not only superfluous but quite damaging owing to its diminution of the priority normally assigned to the artists’ creative contributions. The performance would thus expunge its self-authenticating artistry in the same proportion as it denies its self-validating presence in all other intellectual respects. For the performance cannot be historically informed because the requisite artistic events are always yet to transpire. The play might be historically authentic without being historically informed from a modern philosophical perspective, which must be the case when the performance is, in Hegelian terms, always in the midst of the conscious Idealist procession of historical time. As a rule, stage productions benefit from the players’ insights, yet any absolute defense of historically-oriented performances risks their being seen as artworld affectations or Lehrstücke like Rem Koolhaas’s installation on architectural elements at the 2014 Venice Biennale.11 In Summer-Fall of

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that year, Koolhaas presented a cross-section of a restored ancient Venetian building showing its architectural layers down to the HVAC and plumbing. The structure enclosed a series of art installations subscribing to modern dystopian interpretations of housing. At no small admission fee, his entry in La Biannale di Venezia was decorated in a postmodern style evocative of Jean-Michel Basquiat. True, The Tempest demands scenography that takes into account certain minimal yet essential scenic elements. Yet the play’s mise-en-scène is authentic and sufficient in allowing but for a storm, a vanishing banquet, an area above, a separate space concealed by curtains, Caliban’s “burden of wood,” a rack-full of fripperies, and any other real or implied details required for its staging (2.2.0). In meeting these conditions, The Tempest fulfills its obligation to applied aesthetics and IR theory. Political violence remains a constant threat, but the perceived typhoon is no less ontologically real merely because it is raised as a consequence of Prospero’s and Ariel’s magic; moreover, aesthetics and morals exist prior to the untamed denizens’ occupation of the island-state before Prospero’s arrival. If a profound historical sensibility is one of Hegel’s major contributions to philosophy, his aesthetics profit too from his specific allusions to works in their proper context, by which means he elevated art research to new academic and intellectual heights.

IV. Architectural Aesthetics after Hegel, Part I Hegel advances the cause of the artistic status of architecture even though philosophical aestheticians today remain divided about his conclusions. Questions of authorship (sole or corporate), function (artistic or practical), and form (real structures as against plans and drawings) complicate their determination of the genre’s aesthetic merit. Perhaps no artistic form owes as much for its contemporary standing as architecture does to Hegel’s philosophy, which aestheticians discount at their peril. Far from serving as impermeable monoliths, buildings display a certain fragility over time in suffering wear and stress under real-world conditions, albeit far less so than their relatively more ephemeral artistic counterparts realized on canvas or upon the stage. Like Levinson in the arena of musical aesthetics, Stephen Davies takes for his starting point an historical approach to architectural aesthetics, but he limits his dispensation of artistic credentials to a select group of candidates. He denies the status of art to many architectural works and to all of their related documentation. He establishes a continuum in this matériel-heavy category ranging from weight-bearing “statues” (which are, at minimum, sculptures) to “arches” (which are, at minimum, functional spans).12 Not surprisingly, he disqualifies out of hand an entire category of

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practical architectural habitations, including ocean liners and classic architectural designs in the field of manufactured transportation vehicles, such as the Chris-Craft “Riviera,” the Porsche 356 (the Egg), and even the Vespa 98, which fetch high prices at auction today on the basis of their beauty, originality (as to parts), and running condition. Few would deny that whereas well-maintained old buildings retain their value, a badly dilapidated architectural masterpiece may require demolition, just as the use-value of excessively damaged transports is reduced to their being cannibalized (or Calibanized) for spare parts. Curiously, Davies had at first rather little to say about rare examples of functional African and Oceanic art (ancient weapons, implements, and the like), which have long been assigned undisputed value in the art market. Based upon his aesthetic principles, such objects must undergo special scrutiny. His position is reasonable, if conservative, by some aestheticians’ standards in determining aesthetic merit on the basis of the original fabricator’s abiding intention to create an artistic object above and beyond all other motivations; however, the paint in Old Master paintings (long seen as the fine art genre par excellence) possesses chemical properties requiring certain colors to take longer to dry than others, which no doubt influenced at the margins the artist’s approach to his craft. Watercolors yield unexpected hybrid hues when combined in order to create special effects, not all of which may be foreseen perfectly by even the most accomplished artists. Functionality is thus not so easily excluded from broad aesthetic considerations. Davies includes non-Western art in the category of aesthetics only by relaxing the requirement of non-functionality: “Fine or High Art is art. It is art with a capital A. But it is only one kind within a wider genus.”13 In the end, he carves out a special category for non-Western art by allowing significant decorative flourishes on functional objects to suffice to transform such implements into works of aesthetic merit; indeed, as to nonWestern art, Davies ultimately determines broader aesthetic standards to be necessary and sufficient, “That is, should ‘aesthetic’ definitions be preferred to other varieties? I answer ‘no’ . . . it is not my view that the possession of these [art properties] is essential for something being art.”14 Davies adds a new category to his aesthetic vision rather than revising fundamentally his definition of fine art, although, in my view, he would have been better served to fine-tune his viewpoint so that he might bless popular art forms (e.g., rare Porsches and Vespas) as well as African and Oceanic objects (e.g., Fang and Solomon Island reliquaries) without controversy from the very start. Most Western architects/artists/designers of manufactured or architectural objects are no less aware of the aesthetic value of their labor

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than they are of the function of their inventions. The Italian name of the Vespa “Ape” derives from its wasp- or bee-like engine sound, although the practical uses to which the vehicle itself is put would seem to eliminate it from artistic contention, as Davies sees it. The unfortunate implication is that objects used by heavily perspiring day-laborers with the perceived aesthetic sensibilities of ruffians can never attain the status of art. Perhaps the brute physicality involved in the creation of certain artforms raises qualms of a Platonic nature sufficient to discount architecture. This perspective may carry over into the slighting of the dance, which involves physical exertion and the potential for injury on a par with the repetitive stresses afflicting workers’ limbs in heavy construction. So, too, many valuable works attributed to Andy Warhol were manufactured anonymously at the Factory, where the sweaty production of commercial objects of art under the artist’s name was undertaken entirely without the artist’s autographic conception or supervision. Davies does not believe that he is being dismissive of architecture in limiting greatly the field of aspirants whom he regards as being worthy of aesthetic honor. He could not credibly deny artistic status to certain longadmired buildings: the Taj Mahal, the Sydney Opera House, and so on. These works have identifiable designers or architects, although they may have been completed by artisans and supervisors who outlived their creators, which on his view would place their status as artworks in jeopardy on the grounds of their ever-growing corporate identity. Yet the original architects possessed the requisite level of skill or experience in mathematics, physics, and the like to demonstrate that their conceptions (with or without blueprints) could stand up to the rigors of real-world construction, just as wise sculptors design their works so that no protuberances are vulnerable to breakage or damage under ordinary circumstances. Of course, sculptural noses remain a target for destruction by philistines to this very day. Architects presuppose the requirement of crafting buildings capable of being completed by another corporate hand. Levinson’s stipulation that musical artistry be based upon the composer’s artistic and historical regard (as he puts it) is fulfilled by designers as well in the ordinary course of architectural planning. In the case of buildings completed by competent non-architects, the original concepts are readily identifiable apart from the structure’s unavoidable adoption of an increasingly public identity the more it nears completion. Once technical collaboration is allowed within the limits of acceptable artistry, particularly in view of the fact that the Old Masters employed highly skilled apprentices to outstanding effect, architecture easily withstands aesthetic scrutiny on the basis of its fulfillment of an original design concept.

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Davies holds further that architecture’s very being-in-the-world militates against its inclusion in the artistic fold. He dilutes architecture’s creative value by assigning artistic credit severally, “Not every building created as an artwork by architects will have been determined in its detail before its construction begins . . . by any single individual.”15 Most aestheticians take for granted the excellence of historic structures, whose added improvements over time can hardly be attributed to flaws or lacunae in the original joint or corporate architectural conception. Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral recently enjoyed a revival of awareness as to its transcendent historical and artistic value because its very existence was threatened by a devastating fire starting on April 15, 2019. Perceptions of its aesthetic value had eroded among certain cultural critics to such an extent that some of them commonly referred to the cathedral as a mere tourist attraction. Its spiritual properties have never nullified its artistic status because its design allowed the interpolation of sacred and profane elements from its very origins. Any encrustations of art upon the original design are no different in theoretical terms than the helpful aesthetic elaborations incorporated into an original dance by subsequent practitioners, yet Davies denies that any original decorative improvements on a building could count toward the estimation of its artistic value as a whole. Perhaps the strongest argument against the value of architectural aesthetics is a formal one: how might the realization of an enduring design be considered art if its features are determined in some measure from without (e.g., safety regulations, city codes, etc.) rather than strictly on the basis of the architect’s vision? In this sense, extraneous factors render the architect’s building “subject to the desires and whims of those for whom he works.”16 Yet to regard these outside influences as constituting a disqualifying deficiency is to overlook the entirety of art’s past, present, and future practices in all genres. On Davies’s holding, no architectural plans or drawings—no matter how illuminating—can possibly be seen as art. Only the unadorned building qualifies for his aesthetic evaluation, which seems on its face far too restrictive an aesthetic definition. Davies steadfastly refuses to distinguish between the plans or drawings of the original architect and those of another architect or nonarchitect or even of personnel hired by the firm as project associates, although the entire output of architects has been presented as art in fine-art museums. Most crucial to Davies’s argument is the strong case he makes for “site-specific” buildings, whose singularity he prefers to duplicates appearing elsewhere (e.g., the Las Vegas Eiffel Tower as opposed to the rightly hallowed original), mainly on the grounds that the best founding concepts are created with the specific locale in mind, whereas knock-offs are constructed in utter disregard of their conformity to a new location.17

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On the same rationale, Davies’s argument against moving original architectural works involves reasonable precautions against validating possible “’socio-historic’” failures (e.g., to avoid gimmicks like the installation of London Bridge in Arizona).18 If unique structures suffer by being moved (if moving is possible without incurring a prohibitive risk of damage), majestic old ocean liners, rare vintage scooters, pristine classic roadsters, and related functional objects increase in value by virtue of their having excelled at their original mission to navigate highways or the high seas in style. Such works of transportation retain their worth even after being housed in museums or, like the Queen Mary, moored in a port far removed from the foundries that forged her iron rivets and steel. Davies simply rejects as artistically irrelevant much of the work-product of artisans, builders, contractors, and architects, all of which might reasonably possess inherent value, for no other reason than that their details may scarcely be discerned from a proper critical vantage point; however, small-scale painterly studies executed by great artists in preparation for large oil masterpieces have never been dismissed in the art market for lacking aesthetic value. To Davies’s formal and historical criteria for disqualifying most architectural works from analysis as art, Francis Sparshott adds mimetic and cultural objections. Sparshott sees architecture as being deficient relative to dance, literature, and so on, in showing ideas by presentational or representational means, “Architecture, therefore, remains very much the odd man out.”19 Quite significantly, Sparshott finds architects in general to have failed with respect to the human element of their métier. He objects to the very presence of most urban buildings, which seem to him to impose themselves upon passers-by, to restrict pedestrians’ movements unnecessarily, to overawe the public’s imagination, and to enforce unscrupulously a quasi-authoritarian discipline upon the local citizenry. He determines architectural parameters strictly on the basis of their accommodation of the “aesthetic aspects of the environment.”20 The public presentation of architecture per se becomes a source of constant distress to Sparshott, who exhibits signs of real suffering in recalling his encounters with urban behemoths; however, he does not rail against hyper-acquisitive collectors who purchase art masterpieces for their private enjoyment with the sole intent of withdrawing them from public view. Sparshott adopts a strict environmental posture on the meaning acquired by works of architecture over time, “Coventry Cathedral is a powerful and elaborate symbol of agony overcome, and Angkor Wat diagrams the cosmos.”21 Coventry Cathedral was not designed prospectively out of an awareness that it and the surrounding populace would be aerially-bombarded during World War II. That Angkor Wat

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would be overtaken by the encroachment of history in the form of superabundant natural flora and wild fauna had not been foreseen clearly by its originators. Yet Sparshott seems to prize the value accruing to works of architecture only after the fact of their construction. He feels that most urban spaces would be better off remaining undeveloped, or at a minimum he would require that undesirable structures be dismantled in order to restore the terrain to its natural condition, not least because they fail to reflect human mores, although he would not have consigned less than compelling works in the genres of poetry, sculpture, and dance to the same fate. Sparshott takes a decidedly IR realist stance on the ontology of architectural works of art, “Architecture is above all about the politics of space.”22 He refers to these politics as being mainly of local concern (e.g., City Hall regulations, etc.). Yet by virtue of its design, the Pentagon exerted such IR influence that an enemy wished to destroy it by an assault from the sky on 9/11, just as protesters sought to interrupt Pentagon activities by levitating the office building via correspondingly symbolic mental exertions during Vietnam War-era protests. Thus his holding that architecture is about “big and important buildings” misses the mark given the broad if not universal acclaim heaped upon Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin residence and Philip Johnson’s modernist Glass House, although Wright has long been the focus of no little controversy within the profession.23 Sparshott’s sweeping objections to much urban architecture seem in practice no more valid than holding that all paintings be judged according to their most famous or ineffective instances, including the evaluation of all portraits through the lens of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. To be sure, politics have always entered into the architectural equation insofar as clients and planners wish to promote or publicize their home districts by funding impressive structures, to which edifices politicians inevitably seek to attach their names; however, Sparshott raises an important principle in observing that large-scale construction raises direct and indirect financing from general revenues, necessarily opening real estate construction to public critique. Sparshott advances a skeptical interpretation of the exercise of political power through architectural design, which connotes for him “above all the coercive organization of social space.”24 He displays a distaste for public works that subvert the kind of humanitarian values of which Rousseau would approve, as if we noble savages are prone to being blocked by installations on private property from forging cooperative relationships within naturally harmonious societies. To carry the analogy to excess, an autochthonous figure like Caliban is forced to endure cultural reeducation according to the dictates of an imperialistic and paternalistic housing

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authoritarian like Prospero. Sparshott indicates fairly the luxuriousness of some dwellings in comparison to the squalid tenements in which the masses live, but his dispute rises to a more conceptual social level, “To be against architecture is to declare oneself in favor of small-scale, day-to-day transactions as opposed to grand designs.”25 In this respect, Sparshott appears to believe that human habitations should aspire to the aesthetics of the pueblo of the ancestral Anasazi culture, the Turkish cave dwellings of Cappadocia, the densely packed junks and sampans of old Hong Kong, and the bamboo river huts of Vietnam, all of which could be rendered sustainable with the appropriate modifications in compliance with modern housing ordinances. Sparshott’s viewpoint is profoundly democratic and moral from a communitarian perspective. Sparshott is correct, in my view, to hold that decoration cannot compensate for poor architectural designs marked by the failure to “provide the best possible physical environment in which human lives can be lived.”26 Small wonder that the autographic output in original architectural imagery fails to entice him, not because such works are copies of copies, but rather due to their lack of pertinence to the environmental assessment process. His lamentations over temporary or permanent obstructions of urban passageways resulting from high-rise development should not be dismissed lightly. As well, he makes a good case in noting the tendency of clients to capitulate to the postmodern trends of architects like Frank Gehry or to subsidize designs for sleek office buildings in the manner of Mies van der Rohe. The desire of sponsors to achieve safe outcomes is far from trivial because no corporation wishes its brand to be associated with an architectural failure; however, Sparshott objects rightly to the new conformity to Rohe’s reflective skin applied to nearly contiguous high-rise edifices across the globe, resulting in a hollowing out the unique historical identity of many metropolitan areas. Sparshott reflects a disquiet already being felt within the architectural profession itself. A group of Chicago students in the mid1970s wished to depart from the Second City’s pronounced modernist style, although such preferences (to be clear) are not Mies van der Rohe’s or Gehry’s fault. Sparshott blames the uniformity in design on architectural critics, whom he feels lack the necessary scientific knowledge to expound credibly upon “the general question of whom the buildings are for anyway.”27 These young architects had grown weary of acceding to pressure from their own firms to replicate or imitate existing skyscrapers in their new design concepts. Whereas Sparshott’s objections depend upon his environmental imperatives, the students approve of architectural mammoths provided that they are beautiful, innovative, and well designed. Yet Sparshott would favor stretches of undeveloped terrain to the creation of

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new jewels in the crown of urban overcrowding. On his social and environmental outlook, only buildings enriching human culture by sustainable means are worth the price of construction.

V. A Minor Architectural Revolt Seven students at the staid University of Chicago School of Architecture raised objections to the stylistic monotony of new urban development, but their concerns lay more in the realm of aesthetics than in cost-effectiveness. Chicago’s professional architectural houses had long reproduced the onedimensional appearance of new urban office buildings, yet, in fairness, the firms were simply reflecting the demands of their clients. Blocks of formerly delightful brick-and-mortar structures, some requiring massive refurbishment, had given way to an unrelieved mirror-effect along innercity streets rising from the curb to the heavens. The architectural students called themselves the Chicago 7 in mock homage to the band of anarchoMarxists placed on trial in the city during the era of the Vietnam War protests. Ironically, these students abided by conservative architectural principles. A few of them formed their own professional firm, and while they did not revolutionize Chicago’s skyline, they improved city’s appearance by developing an eclectic design approach that clearly departed from the norm. If they did not supplant the prevailing professional hierarchy, they advanced an equally valid aesthetic alternative. One of the architectural Chicago 7, Thomas H. Beeby, a noted practitioner and teacher, designed the Harold Washington Library Center of the Chicago Public Library, which pays respect to diverse styles under one roof. His library building achieves the striking quality of being contemporary if not postmodern by adding exaggerated ornamentation reflecting a classicist’s perspective. The roofline is accentuated by five huge sculptures of owls of Minerva emerging from oversized reliefs of foliage and grain. In their allusions to classical Greece, these ornaments alone render the building fascinating to behold, historically informed, and attuned to Midwestern themes; moreover, the design is consonant with the interests of the knowledge-based consumers patronizing the facility. Busts of Ceres adorn many interior walls, signifying (perhaps coincidentally) a deity gracing the masque in The Tempest. Three sides of the building show ruggedly dimensional brick walls in keeping with the city’s self-image of productivity and strength, yet the impression of solidity is relieved by arched windows. Each of the great rooms within reflects a distinctive style taken from different architectural eras; nevertheless, the overall effect is not one of a confusing assemblage of scattered aesthetic schools. Although the building is not deemed

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necessarily to have achieved uncontested greatness, it is sufficiently thought-provoking and visually appealing to attract architectural tourism. The rooftop winter garden makes for an appropriate Beaux-Arts setting. Surprisingly, one of the library’s exterior walls on a side street uses Rohe’s tinted-glass-and-steel (now) found ubiquitously, e.g., in New York City’s Seagram Building, which Beeby abhors for being too much of a good thing. He more than surpasses his goal to add plasticity to the city block he adorns; after all, Richmond Palace (1501) is festooned with windows without detracting from local aesthetic values. The iconography decorating Beeby’s structure creates an added theatrical flair and aesthetic depth that had been increasingly overlooked by most of his fellow practitioners in the city. With respect to its aesthetics, the library building would allay Sparshott’s fears of architectural inhumanity. The structure’s enlarged ornamentations satisfy Davies’s aesthetic conditions as to the validity of non-Western and decorative art that (in my view) he would have done well to extend comprehensively even to his general aesthetic outlook.

VI. Architectural Aesthetics After Hegel, Part II Sparshott’s objections to meritorious architectural works on the grounds of their ignoring broader humanitarian needs differ from aesthetic critiques based upon Marxist ideological imperatives voiced by public intellectuals like Fredric Jameson, whose design principles would institute doctrinaire conceptions of social order. Their recommendations are dictated according to their fidelity to post-Marxian, or Gramscian, precepts that demonstrate not only the severe dullness characterizing some Eastern European cityscapes but show as well the practical finesse in various Bolognese metropolitan developments. Jameson limits his canvas drastically by resting architectural aesthetic values upon an anti-capitalist ideology, “Perhaps, in that case, something is to be said after all for Lefèbvre’s call for a politics of space and for the search for a properly Gramscian architecture.”28 Whereas Sparshott’s political perspective demands that architecture reflect humane concepts of natural freedom, Jameson uses urban design to regulate social activity. A few modern architectural critics pronounce in equally firm tones the moral values that they see in beautifully designed buildings in any locale. Roger Scruton holds that fine architecture appeals directly to the moral sensibility as such. If Nelson Goodman finds the formal values in excellent buildings to reflect necessarily the intellectual aspirations of modern culture, Scruton believes firmly that good architecture produces uplifting aesthetic values and moral public inspiration that reflect well upon the profession, “But in another sense [architecture] is objective, for it aims

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to justify that experience, through presenting reasons that are valid for others besides oneself.”29 Scruton’s support for positive architectural experiences is as deeply felt as Sparshott’s, but it results in an affirmation of universal morals, not in the nullification of aesthetics in order to preserve the sanctity of environmentally (or otherwise) correct communes. If Jameson would have the public capitulate to Marxian aesthetics, Scruton finds the contemplation of fine buildings to yield an enduring “rational and objective point of view” in vindication of Kantian aesthetics if departing somewhat from them.30 Scruton believes that architecture’s moral imperative is concrete and real, whereas Kant treats the form’s effect upon our feelings and aesthetic judgment. Kant’s proper vantage point for colossal edifices must (in his view) be neither too near or too far in order to yield a proper aesthetic response. In affirming the public establishment of moral values, Scruton finds our direct experience with works of art and architecture to bring unambiguously our practical and moral faculties into identical alignment. She or he who is not allowed to engage critically with fine specimens of human productivity (e.g., roads, bridges, sculpture, buildings, etc.) may hardly be expected to conceive properly of works that might aspire to the transcendental ideals properly guiding peoples and nations. Scruton’s moral holding combines the best aspects of Kantian ethical ideals and Hegelian theories of historical development obtaining partly through noetic upbuilding. The philosophy grounding Scruton’s architectural aesthetic owes to his adherence to objective standards of beauty per se. He deems brutal architecture to be offensive to aesthetically sensitive, generally disinterested, observers, those who but seek to participate in the improvement of society by affirming the intellectual delights associated with objects beheld according to an informed artistic understanding. Scruton’s moral objection to coarse architecture corresponds to his view of art’s role in effectuating cooperative relationships within society, but his aesthetic viewpoint is equally consonant with his broadly extended moral vision. Beautiful architecture as such is itself moral in demanding the application of our critical faculties in equal measure with our reflections upon the sensations of enjoyment we might feel subconsciously in the proper consideration of great art in any genre. Scruton’s particular architectural preferences lie decidedly in classical façades, whose columns, functional or not, add plasticity to the appearance of buildings—a concept that Thomas Beeby understands well. Scruton’s vision is by no means literal, for he admires the classicism implicit in Sir Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre in London. If this outstanding monument to excellence in drama shows no exact representation of ancient Greek pediments, it presents in broad strokes the

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horizontal rooflines and angular columns that, while remaining altogether modern, strongly suggest ancient architectural tropes. This theatre’s horizontal lines are too pronounced in relative terms (as I see it), but they benefit visitors in allowing ample open air spaces accommodating public gatherings during dramatic intervals while housing comfortably on multiple levels three theatrical venues under one roof. The design not only elevates the site’s rather lugubrious urban surroundings, but it grants broad public access to a dramatic artform not generally noted for enjoying a surplus of funding for three distinct new theatrical spaces, only one of which, the Lyttleton (the proscenium stage), has been deemed to be somewhat less than ideal for performance purposes. Nelson Goodman assesses architecture from the perspective of its expressive properties by using an aesthetician’s eye irrespective of the AIA’s vital code-bound regulations. He is well informed on architecture by modern aesthetic standards. The greatest value in his critique shows in the degree to which he eschews ideological advocacy in order to grapple with the formal and material properties of a building. He does not demand that one be conversant with relevant scientific standards (e.g., stress levels in building materials, wind shear factors, etc.); instead, he assesses formal structures from the perspective of one possessing the aesthetic expertise of a sophisticated onlooker. He imposes no grand value judgments from without in order to encourage greater public interaction or social regimentation, notions that may not have anything to do with the specific priorities clients demand of their architects. By contrast, Sparshott and Jameson are more interested in how society emerges from its interaction with buildings than in how buildings function aesthetically on their own terms. Goodman feels no need to assign religious, moral, or historical imperatives to works of architecture. He sets no standards for admitting architecture into the world of aesthetics in the manner of Jerrold Levinson, who asks that a work be considered for admission to the artworld only if the artist may be shown to have conceived his or her output in terms of its aesthetic legacy; however, Goodman’s aesthetic principles for intellectual development concede Levinson’s historical point, “ . . . we may bridle at considering another building from the same plans and even on the same site to be an instance of the same work rather than a copy.”31 His exclusion of various schools of political thought from aesthetic standing does not imply that he does not give them due consideration before dismissing them for attending to lower-priority concerns. He emphasizes the importance of experiencing fine architecture, for such interactions are crucial to the development of the intellect and its powers in pursuit of the “continual remaking” of the world.32 His aesthetic values assume a relationship to a conceptual world of which Jameson and Sparshott would no doubt

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disapprove. If Sparshott holds that the environment sets the criteria to which society must bend, Goodman requires that art engage our analytical faculties insofar as we might produce ever more beautiful architectural works in city centers. Goodman removes as many as possible of the extraneous ideas that come to encumber the intelligent observer’s interaction with the art object, “I think that a work of architecture . . . works as such to the extent that it enters into the way we see, perceive, conceive, comprehend.”33 His analytical dynamic involves foremost an arrangement between the observer and the structure to the extent of leaving out the architect, thereby sharpening the aesthetician’s native perceptual capacities in his or her engagement with meaningful artistic forms. He regards his symbolic logic as being strictly neutral—not politically charged—although one might allege that he acquiesces to prevailing academic and political institutions. He addresses history as well insofar as it impinges directly upon the fabrication of the structure. He puts to one side his consideration of the purely functional designs of tract homes, for example, but he would evaluate any structure exhibiting high standards of design sophistication. The moral universe Scruton divines in architecture is not readily apparent to Goodman. Neither believes that one might discern perceived transcendental truths in mere buildings, yet whereas Scruton and Sparshott discover moral imperatives embedded in wattles and timbers, Goodman’s analysis is more ontologically restrained in finding architectural values to increase our noetic capabilities. Crucially, The Tempest invokes the aesthetics of architecture on a scale transcending all of these aestheticians’ viewpoints combined, as we shall see.

VII. Architectural Aesthetics as IR Mandala Theory Prospero becomes a moderate moralist in aesthetic terms because he finds that his reliance upon imaginative artistic properties alone reduces his IR standing, not to mention his authority over Caliban. That he seeks to reclaim his political position is to be expected if only because he had reserved for his private use an inner sanctum affirming his unique status, whose security he maintains additionally to preserve Miranda’s dignity. Caliban is granted access to the public areas outside the cell, although after his lascivious attack on Miranda he is allowed admission within solely to stock the premises with firewood and, on rare occasions, to “trim it handsomely” (5.1.291). Prospero’s minimal standards of architectural adequacy are fulfilled by a plain, secure habitation; therefore, the cell occupies not only the core of Prospero’s domain but the center of his IR Mandala target as an aggrieved castaway. The adjacent ring includes the

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public areas outside the cell (e.g., overhangs, pergolas, patios, etc., if any), whereas the third ring encompasses the isle’s natural environs extending to the sea, all accessible to Caliban. Prospero’s IR Mandala cannot preclude showing the greater world beyond because he adds rings to the target when pondering the deceitful affairs of states overseas. Given Prospero’s simple architectural needs, his private study more than compensates him for his enforced sojourn on the island. The architectural themes of seclusion and exclusivity extend to his supernatural powers, “Spirits, which by mine art / I have from their confines called to enact / My present fancies” (4.1.120-122). If Prospero hews to normal concepts of architectural divisions and enclosed spaces, these notions seem to elude Caliban, who espouses his desire to penetrate the cell in his lustful fits of revolutionary fervor; indeed, the drudge hopes that Stephano “mayst brain him” (i.e., Prospero) (3.2.80). Based upon his ability to limit access to privileged areas, Prospero seems to have found on the island all of the intellectual and aesthetic delights that he might have wished for in Milan, although Miranda risks being stunted in her development by their remaining outcasts. Caliban speaks passionately of his enthusiasm for the isle’s music, yet his helpful lectures on tonal aesthetics are lost on his drunken, guiltyminded co-conspirators, Stephano and Trinculo, “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.127-28). Although benign art including airborne-sourced music is taken by some of the uninitiated new arrivals to pose a hazard under certain confusing circumstances, Caliban adopts a utilitarian attitude toward art to the extent of accepting gratefully the locale’s free sonic entertainment, which he views as partial compensation in fulfillment of his revolutionary political agenda. The Tempest never presents a utopia simpliciter, nor do history and morals supplant the play’s aesthetics altogether; however, Shakespeare’s autographic stage direction, “Enter Ariel invisible,” appears to serve no useful theatrical purpose (3.2.36). Given such an allowance, any character could enter the acting space at any time, at risk of befuddling the audience. An aversion to our normal material existence might seem an ideal feature of utopian life, but Shakespeare no doubt means his stage direction to refer in shorthand terms to Ariel’s fellow players’ inability to discern his presence (3.2.56). Unlike Prospero, some characters are not meant to be privy to the inventive rascal’s whereabouts at all times. The duke never yields to the anarchic conceptual allowance lurking in the stage direction, but in a moment of frustration and anger, he takes the suggestion of corporeal freedom so far as to imagine our own transparent or gossamer existence in contrast to our quotidian solidity, “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.156-58). Having briefly

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considered the merits of quite diaphanous physiques, Prospero abjures any viewpoint related to the disappearance of the actor onstage, which entails a corresponding increase in the audience’s exertion of its IR analytical powers in viewing the performance. Two remarks from Utopia bear directly upon Prospero’s modified moralist aesthetics, by which Shakespeare (apparently) means that moral imperatives rule out egregious artistic excesses. First, More calls Utopia a “new world,” an idea that Miranda echoes by comparing the shipwrecked Italians to brave denizens of a world new to her.34 She assigns her utopia an unreservedly positive value, as against Prospero’s IR realist acceptance of violence as a normal practice in European statecraft; however, both characters see the world in moral terms. Second, More remarks that Utopian music “suits the sound to the matter.”35 If the historical More’s aesthetics appeal to the religious plane (he was executed for opposing the Supremacy Act of 1534, which divided England from the Catholic Church), the More of Sir Thomas More helps us resolve the paradox in Prospero’s request for the audience’s prayer for pardon, or applause, that “assaults / Mercy itself, and frees all faults” (Epi. 17-18).36 Unlike More, Prospero asks for more than purely divine absolution because he requests the audience’s manually applied meditation (i.e., applause) even as he dons the mantle of a wizened IR veteran, a theatrical embodiment that most audiences since have found to be aesthetically irresistible. Prospero rejects utopian artistry in the end because he doubts his capacity to overrule its effect upon his governance, but in so doing he simply exchanges one IR theory for another that is less obviously reliant upon art. Notwithstanding the tensions marking local or global politics, the aesthetics of The Tempest are pleasing because of their seemingly universal scope and magical properties. This delightful result obtains primarily as a consequence of the play’s architectural aesthetics, which impinge decisively upon the development of the action. The performance respects this aesthetic level more than any other—including music—because the play treats as valid and uncontroversial a transcendent architectural conception that even Caliban cannot help but acknowledge as divine. This artistic niche is in small the one to which Montaigne refers famously as an arrièreboutique of the mind for private contemplation—a vital architectural addition of a kind sustaining the lives of the island’s interlopers. Of course, Caliban displays few of the social graces exemplified by Montaigne’s friend, Étienne de la Boétie, but the helot would have enjoyed the master’s masque for its celebration of well-ordered nature, provided that he could be spared the cramps and other discomforts visited upon him in order to discipline him for his perceived sins. The IR system in which he participates unconsciously may never assure him of such a respite, although

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one architectural feature reigns as a categorical, universal imperative over all earthly art and politics. For Caliban too appeals to a heavenly construct to which Prospero and the entirety of the East and West—locales defined according to any standard one might imagine—have always sworn allegiance as a matter of both survival and delight: the very stars in the cosmic habitation illuminating voyages home from time immemorial.

CHAPTER FOUR THE EPHEMERAL ART OF IR THEORY: THE WINTER’S TALE

Abstract Tensions roil The Winter’s Tale’s minimalist global system because Sicilia and Bohemia sever their apparently ideal international relations (IR) dyad. Leontes’s abuse of Hermione puts paid to a long peace undermined by complacency abroad. Local disputes based upon ephemeral disagreements are duplicated conceptually in ephemeral art (e.g., reproductions, multiples, etc.). Political and aesthetic misapprehensions raise the specter of interstate violence rising to the purview of IR theory. Sicilia’s Leontes and Bohemia’s Polixenes resolve their differences only as a consequence of their assessing the real world more objectively, prompting a renewal of peace between distant states.

Peace between Bohemia and Sicilia cannot survive international relations (IR) incompetence at the top. As a consequence, The Winter’s Tale’s diplomatic avowals of mutual affection are negated by unfounded suspicions. The viewer too may well be left feeling disoriented by Bohemian statesman Archidamus’s whimsical suggestion that he will give drugs to his Sicilian guests on a planned reciprocal state visit in order to render them incapable of noting the qualitative differences between the two realms. Although the transcendent authority, Time (the chorus), describes Bohemia as “fair,” misleaders on both sides threaten to eradicate all standards of beauty by threatening the innocent with deadly sanctions.1 Archidamus is effusive in his praise of Leontes’s son, Mamillius, but he concedes the rank hyperbole in his conceit that diplomats would sooner follow the prince to an early grave than wish to outlive him. Having artfully restated their belief in IR realism, the advisors conclude their amicable parley on a dissonant note by admitting that unitary actors are ruled by self-interest. Still, hopes for peace unfold as if in syllogistic form: 1) morals cannot be divorced one iota from the state of affairs in the world; 2) the state of affairs in the world cannot be divorced one iota from aesthetic

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discernment; therefore, 3) the moral state of affairs in the world cannot be divorced one iota from aesthetic discernment. The inability of natural allies to “be intelligent” leads them to the brink of disaster, all for want of the true wisdom in aesthetic originality and duplication (1.2.373).

