Theatrical Political Thought: Shakespeare and the Staging of Civic Experience

Alan Finlayson, University of Swansea and Elizabeth Frazer, University of Oxford

Introduction

Today, among political theorists, it is widely accepted that literature is of political interest, but there
is much less agreement about exactly what that interest is. It is also widely accepted that political
thought can be communicated through a wide range of genres. But there is less clarity about the
methodological implications of this for political theorists. This paper explores these issues through
a consideration of Shakespearean drama. We argue that the political theoretical interest of
Shakespeare’s plays (and of literature in general) is to be found in the opportunities they provide for
opening up, to theoretical study and to social criticism, the processes through which aesthetic and
political activities organize discourse and performance. They enable us to consider or experience
ourselves as capable participants in ethical and political judgment.

Political and moral philosophers have approached literature in a variety of ways, but we suggest
that the field can usefully be understood as composed of three broad strands. In this paper we
explore each of these with reference to possible interpretations of Shakespearean drama. The first
approach we consider treats literature as containing acts of political theorising. The second
emphasizes the contribution literature may make to the moral improvement of citizens. The third
begins from a concern with the role literature plays in sustaining ideological integration or
contributing to counter-hegemonic subversion. We then turn to a specific consideration of theatre
and explore a particular scene from Shakespeare that puts into question the ways in which persons
are assigned to particular social locations that render them visible or invisible, audible or inaudible,
intelligible or unreadable.

Literature, Political Ideas and Argument

There can be no dispute over the fact that literature is capable of expounding and developing
political ideas. Many contemporary political theorists have incorporated literary works into
contemporary political-theoretical projects, as foils, as inspiration or as challenge to the canons of
political theory, For example, Milton may be read as relevant to current debates about free speech,
liberty and republicanism [Skinner 2008], Walt Whitman as a theorist of the democratic individual
[Kateb 1990] or of the ‘democratic sublime’ [Frank 2007], and Orwell as a theorist of
totalitarianism [eg Lefort 2000/1992]. Such texts can stimulate fruitful argument in two ways. First,
they can be read as political speech or interventions; second political theory can be used as a
resource for interpreting and understanding them.

In the case of Shakespeare, we can see how we might use political theory as a set of resources for
better interpretation and understanding of the plays and how the plays may be used as vivid
illustrations for political theory. Shakespeare’s ethical concerns interweave with themes from
philosophical anthropology – the nature of human existence, the dilemmas of individual existence
and social relations - and metaphysics. These concerns are explicit in the tragedies with their focus
on character, in the history plays with their focus on duty, loyalty and betrayal; and also in the
comedies and later romances with their focus on personal and social interaction, and personal
voyages of discovery. Thus, the interrelationships between political theory, social theory and ethics
can be brought to bear in reading Shakespeare’s complex texts and scenarios.

1
Copyright PSA 2009
But we can also read Shakespeare’s dramas as a form of straightforward political speech or
argument. Explicit political themes, after all, are present: the competition between parties and
factions for the power to govern; disputes about legitimacy and sovereignty; matters of state; and
social constitution and stability. Problems that political theory identifies and addresses – such as
how justice might be realised, the relationship between truth and prudence, the tension between
universal values and the particular relationships between citizens in a state - are also central to, and
indeed structure, some of Shakespeare’s plays. Julius Caesar addresses the political-ethical problem
of what means are justifiable in the competition for the power to govern and in the maintenance of a
state. Among other things The Merchant of Venice addresses the relationships between citizenship
and friendship in societies that are also ruptured by economic exploitation, ethnic competition and
religious antagonism. Timon’s obsession with gold raises in a vivid and gripping way the nature of
human social relations and friendship, as opposed to the vices of ostentation and vengeance. In sum,
Shakespeare’s plays communicate a fascination with standard problems of political theory, and in
particular with the specific quality of political power as such, its pressingness and its promise.

Yet Shakespeare’s plays cannot be grasped as didactic exercises in political pronouncement. As

Jean Howard has argued, the plays do not articulate a consistent position but rather act like a prism,
omitting nothing but refracting ‘a multitude of colours’ [Howard 2006:129]. There is a danger that
to make these works speak to - or speak as - political theory is an egregious imposition of the
prosaic on the poetic and does injustice to the inexhaustibility and fluidity of meaning in both the
drama and the poetry. Even very general themes of ethics and anthropology might seem, with their
academic overtones, unduly reductive for commentators impressed with the sublime, transcendent
moments in Shakespeare’s treatment of these themes; with the subtlety of his plotting and
characterisation and the brilliance of moments in his poetry.

This is a problem that attaches to all branches of what we may call the ‘Shakespeare and ...’
industries: Shakespeare and Ethics, Shakespeare and Philosophy, Shakespeare and Time,
Shakespeare and the New World. There is no limit to the topics and themes about which
Shakespeare ostensibly had something interesting and important to say – sport, religion, astrology,
alcohol – but solemn analyses of them can fail to exceed the interest of a catalogue. ‘Shakespeare
and Politics’ is especially hazardous. Analysing the dramas primarily in terms of their state settings
and statecraft, relations of authority and obedience, the competition for the power to govern and the
fate of values like justice, can seem to mistake the background or the setting for the significant
issues of the drama.

The drama of Othello, for instance, takes place against a background of Venetian statecraft, military
government, and interstate conflict. But, it might be argued, when put beside the play’s great
themes of jealousy and uncertainty, destruction and murder, social role and character, this
background should be allowed to pale into invisibility. The setting could have been a fairground or
a market, a school or a drawing room, and the power of the drama of Othello’s struggle and defeat,
Iago’s evil, Desdemona’s fight and submission, would have been every bit as great. These are
universal themes. The republican and inter-racial setting could have been substituted by kingship
and religious difference, or urban poverty and cultural difference, and the power of Shakespeare’s
story would have been just as shocking. That his plays have been reworked and restaged in so many
different contexts seems to be sufficient proof of this.

