Shakespeare’s Dialectic of Hope
At a famous and pivotal moment in Shakespeare’s tragicomedy The Winter’s Tale, the old shepherd who has just found and taken up the abandoned newborn child Perdita says to his son (a witness to the gruesome death of a man eaten by a bear and the loss of all hands in a simultaneous shipwreck): “But look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself; thou met’st with things dying, I with things newborn.”1
These are remarkable lines – utterly simple, having a clear literal meaning, but radiating out suggestions of broader and deeper significations. Taking advantage of art’s status as an artificial form that references but does simply reproduce the human lifeworld, they convey a message about art itself and about dramatic structure and genre. They evoke an important thematic point about the potentialities of human life. And, above all, they convey a utopian message of hope, one that inverts the traditional life-story that begins with birth and ends in death.
This inverted pattern is, of course, not universal in Shakespeare’s works. There are, to take the obvious cases first, two extreme examples of highly pessimistic, nonutopian plays early and late in Shakespeare’s tragic period. The first of these, the generically ambiguous but bitter Troilus and Cressida (1601–02), enacts the prevalence of unrestrained power, political and personal, and ends in despair. The second is the late tragedy (c. 1606) Timon of Athens, another despairing play (with perhaps a few moments of utopian relief) that features the story of a misanthrope who disdains humanity for its ingratitude and depravity.2 The inverted pattern emerges just after the (probable) composition date of this play, around 1606, inaugurating Shakespeare’s last artistic period.
In the first half of Shakespeare’s career, then, the utopian was largely confined to comedy, and the histories and tragedies were about the workings of power as Realpolitik. After that, the depiction of power grows more and more critical, and intimations of alternative ways of life can be glimpsed with varying degrees of faintness in the tragedies of 1601–1606, with the exception of the two extremes mentioned above. Beginning with Antony and Cleopatra, I will argue, the utopian becomes a more and more prominent element of Shakespeare’s final plays.
In what follows, I will first discuss the 1599 Julius Caesar as an instance of a political play largely lacking in utopian content; it is a much less despairing play than either Troilus or Timon for several reasons, though similar to them in its relative lack of utopian elements. Its positivity is asserted in its depiction of complex, powerful, and at times idealistic personalities caught up in the workings of a power they fail fully to grasp. In contrast, Macbeth, the subject of Chapters 2 and 3 – while it also depicts power in relentless operation – has, like most of the middle tragedies, intimations of the utopian vision that will dominate Shakespeare’s last plays.
This book aims to study the workings of the dialectic between the political and the utopian in readings of five distinct plays from different phases of Shakespeare’s career – two from the period of political plays (Julius Caesar and Macbeth), two from his most utopian period at the end of his career (The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest), and a transitional work between these two periods (Antony and Cleopatra). The book thus charts a trajectory from plays largely focused on political issues to late tragicomedies that focus on the necessity of utopian vision in worlds of injustice, violence, madness, and death. Of course, in these plays the element of hope does not do away with recognitions of suffering and death. This is true also of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra – a tragedy with strong elements of tragicomedy within it – and even, as mentioned above, of Macbeth, which in its interstices intimates the possibility of a world of refuge from the relentless violence and suffering it depicts.
All five plays, however, begin in political contexts out of which, in the unlikely way of utopian art, hope can develop. The political situations vary, from Julius Caesar’s dangerously factional Roman republic (in which hope is hard to discover), to Macbeth’s misty, barbaric, and violent kingdom, to the power-driven, pleasure-seeking world of Antony and Cleopatra, to the fanciful, tyranny-plagued kingdom of Sicilia in The Winter’s Tale, to the Machiavellian Renaissance world of Italian city-state politics and incipient colonialism in The Tempest. In all of them but Julius Caesar, unconstrained wills-to-power create injustice and desire before succumbing to a variety of ingenious Shakespearean plot devises that reverse the valences of tragic emotion and leave us with hope. In short, the later plays turn to the utopian as a specific dialectical response to a Shakespearean diagnosis and indictment of instrumental politics, capitalism, and modernity generally. These are revealed as largely disastrous developments leading to an empty world devoid of meaning, community, and mutual support.
This book charts the artistic and philosophical trajectory that produced this outcome over the course of Shakespeare’s career. The trajectory makes use of a variety of dialectics contrasting and connecting the political with an aestheticized version of utopian thinking. We could start the story almost anywhere outside the comedies, but I have chosen to take up the narrative beginning with the 1599 Julius Caesar and following it through to the 1611 The Tempest. In the plays selected here from that timeframe, Shakespeare varied both the representation and evaluation of political life, of aesthetic ideas and practices, and of utopian visions. In the chapters that follow, I trace the development of a dialectic from the “thesis” of political plays to the “antithesis” (or arguably, perhaps, “synthesis”) of the late utopian plays.
