Politics in Shakespeare

It seems to me most unlikely that anyone who knows as much about politics as Shakespeare did merely absorbed that knowledge by breathing the rather unwholesome air of Elizabethan London. He takes the student of English history through the labyrinth of legitimacy and illegitimacy, succession and usurpation. He sees and shows the struggling forces in the young Roman republic of Coriolanus and the dying Roman republic of Julius Caesar. He raises again and again the old problem of the rule of men and the rule of law. He uses political terms in the most exact sense, as in the discussions of tyranny. 1 His remarks on the role of fortune are worthy of Machiavelli. If, however, the superstition that the poet is not a thinking man persists, these few illustrations will not dispel it. The convictions with which I begin must be regarded simply as assumptions, if it makes sense to the reader to believe that a great writer is no more deliberate in his thought or careful in his presentation than are the casual utterances of transient communication. I suppose, on the contrary, that a great writer is likely to write with a certain deliberation, that he is likely to have a conscious and coherent philosophy rather than what T. S. Eliot calls a “rag‐bag philosophy”. 2 I also suppose that Shakespeare was bound neither by the conventions of the theater nor by his sources, but that his selection was thoughtful. 3 He followed Plutarch quite closely in three Roman plays, but Antony and Coriolanus become quite different people from what they were in his sources. He found in Plutarch only the most meager suggestions for Midsummer Night's Dream and Timon of Athens , which also deal with Plutarchian characters. Characters not found in his sources, like Mariana in Measure for Measure or Faulconbridge in King John , (The Bastard) to some extent give these plays their profound political significance. Shakespeare made the marriage of Lancaster and York largely responsible for the restoration of civil peace after the Wars of the Roses, while Bacon, writing in the same period, with quite different political intentions, stresses the fact that Henry VII delayed the marriage as long as possible. 4 As for the conventions of the theater, Shakespeare knew them so well that he could use them or alter them as he chose, and he showed that when he returned to the three unities in The Tempest.