Rethinking Shakespeare's Political Philosophy: From Lear to Leviathan 9780748682423

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RETHINKING SHAKESPEARE’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN SHAKESPEARE AND PHILOSOPHY Series Editor: Kevin Curran Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy takes seriously the speculative and world-making properties of Shakespeare’s art. Maintaining a broad view of ‘philosophy’ that accommodates first-order questions of metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, the series also expands our understanding of philosophy to include the unique kinds of theoretical work carried out by performance and poetry itself. These scholarly monographs will reinvigorate Shakespeare studies by opening new interdisciplinary conversations among scholars, artists, and students. Editorial Board Members Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham James Kearney, University of California, Santa Barbara Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine Madhavi Menon, American University Simon Palfrey, Oxford University Tiffany Stern, Oxford University Henry Turner, Rutgers University Michael Witmore, The Folger Shakespeare Library Paul Yachnin, McGill University Published Titles Rethinking Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: From Lear to Leviathan Alex Schulman Forthcoming Titles How Shakespeare Thinks: Scepticism, Faith and the Politics of Cognition James Kuzner Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics Thomas P. Anderson

RETHINKING SHAKESPEARE’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY From Lear to Leviathan ◆ ◆ ◆

ALEX SCHULMAN

For Vanessa ’tis fresh morning with me / When you are by at night.

© Alex Schulman, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – ­Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Baskerville MT by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8241 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8242 3 (webready PDF) The right of Alex Schulman to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations viii Series Editor’s Prefaceix Introduction 1 Political Theory as Literature, Literature as Political Theory4 The Genres of Political Theory7 Bounded in a Nutshell / King of Infinite Space15 Plan of the Book22 I.  SHAKESPEAREAN ANTIQUITY 1. The Birth of Tragicomedy (In the Defeat of Hector by Ulysses) 29 Ulysses’ Pragmatic Platonism30 Troy’s Proto-Hobbesian Rupture41 Troilus’ Tragic Platonism and the Death of Hector49 2. Pagan Christs: Politics in the Roman Plays 55 Of Beasts, Gods, and Stomachs57 Crises of the Republic: Aristocratic Nostalgia, Imperial Executives, and   the Coming of Christianity72 II.  SHAKESPEAREAN MODERNITY 3. King Lear and the State of Nature 97 From Status to Contract: A State of Nature Emerges from Lear’s Love  Test101

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Nature Triumphant: Lear’s Animalisation, Edgar’s Transformation, and   Edmund’s Hidden Victory108 4. Shakespeare’s Novus Ordo Seclorum: Freedom and Authority in the English Histories 125 Richard II: Bolingbroke as Politique in a Late-Medieval State of  Nature129 Freedom from the Fathers140 5. Shakespeare and the Theological–Political Problem 156 Against Theocracy and Patriarchy: Portia’s Politics158 ‘Raze the Sanctuary’: Secularising Passion in Measure for Measure 174

Epilogue: Brave New Worlds

196

Notes 201 Index228

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I could not have written this book without the generous support, from 2011–13, of the American Council of Learned Societies and Duke University’s Department of Political Science, in particular Michael Allen Gillespie. I would also like to thank the administrators and students of Harvard University’s Freshman Seminars Program, where I first taught the classes from which this work evolved. And for their support and advice at various stages of the process, incalculable thanks must go to Julia Reinhard Lupton and editor Kevin Curran.

ABBREVIATIONS

AC AW AYLI Cor Cym Ham 1H4 2H4 2H6

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra All’s Well That Ends Well As You Like It The Tragedy of Coriolanus Cymbeline, King of Britain The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark The History of Henry the Fourth The Second Part of Henry the Fourth The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster 3H6 The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry the Sixth H5 The Life of Henry the Fifth JC The Tragedy of Julius Caesar KJ The Life and Death of King John KL The Tragedy of King Lear Mac The Tragedy of Macbeth MND A Midsummer Night’s Dream Oth The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice R2 The Tragedy of King Richard the Second R3 The Tragedy of Richard the Third RJ The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet RL The Rape of Lucrece TA The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus Tmp The Tempest TOA The Life of Timon of Athens VA Venus and Adonis

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

Picture Macbeth alone on stage, staring intently into empty space. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ he asks, grasping decisively at the air. On one hand, this is a quintessentially theatrical question. At once an object and a vector, the dagger describes the possibility of knowledge (‘Is this a dagger’) in specifically visual and spatial terms (‘which I see before me?’). At the same time, Macbeth is posing a quintessentially philosophical question, one that assumes knowledge to be both conditional and experiential, and that probes the relationship between certainty and perception as well as intention and action. It is from this shared ground of art and inquiry, of theatre and theory, that this series advances its basic premise: Shakespeare is philosophical. It seems like a simple enough claim. But what does it mean exactly, beyond the parameters of this specific moment in Macbeth? Does it mean that Shakespeare had something we could think of as his own philosophy? Does it mean that he was influenced by particular philosophical schools, texts, and thinkers? Does it mean, conversely, that modern philosophers have been influenced by him, that Shakespeare’s plays and poems have been, and continue to be, resources for philosophical thought and speculation? The answer is ‘yes’ all around. These are all useful ways of conceiving a philosophical Shakespeare and all point to lines of inquiry that this series welcomes. But Shakespeare is philosophical in a much more fundamental way as well. Shakespeare is philosophical because the plays and poems actively create new worlds of knowledge and new scenes of ethical encounter. They ask big questions, make bold arguments, and develop new vocabularies in order to think what might otherwise be unthinkable.

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Through both their scenarios and their imagery, the plays and poems engage the qualities of consciousness, the consequences of human action, the phenomenology of motive and attention, the conditions of personhood, and the relationship among different orders of reality and experience. This is writing and dramaturgy, moreover, that consistently experiments with a broad range of conceptual crossings, between love and subjectivity, nature and politics, and temporality and form. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy takes seriously these speculative and world-making dimensions of Shakespeare’s work. The series proceeds from a core conviction that art’s capacity to think – ­to formulate, not just reflect, ideas – ­is what makes it urgent and valuable. Art matters because, unlike other human activities, it establishes its own frame of reference, reminding us that all acts of creation – ­biological, political, intellectual, and amorous – a­ re grounded in imagination. This is a far cry from business-as-usual in Shakespeare studies. Because historicism remains the methodological gold standard of the field, far more energy has been invested in exploring what Shakespeare once meant than in thinking rigorously about what Shakespeare continues to make possible. In response, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy pushes back against the critical orthodoxies of historicism and cultural studies to clear a space for scholarship that confronts aspects of literature that can neither be reduced to, nor adequately explained by, particular historical contexts. Shakespeare’s creations are not just inheritances of a past culture, frozen artifacts whose original settings must be expertly reconstructed in order to be understood. The plays and poems are also living art, vital thought-worlds that struggle, across time, with foundational questions of metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. With this orientation in mind, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy offers a series of scholarly monographs that will reinvigorate Shakespeare studies by opening new interdisciplinary conversations among scholars, artists, and students. Kevin Curran

INTRODUCTION

. . . this great work – Which is almost to pluck a kingdom down And set another up – ­

(2H4 I, iii, 48–50)

This book argues that Shakespeare’s plays and poems, capacious and multifarious though they are, tell a particular story about politics and political philosophy. That story is the rise of modern secular nationalism. Such a phrase covers many diverse sociopolitical phenomena to be examined below, but for introductory purposes one might summarise it as the following epochal transvaluation of values: the decline in the political legitimacy of warrior and priestly castes, and the rise of government as a specialised sphere serving utilitarian, worldly purposes. In what follows, cataclysmic Shakespearean battles and trials shall show a- or supra-political ethics defeated in the name of polis, empire, republic, nation. While locating Shakespeare in the broad transitional zone between the late medieval and early modern worlds, I simultaneously resist imprisoning the author in immediate context, placing his work in conversation with the canon of Western political thought: Weber and Montesquieu alongside Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke alongside Cicero and St Paul. Benjamin Disraeli called the modern nation state ‘a work of art and a work of time’, a structure, that is, needing both suitable materials and skilled architects.1 The England of Shakespeare’s time was fertile soil for what I call his portrayal of the rise of secular nationalism and the sort of state-building it requires.2 It is familiar that Shakespeare belonged to a cohort representing, in England, an innovative literary nationalism: Marlowe, Sidney, Spenser, and so forth. But where nationalism is simply

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glossed as Queen-and-country patriotism, or, more critically, jingoism and sycophantic royalism, the Shakespearean achievement (whatever one’s judgement of a Marlowe or Spenser) is obscured. Liah Greenfeld argues that nationalism, whereby the national unit is ‘perceived as larger than any concrete community . . . as essentially homogeneous, and the lines of status and class as superficial’, is the fundamental sociopolitical fact about the modern world. Greenfeld explains that such nationalism first arose in England in the sixteenth century during the convergence of a ‘transformation of the social hierarchy and . . . unprecedented increase in social mobility’ owing to Tudor state-building requirements and Reformation turmoil.3 I believe Shakespeare provides an unmatchable literary lens through which to view this social, economic and political process. The book is divided into two parts. ‘Shakespearean Antiquity’ interprets Shakespeare’s portrayal of ancient Greek and Roman politics, chiefly in Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. ‘Shakespearean Modernity’ explores major concepts of early modern political philosophy – ­the idea of state of nature and social contract; toleration and/or secular nationalism as a solution to sectarian strife; the decline of corporatist feudalism and the rise of market individualism – ­chiefly in King Lear, the Henriad, The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. The two parts are thematically linked insofar as the plays’ proto-modern discourses are deeply intertwined with Shakespeare’s ambivalent treatment of Renaissance valorisation of ancient politics and philosophy, the hoped-for synthesis between Pagan humanism and Christian morality. Platonism’s conflict with materialist sophism (which frames Chapter 1) resurfaces, in the early modern period, as the social contract theorists’ undermining of religious and teleological conceptions of politics. A paradigmatic construction of early modern political theory – ­state of nature leading to, and legitimating, social contract or social compact – ­is, I argue, legible in King Lear and the Henriad. Shakespeare depicts a breaking of hierarchical social order by early modern rationalism and egalitarianism similar to that suggested by theorists like Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke. Political theorist Andrew Sabl has recently read David Hume’s History of England as an account of, among other things: actors who at first recognise no common interests with their perceived inferiors, and no reason to abandon local fiefdoms that let them flaunt their power . . . brought to prefer the advantages of peace, prosperity, and an expanded scope for potential projects and achievements to the squalid but independent authority they enjoyed in their castles and cathedrals . . . relevant actors must

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restructure their preferences . . . barriers to instrumental reasoning must fall or be overcome.4

I think a similar story is legible in Shakespeare, albeit passed, there, through variegated and conflicting optics. Coriolanus’ arrogant, anti-erotic denial of what is owed to the vulnerable common body is destroyed so Rome might endure; so, too, Antony’s ultra-erotic denial of the pragmatic necessities balancing the search for private fulfilment. This is recapitulated in Bolingbroke’s and Hal’s consolidation of power amidst the declines of Richard II, Hotspur and Falstaff. Like Octavian’s imperial neutralisation of Cassius and Cleopatra, Henry IV and Henry V establish novel secular nationalism, parrying thrusts from politics bowing to imperatives of piety (Richard II), honour (Hotspur) or hedonism (Falstaff). The elimination of theological blockages to the proto-modern regime frames The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. Scholarly efforts are periodically dedicated to hashing out Shakespeare’s potentially secret dedication to Catholicism, as (perhaps) presented in coded and covert form in his writings.5 Here, too, I claim the strongest theme to emerge is secular nationalism as the sensible path around sectarian depredations. Shakespeare’s Pagan world declines, in part, because the values it posits cannot stand up to the scrutiny portended by the very critical rationality the philosophical spokesmen for such values preach. It also violates legitimate human aspirations by excessively devaluing the private realm: ‘political virtue is a renunciation of oneself’, as Montesquieu puts it, ‘which is always a very painful thing.’6 The coming of Christianity remedies this, to some extent, by insulating its values from rational critique via theocracy, and deflating Pagan valorisation of collective – ­chiefly military – ­endeavour towards greater concern for the individual soul. But Christianity introduces its own problems. If the Pagan public persona was too public, Christianity’s private soul could be too private, either giving up on transformative politics entirely, or polluting politics with the irreconcilable imperatives of faction-spawning inspirations, cultic faiths. The ambiguous relationship of salvation to worldly order provides not only standing institutional disturbances to politics in the form of priesthoods, but philosophical ones that remain long after priesthoods have been, at least in much of Europe and North America, effectively disestablished. From the means-ends perspective of utilitarian political management, salvation religion misvalues ordinary life, either degrading the status of material interests just as science and technology become able to fulfil them to previously unimaginable extents, or impossibly tethering them to scriptures written in primitive, tribal times. A ‘task’ of modernity

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will become apparent through engagements with Shakespeare’s writings, which themselves participated in modernity’s beginning and shaped its consciousness: find new forms of thought and action to codify revalorisation of the secular world without replicating antiquity’s collectivist excesses; continue Christianity’s individualism, its attentiveness to society’s weak and humble, but find sturdier scaffolding than scriptural faith, and avoid the spectre of well-fed sheep grazing the pastures where spirited citizens once lived.

Political Theory as Literature, Literature as Political Theory . . . let them be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.(Ham. II, ii, 503–4)

Political theorists have recently paid increasing attention to imaginative literature, reading plays, novels and films through the optics provided by the perennial questions our discipline asks. Simultaneously, philosophers have excavated a Shakespeare who engages with problem topics in phenomenology, epistemological scepticism, and the nature of the self;7 literary theorists, long interested in Shakespeare’s sociopolitical context, have begun a broader conversation between the texts and political theory.8 Western political theory began in a classical Athens where philosophy, politics and the theatre were deeply intertwined.9 Yet the vibrant body of work on political theory and ancient drama has yet to find its Shakespearean equivalent. This book seeks to fill that gap. Discussion of Shakespeare within political theory has been largely dominated by the followers of Leo Strauss, who tend to read Shakespeare as affirming ancient conceptions of virtue and natural right.10 This produces worthy interpretations, but risks closing off others, obscuring, for example, the historical self-consciousness in Shakespeare’s works, which affirm the relevance of ancient politics and philosophy, but also reflect a trajectory transforming many structures and concepts inherited from the past. Located (broadly speaking) at the same cusp of modernity as Machiavelli –w ­ hat aspects of the ancient republic could/should we resurrect? – ­and Hobbes – ­what happens if we pulverise a society of vertical duty and obligation into a horizontal realm of consenting individuals? – ­Shakespeare is surely as relevant a voice for thinking through the problems of politics as Sophocles. Our modern democracies are not distant progeny of Solon and Pericles so much as children of the people who, in the wake of the Tudor and Stuart regimes, cut the seventeenth-century monarchy down to size. William E. Connolly calls political theory the intellectual arena for

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politics’ perennial negotiation of ‘essentially contested concepts’ – ­like freedom, justice, democracy – ­whose definitions cannot be settled by finetuning our language, gathering more data, or becoming more rational.11 Take, for example, Robert Filmer’s royalist critique of Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) in the former’s Observations Concerning the Originall of Government (1652), written after the execution of Charles I. Filmer approves of Hobbes’ defence of absolute sovereignty, but not his legitimation mechanism. Filmer ‘praise[s Hobbes’] building’ but ‘mislike[s] his foundation’, suggesting the building ‘would . . . stand firmer upon the principles of regnum patrimoniale.’ Which misses the point in a telling fashion. Hobbes believed Leviathan necessary precisely because Filmer’s preferred legitimation had lost its explanatory and normative power.12 This was due, most immediately, to the 1630s–40s decline of Crown-Parliament relations into civil war, but it had more distant sources, ones potentially visible in Shakespeare’s England (which partially overlapped Hobbes’). John Alvis says Shakespeare lived ‘when fundamentally opposed conceptions of civil society contended for dominance’; Shakespeare’s ‘inquiry into issues connected with political formation’ was thus ‘commensurate in scope with that pursued by political philosophers.’13 Sociopolitical disintegration produces the most intense contestations of Connolly’s ‘essentially contested concepts’. Sheldon Wolin describes ‘continual reappearance of certain problem-topics’ like ‘relationships between ruler and ruled, the nature of authority . . . the status of certain goals or purposes as objectives of political action, and the character of political knowledge’; ‘great statements’ of political theory emerge from crises in which old meaning-systems falter or collapse.14 Inherited sociopolitical structures fail to effectively neutralise or channel novel energies. Here political theory and literature link up. Raymond Williams explains that ages of ‘stable belief’ feature ‘close correspondence between beliefs and actual experience’ that ‘do not seem to produce tragedy of any intensity’; tragedy blossoms in ‘period[s] preceding the substantial breakdown and transformation of an important culture.’15 Wolin identifies two such major waves in modernity – fi ­ rst, the collapse of late-medieval order via Reformation religious passions; second, the invasion of post-Westphalian absolutism by expanding commerce and capitalism. Both processes find expression in Shakespeare. Shakespeare, of course, did not think he wrote during the English Renaissance, or early modern era: such periodisation has been imposed retrospectively. But just because he would not have mentally classified the Wars of the Roses as a late-medieval conflict does not mean he could not have sensed his own time was one of major transformations. None of it is

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presented in a triumphalist tone; neither, though, is it a jeremiad. He who, like Cassius, ‘had as lief not be, as live to be / In awe of’ Caesar, whose raised status renders ‘Cassius . . . A wretched creature’ represents an enriching, but disturbing, spirit ( JC I, ii, 97–119). Conversely, Shakespeare gives voice to nostalgia for an ‘antique world, / When service sweat for duty, not for meed’ as against ‘the fashion of these times, / Where none will sweat but for promotion’ (AYLI II, iii, 58–61), but ample counterevidence suggests awareness that such a world was, if not wholly illusory, then at least not quite what Orlando imagines. Opinions about how and why political theory arises, canvassed above, relate to accounts of what political theory does. What is it, exactly, that must be rethought in the light of terminological contestation or social disintegration? Leslie Paul Thiele conceptualises political theory as ‘deliberation about the proper organisation of collective human existence’, with the branching lineages of such deliberation ‘a tradition of historical, normative, interpretive and analytic thought whose concern . . . is the nature of collective human life.’16 Beginning with ‘the totality of [the human’s] experience as a creature in society’, argues Dante Germino, political theory ‘transcend[s] the sphere of immediate practical concerns’ and ‘view[s]’ man’s social existence from a critical perspective.’17 My version: political theory’s subject matter is the true condition of, and legitimate hopes for, collective human life in the world. Even without a clearly delineated theory of justice, or freedom, or maximal human flourishing, political theory can be descriptive in a way that goes beyond positivist empiricism, which is constrained insofar as questions about politics are imagined and pictured as mathematical data. I respect such empiricism’s achievements, but it obscures qualitative aspects of political existence necessary for a full picture. Here literature is fruitful: the personative is political.18 Like great literature, political theory that endures does so because, beyond whatever local causes it engages, beyond whatever contemporary morality it affirms or attacks, it describes permanently conflictual aspects of collective human life. Such conflict may be ameliorable, or quieted to where it is latent potential more than bloody presence – ­so the hortatory theorist hopes. Poets who depict flesh and blood characters rather than abstract persons (or classes, or office-holders), who watch them argue and share, battle and love, help us imagine how this all works in practice. They do this in a different sense than those impressive modern techniques of statistical aggregation and formal modelling, prevalent in empirical political science, erected to test theory against fact. Andrew Sabl describes ‘the causal social science we are accustomed to: large-scale, large-N, hostile to proper names, data-driven, progressive’, contrasting it

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with ‘another kind of social science that studies the choices of individuals, regarding larger social forces as the setting rather than the plot’. The first kind follows rational-choice economics’ ‘regarding consumers as ciphers with preferences’, but this, Sabl convincingly argues, is precisely how not to understand political actors. A political science that ‘studies only preference rankings, formal strategies, and payoffs, will miss not the details but the core of how political consensus arises, degenerates, and re-forms’.19 Rational-choice social science starts from assumptions about human nature that must simply be accepted before the theory can be applied. The best political theory, like the best literature, seeks out the human condition. Human affairs being what they are, the conclusions, to be at all plausible, shall eschew the simplicity of mathematical modelling and evince something of the messiness of life. Political theory must ultimately make decisions – a­ disanalogy with literature. But in seeking to understand the human condition it wishes to direct, political theory has, in literature, a useful ally. Political theory’s canon is, after all, filled with literary men and women: Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes (who translated Homer), Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Constant, Nietzsche. Joshua Foa Dienstag argues that ‘narrative’, not just ‘concepts of abstract right and duty’, is central to political thought.20 To ‘try to distill formal rules of genre’ from canonical political thought, he says, ‘would be ludicrous’; political theory is a ‘toolbox’ containing ‘a set of resources that can be called upon in manifold circumstances for different tasks.’21 Political theory should utilise literature, not as a tool for constructing a just society, nor necessarily, despite art’s ability to shock and disturb, as a tool for a ruthless critique of everything existing; rather, as a survey or measurement tool, a magnifier of understanding and vision exposing structures the workman charged with surface improvements may not notice, may not even need to notice. Such a tool broadens, rather than narrows, the scope of inquiry, and engages an emotional register that might ordinarily be suppressed.

The Genres of Political Theory I look not into [myths] but into my own self: Am I a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon, or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in divine and gentle nature? Plato, Phaedrus 230a We need . . . a metaphysic which recognises both the continuity between man and animals and also the discontinuity . . . Man is distinguished from animals by having separated, ultimately into a state of mutual conflict, aspects of life

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Rethinking Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy (instincts) which in animals exist in some condition of undifferentiated unity or harmony. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Now I outline a case made by the rest of the book: that literary study and political theory can be fruitfully unified. Political theorists illuminate themes even from writers they lived long before or long after, and reading Shakespeare yields insights into politics. The ‘fundamental problem’ of politics, claims Rousseau, is to ‘find a form of association that will defend and protect the person and goods’ of each member, where the members, ‘uniting with all, nevertheless obey only [themselves] and remain as free as before’.22 Politics is the penumbra of institutions, laws and mores that balance the centripetal and centrifugal forces in human nature. Locke says God ‘made Man such a Creature, that . . . it was not good for him to be alone’, while giving him ‘perfect Freedom’ as his birthright, ‘uncontrolled enjoyment of all the Rights and Priviledges of the Law of Nature’; yet the community this creature craves demands ‘Political Society, where every one of the Members hath quitted this natural power.’23 Kant writes of an ‘unsocial sociability . . . rooted in human nature’ driving conflict among persons who ‘cannot bear yet cannot bear to leave’ each other.24 Montesquieu says the ‘intelligent world’ in which human politics moves ‘has laws that are invariable’ like the physical world, but ‘does not follow its laws consistently’.25 Homo sapiens’ shared genetic inheritance does not script our group conduct in the manner of other species.26 Hobbes calls it ‘strange . . . that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another’. Other creatures, like insects, ‘live sociably one with another’ with ‘no other direction, than their particular judgments and appetites’; we o’erflow this measure.27 In Henry V, Shakespeare’s Archbishop of Canterbury’s ‘heaven divide[s] the state of man in divers functions’ precisely like ‘honey-bees, / Creatures that by a rule in nature teach / The act of order to a peopled kingdom’; they have ‘a king, and officers of sorts . . . some like magistrates . . . Others like merchants . . . Others like soldiers’; they have ‘singing masons building roofs of gold’ and ‘civil citizens lading up the honey’, teaching how ‘many things, having full reference / To one consent, may work contrariously . . . So may a thousand actions . . . End in one purpose’ (I, ii, 183–212). One imagines Hobbes reading this paean to the natural order and thinking, of course the representative of an institution suffering deeply contested legitimacy would believe as much. Thus Hobbes attacked Aristotle’s Politics and its centuries of scholastic revisers. Aristotle labelled us ‘political animal’, sociable like other gregarious animals, but utilising speech and reason to collectively establish terms of association. For Aristotle, this signifies nobility; for Hobbes, it is a dilemma, engendering perpetual ‘competition

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for Honour and Dignity’ unknown to other animals. In their dull paradise ‘the Common good differ not from the Private’ and none ‘strive to reforme and innovate . . . thereby bring[ing the community] into Distraction and Civill warre’.28 Shakespeare’s misanthropic Timon laments the ‘unkindest beast [is] more kinder than mankind’; ‘The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic’ (TOA III, iii, 27–8; IV, i, 36). Aristotle similarly acknowledges that our capacity for rational virtue is mirrored by a supraanimal capacity for cruelty and evil. There is an old caricature of political thought in which some believe humans naturally sociable, while others believe them naturally diffident, self-interested, fractious. Rousseau perpetuated this false dichotomy at a key point during his lifelong attempt to bridge the gulf between humanity and nature. He describes Hobbes’ split from the natural law tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf thus: Hobbesian ‘man is naturally intrepid, and seeks only to attack, and to fight . . . naturally wicked . . . vicious because he does not know virtue’.29 Rousseau’s fellow philosophe, and eventual enemy, Diderot, placed Rousseau himself into this simplistic dichotomy, in his emblematic entry on ‘Hobbisme’ for the Encyclopedie (1765): ‘[Rousseau] thinks man naturally good, and [Hobbes] thinks him wicked . . . If you follow Hobbes, you are convinced that laws and the formation of society have made men better, while if you follow Monsieur Rousseau, you believe instead that they have depraved him.’30 But neither Hobbes nor Rousseau is adequately read proclaiming natural goodness/wickedness; neither cleanly divides the normality of amity from that of discord. The core problem is: can there be a reconciliation of those forces drawing humans together and those driving them apart? At this point such a formulation is necessarily vague, inviting more specified examination of the sexual-familial, economic, political and religious content humans give this intricate dance of cooperation and conflict. Whatever the differences in ethology and emphasis between an Aristotle, a Hobbes, a Rousseau, they ultimately confront the same situation: the rupture that occurs, or can occur, between humans and nature (despite our being as natural as anything else), and the existence of polis or res publica as the site where that rupture is – ­what? There’s the rub. There is a wound – ­and/or a spark of light? – ­in the human interaction with nature. The elucidation of this wound/spark, and the programme for mining, negotiating or abolishing it, is the root of Western political thought. It begins with a conflict, central to Chapter 1 below, that has never really ended: Socrates’ argument for transcendent values weaving together wisdom, happiness and morality, versus the sophists’ argument for the utilitarian conventionality of politics, for demoralised nature. This is also, in some sense, the root of art and literature, even if

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they see the problem from different vantages: thus Shakespeare reveals, as Graham Bradshaw puts it, ‘how opposed visions of Nature yield opposed accounts of value’.31 Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), a signpost of optimistic Renaissance humanism, calls humanity ‘a work of indeterminate form . . . confined by no bounds’, despite our divine source. God created us, alone, ‘molder and maker of thyself . . . into whatever shape’ we choose, ‘downward into the lower natures [of] brutes’ or ‘upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine’.32 Between this and Hamlet’s anguish about the creature crawling between heaven and earth finding contentment (III, i, 127–8) there is a dark chasm. Victor Kiernan considers poetry and religion ‘parallel responses’ to discomfiting recognition of disorder, ‘one seeking to build order out of chaos with human materials, the other with supernatural aid’.33 The difference between political philosophy and theology mirrors Hegel’s definition of tragedy as a conflict between goods, rather than between good and evil.34 The extent to which the goods – ­state versus family allegiance, rights to autonomy/non-interference versus obligations to provide for vulnerable others – a­ re mutually exclusive constitute the ‘tragic’ mode, even if it is rarely described that way. Conversely, their combinability or reconcilability is ‘comic’, in the sense that, like the commonwealths of Shakespeare’s comedies, a ‘realistic utopia’ successfully juggles justice, consent and preference-satisfaction, assuming participants possessing the right mix of reason and empathy. ‘Realistic utopia’ was John Rawls’ description of his A Theory of Justice (1971), the twentieth century’s most influential work of academic political philosophy. Rawls sees four roles for political philosophy: 1) The practical demand ‘to focus on deeply disputed questions and to see whether, despite appearances, some underlying basis of philosophical and moral agreement can be uncovered’. 2) Orientation ‘contribute[s] to how a people think of their political and social institutions as a whole, of themselves as citizens, and of their basic aims and purposes as a society . . . as opposed to their aims and purposes as individuals, or as memories of families and associations’. 3) Reconciliation demonstrates how sociopolitical ‘institutions, when properly understood from a philosophical point of view, are rational, and developed over time as they did to attain their present, rational form’. 4) ‘Probing the limits of practicable political possibility’ (Rawls’ description of his own endeavour).35

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Each is translatable, with varying degrees of copying fidelity, as a literary experience. Orientation: literature has often been more effective at the task than philosophy; consider Uncle Tom’s Cabin altering American perceptions of slavery, or Animal Farm and 1984 providing the twentieth century a vocabulary of scepticism about state power and ideology. But the others also apply. J. Peter Euben interprets Euripides, for example, as showing how ‘polarities (such as between rights and belonging, authority and liberty, individual and community) share an inner attraction and affinity that enables them to be related to each other’; how such ‘oppositions turn into each other and why it is that what we banish returns with such explosive power’.36 Below I explore, similarly, whether Richard II and Bolingbroke, Edmund and Edgar, Shylock and Antonio, in fact pursue similar values and purposes, despite their conflicts over sovereignty and justice. Which leads us to Reconciliation: I also show Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman plays tracing, somewhat like Hegel (greatly influenced by Shakespeare) would, the emergence of Christian and modern notions of individualism out of the synthesis of clashing elements in Pagan philosophy and politics. Philosopher Jennifer Ann Bates has recently done a striking reading of Shakespeare in terms of Hegel’s philosophy – t­he Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular.37 Though I range over political philosophy generally, rather than having Shakespeare converse with one philosopher, this book can be seen to build off Bates’ work: here, specifically, in terms of Hegel’s analysis of the modern state and the political-historical trajectory of Europe, rather than his ethics or philosophy en bloc. It would be perverse to make Shakespeare proto-Hegelian in the sense of having a totalising philosophy of history or promising rational unification of all human experience. But Hegel’s story of history as the advance of freedom from ‘the ancient Orient’ where ‘only one person is free’, to ‘the Greeks . . . and the Romans’ among whom ‘some persons are free, not the human as such’, to modernity (built, in Hegel’s account, by ‘the Germanic peoples, through Christianity’), which seeks to make ‘every human . . . free by virtue of being human’38 –is legible, if suitably stripped of metaphysics and mysticism, in Shakespeare. Just as Hegel made Shakespeare the tallest signpost on the road from ancient to modern drama, he thought ‘rational politics [arose] in England’ in the writings of those who, like Bacon and Hobbes, thought ‘we must become acquainted with empirical nature, both with the physical and with the human’. Though Hegel found English empiricism inadequate he credited the fact that ‘in Hobbes we at least find this, that the nature and organism of the State is established on the principle of human nature, human desire, &c’.39

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This brings up another caricature of political thought, similar to the one identified above: here, ‘methodological individualists’ who begin from free persons making choices face off against holist or ‘organic’ conceptions of a ‘general will’ that treat the collective as a body with its own interests.40 Certain ancient and medieval theorists might fit this latter description, but modern elucidators of the general will and state ‘organism’, like Rousseau and Hegel (whatever their excesses or inadequacies), are usually being misrepresented. It was precisely the tension between individual preferences and group order that led Rousseau to conceptualise the general will. And Hegel was less interested in politics being organic than in it being organising, a sphere where other institutions, inadequate on their own, are coordinated towards greater freedom: the ‘living . . . equilibrium’ that is ‘the Justice of human law’.41 As Durkheim argued, if ‘diversity . . . is both useful and necessary’ and ‘unity . . . no less indispensable’, but not spontaneously forthcoming, then ‘the task of realising and maintaining it will have to constitute a special function of the social organism, represented by an independent organ’, the modern state.42 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right paints a triptych of family, civil society (here, the market) and state. The family, in which one appears ‘not as an independent person but as a member’ is organised around love, ‘the unity of myself with another and of the other with me’, the ‘immense contradiction’ by which, finding myself ‘deficient and incomplete . . . I find myself in another person . . . gain recognition in this person, who in turn gains recognition in me’. By contrast, the state’s ‘content must be rational, and I must know it’. Under market imperatives, ‘the family disintegrates’: family members become ‘self-sufficient concrete persons’ freely gaining their satisfactions by using their peculiar talents to satisfy others. Here ‘each individual is his own end’, and all other individuals ‘therefore means to the end’ of his self-interest, as he is to theirs. It is ‘a system of all-round interdependence’, like the family, except its inner momentum is love of self rather than love of others. Family love is independent (allegedly) of utility and merit; in market valuation ‘all aptitudes, and all accidents of birth and fortune are liberated’ to serve all by serving themselves. The modern nation state must resolve the tensions between these institutions. It unifies citizens in a bond, not exactly familial and not exactly mercantile; one incorporating aspects of each: ‘duty and right are united within the state in one and the same relation . . . the unity of the universal and the particular’. The sovereign forces fraternity into the market and rationality into the family. If the market cannot assure all are adequately fed, the state injects a principle of family love into civil society. Conversely, families may be compelled to cede their children to public education, freeing their talents to produce resources for non-kin.43

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A major tension over the sweep of Western political thought is between balancing these institutions and affirming one over the others. Here Euben, again, helpfully links drama to political theory: ancient Greek tragic figures ‘reject, turn away from, or seek to resolve in transcendent unity the complexity of life and thought’, and success, here, is as dangerous as failure. Tragedy ‘portrays the attractions of simplifying, harmonising, and freeing oneself from the guilt and remorse imposed by practical choices in a complex moral universe.’44 At the extreme, the anti-balancing option could recommend total expropriation of family and civil society by the state, as in Plato’s Republic or later attempts at communist utopia. And the libertarian argument (more currently popular) that market allocations should dominate human social life, because only they maximise efficiency, rationality and freedom, is the mirror image of Platonism/communism. ‘A radically laissez-faire economy would be like a totalitarian state’, writes Michael Walzer, ‘invading every other sphere, dominating every other distributive process’. Walzer calls such arrangements ‘a social version of the gold standard: one good or set of goods is dominant and determinative of value in all the spheres of distribution’. Such convertibility ‘appears to be a natural process but is in fact magical, a kind of social alchemy’. The just society, on the other hand, would ‘vindicate the autonomy of distributive spheres’.45 The balanced regime insists politics takes the different ways humans appear to one other –b ­ rother, daughter, friend, competitor, compatriot, convert – a­ s a given of nature, a tangle of limitations that must be recognised before it can be channelled towards positive ends. Whether one takes that resolution to be tragic compromise, or something more benevolent, depends upon one’s opinion on the adjustment of desires to social necessities. Is it natural, pre-ordained, in our best interest? Or a cruel necessity that takes with one hand what it gives with the other? We can compare this with Shakespeare’s use of genre, the web of conventions he both exploits and undermines.46 Schelling thought Shakespeare’s ‘combination of opposing elements’ represented ‘the striving of the modern drama back towards the epic, though without becoming epic’, an endeavour that ‘requires that the poet have access to the tragic and the comic’.47 A bungled play-within-a-play signals generic breakdown: ‘tragical mirth’. ‘ “Merry” and “tragical”?’ Duke Theseus wonders, ‘How shall we find the concord of this discord?’ (MND V, i, 56–60). Comedy, Aristotle said, tends to feature ‘some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive’; its ‘mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain’.48 Northrop Frye says that while comedy appears to be ‘a movement from one kind of society to another’, its happy secret is that the resolved society

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is what ‘the audience has recognised all along to be the proper and desirable state of affairs’.49 C.L. Barber reads the comedies as reflections of, and upon, a tradition of English holiday saturnalia, medieval festivities still practiced in Shakespeare’s time despite Puritan assaults. Here pleasure is ‘the touchstone for judgment of what bars it or is incapable of it’.50 This highlights a key incongruity between the comedies and tragedies/ problem plays, beneath obviously opposed conventions of plot and tone. In comedy, the problem about desire is its blockage by an alien or outside force – i­n Frye’s account, ‘some absurd, cruel, or irrational law . . . which the action of the comedy then evades or breaks’.51 In the tragedies and problem plays the problem with desire is some flaw in desire itself. It is unsurprising that the German Enlightenment’s eruption in philosophical aesthetics involved thinkers who studied Shakespeare’s tragedies closely. In Peter Szondi’s account, the theory moves from Schelling, whose system’s ‘essence is the identity of freedom and necessity, culminat[ing] in his definition of the tragic process as the restoration of this indifference in conflict . . . at the price of the conqueror simultaneously being the conquered’; to Goethe, who, somewhat like Hegel, sees tragedy as ‘irreconcilable opposition’. Goethe confessed he was ‘not born to be a tragic poet, for my nature is conciliatory’.52 Shakespeare makes us question that presumption of mutual exclusivity: the whole tragicomedy of life is that nature can be seen either way. Shakespeare’s comedic amnesties are simple, whatever Byzantine plot contrivances precede them, compared to the apocalyptic refashionings or reaffirmings of the social order that conclude Coriolanus, King Lear, Hamlet. Comedy contains safe harbours where ‘law / Cannot pursue’ (MND I, i, 162–3) proscribed lovers, Belmonts where debts are instantaneously amortised. The ‘voluntary exile[s]’ in Arden forest roam an apolitical place where one can ‘fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’ before ‘the penalty of Adam’; a life ‘more sweet / Than that of painted pomp . . . More free from peril than the envious court’ (AYLI I, i, 86–103; II, i, 1–5). But there is no escape from Elsinore except the graveyard. In the comedies and romances, it usually takes magical spells or belaboured misunderstandings, themselves reversible, to produce the ambivalences constitutive of the tragedy/problem play universe. Comedy’s upside-down world, where ‘The more I hate, the more he follows me . . . The more I love, the more he hateth me’, where desire ‘turn[s] a heaven unto a hell’ and ‘a surfeit of the sweetest things / The deepest loathing to the stomach brings’ (MND I, i, 198–207; II, i, 212; II, i, 242; II, ii, 143–4), is an artificial, escapable purgatory. The tragic claim, from Hamlet to Schopenhauer and Freud, is that, examined honestly, the world simply is this purgatory and

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nothing more. Shakespeare’s mature tragedies suggest all of us, not just one devilish, power-mad hunchback, are ‘Cheated . . . by dissembling nature, / Deformed, unfinished, sent before [our] time/ Into this breathing world scarce half made up’ (R3 I, i, 18–20).

Bounded in a Nutshell / King of Infinite Space All of us, really? Haven’t decades of critical assault shown that we cannot even confidently declare that authors speaks for themselves, let alone for some alleged human essence linking present readers to words written hundreds of years ago? Now I shall critically examine another link between literary studies and political theory and, in so doing, make my case against tailoring readings too closely to an authors’ perceived local/historical context. Both disciplines rely on exegesis of an open but conventionally limited group of classic texts; both have housed remarkably similar debates about the nature of such exegesis. Political theory combines intellectual history with present concerns, and has recently seen conflict about canonicity, the nature of reading and learning from past texts, and the social/ political/historical boundedness of ideas. Is the point to discover continuity or rupture? To universalise our interlocutors, or localise them? To discover how we got to where we are, or to illuminate roads not taken, or to retrospectively prosecute history’s many oppressions? ‘Political theory’ names not only its present work – t­ heories of justice, tolerance, democracy, and so forth – ­but also the study of its own tradition, and expects the one to inform the other (compare, for example, the separation between historians of economic thought and practicing economists). So uniting political theory with literary study is, in one sense, hardly novel: political theorists analyse their ‘data’ as much like literary critics as like historians or social scientists. The Shakespeare of E. M. W. Tillyard53 and others, Christian apologist for the Tudor hierarchy, was to subsequent generations more than just a misreading. It was emblematic of a whole literary establishment and intertwined cultural elitism, a ‘reduction of Shakespeare to Anglican platitudes legitimat[ing] the conservative syllabus of post-war British education’.54 That battle expanded into a clash about any vestiges of the ‘immortal bard’ mode of criticism that makes Shakespeare’s (anyone’s?) words into deep, universal truths about human life. ‘The modern literary institution generally uses . . . Shakespeare to organise culture according to the thematics of a post-Enlightenment humanism which finds universal psychological truths in his characters and . . . poetry that transcends history’, Leonard Tennenhouse writes disapprovingly.55 Whatever the

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modern literary institution’s purposes, such a tradition goes all the way back to Shakespeare’s friends and near-contemporaries. It probably found its most dedicated expositors in the Aestheticism/Romanticism on either side of 1800: Hegel’s Shakespeare who reveals ‘the universal interests of mankind’ transcending ‘national artistic conventions’;56 Carlyle’s ‘Politician, Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher’, whose ‘power of vision’ and ‘faculty of thought . . . reveals not this or that face of [the world], but its inmost heart, and generic secret’;57 Taine’s, through which ‘Nature appears . . . in all its fullness’;58 Hugo’s, who ‘decants all Nature, drinks it, and makes you drink it’.59 Marxist and Foucauldian-historicist scholars like Tennenhouse and Jonathan Dollimore claimed an alternatively ‘political’ Shakespeare whose ‘dramatic forms participated in the political life of Renaissance England’, conditioned by that society’s economic and discursive power structures, its ‘particular institutions of cultural production (the court, patronage, theatre, education, the church)’.60 They were interested in ‘not what makes Shakespeare our contemporary, but what makes him Elizabethan’, searching ‘not for relevance, but difference’. We were to cease ­‘celebrating . . . the canon as some holistic cycle, hermeticised from reality’, and instead start ‘attending to [its] material discursivity’, leaving Shakespeare’s language ‘demystified of its irrational mystique and restored to’ its ‘circumambient discourses’.61 To be ‘subversive of’ Shakespeare qua ‘purveyor of eternal human values’ was no mere antiquarian exercise in getting history straight. It was, allegedly, a radical politics. Deconstruction of ‘Shakemyth’62 would combat larger-scale repressions attributed to related ideas and institutions. (As Big Brother’s giant face symbolises the surveillance regime of Orwell’s Oceania, perhaps, endlessly reproduced images of the ‘immortal bard’ stand for the neoconservatism built from rejection of the destabilising 1960s.) Consider Victor Kiernan’s attack on A. C. Bradley’s (1851–1935) characterological focus: ‘A competitive age and its sturdy individualism made for . . . an effort to blow up Shakespeare’s dramatis personae into reallife beings.’63 But contextualising creativity does not, in itself, facilitate enduringly ‘political’ readings, especially if ‘political’ presupposes one particular agenda. De-universalised Shakespeare comes from the questionable belief that transhistorical human nature is necessarily a conservative idea. Such criticism often just replicates ‘immortal bard’ ideology by inverting it. Consider the harsh reception (in English departments at least) of Harold Bloom’s hyperbolic claim about Shakespeare’s ‘invention of the human’ – ­as if Bloom’s argument had not already appeared, albeit in Marxist/Foucauldian rather than Nietzschean form, as (for example) the

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insistence that the rising Tudor–Stuart bourgeoisie created the idea of the human subject.64 An account in which Shakespearean ‘stagecraft collaborates with statecraft in producing spectacles of power’65 has reached Tillyard’s destination even if, tone-wise, paranoia replaces patriotism.66 Only impoverished readings make a Shakespeare who valorises community over individual (or vice versa) coherent. Recently, scholars like Peter Holbrook and Richard Strier have valiantly attempted to rescue Shakespeare’s individualism. Strier uses philosopher Bernard Williams’ distinction between contextsensitive ethics and universalising moral philosophy to defend a somewhat proto-Nietzschean Shakespeare.67 I would supplement Strier’s ethics/ morality interrogation with a politics/morality one, politics, here, being a semi-autonomous realm that has moral implications, but cannot be folded into any unified moral philosophy. Dollimore describes a cycle of ‘consolidation . . . whereby a dominant order seeks to perpetuate itself’, then ‘subversion of that order’, and finally ‘containment of ostensibly subversive pressures’.68 Insightful, evocative; but I consider it by no means obvious whether, or when, by depicting destabilisation, Shakespeare offers support, chastisement, exorcism or domestication. Most plausibly, he offers all at once. Which is to say that to flourish, human societies need ways of protecting legitimate authority, of legitimating beneficial but controversial innovations, and of minimising the suffering inherent in euthanising regimes proven unworthy. ‘New historicism’, led by the formidable Stephen Greenblatt, sometimes makes more politically neutral arguments for contextually repatriating Shakespeare. Greenblatt recounts69 embracing ‘criticism centered on cultural artifacts’, thereby rejecting ‘celebration of a numinous literary authority, whether . . . located in the mysterious genius of an artist or in the mysterious perfection of a text’. Instead, ‘half-hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered’ are ‘signs of contingent social practices’ that the texts in question . . . knowingly and playfully reflect? Possess via osmosis? Ventriloquise despite themselves? It is never clear. Shakespeare’s education featured men dead fifteen hundred years being read, recited and discussed as if still in the classroom, so it is unclear that intervention in Elizabethan/Jacobean politics, rather than transmission of insights to distant ages, was his obvious model for literary endeavour. Anyway, intending ‘local’ themes and treating permanent existential problems in human collective life are not mutually exclusive. Consider this emblematic allegation of critical anachronism: ‘Shakespeare lived in the world of Plato and St Augustine; since the French Revolution we have been living in the world of Rousseau . . . lay[ing] many traps

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of misunderstanding for unsuspecting readers.’70 But there is more than one type of misreading. The accusation can be turned around. Should Shakespeare’s having lived in (roughly) a world of Plato and St Augustine (and Machiavelli and Calvin and . . .) compel suspicion that Rousseauian (or Nietzschean, Marxist, Freudian . . .) reactions are optical illusions? Denying the capaciousness centuries of readers, of varying nationality and political persuasion, have found in Shakespeare is easily as implausible as programmatically affirming eternal canonical relevance.71 Ben Jonson’s ‘not of an age, but for all time’ need not be taken as Holy Writ; still, there is a certain arrogance in the assumption that we know better. The contextualist turn in the history of political thought, similarly, has explored ways in which philosophers assumed to converse across time about big questions of power or justice or freedom actually participated in more bounded discourses. Quentin Skinner recalls chafing at a then-­dominant paradigm of ‘“perennial issues” in the history of Western thought’ in ‘so-called classic texts’; he instead wondered ‘what earlier philosophers may have been doing in writing as they wrote’.72 Such ‘doing’ encompasses what conclusion or course of action they were supporting or defending, attacking or repudiating, ridiculing with irony, scorning with polemical silence . . . through . . . speech acts embodied in the vastly complex act of intended communication that any work of discursive reasoning will comprise.73 But, as with literary scholarship examined above, locking authors into local, functional discourses is as perilous as locking them into timeless, prearranged big themes. Anthony Pagden says investigation of linguistic change reveals considerable ‘continuities of sense’ and advises concern ‘not with the architecture of the linguistic prisons of the past, but with the necessarily limited, but nevertheless intelligible, freedom of those who inhabited them’.74 If one digs present discourses unavailable to the past, or past discourses only murkily available to the present, down to their roots, they expand into broad problem-topics confronting Western societies in their tumultuous passages from the ancient and medieval to the modern world. To what extent, and at what cost, can individuals free themselves from community-imposed moral constraints? What is the legitimacy of subjecting various aspects of society to market versus political versus religious control? The dominant Straussian lineage of Shakespeare interpretation mentioned above goes all the way in the other direction, describing a conduit of timeless wisdom. Besides being limited by presupposing a unified set of teachings, perhaps esoterically presented owing to persecution, these readings tend to go astray by tethering Shakespeare to the ancient thought

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Strauss (and most though not all of his descendants) ranked above its modern revisions. Here, essentially, Shakespeare as vessel for the Tudor Great Chain of Being is pushed back in intellectual history until he teaches the eternal wisdom of Athenian philosophy. Allan Bloom finds ‘necessary lessons concerning human virtue and the proper aspirations of a noble life’, a ‘premodern view . . . more satisfactory’75 than its successor; Shakespeare is a ‘sapient guide to life’ with a ‘deep and abiding teaching to impart’ based largely on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.76 Characters interesting precisely for their disturbing inscrutability or amorality then become rough instantiations of the Platonic philosopher-king, wisely reconciling oppositions and steering the ship of state to virtue.77 Tillyard’s account of the history plays’ culmination in a virtuous Christian Prince’s triumph – ­‘choos[ing], Morality-fashion, between Sloth or Vanity, to which he is drawn by his bad companions, and Chivalry, to which he is drawn by his father and brothers . . . the Prince . . . is Aristotle’s middle quality between two extremes’78 – ­migrates to Athens from Jerusalem. So in The Merchant of Venice ‘pleasure, duty, and honor’ via Portia ‘find harmonious reconciliation’.79 (Even Portia’s dead, obtrusive father exemplifies ‘wisdom, the true basis of all title to rule’.)80 King Lear educates a prince into wisdom, the final Edgar-Edmund battle ‘a climactic fight between good and evil, justice and injustice’.81 Other characters are statesmanship anti-models: Coriolanus ‘fail[s] to encompass the qualities Aristotle discerns in great-souled men’; Hamlet lacks ‘a conception of honor that would permit him to see it as a bond uniting members of a community’.82 Such judgements make Shakespeare too much the teller, however sophisticated, of Aesop’s fables.83 This does not mean one cannot make a case for what Shakespeare valued, or thought the least of a series of given evils. (I agree with Peter Holbrook that ‘emphasizing Shakespeare’s intellectual openness can be overdone, with the plays and poems ending up a bland, self-cancelling rendezvous of perspectives’.)84 It does mean the presence of Platonic themes does not indicate a Platonist programme, any more than numerous biblical references have ever clarified Shakespeare’s religious commitments. (Though Shakespeare’s plays contain plenty of biblical references, it is telling that he never used scripture as a direct source – t­ his could not be entirely because of censorship worries, as many associated playwrights employed bible stories, and Shakespeare ransacked every other type of literature he knew.) If the ancient/modern dichotomy is to be maintained – a­ nd it describes something real, even if, like all dichotomies, it simplifies greatly – ­then I cast my vote with modernity, and with Shakespeare the modern. If an integral part of modernity is acknowledgement that a variety of moral commitments will continue to make up

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society, and acceptance (relieved, nose-holding, or maybe just exhausted) that the role of politics is negotiated settlement between them rather than convergence on the best one, then it is hard to see how as multivocal an author as Shakespeare could be anything but modern. Recently, as mentioned above, scholars crossing (intrinsically porous, I have argued) disciplinary boundaries between literary studies and political theory have made important moves in this direction, most notably Paul Kottman in A Politics of the Scene (2008) and Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare (2009), and Julia Reinhard Lupton in Thinking With Shakespeare (2011). Both use Hannah Arendt as a, or the, major theoretical interlocutor. Lupton refracts Shakespeare via modern radical and democratic thinkers like (in addition to Arendt) Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, unifying them around the concept of ‘biopower’, simultaneous opposition and intertwinement between ‘biological life in its repetitive rhythms . . . and political life as the practice of public virtue’ (p. 3). Lupton’s orientation comes from Arendt, rather than the others, because Arendt prefers a Greek discourse of citizenship based on virtue to the Roman tradition of citizenship based on law . . . the former may yield more multidimensional portraits of human actors, especially those of women, minors, foreigners, and servants, as well as men in their semipublic capacities as friends, husbands, and hosts . . . (pp. 7–8)

Lupton believes critics have oversold Arendt’s separation of private and public realms. She thus uses Shakespeare ‘to read Arendt against her own civic superego’ and ‘disclose instead the many places . . . in which divergent forms of life’ outside a narrowly construed Aristotelian polis ‘enter into world-building and future-founding relationships with each other’ (p.  9). Lupton explores ‘consent’ in All’s Well That Ends Well and Hamlet, the ‘politics of hospitality’ in Timon of Athens and The Winter’s Tale, and ‘varieties of personhood’ in The Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest. Her book is an exemplary reading in that political implications of ostensibly non-political, or micro- rather than macro-level interactions (i.e. not just English kings and Roman emperors) are drawn out. It is also a masterly application of political theory in its being attentive to authorial context, but also spiritedly emancipating from it. ‘Shakespeare’s universality’, Lupton sagely explains, ‘is open, not closed’ (p. 18). In these matters I follow Lupton and Kottman. I diverge, though, in positioning Shakespeare vis-à-vis modernisation more broadly, rather than one particular (some might say tendentiously pessimistic) strand of diagnosing modernity’s ills.85 I am less persuaded

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than Lupton about the ‘elements in Arendt’s thought that emphasise the polis as a recurrent possibility for human action rather than the name of a particular moment in the history of democracy’ (p. 11). Kottman, similarly, reads Arendt’s work ‘not as a nostalgic return to ancient Greece, but in fact as the dismantling of classical philosophical categories in order to help theoretical reflection better come to terms with the proprium of politics . . . the contingency and unpredictability of human interactions, the new beginnings, the new stories and relationships, that we bring into the world when we disclose ourselves in word and deed’. Kottman links Arendt to Shakespeare in terms of ‘a shared theoretical orientation that suspends grand ontological claims about the nature of political life in order to attend to the formation of polities on the singular scenes of their birth and rebirth’. He believes ‘giving up a comprehensive theoretical account of politics . . . might challenge theory itself to more fully come to terms with radical contingency, unforeseeability, and sheer variety of scenes on the world stage’.86 I am dissatisfied with the either/or between ‘comprehensive theoretical’ systems and affirming ‘contingency, unforeseeability . . . variety’. This obscures a core aspect of modern politics: institutional forms, political ethics, conceptions of the person – necessarily ‘comprehensive’ in some sense – a­ re what are needed to facilitate freedom for, and predictable emergence of, such novelty and variety.87 Political theory’s home (however widely it might travel – I­ like to think rather widely) should be on the institutional-ethical-anthropological side of that equation, rather than on the side of valorising indeterminacy as such. Contemporary democratic theory of a postmodernist vintage tends to read democracy – ­whether in terms of consent, hospitality, recognising personal variety, or any number of other positive things – a­ s a perpetual ethics potentially suffusing human interaction in general (Lupton’s ‘portable politics’ (11)), rather than the name for a specific family of politicalinstitutional arrangements, past and present. There is nothing wrong with this, whatever my scepticism, and nothing wrong with mining Shakespeare for insights into its nature and/or future. It is a valiant challenge to the Straussian dominance I outlined above – ­but not, I think, the only challenge. (In a sense, Arendtians and Straussians are left- and right-leaning sides of the same coin, seeking rejuvenation either of ancient politics or ancient philosophy.) I have learned much from both Straussian and Arendtian readings, but just as the Shakespeare presented here is more modern than ancient, he is more modern than postmodern.  My focus on state-building and the rise of secular nationalism treats the growing power of what we now call the ‘private sphere’ differently, for instance. (I return to ‘biopower’ and Arendt’s ‘rise of the social’ in Chapter 5’s

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discussion of Measure for Measure.) While recognising the value of Arendtian or Foucauldian critique, I nevertheless affirm its emancipatory potential as unique legal space under the protection of the political realm, but also freed from it in a meaningful way. Secular nationalism does not automatically produce democracy, but it was a precondition for, and intimately connected to, the democratic institutional forms that grew in the modern West.

Plan of the Book The remainder this Introduction describes the book’s structure, and the themes developed within it. I move chronologically through Western history, rather than through Shakespeare’s career, though I still, whenever relevant, pay attention to how and why Shakespeare’s concerns might have evolved as his art developed and English society changed. I follow an example recently set by Catherine Zuckert in her study of Plato’s dialogues.88 Zuckert jettisons the debate about early versus middle versus late Plato, focusing instead on dating within the dialogues themselves. Shakespeare’s works can be chronologised with more confidence than Plato’s (albeit with nothing close to certainty); still, I think much can be illuminated by a parallel move. I begin, in Chapter 1, in the Homeric Greece of Troilus and Cressida. Shakespeare starts from Chaucer’s medieval romance but, I argue, puts the tonal clash between Platonic philosophy and military epic (minor and decorative in Chaucer) at the centre of the play. Ulysses, professed mouthpiece for Platonism, is exposed as, in practice, an amoral political technician – ­a sophist, to use the terms of the Socratic dialogues. Ulysses’ manipulative victory over Greek and Trojan hero alike represents the simultaneous promise and peril of Platonic rationalism. It is superior to fatalism, or overreliance on primal warrior passion, in terms of winning the battles society’s values demands be won. Taken too far, though, it corrodes those very values, which, if they are not to be surrendered to nihilism (represented by the slave Thersites), must be rebuilt on a new foundation. In Chapter 2, I examine the new foundation of Shakespeare’s ancient Rome: civic virtue, attachment to the good of the commonwealth. In Coriolanus, civic virtue is in the final stages of its conflict with a warrior aristocracy that still, at the extreme, sees the masses as little better than slaves or cannon fodder, raw material facilitating elite achievements. The title character’s defeat affirms that Homeric ideals no longer make sense under republican politics, and can only survive in a transmogrified form. One is political rather than military aristocracy – ­Roman patricians gaining

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honour by linking themselves to the commons rather than, like Coriolanus, hyperbolically separating from them. Prioritising the commons dignifies bodies in terms of capacities other than sanguinary combat: hunger, sex, reproduction. This goes wrong if taken past appropriately dignifying such capacities to apotheosising them. Sex becomes bacchanalia, as with Antony and Cleopatra; an aristocracy that depends upon providing the people more and more goods, but does not want to give up its own wasteful prerogatives, turns to imperial looting. The latter threatens domestic republicanism by moving politics’ focal points outside the city, making it likely that the senator will be replaced by, or merge with, the commander, as with Julius Caesar. These excesses invite mirror-image elite reaction: Platonic, then Stoic, then Augustinian, insistence that bodily goods lack dignity juxtaposed against those of mind or soul. Such reactions are, in their pure forms, of limited appeal – ­only minorities seek out academies or monasteries. But they can be domesticated, and generalised, as a ‘private sphere’ that now finds its value in whatever politics is not: love instead of force, faith instead of obedience. Conceptually inchoate in the ancient and medieval worlds, the private/public opposition becomes a central concern of modern political thought. When it meets the modern re-valorisation of ancient politics – ­stretching from Renaissance humanism to Enlightenment revolutionaries figuratively donning Brutus’ and Cato’s togas – a­ productive tumult ensues. The idea of progress see-saws between champions of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty: freedom to collectively reconstruct the world versus freedom from politics itself. The latter thinks politics optimally conceptualised as one professional specialisation among many, as in Adam Smith’s hyper-productive division of labour.89 Chapters 3 and 4 move into ‘Shakespearean modernity’. Modern political thought takes a concept relegated, by Plato (cf. Republic, Book II), to being one sophistic challenge among many – ­a ‘state of nature’ leading to a ‘social contract’ – a­ nd tries to move it to the centre of the search for new foundations of justice and legitimacy. David Hume’s critique of the concept pointed out that, ironically, the period in European history when political power actually was (at least partially) understood to be contractual, medieval feudalism, was precisely the sort of world modern social contract theorists lauded escape from, overcoming of: a world of superstition-backed hierarchy and ubiquitous private violence. Shakespeare’s major portrayals of the decay of feudalism, King Lear and the English histories, will help us think through this tension. The social contract idea is often criticised for making political legitimacy depend on a unanimous consent it cannot possibly achieve. I think

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this misses the point, and not in the sense pursued by the familiar defence of social contract theory as a ‘thought experiment’. It seems perverse to read as the, or even a, central aim of Hobbes’, Locke’s or Spinoza’s political theory the valorisation of unanimous consent at any point in time (Rousseau is the exception proving the rule: the polity he describes in Du Contrat Social in many ways reflects his prizing of antiquity over modernity). The main concern is reformulating the relationship between state and citizens: replacing acquiescence with participation, religious collectivism with secular self-interest, and glory with resource-provision as the guiding concepts linking government and governed. Secularisation and the rise of social contract theory, I have argued elsewhere, were deeply intertwined, dethroning the timeless Theos of scriptural revelation to enable free collective reconstruction of politics.90 The social contract represents a second birth into political maturity, modern liberal democracy’s supersession (or ersatz) of the older rites of rebirth anchoring tribal ritual and religious conversion. This trope unites Hobbes’ Leviathan, Spinoza’s Tractacus, Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government, Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social, and Kant’s political essays. An Edmund, a Richard III, a Falstaff, go way beyond Troilus and Cressida’s Thersites: these are moral revolutionaries, not slaves. They seek – ­even achieve, in various ways and to various extents – ­access to power. They attack dessicated feudalism’s hierarchical and/or honourbased values in the name of nature and reason. Their ‘liberty is full of threats to us all’, as Claudius says of Hamlet; they ‘have something in [them] dangerous’, as Hamlet says of himself (IV, i, 13; V, i, 247). Though Edmund and Falstaff ultimately fall, in defeat they mould their conquerors significantly. Ideally, contract’s empire levels the playing field, seeking to affirm (produce?) atomistic individuals whose terms of association can thus be consensual. In practice, the result may simply freeze pre-existing power structures, or fool people into believing they have chosen their own subordination, into believing power does more for them than it actually does, or does as much as it could. ‘It is in vain that you pretend to submit governments to the general will’, Constant chides Rousseau’s heirs. ‘It is always they who dictate the content of this will, and your precautions become illusory.’91 The genial norm of contract is persons making mutually beneficial agreements; the extreme is persons understood to own themselves selling themselves. Shakespeare interrogated the political ramifications of bondage understood as total bodily alienation, a question I take up in Chapter 5 via the pound-of-flesh loan in Merchant of Venice and problematic tug-of-war between prostitution, cloistering, and procreative marriage in Measure for Measure.

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Liberalism and social contract theory grow up together; subsequent radical critics of liberalism undermined idealisation of contract by examining how it worked in practice. Thus Marxists and feminists tore the sentimental veil from employment and marriage contracts, exposing systems of domination where society claimed consent ruled.92 This long post-dated Shakespeare, of course. Still, I think the plays illuminate areas where the ideal of contract, in its proto-modern sense, clashes with traditional, and perhaps even permanently intuitive, understandings of human bonds, especially familial ones. Merchant pits patriarchal authority against freedoms that would allow persons and resources freer circulation. In Measure, the idea that God owns persons – ­who are nevertheless free to sin, wondering if or how they will be forgiven – c­ lashes with the related, though not always allied, idea that the state owns citizens – w ­ ho are nevertheless free to rebel and let the chips fall where they may. Control is the disturbing mirror of consent. Long before contemporary critical theory, debate among the social contract’s most famous theorists makes this clear. Locke’s second Treatise on Civil Government implies Hobbes’ Leviathan’s conjuring of absolute sovereignty from natural anarchy banishes one total domination only by producing another; Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social criticises post-Lockean parliamentary liberalism insofar as the model of contract between ruler and ruled, though preferable to naked tyranny, still implies unjust and undemocratic alienation of collective self-­ownership (III.XV). Rousseau simply states that free societies must de-stratify wealth and power such that none is poor enough to be attracted to selling herself and none rich enough to be able to buy her; Locke says we may not sell ourselves because God created, and thus already ‘owns’, us all (§§17, 23–4). They were all – ­like Shakespeare – t­ rying to make sense of a ‘brave new world’ that seeks to break out of inherited constraint and stagnation, yet still acknowledge the traditional wisdom (perhaps codified in religion, perhaps simply intuitive) whereby all are embedded, from birth, in a web of authority they did not choose, and obligations they are wise to accept.