Drama is an inherently dialectical form, and within many of Shakespeare’s plays beyond these five, various forms of resistance to power can be found. There are powerful, critical subjectivities like Falstaff, Brutus, Hamlet, Cordelia, and Edgar probing, questioning, and sometimes acting against power. Eventually, Shakespeare has recourse in the late plays to a motif of several of his comedies, utopian “green worlds” in complex relations to the realm of power politics to which they react. This dynamic creates a dialectical negation producing a utopian response – and in the process affirming art’s ability to imagine alternatives to existing reality. In the four late tragicomedies, this process results in a radically new aesthetic form (for Shakespeare) in which utopian vision triumphs over (but does not annihilate) the destructive effects of a new and developing reified society of autonomous power, commodity fetishism, and changing worldviews.
The political, the aesthetic, and the utopian are the three key concepts of this work, and they are tightly interconnected as used here. My discussion of the political shapes the first chapters of this book, focusing on Shakespeare’s changing views of politics. Accordingly, the political will be the focus of this introduction, and I will defer the theoretical discussion of the utopian and the aesthetic until the second half of this study, in an introduction to the chapters on Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. The point is to avoid conflating the two major poles of the dialectic at issue and instead to give each one independent attention.
Although this division coheres with the development of Shakespeare’s practice, it is also prompted by my theoretical commitment to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the need to fully separate the poles of a dialectical binary. “Dialectics at a standstill,” he called the procedure and used it to help define both Baroque images and the connection of past and present in the act of reading and interpreting a work from the past.3 It is an important part of the Baroque aesthetic he defined – and which I believe Shakespeare used as well, as will become apparent in the chapters that follow. Here, I want to produce a similar stasis, a similar sense of dialectics at a standstill, in giving each of my two major polarities, the political and the aesthetic-utopian, its individual moment as well as examining their interactions.
The aesthetic is of course a crucial category in this study and, as noted, will be discussed in more detail in the Introduction to Part II, primarily as a vehicle for the utopian vision that is also one of this work’s central themes. But there is also another meaning of the term relevant to the discussions that follow: aesthetic in the sense of the specific version of form, style, and structure particular to individual times, places, and artists. In this case, accompanying Shakespeare’s turn to the tragic and then tragicomic late in his career was an aesthetic-stylistic turn as well – a turn toward what I will call a Baroque aesthetic, at work in all the plays discussed here in different ways and levels, though least of all in Julius Caesar. It is an aesthetic that values complexity, dissonance, and ambiguity, and those qualities are important in the deployment of the utopian vision in the plays at issue in what follows. But, because I have discussed early modern Baroque aesthetics elsewhere, I don’t wish to make Shakespeare’s changing styles and individual aesthetic (in a narrower sense of the word) a major topic of discussion here.4 I do introduce the term and give a brief explanation of its meaning in Chapters 2 and 3 and refer to it when it seems to me relevant thereafter. The label “Baroque” will be helpful to some readers, but it can remain merely a stylistic marker for others. This book is primarily about something else, focusing on the changes in dramatic form and thematic content that create Shakespeare’s trajectory toward utopian art. The nature of Baroque aesthetics is a fascinating, complex issue related but not exactly central to my main argument here, and in my judgment its full exploration is best reserved for another occasion.
I begin with Julius Caesar (1599) as a kind of baseline against which to measure the changes in question. It is the last of a series of history-based plays written in 1595–1600 and presents the Roman political system at a moment of crisis occasioned by Julius Caesar’s defiance of the Senate and his assuming an unprecedented position as Consul-for-life. Politics in the play is depicted as an instrumental, largely autonomous system of power contested by a series of agents, none of whom is egregiously good or evil. The play was written in the period I have called in previous work Shakespeare’s Machiavellian Moment.5 Its aesthetic strategy is largely mimetic and embodies the tragic and historic forms and themes of the contemporaneous English theater, taken both from previous Elizabethan playwrights and Shakespeare’s own previous practice, especially from the four recently written histories, King Richard II, 1 and 2 King Henry IV, and King Henry V. And it is almost completely devoid of any meta-aesthetic or utopian spirit or vision: an ironic reference to future dramatists’ displaying the assassins’ violence in “ages hence” is the only possible exception.6 In fact, in Shakespeare’s early political plays, the utopian is largely a null category. I’m thinking of plays like Richard III, Titus Andronicus, the Henry IV tetralogy, and Julius Caesar.
The next stage in the development in these themes takes place in the so-called tragic period, from about 1600 or 1601 to about 1608. It is represented here by Macbeth (1606–07). In all these middle tragedies, and a fortiori in Macbeth, the represented political systems are subject to a distinctly moral, value-laden probing and judgment different from that of Julius Caesar and the plays associated with it. In Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, there are clear distinctions between good characters and evil ones (nuances notwithstanding), and the audience is emotionally inducted to take sides – unlike the earlier “Machiavellian” works. The aesthetic of the middle tragedies, as in the case of Macbeth, is more Baroque, more given to complex figures and modes of representation. There are subdued intimations of utopian vision as well, differing in each play – in Macbeth seen through invocations of the natural world and even in aspects of the Weird Sisters. But they remain far from the more dominant display of utopian vision that characterizes all the late tragicomedies, most especially the two discussed below, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.