1. Intelligence in Diplomacy Espionage in The Winter’s Tale facilitates domestic repression, not political analysis, which Perdita divines rather imprecisely: “The heaven sets spies upon us, will not have / Our contract celebrated” (5.1.202-203). Polixenes refers to his surveillance of Florizel (Doricles) as “intelligence”—meaning both the activity and the elicited data (4.2.30). Leontes and Polixenes might have benefitted greatly from substantive intelligence advisements even though Renaissance espionage was a corrupt, pay-to-play practice by modern standards. Spying proceeded apace because its rules, such as they were, were observed universally. Britain posted agents more to acquire security secrets than to destabilize adversaries. Assets disguised as recusants surfaced in Spain “to spy, and hear everything that is said and done.”2 Surprise inspections of foreign cargo and mail might have yielded vital intelligence, but Britain did not wish to face retaliation in kind; thus, the potential harm caused by espionage could not outweigh the benefits of trade abroad. Although Archidamus and Camillo rehearse their diplomatic repartee on the sidelines, they too realize (somewhat despondently) that the logic in their amusing circumlocutions cannot penetrate their leaders’ insular conceptions of reality. Border closings were options of last resort, although such restrictions would effectively bar the entry of foreign agents. Britain sealed her borders while the Armada was at sea, which placed couriers bearing letters written in cipher at risk of arrest, particularly at the Scottish border. To be sure, the best response to espionage was to practice the craft more effectively than the opposition. British intelligence on Scotland was comprehensive, just as Spain’s was on Portugal, but spying per se was only as beneficial as the use to which it was put by policymakers. Agents dispatched in pursuit of unwise policies were wasted assets. Spain’s highhanded diplomatic style reduced her authority in foreign affairs, thereby undermining the very rationale for espionage. For the same reason, Leontes’s violent crackdown diminishes Sicilia’s credibility for a generation because state actors, not spies, establish the ground rules for global affairs. Not only were spies poorly paid, their work-product was underappreciated. British legates regarded the financial demands of overseas service to be unsustainable, but their wages were princely in comparison to those of the typical agent. A Genoese spy for Spain, Mario

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Antonio Messia, was “arrested for debt” in London even though Philip found his reports to be illuminating.3 Spanish spies were seen as disposable commodities because of the institutional distrust in which they were held. Even under normal circumstances, Spanish ambassador Mendoza saw his agents languish in London until such time as Philip felt certain that they had disgorged all of their secrets. Ambassador Juan Bautista de Tassis pleaded with Philip not to dispatch yet another duplicative agent to Paris because his “discovery could hardly be avoided under such circumstances.”4 Given Philip’s mismanagement of his secret services, Britain ensnared entire Spanish spy rings with relative ease after the revelation of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Although Renaissance states proved competent at domestic surveillance, Polixenes’s decipherment of Florizel’s amateurish disguise epitomizes the (intentionally) low quality of covert action in The Winter’s Tale. Philip encouraged Mendoza to multiply the number of his spies on retainer provided that they remain “unknown to each other, so that the news may be confirmed.”5 Mendoza avoided contact with known spies in London for the same reason. If Philip’s deep-seated distrust of intelligence sources convinced him to duplicate agents, Britain operated parallel spy networks because her mode of intelligence-gathering was more decentralized. Secretary Cecil presided over his own agents, including Dr. Ruy Lopez, the British queen’s physician, whose intelligence reports were meant for him alone. Cecil refused to intervene on Lopez’s behalf even upon the agent’s indictment and execution for plotting against Elizabeth; moreover, a spy’s identity could be revealed easily using standard counterespionage techniques. Philip’s aides urged him to leak false information about the governors of castles in Dover (Lord Cobham) and Southampton to suspected Spanish turncoat H in London.6 H’s collaboration with London would have been confirmed had Elizabeth subsequently castigated or punished the governors. Philip never executed the plan because H was not deemed to be worth compromising favorable arrangements with British naval officials at the Cinque Ports. Sicilia and Bohemia replicate the least effective properties of Spain’s hierarchical intelligence structure due to an evident lack of sophistication from on high. Redundancies in vertical systems tend merely to weaken security due to incautious disseminations of privileged information. Upon being ordered to decamp to Paris in advance of the launch of the Armada, Mendoza inadvertently revealed Spain’s four primary espionage sources by code name: Hercules, Julio, Sampson, and David—names he did not need to know. Hercules was the Duke of Guise, a Spanish operative; Julio was the amiable Sir Edward Stafford, England’s ambassador to France; Sampson was Antonio de Escobar, who was Philip’s

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own agent charged with spying on Mendoza; and David was Manuel de Andrada, a reckless adventurer accused of plotting with Dr. Lopez to poison Elizabeth. None of the principal contacts was beholden to Mendoza, who kept the identities of his private sources to himself because he paid them out of his own petty cash, but Polixenes and Leontes slight objective intelligence altogether owing to their disastrously misplaced faith in personal diplomacy, the predicate of (so-called) soft power. In what was undoubtedly their finest hour, British spies alerted Elizabeth to Spain’s construction of the Armada roughly eight years before the fleet’s ill-fated journey. Spain could not conceal her massive investment in new capital ships due to the increased traffic flowing through deep-water ports in the Iberian Peninsula. One of Walsingham’s best sources for intelligence on the Armada was Portuguese informant Geronimo Pardo, who sailed to England on ships carrying commodities including salt, cochineal, and spices. Pardo’s secrets were written in cipher “’giving a full account of the warlike preparations which were being made in Spain’.”7 He delivered his information to Walsingham in person, although most spies were forced to rely on intermediaries, including clerics and seafarers. One mariner stowed secret letters in a feather bed en route to a meeting in London, but accomplished agents like Pardo rarely committed their thoughts to paper. Crucially, the personal trust developed within Britain’s horizontal spy structure instilled loyalty. Walsingham earned advancement under Elizabeth even though his covert activities were widely known on the Continent, shown in his willingness to “submit myself to the passions of my Prince, to execute whatever she shall command me.”8 Spies then and now serve the policy, not vice-versa, although The Winter’s Tale scarcely shows rulers professing an IR theory worthy of the name. Secret dispatches in the Renaissance treat of intelligence as well as of “marvels,” unusual events that seemed to portend of alterations in international affairs.9 Philip saw IR value in astronomical and natural wonders, including the unexpected appearance of a pod of thirty porpoises outside Elizabeth’s water gate at court. He ordered his aides to monitor events closely in the aftermath of this natural peculiarity, but the mere accuracy of intelligence was no guarantee of its utility. Mendoza was privy to a nearly verbatim account of conversations on Anglo-French relations between Henri III and English ambassador Sir Edward Stafford, information that was revealed either by Stafford, who was on the Spanish payroll by 1587, or by Arundel, his intermediary; however, the product lost its value as a result of Stafford’s depreciation of Henri’s promises as being mere “’French discourse’.”10 Stafford played a lucrative double game by trading on inside information while undercutting it publicly. He operated rather

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effectively on the international level, just as Autolycus reaps smaller profits on “a double occasion” in his larcenous local trade (4.4.789). Philip’s fear that Stafford might “cheat both sides” (i.e., Autolycus’s business model) proved to be well-founded.11 Mendoza knew that at least one of Stafford’s tips was a “lying invention”; however, most sources were forgiven for indulging in self-promotion so long as they did not mischaracterize essential facts.12 Spain viewed gaining access to Britain’s ambassador to France to be imperative because his “intelligence could be well paid for according to its value.”13 By reinforcing Philip’s belief in the invincibility of the Armada (within a vertical security hierarchy), Spanish agents contributed to the king’s discounting of the fatal attrition suffered by his invasion fleet due to foul weather on the high seas. Protestant sympathizers like Walsingham and Throckmorton may have consistently urged Elizabeth to attack Catholic powers, but their IR analysis was substantive in spite of their political biases. Even British officials on Philip’s payroll placed Elizabeth’s interests first. Stafford jockeyed for an appointment to a lucrative post in Ireland in the event that England succumbed to the Armada, but apart from his self-dealing, his intelligence benefitted the crown, whereas Mendoza was reduced to complaining that his contacts with Portuguese agents were “fixed on the pillars of the Royal Exchange,” forcing him to endure no little professional ridicule in London.14 Spanish agents paid lip-service to Philip’s presumed superiority in matters of faith and governance because he funded their networks, whereas James took care to diversify his intelligence portfolio. He praised Cecil (“my little beagle”) for delivering “news from all the parts of the world [that] comes to you in your chamber.”15 The information peddled by Cecil and his pro-Catholic faction was offset by insights slanted in favor of Protestants. In this way, Tudor-Stuart policy institutions struck a balance between zealots of all faiths, although Mendoza reported that Britain’s “sect of Puritans” had begun to grow exponentially as early as 1583.16 Not all policy advocacy was ideologically driven because Walsingham recommended to Elizabeth that she act more assertively abroad solely so that she might be “the more esteemed and feared” by her foes.17 British intelligence was not necessarily better than Philip’s, although it weighed issues on a more objective political scale, whereas IR theory in The Winter’s Tale is subordinated to subjective (i.e., ephemeral) considerations. Because he knows that the play’s political elites place a premium on comfort and longevity, the Clown urges the Shepherd to reveal Perdita’s status as a changeling on the basis of his own apt syllogism: “She being none of your flesh and blood, your flesh and blood has not offended the King, and so your flesh and blood is not to be punished by him.”18 The

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Clown (privately) counts on Polixenes to employ dubious logic; thus, he sees prayer as the Shepherd’s best hope for survival. Just as Leontes and Polixenes foolishly threaten those who dare oppose them, Spain’s intimidation tactics redounded to her disadvantage when France’s Henri IV not only denied the crippled Armada access to French ports but derided her fleet as having been skippered by cowards. He congratulated Elizabeth for a triumph that he viewed correctly as one the great achievements in military history. Philip showed his arrogance in foreign affairs by refusing to allow his ambassadors to converse in any language other than Spanish, whereas Elizabeth adopted the highly professional Venetian model of diplomacy by speaking in Italian when appropriate and by delegating responsibility to trusted advisors except where her vital interests were concerned. At the decisive moment, she used information gathered about the Armada to array her naval defenses most effectively against a superior foe. She ordered Drake, her finest mariner, to remain close to British shores, a cautious strategy provoking no little consternation at the highest naval echelons, but one that proved to be inspired. Drake repulsed with unsurpassed ingenuity the remnants of a Spanish fleet decimated by storms on the high seas along nearly the entirety of its voyage to England. Elizabeth proved capable of distinguishing between accurate eyewitness accounts and what Walsingham calls “frontier news,” or rumors circulating at ports and border crossings that were “better furnished with Fables then matters of truth.”19 Yet Renaissance states held out no hope that their spies would not converse freely with the opposition, much to their annoyance.

II. Artistic Intelligence Multiplication of objects of value accrues to the play’s artistic advantage even if the characters display little aptitude for espionage and its associated violence, whether implied or real. Shakespeare ultimately excuses Leontes’s criminal abusiveness as a token (or iteration) of the play’s concept of mercy. Among the principals, only Mamillius is denied value as a multiple (i.e., reprint) due to his early demise. Leontes at first takes his son to be a natural copy, “How like, me thought, I was then to this kernel, / This squash, this gentleman” (1.2.158-159). But the lad is a nonreplicable original, borne out by the play’s withholding of his narrative from our hearing, otherwise his tale would have been retold (rehearsed, recited). Mamillius’s very appearance in The Winter’s Tale means that he is enmeshed in a regime of repetitions (i.e., multiplications, imprints), shown not least in the near-duplication of the play’s themes on both sides of the “wide gap” of sixteen years described by Time (4.1.7). The young prince’s

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narrative (whispered to his mother) thus remains a secret art, one incapable of being repeated authoritatively due to his unfortunate passing. Notwithstanding her traditional attire as hostess, Perdita rejects duplication (imitation) in refusing to traffic in cheap reproductions such as “streaked gillyvors” (4.4.82). She denies the validity of Polixenes’s unprovable assertion—his proof by infinite regress—that nature serves as the ultimate backstop for the validation of all artistic replications: “The art itself is nature” (4.4.97). She doubts neither her metaphysical belief in her virtuous originality nor that of her loved ones. In treating her costume as a disguise, and thus denying her authenticity, Polixenes uses her argument against her as a pretext to quash her hopes of marriage with Florizel. She sees originality as the foundation of natural artistry, although she benefits from presumptively innovative yet duplicative scripts or scores; however, she is not gulled into believing that lyrics are validated by being printed, unlike Mopsa, who “love[s] a ballad in print alife, for then we are sure they are true” (4.4.249-250). Autolycus’s careless reproductions (or multiples) of vendible music cannot but fail to reflect the original composers’ intentions. The fallen courtier’s imprecise transcriptions threaten to reduce the value of all duplicates (reprints), including artworks that are not properly autographic but that nevertheless convey accurate artistic information on their own terms. Such editions (reprints, impressions) are true to the artist’s original work and may be reproduced in various media including print, canvas, and sculptural bronze (subject inevitably to degradation over time). Assuming that they are complete and accurate, printed scores fulfill the artist’s wish to permit the distribution of sheet music for public consumption even if autographic copies possess far greater inherent value for the purists among fine art collectors. As to the performance of music, a proper copy of the notations is as authentic as an autographic original, as philosopher Nelson Goodman explains conclusively. Perdita takes originality to denote the apex of metaphysical purity—morality being one of her utmost considerations. Mopsa’s naïve holding on artistic authenticity is nevertheless far from trivial, for Paulina attempts unsuccessfully to convince Leontes of Hermione’s innocence by undertaking the same manner of proof. In Paulina’s view, Perdita is nothing but “a copy of the father,” which affirms beyond all doubt the sanctity of Sicilia’s royal marriage bed (2.3.99). Although Florizel lives in fear of discovery by his father, he too is drawn inexorably to Perdita’s exceptionalism, “Each your doing, / So singular in each particular, / Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, / That all your acts are Queens” (4.4.143-146). Mamillius is a true original perceived to be such even by Leontes against his own misconceived interests (before the enraged king

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appears to lose all contact with reality), but Perdita is her brother’s equal as a bona fide creation, Florizel being slightly less so due to his adoption of disguises, and so on down to Autolycus’s level as a known forger and noted peddler in fake multiples. Insofar as Renaissance rulers fall out, the unitary relationship between art and IR theory fractures proportionately, “The King hath on him such a countenance / As he had lost some province, and a region / Loved as he loves himself” (1.2.364-366). Whereas the territorial holdings of a state retain their identity in IR theory, the ontological value of art suffers from physical divisions. States remain nominally coherent no matter how extensively their borders are redrawn, or however many distant lands and tributaries are added to their roster of client-states abroad. The multiplication of IR holdings does not negate the singularity of the unipartite state, whatever the variation in its geographical profile over time. The converse applies as well, for states may increase their range by addition just as they lose dimension by conquest or division. The influence exerted overseas by an aggressor state may wax or wane, but its formal IR property remains that of a discreet player in the global system. Improper Innenpolitik (domestically oriented) policy thus subjects the populace to the effects of IR disintegration similar to those that would disqualify a painting in similar circumstances from enjoying the status of a physical original. By no means could a surreptitiously (or otherwise) altered painting ever be viewed as authoritative. The same holds true as to the performing arts like concerts and plays, which obey their own aesthetic rules.20 The multiples in which Autolycus traffics are forgeries by any measure, to which tortious ends the merry scoundrel adds his misrepresentation of their artistic or commercial authorship in order to increase sales, “Here’s the midwife’s name to’t; one Mistress Tale-Porter, and five or six honest wives that were present” (4.4.257-258). Yet allowing for differentiation proper to each form, the play’s IR and artistic categories overlap almost to the point of absolute identity under normal peacetime conditions.

III. Ephemeral Intelligence Leontes and Polixenes treat foreign policy as an extension of their long friendship. They overlook the systemic imperatives of IR realism due to their Innenpolitik theory. Innenpolitik foreign policy extends home-grown mores to the stature of rules in the global realm insofar as they reflect (i.e., copy) values refined in the domestic sphere. By contrast, IR realist theory assumes that global forces constitute the proper basis for estimations of foreign policy. In their preference for the Innenpolitik perspective, the play’s rulers invite into their folds the other’s perceived scofflaws and

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traitors, including Camillo and Florizel. Yet even IR realism acknowledges the validity of Perdita’s moral idealism, which requires that we weigh her ethical exceptionalism on the scales of diplomacy, “I think affliction may subdue the cheek, / But not take in the mind” (4.4.556-557). Innenpolitik theory gains a merely temporary advantage over IR realism thanks to opportunists like Autolycus, who caricature the presumed amorality of selfhelp policy by reducing political values to the most common monetary denominator, “I saw whose purse was best in picture” (4.4.581-582). The lowest common denominator is by no means a debased integer in arithmetic terms, but Autolycus’s calculation of value demands that he satisfy solely his immediate needs, “If I thought it were a piece of honesty to acquaint the King withal, I would not do’t; I hold it the more knavery to conceal it, and therein I am constant to my profession” (4.4.650-652). If IR realists fail to account sufficiently for free-riders in the system like Autolycus, the backslidden courtier (to be fair) commits no capital crime as grotesque as the one resulting from Leontes’s tyrannical abuse of Mamillius and Hermione. As a statesman determined to reassert not only his own influence but as well that of commonsense IR theory, Camillo casts doubt on the logic of Perdita’s idealism in affirming as inevitable the power of love to conquer all adversity, while ignoring for a time the obvious counterexample of Mamillius’s death. His critique of her belief in moral IR outcomes takes the form of an interrogation betraying nothing but admiration for her, “Yea? Say you so?” (4.4.557). He deplores the unequal treatment she receives as a result of her status as a stranger to the Bohemian court relative to that of Florizel, “There shall not at your father’s house these seven years / Be born another such” (4.4.558-559). His praise goes so far as to imply a rebuke of Polixenes (wisely) in the ruler’s absence. Camillo seems to discern no physical similarities between Perdita and the rulers he once served, but he generously seeks to facilitate her marriage, whereas the mores of the typical Sicilian-Bohemian courtier permit Autolycus to “do the Prince my master good” only if he might profit in the bargain (4.4.789-790). The play rules out showing IR duplicity rising to the level of military espionage, although Autolycus would no doubt have entertained dabbling in such multiples because Renaissance states sought high-value military secrets as a standard operating procedure. Such spying would assume that the play assigns a priority to military force of arms that is not borne out in the action; indeed, the information of greatest interest to some leaders seems at times quite mundane, including exacting details as to the physical appearance of potential marital partners overseas. Elizabeth asked Walsingham to investigate not only the political views of the Duke of Anjou but his “age, stature, conditions, religion, affections towards her Majestie, and devotion

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of his followers.”21 Restatements (replications) of superficial (ephemeral) appearances constitute a higher priority for Innenpolitik devotees than for pragmatic IR classical realists like Shakespeare and Elizabeth, whose perspectives encompass global patterns.

IV. The Intelligence in Artistic Replication Leicester’s request in 1571 that Walsingham (then posted in France) ship him a portrait of Charles IX seems rather inoffensive at first glance. European rulers and courtiers commissioned artists to create original portraits of foreign dignitaries in the studio or from extant originals (i.e., copies of copies). Leicester would have found accurate portraits of Charles and Anjou to possess intelligence value, but to “counterfeit of the King or his Brothers” would have entailed severe punishment during Charles’s reign.22 Walsingham declined Leicester’s request owing to France’s prohibition of pictorial representations of royalty, but he was quite receptive to a less controversial appeal from his former colleague Thomas Smith, Elizabeth’s principal secretary. Upon receipt of Smith’s advance of “five French crowns of the Sun,” Walsingham forwarded a replacement copy of a homeopathic medical book (Commentaries of Mathiolus upon Dioscorides), a metal ink pen, and several large compasses of a manufacture available only in Paris.23 Walsingham’s observance of French law showed that his felt obligation to diplomacy outweighed his inclination to assist an influential political ally, notwithstanding the legitimacy of Leicester’s request from a British security perspective. Queen Hermione’s artistic self-representation restores the value of royalty that Leontes destroys. She serves as her own perfectly accurate aesthetic model, therefore resolving the technical problem of a sculptor’s finding an exact image of her after her (fictional) demise. Her actual disappearance would have presented an insuperable artistic challenge even for a master like Giulio Romano, who could hardly be expected to replicate her image on the basis of a verbal description alone. If the perceived metaphysical value of royalty required that substitution (i.e., duplication, multiplication) be outlawed in France, Hermione elevates the category paradoxically by dissolving the mere image of aristocracy in descending from her real or imagined plinth to greet Leontes. As well, she inflates the currency of royalty to its proper level simply by dispelling at least a few of Leontes’s numerous misjudgments about reality. At the very least, the statue scene affirms the value of aesthetics in enriching our general intellectual capabilities. Leontes misapprehends appearances by seeing Hermione as an exquisite work of sculpture until proof to the contrary arises, yet we would have made the same error from

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our remote perches in the theatre but for our having been alerted beforehand to expect a bit of theatrical legerdemain. Although we are deprived of the opportunity to see an original work by Giulio Romano on stage, we are prepared as an alternative to evaluate Hermione’s transformation into a masterpiece in the guise of a statue because the playwright disallows our critiquing the action via concepts innocent of aesthetic judgment. Shakespeare may well have examined works by Giulio Romano (or others in his style) at court, thereby becoming apprised of the flourishing of aesthetic realism in Renaissance Florence. Perhaps unaware that Romano had gained his greatest fame as a painter and architect, the playwright is nonetheless far from mistaken in ascribing the talents of a sculptor to a celebrated artist whose reliefs stand the test of time. Crucially, the play makes an aesthetic issue out of situating Hermione-as-statue in the performance area, thereby transforming the stage for a time into a virtual art gallery. Staging Leontes’s recognition scene requires that Hermione be revealed by a curtain and that she descend to greet her well-wishers. Also at stake is Leontes’s training in true aesthetic value, an Herculean task she undertakes by becoming her own artifact of inestimable value. Hermioneas-statue (a modern aesthetic category) becomes Hermione the performance artist (a postmodern aesthetic category) before reverting to the theatrical complexities of Hermione in character (a well-worn Shakespearean aesthetic category), transformations communicated to the audience at the discretion of the actor. Our creative powers are engaged in full only in conjunction with her evolving theatrical ploy. Her demeanor might change almost imperceptibly in reaction to Leontes’s remarks on her aging, information that she could signal to us over the heads of her fellow characters. If the compounding of aesthetic levels in her role as a living sculpture makes her a forerunner of today’s performance artists, most of them, unfortunately, lack Shakespeare’s skill in the richly textured design of dramatic portraiture. Because Hermione’s performance as sculpture cannot flout the real-world passage of time given the physical demands involved in striking and holding a pose, Paulina seeks to extract from Leontes the most expansive possible vow of fidelity before inviting Hermione to descend. In this sense, the performance is governed by time in the grand sense alluded to by Time, the chorus. Fortunately for Hermione, Leontes cannot accept Paulina’s conditions quickly enough, including his exercise of faith, his indulgence in reasonable pleasures, and his consideration of contrary viewpoints: “What you can make her do / I am content to look on; what to speak / I am content to hear” (5.3.91-93). Paulina’s ruse succeeds because Hermione maintains her position just long enough for Leontes to accept her

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as he sees her, not as she once was; furthermore, until Hermione moves, Leontes believes Paulina’s claim that it is Giulio Romano who created her as she would have appeared after a lapse of sixteen years. Leontes’s inferior aesthetic view is elevated by his witnessing a (perceived) sculpture turn into a living being. For the play turns Hermione (as ideal art) into a worldly ‘thing,’ or what Nicholas Wolterstorff terms an “object-work” and what the Third Gentleman calls “a piece many years in doing.”24 Polixenes also refers to Perdita as a worldly object, “And thou, fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must know / The royal fool thou cops’t with—” (4.4.402-04). Yet the play’s defense of art’s ontological properties vitiates the derogatory meaning those like Leontes attach to Hermione’s (or Perdita’s) worldly being (i.e., as a “piece”). Hermione’s indisputable authenticity as the model (or duplicate) for her own autographic performance by no means vindicates Paulina’s fraudulent claim of curating a gallery opening highlighted by the unveiling of a statue created by Giulio Romano, who could not have achieved the photorealistic accuracy in representation that Paulina promises given the presumed absence of the prototype, “He so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer” (5.2.85-87). Hermione’s performance is satisfying despite (or because of) its muddying of the waters of artistic authenticity so ably clarified by Nelson Goodman. In her role as sculpture, she is a “one-stage” (static) artwork, to use Goodman’s terminology.25 Leontes’s emotional investment in Hermione’s memory compels him to treat the sculptural form as if it were solely a masterwork of religious iconography, which denies her as Leontes’s (mistaken) sacred representation the right to receive the unlimited artistic acclaim she might otherwise deserve and that might be bestowed upon less generically perceived one-stage works. Hermione transforms herself from a one-stage artwork into a combination of Goodman’s “two-stage” and “three-stage,” or mediated, art forms. 26 The copy, or model, is identical to the artform, or finished sculpture, which is a remarkable art-theoretical achievement in itself, yet it becomes reduplicated in the living performer him- or herself. Hermione’s transfiguration into a living being requires that we account for the aesthetic multiplicities in her singular appearance; thus, she advances both her interests and those of art by replicating her existence on various artistic levels. The quality of the recognition scene would have been reduced to the status of a rather competent visual gag had not Shakespeare instilled new levels of artistic value in Hermione’s interactions with Leontes, the audience, and aesthetics itself. Our response is modulated all the more by aesthetic ideas to the extent that we become increasingly skeptical of the statue’s validity as art

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over time, giving us an added ironic perspective on Leontes. He sees Hermione as a painted sculptural image, for colors were applied to such works in the classical era; however, the patina and color of unaltered marble surfaces change subtly as well under different atmospheric conditions. Hermione’s improvisations make each performance (i.e., rehearsal, repetition) of the statue scene unique above and beyond the normal differences to be expected in recurring live performances. Shakespeare undoubtedly contemplates but cannot possibly memorialize in his stage directions the improvisational nature (as to timing, etc.) of the scene’s aesthetic realization. Depending upon our proximity to the stage, a factor that Shakespeare cannot control, we might also detect natural signs that no performer can suppress: breathing, pulsing, and moisturizing of the eyes. Leontes’s modest intellectual awakening, overdue as it might be, requires affirmation by an audience whose artistic insights are assumed to be greater than the king’s but less than Hermione’s. Leontes suffers in forcing himself to resist the temptation to embrace a statue he ought not to touch for fear of violating cultural mores concerning the handling of freshly minted art. He is thoroughly taken in by the aesthetics of Italian High Renaissance representation, “Her natural posture!” (5.3.23). That he is initially correct out of sheer enthusiasm as to Hermione’s lifelike appearance does not mean that he possesses the aesthetic faculties required to see her true living composite value. Leontes’s exclamation informs us that the posture she assumes is neither monumental in the Roman imperial manner, nor mythological or religious in the style of the medievalists, nor exaggerated in the Baroque style associated with much Renaissance Venetian art. Nor is it bawdy, like some of Giulio Romano’s work, yet any posture she adopts is authentic because her artistry is identical to her very being. The degree of difficulty she is willing to endure in striking her pose depends upon her calculation of the amount of time it might take her to verify Leontes’s low-level reformation. The performer playing Hermione would no doubt have wished to duplicate, or freeze, one of her earlier stage motions by holding a recognizable bodily gest, or gesture. The dramatic tension would only increase if the audience sees her adopted pose as demanding a higher than normal level of difficulty to maintain in perfect stillness, a measurement it could gauge only with reference to her prior appearances. Paradoxically, Hermione’s posture is natural (authentic and original) insofar as it duplicates (imitates) one of her characteristic positions. Paulina demands above all that Leontes surmount the extraordinarily low standards constituting his fallen nature: “It is required / You do awake your faith” (5.3.94-95). The bulk of Goodman’s analysis holds true to form up to the point of Paulina’s addition of moral and

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metaphysical conditions, for, as he maintains, the standards governing theatrical impersonation confirm that Shakespeare’s theatrical realism is indeed “a matter of habit”: “Resemblance and deceptiveness, far from being constant and independent sources and criteria of representational practice are in some degree products of it.”27 If Goodman captures brilliantly the analytics of representation, he leaves morals out of his aesthetic equations as they might pertain to The Winter’s Tale (a play he does not intend to treat); however, on his hypothetical, all initially inconceivable differences between an authentic work and a seemingly identical but known forgery shall be disclosed in the fullness of time. Goodman sees the ultimate revelation of authenticity as being inevitable in virtue of the very rigors involved in our mental grappling with a work’s symbolic language. For the art object itself is to be viewed as a symbolmaking creation, confirming and developing our innate potential in conceptual thinking. Moral and religious considerations remain extraneous to the transparency Goodman demands (fairly enough) in philosophical analysis; however, the play’s resolution tips the critical balance toward religious and humanitarian values as against, or in addition to, the refined perceptual and mental calculations reflected in Goodman’s modern aesthetic holding.

V. Formalities and Repetitions in Diplomatic Intelligence Tudor-Stuart diplomats abroad traditionally mixed intelligence-gathering with ceremonial and political functions as a matter of course. Walsingham balanced his clandestine, political, and ceremonial duties, not necessarily in that order of priority, upon his arrival at the court of Charles IX in 1571 to replace Sir Henry Norris as England’s ambassador to France. His investiture ceremony reaffirmed these levels of diplomatic function in Tudor-Stuart foreign policy. He appeared before Charles in the company of Norris, who formally restated Elizabeth’s belief in the benefits of positive Anglo-French relations. As well, Norris vouched for Walsingham’s honor, discretion, and social standing. Having satisfied himself as to the merits of Norris’s testimony, about which he would already have been well informed via his own clandestine sources, Charles requested that the outgoing ambassador hand over Elizabeth’s letters of credence confirming Walsingham’s assignment to Paris. Charles’s aide read aloud Elizabeth’s written command that Walsingham strive to reach mutually beneficial accords with France. Charles welcomed the new ambassador to his post by voicing his approval of Elizabeth’s sentiments. These rituals, or “Ceremonies,” as Walsingham calls them, comprise two of the three dimensions of his ambassadorial duties: the ceremonial and political, but

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not the clandestine.28 Although the ritual followed a time-honored pattern, its importance to Elizabeth could not be overstated because she wished to profit by Spain’s imperious demeanor not only toward the French court but to other seats of government as well. Walsingham’s comportment had to be flawless if Elizabeth could so much as hope to exert a modicum of influence over French foreign policy. Walsingham completed his installation as ambassador with a “Negotiation” on the rights of Protestants in France, a matter of vital interest to Elizabeth and many other northern European powers.29 His dialogue with Charles constituted a nonbinding, non-improvisational exchange of policy viewpoints. British diplomats referred to any colloquy between state actors outside the scope of purely ceremonial discourse as being (roughly) a negotiation, there being no down time in diplomacy. Walsingham encouraged Charles to reject standing Roman and Spanish foreign policies by exercising lenience toward those in the (Protestant) “Religion.”30 He assured Charles of Elizabeth’s enthusiastic support in exchange for the fair treatment of the Huguenots. Walsingham and Norris reenacted this performance over the next several days for the king’s brother (Henry of Navarre), the Queen of Navarre (Catherine de Médicis), and the Duke of Anjou. In his follow-up report to Elizabeth, Walsingham recounts in great detail his correct observance of ceremonial proprieties in having secured Charles’s promise to consult England on major foreign affairs decisions. He conveys his reservations about Charles’s IR constancy because France’s king seemed to him to become bored by extended policy discussions, suggesting that the ceremony itself had largely superficial IR theory value for the host country. In light of his proper diplomacy, Walsingham could not be blamed for Charles’s subsequent approval of antiProtestant violence and other major concessions to Spain and Italy that left Anglo-French relations in their usual state of disarray. In addition to serving the crown, Walsingham responded quickly to diverse intelligence requests from Cecil, Leicester, and Lord Mildmay. He informed Cecil of the Catholic powers’ plans to divide England from France. Rather than seek a reconciliation with France, Philip and the Pope were determined to facilitate religious instability in the region. The Catholic bloc promised “Monsieur” (the Duke of Anjou) the top admiralty position in planned naval expeditions against the Turks solely in order to remove him from the list of possible suitors for Elizabeth’s hand.31 For their part, the Huguenots wished to pair Anjou with Elizabeth in order to rid from their midst an enemy to their cause. Walsingham was obligated to keep Cecil apprised of French policies that touched upon Elizabeth’s capacity as regent even though the idea of marriage never suited her demonstrated preference for a solitary domestic life in public affairs;

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moreover, her fidelity to the Church of England remained unshakable. Walsingham and Burleigh corresponded in a special code composed of Latin and Greek letters and symbols denoting French statesmen and other intelligence targets. Leicester wished to avail himself of this code, but his request was denied due to restrictions placed on the subscription list. Such minimal security protocols are utterly beyond the comprehension of the play’s Bohemian-Sicilian foreign policy institutionalists. That Autolycus seems to be the most informed character of all as to the domestic culture signals the depth of the crisis we are meant to discern in the play’s Innenpolitik theory because rulers are presumed to be closely attuned to the internal dynamics of their realms.