On what basis, then, can we pluck from a text the elements we find to be of political concern and
how - and for what end - can we consider these independent from all the other things going on in a
work? The challenge for political theory is not only to find and be moved or inspired by political
ideas in a work of literature, but to understand what is happening when we do this: to theorise the
relationship between the social practices of literature, politics and political theorizing. We can make
the literary text into a source of analogies for political thought, a domain within which we can

2
Copyright PSA 2009
practice our art or demonstrate our virtuosity, or a resource for deployment in contemporary
political struggles. In our view, it is a key task at this stage to account for how this happens, and to
interrogate the validity of such moves.

Of relevance here is the approach of those historians of political thought who argue that political-
theoretical texts should be put not only into their historical and political context but also their
linguistic context. These scholars regard political thought as something expressed through many
genres of writing and are particularly keen to show that one of the things a work may achieve is an
adaptation or alteration of the genres within and through which we think or argue politically [for
instance, Skinner 2002]. The political nature of a text is manifold. As well as making a particular
argument is also makes an argument about how arguments can be made, who can make them and
where they might do so. The history of political thought is not only a history of ideas but a history
of how ideas can be articulated.

However, under the influence of the ‘new historicism’ the Shakespeare and politics literature is now
dominated by forensic investigations of Shakespeare’s insertion into his dramas of allusions to
contemporary Elizabethan and Jacobean political and social events, scandals, controversies,
personalities and processes. Sometimes this takes the form of straightforward analogy and parallel,
as Fitter argues pertains between Gloucester in 2 Henry VI and Burghley. [Fitter 2005:141] There
are parallels between the dearth depicted in Coriolanus and contemporary hunger and discontent.
[George 2004] Scholars analyse the points at which Shakespeare departs from his sources and
introduces new elements in order to make a topical allusion. Often such allusions are satirical and
we can infer that knowing or educated audience members would have enjoyed the pleasure of
recognition. These make it clear that Shakespeare was an exceptionally insightful and attentive
reader of both history and contemporaneous events, and was a strikingly clever political
commentator. He was deeply interested in social change, the workings of laws, the nature of
government, the ebbs, flows and circulation of power and influence within the regime, including the
development and decline of factions, and of course uses of violence.

Historicist analysis goes further than looking for these kinds of political comment or intervention. It
is also concerned to identify how a writer took the resources (idioms, concepts, generic devices)
available to them and exploited them, or subverted or transformed them. Shakespeare, as Jean
Howard indicates, was responding to, adapting and building on dramatic styles and techniques. Like
political speech and action, literary works function across a plurality of levels, securing or
disturbing the orders from which they have emerged. The ‘institution’ of communication is always
at stake in them. This includes the societal management and organization of writing which is
dependent on economic and political factors. It also includes the fundamental regime of seeing and
grasping that a mode of communication opens up or closes down. In this respect, although the
concerns of literary historians and political theorists are not entirely congruent they perhaps
converge on a concern with rhetoric in the broadest sense, which is to say not only with what is
argued but with how issues, themes and topics are investigated, how arguments are made, the
contexts of their formation and delivery.[Skinner 2002; also Pocock, Schochet and Schwoerer
2006] Rhetoric was a fundamental part of Elizabethan life, and Tudor drama is deeply marked by
it [Altman, get ref]. Shakespeare’s dramas explicitly consider the virtues and vices of fine speech
and they contain fine examples of the form. They are also part of ongoing ‘arguments’ within the
evolution of the rhetoric of drama.

We can, then, find political ideas of all kinds within Shakespeare. But vital questions for political
theory to ask of Shakespeare - and of literature more generally - concern the way in which the form
through which those ideas are communicated is part of, or contributes to, wider dispute over, and
regulation of, what can and cannot be represented, what is and is not sayable or arguable, and how it
can, or can’t, be said.

3
Copyright PSA 2009
Literature and Moral Education

We now turn to the second broad strand of political theoretical work considering literature – that
which emphasizes the latter’s civic functions. Here the argument is that literature can be a
significant source of moral instruction and that it is thus a vital element of civic order, contributing
an imaginative and empathic dimension to our processes of civic reasoning. This view is, of course,
by no means uncontested. The idea that art in general, theatre and novels in particular, are a source
for vice rather than virtue, is equally prominent in political theory. [Murdoch 1977, Rousseau 1960]

Rousseau’s argument rests partly on the claim that theatre necessarily appeals to our desire for
entertainment and pleasure, and that it can only affirm views already held. If we perceive the arts
as inculcating a moral good then we mistake an effect for the cause: for Rousseau, of course, human
beings are born with moral goodness. Nature and reason cause us to love virtue which we may then
wish to see reflected in the theatre. As he bluntly points out, we do not need to see Medea to find
her crimes terrible [Rousseau1960: 24-5]. For Rousseau, the theatre is a sign and source of moral
degeneracy not when it lacks moral content but when it contains it, for then a community is
allowing its virtues to exist in mediated form rather than finding them spontaneously within itself.
On matters with which our interest is not connected and ‘in quarrels at which we are purely
spectators’, Rousseau argues, we immediately take the side of justice and ‘In giving our tears to
fictions we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of
ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief,
consolation, and work…’ [1960: 25]. Even the best tragedies, he writes, do no more than ‘...make
us applaud our courage in praising that of others, our humanity in pitying the ills that we could have
cured, our charity in saying to the poor, God will help you!’ [1960: 26].

We take Martha Nussbaum as our exemplar for the contrary position. For her, the civic value of
literature derives not from its explicit moral content but from its greater ability, in comparison to
formal works of moral and political philosophy, to explore contingency, incommensurability, and
particularity, and thus to communicate a rounded experience of life.[Nussbaum 1990] She believes
that this is above all the case in the narrative form of the novel, since (she avers) we live our own
lives, and comprehend others’ lives, through narrative. The novel can help us cultivate practical
wisdom in the form of what she calls a ‘perceptive equilibrium’ in which ‘concrete perceptions
“hang beautifully together" both with one another and with the agent’s general principles; an
equilibrium that is already ready to reconstitute itself in response to the new’ [Nussbaum 1990:
183]. Literature and literary theory, then, can help fulfill the goal of ethical cultivation, as
Nussbaum defines it: 'self-understanding and communal attunement' [192]. Narrative literature
harmonises with the human telos - to be a citizen of a polis community – while disavowing the
Rousseauian or Platonic views of what that entails, and enhances the political imagination required
to fulfill it.