The transitional play in this latter stage of development, as noted above, is Antony and Cleopatra, a tragedy, but one with a markedly utopian conclusion that prepares the ground for the tragicomedies to follow. It is a development marked by a greater consciousness of the aesthetic as such and a commitment to unlikely, optimistic endings that seem to take a more sanguine view of human development than did the earlier histories and tragedies. In short, Shakespeare ends his career investigating hope. It is a complex, uneven trajectory, but an easily discerned one that has been discussed in many different forms by Shakespeareans for a long time. By putting these issues in a new context and drawing on neglected theoretical resources highly relevant to them, I hope to bring new light to their discussion at a moment in our current history when they are more relevant than ever.
Shakespeare and the Political
Power – and the social arrangements that produce it and thereby produce politics in a given society – is one of the leading themes of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The histories and tragedies are centrally about political power and who holds it, who wants it, and the dramatic struggles over it that ensue. The comedies explore sexual politics centrally, but they also glance at macro-political issues, as in plays like As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, or Much Ado About Nothing, to name some obvious examples. If the late tragicomedies are comedies, as the First Folio suggests for most of them, then they should be added to the list of comedies greatly interested in political issues. The majority of Shakespeare’s plays are fundamentally political, although a certain kind of formalist critic might greatly qualify this assertion. Nevertheless, I would argue, Shakespeare’s interest in politics has long been noted.7 The debate has been largely around what kind of politics he supported.
Shakespeare and the Political in the Recent Past
For the first half or more of the twentieth century, Shakespeare was seen (at least by the majority of academic critics) as an order-loving, conservative Elizabethan who had absorbed the prevalent political views of his time. This was the argument of the vastly influential The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. W. Tillyard, which made the most developed case for this view.
Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, as generations changed in Shakespeare scholarship, this view began to be questioned. By the late 1980s and the 1990s, it was more or less swept away by the rise of two related critical movements, cultural materialism in the UK and the new historicism in the US – including feminist versions of each. At the present critical moment, these approaches themselves have aged, and the field is visibly engaged in experimenting with a variety of approaches to succeed them. However, I would argue, the paradigm shift brought about by these older developments is in many ways still in place, and many of the newer approaches – presentism, ecocriticism, political theology, a new feminism, race studies, objects studies, and the history of the book, for example – take the now aging historicizing approaches as starting points and retain many of the previous criticism’s assumptions. The guiding idea of the current study is less how we can replace the older methods than how we can build on them and produce new insights and interpretations of Shakespeare. In what follows, I want to review some of the key issues debated in the ferment of the paradigm shift of the recent past with a view to using them to help define how Shakespeare himself evolved in his thinking about politics and moved to a dramatic practice at the end of his career that ended in utopian visions.
New historicism and cultural materialism produced a variety of different approaches to Shakespeare’s representation of politics. Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy saw Shakespeare, along with other Jacobean dramatists, as a skeptical, questioning, and ultimately radical thinker whose plays conveyed these ideas in a variety of ways. “Unlike the influential movements in recent literary criticism,” he wrote, “the response of the drama to crises was not a retreat into aesthetic and ideological conceptions of order, integration, equilibrium and so on; on the contrary, it confronted and articulated that crisis, indeed it actually helped precipitate it.”8
Other approaches, however, emphasized Shakespeare’s participation in the ideologies and structures of power of the day. Leonard Tennenhouse argued that Shakespeare’s plays were implicated in maintaining the power of the monarchial state, even when, as in the case of romantic comic heroines like Rosalind of As You Like It, they appeared subversive.9 In a variation on this approach, Jonathan Goldberg saw Elizabethan and Jacobean literature as generally functioning as part of the overall power apparatus of state and society – but he partially exempted Shakespeare from this. Agreeing with Stephen Greenblatt, he says, Shakespeare is neither a “Tudor propagandist” nor a “Marlovian rebel,” but one who creates a theatrical space “where all the beliefs of the culture are trotted out, tried on, but where none is ultimately adopted.” But he adds: “his theatrical space is inscribed in a cultural theatre” and always has political dimensions.10
As Goldberg’s description suggests, Stephen Greenblatt’s pioneering new historicist approach to Shakespeare recognized the realities of power politics in Shakespeare’s world, but also recognized the complexity of Shakespeare’s art. This was something of an exception in a time when “aesthetics” was not a positive term in the prevailing critical discourses. And Greenblatt’s refusal to provide a simple yes or no answer to the question of whether Shakespeare was complicit with the repressive political regimes of his day became widespread as time went one. There were, in fact, very good theoretical reasons for this as well, though Greenblatt did not himself make an issue of them. In general, Greenblatt’s approach to his authors is implicitly celebratory (or at least sympathetic), even while he inserts them into previously unfamiliar (at least in the mainstream English studies of the period) contexts of anticolonialist politics, Marxist theory, anthropological analysis, and the new theory of power that Michel Foucault had recently introduced into left-wing theoretical circles.