VII. Justified True Belief in The Winter’s Tale Leontes’s belief in the existence of an illicit affair between Hermione and Polixenes is perhaps understandable as a fit of jealousy (or as a tragically mistaken precursor to Sherlock Holmes’s famous scenario of the dog that didn’t bark in the night); however, Leontes revels in an imaginary discovery that is unsupported by convincing evidence, one that introduces the threat of aggression between formerly close allies. Far from reexamining his position based upon the advice of his advisors, Leontes reiterates his accusation as if it were a statement of fact beyond all reasonable doubt, not rank verbiage protected by the royal prerogative. So deeply has he become ensnared in his delusion that he doubts the contrary holding of Apollo. Insofar as his conceit has a logical basis, it relies on the following progression: 1. a. b. c.

L (Leontes) truly knows of A (the Affair) IFF (if and only if) Hermione participated in A, L believes that A occurred, and L’s belief in A is corroborated by Apollo and the ruling elite.

Leontes recants due mainly to his remorse over the death of Mamillius and subsequent reports of Hermione’s demise. Proof of mistaken understanding normally provokes a thoroughgoing reassessment of one’s governing rationale, but Leontes’s belief in the affair as well as in his IR theory had never been based on reason; instead, it was ever the irrational excrescence of his anti-IR realist habits of thought. Upon her (fictional) loss, he makes Hermione his new fount of all true wisdom, whereas he seems to have become somewhat inured over time to the trauma associated with Mamillius’s passing.

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The play illustrates starkly the fallacy in Leontes’s belief in Hermione’s affair. Had there been not only a sensual swerving but even the faintest possibility of such a consummation, Shakespeare would have been supremely capable of considering its implications and of providing evidence of its factual basis—yet he chose not to; instead, the playwright places his dramaturgical bet on letting Leontes’s error ride to its fatal conclusion. We cannot know to a scientific certainty that the illicit affair was consummated or even contemplated (with unprecedented secrecy by Shakespearean standards on the part of the suspected lovers, by the way) because such a confirmation cannot arise in the absence of a credible confession. We have no reason to lend credence to his accusation because, first, his track record on identifying correctly the demerits of others is woefully inadequate, and, second, his analysis fails on its own terms in addition to exposing the vacuity in his IR outlook. A slightly more reliable (but still insufficient) form of proof results from the following sequence: 2. a. b. c.

L knows of A IFF A occurred, L believes that A occurred, and L’s rationale for believing in A is good and sufficient.

But Leontes’s inadequate reasoning is so rife with error that each step in his proof falters under scrutiny. As to 2 above, Leontes cannot have known that the imaginary liaison achieved the mutually satisfying congress about which he fantasizes, an interlude celebrated thereafter with alleged foot-horsings and corner-skulkings, whose meaning he believes he alone is qualified to explicate (1.2.285, 286). Nor, in his fevered dreams, could Hermione’s carnality have been compelled plausibly by some equally fanciful threat, coercion, or temporary state of insanity. As to item 2a in the proof above, it would have gone against Shakespeare’s dramaturgical interests as well as the audience’s expectations to discount an event that cries out irresistibly for treatment by an artist endowed with unlimited intellectual resources. Any valid defense of 2b above depends upon Leontes’s perceived objectivity, an extraordinarily precarious proviso given that, although he seems reasonably sound of body, he is positively unsound of mind. He who had identified Mamillius as his exact replica is quick to express doubts that the self-same son springs from his loins. No action intervenes to add validity to his perceptions; for example, Leontes has evidently not been fitted with corrective prescription spectacles. Regarding 2c, even if Leontes had seen Hermione and Polixenes rubbing noses furtively with erotic abandon, such informality alone does not constitute validation ex post facto of an impregnation occurring months before the

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embers of their alleged lust had roared into Nietzschean flames of Dionysian ardor; therefore (contingently): 3. a. b. c.

L validly knows of A IFF A is true based on good evidence, L knows of A apart from any need to consult Apollo, and L’s belief in A is confirmed by Apollo.

If IR realists Camillo and Archidamus respect customs up to a point, Leontes violates existing social mores willy-nilly. Apollo leaves open the possibility of interpersonal remediation in contradicting Leontes’s accusations against Hermione, yet the king makes the cardinal error of forcing Hermione to prove a negative, thereby retarding the normal dramatic unfolding of logical verification by asking the impossible of her. In repenting of his mistake, Leontes adopts an irrational (if understandable) because over-solicitous attitude of pious remorse out of respect for the memory of his lost queen. Only by demonstrating the kind of aesthetic understanding that might undergird a substantial renewal of faith or at least of mental stability might he be disabused of the noetic confusion clouding his perspective upon the true state of affairs abroad. Most modern productions show Hermione and Polixenes interacting in such a way as to arouse Leontes’s suspicions short of validating his charges, presumably in an appeal to modern notions of psychological realism; however, we fail to assign the value due to epistemology if we do not attempt to determine which beliefs might be true and justified equaling knowledge as it concerns Leontes, who rests his case upon two slender reeds.32 First, Polixenes is a potential seed-bearer in biological terms based upon the duration of his visit, but this standard of proof hardly limits the universe of possible suspects. Second, Polixenes yields to Hermione’s entreaties to prolong his visit despite having professed that only Leontes could change his mind—precisely the kind of impoverished evidence that Sicilia’s king could not fail to overrate: “At my request he would not” (1.2.86). Therefore (with somewhat greater validity): 4. a. b. c.

L’s knowledge of A is valid IFF A occurred, L’s knowledge of A is based upon evidence, and L’s true belief in A is proven by reasonable objective standards.

Yet to side with Leontes, one must place a high-risk wager on the guilty couple’s expertise in social concealment in order to hit the jackpot (i.e., to cash in on winnings inflated by the long odds against their guilt); however, Leontes solicits Apollo’s advice before serving them with his bill of

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particulars, which scarcely reflects the king’s uninhibited confidence in his own analysis. Nor does Leontes give the slightest thought to the disruption in Sicilian affairs and IR policy caused by his airing of outlandish claims. Using circular logic, Leontes stands his ground on scant evidence because he sees the affair’s very incredibility to others as enhancing its validity. Emotions slant his comprehension to such an extent that he suspends reasonable rules of governance: “Affection! thy intention stabs the centre” (1.2.137). The “intention,” or intensity, of his desire negates his obligation to attend not only to the general good (Innenpolitik) but as well to respond to an implicit threat of domestic treachery that the affair connotes (if true), one that would constitute a worrisome breach of security and morals; however, his soliloquy contains epistemological errors of fact and omission. He believes that affection could either inhabit his dreams in furtherance of the creation of false phantoms, or join with facts to produce evidence easily mistaken as real, but affection as such is never commensurate to the task of realistically assessing world affairs. Leontes’s misdiagnosis of an alleged ethical violation precludes him from considering more elegant solutions to a perceived moral failing. In concluding that any delay in punishing her sin would imperil his rule, he throws caution to the winds by reacting in such haste as to utterly disregard the risks associated with unleashing overseas a cascade of unforeseen harms. The twin kings (in terms of their mutual admiration) had never been analytical in their governance; instead, their policies seem mirrorreflective, not policy-responsive. Relative to Leontes, Polixenes shows a greater consciousness of his formative years with his fast friend as a time of prelapsarian bliss in which their worldviews seemed as identical (duplicative) as those of “twinned lambs”; nevertheless, each ruler discounts the nobility he sees in Perdita until it is agreed by general acclamation that she is indeed Leontes’s daughter (1.2.66). Leontes’s denial of Paulina’s proof of Perdita’s legitimacy as a babe is thus repeated in Polixenes’s rejection of Perdita as being unworthy of Florizel’s hand. The rulers may once have been virtual replicas (multiples), but they were never intellectual equals because Polixenes seems to have possessed somewhat greater intuitive powers of understanding. To be fair, IR realists themselves have not always adhered to the highest standards so as to validate sufficiently their beliefs. In abandoning Perdita on the Bohemian coastline, Antigonus rejects the good advice in a life-like dream wherein Hermione implores him either to abandon his inhumane mission or to pay the steep price of abrogating his relationship with his wife, “’For this ungentle business / Put on thee by my lord, thou ne’er shalt see / Thy wife Paulina more’” (3.3.33-35). Ever the IR realist, Camillo defects to Bohemia in order to serve a ruler in dire need of reliable

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counsel. Polixenes rewards Camillo for his disloyalty to Sicilia by promising him safety and security, “Be pilot to me, and thy places shall / Still neighbour mine” (1.2.443-44). Camillo changes allegiance according to the dictates of self-interest. Moral justification plays a negligible role in his decision, a reflection of his innate distrust of Innenpolitik thinking; therefore, his failing as an IR realist is ethical, not analytical. In debating Polixenes, Perdita affirms a standard of authenticity that must exclude artifice (an increasingly difficult position to maintain in the play), whereas Polixenes proposes a standard of propriety that rules out authenticity (an equally challenging standard to sustain). Hermione’s manifestation as a statue brings to a head Leontes’s aesthetic failings, which taint all related IR anti-realist (and idealist) levels of analysis: 5. a. b. c.

L knows that S (the Statue) is real (qua art) IFF S is real (solely as art), L believes that S is real (solely as art), and L has good and sufficient reason to believe that S is real (solely as art).

But 5a above is verifiably false qua art on a cursory examination of Hermione’s robes, which could not have been sewn together from panels of solid marble or bronze because the resulting back-breaking weight would rule out any possibility that she might assume a graceful or characteristic pose. On the other hand, if the statue is indeed Hermione herself, then it could not be a work of art simpliciter on Leontes’s conception of verisimilitude. 5b is false because of Leontes’s faulty means of verification (shown in his need for Apollo’s validation). 5c fails because the statue is a composite artform—an aesthetic concept beyond Leontes’s comprehension. If the formal logic above seems misapplied to the creativity marking a masterpiece of the drama, Shakespeare himself makes such a point of refuting Leontes point by point that a brief foray into Edmund Gettier’s analysis of justified true belief poses no threat to our justified true belief in the playwright’s artistry. Leontes presents an unusual Gettier problem by showing the king’s absolute, (tacitly) divine, and demonstrably unfair right to be wrong about Hermione in virtue of his exalted rank.

VIII. Pragmatic Intelligence in Diplomacy The Winter’s Tale does not proffer a scenario affirming Innenpolitik theory because the play renders the concept as being at best dependent upon higher IR principles. Most Renaissance diplomats were prepared to offer a bird’s eye-view assessment of their states for their counterparts abroad, but Bohemian-Sicilian diplomacy suspends all rationality by treating ephemeral

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issues that justify the modern institutional rationale for a division of labor in diplomatic analysis. Walsingham’s diplomatic brief was to preserve Huguenot gains, a political consideration relating to French internal affairs, but he was not privy to Elizabeth’s overarching strategy to block Spain’s domination of France, an IR consideration involving relations between states; therefore, he bears no responsibility for Elizabeth’s failure to prevent Charles from acceding to the wishes of Catholic powers bordering his southern flank. After all, foreign actors had IR realist obligations of their own that neither Charles nor Elizabeth (nor Polixenes) could wish away. Renaissance diplomats responded with alacrity to their rulers’ personal inquiries. Elizabeth relied routinely on secretly obtained information to evaluate marriage proposals, but the price for gaining her hand in marriage was vertiginously steep: 1) a mutual defense alliance requiring France to assist Britain but relieving Britain of the need to defend France in the event of a Spanish invasion; 2) peace in the Low Countries; and 3) the reversion of Calais to Britain notwithstanding the Treaty of CateauCambrésis. Elizabeth kept this analysis mainly to herself to avoid sowing diplomatic confusion within the ranks, as she had done inadvertently during the Cateau-Cambrésis negotiations. Her preference to remain single had been well established since her youth; nevertheless, she would likely have agreed to enter into a foreign alliance had it proven to be inordinately beneficial to and/or absolutely necessary for the safety of the realm. Having given Walsingham leave to speak freely, she heard his assertion that the Duke of Anjou and Alençon would sow religious discord domestically. He observed that Francis was very much her junior in addition to having suffered superficial disfigurement as a result of contracting smallpox as a youth. Yet Elizabeth enjoyed Anjou’s company so much that she treated him as a serious candidate for marriage, although the Pope’s nuncio characterized their possible alliance in less than flattering terms in judging her to be prohibitively senescent relative to the Frenchman. Such granular covert information often exerts outsized IR influence when applied to personal decision-making. Diplomats were ordered at times to employ rather exotic methods to shed light on an adversary’s innermost feelings. Philip sought to verify Elizabeth’s intentions by having his representative record her facial reactions as she read his letter advising her on how she should manage her domestic and foreign affairs. In a missive of July 18, 1559, Philip ordered the Bishop of Aquila to provide “full particulars of how the Queen takes it, which it is necessary I should know.”33 Aquila’s mission put a new slant on the meaning of Elizabeth’s presence chamber, for Spain’s ruler wished her IR secrets to be revealed in person via her unconscious physiological responses. Yet she remained stone-faced during the encounter because she

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was too clever to reveal the truth of her opinion of Spain by nonverbal means; therefore, Philip’s Leontes-like gambit failed utterly.

IX. The Winter’s Tale and the Battle for IR Theory Supremacy Reckless remarks issuing from overheated imaginations result in death and damaged relations between Sicilia and Bohemia, although disagreements between IR theorists generally produce less dire consequences. The proceedings of an International Studies Association conference in 2000 saw a slight misunderstanding erupt into a controversy over the perceived validity of IR realism in the post-Soviet era. IR realism had towered over IR theory throughout most of the twentieth century, but a reduction in global threats due to Russia’s decline revived interest in such anti-realist theories as neoliberalism, constructivism, and idealism. Numbered among those advocating theories in the latter camp is John Vasquez, who sought to prevail over his intellectual foes (as was his wont); however, his remarks were misinterpreted by offensive realist John Mearsheimer as constituting a declaration in favor of bias against proponents of IR realism. Whereas Vasquez maintained that IR realists completely misconceive world affairs, Mearsheimer demonstrated a) the overwhelming influence that the theory has continued to wield among world leaders to this very day and b) the prima facie evidence of its success in restraining bad actors over the last century (e.g., Axis Germany and Japan, the Soviet Union, and even contemporary China). The spoken words sparking the controversy are those of Vasquez, “ . . . a degenerative research program should not continue to command the intellectual energy and resources of the field.”34 Mearsheimer had grown so accustomed to the academy’s (perceived) expression of antiIR realist sentiments that his perception of Vasquez’s (non)proposal to defund IR realist research seemed to him to go too far. The contretemps reveal the sensitivity of some IR theorists to the prospect of having to entertain a broad array of perceived anti-empirical viewpoints since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Mearsheimer’s error was entirely his fault despite Vasquez’s parsing of his language about defunding that was couched in his familiar critiques of IR realism. Although the offending statement as such did not threaten the quashing of IR realist projects, Mearsheimer drew the mistaken inference as a reasonable conference attendee. In declaiming against IR realism’s perceived shortcomings, Vasquez merely asserted in general terms that research into degenerating subject matters should not receive high-level funding—an entirely anodyne statement. Mearsheimer took the remark mistakenly as a denial of his right to free academic speech, an error that he magnified by

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accusing Vasquez of trafficking in a viewpoint “remarkable for its intolerance.”35 Vasquez claimed fairly that he had merely intended to downplay the relevance of retrograde world orders, not valuable IR theories about retrograde systems. Yet given that Vasquez’s reputation as a staunch anti-IR realist preceded him, it was perhaps understandable that some confusion might ensue in a public setting. Ironically, anti-IR realist theories have always flourished in a symbiotic relationship with IR realism, which The Winter’s Tale reflects by showing Innenpolitik conflicts producing real (fictional) victims in foreign affairs; however, the major philosophical syllogism guiding the action proceeds flawlessly because 1) Leontes’s moral misperception (revealed by art) is compounded by 2) Polixenes’s aesthetic misunderstanding (presented as a reiterated moral failing), leading to 3) Hermione’s redemptive moral and aesthetic revelation. Time insists upon the inferior nature of aesthetic comprehension relative to his/her “power / To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour / To plant and o’erwhelm custom” (4.1.7-9). The choric figure wisely refrains from interceding in Apollo’s affairs so as to avoid compromising the beneficial if seemingly improbable results flowing from the god’s prophecy. Time stands apart from morals and aesthetics in order to maintain a level of impartiality as a “witness” to events dating from the beginning of recorded history; however, in effectively dividing the dramatic action into temporal halves, the chorus contributes decisively to the play’s vital consideration of aesthetics and IR theory (4.1.11). On the other hand, we may well feel justified in seeking to write moral codicils into foreign policy positions where possible, but we should not apply inflexibly “a morality test for theories of international relations” (as Robert G. Gilpin cautions correctly).36 Crucially, none of the IR theories in the present study celebrates the mental torture and possible slaughter of innocents, as Leontes does so callously; consequently, absent the justifiably proven influence of other possible metaphysical actors, The Winter’s Tale gains far more from IR realism than it does from Innenpolitik theory based upon Shakespeare’s implicit awareness of the following axioms: a. Bohemia and Sicilia are always one stray remark removed from hostility; b. Friendship is scarcely more a guarantor of peace than it is of conflict; c. If the play had made Polixenes and Leontes rulers of states as large as Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, their dispute would have devolved quickly into total, global war.

Shakespeare chooses his kingdoms carefully, they being neither too large nor too small, in order to remove the extremes of absolute military aggression and pure idealism from the list of likely outcomes (including

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aesthetic reiterations, repetitions, etc.) resulting from the (virtual) Cold War descending upon Bohemia and Sicilia.

CHAPTER FIVE THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN: THE ART OF AN UNETHICAL GLOBAL SYSTEM

Abstract In conceptual terms, The Two Noble Kinsmen leverages its stake in international relations (IR) theory in order to accumulate fine art, the latter seen increasingly as the true mirror of human aspirations. Co-authors Shakespeare and John Fletcher capitalize their art portfolio by short-selling IR realism following Theseus’s grudging conquest of Thebes. The gods underwrite solely victorious leadership abroad; thus, institutional actors double-down on their investments in the global system in order to increase their chances of survival.

Duke Theseus interrupts his impending nuptial rites in order to vanquish an authoritarian neighbor, although the corrective measure affords the legendary Athenian ruler no apparent delight (unlike the famous victory Hal celebrates in Henry V). The Two Noble Kinsmen does not treat Theseus’s triumph as proof of the supremacy of international relations (IR) realism as such. Various global actors intervene in political affairs, some possessing strength exceeding not only that of Creon, the defeated Theban king who becomes one of the play’s cautionary tales, but as well of demigods like Theseus. Some institutional players even boast of legacies extending back to the very origins of the classical universe; therefore, IR realism (which privileges strong unitary actors in an anarchic system) scarcely fits the play’s showing of fickle institutional mores. IR reversals owe to rather inscrutable divine edicts as well as to Theseus’s remarkable willingness to entertain the claims of defeated Theban knights for Hippolyta’s sister’s hand in marriage. Ironically, the action produces not too few accountable leaders, but far too many—for the good of IR realism. The intensity with which competing views on the nature of interstate authority are presented raises troubling metaphysical questions about the classical global order. The deepest IR-related conflicts arise due to divisions between the gods; thus, Palamon and Arcite (once confirmed moral absolutists) come to define heroic values according to the

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pronouncements of the deity whom they deem most likely to ensure them a successful result in the trial by combat. The play’s aesthetic remedy offers only partial compensation for the harms resulting from global misrule in a universe that seems increasingly devoid of morals. For, by definition, aesthetics alone cannot replace the moral imperatives governing a proper IR system.

I. IR Theory in Extremis Athens towers over all other potential regional hegemons thanks to Theseus’s prowess in defeating Thebes. The victor’s dominance shows in the apparent absence of an armed opposition. In John Mearsheimer’s offensive realist terms, Athens maximized her military strength so that she might behave as she wishes without fear of retaliation from “peercompetitors.”1 Just as Creon conquered his IR inferiors, so Athens prevailed over Thebes; therefore, Theseus has ample occasion to look upon the world as a fertile field that he might harvest for his own ends—but for his caution. Athens’ enviable position in the global system lends some credence to the tenets of both IR realism and offensive realism, the latter entailing realism without the compunctions of moral leadership. John Fletcher’s skillful co-authorship only accentuates the play’s seeming depiction of Manichean extremes in IR theory.2 Mearsheimer once inveighed against the influence of the (so-called) Israel lobby for its distortion of the equilibrium proper to foreign policy (a flawed critique, in my view, about which no more need be said in the present study); however, Shakespeare’s Jupiter nullifies the lobbying efforts of Venus and Mars by imposing a harsh if balanced resolution derived from the play’s Chaucerian source.3 The play’s offensive realist credentials are discounted heavily by the gods, who cast lots over the fate of mortals like Emilia, Arcite, and Palamon. Their form of divine rule seems to favor IR neoliberal institutionalism, a theory long noted for seeking to eliminate the vestiges of anarchy in the system. The deities themselves proclaim their omnipotence as individual stakeholders within a strong collective, in striking contrast to Mearsheimer’s famous verdict on states as black boxes in the global order: “Leadership matters, but leadership doesn’t matter very much.”4 Jupiter and Theseus exert such overwhelming authority in their respective realms that powerful leadership seems to matter above all other IR considerations, but the duke’s triumphant military posture cannot be depreciated as the consequence of favoritism by the gods. If Act One defends the notion that only independent actors matter (as per IR neorealism and offensive realism), Acts Two through Five promote the viewpoint that only

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cooperative powers matter (as per neoliberalism and constructivism). The audience is left to ponder the play’s IR theory complexity, defined on one faint horizon line by Robert O. Keohane’s opinion that “institutions sometimes matter” (by which he means, frankly, that they matter a great deal) and at the other vanishing point by Mearsheimer’s holding that “leadership doesn’t matter very much” (by which he means, frankly, that civil institutions do not really matter at all).5 In the final analysis, the playwrights sustain both IR realism and IR neoliberal institutionalism in somewhat attenuated forms. IR neoliberalism enjoyed a heyday in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union because the theory tends to thrive in peaceful conditions. In my view, neoliberalism prepares mainly for peace, while IR realists prepare always for possible wars. Neoliberal institutionalists wish to diminish anarchic violence in the system by promoting global economic associations. The tenor of their debates with IR realists nevertheless offers scant hope for bridging the divide. Keohane, an institutionalist who is no one’s starry-eyed idealist, points hopefully to the role assumed by IR neoliberals in penalizing aggressors in the aftermath of the Falklands War by creating “a linkage between EC budget contributions and the sanctions issue.”6 Keohane regards the sanctions imposed upon Argentina as proof of the efficacy of IR global institutionalism in penalizing belligerence, but the UK and the indirectly victorious EU succeeded only in assessing yet another penalty upon yet another impoverished IR loser, which has long been a staple in the annals of European warfare. As a consequence, one more in a succession of broken, second-rank powers owes reparations that it cannot afford to first-world institutional actors. Outside the regime of war sanctions, weak members with marginal standing in the EU like contemporary Greece suffered under the austerity measures imposed by wealthy Northern European states. The cascading global financial disasters of 2007-2009 stemmed from major brokerage house bankruptcies, market crashes, and plummeting real estate valuations that caused banks headquartered in Germany and Holland to balk at lending good Euros to presumptively bad Grecian and Italian institutions. This decision visited great pain upon Mediterranean populaces beginning in earnest from 2011-2013. The EU institutionalists’ solution to the impoverishment of poor treaty partners seemed identical to their prescription for neutralizing international aggression, which was that the strong should behave like IR neorealists toward the weak. On the other hand, The Two Noble Kinsmen’s liberal institutionalists (e.g., the supplicant queens) approach Theseus with no compelling claim upon Athenian policy other than their moral suasion. To their credit, they change Theseus’s IR

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policy to their liking in part because he had already reached more or less the same conclusion as to the danger posed by Creon’s immorality. Keohane contends that Mearsheimer attributes to classical liberals like himself “a view that we do not hold: that institutions can prevent war regardless of the structure in which they operate.”7 He implies that IR realists unfairly assign contradictory holdings to IR institutionalists in order that the dominant theory might dispatch expeditiously a competing political concept; however, institutionalists have always sailed on the winds of war by charting a course toward economic rewards and punishments, a view depreciated by IR realists as rather thin beer where vital national interests are concerned. The institutionalists have shown their stripes all along by tacking toward IR realism in the face of strife, yet the play shows its sophistication by couching the Theban queens’ belief in universal religious mores in accusations betraying an intense personal hatred for Creon. These supplicants modulate their tone in order to reduce Theseus’s options to the one they prefer above all others: the destruction of the Theban tyrant; nevertheless, official Athenian policy is based upon a full appreciation of the consequences of war. Unlike Theseus’s brand of IR classical realism, liberal institutionalists place the utmost faith in the mere distribution of information per se as a panacea for stern decision-making. IR neoliberal theory tends to hold the production of data to be an end in itself: “But if one can secure more information, it may be possible to follow policies that more nearly maximize utility.”8 Yet an ever-increasing surplus of information, valid or otherwise, is in itself no guarantee of a rational deductive process. No amount of additional data provided by the supplicant queens could impel Theseus to launch an attack against Thebes. As a rule, the activity of collating information must cease in order that leaders of Theseus’s stature might effectuate a propitious foreign policy strategy. The largely unacknowledged aggressive strain in neoliberal institutionalist policy pushes it to the very brink of IR realism, if not over the edge, in its attempt to clear the indebtedness of subservient allies. When faced with political and economic uncertainty, the elite players in treaty partnerships like the EU may adopt IR realist policies as a means of control cloaked in the discourse of cooperation, “It is in this sense that institutionalism claims to subsume realism.”9 EU institutions (notably banks) retain all of the advantages of interstate cooperation (e.g., common-market tariffs, mutual defense agreements, sovereign currencies, etc.) while demanding that financially embarrassed treaty members abide by draconian budgetary restrictions; therefore, the gentility in the EU’s (and in The Two Noble Kinsmen’s) affirmations of IR institutionalist unity depends entirely upon whose ox is being gored.

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II. The Birth of IR Institutionalism Shakespeare and Fletcher write the final four Acts to make the case for IR institutionalism in such a way that it is endowed with neither more nor less morality than IR realism. The playwrights waste no time in identifying the institutional disputants: the arts of procreation vs. chivalric combat, or, Venus vs. Mars. In prose generally attributed to Shakespeare, the Wooer restates the conditions for his alliance with the Jailer’s Daughter: “Sir, I demand no more than your own offer, and I will estate your daughter in what I have promised.”10 Shakespeare having advanced Venus’s institutional imperative, Fletcher takes up the Martian case by recording Palamon’s lament upon honor, a value that he fears is destined never again to enter the lists to endure the test of his cold steel: “Our good swords now— / Better the red-eyed god of war ne’er wore!— / Ravished our sides, like age must run to rust / And deck the temples of those gods that hate us” (2.1.79-82). Palamon believes that his mores shall endure assault amid strife between the gods, although he cannot foretell of his loss to Arcite on the ceremonial field of battle. For divine principles are not aspirations wafting in classical æther beyond the ken of mere mortals; rather, their dictates inform institutions resting firmly upon the earth. The Theban knights’ dispute lends itself to being arranged in a circus (or circuit) as a logical consequence of Theseus’s stipulations for the contest. Theseus requires that the knights “appear again in this place,” which is located in the liberties outside Athens’ central business district (3.6.293). The combatants are to be accompanied by champions, although the play’s three worthies apiece are fewer by theatrical necessity than Chaucer’s one hundred. As well, Theseus sets the ground rules for victory in the marital contest, “I’ll plant a pyramid; and whether, / Before us that are here, can force his cousin / By fair and knightly strength to touch the pillar, / He shall enjoy her” (3.6.294-297). Given the opportunity to improve the undeveloped fictional landscape, Fletcher (the scene’s author), like Chaucer, adds houses of worship to the wooden O surrounding the pyramid. Much to the benefit of IR institutionalism, the new infrastructure includes not only separate altars for Mars, Venus, and Diana, but a smokefilled temple belching incense to the heavens, “Now let ‘em enter, and before the gods / Tender their holy prayers” (5.1.1-2). A private quarrel set to be resolved amid scrub brush becomes institutionalized to the point that theatrical gimmickry is installed to transmit signals conveying the decrees of the gods. The gods’ auspicious signs are certain to be misinterpreted by benighted mortals, adding layers of suspense to the fate of characters sensitive to the slightest mischance. As a consequence, the audience’s

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aesthetic judgment and nervous system are primed to be manipulated to the breaking point. Institutions on high, including their deities in the classical pantheon, promulgate edicts rationalized and aestheticized by earthly institutions, yet none of their value judgments bears even a passing resemblance to the purity of philosophical idealism. As philosopher Roger Scruton observes humorously on the misconception entertained by those denying the aesthetic distinction between metaphysical ideals and lowerorder interests, “That is like saying that the desire for a steak could be satisfied (after a bit of mental exertion) by staring at a picture of a cow.”11

III. The Aesthetic Value of IR Institutionalism The concept of love as a philosophical realist value does not survive its first encounter with the presumed actuality of a sometimes violent IR arena. Emilia attributes her belief in love’s transcendental reality to her admiration of a childhood friend, “ . . . the true love ‘tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex dividual” (1.3.81-82). Hippolyta seems to take Emilia’s formulation of a highly refined philosophical holding to be a bold declaration of her sexual preference. The Amazon contends that, presented with the same philosophical dilemma, she would eagerly choose to remain as Theseus’s mate. Even so, Hippolyta would never have allowed Emilia to undergo the Pavlovian therapy inflicted upon the Daughter, whose sensual energies are redirected toward her acceptance of an arranged marital partner; however, Emilia’s notion of love is perforce required to evolve. She does not so much deny her prior philosophical belief as reconsider it in the context of her present inhumane predicament, which requires her to wed and bed the champion of the Theban contest, “Enter Emilia alone, with two pictures” (4.2.0). The manner in which she chooses to contemplate her fate on stage involves aesthetics of a decidedly visual orientation, notwithstanding her profound moral values. In establishing a ranking of the merits of each unwished-for marital prospect, Emilia is subject to the same whims and uncertainties as any other mortal attempting to ford the streams of connubial bliss. She examines each portrait in order to find therein a sympathetic reflection of her worldview. She does not critique the images for their artistic value; instead, she dilates upon the subjects’ expressive qualities, which are either imparted by the artist, imposed on the works by she herself, or translated in terms she hopes the audience might find reasonable. Each painting depicts qualities complicating her selection process, for neither a French ménage à trois nor a retreat to a nunnery is an option she might legitimately entertain, “What a mere child is Fancy, / That having two fair gawds of equal sweetness / Cannot distinguish, but must cry for both!” (4.2.52-54). Her enduring

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philosophical beliefs render her somewhat impotent on the level of tactical decision-making; however, her assessment of her chances of choosing the most compatible knight is at any rate of no practical consequence because she has relinquished her right to influence the selection process. Given Arcite’s victory, Emilia laments that her prospective marriage will be tainted irreparably by the ritual slaughter of the defeated combatant (Palamon), whose worth by prevailing social standards exceeds that of any earthly maid. She assumes correctly that her most cherished philosophical insights are predetermined to be seen as inferior in relationship to the tenets of chivalry. Yet the Theban champions themselves discount their values to suit IR contingencies. Palamon calls Venus “false” without any evident fear of retribution (5.4.44). The dying Arcite concedes that his claims upon Emilia are “false, / Yet never treacherous,” his hairsplitting logic nevertheless finding favor among his admirers (5.4.91-92). Individual agents fail to live up to their own idealist standards upon being introduced to the uncertainties of chivalric combat. In order that the winner-take-all rules might produce the fatal outcome that Theseus requires, the playwrights simply ignore Chaucer’s after-action narrative on the joy Emilia experiences in her marriage to Palamon. In positing the differences between ideal and worldly being, which Plato treats in terms of heavenly forms and ersatz reflections on the cave wall, The Two Noble Kinsmen infuses all levels of analysis with aesthetics and erotic love to the extent of altering their ontological makeup. The captives in Plato’s cave are bound with metal chains rather than by oath, but the play’s philosophical shadows are just as imitative of Plato’s image of flickering silhouettes. In view of the gods’ intention to rule by obscuring the course of future events, the play’s visual appearances retain at least the use-value of ennobling each combatant even if they do not vindicate the champions’ institutional allegiances. The play’s chivalric principles receive aesthetic representation more than divine validation. Arcite takes a moral realist view of a martial calling that he once believed Palamon shared unstintingly, “Let’s think this prison holy sanctuary, / To keep us from corruption of worse men. / We are young and yet desire the ways of honor” (2.1.130-132). If love casts a veil of illusion over each devotee, Arcite makes honor seem an even more jealous mistress, for the Theban knights’ mutual admiration is such that each fears a loss at the hands of the other in view of the rival’s perceived moral and physical superiority. No blame attaches however to these adventurers for their jailbreaks. Arcite is freed on Theseus’s exile order, while Palamon makes his escape on the basis of the Daughter’s reasonably coherent if mistaken belief in her prospects for an alliance with him. Far

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from openly misleading her, Palamon pays her scarcely more than the customary courtesies before taking flight at his first opportunity. At the decisive moment, Arcite swears allegiance to chivalric honor based upon a theatrical “token of thy [Mars’s] pleasure” that the stage directions record for posterity, “ . . . there is heard clanging of armor, with a short thunder as the burst of a battle” (5.1.61, 62-63). Shakespeare places an implied time limit on Mars’s aural demonstration of his natural powers because Palamon’s and Emilia’s avowals are sanctified by much more subtle indications of heavenly approval. The playwrights strive to equalize the theatrical weight assigned to each divine actor because the delicate sound of doves in flight scarcely registers at a volume equal to that of thunder and the clashing of iron against steel. The play’s sonic indications of symbolic warfare are produced not by musical instruments but by other means, as if there exists a plentiful supply of theatrical resources that more than suffices to evoke a world order purified by Mars, the “Shaker of o’errank states” (5.1.63). A merely representational aesthetic stage effect is to be taken as a sign of the direct intervention of a war-like god capable of destroying terrestrial champions with consummate ease. Not surprisingly, Arcite’s speech in the temple is bereft of metaphysical ideas, a far cry from the philosophical position that he defended when he embraced Palamon unreservedly as a brother in arms. On Arcite’s revised holding, the complementary forces of nature and humanity are inferior to the power he hopes Mars might bestow upon him, hence his desire to establish direct access to a prime mover capable of dominating all of his foes. Arcite’s appeal produces the loudest theatrical response, but Palamon’s champion distributes her powers so universally as to encompass the quite grotesque image of a gouty “anatomy” whose necrotic seed somehow quickens a ripe “fere” with new life (5.1.115, 116). Palamon’s insight into the Daughter’s motivations (even those moving her to effect his release from prison) may well have inspired him to take the side of the goddess of Love, but his argument is beset with apparent contradictions of daunting proportions. He wishes to instill the values of moral and personal constancy in a deity known to be nothing but permissive in disgorging erotic energy abroad. Venus places no limits on how sexual congress might best be achieved, whether by force, by guise, by genuine mutual attraction, or by exchange of filthy lucre. Palamon’s testimony indicates that he is fully aware of the society he keeps, including those who violate normal aesthetic standards in order to “abuse young lays of love” (5.1.89). Venusian power is demonstrated most clearly via such incongruities: the mighty warrior reduced to anguished tears of love, the confirmed bachelor ensnared at last in the nets of lust, and the senescent and infirm essaying the reproductive act in their sick beds. To separate himself from such

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undistinguished company, Palamon pleads innocent by reason of his repudiation of casual illicit encounters. To this extent, he maintains, his ethics are entirely noble. Palamon is somewhat compromised theatrically as a representative of Venus. Conventional drama would have been better served had he been created as a reformed scamp, for then the playwrights could have shown him admitting the error of his ways, or, alternatively, they could first reveal him in a compromising position contradicting his public image. For Venus is not discriminating as to whom she admits into her fold; indeed, her rules would be validated all the more by our overhearing the confession of a fresh-faced youth rather than by entrapping the archetypal leaping lord. Palamon fulfills the goddess’s primary condition by obeying the dictates of his passions. He is a clever advocate of a hedonistic cult because other knights-errant would not associate (promiscuous) Love with an affair of honor. If at first glance her sensuality seems an inappropriate qualification for her admission into a Martian forum, Venus becomes the divine authority par excellence based upon the erotic premise of the entire controversy. Palamon treats an inconclusive signal as proof of the veracity of his belief, “Here music is heard, doves are seen to flutter” (5.1.129). Despite the pacifistic imagery attending upon the goddess, he swears allegiance to erotic love in all of its permutations as an earthly power so strong as to “put life into dust” (5.1.110). Yet as a votaress standing before the altar of her sworn deity, Emilia is not only the most accomplished of the trio in affirming the tokens of her innocence, but she enacts the proper rites with the greatest precision, “Still music of records. Enter Emilia in white, her hair about her shoulders, a wheaten wreath; one in white holding up her train.” She makes a faithful demonstration of her beliefs by burning “incense and sweet odors,” aromatic substances conveyed on a “silver hind” (5.1.137-138). She wishes no ill upon the disputants besides praying that she not be forced to submit to either of them. Her appeals are synchronized with theatrical business, including stage directions ordering the disappearance of the hind and the elevation in its place of a rose bush bearing but a single flower. Her salutes to divinity are accentuated with precise theatrical tricks: “Here is heard a sudden twang of instruments, and the rose falls from the tree” (5.1.167). She sees as propitious all of the signs invoked on her behalf, including the appearance of the sole living rose, yet she cannot comprehend the negative implications of the falling bud and the removal of the rose bush. Her virtue counts for nothing against metaphysical ironies that the audience may well sense, such devices being communicated solely by aesthetic means. Emilia affirms the impartiality in her assessment of the combatants by rejecting the outcome of the tournament as immoral, “Is this winning?”