Nussbaum is far from being a utilitarian, but she conceives of literature as socially and politically
important because it fulfils a purpose for the polity. We should note that this view presupposes the
need for this function, and thus also presupposes the ignorance of the citizen (the one who needs
moral cultivation) and, conversely, the practical wisdom of the person who interprets and
demonstrates the moral depth we ought to find in the novels she has read for us. It is the
contribution of literature to the moral order that makes it of political importance, and the task of the
political theorist or philosopher is to characterize and demonstrate that contribution. Despite the
differences in their intellectual positions, Nussbaum view is rather similar to the pragmatist
conception of Richard Rorty - that we should endorse works of literature such as Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, as far more effective ways of enlarging the sense of moral community than, say, The

4
Copyright PSA 2009
Metaphysics of Morals.[Rorty 1998] The difference is that Rorty is in part motivated to endorse
literary communication because of his scepticism concerning the capacities of philosophy, whereas
Nussbaum reinforces the authority of the philosophers, enlarging their domain so that it may
encompass literature, claiming a role as keeper of the self-understanding of the polis.Nussbaum’s
enquires presuppose that the central question animating us is what she considers to be the definitive
ethical question of how one should live in this world. (By contrast, Rousseau perhaps indicates the
unasked and overtly political question of how one might change the world so as to make it livable.)

That there is a tradition of seeing in Shakespeare a source of moral instruction hardly needs
pointing out. This status has been afforded by readings of the plays that emphasise themes of
national independence and greatness, timeless and universal virtues in human conduct, duty and
honour and the attainment and establishment of harmony. Such harmony is asserted, according to
these readings, within marriage and surrounding communities, as in the comedies, including
difficult ones such as The Taming of the Shrew or Much Ado About Nothing. In the history plays, it
is asserted by the ascendancy of a new monarch and the maintenance of the English or British
realm. The tragedies invariably end with the redemptive final arrival of a new promising ruler such
as Fortinbras (Hamlet) or Malcolm (Macbeth) who declares the end of violence. More broadly, they
may be understood as sharing one function of tragedy (according to much theory) - the provision of
a cathartic experience enabling us to learn to manage our emotions correctly. The so-called
‘problem-plays’ (Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, perhaps also The Merchant of
Venice) present us with an experience of the irreducible nature of certain ethical dilemmas, the
clash between schemas of judgement or grounds of ethical action, and so enrich our ethical
sensibility.

A difficulty here is that, as numerous critics note, Shakespeare’s engagement with the relationship
between ethics and politics can seem more descriptive rather than prescriptive.[Worden 2004] The
texts entertain possibilities rather than deliver final judgements. However, as Morris insists, it is
very clear what Shakespeare is against. Corruption and exploitation of office for instance, like that
of Angelo in Measure for Measure, cannot be read as being entertained as a serious possibility.
Given this we might read Shakespeare as telling us that politics should be trumped by morality or
ethics, or at least how it is exceeded by a triumph of human spirit. Shakespeare, the argument goes,
turns a merciless gaze on the way politicians have to be in some sense inhuman, to falsify in order
to pursue truth, to pretend to be what they are not and so on. Despite this, politics is inevitably part
of our lives; but this doesn’t mean we cannot be clear about its flaws. The politician’s
dissimulation may be for the greater good; but it is dissimulation no less for that. And that is worse
than transparency and truthfulness. Shakespeare offers us numerous models of human life -
unadulterated love, community without rule, virtuous conduct – of which politics falls short.
Indeed, the plays present us with numerous constructions of politics and none is very pleasing
ethically. For instance, in Othello we have first politics as statecraft, and second politics as Iago’s
manipulative scheming, dissimulation, and ruthlessness in pursuit of his own ends. In the history
plays we see politics as, on the one hand, the competition for the power to govern between elite
factions, and on the other a struggle between assertions of sovereignty and attempts to resist or
challenge on the part of the dominated. In Coriolanus, politics is on the one hand the imperative to
present oneself for public appraisal, to speak as one’s audience needs to hear and not as one really
means, to compromise with the many; on the other hand it is the process of formulating and fixing
public policy regarding distribution of wealth and rights, and this process involves assertions of
will, resistance, and compromise.

Obviously this takes us to one nub of the question of the relationship of literature to political theory
– for the latter does not need the former to tell them any of this. To the extent that political theory is
confined to such matters as the technicalities of equality of opportunity or equality of outcome,
Shakespeare’s contribution is negligible beyond giving us some vivid literary scenarios that bring

5
Copyright PSA 2009
home to us something about the value of equality. If political theory focuses, rather, on the question
of how equality might be realised in public policy and law in practice, then similarly. Formal
debates, such as whether equality and liberty are in a trade-off relationship, or whether rather one is
the condition or outcome of the other, are not well illuminated by Shakespeare’s plays (and perhaps
not by any kind of fictional literature).

However, in Shakespeare’s dramas, for any value, or any principle, its instability and uncertainty,
its difficulty and fragility, is vividly shown. This is clearly the case for constructions of sovereignty
and legitimacy for instance. Shakespeare also draws attention to the problematic relationships
between order and violence, peace and force. The plays frequently raise the conundrums of
citizenship as a universal or particular relationship and its interaction with friendship and hostility.
It might be argued that these features - the instability of sovereignty, the self-undermining of
loyalty, the edging out of reality by mere appearances - are exactly the reasons why we treat politics
as, at the very best, second best. And, indeed, this is what a number of critics of Shakespeare imply
or, as in the case of Morris [1965] explicitly state. But in this treatment of politics Shakespeare
offers subtle and insightful studies of the phenomenology of political power. Audiences may learn
from Shakespeare’s plays what it is like to be in the ebb and flow of authority, to face or grapple
with sovereignty, to lose or win influence, to be an effective or ineffective political actor.