Greenblatt, as I have argued elsewhere, avoids the homogenizing tendencies of Althusserian “ideology” (to be discussed further briefly below). Instead, he downplays theory as such, although a quick review of Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Shakespearean Negotiations will show a broad range of theoretical sources employed, including many Marxist-influenced ones, such as Marx himself, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and, in limited applications, Louis Althusser. And besides these Marxist sources, there was also a large influence from anthropologist Clifford Geertz and, less overtly but decisively, from Michel Foucault, with the result that his tendency was to more microscopic, context-sensitive Foucaultian “discourses” than to the more sweeping, inclusive “ideology” of neo-Althusserian theory. And something else was at work (and continues in his later writings): a positive appreciation for aesthetics existing beside, but going beyond, ideology in works of art. He wrote, for example, in Shakespearean Negotiations, “The idea is not to strip away and discard the enchanted impression of aesthetic autonomy but to inquire into the objective conditions of this enchantment, to discover how the traces of social circulation are effaced.”11 This, as I wrote of this passage in my Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, is not all that far from the very aesthetics-affirming neo-Marxist theory of Theodor Adorno.
This refusal to make blanket political judgments about Shakespeare’s works became, I would argue, the most common one in “progressive” Shakespeare criticism from the 1990s onward. Most of these critics, with various degrees of grace and cogency, make extremely energetic, positive, and ultimately quite persuasive cases for interpreting Shakespeare in a politically critical, insurgent mode that had been quite outside the acceptable canons of professionalism of English studies more or less since its inception at the turn of the previous century – it has subsequently become largely contained and professionalized, but that’s a story for another occasion. But, except for a few isolated phrases here and there, none of these works attacked Shakespeare’s plays as retrograde or as taking up too much time and space in the curriculum.12 Even Kate McLuskie’s “Patriarchal Bard” – her contribution to Political Shakespeare, which has been cited more than once as a clear example of such a position13 – is careful to level her attack not against that no longer quite viable critical concept “Shakespeare himself,” but rather at the “process of the text’s reproduction.” Criticizing some early American feminists, McLuskie argues against simply taking the woman’s part against the man’s or “merely denouncing the text’s misogyny”:
A more fruitful point of entry for feminists is in the process of the text’s reproduction. … Sexist meanings are not fixed but depend upon the constant reproduction by their audience. In the case of King Lear the text is tied to misogynist meaning only if it is reconstructed with its emotional power and its moral imperatives intact. Yet the text contains possibilities for subverting these meanings and the potential for reconstructing them in feminist terms.14
That is to say, the text can in fact be subverted and reconstructed according to different values from those imputed to it by conservative critics. Necessarily, we see different facets of so rich a source as Shakespeare’s plays as we experience historical change and development.
Today, I am arguing, the “political Shakespeare” constructed in recent decades is still highly relevant in our age of continuing political turmoil. But it needs contextualizing and broadening to avoid the reductionism and narrowing that too often accompanied it in the past. The aesthetic and the utopian are concepts that can help bring this about, and they help structure the present work. Neither is complete, however, without reference to and contextualization within the political worlds of past and present. To help create this broadening of the realm of the political, the theoretical work that helped produce the aging approaches of cultural materialism and new historicism is still relevant, if no longer sufficient, and I will review some of its issues next.
Earlier Political Criticism’s Theoretical Sources
Despite their much greater political content and rhetoric, the early documents of cultural materialism clearly owe an enormous theoretical debt to the deconstructive turn of literary criticism in the late 1970s and 1980s. In America, Louis Montrose showed the connection in his much-quoted definition of new historicism as “a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.”15 In the UK, the connection worked largely through Louis Althusser’s redefinition of “ideology,” which transformed the meaning of that older Marxist term to what was in effect a theory of textuality.16 Without weighing this section down with a detailed discussion of theoretical nuances, we can say that British cultural materialism assimilated a post-Althusserian version of the theory in which there was no longer a binary opposition between “science” and “ideology” (as in Althusser’s original argument), but instead a more radical indeterminacy in which all discourse could be considered to be (various forms) of ideology – that is, not as “science” (read, in effect, “truth”), but as interested, value-laden, and variously distorted discourses – which, however, are all that we have available to us as we attempt to capture the world in language.
James Kavanagh usefully articulated this in his sole foray into Shakespeare studies, a contribution to Alternative Shakespeares, “Shakespeare in Ideology.” Kavanagh borrows a critique from Catherine Belsey to help explain this, a critique of
the common-sense “expressive realist” assumption, shared until recently by most marxist as well as bourgeois critics, that “literature reflects the reality of experience as it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual who expresses it in a discourse which enables other individuals to recognize it as true.”17
Instead, Shakespeare confronts us with a clash of ideologies representing different social interests – and critics bring to their tasks their own interested ideologies. This being the case, the problem is not so much “Shakespeare himself” as it is the ideologies through which he is interpreted.
Other potentialities of this poststructuralist and postmodernist insight were developed in a series of path-breaking books on Shakespeare by Terence Hawkes. Today, these can be seen as the founding documents of contemporary literary Presentism, but they were first received and presented as examples of textual deconstruction – especially the much reprinted “Telmah” – and then as examples of cultural materialism, as Hawkes began to focus more and more on the enabling discourses used by a variety of classic Shakespeare critics (A. C. Bradley, J. Dover Wilson, and others) to produce what were at one time taken as canonic and authentic interpretations of the text. In Hawkes’ work, Shakespeare is constantly reproduced according to the pressures of the times and shaped to our needs – consciously or unconsciously – by contemporary readers and other interpreters. But here too, the cultural centrality of Shakespeare is an assumed and unquestioned donné – mocked at times, celebrated at others.
