History and Politics in Shakespeare
History and Politics in Shakespeare
The playwright Thomas Nashe wrote about the importance of the history play as a genre, stating that they helped to preserve the memories of glorious English heroes. Nashe said that the history play creates a collective memory of the national past for the masses, celebrating the realm's heroes and particularly patriotic moments in English history.
Shakespeare drew on historical records of the times about which he wrote, but he condensed dates and events, reordering things if necessary in order to create dramatic tension and compelling plots. He makes Henry VI older than he was at the time of his succession; he was actually only nine months old, but in the play is of marriageable age. Some of the plays most striking scenes are of his own invention, not based in fact: for example the scene in the Temple Garden, in which the followers of Richard Plantagenet pick white and red roses as emblems of their opposing opinions on a point of law. This scene provides an explanation as to the origin of the War of the Roses. Without developing any consistent philosophy of history, Shakespeare gives equal voice to two predominant theories on the cause of 15th century British turmoli: one theory reasons that the history is the result of human choises and actions; another posits that a higher power watches and judges our actions and rewards or punishes accordingly - by this theory the violence of the 15th century came as punishment for Britain's illegal dethroning of Richard II. In Henry VI some events certainly result from human decisions - and particularly human rivalries, yet we see also evidence of other higher powers at work. With court struggles Shakespeare sends message that petty rivalries and internal divisions among the nobility can be as dangerous to England as foreign enemies. His Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth are similar, since Joans identity slips between the two polarities of innocent virgin and immoral whore, as people assume a woman able to influence men must draw her power from sex. Queen Elizabeth too, had the body of a woman yet the role of a man. So too her situatuion provoke both admiration and demonization, both the title the Virgin Queen and malicious rumours of infertility or a sexual defect.
In Henry VI, Shakespeare keeps us on the plane of the political consequences of Bolingbrokes usurpation, putting at the forefront questions of political power, legitimacy and obligation. The quality of restricting the action and the characterization to the political realm clearly sets the Henry IV plays or Henry V apart from say Macbeth and King Lear. These plays also have an important political-historical dimension, but they move far beyond that into the deep personal suffering of the main characters.
About a fifth of all Elizabethan plays were histories, but this was the genre that Shakespeare particularly made his own, dramatizing English history from Richard II to Henry VII in two four-play sequences. The first sequence, comprising the three Henry VI plays – Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VI, Part 2, and Henry VI, Part 3 - and Richard III, begins as a patriotic celebration of English bravery against the French. But this is soon superseded by a mature, disillusioned understanding of the world of politics, culminating in the shocking portrayal of Richard III. He apparently monumentalizes the glorious accession of the dynasty of Tudor, but its realistic description of the workings of state power subtly undercuts such cliches and appeal of Richards individuality is deeply unsettling, preventing any easy moral judgements. The second sequence Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV part 2 and Henry V begins with the overthrow of the bad but legitimate king and follows its consequences through two generations, probing relentlessly at the difficult questions of authority, obedience and order that it raises. In the Henry IV plays Shakespeare cuts scenes among the rulers with scenes among those who are ruled, to create a many sided picture of national life at a particular historical moment. The tone of these plays, though, is increasingly pesimistic, and in Henry V patriotic fantasy of English greateness is hedged around with hesitations and questions about the validity of the myth of glorious nationhood offered by the Agincourt story. Through all these plays runs a concern that is essentially tragic. Shakespeare's other history plays, King John and Henry VIII approach similar questions through material drawn from John Foxe's Actes and Monuments.
Julius Caesar is a political play, a play debating dictatorship. Shakespeare's themes here are: ideals in the real (political) world, the tragedy of corrupting power, the swaying of the public support, politics vs truth and beauty. Shakespeare rises questions: What is a good leader? What happens to a person when he becomes a great public figure? Does power corrupt? Can a good man survive in a political world or will he be corrupted? Is the answer to be found in politics or somewhere else? The audience gets a sense of the inevitable repetition of history. Leaders fall and rise. Julius Caesar is also a play about history, how it revolves. There is a sense of irreversible forces at work which the individual can do little about. History is a flood you have to move with. History is bigger than man. The murder of Caesar was futile. It only results in another leader rising up and taking his place (Antony). Just like it has happened before, and is likely to happen again. The pattern of political strife repeats itself.
Depiction of violence in Shakespeare′s Tragedies
Some of Shakespeare's most violent plays were by far his most popular during his lifetime. Although modern audiences are often repulsed by its gore and brutality, "Titus Andronicus" was a huge success in Tudor England, coveted by several of the finest touring companies. And certainly it is no coincidence that Shakespeare's most profound psychological masterpieces have their share of sensational melodrama. Shakespeare often deviated from his sources to include more titillating details. Hamlet's father is poisoned with a potion so potent that it immediately causes bubbling scabs on his body; King Duncan is lured to Macbeth's castle to be slaughtered in his bed, and so on.