PART I

Shakespearean Antiquity Adieu, valor! Rust, rapier! Be still, drum! For your manager is in love . . . Love’s Labour’s Lost The eloquent man [Ulysses] bore off / the brave man’s [Achilles’] arms. Ovid’s Metamorphoses

CHAPTER 1

THE BIRTH OF TRAGICOMEDY (IN THE DEFEAT OF HECTOR BY ULYSSES)

The philosopher . . . has to be like a child begging for ‘both’, and say that that which is – e­ verything – ­is both the unchanging and that which changes. Plato, Sophist 249c-d Mercury loves wisdom, knowledge, science, And Venus, revelry, extravagance. Because of their contrary disposition The one sinks when the other’s in ascension. Prologue of the Wife of Bath’s Tale

Troilus and Cressida probably contains the most overt references to philosophy in Shakespeare: Ulysses’ manipulation of Achilles (III, iii, 90 ff.) echoes Plato’s (some think pseudo-Plato’s) Alcibiades, and Hector cites Aristotle’s Ethics.1 Anachronisms, technically, like the clock in Julius Caesar; I believe them deliberate, believe Shakespeare meaningfully engages Platonism. Coleridge saw an attempt ‘to translate the poetic heroes of paganism into the . . . warriors of Christian chivalry’2; Frye thought the Trojans ‘medievalized . . . according to the . . . codes of chivalry and Courtly Love’3; A. D. Nuttall sees ‘(medieval) honour against (Greek) cynicism’.4 Yet I think David Hillman correct to read ‘a turning against [Shakespeare’s] medieval and early modern sources and back towards Homer’,5 and feel the same is true of the ancient philosophy percolating under the plot. Of course, my view and the view that the play depicts a late medieval/early modern debate are not mutually exclusive, since Plato, Aristotle, and their Christian reinterpreters maintained an exalted place in Shakespeare’s time.

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This chapter facilitates a conversation between Shakespeare and Platonism via Troilus and Cressida. The first section lays out the problem – ­the armies are disordered, subject to drift and flux eroding the absolute values and hierarchies ostensibly legitimating the war – a­ nd the solution called forth, Ulysses. He stands for two aspects of Platonism that prove ultimately hard to reconcile: one, a critical rationalism that disarms entrenched, inutile pieties (here the Greeks’ fatalistic theology); the other, promotion of an ultimate, universal, metaphysical ‘Good’ ordering creation. Ulysses’ ascent tracks Trojan decline, as I show in the second section. Troy’s collapse suggests Ulysses’ methodology can weaken states lacking proper leadership. In the Introduction, I identified Socratism/sophism as the original clash from which subsequent Western political thought developed. Here I identify the ‘proto-Hobbesian rupture’ potentially lurking in critical rationalism if it is drawn, as it seems inexorably to be in Shakespeare, to sophistic rather than Socratic legitimation.

Ulysses’ Pragmatic Platonism when discords, and quarrels, and factions, are carried openly and audaciously, it is a sign the reverence of government is lost; for the motions of the greatest persons in a government ought to be as the motions of the planets . . . carried swiftly by the highest motion, and softly in their own motion . . . Bacon, ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’ (1625)

Troilus and Cressida engages Plato’s dualities: appearance versus reality, rhetorical persuasion versus true knowledge, absolute worth versus socially determined value, reason versus passion. ‘I cannot come to Cressid but by Pandar’ (I, i, 91), Troilus’ complaint about having to woo his beloved via her uncle, could be an epigraph for the whole play. Its bitter tragicomedy centres on suspicion that no great metaphysical truths are accessible to us. If they exist, attempts to experience them are mediated by a fallen world of flux and decay, as in Socrates’ account of non-philosophers ‘forced to examine other things through [the body] as through a cage’ and thereby ‘wallow[ing] in every kind of ignorance’. The ‘worst feature of this imprisonment is that . . . the prisoner himself is contributing to his own incarceration most of all’ (Phaedo 82d–83a).6 Instead, advises Plotinus, one of Plato’s early Christian heirs, ‘go higher, leaving sensation behind on its own low level’ and find ‘beauties . . . imperceptible to sense, that the soul without aid of sense perceives and proclaims’. Plotinus divides Eros: ‘heavenly Aphrodite dwells in the realm above; here below, the vulgar, harlot Aphrodite.’ 7 He channels Plato, though Plato tempered such ferocity.

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Pausanius’ speech in the Symposium (180d ff.) separates Heavenly Aphrodite from ‘Pandemos’ or Common Aphrodite – ­both gods ‘must be praised’, yet simultaneously kept apart. Socrates acknowledges pleasure is ‘complex’ and ‘comes in many forms’, yet considers it obvious that debauched pleasures have nothing in common with those ‘a sober-minded person takes . . . in his very sobriety’, the fool’s delusory hopes and opinions no resemblance to ‘a wise man tak[ing] pleasure in his wisdom’ (Philebus 12–13). In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates gives two orations about Eros. The first presents a fairly rote ‘quarrel’ between ‘acquired judgment’ and ‘inborn desire for pleasure’; in the well-ordered soul, ‘judgment is in control and leads us by reasoning . . . but when desire takes command’ it is led to hubris, the tree of excess whose branches are gluttony, tyranny, and other failings. But, suddenly fearing his prosecutorial tone will require ‘atonement for some offense against the gods’, Socrates begins again. If ‘Love is a god or something divine’ then it ‘can’t be bad in any way’, and ‘offense against Love’ is religious heresy. But it is more like heresy in monotheism’s sense. The religion of Greek and Latin poets and playwrights is perfectly compatible with pleading to one God against another as the situation demands. Excessive and lasting disdain for a God may count as a hubristic tempting of disaster – c­ onsider, Eros-wise, Phaedra and Hippolytos, or Shakespeare’s Adonis, ‘lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone . . . Statue contenting but thy eye alone’ (VA 211–13). But such ‘heresy’ is different than the above Socratic offence of failing to ascribe all good characteristics to God simultaneously. The latter fuels theological dispute, not art: Thomists dissecting Ockhamites, not the ‘lyric [and] epic poetry’ to which Socrates compares his orations (Phaedrus 237–42). In Chaucer’s version (1381–6), poet spoke directly to reader, establishing Criseyde’s ‘air / Of ease and purity’; her status as ‘angel . . . thing immortal . . . heavenly, perfected creature . . . sent down to earth’ is independent of the subsequent events (I.15, I.44, II.65). Shakespeare, by contrast, deals only in competing, shifting perceptions. (One interpretation close to being delivered straight from playwright to audience is Pandarus’ scabrous epilogue, to which I shall return.) Chaucer’s authorial management – h ­ e promises ‘compassion for’ his characters’ ‘pain, / As though I were their brother’ – ­beats a path to homily. The lesson: ‘Never scorn love’, which ‘Put[s] all the freedom of your heart in thrall’ for ‘no one can undo the law of Nature’. It is ‘virtue’ to let love ‘bind you as he would’ and ‘lead you’ (I.8, I.34–7). Criseyde won, Troilus sings a paean of erotic Platonism to ‘wholesome amity . . . holy tie . . . harmonious sway . . . perpetual bond’, despite having earlier rued being ‘slave to love’ (I.33, III.250–1). In a sense, medieval Chaucer is more Pagan than Renaissance

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Shakespeare: Chaucer’s Eros is like one of the squabbling Greco-Roman Gods, and it is wise to honour each properly. ‘The fire of love . . . did not pay the high respect it should / Have paid [Troilus’] soldierhood’, (I.63) but the converse also applies. Shakespeare, like Plato, is less comfortable with the Pantheon. Chaucer’s Troilus found it ‘high adventure to desire’ Cressida. Such ‘passion was no shame . . . Rather, an honor’; instead of retreating into private melancholy he goes ‘battle-mad . . . to win renown / And please his lady better’ (I.53–4, I.69). Shakespeare’s Troilus finds his public, martial identity undermined by sexual desire: ‘Why should I war without the walls of Troy / That find such cruel battle here within?’ (I, i, 1–2). Identity rent by projected merger with another’s lacks the requisite hardness and unity to pursue military goals. The war’s circumstances have eroded the faith and discipline needed to vigorously pursue victory. Troilus’ ‘Fools on both sides’ is echoed by many. ‘Helen must needs be fair / When with your blood you daily paint her thus. / I cannot fight upon this argument’ (I, i, 86–8). This introduces universalprostitution and sex-death themes – H ­ elen as ‘painted’ lady, coloured by spilt blood – ­but also the search for an absolute value, a Platonic Good, amidst a chaos of see-sawing advantage and tottering values. Philosophy, Plato’s Socrates argues, grasps ‘what is always the same’, the ‘feature of the being that always is and does not wander around between coming to be and decaying’ (Republic 381b, 484b–486b). Cressida is earthier. She identifies as a given what Troilus later experiences as moral and epistemological crisis: ‘Things won are done. Joy’s soul lies in the doing . . . Men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is’ (I, ii, 263–5). Translating bodily desire into thought distorts judgement: seeming metaphysical enlightenments may be nearly as temporally constrained as hunger or thirst. The search for Platonic absolutes stumbles hardest on human experience’s unavoidable mediation by bodies, ‘heavy, ponderous, earthly and visible’ (Phaedo 81c). Love cannot escape perpetual negotiation of appearing versus being. Human relationships follow market-like imperatives, however aggressively our consciences demand we deny this. Agamemnon restates this dilemma to the Greek generals: ‘The ample proposition that hope makes / In all designs begun on earth below / Fails in the promised largeness’ (I, iii, 2–4). They too face confused identities and lack of unity. Take Ajax: ‘a man into whom nature hath so crowded humours that . . . he hath the joints of every thing, but everything so out of joint that he is . . . purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight’ (I, ii, 18–27). Such chaos and flux resembles Plato’s account of democracy’s flawed appeal. Plato analogises the struggle between reason and passion to conflict between political factions, linking regime types to citizens’ characters

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(Republic 439d–440b, 445c–d). Democracy is the triumph of the mercurial soul, revelling in variety of character and ‘equality of pleasures’, refusing the passion-hierarchy true philosophy establishes (557b–c, 561b–c). Ajax drives politics instead of politics bridling Ajax. Ulysses’ famous, ostensibly Neoplatonic analysis of Greek disorder preaches aristocracy/hierarchy/ stability as an antidote to the dangerous democratic temper. ‘The specialty of rule hath been neglected’ by ‘hollow factions’ (I, iii, 77–9) infecting the Greek military. Learn from macrocosm: ‘The heavens themselves . . . Observe degree, priority, and place, / Infixture, course, proportion, season, form, / Office and custom’ (I, iii, 85–8). Ulysses paints a memorably turgid picture of world-turned-upside-down: O when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder to all high designs, Then enterprise is sick. . . . Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows. . . . Force should be right – ­or rather, right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice resides, Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself. 

(I, iii, 101–24)

Equating political order to musical harmony is pure Platonism (Republic 401a); the apocalyptic vision of force expropriating justice such that ‘right and wrong . . . lose their names’ echoes Socrates’ battle with the sophists. But to say either that Shakespeare uses Ulysses to legitimate Neoplatonic ideology, or to parody it, would be oversimplification: ‘these appeals to natural law are contradicted elsewhere within the speeches in which they occur [and] by the play in virtually every respect’, Jonathan Dollimore points out, ‘suggesting that in Nature itself there is something which runs directly counter to the teleological harmony and integration of natural law’.8 Still, this play’s prolonged verbal pitched battles surely add up to more than Hazlitt’s mere ‘lofty examples of didactic eloquence’.9 Ulysses’ speech foreshadows his own technocratic appropriation of Agamemnon’s

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authority as much as diagnosing Greek indiscipline. Mightn’t every King get the army he deserves? ‘Strength should be lord of imbecility’ – ­the impasse between recalcitrant Achilles and an impotent Greek leadership is broken by the novel ‘strength’ of the political technician. Ulysses rules by guile, not force, manipulating prideful Achilles by pitting him against Ajax: ‘Two curs shall tame each other’ (I, iii, 383). Shakespeare nevertheless suggests Ulysses’ infiltration of Agamemnon’s value system promises a cognitive ‘universal wolf’ of its own. Plato describes sophists ‘hunt[ing] rich, prominent young men’ with the ‘ridiculous’ promise of knowledge for sale, though their only real expertise was ‘flattery . . . pleasing people’. They fight non-violently, with ‘controversy . . . words against words’, just as they – ­here Plato approves – ­replace ‘rough’ with ‘smooth’ education, the ‘time-honored method of scolding’ with cross-examination. Examinees seeing the inconsistency of their opinions ‘get angry at themselves . . . become calmer toward others . . . lose their inflated and rigid beliefs’; this ‘important kind of cleansing’ is to soul/mind what gymnastics and medicine are to body. True philosophers, though, are ‘afraid to call’ such cleansing sophistry lest they ‘pay sophists too high an honor’; the similarity between sophist and soulcleanser is like that ‘between a wolf and a dog, the wildest thing there is and the gentlest’. Plato concedes the title of ‘noble sophistry’ to whoever ‘cleanses the soul of beliefs that interfere with learning’; noble sophistry gets as far as ‘refutation of empty belief in one’s own wisdom’ but, allegedly, no further (Sophist 222–5, 229–31). The graver problem – i­gnoble sophistry – g­oes deeper, perhaps, than teaching young men to ‘appear wise . . . without actually being wise’, hawking ‘belief-knowledge about everything, but not truth’. It is not agnosticism about truth but the revelation, or production, of a new truth. Maybe ‘magician’ is the better title for one ‘who promises he can make everything by means of a single kind of expertise’: Promethean lèsemajesté. Ignoble sophists come to the same cliff as Platonists, but then (like Raphael’s Aristotle vis-à-vis Plato) aim for earth, not heaven. Reductionist materialism, just like idealism, can claim to ‘make everything’ emanate from ‘a single kind of expertise’. The materialist ‘drags everything down to earth . . . insisting that only what offers tangible contact’ is important. There is a ‘never-ending battle’ between this temptation and Platonic teaching that ‘true being is . . . nonbodily forms that can be thought about’ (Sophist 233–6, 246). Sophistry, in this sense, periodically resurfaced in Hellenistic schools influential among Rome’s elite, and became a fully-fledged naturalistic political philosophy in the early modern period. Chapter 2 explores Shakespeare’s account of Roman professionalisation of

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politics, and its discontents. Epicurus’ view that natural justice ‘is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness . . . not a thing in its own right’ but a contrivance for ‘mutual dealings in whatever places there [is] a pact about neither harming one another nor being harmed’,10 as resurrected and codified by Hobbes and Spinoza, was to have revolutionary modern implications, which Chapter 3 engages. Roman reimaginings of Ulysses Shakespeare knew give a sense of the long transition between Homer and Hobbism, telescoped, I am suggesting, by Troilus and Cressida. Horace’s ‘Nature cannot distinguish between right and wrong as she does in the case of the desirable and the undesirable, wholesome and harmful.’ Branding Homer poet laureate of ‘feverish passions of foolish kings’, Horace singles out Ulysses for praise befitting a contemplative intellectual: ‘man of vision, who studied the cities and manners of many peoples’.11 Ovid’s Ulysses successfully convinces the Greeks he, not Ajax, should inherit Achilles’ armour; Ajax scoffs at this mere talker, no real warrior. Ulysses responds, ‘envy me not / My talent; a man must use what power he has’. Ajax exults in ‘race and ancestry’ but these are ‘No merit of our own.’ Ulysses audaciously claims that since ‘my hand . . . sent a brave man forward / To his brave deeds . . . his works are mine’. He convinced Agamemnon, ‘whose prejudice was great’, to sacrifice Iphigenia: ‘I brought him / To think about us all’, elevating statist rationality over tribal partiality. But Ovid’s Ulysses shares in much of the Homeric ethos, proposing the Assembly ‘Count worth alone’, making sure to mention his ‘divine descent’. True, he claims ‘thinker’ trumps ‘brave but stupid fighter’, claims he ‘Outrank[s] . . . Ajax’ because ‘knowledge / Governs brute force’, claims that while Ajax’s ‘arm is useful . . . your wits / Need mine to guide them’ because ‘I think about the future . . . Only in the body / Are you worth anything, but I have a mind, / Sense and intelligence’, and says if he must forego the armour it should be dedicated to Minerva. Still, he insists he is no chickenhawk, recalling ‘my services / With hand and brain’.12 There is no indication Shakespeare’s Ulysses fights in the battles he plans. He complains Achilles and his cronies: Count wisdom as no member of the war, Forestall prescience and esteem no act But that of hand. The still and mental parts, That do contrive how many hands shall strike When fitness calls them on, and know by measure Of their observant toil the enemies’ weight, Why, this hath not a finger’s dignity. 

(I, iii, 197–204)

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In Homer it is Nestor who grumbles, ‘We do our fighting with words only.’13 In Shakespeare the main question is, whose command of words will prevail over Achilles? Pious Agamemnon’s, cynical Thersites’, or Ulysses’? And what alternative to tradition and cynicism does Ulysses represent? The problem, Ulysses tells Agamemnon, is Achilles’ affronted pride, spreading an ‘envious fever / of pale and bloodless emulation’ whereby every ‘general’s disdained / By him one step below’ (I, iii, 129–34), all the way down to conscripts like the jesting slave Thersites. This reaches its zenith of negation in the clique most troublesome to Greek strategy, Achilles’ scurrilous mini-court ‘mocking our designs . . . with ridiculous and awkward action . . . slanderer[s] . . . pageant[ing] us’ (I, iii, 142–51). Ulysses eventually prods Achilles back into action by manipulating his passion for fame and honour, but at first it seems cynicism or nihilism, not pride, is hollowing out the Greeks. ‘Hector . . . call[s] some knight to arms / That hath a stomach, and such a one that dare / Maintain – ­I know not what. ’Tis trash’ (II, i, 117–21), Achilles scoffs at a challenge to Greek honour. Homer’s Achilles wanted ‘to be above all others . . . to hold power over all, and to be lord of all’. A prideful Achilles might rail moralistically against incapable or ungrateful leadership; satirically play-acting one’s superiors is different. It suggests awareness that the entire enterprise is absurd. ‘Success or loss . . . serves / As stuff for these two to make paradoxes’ (I, iii, 183–4): this is no longer Homer’s demigod who ‘waste[d] his heart out sitting there, though he longed always for the clamour and fighting’.14 Still, Shakespeare’s Achilles remains a warrior and thus does not represent the full flower of a cognitive ‘universal wolf’. That honour belongs to Thersites, Coleridge’s ‘intellectual power deserted by . . . all moral principle, all not momentary purpose’,15 the ultimate leveller. THERSITES  Agamemnon is a fool, Achilles is a fool, Thersites is a fool, and as aforesaid Patroclus is a fool. ACHILLES  Derive this. Come. THERSITES  Agamemnon is a fool to offer to command Achilles; Achilles is a fool to be commanded of Agamemnon; Thersites is a fool to serve such a fool; and Patroclus is a fool positive.  (II, iii, 53–8)

Thersites flattens the great chain of being by parodying it. But only tone and status differentiate him from Ulysses. Otherwise their attacks converge: dual bombardments by a utilitarian rationality unmoored from custom. Thersites analyses Ulysses’ machinations correctly, telling Achilles and

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Ajax they are ‘bought and sold among those of any wit . . . yoke[d] . . . like draught oxen’ (II, i, 45–6; II, i, 100–2). Ulysses in turn says nothing about the justice of continuing the war. His only discernible interest is how to win quickly and efficiently. Platonism’s rhapsode turns out to also be Plato’s nightmare, the rhetorician for whom ‘persuasion is the . . . fundamental goal’ (Gorgias 453a). Troilus and Cressida’s two set-piece debates juxtapose an argument solely about utility with another, the Trojans’, engaging deeper questions of justice and value: one sophistic, the other Socratic?16 The irony is that the would-be Platonist is the champion of the sophistic dialogue, whereas those searching in earnest for access to a Platonic Good succumb to amoral Greek strategising. Intellect might rot out the very war machine it is tasked to fix. Homer’s Achilles hated Thersites;17 Shakespeare’s makes him an honorary court jester (‘come in and rail’, Patroclus tells this ‘privileged man’ (II, iii, 19–20; II, iii, 51) allowed to speak truth to power, even when Achilles himself is the object of abuse). This may be, as A. D. Nuttall puts it, a ‘world . . . sick with intelligence’,18 but Ulysses’ insight, René Girard explains, is that ‘Only mimesis can successfully combat mimesis.’19 Ulysses’ ostensibly Platonic speech contradicts Agamemnon’s genuinely pious (by Homeric standards) rationalisation for continuing the war. Agamemnon thinks Greek failures ‘protractive trials of great Jove, / To find persistive constancy in men’ – v­ irtue requires hardship (I, iii, 19–33). In that case, why not thank the Gods for bringing the Greeks to the brink of disaster? Rationalist Ulysses, by contrast, voids political analysis of mysticism or fatalism: ‘Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength’ (I, iii, 137). Even his encomium to heavenly degree warns nature sometimes fails to keep order, as ‘when the planets / In evil mixture to disorder wander’ (I, iii, 94–5). Does the fault lie in our stars or ourselves? Figures who thrive in Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ tend to deliberately obscure this issue. They succeed by merging the dominant tones of tragedy and comedy I established in the Introduction: though living in worlds where there is something sick in desire itself, they impose a degree of reconciliation through intelligence and artifice. Thus the chapter’s title, borrowed from Nietzsche, who (in The Birth of Tragedy (1872)) claimed ancient Greece’s tragic spirit, born from clashing Apollonian and Dionysian cultural elements, declined when both fell to the Socratic temperament: moral rationalism, metaphysical optimism.20 Measure’s Duke, Chapter 5 shows, veers between representing divine omnipotence and means-ends rationality. All’s Well’s Helen, a doctor’s daughter who cures an ailing king, says ‘remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven. The fated sky / Gives us free scope . . .’ She also insists divinity and rationality must align.

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In love with a man above her station, she complains whatever ‘Fortune . . . put such difference betwixt their two estates’ is ‘no goddess’, and ‘Love no god, that would not extend his might only where qualities were level.’ Yet, aware her position remains precarious whatever her abilities, she dresses techne in religion, calling it ‘presumption in us when / The help of heaven we count the act of men’. If the king ‘to my endeavors give[s] consent’, he ‘Of heaven, not me, make[s] an experiment’. A successful Helen piously announces, ‘Heaven through me restored to King to health’ as she is granted prerogatives of omnipotence over ‘bachelors . . . at [his] bestowing’: ‘Thou hast power to choose, and they none to forsake’ (I, i, 199–202; I, iii, 97–9; II, i, 150–3; II, iii, 50–61). Plato’s Socrates, too, was infamously cagey about his stance towards existing religious pieties. In the Euthyphro, when (about to face the charges of impiety that led to his death) he interrogates the title character on the morality of prosecuting one’s own father for murder, Socrates simply ignores the first answer given, that esoteric religious knowledge convinces Euthyphro the action is right (6b–d). The Euthyphro’s famous question of whether something is good because the Gods love it, or whether the Gods love something because it is good (10a) is brought down to earth in Troilus and Cressida: Does the state do something because it is right, or is something right because the state does it? Either answer prompts additional questions. The former leads to the classic Platonic problem of how such knowledge is attained; the latter, to the similar problem of whether right is only produced by the best procedural machinery. And the former depends on something Socrates and his interlocutors have trouble identifying: some element of justice not ultimately reducible to, or translatable as, selfinterest. (Socrates convinces Euthyphro his definition of piety really means utilitarian exchange of services and rewards between Gods and humans (13c ff.).) In the Crito, Socrates acknowledges states create justice, of a sort, superseding the particular injustice of their acts. He refuses friends’ pleas to escape on the grounds that Athens’ laws gave him life (its marriage laws facilitated the meeting of his father and mother, for example) and thus can decide when that life ends (50d ff.). Yet this ‘higher’ political justice is not sufficiently persuasive on its own. Socrates keeps infusing these debates with rationally self-interested pleas: escape would endanger his friends (Crito 53b), accepting exile would put him in the unpleasant or humiliating position of fleeing another city or ceasing to practice philosophy (Apology 37c–38a). Even Socrates’ profession of values higher than mere survival, his choice of philosophical martyrdom, is troubled by his trial testimony. He avoided political service, he says, suspicious that speaking truth to

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Athenian power in law court or assembly would have endangered his life (Apology 31d). In the Phaedo, Socrates’ argument against suicide parallels his argument against escape: ‘the gods are . . . guardians’ from whom ‘one must not free oneself or run away’ (62b). Except his deliberate embrace, even encouragement of, the Athenian death sentence can be seen as a foxily non-blasphemous suicide by cop. Shakespeare’s Ulysses walks a similar tightrope through the Greeks, conflating innovation and tradition. The idea of quarrelling Gods is an affront to true piety, as Agamemnon’s fatalism blocks strategic rejuvenation – ­rational morality, Socrates fears, is undermined by any mythology in which evil and suffering seem to occur randomly (Republic 377b–380c, 398a; Euthyphro 6–8; Laws 801, 885). If Olympus gives behavioural examples, they teach that similar things are right or wrong, sacred or blasphemous, depending on context (Euthyphro 8a) – a­ n absurdity to merciless Socratic logic, but a reading of the human condition that remains, absence adherence to such a logic, hard to refute. Socrates attacked longstanding social institutions, not just of classical Athens (he devalues sports by calling the victory of the ‘regimen of philosophy’ over the enslavement of soul by body ‘the true Olympic Contests’21) but of any known polity, deeming base not only lust for lust’s sake but ‘eager[ness] to make babies’ (Phaedrus 250e–251a, 256b). Plato refers to a mythology in which ‘god himself sometimes accompanies [the universe], guiding it on its way and helping it move in a circle, while at other times he lets it go’, which would seem to map onto Ulysses’ political cosmology. But Plato then speaks of the carefree, utopian, apolitical age of Cronus – ‘­human life without toil’, fruits that grow ‘not through cultivation but because the earth sent them up of its own accord’, and ‘no political constitutions . . . nor acquired wives and children’ – b ­ ecoming the age of Zeus. Thereafter ‘the world-order had been instructed to be master of its own motion’ and ‘weak and defenseless’ human beings, ‘deprived of the god who possessed and pastured us’, must rely on their intelligence to survive and flourish (Statesman 269c–274c). This myth of Prometheus as benefactor of intelligence, and Hermes as Zeus’ messenger bringing justice and political order, is given a democratic interpretation by one of Socrates’ sophist opponents (Protagoras 320–3). If Plato knew God helps those who help themselves, he also knew of this doctrine’s troublesome sophist pedigree. Socrates recalls becoming rapidly dissatisfied with the obsession of philosophical naturalists like Anaxagoras with assigning everything material causes, causes which always seemed to undermine Socrates sense that the universe was governed by rational purpose (Phaedo 96–100).

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F. M. Cornford sees Platonism as ‘reaction against [the] materialistic drift of physical science’ after Greek philosophers imagined a ‘Cosmogony . . . detached from theogony.’22 Killing old Gods spurs demands for new Gods, not just new explanations. For Diogenes Laertius ‘natural philosophy came to an end, as soon as Socrates had introduced ethics’;23 Werner Jaeger says Plato’s dialogues mark ‘the first appearance in the Western world of what we now . . . call the soul’.24 The Greek ancién regime’s Olympian fatalism must be destroyed; Shakespeare depicts its paradoxical destruction via a facially conservative panegyrist of ultimate values and eternal order. In this sense, Ulysses recalls R. H. Tawney’s description of the Tudors, ‘masters . . . of disguising commonplace, and sometimes sordid, motives beneath a glittering façade of imposing principles’,25 Neoplatonism among them. But this ambivalence is legible in Plato himself. Ulysses’ verbose picture of a hierarchical cosmos should be examined under the same suspicious light as Socrates’ portraits of an afterlife where punishment and reward are doled out. Such speculations jarringly end ostensibly political dialogues like Republic and Gorgias. ‘One is asking’, Leon Craig writes, ‘whether a dispassionate examination of nature’ provides ‘any guidance whatsoever, upon which to base a mutually beneficial, permanent association of human beings, given that the arrangement must be one that each should accept as being in his own best interest’.26 Laws established by philosophers on a rational basis must be popularly interpreted as originating in divine fiat (Laws 634). Perhaps Plato genuinely believed in the afterlife his Socrates occasionally calls upon. But his evocations of it might also be admissions that Socrates has not successfully proved what he set out to prove against the challenges of Thrasymachus (Republic 336b ff.) or Callicles (Gorgias 483b ff.).27 Can humans be convinced justice equals morality equals happiness without believing in a final, supernatural weighing of accounts? The Republic begins with a playful contrast between force and persuasion as coordination methods. Socrates and Glaucon, returning from the Piraeus where they have just witnessed a new, foreign religious rite, are told they must bow to the wishes of a larger group, led by Polemarchus, to stop and talk, unless Socrates can convince them otherwise – ­‘But could you persuade us, if we won’t listen?’ (327a–c). What, here, is the equivalent to the exciting new rite entering Athens’ port: persuasion or force? Both could be considered traditionalistic aspects of Athens’ democracy. Assembled citizens attempt to persuade one another of the best course; majority decision established, force of numbers dictates right and wrong. Socrates succumbs to Polemarchus’ force of numbers, but in aid of having a discussion, thus leaving the violence–persuasion problem unsolved – o­ r implying open societies always rest on bedrocks of threatened violence.

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The subsequent dialogue tells a story akin to Troilus and Cressida’s. Socrates quickly disposes of Polemarchus’ pious father Cephalus, representative of a declining older generation, in order to explode and redirect definitions of justice defended by younger, more aggressive men; Shakespeare’s Ulysses, similarly, marginalises Agamemnon and Nestor so he can more rationally channel the animal energies of warriors like Achilles and Ajax. In Shakespeare’s political pageant the weak ruler trusts Platonism to be established by reason and virtue, rather than force, fraud or myth. Lamenting the ‘stomach’ exhibited by ‘furious peers’, Henry VI says, ‘How irksome is this music to my heart! / When such strings jar, what hope of harmony?’ Right after this plea, Henry’s adviser forensically dismantles a peasant’s fraudulent account of a miracle. Both he and his king meet dismal ends. Reason itself, it seems, cannot establish the enchanted cosmos legitimating the rule of the philosopher-king, however pious: ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, here, is one among Henry’s many biblical homilies. His ‘What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?’; his being ‘armed [with] quarrel just’ while others are ‘naked, though locked up in steel, / Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted’; this is Socrates’ morality, but also, as the Stoics happily admitted and Nietzsche lambasted, an ethics and wisdom available to slaves – p ­ erhaps tailor-made for them (2H6 II, i, 33 ff.; III, ii, 232–5). Shakespeare was no simplistic glorifier of war, but he shows pacifism cannot by itself be a responsible political ethic. It simply abandons the field to the most aggressive. One way or another, a war is won. The twosidedness of Shakespeare’s depiction of Ulysses’ Platonism established, I now turn to the decline of the Trojans. Ulysses’ rationalistic transvaluation of Homeric values sounds Troy’s death knell, but Shakespeare suggests it contains a certain hubris to which Cressida, transferred from Trojans to Greeks, represents nemesis.

Troy’s Proto-Hobbesian Rupture Thersites’ body is as good as Ajax’ When neither are alive. 

(Cym. IV, ii, 293–4)

I have argued that Ulysses’ strategic intervention, with its facially Platonist cosmology, demonstrates Shakespearean insight into the ambiguities of Platonism. The defeat of traditionalistic ethics by novel rationality has two faces in Plato: Socratic appeal to eternal justice (discernible only by trained philosophers), and sophist utilitarianism (graspable by anyone). Now I will show how the same ambiguities play out among the Trojans.

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The Trojan debate about continuing the war digs deeper into questions about the stability and legitimacy of values, and the place of reason versus passion in motivating action or determining worth. Hector opens with a utilitarian proposal to surrender Helen: If we have lost so many tenths of ours To guard a thing not ours – ­nor worth to us, Had it our name, the value of one ten – What merit’s in that reason which denies The yielding of her up? 

(II, ii, 19–24)

This ‘reason’ means mathematical weighing of accounts, but Hector appeals to two rationales simultaneously – ­one insists all lives be valued the same, the other that Helen specifically, here a vapid courtesan, is hardly worth the effort.28 ‘Tis mad idolatry’, Hector complains, ‘To make the service greater than the god; / And the will dotes that is inclinable / To what infectiously itself affects / Without some image of th’affected merit’ (II, ii, 55–9). A doting will cannot guide policy. It must be judged from a more objective standpoint, as Plato and Aristotle recommend despotic rule of mind/soul over recalcitrant body, tempest-tossed by passion. (Plato warns codes of sexual austerity legislated in society’s best interest will be called ‘stupid and unrealistic’ by ‘some impatient young man . . . bursting with seed’ (Laws 839b).) Otherwise the natural is self-undermining: A ‘law of nature’ can be ‘corrupted through affection’, so ‘each well-ordered nation . . . curb[s] those raging appetites that are / Most disobedient and refractory’. Troilus, Hector says, ‘glosse[s] but superficially’ like the     young men, whom Aristotle thought Unfit to hear moral philosophy. The reasons you allege do more conduce To the hot passion of distempered blood Than to make up a free determination ‘Twixt right and wrong. 

(II, ii, 164–81)

Hector’s faith in the compatibility of ‘right and wrong’ with calculation strikes a ‘noble’ chord if one equates noble with wise, but Troilus is right that it contravenes the Homeric ethos. He pleads the difference between plain ‘spleen’ (like, among the Greeks, Ajax’s rage or Achilles’ petulance) and a ‘theme of honour and renown’, a ‘spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds’ causing ‘fame . . . to canonize us’ (II, ii, 194–201). Honour demands a leap of faith. It is the slave’s perspective that the whole affair is absurd

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because (as Thersites puts it) ‘the argument is a whore and a cuckold’ (II, iii, 65). Yet Troilus’ and Hector’s search for honour proves a losing, backward-looking, vaguely pathetic endeavour. Paris may tell the war council he ‘would have the soil of [Helen’s] fair rape / Wiped off in honourable keeping her’ (II, ii, 147–8), but their subsequent pillow talk is more revelatory: ‘He eats nothing but doves, love, and that breeds hot blood, and hot blood begets hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love’ (III, i, 119–21). Another universal wolf, masticating civilisation’s flimsy hierarchies into a pulp: love is one link in a very physical chain. To the argument that Priam should manage ‘his affairs with reason’ (II, ii, 34) and surrender Helen, Troilus protests the issue cannot be quantified: ‘Weigh you the worth and honour of a king . . . in a scale / Of common ounces?’ TROILUS  Here are your reasons: You know an enemy intends you harm; You know a sword employ’d is perilous, And reason flies the object of all harm. . . . if we talk of reason, Let’s shut our gates and sleep: manhood and honour Should have hare-hearts, would they but fat their thoughts With this cramm’d reason: reason and respect Make livers pale and lustihood deject. HECTOR  Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost The holding. TROILUS  What’s aught, but as ’tis valued? 

(II, ii, 25–51)

A proto-Hobbesian observation: unadulterated ‘reason’ would not just advise ending this war, it would advise avoiding all physical peril. ‘Life every man holds dear, but the dear man / Holds honor far more preciousdear than life’ (V, iii, 27–8), Hector acknowledges shortly before his death. In the dedicatory epistle to De Cive, Hobbes imagines a utopian future in which ‘Geometers’ of moral philosophy banish violence: ‘if the patterns of human action were known with the same certainty as the relations of magnitude in figures . . . the human race would enjoy such secure peace that (apart from conflicts over space as population grew) it seems unlikely that it would ever have to fight again’.29 Unlike Hobbes, Troilus disapproves of pale-liver’d reason’s pacifism. He reaches the opposite judgement, taking for granted an element of antique political theory Hobbes dismantles:

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the idea that an objective definition of ‘manhood and honour’ exists. Yet Troilus unwittingly espouses Hobbism when he responds ‘What’s aught, but as ’tis valued?’ to Hector’s accusation that Helen’s value can be logically determined. And again, when he speaks Shakespeare’s telling riff on Marlowe’s famous lines about Helen: ‘a pearl / Whose price has launched above a thousand ships / And turned crowned kings to merchants’ (II, ii, 80–2). Price replaces face. Paula Blank says Shakespeare’s characters ‘resist quantification even as they affirm a will for the kind of certitude about how to judge people . . . that measurement seems to afford’.30 Warrior societies’ personal metrics of honour and dignity erode to the extent that kings become calculators, or calculators kings. Hobbes says ‘The Value, or WORTH of a man’ is ‘his Price’, which ‘is not absolute’ but ‘dependant on the need and judgement’ of others. Such ‘publique worth . . . set by the Common-wealth’ is the substance of terms like honour and dignity.31 Doesn’t this market-of-honour logic replicate Hector’s suspicion of the ‘doting will’ on a different plane? The fluctuating Hobbesian marketplace may be more rational than fluctuating warrior appetites, but it is equally corrosive of the Platonic search for an Archimedean point from which to objectify values. ‘The Greeks create each other’s identities, the Trojans create their own values’, Terry Eagleton finds, ‘and in both cases the process is circular and selfsustaining: there is no . . . absolute norm, the process can appeal only to itself for justification’.32 The Greeks flirt with sophist/Hobbist logic, scheming to manipulate Achilles back into battle by puffing up Ajax, who asks ‘What is [Achilles] more than another?’ Agamemnon replies, ‘No more than what he thinks he is’ (II, iii, 134–5). Achilles’ ‘Imagined worth’, Ulysses says, ‘Holds in his blood such swoll’n and hot discourse / That ’twixt his mental and his active parts . . . commotion rages / And batters ’gainst himself’ (II, iii, 161–4). Again, Ulysses’ appeal to objective, hierarchical values is camouflage. Achilles has not heretofore matched this (Homeric?) description of a warrior soul divided against itself, refusing sovereign guidance. All valuation is an unstable collective imaginary, a web of clashing perceptions and self-perceptions. Once Achilles sees his ‘greatness . . . fall’n out with fortune [and] with men too’, he reflects, ‘not a man, for being simply man, / Hath any honour, but honour for . . . place, riches, and favour: / Prizes of accident as often as merit’ (III, iii, 69–77). In a disordered world where leaders grasp unsuccessfully for stable metaphysical buttresses, the winning politician is the amoral technocrat who manipulates these clashing perceptions towards utilitarian ends. Enter Ulysses, carrying a book (perhaps one of Plato’s33) claiming ‘man . . . Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, / Nor feels not what he

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[owns], but by reflection’ of his virtues in others’ eyes. Stripped of public esteem, Achilles concurs: ‘beauty[’s] . . . bearer knows not’ itself except through ‘others’ eyes . . . mirrored there / Where it may see itself’ (III, iii, 91–106). After Achilles asks ‘are my deeds forgot?’, Ulysses gives the play’s greatest speech. ‘Time’ has A wallet at his back, where he puts Alms for oblivion, a great-sized monster Of ingratitudes. Those scraps are good deeds past, Which are devoured as fast as they are made, Forgot as soon as done . . . . . . High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin – ­

(III, iii, 139–69)

The ‘wallet’ marks encroachment of marketplace values on Achilles’ now-fractured world of honour, like ‘price’ did in Troilus’ encomium to Helen. In Ulysses’ strange imagery, time’s back pocket is a place where value is supposed to be stored but is actually perpetually lost, a monetary Ouroboros. Then a list of aristocratic virtues is subjected to a Thersitesstyle levelling in the final two lines. Everything reduced to homogenous substance: such atomisation, the ontology of pre-Socratics like Democritus and Empedocles, inverts Plato’s idea of supra-material Forms as the ‘real’ reality. I explained above that such materialism, especially insofar as Sophists regarded it sympathetically, was an important provocation to Plato’s work. Ulysses’ appeal is bizarre. Who wants a wallet that cannot hold what is put into it? Moreover, the Achilles of the beginning of the play, Thersitesemploying mocker of honour and glory, would seem primed to respond to Ulysses with increased inaction. Why pay taxes, ‘scraps [of] good deeds’ or some other currency, to this pitiless monster? Bowing to time’s fatalism, however comparatively realistic, is essentially the same vantage point for human action that Agamemnon took vis-à-vis the Olympian Gods. Ulysses rejected one; why press the other? The answer must be that someone or something else is actually in control. Consider Ulysses’ subsequent warning to Achilles: The providence that’s in a watchful state Knows almost every grain of Pluto’s gold,

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Finds bottom in th’uncomprehensive deeps, Keeps place with aught, and almost like the gods Do infant thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles. There is a mystery, with whom relation Durst never meddle, in the soul of state, Which hath an operation more divine Than breath or pen can give expressure to. 

(III, iii, 189–97)

Hyperbolic ornament for unsurprising news that Achilles’ amours are common knowledge! The ‘watchful state’ Shakespeare’s Ulysses (not its figureheads) controls holds the real treasury keys. The Platonism is smoke and mirrors. Ulysses sees no more ‘mystery’ in affairs of state than in Olympus’ failure to facilitate Greek victory. He supports not mysticism but mystification, like Plato using myth to popularly justify policies actually implemented on eugenic grounds (Republic 414–15, 459–60; Laws 735). Plato’s equally infamous banishment of poetry – ­because art ‘draws us towards what is multiple and what is varied rather than towards what is uniform’,34 as Arlene Saxonhouse puts it – ­also echoes across the play, albeit subtly. Troilus and Cressida shows Plato had good reason to keep playwrights out of philosopy’s utopia. Perhaps Achilles’ fate is neither in his own hands, nor the Gods’, nor time’s, but those of the cognitive specialists who design myths: the political operative (Ulysses) appropriating the warriors’ vices and virtues for reasons of state, or the artist-mythmaker (Shakespeare), who may have another agenda entirely. The lovers picture their names surviving the ages as romantic symbols. ‘True swains in love shall in the world to come / Approve their truth by Troilus’, he imagines; she proposes, ‘If I be false . . . let’ all transgressors be dubbed ‘false as Cressid’ (III, ii, 160–89). Troilus, as much as Achilles, needs to hear Ulysses’ dirge about ‘envious and calumniating’ time, ‘monster of ingratitude’. Future poets will decide whether Cressida is scheming slut or erotic martyr, whether Troilus embodies chivalry or just naïveté. The failure of these fantasies about transfiguration into metaphysical Forms is preordained. ‘I have a kind of self resides with you’, Cressida says, ‘But an unkind self, that itself will leave / To be another’s fool’ (III, ii, 135–7). Her experience in the sexual marketplace mirrors the Greek political plot. She recognises that identity is disunity: selves mediated through shifting valuations of others are inescapably plural. Ulysses prods Achilles with a similar revelation. One portrait of the artist, AWOL warriors pageanting the generals, offers Ulysses easy victory. The more troublesome opponent appears as Cressida is traded to the Greeks for a Trojan prisoner. She proves adept (as

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Troilus feared) at negotiating the talky, artificial world of the Greek elites, claiming kisses from them one by one with bawdy wordplay. Only Ulysses declines full participation in the ceremony: ULYSSES  Why, then, for Venus’ sake, give me a kiss, When Helen is a maid again, and [Menelaus’] – CRESSIDA  I am your debtor; claim it when ’tis due. . . . Fie, fie upon her! ULYSSES There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip; Nay, her foot speaks. Her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O these encounterers so glib of tongue, That give accosting welcome ere it come, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every ticklish reader, set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity And daughters of the game.

(IV, vi, 50–64)

Officially, Cressida is in the hoarder or creditor-state’s power. In reality Helen will never be ‘maid’ again, and the future of Cressida’s dependence is left open. Perhaps there is a ‘mystery . . . in the soul of state’ that Ulysses despairs of his ability to control, an ‘unclasp[er] . . . of . . . thoughts’ and vital energies that is not him. Not Circe, not Calypso, not the Sirens, but . . . what? Though wariness towards female sexuality is common in Shakespeare, Ulysses’ brutal estimation of Cressida is not obviously the author’s. Hazlitt saw ‘mere levity and thoughtlessness of temper’;35 I dissent. On balance she may be the most sympathetically realistic female character in Shakespeare’s mature tragic/tragicomic sequence. Her abandonment (under duress) of Troilus’ religion of total love only destroys her image in his mind. Elsewhere, a wise-beyond-her-years girl makes the best of a bad turn of fortune’s wheel, in a world where daughters are indeed tradable property: all potential ‘daughters of the game’ in your society, Cressida might tell Ulysses. Universal prostitution undergirds the ostensibly honour-based regime where bodies and identities in practice ‘do as chapmen do’ (IV, i, 77), put up for auction. But Cressida does not take Thersitean cynicism to be the only warranted reaction to this disclosure. She can try salvaging love and care, however chastened by her insights into the finitude of passion and the instability of the self. Cressida stands for the interpretive multiplicity, the scepticism, Plato worried would render poetry

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unfit for his beautiful city. Interestingly, the scene that reveals Ulysses’ diffidence towards Cressida also reveals his (privately) Thersitean view of the war. In an aside he complains, ‘we lose our heads to gild [Menelaus’] horns’ (IV, vi, 32). The most accepting picture Plato gives of heterogeneity and flux is spoken by one of his only females. Diotima deems pregnancy and reproduction a ‘godly affair . . . what mortals have in place of immortality’. This model of individuals disappearing into perpetual continuity-throughchange is mirrored at the level of the individual herself. The ‘person said to be the same’ from childhood to old age ‘never consists of the same things . . . is always being renewed’ in ‘hair and flesh and bones and blood’ (Symposium 206c–207e). Just as Plato saw poetry as a force intolerably independent of his attempt to subordinate politics to philosophy, Ulysses senses Cressida represents a potential obstacle to his power grab. And just as Plato’s conflict with poetry is a family quarrel, Ulysses’ diffidence towards Cressida is mostly based on what they share. Platonist Ulysses speaks of metaphysical absolute values while political Ulysses thinks, more sophistically, of matter in motion, manipulable towards the most useful ends. Similarly, as explained below, Cressida indulges in Platonic fantasy with Troilus while, in practice, accepting self-interested negotiation of fluctuating values and perceptions as her proper task. Ulysses has political power, of course, and Cressida does not. But it may not always be that way, and not just in the sense that women have a certain ‘power’ over men who desire their sexual allegiance. The revenge of the poet banished from Plato’s utopia might be to reclaim her rights to interpret the human condition in ways that undermine hortatory dualisms of good/evil, soul/ body, and so forth. Contemporary politics largely relegates art to the private sphere, but in Socrates’ Athens the theatre was a fundamental democratic institution: it is no coincidence that Aristotle used the example of judging music and poetry to affirm the superiority of collective deliberation to individual wisdom (Politics 1281b36). Art demands a balance between recognising human universals and being open to multiple perceptions of reality, crucial aspects of any workable democratic ethos. Below I argue that Cressida’s ‘leftovers’, after the love affair with Troilus goes south, are an intimation of this ethos, probed more extensively in Shakespeare’s Rome. Ulysses personifies Shakespeare’s insight that Platonic politics is pulled towards deception to reconcile the conflict between its pursuits of critical rationalism and transcendent values; Troilus personifies the cataclysm that ensues when the ‘Hobbesian rupture’ demolishes Platonism entirely. I return to the latter theme in Chapter 3.

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Troilus’ Tragic Platonism and the Death of Hector Nor will the Good be any more good by being eternal, if a long-lasting white thing is no whiter than an ephemeral one. Aristotle, Ethics

In the Trojan war council, Troilus steps halfway into Paris’ shoes: I take today a wife, and my election Is led on in the conduct of my will; My will enkindled by mine eyes and ears, Two traded pilots ’twixt the dangerous shores Of will and judgement. How may I avoid – Although my will distaste what it elected – The wife I chose? There can be no evasion To blench from this and to stand firm by honour. We turn not back the silks upon the merchant When we have spoiled them; nor the remainder viands We do not throw in unrespective sewer Because we now are full. 

(II, ii, 60–71)

Troilus’ sense organs steer the middle course between will and judgement à la Ulysses’ navigation of Scylla and Charybdis. Will is too indiscriminate to make the right decision, judgement too cold and cerebral to make, or stick to, any judgement. If I am correct that this speech associates Troilus’ eyes and ears with Ulysses, it is brutal foreshadowing. Ulysses later brings Troilus to witness Cressida’s obliging behaviour among the Greeks – t­ here Troilus regards ‘remainder viands’ rather differently. The ‘monstruosity in love’, Troilus complains, is ‘that the will is infinite and the execution confined . . . desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit’ (III, ii, 75–7); premature ejaculation as a bawdy synecdoche for this too-too solid flesh’s broken promises. On the verge of accessing Cressida’s bed, Troilus says, What will it be When that the wat’ry palates taste indeed Love’s thrice-reputed nectar? Death, I fear me, Swooning destruction, or some joy too fine, Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness For the capacity of my ruder powers. I fear it much, and I do fear besides That I shall lose distinction in my joys, As doth a battle when they charge on heaps The enemy flying. 

(III, ii, 18–27)

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Earlier, Troilus lamented abandoning combat for private passion. Now he suspects the violence reaching its ‘purest’ consummation in war also hides in Eros. (The joy of Renaissance orgasm was simultaneously la petite mort, on the hydraulic-humoral theory that one possessed a finite supply of life force.) Stanley Wells calls Troilus ‘a more physically obsessive lover than Shakespeare ha[d] so far portrayed’37 – a­ dangerous indulgence for an aspirant to the metaphysical world of forms. Love of bodies is ‘hungry’, warns Plato, to be suppressed through ‘mature and genuine desire of soul for soul’ (Laws 837). To be always ‘the same, steadfast and abiding, is the prerogative of the divinest of things only. The nature of the bodily does not entitle it to this rank’ (Statesman 269d). Troilus’ monologue moves from fear of flying too close to the Platonic sun to fear of being abandoned to animal instinct, much as their erotic flirting stumbles into coitus interruptus. Act 1 Troilus avoided his public role because of private desire. The plot comes full circle with Eros disciplined by political necessity, the lovers separated by strategic exigencies. Fittingly, Ulysses oversees this process’ final unfolding. During an interregnum in which Greek and Trojan drink and dine together, he facilitates Troilus’ observation of Cressida with Diomedes, the Greek she has been traded to. Thersites watches too, so there are three onstage perceptions of Cressida’s ‘betrayal’: Thersites’ ranting misanthropy, Ulysses’ icy rationality, Troilus’ febrile jealousy. ‘Was Cressid here?’ TROILUS  Let it not be believed, for womanhood. Think: we had mothers. Do not give advantage To stubborn critics, apt without a theme For depravation to square the general sex By Cressid’s rule. Rather, think this not Cressid. ULYSSES  What hath she done, Prince, that can soil our mothers? . . . TROILUS  If there be rule in unity itself, This is not she . . . . . . This is and is not Cressid. Within my soul there doth conduce a fight Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate Divides more wider than the sky and earth, . . . The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved, and loosed, And with another knot, five-finger-tied, The fractions of her faith, orts of her love, The fragments, the scraps, the bits and greasy relics Of her o’er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed.  (V, ii, 129–60)

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Troilus’ Platonic absolutism fantasises a ghostly or form-al Cressida separate from the fallen physical version on display. Only the former’s ‘beauty [has] a soul’ sovereign over the body like heaven is sovereign over its less perfect shadow, earth. Everything must be ‘square[d by this] general . . . rule’, encompassing wife, mother, and all other women. Cressida is either holy unity, or what Diomedes calls Helen, ‘contaminated carrion’ (IV, ii, 73), an abattoir-floor of edible body parts. In one sense Troilus’ speech reiterates Ulysses’ philippic, Troilus demanding his version of ‘rule in unity’. But Ulysses’ perplexity reveals his faith is in political expedience, not great metaphysical truths. He cannot understand the chasm rending Troilus’ world-picture because, like Cressida, he is comfortable with the social animal being a creature of that ‘strange nature . . . a thing inseparate’ yet able to divide itself between ‘sky and earth’ and other competing loci of allegiance. The speaker of Platonic homilies holds to Aristotle’s critique that the world’s heterogeneity falsifies Plato’s claim to have discovered the Forms, that it is ‘better to enumerate the virtues’ than ‘define them in [Plato’s] general way’ (Ethics I.vi; Politics 1260a). Plato records Zeno telling Socrates that, despite Parmenides’ doctrine inviting scorn based on alleged ‘absurdities and contradictions’ that follow upon the belief that creation is one and not plural, the counterhypothesis ‘suffer[s] consequences even more absurd’ – ­a sidelong admission that either ends in moral confusion? Back then, Socrates did not think reconciling unity and multiplicity a grave matter: ‘if someone should demonstrate that I am one thing and many, what’s astonishing about that?’ There is a difference between ‘demonstrating something to be many and one’ and determining whether ‘the one [is] many or the many one’ (Parmenides 128–9). For Troilus it is all or nothing. Shakespeare’s Venus suggests Platonic communion can coexist with bodily eros: ‘Look in mine eyeballs: there thy beauty lies’, she tells Adonis, ‘Then why not lips on lips, since eyes in eyes?’ She praises herself as if a Symposium participant, calling love ‘a spirit all compact of fire, / Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire’. But he thinks such vaunted transubstantiation or apotheosis one of seduction’s stratagems, ‘reason . . . bawd to lust’s abuse’. He ‘hate[s] not love, but your device in love’, like Venus’ telling analogy ‘gold that’s put to use more gold begets’: common Aphrodite ‘lends embracements unto every stranger’, more like filthy lucre than manna from heaven. The point is its lowest-common-denominator anonymity, not its bounty. Venus pursuing Adonis is ‘not love, for love to heaven is fled / Since sweating lust . . . usurped his name’. Like Phaedrus and Pausanius in the Symposium, Adonis draws a sharp line between love and lust. Love ‘doth always fresh remain’ while ‘Lust’s winter comes

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ere summer half be done / Love surfeits not; lust like a glutton dies’ (VA 119–20, 149–50, 779–803). Dies quickly, as in ejaculation (the petite mort of Renaissance endocrinology) – ­or slowly, as in venereal disease. Pustular Pandarus closes the play, addressing the audience. Wondering why the pimp’s ‘endeavor be so desired and the performance so loathed’ he speaks, he believes, to fellow ‘traders in the flesh’. In two months ‘my will shall here be made . . . Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases, / And at that time bequeath you my diseases’ (V, xi, 31 ff.). ‘Will’ likely winks at Shakespeare, especially if he typically spoke the lines assigned to Chorus, Prologue, Epilogue, and so on, and thus played Pandarus himself. A biographer suggests that works like Troilus and Cressida flourished in the ‘macabre atmosphere’ around the Elizabethan fin de siècle, ‘a hard and disenchanted age’ that led the Archbishop of Canterbury to ban all verse satire in 1599; this was the peak of traded invective between Marston, Dekker and Jonson (the ‘Poets War’), which became too much for authorities when put in the mouths of boy actors, a situation referenced in Hamlet.38 The Sonnets frequently play on Will/will in the sense of desire; Pandarus’ speech plays on it in the sense of what remains after death. His diseases are all that remain after this tournament of nihilism’s climaxes. In this sense, again, Plato – o­ r the Puritan – ­is right to think this ‘will’ offers nothing valuable to their virtuous cities. The question is whether one would prefer such cities to the proto-modern London of Shakespeare’s players, a web of Ulyssean antinomianism and Thersitean cynicism, of pandars and prostitutes. Thersites earns his final reprieve pleading, ‘I am a rascal, a scurvy railing knave, a very filthy rogue’ when asked ‘Art thou for Hector’s match? Art thou of blood and honor?’ (V, iv, 22–5). Achilles violates this code of blood and honour by attacking an unarmed Hector (V, ix). Both prophesy a Hobbesian politics where force and fraud rule absent effective positive law, and reason merges into self-interest rather than revealing transcendent justice. Achilles has become his manipulator Ulysses, unmoored from custom, tunnel vision towards efficacy. In Two Noble Kinsmen an Athenian Duke, asked by Theban supplicants to revenge them upon Creon, proposes delaying until after his wedding to Hippolyta. These nuptials are ‘service . . . greater than any war’. Hippolyta sees things differently, telling him to postpone the wedding ‘and hang / Your shield afore your heart – a­ bout that neck’; Theseus should abandon Venus to ‘earn’st a deity equal with Mars’, even ‘above him, for / Thou being but mortal mak’st affections bend / To godlike honors; they themselves, some say, / Groan under such a mast’ry’. Theseus agrees, men either aspire to Godlike status or lower themselves to beasts’: ‘being

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sensually subdued / We lose our human title’ (I, i, 170–232). This retelling of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, probably Shakespeare’s last play, culminates in devotees of Venus and Mars duelling for ‘bride-habited, / But maidenhearted’ Emilia, virgin devotee of Diana, ‘sacred, shadowy, cold, and constant queen, / Abandoner of revels, mute contemplative, / Sweet, solitary, white as chaste, and pure’. Chaucer’s Theseus, ‘Forsaking Mars . . . follows now the huntress Diana.’39 But in Venus’ power, Shakespeare’s Palamon suggests, even Diana ‘began to throw / Her bow away and sigh’ (V, ii, 24–6; V, iii, 1–15). The Olympian balance of power is upset, but here it makes for wistful romance, more Chaucer than Homer. Shakespeare can no longer manage the philosophical intensity of Troilus and Cressida, or it no longer interests him. Chaucer’s Palamon rails against ‘cruel gods’ with ‘no more esteem’ for humans than for the ‘sheep that cowers in the pen’. Insult to injury, ‘Man is bound to observe the divine laws’ and ‘must curb his will, / Whereas no restraint curbs the animal’. But this resolves itself into Platonic rhapsody about ‘the First Mover, the First Cause above’, a ‘being perfect and immutable’ who ‘created the great chain of love’; then it descends into more homespun wisdom. It is ‘common sense . . . to make a virtue of necessity’; moreover, ‘One shouldn’t pry into God’s mystery . . . the unlettered man is blessed indeed / Who doesn’t know a thing except his Creed!’40 Plutarch’s Theseus was a master of reconcilement, ‘establish[ing] a commonwealth which embraced all sorts and conditions of men’ without allowing ‘democracy to fall into the disorder and confusion which an indiscriminate influx might have produced’; ‘balance’ was his watchword.41 Shakespeare’s return to a monarch from the holiday comedies is significant: Duke Theseus already settled Olympian imbalance. Amazonian Hippolyta ‘wast near to make the male / To thy sex captive, but [Theseus], Born to uphold creation . . . shrunk thee into / The bound thou wast o’erflowing’ (I, i, 80–4 – ­an inversion of the opening rhetoric of Antony and Cleopatra, of which more below). Mars’ champion Arcite, the duel’s victor but mortally wounded in a freak accident, blesses his erstwhile opponent as he dies, bequeathing Emilia. So, a more tractable love triangle than the sonnets’. In Theseus’ interpretation, the concord of Venus and Mars sanctifies tragedy. Everybody wins: ‘the deities / Have showed due justice . . . Never fortune / Did play a subtler game – ­the conquered triumphs, / The victor has the loss. Yet in the passage / The gods have been most equal’. However his final gloss on these matters suggests the self-imposed credulity, or perhaps learned helplessness, necessary to believe in reconciliation. ‘What things’ such gods, ‘heavenly charmers . . . make of us!’ As we remain ‘children in some kind . . . Let us be thankful / For that which is’,

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ignoring matters ‘above our question’. Do as I say, not as I do: the same play that sees Juno called upon to ‘Resume her ancient fit of jealousy / To get the soldier work, that peace might purge’ a decadent Thebes, also praises ‘impartial gods, who . . . View us their mortal herd, behold who err / And in their time chastise’ (I, ii, 21–3; I, iv, 4–6; V, xi, 105–36). Maybe shepherd Ulysses’ seizure of the initiative is too heavy a burden for this mortal herd – o­ r maybe it must be disguised, lest the flock find itself uncomfortably exposed to his ‘universal wolf’. Stanley Rosen speculates Plato’s ‘daydream . . . imagin[ing] what it would be like to be a beneficent despot’ might have been a demonstration that ‘philosophy . . . leads to tyranny’ because ‘truth by its nature intends to suppress falsehood’.42 But this begs Pilate’s question about truth, particularly if the philosopher descending back into the cave is unlikely to be believed. Bacon called truth ‘the sovereign good of human nature’, deemed it ‘heaven upon earth [for one’s] mind . . . turn upon the poles of truth’, yet delicately separated ‘theological and philosophical truth’ from ‘civil business’.43 Epistemological authority need not rely solely on custom, charisma or force, even if the ancients had good reason to consider that the full menu. Modern science is Platonist at least insofar as it says senseexperience deceives – i­s, in fact, designed to deceive – ­us about reality’s structures. We see solid objects in three-dimensional space, not atoms and quarks dancing in the void, because there was no evolutionary pay-off in seeing things as they ‘really’ are. Simon Blackburn calls the cave allegory a ‘plea for just the kind of understanding of the actual world that science and mathematics offer us now’.44 This invites two potential responses. The Foucauldian one denies any position from which to be sure science’s epistemological authority is not just custom, charisma or force wearing a new mask. The (more serious, to my mind) Nietzschean or Weberian response admits a world-historical irony: in finally uncovering the nature of existence, science obliterated Plato’s dream. The discovery is that nature is amoral, morality an evolved utilitarian trick at best: the sophists were right. The ‘tranquil mind . . . had nothing known . . . saw’t not, thought it not . . . was free and merry’ (Oth. III, iii, 344–53). Perhaps such a mind seeks (in vain) for a lost garden, ‘innocent of . . . knowledge’, à la the Doctor’s diagnosis of Lady Macbeth: ‘you have known what you should not’ (III, ii, 46; V, i, 39).

CHAPTER 2

PAGAN CHRISTS: POLITICS IN THE ROMAN PLAYS

. . . if greatness of spirit were detached from sociability, and from the bonding between humans, it would become a kind of brutal savagery. Cicero . . . those rulers’ virtues that master even one’s benevolence and pity . . . the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul. Nietzsche

Chapter 1 argued Ulysses’ transvaluation of traditional Homeric values, despite being intended to serve hierarchical and collectivist goals, called forth nightmarish intimations of its own negation, the ‘universal wolf’. These were embodied, in different ways and to various degrees, by scabrous Thersites and Pandarus; the proto-Hobbesian rupture I identified in the Trojan debate; and Cressida’s contextually-impelled pragmatism about love and sex. Shakespeare’s last play, Two Noble Kinsmen – ­its story also borrowed from Chaucer, thematically similar but tonally different – w ­ as read to suggest that his final version of a satisfactory Athenian politics was one where the deceptive or mythmaking element in Platonism had become dominant. Moving from Greece to Rome, new values come forward. In a sense they are the values of Cressida and Thersites, who affirmed pragmatic bodily goods over Platonic über-concepts (eternal love, honour). But Cressida and Thersites were solitary and weak: a captive bride, a slave. In Rome such values are backed with collective power, though still regarded warily by the more recalcitrant elites. Isolated resistances to traditional structures of domination in Troilus and Cressida, in the Roman plays they are a fullyfledged political theory of civic virtue, commonwealth, popular will. The Greek model would be Aristotle’s pro-democratic critique of Plato; its

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influence on the Renaissance owed as much to the languages of Roman republicanism. ‘What distinguishes the early modern period’, writes Eric Nelson, is ‘the astonishing degree’ to which political writers asked questions about the virtuous commonwealth via ancient Rome. ‘To compare the relative merits of monarchy and civic self-government . . . was unavoidably to ask whether Rome had reached its zenith before or after the rise of the Caesars.’1 Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, begins with a dispute between lineage, military success and popular acclaim as legitimations of Roman imperial succession (I, i, 1–62). Under Renaissance monarchy, classical antiquity was a safe distance from which to examine popular participation and resistance to tyranny. On a smaller scale, though, Englishmen like Shakespeare could have had some experience of participatory politics, if in a mostly aristocratic, premodern sense. (English candidates of the time were generally chosen by a small elite, but sometimes there were ‘disputed’ elections where the King’s council had to forcibly intercede when the people refused to return an MP – ­this happened in Stratford in 1601, with possible parallels in Coriolanus.)2 Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra depict differing conceptions of the person, refracted through shifting regimes: not only political regimes, the classical monarchy–aristocracy–democracy model that set the terms for Aristotle’s heirs, but philosophical and psychological regimes, regimes of individual and collective self-understanding in transition between Paganism and Christianity. By imagining Christ-like stories of expiatory sacrifice3 for the redemption of the sacrifice’s fellows – ­here ancient citizens, not future souls – ­Shakespeare depicts an uneasy fusion, sometimes a no man’s land, between the Pagan and Christian worlds. This is the fusion the West has experienced since the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, a compromise the overcoming of which thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Rousseau and Nietzsche thought the path to secular salvation. But nothing in Shakespeare is so simple. Coriolanus is an all-too-human Hercules, reduced to fruitless ranting amidst the Twilight of the Gods. Hamlet, famously, has been called an intellectual trapped in a revenge drama; what happens to a Homeric warrior trapped in an Aristotelian polis? In his true element heading armies like ‘boys pursuing summer butterflies, / Or butchers killing flies’ (IV, vi, 97–8), Coriolanus becomes, when the hurly-burly’s done, Nietzsche’s blond beast ‘finally enclosed within the walls of society and peace’, its erstwhile values de- or revalued.4 Like Troilus and Cressida’s hammering of the Homeric idols, the Roman plays explore a turning point in Western political thought: a warrior-aristocracy is required to legitimate

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itself beyond its physical virtues. (Chapter 4 finds Shakespeare nationalising this theme in the English histories, where the last Quixotic carriers of chivalric banners fall before the new political technicians of the age of Bacon.) Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus after Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, but in line with the structure described in the Introduction, this chapter moves through Roman history rather than Shakespeare’s authorial history. The movement is broadly in line with the historical transformation also identified in the Introduction: from public to private, from violence to love. But it cannot be called a story of progress except insofar as the decline of ancient Paganism lays the groundwork for Shakespearean modernity. Coriolanus engages the ambiguously anti-democratic implications of Ulysses’ mastery. Ulysses, Chapter 1 showed, kept control over the honour-obsessed warrior class through strategic or deceptive appeals to their values. Yet the danger of the critical rationalism he simultaneously employed in appropriating power is that, unmoored from deception, it is eventually led to ask whether warrior eminence has any purpose at all. This conflict, I argue below, is politicised in the Rome of Coriolanus and personified in its title warrior. My analysis of Coriolanus, which makes up the first part of the chapter, explores the maintenance of republican politics through Shakespeare’s account of Rome sacrificing the warrior it could not accommodate. Ultimately, this suggests a further step in the ascent of Ulysses over the warriors examined in Chapter 1. Ulysses’ cognitive expropriation of warrior charisma, moved from battlefield to city, becomes institutionalised as a novel political aristocracy whose skills are verbal, not physical. Its legitimacy involves connecting to common desires rather than separating from the commons by pursuing great deeds available, by definition, to only a select few. These political elites, Shakespeare sees (and Machiavelli’s republicanism recommends), may employ strategic deception no less readily than Plato’s mythmaking guardians. They have the advantage of doing so towards demotically tangible ends, rather than bare pursuit of power, or some baroque metaphysics. Yet there are flaws in their politics, as I illustrate in the chapter’s subsequent sections, covering the decline of the republic and coming of the empire, and of Christianity, in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.

