‘Poor naked wretches!’
Shakespeare’s politics are famously hard to decipher. In his plays he is everywhere and nowhere, leaving few traces of himself and his own voice. So the reader is never quite sure whether the views expressed are the author’s own. Take for example Ulysses’ view of the ideal society in ‘Troilus and Cressida’, where he argues for rigid social hierarchies to be respected: ‘The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre’, he believes, ‘Observe degree, priority and place’. Fair enough, this is Ulysses’ view – but does Shakespeare share it? Or take a more poignant example: in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Shylock makes a plaintive case for all to be treated equally: ‘Doth not a Jew bleed?’ he asks. But the court finds against him, strips him of his wealth and forces him to convert to Christianity. It seems in many ways a severe punishment for what is at worst a lapse of judgement – and far from equal treatment. But whose side is Shakespeare on? More generally, how far does Shakespeare reveal his own politics through his characters and plays?
One political stance that seems to emerge quite strongly from these plays, in my view, is antipathy to the mob. The crowd with a grievance is a fairly common feature in Shakespeare, but such gatherings are rarely treated with much sympathy by the playwright. Take the crowd in ‘Julius Caesar’ roused by Mark Antony and rampaging through Rome looking for a victim. They find not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet. When he points out that they’ve got the wrong Cinna, the mob refuses to be deterred by trifling details: ‘Tear him for his bad verses’, yells the Fourth Citizen. ‘Tear him, tear him!’ shouts the Third.
Similar scenes appear in ‘Henry VI’ Part Two. Here an insurrection led by the rebel Jack Cade lays hands on the Clerk of Chatham. Like Cinna, the Clerk lives by the pen, and concedes to the mob that ‘I have been so well brought up that I can write my name’. The crowd are not impressed: ‘He hath confessed: away with him! He’s a villain and a traitor’. Cade endorses their judgement: ‘hang him with his pen and ink-horn about his neck’ he shouts. In both these cases, it seems fairly clear what Shakespeare thinks of the crowd and their behaviour.
But critical as Shakespeare may be of the lowest in society, he also seems quite capable of condemning the shortcomings of the highest. In ‘Hamlet’, for example, the weak king Claudius presides over a court in which espionage and flattery have replaced openness and honesty. The results are predictable – and in the case of his adviser Polonius (stabbed through a curtain while eaves-dropping on Hamlet’s conversation with his mother) probably deserved. Further flaws are referenced in ‘The Tempest’: Prospero is deprived of his birth-right as Duke of Milan by a disloyal brother, but he admits that the fault is partly his own as he neglected his duties while pursuing his interest in magic. Claudius, like Polonius, loses his life, but Prospero survives to reclaim his throne.
These are not isolated examples of monarchical shortcomings. In ‘Macbeth’, Duncan’s kingdom is invaded by Norwegians supported by local warriors – partly, perhaps, because he has had no named successor in place. By the time he identifies his son Malcolm as his heir, Macbeth is already reflecting on his options and making plans. But Duncan remains oblivious to danger, and trusts Macbeth as he trusted Cawdor. Julius Caesar may be a very different kind of character, but he too trusts not wisely but too well, and though his wife Calpurnia warns him against going to the Capitol, he dismisses her fears – and pays for his mistake. Further examples of governmental failure litter the Histories and many other plays besides.
So it seems that Shakespeare’s view of monarchy was conditional: perhaps his ideal lies in the character of the young warrior-king Henry V. Where King John was too devious and Richard II too self-absorbed, where Henry IV was too weak and Henry VI too saintly, it does seem that Shakespeare finds plenty in Henry V to admire. He is ruthless, willing to hang old companions if they flout his principles, and even at times cunning, deceiving three nobles into calling for draconian punishments before revealing that he knows them to be traitors. But Henry also has a certain humility, and he spends the night before Agincourt disguised as an ordinary soldier, testing the temperature of his men and their mood for what is to come. An ideal of leadership, perhaps.
Though some might dispute this, I feel Shakespeare is seen at his most daring in his treatment of his female characters. The law of the land forbade women from appearing on the stage – though they were welcome to the theatre as paying customers. Female parts were played by young males, and it’s a familiar trope in Shakespeare’s plays that the female character disguises herself as a male, as if to emphasise the fluidity of gender and the absurdity of the embargo on female actors. But in investing these characters with agency – for example in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Portia is disguised as the lawyer Balthasar, and resolves the problem that has been confounding the men – Shakespeare seems to issue a still more provocative challenge to the authorities.
In other respects, Shakespeare’s politics seem fairly inclusive, even by contemporary standards. Again, one should tread carefully, but a case in point might be Rosaline in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, a woman of colour ‘born’ (according to her excitable suitor Berowne) ‘to make black fair’. But Rosaline is less than impressed: ‘That same Berowne’, she decides, ‘I’ll torture ere I go’, and she resolves to ‘make him fawn and beg and seek / And shape his service wholly to my hests [desires]’. She proves as desirable and as elusive as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and it is possible that the same woman in real life inspired both characters. But perhaps Shakespeare’s inclusive instincts are best seen in the speech he contributed to ‘Sir Thomas More’, a play apparently written by a number of playwrights in collaboration. The speech is an eloquent response to the aggressions of a racist mob caught in the act of driving out refugees from their homes: if you walked in their shoes, he tells them, ‘would you be pleased / To find a nation of such barbarous temper / [That] Would not afford you an abode on earth?’ and he denounces their behaviour as ‘mountainish inhumanity’.
It’s a controversial field, and as mentioned earlier, it’s unwise to be too dogmatic, but overall it seems to me that Shakespeare’s politics were basically individualistic, meritocratic and humanitarian. He was fascinated by the motives and emotions of the individual, regardless of gender, colour or creed. He believed that governments deserved respect for the quality of their governing, and that the poor were not to be dismissed for the depth of their poverty. There’s a powerful scene in ‘King Lear’ in which the old king finds himself on the heath in a raging storm and his thoughts turn to the ‘Poor naked wretches’ that ‘bide the pelting of this pitiless storm’. It’s a key moment in his insight into the human condition: ‘Oh I have ta’en / Too little care of this!’ he exclaims, and he tells himself to ‘Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel’. But does Shakespeare feel this too? Some would argue that he could hardly have written it if he didn’t.
