The Politics of Corruption in Shakespeare’s England

Summary

Carved on one of the exterior walls of the Kennedy Center in Washington we have a passage from a speech by the late President himself:

There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare. And the new frontier for which I campaign in public life can also be a new frontier for American art.

It may perhaps seem an ungracious and ungrateful act for one who spent one of the happiest periods of his life in Washington (during which many pleasant hours were passed in the Kennedy Center) to question the profound generalisation which the President delivered in this moving passage. Yet to the historian the belief that a great age in culture reflects the greatness of the men who govern is an assumption which may be flattering to the politicians but is at best unproven and at its worst conflicts with the evidence. I am in no position to comment as a scholar on either the age of Pericles or that of the Medici; but I have spent half my life studying the age of Shakespeare and I have often asked myself whether the greatness of Shakespeare's works mirrored the achievements of Gloriana or was in fact born out of the strains, the doubt and the despair which I find so marked a feature of the last years of Elizabeth and the early years of James I.