Of Beasts, Gods, and Stomachs For community involves friendship . . . people who are equal and similar. Aristotle

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But will those warriors . . . don, together with civilian dress, that veneration for the laws and respect for protective forms, those tutelary deities of human associations? To them the unarmed class appears vulgar and ignoble, laws are superfluous subtleties, the forms of social life just so many social delays. Benjamin Constant, The Spirit of Conquest (1814)

The lesson Plutarch takes from Coriolanus: a ‘noble disposition, if it lacks discipline, will produce both good and evil fruits’. His ‘uncompromising self-assertion . . . made it difficult for him to cooperate with others’ because ‘to play a part in public affairs’ one ‘must avoid . . . a tendency to self-assertion . . . but rather . . . cultivate the capacity to submit to injury’. He never developed ‘the combination of gravity and tolerance . . . ­indispensable for a sovereign’.5 By contrast, Livy’s account (History II.34–40) and Machiavelli’s reinterpretation (Discourses I.7)6 ignore motives and character and focus on maintenance of republican institutions. Shakespeare combines these approaches. His Coriolanus has problems not imposed by circumstance, beckoning psychology to supplement political analysis. F. N. Lees links the play to the 1598 English translation of Aristotle’s Politics: ‘a lofty but restricted sense of honour . . . crippled by an excess of pride . . . unfitted for the life of a right social animal’.7 Coppélia Kahn suggests ‘the hungry mob’ is ‘the shadow of [Coriolanus’] own emotionally starved self as a child . . . convinced by women that only through violence will [he] achieve manhood’.8 His ‘determination that the aristocracy should suppress the citizenry’ mirrors, Robert Watson says, ‘his effort to establish an internal aristocracy, a selective version of himself’.9 Is he too proud or too weak? Are those mutually exclusive interpretations? Perhaps the root of Corionaus’ behaviour is kept deliberately unclear. Rome is certainly confused. One rioting citizen complains he ‘pays himself with being proud’; another says no, ‘he did it to please his mother’ (I, i, 28–32). Even the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, adept politiques, discuss Coriolanus’ motives without understanding them (I, i, 249 ff.). Officers debate whether Coriolanus disregards plebeian opinion or seeks plebeian hatred (II, ii, 1–30). Aristocrats appeal to what he cannot help in his ‘nature’, ‘bred i’th’ wars’ and maladapted to politics: ‘ill-schooled / In bolted language . . . when he speaks not like a citizen, / You find him like a soldier’ (I, i, 35–6; III, i, 322–4; III, iii, 54–5). But Coriolanus (sometimes) can speak the requisite language, can, as he puts it, ‘counterfeit the bewitchment of some popular man’ (II, iii, 92–3). The willingness is the rub. Aristotle’s famous creature ‘unable to live in society . . . because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god’ (Pol. 1253a25–30); Coriolanus appears to be both. It is as if

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‘whatsoever god who leads him / Were slily crept into his human powers’; he ‘speak[s] o’th’ people as if . . . a god . . . not a man of their infirmity’ (II, i, 205–6; III, i, 85–6). A friend calls him ‘too noble for the world’; his mother says ‘the rabble . . . can judge as fitly of his worth / As I can’ the ‘mysteries of heaven’ (III, i, 255; I, ii, 35–7). Banished Coriolanus returns heading a Volscian army as ‘their god . . . a thing / Made by some other deity than nature’; the Volscian ‘soldiers use him as grace fore meat, / Their talk at table, and their thanks at end’ (IV, vi, 94–5; IV, vii, 3–4). But language of divinity is constantly intertwined with a complementary language of animality. MENENIUS  Pray you, who does the wolf love? SICINIUS  The lamb. MENENIUS  Ay, to devour him, as the hungry plebeians would the noble Martius. BRUTUS  He’s a lamb indeed, that baas like a bear. MENENIUS  He’s a bear indeed, that lives like a lamb. (II, i, 5–12)

A resentful aristocrat says ‘the people / Deserve such pity of [Coriolanus] as the wolf / Does of the shepherds’ (IV, vi, 94–8). Multiple interlocking confusions: Who is beastly, Coriolanus, the people, both? What sort of beast, predator or prey? Similar interchanges occur between Shylock and the Christians: ‘You may as well [ask] the wolf / Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb’; ‘thy desires / Are wolvish, bloody, starved, and ravenous’ (IV, i, 72–3; IV, i, 136–7). The animal-man disturbs the self-understanding of the polis as homogeneous enough for political life. Coriolanus simultaneously stands for the wolf symbolising Rome’s worldly birth and the Lamb of God eventually dividing imperial attentions between earth and heaven. Such imagery places him in a liminal zone between political and anti- or apolitical ethics. This language of inter-species predation moreover suggests that the unity-in-diversity Aristotle recommends as an alternative to Plato’s pyramidal hierarchy faces fatal problems here. In Aristotle’s good polity ‘one citizen differs from another, but the salvation of the community is the common business of them all’ (Pol. 1276b28–30). Every citizen is the same sort of political animal. But the rhetorical bestiary of Coriolanus only divides. Coriolanus rages at ‘curs / that like nor peace nor war’; even Menenius, supposedly the populist patrician (‘one that hath always loved the people’ (I, i, 43–4)), calls the tribunes ‘herdsmen of the beastly plebeians’ and declares, ‘Rome and her rats are at the point of battle’ (II, i, 83–5; I, i, 151–8). Rome is not ‘her rats’, creatures who happen to live and

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feed among the Romans. They represent Aristotle’s ‘bare needs of life’, the state’s infant concern before advancing teleologically, ‘for the sake of a good life’. If the state existed ‘for the sake of life only . . . slaves and brute animals might form a state’, but, by definition, they cannot (Pol. 1252b29– 31, 1280a32–5). Aristotle’s ideal citizenry collaborate ‘in the administration of justice, and in offices’, in Cicero’s ‘honorable burden of public office’ (Off. II.4);10 Shakespeare’s Rome is a seamier regime, its restive citizens manipulated by cynical, self-serving representatives officially tasked to balance their interests against elite power. Aristotle’s participatory polis needs slaves (and wives) to manage ‘the bare needs of life’; Coriolanus lacks slaves, but contains ‘brute animals’ – n ­ ot political animals – ­who happen to be humans. Cicero acknowledges elite rule may force ‘the people [into] a position somewhat akin to slavery’ (Rep. 1.43). Coriolanus supports war against the Volsces, who ‘have much corn’, as ‘means to vent / Our musty superfluity’ (I, i, 216–17; I, i, 240). This Rome is full of the ‘needy’ and ‘indigent’ Aristotle calls the power base of perverse Democratic regimes (Pol. 1275a21, 1279b9–19). The play’s events are set in motion by hunger, for Aristotle a primal rather than noble/teleological spur to collective life. Plutarch dismissed ‘malicious stories . . . that the rich had deliberately created the famine to revenge themselves on the people’,11 but Shakespeare leaves culpability an open question. Language of predation and cannibalism suggests a polity whose self-conception is not unitary enough to make sure all are fed – a­ s in the family, where the dominant provision the vulnerable – ­leads to people eating each other or themselves, figuratively if not literally. Cicero, hardly an egalitarian, advises, ‘those who control public affairs ought to plan for there to be a plentiful supply of necessities’ (Off. II.73–4). But Coriolanus, brutally disregarding the threat of mass starvation, says popular ‘affections are / A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that / Which would increase his evil’, making democratic politics a vomitorium. The ‘noble senate’ keeps citizens ‘in awe, which else / Would feed on one another’ (I, i, 165–97). After Coriolanus’ expulsion Menenius rues that ‘Rome . . . like an unnatural dam / Should now eat up her own!’ (III, i, 292–5). But plebeians see another cannibalism. ‘If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us’ (I, i, 75–6) declares a hungry citizen. Similar language linking popular politics to intestinal reflux occurs in the English histories. An Archbishop explains his rebellion against Henry IV: The commonwealth is sick of their own choice; Their over-greedy love hath surfeited.

Pagan Christs: Politics in the Roman Plays ­

. . . Thou, beastly feeder, art so full of him That thou provokest thyself to cast him up. So, so, thou common dog, didst thou disgorge Thy glutton bosom of [Richard II] . . .

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(2H4 I, iii, 87–98)

But the rebellion fails – i­n these plays, examined below, Bolingbroke and Hal validate public opinion, even if they also manipulate it, avoiding such nausea. Hal may look like a ‘starveling’, but he has learned to meet bodily claims, Falstaff’s ‘huge hill of flesh’ (1H4 II, iv, 239–40), halfway. The Coriolanus of these plays is defeated Hotspur, spitting disdain at ‘this vile politician Bolingbroke’ (1H4 I, iii, 238), seething about a foppish lord who skipped the battle and then insulted the other soldiers: ‘To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet, / And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman / Of guns drums, and wounds . . .’ (1H4 I, iii, 30 ff.). Menenius’ fable of the belly temporarily mollifies the hungry mob, convincing them the aristocracy is not to blame for the famine (I, i, 85 ff.). Here Shakespeare simultaneously represents and parodies the age-old trope paralleling human body to body politic. Aristotle calls ‘the state . . . by nature clearly prior to the family’, a ‘whole . . . of necessity prior to the part’ as ‘if the whole body is destroyed, there will be no foot or hand’ (Pol. 1253a19–21). St Paul’s political teleology is based on divine will, not nature – ­‘Christ’s body is yourselves, each of you with a part to play in the whole’ – b ­ ut the analogy endures. The body’s ‘parts are many but the body is one’ because God makes ‘each part . . . equally concerned for all the others. If one part is hurt, all the parts share its pain. And if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy’ (1 Cor. 12: 12–27). But Menenius speaks of functionality, not higher telos, thereby allowing part to stand aside from and judge whole. Stanley Cavell accuses Menenius of providing ‘words instead of food’.12 The stomach receives food first, Menenius says, because it must circulate nutrition to the extremities; its function hidden, it is easily mistaken as glutton and hoarder (‘suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain’ (I, i, 71)). But given the circumstances, Menenius reveals precisely where the human body/body politic analogy breaks down. What homeostasis does in individual bodies becomes the object of power struggle and/or collective choice in political bodies. Serious crisis in the former is zero-sum: self-correction or death. If ‘each limb were disposed to . . . grow strong by taking . . . its neighbor’s strength’, warns Cicero, ‘necessarily the whole body would weaken and die’. The state, though, ‘should be organized in such a way as to last forever . . . the death of a state is never natural, as it is with a person’ (Off. III.22; Rep. 3.34). If

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crisis metastasises in the body politic, and the state cannot or should not be transformed into a family or individual body – A ­ ristotle’s critique of Plato’s Republic – ­then what decides the matter? ‘Force’, answers Machiavelli, both nostalgic Renaissance student of, and proto-modern critic of, the ancient republic. Machiavelli’s ideal is not Aristotle’s distinctive dwelling between beast and God, but creative synthesis of beast–human–God. ‘Machiavelli reincorporated into political thought that which . . . the Greeks tr[ied] to eliminate’, Wendy Brown writes, ‘the body’.13 Harvey Mansfield says Machiavelli ‘esteems worldly honor less than human strength and even ferocity, a quality shared with wild beasts that does men no particular honor’.14 To ‘seem merciful, trustworthy, humane, upright and devout, and also to be so’ is a virtue, Machiavelli insists, only if one ‘is prepared to act in the opposite way . . . to vary his conduct as the winds of fortune and changing circumstances constrain him’ and be worse than he wishes to seem. The best statesman veers between animal models – ­‘both the fox and the lion, for the lion is liable to be trapped, whereas the fox cannot ward off wolves’ – ­veers, indeed, between animal and human. Cicero had described ‘two types of conflict’, one ‘proceed[ing] by debate, the other by force’, one ‘the proper concern of a man’, the other ‘of beasts’ (Rep. I.34). Machiavelli repeats Cicero’s anatomy of these ‘two ways of contending: one by using the laws, the other, force’, one ‘appropriate for men’ and the other ‘for animals; but because the former is often ineffective, one must have recourse to the latter’. Thus one ‘must . . . imitate beasts as well as employing properly human means’ (Prince, Chap. XVIII). Coriolanus, however, associates language with fear and violence with normalcy: ‘oft / When blows have made me stay I fled from words’ (II, ii, 67–8). Cicero blames the republic’s collapse on grandees who ‘prefer to be feared than . . . loved’. Unfortunately those ‘who wish to be feared’ end up ‘afraid of the very men who fear them’, laying the groundwork for tyranny (Off. II.27, II.29). Machiavelli, again by contrast, recommends politic appropriation of the beastly character, the regime of fear instead of love.15 King James VI/I’s Basilicon Doron (1599) describes a prince ‘clothed with two callings . . . good Christian [and] good King’, but then recommends Machiavellian mixing: And when yee have by the severity of Justice once settled your countries, and made them know that ye can strike, then may ye . . . mix Justice with Mercy, punishing or sparing . . . if otherwise ye kyth your clemency at the first, the offences would soon come to such heaps, and the contempt of you grows so great . . . where I thought (by being gracious at the beginning) to win all mens

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hearts to a loving and willing obedience, I by the contrary found, the disorder of the country, and the loss of my thanks to be my reward.16

‘My blood hath been too cold and temperate’, confesses Shakespeare’s Henry IV in a similar vein, but ‘I will from henceforth rather . . . be feared’, having ‘lost that title of respect / Which the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud’ (1H4 I, iii, 1–9). Of Shakespeare’s most lionised king it is said, ‘Never was a monarch better feared and loved’ (H5 II, ii, 25). Henry V advises his troops in the Machiavellian mode, where virtue is no substitute for tactics (and vice versa): ‘imitate the action of the tiger . . . Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage . . . lend the eye a terrible aspect’ (III, i, 6–9). Terrible aspect indeed: the king paints a besieged town the picture of his soldiers, like ‘Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen’, ‘mowing like grass / Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants’ and ‘Defil[ing] the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters’; of ‘pure maidens fall[en] into the hand / Of hot and forcing violation’, of ‘naked infants spitted upon pikes’ (III, iii, 90–118). He orders a massacre of prisoners ‘expressly against the law of arms . . . as arrant a piece of knavery . . . as can be offert’ (IV, vii, 2–3). Yet elsewhere he forbids despoliation of conquered territory, ordering ‘nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for’, none ‘upbraided or abused in disdainful language. For when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner’ (III, vi, 99–103). To Machiavelli, being feared is safe, being hated dangerous; he associates the latter with seizure of property and ravishing of wives and daughters, both common in Roman history. Cicero also hopes ‘private men are never deprived of their goods by public acts’ because ‘political communities . . . were constituted’ so ‘men could hold on to what was theirs’ (Off. II.73). But Cicero does not separate fear and hatred, finding ‘nothing . . . more suited to protecting and retaining influence than to be loved, and nothing less suited than to be feared’ (A Shakespearean example is Antony, dangerous to Octavius because ‘beloved of those / That have only feared Caesar’ (AC I, iv, 37–8)). Cicero’s republican ideal, though, assumes a common feeling defanging moral diversity and conflict of interest: ‘of all fellowships none is . . . dearer, than that of each of us with the republic’. He knows we have ‘particular love’ for offspring, but simultaneously deems ‘absurd’ altruism towards family alongside ‘another rationale’ for other citizens: ‘the benefit of each individual and the benefit of all together should be the same’. Republican management ‘is like a guardianship’ exercised by statesmen considering themselves ‘champions of everyone’ (Off. II.23, I.57, I.12, III.26–8, I.85). Assuming common feeling means assuming a positive

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valuation of commonness. Republics face problems if this is absent, as Shakespeare shows, punning on the double-connotation of ‘common’: THIRD CITIZEN You have not, indeed, loved the common people. CORIOLANUS You should account me the more virtuous that I have not been common in my love.  (II, iii, 84–5)

Shared or base, depending on context. The imperative to recognise selective excellence faces the imperative to mandate truly ‘common’ affection, a tension only precariously balanced by democratic politics. By conflating politics and war, Coriolanus sometimes understands what other elites miss. Paul Cantor thinks he sees the Roman regime as ‘one enormous deception . . . a peacetime stratagem that does not work quite as the patricians think’.17 Combat experience helps him perceive the naked strategising beneath the mixed-regime ideals officially proclaimed by the granting of power to the tribunes: ‘It will in time . . . throw forth greater themes / For insurrection’s arguing’ (I, i, 208–10). Cicero’s ideal aristocracy is a ‘middle ground between the inadequate autocrat and the reckless mob’ (Rep. 1.52); emblematic Menenius’ failure to facilitate compromise between the people and Coriolanus points to a decayed, ineffectual patriciate. Coriolanus sees beyond Menenius’ impotent ‘On both sides more respect’ (III, i, 183). The time for Cicero’s dialogic politics, ‘reason and speech, which reconcile men to one another . . . and unite them in a kind of natural fellowship’ (Off. I.50), has passed. Coriolanus senses Roman conflict becoming zero-sum and force-based, like war. The nobility delude themselves if they think anything other than imperium in imperio lies in store: You are plebeians If they be senators, and they are no less When, both your voices blended, the great’st taste Most palates theirs. . . . It makes the consuls base, and my soul aches To know, when two authorities are up, Neither supreme, how soon confusion May enter ’twixt the gap of both and take The one by th’ other. 

(III, i, 104–15)

The patricians tempt not shared but collapsed space, a ‘way to lay the city flat, / To bring the roof to the foundation’ (III, i, 203–4). Admittedly, Coriolanus’ disdain for the commons feels aesthetic, personality-specific.

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His conception of democracy is rote Platonism, ‘where gentry, title, wisdom’, guided ‘by the yea and no / Of general ignorance . . . omit / Real necessities . . . unstable slightness . . . Nothing is done to purpose’ (III, i, 147–52). Yet he understands, as his patrician friends do not, that admitting the force of numbers into politics could surrender politics to numerical force. Loyalty is, to Coriolanus, all-or-nothing between the people’s tribunes and the senate (III, i, 166–9). Only in battle outside the city is he dedicated wholly to Rome, and even there he often fights as an army of one. Zero-sum political perceptions were, in Machiavelli’s analysis, republican Rome’s central dilemma: ‘either the populace or the nobility always became arrogant when the other party was humbled . . . as if it were necessary either to treat others ill or to be ill-treated’ (Disc. I.46). Coriolanus understands that Brutus and Sicinius seek control over, not just representation of, the people: ‘You being their mouth, why rule you not their teeth?’ (III, i, 38). A citizen says they ‘are the people’s mouths, / And we their hands’ (III, i, 271–2), returning to the body analogy: but what directs what?18 The tribunes see politics as arithmetic power-struggle: ‘our office may / During [Coriolanus’] power go to sleep’ (II, i, 208–9), Brutus frets. Up to a point, Coriolanus and the tribunes understand each other well. Brutus identifies grave antipopulist threats that must be fought by manipulating plebeian perception: ‘We must suggest the people . . . what hatred’ Coriolanus holds towards them, that ‘he would / Have made them mules, silenced their pleaders, / And dispropertied their freedoms’ (II, i, 231–4). However underhanded the method, this ‘suggestion’ of aristocratic terrorism seems plausible enough. The role of illusion in politics divides Cicero’s republic from Machiavelli’s. For Cicero ‘pretence can never endure’. Perception and reputation matter, but we govern best ‘being what we wish to seem’, even if ‘advice should be given so that we might . . . be seen to be what we are’ (Off. II.43–4). Coriolanus, asked to ‘perform a part / Thou hast not done before’, cannot bear to ‘with base tongue give to my noble heart / A lie’; he would rather ‘play / The man I am’ (III, ii, 14–15; III, ii, 100–10). Wrong, insists Machiavelli: things runs smoother when statesmen do not see adopting varying personalities as the situation requires as a character flaw. Plato’s politicians – ­a pejorative term, here – ­are ‘experts in faction . . . imitators and magicians . . . quickly exchang[ing] their shapes’, a ‘troupe of players acting their part in public life’ (Statesman 291b, 303c). Such criticisms should be reinterpreted as praises because, Machiavelli says, we ‘are as much affected by what a thing appears to be as by what it is’. Pagan religion, for instance, was a valuable ‘instrument . . . for the maintenance

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of a civilized state’ (Disc. I.11, I.25). Artifice about God(s) mirrors artifice in heaven’s worldly trustees. Aristotle says deception is almost always a mistake, though he describes feigning piety and frugality as a good way to maintain tyranny, and allows that since ‘fear makes people keep a firmer grip on the constitution’, clever politicians may ‘excite fears and make faraway dangers seem close at hand, so that the citizens will defend the constitution and, like sentries on night duty, never relax their guard’ (Politics 1297a, 1307b–08a, 1314a–15b). Disagreement over employing illusion in politics is at the centre of Coriolanus’ fraught relationship with his mother. Coriolanus tells Volumnia he ‘had rather be [the people’s] servant in my way / Than sway with them in theirs’ (II, i, 188–90). To be another’s servant ‘my way’ is a paradox (or oxymoron) of representative politics. Coriolanus shores up his self-image as solid warrior against the ‘sway’ of the mercurial political persona. ‘In Shakespeare’s tragedies’, Linda Bamber explains, ‘men who have proved themselves according to a rather limited code of manliness suddenly find that code inadequate to their difficulties . . . and they struggle with more inward definitions of courage, honor, integrity’.19 Volumnia shares Coriolanus’ martial-aristocratic prejudices, but sees nothing wrong with dissembling. Like Lady Macbeth, she tries to spur a man to action by promising his manliness is not threatened by breaking with his pre-existing values: ‘You might have been enough the man you are / With striving less to be so . . . I have a heart as little apt as yours, / But yet a brain that leads my use of anger / To better vantage’ (III, ii, 18–30). The ability to balance head and heart, to accept internal heterogeneity, accepts Machiavelli’s recommendation to fuse beast–man–God. Volumnia one-ups Menenius, ventriloquising body parts in succession. But Coriolanus has no internal hierarchy: ‘His heart’s his mouth / What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent’ (III, i, 256–7). Imagining pandering to the citizenry, he describes appropriation by foreign bodies: The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys’ tears take up The glasses of my sight! A beggar’s tongue Make motion through my lips, and my armed knees, Who bowed but in my stirrup, bend like his That hath received an alms! I will not do’t, Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth, And by my body’s action teach my mind A most inherent baseness. 

(III, ii, 114–23)

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So Coriolanus does not accept Menenius’ fable. At a certain point of crisis, body parts declare their independence and turn on one another. His toopolitical man is a house divided, risking internal civil war. Volumnia grants the similarity between politics and war, but thinks Coriolanus could use this to his advantage. She has ‘heard [him] say, / Honour and policy . . . I’th’ war do grow together’. So ‘If it be honour in your wars to seem/ The same you are not . . . how is it less or worse’ to dissemble ‘in peace’ if that ‘stands in like request?’ Sweet-talking the commons ‘no more / Dishonours you at all than to take in / A town with gentle words . . . I would dissemble with my nature where / My fortunes and my friends at stake required / I should do so in honour’ (III, ii, 42–64). But this association of war and politics is precisely what bothers Coriolanus. His nature and honour are self-defined precisely against dissembling. Saluted by his fellow troops he complains, ‘When drums and trumpets shall / I’th’ field prove flatterers, let courts and cities be / Made all of false-faced soothing.’ Ceremonially appropriated, ‘steel grows / Soft as the parasite’s silk’ (I, x, 41–50). The parasite eating away at the sword is like the hungry populace intruding upon Coriolanus’ desire for selfsufficiency with demands for reciprocity and recognition. To Coriolanus, political speech is only lies, flattery and ‘false-faced soothing’. Despite Volumnia’s recollection, Shakespeare never shows us Coriolanus practicing warfare by guile (as Livy’s Coriolanus does). He is an almost absurd beast–God, winning battles through sheer personal physical strength and bravery when all his soldiers have fled. It is Aufidius, whose obsession with the physically superior Coriolanus borders on the erotic (IV, v, 112 ff.), who accepts the necessity of turning to ‘craft’ when he cannot subdue his rival otherwise (I, xi, 12–16). And it is Aufidius who, in a perverse alliance with the Roman tribunate, finalises Coriolanus’ downfall. Coriolanus reciprocates Aufidius’ warrior Eros: ‘were I anything but what I am, / I would wish me only he’, would ‘revolt to make / Only my wars with’ this ‘lion / That I am proud to hunt’ (I, i, 222–7). His ideal of warfare is the duel or hunt, more a dance of seduction between two individuals than the calculative manoeuvres of whole armies. (In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus fantasises a homoerotic Sparta: ‘If only there were a way to start a city or an army made up of lovers and the boys they love!’ Its soldiers, ‘seek[ing] honor in each other’s eyes’, could ‘conquer all the world’ (178e–179a).) Confusing sex and war, Coriolanus embraces a Roman general ‘In arms as sound as when I wooed, in heart / As merry as when our nuptial day was done, / And tapers burnt to bedward!’ (I, vii, 30–2). Reunion with his wife is, by contrast, emotionally muted. His Eros is so overinvested in violence that none is available for the public or private

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worlds of Rome. ‘He loves your people’, Menenius tells Brutus, ‘But tie him not to be their bedfellow’ (II, ii, 60–1). Volumnia implores him to ‘be ruled, although I know thou hadst rather / Follow thine enemy in a fiery gulf / Than flatter him in a bower’ (III, ii, 90–2). The ‘fiery gulf’ is a vagina with its life-giving properties burned away. Volumnia suspects Coriolanus cannot easily replace it with the domestic ‘bower’ of politics, where persons interpenetrate. To enter and be entered by the latter is to risk castration: ‘Must I go show them my unbarbed sconce?’ (III, ii, 99). It is fornication to ‘speak to th’ people’ with ‘Bastards and syllables of no allowance / To your bosom’s truth’ (III, ii, 53–8). Coriolanus would pre-emptively ‘pluck out / The multitudinous tongue’ (III, i, 158–9) and castrate his would-be ravishers. When his election appears a fait accompli and it only remains for him to show the people his wounds, a citizen says, ‘if he shows us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them’ (II, iii, 5–7). But Coriolanus fears this political tryst between wound and tongue. He says ‘I have wounds to show you which shall be yours in private’ (II, iii, 70–1) – ­but the consummation never occurs. Volumnia is a grotesque mélange of Rome’s traditionally demarcated gender roles, maternal love and paternal militarisation. ‘If my son were my husband’, she informs her daughter-in-law, ‘I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honor than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love.’ (In Livy, Volumnia is the name of Coriolanus’ wife, not his mother.) Separation and violence supersede sexual combination as erotic focus. And had he died? ‘Then his good report should have been my son. I therein would have found issue . . . I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action’ (I, iii, 2–21). A republic privileging military expansion and glory requires a caste that represses worldly eroticism (‘voluptuously surfeit’) towards a more abstract affection (‘good report’). Volumnia says Hecuba’s breast ‘When she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier / Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood / At Grecian sword, contemning’ (I, iii, 36–9). The blood-spitting gash on Hector’s forehead strikingly merges masculine and feminine imagery: battlefield emblem as vagina. It is a vagina that ejaculates, and by emitting blood (as in menses) it crosscuts the realms of conceiving and killing. But unlike his mother (‘O, he is wounded, I thank the Gods for’t!’ (II, i, 10)) Coriolanus feels a gnawing ambivalence about his wounds’ loveliness, especially when the crowd clamours for ritualistic approbation. The wounds ‘represent his (mother’s) desire, as well as his desire for her pleasure’, Jennifer Ann Bates writes, ‘but as masculine, battle penetrations of his body, they also represent the homosociality of state appropriation’.20 Compare erotically non-stunted Antony: believing

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(prematurely) he turned the tide against Octavius, Antony tells his soldiers to ‘Enter the city, clip your wives, your friends, / Tell them your feats whilst they with joyful tears / Wash the congealment from your wounds, and kiss / The honored gashes whole’ (AC IV, ix, 7–11). The politic commander knows how to mix love and war, how to balance seeking power with recognising vulnerability. Initially, Coriolanus compares physical injuries favourably to verbal reward: ‘praise me not . . . The blood I drop is rather physical / Than dangerous to me’ (I, vi, 17–19). Bloodshed is salubrious purgation; hearing praise is contaminating. But gradually speech contaminates the wounds, drafting them into public service. Volumnia, especially, ‘Who has a charter to extol her blood, / When she does praise me grieves me’, Coriolanus admits. His ‘wounds . . . smart / To hear themselves remembered’ (I, x, 13–29). Menenius says Coriolanus’ heart is his mouth; now his wounds are his ears, permeable sites penetrated by the desires and opinions of others. By contrast, Tarquin’s ‘heart granteth / No penetrable entrance to [Lucrece’s] plaining’ (RL 558–9). Intolerably, it now seems to Coriolanus that he ‘received [wounds] for the hire / Of their breath only!’ (II, ii, 146–7) The recurring motif of referring to ‘breath’ and ‘tongue’ when talking about plebeian speech and opinion indicates how discomfiting plain physical bodies are to Coriolanus, at least apart from battle. ‘You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate / As reek o’th’ rotten fens . . . dead carcasses of unburied men / That do corrupt my air: I banish you’ (III, iii, 124–7), he declares just as he, in fact, is banished. You can’t fire me, I quit! John of Gaunt advises exiled Bolingbroke similarly: ‘Teach thy necessity to reason thus . . . Think not the King did banish thee, / But thou the King’ (R2 I, iii, 277–80). But the implication is the exact reverse. Bolingbroke-Henry IV hears a suggestion that manipulating perception, both the populace’s and one’s own, is the necessity reason discovers in politics. As another Roman warns, ‘When valor preys on reason, / It eats the sword it fights with’ (AC III, xiii, 201–2). The ‘carcasses’ corrupting Coriolanus’ air are the bodies of the starved plebeians. By bringing the animalistic issue of hunger into Roman politics they pollute his fantasy whereby human bodies are swordwielding statues, not vulnerable feeders. ‘I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge’ (I, i, 19–20), a citizen avows. Ample textual evidence suggests Shakespearean disdain for the commons, but it is easy to overstate this, or let it crowd out subtler counterevidence. Even the Jack Cade rebellion (2H6 IV, ii; IV, vii), despite its absurdities – ­Cade would make rivers flow with wine, abolish money and writing, sleep with every bride in the land – e­ xpresses poignant peasant grievances. The complaints of Cade and his men that ‘Virtue is not

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regarded in handicraftsmen’, that ‘The nobility . . . scorn to go in leather aprons’, that ‘justices of the peace . . . call poor men before them about matters they were not able to answer’ due to illiteracy seem, if anything, to underestimate the systematic injustice done by a nobility wishing, with the same play’s Suffolk, it ‘were a god, to shoot forth thunder / Upon these paltry, servile, abject drudges’ (2H6 IV, i, 52–3; IV, ii, 8–10; IV, vii, 27–36). At the very least, Shakespeare validates Aristotle’s warning that ‘many of the things that are held to be democratic destroy democracies, and many that are held to be oligarchic destroy oligarchies’ (Politics 1309b). And if one has to squint to find Shakespearean sympathy with urban masses, there is no difficulty whatever in feeling his regard for the countryside’s ‘true laborer’ who says ‘I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness; glad of other men’s good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck’ (AYLI III, ii, 64–7). Cade knighting himself is funny – s­ o, too, his claiming noble ancestry despite his populist rhetoric, and his peculiar communism whereby Englishmen will be ‘like brothers, and worship me their lord’ (2H6 IV, ii, 33; IV, ii, 67; IV, ii, 106). But turn the pages to later in Shakespeare’s career, or leave the minefield of recent English history for Rome or Denmark, and things get serious fast. Few elites are willing and able to stand thorough scrutiny into their origins. Cade’s preposterous claim to the crown is a reductio ad absurdum of the general situation in the histories, where there are as many ‘legitimate’ titles to succession as there are aspiring nobles to make them. (Evidence from Shakespeare’s life and work suggests fascination with the matter and symbolism of aristocratic legitimation.21) Broadly speaking, there are two methods for legitimating aristocracy: an elite exists simply by virtue of what it is, or, less simply, by virtue of what it does. That most historical aristocracies attempt to combine these does not eliminate the gap between them. Nietzsche’s story (Genealogy of Morals, I.7–11) of the transvaluation of values and the invention of ‘bad conscience’ famously critiques Judeo-Christian morality, but also records the transformation whereby a warrior (‘knightly-aristocratic’) aristocracy, previously legitimated by intrinsic character revealed in physical action, recedes before an intellectual (‘priestly’) aristocracy legitimated by political functionality. Livy’s History (I.19) recounts Numa’s second founding of a Rome ‘originally . . . founded by force of arms . . . a second beginning, this time on the solid basis of law and religious observance’.22 Menenius’ fable of the belly reduced the patrician claim to rule to functionality, the crack in the dam. Coriolanus is gradually flooded by the people and their new class of professional advocates. Threatened by public appropriation,

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made to feel functional, he sees himself not as digesting/distributing belly but as the devoured, inverting Menenius. The people are the state’s belly, ‘digest[ing] / The senate’s courtesy’; the deal struck with them ‘nourished disobedience, fed / The ruin of the state’ (III, i, 120–1; III, i, 134–5). Military valour should be highly regarded, Aristotle says, only when pursued for collective purposes, not as an end in itself (Politics 1325a). The fatal moment is political appropriation of Coriolanus’ war wounds, the offering-up of his body for public consumption by ‘the common mouth’; ‘Think / Upon the wounds his body bears, which show / Like graves i’th’ holy churchyard’ (3.1.23, 3.3.50–2). The parallels are to crucifixion/ resurrection, where Christ’s wounds were evidence, and Catholic communion, where the sacrificial body is ritually devoured. ‘I had rather have my wounds to heal again / Than hear say how I got them’; ‘Your multiplying spawn how can he flatter’, asks Menenius, ‘when . . . He had rather venture all his limbs for honor / Than one on’s ears to hear it?’ (II, ii, 65–6; II, ii, 74–7). The ‘multiplying spawn’ is the erotic-political world of states feeding citizens and mothers feeding children – l­iteral food, and the emotional food of collectivising myths – ­that pollutes Coriolanus’ ‘honor’. Volumnia tells him, ‘Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’st it from me’, but later declares, ‘Anger’s my meat, I sup upon myself, / And so shall starve with feeding’ (III, ii, 129–30, IV, ii, 53–4). She starved him by feeding him exclusively from the Thanatotic side, whether its positive ‘valiantness’ or negative ‘anger’. A cannibalistic image: when Volumnia dooms Coriolanus by persuading him not to destroy Rome, Shakespeare suggests he who could not join the communal feasting had to become the communal feast for Rome to endure. Volumnia imagines an exiled barbarian: ‘I would my son / Were in Arabia . . . good sword in his hand . . . He’d make an end of thy posterity’ (IV, ii, 21–8). He could return as vengeful conqueror, ‘a kind of nothing, titleless . . . forg[ing] himself a name o’th’ fire / Of burning Rome’ (V, i, 13–15). Dismissing friends’ and family’s suits he would ‘stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin’ (V, iii, 35–7), becoming the warrior-Narcissus earlier described by Sicinius, ‘viper / That would depopulate the city and / Be every man himself’ (III, i, 263–5). Not enslave every man, as in typical anti-tyranny rhetoric, but be every man . . . yet at the last moment Coriolanus falters. Volumnia warns him he is ‘Making the mother, wife, and child to see / the son, the husband, and the father tearing / His country’s bowels out.’ She neutralises his long-sought disemboweling of Rome with the only familiarity he recognises, and replaces the body part he refuses with the one he, neither beast nor God in the end, cannot escape: ‘to assault thy country’ is ‘to tread . . . on thy mother’s

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womb / That brought thee to this world’. His wife adds, ‘and mine, / That brought you forth this boy to keep your name / Living to time’ (V, iii, 102–4; V, iii, 123–8). They apparently successfully sue for peace by appealing to Coriolanus’ pride in posthumous reputation (V, iii, 143–5), but this is a red herring. A Coriolanus who destroyed Rome could have been remembered as a Volscian hero by a Volscian Livy, willingness to sacrifice familial bonds (as with Livy’s Lucius Junius Brutus) only increasing his name’s power. Anyway, he never fought for reputation before. Invocations of womb, son, and future reorient Coriolanus to the world of human generation more broadly. Volumnia saves Rome by bringing Coriolanus into contact with his physical site of origin and thus with the basic material commonness of all persons.

Crises of the Republic: Aristocratic Nostalgia, Imperial Executives, and the Coming of Christianity ‘On the Ides of March I gave up my life to my country, and since then for her sake I have lived another life which is free and glorious . . .’ But the day of the Republic was past . . . and it was necessary that the rule of a single man should take its place.  Plutarch’s Brutus [Phaedra to Hippolytus]: virtue was out of date in / Saturn’s reign and it died in the next age when / Jove decreed that virtue was pleasure. / Because Jove made his sister his wife the gods / have come to see that nothing is wrong. / The only enduring contract is that which / is preserved by the chains of Venus.Ovid’s Heroides

Above I contrasted Machiavelli’s republicanism with Cicero’s – ­the former attuned to body more than soul and tolerant, even encouraging, towards deception and dissimulation – a­ nd proposed an advance of Machiavellian values occurs in Coriolanus. Though preferable to the aristocratic terrorism promised by the title general, this remains a combustible mix. Coriolanus’ devalution of physical bodies threatened total social collapse; overvaluation, in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, means the subtler threat of decadence. Decadence is better than famine (pretty much anything is). But emphasis on private satisfactions enables deception to become more than one in case of emergency break open weapon in a political class’ arsenal. As republic turns into empire, it may become something more like a permanent relationship between government and governed – ­like Rome maintaining the fiction of popular rule after Augustus centralized power. ‘I do fear the people / Choose Caesar for their king’ ( JC I, ii, 81–2)

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says Brutus. Some choices are only genuinely made once. This creates a potential feedback loop: as public life seems increasingly mendacious and self-serving, private life is valued more. Living under the emperors, Tacitus is sceptical of self-serving talk about mixed regimes: ‘it is always one or the other – a­ mixture . . . is easier to applaud than to achieve, and besides, even when it is achieved, it cannot last long’. He laments that the history of his times lacks older chronicles’ glorious friezes: by Augustus’ ascent ‘government by Senate and People was looked upon sceptically as a matter of sparring dignitaries and extortionate officials’.23 Cicero confessed ‘so los[ing] my manly spirit that I prefer to be tyrannized over in peace and quiet such as is now rotting our fibre than to fight’ to Atticus.24 There may be a hole in material comfort inviting a different, spiritualised conception of the private world: the offstage, but implied, birth of Christianity in the cradle of Pax Romana. Augustine says Augustus ‘wrested from the Romans a liberty which was no longer glorious, even in their own estimation, but productive of strife and tragedy’, a liberty ‘unmistakably listless and enfeebled’ (Civ. Dei III.21).25 Yet there is a politically positive side to this development, in the Hegelian sense of the rise of the state as a facilitator of impersonal law. The Roman Empire, Perry Anderson writes, ‘rested on a system of civil laws, not merely royal caprice, and its public administration never interfered greatly with the basic legal framework handed down by the Republic’.26 Republican writers of Caesar’s time drew a sharp line between the austere Rome of Coriolanus and later decadence. Sallust denounces ‘degenerate days’ when one seeks only ‘to rival his ancestors in wealth and extravagance, instead of in uprightness and industry’.27 ‘What brought your simple shepherd people to such a pitch / Of blasphemous perversion?’ asks Juvenal. He has some suggestions: In the old days poverty Kept Latin women chaste: hard work, too little sleep, These were the things that saved their humble homes from corruption – ­ Hands horny from carding fleeces, Hannibal at the gates, Their menfolk standing to arms. Now we are suffering The evils of a too-long peace. Luxury, deadlier Than any armed invader, lies like an incubus Upon us still . . . . . . filthy Lucre it was that first brought these loose foreign Morals amongst us, enervating wealth that Destroyed us, over the years, through shameless self-indulgence.28

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(Shakespeare put ‘evils of a too-long peace’, or something similar, into several mouths.) Cassius complains, ‘Our fathers’ minds are dead . . . Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish’ ( JC I, iii, 81–3). Surprisingly, there is little of this in Machiavelli. He denounces the degeneracy and effeminacy of his own time as compared to pre-Christian Italy. But an extra-terrestrial reading the Discourses might never discern the difference between early and late Roman republic, or between republic and Empire. Both evinced strength, expansionist vigour and, for the most part, domestic peace. For Machiavelli, the relevant transition is in religion, leading politics, not in institutions per se. He indicts Christianity for having ‘glorified humble and contemplative men rather than men of action’, making ‘man’s highest good humility, abnegation, and contempt for mundane things, whereas’ Pagan religion glorified ‘magnanimity, bodily strength, and everything else that conduces to make men very bold’. Christians’ strength means ‘to suffer rather than . . . do bold things’, their virtue ‘how best to bear, rather than how best to avenge, their injuries’ (Disc. II.2). The emblem ne plus ultra of this seismic shift in values is, Nietzsche argues, Christ himself. A self-sacrificed God is ‘the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes!’29 Yet Machiavelli’s warning in Chapter VI of The Prince that only ‘armed prophets’ prevail fails to account for the world-historical victory of the unarmed Jesus. It begs the question to say, as Rousseau does in The Social Contract (IV.8), that history’s Christian warriors and conquerors are just carriers of non-Christian vestiges. Nietzsche’s chief culprit is St Paul: ‘a Buddhistic peace movement’ was ‘reversed by Paul into a pagan mystery doctrine, which finally learns to treat with the entire state organisation – a­ nd wages war, condemns, tortures, swears, hates’. Through Paul, Jesus’ ‘attempt to destroy priests and theologians culminated . . . in a new priesthood and theology’, and his ‘attempt to destroy the exaggerated inflation of the “person”’ produces ‘the most paradoxical excess of personal egoism’.30 Shakespeare, however immersed in Renaissance enthusiasm for rejuvenating aspects of Pagan antiquity, is not a polemicist assigning blame. He comes neither to praise Caesar nor to bury him, and the same could be said about Christ. The previous section read Coriolanus as a Pagan Christ story: Where Jesus was sacrificed to redeem eternal souls, Shakespeare’s Roman equivalent was sacrificed to redeem political life, here rooted in the commonness of bodily needs, the ‘animal’ in zoon politikon. Plato and Aristotle devalued him; Machiavelli insisted we render unto zoon that which is zoon’s. Allan Bloom says Shakespeare’s Brutus ‘systematically underrates the importance of what is lowest – t­ he body’, which could also be said of Coriolanus.31 Take Brutus’ haughty if pseudo-populist rebuke to

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Cassius during their conflict about paying for their army: ‘I can raise no money by vile means . . . I had rather coin my heart, / And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring / From the hard hands of the peasants their vile trash / By any indirection’ (IV, ii, 126–30). He who too arrogantly devalues the common body becomes ‘a disease that must be cut away’ in a surgery that serves as ‘physic / For the whole state’ (Cor. III, i, 296; III, ii, 31–2). This is why ‘it is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly’. Machiavelli deems ‘free’ polities where ‘every man is ready to have children, since he . . . feels sure that his patrimony will not be taken away’, where one may ‘obtain property . . . convinced that he will enjoy it when it has been acquired’; where there is a reasonable expectation against facing deprivation, the most absolute form of which is the starvation looming in Coriolanus. Yet Machiavelli also deems republican rule the ‘hardest . . . servitude’ as it aims to ‘deprive all other corporations of their vitality’. Rome’s creation of the tribunes was an example of ‘the blending of these estates’ that ‘made a perfect commonwealth’; Coriolanus’ expulsion exemplified ‘ways and means whereby the ambitions of the populace may find an outlet’ to exorcise that ‘feeling . . . apt to grow up in cities against’ overweening individuals or factions. Inverting Platonic and Aristotelian analysis, Machiavelli calls ‘quarrels between the nobles and the plebs’ a ‘primary cause’ of Roman freedom. The eternal ‘cycle through which all commonwealths pass’ described by Plato and Polybius endures until the polity ‘becomes subject to a neighboring and better organized state’, unless it ‘stabilize[s] the form of government’ as a peculiar sort of republic (Disc. I.2, I.4, I.7).32 Aristotle’s ideal ‘polity’ is a mixture of oligarchy and democracy: there should be popular veto points against elite rent-seeking, or vice versa, depending on the context (Politics 1293b, 1298b). Polybius, Greek historian of the rise of Rome, combines a Platonic account of natural regime cycles with Aristotelian praise of the ‘mixed constitution’ first given to Sparta by Lycurgus. Polybius says the Romans themselves are uncertain ‘whether [their] system was an aristocracy, a democracy or a monarchy’;33 Aristotle had proposed as a ‘defining principle’ of good government it being ‘possible to speak of the same constitution both as an oligarchy and as a democracy’ (Politics 1294b). They diverge, it would seem, on the virtues of popular enlightenment. The American offspring of Montesquieu, Hume and Federalist calls this a ‘mixed regime’ with ‘checks and balances’. But we claim to prize transparency, the public delineation of roles and privileges; Machiavelli suggests such compromises endure only through generous infusions of deception.34 We laud equality based in abstract and anonymous law; Machiavelli

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allows a significant role for scapegoating, states of emergency and reigns of terror (especially in new principalities, but republics as well). Balancing stability and change in republican Florence, for example, required periodic reinstallation of terror; avoiding the decadence caused by peace and wealth means manufacturing constant war fever (Disc. III.1, III.16). Harvey Mansfield describes Machiavelli ‘appropriating the Christian doctrine of holy war and adapting it to the acquisition of worldly empire’.35 This was revolutionary. Consider Erasmus’ contemporaneous advice to a prince, its tropes not far removed from those of Augustine: ‘Never forget that “dominion”, “imperial authority”, “kingdom”, “majesty”, “power” are all pagan terms, not Christian. The ruling power of a Christian state consists only of administration, kindness, and protection.’36 ‘What is this whole thing called fame’, Erasmus asks in a letter (1515), ‘but an empty title bequeathed to us by Pagan antiquity?’37 Quentin Skinner, who reads Machiavelli in the tradition of humanism and civic republicanism, nevertheless points out that he ‘makes one alteration – ­small in appearance but overwhelming in significance – ­to the classical analysis of the virtues . . . He erases the quality of justice’ and denies ‘observance of this virtue is invariably conducive to serving the common good’.38 Foundings and refoundings especially dictate their own ethics, so ‘exceedingly cruel, and . . . repugnant’ the Christian will ‘shun them . . . prefer[ring] rather to live as a private citizen than as a king’. Republics may require periodic dictatorship as ‘a way out of abnormal situations’ because ‘institutions normally used by republics are slow in functioning . . . to reconcile their diverse views takes time’. In corrupt republics, salvaging a partial republicanism depends on introducing a monarchical element ‘so that those men whose arrogance . . . cannot be corrected by legal processes, may yet be restrained to some extent by a quasi-regal power’ (Disc. I.18, I.26, I.34). Yet this may be a situation where the cure is worse than the illness – ­or the swapping of one disease for another. Coriolanus did not desire political power, could not perform even the negligible pandering required for it. He was thus resented by the people and respected by the aristocracy. Julius Caesar begins with the reverse: a successful power-seeker is loved by the people and resented by the aristocracy. ‘Coriolanus failed because he could not handle the people’, Allan Bloom writes, whereas ‘Caesar succeeded because he betrayed his own class and won the people by appealing to what is basest in them.’39 But ‘betrayal’ and ‘baseness’ are in the eye of the beholder. Shakespeare introduces post-republican Rome via a cobbler who, asked why he is not at work, declares, ‘we make holiday to see Caesar, and to rejoice in his triumph’ (I, i, 29–30). Plutarch’s Caesar, offering ‘dinner parties and

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entertainments and a certain splendor’ was ‘in the good graces of the ordinary citizens because of his easy manners and the friendly way in which he mixed with people’; he won plebeian favour ‘giving them feasts and allowances of grain, and gratified his soldiers by founding new colonies’.40 Roman success administering Britain, Tacitus reports, involved ‘accustom[ing] them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities’ instead of naked plunder and exploitation. Not that he approves of ‘the demoralising temptations of arcades, baths, and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as “civilization”, when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.’41 Augustus’ success, Tacitus claims, was similarly based on ‘cheap food policy’ and ‘the enjoyable gift of peace’; like Julius, he knew ‘it looked democratic to join in the people’s amusements’.42 If not wholly a regime of panem et circenses, this is at least, in Shakespeare, a world unlike that of Coriolanus: now Rome’s citizens are well fed. Caesar emphasises this to Antony: ‘Let me have men about me that are fat . . . Cassius has a lean and hungry look. / He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.’ To Antony’s erroneous assurance that Cassius is ‘not dangerous’, Caesar reiterates his political gastronomy: ‘Would he were fatter!’ (I, ii, 193–9) To Cassius, such fattening produces untoward political gigantism. Caesar ‘doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs and peep about / To find ourselves dishonorable graves.’ Caesar ‘would not be a wolf / But that he sees the Romans are but sheep’ (I, ii, 136–9; I, iii, 103–4). The zoological confusion of Coriolanus has been resolved. Sheep lies with wolf, foreshadowing the Roman–Christian merger. Inverting Coriolanus, Cassius disdains Rome’s citizenry for submitting to political-military superiority: ‘What trash is Rome . . . when it serves . . . to illuminate / So vile a thing as Caesar!’ (I, iii, 107– 10). Cassius goads Brutus into rebellion with the same trope Ulysses used on Achilles, much as his declaration that men’s ‘fates . . . [are] not in our stars, / But in ourselves’ (I, ii, 140–2) mirrors Ulysses’ attack on Agamemnon’s religious fatalism. ‘Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?’ Brutus responds, as if schooled in this particular philosophical quandary, ‘the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things’. Cassius deems it a pity Brutus has ‘no such mirrors as will turn / Your hidden worthiness into your eye’ – n ­ one among the cowed aristocracy, allegedly, will frankly tell Brutus their hopes. Cassius will ‘modestly discover to yourself / That of yourself which you yet not know of’ (I, ii, 53–72). But unlike Ulysses, Cassius is not the political operative fit for this moment, and the planners of the regicide/sacrifice are the martyrs in the end. As in Coriolanus, Caesar’s wounds link him to Christ.43 Octavius refers

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to avenging his ‘three and thirty wounds’ (V, i, 53). Brutus fantasises Caesar’s death in the language of feast-sacrifice: ‘Let’s be sacrificers, but not ­butchers . . . Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods’ (II, i, 166–74). Antony implores the commons to ‘go and kiss dead Caesar’s wounds, / And dip their napkins in his sacred blood’ and promises, an invertedCoriolanus, to ‘Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds . . . And bid them speak for me’ (III, ii, 127–30; III, ii, 216–17). Brutus gravely misinterprets the situation, imagining that if he proves the sacrifice ‘necessary, and not envious’ the conspirators ‘shall be called purgers, not murderers’ (II, i, 178–80). Diseases are purged; feast-sacrifices are incorporated. The successive funeral orations demonstrate the availability of both conceptualisations. Similar ambivalence haunts the symbolism of Christ’s crucifixion, the necessity of which believers are supposed to lament and celebrate, martyrdom directing its devotees to compassion and vengefulness. Brutus’ eulogy drafts the virtue of his republican ancestor, whose attachment to the polity trumped love for any individuals within it: . . . not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him . . . As he was valiant, I honor him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love . . . and death for his ambition. Who is here so base that would be a bondman? . . . I have done no more to Caesar than you shall do to Brutus . . . as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death.  (III, ii, 20–43)

He ironically foreshadows his later suicide, violence ‘do[ne] to Brutus’ when it pleases Rome to need his death – ­because of a desire for peace and order, not republican liberty. Antony knows the crowd’s political Eros is no longer attached to Brutus’ superannuated political abstractions. Richard Wilson calls Antony’s use of Caesar’s will a ‘deflection of the vox populi towards the institution of monarchy’.44 Caesar, Suetonius reports, knew ‘the Republic was . . . mere name without form or substance’.45 Even as Shakespeare’s crowd responds favourably to Brutus’ speech, one citizen says: ‘Let [Brutus] be Caesar’ (III, ii, 47). It seems the tyrranicides have wasted their energy. Desperate to stop the snowballing of public sentiment against them, the conspirators ‘decided to distribute bribes to the ordinary people’, Appian records. But this only revealed their quest’s hopelessness. As their republican counter-revolution was premised on the ‘thought that the people were genuinely Roman’, they ‘failed to realise that they were

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expecting two contradictory things . . . that [the people] should want to be free and at the same time take bribes’. While bribery may not necessarily produce amoral mercenaries, it hardly seems suited to austere, nostalgic republicanism. This was a republic, Appian writes, ‘rotten for a long time’, in which a ‘corn ration . . . supplied to the poor’ had brought ‘idle, destitute, and hotheaded elements of the Italian population’ to a capital already teeming with ‘discharged soldiers . . . ready to be hired cheaply for any purpose’.46 Antony, who understands the utility (then as now) of feigned folksiness in democratic politics, calling himself ‘no orator as Brutus is, / But . . . a plain blunt man / That love my friend’ (III, ii, 208–10), reminds the people Caesar ‘brought many captives home to Rome, / Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill . . . When the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept . . . You all did love him once’ (III, ii, 85–99). The final nail in the republican coffin is the reading of Caesar’s will giving ‘every Roman citizen . . . seventy-five drachmas’ and the public ‘his walks, / His private arbors, and new-planted orchards . . . common pleasures / To walk abroad and recreate yourselves’ (III, ii, 232–40). Juxtaposed against Brutus’ austere patriotism, Antony associates love with individuals, their personal relationships and physical pleasures. He ‘won the affections of the soldiers’, Plutarch writes, ‘by joining them in their exercises, spending much of his time among them, and providing gifts for them whenever the opportunity arose’.47 Brutus’ republicanism seems a backward-looking and reputationdriven distraction from his disinterest in ordinary politics.48 Plutarch records Cassius saying the people ‘look to the other praetors for public doles and spectacles and gladiatorial shows, but’ to Brutus ‘to deliver them from tyranny’. But if deliverance from ‘tyranny’ was genuinely important to them, why look to other praetors for anything? Even Cassius, Plutarch believes, was motivated by ‘personal animosity’, not ‘disinterested aversion to tyranny’, although ‘bitterness and animosity towards the whole race of those who seek to dominate their fellows’ could count as a principle.49 Shakespeare’s Brutus ‘love[s] / The name of honor more than I fear death’ (I, ii, 90–1). He and Cassius reconcile with death, individual and collective, by rendering Eros unto political honour in one last desperate stand. Just as Brutus foreshadows his death in the funeral oration, Cassius eulogises suicide when imagining Caesar as king: ‘Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius. / Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong; / Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat . . . life . . . Never lacks power to dismiss itself . . . That part of tyranny that I do bear / I can shake off at pleasure’ (I, iii, 89–99). Brutus and Cassius embrace individual death once they decide collective death has already taken place, the world ceded to Caesar’s lovers

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and inheritors. But Antony’s privatisation of Eros, as Shakespeare goes on to explore, carries its own dangers. In the century after Actium, Tacitus reports, ‘extravagant eating . . . reached fantastic heights’, and ‘rich families, noble and illustrious, were often ruined by their sumptuous tastes’.50 Plutarch describes Antony, prior to the discipline (temporarily) imposed by Julius Caesar, in a riot of ‘drunkenness . . . extravagant spending . . . gross intrigues with women’; he ‘appeared in public surfeited with food and vomited into his toga’; ‘golden drinking cups’ were ‘carried before him when he left the city, as if they were part of some religious procession’.51 Income inequality climbed as high as 20,000 to 1 in Rome (a few hundred had been the ratio’s upper limit in Greece).52 A translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia by Nicholas Rowe (1718), one of Shakespeare’s first editors and biographers, describes Cleopatra ‘display[ing] her wealthy store, / Excess unknown to frugal Rome before’ (X.163–4). To move from Coriolanus to Julius Caesar to Antony and Cleopatra is to move from dearth to fullness to surplus. Julius Caesar ‘Grew fat with feasting’ in Egypt (AC II, vi, 66). Shakespeare’s early republic was all starvation, from the impending famine to Coriolanus’ emaciated emotional life. The age of Caesar is well fed, ‘lean and hungry’ Cassius the primary source of instability. Antony’s world, featuring ‘Eight wild boars roasted whole at breakfast and but twelve persons there’ (II, ii, 186–7), goes past the political necessity inherited by Octavius/Augustus, experimenting with superfluity and excess. Cleopatra ‘makes hungry / Where most she satisfies’ (II, ii, 242–3), Volumnia reclaimed from Thanatos for voracious Eros. Hazlitt called her ‘the triumph of the voluptuous’.53 Cleopatra builds off Shakespeare’s Venus, who pleads concupiscence’s case against abstinence, contrasting ‘loathed satiety’ with ‘fresh variety’ and ‘time-beguiling sport’; the celibate ‘famish . . . amid . . . plenty’ (VA 19–24). Venus boasts of making the ‘direful god of war . . . my captive and my slave’; Mars ‘learned to sport and dance . . . wanton, dally, smile, and jest’ under her tutelage, a ‘prisoner in a red-rose chain . . . servile to my coy disdain’ (98–112). Similarly, Antony’s ‘captain’s heart . . . hath burst’ and ‘become the bellows and the fan/ To cool a gipsy’s lust’ (I, i, 1–10). Venus defeats Mars, Ovid’s god of war ‘Driven wild by a frantic passion’ and ‘transformed / From grim captain to lover’; ‘Mars has wheeled off, and today / Venus is in the ascendant’ (Ars Am. II.563–5, Amores I.8.30–1).54 Antony, formerly ‘like plated Mars, now bend[s]’ his ‘office and devotion . . . Upon a tawny front’ (I, i, 4–6). Even the eunuch Mardian experiences the frenzy: ‘I can do nothing . . . Yet have I fierce affections, and think / What Venus did with Mars’ (I, v, 15–18). Cleopatra ‘made great Caesar lay his sword to bed. / He ploughed her, and she cropped’ (II, ii,

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233–4), turning weapons from destruction to fecundity. This reaches its apogee as Antony abandons battle at Actium to chase after Cleopatra. He complains, ‘you were my conqueror . . . My sword, made weak by my affection, would / Obey it on all cause’ (III, xi, 65–8). But in Antony and Cleopatra there is no Vulcan, and if Antony periodically expresses Ovid’s exposed lover’s shame, Cleopatra does not. Is this the ‘eastern’ aspect of her status as Egyptian Venus?55 Sallust describes ‘the reckless gaiety and pleasure-seeking which a long period of tranquility had fostered’, where men ‘prostituted themselves like women’. He blames contamination from Asia, where soldiers ‘learned to indulge in wine and women, and to cultivate a taste for statues, pictures, and embossed plate, which they stole from private houses and public buildings, plundering temples and profaning everything sacred and secular alike’.56 Coriolanus’ heart only ‘burst’ forth in war, recapitulating Volumnia’s choice of blood-spitting wound over milk-giving breast. Antony explores different realms of Eros (tellingly, the name of one among his entourage): first the demotic promiscuity of Julius Caesar, now the part-private, partpublic pleasure-dome of Cleopatra’s palace. CLEOPATRA  If it be love indeed, tell me how much. ANTONY  There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned. CLEOPATRA  I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved. ANTONY  Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth . . . Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the ranged empire fall. Here is my space. Kingdoms are clay. Our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life Is to do thus; when such a mutual pair And such a twain can do’t . . . (I, i, 14–17; I, i, 35–49)

Coriolanus could not verbalise love for the Roman people because he had none; Antony cannot verbalise love for Cleopatra because, representing something like a new religion – ‘­new heaven, new earth’, a New Testament allusion (Rev. 21: 1) – i­t is too large and mysterious to be fully cognised. Like Coriolanus, Antony denigrates the brute physicality of Roman politics, whose empire of clay ‘feeds beast as man’; unlike Coriolanus he imagines replacing it with a religion of love, not war. The latter is politically problematic, I argued above, but unlike the former its drive towards hierarchy and discipline can at least approximate order. ‘Authority’, Antony muses, by contrast, ‘melts from me of late’ (III, xiii, 90), like Rome into the Tiber. In Lepidus’ diagnosis, Antony ‘filled / His

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vacancy with his voluptuousness’ (I, iv, 25–6). Cleopatra feminises him, reducing him to impotence as Volumnia does Coriolanus. But here the struggle is (roughly) between equals. Anne Barton says the play channels ‘one of the great Renaissance wish-dreams . . . exchange and union, not merely harmony, between the masculine and feminine principles’.57 Cleopatra fondly remembers the time she ‘put my tires and mantles on [Antony] whilst / I wore his sword Philippan’ (II, v, 33–4). Cleopatra embodies emotional miscegenation: ‘everything becomes [her] – t­ o chide, to laugh, / To weep; how every passion fully strives / To make itself, in thee, fair and admired!’ (I, i, 51–3) She tries to free Antony from Rome’s demand, oppressive to Coriolanus in a different way, that he rationally compartmentalise his emotions to serve a higher political goal. ‘He was disposed to mirth, but on the sudden / A Roman thought hath struck him’ (I, ii, 72–3). Geoffrey Miles claims Shakespeare’s Roman plays demonstrate consistent ambivalence about Stoicism.58 Accepting flux, Cleopatra rejects the Stoic conception of life lived according to nature as the disciplining of passion. Her naturalism seeks Godlike energy, not Godlike serenity: her ‘passions . . . are greater storms and temples than almanacs can report . . . she makes a shower of rain as well as Jove’ (I, ii, 133–7). Plotinus pictures the soul ‘rising to that place where it is free of all evils’, where ‘its proper nature is regained’, where ‘the real object of our love exist[s] . . . which we can intimately possess without being separated by the barriers of flesh’.59 Augustine’s Heavenly City, where the blessed possess ‘no animal bod[ies]’ but purely ‘spiritual bod[ies] with no cravings’ (Civ Dei XIX.17), is not the new heaven Antony and Cleopatra have in mind. Cleopatra centrifuges a Stoic description of Antony, ‘between the extremes / Of hot and cold, he was nor sad nor merry’, into those extremes: ‘sad or merry, / The violence of either thee becomes; / So does it no man else’ (I, v, 50–60). When she declares, ‘since my lord / Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra’ (III, xiii, 188–9), does she understand the heavy toll such proteanism takes on him? Harold Goddard says Cleopatra ‘has all the moral neutrality of nature’.60 Similarly, Northrop Frye describes a mythic-romantic archetype, using terms that fit Cleopatra well: ‘characters who elude the moral antithesis of heroism and villainy generally are or suggest spirits of nature . . . of the intermediate world’.61 Yet she is decidedly earthbound, no fairie or sprite of the Tempest variety. The ‘vilest things / Become themselves’ in Cleopatra; even ‘holy priests / Bless her when she is riggish [sluttish]’ (II, ii, 243–5). Her energy is continually recharged through contrariety. ‘If you find [Antony] sad, / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick’ (I, iii, 3–5) makes a coy erotic game out of pleasure’s duality.