There is a possibility of feminist psychoanalitic interpretation of Shakespeare′s works and in it we see that they depict violence. In Shakespere′s tragedies there is a shared fiction on the part of the heroes about femininity and about their own vulnerability in relation to women - fictions interwoven with violence, which generate a particular kind of heterosexual dilemma. Whether playfully resolved in the comedies or brutally exposed in the tragedies, at some level, all his works symbollically explore the conflict between male and female. Particulaly in his tragedies, his characters link masculinity with control, strenth and success and femininity with weakness, loss of control. The prospect of heterosexual union arouses emotional conflicts that give shape to the plot, unleashing a kind of violence that in the comedies remains symbolic, imagined rather than enacted.
In Macbeth Shakespeare makes a fictional social order that is completely based on violent masculine domination and the suppression of the feminine side. Even more so than in Hamlet or King Lear, masculinity is a means to domination and success. In a world where male supremacy is being protected by brute force, honour, compassion and trust cannot survive.
In Romeo and Julietto participate in the masculine ethic of this play is to participate in the feud, which defines relations among men as intensely competitive, and relations with women as controlling and violent. What is striking about the relationship between, for example, Romeo and Juliet is the extent to which it anticipates and ultimately incorporates violence. Both lovers have a lively imagination of disaster. While Romeo ponders: «some vile forfeit of untimely death», Juliet speculates: «If he is married/My grave is like to be my wedding bed.». Premonition, for both, has the force of self-fulfilling prophecy. While Romeo seeks danger by courting Juliet and death by threatening suicide in the wake of Tybald′s death, Juliet, under pressure, exclaims: «I′ll to my wedding bed;/And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead!». The paradigm offered by Romeo and Juliet, with some modifications, may be read in the major tragedies as well. Here the structure of male dominance involving various strategies of control expressed in the language of prostitution, rape and murder, conceal deeper structures of fear, in which women are perceived as powerful and the heterosexual relation is seen as either mutually violent or deeply threatening to the man.
Hamlet′s violent behaviour in his mother′s bedroom expresses some of the violence of his impulses toward her. Obsessed as he is with sexual betrayal, the problem of revenge for him is less a matter of killing Claudius than one of not killing his mother. Hamlet′s anger against women, based on his perception of his mothers conduct, finds expression in the language of prostitution in his violent outburst against Ophelia. For a aman to be betrayed by a woman is to be humilited or dishonoured. To recover his honour he must destroy the man or woman who is responsible for his humiliation, for placing him in a position of vulnerability. Adultery is a form of violence and as a great crime, Hamlet who reacts as an injured husband in seeking revenge against Claudius, also seeks retribution against his mother. That his manner sugests physical violence is confirmed by Gertrude′s response: «What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?/Help, ho!» It is at this point that the violence Hamlet seeks to contain in his attitude towards his mother is deflected onto another object presumed to be appropriate. This single act of displaced violence, moreover, has further ramifications in terms of Hamlet′s relation to Ophelia, whose conflicted responses to the fact that her lover has killed her father increase the burden of double messages she has already received from the men in the play, culminating in her madness and death. It is not his mother whom Hamlet kills but Ophelia. Only when she is dead, is he free to say clearly that he loved her.
Similarly Othello, whom the pathology of jealousy, the humiliation and rage that plague the man supposedly dishonoured by the woman he loves, are more specifically and vividly portrayed, will say of Desdemona late in the play: «I will kill thee,/ And love thee after». Once Othello is convinced of Desdemona′s infidelity, he regards her not as a woman who has committed a single transgression but as a whore, one whose entire behaviour may be explained in terms of lust. As such, he may humiliate her in public, offer her services to the Venetian ambassadors, pass judgement on her, and condemn her to death. Murder in this light is a desperate contempt to control. It is Desdemona′s power to hurt that Othello seeks to eliminate by ending her life. It is the fear or pain of victimization on the part of the man that leads him to victimize women. It is those who perceive themselves to be powerless who may be incited to the acts of greatest violence. The paradox of violence in Othello, not unlike that in Macbeth, is that the exercise of power turns against the hero. In this case the murder of a woman leads to self-murder, and the hero dies attesting to the erotic desstructiveness at the heart of his relationship with Desdemona. If murder may be a loving act, love may be a murdering act, and consummation of such a love is possible only through the death of both parties.