The incorporation of the Postmodernist (or Poststructuralist) close-reading techniques – as in Montrose’s call for the recognition of “the textuality of history” as well as the “historicity of texts” – is still crucial and assumed here throughout. Historicism arose in a context of professionalist positivism, and professionalism as ideology has made something of a comeback in the recent deradicalization of historicism that marked the 2010s. However, we can’t afford to forget the lessons learned with so much difficulty over the last scholarly generation.
Shakespeare and Politics in Contemporary Theory
More recently, however, the discussion of Shakespearean politics has made an interesting and salutary “return to theory” under the influence of a range of critics, all using the term “political theology” to describe their thematic interest. The term was coined in several works by Carl Schmitt, a right-wing political philosopher of the early twentieth century,18 to designate the process in the transition from feudalism to modernity that saw the metamorphosis of formerly theological concepts into secular ones – concepts, however, that retained something of their theological origins. An example would be the idea of the king’s two bodies made well known by Schmitt’s contemporary Ernst Kantorowicz.19
Schmitt’s ideas have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Despite his right-wing (and later Nazi) affiliations, he shares with left-wing intellectuals like Walter Benjamin (who used some of his ideas in his own writings) an emphasis on interdisciplinary connections and a focus on the process of modernization. Beyond that, he attempted to define the category of the political itself, something that had been largely neglected in the Marxist tradition (with the exception of Antonio Gramsci, to whom I will return in Chapter 2). Accordingly, he has found a place within the work of early modern scholars to whom his politics is otherwise inimical. Contemporary political theology in Shakespeare studies is resolutely of the Left, even though Schmitt himself lacked democratic values and aspirations for a society of economic and social equality. He was a devotee of a kind of Realpolitik, arguing, for example, that all politics is based on the distinction between friends and enemies, and in general he supported the rights of the “sovereign” over the legislature and popular sovereignty. He was first a Catholic conservative, later a member of the Nazi Party, and he refused all attempts at de-Nazification in the postwar years.20
But his revival in our own era has in effect moved his politics to the Left, and the Shakespeare of political theology is largely a progressive figure. The Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben became fascinated with Schmitt, finding connections, among others, between Schmitt’s politics and the phenomenon of the exile and stranger he delineated in this work.21 Other intellectuals have followed suit: besides Benjamin (who died in 1940), Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and several others wrote critiques of Schmitt, and these critiques have been brought into the political theology pantheon. The trend continues to the present. Schmitt’s critics have been largely hostile to his values – but they have been influenced by his framing of the issues, and the Schmitt revival is related as well to the “religious turn” taken by so many theorists in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, along with the rise of Islamic extremism and the ongoing political stalemates and crises in the West.
This is the context in which Carl Schmitt has become a theoretical source for many in Shakespeare studies.22 Schmitt’s ideas on the politics of the Renaissance and seventeenth century in fact were highly congruent with many established themes of the field. Schmitt argued that the early modern saw the waning of the medieval, organic, ontological view of political authority that conceived of the king as a “natural” lynchpin of a wholly hierarchical cosmos, and he emphasized the development of a secular, pragmatic approach to politics leading in most of Europe to the figure of the sovereign, absolutist monarch. In other words, his work fit right into the turn against E. M. W. Tillyard’s theocratic The Elizabethan World Picture, a turn that had been in process in the field since the late 1970s at least. For Schmitt, as for many contemporary Shakespeareans, a figure like Machiavelli was crucial in the intellectual evolution of this development. But Schmitt also emphasized other less well-known sources like the monarchist Jean Bodin, a central figure in Political Theology and elsewhere.23 Thus, Schmitt provided continuity with the field’s past but also additional new sources for its future. Political theology is useful and interesting, but it is less novel, I believe, than has been claimed. Within this framework (as in so many others), Shakespeare is seen as inhabiting a politically transitional period between the medieval and a modernizing absolutism – with different plays emphasizing different constellations of the complex development.24 These themes of political theology are clearly complementary to ideas about the transition to modernity already in place in the field, including those of my 2002 Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, on which I build in this work.25 I believe that the politics Shakespeare presents in the plays throughout his career is, in a broad sense, Machiavellian. But that term is a protean one and has different senses, and its meaning shifts as we move from one period to the next in Shakespeare’s dramatic career. I discuss further uses of Schmitt in Chapter 5.
Shakespeare’s Changing View of Politics
I discuss the details of the periodization of Shakespeare’s thinking about the political below, but a summary of what I see as its major chronological boundaries should be helpful in providing an initial overview of how I’m conceiving of Shakespeare’s treatment of politics over his entire career – and also in providing a context for the discussions of individual plays to follow. For the reader’s convenience, I will here sketch the main divisions as I see them, before moving to some of the key individual plays separately.26 It should be understood that the posited periods are heuristic in nature, not reflecting all the nuances and complexities in play in individual dramas. They are approximate rather than precise. The periods are:
1. The period of the earliest political plays, from the Henry VI trilogy through Titus Andronicus and Richard III, encompassing c. 1590–c. 1594.27
2. The period of Shakespeare’s Machiavellian Moment – a period of political plays with ambiguous moral frameworks reflecting Machiavellian ideas circulating in the political classes, including the second historical tetralogy, King John, and Julius Caesar – but, inconveniently for neat schemas, also including Romeo and Juliet and many comedies, beginning c. 1595 with Richard II and concluding c. 1600–c. 1601 with the transitional Hamlet.