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That duality typically provokes melancholy in Shakespeare’s tragedies – a­ s it sometimes does to Antony here. ‘The present pleasure, / By revolution low’ring, does become / The opposite of itself’ just as ‘quietness, grown sick of rest, would purge / By any desperate change’ (I, ii, 113–15; I, iii, 47–54). ‘I am quickly ill and well; / So Antony loves’ (I, iii, 72–3), Cleopatra sighs, but that eternal unsettled play of opposites is, for her, Eros simpliciter. Its socially tangible purpose, children, figure in the political plot, but hardly at all in the lovers’ conversation.62 Shakespeare’s Venus, like his sonneteer, pleads with Adonis that ‘Beauty within itself should not be wasted’; flowers ‘not gathered in their prime / Rot, and consume themselves’ (VA 130–2). Adonis’ celibacy is ‘growth’s abuse . . . beauty breedeth beauty: / Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty’ (166–8). But immortal Venus need not attend to such concerns. She may breed if she wants, but without the imperative to ameliorate death’s oblivion in so doing. His body might be ‘a swallowing grave, / Seeming to bury that posterity . . . thou needs must have’, but hers is not. She prosecutes ‘fruitless chastity, / Love-lacking vestals and self-loving nuns’ that on ‘earth would breed a scarcity / And barren dearth of daughters and of sons’ – b ­ ut she comes from a different theology than Genesis’ and follows this not with ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ but with ‘Be prodigal’ (751 ff.). Cleopatra speaks ‘Of us that trade in love’ (II, v, 2), a time traveller from some ancient Mesopotamian religion of temple prostitution. Her position is increasingly precarious in a world of monogamy and chastitycults, the world of ‘holy, cold, and still’ Octavia, ‘a body rather than a life, / A statue than a breather’, ‘chastis[ing] with [her] sober eye’ (II, vi, 120; III, iii, 20–21; V, ii, 53). Octavius’ response to Antony’s popularity – ­‘This common body . . . Goes to, and back, lackeying the varying tide, / To rot itself with motion’ (I, iv, 44–7) – c­ ould be a Philippic against Cleopatrism as much as a complaint about a fickle populace. Romans who mourn Cleopatra’s influence either reject or misunderstand the Dionysiac quest to gain freedom by surrendering unity and control: ‘sometimes when he is not Antony / He comes too short of that great property / Which still should go with Antony’ (I, i, 59–61), Philo reports. Her ‘infinite variety’ that ‘Age cannot wither . . . nor custom stale’ (II, ii, 240–1) impedes Octavius’ project of imposing uniformity across the Mediterranean, as in Thidias’ plea that she ‘put [her]self under his shroud, / The universal landlord’ (III, xiii, 71–2). Whatever tranquility this landlord promises (‘universal peace is near . . . the three-nooked world / Shall bear the olive freely’ (IV, vi, 4–6)) is mediated by a ‘shroud’ obscuring beauty, or softening the sensual experience of burying a corpse.63

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Augustine admits Rome ‘was better ruled by the Romans of antiquity than by their later successors’; nevertheless, ‘true justice is only found in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ’. This new solution, outside of politics, to the problem of post-republican decadence ‘frees you from such oppressions’, succeeding where Cassius and Caesar failed (Civ. Dei I.30–2, II.18–21, III.21). Antony and Cleopatra is conspicuously devoid, on both the winning and losing side, of the patriotic oration and common-good discourse found in the other Roman plays.64 One strand of Pagan tradition indeed suggests that Octavius’ censorious tee-totaling, not Antony’s suggestion to crown a political conference by ‘tak[ing] hands / Till that the conquering wine hath steeped our sense / In soft and delicate Lethe’ (II, vii, 101–3), is the counter-traditional anomaly. Still, Antony’s language of softness and forgetfulness bodes ill, juxtaposed against imperially armed sobriety. Richard Crookback suggests his Machiavellianism works undetected because the court has abandoned war-readiness for the ‘fair well-spoken days’ and ‘idle pleasures’ of peace, ‘caper[ing] nimbly in a lady’s chamber / To the lascivious pleasing of a lute’. In this environment the man ‘not shaped for sportive tricks’, or uninterested in them, he who ‘cannot prove a lover’, has ‘no delight to pass away the time’ except patiently accumulating power. This particular power-seeker thinks the only alternative to proving a lover is ‘prov[ing] a villain / And hat[ing]’ the world around him (R3 I, i, 12–31). Shakespeare’s mature tragedies provide a more nuanced counterpoint between political and erotic imperatives. Rome’s demand that its ‘heroes’ be wholly public personae is simply too hard. One potential solution: compartmentalise the self into public and private such that utilitarian administration defines the former while the latter gets the moody food of love, spiritual or physical. That inverts the Aristotelian public/private distinction, where the household realm runs on calculation and administration, and polis outside and above it brings forth friendship and love.65 This was a legal–philosophical revolution. Rome’s public/ private distinction was more thorough than the Greek polis/household. As Ellen Wood explains, it created ‘a new and probably unprecedented kind of private sphere’ and ‘a historically unprecedented partnership between the state and property, in contrast to all other known civilisations in which a powerful state meant a relatively weak regime of private property’ – t­he emblematic Roman elite career involved accumulation and management of property as much as, or more than, political or military exploits.66 Cicero was ‘sure’ his ‘passion to be famous . . . is not dishonorable’.67 Yet his indictment of the ‘tranquility [sought] by abandoning public business and fleeing to a life of leisure’ (Off I.69) depends, for its pejorative

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force, on leisure’s content. A letter of this dedicated propagandist for public service confesses, ‘My brilliant, worldly friendships may make a fine show in public, but in the home they are barren things . . . I go down to the forum surrounded by droves of friends, but . . . I cannot find one with whom I can pass an unguarded joke or fetch a private sigh.’ After Caesar’s victory, another letter declares, ‘I have dropped all my concern for public affairs, all preoccupation with what to say in the Senate, all study of briefs, and flung myself into the camp of my old enemy Epicurus.’68 While in Rome Octavian ‘was wearing himself out in the never-ending struggle of party politics and civil war’, Plutarch records Antony ‘reveling in the delights of peace and infinite leisure’.69 Appian’s account of this last phase of the civil wars interestingly downplays xenophobic rhetoric of Eastern decadence, portraying, instead, an Antony who wore the square Greek garment instead of his native Roman one, and his shoes were the white Attic type . . . worn by the priests at Athens and Alexandria. He went out only to temples or gymnasia or scholarly discussions, and . . . laid aside the role of commander to assume the simplicity, Greek clothes, Attic shoes, and quiet front door of a private citizen. Likewise there was no pomp when he went out, with a couple of friends and a couple of attendants, to the schools of the teachers or to lectures.70

Consider, in Shakespeare’s version, Antony’s supine plea after Actium that Octavian ‘let him breathe between the heavens and the earth, / A private man in Athens’ (III, xii, 13–15). Is this the final destination of the ‘new heaven, new earth’ he dreamed of when embracing the last Pharaoh? A fate perhaps better suited to a middling prelate of Shakespeare’s English histories like the Bishop of Carlisle, instructed by Bolingbroke to ‘Choose out some secret place . . . and with it joy thy life. / So as thou livest in peace, die free from strife’ (R2 V, vi, 25–7). Similarly, in a ruminative, melancholy mood before Agincourt, Henry V wonders What infinite heartsease Must kings neglect that private men enjoy? And what have kings that privates have not too, Save ceremony, save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idol, ceremony? What kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers? What are thy rents? What are thy comings-in? O ceremony, show me but thy worth.

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What is thy soul of adoration? Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form, Creating awe and fear in other men? Wherein thou art less happy, being feared, Than they in fearing. 

(H5 IV, i, 218–31)

Self-serving self-pity, to be sure: Hal succeeds partly because he is a great dissembler, and the most accomplished liars can lie to themselves. If anyone can quantify the ‘rents’ and ‘comings-in’ represented by ‘ceremony’ it is the king! He promotes his utility when he claims no king Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave Who with a body filled and vacant mind . . . . . . follows so the ever-running year With profitable labor to his grave. And but for ceremony such a wretch, Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep, Had the forehand and vantage of a king. The slave, a member of the country’s peace, Enjoys it, but in gross brain little wots What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace, Whose hours the peasant best advantages. 

(H5 IV, i, 250–66)

Still, that Shakespeare writes such a lengthy study of the public man – ­his greatest English King, moreover – l­ooking inward and questioning the value of glory helps illuminate what changes on the road from ancient Rome. When the chorus in Henry V recounts the conquering King’s return to England, London ‘doth pour out her citizens . . . Like to the senators of th’antique Rome / With the plebeians swarming at their heels, / Go forth and fetch their conqu’ring Caesar in’ – ­but Henry, here, is a sort of fusion of Coriolanus and Caesar. The lords desire him to have borne His bruised helmet and bended sword Before him through the city; he forbids it, Being free from vainness and self-glorious pride, Giving full trophy, signal, and ostent Quite from himself, to God. 

(V, Prologue, 16–28)

The private realm, in Hal’s speech, is not only an oikos that can be dumbly sated without partaking the polis’ glory. It is something deeper, something

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in the person: a recognition that power’s goods stand exposed as empty or fraudulent. Value must lie elsewhere – b ­ ut where? Religion? Art? Love?71 Antony and Cleopatra’s attempted religion of love, I have suggested, mirrors the coming of Christianity under Pax Romana. Later Christian apologists like Lactantius and Augustine partially deified the Pagan empire as, in Anthony Pagden’s description, ‘God’s instrument in the world whose purpose was to prepare the way for its ultimate conversion to Christianity’, just as Dante and Frederick II accorded the Aeneid semisacred status.72 Virgil’s ‘messianic’ Eclogue, later taken to presage the origin of Christianity under Augustus, was probably actually written to celebrate Antony and Octavia’s political-dynastic marriage: The great succession of centuries is born afresh. Now too returns the Virgin; Saturn’s rule returns; A new beginning now descends from heaven’s height. O chaste Lucine, look with blessing on the boy Whose birth will end the iron race at last and raise A golden through the world . . .73

But this play’s Octavia is chaste as the virgin mother, peripheral to Antony’s more authentic marriage. Shakespeare also (anachronistically) connects the lovers’ defeat to Jesus by having both Charmian and Cleopatra refer to ‘Herod of Jewry’ (I, ii, 24; III, iii, 3–6; Enobarbus reports Herod’s defection from Antony to Caesar (IV, vi, 13)). Cleopatra’s ‘That Herod’s head / I’ll have’ associates her with Salome and John the Baptist. Are she and Antony a way station between Rome and Jerusalem, preparing the revelation of ‘new heaven, new earth’ but incapable of understanding a kingdom fully not of this world? Lars Engle suggests ‘hints about the coming of Christ in the play . . . support the plausibility of a different kind of empire ruled in a collaborative and contestatory political style by Antony and Cleopatra and Octavius’.74 It depends on whether one reads the sacrificial motif through a lens of incorporation or banishment/excision. Augustine ridicules Pagan rites, their belief that through ‘perishable sacred objects . . . the temporal felicity of their city can be preserved imperishably’ (III.18). The religion of worldly love is hazardous. However poetically it speaks the language of eternity, its faith is in bodies, other ‘perishable sacred objects’. (Cleopatra tells a bearer of bad news, ‘Some innocents ‘scape not the thunderbolt’ (II, v, 77).) That Antony, ‘triple pillar of the world transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool’ ‘hath given his empire / Up to a whore’ (I, i, 12–13; III, vi, 66–7) is the propagandistic tunnelvision of Caesarism. It does not match the audience’s experience of the

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play. Still, the extent to which Shakespeare mediates the lovers’ portrayal through other characters’ (typically state functionaries’) commentary is noteworthy.75 The erotic superflux of Egypt always risks nullification by an unavoidable political world. Missing Antony, Cleopatra ‘feed[s] myself / With most delicious poison’, but quickly recollects being a ‘morsel’ for Pompey (I, v, 26–34). When Enobarbus hears Lepidus was forced out of the triumvirate, the alimentary trope turns bloody: ‘world, thou hast a pair of chops, no more, / And throw between them all the food thou hast, / They’ll grind the one the other’ (III, v, 12–14). One solution: displace Eros onto a more permanent entity. Previously this was the ‘earthly city’ Rome, whose heroes, Augustine reports, sought glory ‘not in life eternal, but in the process where the dying pass away and are succeeded by those who will die in their turn’, who imagined ‘life after death on the lips of those who praised them’ (V.14). But this, too, is an Eros working through perishable bodies, however it grasps at higher things. Only a kingdom with neither conception nor extinction, bookends of human impermanence, solves that problem. Augustine’s heavenly city ‘is eternal; no one is born there, because no one dies’. Brutus’ filicide, emblem of republican virtue, is a horror this ‘other country compels no one to do’; Romulus’ expiation of crimes during the earthly foundation of Rome becomes the divine remission of sins in heaven (V.16–18). The defeat of Eros by death is foreshadowed from the play’s beginning. Enobarbus is that familiar Shakespearean character whose earthy, sarcastic commentary on surrounding events resonates beyond its immediate content. When Antony proposes returning to Rome after hearing of Fulvia’s death, Enobarbus responds, ‘Cleopatra catching but the least noise of this dies instantly. I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment . . . she hath such a celerity in dying’ (I, ii, 129–31). Comic banter-wise, he is calling her a drama queen. But the audience knows Cleopatra will die for love, sacrificed to the Roman imperium, so such language cannot be limited to its playful context. Coriolanus tragically sought an identity completely void of reference to others. Cleopatra swings the pendulum to the other side: ‘my becomings kill me when they do not / Eye well to you’ (I, iii, 97–8). Northrop Frye calls her Shakespeare’s paean to the stage, ‘the essence of theater’.76 To perpetually or cyclically die is the privilege of the fertility goddess: ‘if Hercules deserts Antony’, Tony Tanner writes, Antony ‘goes on to play Osiris to Cleopatra’s Isis’.77 Plutarch describes Antony entering Ephesus trailing ‘women dressed as Bacchantes and men and boys as Satyrs and Pans . . . people hailed him as Dionysus the Benefactor and the Bringer of Joy’. Cleopatra met him ‘dressed in the character of Venus . . . come to revel with Bacchus for the

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happiness of Asia’.78 Cassius Dio records Egyptian artists depicting Antony as Osiris, Dionysus or Serapis, with Cleopatra as Selene or Isis: ‘it was this practice . . . which gave the impression that she had laid him under some spell and deprived him of his wits’.79 To Roman austerity, cyclical death is blasphemous, the curse of one too tied to life: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once’; ‘he that cuts off twenty years of life / Cuts off so many years of fearing death’ ( JC II, ii, 32–3; III, i, 102–3). At least I only have to die once, a timocratic Coriolanus or Stoic Brutus could chide Cleopatra. The drama queen might justly reply, precisely. You have your ways of ‘mock[ing] the midnight bell’ and I have mine: ‘Let’s have one other gaudy night . . . Fill our bowls once more’ (III, xiii, 185–7). Do not go gently into that gaudy night. Coppélia Kahn sees in Cleopatra’s death ‘marital consummation through reunion with Antony . . . as a Roman wife’.80 I am not so sure. That quintessential Roman wife Octavia rankles Cleopatra as much as ever, ‘her modest eyes / And still conclusion’ symbolising the ‘dull world [where] there is nothing left remarkable’, only ‘such poor passion as the maid that milks / And does the meanest chores’ (IV, xvi, 28; IV, xvi, 62–77). What apotheosis, finally, is granted Antony and Cleopatra? Initially Antony, ‘No more a soldier’ (IV, xv, 42), fantasises carrying the party into the Elysian Fields, where ‘Dido and Aeneas shall want troops, / And all the haunt be ours. Come, Eros, Eros!’ (IV, xv, 53–4). But Eros the underling now serves death, and Antony switches to a Stoic register when requesting euthanasia. Now he sounds like the republicans he outmatched after Julius Caesar’s death: ‘Thou strik’st not me; ’tis Caesar thou defeat’st’, Antony promises, and Cleopatra ‘by her death Caesar tells / ‘I am conqueror of myself’ (IV, xv, 61–8); ‘Not Caesar’s valor / Hath o’erthrown Antony, but Antony’s / Hath triumphed on itself . . . none but Antony should conquer Antony’ (IV, xvi, 14–17). In Stoicism, the omnipresent possibility of suicide was the power of the powerless, the freedom even slaves possess. ‘We’re born unequal, we die equal’, writes Seneca, and ‘no one has power over us when death is within our own power’.81 But Antony uses martial rather than philosophical language: he and Cleopatra are conquerors of themselves, not liberators. Enobarbus shall ‘conquer him that did his master conquer, / And earns a place i’th’story’ (III, xiii, 44–5). This bears the mark of Cleopatrism. The purpose of resistance is not political or moral but aesthetic, one’s ‘place in the story’. Cleopatra does employ Senecan rhetoric later, saying the arrival of her asps ‘brings me liberty’. Tellingly, here she describes herself with Octavia-like language: ‘I have nothing / Of woman in me. Now from head to foot / I am marble-constant’ (V, ii, 233–6).

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How could votaries of a religion of earthly passion see death as Stoic liberation? Cleopatra leavens the Elysian fantasy with realism: ‘Had I great Juno’s power / The strong-winged Mercury should fetch thee up / And set thee by Jove’s side. Yet come a little. / Wishers were ever fools. O come, come, come!’ (IV, xvi, 35–8). The Olympian ideal – ­eternity/ immortality combined with concupiscence, not an escape from or negation of it – ­is worn out. Antony, like the Eros he calls on above, comes no more, not on earth, not in heaven. Cleopatra’s final ‘dream’ of dead Antony pictures a fertility God complementing her superflux: ‘For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas, / That grew the more by reaping’ (V, ii, 85–7). But this transfiguration only takes place in her imagination. It is material not for theology but for that secular site of cathartic ritual, the theatre, where Cleopatra can, after a fashion, live and die in perpetuity. (Augustine’s Confessions (I.13) shamefacedly recalls a time when the author wept for Dido, but not for God.) Can the stage validate Cleopatra’s ‘immortal longings’ (V, ii, 272)? The same problem attended Troilus and Cressida’s betrothal to posterity, though Shakespeare himself gives Antony and Cleopatra the better deal. Poetry’s subjects, the sonnets promise, ‘outlive a gilded tomb . . . praised of ages yet to be’ (101), that ‘eternal summer [that] shall not fade’ (18). Shakespeare contrasts ‘gilded monuments / Of princes’ with his ultimately more ‘powerful rhyme’ (55). Yet he also, in importuning sexual reproduction, refers to ‘my barren rhyme . . . my verse . . . as a tomb’ compared to the regeneration childrearing provides (16–17). Cleopatra is not optimistic. What the near future has in store, she guesses (correctly), is ‘scald rhymers’ who will ‘Ballad us out o’ tune’, Roman ‘comedians’ who will ‘stage . . . Our Alexandrian revels. Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’th’ posture of a whore’ (V, ii, 211–17). The only power left as imperial troops approach is to ‘throw my scepter at the injurious gods, / To tell them that this world did equal theirs / Till they had stol’n our jewel’ (IV, xvi, 78–80). Eros giveth and Eros taketh away. Requesting death, Antony reminds him, ‘When I did make thee free, swor’st thou not then / To do this when I bade thee? . . . Draw, and come’ (IV, xv, 81–4). The last orgasm is the sword’s. Ovid, Shakespeare’s favourite Roman poet and frequent fount of source material, wished to ‘die on the job’: ‘What a bliss to expire in Love’s duel . . . Let the soldier stick out his chest as a target for hostile / Arrows, purchase eternal renown with blood . . . I’d like to reach dissolution, / In mid-act’ (Amores II.10.29–36).82 A familiar notion, commonly passed off as joyous, life-affirming, ribald – ­but whatever the tone, it simultaneously

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represents a disturbing tendency to link sex and death. (The Alexandrians, Plutarch writes, ‘used to say that Antony put on his tragic mask for the Romans, but kept the comic one for them’.83) Eros steals a march on the general, killing himself rather than dutifully executing Antony. He outStoics his (suddenly) Stoic overseer, escaping intolerable necessity. Antony reacts by taking death into his own hands, becoming ‘bridegroom in my death . . . run[ning] into’t / As to a lover’s bed . . . Eros, / Thy master dies thy scholar. To do thus / I learned of thee’ (IV, xv, 99–103). Thanatotic rendezvous with political reality was foreordained from the moment Antony freed passion from its traditional Roman constraints. The Eros in Augustus’ court, one presumes, remains a slave. The state has a longevity no body can match. With the fall of Antony and triumph of Augustus, the conflict between warrior self-aggrandisement and political rationalism I traced from Troilus and Cressida to the Roman civil wars comes to a sort of provisional terminus. Three elite attempts to reaffirm aristocratic values by positioning them against common ones have failed: Coriolanus’ narcissistic dedication to war for war’s sake; Cassius and the conspirators’ virtue-nostalgic counter-revolution against Caesarean populism; Antony and Cleopatra’s erotic apotheosis, attempting to make common passions uncommon, even Godlike, by hyperinflating them. Victory belongs to the use of words rather than force or, more precisely, words managing force: Ulysses, Brutus and Sicinius, the pre-decadent Antony of Caesar’s funeral oration. ‘He words me’, Cleopatra’s dismissal of Octavius’ suit, is also a sidelong acknowledgement of his strength. And the hole I suggested might lurk at the centre of Ulysses’ rationalism – i­ts seeming lack of any purpose beyond power-accumulation – ­has been filled by a concept of remarkable staying power, the common good. There are some lingering questions, though. If that common good is defined as Shakespeare’s Rome increasingly seems to want to define it, as provisioning of resources, then are republican institutions necessarily preferable to benevolent despotism? A Roman official brags to King Cymbeline of ‘Caesar, that hath more kings his servants than / Thyself domestic officers’ (III, i, 61–2) – b ­ ut such strength could be reinterpreted as weakness to the extent that loyalty and legitimacy erode as their objects become more distant and intangible. Perhaps participation is as much of a common good as other, more tangible resources? The domination of caring parent over well-fed child is different from that of aloof master over minimally fed slave, but it is still domination. Perhaps, moreover, participation is the precondition for ensuring the fair dispersal of those resources will be stable. Above I demonstrated how Shakespeare used Menenius’ fable, with

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its organic analogy, to introduce tensions in ancient politics; the analogy that similarly elicited the critical skills of modern political theorists was that between polity and (patriarchal) family. The organic analogy intrinsically privileges hierarchy and stasis, since the function of a body part does not change over time, even if a suddenly populist king can declare seemingly humble (though in this case secretly noble) subjects ‘the liver, heart and brain of Britain’ (Cym. V, vi, 14). The familial analogy appears designed to legitimate hierarchy, yet also threatens to disturb it due to the non-static nature of familial relationships. ‘Honor thy Father and Mother, cannot mean an absolute Subjection to a Sovereign Power, but something else’, Locke decides. ‘The right, therefore, which Parents have by Nature . . . cannot be . . . political Dominion.’84 A stomach is always a stomach, but a daughter ceases to be just a daughter (ceases even, when her parents die, to be a daughter at all?) as she becomes wife, mother, grandmother. Part II of this book covers plays in which family dynamics are not only central (that describes nearly all Shakespeare plays) but politically salient. Sir John Fortescue’s Praise of the Laws of England (1468–71) says that in the well-ordered kingdom one’s fear of the law ‘is as a son’s for his father’.85 Like most political writers of the time, Fortescue affirms the standard Aristotelian distinction: just kings rule for the general good, tyrants follow personal desires. But missing, from the point of view of modern citizens schooled in Locke and Mill, is the obvious disanalogy. Sons become the new fathers of new sons, like Aristotle’s ideal citizen-legislators rule, and are ruled in turn. Early modern theorists of absolutism like Hobbes and Bodin attacked the king/tyrant distinction on another ground. In the inherited Christian– Platonic conceptual map Hobbes – w ­ hose social contract theory frames the next chapter – ­rejects, passion/desire/sin faces justice/reason/virtue, and only education’s moulding of noble character ensures the good angel’s victory. As Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince (1516) admits, virtue’s centrality to leadership is in tension with the ubiquitous role of heredity in monarchical succession. Monarchy is the best form of government if the monarch follows ‘the example of God’, because ‘God is the very opposite of a tyrant’; but Erasmus admits that since even well-educated princes tend to fall short of this ideal, it is ‘better to have a limited monarchy checked and lessened by aristocracy and democracy’.86 The next leap in Western political thought – ­comparatively undeveloped even in Erasmus’ great contemporary Machiavelli – t­akes us from the battered viewpoint that only moral exhortation and/or fear of hellfire solves the problem, to what Albert Hirschmann identifies as the ‘new doctrine’ of interests as stabilisers between passion and reason – ­between

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Cleopatra and Ulysses, as it were. Mapping passion and reason as ultimate poles leaves self-interest in a sort of no man’s land, status-wise, but abandoning the poles for the excluded middle bears fruit: ‘Once passion was deemed destructive and reason ineffectual . . . Interest was seen to partake in effect of the better nature of each, as the passion of self-love upgraded and contained by reason, and as reason given direction and force by that passion.’ This move pressured political theory to shift focus from moulding the perfect prince to designing optimising institutions.87 Comparing tyranny with legitimacy was not, for Hobbes and Bodin, entirely wrong; monarchs who behaved with needless brutality could be admonished. But distinctions that frame political questions in character terms foreclose possibilities of institutional reform. Anything beyond mere tinkering requires the ‘sovereign’ to be depersonalised to an extent that throne-and-altar ideology, however amenable to absolutism otherwise, greeted suspiciously. Such depersonalisation and rationalisation of sovereignty, I argue in the next chapters, frames the politics of King Lear and the Henriad.

PART II

Shakespearean Modernity Reason’s empire is growing by the day. Increasingly it requires the restoration of rights that were usurped. Sooner or later every single class will come to be bound by the limits of the social contract . . . True human bonds may have been destroyed during the long night of feudal barbarism. Every notion may have been overturned and justice corrupted. But as light begins to dawn, gothic absurdity will have to take flight, and the last vestiges of ancient ferocity will fall and be annihilated . . . The question is then whether we will simply substitute one evil for another or whether true social order in all its beauty will come to replace ancient disorder. Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? (1789) I fear that at the end of all these agitations which rock thrones, sovereigns may be more powerful than ever before. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840)

CHAPTER 3

KING LEAR AND THE STATE OF NATURE

But what father in the flesh desires his children always to be infants so that he may have more control over them for his own pleasure? Erasmus to Paul Volz (1518) Had the patriarchs their power given them by their own children? . . . If, then, fatherhood enjoyed this authority for so many ages by the law of nature, when was it lost, or when forfeited, or how is it devolved to the liberty of the multitude? Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha

This chapter, which focuses on King Lear, begins the conversation between Shakespeare and modern political theory that makes up the rest of the book. In the Introduction I cited Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision, which interpreted modern political theory as a web of attempts to adapt politics to two consecutive eruptions existing structures could not contain: first, Reformation religious passions; second, social upheavals caused by the dawning of capitalism. The minimal precondition for agile response to such crises was a state unshackled from medieval societies’ traditional ‘two swords, three estates’ ideology.1 In practice, of course, Western nation states modernised over hundreds of years, and in markedly different ways depending on local circumstances. Here I focus, theoretically, on one of the process’ major legitimating concepts: the ‘social contract’ authorised by escape from a ‘state of nature’. A ‘two swords, three estates’ conception prizing, at least officially, religious uniformity and social stasis, is ill-equipped to deal with modernisation pressures rendering creedal pluralism and commercial-­technological growth increasingly non-refusable. The social contract idea claims

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credibility through better accommodating those facts. If government’s main purpose is not to perfect us but protect us from each other’s worst depredations – ­lawless violence – t­hen different confessions should ideally have no more difficulty coexisting than people of different eye colour. (The difficult question, taken up in Chapter 5, is how much religions themselves must change to facilitate this project.) And a political order whose foundational purpose is to protect individuals from anarchic violence moves naturally, once this is accomplished, to foregrounding the goods such protection enables and/or relies upon: property accumulation, technological innovation, trade. Before turning to King Lear, I shall briefly consider Cymbeline as a kind of coda to the Roman sequence examined in the last chapter, and a bridge between Shakespearean Antiquity and Modernity. It serves well as such a bridge due to both its geographical and temporal location. Cymbeline’s Britain is a tributary of Augustus’ Roman Empire flirting with calls for independence, ‘more ordered than when Julius Caesar / Smiled at their lack of skill but found their courage / Worthy his frowning at’ (II, iv, 21–3). Yet it also resembles Lear’s Dark Ages England, with sinning and sinnedagainst royals chased out of castles to live as savages in a wilderness where ‘law / protects not’ and one ‘Play[s] judge and executioner all himself’ (IV, ii, 126–9). Giacomo, the cad who wreaks havoc slandering Imogen’s chastity, is more a stereotypical Italian Renaissance courtier than a Roman imperial officer, linking ancient opposition to Caesar and modern English diffidence about continental machinations. When Giacomo, having snuck into Imogen’s bedroom, invokes Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece (II, ii, 12), Shakespeare recalls the republicanisation of early Rome that followed from Brutus’ making the crime a matter of public justice rather than private revenge (RL 1830 ff.). Here, then, a later historical movement is suggested to follow a similar model: such a Rome, having grown bloated and despotic over centuries, will fall before a modern brand of political entrepreneurs dedicated not to republicanism but to nationalism. (Or: republicanism, to be modern, must also be national, not just municipal.) In modern political theory there is – ­to follow upon my genre discussion in the Introduction – a­ tragic and comic model for the state of nature. The tragic, Hobbesian model figures nature as a nightmare from which political authority is tasked to wake us, and granted extensive forces with which to do so. The comic, Rousseauian model figures nature as a lost source of virtue and happiness, still discernible however buried beneath layers of civilized distortion.2 Lear’s stormy heath to one side, As You Like It’s Arden forest to the other: Cymbeline’s wild periphery is a mixture. Belarius tells secretly royal sons being raised in rusticity of the treachery

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and artifice infecting courts: ‘this life / Is nobler . . . Richer than doing nothing for a bauble, / Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk.’ But they complain simplicity is ‘A cell of ignorance . . . A prison for a debtor, that not dares / To stride a limit’ (III, iii, 21–34). And disguised Imogen, venturing into their cave, gives equal odds to being plundered (by the ‘savage’) and being helped (by the ‘civil’). Newly naturalised and desperate, Imogen knows her trespass could be interpreted as criminal, ‘yet famine, / Ere clean it overthrow nature, makes it valiant’ (III, vi, 19–24). Like Lear, Cymbeline is (at least at the beginning of the play) a cantankerous despot surrounded by courtiers ‘wear[ing] their faces to the bent / Of [his] looks’ (I, i, 13–14) rather than speaking the truth, who burdens his loyal and virtuous daughter with perverse demands about love. Imogen must accept the banishment of her matrimonial choice and wed her clod of a stepbrother instead. Cloten reminds Imogen of the Obedience you owe your father. For The contract you pretend with that base wretch, One bred of alms and fostered with cold dishes, With scraps o’th’ court, it is no contract, none. And though it be allowed in meaner parties . . . . . . to knit their souls, On whom there is no more dependency But brats and beggary, in self-figured knot, Yet you are curbed from that enlargement by The consequence o’th’ crown, and must not foil The precious note of it with a base slave, A hilding for a livery, a squire’s cloth, A pantler – n ­ ot so eminent. 

(II, iii, 107–19)

Like Cordelia, as will be shown below, Imogen brings patriarchal authority into conflict with the idea of contract. To her it is something free individuals do with each other; to Cloten, it is a legal device with which existing elites manage power. There is a flipside to Cloten’s haughty claim that Imogen’s free contract is base because only ‘meaner parties’ engage in such things. If commons are allowed (despite severe material constraints) to pursue happiness in a way nobles are not, then maybe nobles should seek to become more ‘common’, not the other way around. In Belarius’ cave Imogen finds ‘brothers’, as ‘man and man should be, / But clay and clay differs in dignity, / Whose dust is both alike’ (IV, ii, 3–5). Cloten complains that ‘imperceiverant’ Imogen loves Posthumus ‘in my despite’ even though Cloten is ‘above him in birth’ – ­but Cloten, here strategically disguising

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himself as Posthumus, speaks at nontrivial length of their resemblance: ‘the lines of my body are as well drawn . . . no less young . . . not beneath him in fortunes . . . alike conversant in general services’ (IV, i, 8–13). The ‘villain mountaineer . . . slave’ that kills Cloten in combat speaks to him similarly: ‘What art thou? Have not I / An arm as big as thine, a heart as big?’ (IV, ii, 78–9). Cymbeline is of two minds about the nature of blood-determined nobility. Cloten makes it seem preposterous: ‘it is fit I should commit offence to my inferiors’, he declares, but then must ask other lords what superior behaviour actually entails. ‘Is it fit I . . . look upon him?’ he asks of a page. ‘Is there no derogation in it?’ ‘I had rather not be so noble as I am’, he complains, believing no one will fight with him and allow him to seek honour because they fear his mother (II, i, 17–41). When he leaves court for the savage periphery, he is promptly beheaded. His killers, Polydore and Cadwal (really, and unbeknowest to themselves, Guiderius and Arviragus, Cymbeline’s lost sons), represent the opposite side of the coin. ‘How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature!’ declares Belarius, who believes their true royal characters keep emerging despite their upbringing as subsistence hunters in a woodland cave. Belarius’ ‘goddess . . . divine Nature’ (III, iii, 79–86; IV, ii, 170 ff.) reifies notions of inborn nobility where Edmund’s, examined below, explodes them. Cymbeline melds class- and nation-disguises, suggesting state-building as opposed movements of identification. The more the English want to define themselves as not-Roman, the more domestic elites must place themselves in the same category as domestic peasants. (Renaissance admirers of Tacitus learned traditionally virile and freedom-loving Britons, ‘not yet . . . enervated by protracted peace’, were subjugated by Rome only when ‘distracted between the warring factions of rival chiefs. Indeed, nothing has helped us more in fighting against their very powerful nations than their inability to co-operate’.3) A deracinated Posthumus, ‘brought hither / Among th’Italian gentry . . . to fight’ the Britons declares, ‘I’ll disrobe me / Of these Italian weeds, and suit myself / As does a Briton peasant’ (V, i, 17–24). This Posthumus, who maintains ‘more valor in me than my habits show’, subsequently vanquishes and disarms Giacomo, who marvels that a ‘drudge of nature . . . subdued me’, proving ‘Knighthood and honors borne / As I wear mine are titles but of scorn’ (V, i, 30; V, ii, 5–7). Lear, tragic where Cymbeline is romantic or fantastic, presents similar transformations in apocalyptic tones. Interestingly, Cloten himself speaks nationalistically – ­though it is alleged he simply parrots his power-seeking mother. ‘Britain’s a world / By itself’, he says, rejecting demands for resumed tribute. Cymbeline

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criticises ‘Caesar’s ambition, / Which swelled so much that it did almost stretch / The sides o’th’ world.’ ‘A kind of conquest / Caesar made here’, the Queen says, ‘but made not here his brag / Of “came and saw and overcame”’ – B ­ ritain has an identity such that it cannot be subsumed into a general category like colony or dependency (though this scene reveals that, elsewhere, rebelling ‘Pannonians and Dalmatians’ have set ‘a precedent’ Britain should be ashamed not to follow). Britain already had ‘laws, whose use the sword of Caesar . . . mangled’ but ‘whose repair and franchise / Shall by the power we hold be our good deed’ (III, i, 12–24; III, i, 46–55). Cymbeline claims the people prompt him to nationalism. ‘Our subjects’, he informs Lucius, ‘Will not endure [Augustus’] yoke, and for ourself / To show less sovereignty than they must needs / Appear unkinglike’ (III, v, 4–7). He militarises the meek inheriting the earth, lauding the ‘poor soldiers that so richly fought, / Whose rags shamed gilded arms’ (V, vi, 3–4 – ­Chapter 4 views Henry V’s pre-Agincourt rhetoric similarly). In Cymbeline, distant English history is filtered through romance, whereby a better version of the existing world is affirmed at the end. Imogen still speaks as Cymbeline’s ‘vassal’; the lost sons, ‘well descended as [Cymbeline]’, are declared ‘not born for bondage’ (V, vi, 119; V, vi, 307). Indeed, Britain will continue to pay ‘our wonted tribute’ to Rome as long as ‘the Roman eagle’ recognises how it ‘Lessened herself’ and almost ‘vanished’ in Britain, ‘which foreshowed our princely eagle’ (V, vi, 460–76). In Lear, distant English history is tragically figured. Magic and fairy-dust washed off, Shakespeare’s state of nature there suggests that there is no going back.

From Status to Contract: A State of Nature Emerges From Lear’s Love Test For competence of life I will allow you, That lack of means enforce you not to evils; And as we hear you do reform yourselves, We will, according to your strength and qualities, Give you advancement.  Idle old man, That still would manage those authorities That he hath given away! 

(2H4 V, v, 64–8)

(KL I, iii, 16–18)

A ravished woman ‘Pleads in a wilderness where there are no laws / To the rough beast that knows no gentle right, / Nor aught obeys but his foul appetite’; in this state of nature ‘will is deaf . . . ’gainst law of duty’ and

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‘nothing can affection’s course control’. The ravisher falsifies the monarchist ideology whereby ‘kings like gods should govern everything’ and ‘princes are the glass, the school, the book / Where subjects’ eyes do learn, do read, do look’ (RL 495–500, 544–6, 602, 615–16). In Shakespeare’s poem, The Rape of Lucrece, Tarquin’s Roman gods, appropriated from Hesiod and Homer, ‘govern everything’ not by controlling their desires but by instantaneously gratifying them, omnipotent over mortals save for the interferences of their brethren. So Lucrece switches her plea into proto-Kantian mode: Think but how vile a spectacle it were To view thy present trespass in another. Men’s faults do seldom to themselves appear; Their own transgressions partially they smother. This guilt would seem death-worthy in thy brother. 

(631–5)

Ironically, this, or something like it, is the estimation to which Tarquin accedes – ­not after she says it, but after the deed is done. When ‘will’ is no longer ‘strong past reason’s weak removing’, his ‘hot desire converts to cold disdain’, towards himself as well as his victim. This is more acid reflux than moral awakening – ‘­His taste delicious, in digestion souring, / Devours his will that lived by foul devouring . . . Drunken desire must ­ ut an insight is an insight. vomit his receipt’ (243, 691–703) – b Temporarily voided of self-seeking drives, Tarquin sees the situation impartially, though not sympathetically. Instead, his crime is appropriated by the state. ‘Why should the private pleasure of someone / Become the public plague of many moe?’ Lucrece laments (1478–9); Brutus, ceasing his feigned madness, will cure a public plague by collectivising an otherwise private cycle of victimisation and revenge. Father and husband argue about who is more devastated by Lucrece’s suicide; Brutus, ‘Seeing such emulation in their woe / Began to clothe his wit in state and pride.’ She ‘mistook the matter’, he says, ‘slay[ing] herself, that should have slain her foe’. Between Tarquin’s icy post-rape rationality and the self-centred passions of the victims, Brutus steers a middle path, politicising emotional imperatives. They shall ‘rouse our Roman gods with invocations’ of these ‘abominations’ by which ‘Rome herself . . . doth stand disgraced’, shall swear ‘by the Capitol that we adore . . . By all our [civic] rights in Rome maintained’, shall ‘show her bleeding body [throughout] Rome’ and ‘publish Tarquin’s foul offense’ and thus be able to later say Rome ‘plausibly did give consent / To Tarquin’s everlasting banishment’ (1808–55). An adumbration of the structure to recur in the politics of many of the mature

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plays: ostensible restoration to status quo ante may in fact be a novel social compact, born of the appropriation of private aggression and centrifugal naturalism by the state. Through the famous ‘love test’ that begins King Lear, Shakespeare depicts a breaking of hierarchical order by early modern rationalism and egalitarianism similar to that advertised by social contract theorists like Hobbes. I emend Leon Craig’s tantalising reading of ‘a portrayal of the birth of philosophy . . . arising out of man’s confrontation with Nature’4 thus: an ancién regime collapses through immersion in a state of nature, and modernised politics is midwived by tragedy. Cordelia does not refuse to verbalise love for Lear. She does not speak like Goneril and Regan, but she does speak. She loves Lear ‘According to my bond; nor more nor less’ (I, i, 92), declaring, You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honor you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty.

(I, i, 95–101)

Lear requiring a literal demonstration of love, spoken not in a setting of private intimacy but in public, on display, feels strange. But given the context it is arguably less strange than Cordelia’s reply that love is contractual, even mathematical. In Shakespeare’s time, Victoria Kahn explains, ‘family was a far more common analogy for political order than was contract’.5 No direct reference to a ‘bond’, or to verbally proclaiming one’s silence, appears in Shakespeare’s prose sources, and a Leir play evidently performed in the early 1590s clearly explained the characters’ strategic imperatives.6 The love test plays a very different role in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History (ii.11–16): Cordelia’s response attempts ‘to test [Leir] by giving him quite a different answer’ than what she knows he expects. That would have been more in line with the morality-play tone Shakespeare’s Lear does not make dominant. When Geoffrey’s Cordelia says Leir is ‘worth just as much as you possess, and that is the measure of my love for you’, the resemblance to Shakespeare’s language is skin-deep. She casts Leir in the biblical role of humbled king. He journeys to France, stripped of possessions and titles, and finds her love and forgiveness. One fruitful route to Shakespeare’s thematic concerns is what he adds to or subtracts from his sources: in this

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case, they feature no flight into tumultuous nature. Leir regains his power and wealth in France, and leads conquering armies back into England.7 Shakespeare’s Cordelia suggests a moral order inherent in the universe, obligating parents and offspring, but her description of this ‘bond’ is jarringly geometrical. She only owes what was given (lent?) to her. Her jab at her sisters’ phony effulgences is not just a strategically misfiring attempt to reveal their deception. Cordelia breaks apart affective-hierarchical bonds by introducing rational-contractarian ones: love is a fungible asset, to be balanced as if in an account ledger. Thomas Dumm says the love test’s aftermath ‘places us squarely in the world of modernity . . . We internalise the sovereign powers that we once could see inscribed on the bodies of kings and queens.’ Dumm valorises Cordelia’s role in seeking ‘a sense of autonomy . . . she tries . . . to establish a reasonable, rational, thoughtful division of love’; he even calls her ‘our first modern person’.8 I share Dumm’s thematic concerns, but believe largely absent Cordelia does not centre the play. Even if Cordelia sets this recreation of sovereignty in motion, double-plotted King Lear gains its most intense energy elsewhere, in the seemingly gratuitous additions to this orgy of suffering provided by the Gloucester–Edgar–Edmund plot (taken from an entirely different source). Paul Kottman, too, while tremendously incisive about the Cordelia–Lear rupture, pays insufficient attention to the other characters. Kottman says Cordelia forces Lear ‘to acknowledge . . . he is, like she herself, a natural creature . . . shared nature is constitutive of their relation to each other’. He observes, ‘no prior attachment, kinship tie, political allegiance, or friendship survives the collision between Lear and Cordelia unscathed or undamaged’, but then makes the curious claim that other conflicts in the play ‘appear petty by comparison’.9 Edgar would disagree, and so do I. The ‘shared nature’ theme Kottman rightful identifies may begin with Cordelia, but it is cashed out in the Edmund–Edgar conflict. Considering the puzzle of why Gloucester immediately believes Edmund’s libel, Harry Berger writes, ‘The heir is a potential enemy and competitor, the eventual replacement whose appearance prophesies his father’s death . . . If a father loves his children for what he feels they owe him, his anxiety is aroused by what he feels he owes them’,10 tying Gloucester to Lear nicely. Still, it is fair to wonder why we see two cycles of parent misunderstanding child’s loyalty, two embraces of villainous progeny producing cosmic disaster, only ambivalently redeemed at the end. Geoffrey’s/Holinshed’s Cordelia returns to rule England as Queen; Shakespeare could have written Lear as one of the histories taken from those sources. But here, Edgar re-establishes authority at the end, which is why Edgar and Gloucester pass through the meat-grinder state

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of nature alongside Lear. This family’s pulverisation is more complete and terrifying than anything in the parallel story. Cordelia disappears to return almost beatified; Edgar slogs through Pandaemonium, humanall-too-human. Hers is the moral apotheosis, his the secular inheritance. Nature, into which Lear gradually descends, ruptures Edgar’s family from the outset: not nature underwriting a universe of harmonious laws, but modern nature, undermining our pretentions to order and dignity. Lear deconstructs his universe with a demand for proof, like Descartes at the dawn of modern philosophy.11 Yet to trade faith for rational demonstration ties the latter to a perpetual fear of being tricked – ­perhaps by others, perhaps by oneself. ‘They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear’ (AW 2.3.1–5). Being thrown back on the human mind enables rational materialism, but also establishes Hobbes’ realm where ‘the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another . . . caused . . . by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs’; where ‘IMAGINATION . . . is nothing but decaying sense . . . a Fiction of the mind’; where it is difficult ‘to distinguish exactly between Sense and Dreaming’. Chapter 1 proposed modern science as a Platonism without the ideal forms, or Platonic epistemology fused with sophist worldview. Confusion of appearance and reality is remedied, not by searching the heavens for perfection, but by searching ourselves, probing our self-serving utilitarian bioprogrammes. Hobbes stresses neurological fallibility to counter religious threats to order: ‘false Prophecies . . . by which crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people’, and without which ‘men would be much more fitted . . . for civill Obedience’.12 Lear is ambivalent, suggesting people may be less likely to adhere to existing order the more rationally they examine it, at least until it changes to their satisfaction. The Cartesian, tradition-deconstructing individual is, Hobbes argues, no more trustworthy a priori (‘men that think themselves wiser than all others, clamour and demand right Reason for judge; yet seek no more, but that things should be determined, by . . . their own’) than the traditions deconstructed. Since no individual or collective ‘Reason . . . makes the certaintie’, since nothing consensually or even ‘unanimously approved’ becomes truth, ‘parties must by their own accord, set up . . . some Arbitrator, or Judge’ without whom ‘their controversie must either come to blowes, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature’.13 There is no single deconstruction of Lear’s old regime: several (Cordelia’s, Goneril’s and Regan’s, Edmund’s) intertwine, and force

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ultimately decides the matter. Once Cordelia dissolves the old bonds of faith and duty, a new moral universe must be constituted. The radicalism of what is required gives this drama its famously apocalyptic tone. When Kent pleads to Lear, ‘Reverse thy doom’ and ‘Revoke thy doom’ (I, i, 149; I, i, 165), ‘doom’ is not just Lear’s rending of family love. It is the death knell for the old regime represented by men like Kent, whose banishment renders the above ‘doom’ not only destruction, but recreation. ‘Five days do we allot thee, for provision’, Lear tells him, but ‘on the sixth day . . . turn thy hated back / Upon our kingdom’ (I, i, 174–7). On the sixth day the God of Genesis (1: 26–7) created human beings and gave them sovereignty over the earth. When Lear rebukes Cordelia, ‘truth, then, be thy dower!’ (I, i, 108) he is not merely being irascible. The ‘truth’ of modern political rationalisation is Cordelia’s dower, and not just hers: it is the general human inheritance implied by Lear’s and Gloucester’s declines. The Lear of Act 1 is somewhat in the mould of Old Testament Yahweh, all-powerful, jealous, impetuous. Yet the play is not a journey from Old Testament legalism to New Testament agape, or ‘from contract to ethical desert’.14 True, France’s estimation of spurned Cordelia has a Gospel lastshall-be-first flavour: ‘most rich, being poor; / Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised! . . . I take up what’s cast away’ (I, i, 251–4); so too Lear’s humbled, egalitarian cadences during exposure to the elements (III, iv, 29–37). But Lear makes better sense as a non-theological (re)creation of human beings: a secularised Genesis tracing the birth of a modern regime, a theoretically egalitarian realm of contract and consent. ‘Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here’ (I, i, 182), declares Kent. Such freedom appears even more nightmarish than in Hobbes’ vision of disorder. Might the tortures of Lear fill in the picture of what is actually required, emotionally, physically and morally, to establish modern sovereignty from premodern feudalism via a Hobbesian state of nature? To ‘change / Command into obedience’ (Cym. III, iv, 154–5)? Shakespeare recognised that contracts made ‘freely’ but in conditions of radically asymmetrical power may be little better than serfdom. Thrown into an arena of ‘Famine . . . Need and oppression . . . Contempt and beggary’, what becomes of the ideals of contract, consent, free exchange? ‘My poverty ­ omeo but not my will consents’; ‘I pay thy poverty and not thy will’ – R convinces an apothecary to risk his life breaking the law by pointing out that he risks his life more immediately by obeying it (V, i, 69–76). This is one reason an Enlightenment republican like Montesquieu claims, contra Hobbes, that ‘liberty can consist only in having the power to do what one should want to do and in no way being constrained to do what one should not want to do’.15 Jack Cade is a liar and a megalomaniac, but his

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lament ‘that . . . skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment’ which ‘being scribbled o’er, should undo a man . . . I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since’, feels authentic (2H6 IV, ii, 70–3). Paternalism claims to protect the prematurely unmoored individual from ‘contract[s] . . . too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, / Too like the lightning which doth cease to be / Ere one can say it lightens’ – t­hus the compromise between father and daughter whereby ‘My will to her consent is but a part, / And, she agreed, within her scope of choice / Lies my consent and fair-according voice’ (RJ I, ii, 15–17; II, i, 159–61). A related question haunts the end of Henry V. With France forced to sue for peace after Agincourt, the Duke of Burgundy comes to terms with loss in strikingly proto-Hobbesian language (V, ii, 34 ff.). A ‘naked, poor, and mangled peace’ can be recast as, not dishonour, but ‘Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births’, such that the tragedy is not France’s loss of sovereignty but rather that her ‘vineyards . . . grow to wildness’ and her ‘husbandry doth lie on heaps’ while ‘the coulter rusts / That should deracinate such savagery’. Worse,     our houses and ourselves and children Have lost, or do not learn for want of time, The sciences that should become our country, But grow like savages – ­as soldiers will That nothing do but meditate on blood – ­ To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire, And everything that seems unnatural.

Burgundy exorcises the cognitive dissonance that invariably ensues when one’s superior self-conception is mugged by reality and humbled. He does this, not by complaining of treachery and nursing hopes of revenge, but by re-conceptualising political honour as something that finds its fullest expression in peace/production rather than war/conquest. The modern world ‘is sufficiently civilized to find war a burden’, hoped the great postNapoleonic liberal Benjamin Constant. ‘The sole aim of modern nations is repose, and with repose comfort, and, as source of comfort, industry.’16 Yet Burgundy’s insight is forced on France by the victors of precisely such a warlike endeavour. Shakespeare’s audience knows the dividends of agricultural and scientific renewal in France will eventually be used to forcefully expel the English; moreover, as in the Henry VI plays, the disaster will bring civil war back to English soil. Such humbling might not guarantee the right lessons, but it is a necessary precondition for them. What modern freedom offers, from the social

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contract theorists’ perspective, is that the past’s hierarchically embedded humans be made abstract, rights-bearing equals, at liberty to reconstruct their politics. Cordelia’s ‘dower’ again: ‘She is herself a dowry’, (I, i, 242) says France, affiancing her despite her disinheritance. This is not merely the wisdom of seeing past courtly smoke and mirrors to true moral worth. It portends a new world where the human is simply what it is: exactly like all other humans in all relevant ways save, perhaps, some novel conception of merit. Location in a hierarchical chain of power and obligation no longer predetermines worth. Banished Kent, poignant symbol of a lost feudal world, is tellingly misrecognised when stripped of identity. ‘What are you?’ asks Lear, confused as to whether humans are whos or whats. ‘A man, sir’ Kent replies (I, iv, 8–9). Outside the surrendered castle the pulverisation of old identities entails such abstraction. Lear’s turn comes next: noticing ‘neglect of late’ he asks Oswald ‘Who am I, sir?’ (I, iv, 67). This contains seeds that will grow beyond the surface implication, you know who I am and what I am due. Lear’s sense of dislocation advances mercilessly: ‘Doth any here know me? This is not Lear . . . Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (I, iv, 201–6). He is flummoxed by the political transition he inadvertently set in motion. Social identity determined by location in a fixed hierarchy gives way to universally shared status based on a new naturalism.

Nature Triumphant: Lear’s Animalisation, Edgar’s Transformation, and Edmund’s Hidden Victory Covenants entred into by fear, in the condition of meer Nature, are obligatory . . . it is a Contract, wherein one receiveth the benefit of life . . . Hobbes, Leviathan

In King John, Shakespeare experiments with the idea of a ‘natural’ child subjecting the social order to critical scrutiny. While John and Eleanore debate whether ‘strong possession’ of French territory equals ‘right’, the Bastard summarises, ‘have is have, however men do catch’. His status leads to the parallel insight, ‘I am I, howe’er I was begot.’ Though not ‘true begot’ he is still ‘well begot’ (I, i, 40; I, i, 73–9; I, i, 173–5). The corollary to bastard equality is the implication that we are all, equally, potential bastards. Shakespeare’s males routinely lament the impossibility of absolute confidence about paternity, and what goes for personal origins goes for national origins. It is all a matter of perspective, if not simply of faith. Commiserating before Agincourt, the Dauphin and his Constable call the English ‘sprays of us, / The emptying of our fathers luxury, / Our scions put in wild and savage stock’, descendants of ‘bastard Normans’ from ‘that nook-shotten

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isle of Albion’. But bastard victory can be interpreted as refounding, rejuvenation: ‘Our madams mock at us’, the Constable complains, saying ‘Our mettle is bred out, / and they will give / Their bodies to the lust of English youth, / To new-store France with bastard warriors’ (H5 III, v, 4–31). Even the bastard’s wish to enter the aristocracy exults in novelty above tradition: ‘now I can make any Joan a lady’, he announces, abandoning a contested hereditary claim for a new title. He gleefully makes contextual self-interest a morality: ‘whiles I am a beggar I will . . . say there is no sin but to be rich, / And being rich . . . say there is no vice but beggary’ (KJ I, i, 184; II, i, 594–7). Fortescue said the illegitimate son contract[s] corruption and blemish from the sin of his progenitors through no fault of his own, just as we all contract it greatly from the crime of our first parents, though in not so great a degree . . . it is the culpable and mutual lust of both their parents that contrives their engendering, which is not wont to prevail in the lawful and chaste embraces of married couples. The sin of such fornicators is mutual and common . . . resembling the original sin, it more impresses itself upon the offspring . . . the child deserves to be called the son of sin rather than the son of sinners.17

The modern liberal mind considers such a rule intolerably cruel – ­also intolerably arbitrary (a central feature of its cruelty), which from the medieval perspective it was not. But note how the author makes sense of such a harsh a priori condemnation by interpreting bastardy as a concentrated form of general sinfulness. Anti-theocratic rebelliousness is a recessive gene, and the bastard is inbred. Shakespeare’s bastards, bursting with antisocial yet liberating energies, suggest a new consciousness about such matters. Milton’s ‘Puritan Divine Comedy’ would eventually prompt generations of literature students to debate whether Satan was the poem’s real hero. At ­ uritan sans theology, replacing holiness Enlightenment high tide, Kant – P with reason – ­reinterpreted Genesis to make Adam and Eve’s search for knowledge triumph rather than sin.18 Heretic modernity stands perpetually accused of ‘never remembering that the desire of liberty was the cause of the fall of Adam’; of implicit atheism, ‘since a natural freedom of mankind cannot be supposed without the denial of the creation of Adam’.19 Here, Gloucester’s bastard Edmund represents nature’s challenge to traditional social order, at once fount of creative energy and site of dangerous destabilisation. ‘Do you smell a fault?’ (I, i, 15) Gloucester asks indelicately, revealing Edmund’s origins in fornication. This is no innocent bawdy. The ‘fault’ is simultaneously Gloucester’s indulgence and Edmund’s mother’s vagina. The latter trope acquires increasingly harsh

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colour – ­and odor, culminating, as Lear’s naturalistic deracination reaches its apogee, in febrile misogyny: Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit. Beneath is all the fiends’, there’s hell, there’s darkness, There’s the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, Stench, consumption!

(IV, vi, 121–6)

Lear’s fool equates Regan’s and Goneril’s assumption of power to Lear’s castration (I, iv, 149–50; I, iv, 163–4); Lear tells Goneril he is ‘ashamed / That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus’, cursing not only her but specifically her womb (I, iv, 245–54). She has become ‘a disease that’s in my flesh’ (II, iv, 217). Such disturbing vitriol went mostly unremarked until the attention of feminist criticism.20 Coppélia Kahn explains Shakespearean patriarchy’s cognitive dissonance: ‘conced[ing] to women, who were essential to its continuance, the power to validate men’s identities through their obedience and fidelity’, engendering ‘masculine anxiety about the uses of patriarchal power over women’ and ‘control over women’s sexuality, which arises from this disparity between men’s social dominance and their peculiar emotional vulnerability’.21 The ‘fault was hers’, it is said (‘fault’ double entendre again) of illegitimacy, ‘the hazards of all husbands’ (KJ I, i, 118–19). Another noteworthy aspect of Lear’s curses, though, is the discomfort that bare physical facts of human existence cause to those whose social order is either collapsing or has collapsed. Lear’s cries of wounded masculinity protest his daughters’ rational cost-cutting: despite his wish to ‘retain / The name, and all the additions to a king’ (I, i, 135–6), after abdication they defund his ‘insolent retinue’ of carousing knights (I, iv, 176–221), now bereft of purpose and, from the Hobbesian perspective, threatening imperium in imperio: ‘How, in one house, / Should many people, under two commands, / Hold amity?’ (II, iv, 235–7: Paula Blank says the play ‘reveals the ideological consequences of . . . letting the idea of human “equality” play in the semantic field of mathematics’22). Lear equates reduction from locus of command to object of caretaking not merely to feminisation, but to animalisation. ‘Reason not the need!’ for his knights, he exclaims, for if we ‘Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life’s as cheap as beasts’ (II, iv, 255), bleakly foreshadowing the heath. Yet Goneril and Regan embody the old regime’s negation only up to a point. No philosophy fuels their power grab. The limit of their imagination

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is personal aggrandisement and/or pseudo-Machiavellian raison d’etat. And their later hysterical falling-out over Edmund’s affections shows they had more in common with their father than they knew. Comparing Machiavelli with subsequent social contract theorists, Sheldon Wolin finds the former ‘lacking in one vital element: some comprehensive principle, some notion of a unifying consensus for coping with the interest-ridden nature of the new politics’.23 In Wolin’s account, enter Hobbes; in Shakespeare’s, enter Edmund. The earlier usurper-villain Richard III’s belief that ‘Conscience is but a word that cowards use, / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe’ came from hatred and ‘hell’ (R3 V, vi, 39–43), but Lear tells a different story. Edmund identifies natural with moral order in order to destabilise, not underwrite, existing authority. Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity [legalities] of nations to deprive me, For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous and my shape as true, As honest madam’s issue? 

(I, ii, 1–9)

Falstaff, along the above lines, jokingly deems his band of thieves ‘men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal’ (1H4 I, ii, 22–6). His comic inversion of ‘government’ – ­from governing one’s acquisitive desires to being governed by them – ­becomes catastrophic in Lear. But Edmund is unlike other Shakespearean figures of immoralism and nihilism, unlike Iago or Macbeth. There is no mystery about motivation. He judges the social order unjust, and it is hard to disagree. But there is always a price to pay for renovating justice, as Hobbes saw. Frequently, appellants to conscience are just ‘in love with their own new opinions’. It is ‘absurd . . . to demand’ a ‘Liberty, by which all other men may be masters of their lives’, but Hobbes knows people reliably believe and demand absurd things, and may is the key word. We enter the no man’s land where irrational pride jostles with rational fear. Hobbes considers ‘very few so foolish, that had not rather governe themselves, than be governed by others’; experience with everyone governing themselves should disabuse people of this notion. Perhaps reason can convince pride not to seek perpetual rule over others.

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Pride’s submission to such rule is a tougher sell. Thus there is a momentum towards equality independent of empirical facts. ‘If Nature . . . made men equall’, writes Hobbes, ‘that equalitie is to be acknowledged’; if nature ‘made men unequall; yet because men that think themselves equall, will not enter into conditions of Peace, but upon Equall termes, such equalitie must be admitted’.24 Ferdinand Lassalle named his ideal moral revolutionary a ‘new Hamlet’ who ‘unlike the old one, says “I am glad that I was born to set [the time] right.”’25 Edmund is not armed with Hegelian philosophy of history (thank God), but he too embraces his self-appointed task of setting the times right. Dollimore is too censorious in calling Edmund a wholly failed revolutionary, ‘embod[ying] the process whereby . . . a revolutionary (emergent) insight is folded back into a dominant ideology’.26 True, Edmund is never a wholly free (re)creator of his world, and never sees himself as such. Not Hamlet, nor meant to be: mostly oblivious to the paradoxes and antinomies of freedom, Edmund could never be that brand of tragic figure. Here, too, are challenging and disturbing intimations of Hobbes’ philosophy. Hobbes’ ‘liberty’ means ‘absence of externall Impediments’, not noumenal emancipation of human beings from the mechanical operations of nature. The term ‘may be applied no lesse to Irrationall, and Inanimate creates, than to Rationall’ and is ‘abused’ when ‘applied to any thing but Bodies’.27 Edmund eagerly disturbs the social order, yet thinks himself beholden to the untraduceable ‘law’ of goddess ‘nature’. Her children are not stained by parental fornication. Her rationality lets the clever and energetic claim fair shares of power. ‘Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit: / All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit’ (I, ii, 167–8) anticipates meritocracy infiltrating decayed aristocracy. All’s Well That Ends Well’s king, cured by title-less doctor’s daughter Helen, promises her the noble husband of her choice, and when her choice refuses chides, ’Tis only title thou disdain’st in her, the which I can build up. Strange is it that our bloods Of color, weight, and heat, poured all together, Would quite confound distinction, yet stands off In differences so mighty. . . . From lowest place when virtuous things proceed, The place is dignified by the doer’s deed. Where great additions swell’s, and virtue none, It is a dropsied honor.

