The Political Shakespeare
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 2 Jan 2017
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service
26 Dec 2016 – These last three years have been dedicated to the Bard. For the theatre world, this year is hugely important as the 400th anniversary of his death. In December, New Delhi hosted the Asian Shakespeare Association’s biennial conference – All the World’s His Stage: Shakespeare Today, with reputed Shakespearean scholars from around the world, including East Asia.
As was to be expected the Royal Shakespeare Company had also performed many of his plays, trying to give new interpretations to well known works and engage the interest of younger audiences. Leading up to this significant year, Stratford had performed a complete cycle of all his plays, and also staged a few of doubtful authorship, like Edward II.
Except for a period around the Restoration under Charles II, when English audiences, tired of Puritanism during Cromwell’s times turned to risqué comedies, Shakespeare held centre-stage, not only in the land of his birth but elsewhere as well. Unlike other geniuses, he was immediately popular from his earliest plays, not only with the penny-a-ticket theatre crowds of London, but with discerning critics, including Elizabeth I and her court. So enduring has been his fame that doubts started creeping in among some 19th century academics whether a country bumpkin from Warwickshire could really have written such immortal plays. Francis Bacon, an essayist of Shakespeare’s times, and a friend of James I, was first picked as the likely real author, followed by a number of suspects from the nobility.
The reason for such elaborate subterfuge was never satisfactorily explained. Victorian elitism assumed that a courtier would not like to be known as a lowly playwright. However in Elizabethan times plays were well regarded, there were theatre groups known as ‘the Queen’s players,’ and ‘the Chancellors players.’ Elizabeth had many of Shakespeare’s plays performed at court. His triumphal Henry V was clearly written to rally people round the flag, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and served the same purpose as Laurence Olivier’s patriotic film version of the play in 1944, after the victorious Battle of Britain.
Religious feelings ran very high in Elizabethan times. Protestantism was the religion of nascent English nationalism. Catholics were suspected to be traitors, in league with Rome, and Philip of Spain. Mutual animosities continued to split British society for more than a century. Plays in that period had a political role, and governmental censorship had a greater role than it does in India today. There was no earthly reason why a grandee of the court, whether Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, would want to hide his genius, especially in times when men like Sir Philip Sydney paraded their many talents. Despite the wealth of evidence that Shakespeare was the one and only author, Anonymous, a film scripted by John Orloff raised this Victorian question once again, even in these egalitarian times.
Doubts about the authorship of the plays have persisted, because so little is known about Shakespeare. This dearth of knowledge about the world’s best-known playwright seems to be inexplicable, particularly when so much is known about lesser men of his period. He had friends and enemies. The other famous playwright, Ben Jonson, called him ‘the sweet swan of Avon.’ Richard Greene, not so well known, sneered that he thought he was ‘the only Shake-stage.’ And yet real information about the man is curiously lacking, making one suspect that efforts were deliberately made to obliterate some records. Could this have been done without Shakespeare’s own connivance at their destruction? Doubtful. Could the cleansing of such information be so thorough without the state overseeing it? Not likely.
If we permit ourselves to speculate about the curious silence around Shakespeare, especially his seven or ten ‘lost years,’ from 1582 till 1592, many possibilities open up. His family was Catholic – as suspect as being Muslim is in the present-day – his father, an alderman of Stratford, was for some reason dishonoured, but not destroyed. Soon after marriage, Shakespeare disappeared from Stratford. Did he go north to Lancashire, a Catholic stronghold, to be a tutor in some noble household? There are a few indications that this might have happened. Why would he have so dared, at the start of life, especially if he ever had hopes of making it large in London’s theatre scene? He reappeared suddenly in 1585 at the christening of his children, and then was lost to view for seven critical years. In those momentous years the Armada was launched from Spain and defeated by Drake. The English admirals seem to have had complete inside knowledge of the composition of the Spanish Armada and its sailing schedule. Drake was playing calmly at bowls when it appeared off the English coast, for he was well prepared. Where was Shakespeare at that time, in England or in Europe? There is a curious reference to a certain ‘clerk Gulielmus’ having visited the Vatican around this time.
