| Summary: | <p>Did Shakespeare argue on ‘both sides’ of questions and stand aloof from political debates? Attempts to locate political sympathies and inclinations have elicited complaints about reducing the plays to their politics; as Jason Scott-Warren cautioned, ‘the attempt to introduce philosophical abstractions’ threatens to ‘extinguish the energies of theatrical narrative’. This thesis explores how Shakespeare orchestrated a diversity of voices to create suggestive patterns of political argument, which are individually unobtrusive but develop an undeniable collective force. Instead of seeking to extract coherent doctrines from the plays, this thesis follows the clusters of proverbs, idioms, key terms, and maxims regularly associated with a wide range of political and social arguments. The modest scale of these discrete elements allowed significant ambiguities: whenever a developing pattern threatened to impose an unwelcome ideological closure, Shakespeare simply disengaged or snagged the thread.</p>
<p>A close reading of Shakespeare’s <em>Coriolanus</em> (c. 1608) offers a case study by charting its layered intersections of early modern political vocabularies. The chapters begin with the play’s unprecedented concentration of the languages of ‘deserving’ and ‘worth’; Shakespeare meticulously structures contests between different paradigms of ‘deserving’ (meritocratic, theological, institutional) throughout <em>Coriolanus</em>. Successive chapters variously explore strands of neo-Stoic, Aristotelian, and Machiavellian thought and the palpable frictions between them, which register in the dramatic texture. These conflicts rapidly implicate the central terms of early modern political thought (e.g., merit, custom, consent, policy, prerogative, justice, law, honour, nobility, Machiavellian ‘dissimulation’, etc.). The unfolding authorial patterns become reliable enough to invite important deductions about some major political questions, from the role of distributive justice in the commonwealth to the challenge of <em>raison d’état</em>, which was filtering into England through figures such as Montaigne, Lipsius, and Machiavelli. Rather than identifying linear ‘influence’ and ‘sources’ or a passive recycling of the ‘sides’ of historical debates, this analysis reveals how the play dexterously interweaves tropes and axioms from across the spectrum of political argument. Ultimately, this thesis presents not just a fresh interpretation of <em>Coriolanus</em>, but also a method for reading early modern drama in the light of a wide array of political and legal discourses, whilst preserving and elucidating ‘the energies of theatrical narrative’ rather than extinguishing them.</p>
|
|---|