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Lacking ‘title’, Helen’s ‘property’ is her mind and character: ‘to nature she’s immediate heir, [which] breed[s] honor’ in ‘acts’, not mere birth. Here Shakespeare suggests that such meritocracy, far from emerging spontaneously out of nature, must be created by absolutism. The solution is to ‘build up’ Helen’s title, not eliminate the whole idea of title and let a thousand Helens bloom. Where did the king get his authority to ‘build up’ whatever craftsman or burgher he wishes? If from custom and convention, perhaps he had best not play so freely with it. If from God, or nature – ­presumably the very forces that had condemned him to premature death – ­troubling questions linger. Just how thorough a reimagining of the existing order is suggested by Helen’s epidemiological intervention? The frustrated ambitions of bourgeois improvers cannot be bought off with titles forever. ‘If thou canst like this creature as a maid’, the king tells Helen’s recalcitrant quarry Bertram, ‘I can create the rest. Virtue and she / Is her own dower; honor and wealth from me.’ Not nature but a monarch mirroring God’s omnipotence raises Helen: ‘It is in us to plant thine honor where / We please to have it grow’ (II, iii, 113–53). Yet comparing Helen to Cordelia, despite identical language of ‘her own dower’, gives pause. One is ennobled, the other disinherited, by absolutism. Bertram is at least as much like Cordelia, though no hero and no saint; he too speaks of emotional, if not moral, intuitions that shall not be coerced. ‘In such a business’ as marriage, he implores the king, ‘give me leave to use / The help of mine own eyes’ (II, iii, 103–4). What if his objection to Helen is something deeper than aristocratic prejudice? He grew up in the same household as her and thus may, as his mother the Countess Roussillon puts it, place her ‘in the catalog of those / That were enwombed mine’, triggering incest-disgust. Indeed, the Countess’ declarations that adopted Helen is family mirror the king’s that Helen is noble. ‘I say I am your mother . . . ’Tis often seen / Adoption strives with nature, and choice breeds / A native slip to us from foreign seeds’ (I, iii, 126–30). The powerful reserve the right to decide when ‘nature’ can be brought in to replace or supplant convention. Yet Bertram, although few root for him, heroically parodies such claims when he sycophantically announces, before fleeing the country, ‘I submit / My fancy to [the king’s] eyes . . . I find that she, which late / Was in my nobler thoughts most base, is now / The praised of the King; who, so ennobled, / Is as ’twere born so’ (II, iii, 163–9). The reductio ad absurdum of totalitarianism is the boast that it can compel thoughts: make disgust desire, hatred love, slavery freedom, and so forth. We know now, hopefully, how that ends – ­not in Orwell’s dystopia, but with the Ceaucescus laughed offstage, and to the gallows. This is why Bertram is the chastened libertine of a problem play and

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not one of the relatively interchangeable Act 5 husbands of the holiday comedies. He must submit, in the end, to seeing Helen through the king’s eyes, just as he is tricked into having sex with her, believing her body another’s. But compulsory desire and hoodwinked copulation leave a sour aftertaste. ‘Nature’ still percolates offstage, primed to destabilise a happy ending’s fragile politic compromises. Somewhat like Helen or Ulysses, Edmund mocks Gloucester’s habit of blaming astrological signals for human misfortune, ‘as if we were . . . fools by heavenly compulsion’, an ironically sceptical rationalism inasmuch as Edmund considers himself over-determined by his exogenous authority, nature: ‘I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing’ (I, ii, 96–121). Epicurus called it ‘better to follow the stories about gods’ he found ridiculous ‘than to be a slave to the fate of the natural philosophers’ who blanketed all with ‘inescapable and merciless necessity’. It is only ‘what occurs by our own agency’ to which ‘praise and blame are attached’.28 If morality necessitates free will, or at least collective belief in free will, then Edmund’s crusade for justice lacks a crucial element. Yet, to follow on the above question of whether Cordelia is more like Helen or Bertram, the mirrors in Lear’s double-plot are foggy. The temptation is to align Cordelia with Edgar, true progeny, constant in love despite disinheritance and abasement. (Redactors later rewrote the play so Cordelia survived to marry Edgar.) There is warrant, however, for aligning Cordelia with Edmund, despite their seeming moral opposition. Each speaks of a natural ethics s/he cannot traduce, whatever the cost. Each disturbs paternalistic hierarchy with an anti-conventional conception of justice. Each dies on the cusp of the political renovation they together set in motion. So it is Edgar who is un-doubled, sui generis. Cavell says Edgar’s disguised stalking of Gloucester reveals his capacity for cruelty . . . If good is to grow anywhere in this state, is must recognise, and face, its continuity with, its location within, a maze of evil. Edgar’s is the most Christian sensibility in the play, as Edmund’s is the most Machiavellian. If the Machiavellian fails in the end, he very nearly succeeds; and if the Christian succeeds, his success is deeply compromised.29

I see more than a clash between Christian and Machiavellian ethics. A standard-issue Shakespearean Machiavel could have disposed of Edgar. And can Christian sensibility survive the sheer sadomasochism of Edgar’s journey through natural purgatory? Donning a disguise to observe or manipulate plot developments is

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common Shakespearean strategy. Yet the extent to which Edgar’s disguising himself becomes self-abasement, even self-annihilation (even, indeed, other-annihilation), is shocking. He does not just dress as a commoner, he ‘take[s] the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury in contempt of man, / Brought near to beast’; alongside his declaration ‘Edgar I nothing am’ (II, iii, 7–9; II, iii, 21), this begins to make sense of his place in Lear’s proto-Hobbesian politics. Sovereignty’s inheritor must be radically depersonalised for authority to be adequately reconstructed. Lear’s famous dirge on ‘unaccomodated man’ is not just mused generally, but provoked literally by the sight of Edgar/Poor Tom, ‘the thing itself . . . such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (III, iv, 94–100). Such extreme deracination entails a period of literal insanity, whose up-is-down, black-is-white tone can be mistaken for a Christian vision of last becoming first. Shakespeare frequently locates ‘Reason in madness!’ (IV, vi, 169) – ­as Edgar exclaims here, witness to a ranting Lear. Hobbes’ ‘Reason’ entails reducing humans to the bare minimum of physical existence in order to reinterpret government’s purposes. ‘Here I stand, your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man’ (III, ii, 15) says Lear, now ‘slave’ to the elements. This is more than the humbling of a dethroned despot. We trade enslavement by anarchic nature – ‘­ The tyranny of the open night’ (III, iv, 2) – ­for consensual bondage in a social contract. Honour-ethos then necessarily morphs into utility-ethics. Spinoza’s ‘state of nature’ is prior to religion both by nature, and in time. No one knows from nature that he is bound by obedience towards God. Indeed, he cannot discover this by reasoning either; he can only receive it from a revelation confirmed by miracles. Hence, prior to a revelation, no one is obligated by divine law, which he simply cannot know. The state of nature . . . must be conceived apart from religion and law, and consequently apart from all sin and wrongdoing.

Like Hobbes, Spinoza quickly adds that revelation is inherently untrustworthy. Absent a whole people receiving one simultaneously, some part of the population remains legitimately unconvinced. Hence, in secularising social contract theory, the political ‘revelation’ of nature, data open to all, replaces the stubborn exclusivity of theology. ‘By the right and order of nature’ Spinoza ‘mean[s] the rules determining the nature of each individual thing by which we conceive it is determined naturally to exist and behave in a certain way’. The ‘supreme law of nature’ is simply ‘that each thing strives to persist in its own state’. Here, as in Hobbes’ redefinition of liberty, there is ‘no difference between human beings and other individual things of nature, nor between those human beings who are endowed with

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reason and others who do not know true reason, nor between fools or lunatics and the sane’.30 Edgar’s startling speech on the unexpected advantages of reduction to the worst possible position is a philosophical upheaval, not a sour grapes coping mechanism. ‘The lamentable change is from the best’ while ‘The worst returns to laughter’, he says, ‘the worst is not / So long as we can say “This is the worst”’ (IV, i, 5–6; IV, I, 28–9). The worst, in other words, is death. It is ‘Feare of death’, Hobbes proposes, ‘upon which men may be drawn to agreement’, a summum malum collapsing Aristotelian teleology and virtue ethics.31 Lear’s Act 5 misinterpretation of regaining consciousness as having been brought back from the dead indicates transition, not from Paganism to Christianity, but from religious enchantment to materialism. Edgar’s fake-assisted suicide of Gloucester is similarly legible. ‘Thy life’s a miracle’ (IV, vi, 55), Edgar says after making his father think he had heaved himself off a cliff yet survived. Not a theological miracle: Gloucester was never dead and has not been resurrected. Human action replaces divine intervention. Edgar performs an earthly ‘miracle’. He makes the value of human life inhere simply in life itself. He removes the burden of having to measure life’s value by external metrics. Gloucester initially protests being stripped of suicide’s humanitarianism: ‘Is wretchedness deprived that benefit, / To end itself by death?’ But he comes around to Edgar’s philosophy, however Stoically framed: ‘Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / “Enough, enough”, and die’ (IV, vi, 61–77). Edgar’s version, by contrast, is so hyperbolic a salvaging of hope from despair it could be taken as reductio ad absurdum: ‘our lives’ sweetness! / That we the pain of death would hourly die / Rather than die at once!’ (V, iii, 183–5). This is as thorough an inversion of maligning hope as ‘a flatterer, / A parasite, a keeper-back of death / Who gently would dissolve the bands of life’ (R2 II, ii, 69–71), as imaginable. Here a Queen addresses a dethroned and deconstructed personality, ‘­unkinged . . . nothing’, who announces ‘whate’er I be, / Nor I, nor any man that but man is, / With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased / With being nothing’ (R2 V, v, 37–41). Richard II is far from the tone of Edgar’s philosophically similar observation. Tellingly, Edgar is the new authority at the end of King Lear, Richard and Isabel the old regime swept away to precipitate the Henriad, examined in the next chapter. Nothing more exalted than ‘Desire of Ease’, ‘sensuall Delight’ and ‘leasure’, Hobbes writes, ‘disposeth men to obey a common Power’. Call this the workaday hubris of the moderns, an inverted pride claiming ‘the time, which Nature ordinarily alloweth men to live’, as the core right, life no longer hostage to metaphysics of honour or righteousness.32 Aquinas

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called ‘blessedness . . . the ultimate end of desire; for the motion of desire does not continue into infinity’. There is a ‘good such that, once it is achieved, no good remains which might be the object of any further desire . . . But no earthly good can do this.’33 In a sense, Hobbes agrees. If ‘there is no such Finis ultimis, (utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Morall Philosophers’, if happiness is ‘continual progresse of the desire, from one object to another’, if the ‘generall inclination of all mankind [is] a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death’, then maybe reason suggests people who never fight, not power-seekers warring unendingly.34 Such is Falstaff’s conclusion. He plays dead to survive a battle: Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? . . . Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea . . . therefore I’ll none of it . . . To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man. But to counterfeit dying, when a man liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. (1H4 V, i, 126–39; V, iii, 59–61; V, iv, 112–18)

Juliet similarly deconstructs the honour ethos setting Verona’s leading families at odds. Only the Montague ‘name . . . is my enemy’, and a name ‘is nor hand, nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part / Belonging to a man’. She draws a line between bodies and words, proposing Romeo ‘[shed] thy name, / And for thy name . . . Take all myself’; Romeo likens this trade to ‘be[ing] new baptized’ (II, i, 80–98). Falstaff’s verbal trick by which counterfeiting death becomes honesty, and the dead soldiers around him counterfeits, anticipates Hobbes’ denial of a vantage point from outside life’s perpetual series of desires and fulfilments from which to judge that process. For Hobbes, Falstaff can be accused of cowardice but not faulted with injustice, for ‘no man can transferre, or lay down his Right to save himselfe from Death, Wounds, and Imprisonment’; plus ‘there is allowance to be made for naturall timorousnesse’.35 Doll asks Falstaff to ‘leave fighting a-days, a foining a-nights, and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven’, but his long nocturnal career was built on avoiding such fights, and on doubt about heaven’s interest in his activities. When Falstaff is asked after, his crew specifies his ‘bodily health . . . the immortal part needs a physician, but that moves not him. Though that be sick, it dies not’ (2H4 II, iv, 226–8; II, ii, 97–9). To the barrage of jokes about his corpulence, Falstaff replies, ‘I have more flesh than another man, and therefore

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more frailty’, affirming the moral relevance of bodily vulnerability. ‘God keep lead out of me, I need no more weight than mine own bowels’ (1H4 III, iii, 164–6; V, iii, 34–5). Falstaff’s comic status does not render his hedonic-materialistic vision any less radical. A. D. Nuttall deems him Shakespeare’s first character with ‘a “philosophy” . . . Falstaff’s sceptical nominalism is the real philosophical opposition to Henry’s strangely ethical Realpolitik, his white Machiavellianism’.36 Falstaff could be a prototype for Constant’s definition of a modern temperament ‘that values everything according to its utility . . . opposes its irony to every real or feigned enthusiasm’ and does ‘not content itself with a sterile glory’.37 That said, Falstaff’s pleasure principle is inseparable from his willingness to have a good war by pressganging others into harm’s way, riff-raff he brutally dubs ‘cankers of a calm world and a long peace’ (1H4 IV, ii, 28–9). Unjust? Dishonorable? That honour is just a word does not mean it does not exist. Fictions of the brain arise from material events in the brain, Hobbes argues, and from this perspective are as real as anything else. Appellations like good and evil reflect competing human desires: attributing some to God and others to Satan is irresponsible escapism. Shakespeare makes as much of Pauline sexual theology when clownish Lavatch, asked ‘why thou wilt marry’, replies ‘My poor body . . . requires it. I am driven on by the flesh, and he must needs go that the devil drives.’ Attributing fundamental human traits to Satan does not dispose of them, any more than attributing them to unreason does. Asked, subsequently, whether he fears cuckoldry, Lavatch replies the prospect bothers him little: If I be his cuckold, he’s my drudge. He that comforts my wife is the cherisher of my flesh and blood; he that cherishes my flesh and blood loves my flesh and blood; he that loves my flesh and blood is my friend; ergo, he that kisses my wife is my friend. If men could be contented with what they are, there were no fear in marriage.

Perhaps he jests in earnest – ­called ‘a foul-mouthed and calumnious knave’ he responds that he is ‘A prophet’ who ‘speak[s] the truth the [most direct] way’ – ­but the blinding jealousy of Othello or Leontes will not be quelled by clever wordplay (AW I, iii, 20–52). To say that if men could be convinced not to be jealous they would cease to be plagued by jealousy is not to say very much – ­ditto, that if they thought the concept of honour ridiculous they would cease fighting for honour. What’s more, this invites the troubling riposte: if the upshot is that we do not shed sexual jealousy or honour-orientation without in some significant way shedding longstanding

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human nature, then what else might we be losing in the process? Love itself? A sense of dignity that, however it may misfire, also protects us from tyranny and lassitude? Optimistically, superimposing reason’s long-term consequentialism upon humoural instincts overdetermines cooperative outcomes. ‘One must not force nature but persuade her’, Epicurus advised, ‘by fulfilling the necessary desires, and the natural ones too if they do not harm [us], but sharply rejecting the harmful ones’.38 The honour ethos’ potential flimsiness, confronted with rational-utilitarian challengers, lies in its arbitrariness or conventionality. Gestures as intrinsically meaningless as biting one’s thumb take on life-or-death significance, ‘civil brawls bred of an airy word’ – ­as long as the conventions stand. The challenge is a ‘disgrace to them if they bear it’ (RJ I, i, 82; I, i, 38). What if they bear it and refuse to feel disgraced? Conventions are socially crucial, but unlike hunger, or love, they can be refused, or so altered as to be unrecognisable. To what extent, then, do we want to prevent ‘higher’ passions from muddying the waters? Falstaff waves reason’s banner questioning the relationship between an ‘insensible’ notion like honour and actual bodies, vulnerable to physical wounds honour cannot fix. Yet the perquisites of Falstaff’s existence depend on the willingness of men like Hal to answer honour-based challenges in battle, risking life to re-establish fractured sovereignty on their terms. ‘If the English had any apprehension, they would run away’, scowls a French Constable, seeing his foe as Coriolanus saw the plebs: ‘they have only stomachs to eat, and none to fight’ (H5 III, vii, 138–9). When Lepidus warns Enobarbus, ‘’Tis not a time/ For private stomaching’, when Octavian tells Antony ‘You were the word of war’ and Antony responds, ‘You do mistake my business. My brother . . . [made] the wars . . . against my stomach’ (AC II, ii, 8–54), such language foreshadows Antony’s decline. Hal tells Falstaff ‘I lack some of thy instinct’; Falstaff, explaining why he fled the Gads Hill ambush, had said, ‘I was . . . a coward on instinct.’ He incorrectly assumes Hal is as ‘horribly afraid’ as he is of the coming strife. Bolingbroke worries Hal is ‘like enough, through vassal fear, / Base inclination, and the start of spleen, / To fight against me under Percy’s pay’ (1H4 II, iv, 266; II, iv, 364–5; III, ii, 124–6). But this is the ( justifiably) mercenary ethos of the slums and taverns, where precarious lives choose sides based on necessity and self-interest. King Lear and Leviathan each feature a fool who speaks to power. Do they speak truth? How to determine speech’s truth-status in either world? Hobbes’s fool says ‘in his heart, there is no such thing as Justice; and sometimes also with his tongue’, sees ‘no reason, every man might not do what he thought conduced’ to self-interest, including ‘to make, or not make; keep, or not keep Covenants’;39 the political equivalent of the fool

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of Psalms (14: 1), whose heart says there is no God. Yet Hobbes’ fool is only fool-ish once Leviathan is established – ­even then, perhaps, the worst (only?) sin she commits is heaving her heart into her tongue. Otherwise, this is simply Hobbes’ description of what the world is like. ‘The cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen’ (III, iv, 75), Lear’s fool says: creatures like Edgar, made mad by immersion in the world Hobbes’ Foole describes. The paradox: how is the social contract possible if anarchy proscribes trust and mutual obligation?40 Lear suggests the necessary adjustment costs considerable violence, both physical and mental. Gloucester having his eyes ripped out to ‘See better’ (I, i, 167–8) is physical violence parallel to Lear’s or Edgar’s cognitive depersonalisation. ‘Nothing will come from nothing’, Lear admonishes Cordelia, introducing a recurring trope. Yet here political/metaphysical nothingness is productive. It seems, at least, something can produce something else by passing through nothingness. ‘The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself’ (I, ii, 33–4) says Gloucester, but a sort of nothingness was hiding behind the putrefying authority of Gloucester and Lear, and they will be made to confront it. When Lear repeats the idée recue about nothing coming from nothing to his fool, their punning exchange (I, iv, 111 ff.) ends with the news that Lear has become nothing, his new status comparable to the fool’s. ‘Dost thou call me fool, boy?’ ‘All the other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.’ The fool goes further: ‘I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing’ (I, iv, 129–30; I, iv, 168–9). Lear discovers the hollowness of positional identity. ‘They told me I was everything’ (IV, vi, 95–6), and they were right, but only so long as such politics obtained. Gloucester’s ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport’ (IV, i, 37–8) identifies a political experience of nothingness, a collapsing of human dignities formerly embedded in social status into animal nature.41 ‘I abjure all roofs’, declares Lear, entering the wild, ‘and choose / to wage against the enmity o’ the air; / To be a comrade with the wolf and owl’ (II, iv, 203–5). He enters a combination of homo homini lupus and the flight of wisdom, postponed until his midnight. Spinoza’s words could adorn a sign above Lear’s heath just as ‘abandon all hope . . .’ announced Dante’s hell: ‘as long as people are determined to live under the government of nature alone, the person who does not yet know reason or does not yet have a habit of virtue, lives by the laws of appetite alone with the same supreme right as he who directs his life by the laws of reason’.42 Fusing Ulysses and Thersites, Lear dedicates monarchy to levelling, scabrous materialism:

­

King Lear and the State of Nature I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery? No. The wren goes to ’t, and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester’s bastard son Was kinder to his father than my daughters Got ’tween the lawful sheets. To ’t luxury, pell-mell! For I lack soldiers. 

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(IV, vi, 107–28)

Despite misreading Edmund’s character, he has adopted Edmund’s philosophy. Social codes can sanction fornication, but plain reason cannot morally condemn it. ‘It is not politic in the commonwealth of nature to preserve virginity’, an ‘offendress against nature’, Paroles says in a courtlier context (AW I, i, 119–32). For Hobbes, passions and desires, after all, ‘are in themselves no Sin. No more are the Actions, that proceed from those Passions, till they know a Law that forbids them.’43 Fatherhood is just a word, as Lear learned during the process by which he came to ‘lack soldiers’. One sovereign proscribes adultery to guard patrimonial legitimacy, another encourages it to build an army of fatherless men. Prince Hal lapses into Falstaffian mode when joking (so to speak) with Poins about Poins’ bastards: ‘God knows whether those that bawl out the ruins of thy linen shall inherit His kingdom – ­but the midwives say the children are not in the fault. Whereupon the world increases, and kindreds are mightily strengthened’ (2H4 II, ii, 22–6). Noting the co-existence of poverty and civil war Falstaff asks ‘Is there not employment? Doth not the King lack subjects? Do not the rebels need soldiers?’ (2H4 I, ii, 72–4). Hobbes is in the paradoxically radical position of producing the very chaos he purports to fear. His Reason’s momentum is towards calling all existing codes into question, like Lear on the heath. The ‘show / Of smooth civility’ evaporates, punctured by the ‘thorny point / Of bare distress’ (AYLI II, vii, 94–5). Can materialism’s universality of bodily vulnerability and desire replace Christianity’s universality of divine love? Shakespeare’s most brutal portrayal of this inversion, Regan scoffing ‘let him smell / His way to Dover’ (III, vii, 96–7) at Gloucester (whose eyes have been ripped out), is among literature’s most terrifying examples of bestialising one’s enemies. But Regan and Goneril too must be incorporated into the new polity, if only as vanquished demons. Lear’s tirade suggests society reimagined and reconstructed, not on the Plato–Aristotle basis of what differentiates humans from other animals, but on the basis of what all sentient beings share. His lament over Cordelia’s body – ‘­No, no, no life! / Why should a

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dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?’ (V, iii, 304–6) – ­seems to protest animalisation, but actually accepts his and Edgar’s transformation in nature. Biological life, not social position, not honourable action, is our essential possession. The ancients thought it inessential because even those without honour and recognition could possess it. The Hobbist knows it is essential because it is all that remains when such mists evaporate. His pretences unmasked, Paroles pleads for ‘My life . . . I would repent out the remainder of nature . . . in a dungeon, i’th’ stocks, or anywhere, so I may live.’ Once alone, though, his language loses its self-abasement. ‘Captain I’ll be no more, / But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft / As captain shall. Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live.’ Mocked that he ‘could find out a country where but women were that had received so much shame’ and ‘begin an impudent nation’, he proclaims one lives ‘Safest in shame; being fooled, by fool’ry thrive. / There’s place and means for every man alive’ (AW IV, iii, 229–32; IV, iii, 303–16). The real work remains to be done. Ideally, the social contract leads to a politics of participatory reconstruction among citizens who humbly recognise basic mutual freedom and equality. Yet it also stands accused of leading to caretaking by a benevolent despotism, its legitimacy based exclusively in its provisioning goods more rationally/efficiently than honour-based, pageantry-obsessed predecessors.44 ‘Political liberty’, Tocqueville writes, ‘occasionally gives sublime pleasure to a few’, but modern equality ‘daily gives each man in the crowd a host of small enjoyments’.45 Consider Lear’s embrace of returned Cordelia, she who ‘redeems nature from the general curse’ (IV, vi, 200). ‘Come, let’s away to prison’, he says, where they can . . . hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who’s in, and who’s out; And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were Gods’ spies; and we’ll wear out, In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon. 

(V, iii, 13–19)

Lear’s Act 1 purpose has been called trading power for love (I, i, 47–9).46 Yet this final location of love’s unfolding, the prison where he can finally ‘Unburthened crawl toward death’ (I, i, 39), is not exactly free of power. Lear’s private realm seems to depend for its value on comparison with an inconstant public world. Here politics resembles professional sports:

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ordinary people validate its contests with periodically intense interest, but without significant opportunities for participation. Still, there are intimations of freedom, of nature’s promised redemption from the play’s general curse. Though Edmund fails to save Cordelia from the death sentence he imposed, he takes a tentative step away from determinism, abandoning self-exculpation – ‘­men / Are as the time is’ – a­ nd choosing morality: ‘Some good I mean to do, / Despite of my own nature’ (V, iii, 31–2; V, iii, 242–3). We can freely contravene ‘nature’ only after honestly coming to terms with it. Even with Edgar’s authority established, the old regime is gone for good. Preparing to fight Edmund, Edgar says ‘my name is lost . . . Yet am I as noble as the adversary / I come to cope’ (V, iii, 120–3). Edgar might have emphasised his superiority to Edmund, in character if not literal social position. But conflict among ‘masterlesse men’ outside the Leviathan admits no claims except basic equality. ‘The question who is the better man, has no place in the condition of meer Nature’, Hobbes declares. ‘The inequality that now is, has bin introduced by the Lawes civill.’ The old plague of custom and curiosities of nations would have advanced Edgar without asking much of him, but ‘in the condition of meer Nature, the inequality of Power is not discerned, but by the event of Battell’.47 Edmund loses the battle, but his philosophy wins the war. Edgar incorporating Edmund: what kind of creature is this new monarch? This chapter has suggested King Lear as a dramatic prototype for a construction (story? fable?) subsequently influential in early modern political theory: the state of nature prompting a social contract. Chapter 4 suggests how the philosophical upheaval just described might play out politically, in the realm of successful state-building. The anarchy and naturalisation in Lear are so thorough that the play’s recreation and reunification of its characters climbs towards a somewhat metaphysical (though not, I argued, theological) register. In reality, though – ­as critics of the ­ olitics are almost social contract have frequently, tiresomely pointed out – p never re-established ex nihilo, and even if they were it is hard to imagine a supersised Mayflower Compact the default option. To shed the metaphysical element towards a more narrowly political focus, I turn to the English histories. These depict a real ‘state of nature’ – baronial/sectional strife under conditions of severely contested legitimacy; the corruption of Montesquieu’s aristocratic ‘monarchy that has many monarchs’ into ‘a despotic state that has many despots’48 – ­and the emergence, not of a social contract in the strict Mayflower sense, but a proto-contractarian picture of executive authority. The puzzle: maximise Leviathan’s ability to nationalise where other loci of power would

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regionalise and/or divinise, to convert wasteful particularist projects (baronial power, religious persecution) into nationalist ones, without giving it so much power that the freedom- and progress-facilitating aspects of secular nationalism are themselves threatened.

CHAPTER 4

SHAKESPEARE’S NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM: FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY IN THE ENGLISH HISTORIES

Thus the limitation of sovereignty is real, and it is also possible. It will be ensured firstly by the same force which legitimates all acknowledged truths: by public opinion. Subsequently it will be guaranteed more precisely by the distribution and balance of powers. Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique (1815) Me rather had my heart might feel your love / Than my unpleased eye see your courtesy.  (R2 III, iii, 192–3)

Marlowe’s Edward II (c.1592) features a ‘pliant king’ drawn ‘which way I please’ by a male lover planning to fill the court with ‘wanton poets, pleasant wits’, ‘Italian masques’, pages dressed ‘like sylvan nymphs’ (I.50 ff.); such reorganisation rankles the existing warrior nobility, who ‘leave the brainsick king’ to ‘henceforth parley with our naked swords’ (I.124–5). Edward’s lover, Gaveston, tells the ‘Base leaden earls, that glory in your birth’ to ‘Go sit at home and eat your tenants beef” (VI.74–5). But he misinterprets the situation: if they were mere hedonists they would not be such obstacles. ‘Glory’ is the sticking point. Honor ‘glories in scorning life’, Montesquieu writes, ‘and the despot is strong only because he can take life away’.1 The honour ethos of Warwick and Lancaster ‘scorn[s] thy threats and menaces’ as ‘but temporal’: ‘The worst is death, and better to die to live / Than live in infamy under such a king’ (XIII.21–4). In one of the great influence-ratchets in literary history, it seems, Marlowe was goaded into Edward II by the success of Shakespeare’s Henry VI series; Marlowe’s play, in turn, prompted Richard II.2 (Like that hapless monarch, Edward ends up murdered in prison, calling usurpation ‘my tragedy’ (XXV.74).)

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Now I must plead an exception to my general framework, which moves chronologically through European history rather than Shakespeare’s career. The fact that the Henriad was composed after the Henry VI series is, here, more important than the fact that its events take place earlier; the Henriad shall be read as the fuller depiction of political modernisation. Shakespeare’s first historical tetralogy, covering the Wars of the Roses and culminating in Henry VII’s defeat of Richard III, contains cartoonish anticipations of the issues later explored more searchingly: in retrospect, ‘bashful’ ‘faint-hearted and degenerate’, Henry VI seems a sketch for Richard II, each failing to claim the unadulterated sovereignty his moment requires. ‘Far be the thought of this from Henry’s heart, / To make a shambles of the Parliament House’, he declares, refusing to attack rebellious nobles there. Instead ‘frowns, words, and threats / Shall be the war that Henry means to use’. Except he is not skilled with those either: informed his rule is illegitimate because of prior usurpation he ‘know[s] not what to say – ­my title’s weak’ (3H6 I, i, 41–2; I, i, 70–3; I, i, 135; I, i, 184–5). The rebels only care about the ‘words’ rationalising power claims if they are to Yorkist advantage. They will not debate interpretation: ‘Will you we show our title to the crown?’ York asks the king. ‘If not, our swords shall plead it in the field’ (3H6 I, i, 102–3). Henry strikes his only assertive chord demanding others listen: KING HENRY  Have done with words, my lords, and hear me speak. QUEEN MARGARET  Defy them, then, or else hold close thy lips. KING HENRY  I prithee give no limits to my tongue –     I am a king, and privileged to speak. CLIFFORD  My liege, the wound that bred this meeting here     Cannot be cured by words . . .  (3H6 II, ii, 117–22)

He thinks ‘privileged’ monarchical speech intrinsically counts more than ‘words [of] my lords’, but failure to act pre-established fatal ‘limits to [his] tongue’. His own queen and counsel, not the rebels, seek to shut him up. Mere moments after winning major concessions by promising to lay down their arms the Yorkists are saying things like ‘for a kingdom an oath may be broken. / I would break a thousand oaths to reign one year’ and ‘An oath is of no moment being not took / Before a true and lawful magistrate’. Henry capitulates by disinheriting his lineage, preferring (shades of Lear) life ‘in peace abandoned and despised’ to ‘dreadful war’, ‘mak[ing] thy sepulcher / And creep[ing] into it far before thy time’. He presents the historically progressive, albeit in context disastrous, spectre of a man

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putting ‘life before . . . honor’, a ‘king [who] wilt be forced’, who ‘shalt reign but by [subjects’] sufferance’ (3H6 I, i, 188–9; I, i, 230–47; I, ii, 16–23). The Yorkist line declines into stereotyped Machiavellianism. Nevertheless, Henry validates Machiavelli’s warnings about mixing Christian principles into government. ‘Were he as famous and as bold in war / As he is famed for mildness, peace, and prayer’, mourns mercenary Warwick. To Henry’s plea ‘Withhold revenge’, hyper-martial Clifford sensibly replies that ‘lenity / And harmful pity must be laid aside’, providing a long list of animals that fight when threatened. If Henry had ‘swayed as kings should do . . . Giving no ground unto the house of York, / They never then had spring like summer flies’ (3H6 II, i, 155–6; II, ii, 7 ff.; II, vi, 14–17). Knighting Prince Edward, Henry’s ‘lesson’ to his son is ‘draw thy sword in right’. But Henry’s family recognises that Christian principles – ­he touts his tradition of ‘pity . . . mildness . . . mercy’, shocked at reports of popular disloyalty – h ­ ave left him bereft of purpose altogether. He twice surrenders authority: first promising a Yorkist succession despite having a male heir; then ceding all but ceremonial power to Warwick, desiring ‘ease, / Where having nothing, nothing can he lose’, to ‘conquer fortune’s spite / By living low, where fortune cannot hurt me’, to ‘lead a private life / And in devotion spend my latter days, / To sin’s rebuke and my creator’s praise’. Prince Edward says he shall interpret ‘draw your sword in right’ thus: ‘I’ll draw it as apparent to the crown, / And in that quarrel use it to the death.’ Clifford is relieved: ‘that is spoken like a toward prince’ (3H6 II, ii, 61–6; III, i, 88; III, iii, 151–2; IV, vii, 19–44; IV, x, 6–18). Henry VI’s ‘mind is bent to holiness’ his ‘champions . . . prophets and apostles, / His weapons holy saws of sacred writ . . . his loves . . . images of canonized saints’. His chagrined Queen muses, ‘I would the college of the cardinals / Would choose him Pope, and carry him to Rome . . . a state fit for his holiness.’ A Pope uninterested in politics would be good for the realm in other ways. Linking Henry’s religiosity to political weakness, Shakespeare shows him ill equipped to handle his age’s mirror-image problem, clerics grasping at secular power. The king whose ‘bookish rule hath pulled fair England down’ opens up space for the ‘haughty Cardinal, / More like a soldier than a man o’th’church, / As stout and proud as he were lord of all’ (2H6 I, i, 182–4; I, i, 258; I, iii, 59 ff.). ‘Highness’, here, becomes a play on the dual imperatives of ‘ascent’ in the hierarchical medieval cosmos. Gloucester and Cardinal Beaufort trade accusatory innuendo as the court ostensibly discusses falconry. Beaufort says Gloucester ‘would be above the clouds’ and control the king (who confesses to be ‘fain of climbing high’). Gloucester wishes the Cardinal ‘could fly to heaven’, Henry’s ‘treasury of everlasting joy’, leaving them

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unencumbered; Beaufort replies that Gloucester’s ‘heaven is on earth . . . a crown, the treasure of thy heart’. Henry turns out to be right about Gloucester’s innocence, but when he calls him a ‘suckling lamb or harmless dove . . . virtuous, mild, and too well given / To dream on evil’, the Queen, though mendacious, justly names ‘this fond affiance . . . dangerous’ (2H6 III, i, 69–74; III, i, 141). Neither ally nor enemy is well described with such language. As Henry VI now seems a cartoonish anticipation of Richard II, so Crookback Richard (subsequently Duke of Gloucester, then Richard III) is the simplistic ‘murderous Machiavel’ (3H6 III, ii, 193) through whom Shakespeare begins to explore will-to-power, moral relativism, and other matters of political philosophy later handled more subtly. As this early Machiavel murders his king, he mocks Christian–Platonism: ‘What – w ­ ill the aspiring blood of Lancaster / Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted’ (3H6 V, vi, 61–2). Henry’s VI’s impotent morality parodies the ease with which Erasmus’ or More’s Christian-monarch rhetoric polishes the grime off politics; Richard III is Machiavelli’s prince grotesquely self- rather than polity-obsessed. His lust for power is a caricatured counterpoint to Henry’s absurd eagerness to capitulate, his dethroned Stoic embrace of being ‘a king . . . in mind’ whose ‘crown is in my heart, not on my head’, a ‘crown . . . called content . . . that seldom kings enjoy’ (3H6 III, i, 59–65). Richard calls the crown ‘Elysium’; Henry calls it ‘a thousandfold more care to keep / Than in possession any jot of pleasure’ (3H6 I, ii, 29–30; II, ii, 52–3). Thrown into civil turmoil he cannot manage, Henry imagines ‘a happy life’ as ‘a homely swain’ husbanding his ewes unto ‘a quiet grave’; Richard bridles that ‘I am not looked on’ in a world that is ‘but hell, / Until my . . . head / Be round impaled with a glorious crown’. He deems kingship ‘the golden time I look for . . . What other pleasure can the world afford?’ (3H6 II, v, 21–54; III, ii, 127–71; V, vii, 22). That’s the spirit! But when Shakespeare peers into Richard III’s psyche, he sees pure ressentiment. Born deformed, this Richard sees a world that ‘affords no joy to me / But to command, to check, to o’erbear such / As are of better person than myself’ – ­Napoleon complex in extremis. He boasts ‘neither pity, love, nor fear’ and allows that ‘if I die no soul will pity me. / Nay, wherefore should they? – ­Since that I myself / Find in myself no pity to myself’. Like Marlowe’s protagonists he has one foot in the medieval morality plays, with their reductive division of human affairs into virtue and vice, good and evil, God and Satan: ‘since the heavens have shaped my body so, / Let hell make crooked my mind to answer it’. The ‘word, “love”, which greybeards call divine’ is ‘resident in men like one another’ but ‘not in me

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– I­ am myself alone’, recognising ‘no father’ and ‘no brother’ (3H6 III, ii, 165–71; V, vi, 68–84; R3 V, v, 154–7). Later angel and devil will inhabit not separate shoulders, but live within the same psyche – s­ uch that it becomes hard to tell which is which, or where one ends and the other begins.

Richard II: Bolingbroke as Politique in a Late-Medieval State of Nature WARWICK There is a history in all men’s lives Figuring the natures of the times deceased . . . . . . KING HENRY IV Are these things then necessities? Then let us meet them like necessities . . . 

(2H4 III, i, 76–89)

Like Lear, the Henriad begins in feudalism and ends anticipating modernity, aptly described by Victor Kiernan as ‘defeat of the more retrograde . . . party by the monarchy and its allies – i­ncluding public opinion’.3 (The anti-Bolingbroke rebels tellingly plan to divide the kingdom in three (1H4 III, i, 68 ff.).) Richard II also begins, like Lear, with a test of royal authority the monarch fails, with revolutionary implications. The curtains rise on Richard mediating a dispute between two nobles accusing each other of treachery: ‘I’ll answer thee in any fair degree / Or chivalrous design of knightly trial’ (I, i, 80–1), Mowbray challenges Bolingbroke. Richard indecisively botches his above-the-fray role. He promises ‘impartial . . . eyes and ears’, despite his cousin Bolingbroke’s ‘nearness to our sacred blood’ (I, i, 115–19). But the political reality is Richard’s fear of Bolingbroke’s rising popularity. . . . his courtship to the common people, How he did seem to dive into their hearts With humble and familiar courtesy; What reverence he did throw away on slaves, Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles.

(I, iv, 24–8)

(Once king, interestingly, Henry IV tells Hal a cautionary tale about a Richard who ‘Grew a companion to the common streets’ and ‘Enfeoffed himself to popularity’ (1H4 III, ii, 68–9), becoming over-familiar while Bolingbroke acquired a distant, almost religious mystique – j­ust one of the ways that Richard/Bolingbroke is a study in similarity as well as contrast.) Richard blanches at letting God’s justice reveal itself in battle, the theory behind trial-by-combat. Bolingbroke might win, divinely legitimating his accusations about a political murder widely understood to

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implicate Richard. ‘Wrath-kindled gentlemen, be ruled by me’, the King pleads, ‘Let’s purge this choler without letting blood’ (I, i, 152–3), forgetting he is not supposed to request submission to his rule, forgetting nothing hollows out legitimacy like giving an unfollowed order. Reinhard Bendix says the fundamental tension of medieval politics, ‘managed but never resolved’ was that while kings ‘delegated authority but wished to control its exercise’, aristocrats ‘accepted such authority but sought to make it autonomous’.4 Feudalism’s core contradiction, Perry Anderson explains, was between the ‘tendency to a decomposition of sovereignty and the absolute exigencies of a final centre of authority in which a practical recomposition could occur’.5 Richard is similarly trapped between differing conceptions of authority and sovereignty. In one, his rule derives from some blurry combination of Godly approval above and aristocratic allegiance below. The other, as yet undefined, has something to do with ‘humble and familiar courtesy’ and ‘craft of smiles’ seducing mere craftsmen. He blunders at it; Henry IV and V successfully establish it. Mowbray insists upon the non-negotiability of honour, his ‘fair name . . . spotless reputation’, the ‘purest treasure mortal times afford’, without which life lacks purpose: ‘mine honour let me try / In that I live, and for that I will die’. Richard reverses course and schedules the duel – ­‘we shall see / Justice design the victor’s chivalry’ – ­but still mistrusts Mowbray’s homilies (I, i, 166–85; I, i, 202–3). Do men really seek such honour because all else in ‘mortal times’ is trivial? Might there be worldlier, utilitarian purposes? So Richard re-cancels the trial at the last minute. He angrily redescribes honour as ‘eagle-winged pride . . . sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts . . . rival-hating envy’ (I, iii, 129–31), banishing Bolingbroke for ten years and Mowbray for life. He neither embraces tradition, letting the duel proceed, nor seizes the absolute sovereignty this state of emergency – ­‘the dire aspect / Of civil wounds’ (I, iii, 127–8) – ­offers, and can thus be resented by all sides. Richard’s later suspension of law in the name of political expediency invites accusation that he ‘take[s] from Time / His charters and customary rights’. This risks boomeranging: ‘how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession?’ (II, i, 195–9). Usurpers exemplify their own potential usurpation, or a cycle of usurpation until legitimacy is re-established on new ground: KING JOHN  Alack, thou dost usurp authority. KING PHILIP  Excuse it is to beat usurping down. 

(KJ II, i, 110–19)

As Bolingbroke tells Mowbray, ‘had the King permitted us, / One of our souls had wandered in the air, / Banished this frail sepulcher of our flesh,

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/ As now our flesh is banished from this land’ (I, iii, 184–7). Richard’s attempted middle road, between allowing honour-premised clash of souls and ignoring honour to claim utilitarian sovereignty over flesh, is doomed. Worse than a crime: a mistake, one compounded when Richard suddenly reduces Bolingbroke’s banishment from ten years to six, perceiving John of Gaunt’s ‘grieved heart’ and ‘sad aspect’ (I, iii, 209). Gaunt is Bolingbroke’s father and, in this telling, Richard’s trusted adviser. In reality Gaunt was an overweening and wasteful baron, suspected of plotting with the Pope against the monarchy. He owned upwards of one third of the country and effectively ran his own private army. (Periods of civil war in late medieval England saw large-scale recruiting of private retinues like the one Goneril and Regan prophylactically liquidate, although cause–effect is unclear;6 Shakespeare’s English histories have been seen to depict landed feudal nobility decaying as court-based service nobility grows.)7 Shakespeare consciously transforms history’s Gaunt into a nostalgic counterpoint to the changing order.8 ‘Four lagging winters and four wanton springs / End in a word – ­such is the breath of kings’ (I, iii, 214–15): Bolingbroke mimes awe at Richard’s badly damaged majesty, foreshadowing how his banished flesh’s reappearance will turn Richard’s speech into mere ‘breath’. The farther Richard falls from power, the more, and the more poetically, he talks. He ‘indulges in dazzling word-games’, Anne Barton observes, ‘only to find that language breaks against a reality which it is powerless to alter’.9 Richard impotently announces that ‘breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord’ (III, ii, 56–7), exhaling the mere breath of worldly men while Bolingbroke earns God’s new mandate: trial-by-combat, updated to validate not personal honour, but collective escape from a state of nature. In King John, citizens of an embattled town who declare themselves ‘the King of England’s subjects’ add that that only applies to ‘he that proves the king’ (II, i, 267 ff.; II, i, 325 ff.). Bolingbroke knows something other than claims of ancient justice energised his triumph: ‘necessity so bowed the state / That I and greatness were compelled to kiss’, he says later. As his ally later tells an enemy with his own claims about affronted justice, ‘Construe the times to their necessities . . . it is the time, / And not the King, that doth you injuries’ (2H4 III, i, 69–70; IV, i, 103–5). Another factor is Richard’s need to squelch Irish rebellion. Consolidating Renaissance states, R. H. Tawney explains, typically faced ‘a desperate financial situation’ caused by ‘the combination of modern administrative and military methods with medieval systems of finance’.10 His coffers emptied by ‘too great a court / And liberal largess’, Richard

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must ‘farm our royal realm’, giving deputies ‘blank charters / Whereto, when they shall know what men are rich, / They shall subscribe them for large sums of gold’ to provision soldiers (I, iv, 43–50). The same revelation as in the cancelled duel, this deadly combination of admitting weakness while playing at absolutism: Richard will mortgage royal lands and privileges, and, if that proves inadequate, intimidate Londoners into making up the balance. Richard sees cash on the table in the reported illness of Gaunt, symbol of fading feudalism: ‘The lining of his coffers shall make coats / To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars’ (I, iv, 61–2; cf. II, i, 160–2; ­ emi-paradise’ II, i, 209–10). Gaunt complains his idyllic ‘other Eden – d England, renowned ‘For Christian service and true chivalry . . . Is now leased out . . . Like to a tenement or pelting farm.’ Richard’s leases and blank charters are ‘inky blots’ on the sceptred isle, ‘rotten parchment bonds’ by which a land ‘wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself’ (II, i, 42; II, i, 54–60; II, i, 64–6). Despite the Irish emergency, Richard lacks the skill to convince anyone his exactions are for a purpose beyond himself. ‘The commons hath he pilled with grievous taxes, / And quite lost their hearts. The nobles he hath fined / For ancient quarrels, and quite lost their hearts’; ‘The nobles they are fled. The commons they are cold’ (II, i, 246–8; II, ii, 88). When an underling complains about ‘wavering commons’ whose ‘love / lies in their purses, and whoso empties them / By so much fills their hearts with deadly hate’ (II, ii, 128–30), he only half-understands the situation. Shakespeare’s commons do not live by bread alone, not always. Chapter 3 showed Lear’s foolish anticipation of possessing the ceremonial perquisites of power after transferring actual power. Here, in a similar vein, Gaunt warns that mortgaging crown assets and rents will leave Richard merely formal authority. ‘Landlord of England art thou now, not king. / Thy state of law is bondslave to the law’ (II, i, 113–14). Medieval kings were supposed to be subject to higher law, but if its guarantor was a God whose authority the king himself represented, sovereignty was reasonably safe. The Pope is far; Richard’s bondholders are near. Richard is ‘bankrupt like a broken man’ (II, i, 257), foreshadowing the broken man he literally becomes when Bolingbroke returns to cement Richard’s fait accompli surrender of legitimacy and ‘Redeem from broking pawn the blemished crown . . . make high majesty look like itself’ again (II, i, 293–5). Is it the same crown? Or does it, despite looking like itself, represent something novel? York later says of delegitimised Richard, ‘Yet he looks like a king’ (III, iii, 68). There is no evidence that Richard II was controversial when first publicly performed (1595), but later a privately commissioned performance became infamously associated with the failed 1601 Essex

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rebellion. (‘I am Richard, know ye not that?’ Elizabeth is supposed to have remarked.)11 Yet the Henriad as a whole has been plausibly read to signal Shakespeare’s awareness that Essex’s chivalric-heroic ideals had seriously deflated ( James I, worried they were revivifying around his son Henry, even commissioned an MP’s tract condemning Essex’s cult of honour and militarism, around the time Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus).12 In terms of the longstanding ideological conflict between Machiavelli’s militarism and More’s pacificism, Steven Marx argues, Shakespeare shifted from warpartisan to peace-partisan during the Tudor-Stuart transition.13 Strangely for a Shakespearean history, Richard II contains no battle scene. Richard’s capitulation is, tellingly, to verbal, not physical, force.14 The legitimacy of Richard’s predecessors depended largely on military leadership in the French campaigns. Richard, patron of Chaucer, whose queen ran a sophisticated, cosmopolitan court theretofore unfamiliar to England, was from childhood reproached for lacking the martial virtues of his brothers and ancestors. He puzzled countrymen accustomed to warrior-monarchs by trying to establish a religious conception of kingship, believing a prophecy that he would become Holy Roman Emperor and lead a crusade.15 Shakespeare, pursuing themes introduced through Henry VI, highlights the increasing hollowness of Richard’s appeals to divinity as his material power crumbles. ‘For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed / To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown’, he promises, ‘God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay / A glorious angel’ (III, ii, 58–61). He will wait until doomsday for the righteous counterattack of such angels. He requests the rebels ‘show us the hand of God / That hath dismissed us from our stewardship’ as he ‘know[s] no hand of blood and bone / Can grip the sacred handle of our scepter / Unless he do profane, steal, or usurp’ (III, iii, 77–81). One hears the Hobbist adviser at Bolingbroke’s side: not to worry, sir, those are mere words, insignificant speech. In these circumstances one man’s profanation is another’s sacred duty. Richard’s ‘master, God omnipotent . . . mustering in his clouds on our behalf / Armies of pestilence’ to ‘strike / Your children yet unborn and unbegot’ (III, iii, 85–8) is a pathetic delusion. Bolingbroke’s children live in the world he makes for them, and they make for themselves. In the Henriad, the sins of the father are not visited upon the son. If anything, the son redeems or cancels them. Richard’s final attempt at self-transfiguration, ‘Mount, mount, my soul. Thy seat is up on high, / Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward here to die’ (V, v, 111–12), underscores the thoroughness of his loss of worldly power. Bolingbroke’s return from exile is a political/ secular pilgrimage that ends with him kneeling before York, his uncle, another representative of decrepit feudalism. (The scene in which York

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finds a letter proving his son Aumerle’s treachery (V, ii, 56 ff.) contains language almost identical to that used in King Lear when Edmund’s plot turns Gloucester against Edgar.) York was put in charge when Richard left to fight in Ireland. Like Kent in the wake of Lear’s rage, York tries to perform the duty he believes owed to Richard’s majesty, simultaneously recognising the king’s hopeless folly. ‘Show me thy humble heart’, York responds, ‘and not thy knee, / Whose duty is deceivable and false’, recognising the manipulative core behind Bolingbroke’s traditionalist – h ­ ere only, he says, to claim rightfully inherited lands – ­façade. ‘I am no traitor’s uncle; and that word “grace” / In an ungracious mouth is but profane’ (II, iii, 83–8). Bolingbroke’s ability to turn once-sacred ideas towards profane concerns now counts in his favour. Promising to ‘wash your blood / From off my hands’ (III, i, 5–6) as he sentences Richard’s lackeys to death, Bolingbroke is Pontius Pilate miming expiatory sacrifice while, in practical matters of government, sticking to And what is truth? By contrast, Richard’s theological hope that ‘not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king’, like his vow that his murderer ‘shall burn in never-quenching fire’ (III, ii, 54–5; V, v, 108), sounds anaemic. Marjorie Garber describes a fateful chasm ‘between the cycle play of Christ’s passion that Richard thinks he is performing and the Shakespearean play of politics, history, and metamorphosis in which Bolingbroke is an eager and complicit actor’.16 Bolingbroke’s political invocation of Pilate is closer to the true tone of the play than Richard’s theology of usurpation, ‘So Judas did to Christ’, or Carlisle’s prophecy of a strife-torn England ‘to be called / The field of Golgotha’, or York’s via dolarosa narrative of Bolingbroke leading Richard in triumph (IV, i, 170; IV, i, 144; V, ii, 23 ff.). Perhaps Shakespeare’s audience was meant to interpret Richard as committing true Lèse-majesté, considering the contextual dual imperative: depict dethroning a legitimate monarch as a horror, but spare the Tudors wholesale condemnation of their ancestry.17 Even when Richard accepts the Pilate metaphor he identifies with Christ, evading his political role: ‘you Pilates / Have here delivered me to my sour cross, / And water cannot wash away your sin’ (IV, i, 239–41). When the Queen’s gardener likens Bolingbroke to a political landscaper ‘pluck[ing] up, root and all’ the ‘noisome weeds which without profit suck / The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers’, ‘lop[ping] . . . Superfluous branches’ like Richard’s spendthrift courtiers, the Queen angrily replies that the rebels taste the forbidden fruit: ‘What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee / To make a second Fall of cursed man?’ (III, iv, 38–76). The de- and re-personalisations of Richard and Bolingbroke link this play to Lear. When dethroned, Richard suggests his wife ‘think our former

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state a happy dream; From which awaked, the truth of what we are’ appears, ‘brother[s] . . . To grim Necessity . . . [in] league till death’ (V, i, 18–22), he sounds like newly Stoic Gloucester after Edgar’s trick euthanasia. Bolingbroke accuses Bushy and Green, expropriators of Gaunt’s lands, of ‘leaving me no sign / Save men’s opinions and my living blood / To show the world I am a gentleman’ (III, i, 25–7). He is an Edgar strutting and fretting history’s stage of political horse-trading and compromised heroism, rather than Lear’s tragic heather of radical suffering and metaphysical debasement. ‘I was banished Hereford; / But as I come, I come for Lancaster’, Bolingbroke tells York. ‘Look on my wrongs with an indifferent eye.’ Legal nicety, or revelation that he is not the same dutiful noble who left, this no longer the same kingdom? If that my cousin King be king of England It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster. . . . I am a subject, And I challenge the law. Attorneys are denied me, And therefore personally I lay my claim To my inheritance of free descent. 

(II, iii, 112–35)

Bolingbroke turns Gaunt’s ‘landlord’ warning into a coup d’etat decorated with faux-conservative tinsel. Does he really think his claim to paternal title and lands depends upon Richard’s legitimacy? Probably not, but it matters little in the Henriad’s canvas of Britain collapsing into a state of nature where provinces revolt against metropole and noble sells out noble. York, unprepared for the future, is unfit to judge what is true and false, just and unjust, in this newly Hobbesian world: ‘I’ll give, and willing too; / For do we must what force will have us do’ (III, iii, 206–7). He is well advised to watch ‘indifferent[ly]’ from the sidelines. York’s desire to arrest the rebels and ‘make [them] stoop / Unto the sovereign mercy of the king’ bows to necessity: ‘since I cannot . . . I do remain as neuter’ (II, iii, 153–8). The last term carries a double-connotation: politically neutral and of neither gender, or castrated. Richard, deposed by a male cousin rather than Gorgon daughters, does not plumb the febrile depths of Lear’s anti-vaginal harangues. But he records loss of identity in language similar to Lear’s. ‘I had forgot myself. Am I not King? . . . Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names?’ (III, ii, 83–5) Not if the other side provisions those twenty thousand names. It is as if Lear’s ‘insolent retinue’ had not just been sold off but had then entered Edmund’s employ. ‘In your lord’s scale is nothing but himself’; ‘I

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must nothing be . . . I have no name, no title’ (III, iv, 85; IV, i, 200; IV, i, 254). Richard experiences the pulverisation of the heath, except he is a political prisoner – ­Lear’s abortive Act 5 fantasy – ­the entire time. He experiments with the Stoic humility to which Edgar leads Gloucester, but often sounds unable to convince himself. ‘The worst is worldly loss . . . is my kingdom lost? Why, ’twas my care; / And what loss is it to be rid of care? . . . The worst is death, and death will have his day’ (III, ii, 94–103). There is always memento mori to fall back upon: Bolingbroke, however many worlds he conquers, will die too,     For within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps death his court; and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a little breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks . . .

(III, ii, 160–5)

But the war-torn England of the histories is not the existential hell of Macbeth’s poor player strutting and fretting his hour about the stage, meaningless despite his sound and fury. Richard flirts with Lear’s materialistic reductionism, asking what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground? . . . nothing can we call our own but death And that small model of the barren earth Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. . . . Throw away respect, Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty; For you have but mistook me all this while. I live with bread, like you; feel want, Taste grief, need friends. 

(III, ii, 149–54; III, ii, 172–7)

A double recognition: first, Bolingbroke revealed political reality rather than heretically altering it; second, what turns out to be most important about Richard is what he shares with others, rather than what they owe him. The Queen inadvertently gives the game away, in anguish at her gardener’s news of Bolingbroke’s victory: ‘Darest thou, thou little better thing than earth, / Divine his downfall?’ (III, iv, 78–9). While transferring power

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Richard acridly jokes to Bolingbroke, who addressed him as ‘fair cousin’, ‘I am greater than a king: / For when I was a king, my flatterers / Were then but subjects; being now a subject, / I have a king here to my flatterer’ (IV, i, 295–8). He does not realise the scope of his insight. He describes the rise of modern liberal politics out of the failure, especially in England, of monarchical absolutism to seize the evaporating legitimacy of feudalism. Bolingbroke senses that ‘subjects’ constitute authority as much as authority controls subjects. This is why he and his son make good politician–monarchs, however skin-deep their populist commitments. The future, as Hegel would relate optimistically and Nietzsche pessimistically, belongs to the hard-working slaves, rather than the indolent masters. Richard’s jibe, stripped of its sour grapes tone, could be a précis for Hegel’s master–slave dialectic. Ruling people who freely give consent turns out to be more satisfying than dominating them through force, not only more just, or safer. And giving people what they want, rather than taking from them what you want, is more than just a strategic compromise with necessity. It is the path to a new sort of power, more effective at mobilising resources than the authoritarian alternatives. ‘Just as the peoples who live under a good police are happier than those . . . without rule and without leaders’, Montesquieu writes, ‘so monarchs who live under the fundamental laws of their state are happier than despotic princes, who have nothing to rule their people’s hearts or their own’.18 Richard does not travel the full distance from ancién regime to the reconstruction of politics suggested by Hobbes’ world of bare life pursuing survival only. He imagines himself a courtier in his ex-court: ‘I hardly yet have learned / To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my knee’ (IV, i, 164–5). He never convincingly yearns for Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space outside Elsinore. ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs’ (III, ii, 145), Richard laments: death as a social fact and not just a natural levelling process. By contrast, Bolingbroke’s final turn to this register (‘compound me with the forgotten dust. / Give that which gave thee life unto the worms’) accompanies the passing down of his achievements. To Hal, power ‘descend[s] with better quiet, / Better opinion, better confirmation’; Bolingbroke’s ‘death / Changes the mood’ and power ‘Falls upon [Hal] in more fairer sort’ (2H4 IV, v, 116–17; IV, v, 187–200). This is the historical mode’s melioration of the tragic consciousness exemplified by Hamlet’s obsession with brutally physical, vermiculate death. Richard is lost between these worlds. ‘What says King Bolingbroke? Will his majesty / Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?’ (III, iii, 173–4). Memento mori is mute as to what living Richard can do or be in this new world. Hazlitt’s experience was that Richard’s ‘sufferings . . . make us forget that he ever was a king’;19 Richard, however,

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wants to forget but cannot. ‘O that . . . I could forget what I have been, / Or not remember what I must be now!’ (III, iii, 138–9) Lear’s final ‘let’s away to prison’, I argued above, sought protection for a private realm of love shared with Cordelia. Such exhausted wards might be satisfied gossiping about court politics; Richard, however, projects the bathetic identity of an ex-monarch who will ‘sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings’ (III, ii, 155–6). He advises Isabel, ‘Think I am dead, and . . . In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire / With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales / Of woeful ages long ago betid’ while she ‘Tell[s] . . . the lamentable tale of me’, sending ‘hearers weeping to their beds’ (V, i, 38–45).20 Richard conjures an emperor-turned-penitent who trades     My jewels for a set of beads My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown, My figured goblets for a dish of wood, My scepter for a palmer’s walking staff, My subjects for a pair of carved saints, And my large kingdom for a little grave, A little, little grave, and obscure grave . . . 

(III, iii, 147–55)

This fantastically refigures his fait accompli as a voluntary departure from the worldly goods and cares of empire for the stark authenticity of the monastery. There was, in the sixteenth century, one such notable (uncoerced) transfer of power. In 1556, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ceded authority to his brother and son in order to spend the rest of his life in a monastery. It was said he filled the rooms with clocks so as never to forget the brevity of earthly time. The interaction between emergent English nationalism and the Protestant Reformation is an important context for Shakespeare’s histories.21 (Shakespeare’s transfiguration of the Lollard martyr Oldcastle into Sir John Falstaff is explored below.) It was Charles V who summoned Luther to the Diet of Worms, watched ruefully as the ‘monks’ quarrel’ dismissed by politiques turned bloody, and midwifed the Counter-Reformation by supporting the rise of the Jesuits and Papal convocation of the Council of Trent (1545–63). His son Philip went on to marry Catholic Mary Tudor, setting the stage for centuries of paranoia and strife surrounding the possibility of a continent-spawned English Counter-Reformation. Elizabeth, who refused to marry Philip after Mary died childless, sought to foreclose that possibility. If Shakespeare associates hapless Richard with Charles, he

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indicates a passing of legitimacy from the supra-national, Catholic monarchia universalis of Habsburg Spain to Reformation nationalism. Abdicating, Richard first seeks not a clock but a mirror: ‘show me what a face I have / Since it is bankrupt of its majesty’. Stripped of customary authority he ‘turn[s] mine eyes upon myself’ and discovers having given ‘my soul’s consent / To’undeck the pompous body of a king’, making ‘sovereignty a slave; / Proud majesty, a subject; state, a peasant’ (IV, i, 246–66). As with Cordelia’s rupturing of Lear’s love test, the idea of ‘consent’ turns the world upside down. But Richard’s thoughts do turn to time later, in prison, as he hears music playing without: ‘time is broke, and no proportion kept’ (V, v, 42). True, his newly oppressive timeconsciousness is self-pity, not Charles’ (reported) insight into the true scale of things. As in Lear, a cast-off monarch moves towards awareness that pulverisation of the ancién regime (the mirror ‘cracked in an hundred shivers’ (IV, i, 188)), whatever its horrors, makes possible a new conception of the self. Richard tells Isabel, ‘cloister thee in some religious house, / Our holy lives must win a new world’s crown / Which our profane hours here have thrown down’ (V, i, 23–5); like Antony’s ‘new heaven, new earth’, this associates undiscovered political worlds with unfamiliar inner worlds or selves. Richard’s final prison monologue wonders how to ‘compare / This prison . . . unto the world’, which leads to the prisoner, ex-representative of divinity, becoming like a creator-God, his mind ‘beget[ting] / A generation of still-breeding thoughts, / And these same thoughts people this little world’ (V, v, 1–9). When monarch ceases to automatically represent God, space opens up for the creative prerogatives of divinity to be dispersed among mere mortals. Coleridge, well along in his reactionary turn, usefully misread Richard’s climacteric as nostalgic and hortatory, a ‘spirit of patriotic reminiscence . . . the all-permeating spirit of this drama’ leading us to ‘acknowledge and reverence the eternal distinction between the mere individual and the symbolic or representative, on which all genial law, no less than patriotism, depends’.22 Not exactly: Shakespeare prompts scepticism about romantic/ authoritarian nostalgia to match that about utilitarian or utopian reformers. The clock will not be turned back. Protestant nationalism will become secular nationalism, however much one might want to reclaim the lost religious resources of monarchia universalis. Hence Bolingbroke’s wish to wash the blood of usurpation from his hands ends up a perpetually unfulfilled plan to end England’s internal strife by redirecting her martial energies outward, towards a new crusade (cf. R2 V, vi, 49–50; 1H4 I, i, 18 ff.; 2H4 III, i, 102–3; IV, iv, 1 ff.; H5 V, ii, 192–6). But his son’s French war in Henry V is an exercise in nation building, not unification of Christendom.

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The dream that eternally squabbling English and French armies depart ‘unto a pagan shore, / Where [they] might combine . . . not to spend it so unneighbourly’ (KJ V, ii, 36–9) will remain unfulfilled. Bolingbroke requests transfer to the ‘Jerusalem’ chamber of the palace to expire: ‘there my life must end. / It hath been prophesied to me, many years, / I should not die but in Jerusalem, / Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land’ (2H4 IV, v, 234–7). The Promised Land was just England all along.

Freedom from the Fathers Cousin, I am too young to be your father / Though you are old enough to be my heir.  (R2 III, iii, 204–5) Come, my old son . . . I pray God make thee new. 