A critical feature of the phenomenology of political power is openness, ambivalence and ambiguity.
The point comes through clearly in analysis of aspects of numerous plays. To take an example
from Yachnin [1993]: the theme of loyalty in Anthony and Cleopatra is instantiated in a
straightforward relationship of inequality, of command and obedience, and steadfast conduct on the
part of the inferior party – Dolabella, Enobarbus. Yet, such a straightforward rendering of loyalty is
disrupted again and again in the text and in the action, in which the question whether a character is
really loyal is inescapable. The idea of sovereignty is presented again and again, in Hamlet, in
Macbeth, in the history plays, always in such a way that it is by the very fact of its being pressed,
made dubious. As Greenblatt puts it, subversive voices are produced (and not just accidentally as it
were) by the affirmation of order.[1988: check ref] Greenblatt’s point is that Shakespeare’s
characters unintentionally and unconsciously act and represent the new roles and relations that
disrupt cherished traditional accounts of social order. We might add that such disruptions and
ambiguities are inevitably a feature, albeit one that is frequently ignored or disavowed, of political
relationships and processes.

It seems to us that among Shakespeare’s conscious preoccupations are matters to do with the
workings and phenomena of political power, and among the large themes that he treats with is
exactly this nature of political dynamics and experience. The politics of patriarchy and patronage
are an aspect of Hero’s fate in Much Ado; the Venetian state is the crucial backdrop against which
Desdemona’s and Othello’s fates are acted out; the preoccupation of Coriolanus is the matter of
political agency and justice, as much as it is the emotional triangle between son, mother and wife.
The jostling for position and influence that are repeated motifs throughout the drama might be
ethically dubious, base indeed; but it does not follow from that that political matters as such have to
be overcome according to Shakespeare.

May we say, then, that Shakespeare’s art provides us with the kind of moral instruction Nussbaum
finds in the modern novel? In presenting us his explorations of ambiguity and complexity does
Shakespeare help us enlarge our moral and political mentality? In thinking about how Shakespeare
depicts the uncertainties, contingencies, ambiguities and dynamics of political values and political
relationships, and bearing in mind our remarks earlier about the insight that Shakespeare brings to
the phenomenology of political power it is also clear that the plays offer, in addition to fantasies
about magic, or the wish for love or community without sovereignty, a clearly articulated sense of
the ways of politics and their place in the world, of what we might call ‘the political way’. The

6
Copyright PSA 2009
point is that political dilemmas cannot be resolved once and for all without remainder; but we have
to move forward together anyway. There are, obviously, numerous scenarios in Shakespeare in
which this process is fatally corrupted by violence, destruction, various forms of charisma, magic,
natural disasters and so on. But equally there are numerous moments in Shakespeare (some of them
are moments only) where the Arendtian values of plurality, trust, promising, forgiveness, freedom
and the capacity to act, publicity, and the acceptance of responsibility in situations in which there is
nothing for it but to take a risk and go on, are articulated. Such moments arise in Measure for
Measure, Macbeth, Julius Caesar. In our view, these are critical points at which Shakespeare’s
understanding of the nature of political relationships and how they work exceed the categories and
concerns of moral and political theory which come to seem unequal to the excess and exuberance of
Shakespeare’s concerns and style.

And one reason why we believe that Shakespeare is a writer who makes a critical contribution to
political theory is that his treatments of political themes precisely capture the ambivalent qualities
of political life and they cannot easily be made to fulfill the functions that might be set for them by
philosophers. However, this ambiguity is exactly what makes ‘Shakespeare’ something people
argue over and attempt to recruit to various causes. If, as political theorists, we stop at pointing up
the sensitive and rounded conception of political life communicated by Shakespeare we would have
failed to consider the wider networks of power within which Shakespeare is embedded. We must
not only determine the moral or political worth of Shakespeare but account for politics of just such
specifications. By whom, and for whom are these specifications made?

Literature and the Social Order

In the first section we considered conceptualizing literature as texts that propose political-
theoretical conceptions but found that this must also mean placing those texts into a context so that
we can identify their place in a broader field of argumentation. That included argument about
argument and attempts to open up ways of saying and making seen. In the second section we saw
that the attempt to appropriate literature for the moral or political development of the polis raises
questions about the authority through which this function is activated. In both cases we are led to
think more deeply about the relationship of literature to the social order of which it is a part. Rather
than simply appropriate literature for political theory, then, we must acknowledge that both are
explications or interpretations of social experience and, in the act of interpretation and its public
articulation, also contributions to that social experience and to social order. In this respect literary
works do not need to be rendered political by anyone. They already are political. A task for political
theory, then, is to think through the ways in which this happens and what it might tell us about
social order, the political, political theory and literature.

There is already a critical tradition of political and cultural theory and analysis that starts from the
premise that cultural artefacts are political phenomena to the extent that they necessarily represent
the world-views of particular social interests or are facilitators of moral or ideological conformity.
For this approach the task of the critic is to identify the precise ways a text can be shown as a
product of the combination of ideological and commercial imperatives, its standardized form
calibrated to act directly on consumers’ internal subjective perceptions so as to bind them ever
closer to a social system they might otherwise perceive as in contradiction with their true interests.

A more sophisticated version of this approach identifies a multiplicity of different literatures that
can be located in their social class context and thus placed in a political arena where contests
between interests are fought out. Where for Nussbaum literature may contribute to and enhance
public deliberation, for this critical tradition it is understood as a component of larger and wider

7
Copyright PSA 2009
processes of hegemonic conflict over the constitution and reconstitution of interests and identities.
Once this is recognized it is a short step to our perceiving literature as implicated in political
processes that are much broader than those structured by class interests and identities: nationalist
political consciousness [eg Anderson 1983] and mobilization (see anything about Irish literature) as
well as colonial domination [eg Said 1978] or feminist consciousness-raising. This way of
approaching art, literature and politics is taken furthest in the politicization and subversion, or rather
dismantling or deterritorialisation, of dominant languages identified by Deleuze and Guattari as the
revolutionary power of a ‘minor literature’. [Deleuze and Guattari 1986].

These kinds of approach rapidly exceed the narrower focus of political theory and become
integrated with the general concerns of cultural studies and social theory and of the activist
intellectual, self-consciously attached to a political project and seeking resources for the struggle
(the nightmare of Allan Bloom). The applications of this sort of approach to Shakespeare are well
known. The political role of Shakespeare as an icon, and the place of Shakespeare’s work in the
national culture, is a key theme in studies of Shakespeare’s reception [Taylor 2002] and
Shakespeare’s status at the centre of school and university education in literature connects, to be
sure in complex ways, with phenomena of national as well as class identity.