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(5.3.138). She is so advanced ethically as to regard as savage any result by which one kinsman perishes in order to achieve what seems the utterly incongruous eventuality of a marital alliance, “O all you heavenly powers, where is your mercy?” (5.3.139). She has a dramatic foil in the Daughter (Fletcher’s creation), a character absent in Chaucer; therefore, the playwrights apparently intend that the audience associate untrammeled desire with sensual madness, and reasonable modesty with charity. Widely regarded as offering the actor a compelling role, the Daughter has the added theatrical merit of combining mad scenes with a bed trick; nevertheless, the Jailer’s lass is essential to our institutional understanding of moral value. Emilia expresses her personal ethics in full awareness of their inapplicability to extant ancient Athenian philosophy, whereas the Daughter succumbs by degrees and by coercion into the unfortunate state of being deprived of volition altogether. The resolutions imposed by the gods pertain solely to practices of divine rule, which may or may not benefit their devotees. Crucially, only worldly institutions, not individual faiths, may unfurl the moral dramatic backdrop whereupon Athenians might decipher the reflections of the decrees of the gods; otherwise, the play’s Greeks would have lived in moral darkness devoid even of the considerable illumination projected by philosophical aesthetics, which the playwrights make it their business to supply in abundance.

IV. Of Artistic Tokens and Types in IR Theory Stage directions call for the transmission of tokens of divinity in order to convey information vital to the combatants so that they might fulfill their assigned functions. The exact artistic means by which messages in the communicative loop are to be revealed is left to the discretion of the Globe theatre management. Although leading actor/artist Richard Burbage possessed the requisite skill to construct these artifacts (given his ability to create coats of arms), it is not known whether he was engaged to that effect. Richard Wollheim argues that treating aesthetics in terms of tokens and types is at least partly valid because art’s essential nature may be determined according to its metaphysical definition (e.g., as being conceptual or sensual) or by its categorical properties (e.g., as being derivative or sui generis). In order to show the artistic difference between metaphysical and formal properties, Wollheim assesses the aesthetic status of a “physical object” by stressing first its substantive nature, followed by its objective classification.12 He deems the metaphysical issue to be the most profound but accepts the categorical status of art as a type or token as an unavoidably related aesthetic matter. Wollheim’s elaboration upon aesthetic distinctions corresponds directly to the play’s treatment of a

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dispute between IR realism and neoliberal institutionalism, although IR theory is not his academic concern. The Two Noble Kinsmen treats metaphysical and ontological issues on an equal footing because such classifications help us to understand the nature of the gods. Taken as a group, the deities seem an unpleasant, quarrelsome, and supercilious group in part because their rulings (types) issue only in one direction—downward to the gente, to be refracted thereupon into distinct tokens. No dispositive holdings (tokens) are directed upward to the gods in order to influence divine edicts (types). For the playwrights to show the gods responding sensitively to the appeals of their followers’ prayers would be to enlist a logical impossibility in the service of aesthetic incompetence. This seemingly inflexible theatrical principle makes Emilia’s plight all the more wrenching on stage. The play defines the concept of courage with rather less finality than it does certain related properties: formal shows of honor, style per se as a weapon in deadly combat, and the public mania generated by ritual duels. The metaphysical attribute (type) of courage admits of no qualification upon being identified, being in itself complete and self-sufficient; however, terrestrial instances (tokens) of courage may be divided into Arcite’s brand of ferocity, Palamon’s resoluteness, and Emilia’s fidelity. To follow Wollheim’s lead, these tokens of honor derive from higher categories, although they do not necessarily endure in fidelity to the ideal form of courage. By analogy, that the khaki in modern military garb might stem from the metaphysical form of khaki is of no particular relevance because the earthly apparel is unique in and of itself and can make no claim upon nor modify heavenly khaki (there being no khaki-uniform outlet stores in heaven, or, if there are, the khaki in earthly uniforms bears no necessary resemblance to the divine form of khaki). The downward, unidirectional flow chart imposing severe discipline in the enforcement of metaphysical distinctions on earth has the advantage of sharpening the precision with which the playwrights create their dramatic roles. As a noted disciplinarian himself, Theseus would have understood the need for such a division of intellectual labor even if he seems to conceive of the duel between the two Theban champions more as an athletic spectacle than as a contest destined to result in a fatality. Philosophical realist notions of courage, honor, and the like help to define the characters by way of moral contrasts that render the notion of metaphysical clarity as such all the more appealing, as Wollheim would affirm. But for the rigorous logic the playwrights impose upon the action, all moral distinctions would be lost along with the ironies associated with the characters’ unethical, foolish, or noble personal attributes. Even so, the audience might not necessarily wish to throw its collective weight behind

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Emilia, admirable though she might be in defending her morals and in refusing to depreciate Arcite and Palamon unfairly. Her perspective is susceptible to criticism not in derogation of her (unknown) preference in a mate but due to her seemingly extreme stance in defense of abstinence. In declining to ratify Emilia’s Manichean ethical viewpoint, we might well wish to reconsider our aversion to the Martian principles advocated by the god’s acolyte, Arcite, or indeed to embrace those espoused by the Venusian partisan, Palamon. If the famous precept (“The world must be peopled”) expressed by another inconstant knight (Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing) has any merit, Emilia and Arcite take the side of more or less moral global depopulators, while Palamon throws in with Venus as a more or less immoral global re-populator. For Palamon cannot fail to adhere to the one incontrovertible metaphysical imperative championed by Venus, which is that the world must be peopled. Emilia’s moral appeals may never surmount the walls harboring the classical deities, but her plight certainly rises to the level of the audience’s affective and interpretive sympathies even if the play shows no (hypothetical) relationship between worldly love and the idea of love, or, e.g., between the khaki in uniforms and the idea of khaki. Nothing in Wollheim’s philosophy would deny the great delight we sense artistically in deciphering signals between heaven and earth (and all points in between) in the theatre, a logical process that the playwrights treat as a matter of aesthetic life and death. Philosophical aestheticians tend to agree with Wollheim that solid works of art like sculptures and paintings have an autographic presence necessarily imbued in the physical object itself. The same aestheticians voice greater disagreement over whether poems exist only in the mind, or only as spoken, or only in writing; however, there is near-unanimity that opera may only be considered real once it is formally committed to paper or performed on the stage.13 Yet the numbers of musicians, composers, and conductors are legion whose minds contain photographically precise replications of entire catalogues of musical works, so much so that their internalized music may arguably be seen as being vital and real; moreover, the play’s transmission of theatrical signals (e.g., the rose, the hind, the sound of thunder) may be distinguished aesthetically from the playwrights’ quite proper claim of autographic authorship of speeches spoken as a prelude to the trial by combat. The merely technical properties in the transmission of these signals may seem rude and mechanical given their mode of construction, but the very details in their theatrical presentation are essential to our understanding of the play’s style and meaning. The technical theatrical means chosen to convey the decisions of the gods admits of creative manipulation in performance in order that qualities like humor or piety may be accentuated in ways that the

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playwrights might not have entirely foreseen, nor might such a predetermination be viewed as being necessarily advantageous. Conversely, the full dimensions of the play’s aesthetics should by no means be reduced to the artistry pertaining to the downward flow of the communication of the judgments of the gods (e.g., the falling rose, the thunder) preceding the offstage ritual contest. Most surprisingly, the play’s logical categories cannot reasonably be regarded as facilitating the viewers’ artistic experience in the precise manner that Wollheim believes, for he sees a deliberate interpretative act intervening between artistic expression and audience’s perception of theatrical tokens.14 Our appreciation of the aesthetics of The Two Noble Kinsmen involves our considering its many artistic layers, including those contemplated by Wollheim; therefore, any final evaluation of the action is premature in the absence of a reasonably complete analysis of the play’s aesthetic properties. The same reasoning process applies to our determination as to whether the play means IR theory to share classical realist values in common with neoliberal institutionalism. If Wollheim adds value to his concept of the nature of the audience’s artistic appreciation by drawing liberally upon ontology and metaphysics, Joseph Margolis takes a cultural and historical approach. He rejects the notion that abstract institutions (e.g., the formal duel of honor, the theatrical houses of worship) accommodate both universals and particulars; instead, he sees types and tokens as being unified in the web of culture and history apart from metaphysics. Margolis is a cultural nearabsolutist as to the ontology of art, which has implications by analogy for our understanding of IR theory (which is not his scholarly concern). He enlists analytical philosophy expertly in the cause of privileging the cultural ontology of art. As Margolis sees it, no aesthetician could correctly assign universal artistic significance to a work outside of the warp and woof of the fabrication of the art object itself. Margolis is left to provide an alternate explanation for the feelings experienced by all insightful aestheticians like himself whereby some works seem to transcend the limits of their mode of production. For one more in a sequence of French Impressionist landscape masterpieces might stimulate our critical faculties by slightly different means than would our seeing a new, perhaps lesser-quality work that had achieved artistic renown by introducing an aesthetic value that the artworld had not previously considered (e.g., cubism, photorealism, abstract expressionism, etc.). Allowing for Margolis’s focus on painting in this case, he offers a brilliant proof of the unity of types and tokens in art: “Works of art, then, are culturally emergent entities, tokens-of-a-type that exist embodied in physical objects.”15 In my view, he does not make as strong a case for culture’s role in art as he does for art’s requisite physical presence, which is

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not to deny culture a role in aesthetics. He claims that artistic inventions cannot exist as types apart from their concrete instantiations; moreover, all artistic types must also (on his view) be tokens in virtue of their very physical existence. Consequently, he finds that purely metaphysical conceptions of artistic beauty must be mere phantoms of the mind. He would hold that artistic ideas obtain (for example) in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, but they do not do so strictly via conceptual inferences or in their ghostly penumbras; rather, they emerge by dint of Picasso’s application of paint in the creation of an image made visible thanks to the physical properties in the artwork itself. The problem remains as to our determination of the totality in what else that sensation of an artistic something else or something added might consist (e.g., culture, metaphysics, etc.). Margolis differentiates between higher aesthetic meanings and analytical practices because he is far too sensitive and far too accomplished to rule out even the slightest intellectual and emotional qualities in art, which he sees as cultural and historical verities; thus, he reverts to his core philosophical belief to unlock the key to art’s influence while rejecting its metaphysical quality. He denies philosophical “dualism” a role in his profound aesthetic definition by holding that our reflections upon art result from the manner in which culture has “embodied” its greatest works, which is not necessarily an argument for cultural exclusivity.16 He believes firmly in noble human aspirations, which he celebrates unstintingly, and which no doubt include vital but not obviously artistic forms of human ingenuity like skyscrapers and bridges, yet he sees the hidden value in artwork X as being derived from its cultural artistic properties, which in turn inspires the creation of art object Y, and so on in an unending stream of works endowed with ever greater aesthetic beauty and cultural wisdom. Both Margolis and the metaphysical philosophers he critiques hold dear the valuation of a work’s extrinsic (or external) creative echoes, but he provides no sure basis upon which to discount metaphysics in favor of cultural types, nor does proof exist that the mere existence of cultural energy supplants forever the diachronic imaginative architecture of metaphysics. Margolis elevates cultural analysis in order to validate the artistic output of cooperative peoples, although not every artwork must perforce be seen as being culturally derived. To strike rather too sharp a contrast, even Shakespeare (the IR classical realist) and Fletcher (the materialist) defend the greater good of aesthetics to the extent of sacrificing Emilia despite her unimpeachably enlightened moral philosophy. For an artwork may be entirely private in terms of its creation and exhibition, just as it may respond to long-forgotten philosophical positions or to other viewpoints no longer extant or available to aestheticians. Margolis and Hilary Putnam also agree

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that art and philosophy address moral values, but Putnam never rules out metaphysics even if he remained for much of his career an agnostic about metaphysical realism in art. Putnam merely requires fair play in requesting that cultural relativists accord the same level of respect to their opponents that they wish for themselves, a courtesy Margolis too never fails to extend; however, the tenets of cultural predomination may well produce palpable foreign policy harm in the arena of IR theory. For any security lapse enabled by IR cultural relativists like Keohane would result in almost instantaneous and actual pain in a dangerous world. Although Margolis’s philosophy has no direct foreign policy implications, his assumptions are shared by IR neoliberal institutionalists like Keohane. If Margolis’s cultural purchase on reality is conceptually valid, we nonetheless divine from the play that Theseus’s stern, pragmatic viewpoint is an effective response to the demonstrated incompatibility between IR realism and neoliberal institutionalism. Given the play’s critique of the relationship between metaphysics and IR theory, Theseus’s pragmatism (laced as it is with moral and other equally important practical and social considerations) is as necessary to the development of the action as Venus’s hedonism in the service of population replenishment, or Emilia’s belief in the purity of selfless love. Although Theseus must have taken IR realist calculations into account before invading Thebes successfully (including considering practical details such as assembling the right number of allies to defeat the designated foe), he relies upon moral and institutional demands as well. In short, Theseus’s invasion is based upon more than just IR neorealist estimates of his chances for victory. Nor does the play assert that idealistic thinking along Emilia’s lines is without earthly value; rather, it suggests that we must take Putnam’s admonition to heart: “Even if the ideal physics explained the sensations we would have on viewing [Rembrandt’s] The Polish Rider, it would certainly not explain them under this description”; that is, even a perfectly precise accounting for the number and location of neurons firing in one’s brain while viewing The Polish Rider appreciatively could by no stretch of the imagination explain the work’s aesthetic value.17 Putnam’s main point is that correct empirical data may no more account for a work’s (perhaps metaphysical) value than they may explicate the entirety of the cultural and historical forces swirling about the creation of art, which to understand in full would involve repetitive research subject to the law of diminishing critical returns. IR realism holds true in the play if and only if it includes vital moral perspectives, particularly given the appalling enforcement of the Daughter’s unwanted training in sexual compliance therapy. This condition alone threatens to discredit Fletcher’s artistic enterprise in the fabrication of empirical evidence, whose logical value is exhausted once the audience

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decodes the play’s theatrical messages; however, the quarrels of the gods no more reliably indicate the validity of metaphysical beliefs than do the prayers of the supplicant queens, whose justifications for war are selfinterested. The gods do not so much as pretend that their decrees have a moral foundation given that they are all-powerful, unrestrained, and unapologetic institutionalists. The theatrical tokens of their decisionmaking processes should not (in my view) be ranked above moral IR theory values.

V. IR Theory: Types, Tokens, and Predicates As seen from the characters’ subordinate perspective, the play’s foremost institutionalists (the gods) behave like anarchists in the global order because each poaches relentlessly on the territory of his or her peers. Yet the deities remain devout partisans because such a global structure offers them the opportunity to attract the followers they must amass in order to consolidate their power. Keohane adopts a conciliatory perspective on neoliberal institutionalism in finding that it functions properly only if state actors have mutual interests, which IR realists regard as circular logic yielding a selffulfilling prophecy. Given the dire circumstances upon which IR realists focus in claiming that there exists no umpire or benevolent controlling authority to regulate the anarchic game of states, the internationalists’ viewpoint strikes an upbeat note by comparison. Keohane’s qualified position seems somewhat too risk-free because he believes that all global actors share innate interests on some level, or if they do not, they shall eventually find interests in common with all those with whom they have yet to reach a beneficial compact. Keohane finds no little support for his position in the evidence shown in the succession of treaties signed in the aftermath of World War II designed to create institutions and to foster concepts aimed at ridding the world of tyranny and want: the UN, various economic organizations, human rights declarations, and the like. To his credit, he seeks to instill cooperative principles within the very anarchic system postulated by IR realists. Soviet expansionism after World War II supplied neoliberal theory with a tacit institutional role in offering wavering states threatened by communist influence an inducement to defect to the West. The Iran hostage crisis (1979) validated all the more the institutionalists’ goal to cement their theory in the IR firmament. Iran’s crime was used by Keohane and others as a trump card to be played in order to counter the rejection of neoliberal theory by IR realists. Indeed, the hostages seized by Iran were freed not by military force but through institutional negotiations, possibly involving some U.S. interlocutors with less than pristine political motivations.

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Keohane attempts mistakenly (I believe) to equate Thucydides’ honorable admission of closely paraphrasing lengthy political speeches from memory with Morgenthau’s modern political science methodology. Imputing to IR realists an intent to present flawed academic data as bona fide research in their pursuit of “rational reconstruction” shows the lengths to which competitors go to earn a seat at the IR theory table.18 Thucydides is undoubtedly the patron saint of IR realism, but the Greek historian’s reliance upon his memory cannot be construed as a moral failing, nor should his analytical feats be disparaged to gainsay the scholarship of his successors. That said, the sensitivity of IR realists to more or less valid criticism reveals perhaps a certain resistance to the increasing complexity of modern global political theory; furthermore, if works of dramatic art lack the necessary basis upon which to render accurate foreign policy predictions, The Two Noble Kinsmen explores brilliantly the higher theoretical principles involved in global political decision-making. Keohane employs type-to-token ratios in his analysis as effectively as his IR realist brethren. Neoliberal institutionalists see Morgenthau’s belief in “the presumed iniquity of the human race—original sin in one form or another” as a flaw commensurate with IR realism’s view of power politics (a type) reflected in international crises (tokens).19 Yet Keohane’s view of neoliberal “cooperation”—however inherently benign—is nevertheless a type designed to “automatically facilitate the attainment of the others’ goals” as tokens.20 Neoliberal institutionalists may well believe that IR realists fail to accord due respect to the concept of cooperation, particularly given the recent proliferation of global treaties, but the realists’ motives are not necessarily based upon their disapproval of foreign compacts. IR realists wish mainly to warn of impending conflict in the global system, whereas institutionalists seek to promote the vital processes involved in reaching accommodations between neighbors as to, say, the sharing of water rights. In this way, IR realism becomes ever more exclusively global in its perspective, while neoliberalism seizes upon local needs to attempt to forge stronger bonds between potential allies: however, both theories seek to reduce conflicts in foreign relations. Keohane assigns foreign policy credit to pacts forged between peaceful neighbors based upon nuanced arguments that he takes to be neoliberalism’s birthright. Yet IR realist predictions increase in accuracy and subtlety the more hostilities arise between hegemons (including the play’s gods); however, its principles apply equally to lesser disputes when seen from the perspective of the local combatants, if not of modern global hegemons like China and the U.S., who assess regional conflict through the lens of their own preferences for interstate stability. Keohane attributes to a lack of concern that which IR realism sees as a hegemon’s prioritization of

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relative threats. After all, Creon’s local wars of aggression had not been raised to the level of an immediate vital concern to the play’s superpowers, including (on different levels of analysis) Athens and the gods: “ . . . Realist theory needs to develop indices of intensity of motivation that can be measured independently of the behavior that theorists are trying to explain.”21 IR realists merely assign more weight to systemic, anarchic desire than to the tacitly emotional needs of institutional actors in a given global political structure. Even Keohane could not have anticipated the recent division of IR realism into subsets far more numerous than classical realism and structural realism, the latter’s beliefs having been assigned too conveniently to Kenneth Waltz. IR classical realism privileges military strength and balance-of-power, but Waltz’s ethical investment is surely complete even given his most abstract assessments of interstate conflicts because, in my view, he remains forever faithful to classical realist principles. It takes Mearsheimer’s brand of offensive realism to show the true difference between classical realism and its more structuralist-leaning realist fellow travelers. Mearsheimer never promotes overseas aggression, although his theory has as little to do with morals as possible; therefore, Keohane’s reflections on IR realism (a theory of which he only partly approves) would have been far better applied to neorealism or offensive realism, theories which were later in appearing. For, if necessary, Keohane too incorporates IR realist analytical gradations into his global perspective, “ . . . there is little doubt that a nationalist-fundamentalist revolution or coup in Saudi Arabia would have more profound and far-reaching implications” than the Iranian revolution, which caused oil shortages and a price shock but not a permanent rupture in the supply of an essential commodity. 22 Had the global availability of oil been threatened by Iran alone, Keohane would allow that an invasion might have ensued justified by hegemons according to the imperative of protecting their vital interests. Keohane shows IR realism responding to developments in IR theory. But what seems to some a moral deficiency in Waltz relative to Morgenthau is actually a robust continuation of IR realism, a point clarified upon the emergence of Mearsheimer’s theory. Morgenthau’s viewpoint is in its broadest strokes a token of Thucydides’ realism (as a predicate). Waltz’s refinement of IR realism (notably in clarifying Morgenthau’s analysis) makes him roughly the equal of the latter as a disciple of Thucydides. If Mearsheimer’s ideas are tokens of Thucydides’ (as predicates), they are unsuited to being seen as the same kind of tokens as Morgenthau’s or Waltz’s because they would negate morals. In this respect, Mearsheimer extends the structural aspect of Waltz’s analysis to the point of ignoring certain human frailties. Keohane takes a rather modest

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departure from the IR realist legacy as evidence of a total break, for Mearsheimer’s theory will no doubt one day be seen in retrospect as a quite mainstream continuation of Thucydides’ IR classical realist predicate once an even less morally-based IR realist theory takes its place. The Two Noble Kinsmen raises the same question of continuity in Renaissance drama in view of Fletcher’s unusually empirical approach to character development, although both playwrights show the aesthetic wisdom to keep the action roughly within the bounds of morals and good taste (with the occasional lapse).

VI. Aesthetic Taste and Empirical Science As abhorrent as it truly is, the Doctor’s experiment on the Daughter’s psyche is a complete success on his terms. Fletcher simply follows the spirit of Renaissance intellectual freedoms by having the Doctor explore new scientific concepts capable of producing such an outcome. In similar conceptual terms, advances in geometry offered a means by which the illusion of dimensionality could obtain on flat surfaces. Leon Battista Alberti’s 1436 treatise applies natural science to the creation of art, “The painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen.”23 Florentine realism had so prevailed by Shakespeare’s age that it scarcely matters if the playwrights had read Alberti’s treatise before creating their characters. Just as Fletcher draws implicitly upon Alberti’s naturalistic principles in his manipulation of the dramatic action, so too he conveys the Florentine art theorist’s crucial point that exquisite realism means little if the quintessential emotional and moral action is not made paramount, “The greatest work of the painter is not a colossus but an istoria.”24 The Doctor’s fraudulent scientific test in behavior modification is nonetheless offset by the playwrights’ emphasis on Emilia’s quite brilliant morality. The Doctor far exceeds the limits of good taste in explaining the rationale underlying his treatment to cure the Daughter of melancholy, “Please her appetite / And do it home” (5.2.35-36). His solution promises a resolution by stimulus-response. The low-born Daughter’s physical attraction to Palamon (an irredeemable condition based upon the social ideology of the age) may be mitigated only by delivering the physical pleasure associated with coitus via the relevant party (the Wooer) as a stand-in for the unwilling knight. Not only is the Doctor’s bed-trick deception medically immoral, his assumption that the intensity of the Daughter’s feelings of love may be reduced to physical sensations before being rechanneled elsewhere is brutal at best. She needs to be cured, it seems to him, in the worst possible way.

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Paradoxically, the pattern of the scientific method flourishes at the same time that the touchstone of aesthetic judgment begins to revert all the more to a subjective sensibility. Rules previously established according to the dictates of an irresistible external authority became seen as requiring mediation by noetic processes (i.e., internal-sense theory). The first aesthetician to attribute a decisive role to mental powers in the estimation of beauty was Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), who nevertheless “presupposes our Sense of Beauty to be natural”; thus, we should take our own counsel in calling a sunset beautiful without seeking moral validation from higher scholarly sources.25 He sees different noetic features being activated in our organization of external stimuli into a format capable of yielding estimations of the value of works that we judge to be worthy or not by our own aesthetic lights. Such evaluations cannot avoid the involvement of “our internal Senses,” whereupon, “if the finest Objects are presented to us, we grow conscious of a Pleasure far superior to what common Performances excite.”26 Hutcheson is no Romantic philosopher, but he grants the mind a creative role in engaging the innate noetic faculties required to comprehend the full range of creative values embodied in works of art. Theseus too possesses a well-developed aesthetic sense despite remaining an utter realist (IR and philosophical, somewhat pragmatically) who instinctively refuses to meddle if possible in the given state of affairs abroad, “Let us be thankful / For that which is, and with you leave dispute / That are above our question” (5.4.133-135). Nothing bars Theseus from adjudicating aesthetic issues along the lines advocated by Hutcheson, although the playwrights seem to have instilled Renaissance conceptions of science in Theseus’s characterization from the start. Yet Hutcheson’s (partly) subjective definition of beauty is in line with many standards presented in the play. Natural science merely adds weight to the evidence IR realists like Theseus find in the world as they wish to see it, but even he overlooks certain moral nuances that would come to comprise the definition of taste (itself an extremely imprecise term, to be sure) as an aesthetic value. Theseus attends in good humor to the peasants’ cultural event, led in worrisome fashion by a pedant to whom the duke refers twice as “dominie,” the Scots English title for a schoolmaster or pastor (3.5.134, 146). Given the Daughter’s participation, the rural celebration becomes a near-antic dance upon which Theseus remarks wittily from the point of view of an aesthetic sophisticate. In response to the players’ atmospheric salutation (“Thou doughty Duke, all hail! All hail, sweet ladies!”), with its distinct if lighthearted nod to Macbeth, Theseus renders a meteorologicallytinged judgment upon their bad taste, “This is a cold beginning” (3.5.99, 100). The precise manner in which the Morris dance unfolds is yet another

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artistic determination to be made in performance, although the playwrights likely had more direct input into its realization (because the expert players were ready at hand) than they exercised over the off-stage fabrication of slightly more durable stage props. The Schoolmaster’s analysis of the “tediosity and disensanity” of the rehearsal foreshadows a comic aesthetic exercise in irregular verse, faulty logic, and bad taste that Theseus is more than prepared to ridicule (3.5.2). The dim “rectifier” requires that foundational principles of decency and sweetness prevail (3.5.108). Somewhat less sure-footedly, he promises that athletic tumbling will be carried out with “audacity, and manhood” (3.5.36). Any pretense of artistic coherence vanishes with the Daughter’s participation in the dance owing to her inchoate gestures and mental imbalance. As well, the half-wit pedant’s inapposite comparison of the pastime to sublime events recorded in the great works of classical antiquity misses the mark entirely. Yet Theseus is utterly confident in his aesthetic judgment as a sensibility based upon classical principles that he believes give him leave to issue the pitch-perfect response to an ill-contrived entertainment. His sense of humor depends upon his awareness of the difference between the peasants’ untutored presentation and the professional aesthetic care that must be invested in the realization of nobler pursuits like ritual combat and the hunt. The playwrights do not need one like Hutcheson to inform them that the peasants move Theseus to mirth by means of the external stimuli they generate in order to activate his aesthetic judgments, but the play notes clearly the distinction between Theseus’s natural pleasure taken in scenes of combat as against the aesthetic barriers he raises in critiquing a wonderfully incompetent dance. Fletcher does not assign a negative connotation to Theseus’s overly restrictive external standards and a positive value to Emilia’s (presumptively admirable) internal ones. Such an aesthetic determination scarcely rises above what Frank Sibley calls the “fashionable preferences, or personal likes or dislikes” that some hold wrongly to define taste.27 By no means do the playwrights differentiate the characters according to such rudimentary standards. Theseus possesses the utmost taste as a reflection of his era, whose values he distributes all the more efficiently given his position as Athens’ ruler. The Schoolmaster takes upon himself the role of a stern disciplinarian, but he is unsuited to the task of channeling the rustics’ disordered energies in order to that he might fulfill the aesthetic promises he makes in his mock-learned choric prelude. His earthy references are of course entirely unsuited to the polite company he wishes to entertain. Theseus is thus not unfair in his criticism, but if he cleverly deflates the pretensions of the antic dancers, even he does not comprehend in full the aesthetics of the play. Based on the Morris dance alone, Emilia is justified

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in seeking an alliance with Diana, the “abandoner of revels” tout court, rather than joining in a comic exercise whose cruelty is presupposed (5.1.138). The playwrights use Emilia’s prayer to introduce a limited conception of internal sense theory, “I think so, but I know not thine own will: / Unclasp thy mystery” (5.1.173). Hutcheson does not impose upon his readers his precise tastes in philosophical aesthetics, although he too undoubtedly held moral and artistic ideals. Aesthetic theoretical uncertainty is however exactly what Emilia’s characterization adds to the play’s conception of mind-body dualism; therefore, I find Stanley Cavell’s fears over skepticism in The Winter’s Tale to be more apt (for my purposes) to our consideration of The Two Noble Kinsmen. An IR theory balance is restored in The Winter’s Tale, admittedly at the cost of Mamillius’s life and Hermione’s discomfiture, but no such theoretical or personal equilibrium obtains in The Two Noble Kinsmen; moreover, the Daughter’s nature is violated in view of her being abused in her state of mental distress. The chasm between IR classical realism and neoliberal accommodation (or between humanism and science) suffices to elicit our skepticism as to the efficacy of moral philosophical dialogue that is worthy of Cavell’s attention insofar as it is “a response to what skepticism is a response to.”28 Yet Shakespeare and Fletcher create dramatic action that is coherent despite the apparent differences between their IR theories and the distinct values that they assign to ethics in art. Hutcheson and the playwrights assume taste to be an essential component of our evaluation of art, but the parameters marking the artistic preferences of different eras become less certain the more their range extends to the level of philosophical aesthetics. If the beauties of art have properties that are internal and sublime, they are not so circumscribed that they rule out concepts “perceived in Theorems, or universal Truths, in general Causes, and in some extensive Principles of Action.”29 The play’s vision of artistic excellence does not appeal solely to the divine forms, nor to personal preferences, nor to the materiality of the world, although it has moral properties reflected in two axioms defining notions of taste that we hold to this very day: first, taste is transitory; and second, aesthetic pleasure arises by means both internal and external, being both of the mind and of the exacting skill demonstrated in the proper execution of an artwork.

CHAPTER SIX IR THEORY IN SHAKESPEAREAN AND RENAISSANCE DRAMA

Abstract Apart from Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, British Renaissance dramatists approach international relations (IR) theory on a rather practical level; indeed, they stage the romance of political drama to good effect by dispensing with grand theories about conflict abroad. George Chapman and John Fletcher see global affairs mainly as an extension of domestic politics in which morals prevail to Britain’s advantage. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra requires that imperial conquerors at least pay tribute to the aesthetic values in IR encounters, although interstate dealings unfold on a higher philosophical plane in the playwright’s romances to come.