3. The period when the relative moral neutrality of the Machiavellian Moment shifts to a more critical view of instrumental politics and a sense of an empty world in moral crisis. It coincides with what is traditionally called the era of the major tragedies, from c. 1600 to c. 1606, encompassing Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, and perhaps the outliers Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra (this last a key transitional work, as we will see).
4. The period of plays which begin in an empty world of instrumental politics but conclude in more utopian registers. Antony and Cleopatra is the transitional work in this regard, but more typical examples are the tragicomedies The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Pericles, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsman, thus encompassing the years c. 1606–c. 1613.
Coming to Terms with the Machiavellian
As I argued in earlier work and sketched above, in the series of plays from King Richard II to Hamlet (c. 1595–c. 1600), Shakespeare undertook a new, more positive evaluation of Machiavellian politics and, in doing so, developed a concept of what I am calling instrumental or reified power – power that is at least partially autonomous and out of the direct control of those caught in its webs.28 In these plays there are no clearly demarcated “tyrants” of the sort recently singled out in Shakespeare’s oeuvre by Stephen Greenblatt.29 Instead, at least in the latter plays of the sequence, power itself is a kind of tyrant, but it is an impersonal one.30
This implied concept of instrumental power is conspicuous not only in the political plays of 1595–1600 but also (with a crucial change in evaluation to be discussed below) in the tragic period that follows. It reappears in distanced and stylized form in the late tragicomedies, as I will discuss in the concluding two chapters of this book. But it commences in King Richard II as Shakespeare begins to depict the play of political power in new ways that he probably derived (either directly or indirectly) from Machiavelli.
While his fascination with the issues raised by Machiavellian politics was a constant, Shakespeare’s representation of politics was not static but changed and evolved. Throughout his career, he represents political dynamics in which deceit, violence, disloyalty, and other qualities usually condemned in the name of morality are represented as crucial parts of the struggle for power.31 But his plays’ evaluations of the Machiavellian differ significantly from period to period. To help create a broader context for the argument to follow, I want to further develop the schema given above of changes in Shakespeare’s representation of the political from the early to the late plays.
Shakespeare’s Early Works
The early political works are among the most difficult to categorize because they are not consistent. Unlike the Henriad and associated works, they never enact a completely distanced, truly value-free and instrumental attitude toward power; they are not part of Shakespeare’s Machiavellian Moment. Instead, they both condemn and invite us to enjoy vicariously the villainy they enact. The often-repeated generalization that it is possible to make about these early political plays is that they all show a strong influence from the thinking and dramaturgy of Christopher Marlowe, who used a very similar strategy. Indeed, in some of the new analyses of multiple authorship recently published, Marlowe himself emerges as one of the principal authors of the Henry VI plays, making the connection a direct one.32 However, the claim for Marlowe’s direct presence in these plays remains a controversial one in today’s Shakespeare studies, and I am not assuming it here.
Marlowe’s approach to political power is in any case a complex one. Using the two Tamburlaine plays and The Jew of Malta as the main examples, we can see a complicated play of conflicting subtexts at work, but power is clearly amoral and used instrumentally. Political success in these plays clearly depends on instrumental skill and indifference to ordinary rules of morality: Tamburlaine achieves his success through ruthlessness, as do all the political characters in The Jew of Malta. Their evil is flaunted and celebrated, but in such a manner that the implied audience is simultaneously fascinated and horrified by their success – and in many cases disappointed by the absence of any divine retribution for it. Stephen Greenblatt memorably defined how Marlowe seems able to have it both ways, to raise frissons of horror at the perfidy of his characters, to exempt them from all but pro forma punishments, and to leave the issue of morality in an important sense undisturbed. But in the end, as Greenblatt argues, Marlowe is never able to completely escape from the nets of power of his society.33
Greenblatt goes on to try to define an audience reaction to this complex structure of attitudes and feelings, and one crucial element, to which I have alluded already, is complicity, an enjoyment by the audience of the outrageous behavior of the Marlovian rebels. But there is also a disquieting apprehension at the lack of divine retribution (or “poetic justice,” as the eighteenth century called it) and at the implied emptiness of the skies that the success of the Marlovian machiavels discloses. Marlowe’s mighty lines, Greenblatt asserts, “echo in the void [and] echo more powerfully because there is nothing but a void.” Even in Dr Faustus, with its apparent invocation of divine retribution at the end, it is possible to view this conclusion as a winking and pro forma submission to authority that authorizes the audience to enjoy the rest.