Such readings are also contested. This has to do both with what historicist critics would identify as
anachronistic or non-historical readings of the plays, and also with the status of Shakespeare
himself as national poet (of ‘this blessed plot’) and national symbol (of this ‘teeming womb of royal
kings’). There are also those who emphasise the implication of this reading in attempts to
legitimate a particular sort of state form and that seek actively to subvert Shakespeare or to
appropriate the work in various forms of dissenting or dissident reading for socialist, feminist and
sexual politics [Dollimore and Sinfield 1985].

Radical readings claim Shakespeare as a kind of counter-hegemonic people’s, rather than nation’s
or state’s, poet, as the champion of a prelapsarian life before foreign domination, absolute
monarchy, and the degradation of people by commerce, inequality and poverty. Shakespeare’s
drawings of ordinary citizens emphasise, as Morris [1965] puts it, the ordinary life that must go on
whatever happens at the level of state politics (as in the garden scene in Richard II). It is quite
possible to read his depiction of people who must make a living, as in Measure for Measure, or who
overtly engage in rebellion against injustice, such as Cade and his followers in Henry VI, Part II, as
sympathetic. In Coriolanus Shakespeare gives the crowd a coherent set of voices, which are not just
preferences but reasons and arguments; and he sets these against a background of dearth and
deprivation which can only generate claims of justice, even if other characters in the play do not
have the moral sensibility to know this. [George 2004]

These themes, together with the construction of Shakespeare as an ordinary man who, had he not
been a poet, would have worked with his hands, whose poetry indeed benefits from his lack of
formal university education, underpin socialist and radical claims to retrieve Shakespeare from his
fate as emblem of an aristo-bourgeois nation, as well as from projects to establish that the plays of
Shakespeare were actually written by someone of more elevated social origins.[Taylor 2002] But
here debate can degenerate into dispute over whether Shakespeare’s plays are broadly left or right
wing; whether the authorial voice and overall message is radical or reactionary as regards inherited
as opposed to elective power to govern; monarchical, aristocratic or popular sovereignty; the
alleged stability of hierarchical inequality or the democratic justice of the egalitarian distribution of
resources.

This sort of simply sectarian contest is perhaps of minimal interest to political theory. Yet this
broader politicization – the fact not only that it does happen but that it can happen at all - ought to
be a more direct concern of political theorists of all kinds. It tells us that texts can be taken up, used

8
Copyright PSA 2009
and re-used in contexts quite at odds with those from which they first emerged; and it tells us that
this is one of things that politics is – the experience of certain ‘tellings’ of the world and responses
to those tellings that in turn prompt new and other tellings. This raises the question of the
relationship of literary communication to political organisation. Raymond Williams, for instance,
sought to integrate literature and culture into the theory of democracy.[Williams 1991] Conscious
of the fact that cultural forms represent expressions of a way of life he was committed to the spread
of the capacity to make and receive them. He saw that cultural institutions were as central a part of
democratic organization as political and economic ones; their arrangement a fundamental aspect of
the constitution of any society.[1991 esp pp 340-47] Political theoretical investigations of
utopianism indicate that rather than be seen as making a contribution to the maintenance of the
public realm or the polis in general, literature may be one means through which the possibility of its
radical transformation is intimated, activating a principle of hope, as Ernst Bloch called it, that
holds open the possibility of a future reconciliation.[Bloch 1989] To the extent that it is interested in
the overall relationships of components of the polis contemporary political theory tends to
concentrate on the constitutional balance between governmental, legal and military power or force
and also on balanced redistribution of either wealth or recognition. But there are good reasons to
make communication and cultural production as central a concern of political theory as any of
these.[Norton 2004; Dean 2000, 2005]

How might we do this? A number of lines of thought in contemporary political theory are
suggestive here, among them Jacques Ranciere’s conception of a polity as formed out of a
particular distribution of persons to tasks, for instance mental or manual labour, to speaking or non-
speaking parts. [Ranciere 1999] Such a ‘distribution of the sensible’ establishes something in
common but also a ‘distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very
manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in the way various
individuals have a part in this distribution’[Rancière 2003:12]. Politics ‘revolves around what is
seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around
the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time’ [2003:13 check p refs] Above all, it is what
happens when that which was not supposed to speak does, disputing a ‘distribution of the sensible’
by demanding a place in the public (as when worker’s demand rights, women insist on being heard
or migrants without citizenship begin to act as if they were bearers of political rights). Artistic
practices are of course also involved in such a partitioning or distribution of the sensible. For
Ranciere, in a novel definition, aesthetics is ‘the system of a priori forms determining what presents
itself to sense experience...a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and invisible, of speech
and noise’ and as such it contributes to the determination of ‘the place and the stakes of politics as a
form of experience’. Artistic practices intervene into the 'distribution of ways of doing and of
making’.

This conception, in the light of what we have considered before, opens up a space for enquiry
concerning the varied modes of literature, the ways in which they engender certain kinds of
aesthetic experience and the relationship of these to political experience. It does not mean that we
cannot think about the particular ideas expressed through artistic forms or the moral claims they
present to us. But it draws our attention to the ways in which they organise our senses, perhaps
presenting a particular kind of ‘perceptual equilibrium’ as the only or absolute kind; or how they
displace just such an equilibrium, engendering in audiences a reorientation, even a political
experience of the unsayable being said. That the ‘aura’ surrounding ‘Shakespeare’ tends to the
opposite experience (one of incapacity and ignorance) is to be greatly regretted but is also - perhaps
– indicative of the ways in which literature as an institution is simultaneously an effect, a
manifestation and a contribution to the management of social orders.

9
Copyright PSA 2009
Political Theatre

To some degree the three broad approaches we have sketched can be identified with traditions of
political theatre. We might think of Shaw or Priestley as exemplars of a theatre which seeks to
rehearse or promote particular political ideas, and to engender moral reflection. There is also theatre
which has been thought an element in a wider political struggle, a counter-hegemonic force or a
space for the autonomous ‘self-education’ of the working class: Joan Littlewood and Theatre
Workshop; the agit-prop of John McGrath; the attempts to re-present history and social experience
developed by David Edgar or Howard Brenton. And of course there have been various experiments
with the form in ways intended to enhance consciousness within the audience (the avant-gardism of
Artaud, the formal experimentation of Brecht, the absurdism of Ionescu or Pinter).