Most Tutor-Stuart playwrights view foreign relations as the application of domestic politics (Innenpolitik) to an anarchic global realm. They treat the local policy in overseas affairs, an axiom of international relations (IR) theory extended brilliantly to interstate politics by (IR realist) Machiavelli and restated by Dr. Samuel Johnson, “Policy is the art of government, chiefly with respect to foreign powers.”1 Whereas Shakespeare stages complex IR models for a general audience, his fellow dramatists for the most part regard IR acumen as depending much more upon the diplomatic talents of individual practitioners than on theories about the nature of the global system. The IR-related plays of this era employ stock characters including commedia dell’arte types, whose popularity can be attributed to their comedic representation of changing social roles within historical movements that (ultimately) transform feudal powers into cooperative selfhelp states. These plays’ quite exotic scenarios show diplomacy to be an elite political interaction guided by a well-hidden hand of universal morals and taste, but Shakespeare’s political and aesthetic modernity sets him apart from his peers (excluding Christopher Marlowe, who was the first to conceive of IR offensive realism). The popular theatre of the British Renaissance produced fanciful if rather cosmopolitan works on foreign

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affairs, of which Antony and Cleopatra is perhaps the most insightful, but Shakespeare’s romances assess global relations on the basis of higher conceptual models. IR theory and philosophical aesthetics present the best defense against the charge of imperialism levelled against these playwrights by cultural materialists. Edward Said’s Orientalist critique proclaims the existence of a rapacious British empire that had yet to appear.2 Far from dispossessing the weak like a global hegemon, Britain engaged cautiously with neighboring great powers like France, Holland, and Spain; moreover, public antipathy toward Spain placed a notional limit on the policy options available to British rulers throughout the Renaissance. Given her mid-level international status, Britain devised means to reduce the Spanish threat, including Elizabeth’s condoning of Turkish sallies against Philip’s navy. She supported nautical harassment against Spain in the Eastern Mediterranean despite her disingenuous claims to the contrary before Ambassador Guzman de Silva: “’It seems very wrong that we Christian princes leave my brother the [Spanish] King alone in this matter’.”3 England maintained vital diplomatic and trade relations with the Porte even following Spain’s rout of the Turks at Lepanto. Elizabeth’s personal aversion to the Islamic faith did not nullify the true inclusiveness of her foreign policy because Britain affiliated with Eastern regimes for mutual political and economic advantage. Ironically, Britain might well be said to have resisted Spanish (and, earlier, French) imperialistic designs on the Continent.

I. British Renaissance Global Policy Britain charted ever more accurately her international bearings the more her ships sailed to the four corners of the globe, with all the perils attendant upon voyages at sea. Due to domestic economic imperatives, Elizabeth had little choice but to involve diplomats in England’s expansion of overseas trade, but she achieved her vital security objective to preserve an uneasy regional peace by playing one Continental power off against another. Given that IR realism was the sole extant international political theory respected by rulers worldwide, British Renaissance theatre (aside from the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare) essentially presented simulated diplomacy plays that translated global conflicts into the idiom of popular knockabout comedy. The public theatre was not ideally suited for diplomatic interactions; therefore, Elizabeth at times transacted foreign policy during festivities at court. She entertained Ambassador de Silva with a marriage comedy, translating the play for him as the action unfolded. Knowing that

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questions surrounding her prospects for marriage were foremost on the mind of the Spanish king, Philip II, she regaled Silva with outdated news about her diminishing prospects for becoming a potential bride of the juvenile Spanish prince (Don Carlos), “’Well, everyone disdains me; I understand he is to be married to the queen of Scots’.”4 In response to Silva’s protestations to the contrary, Elizabeth cleverly added to his confusion by floating a contradictory scenario, “’They said in London the other day that the [Spanish] King, my brother, was sending an Ambassador to treat of the marriage of the Prince with me!’”5 Elizabeth treated court performances of comedies and masques as opportunities to baffle Spain while deflecting to others any blame for Philip’s misunderstanding of her marriage preferences. Silva understood that the formal occasion was arranged in honor of Elizabeth because the dancers in the masque were “dressed in black and white, which the Queen told me were her colours, and after dancing awhile one of them approached and handed the Queen a sonnet in English, praising her.”6 Adding to Spanish consternation was her association with influential favorites, including Essex and Leicester, whom Silva saw correctly as her confederates in confounding Philip. Elizabeth’s astute management of these performances showed her overriding policy to be one of avoiding war with Spain, whose values were as odious to Britain as any other state’s, whether in the East or the West. Elizabeth took it upon herself to harry the foe on the diplomatic level, a practice that proved cost-effective over the course of her reign. Elizabeth acted again as translator for Silva at a comedy hosted by Leicester in which Jupiter sides with Juno against Diana in order to advocate on behalf of the virtues of matrimony. In a letter to his ruler, the Spanish ambassador recorded Elizabeth’s artful analysis of Leicester’s rationale for staging the play: “’This is all against me’.”7 The performance did nothing to contradict British foreign policy apart from showing the subtleties in Elizabeth’s diplomatic calculations. With Diana at the forefront of her mind, Elizabeth feigned distress at (alleged) calls urging her to validate the institution of marriage. She played her usual double role visà-vis Spain by raising marriage as a possible foreign policy outcome while lamenting that the performance made the case for nuptials against her wishes; therefore, Elizabeth distanced Spain through deception while seeming to unite Silva with her other guests at a celebratory event. Silva noted that Elizabeth associated arms with art, “ . . . there entered 10 parties of 12 gentlemen each, the same who had fought in the foot tourney, and these, all armed as they were, danced with the ladies—a very novel ball, surely.”8 She pacified Spain imaginatively with armed drama and dance in order to evade a candid discussion about her true

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intention, which was never to marry a Spaniard. Over the course of her reign, she gained far more from the drama than she lost. Her patience eluded her during the (now-famous) 1601 London rebellion in which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men reluctantly restaged Richard II at Essex’s request as his warning against perceived foreign policy weakness, but Elizabeth was rarely victimized by representations of sedition; instead, she attended plays and masques for her entertainment as well as to advance her international interests. Elizabeth placed a premium on witty dialogue and competence in foreign affairs, qualities enhanced by performances of comedy. In theory, she felt that she could formulate British foreign policy as she pleased even if her opinion carried far less weight than treaties “after another authentical sort sworn and sealed.”9 In practice, she dared not undertake adventures abroad without firm domestic support, resulting in the power-balancing act in foreign policy at which she excelled. For his part, James was an avid consumer of plays and masques for personal and political entertainment, including productions that facilitated his exercise of autocratic power, “The masque at Court goes forward for Twelfth-day; all the holidays there were plays.”10 James supported trade with Spain to fill his (leaky) coffers while allowing commerce with the Levant to flourish, for which he received from Turkey the symbolic gift of “a pair of partridges.”11 He used traffic with the East more as a source of revenue than as a balancing force in Continental politics because he inherited a relatively disciplined international order owing to Elizabeth’s diligence in the conduct of foreign affairs. Spain and France no longer overawed Stuart Britain because mistakes and miscalculations in their management of their domestic affairs had somewhat diminished their global status, albeit for internal political reasons entirely within their control. Even so, Tudor-Stuart rulers never enjoyed anything approaching the margin of a clear force advantage relative to their traditional Continental antagonists. Francis Bacon thus merely reiterated Thucydides’s IR classical realist maxim on the need to reduce the military readiness of opposing powers, a policy that Athens had applied to her island foes: “ . . . princes do keep due sentinel, that none of their neighbours do overgrow so (by increase of territory, by embracing of trade, by approaches, or the like), as they become more able to annoy them than they were.”12 Bacon’s stress on science was new to Renaissance humanism, on the basis of which he added trade and migration to the list of overseas threats, but his core IR realist concept was utterly traditional. In seeking to control Elizabeth, Philip hoped to reach a consensus with her on matters of global governance where their interests coincided. He saw the quashing of religious dissent and a reduction of piracy as two

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issues on which he and Elizabeth might agree. Silva broached the possibility of instituting such talks (to Spain’s advantage), “Kings should combine together to punish insolence and disobedience, as the matter concerns them all so closely.”13 Yet Elizabeth had made it her personal policy to avoid the extremes in religious policymaking at home. Having been educated by Italian Catholic dissenters, she abided minor religious differences in public policy early in her reign, but never religious defiance or open dissent. The Bishop de Aquila informed Philip that her skill in Italian was “learnt from Italian heretic friars who brought her up.”14 Her relative open-mindedness on questions of faith showed in her to attempt to placate London’s Catholic community while securing its loyalty to England, although advocacy on behalf of Catholic and Puritan doctrine on stage was discouraged severely. Elizabeth suppressed Catholicism altogether during periods of extreme political tension with Spain, one of which culminated in the launch of the Armada. With the outbreak of war, she broke relations with Spain, although she kept open her lines of communication to the East. Faced with strong adversaries abroad, Elizabeth tapped foreign currency flows to attempt to fund her crown and enrich the realm. This financing required subventions from Parliament and other taxes, but Elizabeth also gained from piracy. Appropriating Spanish treasure en route from the West Indies produced quick results at a low cost, yet Silva told Philip of human rights abuses in which Spain and Britain also participated, “The trade of capturing negroes in Guinea and taking them to the Indies is considered very profitable.”15 Elizabeth’s approval of this inhumane practice was encouraged by talented naval captains like John Hawkins and Francis Drake, who insisted upon seeking means to augment their fortunes; therefore, she bore responsibility for sponsoring on an ad hoc basis an absolutely obnoxious trade originating in sub-Saharan Africa in order to retain her most outstanding mariners for the defense of the realm. Elizabeth consorted with disparate powers outside the mainstream of European politics to gain a foreign policy advantage. She maintained relations with Turkey, the nearest great Islamic power, in order to blunt Spanish aggression and to import spices and other valuables from the East. Turkey saw economic relations with Britain as beneficial owing to her need for tin, a necessary component of the armaments industry, for which she paid England handsomely in gold. Spanish ambassador Bernardino de Mendoza describes Turkey’s vital economic interest in Britain, “The Turks are also desirous of friendship with the English on account of the tin which has been sent thither for the last few years.”16 Mendoza informed Philip that Britain had recently established an embassy in Turkey, whose Sultan assured Elizabeth “of the good reception extended to Englishmen who go to trade in his country.”17 Islam exerted no political power in Britain at this

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time, but Elizabeth’s Eastern overtures vexed Spain because Philip’s fleet vied with the Turks for commercial as well as military dominance in the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas. Constrained by Continental powers, England could not afford the luxury of acting on the basis of presumed Orientalist biases. Nor did its theatre consistently treat other cultures maliciously. In 2 Tamburlaine, Marlowe refers to “black Egyptians” imprecisely but without prejudice, for the play shows certain aspects of foreign policy worldwide to be dictated by predatory IR strategies (1.1.63).18 English pirate-adventurers returning from successful raids reproduced for Londoners the lavish spectacle of a royal Egyptian barge at sea. On the occasion of Britain’s capture of a foreign vessel, her ships sailed in triumph up the Thames into London, with one observer noting that “every sailor had a gold chain round his neck, and the sails of the ship were of blue damask, the standard of cloth of gold and blue silk. It was as if Cleopatra had been resuscitated.”19 More so than England, Turkey enjoyed reasonably good relations with both Christians and Jews within the bounds of foreign policy realism. In his 1599 book on elite Turkish manners, Mustafa Âli called Moses “the Interlocutor of God” while humorously urging his readers to exercise caution when interacting with Christian clerics, in whose mores he says the Turks were deeply interested.20 Turkey tolerated the presence of nonMuslim believers so long as they observed a reasonable level of decorum. Britain and Turkey maintained mutually beneficial cultural, commercial, and political relations, to which end Elizabeth used theatrical entertainments to defuse confrontations with Spain.

II. Imperialism Defined: Morgenthau New historicist/cultural materialist critics generally address directly neither philosophical aesthetics nor IR theory, although they call into question the legitimacy of such analysis. Stephen Greenblatt’s apparently value-free notion of “a poetics of culture” aims to negate metaphysical discourse on poetics and to destabilize politics via occasional solicitations of the occult.21 He tacitly denies the value of philosophical aesthetics: “The attempt to locate the power of art in a permanently novel, untranslatable formal perfection will always end in a blind alley. . . . ”22 Without assigning unwarranted significance to language intended to be all the more disruptive in virtue of its liminal relationship to the real world, Greenblatt refers not to art per se but to the power of art, which results in a logical tautology: art defined in terms of “the circulation of social energy” is best addressed by his theory of the circulation of social energy.23 Conversely, art defined by the circulation of social energy cannot be addressed by (metaphysical,

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analytical, etc.) philosophies denying his theory of the circulation of social energy, although intellectual rejectionism is not foundational to metaphysical or aesthetic philosophy. The work of renowned philosophers like Joseph Margolis (an expert in the diachronic cultural analysis of art, including contemporary art) has long been available for citation by new historicists; however, Greenblatt seems to oppose realism and metaphysics by stating famously his desire to commune with the dead, although there remains yet unfinished work in literary studies to benefit the living. Far from having been unearthed recently by new historicists, cultural energy and its artifacts possess a value recognized ironically by both the most virtuous and most retrograde states (e.g., Axis Germany as to the latter) throughout history, which in itself does not invalidate the analysis of art or its energies from a cultural perspective. The literary critical insurgents err in treating culture in totalizing terms. Supplant the existing power formation with their humane energy, so they seem to believe, and the Romantic benefits will ripple freely throughout the system by lifting wholesome circular political movements into the sunlight; however, the rotation, circulation, circumnavigation, peregrination, and/or revolution of energy (be it cultural, material, political, etc.) is not opposed to IR theories of global influence, whether contemporary or Renaissance in origin, as Morgenthau shows in Politics Among Nations, probably the most influential IR theory book since The Prince. Cultural energy (qua energy) may only be arrayed haphazardly against the principle of IR hegemony because the properties of each are neither identical nor complementary absent policy manipulation; instead, their essential elements are categorically distinct. Morgenthau understands that the exertion of control over vast realms, the display of prodigious energy of any orientation, and the acquisition of benefits accruing to a state’s holding of almost unsurpassed caches of material wealth may orbit wildly abroad yet still not “create” or even alter the calculus of IR power—nor of culture, politics, art, or what have you.24 A territory as immense as Alaska was transferred in 1867 without disturbing “to any appreciable extent the distribution of power between the United States and Russia.”25 The peaceful exchange of (possibly) undiscovered but culturally and economically significant lands would seem to raise questions about why IR imperatives attached to the perambulation of social or other energies may never vindicate cultural materialist/new historicist theory. The crucial formula passed over by cultural/literary theorists does not concern the free redistribution of materials or ideas, whether equitably or otherwise; rather, the concept they overlook proves that transfers of energy or materials preserve the status quo, or, to be more specific, the balance of power. If Russia had ceded Alaska to the United States in so foolish a manner as to deliver to an implacable or potential foe

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the very key to overthrowing the Tsarist government, then the underlying U.S. policy might well have been one of secretly co-opting politico-cultural energy capable of rotating or revolving at such a great velocity as to fulfill a covert American imperialist aim. For the social forces swirling about the acquisition of a great expanse of land should have more than sufficed to show the intent of the U.S. to extinguish the very life from an enervated if authoritarian regime in Russia; however, this result did not transpire, proving yet again that the central tenet of cultural materialist theory fails under global conditions perfectly hospitable to its cause. Accusations of ill-will have long been lodged as a rhetorical bludgeon against states with huge, sometimes weakly enforced, territorial holdings, although such epithets conceal perhaps deeper motives: economic (by Marxists), political (by anarchists), and, by devout believers in the superpower system’s suppression of peoples, moral opposition to racial inequality. Imperialist is the term of art applied indiscriminately to culprit states and, by extension, to perceived unjust IR systems. Extirpate the imperialist, so the thinking goes, and soon will sound the death knell of the other’s bare-knuckle politics. Morgenthau holds correctly that imperialism (insofar as it is conceived and framed with historical specificity) is generally “a program of consolidation, not of expansion.”26 Viewed in this light, the farsighted ambassador to France, James Monroe, exceeded his brief in concluding the Louisiana Purchase in Paris in 1803. Monroe regarded the massive accumulation of land west of the original American colonies as having defensive value per se, in addition to removing a potential Continental foe from America’s western flank. Much of the land was from the colonists’ perspective terra incognita; therefore, neither France nor her post-revolutionary diplomatic interlocutor interpreted the pact in derogatory imperialist terms. France faced a balance of payments deficit after long wars with Britain. With more such conflict in the offing, the stresses in France’s economy required the healing infusion of American greenbacks. Almost incredibly, Monroe took title to a breathtaking stretch of land on behalf of the United States on the mere promise of future regular payments, with almost no money down; nevertheless, France could justifiably balance her books based upon a new schedule of U.S. subventions. Perhaps France was duped by jaded U.S. foreign policy sophisticates, a remarkable eventuality, if true, given Gallic pride in her diplomatic savoir-faire; however, Monroe was deeply preoccupied with two strategic problems of his own making. First, he had overpaid for the real estate by about 50% above the allowance granted him by President Washington, who at any rate was far more consumed with pacifying relations with an increasingly warlike Great Britain than in coddling an old

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ally, France. Despite paying $15 million for land that he had told his president would cost $10 million, Monroe insisted that the extra margin was affordable due to his skill in negotiating easy down payment and annual payment terms. Second, Monroe was forced to consider how French forces posted in the new nation might be repatriated safely to the Continent. Their numbers were not great, but the leftover French militiamen stationed along the Mississippi River boded no apparent good. If their presence was not threatening, they were from a certain professional diplomatic perspective an untidy political remainder. Monroe resolved to find them transportation home at an extremely leisurely pace bordering on social osmosis. Neither states’ calculations of the value of ownership of land possessing, in retrospect, almost infinite historical, cultural, and economic value, suggested the devious manipulations of the imperialist mentality, for, as Morgenthau asserts, “Not every foreign policy aimed at an increase in the power of a nation is necessarily a manifestation of imperialism.”27 The global system absorbed the increase in the territorial configuration of one of its members because the overall IR balance held proportionately. An exchange on an almost unimaginable scale was therefore effectuated without any appreciable disturbance in global relations. This result is sometimes referred to incorrectly as the maintenance of the status quo, which on the cultural materialists’ definition of social energy would require a great upheaval in the order of anarchic states. Yet the barter of an immense expanse of raw acreage between these regional hegemons produced no strategic anxiety. One might easily imagine Paris parting with the equivalent of two or more Louisiana territories in return for a miniscule, well-fortified island located strategically between England and France, or for a prophylactic sliver of land safeguarding French military interests in one of their hotspots around the world because, as Morgenthau puts it, “Not every foreign policy aimed at the preservation of an empire that already exists is imperialism.”28 A decidedly imperialistic occupation had already been imposed upon the New World by France in 1682, well before Ambassador Monroe offered to acquire the territory ranging from just over the Canadian border, to the Rockies, to the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico—certainly a parcel of international dimensions. France had obtained by retrocession these perceived wildlands overseas under the (secret) Third Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1800 in exchange for bountiful vineyards in Tuscany, which reverted to Spain. Questions pertaining to U.S. imperialism might validly have arisen had the property been seized in defiance of the prevailing balance-of-power or exchange of social energies. Other moral questions about human rights at a lower structural level of at least domestic political

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concern might quite justly demand a response, but these may scarcely be considered on their due merits under mistaken notions of IR theory.

III. Morgenthau On Cultural Imperialism New historicists freely concede that elements of fantasy permeate their analysis of the works under their scrutiny (e.g., as it concerns “the lunatic, the lover and the poet” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), yet their literary critical tropes aim to address local or individual concerns. Put in terms of IR theory, which he does not intend to discuss, Louis Montrose sees Innenpolitik including culture to be so far superior to Renaissance IR realism as to justify his reconsideration of an intellectual giant: “The spiritual, maternal, and erotic transformations of Elizabethan power are not reduceable to instances of Machiavellian policy, to intentional mystifications.”29 Montrose’s analysis of the nature of phenomena in the outside world as expending sensual feminine currency neglects to acknowledge the totality of the resources tapped by IR theory, which easily encompasses the very activism to which he appeals; however, cultural materialists, like their New Diplomatic History allies, inadvertently rate conceptual landscapes and fictional significations above politico-economic actualities. Montrose’s article begins where it ends in that he sees A Midsummer Night’s Dream as being destined to reproduce the power informing it: “The play is rather a new production of Elizabethan culture, enlarging the dimensions of the cultural field and altering the lines of force within it.”30 Charges of critical reductionism might just as well apply to Montrose’s vision of theatrical production as “a creation of Elizabethan culture: for it also creates the culture by which it is created, shapes the fantasies by which it is shaped, begets that by which it is begotten.”31 Cultural self-referentiality seems scant compensation for the banishment of diachronic IR theories, yet the author holds the notion up for favor before his critical audience. While it is true that A Midsummer Night’s Dream displays internal artistic regularities—a hallmark of Renaissance dramaturgical expertise—besides staging imaginative notions of aesthetics and Innenpolitik theory, cultural critics discount these playwrights’ speculative analyses on global flashpoints. Montrose appeals to formal and informal currents of intellectual energy flowing within an increasingly dominant regime in academia, but he seems disinclined to believe that there might validly exist worlds between culture and metaphysical forms, suggesting that the social networks identified by new historicists are by definition too insulated from philosophical critique to become truly emancipatory movements.

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New historicist literary criticism justifies the application of cultural analysis to new noetic alliances, one of which Leonard Barkan describes as “a vigorous entry by the theater into the cultural arena where image and word combat or complement each other, where poetic utopia and generic monstrosity both appear in the marketplace.”32 He finds Sir Philip Sidney (an icon of the old order for the nonce) to get the worst of his own definition of poetry as a speaking picture because, under the weight of its new cultural baggage, the theatre appropriates literary metaphors in order to exhibit them subversively onstage. The discourse of cultural materialism having infiltrated Barkan’s aesthetic understanding (just as he claims its language had centuries earlier permeated Elizabethan discourse), he suggests that art’s old imperial borders had been transposed to the theatrical walls surrounding Elizabethan open markets by means epitomized by Hermione (as performer) in The Winter’s Tale: “ . . . the work of art is so real it could almost come to life. Theater removes the almost.”33 The cultural materialists’ fascination with the theatre appears to be satiated once their investigations complete their diurnal loops. New discursive processes in the same literary arena appear self-reflexively upon these critics’ reinvention of the text after they once again show the theatre the door, “And even as it becomes the name for a place of public performance, it is also the buzzword for a kind of book that sets out aspects of the world in a grand visual display.”34 Although the stage regularly attracts appreciative paying audiences, the illustrated manuscripts to which the new historicists now promise to repair address with greater perceived sobriety much more essential but presumptively less frivolous theatricalized discursive formations. Barkan’s sophisticated perspective on rather well-travelled avantgarde aesthetic sensibilities cannot fail to include Freudian analysis, with its “critical imprecision about the flow of time”; moreover, he validly pays homage to the “radically unstable” readings marking cultural materialism.35 Painting, poetry, and theatre are thereby forced to compete for the right to represent the world under the purview of new historicism, although Hamlet surely sees in the dumb show’s subversive plot a coup affirming his moral and political values. If the new historicists’ quest to dominate novel intellectual realms helped them to consolidate their power within academic walls, philosophy treats art beyond the representation of solely cultural boundaries. Nor does philosophy align itself exclusively with the Nietzschean will-to-power and the Freudian Id; however, the cultural critics’ prior resistance to the artistic entreaties of the drama in performance seems to have abated, if only temporarily. By containing revered literary giants under the cover of play, new historicist literary criticism has

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entrenched itself by harvesting ever newer intellectual endowments in continually reorienting its academic discursive patterns. Morgenthau assesses cultural interventions in political affairs with a circumspection not fully appreciated by new historicists: “What we suggest calling cultural imperialism is the most subtle and, if it were ever to succeed by itself alone, the most successful of imperialistic policies.”36 Cultural critics see armed invasion as an instrument too coarse to sculpt the verdant pathways of literary theory, although the inhabitants victimized under normal occupations differ little from those dressing their broken bodies as a result of their states’ annexation by imperialistic invaders. Thus, IR theorists would renew alliances without abrogating old treaties (if only for reasons of expediency) in order to safeguard endangered lives, whereas new historicist critics seem to assume that all societies flourish under the rule of uninhibited flows of cultural energy. Morgenthau shows the distribution of cultural force to yield outcomes of which even the most passionate materialists might not approve. Tyrants throughout history enlist cultural aesthetics in order to abet their policies (e.g., to construct the pyramids and wide Parisian boulevards), yet cultural politics are not immune to losses in the energy of their force fields. Even peaceful alliances suffer the effects of cultural erosion—all energies being subject to scientific laws of entropy in physics. In theory, amicable partners may sign pacts with the intention of signaling their opposition to the perceived imperial aspirations of neighboring hegemons and their tributary states, if any. The very looming presence of two or more new coalitions may produce yet another group composed of malingerers— passive states linking arms haplessly in a desperate show of independent resolve, deeply fearful of fractures splitting what had been a stable if not ideal political environment; moreover, the original cosigners in all three alliances may fall out among themselves over insecurities stemming from their perception of new threats arising in the others’ domestic politics. Such a (so-called) parade of horribles did not cause British cultural materialists to differentiate themselves from American new historicists, yet even these academic partners wished to distinguish between themselves, if in name only. Still, the mighty imperialists of ages gone by inflicted such painful lessons upon the innocent that the need arose for IR realist prescriptions of political medication. Strife between a succession of hegemons forced IR realists to consider ever more subtle political variations and to invent distinctly new explanatory theories. IR theory has been from its origins a game of perception and analysis because it has always been required to account accurately for the probabilities and costs of war.

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IV. An Aside on Monroe Beardsley’s Philosophical Aesthetics Because IR theory responds to perceptions of instability abroad, W. K. Wimsatt’s and Monroe C. Beardsley’s (henceforth Beardsley’s) apparent denial of the role of intent and affect in literary criticism would have sufficed to place formalism in bad odor with IR theorists. For validity in IR theory demands clarity as to global realities and foresight as to global threats, the latter of which ancient Athens detected preemptively even in her largely peaceful neighbors. Morgenthau’s IR theory confirms that the foreign policy variables of intent and affect comprise part of an “estimate of the power relations as they exist between different nations . . . and as they are likely to develop in the immediate and distant future”; therefore, if so, might the New Critics’ iconic work of art be seen as a black box roughly akin to the IR realist’s unitary state: each adrift on the anarchic main, each governed by self-interests not ordained from on high? 37 Beardsley holds that verbal and physical artifacts have an independent presence athwart a sea of diverse, often conflicting interpretations; consequently, cultural materialists could hypothetically claim solidarity with IR theorists and aesthetic philosophers on the grounds of their rejection of the autonomy of art and of the significance of authorship. Yet Beardsley prefers the artwork’s “formal unity and the intensity of [art’s] regional quality” such that aesthetic autonomy does not rule out the audience’s sensibilities, cultural or otherwise.38 As a moral aesthetician, he would have rejected not only the cultural materialists’ view of the artworld but as well the concept itself of the possible autonomous existence of art. Neither the self-reliant poem of the New Critics (with whom Beardsley is aligned mainly via Wimsatt) nor cultural critiques like those of the new historicists (which he accepts with severe limitations) bears any substantive relationship to the IR realists’ self-help state, whatever the level of anarchy in the system. Beardsley finds aesthetic solace in espying analytical and moral properties beyond the four corners of the work. Notwithstanding his suspicions of affect and intent, he never imagines art to be an entirely autonomous object, although he rejects the imposition of socio-historical aesthetic perspectives on art without proper regard for the work’s intrinsic merits. In paying tribute to the artist’s intellectual contribution, he requires only that art be said to occasion logical analysis and that its assigned properties (whether occupying the center or the margins) be such that beholders might enjoy them, “The aesthetic value of an object is the value it possesses in virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic gratification.”39 He appears to be flummoxed by avant-garde art, but he peruses its aesthetic umbra and penumbra so long as a modicum of analytical energy might be

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expended profitably in its apprehension. His account of an artwork’s formal properties allows such freedom that he grants that an absolute forgery might fulfill his criteria for aesthetic value. If, as a consequence, we see emerging even the faintest outlines of an alliance between Beardsley and the new historicists, his moral strictures militate against it, “And it can never be a moral error to realize value—barring conflict with other values.” Morals balance a broad aesthetic “interest” against an artwork’s “being good of a kind.”40 As an early innovator in philosophical aesthetics, he aims to extract no more nor less than the greatest possible intellectual and ethical satisfaction from art.

V. Renaissance Drama and Literary Diplomacy In addition to assuming the ruler’s in-bred aesthetic sensibilities, TudorStuart IR dramatists treat sprezzatura in princely governance as involving at least four general categories that may be said to occupy the extreme points of the compass: fantasy (N), artistry (S), sovereignty (W), and diplomacy (E), although the playwrights combine the elements in these analytical quadrants according to their taste. Fletcher’s The Island Princess takes advantage of the audience’s general familiarity with benign AngloPortuguese relations, both states being mid-sized powers. The residual goodwill in the recently expired Anglo-Portuguese Alliance (1386-1604) permitted audiences in London to identify with Portuguese adventurers, an affinity reinforced by Piniero’s approval of “the dancing English, / In carrying a faire presence” in their paces.41 The cessation of these relations due to the Anglo-Spanish War (1586-1604) was offset by renewed feelings of comradery over the Dutch-Luso War (1602-1663), Holland being perceived as the greatest threat to these erstwhile allies along Eastern trade routes. The Island Princess navigates the NW quadrant while luffing smartly toward the center point of the compass before the mast of Fletcher’s artistic talents. The playwright treats the conflict between Maluku Islands neighbors as a politico-religious adventure in which all virtues align, at times ironically, to the benefit of their Western guests. Along with Portuguese respect for Island rule, such as it is, moral values reduce any threat inhering in the expansion of the West’s trade routes, which Fletcher treats as a civilizing force when plied humanely. Portugal asserts her influence all the more owing to her seeming military restraint, which on Fletcher’s aesthetic definition shows foreign policy wisdom while denoting as well a certain finesse in the practice of effective diplomacy. Portugal’s commercial traders are defended by military attachés possessing the scientific expertise necessary to enlarge the region with

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negligible opposition. The West thus influences local affairs while seeming to intervene only by invitation. The Edenic fertility of the greater Southeast Asian and Oceanic region is meant to affirm Continental visions of the everlasting: “We are arriv’d among the blessed Islands, / Where every wind that rises blowes perfumes, / . . . The treasure of the Sun dwels here, each tree / As if it envied the old Paradice, / Strives to bring forth immortall fruit . . . ” (1.3.16-21). Continental notions of universal amity stand in stark contrast to Fletcher’s purple passages on (supposed) Eastern treachery, which reveal the horror of tortures enacted routinely by the islanders, “Murther’s a morall vertue with these Lovers, / A speciall peece of Divinitie, I take it” (3.1.94-95). The subtext of domestic savagery largely cancels out the unstated evil in presumed Tudor-Stuart imperialism and IR dominion, but British audiences could easily grasp the posited feudal order of the island-states. Fletcher’s sense of IR prowess combines policy and science to the exclusion of Eastern thought. If he slights the Mahommedan faith by staging local religious conversions, he has the West maintain its political balance based upon Eastern violations of basic rules of governance: “The old heathen policie has light upon him. / And paid him home” (5.5.50-51). The benefits of pre-Adamic life on the Islands having been negated regularly by his “policie,” the Governor nullifies his religious oaths to the gods he tacitly worships, “I had paid you all, / But fortune plaid the slut” (5.5.62-63). For reasons of policy, Fletcher reserves his most salient theatrical gestures for the display of Western scientific and technological advances, shown in Portugal’s ability to tunnel escape routes and to confound her enemies with explosives and high-caliber armaments, for which the East has no answer. Fantasy, global politics, and diplomacy serve the offices of technical rather than ideological dominion. Technological expertise revealed by art preserves the West, whose morals are made manifest as if naturally (if only contingently as to political rule) in its attempt to win over the region’s denizens on behalf of the universal good. Fletcher grants himself ample opportunity to divide East from West altogether, but he declines to do so on ideological grounds. Portuguese nationalistic pride is tempered by its recognition of “civill manner’d” islanders (1.3.32). Portugal prefers that her commercial activity fit seamlessly into life in the equatorial archipelago. She sees trade as a necessary and sufficient reason to excuse her presence, although the playwright exposes the potential frailties in her political ideology in Ruy Dias’s state of decrepitude relative to that of Armusia. Fortune proves fickle for political actors on all sides; therefore, technological superiority in the form of the West’s excellence in armaments determines outcomes with a