We can see traces of this complex set of conflicting attitudes in 2 Henry VI (The First Part of the Contention), but differences as well. Marlovian elements include the scheming, soliloquy-delivering Duke of York and a flurry of Machiavellian political plots against a hapless, young, and inexperienced King Henry VI and his Lord Protector. However, the world is not quite as morally void as in Tamburlaine or The Jew of Malta. The Lord Protector (designated “Good Duke Humphrey” in both the quarto and the Folio texts) is a positive figure, while his wife Eleanor is an evil schemer soon consulting a witch, but she in turn is the object of the malicious political maneuverings by Henry’s unfaithful Queen Margaret. A kind of moral retribution seems to be at work: Eleanor is ultimately punished with banishment, and her husband is killed. There is an assassination and a manipulated peasant uprising led by Jack Cade, who is carrying out the orders of the Duke of York, but Cade dies miserably. All the while, King Henry is made to seem indecisive, weak, and open to manipulation. But the play lacks an archetypal Marlovian machiavel seemingly mocking heaven in his perfidy. York is a political intriguer, but not an Iago. Politics is a dirty business, but that is not news and doesn’t carry metaphysical implications in these plays as it did in Marlowe.
In short, both sides have their share of corruption and weakness, though the moral judgment is clearly weighted against the Yorkists and their plots.34 And, notably, the Yorkists (the more morally reprehensible side) triumph at the end of the play as Henry and his Queen are defeated by them, at least temporarily disrupting the motif of retribution that seemed at work earlier in the play. Consistency is not its strong point.
Though E. M. W. Tillyard convinced a generation of Shakespeareans that the plays of this tetralogy constituted a clear moral vision of a Providential God leading England through evil times of disorder to the golden age of the Tudors,35 that reading depends heavily on the moral valences of the last play in the tetralogy, King Richard III – a play which does indeed support important elements of that reading, as we will see. However, looking at the plays one at a time, it is difficult to find Providence at work consistently, especially in the first two plays composed, 2 and 3 Henry VI. In 2 Henry VI, as we have seen, there is the at-least momentary triumph of a self-declaring, morally self-disclosing intriguer. And this is only amplified in the second play (in order of composition), 3 Henry VI (or Richard, Duke of York), even though the Yorkist tide temporarily wanes in the play’s first part.
The plot of this play is notable for its rapid succession of reversals of fortune, producing a zigzag of a drama. Mistakes are made, but there seems no obvious moral lesson; both sides are fairly ruthless (a more charitable reading might say they are both “fierce warriors”), and the uncertainties of war seem to be the main deciding factor (though wily kidnapping stratagems are crucial too). In a departure from Marlowe’s practices, there is a growth in the psychologizing of the characters, with King Henry VI developed as something of a prototype of the hapless King Richard II, and both père and fils Richard of York (but especially the latter) are given a certain set of motives and interior psychology to explain their actions. Again, it is hard to see any consistent moral or political judgments being made about the larger historical events depicted. Instead, moral, legal, and political issues are depicted as ambiguous, maybe even muddled.
Again, both claimants have their strengths and weaknesses. The issue is in doubt almost to the end, but after it is settled, we get Richard confiding to the audience how he plans to murder his way to the throne in the next play, and his psychology is explained at more length than before. We move from the weak king dilemma to the evil king dilemma36 – and to the most Marlovian of the tetralogy, King Richard III.
As for the third play composed, which was designated 1 Henry VI in the posthumous 1623 Folio (its only printing), it appears to be an older play that was recycled and updated, possibly by Shakespeare himself, after the successes of 2 and 3 Henry VI. It is full of political intrigue and spectacle, but it is highly moralized in its depiction of the idealized English nationalist hero Lord Talbot and the charismatic but diabolically aided Joan of Arc. Editors and scholars since the eighteenth century (and again recently) have suspected multiple authorship for it, though this is not unanimous. In any case, since it depicts the first stage of the long-term defeat of the English in France, it hardly suggests any clear, larger moral lessons other than an easy patriotism and a disdain for Joan of Arc and the French. Neither does it show much Machiavellian spirit. It has its moments, but if it is Shakespeare’s, it is one of his weakest plays. In short, Shakespeare’s first historical tetralogy lacks a clear political philosophy. It displays Machiavellian politics at work, but not the detached, instrumental intellectual framework of his next political plays.
King Richard III and After
Unlike the three earlier plays in the histories depicting the Wars of the Roses, King Richard III does present both a memorable Marlovian self-disclosing machiavel and a fairly easily discerned moral pattern. It is thus a play that shows a clear influence from Christopher Marlowe – but also a moral dimension that was foreign to Marlowe’s dramatic practice. It does indeed bring the events depicted in the three earlier plays to a triumphant, pro-Tudor conclusion and also satisfies any desire for the idea of Providence overseeing history in its defeat of the strangely appealing but quite definitely malevolent title character. It goes without saying that it also achieves a new level of drama and poetry for its author. It is an early Shakespearean masterpiece to whose vision and spirit Shakespeare will return with even greater results in Macbeth. Between those two plays, however, Shakespeare presents us with a whole world of political drama, never resting on the laurels of this early achievement. In the political plays that follow, he seems to have continually rethought many of these issues, especially when he undertakes to continue his dramas on English history in the four plays of the second tetralogy, beginning in 1594 or 1595 with Richard II.