What is a firm fact is that the world’s first secret service was created by Lord Walsingham at that time. It infiltrated Catholic strongholds, not only to winkle out supposed traitors, but to gather real information about the threatened invasion from Spain. Everything hung in the balance, and everyone who could be pressed into service, or coerced, was secretly recruited by him and his minions. If Philip Sydney was a famous soldier-poet, could Shakespeare not have been a secret playwright-spy? Christopher Marlowe, another famous playwright of those times, had once been Walsingham’s man. But he was a loose cannon, as dangerous to his paymaster as to his enemies. He was so indiscreet during operations in Flushing, that he was recalled and murdered, perhaps by his own secret service colleagues, though the inquest into the crime fudged that possibility. If Shakespeare had at all been involved in such secretive work, there was every reason to obliterate any record to protect him, and the state’s interests.
If this speculation is considered amazing, what is equally so is the fact that an unknown man descended on the London stage in 1592 and very soon became famous. He had easy and quick access to theatres, patronage, and money. It was a time when London had a dozen or so well-known competitive playwrights. Without casting any aspersions on his undoubted genius, it is remarkable that he could have risen so rapidly without substantial backing from a powerful authority. None of his acknowledged sponsors, such as the Earl of Southampton, could have wielded such power, and were, perhaps, no more than front men. Did the English secret service bankroll Shakespeare for services rendered and see that he got a start?
If such speculations are thought to be preposterous, the world has calmly accepted even more preposterous speculations that his plays were written by a motley group of aristocrats, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Southampton, or even the dry and dusty Francis Bacon. Harold Bloom, arguably the greatest of present-day Shakespearean critics, placed the Bard at the centre of our humanist canon in his masterpiece Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human. Was he justified in doing so? Shakespeare lived and worked in a period of great change. The old feudal world and its values had almost disappeared. The Battle of Bosworth in 1485 had ended not only the long drawn out War of the Roses, but put an end to the old order. Henry VII had to contend with a new political structure. A new class of the bourgeoisie was rising to power. London was transformed into a rich trading entrepot. Queen Elizabeth the First signed the East India Company Charter on December 31, 1600, giving a fresh impetus to trade and the new class of merchants. The struggle for political power between town and country, between landed aristocrats and the new mercantilists –later to be transformed into the political polarities of Tory and Whig – added to the religious conflict between Protestant and Catholic, opened the mind for humanistic imagination as definitively as did the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
Shakespeare, the son of the new class rising to power was supremely capable of the great intellectual explorations we see in his plays. It goes against all modern psychological understanding of creativity to give the authorship to a member of a dying aristocracy, confined by court privilege, class prejudice, and the narrowness of self-censorship to write only what is acceptable to one’s peers.
This period of intellectual and political turmoil, which the historian of the period, Christopher Hill, has termed ‘The world turned upside down,’ entertained fiercely contested ideologies, from monarchial absolutism to social contract between the rulers and the ruled, to early socialism in the writings of Winstanley and the activities of the Levellers and the Diggers. Every formulation was open to impassioned discussion. The English were divided by economic and class interest, religious belief, and political persuasions. These divisions led within a short span of a few decades to the Great English Revolution, the beheading of Charles the First, the destruction of the socialist levelers by Cromwell, and later to the Restoration of the Monarchy itself to heal the open wounds of English society.
The greatest political philosopher of those times in Europe was Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan is a result of deep intellectual speculation on the tortured history of the period. It is no idealistic formulation like Plato’s concept of philosopher-kings, but a product of close reasoning based on tragic recent experience of the actions of the various players in the drama of revolution. Like Cromwell himself, Hobbes rejected the idealism of a Winstanley or the economic impracticality of the Levellers. If his thesis was facilely seized upon by Continental jurists to justify monarchial absolutism, Hobbes in reality foreshadowed the modern state with its centralized power but accountable to the people for its very mandate to rule. Hobbes’s concept of good governance depends on social justice and the political knowledge required to rule effectively. These concepts are at the very centre of the new humanism of the bourgeois class, finding articulation in Shakespeare’s plays, as so instinctively recognized by Harold Bloom.