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force on a par with natural disasters, “Heaven blesse us, what a thundring’s here? what fire-spitting?” (5.3.1-2). Technology alone cannot form the basis of an enduring IR theory, but neither are the Portuguese shown to be absolute religious evangelicals, however much they adhere to faith and however often the islanders line up for conversion. Fletcher’s (limited) IR theory as presented is simply that Portuguese military superiority provides a huge advantage in determining the affairs of certain localities. Chapman’s The Blind Beggar of Alexandria was one of the most popular plays of any genre on the English Renaissance public stage. Philip Henslowe’s Diary shows only Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, and The Jew of Malta exceeding its quantity of 22 public performances through 1601. The disguise comedy allowed the Admiral’s Men to capitalize on the success of Edward Alleyn’s creation of Tamburlaine, of whom the play’s hero, Duke Cleanthes, is a comic variation. Exiled for spurning the advances of Ptolomy’s queen (Ægiale), Duke Cleanthes returns in multiple disguises in order to gain domestic political supremacy in Egypt, a Marlovian aspiration if ever there was one. He toys with Ægiale and woos her daughter, Aspasia, in aiming to supplant the Egyptian ruler; therefore, Chapman treats Eastern exoticism as a mere façade for portraying prevailing British notions of IR realism, which he stages with familiar comic devices to realize a tacitly humane foreign relations resolution, “So will we linke in perfit league of loue.”42 Cleanthes recalls almost too late the threat of a regional war against Egypt, but he is nevertheless so proficient that he recovers just in time to defeat the foes (seemingly) almost single-handedly. By employing quick costume changes, Cleanthes appears as Irus, the seer; Leon, the usurer; and Count Hermes, the madcap courtier, in order to satisfy his political and financial needs, before revealing his true identity as an exile-turned-Egyptian savior. Chapman’s play suggests that kingdoms are ruled best by a vital potentate who instills respect for moral values in others while violating them himself if necessary as the occasion requires. Ptolomy is shown to be dangerously weak. Ægiale is morally compromised by her role in facilitating the death of Cleanthes’s wife; thus, Cleanthes’s motivation to reverse his banishment, revenge the murder of his wife, and preserve the Egyptian state is a more or less rational political goal. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, Cleanthes triumphs by enlisting subterfuge in the service of regional stability. Chapman shows Cleanthes to be a Machiavellian reformer surmounting IR realist political obstacles by somewhat farcical means. The duke is no mad revenger, for he acts violently only when his core interests are threatened. The geographical setting of Chapman’s ten-scene, textually corrupt play is the East, although two of the four defeated kings hail from

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Arcadia (Greece) and Colchis, states straddling Europe and Asia; therefore, Western imperialism is never targeted as a culprit. Cleanthes’s manservant, Pego, holds the rank of Burgomaister of Alexandria—the title itself a comic conflation of East and West. Marlowe’s influence on Chapman’s verse is readily apparent given Ægiale’s request that Cleanthes (disguised as the seer) share his wisdom, “Now Irus let thy mindes eternall eye, / Extend the vertue of it past the Sunne” (I.6-7). Irus is neither blind, nor a beggar, nor a seer, nor does he intend to save Ægiale; instead, Cleanthes wishes to establish a close rapport with the audience by addressing directly his political rationale for his disguises, “Kinges in there mercie come most neare the Goddes” (X.70). The play’s romance structure suggests that he means Aspasia to become his mate, yet its IR devices are such that political imperatives prevail over marital desires. A prophecy foretells of a match between Doricles and Aspasia that will yield regional peace, but Cleanthes imposes order by rule of moral strength. He abjures his devices as trickster the nearer he comes to fulfilling his political goal. If Fletcher sees mere technology filling the IR theoretical void, Cleanthes employs policy rather than force where possible. In a coup de théâtre, Cleanthes discharges a pistol, killing the prophesied ruler, Doricles, in an exception to his typical statecraft. Ever the IR classical realist, Cleanthes demands that the leaders of the four state-invaders (Ethiopia, Arabia, Phasiaca, Bebritia) grant him a vote of confidence in order to affirm his legitimacy, a precaution that Tamburlaine would have rejected as an intolerable nicety. Nor does Cleanthes humiliate the four kings as he had Bragadino, a Spanish rival for Elimine’s hand; instead, he frees the enemy rulers upon hearing their oaths. The denizens of the East are as capable of dispatching a braggart soldier as their Western counterparts. So too are they willing to revise IR “pollicie,” shown in Bebritius’s scheme to enslave Ptolomy: “We will deuide his kingdome twixt vs foure, / And reaue from him his foure cheife ornamentes, / And for to greeue his aged mind the more, / He shall be kept in lasting seruitude” (VIII.17-20). War fades quickly from Egypt’s memory as Cleanthes arranges the marriages of Egyptian war widows to the highest-ranking vanquished invaders as a means to solemnize the regional peace. Chapman’s outlook on the East is sufficiently benign that he (like Marlowe) may have influenced Shakespeare’s conception of foreign policy. The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (staged 1595-1596) predates Antony and Cleopatra by roughly ten years; thus, the Admiral’s Men made an aesthetic success of portraying fairness and peace in foreign policy. Chapman attributes to Egypt the concept that life proceeds by “driftes of fate, / Our fortunes and thinges hid from sensuall eyes” (I.23-24). Ægiale believes Cleanthes’s account of the capacity of the sorceress, Hella, to turn her son

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into a mandrake root and restore him to health, but she also makes “continuall pilgrimages” and worships “saints and Idols” (I.100, 101). In his disguise as Irus, Cleanthes foretells of the sisters’ marital bliss, a prophecy of love transcending wealth and power while granting the wayward ingénues the high status they desire, “Their fortunes that I told as I was Irus, / Will now in force I see be come to passe” (X.147-148). Most importantly, Chapman commends to our attention Egypt’s overriding interest in diplomatic harmony.43 Chapman modifies British Renaissance IR realism to fit the play’s aesthetics and his audience’s expectations. Despite the Admiral’s Men’s past successes with Marlowe, Chapman was not inclined to stage IR offensive realism, although he uses the Marlovian premise of political supremacy as a vehicle for Edward Alleyn, whose role as Cleanthes comprises over one-third of the lines in the play. Cleanthes however refuses to wallow in the currents of fortune. Perhaps Chapman reflects the true theatrical values of the Admiral’s Men by giving Alleyn the opportunity to demonstrate his comedic talents while endorsing moderation in foreign policy relative to Marlowe’s quite aggressive stance.44 Chapman’s conciliatory IR play seeks to extend right rule to regional politics. Innenpolitik in Egypt having lost most of its defensive potency due to Ptolomy’s senescence, a hero like Cleanthes is required to assume command of domestic affairs in order to put down threats from abroad. The prophecy inspiring regional insurgents to invade the hegemon is undercut by a master of disguise who dallies with wayward spouses. Far from inventing new IR principles, Chapman affirms traditional domestic political principles in stabilizing Egypt’s foreign affairs. Rather like Shakespeare’s Theseus (on the surface), Cleanthes displays unsurpassed excellence in arms, amour, and diplomacy; however, Chapman’s new league of peace restrains men’s and women’s appetites more than it develops their IR theory curiosity, thereby adding SW quadrant principles to its NW orientation. Victory achieved through the proper application of the arts of military science eludes Antony and his allies even if they do not want for subtlety in world affairs; however, Octavius Caesar’s main political antagonist cannot bring to bear the diplomatic skills needed to rule the globe. Envoys like Thidius who encroach upon Antony’s privileges are subject to being whipped like common criminals. Yet in the battle between global hegemons, Antony and his paramour are not slaughtered like the ancient, uncomprehending Coriolanus, nor abandoned like the even more antique, despairing Timon of Athens. They understand all too well the differences between Roman and Egyptian philosophies, but they value their relationship to the exclusion of all others. Shakespeare’s play transforms

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the theatre into an aesthetic monument sufficient to compensate the lovers for their spurning the dictates of IR realism. Enobarbus’s doubts about Antony’s leadership do not owe to his disrespect of an acknowledged military hero. He captivates Agrippa and Maecenas with a tale of luxury that he relates like a popular historiographer—Cleopatra’s barge being an icon of alleged Egyptian sensuality. Yet Shakespeare ensconces his narrative within even more dominant laws regulated by IR realist principles. Enobarbus’s vaunted reliability consequently shows signs of disintegration owing to his eagerness to position himself as a reliable narrator of exotic stories and debunker of artistic fantasies. The barge scene scarcely “beggared all description” given his heated exposition upon silver oars beating the water with increasing intensity and lines swollen by the mermaid’s touch, an account of Cleopatra’s passage taking on the tone of a racing scull enthusiast in order to enthrall his comrades.45 The play’s IR realist portrayal of the clash of imperial powers outweighs his hyperbolic narrative style because of his own self-destructive inconsistency. Shakespeare takes care to reap the theatrical rewards of presumed Egyptian self-indulgence. Enobarbus reveals unwittingly the effect of erotic desire on Rome, as if it might have stunted the empire’s emotional maturation. In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1972-1973 production directed by Trevor Nunn and Buzz Goodbody, Patrick Stewart played the character as a wizened old warrior spinning a yarn about Cleopatra to credulous associates because he believed at bottom that “none of it was true.”46 Stewart’s creation of the role changed drastically in Peter Brook’s 1978 RSC production, in which Egypt’s “profound” influence had made Rome “passionate”; therefore, he believed that he had “shared in some kind of mystery” that he wished to relate truthfully to his friends while doing justice to a rare vision.47 Although each production evaluated the East as a complicated entity, the initial RSC production treated Egyptian desire as fool’s gold, whereas the second showed Egypt having the power to infect and control Roman nobility. Cleopatra’s personal energy proved incapable of blocking Octavius Caesar, but the Roman’s somewhat timorous demeanor before her was such as to lower him in our personal estimation, if not within the bounds of military and political strategy. Shakespeare’s play covers not only the NW but the SW quadrant, including the center point of the compass (rather to the exclusion of diplomacy), the more that artistry arises as sole compensation for Egypt’s loss of an ever-evaporating political fantasia. In a nice artistic touch, the lovers reunite “aloft” at the height of their political weakness, while showing paradoxically the superiority of their alliance, “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned” (4.15.0,

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1.1.15). Conventional British Renaissance poetics prove more than equal to the task of revealing Antony’s conceit of his love as surpassing normal human powers of understanding, “Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17). There are few elements of fantasy in his relationship with Cleopatra that are not treated by Renaissance metaphysical poets of the highest quality. The play’s Egyptian tropes are drawn readily from the literary canons of the scepter’d isle, to whose rules the play remains accountable in the end, but the 1978 RSC production treated Cleopatra as a vibrant woman in her prime. She appeared mature, sagacious, independent, and self-confident (perhaps Glenda Jackson was simply playing herself). Her comparison of the application of the asps to her breast to the toils of sexual play made a literary device of her envisioned passing. Jackson’s Cleopatra was an outstanding political actor, although she called Antony “husband” to justify her new claim to immortality by virtue of a “title” she held in far greater esteem than political success granted by good fortune (5.2.286, 287). Her Cleopatra was well-rounded as a character quite capable of ruling an empire, if not the world. Not only was she Antony’s equal, she was more than a match for Octavius Caesar, who paled before her; therefore, she diminished the mystique in raw political supremacy not by dispelling the heavy fog yet obscuring IR theory but by illuminating those clouds with her realistic acting style. Charmian expresses playfully an aspiration voiced similarly by Chapman’s ingénues to marry “three kings in a forenoon and widow them all” or to secure an alliance with the Roman emperor (1.2.28). The artistry in the lovers’ relationship is procreative, whereas Octavius’s imperial designs dilute such fecundity. Antony demonstrates that his native artistic skills equal those of a professional actor in his impromptu orations to the troops and in his final loving kiss, “ . . . the poor last / I lay upon thy lips,” as though he were applying the finishing touch of color to a sculptural masterpiece (4.15.21-22). The calculus of IR realism operates inexorably in the system notwithstanding the aesthetic values gracing the lovers’ extended demise. The world remains divided by IR realist conflicts involving opposed imperial powers, although the drunken shipboard celebration attended by Antony, Lepidus, Octavius Caesar, and Pompey imitates the high spirits marking (presumed) Egyptian revelry that the Romans regarded publicly with such disdain. Lepidus’s besotted foolishness seems more admirable than Octavius Caesar’s dry calculations to gain strategic advantage in his pose as being little more than an onlooker. Antony shows himself to be an eternal Roman by taking temporary leave of regimented military discipline in order to partake in the festivities, but he would never have so much as entertained for a moment the opportunity that entices

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Pompey—the prospect of becoming the sole ruler of the world by dispatching rivals deep in their cups. Shakespeare’s spectacle of a superpower summit is rather deflating in the end, but it is no less an accurate portrayal of power politics from a certain wry perspective. Shakespeare’s tragedy renders verdicts on the relative strengths of hegemons such that imperial Rome consolidates its power before fatal sanctions are distributed against those who run afoul of the IR realist global system. The love of Antony and Cleopatra is the playwright’s last best attempt to find a value to prevail over anarchy in global affairs. His most romantic Roman play conveys a highly refined view of brutal IR principles, rules holding no less firmly despite the psychological variations seen among leaders in antiquity. The very momentum in the IR system predominates over the rulers’ ability to manipulate world affairs, a concept that eludes Chapman because he could scarcely have understood it. As well, more so than Fletcher, Shakespeare places a value on art that meets or exceeds the contributions of military and political science, albeit without discounting objective patterns or movements in the IR theory constellation.

VI. Conclusions: Modern and Shakespearean These mainly pre-IR theory plays show an understanding of the concept of the status quo, but they do not seek to transform world affairs on the basis of an abstract international view (Antony and Cleopatra being on the philosophical cusp in this regard given its global political dynamic). Still, the fundamental stakes at play between powers are set out in IR realist terms worthy of diplomatic notice. Status quo is a useful short-hand expression referring to the preexisting balance in global affairs (without putting too fine a theoretical point on it), because Shakespeare’s lovers delay only briefly Rome’s consolidation of her supremacy. Modern political scientists and diplomats frequently avail themselves of the locution; however, its standard definition was slightly altered upon former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s mellifluous intonation of “status quo ante” (the prior order) in television interviews at the time of the Iranian hostage crisis (if memory serves).48 Because he was (and still is) seen as the world leader par excellence in diplomatic wisdom and professional diction, many foreign policy pundits appearing on television in his wake dutifully adopted his terminology, if not his accent, as their own. Seemingly unknown to them all, the most informative expression is status quo ante bellum, so long as brevity is no longer prized. Kissinger’s tripartite variation omits the causal historical reference to war, although the old Chinese hand’s version became de rigueur; however, he might just as well have said: restore the status quo. The complete four-word phraseology

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is the most instructive of all because it puts the concept in its proper context by implying the restoration of old boundaries prior to the territorial adjustments visited upon states ensnared in the exigencies of war. The nuances in diplomatic and other peaceful post-war developments are thus negated out of hand under an imposed pacification of weaker states upon their return willy-nilly to their pre-last war condition. For example, upon the expiration of the terms of the U.K.’s New Territories lease, China signed agreements extending Hong Kong’s provisional independent status following Britain’s forced departure in 1997. In 2020, China, ruled by the Communist Party of China, abrogated the revised lease by mere threat alone, which compelled Hong Kong to revert to her de facto dependency upon mainland China not only prior to the Japanese occupation of the city in World War II, but (even better from the CPC’s perspective) back to the era before the flowering of British gunboat diplomacy: the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century—i.e., the status quo ante bellum. The annexation of Hong Kong has proceeded ruthlessly because the territory lies well within China’s (and the CPC’s) sphere of influence—another well-travelled concept guiding IR realist estimates of foreign affairs. Shakespeare takes equal care to consider relations between states in their full personal and historical (not just materialist) significance, even to the point of tacitly assigning to mighty Caesar the role of the lovers’ chronicler. Shakespeare’s IR theory does not yet display in full the parameters established subsequently in his romances, but his diachronic sense of Renaissance IR realism allows him to stage complicated levels of conflict simultaneously. In this vein, IR classical realist Edward Hallett Carr insists upon the importance to historians of distinguishing between immediate IR causes and effects, including inadvertent causes and effects. Carr’s thinking on the matter arises from his consideration of the role of accidents in history, a concept he defends while allowing that some elements of causation rise neither to policy heights nor to the level of metaphysical laws. In a refutation aimed seemingly at dialectical materialism, he holds that historical events depend upon direct causation, although he understands the perils associated with drawing universal principles from personal idiosyncrasies, including one of Antony’s alleged infatuations: “The shape of Cleopatra’s nose, Bajazet’s attack of gout, the monkey-bite that killed King Alexander, the death of Lenin [due to a stroke]—these were accidents which modified the course of history.”49 No one knew better than Carr not to build theoretical sandcastles upon mere ephemera, but neither did he belittle the idea that minor details and absolute chance occasionally hold sway in the fate of nations. Shakespeare’s dramaturgy makes sense of the past by means of which Carr would have approved because “interpretation in history is . . .

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always bound up with value judgments, and causality is bound up with interpretation.”50 Shakespeare’s art establishes as well the essential connection between the transitory properties in personal alliances and the theoretical principles governing historical movements. IR theorists have occasionally discounted diplomacy by minimizing reasonable insights into the major political actors’ hidden motivations. Yet Shakespeare takes care to formulate value judgments like a diplomat while relating causality to interpretation like an IR theorist in Antony and Cleopatra. Only the most experienced legates can divine the full IR theory significance of events inclusive of extremely granular perspectives on the most sensitive personal levels; however, too few rulers then and now would on the basis of such a holistic analysis allow their diplomats’ profound insights to sway the course of global relations for the better.

CHAPTER SEVEN CODA: SHAKESPEARE’S IR DEBT TO CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

Abstract Shakespeare’s concept of ethical interstate relations traces its theatrical origins (ironically) to Christopher Marlowe’s amoral brand of offensive realism. Like Shakespeare, Marlowe expresses his international relations (IR) theory via an extraordinarily refined aesthetic sensibility. As well, Shakespeare shares Marlowe’s ambivalence toward the East as a prospective IR partner for the same reason that each doubts the permanence of Western alliances; however, Shakespeare creates redemptive IR categories that circumscribe the authoritarian global aspirations characterizing the Marlovian hero.

Shakespeare’s romances entirely redefine Christopher Marlowe’s concept of aggression in international relations (IR) theory. Marlowe’s two-part play, Tamburlaine the Great, stages IR offensive realism in a style utterly consistent with his theatrical vision. Marlowe claims dominion over IR theory on the stage by virtue of the sheer artistry of oratory, shown in the surrender of a greater power led by Theridamas to Tamburlaine, the young Scythian shepherd, “Won with thy words and conquered with thy looks, / I yield myself, my men, and horse to thee.”1 If Marlowe streamlines offensive realism according to the specifications of a study of character (or of leadership), Shakespeare treats world affairs as a dynamic relationship between independent actors in a (finally) moral interstate system; nevertheless, both dramatists open IR theory to new aesthetic vistas in the realm of Renaissance and modern ideas. Marlowe’s piratical IR theory obscures certain moral principles of defensive realism that are no longer treated as given in the West. Defensive realism is seen today mainly as a hybrid theory on IR security that combines the perceived normalcy of IR neoliberalism (which involves economic relationships among regional powers, as in the EU) with occasional restorations of IR realism (which assumes state autonomy and balance-of-

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power in times of great duress). Marlowe’s portrayal of an unstoppable hegemon shows only glimpses of IR defensive realism in its true moral light—precisely as it had been conceived in Chinese antiquity by Mencius, the 2nd century B.C. follower of Confucius.2 Unlike Marlowe, Mencius rests his IR theory upon the broad shoulders of the moral leader. Mencius’s right ruler embodies magnanimity and wisdom acquired through traditional ethical teachings. His principles aim to protect his people as if they were his kin. On his view, monarchs should accrue territory solely as gifts in recognition of their benevolent public service, whereas Marlowe’s plunderer seizes land at will by raw force of arms. Whether Mencius’s prince rules an empire or a muddy redoubt, moral values place a limit on his capacity to endanger his people for the sake of territorial expansion. Western audiences would find Mencius’s self-reliance appealing, but his observance of the Way (Confucian philosophy) bears no resemblance whatsoever to Tamburlaine’s cultivation of his acquisitive instincts. Mencius concedes that the populace is amoral, although he believes that it may tread the path of enlightenment by following examples set forth from on high; therefore, defensive realism in pre-Qin thought depends upon a kingdom’s virtuous resistance to military invasions. Because Tamburlaine is not inclined toward pacifism, his offensive realist style can be checked only by a superior hegemon, if such a one dares oppose him. Marlowe’s hero simply exhorts his troops to accept his vision of absolute conquest, which promises riches beyond imagining for his loyalists.

I. Britain’s IR Compromise on Eastern Traffic in Drugs In combining largely autonomous if at times competing values in his IR theory, Shakespeare describes the actual state of affairs in the world more accurately than Marlowe. IR theory explains power relationships between states, but it often glosses over the most unpleasant—and persistent— overseas exchanges. Contemporary scholarship in the field tends to ignore the baser elements of foreign transactions in favor of addressing prestigious cultural and personal modes of diplomatic enrichment. Renaissance Britain engaged with the East for political advantage and financial gain, yet drug imports negated some of the benefits of her global trade. Traders knew of opium’s addictive properties, but Francis Walsingham was among those enticed by the medical benefits of “druggs out of India, or some other far parte.”3 British elites respected classical Roman physicians like Galen for administering opium judiciously, yet the West doubted its ability to resist the drug’s habit-forming allure. The conflict between Britain’s desire for Eastern (so-called) cures and her distrust of a poisonous commodity was

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resolved ultimately against the interests of the realm. A brief chronology shows Britain’s descent into opium trafficking: a) November 17, 1566: Parliament approves Far Eastern trade despite Portuguese diplomatic accounts of opium addiction in India. Regular commerce in the region is delayed by Britain’s failure to locate a northern passage. b) 1601: East India Company (EIC) vessels set sail for India via established trade routes. By 1608, British diplomats and traders include opium among “the most desirable commodities for sending home.”4 c) July 16, 1624: James I describes Far Eastern trade as a vital “business of State.”5 In 1632, Charles I reiterates British foreign policy allowing the EIC to import “drugs of all sorts” from the East.6 d) January 10, 1633: The EIC investigates its first selfinflicted opium death in Masulipatam, India (on the Bay of Bengal). An EIC factor swallowed a handful of opium rather than endure torture designed to elicit his confession of theft of pepper, “The night before [his interrogation] he ate opium, which was the occasion of his death.”7 But British traders were by now quite familiar with opium’s toxicity. The EIC makes note of an alarming “imputation concerning a parcel of opium” stolen from her Blackwall shipyard in London.8 Ironically, British trafficking opens opium markets at home, not in the Far East. e) 1682: The EIC auctions Indian opium publicly in London. Britain ultimately failed in her plan to resell opium in wellestablished Eastern markets in order to subsidize her global trade. The EIC valued Indian opium for its purity, which suggests that Silk Road opium became adulterated along the land trade route to Britain. Yet the quality of opium was no measure of its merit, for Don Alfonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese governor of Malacca, reports in 1513 that Indian opium was morbidly addictive, “The people of India are lost without it, if they do not eat it.”9 Travel writer Duarte Barbosa embellishes upon the governor’s analysis, “If they [Indians] leave off eating it they die immediately.”10 Albuquerque too suggested that opium be grown as a cash crop to finance trade, but Portugal rejected both this suggestion as well as his idea that opium be recycled in the East for huge profits; nevertheless, European diplomats saw commercial value in Far Eastern remedies that were displayed in bulk on Portuguese docks. Venetian legate Giovanni de la

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Faitada observes that “the captains of the ships, and other individuals, smuggle the most valuable part of their freight,” which further depressed the market.11 Having witnessed Portugal’s Eastern dealings in Continental harbors, Nicholas Wotton informed Henry VIII that the Holy Roman Emperor ate “’the wood of Ynde’” (India) to alleviate the pain resulting from his mortal illness.12 Renaissance Britain remained divided between viewing opium as a medication and as a commodity of uncertain value. The Elizabethans facilitated drug trafficking so long as EIC traders did not jeopardize relations with Far Eastern governments. British legates at the court of Mughal Emperor Jahangir wished to distinguish themselves from their Portuguese and Dutch counterparts by emphasizing “the difference between an ambassador and a private agent.”13 Foreign envoys like Thomas Roe reaped financial benefits from the EIC’s trade in cures even though India’s consumption of opium had reached its peak, whereas late Ming China had relentlessly quashed the drug trade to the point of extinction. Still, Jacobean traders felt compelled to “thrust a sickle into [Portugal’s] harvest” in the Far East.14 Normal trading inefficiencies were exaggerated due to Britain’s need to employ some of the EIC’s commercial functionaries as quasi-diplomats, but Elizabeth expected some return on her investment in the East short of incurring risks that might damage overseas alliances. The EIC established its headquarters in Surat, India, on the Arabian Sea, although the traffic in opium and rare commodities took its vessels to the Bay of Bengal, the Moluccas, the South China Sea, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Some distant ports of call lay well outside the major diplomatic centers in India, Persia, and China, most of which had been founded by Britain’s Continental competitors. Because EIC traders found no market in equatorial climes for heavy English cloth and repurposed Indian opium, the company permitted its returning employees to import small quantities of drugs and other products into London, even if its supervisors lamented “the monster private trade”; moreover, the EIC often worked at cross-purposes with diplomacy.15 Agent Thomas Barber informed Thomas Roe that Persia’s opium “is better than that of Indya” and grew “in greater aboundance,” but, due to his overwork, Ambassador Roe discouraged as much as possible eastward explorations promising solely commercial benefits.16 Elizabeth promoted Eastern trade alliances by providing ship’s captains with boilerplate letters of introduction. These documents followed British diplomatic precedent by lavishing praise on overseas rulers in the salutation (leaving blank the space for the name of the addressee): “To the great and mighty King of ( ) our loving brother, greetings.”17 From her very first paragraph, Elizabeth embraces prospective partners as members of

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her royal family. Foreign potentates could thus determine immediately the tenor of her messages, whereas France’s Henri IV reserved his praise solely for his letters’ complimentary close. Elizabeth commonly salutes favored diplomats with a variation on “Right trusty and well-beloved, we greet you well,” the rare omission of which implicitly conveys her displeasure. She commands her Far Eastern representatives to meet diplomatic standards of excellence, “Traders will apply themselves to learn the language, and direct themselves according to the fashions of the country.”18 Her form letter extols international trade as the most effective means to redistribute nature’s bounty. She requests a line of credit from foreign leaders, guaranteed by her “love and amity,” to cover any debts incurred in their cooperative venture.19 Elizabeth’s letters were well received, but Far Eastern rulers were also experienced global traders. They expected transactions to be paid up-front in full and on time; otherwise, they sanctioned commercial deadbeats. These leaders knew that Western purchasers of spices were buyers of opium, so theirs was a seller’s market, with Britain being the alltoo-obvious buyer. To be sure, the Sultan of Acheen and Sumatra welcomed political ties with Britain. To show his appreciation, Sultan Ala’u ‘d-Din Shah sent Elizabeth a ruby-studded gold ring and vestures woven with gold. These gifts were packed in a 13th century Chinese Jin dynasty box, itself a valuable antique.20 The Sultan corresponds in Malay, the standard language of diplomacy regionally and in the Strait. Opening with a Muslim prayer of thanks for God’s beneficence, the Sultan affords British traders equal protection under his laws. His proclamation grants British captains safe passage within his domain on his authority, “I am the reigning sovereign of these [countries] below the wind [the typhoon belt], holding the throne of the kingdom of Acheen and Sumatra.”21 The safe conduct letter notes Britain’s interest in “pepper and so forth,” commodities inclusive of opium that were available in these entrepôts.22 British traders often used euphemisms for opium (e.g., cures) to save face in official meetings. Far Eastern leaders knew these code words but downplayed the topic of opium for its being déclassé in comparison to their most highly prized commodities, most of which British importers could not afford in the regular course of their commercial activities. The Sultan treats political relations with Britain as being mutually beneficial. He greets Elizabeth as “Sultana” in his private letter while referring to her as “the King of England” for domestic consumption.23 Elizabeth would not have been troubled by the formal gender ambiguity because she included herself among Europe’s princes. The Sultan closes his letter by noting “the year 1011 of Mahomet. Peace be unto you,” without fear of offending her.24 The Sultan’s gold reserves and fair trading practices

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made his port a safe harbor; however, Britain neglected to station diplomats in Acheen in order to preserve this relationship. She joined the fray instead in hotly contested commercial centers like Bantam and Macau, mainly to her disadvantage. English commerce in wools and tin could have been sustained at a low level by posting factors and diplomats in the temperate harbors of Korea and Japan as well as in ports serving Persia (if not Acheen) in order to take advantage of the reduced trading competition, yet Britain made it a priority by default that spices and opium predominate in her imports. James extended the Elizabethan model of cultivating peaceful relations with Far Eastern rulers even though EIC captains took prizes almost indiscriminately from all nationalities and fought Dutch and Portuguese antagonists on the high seas. He composed his own letters of introduction to the rulers of India and China, translating into Portuguese a form letter of introduction designed to improve the EIC’s chances of increasing market share in ports dominated by Iberian competitors. James’s maneuver was welcomed by most of his Far Eastern counterparts, who were becoming alarmed by highhanded Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese tactics. Upon sealing a pact with James that excluded the Dutch and the Portuguese, the King of Bantam proclaims, “Now England and Bantam are both one.”25 Sultan Iskander Muda of Sumatra and Acheen assured Britain of continued unrestricted trade in 1615 despite occasional local disputes that resulted in brief commercial interruptions. British suasion alone could not open the Chinese marketplace to regular trade, although Persia beckoned as an alternate site boasting of comparable products available for the fair reimbursement of “one-third in ready money and two-thirds commodities”; however, England delayed forming advantageous economic relations with Isfahan via trade routes through the Persian Gulf.26 British adventurer Anthony Sherley became Persia’s representative to Europe, but he abused his post for his personal benefit at great cost to the interests of his homeland; nevertheless, his behavior did little to damage his financial reputation because his contacts were seen to be vital to British commerce. The Levant Company picked up some of the resulting slack in Persian trade, adding new layers of expense and bribery to goods passing through multiple jurisdictions on their way to England. Even the inconvenience of the oppressive summer heat in Gulf ports like Bandar Abbas was outweighed by fairly priced and reliable cargoes of drugs, spices, and the occasional rare or valuable commodity constituting Britain’s imports of choice. English fortunes rose in India due partly to Thomas Roe’s skillful ambassadorship at the Mughal court, where he supervised the EIC’s increased investments in trade following a regional British sea victory over

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Portugal in 1615. Emperor Jahangir follows protocol perfectly in expressing his “mutual affection with the King of England.”27 Like the Shah of Acheen, he does not mention opium because the Mughal court too regarded the drug as a base commodity. China’s effective suppression of the drug trade shows in import duties levied on opium only in “1589, 1615, and 1687.”28 Opium remained a commodity essential to British trade because EIC stakeholders cited Far Eastern “drugges” first in order of importance in order to justify the relative weight assigned to her expenditures in the procurement of cures abroad.29 Recent new historicist-based studies on New Diplomatic History overlook the central function of the ambassador to develop local partnerships permitting him or her to be informed quickly of political activities in the vicinity of his or her posting. Indeed, Catherine Fletcher believes that normal diplomacy involves a stylized exhibition of shamanic (or otherwise ambiguous) gestures that make the chargé d’affaires “a particular type of performer” combining the esoteric insights of an enlightened magi with the authority invested in a foreign representative.30 Yet Far Eastern rulers would never have abided an incoherent embassy of state. These potentates would have sought to eliminate any and all possible confusion arising in talks at the state level by summoning their interlocutors’ next best available representative to relay a British ruler’s message clearly. Not only would a liminal diplomatic performance of the kind favored by Catherine Fletcher risk offending a Sultan or Shah, thereby endangering the entire sea-bourne mission, but the crew would have resented deeply any mismanagement (intentional or otherwise) of an encounter facilitated by their good offices abroad. Unlike his predecessors, Charles I attempted to circumvent not only the EIC but normal diplomacy itself in order to increase crown revenues. He chafed at the “backwardness” of the EIC in its turning a blind eye to private dealing and resisting increased customs fees.31 The king surreptitiously launched his own Far Eastern fleet in 1637 with designs on the Chinese market through “Cochin” (Vietnam).32 He authorized Captain John Weddell to act boldly so long as his fleet avoided EIC ports, “ . . . you may rest assured to find favour from us, and let not any rumour raised from such here as malign your employment beget any distrust of our continued esteem. . . . ”33 Charles miscalculated badly in attempting to use overt naval force to enter China, whose military repulsed Weddell’s naval assault because Ming rulers were determined to honor their historical, arm’s-length alliance with Portugal. The British decision to invade China is additionally puzzling because Weddell had been commended for developing commerce with Persia by quite genteel means; moreover, the EIC considered the consumption of Persian drugs to be a “more effectual” medical practice than

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blood-letting.34 Persian ports and independent Chinese merchants scattered throughout the region provided Britain with ready alternative sources for valuable goods that might have compensated her for China’s closed-door policy, but Charles insisted (perhaps not uncharacteristically) upon conducting Far Eastern affairs as if he exerted power in the region equal to that of the Dutch VOC. Britain’s formal departure from Japan in 1623 consequently eliminated Korea as a viable trading partner, although the residents of these temperate lands might have benefitted considerably from English trade. Silver accumulated from the sale of textiles to Japan and Korea could have financed British purchases of prestigious Chinese silk and commodities. Britain’s cavalcade of commercial errors reached a culmination in 1682, when the EIC auctioned opium publicly in her home port: “The East India sale began last Tuesday and ends to-day. They have sold drugs and pepper to the value of 150,000£. and silks to the value of 400,000£.”35 Not coincidentally, the EIC began taking standing orders for opium. Decades of worry over drug addiction ended with Britain selling the product openly to the highest bidder on her own shores. Two broad conclusions about British Renaissance IR theory may be drawn from the Eastern drug trade. First, the crown regarded the establishment of alliances overseas to be an unalloyed virtue (notwithstanding Mencius’s defensive realist perspective) despite any increase in addiction and strife resulting from such foreign interactions. Coriolanus’s famous retort to perceived Roman ingratitude (leading to his banishment) reflects in a different context the prevailing Tudor-Stuart belief in the inherent value of foreign trade: “There is a world elsewhere” (3.3.135). Drug trafficking showed Britain’s quest for worldwide economic relations in nearly the worst possible light. Having failed to stimulate opium trafficking in the Far East by offering the drug at below-market prices, the EIC imported the crop for domestic consumption, proving that Britain’s IR policy was in this respect self-defeating; nevertheless, England pursued foreign commerce as if it were a moral imperative. Second, as a consequence of the above axiom, British Renaissance dramatists saw the mere portrayal of global interactions as a virtue, although not all such exchanges were demonstrably positive; therefore, they rejected the implicit isolationism of defensive realists like Mencius. Although the Chinese philosopher’s viewpoint cannot be faulted on moral grounds as a rationale for national defense, opinions like his would have been ruled out as retrograde by Renaissance playwrights. Marlowe’s IR theory treats foreign engagements as a boon to the hegemon by dismissing ethical questions out of hand in favor of approving the crown’s acquisition of treasures and cures by conquest if necessary; furthermore, the playwright

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tacitly imbues Britain’s relations with the East in the glow of aesthetic inspiration. To be sure, Britain’s gift of miniature portraits to Emperor Jahangir spurred art sales with India. A Mughal painting depicted Roe’s inaugural meeting with the Emperor. Charles’s courtiers reserved space in the Company’s London warehouses for “some [Indian] statues and pictures, brought for the King.”36 Britain sought out Japanese “pictures of wars”; thus, Marlowe and Shakespeare evaluate the East according to the same (occasionally caustic) political and aesthetic standards that they applied to Continental affairs, all while making allowances for perceived local flavor.37 Diverse faiths and nationalities endure criticism in Tamburlaine, but Marlowe’s epic tale reveals a certain undying admiration of the East. Tamburlaine abstains from drug use, but he would not have been troubled by the traffic in mind-altering substances. To the contrary, he would have viewed narcotics as an ally in his goal of world conquest. Marlowe nullifies the stigma associated with foreign aggression, whereas Shakespeare proposes moral limits in his IR theory. To the extent that drugs might have interested him, Shakespeare shows them to reveal new facets of our noetic capabilities. On a higher IR theoretical level, the global visions of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Mencius might well be charted to good effect: assuming a North/South axis with the category of active leadership above and that of absent leadership below, and assuming further an East/West axis with defensive realism in the West and offensive realism in the East, Mencius’s ruler occupies a firm position in the NW quadrant, while Tamburlaine presides over the SE quadrant. Shakespeare appears roughly near the center point of the axis, albeit on a dynamically sliding scale given his wide-ranging analysis of various rulers’ responses to international aggression and cooperation.