One contemporary trend in British political theatre is of particular interest. A rash of recent
productions seem to view theatre as not merely a counter-hegemonic or proletarian public sphere
but as the public sphere itself. They thus seek to convert drama into documentary rather than the
other way around: the Tricycle Theatre’s dramatization of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry; Richard
Norton-Taylor’s versions of the Scott and Hutton inquiries; Gillian Slovo’s Guantánamo; the Royal
Court production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie; David Hare’s recent work such as The Permanent
Way and Stuff Happens. At a moment when politics seems ever more of a manufactured spectacle
and radical political protest has become yet more self-consciously theatrical these productions seem
to present themselves as a substitute for what is lacking in political discourse or as a supplement to
the news (as for instance Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: a play for Gaza in January
2009).

This sort of theatre raises exactly the question we want to raise about Shakespeare. For the political
nature of these plays is not found simply in what they say about events and in the ways in which
they say it but also in the fact that they say it at all. ‘From the Platonic point of view’, as Ranciere
puts it, ‘the stage, which is simultaneously a locus of public activity and the exhibition-space for
“fantasies”, disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities and spaces’ [Ranciere 2003:13].
Does this present wave of political theatre succeed in effecting such a disturbance, by simply
placing the formal dramas of courtroom, enquiry and political meeting upon the stage, or, in such a
flat presentation and concentration on elite and official activities does it ultimately reinforce the
partition? Does it leave the audience – as Rousseau worried – satisfied that it has done its moral
duty through its spectatorship; or does it constitute everything as only an alienating and distracting
spectacle?

And we can make the same enquiries about Shakespeare. Many historicist analyses emphasise the
political nature of Elizabethan theatre, showing how theatre managers and players were
unavoidably caught up in a direct relationship with the state via the office of the censor, and needed
to scrutinise and doctor scripts accordingly. In this context, Shakespeare’s topical allusions, and
satirical and judgemental comments on the events of his day, look daring and canny at the same
time. It is also remarked that this close attention by the state to theatres had the effect of making
theatre attendance in itself a potentially subversive, definitely somewhat risky, politically suffused
act, more like going on a demonstration or to a political rally is for us than going go the cinema is.
Shakespeare’s theatre, after the move to Bankside in 1599, took up a topologically and symbolically
more marginal place – in the suburbs. Arguably, this position intensifies the subversive or
challenging nature of the theatrical text and performance, positioning the theatre itself as outwith
the direct authority of the city.[refs]

We might, then, think of the theatre as political in the same way that at various particular times
pulpits or mosques are political. That is to say, they are points of origin of political
communications, whether in the form of overt moralising or exhortation, or covert or overt

10
Copyright PSA 2009
challenges to dominant power, a kind of ekklesia, with people gathered in a particular space for a
temporally specific and collective activity. As Cavell argues, in the theatre we have to suspend
disbelief, in the company of others.[Cavell 1987: ..] In numerous settings including the ancient city
states and Elizabethan England, the theatrical public engaged with the acting and representation of
human dilemmas and relationships in a collective setting around a stage. This can be
conceptualised either as constituting a critical instance of the polity or more weakly as rehearsing or
representing political life. Certainly, the architecture of Shakespeare’s theatres, in which the
audience can take the part of crowd, in which the actors have to compete with the hubbub of the
audience to be heard and attended to, conduces to this idea that theatre going is in itself an aspect of
public life in which the power to govern is engaged with. And in Shakespeare’s time it also enacted
a kind of egalitarianism, all classes gathered in one place engaging in the same activity
simultaneously.

In a sense, then, theatre appears to have a homological relation to political life and experience.
Shakespeare’s scripts are multivocal and in them no position is left entirely uncontested or
unproblematised. They can be said to be quintessentially political, if by political we imply, among
other things, that in a political setting we put ourselves into others’ presence (of course, this might
be mediated in all kinds of ways, or even highly distanced and dislocated) and into a context of
plurality in which agreement is at best provisional. The Elizabethan popular stage, Howard shows,
juxtaposed varieties of thought, and enabled examination of them through ‘contrapuntal and multi-
vocal dramatic effects that simulated the structures both of debate and of cultural struggle and
negotiation’ (Howard 2006:130). Plays set ideas in motion, let perspectives play out their rivalry,
not merely through characters but through dramatic structures that alternated good and bad counsel,
the high and the low, following the rhetorical principle of considering things in utramque partem or
on both sides of the question [Alman 1978]. As Howard writes: ‘…in the Elizabethan theatre, the
presentational elements of performance carried within them the capacity to disrupt and complicate
the ideological thrust of representation’ (142-3). In particular, the history plays, of which
Shakespeare was a pioneer, ‘not only gave playgoers a sense of their national past, but also let them
experience a uniquely dialogic and complex exploration of political ideas that circulated in different
forms in other quarters of the national culture’ (143).

This staging of contests, the very act of representation, had yet deeper implications. Kastan goes so
far as to argue that ‘In setting English Kings before an audience of commoners, the theatre
nourished the cultural conditions that eventually permitted the nation to bring its King to trial, not
because the theatre approvingly represented subversive acts, but rather because representation
became itself subversive. Whatever their overt ideological content, history plays inevitably if
unconsciously, weakened the structure of authority: on stage the king became a subject – the subject
of the author’s imagining and the subject of the attention and judgment of an audience of subjects’
[Kastan 1986: 460-461]. As Plato knew theatrical representation wrecks sovereign inviolability or,
as Kastan continues, representation ‘undermines rather than confirms authority, denying its
presumptive dignity by subjecting it to a common view’ [462].

The point here is not that such theatre appears to make an argument about the simulated nature of
political authority. Rather, theatre makes possible a certain kind of experience for spectators who
are invited to judge something for themselves. This is not to say that the politics reduces to a series
of subjective individual judgements. The politics of theatre lies in the way that it makes possible a
re-distribution of what is to be seen and not seen and this happens in the interaction between
spectator and spectacle.