Hobbes was known to be a friend of Ben Jonson, who himself was a great friend and admirer of the Bard. It is inconceivable that they did not discuss Shakespeare’s plays. There is every reason to believe that Hobbes might have seen quite a few of them, for plays were at the centre of political life in that period, hence the watchful censorship that was exercised. Of course he does not ascribe any of his thoughts to Shakespeare. Such ascriptions or footnoting were not the philosophical practice of that age.
Shakespeare wrote when Hobbes would have been stripling, but only a few decades before the disasters of the revolution. Revolutions take long in brewing, and wild philosophies must have been flung around in the London taverns that Shakespeare visited regularly in between his plays. Can we see shadows of those discussions in the plays? He sees no special wisdom in the actions of mobs, unlike Robespierre two hundred years later, and holds them up to scorn in several plays, especially in Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus.
If Hobbes locates an aspect of good governance in social justice, as we would term it, Shakespeare looks for virtue in the person holding the power of rule. Similarly he looks repeatedly for wisdom in the person of the ruler.
The London stage has produced many facile interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, but none that explore his political philosophy. Hamlet says that a play holds a mirror up to nature. In that mirror, Shakespeare reflects the political concerns of his age. Sitting in London’s argumentative taverns, Shakespeare would have heard the case for many competing political philosophies, which within a few decades of his time would produce the English Revolution. In his plays, we see that tragedy results when power is stripped of virtue, as in Macbeth; when power is let go of without wisdom, as in King Lear; and when a virtuous and wise prince refuses to capture power, as in Hamlet. When Prospero breaks his magic wand at the end of The Tempest, it is only after he has secured the bonding of virtue and wisdom with power. In this late play of his, was Shakespeare saying despairingly that only magic could produce the components of good governance that he sought for? We don’t know, but so astute a man as Shakespeare must have sensed the coming tragedy of his times.
In Hamlet we see the tragedy that results when the wise and virtuous Prince of Denmark, fresh from his studies at Wittenberg, hesitates to assume the reins of power. To a political scientist no message could be clearer than this. We see that the Bard is not only for all ages, but remains to teach students in several branches of knowledge.
Even in plays that were not so clearly political, was not the Bard looking at the larger social issues, normally masked by the theatrical interplay of characters so focused on by actors and audience? In that immortal love story Romeo and Juliet were not the lovers also trying to end the hatred between the clans of Montague and Capulet that was destroying Verona? Friar Lawrence gives that as his explicit reason for helping them. These days we read The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice differently for an earlier generation. Surely that is exactly what Shakespeare expected us to do when he held a mirror up to nature? Was Othello no more than a tale of jealousy, or can we see the effect of racism and discrimination suffered by Othello, which left deep psychological scars that would be exploited by the ruthless Iago?
We can only suggest lines of enquiry that more assiduous scholars can pursue in rediscovering the political explorations of Shakespeare’s by a closer study of the plays from this standpoint. Dramatic political change was in the air when he lived and wrote. The great humanist sensed these changes and mirrored them in his plays for us to make of them what we will.
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Vithal Rajan, Ph.D. [L.S.E.], worked as a mediator for the church in Belfast; as faculty at The School of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, and as Executive Director, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. He has founded several Indian NGOs, is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 2 Jan 2017.
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Rajan writes a fine essay with some interesting points.
Shakespeare could have been a spy; but he was certainly a propagandist.
Rather than Shakespeare looking for, “virtue in the person holding the power of rule” or, “wisdom in the person of the ruler.” I see Shakespeare setting up models of rulers and powerful men. He shows how power can be held, and even more so, how it can be lost to foolishness, blind trust, pride and immorality: Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III. He also shows a model of the common man and woman of England at their best, particularly in the comedies.
Shakespeare teaches Britons their history intertwining it with the modern monarchical system of government and bureaucracy. At the same time, he inculcates patriotism to the nation, not the land, lord or creed.
Perhaps one day a modern Shakespeare will write the defining plays about American presidents for the same purpose. There are some parallels: Kennedy always did have Roman gravitas in his rhetoric; Truman faced an ethical knife-edge even greater than Richard III; and Obama also felt the sly racism that Othello did.