II. Marlowe’s Contribution to Shakespearean IR Theory and Aesthetics Marlowe shows Tamburlaine to be a preternaturally successful offensive realist in a world inhabited by other highly accomplished offensive realists. The militarily astute shepherd justifies his foreign invasions on the amoral basis of winner-take-all warfare. He presupposes an IR system inclusive of defensive realism in dispensing rewards to his allies. Although he is personally abstemious apart from the luxuries he lavishes upon Zenocrate, he places real monetary and political value on the assistance rendered by his able lieutenants, to whom he grants the sovereignty of kingdoms and realms as a reward for their competence on the field of battle. Tamburlaine’s foes form relatively weak military alliances in a prudential nod to modern defensive realism as conceived in terms familiar to the West; nonetheless,

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the mighty herdsman brushes aside his opposition like so much chaff under the relentless pressure of his irresistible advances. Tamburlaine’s IR values are not diametrically opposed to those of Mencius because Marlowe’s conception of offensive realism depends upon the higher systemic logic of anarchic aggression overseas; however, his warrior-shepherd turns defensive realism into a spoils system by rewarding his allies for victories abroad, whereas Mencius gives an entirely moral account of the IR theory. The Chinese sage’s emphasis on ethics would have placed him in good stead with IR classical realists because he views the unwise ruler’s impulse to gain power through territorial absorption as a moral error. Mencius reserves his highest praise for leaders who protect their subjects, whose interests they regard as being in harmony with their own. He disapproves of new alliances struck solely so that autocrats might gain temporary refuge against a rising tide of international strife. He argues that rulers fearful of their neighbors should rely upon support at home rather than enter into unwholesome military associations: “Dig deeper moats and build higher walls and defend them shoulder to shoulder with the people. If they would rather die than desert you, then all is not lost.”38 Mencius’s austere philosophy embraces a holistic belief in the alignment of heaven and earth, “He who is in awe of Heaven will continue to enjoy the possession of his own state.”39 The Chinese philosopher is not the sole authority on preQin thought, but he is certainly the most proficient at reconciling Confucian principles with IR theory by urging his elite followers to desist from undertaking expansionist adventures. If Tamburlaine fits the profile of the complete IR offensive realist, the patronage system he creates implicates him in a predatory variant of defensive realism that scarcely resembles its traditional form; however, his IR theory fits hand-in-glove with the Elizabethan stage’s conventional aesthetic values. Tamburlaine goes so far as to bridle conquered rulers, an inhumane act accompanied by a torrent of his insults, in order that they submit to pulling his chariot like oxen. Marlowe perfects the visual tricks of the tragic theatre in order to illustrate his hero’s vengeful foreign policy: shootings, imprisonments in cages, stabbings (of his own arm and of Olympia’s throat), and a braining. All these and the play’s implicit open staging facilitate quick changes of locale, indicated at times by tents or by turrets razed in the (theatrical) heavens. Marlowe’s art draws opportunistically upon the given properties of the Elizabethan stage, which he exploits for maximum effect, as if the playwright serves as but an aesthetic double of his Scythian protagonist. Marlowe elicits raw emotions from his audience by matching his IR theory to his stage artistry. Tamburlaine refers to himself as “the scourge of God,” in which role he takes no little pleasure in discomfiting his most disrespectful foes

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(2Tamb.5.3.248). Yet Marlowe himself might be called the scourge of those who doubt his artistic gifts on the boards, whereas Shakespeare generally proceeds with equal expertise by less confrontational aesthetic means. Tamburlaine uses clever theatrical devices to demonstrate the harrowing of his opponents, but he summons up the finest œuvres d’art to memorialize Zenocrate; therefore, Marlowe associates the protagonist’s bride with the higher artforms of music and painting. Tamburlaine calls for aural performances to sweeten his initial encounter with his future wife, “Yet music would do well to cheer up Zenocrate” (1Tamb.4.4.65). Those assembled around her death bed second her call for pleasing tones to relieve her pain. With her passing, Tamburlaine requires that her portrait be displayed on her hearse: “Sweet picture of divine Zenocrate” (2Tamb.3.2.27). The music connoting the seduction and remembrance of Zenocrate borders on melodrama (by definition), yet Marlowe’s aesthetic touches are highly selective and theatrically propitious. Art does not assume the role claimed for opium by Tonya Pollard as a Tutor-Stuart “pleasure, in the form of a languorous, quasi-erotic oblivion.”40 For Marlowe’s theatre does not lure its audience in the way that drugs entice users. Properly administered, papaver somniferum (sleepinducing poppy) was used traditionally as a local and general anesthetic as well as a means to ease stomach cramps, aid digestion, and relieve toothaches, although Galen prescribed opium as well to cure serious diseases. Francis Bacon too embraces ancient pharmacology, “Opiates in moderate doses . . . contribute a good deal to the cure of diseases and the prolongation of life.”41 Confusion over categories, nomenclature, and outcomes was however endemic to the age. The EIC classified opium as a drug, but some traders placed it in the same class as spices. Western traders in the Far East referred to opium as “afyam, affion, anfion, opio, opion, and opium.”42 Tamburlaine the Great mentions drugs in connection with behavior-altering properties only as it pertains to “assafoetida,” and then only in relationship to the movement of schools of fish (2Tamb.5.1.207). Olympia refers to “balsamum” merely as a feint to enable her to commit suicide by Theridamas’s hand (2Tamb.4.2.60). “Cassia, ambergris, and myrrh” had scant opioid-like effects, if any, but Marlowe’s conception of these products as being useful in facilitating the potential revivification of human remains pertains to ancient balms designed solely to preserve Zenocrates’s lifeless body as she awaits the companionship of Tamburlaine in death (2Tamb.2.4.130). Shakespeare and Marlowe propose distinct IR theories yielding quite different aesthetic results, although both ensure that the arts of the theatre give full expression to their political views. Shakespeare turns to the

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subject of drugs to explore mental affects, not solely theatrical effects. The very aesthetic discipline in his IR theory refutes Janet Adelman’s view of Cymbeline as being “conspicuously without a center.”43 Innogen swallows the Doctor’s potion to mitigate the shock of Posthumus’s accusations of infidelity against her, although Pisanio’s account of its remedial qualities is limited to physical cures, “If you are sick at sea / Or stomach-qualmed at land, a dram of this / Will drive away distemper” (3.4.188-90). The Doctor’s drug is shown to have the properties of both a narcotic and a cure, placing it presumptively in the category of mainstream Far Eastern opiates imported in Renaissance London. For Innogen informs her Welsh champions and allies that her illness is physiological even while confiding to us that she feels desperately “heart-sick” (4.2.37). The Doctor replaces the deadly compounds requested by the Queen with a Far Eastern-type of potion conceived in idealized terms as leaving the patient “more fresh, reviving,” but he revises his claim following Britain’s victory over Rome on the battlefield (1.3.42). On the Doctor’s altered explanation, the drug halts Innogen’s life processes before restoring “all offices of nature” (5.4.257). The difference between refreshing and restoring health raises implicit ethical questions, for Innogen believes that the drug is utterly harmful. She suspects Pisanio of foul play upon her awakening in a Welsh grave. She flatly dismisses his claim that the substance is “precious / And cordial,” holding instead that it is “murd’rous to th’senses” (4.2.325-26, 327). She directly accuses him of giving her a “poison” (5.4.237). To prove the drug’s toxicity, she asserts, “I was dead”; indeed, the play suggests that she may have known that she was dead while she was dead, to employ her terminology (5.4.259). She seems to have endured or recalled a conscious experience or noetic representation of death while under sedation, an experience that strikes her as being the equivalent of a living hell. Not only does the traffic in drugs (and slavery) confound the otherwise rather productive interests of British Renaissance IR theory, it proves that no perspective on global affairs may ultimately rise above the quality of the foreign policy actors themselves. Shakespeare’s craftsmanship is somewhat more complex than that of his main dramaturgical rival because he chooses to portray the characters resorting at last to a wide range of moral devices in order to resolve foreign policy differences; however, in the final analysis, the IR theories of Marlowe and Shakespeare remain ever the handmaidens of their profound theatrical artistry.

CONCLUSION

Shakespeare’s romances expanded Tudor-Stuart conceptions of IR theory on such a scale that their principles undergird our contemporary notions of IR realism, defensive realism, and constructivism. The playwright crossed the IR theory Rubicon in Cymbeline with Posthumus’s technically true but unconvincing denial of his service to Britain as a “Statist”; moreover, these late plays transcend Northrop Frye’s vision of a comic “green world” because of their depiction of foreign policy, a discipline in which IR theory figures prominently.1 Prospero’s idealistic masque, Gower’s antique moral verses, Emilia’s internal debate over the kinsmen’s portraits, Hermione’s liminal status as an apparent statue, and the emergence of IR theory from emancipatory visions of British mythology in Cymbeline—all possess autonomous aesthetic value, yet Shakespeare’s IR theory innovations have not been studied previously; furthermore, his aesthetic philosophy is only rarely addressed in modern critical interpretations of the plays up to this very day. Philosopher Joseph Margolis holds correctly that art and morals in the contemporary world seem “improvisational under historical conditions”; however, Shakespeare takes full advantage of the luxury afforded him by the Renaissance stage to examine metaphysical and other related philosophical values in his art.2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first to name these plays romances, “The Tempest is a specimen of the purely romantic drama,” by which he means the staging of “a birth of the imagination.”3 The famed poet insists upon the plays’ moral foundation, “Shakespeare may sometimes be gross, but I boldly say that he is always moral and modest.”4 Ethics are of the utmost importance to Coleridge’s assessment of Shakespeare’s character, “For it is in the primacy of moral being only that man is human.”5 After Coleridge, critical opinions on the romances ranged from their being “visionary” religious events (G. Wilson Knight) to Shakespeare being the “least sentimental dramatist who ever lived” (A. D. Nuttall).6 Rather than dissect literary critical interpretations, the present study sounds the plays’ depths in philosophical aesthetics and IR theory in order to assess Shakespeare’s investment in the concept of peaceful world affairs. The saliency in Shakespeare’s association of art with IR theory endures in part due to modern conceptions of identity—national, international, and personal—matters of but heightened interest today. After

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World War II, the restoration of stolen art was treated as a human right under international law. The 1954 Hague Convention outlawed the destruction or conversion of artworks and artifacts by invading armies on the grounds that art is on some level the common property of all humanity, a provision that the Taliban flagrantly violated by demolishing the enormous ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan sculpted on the mountainsides of Afghanistan. Consequently, some governments have sought to recover or retain artworks deemed vital to the national heritage. Greece’s arguments for the return of the Elgin Marbles have gained traction. France reserves the right to match the high bid on art sold at domestic auctions in order to prevent the export of works deemed to be of essential cultural importance. Private owners assert claims that may seem contrary to the public’s interest in art, although uncontested authorship in Shakespeare’s era was no guarantee of ownership rights. Philosopher Janna Thompson notes the tension between cultural rights and the private acquisition of art in her hypothetical on the dying billionaire amateur of Van Gogh. On the basis of the “moral right of artists,” Thompson holds that individual caprice does not suffice to grant that the mere financial capacity to purchase the tormented Dutchman’s masterpieces validates a deep-pocketed art aficionado’s right to entomb them for eternity in his or her final resting place.7 Thompson proposes that artists and the public alike should be able to see the works of Van Gogh on an (at least) occasional or conditional basis by virtue of fundamental principles unifying the culture. In essence, she defines private art ownership as a leasing or borrowing of works over an indefinite term, for, on her holding, Western art masterpieces ought at some point to be returned to the public sphere. Upholding the right of the public to view great artworks at appropriate intervals seems altogether fair and reasonable, although Thompson cites a condition under which an acknowledged masterwork might well be allowed to expire with the art patron. “Cultural property” rights take precedence over those of private ownership in the hypothetical case of an ancient artist who intends that her work be buried alongside her fellow aboriginal tribesmen.8 Thompson respects the artist’s intent to honor the spirit of the deceased by interring art according to the burial customs of the tribe. Although explorers of different nationalities might wish to excavate such artworks carefully in order to display them reverently in museums worldwide, she believes that the artifacts must be allowed to remain underground even if the attendant aesthetic loss might seem incalculably great. Thompson bases tribal assertions of rights to consign art to the grave on “universalist” claims as valid as any that we might proffer in consideration of Western standards for preserving the legacy of, say,

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Impressionist or Old Master works.9 In demanding that its cultural practices be respected, the aboriginal tribe might be said to observe its traditions all the more should it encourage its members to create new works for general public consumption, providing connoisseurs everywhere aesthetic enjoyment without restriction. As well, Thompson proposes a solution to this hypothetical dilemma in the form of a compromise by which buried artworks might be displayed through glass panes in situ; however, if it is the aboriginal artist’s intent that her work suffer the ravages of subterranean disintegration for spiritual reasons, then Thompson believes that her wish should be granted. Thompson sometimes blurs the line between art and design, but her analysis shows that the value placed on artworks encompasses morals, aesthetics, and foreign relations, whether we treat works as private property or as objects belonging properly in the public domain. We may thus consider art to be public property, or as having properties of a public nature, even if strict rules associated with the creation of art by private treaty hold sway. This viewpoint puts to one side such intentionally amusing exceptions as Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing” of 1953, which has provoked no little debate over the ontology of art. Consistent with the global scale of Shakespeare’s moral and aesthetic vision, art ownership today has become enmeshed in diplomatic affairs to the extent that the possession of masterworks is contested on the grounds of their having accrued added value as national treasures. A 20002002 art law case heard in the Southern District of New York reveals anew the interplay between morals, aesthetics, and IR theory. In United States v. Portrait of Wally, Judge Michael B. Mukasey ruled initially in favor of Austria’s Leopold Museum’s claim of ownership of Egon Schiele’s painting, and against the apparently true owners by descent. The painting had been seized from its Jewish owner, Lea Bondi Jaray (i.e., Bondi), in 1938 under Axis-era terror. Judge Mukasey’s July 19, 2000, rationale was based upon his justifiable fidelity to existing U.S. rules of legal procedure that included technicalities (unfortunately) preempting evidence establishing Bondi’s rightful ownership. The judge strictly observed precedent in holding that the work lost its status as stolen art because “United States forces recovered the painting” after the war.10 The post-World War II U.S. military followed its own proper procedures in dispatching the painting to the Austrian government because it had been unable to determine conclusively the provenance of the work. Faced with the same doubts about the work’s provenance, Austria obeyed her post-war mandate to put the painting up for auction so that the proceeds of the sale might benefit Holocaust survivors in general. After several subsequent transactions, the work came to rest in the collection of the

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Leopold Museum. On the judge’s initial ruling, the ethical issue of personal ownership was mooted by an obscure precedent allowing the immaculate conversion of stolen property into legal ownership by virtue of the work’s having fallen temporarily into the hands of the Allies, whose art experts could not foresee all of the legal and moral contingencies surrounding the restoration of lost masterpieces in post-war Europe. Remarkably, Judge Mukasey reversed himself two years later. On April 11, 2002, he ruled that ownership of Bondi’s painting could not be converted to the possession of a corporate body merely because the U.S. military had briefly taken the work into its administrative custody. Finding that no “good title” to the painting had been shown since 1938, the judge held that it was “stolen art at the time of its importation” into the U.S. for a 1997-1998 MoMA exhibition, the occasion prompting the lawsuit by Bondi’s heir.11 The judge’s second ruling was thus for Bondi and against the Leopold Museum. Judge Mukasey’s correct rationale in each decision addressed separate moral issues. Initially, he saw the legal procedures designed to return looted art to the nation of its origin to be sufficient to negate the traditional legal imperative to restore stolen property to its rightful owner; however, once the standard legal institutional practice was vitiated to his satisfaction (by his nullification of the relevant procedural rules), he revisited Bondi’s ownership claim based upon his revised analysis of the painting’s chain of custody. As a consequence, faced with an adverse ruling, the Leopold Museum wisely consented to purchase the Schiele painting from Bondi’s heirs for $19 million in July 2010; therefore, Judge Mukasey twice ruled appropriately, once each according to two mutually exclusive legal theories. Giving pride of place to formal legal procedures, Judge Mukasey’s initial ruling in US v. Portrait of Wally was no accident or legal error; rather, it was based upon his good-faith reading of black letter law. For the judge had decided the August 27, 2001, music law case of Marlon Williams v. Calvin Broadus according to equally strict legal precedents rather than on the relative weight commonly assigned to musical creativity or popularity. Plaintiff Marlon Williams, a self-admitted music borrower (by legal standards) holding a valid copyright claim for his work, “The Symphony,” sought damages for infringement against defendant Broadus (AKA Snoop Doggy Dogg), another self-confessed music sampler before the law, for Mr. Snoop’s additions to “Ghetto Symphony.” The plaintiff claimed to control the rights to music that both he and Mr. Dogg had sampled from Otis Redding’s original song (“Hard to Handle”), although Mr. Williams eluded paying damages by having limited his appropriation to selected instrumental sounds.12 Judge Mukasey’s decision in favor of the plaintiff upheld the right of the copyright holder to monetary damages for substantial

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infringement. Although Mr. Williams too was found to have palmed from Otis Redding’s instrumental score, the judge found his demerit to be insufficiently weighty to require a legal remedy. Thus, Marley Marl was spared legal hazard with respect to Otis Redding, whereas Mr. Dogg faced jeopardy for taking tonal liberties with Marley Marl’s “The Symphony.” Judge Mukasey’s rationale in this decision comports with the judicial restraint guiding his initial verdict in US v. Portrait of Wally, although it departs from his morally penetrating analysis in his final ruling on the matter. Based upon this admittedly tiny sample of cases, I believe that Judge Mukasey became a common-sense moral activist (or showed decidedly moral preferences) in his post-9/11 ruling in US v. Portrait of Wally by favoring Bondi’s heirs, unlike his pre-9/11 ruling on the case as well as in Williams v. Broadus, although each decision fits comfortably within acceptable boundaries of legal justice. The catastrophic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, raise the entirely speculative but relevant question of whether the shocking international crimes affected not only a nation’s conscience but the jurist’s legal philosophy. Political party affiliation is no determiner of moral outrage in response to terrorism, but Judge Mukasey’s patriotic sympathies were engaged to the extent that he became President George W. Bush’s U.S. attorney general from 2007-2009, in which position he defended all of the controversial foreign policy positions taken by that administration. His art-juridical philosophy may have changed due to his proximity to traumatic terrorist attacks, which were imbued in an eerie—even supernatural—aura not absolutely distinct in conceptual terms from certain turning points depicted in the romances: the soothsayer’s dream-interpretation after the pitched battles in Cymbeline, the Delphic oracle’s ruling in The Winter’s Tale, Prospero’s magical confounding of his antagonists in The Tempest, the uncanny accuracy of the thunderbolts of justice propelled in Pericles, and the divine manipulation of events by the gods in The Two Noble Kinsmen. The plays’ resolutions arise from deeply held moral theories involving state relations: IR realism, constructivism, idealism, and the like. Shakespeare’s sophisticated theoretical holdings are likely the consequence of his own noetic endeavors rather than of psychic visitations of Renaissance existential dread; however, if I find little evidence that Shakespeare’s romances favor neoliberal and offensive realist IR theories, I do not deny that a reasonable reader might fairly reach IR theory determinations contrary to my own. Questions about the relationship between IR theory, art, and morals persist in view of today’s sensu stricto philistines toppling statues worldwide. Perhaps some activists view themselves as bulwarks against the imposition of restrictions on speech by their perceived foes, for society has

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long used art as a legal “firebreak” in order to help the courts determine the proper limits to be placed on social expression in general.13 Aesthetician Noël Carroll is quite aware that we need not attend a performance of Macbeth to discover that murder is wrong, but he cedes ground to social conventions in his “moderate moralist” argument, on the basis of which any unethical behavior presented in art might justify aesthetic concessions to Blue Law ordinances.14 But no moral law (retrospectively applied) could fairly condemn Pericles for his having consented to bury Thaïsa at sea on the basis of an accidental, overhasty diagnosis of her true medical condition. Cultural mores and the imperatives of the moment dictate that he must consecrate his wife to the deep. He acts for the general good in exigent circumstances; nevertheless, only the seemingly improbable workings of the romance genre (inclusive of concepts surrounding aesthetics and IR theory) can begin to repay her for the harms she suffers. Whether it is the near-universal peace reached in Cymbeline or the uneasy political truce affirmed in The Tempest, accommodations between states are revealed to be necessary corollaries to the dramatic action of Shakespeare’s romances. These plays consider conflict on any level of analysis to be sufficient to disturb the equilibrium in the international system, which is the basis of the somewhat systematic (but not structuralist) IR realist theory introduced in 1954 by Kenneth Waltz. Waltz was influenced in turn by IR classical realist elders like Hans J. Morgenthau, E. H. Carr, Machiavelli, and Thucydides, each of whom held profoundly morallycentered positions on political philosophy. Although diplomats too may exhibit a range of personal styles and aptitudes, Shakespeare mainly rules out the constructivist notion that foreign relations are solely what individual actors make of them because he shows universal moral imperatives and IR theory as well to hold sway in global affairs. His works in other genres are at times even more unforgiving as to the fate assigned to political losers, but the great game of diplomacy exacts a terrible cost on victims in the romances as well. Shakespeare ultimately mitigates all overseas injustices through compensatory dramaturgical gestures by which the majority of those suffering the most reap, at long last, unexpected rewards.

APPENDIX A ABBREVIATED GLOSSARY OF IR THEORY TERMS

CLASSICAL REALISM: The anarchic, self-help global system rewards states for aggrandizing security and power. Classical realism was the prevailing IR theory through roughly the 19th century. Main exponents: Thucydides, Machiavelli, etc. CONSTRUCTIVISM: Dominant institutions share access to resources and power from a top-down global perspective. Constructivism is one of the three leading IR theories today. Main exponents: Alexander Wendt, Richard Ashley, etc. DEFENSIVE REALISM: The anarchic system of unitary states is best regulated by self-reliant states and ethical rulers (although closed, weak authoritarian states like North Korea qualify under this rubric). Main exponents: Mencius, etc. ENGLISH SCHOOL: Political and academic institutional actors with a pluralistic mind-set ennoble diplomacy by offering reasonable suggestions for inter-cultural and interstate dialogue. Main exponents: Hedley Bull, Barry Buzan, etc. GAME THEORY: Rational choice (game) theory outlines the probable outcomes of IR decision-making. Various IR theories (not limited to security studies and neoliberalism) depend upon game theory, which cuts across academic disciplines. Main exponents: Merrill Flood, Melvin Dresher, Steven J. Brams, etc. INNENPOLITIK: Domestic power players determine IR theory from the ground up—domestic priorities trump foreign policy. Domestic political elites are seen as water carriers for the permanent foreign policy class. Main exponents: Gideon Rose, etc.

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MARXISM: Marxists tacitly assign control of the levers of global economic and political power to the proletariat. Main exponents: Marx, Ho Chi Minh, etc. NEOLIBERALISM: Global economic interdependence determines the order of world affairs. Neoliberalism is one of the three leading IR theories extant today. Main exponents: Joseph Nye, Robert Keohane, etc. NEOREALISM: Neorealism approaches the given anarchic global system from an IR structuralist perspective favoring hegemonic power. Main exponents so perceived (despite their stated affinity for IR realism): Kenneth Waltz, Robert A. Gilpin, etc. OFFENSIVE REALISM: Supreme hegemonic power is the rational goal pursued by self-help states in an anarchic world system. Main exponents: John J. Mearsheimer, etc. PEACE, SOCIOLOGICAL, AND RELATED IR THEORIES: Feminism, green energy, pacifism, conflict resolution, and other IR approaches too numerous to enumerate here inform these sociologically-based IR theories. Main exponents: J. David Singer, J. Ann Tickner, John Vasquez, etc. REALISM: The anarchic global system of unitary states favors the sober, self-interested exercise of hegemonic power, whether regional or global in scope. Realism is one of the three leading IR theories today. Main exponents: E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Robert Gilpin, etc.

NOTES

Introduction 1

Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and other Essays, 100. Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 5. 3 Hill, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, 59. 4 Putnam, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses,” 446. 5 Hume, ed. Calendar of Letters and State Papers, Spanish, Elizabeth, 4: 203. Hereafter, CLSPSE. Elizabeth’s stance on aristocratic courtesy resembles in part that of the modern IR English School. 6 Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 91. 7 Ibid., 268. 8 Ibid., 116. 9 Green, ed. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, James I, 1603-10, 8: 187. 10 Hennings and Sowerby, “Introduction: Practices of Diplomacy,” 9. 11 Hume, ed. CLSPSE, 4: 594. 12 Brown, ed. Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs, Venice, 16031607, 10: 8. 13 Hume, ed. CLSPSE, 4: 387. 14 Ibid., 3: 185, 187. 15 Farrington, The English Factory in Japan, 1613-1623, 2: 1529. 16 Windler, “Afterword,” 256. 17 Farrington, English Factory in Japan, 1: 209. 2

Chapter 1. Cymbeline: An Unexpected Song of Peace 1

This chapter benefitted greatly (as to the relevance of philosophy to Shakespearean studies) from a workshop led by philosopher Brayton Polka (“History and Hermeneutics: The Relationship Between Identity and Values”) at the Tenth ISSEI International Conference at the University of Malta in 2006, although the faults herein are my own. My presentation was published as an article along with the other proceedings, “Peace, Prestige, and Prediction: Cymbeline as Hermeneutics and IR Theory,” in The European Mind: Narratives and Identity, Vol. 2 of 2, ed. Henry Frendo, Msida, Malta: Malta University Press, 2010. 2 Stevenson, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, Elizabeth 1558-1559, 1: 246. Hereafter, CSPFE. 3 Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 1.5.80. Citations in the text refer to the New Cambridge edition. I follow the editor’s preferred spelling of Innogen, not Imogen. 4 Watkins, “The 1559 Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis,” 170.

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5 Hume, ed., Calendar of Letters and State Papers, Spanish, Elizabeth, 1: 15, 3. Hereafter, CLSPSE. 6 Waltz, “Reductionist and Systemic Theories,” 58. 7 Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 132. 8 Ibid., 281. 9 Ibid., 105. 10 Waltz, “Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response,” 342. 11 Wendt, 376. 12 Ibid., 211. 13 Ibid., 162. 14 Ibid., 284. 15 Ibid., 140. 16 Churchill, The Gathering Storm, 207. 17 Hume, ed., CSPFE, 1: 16. 18 In addition to their contribution of fine music, professional musicians play supporting roles in Othello, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, Cymbeline, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Robert Johnson’s participation in The Tempest has been confirmed. Shakespeare’s Robert Johnson should not be mistaken for the American musician Robert Johnson, the King of the Delta Blues Singers. 19 Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding, 40. I retain Scruton’s spelling of “programme” throughout this book. 20 Hunt, “Jangling Bells Inside and Outside the Playhouse,” 72. 21 Levinson, “Refining Art Historically,” 29. 22 Scholarly interest in Shakespeare’s music spiked in the era of Romanticism. For an annotated list of publications in the UK and the Continent, see Greenhill et al, All the Songs and Passages in Shakespeare which Have Been Set to Music, 1884. Cymbeline’s songs have been set to different titles in opera, including Dinah, by Edmond Missa and Schubert, see Wilson, ed., Shakespeare and Music, 1977 (1927). For Cymbeline’s music in modern dramatic contexts, see Long, Shakespeare’s Use of Music, 1961. 23 Tolstoy, What is Art, 94. 24 Tomlinson, “The Matter of Sounds,” 238. 25 Descartes, René, Renatus Des-Cartes Excellent Compendium of Musick (Compendium Musicae), 2. 26 Tomlinson, “The Matter of Sounds,” 238. 27 Levinson, Music Art, and Metaphysics, 64. 28 Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 105. 29 Tomlinson, “Matter,” 239. 30 Putnam, “Philosophy and our Mental Life,” 2: 295. 31 Tomlinson, “Matter,” 238. 32 Putnam, “Philosophy and our Mental Life,” 2: 296. 33 Goodman, “Some Notes on Languages of Art,” 571. 34 Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 9-10. 35 Levinson, “What a Musical Work Is,” in Music Art, and Metaphysics, 65. 36 Levinson, “Refining Art Historically,” 26. Levinson’s stipulation requires the artist to create works in full art-historical awareness, which obviates the hypothetical

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aired by V. Tomas suggesting that art may be created by virtue of the mere physical (or material) activity of simians or computers, see Creativity in the Arts, “Introduction,” 3. 37 Carroll, “Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism,” 419. 38 Digges, The Compleat Ambassador, 360. 39 Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 51. 40 Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace and History, 94-95. 41 Kivy, Introduction to a Philosophy of Music, 32. 42 Talmor, Sascha, “The Aesthetic Judgment,” 108. Hanslick’s book, Vom Musikalisch-Shönen, elevated musical ideas to a stature commensurate with the thinking provoked by other artforms.

Chapter 2. Pericles: Ethical and Metaphysical Dances 1

Shakespeare, Pericles, 2.5.27. Citations in the text refer to the New Cambridge edition. 2 Knight, The Crown of Life, 37; Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, 147. Ben Jonson famously dismisses the play as a “mouldy tale” spoiled by flights of fantasy. G. Wilson Knight regards its episodic action as a dramatic procession dotted with political homilies, giving way finally to quasi-religious verse of the highest order. With music as its “theme,” the play’s “atmosphere of mysticism” reflects the eternal “spirit” rising above artistic forms (15, 14, 31). He is correct that “art, as such, seems to be getting a more self-conscious attention than is usual,” but aesthetics does not possess the qualitative value in Knight that it does in Hegel (51). C. L. Barber (like Knight) finds the hero deficient in his “consistent avoidance of all aggressive self-assertions” until familial identities are “sorted out and made whole” (316, 328). Northrop Frye admires the play’s artistry in fusing ritual and myth based on “narrative recitativo and dramatized arias” (28). But Lisa Hopkins holds Shakespeare’s concept of the Mediterranean to be entirely “of the mind” owing to its presumed inaccuracy in recording “geographical differences,” in “’The Shores of My Mortality’” (228, 236). 3 Said, Orientalism, 7. 4 Ibid., 322. 5 Ibid., 7. 6 Ibid., 27. 7 Ibid., 23. Edward Said denounced the 1993 Oslo Accords as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” in “The Morning After,” London Review of Books 15, no. 20 (1993): 3-5, lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n20/edwardsaid/the-morning-after. Said famously belonged to the leadership board of the PNC, the umbrella group overseeing the PLO. The reader may judge how Said’s political perspective comports with his literary sensitivity. 8 Ibid., 28. 9 Ibid., 27. 10 William Phillips (1878-1968) established the U.S. State Department’s Division of Far Eastern Affairs in 1909, which opposed British plans to partition Palestine. As

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the lead U.S. diplomat in Lausanne’s post-World War II committee hearings for the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine in 1945, which rendered a judgment (rejected by Roosevelt) on the prospective State of Israel, he was deeply skeptical of dividing Palestine for fear of destabilizing the region’s economy and politics, “At the end of the week, we had a good idea of the intransigent attitude of Zionism, demanding that Palestine should become a Jewish state”; however, his position softened as a result of Jewish demonstrations on behalf of partition: “This passionate longing had I believe a dual origin: one . . . their bitterness toward those . . . who had helped to murder so many of their friends and relatives; and secondly, the age-old dream of a home where they would no longer be persecuted . . . " (277, 279). The governing U.S. disposition toward the region was thus marked by international balance and fairness in the service of a benign regional outcome; see Phillips, Ventures in Diplomacy. 11 Said, Orientalism, 26. 12 Ibid., 28. 13 In making a case for balance in literary history, Edward Said’s “Orientalism Reconsidered” does not revise his holdings in Orientalism, “Each age, for instance, re-interpreted Shakespeare, not because Shakespeare changed, but because . . . there is no such fixed and non-trivial object as Shakespeare independent of his editors . . . ” (92). The scholars objecting publicly to Said’s partisan historiography remain few in number. 14 Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Japan, 1513-1616, 2: 178. Hereafter, CSPCSEICJ. 15 Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, 637. 16 J. S. Mill undermined somewhat his humane principles by promoting the East India Company (EIC) as the best possible steward of Indian interests, even granting his desire to shield India from British parliamentary rule. Mill wished to keep the EIC in, Parliament out, and India down (at least temporarily); see Writings on India, 1990. 17 Mullaney, 147. 18 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 133. 19 Cohen, “The Undiscovered Country,” 150. 20 Ibid., 150. 21 Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, James I, 1611-1618, January 26, 1611, 9: 4. Hereafter CSPDJ. 22 Ibid., April 23, 1615, 9: 284. 23 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ, December 30, 1609, 2: 202. 24 Ibid., 2: li. 25 Ibid., 2: 478-479. 26 Ibid., 2: 455. 27 Green, ed., CSPDJ 1603-1610, April 28, 1609, 8: 506. 28 Farrington, English Factory in Japan, 1: 162. 29 Carroll, “Moderate Moralism Versus Moderate Autonomism,” 419, 424. 30 Ibid., 419. 31 Ibid., 420. 32 Kivy, “Emotions in the Music,” 628. 33 Kivy, “Representation as Expression,” 327.