(R2 V, iii, 145)

John Wilders calls it ‘difficult . . . to define with any precision what, for Shakespeare . . . distinguished his tragedies from his histories’; there was no Renaissance canon of history-play aesthetics.23 This yielded considerable artistic dividends, as Alexander Leggatt argues: ‘Free of the formal expectations of comedy and tragedy with their decisive endings’, Shakespearean history ‘can register something of the open, unfinished quality of life’24 – ­what Hannah Arendt considered the necessary premise of politics as opposed to philosophy or theology. Pursuit of this generic freedom occurs not only through the histories, but within them. Throughout the Henriad the pragmatic, state-building demands of history combat troublesome invasions from more unadulteratedly tragic and comic worlds. First, examined above, was Richard’s jarring, forlorn attempt to alchemise loss of power into passion play; second, analysed below, is Falstaff’s doomed, unforgettable quest to live a permanent holiday-burlesque while participating in the political upheavals of Henry IV. Leggatt explains Falstaff’s ‘concentration on the common and material’ is comedy ‘not as a certain kind of story but as a certain attitude to life’ which ‘Hal must reject in order to prove himself the king the world of history needs’; comedy ‘steps into the paths of History and is crushed’.25 Northrop Frye calls Falstaff and Cleopatra ‘counter-historical characters’, founts of centrifugal energy blocking the paths of empire builders.26 Hal’s ‘mark now how a plain tale shall put you down’ (1H4 II, iv, 249–50) could be a Falstaff’s clairvoyant epitaph. Falstaff is to Shakespearean modernity what Cressida and Thersites, Antony and Cleopatra were to Shakespearean antiquity, a challenge to public austerity from private hedonism. But like Antony and Cleopatra, he reveals that the private neither can nor should divorce itself

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entirely from public purposes. And if such purposes ultimately advance through Falstaff’s defeat, Shakespeare implies that they do so by partially incorporating him, just as the remorseless march of Caesarism through the Roman histories crushed Antony and Cleopatra, not to extirpate private desire but to make the world safe for a common version of it. In contrast to Richard II, which mostly feels tragic, the next three plays in the Henriad were written concurrently with Shakespeare’s major comedies.27 While Richard fills his prison cell with bathos, Bolingbroke finds earlier serious plotlines replayed as farce. In Act 4, he oversees an explosion of gauntlet-throwing accusations far more tiresome and byzantine than the Act 1 feud between Mowbray and himself. He suborns extrajudicial murder of imprisoned Richard, then officially disowns the assassin – ­exactly as many had suspected Richard of doing. And Bolingbroke’s pardoning of Aumerle amidst a cacophony of conflicting pleas – ­father requesting severity, mother begging forgiveness – s­eems a comic echo of his own previous sentencing under Gaunt’s wistful eyes. ‘Our scene is altered from a serious thing’ as the sounds of a ‘shrill-voiced suppliant’ mother fill the castle and Duke and Duchess of York trade hysterical invocations of paternal honour and maternal love in rhymed couplets. The language of these scenes also prepares us for the next problem in the Henriad: Bolingbroke’s relationship with another wayward son, mentioned here for the first time. Hal is a ‘plague hang[ing] over us’ in whom one nevertheless senses ‘sparkles of a better hope’. York calls Aumerle ‘vice’s bawd . . . spend[ing] mine honor with his shame / As thriftless sons their scraping fathers’ gold’, foreshadowing Hal’s inward wrestling with opposed loyalties. ‘O loyal father of a treacherous son!’ Bolingbroke tells York, ‘thy abundant goodness shall excuse / The deadly blot in thy digressing son’ (V, iii, 1–21; V, iii, 51–68; V, iii, 74–8). Is the generational slate so straightforwardly cleaned? Richard III tries, unsuccessfully, to bury past hatreds with promises of future flourishing, past murders with future births, pleading ‘what I will be, not what I have been; / Not my deserts, but what I will deserve’. Enamoured of his own demonic Machiavellianism, he believes he can win over a woman whose children he murdered by promising, ‘in your daughter’s womb I bury them . . . they will breed / Selves of themselves, to your recomfiture’ (R3 IV, iv, 345–56). Bolingbroke ‘pardon[s] York as God shall pardon me’ (R2 V, iii, 130). But the monarch’s pardon is political, not metaphysical, and Bolingbroke, however beloved of the people, develops gnawing doubts about his status in God’s eyes. Henry IV’s rebels call up the nightmarish prospect of hatred and violence passed down for generations. Bolingbroke will try to ‘wipe the tables clean’ through violence, but he ‘cannot so precisely weed this

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land’ because ‘to end one doubt by death / Revives two greater in the heirs of life’; so ‘heir from heir shall hold this quarrel up / Whiles England shall have generation’ (2H4 IV, i, 197–203; IV, i, 274–5). ‘Can vengeance be pursued further than death?’ – ­Paris wrongly, but considering the circumstances not unreasonably, concludes Romeo has entered the Capulet tombs to desecrate corpses (V, iii, 55). But Bolingbroke envisions the opposite process, freeing rather than constraining the future. Henry V’s ascent similarly loosens generational constraints and rearranges generational obligations. He bids the court ‘be assured, / I’ll be your father and your brother too’. He tells the Lord Chief Justice, formerly scourge of Hal’s misspent youth and Falstaff’s foil, that such rectitude is newly appreciated. His office will continue ‘Till you do live to see a son of mine / Offend you . . . So shall I live to speak my father’s words’; then shall he ‘use the same . . . bold, just, and impartial spirit / As you have done ’gainst me . . . father to my youth’ (2H4 V, ii, 56–118). Hal speaks of history repeating itself, but not as revenge’s dirge, always cycling back to zero. Bacon called revenge ‘a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out’; it ‘putteth the law out of office’. Wisdom knows the ‘past is gone and irrevocable’ and focuses on ‘things present and to come; therefore they do but trifle with themselves that labor in past matters’.28 Revenge ethos equals perpetual regress to state of nature, blocking new generations’ rational ascent to a higher plane of civilisation. Like Abrahamic law, it is the past binding the present. Hamlet’s resistance is as much a sign of budding modernity as of crippling melancholy or hypertrophic intellect. ‘My father’s blood / Hath stopped the passage where thy words should enter’, a fuming Lord says to a pleading boy he is about to kill. He goes on, reductio ad absurdum, ‘if I digged up thy forefathers’ graves, / And hung their rotten coffins up in chains, / It could not slake mine ire nor ease my heart . . . till I root out their accursed line, / And leave not one alive, I live in hell’ (3H6 I, iii, 22–34). Hell, then, is everywhere and forever. Revenge, here, is insatiable like lust and avarice, but without their potentially productive side effects. By contrast, Henry VII ‘unites the white rose and the red’ by ‘Proclaim[ing] a pardon to the soldiers fled / That in submission will return to us’ (R3 V, viii, 16–19). Jonathan Baldo suggests that in these plays ‘forgetting . . . not the rebels’ well-trodden path of memory . . . lead[s] to greater national unity’.29 The transition from medieval to early modern political theory, Quentin Skinner writes, shifted ‘the idea of the ruler “maintaining his state” – ­where this simply meant upholding his own position – ­to the idea that there is a separate legal and constitutional order, that of the State, which the ruler has a duty to maintain’.30 Punishing the

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conspirators, Hal relatedly promises to rule by law rather than personal whim. ‘Touching our person seek we no revenge’, he announces, ‘But we our kingdom’s safety must so tender, / Whose ruin you have sought, / that to her laws / We do deliver you’ (H5 II, ii, 170–3). Hal shows how obeisance to impersonal law, however self-serving in his case, can strengthen rather than weaken a monarchy. He knows in advance that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who he protected from Lollard threats, will not only support his opportunistic war in France by ‘justly and religiously unfold[ing] / Why the law . . . should not bar us in our claim’ (H5 I, ii, 9–12), but pay for it. The Archbishop fawningly proposes that to hear him ‘reason in divinity . . . You would desire the King were made a prelate’; yet he suspects Hal’s ‘reformation’ was a deliberate strategy, ‘for miracles are ceased’ (H5 I, i, 34–41; I, i, 68). Janet Adelman proposes a psychoanalytical taxonomy of Shakespeare based on family romance: father–daughter dominates the comedies and late romances, mother–son the tragedies, and father–son the histories.31 This is provocative and persuasively argued, but one must be careful applying it to the Henriad. It is common to see in Hal a wayward son torn between duelling father figures, as in Hal’s proposal that Falstaff ‘stand for my father and examine me upon the particulars of my life . . .’ FALSTAFF  This chair shall be my state, this dagger my scepter, and this cushion my crown. PRINCE HAL  Thy state is taken for a joint-stool, thy golden scepter for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown. (1H4 II, iv, 369–75)

Here Hal seems to play out historical family romance, having his ‘fathers’ judge him while he judges them. He indicts Falstaff’s performing a grotesque imitation of sovereignty in dissolute Eastcheap, but of course Hal suggested this blasphemous pageantry in the first place. (Grace Tiffany likens Hal to ‘a Dionysian Alcibiades, trained in sophistry by his Silenic Socrates, Falstaff, and able to dazzle his subjects with mystical rhetoric and to convert war to Dionysian play’.32) Yet frequently Falstaff is described, and self-describes, as a sort of infant. Speaking of ‘us that are young’ to an official incredulous one so ‘blasted with antiquity . . . yet call[s him]self young’, Falstaff says, ‘I was born about three a clock in the afternoon, with a white head, and something of a round belly’; in death he ‘went away an it had been any christom child’ (2H4 I, ii, 176–90; H5 II, iii, 11–12). In Freudian terms he is all id, a walking, talking infantile pleasure principle that reality and superego gradually grind down. He lives as wholly in the

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present as possible: ‘a purse of gold most resolutely snatched on Monday night [is] most dissolutely spent on Tuesday morning’ (1H4 I, ii, 33–5). Constant says ‘morality needs time’, for only futurity ‘sets its compensations and rewards’.33 Falstaff is the incessant feeder always fed by others, unimpressed by rational husbandry or delayed gratification. ‘Your means are very slender, and your waste is great’ puns on the excessive cost of Falstaff’s rotund (like a baby’s) waist; Falstaff ‘hath put all my substance into that fat belly of his’, complains the Hostess (2H4 I, ii, 141–2; II, i, 72–3). This also describes hermaphroditism or sex-inversion, a male pregnant with female substance.34 Freud’s narcissist-infants are ‘polymorphously perverse’, their homogeneous universe of desire not yet channelled and compartmentalised by social exigencies. Falstaff has ‘a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name . . . my womb, my womb, my womb undoes me’ (2H4 IV, iii, 18–22). During one Eastcheap improvisation, Hal wants to ‘play Percy’ while Falstaff ‘play Dame Mortimer his wife’ (1H4 II, iv, 100–3). Falstaff’s unwelcome prank (‘What, is it a time to jest and dally now?’) at the battle of Shrewsbury, where he offers Hal a pistol case containing only wine (1H4 V, iii, 50–5), is similarly sex-inverting. Power-granting phallus becomes pleasure-giving liquid. ‘What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day?’ (1H4 I, ii, 5–6). Nothing: the id is timeless, like the realm of dreams where it resurfaces even in well-adjusted adults.35 Thus the language of Hal’s final rejection of Falstaff: ‘I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, / So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane, / But being awaked I do despise my dream’ (2H4 IV, v, 50–4). As the prince’s ‘herein I will imitate the sun’ soliloquy, where his ‘reformation’ appears a premeditated strategy to ‘show more goodly . . . Redeeming time when men think least I will’, muses, ‘If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work; / But when they seldom come, they wished-for come, / And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents’ (1H4 I, ii, 175–95). Hal is ever an oblique character, so the reader who believes this explanation commits no obvious interpretive error. But it sounds to me like he protests too much, needing to convince himself allyear holiday would be intolerable. That may be the correct course; still, Shakespeare uses Hal’s progress and Falstaff’s decline to communicate, more effectively than anyone before Freud, the brutality inherent in such political adjustment to necessity. ‘Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world’; ‘I do, I will’ (1H4 II, iv, 465–6). As superego spreads its empire, Thanatos bleeds into Falstaff’s language. He imagines himself ‘eaten to death with a rust’, describes a population ravaged by ‘the gout . . . and

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the pox’, and confesses, ‘I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable’ (2H4 I, ii, 199–224). He pleads Doll ‘not speak like a death’shead; do not bid me remember mine end’, and whines, ‘Thou’lt forget me when I am gone’ (2H4 II, iv, 229–30; II, iv, 270–1). Perhaps the Lord Chief Justice, despite his officious pomposity, is insightful when he tells Falstaff ‘you loiter here too long’ (as Bolingbroke tells Hal ‘I stay too long by thee, I weary thee’ (IV, v, 94)). It seems even Priapus has deserted him, ‘desire [by] many years outliv[ing] performance’ (2H4 II, i, 185; II, iv, 255–6) – ­Falstaff’s very name, after all, winks at impotence. Between I and II Henry IV, C. L. Barber explains, Falstaff’s reign becomes Falstaff’s trial. He ‘proves extremely difficult to bring to book’ because by the sequel ‘burlesque and mockery . . . crystallizes as a settled attitude of skepticism’. Increasingly speaking directly to the audience, Falstaff is ‘setting himself up as an institution’, an ambition unsuitable for a jester, a mere safety valve, in the new king’s court.36 By the end of the series the Thanatization of Falstaff has proceeded mercilessly. We hear Doll died ‘of malady of France’, meaning venereal disease; meanwhile, Pistol promises to become a pimp upon returning to England, and lie that he got his wounds in battle (H5 V, i, 73–80 – y­ et he is a grubby, witless substitute for the fat knight, showing how obnoxious Shakespeare knew the character of the ‘rogue, that now and then goes to the wars, to grace himself at his return to London under the form of a soldier’ (III, vi, 63–5) could be). Part of Falstaff’s spirit nevertheless endures to puncture the mood of martial glory ascendant in Henry V, suggesting unresolved contradictions in Hal’s secular progress towards well-balanced political ego. Hearing a soldier sing of ‘immortal fame’ another declares, ‘I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety.’ The same youth, after his comrades exit the stage, deflates their chickenhawk pretences in Falstaffian mode. Bardolph ‘is white-livered and red-faced . . . [he] faces it out, but fights not’; Pistol ‘hath a killing tongue, and a quiet sword’ (H5 III, ii, 11–34). Hearing Henry V likened to Alexander, a sceptical soldier suggests the king be called ‘Alexander the Pig’ instead. ‘The pig or the great or the mighty or the huge or the magnanimous are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations.’ A comparison initially made by a court sycophant – ‘­any cause of policy, / The Gordian knot of it he will unloose’ – ­now turns unflattering: Hal ‘killed’ his drinking companion Falstaff like Alexander killed Cleitus (H5 I, i, 46–7; IV, vii, 37–43). From battlefield to tavern, from national macrocosm – w ­ here Hal, preparing his invasion of France, is reminded of a concurrent need to ‘defend / Our inland from the pilfering borderers’ of Scotland (H5 I, ii,

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137–42) – t­o princely microcosm, the Henriad places pragmatic demands on Bolingbroke and Hal to eliminate or suppress unruly forces. These include ‘irregular and wild Glendower’ (1H4 I, i, 40) and his reluctant ally Hotspur, ‘Mars in swaddling clothes, / This infant warrior’ (1H4 III, ii, 112–13), an inverted Falstaff whose unbalanced id pursues battle instead of pleasure.37 Hotspur memorably cuts Glendower’s supernatural fantasies down to size, but such rationalism is no sign of prudence. To Glendower’s boast, ‘the earth did shake when I was born’, Hotspur replies, ‘the earth was not of my mind, / If you suppose as fearing you it shook’ (1H4 III, i, 18–20). His scepticism is just another advertisement for his own fearlessness. Wouldn’t humouring an ally’s fancies be the more prudential course? Self-piteous over Hal’s debauchery, Bolingbroke fantasises Hal and Hotspur as changelings, the latter ‘so blest a son . . . the theme of honor’s tongue, / Amongst a grove the very straightest plant’ (1H4 I, i, 79–81). But the experience of Richard II should have taught Bolingbroke that ‘honor’s tongue’ is of questionable value unless straightened by rational public purposes. Hotspur is later described, admittedly with victors’ hindsight, as having ‘with great imagination / Proper to madmen, led his powers to death’ (2H4 I, iii, 31–3). He ‘shows honor must be for the commonwealth’, Victor Kiernan observes; his is ‘easily caricatured because destitute of any social or moral purpose’.38 Hotspur possesses the charismatic authority Max Weber explained only reaps long-term dividends by routinising itself and accessing the stabler virtues of tradition and bureaucracy.39 Hotspur’s death ‘took fire and heat away’ from his soldiers, ‘For from his metal was his party steeled, / Which once in him abated, all the rest / Turned on themselves’; the rebellion can only continue if ‘the Bishop / Turns insurrection to religion’ (2H4 I, i, 114–18; I, i, 200–1). Instead, Hal, as shown by his later dealings with the Archbishop of Canterbury, assimilates religion to bureaucratic raison d’etat. Hal makes space for experimentation and progress, even if he submits Falstaffism to authoritarianism to do so. There is, it must be said, a perpetually self-serving element of this king’s disassembly of holism into freely choosing individuals. ‘Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own’ (H5 IV, i, 164–5). The notion that sons have been freed from automatic obedience invites the response that fathers have been freed from duty. When, in disguise among his army, he hears himself held responsible for soldiers dying with unexpiated sins he replies, ‘if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him’. But a King ‘is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers . . . for they purpose not their deaths when they propose their

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services’ (H5 IV, i, 139–51). Having forced his enemies to sue for peace, he woos the French princess with a mixture of traditionalism and novelty that would confuse his quarry even without the language barrier. He describes himself as ‘such a plain king that thou wouldst think I had sold my farm to buy my crown’, incapable of dissembling about love (H5 V, ii, 123–6). He resurrects, though with questionable seriousness, his father’s pious dream of unifying Christendom against Islam: ‘Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half-French half-English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?’ (H5 V, ii, 192–6). Yet he also ‘proves’ to Kate she does no disgrace to France, marrying its conqueror, with casuistry rivalling that which originally legitimated the conquest: ‘loving me, you should love the friend of France, for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it, I will have it all mine; and Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, then yours is France, and you are mine’ (H5 V, ii, 165–8). The labyrinthine paper trail of who owns what, and by what title, dazzlingly obscures his Machiavellian conflation of power with right. But the more legal norms are used by power for power’s sake, the more they might take on a life of their own, and eventually sit in judgement on power itself – s­ omething like this, I propose below, happens between the English histories and the final romances’ monarchies. Hal’s charisma can break a decayed tradition’s miserable stalemate, but its real gift to the future relies as much on its rationalisation. The tension between these two energies reflects a tension in the Renaissance/early modern attempt to theorise an absolute monarchy depersonalised, as in Hobbes above, into ‘sovereignty’. The ‘absolutely sovereign’, for Bodin, is an earthly approximation of God’s will ‘exempt from the laws of his predecessors’, even from ‘laws and ordinances that he has made himself’, because it is impossible ‘to command one’s self to do something that depends on one’s own will’. Political order is ‘modeled on the law of God’ because ‘justice is the end of law, law the work of the prince, and the prince the image of God’, but also because the sovereign legislates de novo. Sovereignty cannot pass law to which sovereignty is bound just as God ‘cannot make a God equal to Himself’. Yet the prince is obligated by ‘just contracts and promises that he has made’, like private individuals. A prince unbound by his predecessors is partially subject to his predecessor self’s ‘just and reasonable contracts in the observation of which his subjects in general or particular subjects have an interest’. But the contracts binding private individuals are underwritten by material enforcement mechanisms beyond shame or foregone reputation. What does Bodin’s prince fear? By definition, his contracts cannot be

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backed by law (‘many commentators mistakenly confuse the prince’s laws with his contracts, which they call laws’): A contract between a prince and his subjects . . . obligates the two parties reciprocally and one party cannot contravene it to the prejudice of the other and without the other’s consent . . . except that, if the justice of a law [the prince] has sworn to keep ceases, he is no longer bound by his promise . . . a liberty that subjects cannot exercise with respect to each other unless they are relieved [of their obligations] by the prince.40

It seems the ancient notion of judging a state by whether all – i­ncluding the rulers – ­are subject to the same law, is misguided. What makes sense for city–republics with citizen armies and rotating officeholders becomes incoherent applied to large states governed by professional militaries and bureaucracies. For example, Bodin points out, a nation wracked by baronial strife might prohibit private possession of arms – a­ statute to which the sovereign obviously could not be subject. Marlowe’s ‘aspiring Guise’, accused of being ‘in arms without the king’s consent’, replies with a list of his domestic enemies: ‘What should I do but stand upon my guard? / And, being able, I’ll keep a host in pay.’ The foe complains Guise’s machinations waste ‘treasure that should strength my land / In civil broils’ (Massacre at Paris, IX.22–4; XXI.107–8). Similarly, dire ‘exigencies of situations, times, and persons’ might compel Bodin’s prince ‘to annul, change, or correct the laws’. Needing general approval to perform such corrections would be like a ship’s captain ‘waiting on the opinion of its passengers’ to shift course.41 What could it mean to call Bodin’s prince bound by contracts? Marsilius of Padua probed the limits of late-medieval republicanism when, using Aristotle’s authority, he proposed that elected rulers were superior to hereditary ones, and that a monarch might be ‘corrected not as a ruler but as a subject who has transgressed the law’. But, he quickly added, one should be careful lest a ruler ‘corrected for every small and infrequent excess . . . be made an object of contempt’, harming the community as a whole.42 Bodin says the sovereign’s obligation derives from its status as ‘guarantor . . . of the agreements and mutual obligations [subjects] have entered ­ ut what if an aforementioned ‘exigency’ requires nulwith one another’ – b lifying contracts or allowing abrogation of promises? Bodin considers law the prerogative of a political sphere separate from society, not emerging organically from it. Society is governed by custom, which acquires its force little by little and by the common consent of all, or most, over many years, while law appears suddenly, and gets its strength from one person

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who has the power of commanding all. Custom slips in softly and without violence; law is commanded and promulgated by power, very often against the subjects’ wishes . . . Law, furthermore, can repeal customs, while if custom should detract from law, the magistrate . . . can have the law enforced.43

One could interpret the division conservatively: custom, long-lived and popular, has a power such that law would be wise to tread lightly in its presence. Only ‘reform by laws what is established by laws’, advises Montesquieu. It is ‘very bad policy to change by laws what should be changed by manners’.44 On the other hand, a more radically minded prince might, with a clear conscience, think he has found a new way to smash customs grown politically or economically inconvenient (like communal tillage), or formerly neighbouring customs grown irreconcilable (like Erasmian humanism and Lutheran fundamentalism). This chapter has demonstrated how Henry IV’s and Henry V’s rise to power and search for legitimacy illustrates, among other themes, this ambivalence. A politics understood to emerge organically from society, or descend metaphysically from an all-powerful God, is bounded in a way that one awarded a set of exclusively controlled priorities is not. Two reconciliations managed by Henry V – b ­ etween himself and the French princess, and between his multiethnic soldiery – ­at the end of the play may serve to illustrate the complicated imperatives of Bodinian sovereignty. Power has a paradoxical double need for both constraints and freedom from constraints – ­Hal’s would-be middle road between, or higher synthesis of, too-constrained (by feudal-honour tradition) Hotspur and too-unconstrained Falstaff. Princess Kate takes for granted the patriarchal traditionalism that could never quite corral Hal, even when he accepted its demands: ‘as it shall please’ her father, she replies simply, Hal’s marriage proposal ‘sall also content me’ (H5 V, ii, 229–32). This does not fully satisfy her suitor, who demands recognition of his prerogative to suspend tradition, stealing a pre-matrimonial kiss against local custom: ‘nice customs curtsy to great kings’ and ‘cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults’ (H5 V, ii, 250–3). Victor Kiernan calls Henry V ‘partially modernized’ insofar as he pursues feudalist territorial rights, but with a consciously nationalist purpose.45 His self-congratulatory announcement that he is ‘not covetous for gold’, but ‘covet[s] honor’, prizes the nation’s status over his own, and the famous ‘band of brothers’ speech that follows is as much about peace as war, imagining the battle transforming an originally religious Saint Crispin’s holiday into a tradition of patriotic remembrance (H5 IV, iii, 24–8; IV, iii, 40 ff.).

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When Henry V reminds provincial Fluellen that England’s King, too, is Welsh (H5 IV, vii, 96), he is not joining a soldier in regional particularism, but suggesting that nationalism has enough latent power to progressively render such particularisms harmless aesthetic indulgences. So when Fluellen dons the symbolic Welsh leek and is challenged by Pistol, Gower calls Pistol a counterfeit cowardly knave. Will you mock at an ancient tradition, begun upon an honorable respect and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valor . . . You thought, because [Fluellen] could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel. You find it otherwise. And henceforth let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition. (V, i, 62–70)

Except this ‘ancient tradition’ was originally ‘worn as a memorable trophy’ of Welsh independence: legend claimed Wales’ patron Saint David had his soldiers wear leeks in their helmets to identify each other when fighting the Saxons. Henry’s war has transformed it into an acceptable signal of national pride. Henry then engineers a conflict between Fluellen and Williams (H5 IV, vii, 160 ff.) so he can step in and squash it, politicising the pranksterism of Falstaff to the point where it now relives, and reverses, the epochal failure of Richard II that began the Henriad. Peacemaking links Henry with the commons, whereas Richard’s bungling of the Bolingbroke/Mowbray conflict pushed his already dangerous distance from popular emotion to the breaking point. The King reveals his prebattle disguise: KING HARRY  It was ourself thou didst abuse. WILLIAMS  Your majesty came not like yourself. You appeared to me but as a common man . . . And what your highness suffered under that shape, I beseech you take it for your own fault, and not mine, for had you been as I took you for, I made no offence. Therefore I beseech your highness pardon me. KING HARRY  Here, Uncle Exeter, fill this glove with crowns And give it to this fellow. – K ­ eep it, fellow, And wear it for an honor in thy cap Till I do challenge it.  (IV, viii, 45–55)

Bodin in a nutshell: Henry artfully admits a subject may plead the King’s ‘fault’ insofar as the King can be seen as just another subject, except the relationship remains one of radically asymmetrical power – ­he can

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challenge Williams’ earned ‘honour’ anytime he chooses, not vice versa. But might the latter option be hidden in the above? The suggestion of an affirmative answer can be found in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale, where jealousy-mad King Leontes’ attempts to impose absolutist discipline are thwarted at every level. Enforcing private passion on an intransigent reality, bending a suddenly disorganised world to his will: all, here, democratically checked, such that Leontes may not play a Claudius, an Othello, a Macbeth. Offended advisers and subjects tell Leontes his ‘justice’ is mere ‘violence’, ‘rigor, and not law’ (II, i, 129–30; III, ii, 112). The chastened King pleads, ‘Lack I credit?’ and cites a ‘prerogative’ that requires ‘not your counsels . . . our natural goodness / Imparts this . . . The matter, / The loss, the gain, the ord’ring on’t, is all / Properly ours’ (II, i, 159; II, i, 165–72). Yet Leontes’ subsequent actions admit he cannot place himself above the law. He arranges for Hermione, his ‘publicly accused’ wife, to receive a ‘just and open trial’, and sends to the Delphic oracle – ­which does not, in this case, respond at all cryptically – ­to confirm or refute his suspicions (II, i, 185; II, i, 199; II, iii, 202–5). The oracle’s authority indicates the procedure could not be a show trial, even if Leontes wanted it so. As in the Henriad above and The Merchant of Venice below, a key question here is the relationship between paternal control and filial freedom. Leontes’ son dies victim to the backward-looking model: ‘Conceiving the dishonor of his mother . . . declined . . . Fastened and fixed the shame on’t in himself . . . languished’ (II, iii, 13–17). But Paulina, the play’s most spirited conscientious objector, promises the opposite will be true of Leontes’ daughter: This child was prisoner to the womb, and is By law and process of great nature thence Freed and enfranchised, not a party to The anger of the King, nor guilty of – If any be – ­the trespass of the Queen. 

(II, ii, 62–6)

Edmund plus Cordelia: ‘great nature’ identifies what no father can legitimately demand, illegitimate though the child might be. Paulina inverts the Hal–Williams relationship established above, telling Leontes she ‘would by combat’ stand for Hermione’s honour ‘so were I / A man, the worst about you’. Decision-making based solely on ‘your own weak-hinged fancy . . . savors / Of tyranny’ (II, iii, 117–20). Leontes lambasts her furiously, but basically concedes the point. He will ‘be cleared / Of being tyrannous’ by ‘openly / Proceed[ing] in justice’. Though he initially grasps at the

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totalitarian prerogative of simply creating facts when the oracle’s report comes back not guilty (‘There is no truth at all i’th’ oracle. / The sessions shall proceed’) he reverses himself almost immediately (‘Apollo’s angry . . . at my injustice’ (III, ii, 4–6)). Leontes’ irresolution, his inability to exercise absolute power – ­‘I am a feather for each wind that blows’ (II, iii, 154) – ­thus turns Henry VI’s and Richard II’s similar flaws inside out. The Machiavellian boldness that would have been a virtue in a late-medieval England of clashing barons is hazardous for a state with settled, legitimate delineations of authority and legality. Here would-be Machiavellian princes, not the chaos they reordered, have become the problem to be solved, the new fathers whose children must be freed. As Montesquieu, admirer of Enlightenment England’s constitutional monarchy, puts it, ‘A monarchy is ruined when a prince believes he shows his power more by changing the order of things than by following it.’46 In the final romances, generous infusions of magic are often required to set disjointed time right, perhaps signalling a disaffection with actual politics that accompanied, for many, the Jacobean transition.47 Still, these plays, like the Henriad, suggest a politically balancing attitude towards the clash between tradition’s resources and periodical requirements of novelty and recreation. In The Winter’s Tale, ‘Time’, a Chorus figure, speaks of its ‘power / To o’erthrow law . . . and o’erwhelm custom’ (IV, i, 7–9). Time is everyone and no one, escaping sanction. Here its human imitators expect similar leeway. Bohemia’s Prince Florizel disguises himself as a shepherd to woo and wed foundling (but rightful princess) Perdita: to the ‘dread’ she feels in their social ‘difference’ he responds, ‘gods themselves, / Humbling their deities to love, have taken / The shapes of beasts upon them’ (IV, iv, 17–27). But Florizel does not entirely claim the prerogatives of such gods. Charisma-id shall be bound by tradition-superego. He refuses ‘my succession’ as ‘I / am heir to my affection’, but unlike Tarquin and other such villains he will be a ‘chaste’ Jupiter: ‘my desires / Run not before mine honor, nor my lusts / Burn hotter than my faith’. He unbinds himself from the past by binding himself to the future: ‘I’ll be thine’, he tells Perdita, ‘not my father’s. For I cannot be / Mine own . . . if / I be not thine’ (IV, iv, 33–45; IV, iv, 468–9). Even Polixenes, the unconsenting father who initially damns and disinherits apparently slumming Florizel, foreshadows eventual reconciliation when he explains how innovations in the natural order (here, agricultural cross-breeding) can themselves be considered natural: Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean . . . that art

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(IV, iv, 89–97)

Hence, the fragility of his subsequent tirades about Florizel’s ‘unfilial . . . wrong’ in not allowing ‘The father, all whose joy is . . . fair posterity . . . some counsel’ in the decision (IV, iv, 393–8). The radical suggestion above is that nature would legitimate Florizel and Perdita’s union, even if she did not prove a secret princess. Innovations can be defended as producing a better nature, or choosing the better of the options nature presents. ‘The selfsame sun that shines upon his court’, Perdita argues, ‘Hides not his visage from our cottage, but / Looks on alike’ (IV, iv, 432–4). The Tempest, similarly, is filled with egalitarian cadences (like the Golden Age fantasy Gonzalo cooks up mixing Ovid and Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Cannibals’ (II, i, 146 ff.)), albeit ones enabled by exceptional circumstances and/or magical interventions. It also ends with generational upheaval framed by rhetoric of cross-breeding. Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, is ‘the goddess that hath’ both ‘severed’ Alonso and his son Ferdinand ‘And brought us thus together.’ Ferdinand ‘chose her when I could not ask my father / For his advice, nor thought I had one’ – t­hereby defending innovative individualism and traditionalism at once. Miranda gives him ‘a second life; and second father’, Prospero; Alonso in turn dubs himself Miranda’s second father and exclaims, ‘how oddly it will sound, that I / Must ask my child forgiveness!’ (V, i, 190–201). Prospero’s disciplinary trials of the would-be new son morph into abasement of old generation before new. Prospero himself moves from absolutism to something more like constitutional monarchy over the course of the play. Though officially he is a legitimate authority combating his brother Antonio’s usurpation, it is unclear from Prospero’s behaviour on the island that he possesses a less despotic personality than Antonio’s. He accuses Antonio of consolidating power through having ‘new created / The creatures that were mine . . . or changed ’em / Or else new formed ’em’; Antonio ‘set all hearts i’th’ state / To what tune pleased his ear’ (I, ii, 79–85). Creatures that were mine: Prospero’s magic replicates Antonio’s politics by imposing hierarchy and dominance on Caliban’s island. Prospero guesses Antonio will inwardly legitimate his Machiavellian ascent by expanding rather than limiting his power, will

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‘credit his own lie [and] believe / He was indeed the Duke’; ‘To have no screen between this part he played / And him he played it for, he needs will be / Absolute Milan’ (I, ii, 101–9). Antonio speaks of power only, but the usurpation’s necessity is easily defensible given Prospero’s abandoning politics for academic pursuits (I, ii, 73–90). Prospero’s subsequent control over the island originates in an appropriation of questionable legitimacy. Whether or not the play engages New World colonisation and enslavement, Prospero rules as, at best, a feudal baron. The ‘worthy service’ Ariel owes him is, he implies, theoretically eternal because of ‘From what torment I did free thee’, Ariel’s previous imprisonment (I, ii, 246 ff.) – ­not to mention the perpetual serfdom imposed on Caliban, the island’s original inhabitant, who Prospero initially treated as ally and ward. By play’s end he has begun to come to terms with constrained authority: ‘The cell’s my court’ (compare Imogen’s finding ‘a court no bigger than this cave’ (Cym. III, vi, 80)) with ‘few attendants’ and ‘subjects none’. ‘My dukedom since you have given me again’, he says, ‘I will requite you with as good a thing . . . a wonder to content ye / As much as me my dukedom’ (V, i, 168–73). Even as he recovers his dukedom he speaks a more egalitariancontractual than feudal-bondage language. I can now follow up on earlier invocations of Max Weber’s analysis of legitimacy, and link it to my invocation, via Falstaff, of Freudian psychology.48 In the Henriad, a partnership between charisma and rationality appropriates feudal traditionalism’s faltering power. In the final romances, monarchical charisma itself bows to rationality, and in so doing suggests a new proto-democratic (rather than feudal–hierarchical) sort of traditionalism could be established, with its own rites, gods and pieties. But prototypes for this, like Hal’s interaction with Fluellen, have been suggested in the Henriad itself. Shakespeare pointedly counterposes Henry V’s populism (however cynical), who before battle ‘Bids [his soldiers] good morrow with a modest smile / And calls them brothers, friends, and countrymen’, promising that whoever ‘sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition’, for ‘there is none of you so mean and base / That hath not noble lustre in your eyes’, with the arrogance of a French commander’s request for a temporary truce to bury the dead: ‘To sort our nobles from our common men . . . our vulgar drench their peasant limbs / In blood of princes’ (H5 III, i, 29–30; IV, Prologue, 33–4; IV, iii, 61–3; IV, vii, 66–70 – a­ s Margaret of Anjou, castrating wife to oft-impotent Henry VI, cries ‘Away, base scullions!’ to a crowd petitioning the crown, amazed at such a strange English custom (2H6 I, iii, 44)). Weber’s anatomy of charisma-bureaucracy-tradition interestingly

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mirrors Freud’s roughly contemporaneous map of id-ego-superego. The middle term, pursuing rational goals with means-ends methodology, must be strong to resist the centrifugal or tyrannical excesses to either side. But, like the others, it can be too strong for its own good, inviting the anomie and dissatisfaction that sometimes fuels a modern sense of being devalued cogs in a vast, efficient-but-purposeless machine. My Introduction proposed Western political thought has tended to pit unifying against mixing or balancing conceptions of the regime. Ego-bureacracy’s task is not to crush id-charisma and superego-traditionalism, but make them safe for the world and the world safe for them. This is a core requirement of modern politics because our societies are too large and complex, our technology- and market-primed purposes too diverse, for stable authority to be constituted through charismatic or traditionalistic resources alone. Chapter 5 continues to examine such themes of Shakespearean modernity specifically through the lens of tension between religious authority and an increasingly secular state.

CHAPTER 5

SHAKESPEARE AND THE THEOLOGICAL–POLITICAL PROBLEM

Christ and the apostles wanted to be and were continuously subject in property and in person to the coercive jurisdiction of secular rulers . . . The coercive judicial power of Pilate over the person of Christ . . . was from God. Marsilius of Padua There is . . . a kind of profession of faith which the laws may impose . . . because there can exist Religions that attack the foundations of society, and one has to begin by exterminating these Religions in order to insure the peace of the State. I would wish, then, that in every State there were a moral code, or a kind of civil profession of faith, containing, positively, the social maxims everyone would be bound to acknowledge, and, negatively, the fanatical maxims one would be bound to reject, not as impious, but as seditious. Thus every Religion that could conform to the code would be allowed; every Religion that did not conform to it would be proscribed; and everyone would be free to have no other Religion than the code itself. Rousseau to Voltaire

Just as Shakespeare weaves the birth of Christianity into his Roman plays, he weaves conflict over the secularisation of politics prompted by Renaissance humanism and Protestantism into two plays that hinge on the nature of contract and bond(age). The traditionalism of the Judaic covenant, represented by The Merchant of Venice’s Shylock, clashes with the Venetian commercial–political order that had previously accommodated it. Measure for Measure revolves around disturbances of entrepreneurial holiness represented by the conflict between Angelo and Isabella. This continues my general account of the rise of secular nationalism, and

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political professionalism, out of a struggle between its representatives and opponents with anti- or suprapolitical values. Here the victors are Merchant’s Portia, who expropriates Shylock’s estate by disguising herself as a loophole-hunting litigator, and Measure’s Duke, who manages the threat of Vienna coming apart due to erotic and thanatotic extravagances by incorporating Angelo, Isabella and others into matrimonial institutions. Contemporary resurgences of religious fundamentalism have reinvigorated examination of the ‘theological–political problem’, which has, Steven Smith explains, ‘two dimensions: Should religion rule politics, or should politics rule religion?’1 In the West, this originates in Christianity’s peculiar history. As Bacon’s essay ‘Of Unity in Religion’ (1612) relates, ‘quarrels and divisions about religion were evils unknown to the heathen’, who valued ‘rites and ceremonies’ over ‘constant belief’. But monotheism introduces ‘a jealous God’ whose ‘worship and religion will endure no mixture nor partner’.2 And Christianity’s drastic revision of the drab Pagan afterlife into poles of eternal bliss and torment gives religion a structure of punishment and reward that even the most powerful worldly state cannot match. Originally a salvational, otherworldly minority sect within the Roman Empire, Christianity was transformed, even inverted, into a state religion with perpetually contestable claims to political–juridical space. Leo Strauss calls ‘this conflict . . . the secret of the vitality of the West’.3 The impetus it provided medieval and early modern political thought supports Strauss’ claim; still, during certain periods vitality can be translated as pandaemonium, Rousseau’s ‘perpetual conflict of jurisdiction which has made any good polity impossible in Christian States’.4 Nevertheless, after the eleventh century Papacy’s failed attempt to subordinate the Emperor to its will, Europe hit a stalemate accounting, in historian Joseph Canning’s estimation, for a ‘dynamism [in] western medieval political thought [that] prevented the emergence of the idea of a monolithic society’.5 Unlike in Byzantine Caesaro-Papism, struggle over spheres of influence ensued. Which aspects of collective human life are religious, which political? This chapter interprets Shakespeare’s examination of this question, first in Merchant and second in Measure. Criticism has obscured general political–theological themes in Merchant by focusing on the question of the play’s anti-Semitism. The deep conflict undergirding the play is neither Christianity versus Judaism nor bigotry versus tolerance, but political ethics versus theology. In depicting Jessica’s emancipation from Shylock’s control, as facilitated by Portia’s legalistic cleverness, and the related stoppage of Shylock’s vengeance and Antonio’s would-be martyrdom, Shakespeare engages questions about modern valorisation of consent/ contract and older religious legacies that have never ceased to haunt

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politics and philosophy. Turning to Measure, I continue to explore these themes as they play out in a situation where the disturbance to order is novel religious energy rather than backward-looking religious tradition.

Against Theocracy and Patriarchy: Portia’s Politics In Venice people make contracts; in Belmont they exchange wedding rings. In Venice they are held together by combinations of interest; in Belmont by mutual affection. The wealth and power of Venice depend upon the willingness of its courts to hold men to their contracts. The charm of Belmont is to provide its inhabitant with a community in which contracts remain for the most part superfluous. Venice is tolerable because its citizens can flee occasionally to Belmont and appeal from Venetian justice to Belmontine mercy. But the very existence of Belmont presupposes the prosperity of Venice, from which the denizens of Belmont gain their means of livelihood. This is the form of life classical contract theory claims to describe and seeks to define – a­ n existence separated into a sphere of trade supervised by the state and an area of private family and friendship largely though not wholly beyond the reach of contract.  Roberto Unger I beg the ancient privilege of Athens: As she is mine, I may dispose of her . . . To you your father should be as a god One that composed your beauties, yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted . . . 

(MND I, i, 41–50)

The world governed by instrumentally rational contract is ideally anonymous and thus, in terms of opportunity, egalitarian. Intrepid Enlightenment political economists rejected centuries’ fetishising of autarky and its cognate purity, of which mercantilism was a modern, wealth-friendly example. They heretically linked commerce with virtue and envisioned the replacement of war and plunder by trade. The American and French revolutionaries’ Roman-republican heroes would have been appalled. Cicero called ‘the moral character of coastal cities . . . prone to corruption and decay’, their citizens ‘exposed to . . . strange modes of behavior. Foreign customs are imported along with foreign merchandise; and so none of their ancestral institutions can remain unaffected.’ The sea’s proximity offers ‘enticements to luxury’ and ‘temptations to sensual indulgence’; Cicero thought this ‘the cause of Greece’s misfortunes, including her political instability’ (Rep. 2.7–9). Tacitus recalled the Julio-Claudian Empire’s periodic emetic

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fits, rearguard fights against decadence via ‘expulsion of astrologers and magicians . . . of Egyptian and Jewish rites’.6 This trope lived on long after Shakespeare’s time, in the more austere species of neo-republicanism. Contemporary readers are more primed to react emotionally to a Christian polity purging Jews than ancient Rome purging Greek effeminacy or Egyptian luxury. But this does not overdetermine Merchant as an example or depiction of anti-Semitism, does not require branding it Judeophobe7 or Judeophile8. Stephen Greenblatt suggests Shylock’s forced conversion at the end, absent in Shakespeare’s sources, was actually an ‘attempt to evade the nastier historical alternatives’, executions and/or mass expulsions.9 Considering the fate of many Catholics under Anglican persecution, Robin Headlam Wells even declares Shylock’s sentence ‘lenient’: perhaps Shakespeare ‘used a politically uncontroversial hate-figure to stand for the puritan sensibility’10 and we are asking the wrong questions. Shylock’s accumulative drive certainly seems, as Weber described the Calvinist ethic, ‘devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture’.11 True, in this play hedonism means not earning one’s fortune in the vocational sense. Its exemplars are Portia, inheriting horn of plenty, Bassanio the fortune hunter, and Jessica and Lorenzo, spendthrift thieves. Perhaps Shakespeare’s apparent ‘anti-Semitism functions ideologically as an assault on the Hebraism of the usuriously hardworking, anti-theatrical Puritan capitalists’, as Ned Lukacher argues.12 But I would go further: what is on trial in Merchant and Measure is religion itself as a political force. Alone among Shakespeare’s major comedies, Merchant features a clash between irreconcilable belief systems, matter, more typically, for tragedy or history.13 But this conflict, as suggested above, is more complex than Christian versus Jew: at Portia’s Belmont, for example, a sort of Paganism presides over the tension between Venice’s monotheisms.14 In terms of nation building, Portia herself is the site of a clash between ethnic–racial and legal–moral imperatives. The disguised lawyer of Act 4, who speaks of universal, unifying values like mercy and love, is also the would-be bride of Acts 1–2, suspicious of foreigners, queasy at the thought of miscegenation. Even when disguised as the bloodshed-preventing lawyer Balthasar, Portia reveals that the vaunted impartiality of law rests on a citizen–alien distinction that, in practice, tracks structures of racial dominance and/or creedal intolerance within the city. Shylock’s disturbance to the Venetian social order is neither purely theological nor purely racial. Rather, it is located in the interstices of such permanent or pseudo-permanent categories of separation, understandable in a period that saw old lineages of both blood and faith scrambled by nationalist imperatives. The converso was emblematically perplexing in

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this regard, as Janet Adelman explains: ‘Jews who had become Catholics who had become Protestants who were – ­maybe – ­still Jews after all’, whose ‘history of conversion disquietingly echoed the vexed and imperfect recent history of conversion in England’, and ‘Protestant understanding of a broader pattern . . . the passing of the promise not only from Jew to Christian but from Catholic to Protestant.’ If Jews remained Jews whatever their professed faith, then since ‘nationhood was increasingly identified with land boundaries rather than kinship bonds’, Jewish claims of ‘sacred nationhood despite their landlessness had the potential to disrupt the developing concept of nationhood’.15 Judaism’s history famously confuses the distinction between race and religion, and Shakespeare expands this issue beyond medieval/Tudor discourse about Judaism’s nature.16 Here religion is a peculiarly intense ground for the broader antinomy between intergenerational obligation and human freedom, a perennial Shakespearean concern. No other Shakespeare play is as potentially befogged by reading a later era’s political passions backwards. This acquired special urgency post-Holocaust, but began earlier, with Romanticism’s attempt to reinvent Shylock as rebel-hero. This ‘depository of the vengeance of his race’, noted Hazlitt, was ‘a half-favourite with the philosophical part of the audience, who . . . think that Jewish revenge is at least as good as Christian injuries’ and who ‘can hardly help sympathising with the proud spirit’.17 For Hugo, ‘it is because he sums up a whole race, such as oppression has made it, that Shylock is great’.18 Compared to Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale or Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare indeed seems to look forward to toleration more than backward to blood-libel. Yet, as Ron Rosenbaum aptly suggests, the ‘warm and fuzzy Shylock, the feel-good Shylock’ might backfire, actually exacerbat[ing], deepen[ing] the anti-Semitism of the play . . . making the play not about the villainy of one Jew, but the villainy of all Jews . . . beneath the surface even in those who appear ‘nice’ on the surface. The more warm and fuzzy you make Shylock, the more you make it a play about the fact that even such a Jew will not hesitate, when it comes down to it, to take a knife and cut the heart out of a Christian.19

Rosenbaum also errs, however, in implying interpretation must be conditioned, one way or another, by modern experience of anti-Semitism’s horrific ne plus ultra. Adelman’s reminder that ‘Shakespeare’s contemporaries were far less sure’ than we ‘that Judaism was a theological, rather than a racial, category’20 is useful. Still, any claim that Shakespeare says something about ‘all Jews’, is suspect. The only other Jew we really meet

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is Shylock’s daughter Jessica, who sees herself as precisely his opposite: hedonist, seeker beyond the walls of the tribe, convert by choice. No play whose major Jewish characters, despite being blood relatives, are thus opposed, makes a single statement about ‘the Jews’. If Shakespeare stereotypes, he does so with Judaic ideology, not some purportedly intrinsic Jewish character: Judaism as synecdoche for or purified form of, not evil potentialities in human nature, but religiously atavistic challenges to modern state-building. If ‘one of the main endeavours of civilisation is to bring people together into larger unities’, as Freud proposes, then ‘the family [that] will not give the individual up’ becomes a political problem.21 Two fathers imprison two daughters. Jessica must escape from her ancestral home to marry Lorenzo. Portia, however, comfortable at Belmont, ‘may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father’. She ‘will die as chaste as Diana unless I be obtained by the manner of my father’s will’ (I, ii, 22–4; I, ii, 103–5) which specifies the three-casket test to screen out unsuitable suitors. Portia complains ‘the lott’ry of my destiny / Bars me the right of voluntary choosing’ (II, i, 15–16). She is a non-tragic Hamlet, also wrestling with how to obey a dead father’s order. All deference to temporal authority, Freud argues, recapitulates abasement before the dead father, an ancestor-cult transposed into monotheisms worshipping God-the-father. ‘The dead now became stronger than the living’; this ‘revenge of the deposed and reinstated father has been very cruel’.22 Freud’s focus is fathers and sons, but in Merchant such (admittedly milder) ‘cruelty’ is the impediment to Portia’s and Jessica’s guilt-free Eros. ‘Here, catch this casket; it is worth the pains’, Jessica tells Lorenzo as they steal away. Like Portia, she asserts control over the ‘casket[s]’ representing paternal authority, a sepulchral past blocking present life, booby-trapping it with guilt. ‘I am much ashamed of my exchange. / But love is blind . . .’ (II, vi, 33–6). In Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, something like the reverse had occurred: Barabas has his daughter Abigall pose as a convert to enter a convent and retrieve his confiscated fortune (II, i). Abigall eventually does turn apostate, pursued by Christian suitors and horrified by her father’s villainy. But Barabas is a cartoonish Machiavel, more Aaron the Moor than Shylock: We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please, And when we grin, we bite; yet are our looks As innocent and harmless as a lamb’s. I learned in Florence how to kiss my hand, Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog . . .

(II, iii, 20–4)

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Accent on Florence, Machiavelli’s home. Similar language appears in Shakespeare, but the thematic core is different. Shylock’s resort to animal metaphors shall signify – l­ike a Coriolanus where creed has replaced class as sticking point – ­not politique mendacity but the breakdown of civil order potentially triggered by clashing identity claims. Disobedient daughters appear throughout Shakespeare,23 represented in all genres, but only in Jessica is this theme directly religious. ‘Jessica is property to both her father and her husband’, Lisa Lampert explains, but ‘her decision to convert and to abandon her father’s house . . . displays an agency that is at least as much of a threat to Venetian order as Shylock’s bond’.24 Hermia similarly refuses to ‘yield . . . Unto his lordship whose unwished yoke / My soul consents not to give sovereignty’ (MND I, i, 80–2). Actual Athenians of Theseus’ time might have wondered at this idea of a soul dispensing consent and ratifying sovereignty. The ‘ancient privilege of Athens’, like the ancient privilege of Jerusalem, is on a collision course with the modern privileges of Wittenberg and Philadelphia. Aquinas, citing Aristotle’s authority, says ‘father is not related to his son simply as one man to another’, proposing that child is to parent as slave to master: ‘insofar as each is something belonging to another, the complete idea of “just” or “right” is lacking as between them’.25 Protestant firebrand John Knox’s letter to the ‘Commonalty of Scotland’ (1558) associates this idea with the Papacy’s interest in forbidding open discussion of its authority ( John of Salisbury’s ‘Roman Church, which . . . protected by heavenly privilege, cannot be judged and censured by men’26). Knox claims this entered Christianity through Satan (or ‘Mahomet’), who taught ‘the Pope and his rabble . . . that their religion should not be disputed upon, but what the fathers have believed, that ought and must the children approve’. Nothing ‘hath more established the kingdom of that Roman Antichrist than this most wicked decree . . . that no man was permitted to reason of his power or to call his laws in doubt’.27 Religions that descend from parent to child explicitly or implicitly claim religion is like race, destiny rather than chosen faith. Heaven’s patriarchs typically regard heresy and apostasy as unmercifully as earthly fathers like Shylock. Jessica theoretically follows St Paul from body to soul, from ancient law to elective love, from tribal to imperialuniversal consciousness: ‘though I am daughter to his blood, / I am not to his manners . . . I shall end this strife, / Become a Christian and thy loving wife’ (II, iii, 18–21). Even salvation religions like Christianity and Islam that allow (require?) the entry of all rarely view exit with tolerant eyes. Paul references Deutoronomy’s death sentence for apostasy, though he suggests that punishment in the afterlife is punishment enough (Heb. 10: 26–31). Taking religion-as-race at its most literal would damn Jessica whatever

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her disposition and whoever her husband: ‘the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children . . .’. The subsequent banter is only half-joking: LANCELOT  Marry, you may partly hope that your father got you not, that you are not the Jew’s daughter. JESSICA  That were a kind of bastard hope indeed! So the sins of my mother should be visited upon me. LANCELOT  Truly then I fear you are damned both by father and mother. Thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother. Well, you are gone both ways. JESSICA  I shall be saved by my husband; he hath made me a Christian. (III, v, 1–18)

Jews are akin to bastards: at once insiders and outsiders, they disturb the social order; yet the social order cannot expunge them.28 In Lancelot’s pessimistic estimate, Jessica is tainted bodily or spiritually. She can shed her Judaism only by becoming the issue of fornication. (Parroting the ‘sins of the father’ malediction is ironic: it exemplifies the heartless legalism Merchant’s Christians attribute to Shylock and oppose to mercy, and is also the curse historically used to convict all Jews of Christ’s death.) Jessica optimistically retorts that legitimate marriage redeems body and soul. She sees her identity in the terms of social contract, revisable and revocable. The problem is that monotheism was established by covenant, not contract, ‘between [God] and [Abraham], and your descendants after you, generation after generation . . . in perpetuity’ (Gen. 17: 7–14). Who counts as these descendants? Monotheism’s original sign, circumcision, made on the male body, marks the Jew physically and not just spiritually distinct. But the Jewish daughter can ‘pass’. Aristotle’s account of conception, with the female womb passive soil for male seed, was influential in the Renaissance (though Galen’s argument for input from both sexes was also known). So marriage to a Christian might free Jessica from the sins of the fathers.29 Jessica does not refuse patrimony, she hijacks it. She and Lorenzo abscond from Shylock’s house with his wealth the night he is ‘bid forth to supper . . . I am not bid for love . . . yet I’ll go in hate, to feed upon / The prodigal Christian’ (II, iv, 30–1; II, v, 11–15). It is a Last Supper – ­betrayal by Judases within his camp assures a sacrificial denouement. Feeding on Christians, he is unknowingly fed upon. ‘My own flesh and blood to rebel!’ he exclaims. ‘I say my daughter is my flesh and blood’, he insists as the Christians taunt: ‘There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish’ (III, i, 32–8).

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Flesh and blood – ­what Portia, at the end of the play, legalistically separates to void Shylock’s and Antonio’s contract. Portia insists the bond promises Shylock a pound of Antonio’s flesh, but specifies no blood. Alongside another law Portia suddenly brings up (any shedding of Christian blood by Jews is a capital offence), this renders Shylock’s pursuit of contractual fulfilment self-annihilating. In the play’s earlier rhetoric, flesh and blood necessarily went together, whether to unify or separate. Shylock says flesh–blood links him irrevocably to Jessica and separates them from non-Jews; elsewhere, though, his ‘if you prick us, do we not bleed?’ speech links Jews and Christians precisely in terms of flesh-blood similarities. The Christians, for their part, propose incorporating Jessica’s flesh–blood into theirs by drawing a sharp line between her and Shylock. What does it mean, then, for Portia’s success to hinge on manipulating the legal system to break such a link? The obvious difference between flesh and blood, in the metaphorical sense, is that one stands for appearance and the other for intrinsic quality. This is ostensibly the moral recognition to which the casket test was supposed to lead Portia: ‘all that glisters is not gold’, and so forth. Yet Portia’s reactions to the suitors are decidedly based on appearance. Even Bassanio, who passes the test by picking lead over gold or silver, sets the plot in motion by requiring a capital outlay through which he can appear more materially splendid than actual circumstances allow. The chooser of gold ‘shall gain what many men desire’; of silver ‘shall get as much as he deserves’; of lead ‘must give and hazard all he hath’ (II, vii, 5–9). Since there are three choices, this cannot map directly onto the dualism between appearance and intrinsic quality. Gold is linked to appearance, presumably the common denominator that allows ‘many men [to] desire’ the same thing. But merit is split in two. Silver represents desert based on a subject’s intrinsic, unchangeable characteristics; lead, desert based on action undertaken by the subject. The third, and winning, option, is an alternative to pure flesh (gold) and pure blood (silver), just as Portia’s later legal intercession is an alternative to the flesh–blood linkage’s tendency to either totally unify or totally separate. What differentiates action-based desert from its gold and silver alternatives? The answer that it comports better with modern conceptions of moral dignity is too pat. There is little evidence Bassanio is of obviously superior character to the other suitors, and the ‘hazard’ he risks is to another’s life and wealth in order to win aristocratic leisure. But there is another way to differentiate the metals. Whatever Bassanio’s actionbased merit means morally, it necessarily connects people to one another in a way the others do not. Appearance-value and intrinsic-value, in

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their extreme (unalloyed) forms, are unchangeable. They do not require continual renegotiation of human relationships. In this they mirror the Abrahamic covenant; lead suggests the revisable social contract. That is why Portia finalises the emancipation of Jessica from Shylock, not with the other Christians’ strategy, incorporating her flesh–blood into theirs, but with a novel legalism, disaggregation of flesh and blood. The incorporation strategy mirrors Shylock’s. It just replaces religion with character as the variable through which social hierarchies are sorted out (as St Paul or Luther replaced outward signification with inward faith). If flesh is to be freed for better future outcomes, it must be separated from controls imposed by the past’s absolute authority, or the purported unchangeableness of the present. The slippery slope of contract and consent, complained Filmer amidst the English civil war, leads to the idea that ‘every infant at the hour it is born in, hath a like interest with the greatest and wisest’; with generations unbound by their predecessors, ‘Mankind is like the sea, ever ebbing or flowing . . . the people this minute, are not the people the next.’ Valorisation of consent ‘give[s] the children the government over their parents’.30 It is no coincidence that this play’s metaphors are mercantile even in areas of the plot not strictly connected with commerce. The more one judges the social order by how well it facilitates market efficiency, the more claims future-orientation has over present and past. Marx was famously fond of quoting Shakespeare; Timon decorates his early thoughts on money. This ‘yellow slave’, this ‘common whore of mankind’, makes ‘Black white, foul fair, wrong right, / Base noble, old young, coward valiant.’ It ‘Hath in her more destruction than [the] sword’ and ‘Will knit and break religions’ (IV, iii, 28–62). Except Merchant shows a commercially oriented sector of society reverting from rational self-interest to atavistic despotism where the family is concerned. Shakespeare makes Marx’s ‘the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism’31 founder on the more basic question of intergenerational binding, a passion that predates monotheism and may be religion’s cause as much as its effect.32 Marx affirms the historical importance of what he calls ‘merely political’ emancipation, but underestimates the reconstruction of religion and family radically promised, albeit imperfectly realised, by contractarianism. In Spinoza’s account, ‘religion among the Hebrews assumed the force of law only from the authority of the state, and when this was obliterated, religion could no longer be regarded as the prescription of a particular state but as a universal religion of reason’.33 Locke advertised voiding religious persecution from politics by deeming the church

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a free and voluntary Society. No body is born a member of any Church; otherwise the Religion of the parents would descend unto Children, by the same right of Inheritance as their Temporal Estates, and every one would hold his Faith by the same Tenure he does his Lands; than which nothing can be imagined more absurd . . . No man by nature is bound unto any particular Church or Sect, but every one joins himself voluntarily.34

Which cannot be an objective description of religion. Locke’s ideals of dissenting Protestantism notwithstanding, most humans who have ever existed took this ‘absurd’ situation for granted. What appears description is really the same proscription on binding the future with which Locke’s political treatises attacked Hobbes and Filmer, their argument here transposed from politics to religion. Calvin had likened the difference between law and grace to that between punitive and parental control. Those ‘bound by the yoke of the law are like slaves’, whereas those emphasising faith are ‘children . . . treated by their parents in a more liberal manner . . . imperfect and . . . faulty’ but ‘accepted’ regardless.35 And if parent treats child not in this liberal manner but as one bound by law’s harsh yoke? Presumably one then self-emancipates, emigrating to a more forgiving parish. When Paul nullified the Jewish covenant he named circumcision a vestige of ‘the Law’ that ‘will not save’. Judaism no longer depends on ‘having the outward appearance of a Jew, and . . . real circumcision is in the heart, a thing not of the letter but of the spirit’ (Rom. 2: 25–9). This proto-Christian ideal erases existing distinctions between ‘Greek and Jew . . . circumcised and uncircumcised . . . barbarian and Scythian, slave and free’ (Col. 3: 11). Luther returned to the notion of ‘uncircumcised hearts’ in one of the Reformation’s most viciously anti-Semitic screeds (1543), promising ‘We can be God’s people without it, just as the people in Nineveh, in Babylon, in Persia, and in Egypt were.’36 For Calvin, although ‘the brightness of the Gospel’ has been ‘obscured by Jewish shadows’, Christ gave ‘a complete exhibition of all those things which were adumbrated by the ceremonies of Moses’.37 Shylock’s aborted excision of Antonio’s pound of flesh would have materialised spiritual ‘circumcision . . . in the heart’ and reversed Paul’s epochal supersession of tribal–political Judaism by universal–salvational Christianity. (In one of Shakespeare’s sources, the Jewish moneylender considers chopping off the forfeit’s ‘privy members’, on the theory that male genitals weighed the requisite pound of flesh.38) That Antonio consciously tries to play Christ, before Portia’s intercession succeeds, amplifies the threat. Shylock’s accusation, Cavell argues, is that the Old-to-New Testament passing ‘never took effect, that the

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Christian’s humility is merely a parody, or disguise, of the Jew’s Law, Christian mercy merely vengeance disguised with passiveness’.39 The first encounter between Shylock and Antonio and Bassanio foreshadows subsequently clashing attempts to turn Jew into Christian and Christian into Jew. Shylock initially emphasises the gulf between them. ‘My meaning in saying [Antonio] is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient’ (I, iii, 15–17) demarcates seeing others as moral equals from seeing them as business transactions. Tradition dictates Shylock ‘buy with you, sell with you’ but ‘not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you’ (I, iii, 33–5). But after Shylock interprets the story of Jacob and Laban’s flock (I, iii, 79 ff.; Gen. 30: 25–43) as a legitimation of usury, he reverses course. He shall accommodate Christian practices – t­he misbegotten venture leading to the non-usurious pound-of-flesh contract. Weber, critiquing Werner Sombart’s attribution of capitalism’s origins to Jews, says ‘the distinctive elements of modern capitalism originated and developed quite apart from the Jews’ because of ‘the peculiar character of the Jews as a pariah people’ who ‘retained the double-standard of morals . . . characteristic of primordial economic practice . . . what is prohibited in relation to one’s brothers is permitted in relation to strangers’.40 Antonio asks for a Jewish loan: ‘lend this money . . . not / As to thy friends; for when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend? / But lend it rather to thine enemy / Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face / Exact the penalty’. (Antonio himself, however, might be seen to link ‘barren’ money and generation, financing Bassanio’s marriage quest.) Shylock replies, ‘I would be friends with you and have your love . . . and take no doit / Of usuance for my moneys’ (I, iii, 128–37). He offers, not a gift, but a Christian loan without interest, with physical penalty for non-payment. Neither Shylock nor Antonio seriously anticipates default: ‘what should I gain / By the exaction of the forfeiture?’ Shylock wonders. ‘A pound of man’s flesh . . . Is not so estimable, profitable neither, / As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats’ (I, iii, 160–4). In the bible story Shylock employed, Jacob prospers by appropriating and husbanding Laban’s flock (‘is your gold and silver ewes and rams?’ ‘I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast’ (I, iii, 92–3)). But now Shylock agrees to limit ‘use’ to flesh that literally breeds, Laban’s ‘mutton [and] goats’ replacing Antonio’s ‘barren metal’. ‘The Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind’ (I, iii, 175), Antonio says. Since Jews were only supposed to lend at interest to non-coreligionists, Shylock, here, either makes Antonio Jewish or offers himself to Antonio as Christian. The courtroom scene reintroduces both possibilities. It is Jessica’s elopement that turns Shylock’s plea for friendship into a demand for vengeance. Idly mused at the play’s beginning (‘I will feed

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fat the ancient grudge I bear him’ (I, iii, 44)), it becomes a demand for ‘The Duke[’s] . . . justice’ (III, iii, 8) with Antonio’s improbable default. The Christians cannibalised Shylock by taking Jessica along with his capital (‘My daughter! My ducats!’ – e­ ach a matter of patrimony) while he broke tribal proscription, eating with them. Now he can make good his earlier fantasy to ‘feed upon / The prodigal Christian’. Told he will ‘not take [Antonio’s] flesh. What’s that good for?’ he replies, ‘it will feed my revenge’ (III, i, 51). He becomes the carnivorous animal he was wrongly accused of being: ‘Thou called’st me dog before thou hadst a cause, / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs’ (III, iii, 6–8). Lex talionis possesses biblical sanction, but it is older than Judaism or Christianity. ‘Blood will have blood’ was a structuring principal of ‘the olden time, / Ere human statute purged the gentle weal’ (Mac. III, iv, 74–5; III, iv, 121). Male violence over possession of women was, in Freud’s view, the primal chaos from which ameliorative law was born.41 Now, revealingly, comes Shylock’s famous ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ (III, i, 56 ff.) speech, hardly suitable for the rise-of-tolerance anthology. Or rather, its humanism is the stuff of Hobbesian materialism, not Hegelian recognition.42 And Hobbes indicated his materialistic reduction would only yield political dividends if subjects could be persuaded that most differences they had learned supplemented organic similarity were pointless delusions. Compare Henry V’s ruminations on commonness, in disguise among his soldiers before Agincourt. Asked to speculate on the king’s state of mind he replies, ‘The violet smells to him as it doth to me; the element shows to him as it does to me. All his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man’ (H5 IV, i, 99–104). It seems easier for a king to admit the triviality of political ceremony than for believers to accept the arbitrariness of religious custom. Henry presumes unity with his people despite their hierarchical separation. Religious unification with some, though, presupposes separation from others. Perhaps if sect and nation were always perfectly aligned this would not be a problem, but in Shylock’s Venice or Shakespeare’s England, they were not. Shylock’s famous appeal turns away from the cosmopolitan brotherhood where Jews lend like Christians, and from the ghetto communalism where Jews lend to Christians. The common ‘bond’ it acknowledges is entirely at the animal level of flesh and blood. But this only unites people, Hobbes explained, insofar as they prize some sanguinary passions (safety, material comfort) over others (avenging traduced honour). Terry Eagleton thinks ‘Shylock’s ferocious insistence on having Antonio’s flesh’ represents ‘scandalous exposure of that which Antonio owes him – ­his body, an acknowledgement of common humanity with Shylock – a­ nd arrogantly

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denies’. Here the ‘ritual carving up of Antonio’ would be ‘a kind of black mass or grotesque parody of eucharistic fellowship’.43 If Shylock pricks him, he will bleed. Yet, as Janet Adelman points out, Shylock also ‘reinforces blood difference’ insofar as ‘double enactment of Crucifixion and ritual murder . . . recalls the founding moment of Jewish blood difference’. Hence Portia’s ‘last-minute invocation of Antonio’s Christian blood . . . simultaneously manages to prevent the display of blood likeness and to ground the fiction of blood difference firmly in the theology that underwrites the play’.44 I agree that this second Portian loophole reveals the mendacity involved in what I called her strategy (in the first loophole) of disaggregating flesh and blood. The law’s impartiality turns out to rest on a bedrock of discrimination singling out some citizens as more equal than others. But I am sceptical about Adelman’s ‘theology that underwrites the play’. The Portia who, whatever her concessions to existing power structures, at least partially undermines patriarchy in the name of autonomy, is a political and not theological actor. The law/mercy opposition Portia preaches in the courtroom scene is sometimes taken to complete the play’s vision of gospels succeeding Pentateuch. Jesus audaciously rejects lex talionis when he preaches loving one’s enemies: ‘you love those who love you . . . Do not even Pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect’ (Matthew 5: 43–8). But surely Jews in Jesus’ audience recalled a Yahweh whose perfection was compatible with punishment, vengeance, righteous ire. Paul opposes the old law to neither mercy nor unconditional love, but faith, and an austere faith at that. One does not imagine him in his element at Belmont. If mercy is divine prerogative, Jesus’ abolition of the friendenemy distinction has no place in Caesar’s realm. Christians must obey political authorities because ‘Magistrates bring fear not to those who do good, but to those who do evil’ (Rom. 13: 1–7 – ­a formulation Luther frequently repeated). Portia says mercy ‘blesseth him that gives and him that takes’, but describes mercy floating above politics, which makes it, Shylock points out (‘I crave the law’), irrelevant to the circumstances. . . . mercy is above this sceptred sway. It is enthroned in the hearts of kings; It is an attribute to God himself, And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation. 