11
Copyright PSA 2009
Henry VI Part II Act 4 Scene 2

To explore this theme further we consider one particular sequence from the history plays: the Cade
rebellion as presented in 2 Henry VI. This scene provokes the range of perspectives we have
considered. It might suggest particular things about democracy and sovereignty. It can also be
explored in its own historical context – as a comment on Elizabethan politics – or as an exercise in a
kind of historiography in its own right. We may see it as inviting us to pass moral judgment on a
particular kind of political excess, or on the failings of elite rule that allow disorder to break
through. These scenes are also a staging of arguments about who can rule and by what right.
Shakespeare might be inviting us to sympathise with the poor that protest at their subordination, and
we might be able to recruit these moments to a broader critique of class misrule. All of these are
potentially sound readings and the methodologies behind them have their merits. But there is more
for political theory to say in an effort to grasp the phenomena of such theatre at a more general
level.

When Cade first comes on stage he pretends to nobility in birth and bearing. That this is a mockery
of claims of right to rule is obvious. But they are in turn mocked by asides from other of Cade’s
men. These might be thought to indicate that Cade’s claims are the ones to be scorned, and not
claims to rule in general. But they also open up the question of who is to judge such a claim, and as
asides that open up the stage-audience relationship we are implicated in that judging. The claim to
rule is made available for our evaluation.

As well as aping the speech of the ruling caste Cade also disrupts the order within which it takes
place. Challenged by Stafford he refuses to speak with him. He and his rebels reject the legal and
political writing, the parchments, of the order that confines them. In Scene VII a suit is presented to
Cade and it is declared that ‘the laws of England come from his mouth’, but these are again
undercut by asides that tell us his mouth is not whole, it has been thrust with a spear, and it stinks
from eating cheese. If this is so, and this makes his mouth no good for making laws, then the
question arises, what mouth should pronounce law; how (and by whom) can it be identified?

Cade orders the burning of the records of the realm. His band attacks scholars, learning, nouns,
verbs, Latin – they are aware of the gulf between a literate and wordy law and the peasants who
cannot read but are subjected to it. The series of linguistic systems that function to assign persons to
their place in the ‘great chain of being’, and that keep them there, are made quite plain to us.
Throughout Cade speaks in prose rather than the verse of the nobles such as Say. Cade’s men are
described as ‘a ragged multitude of hinds and peasants, rude and merciless’ (Scene IV) and
themselves declare that ‘We are in order when we are most out of order’. But this is not entirely
undirected disorder and carnival. It opens up – quite precisely – an aesthetic order of speaking,
writing and record keeping that is central to the institution of rule.

Now, there is a danger that we take all this to be saying that all claims to rule are fake, merely
performances of one kind or another; and that the politics of the drama consists in a demonstration
of this. But we must not neglect the fact that it is presented in a context, to an audience who are
placed in particular positions by it. We need to look a little more carefully.

The scenes of Cade’s rebellion are preceded and prepared for by a brief exchange between two of
the rebels (Act IV, Scene II). They wonder by what presumption might a clothier seek to ‘dress the
commonwealth’ (5-7). That is to say, they open the question of who can institute an order and by
what means. ‘Virtue’ they observe, is not regarded in handicrafts men’ (11-12) and nobles ‘think
scorn to go on leather aprons’ (13-14). They are aware, then, that their labour debars them from
office, sets them apart from the orders of rule. But in their exchange they begin to blur the division
of magistrate from worker in part through a series of word plays that expose the workings of

12
Copyright PSA 2009
naming and then claim the power to assign such names. ‘The king's council are no good workmen’
says Bevis, and Holland agrees, adding ‘and yet it is said, labour in thy vocation; which is as much
to say as, let the magistrates be labouring men; and therefore should we be magistrates’.

The logic here follows the form set down, negatively, in Plato’s Euthydemus in which so-called
Sophists seek to win arguments through exploiting the dual meanings of words, lexical sideways
slides rather than the solid vertical derivations of syllogism. It follows too the tricks laid out in
Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations and cited in the classical handbooks of rhetoric. We can, then,
see this as a moment of mockery of peasant stupidity or an exposure of rhetorical sleight-of-hand.
Whichever we decide, however, we cannot deny that the exchange opens up for question the system
that makes its own refutation possible. Here are two peasants discussing by what right the
magistrates rule. Here they are asking after the definitions, divisions and dispersals that assign them
to one place and the magistrates to another. And here are we watching them do it and being invited
to evaluate it – and yet, we are not magistrates. Perhaps we too are labourers.

The discussion then initiates a blurring of the very distinction of mental and manual labour. Bevis
remarks that ‘there's no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand’ and the two exchange a string
of metaphors combining manual labour with the policing functions of the magistracy: a butcher
strikes down sin like an ox or cuts the throat of iniquity like that of a calf. Again their argument
seems to rest on mere wordplay and comedy; on horrific images that will soon be given a more
substantial form in the brutality of Cade’s attack. Surely, then, we cannot accept this and surely
Shakepeare did not intend for us to be convinced by it? Perhaps, then, the argument is precisely that
this is not a good argument, that such disregard for the proper orders of society leads to the brutality
of butchers and thus Cade, when he fades away, starving and homeless, has his just punishment. Is
this the moral lesson of the sequence? Or do we find here again the suggestion that all claims to rule
are merely wordplay, that all claims to authority are fake, merely theatrical performance and
spectacle?

But the words of the labourers and peasants are not the argument at hand. The argument is not in
the plot or in the spectacle – it lies in the fact that the spectacle takes place at all, and that we are
there observing it and judging it and the phenomena it presents. If we search within the text for a
final answer as to who is and is not virtuous then we search in vain. For the virtue – or its lack – lies
in the relationship between us, a spectator, and the performance, in the capacity that the experience
of play going engenders, of being able to judge, of being asked to judge, of persons without
qualification able to take on the office of magistrate and decide what we are seeing and what we
think about it.