Interwoven into the patriarchal structure of Shakespeare′s tragedies is an equally powerful matriarchal vision. They are even, aspects of one another, both proceeding from the masculine consciousness of feminine betrayal. Both inspire a violence of response on the part of the hero against individul women, but more importantly, against the hero′s perception of himself as womanish, in which he ultimately hurts himself. The concurrence of these themes is particularly evident in Antony and Cleopatra, a play that both recalls the ritual marriage conclusion of the comedies as it deepens the sexual dilemma of the tragic hero.
Throughout Shakespeare′s tragedies, the imagery of heterosexual union involves the threat of mutual or self-inflicted violence. Violence against women as an aspect of the structure of male dominance in Shakespeare′s plays may be seen to obscure deeper paterns of conflict in which women as lovers, are perhaps more importantly as mothers, are perceived as radically untrustworthy. In this structure of relation, it is women who are regarded as powerful and men who strive to avoid an awareness of their vulnerability in relation to women, a vulnerability in which they regard themselves as feminine.
Shakespeare and the Jacobean Era
The term Jacobean comes from James I (from Latin Jacobus), King after Elizabeth's death, who reigned from 1603-1625. The distinction between the early Jacobean and the preceding Elizabethan styles are subtle ones, often merely a question of degree. During the unstable reign of James I there were disillusion and pessimism. The 17th century was to be a time of great turmoil - revolution and regicide, restoration of the monarcy. During this time the literature became sophisticated, sombre, and conscious of social abuse and rivalry. The plays become even more complex, even more passionate and violent than the plays of the Elizabethan age, as they go more deeply into problems of corruption and human weakness.The Jacobean Age produced rich prose and drama as well as the King James translation of the Bible. Shakespeare and Jonson wrote during the Jacobean Age, as well as John Donne, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Middleton.
The division between Shakespeare's Elizabethan phase and his Jacobean phase is real and significant. During the Jacobean age he wrote the darker, problem comedies, virtually all the great tragedies and finally a group of predominantly tragicomic romances. The recognizable distinction between the Elizabethan and the Jacobean Shakespeare is a tribute to the extraordinary intellectual and artistic consistency of this dramatist as he sought constantly to develop new forms. It is easy to oversimplify the possible motives underlying Shakespeare's change of direction by seeing a politial reflection in his plays, an indication of a shift from the great Elizabethan compromise to an era under James I of political and religious confrontation, impasse, and eventually drift toward civil war. More broadly, it is tempting to invoke a change of cultural and philosophic outlook from Elizabethan optimism to Jacobean pessimism.
James I detested war and Shakespeare knew he would not write any more fire-snorting plays like Henry V. What the King loved best was a masque. The themes of the masks were abstract. Virtues and vices were personified in very sophisticated costumes and the virtues always won. It had much of morality interlude and it was an anticipation of opera. It had only one act but it was extavagant and it interest was more sensuous than intelectual. Shakespeare could have given up five-act tragedies and make a fortune out of one-act masques, but the artist got better of the man of business and he never wrote any masques. He instead continued to write his plays for the Globe, for royal command purposes and for the indoor theatre at Blackfriars.so at the globe and the Blackfriars Shakespeare worked out the climax of his career. He had everything he had ever wanted and he proceeded to present human life as a tragedy.
During the Jacobean age Shakespeare's company were at the height of their prosperity. Drama continued to flourish until the theatres at the beginning of the English Revolution in 1642. James I liked drama. He turned the Lord Chamberlain's Men into the King's Men in 1603. King thought highly of the company that bore his name His reign was glorious with dramatic achievements, though there was much sickness and corruption in the plays. To this period belong Shakespeare's greatest tragedies and they are increadibly beatiful and moving products of disillusionment. His comedies of the time All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure are not meant for laughs and are diffficult to categorize. We will no longer find the simple quality of gaiety in his plays.
As already stated this was the age both of Shakespeare and of Johnson. While Jonson's interests were social and political Shakespeare turned from social issues to the proper study of mankind. In the space of four years 1604-1608, he appears to have composed Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and perhaps some lesser works. King Lear was performed in 1605-06 and published in a quarto edition in 1608. The play displays pessimism and nihilism that make it a modern favourite. For Shakespeare the interest lay not in political events but in the personal character of the King. Othello was possibly composed while Elizabeth was still alive. The first performance was recorded in 1604. Trusting to false appearance and allowing ones reason to be guided by ones passions had been a theme of many Shakespeare's comedies. In Othello he showed that the consequences of doing so can be tragic as well. Shakespeare adapted the story from an Italian model. His principal innovation consisted in developing the character of Iago. Shakespeare was keenly interested in a villain who could successfully preserve an appearance of honesty. Macbeth exploits one of the preocupations of King James – witchcraft. To Shakespeare witchcraft was good dramatic material. Plays written between 1608-1612 – Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter s Tale, and Henry VIII – are commonly known as late plays or last plays, and sometimes with reference to their tragicomic form they are called romances.