(IV, i, 189–203)

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To ‘season’ justice might still allow justice priority. As to the last lines, the converse is equally plausible. If politics seeks the course of salvation, will any of us see justice? The monarch who ‘Forbear[s] to judge, for we are sinners all’ (2H6 III, iii, 31) is not long for the throne, especially if civil war is brewing. Marsilius of Padua proposes worldly rulers must consciously do the opposite of Christ’s example, because Christ ‘permit[ted] the affliction of the just and doers of good’ as a promise of heavenly rewards ‘according to . . . merits and demerits’; princes, tasked with the maintenance of justice, ‘do and ought to do the contrary’. He cites unintentional loan-defaults as something ‘permitted by divine law’ that is nonetheless legitimately ‘prohibited by human law’.45 In Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, Barabas is told of his confiscated wealth, ‘we take particularly thine / To save the ruin of a multitude; / And better one want for a common good / Than many perish for a private man’ (I, ii, 97–100). Similarly, Bassanio pleads not for Shylock to show mercy but for the Duke to suspend the law, as a state of exception requires existential friend–enemy decisions: ‘Wrest once the law to your authority. / To do a great right, do a little wrong’ (IV, i, 212–13). Portia bests Shylock with legalistic trickery, not caritas, like she games the casket test by helping Bassanio make the correct choice. Whether the authority is Duke or dead father, Portia alternates spirit and letter of law as is expedient.46 The ultimate irony of ‘Shylock’s identification with Jacob’s clever ploy’, Lisa Lampert explains, is that Shylock later becomes Laban, ‘who loses his daughters and much of his property to Jacob, identified in Christian exegetical tradition with Christians’.47 Jacob finagled two patrimonies, first pretending to be his brother Esau to get his father’s blessing, then usurping his uncle’s flocks (Gen. 27–30). Merchant ‘converts’ Jacob into a Christian, of sorts, by splitting him into the two disobedient daughters. Portia–Jessica recalls Jacob’s use of wit and guile in the appropriation of Shylock’s wealth. Both disguise themselves, and Portia uses the letter of the law to best Shylock as Jacob did Laban. They rarely interact directly, but are finally united at Belmont with their respective mates. There, Jessica and Lorenzo compare themselves to famous, albeit ill-starred, lovers of ancient myth – T ­ roilus and Cressid, Pyramus and Thisbe, Aeneas and Dido, Jason and Medea (V, i, 1–22) – p ­ rompting understandable scepticism about their future: Shakespeare’s only successful ‘intermarriage . . . remains hubristic, divisive, morally ambiguous and decidedly ill-omened’, in John Gillies’ description.48 And two of the above pairings were (permit me the anachronism) interracial. Yet to end with Medea is to return to where Merchant’s disobedient

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daughters started, to Portia’s ‘sunny locks / Hang[ing] on her temples like a golden fleece, / Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchis’ strand, / And many Jasons come in quest of her’ (I, i, 169–72; ‘We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece’ (III, ii, 239), the victorious suitors later declare). Jessica’s and Lorenzo’s erotic pantheon mentions Medea only in her healing capacity, referencing Ovid’s account of her rejuvenating Jason’s father by draining and replacing his blood.49 Gillies suggests ‘the intimation of Medea which is repressed in the case of Portia, returns in the figure of Jessica’ because Jessica has ‘the essential Medean attribute of otherness’; such myth-references both ‘celebrate the merchant-adventuring ethic of Shakespeare’s Venetians’ and ‘intimate anxieties . . . about trade, intermixture and miscegenation’.50 Portia, transferring her allegiance from family to male adventurer, makes her both Belmont’s Medea and its golden fleece, ‘sunny locks’ suggesting an angel/nymph floating above Venice, not dangerously outside it like Medea vis-à-vis Greece. Michael Zuckert aptly deems Portia ‘a Pilate who prevents the passion of Christ . . . a new or reverse Pilate and thereby . . . a new or nontragic Medea’. Portia ‘doubly thwarts the new Jesus: she neither vouchsafes [Antonio] his longed-for martyrdom, nor does she appeal to specifically Christian principle to do so’.51 She is also compared ‘To Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia’ (I, i, 165–6), though austere Catonian virtue does not seem to dominate one who Nerissa chides, ‘they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing’ (I, ii, 5–6). If anything, it is the dominant humour of her opponents.52 Blending Paganism and monotheism, Portia suggests sectarian conflict be solved politically, with ethics or virtues not derived from any one faith. Antonio realises political considerations override his desire that Venice be governed on Christian principles: ‘The Duke cannot deny the course of law, / For the commodity that strangers have / With us in Venice, if it be dented, / Will much impeach the justice of the state’ (III, iii, 26–9). Elective economic contracts form the uneasy material base of Venice’s superstructural ideals, whether Jewish tribal covenant or Christian caritas and agape. Shylock taunts the Duke that Venice already legitimises that peculiar lex talionis, the slave ‘contract’: Shall I say to you, ‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs? Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates Be seasoned with such viands’? You will answer ‘The slaves are ours’. So do I answer you.

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The pound of flesh which I demand of him Is dearly bought: ’tis mine, and I will have it. 

(IV, i, 92–9)

But then, Christian tradition from St Paul to Luther disaggregates the statuses of soul and body. Citizens remain citizens, and taxpayers; slaves remain slaves, ‘obedient to those who are, according to human reckoning, your masters’ just as children must honour parents (Eph. 6: 1–9). Masters should treat slaves fairly, but in God’s eyes the institution itself is, like most earthly institutions, morally neutral. More bats nary an eyelash when Hythloday informs him Utopians own slaves, who do work (like butchering animals) deemed undignified for citizens.53 Justice, Aquinas says, means ‘commensuration of one person with another’, but in ‘human affairs’ is perfectly compatible with father–child and master–slave domination.54 For Augustine, the natural freedom originally promised humans, with dominion only exercised ‘over the beasts’, was lost to ‘the deserts of sin’ (Civ Dei XIX.15–16). He and St Paul theologised Stoicism’s teaching that slaves can be free (freer than masters, even) in a wholly spiritual sense. (Anthony Pagden identifies as the flipside of this Christianity’s ‘transform[ation of] the pagan ambition to civilise the world into the analogous objective to convert literally all its inhabitants to Christianity’, Stoicism’s universal natural law become universal religious doctrine.55) It is only when dissenting left–Protestants merge Gospel universalism with the radical notion that all earthly bodies are born free that the peculiarity of the slave contract becomes a serious philosophical problem – s­ o, too, the wider debate across social contract theory about one generation’s authority over its successors. Between the lines of Shylock’s J’accuse is the spectre of Jessica: the daughter he wished to keep away from Christian heirs, from their soft beds and rich feasts. C. L. Barber was wrong to make Shylock a symbol of ‘the evil side of the power of money’.56 His real affront to ostensibly cosmopolitan yet actually Christian-dominated Venice is keeping a ‘slave’ that he will not allow circulated into the general marriage-economy. He answers them: that flesh is his, and if he will not have it, he will have its equivalent as recompense. Portia’s final victory is over Shylock and Antonio, ‘To whom [Bassanio is] infinitely bound’; in the final scene she makes Antonio, who ‘once did lend my body for his wealth . . . be bound again, / My soul upon the forfeit’ (V, i, 134–7; V, i, 249–52). A playful exchange, on the surface: Portia tricked Bassanio into giving away a ring he pledged to keep, so, proven untrustworthy, he must rebind himself with more serious collateral. Transferring Antonio’s debt from body to soul, Portia grants his desire for crucifixion (‘I am a tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest

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for death’ (IV, i, 113–14)), except not in the courtroom Golgotha he would have preferred. Instead they are in her private realm of accumulation, consumption, copulation and procreation, where Antonio has no place. He becomes the pure ‘soul’ of Christian Neoplatonism, his corporeal disturbance to Venetian politics ending not with a bang but with a whimper. The news that his mercantile enterprises succeeded after all only comes after he has been thus neutralised. Marc Shell writes, ‘The action has demonstrated that souls are as interconnected with bodies as lives (persons) are connected with the means of livelihood (purses).’57 The ‘infinite’-ness of Antonio and Bassanio’s love is not only barren (like Antonio thinks money should be) because it is homoerotic and thus non-procreative.58 It is also because an impecunious Antonio could not make his body the horn of plenty that Portia, who ‘drop[s] manna in the way / Of starved people’ (V, i, 294–5), promises: ‘Myself and what is mine to you and yours / Is now converted . . . never shall you lie by Portia’s side / With an unquiet soul. You shall have gold / To pay the petty debt twenty times over’ (III, ii, 166–7; III, ii, 303–5). Portia represents the opposite of the lesson the casket test is supposed to teach, embodying the unavoidable pollution of love by self-interest. She did not earn her fortune through Weberian renunciation, obviously. Still, her hyperbolic profligacy foresees the secular investment of passions into worldly wealth and improvement that eventually undermined otherworldly religion. Alternative genera of love or bond that threaten a political economy grounded in anonymous commercial transactions and, deeper down, in marriage contracts that systematise inheritance and produce new producers, are swept aside. Portia defeats the Christian-Platonist agape of Antonio and Bassanio and the tribal-Judaic covenant by which Shylock claims to rule his offspring. The Jewish ‘covenant’ looked less conservative reinterpreted by neoHebraic Puritans. An ‘explosive contact’ occurred between covenant theology and social contract theory in early modern England, writes Victoria Kahn: ‘covenant theology radicalised natural rights theory by virtue of its exclusive emphasis on the individual conscience, while natural rights theory contributed to the secularising of conscience by virtue of its emphasis on passion, self-interest, and purely human agreements’. Ultimately ‘a new kind of political subject’ appears, ‘located between the discourses of conscience and natural rights, promise and contract . . . motivated not only by the claims of conscience but also by his passions and interests’.59 Radicalised covenant theology went past Shylockian claims for a ghetto of paternalistic authority insulated from the majority’s sociopolitical order. It demanded rethinking the entire purpose of worldly authority, the very meaning and value of concepts like freedom, consent, justice, obligation.

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Reformation dissolved the (always uneasy) medieval détente between politics and religion. Sheldon Wolin explains that despite the tensions between them, Protestantism and humanism together built a ‘more autonomous political theory . . . more national in orientation’. Lutheranism ‘depoliticize[d] religion’ while Italian humanists like Machiavelli ‘detheologize[d] politics. Both served the cause of national particularism.’60 Above I cited interpretations of the Papacy/Empire split as a source of Christian Europe’s comparative pluralism and dynamism. But the division also ultimately led to stronger, more centralised political units, especially after Reformation crises, as Martin van Creveld explains: the prolonged, and as it were predestined, conflict between pope and Emperor . . . enabled the monarchs to play one off against the other; had the Emperor also been head of the established religion, as was the case in virtually any other part of the world where similar political systems existed, then almost certainly his power would have proved suffocating and the modern state would never have been born. As it was, religious reform and the fragmentation of Imperial political power marched hand in hand, culminating in the Reformation. Almost regardless of whether they supported the reforms or opposed them, it was the monarchs who benefited.61 

The next section interprets Measure for Measure as Shakespeare’s depiction of modern state-building threatened by religious passions like those which prompted Reformation and Counter-Reformation across Europe.

‘Raze the Sanctuary’: Secularising Passion in Measure For Measure . . . she were fitter for a tale of love Than to be tired out with orisons; And better would she far become a bed, Embraced in a friendly lover’s arms, Than rise at midnight to a solemn mass. . . . sweetest flower . . . Cropped from the pleasures of the fruitful earth, And strangely metamorphised nun.  The Jew of Malta (I, iii, 4–16)

Marlowe’s play features a Jewish daughter who enters a convent, and a courtesan whose business is interrupted by theological–political conflict. Since Malta was besieged by the Turks ‘against my will I must be chaste’, whereas before, ‘From Venice merchants, and from Padua / Were wont to come rare-witted gentlemen, / Scholars, I mean, learned and liberal’

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spreading coin. A slave who falls in love with her later promises ‘we will leave this paltry land, / And sail from hence to Greece . . . I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece’ (III, i, 1–8; IV, ii, 91–3). Shakespeare transforms Marlowe’s appealing if somewhat chaotic mélange – C ­ hristian unity under siege, religion versus sexual libertinism and/or economic imperatives – ­into the two plays I read here as his supreme explorations of the theological–political problem. Merchant’s Venetian financiers and Paduan scholars met not to frequent brothels but to debate how and why bodies come to be controlled. In Measure‘s Vienna, slavery and pound-of-flesh bonds do not represent the extremes of contractual purchase and disposal of bodies. Here, Shakespeare returns to prostitution, depicting the interruption of a woman’s plan to enter a convent, and her reverse-Ophelian integration into the secular–political world of marriage and procreation. Isabella embodies Weber’s Protestant ‘transformation of asceticism to activity within the world’;62 Marc Shell says she ‘moves away from homogeneity in liberty to political and patriarchal heterogeneity’.63 Such movement signifies the Reformation’s destruction and expropriation of the monasteries, and pivots on Isabella being challenged to prostitute herself. This she does, although behind-the-scenes machinations substitute another physical body at copulation. Robert N. Watson calls ‘impressment of Isabella into the reproductive economy . . . a queasy burlesque of her religious mission’.64 The play see-saws between regarding Isabella’s valuation of purity as admirable and as absurd: LUCIO  I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted, By your renouncement an immortal spirit, And to be talked with in sincerity As with a saint. ISABELLA  You do blaspheme the good in mocking me. 

(I, iv, 34–8)

One forgives her confusion; it matches ours. Just as Troilus could only reach Cressida via Pandarus, this play’s most Dantean (in the Paradiso sense) description of Isabella is spoken by one of its unapologetic libertines. The Reformation inherited, and engendered, discordant factions: monks yearning for apostolic piety, millennial utopians seeking economic and maybe (such rumours always follow) sexual communism, princes consolidating national power by seizing church treasure. Accusations of Satanic influence flew in every direction. The turbulence was such that even reform’s greatest partisans worried about the consequences of breaking old ties. Take Eros: untethered from Catholic discipline (grown however lax), where might it go? Reformed ‘Christian liberty’, Calvin says,

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having cut the ties between sacerdotal authority and salvation, might veer off into ‘the most unbridled licentiousness . . . subversive of all moderation, order, and moral distinctions’. This goes, mutatis mutandis, for reformers questioning duties to obey newly disenchanted temporal authorities. Some ‘infatuated and barbarous men madly endeavor to subvert [civil government] established by God’; meanwhile ‘flatterers of princes, extolling their power beyond all just bounds . . . oppose it to the authority of God himself’. Inwardly we contain ‘two worlds’, one sacred, one secular. To deem the latter ‘a polluted thing which has nothing to do with Christian[ity]’ just recapitulates monastic withdrawal. Making ‘secular and impure cares . . . uninteresting to a Christian man’ surrenders politics to ‘licentiousness without any restraint’.65 Secular nationalism might justifiably expand its power when the sovereign possesses a plausible claim to be the safe path between Papal Scylla and Lutheran Charybdis. Filmer’s defence of absolutism claims the doctrine of natural freedom was ‘hatched in the schools, and . . . fostered by all succeeding papists’ and embraced by ‘divines . . . of the reformed churches’ to stir up ‘the common people . . . the meanest of the multitude’.66 James I exhorts avoidance of both the Catholic’s ‘sickness of superstition’ and the radical Protestant’s tendency to ‘credit . . . your own conceits . . . and dreamed revelations . . . as well as ye repress the vain Puritan, so [do not] suffer the proud Papal Bishops’. Instead, he advises, ground conscience in ‘Scripture’ – ­which just begs the question, unless one has non-prudential reason to accord the monarch better access to Scripture’s politics than priests or ministers. Elsewhere, James told Parliament he would not criminalise ‘Papists’ because ‘I must put a difference betwixt . . . private profession of mine own salvation, and my politic government of the Realm for the weal and quietness thereof.’ A king – n ­ ot a people, as in radical Protestantism – ­must ‘discern betwixt points of salvation and indifferent things, betwixt substance and ceremonies; and betwixt the express commandment and will of God in his word, and the invention or ordinance of man’. While admitting the Scottish Reformation ‘extraordinarily wrought by God’, James thus stealthily questions God’s methods. The Scots were ‘clogged with their own passions’; in England and Denmark reform came top-down, ‘from the Princes order’.67 (Though the later Stuart goal of forging a throne-and-altar absolutism like Louis XIV’s was not to be.68) Luther deems government ‘spiritual in status, although it discharges a secular duty’.69 Calvin admits political authority would be ‘superfluous if the kingdom of God . . . extinguishes the present life’. But present life endures, a ‘pilgrimage’ requiring certain preconditions for Godly conduct. Up to a point, these are like the preconditions for stable pursuit

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of self-interest in Hobbes or Locke: ‘civil justice . . . to establish general peace and tranquility . . . that every person may enjoy his property without molestation’. But we might also ‘feel within us some preludes of the heavenly kingdom, and in this mortal and transitory life’ taste ‘prelibations of immortal and incorruptible blessedness’. So the material world remains partially enchanted. Calvin describes demolition of previously compartmentalised attachments and behaviours: ‘our soul must be . . . divested of every other perception and thought . . . freed from all desires . . . collected and contracted to this one point’, love of and surrender to God.70 But if God pours even a small prelibation of divinity into the world, properly homogenised souls will greet partially enchanted nature with . . . what? Diffidence? A confident, reconstructive will-to-power? Michael Walzer calls Calvinists ‘the first . . . self-disciplined agents of social and political reconstruction’; with ‘a novel view of politics as a kind of conscientious and continuous labor’ they ‘transform[ed] politics into work’. For Walzer, this ‘repressive system’ had ‘to be endured before it [could] be escaped or transcended’. Its failure associates it ‘not with modernity but with modernisation . . . process far more significantly than . . . outcome’.71 In other words, Protestantism makes the world safe for the social contract, and the social contract returns the favour by making the world safe for Protestantism.72 And Protestantism could plead security in a more direct sense. Catholicism becomes associable with literal foreign powers. In Marlowe’s Edward II, the Papacy facilitates a nobility’s wish to ‘Depose [Edward] and elect another king’: ‘Proud Rome . . . hatchest such imperial grooms, / For these thy superstitious taper lights, / Wherewith thy antichristian churches blaze’ (IV, 55; IV, 96–9). Guise, Counter-Reformation villain of Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, manoeuvres with assurance that ‘what he doth the Pope will ratify, / In murder, mischief, or in tyranny’ (I, 39–40). Protestant Henry of Navarre, later the Henry IV famous for converting because Paris vaut bien une masse, suspects Guise contrives to ‘plant . . . popelings in the realm / And bind it wholly to the see of Rome’, revealed by his related attempts to gather English priests at ‘the seminary at Rheims / To hatch forth treason ’gainst’ Queen Elizabeth, and invite ‘Spain’s huge fleet / To threaten England’. Guise haughtily describes Navarre as ‘but a nook of France’ whose ‘rabblement of . . . heretics . . . troubleth our estate’. But, he brags, Spain ‘Sends Indian gold to coin me French ecues’; Spain’s King, ‘Ere I shall want, will cause his Indians / To rip the golden bowels of America’ while the Pope offers ‘A pension and a dispensation.’ But Guise, a cardboard Machiavel, informs the audience it is all pretence: ‘My policy hath framed religion.’ No benighted participant in the Reformation’s clash of religious passions, he acts from pure will to power,

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‘quenchless thirst’ to ‘mount the top with my aspiring wings / Although my downfall be the deepest hell’; for ‘What glory is there in a common good / That hangs for every peasant to achieve?’ (II, 34 ff.; IX, 34–5; XX, 24–5). Whatever Marlowe’s private scepticism, here triumph over ‘proud disturbers of the faith’ like ‘the Guise, the Pope’ and ‘Spain . . . the councilchamber of the Pope . . . where he makes peace and war’ is, essentially, Tudor propaganda. France’s Henry III, absurdly, breathes his last blessing England’s Queen as his heir promises an alliance with Elizabeth ‘To beat the papal monarch from our lands, / And keep those relics from our countries’ coasts’ (XVI, 1–15; XVIII, 15–17). Shakespeare’s early histories feature such Marlovian Protestantnationalist rhetoric. One monarch lambastes the Vatican’s ‘usurped authority’, mourns ‘the curse that money . . . vile gold, dross, dust, / Purchase[s] corrupted pardon’, calls the Pope’s title ‘slight, unworthy, and ridiculous’, and tells a visiting Cardinal ‘the mouths of England [say] no Italian priest / Shall tithe or toll in our dominions’ (KJ III, i, 76–92). The Cardinal responds with ‘the lawful power that I have’, declaring the king ‘cursed and excommunicate’, blessing whoever ‘doth revolt / From his allegiance to an heretic’, and promising that a regicide will be ‘Canonized and worshipped as a saint’ (III, i, 98–105). Catholic sympathisers, on the other hand, might have enjoyed exposure of the tawdrier motives behind state-led Reformation. Henry V confronts ill feelings surrounding Lollard Parliamentarians’ effort to dispossess the clergy of ‘temporal lands which men devout / By testament have given to the Church’. The Archbishop of Canterbury knows the secular goods such wealth could provide: ‘fifteen earls and fifteen hundred knights, / Six thousand and two hundred good esquires . . . relief of . . . indigent faint souls past corporal toil, / A hundred almshouses right well supplied; / And to the coffers of the King beside / A thousand pounds by th’ year’. The King, called ‘a true lover of the holy Church’ even though he ‘seems indifferent’ to the outcome, kills the bill only because the Archbishop offers ‘a greater sum’ (H5 I, i, 9–24; I, i, 76–80; I, ii, 133). But such cynical exposé is more than matched by emphasis on the Papacy’s scheming use of spiritual authority and religious emotions to seek worldly power. King John gives in because he needs the church to prevent an inchoate civil war (V, i) – ­mirroring Protestant accusations that continental Catholic powers deliberately provoked English unrest. (He dies ‘poisoned by a monk’ (V, vi, 24).) A Cardinal tells the dauphin of a ‘path which shall directly lead / Thy foot to England’s throne’ – t­hey will create circumstances forcing King John to treat his population with hardness, after which a credulous people will interpret natural phenomena as God’s punishment for breaking with Rome (the Bastard later confirms a

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‘people strangely fantasied, / Possessed with rumours . . . full of fear’ (III, iv, 129 ff.; IV, ii, 144–6)). In early Shakespeare le style c’est l’homme – ­and also le visage, ‘face . . . cipher[ing one’s] heart’, in ‘face . . . manners most expressly told’, ‘red sparkling eyes’ that ‘blab [the] heart’s malice’, the ‘cloudy brow’ revealing ‘stormy hate’, Aaron the Moor’s ‘soul black like his face’ (RL 1396–7; 2H6 III, i, 154–5; TA III, i, 204). Even when villainous Machiavels can pass under the radar, they are essentially transparent to themselves. The soliloquy undergoes a momentous transition in Shakespeare’s development. Originally a blunt device informing audiences about characters’ actual motivations and plans, it becomes a poetic tool for self-exploration and existential or ontological world-interrogation. (Actors like Burbage were concurrently revolutionising their craft, Peter Ackroyd recounts, ‘drift[ing] away from external symbolism towards imitation . . . identified with the new role of individualism in social and political life.’73) Consider this confession, in early Shakespeare, of power-seeking York: Be that thou hop’st to be, or what thou art Resign to death; it is not worth the enjoying. Let pale-faced fear keep with the mean-born man And find no harbor in a royal heart. Faster than springtime showers comes thought on thought, And not a thought but thinks on dignity. . . . And this fell tempest shall not cease to rage Until the golden circuit on my head Like to the glorious sun’s transparent beams Do calm the fury of this mad-bred flaw.

This ambitious lord, ‘sen[t] . . . packing with an host of men’ to Ireland, mocks the monarchy he seeks to usurp: ‘’Twas men I lacked, and you will give them me . . . You put sharp weapons in a madman’s hand’ (2H6 III, i, 333–54). No doubt the political realm has seen its share of sociopaths. Still, the climber who speaks, and thinks, on righteousness and/or pragmatic necessity is a more serious foe than the one openly declaring himself ‘madman’, and the character unsure about reasons for action, or inaction, truer to the human condition. York gives way to his son Richard Crookback, the last moulded from the clay of Marlowe’s megalomaniacs. ‘I sigh, and with a piece of scripture / Tell them that God bids us do good for evil’, he tells us, ‘I clothe my naked villainy / With . . . Holy Writ, / And seem a saint

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when most I play the devil’ (R3 I, iii, 332–6). This is not too far from, for example, the summoner of Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale, who announces ‘I have no conscience . . . nor bowels of compassion.’74 By the time Shakespeare has Measure’s Duke go undercover as a friar, the nature of conscience, the possibility that doing good results in evil and vice versa, or that in politics there are simply no such things as saints and devils – ­all has become contestable, perhaps irresolvable. In the problem plays there can be ‘wicked meaning in a lawful deed / And lawful meaning in a wicked act, / Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact’ (AW III, vii, 45–7). In mature tragedies like Othello and Macbeth, amoral nihilism and demonic will-to-power return, except there, mystery about motivation provides the dramatic nuance lacking where monsters simply declare themselves such. I think Shakespeare’s transitional figure is Tarquin, who ‘for himself himself . . . forsake[s] . . . himself himself confounds’, who ‘strive[s] . . . to embrace mine infamy’ (RL 157–60, 504). He does not rape Lucrece because he is simply evil, rape being what evil people do. Such a figure would only be familiar with wicked desires, thinking them desire itself, censored for social order’s sake. Tarquin, on the other hand, is suddenly shocked to find himself desiring something because he knows it is wicked: ‘the name of chaste unhapp’ly set / This bateless edge on his keen appetite’ (8–9). The cardboard Machiavel would exult here, but Tarquin blanches, like the Macbeths seeing their various apparitions. Tarquin is something of an inverted Macbeth or Iago. His ‘inward mind . . . doth debate’, hosting a lengthy ‘disputation / ‘Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning will’ (185, 246–7); Macbeth and Iago stay in theatre’s pantheon by always leaving us guessing. Rather than splitting desire into holy/ unholy, Tarquin finds flaw with desire – ‘­thorns the growing rose defends . . . honey guarded with a sting’ (492–3) – ­as such: . . . in vent’ring ill, we leave to be The things we are for that which we expect, And this ambitious foul infirmity In having much, torments us with defect Of that we have; so then we do neglect The thing we have, and all for want of wit Make something nothing by augmenting it. 

(148–54)

This is especially true of lust, whose ‘froth of fleeting joy . . . buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week’. Yet Tarquin binds himself to this pitiless god: ‘Affection is my captain, and he leadeth . . . Desire my pilot is’ (212–19). Measure’s tempted Angelo speaks in almost identical terms.

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G. Wilson Knight saw Measure as a redemptive Christian allegory: ‘Isabella stands for sainted purity, Angelo for Pharisaical righteousness, the Duke for a psychologically sound and enlightened ethic.’75 Political theorists influenced by Leo Strauss also lionise the Duke. He may possess a ‘dangerous morality . . . fit only for those few possessing in the highest degree both benevolence and wisdom’, yet he facilitates ‘catharsis by which the bad and unruly passions’ are ‘purged . . . as if an earthly city had been transformed into a heavenly one. The returned Duke, like a returned Christ, has brought good out of evil, in the process of revealing himself.’ Such readings, like the suggestive if too-sunny account of ‘a kind of Hegelian dialectic, in which the thesis is celibacy and sexual abstinence, the antithesis unbridled lechery and fornication, and the synthesis an eroticism in harmony with the family and the virtue of the citizen’, bracket too much of the play’s moral ambivalence.76 Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Duke as God-like, a deus absconditus figure stalking the play, need not imply worshipping him. Let us instead examine what this strategy says about God, or, more precisely, about religion as political force. ‘God moves in a mysterious way: Duke Vincentio moves in a mysterious way: therefore the Duke is God. There is a piece missing in the syllogism’, A. P. Rossiter notes, and ‘something missing in the play corresponds to it’.77 The Christian vision suggested, but undelivered, by the deus absconditus Duke found thus missing, others fill in the picture by making the Duke a modern disciplinary political technician. They associate him with surveillance and biopolitics, where the sovereign’s old power over death through physical punishment is replaced by a new power over life through ideological control of sexuality.78 Michel Foucault argued the destructions of aristocratic and priestly power hailed by post-Enlightenment liberalism produced not freedom but a new and tenacious form of discipline. ‘In political thought and analysis’, he writes, ‘we still have not cut off the head off the king.’ Nature abhors a vacuum, and the space vacated by Lear and Richard II, by Charles I and Louis XVI, is quickly ‘penetrated by quite new mechanisms of power . . . irreducible to the representation of the law’. The account is similar to Weber’s, though less historically specific, with the attribution of cause to ideological versus material factors left (deliberately?) vague. The old arrangement hinged on religious authority claiming responsibility for the soul, with political authority’s prerogative a punitive one ex post facto. The new imperative is for secular power to, ex ante, ‘take charge of . . . living bodies . . . not by law but by normalisation, not by punishment but by control’. The central task is no longer to keep a population in fear of royal or divine majesty, but to ‘increase . . . its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’.

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We are ‘no longer . . . dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings’, and ‘mastery . . . over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself.’79 Foucault notes the coincidence of this shift with the rise of the application of new mathematical and scientific techniques, like statistics, to political questions. Hannah Arendt similarly faulted modern politics with collapsing the ancient polis’ public/private divide. Formerly, it was the ‘sphere of the household’ that addressed itself to ‘maintenance of life’; now ‘the dividing line is entirely blurred’, and modern states see their populations as ‘a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping’. Arendt calls this modern emergence of communal housekeeping – ­greatly empowered, as in Foucault, by looking at a population under a scientific, statistical lens – ‘­the rise of the social’.80 Measure does indicate ways in which state power might seek to control subjects’ desires ex ante instead of simply punishing or forgiving their behaviours ex post. And its information-gathering, manipulative Duke has obvious resonance for those who see nefarious ‘discipline’ and ‘governmentality’ everywhere in the modern state, schools and hospitals as much as prisons, Social Security cards as well as military bases. But Shakespeare prompts us to ask further questions, like, what is the alternative? It is too simple to say, with Arendtians or left-libertarians, democracy or resistance, or, with right-libertarians (even more simply), freedom. This is wholly a ‘problem play’ in that the conflict is between alternative modes of authority, not authority and freedom. Vienna’s Duke let prosecution of anti-fornication and anti-prostitution laws lapse. He gives authority to a deputy, Angelo, told to enforce the dormant vice statutes. In its initial design, this transfer of power is reminiscent of Weber’s description of Protestant moral ascendancy, ‘a new form of control . . . penetrating to all departments of private and public life’ replacing one ‘which was very lax . . . scarcely perceptible in practice’; the only space left for Weber’s ‘otherworldliness . . . the strong predominance of religious interests in the whole conduct of life’ is Isabella’s cloister (where the novice ‘wish[es] a more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood’ (I, iv, 4–5)). In Weber’s Reformation, the other world is stripped of the ‘rational’ aspects it has under Catholicism: the economy of grace by which a partnership of laity and religious specialists expiate the sufferings of the dead. The paradoxical result is post-Lutheran ‘valuation of . . . worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume’.81 This commences with two pleas to participate in worldly activity. The Duke asks Angelo to be a refounding Prince; Lucio implicitly asks Isabella to prostitute herself to save her brother.

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Angelo is warned that politics requires balancing Eros and violence: Vienna has ‘Lent him our terror, dress’d him with our love . . . Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in thy tongue and heart’ (I, i, 20; I, I, 45–6). Even before Isabella’s progress towards holy orders is interrupted by Lucio, the Duke voices Protestant disapproval of the cloistering and effective castrating of God’s creations: ‘Thyself and thy belongings / Are not thine own so proper as to waste . . . if our virtues / Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike / As if we had them not’ (I, i, 30–42). But the Duke’s perspective on political leadership seems ambivalent. Not only does he devise a communal Rube Goldberg device to lead Vienna to an obedience he could have simply re-established personally. He also says of his disappearance, ‘I love the people, / But do not like to stage me to their eyes . . . do not relish well / Their loud applause and aves vehement’, having ‘ever loved the life removed, / And held in idle price to haunt assemblies’ (I, i, 68–73; I, iii, 8–10). This is ironic foreshadowing, given the public spectacle with which he metes out justice in the final scene. Lucio puts it differently: ‘The Duke yet would have dark deeds darkly answered; he would never bring them to light’ (III, i, 434–5). Yet in the end ‘dark’ deeds are resolved by the Duke bringing everything to light. Explaining his scheme to a friar, the Duke excuses subcontracting justice thus: ‘’twas my fault to give the people scope, / ’Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them / For what I bid them do’ (I, iii, 35–7). If the Duke is God, it is in this morally equivocal sense. Omnipotence does not, by mere mortals’ reckoning, exercise its power reasonably; it punishes people for indulging in the drives it gave them. This was neo-Pagan naturalism’s critique of monotheistic morals. David Hume faulted religious proscription on suicide for ‘prolong[ing] a miserable existence from a vain fear lest’ one offend God ‘by using that power, with which that beneficent Being has endowed him’.82 Judgements about death imply judgements about creation as a whole, a philosophy– theology impasse we will see again in the disguised Duke–Friar’s advice to a condemned prisoner. The Duke hints at an entirely different purpose for Angelo’s promotion – t­ esting Angelo himself. ‘Lord Angelo . . . scarce confesses / That his blood flows, or that his appetite / Is more to bread than stone. Hence shall we see / If power change purpose, what our seemers be’ (I, iii, 50–4). What is the true purpose? Is any of it moral? For Weber, ‘the complete transcendentality of God’ was ‘very much more modern than the milder doctrine . . . which subjected God to the moral law’.83 The bawd Pompey brings this moral nominalism down to earth when asked whether he practices ‘a lawful trade’; ‘If the law would allow it’, (2.1.214–16) he replies. Compare this, however, with the more harmless nominalism of purer comedy. Asked what he thinks

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of the shepherd’s life, the clown Touchstone replies, ‘in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd’s life, it is naught’. As it is ‘solitary, I like it’; as it is ‘private, it is a very vile life’. Because ‘in the fields, it pleaseth me well’; because ‘not in the court, it is tedious’ – ­and so forth. To Touchstone’s farcical accusation, ‘if thou never wast at court thou never sawest good manners’, the shepherd retorts, ‘good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court’ (AYLI III, ii, 14–42). But nothing is intrinsically wrong with either court or country here. A usurper temporarily controls the former, but everything can be returned to its right place, just as the erotic misunderstandings prompted by cross-dressing are resolved in legitimate marriage. Pompey’s comic redemption, by contrast, leaves a sour aftertaste. Like Isabella, he is impressed into state service over the course of the play, becoming an executioner, giving the reconciliation of Eros and death a disturbing edge. Arrested (‘What, at the wheels of Caesar? Art thou led in triumph?’ (III, i, 310–11)), Pompey tells the authorities ‘I have been an unlawful bawd time out of mind, but yet I will be content to be a lawful hangman’ (IV, ii, 14–15). Has he rethought his moral nominalism, or simply reapplied it? Measure’s Duke sits uneasily astride a fence the modern side of which, Weber thought, passes through modern science into materialistic atheism. He is half arbitrary sovereign, half manager of an intricate theodicy that takes its curtain call in the best of all possible worlds. Before he starts bulldozing bordellos, Angelo’s first act is to arrest Claudio, Isabella’s brother, for impregnating a woman outside marriage (though both lovers claim verbal pre-contract (I, ii, 146–7)). Claudio’s initial interpretation of his predicament cites an inscrutable yet legitimate sovereignty: ‘demi-god, authority’, effecting those ‘words of heaven: on whom it will, it will; / On whom it will not, so; yet still ’tis just’ (I, ii, 119–22). When Lucio asks bound Claudio ‘whence comes this restraint?’ Claudio replies with a fugue on human desire: From too much liberty . . . As surfeit is the father of much fast, So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, Like rats that raven down their proper bane, A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die. 

(I, ii, 124–9)

Modern critics from Rousseau to Nietzsche and Freud suggest fundamental misalignment between natural desires and social order – ­in Measure it is the clash between unrestrained (unrestrainable?) sex and the interests of

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patrimonial legitimacy and public health. ‘Fornication’ in this situation, Harry Jaffa explains, ‘as a kind of false coinage of citizens, becomes more than a private action’, and its suppression ‘a bulwark of politics and law itself’.84 Angelo tells a supplicant Isabella ‘I show [pity] most of all when I show justice, / For then I pity those I do not know’ (II, ii, 101–2), future generations threatened by illegitimacy or abandonment, like the child Lucio fathered by a prostitute. Claudio’s tone is pessimistic resignation, not railing against cosmic or political injustice. Though others question the sentence, he does not seem to find the prosecution odd. He sounds the bewildered note Weber imputes to newly disciplined bodies at the dawn of Protestantism. Previously the clergy ‘granted release from that tremendous tension to which the Calvinist was doomed by an inexorable fate’; now there is ‘no place for the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin’. Erstwhile ordinary conduct is ‘deprived of its planless and unsystematic character and subjected to a consistent method’; only ‘destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment . . . bring[s] order into the conduct of its adherents’.85 The policing of what we might now call private behaviour between consenting adults invites the stock challenge about those without sin casting the first stone, the would-be righteous judging such that they shall be judged – I­ sabella’s initial tactic. She extols mercy, like Portia, but from a position of weakness. ‘How would you be’, she asks Angelo, ‘If He which is the top of judgment should / But judge you as you are? O, think on that, / And mercy then will breathe within your lips / Like man new made’ (II, ii, 76–80). Angelo gives the obvious response that his personal morality is irrelevant. ‘It is the law, not I, condemn your brother / Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son, / It should be thus’ (II, ii, 81–3). Provoked by increasingly desperate pleas for commutation to admit as evidence not only his own behaviour (‘What knows the laws / That thieves do pass on thieves?’ (II, i, 22–3)), but his own desires, he replies, again reasonably, that law covers action, not thought. ‘’Tis one thing to be tempted . . . Another thing to fall’ (II, i, 17–18). This mirrors Protestant decoupling of blessedness and good works. When Christian salvation is voided of input from worldly behaviour, the latter falls entirely into the jurisdiction of a secular law freed, mutatis mutandis, from concern about individual holiness. Luther thought politics’ moral worthiness would only be maintained if good men became princes, or princes good men. He did not conceive of a constitutional solution to moralise politics, either through wilful specialists (Calvinism) or institutional logic (Madisonian republicanism). Interesting, then, that Luther’s illustration comes from the same folk legend that gives Measure its plot:

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A nobleman captured his enemy. The wife of the captive came to ransom him. The nobleman said he would give the man back to her if she slept with him. The woman was virtuous, but wanted her husband released, and so she went and asked her husband whether she should do it to get him freed. The man wanted to be free and to save his life, and permitted it. But the day after the nobleman had slept with the woman, he had her husband beheaded, and gave him back to her dead. The woman complained of this to Duke Charles who summoned the nobleman and ordered him to take the woman as his wife. After the wedding day, he had the man beheaded, placed the woman in possession of his goods and restored her honour . . . no pope, no lawyer and no book could have taught him to give such a verdict. Rather it came from unfettered reason, which is greater than all the laws in books; it is so just a judgement that everyone is bound to approve it and find written in his heart that it is right.86

Actually this solution seems highly legalistic, hinging on marriage as a purely social institution, legitimating necessary exchanges of sex and property.87 Surrendering this politique exemplar to ‘reason’, Luther brackets what philosophers and theologians should consider its major ethical questions. Nothing about whether the husband’s desire to live at the price of his wife’s ravishment is right or wrong; nothing about whether the wife is justified in trading her body thus, whatever her husband’s wishes. As with much else, Luther’s main inspiration was probably Augustine, who criticised Roman valorisation of women who preferred death to rape, evidence, he felt, of excessive pride in worldly goods, here ‘clean’ bodies (Civ Dei I.16–19). Luther’s political pragmatism largely reads away Augustine the psychologist–theologian. Shakespeare returns the psychology and theology to the politics and lets them clash. Husband–wife becomes brother–sister. Sister is also (almost) an otherworldly ‘sister’, a bride of Christ. Intense moral debate and self-searching about the legitimacy of the condemned man’s request return. Shakespeare’s Duke is aware of the proceedings at every stage, not a Solomonic dispenser of justice ex post. And no one is executed at the end: the marriages are permanent. All of which suggests that what we witness is not one example of political prudence, but existential struggle between religion and politics, between claims of conscience and raison d’etat. Isabella’s anti-Pharisaical plea that Angelo examine the depths of his soul begins the unravelling of his political authority. Her prior argument – ­‘If he had been as you, and you as he, / You would have slipped like him, but he like you / Would not have been so stern’ (II, ii, 64–6) – f­ alls on deaf ears, its picture of two abstracted figures in a Golden-Rule situation

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merely reinforcing Angelo’s regard for the impersonality of law. Her next request is personal. ‘Go to your bosom, / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault.’ Almost immediately, Angelo’s inner monologue imagines Isabella’s ravishment. She speaks ‘such sense that my sense breeds with it’ (II, ii, 138–44). Breed: the biological imperative Isabella flees. ‘Be that you are . . . a woman; if you be more, you’re none’ (II, iv, 135–6). Is Angelo’s desire ‘like [her] brother’s fault’? Claudio’s crime was fornication, lust consummated outside society’s boundaries. Angelo, despite having indicated that for the sovereign only actions matter, now indicts himself for thought-crime: Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman’s lightness? Having waste ground enough, Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary And pitch our evils there? . . . Dost thou desire her foully for those things That make her good? . . . Never could the strumpet, With all her double vigour, art and nature, Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid Subdues me quite. 

(II, ii, 171–89)

Conceivably, when Claudio told Lucio to enlist Isabella in this task he entertained, consciously or not, this possibility of Angelo’s heretofore dormant forbidden fruit psychology: ‘in her youth / There is a prone and speechless dialect / Such as move men’ (I, ii, 180–2). Yet Angelo’s ‘desire to raze the sanctuary’, given that he is a political authority who sets in motion a chain of events stopping Isabella’s holy vocation, indicates broader theological–political import. Later Angelo laments, ‘Heaven hath my empty words, / Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue, / Anchors on Isabel: Heaven in my mouth, / As if I did but only chew his name, / And in my heart the strong and swelling evil / Of my conception’ (II, iv, 2–7). This image of failed communion (‘chew his name’) mirrors the interruption of Isabella’s novitiate, an interruption ending, perhaps, with ‘strong and swelling . . . conception’ as the Duke assigns Isabella and Angelo to marriage (though not with each other). Lucio deems all material desires inexorably linked, calling it ‘impossible to extirp [fornication] quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down’ (III, i, 365–6). Eros’

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‘thorn’ proves ‘we are nature’s’ (AW I, iii, 113). Like Shylock, Angelo is brought to a materialistic levelling (‘Blood, thou art blood’ (II, iv, 15)), but Angelo’s is connected to Reformation controversy. Worldly imperatives are such that priests cannot magically change matter into something divine, nor cloistered nuns usefully sue for purgatorial mercy. Claudio’s confusion about proper attitudes towards death also reveals a world in theological and metaphysical flux. Almost as soon as he has said, ‘If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride, / And hug it in mine arms’ (III, i, 84–6), he backtracks: ‘The weariest and most loathed worldly life . . . is a paradise / To what we fear of death’ (III, i, 132–5). The Duke, disguised as a friar, gave him a verbose neo-Stoic lesson on learning how to die: Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences That dost this habitation, where thou keep’st Hourly afflict. Merely, thou art death’s fool, For him thou labour’st by thy flight to shun, And yet run’st toward him still. . . . Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok’st, yet grossly fear’st Thy death, which is no more. 

(III, i, 6–19)

There is something odd about a friar telling a condemned man death means annihilation (Claudio thought that only one possibility). Is resignation to dying before one’s time the logical response to such news? Austere varieties of Stoicism say yes, but one can also picture Epicurus, or that modern Epicurus, Hobbes, pleading for the ‘security . . . of living out the time, which Nature ordinarily alloweth men to live’.88 Claudio initially accepts the Duke/friar’s advice, bewilderedly reporting ‘To sue to live, I find I seek to die, / And seeking death, find life’ (III, 1, 42–3). He had ‘framed to himself, by the instruction of his frailty, many deceiving promises of life’, which the Duke/friar ‘discredited to him, and now is he resolved to die’ (III, i, 500–3). But Claudio’s residual confusion about ‘to live . . . to die’ foreshadows his eventually learning the opposite lesson. Isabella, offered the prostitution-commutation deal, harshly reintroduced to the sensual world, smells the Hobbism on Claudio, fearing he ‘a feverous life shouldst entertain, / And six or seven winters more respect / Than a perpetual honor’ (III, i, 76–8).

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The breach between Angelo and Isabella widens until it is the chasm between an Epicureanism valuing nothing above ‘six or seven winters more’, and a religious fundamentalism rejecting all claims of the sensual world in the name of eternity and divinity. ‘Because there is nothing in this World’, Locke reminds us in his defence of separating religion and politics, ‘that is of any consideration in comparison with Eternity’.89 Or, ‘More than our brother is our chastity’ (II, iv, 186), as Isabella tells Angelo. ISABELLA  Better it were a brother died at once Than that a sister, by redeeming him Should die for ever. ANGELO  Were not you then as cruel as the sentence That you have slandered so? 

(II, iv, 107–11)

Bodily desire turns Angelo, erstwhile dispenser of abstract justice, into an apostle of hedonic utilitarianism. Now he proposes Isabella bracket her sense of personal integrity to maximise happiness. ‘I give my sensual race the rein. / Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite’ (II, iv, 160–2). Claudio agrees: ‘let me live. / What sin you do to save a brother’s life, / Nature dispenses with the deed so far / That it becomes a virtue’ (III, i, 136–9). Isabella’s horrified response redoubles her preference for purity/death over pollution/life: ‘Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? / Is’t not a kind of incest to take life / From thine own sister’s shame?’; ‘Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd, / ’Tis best that thou diest quickly’; ‘I had rather my brother die by the law than my son should be unlawfully born’ (III, i, 141–55; III, i, 192–4). Now Isabella, like Angelo before, claims to pity those she does not know – ­her potentially bastard child, and future victims of Claudio’s imagined fornication. Isabella figures submission as a complicated ‘kind of incest’, as she would have sex based on Claudio’s sensual desire to continue living, giving (re)birth to him. For a novice nun this grimly parodies the Virgin Mary, simultaneously bride of, and mother to, God. When Isabella briefly believes Claudio will refuse the deal she cheers, ‘there my father’s grave / Did utter forth a voice’ (III, i, 87–8). But this voice, like that of Portia’s father, will be politically circumvented. If life and desire trump virtue, Isabella must secularise the Virgin Mary, renounce the status of bride of Christ, and agree to marry and reproduce the sensual world. Lucio wishes ‘the Duke . . . were returned again; this ungenitured agent [Angelo] will unpeople the province with continency’ (III, i, 430–2). He conjures a more tolerant past Duke. ‘Ere he would have hanged a man for the getting a hundred bastards, he would have paid for the nursing a thousand: he had some feeling of the sport;

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he knew the service, and that instructed him to mercy’ (III, i, 378–82). Lucio’s hedonification of ‘mercy’ radicalises Portia, who at least spoke religion while practicing secularism. Political-worldly imperatives defeat otherworldly religious ones. Chastity, says the seducer, is ‘huge waste’; the chaste women, ‘beauty starved with her severity / Cuts beauty off from all posterity’ (RJ I, i, 211–13). She who rejects ‘the quick fire of youth’ is ‘no maiden but a monument’, and instead ‘should be as your mother was / When your sweet self was got’ (AW IV, ii, 5–10). Lucio’s imagined Duke bawdily parodies Theseus, who threatened to make Hermia ‘endure the livery of a nun . . . in shady cloister mewed . . . a barren sister all your life, / Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon’ while promising her ‘earthlier happy is the rose distilled / Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn, / Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness’ (MND I, i, 70–8). Theseus’ appeal is to individual fulfilment rather than social necessity, but in the holiday comedies the two can be expected ultimately to align. Measure’s most extraordinary representative of the clash between order and desire is the prisoner Barnardine, an unrepentant murderer somehow able to refuse execution. He apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep, careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come . . . He hath evermore had the liberty of the prison; give him leave to escape hence, he would not . . . We have very oft awaked him, as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it; it hath not moved him at all.  (IV, ii, 142–52)

A sort of Rabelaisian prototype of Milton’s Satan, finding it better to reign in hell than serve in heaven? Inquiring as to his own past edicts the disguised Duke makes Barnardine – ­‘Unfit to live or die . . . unprepared, unmeet for death’, (IV, iii, 61–4) the mindset his intervention produced in Claudio – ­a symbol of the deus absconditis’ morally ambivalent behaviour: ‘How came it that the absent Duke had not either delivered him to his liberty or executed him?’ (IV, ii, 132–3). When bawd-turned-hangman, Pompey requests Barnardine ‘be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death’, the prisoner responds ‘I have been drinking all night, I am not fitted for it . . . I will not consent to die this day, that’s certain . . . will not die today for any man’s persuasion’ (IV, iii, 25–53). Barnardine, the ‘stubborn soul / That apprehends no further than this world, / And squar[es his] life according’ (V, i, 483), is the earthy flipside to Claudio’s terror of death. He already embodies the Duke’s advice to Claudio, imagining death ‘no more dreadfully as a drunken sleep’. He resists death anyway. The evaded execution contains a telling sexual joke. To ‘rise and be put to

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death’ describes the male experience of copulation in Shakespearean slang (where drunkenness threatens impotence or anorgasmia). Claudio’s execution, too, was transformed into a bungled sex act: the ‘bed trick’ whereby a spurned fiancée of Angelo’s stood in for Isabella. Previously, Angelo had wrestled with whether action or thought was the true province of sin. The Duke’s manipulation fuses them. Angelo sins in thought (believing himself to be ravishing Isabella) while behaving dutifully in act. Janet Adelman writes, ‘Confronting his own sexuality . . . [Angelo] experiences the secular equivalent of original sin and the fall into death’90 – ­but in Vienna political sovereignty demarcates good and evil (as Pompey predicted) and the ‘secular equivalent’ of Angelo’s fall means re-naturalisation, not banishment. Angelo, not Claudio, encounters darkness in his arms, and hugs it as a bride. It is the beginning of his path to a sort of inverted redemption. The ‘darkness’ he found inside himself, an abyss between his physical passions and his religious conception of political office, becomes the light of Act 5’s matrimonial revelations. Shakespeare arranges sacred prostitution. Believing himself to be fulfilling his half of the prostitution-contract he offered Isabella, Angelo actually fulfils his marriage contract. Chapter 2 associated Cleopatra with temple prostitution. But in Shakespearean antiquity the eminent were trapped in a zero-sum quest for glory, and inflating sex thus was only a mirror image of Coriolanus’ inflation of war. Shakespearean modernity follows, and extends, the path of Coriolanus’ vanquishers by valorising what can be shared. Angelo lives this shift and in him, specifically, it appears as the transition from Catholic hierarchy to Protestant nationalism. Introduced as an expert in holiness, he will be reincorporated on a humbler basis, one absolved groom among many, after coming to terms with the biological common denominator that links him to his declared enemies, Vienna’s pimps and whores. But Measure is not Protestant polemic. Far from criticising the worldly transgressions of the church as Marlowe (and early Shakespeare) had, Measure locates religious disturbance in people much like the original would-be reformers of Catholicism: people who want cloisters purified rather than evacuated, who want officials to take their role as God’s earthly representatives more seriously. When the Duke finally reveals his true identity, Angelo begs for a death à la divine wrath: ‘your grace, like power divine, / Hath looked upon my passes . . . let my trial be mine own confession. / Immediate sentence, then, and sequent death / Is all the grace I beg . . . I crave death more willingly than mercy’ (V, i, 370–5; V, I, 479). But the state claims his body as well, claims it not for death but for life, unlike in the source story.

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(Foucault writes, ‘As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life’ it became ‘more and more difficult to apply the death penalty.’91) Lucio’s punishment is to marry the prostitute whose child he fathered. Even Barnardine is simply told to go forth and sin no more. A Foucauldian reading might interpret this ratification of the will of one ‘not consent[ing] to die this day . . . for any man’s persuasion’ as simply a disciplinary strategy to neutralise subversion, and would not be entirely off base. Yet, however one parses its compromises, this remains a happier conclusion, surely, than mass execution. Under the Duke’s re-established power, Isabella supplicates like before, now arguing that Angelo should be pardoned. Still believing Claudio to have been executed she nevertheless asks the Duke to ‘Look . . . on this man condemned, / As if my brother lived.’ Claudio ‘had but justice, / In that he did the thing for which he died’ but Angelo’s ‘act . . . must be buried but as an intent / That perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects, / Intents but merely thoughts’ (V, i, 445–55). Religieuse no longer, Isabella is not Lucio’s ‘thing enskied and sainted’ pleading for mercy, but a citizen affirming allegiance to political justice. That ‘thoughts are no subjects’ was a central Lutheran argument against religious coercion. Luther’s reasoning was mainly theological, but left-Protestants in the Lockean tradition would merge the theological into a political imperative for toleration. Hence Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia (1782): The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.92

This is a radicalisation of Locke, who, despite broadly making the same argument, allowed some exceptions. Public avowers of atheism or Papal supremacy, for instance, could be suppressed. Even if announcing such doctrines picks no pockets and breaks no legs, in doing so one attacks the bedrock of Locke’s society (tolerance underwritten by a rationalistic sort of deism) and thus either does intangible yet serious harm, or portends future actual harms, or both. Rousseau’s statism goes even further, as is evident from this chapter’s

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epigraph. The ‘Civil Religion’ he outlines in Du Contrat Social (IV.8)93 acknowledges there ‘no longer can be an exclusive national Religion’, but does not thereby dispense with dogmatism altogether: ‘one must tolerate all those which tolerate the others insofar as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of the Citizen’, he allows. ‘But whoever dares to say, no Salvation outside the Church, has to be driven out of the State.’ Jefferson radicalises Locke’s disaggregation of religious speech and political order; Rousseau radicalises Locke’s allowance, within a toleration framework, of raison d’etat to trump diversity. The rights the social contract gives society over individuals ‘does not . . . exceed the bounds of public utility’ Rousseau announces, following Locke. But then: ‘Subjects therefore only owe the Sovereign an account of their opinions insofar as these opinions matter to the community.’ Which is decided how? If Rousseau means that whatever the community (meaning the majority) cares enough about therefore matters, then it is hard to see this as a protection at all. If it means that some pre-existing objective conception of ‘public utility’ determines what opinions actually matter to the community’s functioning well, then Rousseau invites the Hobbesian Leviathan he criticises in the back door. Rousseau’s announcement that the days of ‘exclusive national Religion’ are gone somewhat masks the nature of what he is doing here, which is to transform religion into patriotism, like the Pagan city which ‘drew no distinction between its Gods and its laws’. Christianity arrived as a pure ‘Religion of man’ (in contrast to the Roman religion ‘of the citizen’) preaching nothing but ‘the eternal duties of morality . . . true Theism’, but it then evolved into the ‘bizarre sort of Religion’ that gets between man and citizen, giving him ‘two legislations, two chiefs, two fatherlands’. The problem is not solved simply by Protestant efforts to return to the pure religion of the Gospels. If genuine, this ‘leaves the laws with only the force they derive from themselves without adding any other force . . . far from attaching the Citizens’ hearts to the State, it detaches them from it as from all earthly things’. And Rousseau, a son of Calvinist Geneva, surely knew that any religion potentially over-concerned with the next life, any faith whose ‘fatherland is not of this world’, even one without ‘vain ceremonial’, could make people ‘credulous, superstitious . . . bloodthirsty and intolerant’. It is ‘impossible to live in peace with people one believes to be damned’, Rousseau argues, impossible for ‘theological intolerance . . . not to have some civil effect’. The final clause is ambiguous insofar as one might acknowledge inevitable civil effects short of civil war, but regard them neutrally or even sympathetically. Perhaps a state’s inability to assume its citizens possess identical moralities will facilitate restraint, even productive

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dialogue. Perhaps, further, the behaviour of states, and not the faiths in question, is what determines whether people will be able to live peacefully with those they believe to be damned. Nevertheless, Rousseau has a point. If one heeds Locke’s warning that salvation religions’ threat to politics is in the extreme asymmetry between earthly and eternal interests, it becomes plausible that politics must change religion to keep religion from hobbling politics. Friars must become Dukes, so to speak – a­ nd not, clearly, in the literal sense of reimposing theocracy. The passionate attachments that made religion dangerous to politics must be secularised. Rousseau, whose nostalgia for Pagan vigour echoed Machiavelli’s (and anticipated Nietzsche’s), looked to a religion of patriotism. The nation, perhaps, has a sort of artificial, conceptually limited eternity that imitates the old religious one without its political distortions. But other options have appeared in previous chapters, options that challenge the claustrophobia many might feel in a strictly neo-Pagan republicanism: the valorisation of market hedonism in Merchant, or, more simply, of biological life itself in Lear. Keeping up the pretence of Claudio’s execution, the Duke acknowledges that Isabella ‘may marvel why I obscured myself . . . and would not rather / Make rash remonstrance of my hidden power / Than let him be so lost’. His bizarre answer remains the neo-Stoicism he parroted when in disguise: ‘That life is better life, past fearing death, / Than that which lives to fear. Make it your comfort, / So happy is your brother’ (V, i, 391–400). But Claudio lives – ­more bodily interchangeability, this time in death instead of sex. Another was executed in his place: ‘death’s a great disguiser’ (IV, ii, 173), the Duke/friar reports to jailers sceptical they could pass off a different severed head as Claudio’s.94 Why does the Duke delay, so long after he has revealed his own identity, telling Isabella the truth about her brother’s survival? Earlier he revealed, ‘I will keep [Isabella] ignorant of her good, / To make her heavenly comforts of despair / When it is least expected’ (IV, iii, 106–8 – e­ choes of Prince Hal’s strategic reformation). But this essentially aesthetic plan for shock and awe plays out in the political and not ‘heavenly’ sphere, just as the last lines of the play beckon Isabella to wed the Duke instead of Christ. Measure’s title is a biblical reference. Falstaff tells Hal, though, of the agile politician’s ‘damnable’ ability to quote scripture such that one is ‘indeed able to corrupt a saint’ (1H4 I, ii, 90). There is a hint of this transposition after the ‘friar’ is unmasked: DUKE Your friar is now your prince. As I was then Advertising and holy to your business, Not changing heart with habit, I am still

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Shakespeare and the Theological–Political Problem Attorneyed at your service. ISABELLA O give me pardon That I, your vassal, have employed and pained Your unknown sovereignty. DUKE You are pardoned, Isabel. And now, dear maid, be you as free to us. 