Conclusion

Shakespeare undoubtedly engaged in the activity of theorising about politics. His plots often begin
with an order of authority, sovereignty, power or resources which is disrupted by an excess of
energy (ambition, love, greed) or by an entry or exit, an action or injury. The action then focuses on
attempts to reorganise affairs, and the movement of forces that this involves. In the process
Shakespeare is able to interrogate the concepts and categories that we conventionally use to refer to
and reason about political institutions, events and processes; attributing value to states of affairs and
modes of conduct in politics; and questioning the hypotheses we make about the probability of
causal relationships between events, phenomena, actions and processes. When we watch his plays
we are encouraged to enlarge our moral frame of reference. We also required to share dominant
conceptions of the world and invited to subvert them. We are given a particular sort of experience
of the contradictory and irresolvable nature of social and political life. Indeed, at the presentation of
such a contradictory and irresolvable experience that Shakespeare excels. In responding to and

13
Copyright PSA 2009
thinking about Shakepeare we also - inevitably - become caught up in a politics over what that
name refers to, what it means about culture, class and nation. That all of this is possible lies in the
way the plays set in motion a disturbance of orders of seeing and judging, drawing attention to the
organization of sensations, persons and experiences that underpins a social and political. This takes
place not simply within the text but between text and audience in the singular encounter that is
theatre.

Kastan cites the Lord Mayor of London worrying of the theatres in 1597 that ‘They give
opportunity to the refuze sort of euill disposed & vngodly people, that are within and abowte this
Cytie, to assemble themselves & to make their matches for all their lewd and vnhodly practices’
Kastan 1986: 464]. The Mayor, we would suggest, was not wrong. The political interest of
Shakespeare’s work lies in the provision of a moment in which all sorts of ‘ungodly’ people, with
no qualification beyond being there, are enabled to judge what they see and hear and feel and
experience. In this lies the democracy of Shakespeare and of dramatic theatre.

References

Altman, Joel. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Enquiry and the Development of Elizabethan
Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
Revised edition; first 1983 ed. London: Verso, 1991.

Barton, Anne. "Livy, Machiavelli and Shakespeare's Coriolanus." In Shakespeare and Politics,
edited by Catherine M.S. Alexander, 67-90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function in Art and Literature. Translated by Jack Zipes and Frank
Mecklenburg. Boston: MIT Press, 1989.

Carroll, William C. "Language, Politics and Poverty in Shakespearian Drama." In Shakespeare and
Politics, edited by Catherine M.S. Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004.

Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1987.

Coby, Patrick. "Politics and the Poetic Ideal in Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’." Political Theory 11,
no. 2 (1983): 215-43.

Dean, Jodi, ed. Cultural Studies and Political Theory. New York: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Dean, Jodi. "Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and Foreclosure of Politics." Cultural Politics
1, no. 1 (2005): 51-74.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986.

Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural
Materialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

14
Copyright PSA 2009
Drakakis, John. "'Fashion It Thus': Julius Caesar and the Politics of Theatrical Representation." In
Shakespeare and Politics, edited by Catherine M.S. Alexander, 206-18. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Frank, Jason. ‘Aesthetic Democracy: Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the People’, The Review of
Politics, 69, 3, 2007, pp. 402-430

Fitter, Chris. "Emergent Shakespeare and the Politics of Protest: 2 Henry VI in Historical
Contexts." English Literary History 72 (2005): 129-58.

George, David. "Plutarch, Insurrection and Dearth in Coriolanus." In Shakespeare and Politics,
edited by Catherine M.S. Alexander, 110-29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance

England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Heinemann, Margot. "Demystifying the Mystery of State: King Lear and the World Turned Upside
Down." In Shakespeare and Politics, edited by Catherine M.S. Alexander, 155-68.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Howard, Jean. "Dramatic Traditions and Shakespeare's Political Thought." In British Political
Thought in History, Literature and Theory 15000-1800, edited by David Armitage, 129-44.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. 2ns ed.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1989 1st edn 1983.

Jardine, Lisa. Reading Shakespeare Politically. London: Routledge, 1996.

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Preface,
William Chester Jordan ed. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997 fp 1957.

Kastan, David Scott. "Proud Majesty Made Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule."
Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1986): 459-75.

Kateb, George. ‘Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy’, Political Theory, 1990, 19, pp. 545-
571

Lefort, Claude. Writing: The Political Test. Part translation of Ecrire: A l'epreuve du politique,
1992, Fondation Saint-Simon ed: Duke University Press, 2000.

Matheson, Mark. "Venetian Culture and the Politics of Othello." In Shakespeare and Politics,
edited by Catherine M.S. Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Morris, Christopher. "Shakespeare's Politics." The Historical Journal 8, no. 3 (1965): 293-308.

Murdoch, Iris. The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977.

Norton, Anne. 95 Theses on Politics, Culture and Method. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004.

Nuttall, A.D. Shakespeare the Thinker. London: Yale University Press, 2007.

15
Copyright PSA 2009
Palfrey, Simon. Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Pocock, J G A, J Schochet, and Schwoerer. "The History of British Political Thought: A Field and
Its Futures." In British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory 1500-1800,
edited by David Armitage, 16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Ranciere, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis,
Ma: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 fp French 1995.

Ranciere, Jacques. "The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics." In Fidelity to the
Disagreement: Jacques Ranciere and the Political. London, 2003.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Letter to M D'alembert on the Theatre. Translated by Allan Bloom. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1960 fp French 1758.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

Schoenbaum, S. "Richard II and the Realities of Power." In Shakespeare and Politics, edited by
Catherine M.S. Alexander, 91-109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Shklar, Judith N. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Skinner, Quentin. "What Does It Mean to Be a Free Person." London Review of Books 30, no. 10
(2008).

Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics: Vol I: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002.

Taylor, Antony. "Shakespeare and Radicalism: The Uses and Abuses of Shakespeare in Nineteenth
Century Popular Politics." The Historical Journal 45, no. 2 (2002): 357-79.

Weinberger, Jerry. "Pious Princes and Red-Hot Lovers: The Politics of Shakespeare's Romeo and
Juliet." Journal of Politics 65, no. 2 (2003): 350-75.

Worden, Blair. "Shakespeare and Politics." In Shakespeare and Politics, edited by Catherine M.S.
Alexander, 22-43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Yachnin, Paul. "Shakespeare's Politics of Loyalty: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in Antony and
Cleopatra." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 33, no. 2 (1993): 343-63.

16
Copyright PSA 2009