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34

Kivy, “Emotions in the Music,” 629. Ibid., 636. 36 Ibid., 635. 37 Ibid., 632. 38 Kivy, Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences, 21. 39 Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, 3: 215. 40 Ibid., 216. 41 5.1.242; Knight, The Crown of Life, 37. 42 Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” 288. 43 Ibid., 289. 44 Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, 3: 216. 45 Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” 285. 46 Ibid., 285. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 295. 49 Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, 5.3.299-300. 50 Wernham, ed., “A Persian embassy arrives,” in State Papers, Foreign Series, Elizabeth I, January 23-24, 1590, 443. 51 Jonson, Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, 95. 52 Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, 3: 125. 53 Ibid., 3: 212. 54 Ibid., 3: 213. 55 Ibid., 3: 27. 56 Sparshott, “The Missing Art of Dance,” 80. 57 Margolis, “The Autographic Nature of the Dance,” 423. 58 Ibid., 426. 35

Chapter 3. The Moral Architecture of IR Theory: The Tempest 1 Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.50. Citations in the text refer to the New Cambridge edition. 2 Ruthnaswamy, Principles and Practice of Foreign Policy, 291. Ruthnaswamy cites Zimmer’s Philosophies of India as a direct source for his analysis of “political geometry,” 115. 3 Munday, Sir Thomas More, 2.3.76. Probable speech author: Shakespeare. 4 Ibid., 1.2.175-177. Probable speech author: Munday. 5 More, Utopia, 4: 239. 6 Munday, Sir Thomas More, 2.3.248. Probable speech author: Munday. 7 Ibid., 2.3.114-115. Probable speech author: Shakespeare. 8 In early Renaissance Britain, art refers to technical skill in the classical Roman tradition, unlike our modern connotation of fine art. But the later British Renaissance includes magic as well as the arts of the Muses under the old definition. In his 1601 book on songs, Philip Rosseter’s “To the Reader” holds that “ayres have both their Art and pleasure,” A3. In his dedication to Morley’s editions of collected music, Ant. Holborne adds, “To whom can ye, sweet Muses, more with right /

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Impart your pains to praise his worthy skill, / Than unto him that taketh sole delight / In your sweet art, therewith the world to fill?”, in Morley, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, 4. 9 Kivy, “On the Historically Informed Performance,” 110. 10 Ibid., 101. Kivy suggests humorously that the two historical approaches are as alike as the (false) politicized distinction between “tax cut” and “tax relief,” 92. 11 The architectural displays in Koolhaas’s art installation are most worthy of examination, but Basquiat’s work goes beyond themes of urban economic deprivation and architectural/political violence. 12 Davies, “Is Architecture Art?” 33. 13 Davies, “Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition,” 202. 14 Ibid., 209. 15 Davies, “Is Architecture Art?” 38. 16 Ibid., 39. 17 Ibid., 45. 18 Ibid., 46. 19 Sparshott, Theory of the Arts, 95. 20 Sparshott, “Figuring the Ground,” 16. 21 Sparshott, Theory of the Arts, 94. 22 Sparshott, “The Aesthetics of Architecture and the Politics of Space,” 4. 23 Ibid., 4. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid, 8. 26 Ibid., 11. 27 Ibid., 14. 28 Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” 87. Jameson notes Henri Lefebvre’s “conception of space as the fundamental category of politics and of the dialectic itself,” 53. Leftist intellectual thought in architecture tends to be conceptual, leaving architects to resolve any contradictions between Marx and his successors, some of whom find instances in which Marx seems outmoded or in error. 29 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture, 237. 30 Ibid., 240. 31 Goodman, Languages of Art, 221. 32 Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” 652. 33 Ibid., 652. 34 More, Utopia, 197. 35 Ibid., 237. 36 David Norbrook mistakenly sees deconstructionists as presenting wrongheaded “dystopian readings” of the play that may yet convey a “fixed and essentialist notion of human nature,” in “’What cares these roarers for the name of king?’,” 169. Meredith Skura defines the play as being part of the global colonialist project, “The Tempest itself not only displays prejudice, but fosters it. . . .” Skura admits that proving the play’s involvement with colonialism is all but impossible because modern English imperialist discourse had yet to appear in print; nevertheless, she holds without basis that Shakespeare’s (presumed) imperialistic view of the New World may derive from his unconscious sense of rejection as an infant, or, of being

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“a child in an adult’s world,” in “Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,” 45, 69.

Chapter 4. The Ephemeral Art of IR Theory: The Winter’s Tale 1

Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 4.1.21. Citations in the text refer to the New Cambridge edition. 2 Hume, ed., Calendar of Letters and State Papers, Spanish, Elizabeth, 1587-1603, 4: 498. Hereafter, CLSPSE. 3 Ibid., 4: 418. 4 Ibid., 3: 427. 5 Ibid., 4: 160. 6 Ibid., 4: 601. 7 Ibid., 4: 221. 8 Digges, Compleat Ambassador, 29. 9 Hume, ed., CLSPSE 4: 252. 10 Ibid., 4: 257. 11 Ibid., 4: 528. 12 Ibid., 4: 416. 13 Ibid., 3: 529. 14 Ibid., 3: 419. 15 Akrigg, ed., Letters of King James IV, 234. 16 Hume, ed., CLSPSE 3: 496. 17 Digges, “Walsingham to Thomas Smith,” Compleat, 275. 18 4.4.662-664. The Clown’s logic is all the more effective for its juridical sagacity. 19 Digges, “Walsingham to Mildmay,” Compleat, 21. 20 International relations theorist Andrew Moravcsik helpfully distinguishes Innenpolitik (domestic politics) theory from constructivism in IR theory. On his view, by privileging social values, each theory downplays the importance of states as unitary actors in a world devoid of rules. But Innenpolitik theorists see international relations theory from the ‘ground up’ as reflecting “the primacy of societal actors,” whereas constructivists in IR theory justify the value of an ideology imposed from the ‘top down’ in order to create a neat rationale for installing an order of (globalist) intellectual elites, in “A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” 516. 21 Digges, “Walsingham to Burleigh,” Compleat, 220. 22 Digges, “Walsingham to Leicester,” Compleat, 30. 23 Digges, “Smith to Walsingham,” Compleat, 299. 24 Wolterstorff, “Toward an Ontology of Artworks,” 232; 5.2.81-82. 25 Goodman, Languages of Art, 114. 26 Ibid., 114. 27 Ibid., 38, 39. 28 Digges, “Walsingham to Elizabeth,” Compleat, 23. 29 Ibid., 26. 30 Ibid., 25.

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31

Digges, “Walsingham to Cecil,” Compleat, 26. The syllogistic format shown here is representative of modern academic standards in logic, which allows for conceptual revisions as well as for variety in form and content: see Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 1996; and Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” 121-123. 33 Hume, ed., CLSPSE 1: 89. 34 Vasquez, “Realism and the Study of Peace and War,” 80. 35 Mearsheimer, “Realism, the Real World, and the Academy,” 62. 36 Gilpin, “The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism,” 319. 32

Chapter 5. The Two Noble Kinsmen: The Art of an Unethical Global System 1 Mearsheimer, November 2, 2013, “Can China Rise Peacefully? A Debate Between John Mearsheimer and Yan Xuetong,” YouTube. 2 Modern editors generally assign primary authorship of the play’s scenes as follows: Shakespeare: 1; 2.1; 3.1-2; 4.3; 5.1; 5.3-4; and Fletcher: 2.2-6; 3.3-6; 4.1-2; 5.2. 3 In my view, Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt misfired badly by attributing to Israel’s defenders the power to veto U.S. foreign policy. They also decried established U.S. policies to aid the Jewish state; moreover, they argued that the invasion of Iraq was meant to placate Israel, a misjudgment ignoring altogether the retaliatory mood in the U.S. following the attacks of 9/11. 4 Mearsheimer, October 17, 2019, “Can China Rise Peacefully?” T-House (Internet). 5 Keohane and Martin, “The Promise of Institutionalist Theory,” 40; Mearsheimer, October 17, 2019, “Can China Rise Peacefully?” 6 Keohane and Martin, “The Promise of Institutionalist Theory,” 49. 7 Ibid., 42. 8 Ibid., 44. 9 Ibid., 42. 10 Shakespeare and Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, 2.1.10-12. Subsequent citations refer to the Signet edition. 11 Scruton, Beauty, 42. 12 Wollheim, “Art and its Objects,” 219. 13 Ibid., 223. 14 Ibid., 228. 15 Margolis, “The Ontological Peculiarity of Works of Art,” 259. 16 Ibid., 257. 17 Putnam, “Reflections on Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking,” 614. 18 Keohane, International Institutions and State Power, 39. 19 Ibid., 40. 20 Ibid., 159. 21 Ibid., 56. 22 Ibid., 77. 23 Alberti, On Painting, 43. Istoria means the morals and emotions reflected in gestures.

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24

Ibid., 72. Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 89. 26 Ibid., 92, 84. 27 Sibley, “Symposium: About Taste,” 68. 28 Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, 198. 29 Hutcheson, Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas, 9. 25

Chapter 6. IR Theory in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama 1

Dr. Samuel Johnson, in Ruthnaswamy, Principles and Practice of Foreign Policy, 1. Said’s popular but (in my view) ahistorical IR notions are discussed in Chapter Two; see his Orientalism, 1979. Dympna Callaghan holds that “the raced and gendered Other is in a significant sense—in exactly the same sense that the subaltern is unrepresentable for Spivak—unrepresentable in Antony and Cleopatra”; therefore, on Callaghan’s view we should question Cleopatra’s representation on stage but not the virtue of the subaltern Eastern ruler herself; see “Representing Cleopatra in the Post-Colonial Moment,” 49. Janet Adelman oversimplifies in believing that “we are asked to see [Cleopatra] in the posture of a whore” in The Common Liar, 110. Napoleone Orsini regards Cleanthes’s “Pollicie” as a Western concept playing out in an exotic setting, not a widely accepted political idea, in “’Policy’: or the Language of Elizabethan Machiavellianism,” 128. Jack Reese views Cleanthes as being “distasteful and eccentric” but still an “appropriate ruler” for Egypt, in “’Potiphar’s Wife’ and Other Folk Tales in Chapman’s The Blind Beggar of Alexandria,” 45, 44. Chapman’s conventional Elizabethan interpretation of Machiavelli’s advice to gain power by any means is often restated by Shakespeare, albeit with complicated comic and tragic elaborations. 3 Hume, ed., March 12, 1565, Calendar of Letters and State Papers, Spanish, Elizabeth, 1558-1603, 1: 406. Hereafter, CLSPSE. 4 Ibid., July 10, 1564, 1: 367-368. 5 Ibid., 1: 368. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., March 12, 1565, 1: 404. 8 Ibid., 405. 9 Digges, Compleat Ambassador, 170. 10 Green, ed., January 5, 1608, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, James I, 16031610, 8: 394. Hereafter, CSPDJ. In Stephen Orgel’s view of the Jacobean masque, “What the noble spectator watched he ultimately became,” in The Illusion of Power, 39. Martin Butler asserts that performances of Jacobean masques are less totalizing in terms of power than Orgel suggests, showing instead “fault lines in the structure of power [that] were unusually apparent,” see “Courtly Negotiations,” 29. 11 Green, ed., CSPDJ, 506. 12 Bacon, “Of Empire,” 85. 13 Hume, ed., CLSPSE, 1: 566. 2

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Ibid., 89. Of course, upon her ascension to the throne, Elizabeth issued a series of dictates banishing displays other than those professing allegiance to the Church of England. 15 Ibid., February 4, 1566, 522. British economic policy was limited in its sophistication to the extent of raising the exchange rate occasionally in order to encourage foreign buyers to pay sooner rather than later for desired goods. 16 Ibid., 2: 706. 17 Ibid., 3: 65. 18 Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two, 1.1.63. 19 Hume, ed., CLSPSE, 4: 491. 20 Âli, The Ottoman Gentleman of the Sixteenth Century, 6. 21 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 5. 22 Ibid., 4. 23 Ibid., 1. 24 Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 25. 25 Ibid., 25. 26 Ibid., 28. 27 Ibid., 27. 28 Ibid. 29 Montrose, “’Shaping Fantasies’,” 85. 30 Ibid., 62. 31 Ibid., 86. 32 Barkan, “Making Pictures Speak,” 338. 33 Ibid., 343. 34 Ibid., 339. 35 Ibid., 345, 346. 36 Morgenthau, 40. 37 Ibid., 56. 38 Beardsley, “The Aesthetic Point of View,” 21. 39 Ibid., 15. 40 Ibid., 13, 12. 41 Fletcher, The Island Princess, 1982: 1.1.26-27. 42 Chapman, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, ed. Lloyd E. Berry, X. 169. Subsequent scene and line citations appear in the text. 43 Chapman’s play is seldom revived today despite its popularity in Renaissance Britain. The American Shakespeare Center in Washington, D.C., fairly emphasized broad comedy in its Blackfriar’s Theatre performance on March 11-29, 2009. Chapman’s closet drama, The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey (c. 1612), shows a struggle for Rome in which Pompey and Cato die upholding republicanism against Julius Caesar. Antony has a supporting role as Caesar’s able defender, but Cleopatra does not appear. 44 John J. Mearsheimer is the main exponent of offensive realism, a relatively new IR theory variant; see “Realism, the Real World, and the Academy,” 57-64. 45 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.208. Subsequent line citations (from the Bloomsbury Arden edition) appear in the text. 46 Stewart, The South Bank Show, 1979. 47 Ibid.

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48

Kissinger inaccurately said “original status quo ante” in a policy meeting with key Nixon administration officials, see “Memorandum of Conversation,” declassified proceedings of The White House, prepared by the United States Department of State, October 19, 1973, fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document0314/1552624.pdf. Other participants included Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, CIA Director William Colby, JCS Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer, and Major General Brent Scowcroft, Deputy Assistant to the President, NSA. The phrase, status quo ante, was somewhat common but far less so than status quo. 49 Carr, What is History?, 135. 50 Ibid., 141.

Chapter 7. Coda: Shakespeare’s IR Debt to Christopher Marlowe 1

Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part One; Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two; 1 Tamb.1.2.228-229. Citations are from the Penguin edition. 2 For a treatment of several other Chinese pre-Qin IR philosophers, see my review essay in The European Legacy on Yan Xuetong’s two books (Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers and Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power): “Supremacy First, Morality Later? Chinese Ascendancy from a Western IR Perspective.” As well, see Shiping Tang’s “The Security Dilemma: A Conceptual Analysis,” 587-623, among other scholarly works, for more on the Western concept of defensive realism as a security alliance in which states balance their relative strengths in a mutually protective formation. 3 Digges, The Compleat Ambassador, 420. 4 Markham, ed., The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster to the East Indies, 140. 5 Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Japan 1622-1624, 4: 324. Hereafter, CSPCSEICJ. 6 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ 1630-1634, 8: 252. 7 Ibid., 8: 344. 8 Ibid., 8: 432. 9 Brassey, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, Part II: Historical Appendices, 7: 30. 10 Ibid. 11 Giustinian, Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII, 2: 83. 12 Gardiner, ed., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 20, 1: 75. 13 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ 1513-1616, 2: 399. 14 Kirk, ed., Report of the Manuscripts of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, Preserved at Montagu House, 1: 167. 15 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ, 8: 440. 16 Brassey, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, Part II, 7: 33. 17 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ, 2: 120. 18 Ibid., 2: 120-121. 19 Ibid., 2: 121.

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167

Ibid., 2: 136. Shellabear, “An Account of Some of the Oldest Malay MSS.,” 119. 22 Ibid., 122. 23 Ibid., 109, 119. 24 Ibid., 110. 25 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ, 2: 143. 26 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ, 8: 203. 27 Shellabear, “An Account of Some of the Oldest Malay MSS.,” 119. 28 Brassey, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, Part II, 7: 17. 29 Mun, “A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East Indies,” A3. 30 Fletcher, Catherine, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome, 166. 31 Bruce, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Charles I, 1625, 1626, 1: 144. 32 Bruce, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Charles I, 1636-1637, 10: 528. 33 Bruce, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Charles I, 1637-1638, 12: 306. 34 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ, 8: 623. 35 Blackburn, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Charles II, 1682, 23: 127. 36 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ, 8: 151. 37 Sainsbury, ed., CSPCSEICJ, 2: 380. 38 Mencius, 71. 39 Ibid., 62. 40 Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern Britain, 55. 41 Bacon, The New Organon, 212. 42 Brassey, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, Part II, 7: 30-31. 43 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 200. 21

Conclusion 1

Frye, A Natural Perspective, 141. Margolis, “A Reasonable Morality for Partisans and Ideologues,” 24. 3 Coleridge, “Notes on The Tempest,” 94. 4 Ibid., 94. 5 Ibid., 98. 6 Knight, The Crown of Life, 57; Nuttall, A New Mimesis, 131. 7 Thompson, “Art, Property Rights, and the Interests of Humanity,” 547. 8 Ibid., 546. 9 Ibid., 551. 10 Mukasey, United States v. Portrait of Wally 2000, 105 F. Supp. 2nd 288. 11 Mukasey, US v. Portrait of Wally 2002 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 6445. 12 Mukasey, Marlon Williams v. Calvin Broadus 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12894. 13 Carroll, Art in Three Dimensions, 147. 14 Ibid., 148. 2

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INDEX

Abstract Expressionism, 103 Acheen, 140, 142 Adelman, Janet, 147, 164n. Admiral’s Men, 128, 130 Afghanistan, 149 Alaska, 119 Alberti, Leon Battista, 109 Âli, Mustafa, 118 Alleyn, Edward, 128 Anarchy, ii, 1, 6, 9, 106, 113, 120 Anasazi, The, 58 Angkor Wat, 57 Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, 126 Anglo-Spanish War, 126 Anjou (and Alençon), Francis, Duke of, 20, 75, 81, 87 Aquila, Bishop de, 87, 117 Arabia, 129 Architecture, 45-66 Argentina, 93 Armada, Spanish, v, vi, 4, 68, 7071, 72, 117 Art, African, 53-54 Art, ephemeral, 67-90 Art, Oceanic, 53-54 Art, Old Master, 53, 55, 150 Ashley, Richard K., 38-40, 43-44, 154 Austria, 150 Bacon, Francis, 116, 146 Bantam, 26, 141 Barber, C. L., 157-158n. Barber, Thomas, 139 Barkan, Leonard, 123-124 Baroque (Art), 79 Barton, Edward, 41 Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 43 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 52, 161n.

Bassano, Jacopo, 27 Beardsley, Monroe C., 125-126 Beeby, Thomas H., 59-60 Belief, Justified True, 83-86 Blind Beggar of Alexandria, The, 128-130 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 22 Brams, Steven J., 154 Brecht, Berthold, 15 Brook, Peter, 131 Buddha, The, 149 Bull, Hedley, 154 Burbage, Richard, 100 Butler, Martin, 10, 165n. Buzan, Barry, 154 Cage, John, 13 Calais, 4, 5, 9, 10 Calder, Alexander, 43 Callaghan, Dympna, 164n. Canada, 8, 121 Cappadocia, 58 Carleton, Dudley, 27-28 Carr, Edward Hallett, 134-135, 153, 155 Carr, Robert, 27-28 Carroll, Noël, 19-20, 30-32, 153 Cateau-Cambrésis, Peace of, 3, 4, 5, 11, 87 Cavell, Stanley, 112 Cecil, William, 2, 69, 71, 81 Chapman, George, 113, 128-130, 133, 165n., 166n. Charles I, 142-143, 144 Charles IX, 76, 80-81, 87 Chaucer, 95, 97, 100 Chicago, 58-59 China, 40, 88, 108, 134, 139, 141142, 143

Index Chisholm, Roderick M., 163n. Chopin, Frédéric, 17 Chris-Craft “Riviera,” 53 Churchill, Winston S., 9 Clausewitz, Carl von, iii Cocks, Richard, vi Cohen, Walter, 27 Cold War, iii, iv, 90 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 148 Colonialism, 6, 24 Commedia dell’arte, 113 Communism, 6, 44 Communist Party of China (CPC), 134, 139 Confucius, 137 Constantinople (Istanbul), 25, 41 Constructivism, 8, 9, 22, 23, 37-44, 93, 148, 152 Coventry Cathedral, 57 Cubism, 103 Dadaism, 44 Dalmatia, 7 Dance, 24-44 Davies, Stephen, 52-56 Descartes, René, 14-17 Diderot, Denis, 16 Diplomacy plays, 114 Doctor Faustus, 128 Drake, Sir Francis, v, 6, 72, 117 Dresher, Melvin, 154 Dutch-Luso War, 126 East India Company (EIC), vi, 138139, 142-143, 146, 159n. Egypt, 42, 118, 128, 130-133 Elgin Marbles, 149 Elizabeth I, iii, iv, v, 3, 4, 9, 20, 27, 70, 72, 75-76, 115-118, 139, 165n. Epistemology, 14, 15, 85 Erasmus, Desiderius, 47 Espionage, 68-72, 75, 80-82 Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of, 115 Ethiopia, 129

179 European Union (EU), 93-94 Expressionism, 44 Faitada, Giovanni de la, 139 Falklands War, 93 Fang (reliquary), 54 Feria, Duke of (Gomez Suárez de Figueroa y Córdoba), 5 Ficino, Marsilio, 16 Firando, vi Fletcher, Catherine, 142 Fletcher, John, 91-112, 113, 126128, 133, 163n. Flood, Merrill, 154 Florence (Italy), iv, 77, 109 Foucault, Michel, 14-17 France, v, 5, 81, 114, 120-121 Freud, Sigmund, 123-124 Frye, Northrop, 148, 158n. Galen, 137, 146 Game at Chess, A, v Gehry, Frank, 58 Germany, 7, 9, 88, 119 Gettier, Edmund L., 86, 163n. Gilpin, Robert B., 89, 155 Globe Theater, 13 Gogh, Vincent van, 149 Gondomar (Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña), iv, v Goodbody, Buzz, 131 Goodman, Nelson, 18, 19, 61, 6263, 73, 78-80 Gramsci, Antonio, 60 Greece, 41, 93, 129 Greenblatt, Stephen, 118-119 Grotius, Hugo, 26, 159n. Gunpowder Plot, 69 Hague Convention (1954), 149 Hampton, Timothy, ii Handel, George Frideric, 21 Hanslick, Edouard, 22, 157n. Hawkins, John, 117 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 32, 34-36, 39-42, 49-52

180

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Hennings, Jan, 155n. Henri II, 5 Henri III, 70 Henri IV, 72, 140 Henslowe, Philip, 128 Hill, Charles, iii Hobbes, Thomas, 8 Holbein, Hans, iii Holland, v, 93, 114, 126, 141 Holmes, Sherlock, 82 Holy Roman Empire, 89, 139 Hong Kong, 40, 58, 134 Hopkins, Lisa, 158n. Howard, Thomas, 27 Huguenots, 81, 87 Hunt, Katherine, 13 Hutcheson, Francis, 110-112 Idealism, 1, 3, 5, 16, 32, 35, 47, 50, 74-75, 86, 88, 96, 148, 152 Ildefonso, San, Third Treaty of, 121-122 Impressionism, 150 India, 138-139, 142 Innenpolitik (IR Theory), 74-76, 82, 85, 86, 89, 113, 122, 130 Institutionalism (IR), 82, 91, 92-100 Iran (Persia), iv, 106-107, 139, 141, 143 Iraq, 163n. Islam, 118, 127, 140, 141 Island Princess, The, 126-128 Israel, 25, 92, 158n., 163n. Italy, 3-5, 93, 117, 122 Jackson, Glenda, 132 James I, iv, vi, 5, 28, 116, 138 Jameson, Fredric, 60, 161n. Japan, vi, 88, 139, 141, 143 Jazz, 13 Jew of Malta, The, 128 Johnson, Philip, 57 Johnson, Robert, 12, 17, 156n. Johnson, Samuel, 113, 161n. Jones, Inigo, 27 Jonson, Ben, 42, 43

Jupiter, 1-7, 9, 11, 21-23, 92 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 16, 21, 61 Kennan, George, F., iii Keohane, Robert O., 93-95, 105109, 155 King’s Men, 12, 20 Kissinger, Henry A., 133-134, 166n. Kivy, Peter, 22, 33-34, 50-51, 160161n. Knight, G. Wilson, 37, 148, 157 Koolhaas, Rem, 52, 161n. Korea, 141, 143 Las Vegas, 56 Lasdun, Sir Denis, 62 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of, 76, 81, 115 Leopold Museum, 150-151 Levant Company, 141 Levinson, Jerrold, 14, 16, 18, 52, 54, 62, 157n. Liberalism, 8 Locke, John, 8 London Bridge, 56 Lopez, Ruy, 69, 70 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 12, 116 Louisiana Purchase, 119-122 Ma, Yo-Yo, 51 Macau, 141 Machiavelli, Nicolò, v, 5, 113, 119, 122, 129, 153, 154, 165n. Maluku Islands (Malacca Strait), 126-127, 138 Mandala (IR Theory), 46, 63-66 Margolis, Joseph, 31-32, 103-105, 119, 148 Marl, Marley (Marlon Williams), 151-152 Marlon Williams v. Calvin Broadus, 151-152 Marlowe, Christopher, 26, 113, 114, 129, 136-147 Marx, Karl, 26, 59, 60-61, 120, 155, 161n.

Index Mary I, 5 Materialism, 7, 8, 14-17, 22-23, 104 Mattingly, Garrett, v, 21 Mearsheimer, John J., 88-89, 92-95, 108-109, 155, 163n., 166n. Médicis, Catherine de, 81 Melian Dialogue, 6 Mencius (Mengzi), 137, 143-145, 154 Mendoza, Bernardino de, v, 69-71, 117-118 Messia, Mario Antonio, 69 Metaphor, 10 Metaphysics, 2, 6-9, 17, 22, 30, 39, 50, 73, 92, 98-99, 100-106 Mexico, 121 Michelangelo, Buonarroti, 30, 35 Middleton, Thomas, v Mill, John Stuart, 26, 159n. Minh, Ho Chi, 155 Monaco, 8 Monroe, James, 120-122 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 6566 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 122-123 Moravcsik, Andrew, 162n. More, Sir Thomas, 46-48, 65 Morgenthau, Hans, 107-109, 118125, 153, 155 Morley, Thomas, 160n. Mukasey, Michael B., 150-152 Mullaney, Steven, 26-27, 157n. National Theatre (London), 62 Neoliberalism, 4, 23, 93-94, 107, 108, 112 Neorealism, 7, 10, 23, 38-39, 93, 108 New Diplomatic History, vi, 122, 142 New Historicism (cultural materialism), ii, vi-vii, 118-122, 123-124, 126, 142 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 84 Norbrook, David, 161n. Norris, Henry, 80, 81

181 Norway, 7 Notre Dame (Cathedral), 55 Nunn, Trevor, 131 Nureyev, Rudolf, 43 Nuttall, A. D., 148 Nye, Joseph S., Jr., 155 Olivier, Laurence, 51 Ontology, 5, 7, 8, 17, 36, 52, 63, 74, 78, 97, 101, 103 Opium, 134, 138-139, 142 Orgel, Stephen, 165n. Orientalism, vi, 24-25, 158n., 164n. Orsini, Napoleone, 164n. Ottoman Empire, iv Ovid, 8 Palestine, 25, 158n. Pannonia, 7 Pardo, Geronimo, 70 Pentagon (Washington, D.C.), 57 Phenomenology, 39 Philip II, v, 4, 69-71, 88, 115, 117118 Phillips, William, 25, 158n. Photorealism, 103 Picasso, Pablo, 104 Plato, 29, 54, 97 Polka, Brayton, 155n. Pollard, Tonya, 146 Porsche “356,” 53, 54 Portugal, 68, 126-128, 138-139, 142 Prince, The, iv Protestant (religion), 81 Puritan (religion), 71 Putnam, Hilary, ii, iii, 16, 17, 105 Queen Mary, RMS, 56 Rauschenberg, Robert, 150 Realism (IR), ii, 6-8, 20, 22, 28, 39, 45, 48, 67, 74-75, 82-89, 91112, 124, 128, 132, 137, 152 Realism, Classical, ii, iii, 1, 6, 7, 23, 39, 103, 104, 153 Realism, Defensive, 136-137, 148

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Realism, Offensive, 9, 88, 92-112, 145 Redding, Otis, 152 Reese, Jack, 165n. Rembrandt, Harmenzoon van Rijn, 60, 105 Richmond Palace, 60 Roe, Thomas, 27, 139, 144 Rohe, Mies van der, 58 Romano, Julio, 76-79 Rome, 1-6, 9, 11, 17, 133, 147 Rose, Gideon, 154 Rosseter, Philip, 160n. Royal Shakespeare Company, 131132 Russia, 6, 44, 88, 93, 119-120 Ruthnaswamy, M., 46, 160n. Said, Edward, 24-25, 113-114, 158159n., 164n. Saris, John, vi Schiavone, Andrea, 27 Schiele, Egon, 150-151 Scotland, v, 68 Scruton, Roger, 13-14, 61, 96 Sculpture, 34, 73-79, 86 Seagram Building, 60 Semiotics, 1 Shakespeare, William, Antony and Cleopatra, ii, 113, 114, 129133, 135, 156n. Coriolanus, 131 Cymbeline, iii, 1-23, 148, 152, 153, 156n. Hamlet, 10, 46, 123 Henry V, 9, 91, 122, 128 Henry VIII, 47, 156n. Macbeth, 110, 153 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 122 Much Ado About Nothing, 102 Othello, 156n. Pericles, iii, 13, 24-44, 131, 152, 153 Richard II, 116

Romeo and Juliet, 156n. The Tempest, iii, 14, 45-66, 148, 152-153, 156n. Timon of Athens, 131, 156n. The Tragedy of King Lear, 41 Troilus and Cressida, 2 Twelfth Night, 21, 156n. The Winter’s Tale, 67-90, 112, 123, 152, 156n. ---, and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, 91-112, 152, 156n., 163n. Shaw, George Bernard, 31, 50 Sherley, Anthony, iv, 141 Sibley, Frank, 111 Sidney, Sir Philip, 123 Silk Road, 25, 138 Silva, Guzman de, 114, 115 Singapore, 8 Singer, J. David, 155 Sir Thomas More, 45-47, 65 Skura, Meredith, 161-162n. Slavery, 117, 147 Smith, Thomas, 76 Snoop Doggy Dogg (Calvin Broadus), 151-152 Sociality (diplomatic), 5, 8, 9, 21, 22-23 Solomon Islands (reliquary), 54 Sonnet, 11 Southampton, Earl of (Henry Wriothesley), 116 Sowerby, Tracey A., 155n. Spain, 2-5, 72, 81, 89, 114-116, 129 Spanish Tragedy, The, 128 Sparshott, Francis, 43, 56-60, 63 Spenser, Edmund, 25 Stafford, Edward, 70-71 “Star Spangled Banner, The,” 13 Stewart, Patrick, 131 Sumatra, 140, 141 Sweden, 7 Sydney Opera House, 54 Symbolism, 44 Taj Mahal, 54

Index Taliban, 149 Tamburlaine the Great, 26, 118, 128, 136-147 Tang, Shiping, 167n. Tassis, Juan Bautista de, 69 Terrorism, 152 Thompson, Janna, 149-150 Throckmorton, Francis, 2, 71 Thucydides, 6, 108, 116, 153, 154 Tickner, J. Ann, 155 Tintoretto, Jacopo Robusti, 27 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 27 Tolstoy, Leo, 14, 15 Tomas, V., 157n. Tomlinson, Gary, 14-17 Tunis, 46 Turkey, 28, 41, 48, 51, 116-118 Twine, Laurence, 26, 36 United Nations (UN), 106 United States v. Portrait of Wally (2000), 150-152 US v. Portrait of Wally (2002), 150152 Utopia, 47, 65 Vasquez, John, 88-89, 155 Venice, iv, 2, 27, 52, 72, 79 Venice Biannale, 52 Veronese, Paolo, 27 Vespa “98,” 53, 54 Vespa “Ape,” 54 Vico, Giambattista, 40, 101

183 Vietnam, 57, 58, 142 Vinci, Leonardo da, 57 VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), 143 Wales, 4, 5, 147 Walsingham, Francis, 20, 70-71, 7576, 80-82, 87, 137-139 Walt, Stephen, 163n. Waltz, Kenneth N., 6, 8, 108, 153, 155 Warhol, Andy, 54 Washington, George, 121 Watkins, John, 4 Weddell, John, 142-143 Wendt, Alexander, 6-9, 154 West Indies, 117 Westphalia, Peace of, 4 Williams, Raymond, 25 Wimsatt, W. K., 125 Wollheim, Richard, 100-103 Wolsey, Thomas, 2, 11, 47 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 78 World War II, 7, 106, 134, 149, 150-151 Wotton, Henry, 27 Wotton, Nicholas, 139 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 57 Xuetong, Yan, 167n. Zimmer, Heinrich, 160n.