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(V, i, 383–9)

The Duke awes Isabella with the news that the ‘unknown sovereignty’ of the deus absconditus has been political sovereignty all along. Despite the rhetoric of ‘your prince’ being your servant, the ultimate imperative is that her maiden body be freed for incorporation into the state. ‘What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine’ goes the marriage proposal as the living Claudio is revealed: ‘If he be like your brother, for his sake / Is he pardoned, and for your lovely sake, / Give me your hand and say you will be mine, / He is my brother too’ (V, i, 493–6; V, i, 540). By ‘killing’ Claudio and then bringing him back to life before Isabella’s eyes, the Duke has removed her previously felt burden of incestuously giving (re)birth to her brother. She is sexually free, from brother–son and (like Jessica) father–God, for exogamy. Later thinkers like Freud, Frazer and Durkheim speculated that this was the source of basic human social forms like politics and religion. Here it represents at least a political re-founding needed to manage the confessional conflict, and eventually secularising forces, unleashed by the Reformation. Put schematically: The Renaissance question was, could Christian and Pagan-humanist ideals combine as a higher synthesis, or would they prove unreconcilable? The Reformation, then, intensified the problem while changing its terms. Post-Lutheran fratricide made religious emotion itself, rather than this or that religious institution, indictable as political disturbance. Here both ancient polis, with no private life cordoned off from collective worship (the modern ‘opposition . . . between the ties of religion and those of the world’, Montesquieu writes, was ‘unknown among the ancients’95), and ancient empire, decoupling private cult and political/legal identity, offered limited advice. Protestant fundamentalists (as humanists like Erasmus ended up lamenting) were as uninterested in Peripatetic philosophy as they were in the fine points of scholastic theology. With Holy Scripture to live by, it hardly matters which layer of Purgatory houses Aristotle and Virgil. But nature abhors a vacuum, and to men and women of any imagination a single bible or Qu’ran will never be enough. With medieval theocracy discredited, and antique learning increasingly a matter of historical erudition rather than a requirement for statesmanship, the new vistas of Bacon and Descartes appear.

EPILOGUE

BRAVE NEW WORLDS

EPILOGUE: BRAVE NEW WORLDS

Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come In yours and my discharge . . . 

(Tmp. II, i, 249–50)

The unmasking of erstwhile confessor–Duke as political sovereign that ends Measure for Measure is a useful final signpost for the road this book has, with Shakespeare as mapmaker and companion, travelled. Chapter 5 read Measure as Shakespeare’s exploration of the ‘political–theological’ problem in its Reformation context; now, by way of offering some closing thoughts, I will broaden the scope of that unmasking’s significance, proposing it as a synecdoche for Shakespearean modernity as a whole. By 1789, the French revolutionary theorist Sieyès could claim the ‘nation exists prior to everything’ and ‘is the origin of everything . . . law itself. Prior to the nation and above the nation there is only natural law’.1 Alexis de Tocqueville, dedicated to explaining the causes and effects of that revolution and its American counterpart, saw the lords and barons of yesteryear fast getting ‘lost in the crowd, and nothing stands out conspicuously but the great and imposing image of the people itself’.2 Ernest Gellner describes modern politics’ ‘assumption of a moral identity independent of status and occupation . . . these attributes are supposed to be, and in some measure actually are, redistributed in each generation’. Modern citizens ‘identify, not with hereditary roles, but with the cultural zone (‘nation’) within which roles are redistributable without protest’.3 Liah Greenfeld calls nationalism ‘a unique form of social consciousness which emerged in the early sixteenth century in England and subsequently spread’, its core ‘social consciousness . . . a compelling, inclusive image of . . . a sovereign community of fundamentally equal members’. She calls

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this consciousness ‘inherently democratic: egalitarianism represents the essential principle of the social organisation it implies, and popular sovereignty its essential political principle’.4 Of course, contemporary standards for egalitarianism, democracy, and popular sovereignty are quite different than those held by most of the men who (theoretically and practically) initiated this process. Still, the core argument of the ‘social contract’ theorists I placed in conversation with Shakespeare is legible in Greenfeld’s terms. Political modernity frees people from inherited domination at the hands of particular others by forging a novel super-dominator that is, paradoxically, both more powerful and, at least potentially, less obtrusive than its predecessors. ‘An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized’ as ‘despotic power . . . hostile to the principles of liberty’, wrote Alexander Hamilton, the American founding’s pre-eminent theorist of such strong-state liberalism, in the first Federalist essay. But ‘the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty’.5 ‘A weak government’, as Samuel P. Huntington puts it, ‘is immoral in the same sense in which a corrupt judge, a cowardly soldier, or an ignorant teacher is immoral’.6 It is better to be subject to predictable, rationalised power than to violence-fraught anarchy: that is the state-of-nature/social contract story at its simplest. But it is also better to be dominated by a relatively impersonal conglomerate – ­the modern nation state – ­than by the personal relationships that define family, church, and locality. This is because the state tends to require a less stereotyped conformity than inheritance-dispensing patriarchs or gossipy Puritan villagers. Indeed, it may positively want citizens who consider openness and innovation virtues, especially if this is a precondition for the material progress promised as a perpetual dividend – ­beyond mere physical safety, but following from it – t­ o Leviathan’s investors. The essence of modern philosophy, as Hegel put it, is that ‘man has attained confidence in himself and . . . in sensuous nature outside of and within him; he has discovered an interest and pleasure in making discoveries both in nature and in the arts’. The old ‘romantic impulse’ that had sought martial eminence ‘passed into other adventures, not of hate or revenge’ but ‘explorations of the earth’ and other scientific and technological endeavours.7 But might this be a false dichotomy, well designed (intentionally or not) to flatter state power and foreclose better options? Modern critical theory has pled, often heroically, on the behalf of those allegedly left out of the above story: exploited workers, subordinated races, women relegated to a ‘private’ sphere hypocritically outside the rules of the game. Yet the most effective of these pleas tend to affirm the basic premises of the theory. They expose them as fraudulent in application, but not t­ heoretically incoherent.

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Enduring Western political theory, my Introduction proposed, is a flowering of arguments from one thematic root: should our social arrangements follow from an empirical understanding of nature, or from some other metaphysical conception? This starts with Plato’s rout of the sophists, largely continued by a Platonised and then Aristotelianised Christianity. The sophists begin to get their posthumous revenge when Hobbes hobbles Aristotle with Epicurus, making nature guide politics in the sense of basic biological imperatives. These advance from a core of survival to procreation and production; sanctioning anything beyond that, like holiness or nobility or collective virtue, is a dangerous error. Addressing the natural/ metaphysical problem is the beginning rather than the end of the discussion, however. The devil is in the detail. The subsequent question is what understanding either entity actually warrants, politically. Here, as I argued in the Introduction and have pursued through Shakespeare, the central opposition seems to be between unifying and pluralising conceptions, what I referred to as unbalanced versus balanced regimes. Naturalism is, I believe, logically more conducive to balancing than metaphysics, and also for reasons first mentioned in the Introduction. When, divested of illusions, we look inside ourselves, we find conflict, multiplicity, the animal divided against itself. Yet one need not be excessively sanguine. There is ample evidence that naturalism can be as tempted to unbalancing as any Platonism: fascism, communism and libertarianism have always had their purely secular defenders, their merciless logicians. Thus one imposing alternative to the above is escaping personal domination by ceding all domination to transcendent God. This fails because, in practice, God’s authority is only made tangible through humans: priesthoods, writers/interpreters of scripture. Isabella’s holy orders would have let her escape domination by the male power structure of Vienna, whose women otherwise risk becoming chattel, as brides or prostitutes. Shakespeare allows sympathy with her foreclosed project, but also traces its cruel consequences. Outside the cloister, Isabella’s transcendent God is personified in a bizarre, bungling pseudo-theocracy. Angelo punishes sexuality indiscriminately and disastrously; a friar uses his confessional power to tell a prisoner that, from the universe’s perspective, his execution is no big deal. This elicits Barnardine’s counter-melody, exposing clerical and political absurdities by refusing confession and execution. When friar becomes Duke, Barnardine walks free. Political authority is often irrational in practice, but theocracy is irrational by definition. The more Richard II spoke of divinity, the more his practical affairs spun into chaos, inviting usurpation and refounding by the more secular and rational Bolingbroke.

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‘Worldly matters’, says Hegel, ‘demand to be judged of in a worldly way’ in the modern world.8 Ideally, Leviathan allows us to keep what was valuable in the old structures – ­familial love, the sense of purpose that communal piety/­solidarity brings – ­while sloughing off their blockages to progress. The reality, as reading Shakespeare indicates, is considerably messier. Perhaps, for example, Leviathan can look tolerantly upon multiple religions . . . if they transform themselves according to presumptions that might be considered fundamentally irreligious. Should they refuse, the state either intervenes at potentially drastic costs, or, in choosing non-intervention, risks subverting its own claims about free and equal citizens. Both options were presented in Merchant. Shylock’s show trial and forced conversion have monopolised modern sympathies; I claimed the counterfactual of imprisoned Jessica must also be considered. One reason ‘it is easy to deplore Shylock’s conversion as a forced one’, Julia Lupton writes, ‘is because . . . we are no longer cognisant of the systematic transformations in the nature of Jewish collective life that emancipation itself entailed’, a ‘replacement of corporate self-rule (the many estates and bodies of Europe’s anciens regimes) by political representation in a larger entity (the modern state)’9 – ­a movement I found in Shakespeare generally. A different worry is that modernity’s pre-eminent impersonal structure, the market economy, makes many worse off than they would be under different, more holistic arrangements.10 In Lear, pulverisation of an oppressive ancién regime where love and politics were intertwined (or so Lear thought) called forth the spectre of a new servility: men turned, in the heath’s state of nature, into increasingly animalised creatures not unlike the ex-peasants who haunted Shakespeare’s England, abandoning enclosed lands in search of food and work. Here, as in Troilus and Cressida and Coriolanus, marketisation is contrasted with honour and dignity – t­hough ruling conceptions of honour and dignity in those plays were found problematic, to say the least. A world ruled by the imperative to maximise profits may be preferable to one ruled by the imperative to maximise honour or holiness, but it is unlikely to be a utopia of freedom and abundance for all. Commercial self-interest might be a safer foundation for human interactions than aristocratic status seeking was; better to borrow from Shylock than fight-or-starve under Coriolanus. There is a built-in egalitarianism to seeing all as buyers and sellers, as against ownership itself serving as caste marker. But there remain unpleasant vestiges of the old ethos, the masses as mere stuff hindering or advancing the projects of übermensch elites (now industrial/financial instead of martial – ‘­one of the hardest’ aristocracies

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‘that have appeared on earth’, Tocqueville figured, but also ‘one of the most restrained and least dangerous’11). Irrational confidence in, even worship of, profit-makers replaces the old irrational hatred of them as devils and parasites. The modern republic only works if commerce is nationalistically constrained, Montesquieu suggested, praising (as usual) Enlightenment England: ‘Liberty of commerce is not a faculty granted to traders to do what they want; this would instead be the servitude of commerce. That which hampers those who engage in commerce does not, for all that, hamper commerce.’ In true ‘countries of liberty . . . the trader finds innumerable obstacles’, like imperatives ‘to export and import commodities in favor of the state’. In commercial matters ‘public convenience’ must balance ‘the liberty of a citizen’, which ‘does not prevent the restrictions and limitations that humanity and a good police can require’.12 As I suggested in the Introduction, laissez-faire is an unbalanced regime (is, in that sense, contemporary America’s only heir of any political influence to Platonism and Marxism). To put it, also following on my Introduction, in literary language: such idea-structures insist that life would be comic if only evil/misguided people stopped making it tragic. The Shakespearean answer is to recognise the power, and limited truth, of tragic and comedic visions in their pure forms but show, in so doing, that balance or integration is the only humane and feasible option. I circle back to a story the Introduction said would be told through Shakespeare: the rise of professionalised, utilitarian politics. Its path from Ulysses to Rome’s tribunes and Caesars, from Bolingbroke and Hal’s renovated monarchy to Portia’s legal intercession and Measure’s nuptial consummation, has been a tangled one. Shakespeare was neither protoWhiggish triumphalist nor proto-Tory nostalgist. The nihilistic abyss into which a Nietzsche, Weber, or Heidegger thought this bottoms out is there; in Ulysses certainly, more equivocally elsewhere. Still, Coriolanus promisingly counters the détente between Brutus and Sicinius and Volumnia, which saves Rome by reinvesting suppressed maternal Eros into the city as a whole. If we must be cared for, and families and churches cannot be blindly trusted to do the job, or their monopolising such care brings intolerably regressive results, then politics is the only answer: ‘an institutionalization of love’.13 A redistributive state, staffed by salaried bureaucrats, does the collective caring dispersed individuals are unable to do effectively. Perhaps Lear’s and Cordelia’s prison is not so bad, especially if, like Barnardine, we conjure a veto power against our jailers, and occasionally wander out to do our part making and unmaking Dukes.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Quoted in Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1953), p. 21. 2. Economic historian David S. Landes (The Weath and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 190, 219) says England ‘had the early advantage of being a nation . . . not simply the realm of a ruler . . . but a self-conscious, self-aware unit characterized by common identity and loyalty and by equality of civil status’. Historians of political thought Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood (A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688 (New York: NYU Press, 1997), p. 5) observe that ‘by 1600, England had become a unified state, with a clear center of power, a national or “common” law, a national representative body, and even a national church subordinate to, and sustaining, the unified state’; this in contrast to other European states, ‘still subject to various fragmented and competing jurisdictions, the legacy of feudalism’. Alexis de Tocqueville (The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 18–19) thought that by the seventeenth century England was ‘already a quite modern nation’ despite ‘venerat[ing] . . . within its heart some relics of the Middle Ages’: ‘feudalism was to all intents and purposes a dead letter, classes intermingled, the nobility no longer had the upper hand, the aristocracy had ceased to be exclusive, wealth was a steppingstone to power, all men were equal before the law and public offices open to all, freedom of speech and of the press was the order of the day’. In other words, it had modernised. 3. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 3–7, 44. 4. Andrew Sabl, Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England

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(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 43–4. More generally, see Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), and Hiram Caton’s account of the rise of ‘polytechnic rationality’ in The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600–1835 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988). Alan Macfarlane (The Culture of Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), Chap. 3) argues that England de-privatised the violence of peasantry and locality well ahead of comparable societies, while Ellen Meiksins Wood (The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Regime on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991) p. 27) finds English elites ‘demilitarized before any other aristocracy in Europe’. 5. Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005). 6. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 35. 7. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987); Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Ned Lukacher, Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of Conscience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Millicent Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Agnes Heller, The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 8. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking With Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011) and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Paul A. Kottman, A Politics of the Scene (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) and Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Ewan Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2001); Robert N. Watson, The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity From Richard II to Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 9. J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 46–50: ancient Greek drama was ‘a formal part of public life, whereas political theory was not’, and ‘drama evolved as a democratic institution, whereas political theory arose as a critique of its corruption’. Euben points out that ‘theater’ and ‘theory’ share

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‘a common root. The Greek thea means see, sight gaze, look upon, behold, admire, and contemplate.’ 10. Book-length studies include John Alvis, Shakespeare’s Understanding of Honor (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1990); Leon Harold Craig, Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); David Lowenthal, Shakespeare and the Good Life: Ethics and Politics in Dramatic Form (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Allan Bloom, Shakespeare’s Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964) and Shakespeare on Love and Friendship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); John Alvis and Thomas G. West (eds), Shakespeare as Political Thinker (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1981); and Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan (eds), Shakespeare’s Political Pageant: Essays in Literature and Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). If Hugh Grady (Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 1) is right about ‘the frequency with which [Shakespeare’s] work is termed “modern”’ throughout ‘the four-hundred-year-old archive of writings’ about him, then political theory is a glaring exception. 11. William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1974). 12. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 184–5, 195. Filmer shows why royalists were right to mistrust Hobbes and why the book Filmer dubs ‘destructive to all government whatsoever, and even to the Leviathan itself’ was suspected to be a backhanded authorization of Cromwell’s Long Parliament. 13. Alvis and West, Shakespeare as Political Thinker, p. 4. 14. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Change in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 5, 9. Kottman (Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare, pp. 3–4) calls Shakespeare’s protagonists ‘conditioned by authoritative social bonds – ­kinship ties, civic relations, economic dependencies, political allegiances – t­ hat end up unraveling irreparably’; Lupton’s (Thinking With Shakespeare, pp. 98, 129) resonant conception of All’s Well That Ends Well – ‘­between medieval conceptions of the body politic as a mystical unity and liberal conceptions of the social contract as a consensual document among secular persons . . . an opening of sovereignty to new impulses, insuring, without fully imagining, a future for consent’ – ­could extend throughout the plays. Victor Kiernan argues for more English social mobility in the later sixteenth century than before or after: the aristocratic aspirations of the middling sort, but also the troublesome spectre of former smallholders sinking to the status of hired labour. Thus the ‘Great Chain and Christian brotherhood’ of Neoplatonic propaganda were ‘flagrantly at variance with the facts of Elizabethan life, where many were rising, many sinking, and multitudes were discontented’. See Kiernan’s Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 3–4, and Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare: A Marxist Study (London: Verso, 1996), p. 9. Also Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts:

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Notes to pages 5–10

The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), and more generally, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). 15. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 54. 16. Leslie Paul Thiele, Thinking Politics: Perspectives in Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Political Theory (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1997), pp. xiii–xiv. 17. Dante Germino, Beyond Ideology: The Revival of Political Theory (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 5–7. 18. Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), for example, ranges over playwrights and novelists as well as political philosophers. 19. Sabl, Hume’s Politics, pp. 12, 27. 20. Joshua Foa Dienstag, Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 3. Cf. Tracy B. Strong, The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), esp. Chap. 2. 21. Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 238–9. 22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 49–50. 23. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 318, 323–4. 24. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 44. 25. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, p. 4. 26. Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 14, 18. 27. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 89. 28. Ibid., p. 119. 29. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 135, 151. 30. Denis Diderot, Political Writings, ed. and trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 27–8. 31. Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism, p. ix. 32. Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), pp. 4–5. 33. Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare, pp. 22–3. 34. Cf. Judith N. Shklar, Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

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35. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 10–11. 36. Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory, p. 49. 37. Jennifer Ann Bates, Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010). 38. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 21. 39. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London: Kegan Paul, 1896), pp. 175–6, 313, 319. 40. E.g. James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 12. 41. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), §462. 42. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1984), p. 295. 43. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§158, 181–3, 239–40, 261. 44. Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory, pp. 37–8. 45. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic, 1983), pp. 10–11, 17, 119. 46. Classic studies like C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959) and Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) highlight the political salience of genre conventions, and the places where categorisation collapses – B ­ arber discusses the Henry plays; Dollimore places Troilus and Cressida alongside King Lear. 47. F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed. and trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 268. Less grandiosely, but also evocatively, Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art, vol. 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque (New York: Vintage, 1957–8), p. 171) sees ‘a special case in which elements of the Renaissance, of mannerism, and of the baroque are intermingled’. 48. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 59. 49. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 163–4. 50. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, pp. 8, 186. 51. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 166. 52. Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 10–12, 25. 53. Cf. E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto &

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Notes to pages 15–18

Windus, 1943) and Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944). 54. Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 7. 55. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 1. 56. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), II, pp. 1176–7. 57. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1840), pp. 74, 96–7. 58. Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature, trans. H. Van Laun (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1873), pp. 228–9. 59. Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), p. 184. 60. Tennenhouse, Power on Display, p. 6; Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. vii–viii. 61. Wilson, Will Power, pp. ix, 20. 62. Peter J. Smith, Social Shakespeare: Aspects of Renaissance Dramaturgy and Contemporary Society (New York: St Martin’s, 1995), pp. 10, 219. 63. Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare, p. 8. Bradley’s classic study is Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1905). 64. E.g. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985). 65. Tennenhouse, Power on Display, p. 15. 66. As virtually conceded in Smith, Social Shakespeare, pp. 8–9. 67. Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare’s Individualism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 68. Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, p. 10. ‘Invisible bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, Stephen Greenblatt’s essay in the same volume, says ‘moral values – ­justice, order, civility – ­are secured paradoxically through the apparent generation of their subversive contraries’ (p. 40). 69. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 3, and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 3–5. 70. J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), p. 7. 71. Cf. Kiernan Ryan’s anti-historicist treatment of Troilus and Cressida in Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (eds), Presentist Shakespeares (New York: Routledge, 2007), Chap. 9. Alexander Leggatt’s (Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Violation and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 1) identification of ‘the

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danger that a thick reading of the culture will entail a thin reading of the plays’ is apt. 72. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), I, pp. 2–3. 73. Ibid., II, p. 194. 74. Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 2. 75. Bloom, Shakespeare’s Politics, p. 2, and Shakespeare on Love and Friendship, pp. 1–2. 76. Lowenthal, Shakespeare and the Good Life, pp. vii–x. 77. Harry V. Jaffa, ‘Chastity as a political principle: An interpretation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure’, in Alvis and West, Shakespeare as Political Thinker; Barbara Tovey, ‘Wisdom and the law: Thoughts on the political philosophy of Measure for Measure’, in Alulis and Sullivan, Shakespeare’s Political Pageant. Cf., contrariwise, M. W. Rowe, ‘The dissolution of goodness: Measure for Measure and classical ethics’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5.1 (Summer 1998), pp. 20–46. 78. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, p. 265. 79. Michael Zuckert, ‘The new Medea: On Portia’s comic triumph in The Merchant of Venice’, in Alulis and Sullivan, Shakespeare’s Political Pageant, p. 31. 80. Olivia Delgado de Torres, ‘Reflections on patriarchy and the rebellion of daughters in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Othello’, Interpretation, 21.3 (Spring 1994), p. 333. 81. Joseph Alulis, ‘Wisdom and Fortune: The education of the Prince in Shakespeare’s King Lear’, Interpretation 21.3 (Spring 1994), p. 376. 82. Alvis, Shakespeare’s Understanding of Honor, pp. 89, 104. 83. I agree with Leggatt (Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 238) that Shakespeare’s ‘treatment of politics is exploratory rather than prescriptive’; and thus prefer Norman Rabkin’s (Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 9–12, 55) ‘universe susceptible of contradictory interpretations which are voiced by the characters [and] made equally plausible by the action’, where ‘meaning is more an area of turbulence than a sententious moral’. Also cf. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor, 2005), pp. 7–8. 84. Holbrook, Shakespeare’s Individualism, p. 22. 85. Cf. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996); Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 86. Kottman, A Politics of the Scene, pp. 8, 16. 87. A classic statement from modern political science is Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). 88. Catherine Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers: The Unity of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

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Notes to pages 23–36

89. Cf. Benjamin Constant’s 1819 address, ‘The liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns’, in Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 309–28; and Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 lecture, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 191–242. 90. Cf. Alex Schulman, The Secular Contract: The Politics of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 2011). 91. Constant, Political Writings, p. 179. 92. Cf. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Chapter 1 1. Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 95. 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1960), I, p. 100. 3. Northrop Frye, The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 62. 4. A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 208. 5. David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 66. 6. Quotes are from Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). 7. The Essential Plotinus: Representative Treatises From the Enneads, trans. Elmer O’Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1964), pp. 37, 85. 8. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 43. Cf. Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), Chap. 2. 9. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: George Bell and Sons, 1901), p. 59. 10. The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, ed. and trans. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 35. 11. The Satires of Horace and Persius, trans. Niall Rudd (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 52–3. 12. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), pp. 305–18. 13. Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), II.342. 14. Ibid., I.287–9, I.419–20. 15. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, I, p. 100.

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16. E.g. Thomas G. West, ‘The Two Truths of Troilus and Cressida’, in John Alvis and Thomas G. West (eds), Shakespeare as Political Thinker (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), esp. p. 153. 17. Iliad, II.220. 18. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, p. 207. 19. René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 141. 20. Cf. Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Chap. 5. 21. If Plato’s dialogues are alternative theatre, perhaps their purpose, Euben suggests, was ‘to make Socrates’ life and death rival if not replace that of Achilles’ ( J. Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 110). 22. F. M. Cornford, Before and After Socrates (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 19, 27. 23. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols, trans. R.D. Hicks (New York: Putnam’s, 1925), I, p. 147. 24. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 3 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), II, p. 40. 25. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (New York: New American Library, 1954 [1926]), p. 144. 26. Leon H. Craig, The War Lover: A Study of Plato’s Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 129, 142. 27. As Euben (The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 242–3) points out, the Myth of Er in Book X of the Republic ‘elaborates the story of rewards and punishments first mentioned by Cephalus’ and initially dismantled by Socrates with little fanfare. 28. Janet Adelman (Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 44) says Helen’s ‘vacuity [is] emblematic of the sense of absence or hollowness at the core that pervades this play, where there is no center from which meaning can radiate’. 29. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 4–5. 30. Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 4. 31. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 63. 32. Terry Eagleton, Shakespeare and Society: Critical Studies in Shakespearean Drama (New York: Shocken, 1967), p. 26. 33. John Alvis, Shakespeare’s Understanding of Honor (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1990), p. 129. 34. Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 145.

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Notes to pages 47–56

35. Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, p. 64. 36. References are to Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson, trans. Jonathan Barnes and Benjamin Jowett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 37. Stanley Wells, Shakespeare: A Life in Drama (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 216. 38. Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), pp. 384–6. 39. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 43. 40. Ibid. pp. 34, 76–7, 88. 41. Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 30. 42. Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 6, 129. If Plato’s commitment to the dialogic form ‘accepts Socratic questioning’ Plato also ‘pushes it beyond Socrates with un-Socratic results’, Euben (The Tragedy of Political Theory, p. 267) writes, forcing consideration of ‘the possibility that questioning is part of the political problem and inadequate as a form of political philosophy’, that ‘order, rule, coherence, and closure are essential for the living of a human life and the doing of political philosophy’. 43. The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon (London: George Bell & Sons, 1894), pp. 2–3. 44. Simon Blackburn, Plato’s Republic: A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2006), p. 15. Chapter 2 1. Eric Nelson, ‘Shakespeare and the Best State of the Commonwealth’, in David Armitage, Conal Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice (eds), Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 253. 2. Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 346. 3. Northrop Frye (Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), p. 4) says the ‘impetus of tragedy is sacrificial’: thus while I agree with Stanley Cavell (Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 145, 165) that Coriolanus is ‘about the formation of the political . . . about what it is that makes a rational animal fit . . . for civility’, I do not agree the outcome represents ‘a failed sacrifice’. That is comedy, not tragedy, better describing a play like Merchant of Venice. ‘The typical Shakespearean comedy is a tragedy . . . prevented from happening by the improbable presence within the play of a wise man, or wise woman’ (Harry Jaffa, ‘The unity of tragedy, comedy, and history: An interpretation of the Shakespearean universe’, in John Alvis and

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Thomas G. West (eds), Shakespeare as Political Thinker (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1981)). 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 84. 5. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 15, 28. 6. References are to Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker and Brian Richardson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 7. F. N. Lees, ‘Coriolanus, Aristotle, and Bacon’, Review of English Studies, 1.2 (April  1950), p. 114. Cf. Carson Holloway, ‘Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Aristotle’s Great-Souled Man’, The Review of Politics, 69.3 (Summer, 2007), pp. 353–74. 8. Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 2, 151. 9. Robert N. Watson, Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 146. 10. References are to Cicero, On Duties, ed. and trans. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and The Republic, trans. Niall Rudd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 11. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, p. 25. 12. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, p. 163. Cf. Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 39. 13. Wendy Brown, ‘Renaissance Italy: Machiavelli’, in Maria J. Falco (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Niccolo Machiavelli (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2004), p. 118. 14. Harvey N. Mansfield, Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989), p. 124. 15. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, trans. Russell Price (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. Chaps. XVII, XXI. 16. King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 19, 22–3. 17. Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 88. 18. Jeffrey Edward Green (The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 132) thinks ‘Shakespeare suggests that any effort to locate the true opinion of the People is misguided . . . grounded on an ontological mistake . . . The People does not take the form of substantive opinions, values, and interests waiting to realize themselves in law and politics . . .’ Green is right that Shakespeare presents tribunal representation as opinion-managing as much as opinion-reflecting. But I think that

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Notes to pages 66–75

by beginning the play with impending famine, Shakespeare suggests certain popular interests are objectively there, pre-existing representation. 19. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 83. 20. Jennifer Ann Bates, Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), p. 38. 21. Cf. Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), pp. 292–3. 22. Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 54; Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 132. 23. Tacitus, Annals, pp. 32, 172–3. 24. Cicero, Selected Letters, trans. D.R. Shackleton Bailey (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 52. 25. References are to Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 26. Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism (London: NLB, 1974), p. 74. 27. Sallust, The Jugurthine War / The Conspiracy of Catiline, trans. S. A. Handford (New York: Penguin, 1963), p. 37. 28. Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green (New York: Penguin, 1974), pp. 137–8. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 138. 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. R.J.  Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), §167. 31. Allan Bloom, Shakespeare’s Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 99. 32. The classical-humanist understanding of Machiavelli’s republicanism pressed by J. G. A. Pocock (The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)) and Quentin Skinner (The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), I: Chaps. 4–6; Machiavelli (New  York: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Visions of Politics, 3 vols (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), II, pp. 160–212) has been rightly questioned by those who, like Mansfield (see also Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), and Hanna F. Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)), see a different, more disquieting sort of republicanism. 33. Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 304, 312 (VI.3, VI.11). 34. Harvey N. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. xiv, 247.

Notes to pages 76–82 ­

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35. Mansfield, Taming the Prince, p. 127. 36. Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Lester K. Born (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936 [1516]), p. 175. 37. Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings, ed. John C. Olin (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 57. 38. Skinner, Visions of Politics, II, pp. 207–8. 39. Bloom, Shakespeare’s Politics, p. 80. 40. Plutarch, Fall of the Roman Republic, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1972), pp. 246, 297. 41. Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania, trans. H. Mattingly and S. A. Handford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 72–3. 42. Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, pp. 31, 63. 43. John Alvis (Shakespeare’s Understanding of Honor (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1990), pp. 158–62) says Shakespeare associates Caesar ‘with Dionysus, the human-divine, feminine-masculine, frail-potent, dying-reviving, class-dissolving, mythological demagogue’, but also makes him the figure ‘who prepared the world . . . for Christ’s coming’. 44. Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 58. 45. Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (New York: Penguin, 1957), I.77. 46. Appian, The Civil Wars, trans. John Carter (New York: Penguin, 1996), pp. 133–4. 47. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, p. 277. 48. W. Gordon Zeeveld, The Temper of Shakespeare’s Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 98. 49. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, pp. 230–2. 50. Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, p. 145. 51. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, p. 279. 52. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London: Verso, 2008), p. 116. 53. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: George Bell and Sons, 1901), p. 70. 54. Ovid, The Erotic Poems, trans. Peter Green (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 98, 208. 55. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 203–14. 56. Sallust, The Jugurthine War / The Conspiracy of Catiline, pp. 182–3, 197. 57. Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 119. 58. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. Chaps. 7–9. 59. The Essential Plotinus: Representative Treatises From the Enneads, trans. Elmer O’Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1964), pp. 85–6

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Notes to pages 82–92

60. Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), II, p. 194. 61. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 196. 62. Alvis, Shakespeare’s Understanding of Honor, pp. 168, 193. 63. Allan Bloom (Shakespeare’s Politics, p. 79) calls Octavius ‘a dry opportunist’; by comparison ‘Antony, in all his decadence . . . is the last hero’; in Antony’s fall ‘the unheroic subject will take over from the citizen’. 64. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome, p. 38. 65. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. pp. 7–78, provides a famously pessimistic account of this reversal. Cf. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), pp. 31–2. 66. Wood, Citizens to Lords, pp. 117–24. 67. Cicero, Selected Political Speeches, trans. Michael Grant (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 162. 68. Cicero, Selected Letters, pp. 49, 170. 69. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, p. 290. 70. Appian, The Civil Wars, pp. 284, 318. 71. Cf. Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), p. 21. 72. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 26. 73. Virgil, The Eclogues, trans. Guy Lee (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 57. 74. Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 221. 75. Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 40. 76. Northrop Frye, On Shakespeare (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 126. 77. Tony Tanner, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 634. 78. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, pp. 290–93. 79. Cassius Dio, The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (New York: Penguin, 1987), pp. 38–9, 53–5. 80. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 138. 81. Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (New York: Penguin, 1969), pp. 182–3. 82. Ovid, The Erotic Poems, p. 124. 83. Plutarch, Makers of Rome, p. 296. 84. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 188. 85. Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5.

Notes to pages 95–105 ­

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86. Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, pp. 140, 162, 172–3. 87. Albert O. Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 35–44: ‘For the Prince . . . the new doctrine was nearly as constraining as the old one’ and ‘rather unhelpful: whereas the traditional standards of virtuous behavior were difficult to attain, interest turned out to be correspondingly difficult to define . . . Yet, although the concept of interest became fairly bogged down in its original domain (the prince or state), it prospered remarkably when it was applied to groups or individuals within the state.’ Such groups embody an unintended consequences model unproblematically; the absolute monarch’s only alternative to pursuing her will is being manipulated. Chapter 3 1. Cf. Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Terence Emmons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 2. These are ideal types, not interpretations of Hobbes’ or Rousseau’s actual texts. If anything, Hobbes is the optimist insofar as he thinks the problems nature presents are rationally solvable, and Rousseau the pessimist insofar as his tale of departure from original naturalness is one of mostly irremediable loss. Cf. Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 35, 49–83. 3. Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania, trans. H. Mattingly and S. A. Handford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 62. 4. Leon Harold Craig, Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 14, 22, 168. 5. Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 10. 6. Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 327–8. 7. Shakespeare’s Holinshed, ed. Richard Hosley (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968), p. 1; Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 81–7. 8. Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 10–14. Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 92. 9. Paul A. Kottman, Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 98–9, 110. 10. Harry Berger, Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 55. 11. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 3: ‘the advent of skepticism as manifested in Descartes’s Meditations is already in full existence in Shakespeare’.

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Notes to pages 105–116

See also Lars Engle, ‘Measure for Measure and modernity: The problem of the sceptic’s authority’, in Hugh Grady (ed.), Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2000), Chap. 5; and Richard Strier, ‘Shakespeare and the sceptics’, Religion & Literature, 32.2 (2000), pp. 171–96. 12. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 86–93. 13. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 14. A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 317. 15. Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 155. 16. Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 54. 17. Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 58. 18. Cf. Alex Schulman, The Secular Contract: The Politics of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 2011), Chap. 6. 19. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 2, 237. 20. Cf. Marilyn French, Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981). 21. Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 12. 22. Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 125–6. 23. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Change in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 214. 24. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 132, 264, 211. 25. Quoted in Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 64. 26. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 201. 27. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 189, 261–4. 28. The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, ed. and trans. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 31. 29. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, p. 55. 30. Spinoza, Theological–Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 195–6, 205. 31. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 188. Cf. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), esp. pp. 15–17, and Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 166–202.

Notes to pages 116–123 ­

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32. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 161–2, 190. 33. Thomas Aquinas, Political Writings, ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 25–6. 34. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 160–1. 35. Ibid., pp. 199, 270. 36. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, pp. 157–60. 37. Constant, Political Writings, p. 55. 38. The Epicurus Reader, p. 37. 39. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 203. 40. Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 197. 41. Laurie Shannon, ‘Poor, bare, forked: Animal sovereignty, human negative exceptionalism, and the natural history of King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 60.2 (2009), pp. 168–96. 42. Spinoza, Theological–Political Treatise, p. 196. 43. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 187. 44. Richard Flathman, Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism and Individuality in Political Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 4, 51; Melissa Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), Chap. 2, esp. pp. 36–8. 45. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 505. 46. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, p. 61. 47. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 238, 211, 200. 48. Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, p. 115. English nation building – ­overtly in the Henry plays, more subtly in Lear – ­occurs with French politics consistently interfering at the periphery. The dawning nationalist self-consciousness of Shakespeare’s time fed and was fed by England’s weighing itself against the states and societies of continental Europe, France in particular. ‘Despite episodes of baronial and dynastic conflict, England never lapsed into feudal parcellization’, explains Ellen Meiksins Wood (The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Regime on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991), p. 27), which ‘sharply distinguished the English monarchical state from the French, with its fragmented jurisdictions and representative institutions vertically and horizontally divided by class and region’. Wood points out that the French Renaissance’s rich theorising, missing in England until much later, of absolute sovereignty (e.g., Bodin) ‘was a response to the absence in [France] of an “absolute” and “indivisible” sovereign power. The English evidently felt no comparable conceptual need, possessing the reality of sovereignty to a greater degree than any other European state. There was nothing comparable to the corporate or regional fragmentation of the French state’ (ibid., p. 44). During the last third of the sixteenth century, France experienced seemingly intractable sectarian violence and largely non-functional central government. (Philip Sidney and Francis Walsingham were in Paris during

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Notes to pages 125–131

the 1572 St Bartholomew massacres, and barely escaped with their lives.) Thomas More (Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 17) described a ‘whole country . . . crowded and overrun with foreign mercenaries’; Bacon’s (The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon (London: George Bell & Sons, 1894), p. 483) elegy for Elizabeth praised a ‘glorious peace . . . rendered more conspicuous and illustrious by the calamities of our neighbors’. Shakespeare’s depictions of post-Reformation political theology and the squabbling regional armies of the English histories, examined in this Chapter and the next, reflect this context. Cf. Susan Doran, ‘The politics of Renaissance Europe’, in Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond (eds), Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), Chap. 1. Chapter 4 1. Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 27. 2. Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co. (London: Allen Lane, 2006), Chap. 3; Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 294–306; Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), pp. 147, 196; Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 189–207, 256–7) suggests the Henry VI plays were prompted by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. 3. Victor Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare: A Marxist Study (London: Verso, 1996), p. 35, outmatching Tillyard’s conservative account of ‘[Hal’s] wealth of humours . . . contrasted with the single humour of Hotspur’, ‘northern provincial’ defeated by ‘Renaissance gentleman’ (E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944), pp. 275, 284). Cf. Auden’s map of Northern and Western foci of power like Glendower and the Percies who promote ‘the decentralized . . . feudal state’ versus the ‘more cynical centralized monarchy of the new order, consisting of Henry IV and his sons, the South and East, and London’ (W. H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 102). Also Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor, 2005), pp. 240, 266, and the discussion of Richard II in Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s classic study The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 4. Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 4. 5. Perry Anderson, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism (London: NLB, 1974), p. 152. 6. John A. F. Thomson, The Transformation of Medieval England, 1370–1529 (New York: Longman, 1983), p. 124.

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7. Catherine M. S. Alexander (ed.), Shakespeare and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 33–4. 8. John Julius Norwich, Shakespeare’s Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages, 1337–1485 (New York: Scribner, 1999), pp. 56–7, 115. 9. Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 56. 10. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (New York: New American Library, 1954 [1926]), p. 71. 11. Cf. Ackroyd, Shakespeare, pp. 283–5; Greenblatt, Will in the World, pp. 308–10. 12. Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare’s Politics: A Contextual Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 56–8. Cf. Wayne A. Rebhorn, ‘The crisis of the aristocracy in Julius Caesar’, Renaissance Quarterly, 43.1 (Spring 1990), esp. pp. 84–7. 13. Steven Marx, ‘Shakespeare’s pacifism’, Renaissance Quarterly, 45.1 (Spring 1992), pp. 49–95. 14. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 56; Wells, Shakespeare, p. 138. 15. Jonathan Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 26; Norwich, Shakespeare’s Kings, pp. 55, 70–2; Thomson, The Transformation of Medieval England, p. 141. 16. Garber, Shakespeare After All, pp. 251–2. 17. W. Gordon Zeeveld, The Temper of Shakespeare’s Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 39–53. 18. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, p. 58. 19. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: George Bell and Sons, 1901), p. 127. 20. Alexander Leggatt (Shakespeare’s Political Drama, p. 64) describes Richard’s instinct to ‘replac[e] ceremony with theatre.’ 21. Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories, pp. 2–3. 22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1960), I, pp. 129–33. 23. John Wilders, The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays (London: MacMillan, 1978), pp. 4–5. 24. Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama, p. 242. 25. Ibid., p. 99. 26. Northrop Frye, On Shakespeare (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 128. 27. Wells, Shakespeare, pp. 140–1. 28. The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon (London: George Bell & Sons, 1894), p. 12. 29. Baldo, Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories, p. 53. 30. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), I, pp. ix–x. 31. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s

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Notes to pages 143–157

Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. pp. 9–12, Chap. 8. 32. Grace Tiffany, ‘Shakespeare’s Dionysian prince: Drama, politics, and the “Athenian” history play’, Renaissance Quarterly, 52.2 (Summer 1999), pp. 366–83. 33. Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 59. 34. Valerie Traub, ‘Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning psychoanalysis and the female reproductive body’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40.4 (Winter 1989), pp. 456–74. 35. Cf. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 37–8. 36. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 13–14, 213–15. 37. Jonathan Baldo (Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories, p. 62) says Hotspur and Falstaff both ‘belong to the legion of the single-minded, whose very identities are founded on neglecting most of the world’s concerns’. 38. Victor Kiernan, Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 38, 58. 39. Cf. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), esp. parts VIII–IX. 40. Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. and trans. Julian H. Franklin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 4, 12–15, 45, 50. 41. Ibid., pp. 24, 27. 42. Marsilius of Padua, The Defensor Pacis, trans. Alan Gewirth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), I.XVI.13–14, I.XVIII.3–5. 43. Bodin, On Sovereignty, pp. 35, 57. 44. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, p. 315. 45. Kiernan, Shakespeare, p. 71. 46. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, p. 117. 47. Cf. Constance Jordan, Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 48. On Weber and the Henriad see Kenji Yoshino, A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), Chap. 5. Chapter 5 1. Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 2. Cf. Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Notes to pages 157–159 ­

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2. The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon (London: George Bell & Sons, 1894), pp. 6–7. 3. Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), p. 295. 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 145. 5. Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300–1450 (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. xii. Cf. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 6. Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 92, 118. 7. E.g. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), Chap. 12. 8. E.g. Martin D. Yaffe, Shylock and the Jewish Question (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 9. Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 280. 10. Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 52–3. 11. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2001 [1930]), p. 18. 12. Ned Lukacher, Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of Conscience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 110. 13. On the uniquely dark undertext beneath Merchant’s comedic surface, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 314–15, and Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 28: The ‘scapegoat ritual of expulsion . . . gets rid of some irreconcilable character, but exposure and disgrace make for pathos, or even tragedy’, Rabkin writes. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 165, calls the play ‘an experiment in coming as close as possible to upsetting the comic balance’. A. G. Harmon’s Eternal Bonds, True Contracts: Law and Nature in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004) reads it as more ‘problem play’ than pure comedy. 14. Allan Bloom, Shakespeare’s Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1964), Chap. 2, esp. pp. 18, 24. Also Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), pp. 86–90, 131, which reads ‘an allegorical contest between Old Testament principles and New . . . law versus grace, justice versus mercy, aneye-for-an-eye versus forgive-ye-one-another’, yet Antonio’s place, ‘for all his tragic implications in a comedy where Spartan reticence is as little at home as Roman virtue or Jewish piety’ complicates this. Fiedler argues that ‘neither

222 ]

Notes to pages 159–163

[Portia’s] morality nor her deepest faith are Christian. What moves her – a­ nd what kills Shylock – i­s hedonism, the pleasure principle.’ Shylock’s crime is ‘not so much his usury, much less his denial of Christ, but his puritan austerity and his insistence that men are finally accountable’. Cf. Richard Posner’s discussion of Merchant and Measure in Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 15. Janet Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 11, 93. Cf. Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 101 ff. 16. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On the difficulties involved in separating modern racial from premodern theological understandings of Judaism, see Lisa Freinkel, ‘The Merchant of Venice: “Modern” anti-Semitism and the veil of allegory’, in Hugh Grady (ed.), Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2000), Chap. 7. 17. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: George Bell and Sons, 1901), p. 190. 18. Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), p. 192. 19. Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 288–9. 20. Adelman, Blood Relations, p. 5. 21. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989 [1930]), p. 58. 22. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Vintage, 1946), pp. 185, 193. 23. Diane Elizabeth Dreher, Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986). 24. Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, p. 143. Lisa Jardine (Reading Shakespeare Historically (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 10) says the Shakespearean daughter/wife is ‘where the male fiction of the pure and proper blood-line is both founded and undermined’. 25. Thomas Aquinas, Political Writings, ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 166–7. 26. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), VIII.17. 27. John Knox, On Rebellion, ed. Roger A. Mason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 117. 28. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 59. 29. M. Lindsay Kaplan, ‘Jessica’s mother: Medieval constructions of Jewish race and gender in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 58.1 (Spring 2007), pp. 1–30.

Notes to pages 165–171 ­

[ 223

30. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 142. 31. Ibid., p. 49. 32. Richard J. Arneson, ‘Shakespeare and the Jewish question’, Political Theory, 13.1 (February 1985), pp. 85–111, proposes a ‘Shakespearean criticism of . . . Marx’s confidence in the power of market relations to obliterate differences in culture’ and neglect of ‘the ferocity of local and sectional loyalties typified by the conflict between Shylock and Antonio’. 33. Spinoza, Theological–Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 241. 34. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), p. 28. 35. John Calvin, On God and Political Duty, ed. John T. McNeill (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), p. 30. 36. ‘On the Jews and their lies’ in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005), p. 27. 37. Calvin, On God and Political Duty, p. 28. 38. Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man, p. 92. 39. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 479. 40. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), I, p. 614. 41. Freud, Totem and Taboo, esp pp. 182–6. 42. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 92, compares Shylock’s speech to Falstaff’s more hedonistic materialism. 43. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 43. 44. Adelman, Blood Relations, p. 128. 45. Marsilius of Padua, The Defensor Pacis, trans. Alan Gewirth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), II.IV.6, II.X.7. 46. As Leon Craig (Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 195) puts it, the ‘Rule of Law turns out to be the rule of lawyers, technical experts skilled in exploiting the letter of the law at the expense of its spirit’. 47. Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare, p. 146. 48. John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 100. 49. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), p. 162. 50. Ibid., pp. 135–6. 51. Michael Zuckert, ‘The New Medea: On Portia’s Comic Triumph in The Merchant of Venice’, in Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan (eds), Shakespeare’s

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Notes to pages 171–177

Political Pageant: Essays in Literature and Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 17, 24. 52. Steve Patterson, ‘The Bankruptcy of homoerotic amity in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 50.1 (Spring 1999), p. 27: the ‘characters who believe deeply in values outside the marketplace, Shylock and Antonio . . . have no place in Venice and are neither of them understood by its citizens’. Cf. Grady, Shakespeare and Modernity, Chap. 8. 53. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 43, 55–6, 77–8, 81. 54. Aquinas, Political Writings, pp. 166–7. 55. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 29. 56. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 167. 57. Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 81. 58. Patterson, ‘Bankruptcy’, p. 10; Richard Kuhns, Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 39. 59. Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 5–6. 60. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Change in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 128. 61. Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 118. 62. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 73. 63. Marc Shell, The End of Kinship: ‘Measure for Measure’, Incest, and the Idea of Universal Siblinghood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 74. 64. Robert N. Watson, The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 125. 65. Calvin, On God and Political Duty, pp. 26, 41, 44–5. 66. Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, p. 2. 67. King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 19, 25, 138. Cf. Andrew Barnaby and Joan Wry, ‘Authorized versions: Measure for Measure and the politics of Biblical translation’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51.4 (Winter 1998), pp. 1225–54, which reads Measure terms of James’ bible-translation project, ‘a cautionary tale about the dangers of deploying religious rhetoric in secular political contexts’. 68. Cf. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 69. Martin Luther, Selections From His Writings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), p. 411. 70. Calvin, On God and Political Duty. pp. 29, 46–7. 71. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origin of Radical

Notes to pages 177–186 ­

[ 225

Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. vii, 1–4, 18. Cf. Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Terence Emmons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 4–9. 72. Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World, trans. W. Montgomery (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1912). 73. Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), pp. 228–9. 74. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 255. 75. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen, 1949), p. 74. 76. Barbara Tovey, ‘Wisdom and the Law’, in Alulis and Sullivan, Shakespeare’s Political Pageant, pp. 64–5; Harry V. Jaffa, ‘Chastity as a Political Principle: An interpretation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure’, in John Alvis and Thomas G. West (eds), Shakespeare as Political Thinker (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), pp. 182, 189. For a critique of the sympathetic Duke, see Michael Long, The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 80 ff. 77. A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns: And Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (London: Longmans, 1961), p. 168. 78. Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 72–87; Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), Chap. 5. 79. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 89–90, 138–9. 80. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 28, 38. 81. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 4, 8, 40. 82. David Hume, Two Essays, orig. Anonymous (London, 1777), pp. 3–4. 83. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 78. Cf. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), which reads many of the themes discussed here as the outcome of the late-medieval clash between Thomist rationalism and Occamite nominalism. 84. Jaffa, ‘Chastity as a Political Principle’, p. 198; Shell, The End of Kinship, p. 33. 85. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 71–3. 86. Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, ed. and trans. Harro Höpfl (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 42–3. 87. Troeltsch (Protestantism and Progress, pp. 93–4) says that by ‘abolish[ing] the monastic and clerical view of the conjugal relation’, Protestantism encouraged an ‘increase of population . . . important for the rise of the modern State

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Notes to pages 188–197

. . . put marriage on the basis of a more ethical and personal relation, made possible divorce and remarriage, and thus prepared the way for a freer movement of the individual’, however unintended some of these consequences. Yet as Peter F. Grav (Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative: ‘What’s Aught but as ’tis Valued?’ (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 116) points out, marriage, ‘normally the mainstay of Shakespearean comic resolutions’, is in Measure ‘highly problematized . . . not grounded in a free exchange of love’ but ‘treated as a market transaction’. 88. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 91. 89. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 47. 90. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 92–3. 91. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 138. 92. The Essential Jefferson, ed. Jean M. Yarbrough (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), p. 127. 93. All subsequent quotes are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 142–51. 94. Watson, The Rest is Silence, p. 128: ‘Shakespeare links the Ovidian comic proverb that all women look alike in the dark with the darker preacherly proverb that all bodies are food for worms.’ 95. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 35. Epilogue 1. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), p. 136. 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 669. 3. Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 25. 4. Liah Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 2. ‘There is only one order in England’, claimed Sieyès, ‘and that is the nation’ (Political Writings, p. 127). 5. Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Mentor, 1961), p. 3. Of course nationalism, secular or otherwise, can take on quite illiberal colours – ­this Anglo-American ‘strong-state liberalism’ that began (roughly) in Tudor England is only one variant. But so far its record against challengers has been reasonably impressive. For exemplary anatomies of strong-state liberalism beyond this book’s Shakespearean context,

Notes to pages 197–200 ­

[ 227

see Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995). 6. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 28. 7. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London: Kegan Paul, 1896), pp. 158–9. 8. Ibid., p. 159. 9. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 101. 10. A classic j’accuse is Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1944). 11. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 558. 12. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 346–7. 13. Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. xv.

INDEX

Ackroyd, Peter, 179 Adelman, Janet, 42n, 143, 160, 169, 191 Alexander the Great, 145 All’s Well That Ends Well, 5n, 37–8, 105, 112–14, 118, 121–2, 180, 187, 190 Alvis, John, 5, 77n Anderson, Perry, 73, 130 Antony and Cleopatra, 2–3, 23, 53, 56–7, 68–9, 72, 80–91, 119, 140, 191 Appian, 78–9, 85 Aquinas, St Thomas, 116–17, 162, 172 Arendt, Hannah, 20–1, 84n, 140, 182 aristocracy, 56–7, 64, 70, 72, 76, 91, 99–100, 112–13, 125, 130–1, 148, 196, 199 Aristotle, 8–9, 13, 29, 42, 48, 51, 55–62, 66, 70–1, 74–5, 84, 92, 116, 121, 148, 162–3, 195, 198 Arneson, Richard J., 165n As You Like It, 6, 14, 70, 98, 121, 184 Auden, W. H., 129n Bacon, Sir Francis, 54, 123n, 142, 157, 195 Baldo, Jonathan, 142, 146n Bamber, Linda, 66 Barber, C. L., 14, 145, 172 Barton, Anne, 82, 131 Bates, Jennifer Ann, 11, 68 Bendix, Reinhard, 130 Berger, Harry, 104 Biblical references, 19, 41, 56, 71, 77–8, 81, 87, 106, 120, 134, 166–71, 194 biopolitics, 181–2 Blackburn, Simon, 54

Blank, Paula, 44, 110 Bloom, Allan, 19, 74, 76, 83n Bloom, Harold, 16 Bodin, Jean, 92–3, 147–50 Bradley, A. C., 16 Brown, Wendy, 62 Calvin, John, 159, 166, 175–7, 185, 193 Canning, Joseph, 157 Cantor, Paul, 64 Carlyle, Thomas, 16 Cassius Dio, 89 Catholicism, 3, 127, 138–9, 157, 159–60, 162, 175–8, 182, 187–8, 191 Caton, Hiram, 3n Cavell, Stanley, 56n, 61, 105n, 114, 166–7 charisma, 146–7, 152, 154–5 Charles V, 138–9 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 31–2, 53, 55, 133, 160, 180 Christianity, 3–4, 56, 73–4, 78, 87, 106, 114–16, 121, 127, 134, 156–7, 162, 166–78, 181, 185, 193, 198 Cicero, 60–5, 72–3, 84–5, 158 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 29, 36, 139 comedy, 10, 13–14, 37, 53, 98, 114, 140–3, 158, 183–4, 190, 200 commerce, 158, 165, 199–200 Connolly, William E., 4–6 conservatism, 40, 149 Constant, Benjamin, 23n, 24, 107, 118, 144 Coriolanus, 3, 14, 19, 22–3, 56–81, 88, 91, 119, 133, 162, 191, 199–200

Index ­ Cornford, F. M., 40 Craig, Leon, 40, 103, 170n Creveld, Martin van, 174 Cymbeline, 91–2, 98–101, 106, 154 democracy, 32–3, 40, 48, 56, 60, 64–5, 69–70, 75, 79, 151, 154, 182 Democritus, 45 Descartes, Rene, 105, 195 Diderot, Denis, 9 Dienstag, Joshua Foa, 7, 98n Diogenes Laertius, 40 Disraeli, Benjamin, 1 Dollimore, Jonathan, 13n, 16–17, 33, 112 Dumm, Thomas, 104 Durkheim, Emile, 12, 195 Eagleton, Terry, 44, 168 Elizabeth I, 132, 138 Empedocles, 45 Engle, Lars, 87 Epicurus, 35, 114, 119, 188–9, 198 Erasmus, 76, 92, 128, 149, 195 Essex rebellion, 132–3 Euben, J. Peter, 4n, 11, 13, 39n, 40n, 54n fatalism, 39–40, 45, 114, 123 feminism, 25, 110 feudalism, 24, 106, 108, 129–33, 137, 149, 154 Fiedler, Leslie, 159n Filmer, Sir Robert, 5, 165–6, 176 Fortescue, Sir John, 92, 109 Foucault, Michel, 16, 22, 54, 181–2, 192 Freud, Sigmund, 143–4, 154–5, 161, 168, 184, 195 Frye, Northrop, 13–14, 29, 56n, 82, 88, 140, 159n Galen, 163 Garber, Marjorie, 19n, 134 Gellner, Ernest, 5n, 196 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 103–4 Germino, Dante, 6 Gillespie, Michael Allen, 183n Gillies, John, 170–1 Girard, Rene, 15 Goddard, Harold, 82 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 14 Grav, Peter F., 186n Green, Jeffrey Edward, 65n Greenblatt, Stephen, 17, 125n, 159 Greenfeld, Liah, 2, 196–7

[ 229

Hamilton, Alexander, 197 Hamlet, 10, 14, 19, 24, 52, 56, 112, 137, 142, 161 Hauser, Arnold, 13n Hazlitt, William, 33, 47, 80, 137, 160 Hegel, G. W. F., 10–12, 16, 73, 137, 168, 197, 199 Henry IV plays, 3, 60–3, 111, 116–21, 129–33, 138–46, 149–54, 194 Henry V, 3, 8, 63, 85–6, 101, 107–9, 119, 139, 145–51, 154, 168, 178 Henry VI plays, 41, 69–70, 106–7, 125–9, 133, 142, 152, 154, 170, 179 Hillman, David, 29 Hirschmann, Albert O., 87n, 92 Hobbes, Thomas, 4–5, 8–9, 11, 24–5, 35, 43–4, 52, 92–3, 98, 105–7, 110–12, 115–23, 133–7, 147, 166, 168, 177, 188, 193, 198 Holbrook, Peter, 17, 19 Holinshed, Raphael, 104 Homer, 35–7, 42, 44, 55–6 honour, 42–7, 52, 57, 67, 71, 79, 107, 115–19, 122, 125, 130–1, 146, 149, 151, 168, 199 Horace, 35 Hugo, Victor, 16, 160 Hume, David, 2–3, 23, 183 Huntington, Samuel P., 21n, 197 individualism, 17, 153 Jaeger, Werner, 40 Jaffa, Harry, 56n, 185 James I, 62, 133, 176 Jardine, Lisa, 162n Jefferson, Thomas, 192–3 Jonson, Ben, 18 Judaism, 156–73, 199 Julius Caesar, 3, 6, 23, 56–7, 72–81, 89, 91 Juvenal, 73 Kahn, Coppélia, 58, 89, 110 Kahn, Victoria, 5n, 103, 173 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 24, 109 Kiernan, Victor, 5n, 10, 16, 129, 146, 149 King John, 108, 110, 130–1, 140, 178 King Lear, 2, 11, 14, 19, 23, 97–123, 131–9, 151, 181, 194, 199–200 Knight, G. Wilson, 181 Knox, John, 162 Kottman, Paul, 5n, 20–1, 104

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Lampert, Lisa, 162, 170 Landes, David S., 1n Lassalle, Ferdinand, 112 Lees, F. N., 58 Leggatt, Alexander, 18n, 19n, 138n, 140 legitimacy, 1, 8, 23, 57, 91, 93, 122–3, 130, 137, 152–4 liberalism, 24–5, 137, 181, 197 Livy, 58, 67–8, 70, 72 Locke, John, 8, 24–5, 92, 165–6, 177, 189, 192–4 Louis XIV, 176 Lucan, 80 Lukacher, Ned, 159 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 5n, 20–1, 199 Luther, Martin, 138, 149, 165–6, 169, 172–6, 182, 185–6, 192, 195 Macbeth, 54, 66, 136, 151, 168, 180 Macfarlane, Alan, 3n Machiavelli, Niccolò, 4, 56–8, 62–6, 72–6, 84, 92, 111, 114, 127–8, 133, 147, 152–3, 161–2, 174, 177–80, 194 Mansfield, Harvey, 62, 76 Marlowe, Christopher, 44, 125–8, 148, 160–1, 170, 174–9, 191 Marsilius of Padua, 148, 170 Marx, Karl and Marxism, 16, 25, 165, 200 Marx, Steven, 133 materialism, 34, 45, 48, 105, 116, 118–21, 168, 184, 187–8 Measure for Measure, 3, 24–5, 37, 156–9, 174–5, 180–96, 200 Merchant of Venice, The, 3, 11, 19, 24–5, 59, 151, 156–75, 188–90, 194, 199 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 13–14, 162, 190 Miles, Geoffrey, 82 Milton, John, 109, 190 Mirandola, Pico della, 10 modernity and modernisation, 97, 103, 106–9, 126, 155, 161, 164, 181–2, 191, 196–9 monarchy, 92, 113, 126, 129, 132–4, 137, 143, 147, 152–4, 176 monotheism, 31, 157, 163–5 Montaigne, Michel de, 153 Montesquieu, 3, 8, 106, 123, 125, 137, 149, 152, 195, 200 More, Sir Thomas, 123n, 128, 133, 172 nationalism, 1–2, 100–1, 123–4, 138–9, 149–50, 156–9, 174–8, 191, 194–6

nature and naturalism, 39, 103–5, 108–15, 120, 122, 152–3, 183–4, 191, 198 Nelson, Eric, 56 new historicism, 17–18 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 37, 41, 54, 56, 70, 74, 137, 184, 194, 200 Nuttall, A. D., 29, 37, 118 Othello, 54, 118, 151, 180 Ovid, 35, 90, 153, 171 Pagden, Anthony, 18, 87, 172 Patterson, Steve, 171n Pinker, Stephen, 3n Plato and Platonism, 13, 19, 22–3, 29–59, 62, 65, 67, 74–5, 105, 121, 128, 173, 198, 200 Plotinus, 30, 82 Plutarch, 53, 58, 60, 76–80, 85, 88–91 Polybius, 75 problem plays, 14, 37–8, 113–14, 180, 182 prostitution, 47, 83, 175, 182, 185, 188, 191 Protestantism, 138–9, 156, 160, 162, 166, 172–8, 182–8, 191–5 public/private division, 84–7, 122–3, 138–41, 173, 182, 195–7 Puritanism, 52, 159, 173, 176 Rabkin, Norman, 19n, 159n Rape of Lucrece, The, 69, 98, 101–3, 179–80 Rawls, John, 10 reason and rationality, 36–42, 48, 52, 57, 91–4, 103–6, 110–21, 146–7, 154, 165, 186, 197–8 republics and republicanism, 56–81, 106, 148, 158–9, 185, 194, 200 Richard II, 3, 11, 69, 85, 116, 125, 128–41, 146, 150, 152, 181, 198 Richard III, 15, 84, 111, 128–9, 141–2, 179–80 Romanticism, 16, 160 Romeo and Juliet, 106–7, 117, 119, 142, 190 Rosen, Stanley, 54 Rosenbaum, Ron, 160 Rossiter, A. P., 181 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8–9, 12, 24–5, 56, 74, 98, 157, 184, 192–4 Rowe, Nicholas, 80 Sabl, Andrew, 2–3, 6–7 St Augustine, 23, 73, 76, 82, 84, 87–8, 90, 172, 186 St Paul, 61, 74, 118, 162, 165–6, 169, 172

Index ­

Sallust, 73, 81 Saxonhouse, Arlene, 46 Schelling, F. W. J. von, 13–14 secularisation, 24, 106, 115, 139, 156, 173, 175, 181, 185, 189–91, 194–5, 198 Seneca, 89 sex and sexuality, 47–52, 68, 80–91, 109–10, 114, 118, 121, 144–5, 175, 180–4, 187, 189–91, 195 Shell, Marc, 173, 175 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 196 Skinner, Quentin, 18, 76, 142 slavery, 60, 171–2 Smith, Adam, 23 Smith, Steven, 157 social contract, 23–5, 97–8, 103, 106–8, 115, 120–3, 148, 154, 157, 163, 165, 172–3, 177, 193, 197 Socrates, 9, 30–3, 38–41 Sombart, Werner, 167 sonnets, 52–3, 90 sophism and the sophists, 9, 22–3, 30, 33–4, 39, 41, 44–5, 48, 54, 105, 198 sovereignty, 5, 25, 93, 104, 106, 115, 119, 126, 130, 132, 143, 147, 181, 184, 187, 191, 195–7 Spinoza, 2, 24, 35, 115, 120, 165 state of nature, 23, 97–8, 101–6, 123, 131, 142, 197 Stoicism, 23, 41, 82, 89–91, 128, 135–6, 172, 188, 194 Strauss, Leo, 4, 18–19, 21, 157, 181 Strier, Richard, 17 Suetonius, 78 Szondi, Peter, 14 Tacitus, 73, 76, 80, 100, 158–9 Taine, Hippolyte, 16 Tanner, Tony, 88 Tawney, R. H., 40, 131

[ 231

Tempest, The, 82, 153–4 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 15 Thiele, Leslie Paul, 6 Tiffany, Grace, 143 Tillyard, E. M. W., 15, 19, 129n Timon of Athens, 9, 165 Titus Andronicus, 56, 179 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1n, 122, 196, 199–200 toleration, 192–3, 199 tragedy, 5, 10, 14, 37, 53, 98, 100, 112, 137, 140–3, 159, 200 Troeltsch, Ernst, 186n Troilus and Cressida, 22, 29–57, 77, 90–1, 120, 140, 175, 199 Two Noble Kinsmen, 52–5 utility and utilitarianism, 36–8, 41–4, 54, 105, 115, 119, 130–1, 139, 189, 193 Venus and Adonis, 31, 51, 80, 83 Virgil, 87, 195 Walzer, Michael, 13, 177 Watson, Robert N., 58, 175, 194n Weber, Max, 54, 146, 154–5, 159, 167, 173–5, 181–5, 200 Wells, Robin Headlam, 159 Wells, Stanley, 50 Wilders, John, 140 Williams, Bernard, 17 Williams, Raymond, 5 Wilson, Richard, 78 Winter’s Tale, The, 151–3 Wolin, Sheldon, 5, 97, 111, 174 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 1n, 3n, 84, 123n Zuckert, Catherine, 22 Zuckert, Michael, 171