From Shakespeare’s “Machiavellian Moment” to the Tragedies
King Richard II (1594–95) inaugurates the second of Shakespeare’s political phases. The machiavels of Titus Andronicus and Richard III are no longer to be found; they are replaced by much more morally and politically ambiguous figures: Richard II and Bolingbroke in the first play of the tetralogy, then King Henry IV, his prodigal son Prince Harry, Harry’s ambiguous boon companion Falstaff, and the rebel Harry Hotspur. In these plays, we are no longer in a morally certain universe – but there is a consistent intellectual framework based on a detached, disinterested attitude toward the struggle for and achievement of power. In Shakespeare’s second historical tetralogy, we are in a highly political world in which power is seen to unfold amorally, and its agents are entrapped in its dynamics in ways that they only partly control. Moral judgments are difficult and often separate from political judgments. The classic example of this is the way readers and audiences have been divided for centuries over whether to applaud or deplore the newly crowned Henry V’s banishment of Falstaff. But Shakespeare, for all his nuance and complexity, is never simply “neutral” or “value-free” over the course of this five-year period.37 Instead, we can detect a growing critique of aspects of Machiavelli’s thought that culminates in the depiction of politics in Julius Caesar.
From Richard II on in Shakespeare’s career, a Machiavellian view of politics did indeed become more or less a constant in his subsequent works. But the implied evaluation of this kind of amoral politics, as noted, went on to evolve, ramify, and vary, even from play to play. At times, as in, say, Richard II or 1 Henry IV, Machiavellian politics are represented as the way of the world, and characters like King Richard or Hotspur who fail to understand this are presented as antiquated failures – if colorful and sometimes likable ones. But in 2 Henry IV, King Henry V, and Julius Caesar, a more negative evaluation of power politics begins to assert itself. In Hamlet, this implied critique reaches a new level, as the murderous realities of political dynamics form an important element of the Weltschmerz that envelops the hero. And in the cases of Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and Macbeth, Machiavellian politics take on a dark, at times positively diabolic, aura. 38 I will examine this phase via the complex political drama Macbeth in Chapters 2 and 3 – a play that, as I have noted, also presents a few intimations of a more utopian vision amidst the darkness which is its primary subject matter.
After that, beginning in Antony and Cleopatra and continuing to the late tragicomedies, the implied evaluation shifts again. In Part II of this work, I will use the cases of Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest to illustrate this last thematic development, in which a negatively evaluated instrumental politics is “contained” by aesthetic and utopian counter-themes. But I will begin with Julius Caesar as a prime example of a political play largely void of utopian impulses and an excellent example of a play displaying Shakespeare’s thinking about the political in the crucial period of 1595–1600. It also, however, has a specific place in the continuum of changing representations of the political that took place from Richard II on. In particular, while it clearly recognizes, as we shall see, the reality of the autonomy and instrumentality of political power, it subtly begins to enact negative judgments of this kind of power. It is only a few decisive steps away from the full-blooded condemnation of instrumentality in Macbeth and the other middle tragedies.
Relevance to the Present
Although initially conceived several years earlier, the bulk of this book has been written in the era of the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump, an era in which despair has been an all too tempting indulgence in the face of the 2016 victory of Trump’s corrupt, instrumental, and divisive politics. The second part of the book was written during the Covid epidemic and antipolice brutality protests of 2020, and Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat occurred only in the phase of the very last revisions of the work. The resonance of the power dynamics explored here with that of Trump’s own accession to and practice of power should be evident without much additional commentary, and parallels to the book’s discussion of the dynamics of despair and hope have been all too evident in these dark times.
Beyond these immediate events, the election and tenure of Donald Trump have represented a vindication of some of the most pessimistic insights of the Frankfurt School Critical Theory used in this book to ground the concepts of the aesthetic and the utopian, and these insights continue to be relevant, given that Trumpism and its causes are clearly persisting past the end of the Trump presidency. Theodor Adorno and others had pointed out how the development of the cultural dynamics of late capitalism led to a series of debilitating effects on critical rationality and political judgment, to an erosion of the efficacy of parliamentary democracy, to the commodification of areas of life that had once been enclaves of resistance. And we need to add a development Adorno didn’t much discuss because it was in relative abeyance for a time in the mid-twentieth-century US: a radical division of society into haves and have-nots.
Adorno and the others had witnessed earlier manifestations of these tendencies in the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany in a technologically transformed social order in the 1920s and 1930s. We are witnessing similar effects in the newly technologically transformed United States now, even though we stopped short of full-fledged fascism in the Trump years. But given the constant lies and deceptions of the Trump administration, its systematic attacks on the press, its continual attempts to divide the country and manipulate and incite some of late capitalism’s most unnoticed and least understood victims in the white working class, and in its degradation of and attacks on women, racial minorities, and immigrants, it is possible that we have already taken the first steps down that path. Indeed, the former president’s denial of his defeat in the aftermath of the 2020 election, his relentless campaign to reverse its verdict and install himself as an unelected president, and his complicity in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol have all revealed how close that path to fascism had become, how close America came to losing its democratic traditions. So far, however, as newly elected President Biden suggested, democracy has prevailed. This book is written in the hope and belief that this Trumpian interval will prove to have been an aberration in history and that humanity will once again take up the utopian dreams it has long known and which I will discuss with more specificity in the Introduction to Part II. I can only hope that when we are past this current dark moment, it will not prove to be too late.
