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I. Shakespeare's Politics1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2010

Christopher Morris
Christopher Morris
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge
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Extract

In the year 1582 William Camden the antiquary was about to venture into a remote country beyond the mountains, called Lancashire, ‘which’, he wrote, ‘I go unto (God speed me well) after a sort somewhat against my will…but I will proceed, in hope that God's assistance, which hitherto hath been favour-able unto me, will not now fail me'. Such qualms might well assail any professional historian who plans an expedition into Shakespeare country; for the trail is marked by his predecessors’ whitening bones and, in one case, by bones which the vultures have not finished picking clean.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , 1965 , pp. 293 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1965

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References

2 Britannia, trans. Holland, Philemon (1637), p. 745Google Scholar.

3 Preface to Shakespeare (1765) in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Ralegh, W. (Oxford, 1925). pp. 20-1.Google Scholar

4 Inferno, xv, 121-4, and x, 35-6.

5 Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 Oct. 1818.

6 ‘My Friend the Swan’, in Fiery Particles (Phoenix Library, 1928), pp. 77–8Google Scholar.

7 Discorsi, Book 1, ch. xxvii.

8 Baldwin, T. W., ‘William Shakespere, Anglican’, in William Shakespere's Petty School (Urbana, 1943), PP. 216–24Google Scholar.

9 Cf. Morris, Helen, Elizabethan Literature (Oxford, 1958), p. 214Google Scholar, and Harbage, A., Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York, 1952), pp. 192-200 and 351–8Google Scholar.

10 Notes on The Tempest.

11 Cf. Danby, J. F., Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London, 1949), pp. 20–31 and 168–95Google Scholar, and Spencer, Theodore, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (Cambridge, 1945), pp. 1-50 and 135–52Google Scholar.

12 Coleridge, loc. cit.

13 Characters of Shakespeare's Plays: Coriolanus.

14 Shakespeare and the Homilies (Melbourne, 1934), pp. 9–76Google Scholar.

15 Cited in Morris, H., op. cit. p. 213Google Scholar.

16 See Hocart, A. M., Kingship, Thinker's Library (1941), p. 16Google Scholar.

17 Cf. Morris, Christopher, Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker (Oxford, 1953). PP. 32–44Google Scholar.

18 Ibid. pp. 12, 58-9, 69-77, 116-17, 148.

19 Ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, England, 1938), pp. 65-7.

20 See Morris, Christopher, The Tudors (London, 1955), p. 182Google Scholar.

21 Cf. Morris, Christopher, Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker (Oxford, 1953), pp. 68–73Google Scholar.

22 Cf. Reese, M. M., The Cease of Majesty (London, 1961), pp. 181–4Google Scholar. Mr Reese's book is almost certainly the best existing study of Shakespeare's politics.

23 Cf. , Reese, op. cit. pp. vii–viiiGoogle Scholar, 91–2, 105, 109–15.

24 Cf. Morris, C., op. cit. pp. 103–4Google Scholar.

25 Cf. , Reese, op. cit. pp. 282–5Google Scholar.

26 , Boswell, Life of Johnson (02 1766)Google Scholar.

27 A Descriptive Catalogue, Etc. in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Keynes, G. (Nonesuch, 1927), p. 819Google Scholar.

28 Cf. Muir, Edwin, “The Natural Man and the Political Man”, Essays on Literature and Society (London, 1949), pp. 151–65Google Scholar, and , Reese, op. cit. pp. 205 and 233–9Google Scholar.

29 Cf. Knights, L. C., ‘Shakespeare's Polities’, Proceedings of the British Academy, XLIII (1957) 117–24Google Scholar, and Some Shakespearean Themes (London, 1959), pp. 26–44Google Scholar.

30 In The Summing-up, cited in Brown, Ivor, Shakespeare (London, 1949), p. 327Google Scholar.

31 Preface to Shakespeare (1765), in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Ralegh, W. (Oxford, 1925), p. 12Google Scholar.

32 See, for example, Heywood, Royal King and Loyal Subject, or Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster.

33 Cf. Knights, L. C., ‘Shakespeare's Politics’, p. 119Google Scholar.

34 Troublesome Raigne, III, 114-31; see also Whitaker, Virgil K., Shakespeare's Use of Learning (San Marino, 1953), pp. 138–9Google Scholar, and Morris, C., op. cit. pp. 99–100Google Scholar.

35 Cf. Palmer, John, The Political Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1945), pp. 30-1, 289, 292 and 308-9Google Scholar, and Stirling, Brents, The Populace in Shakespeare (Columbia, 1949), pp. 54–61Google Scholar.

36 I follow the Quarto reading which seems to have more force and point than the Folio's ‘great vices’.

37 Cf. Morris, C., op. cit. pp. 102–3Google Scholar.

38 Thucydides, Book v, xvii, 89-106.

39 So is Falstaff, when he says (of Shallow), ‘If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him’.

40 Cf. Timon of Athens, IV, i, 1-21; see also Muir, Edwin, ‘The Politics of King Lear’, Essays in Literature and Society (London, 1949), pp. 31–48Google Scholar; , Danby, op. cit. pp. 31–53Google Scholar; Siegel, Paul N., Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise (New York, 1957), pp. 4-16, 44–8, 161–88Google Scholar; Haydn, Hiram, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950), pp. 638–51Google Scholar.

41 Cf. Morris, C., op. cit. pp. 107–9Google Scholar.