SISSON-DISSERTATION-2014.Pdf

CITIES WITHOUT END: ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE AND THE LIMITS OF REPUBLICANISM by Andrew Sisson A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland August, 2014 © 2014 Andrew Sisson All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT This is a study of the responses of three major Elizabethan writers—Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare—to the classical republican account of political personality. Much recent scholarship has sought to demonstrate the relevance and availability of republican thought in England in the years before 1600. Taking those facts as established, I ask instead how and why authors apparently well positioned to take up republican concepts declined to do so, or took them up only in such a way as to emphasize their problematic character. My proposal is that the most troubling features of the republican ethic appeared when it was considered in the dimension of time. The defining feature of that ethic is the reciprocal, mutually definitive relationship between good action (“virtue”) and good structure (“balance”). We become virtuous by acting in the establishment, direction, and defense of a civic structure that, in turn, allows our action to remain virtuous by balancing it against that of our fellow citizens. The three authors who are the focus of this study represent alternative critical positions on republicanism, so defined, from the perspective of its temporal character. Sidney and Spenser each seek, in opposite ways, to loosen the definitional relationship between enduring structures and virtuous action. For Sidney, political life must be oriented to a structure more durable than one standing and falling by mere action; for Spenser political action is vitiated unless it can look beyond its attachment to the endurance of worldly structures. Alone of the three, Shakespeare accepts on its own terms the republican nexus of structure and action; what he finds in it, however, is not a prospect of permanently joining virtue and stability, balance and dynamism, but rather a vision of the tragic finitude entailed by their incommensurability. ii Advisors: Richard Halpern, Drew Daniel iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First thanks are due to Richard Halpern, my advisor: without his intellectual example and sage guidance, this piece of work would surely be a much poorer thing than it is; without his patient and unstinting support it surely would not exist at all. I am grateful, too, to Drew Daniel, whose ability to ask the right questions has improved it in innumerable ways large and small. My gracious institutional home during the years of writing has been the Expository Writing Program, in which I have had the honor of working alongside such remarkable and dedicated teachers as Pat Kain, Will Evans, Anne-Elizabeth Brodsky, and George Oppel. Much of my thinking about republicanism owes a debt to conversations with George. The Renaissance Reading Group continues to be an invaluable resource for vital, invigorating discussion. Over the years, Caroline Domenghino, Rob Higney, Jason Hoppe, Mark Noble, Chris Nygren, Ben Parris, Maggie Vinter, and Tony Wexler have been sustaining presences. My deepest gratitude of all is reserved for Meredith. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. Constitution, Constancy, and Crisis in the Old Arcadia 31 2. After Rome; Or, Why Spenser Was Not a Republican 76 3. Othello and the Unweaponed City 119 Works Cited 161 v INTRODUCTION History would be for ever unsatisfying if it did not cast a wider net for the truth; for if in one aspect it is the study of change, in another aspect it is the study of diversity. The historian like the novelist is bound to be glad that it takes all sorts of men to make a world. Like the novelist he can regret only one kind—the complete bore—and take care not to describe him with too great verisimilitude. For the rest, all is grist to his mill. His greatest limitation would be a defect of imaginative sympathy, whether it were the refusal to go out to understand a Scotsman or the refusal to put all his humanity into the effort to understand a Jesuit, a tyrant, or a poet. —Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History1 This is a study of the responses of three major Elizabethan writers—Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare—to the classical republican account of political personality. In recent years, those who have taken up this and similar topics have usually done so with the intention of showing how far minds of this period possessed the capacity and the inclination to respond affirmatively to republican ideas, whether accessed through continental sources or through older traditions of English humanism. My concern is roughly the opposite. Accepting the premise that republican concepts were in fact a readily available way of cognizing the norms of political conduct and its proper institutional framework, I ask instead how and why other minds equally well positioned to appreciate the force of those concepts declined to take them up, or took them up in such a way as to emphasize their problematic and unstable character. The answers, I propose, require restoring to view a line of analysis that once featured prominently in the work of scholars of republicanism such as Zera Fink and J.G.A. Pocock, but has since fallen into relative obscurity, according to which what distinguishes the republican position most 1 Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931; repr., New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 95-6. 1 sharply from its adjacent competitors is its notion of temporality, of political action and structure as phenomena in time.2 In its most condensed form, that analysis runs as follows. The community characterized and valorized as “the republic” is one through which the citizen becomes virtuous by participating in its establishment, direction, and defense. Because this community is neither cosmopolis nor Church militant, but a localized political organization defined by a particular formal structure, it might conceivably collapse as an effect of events in time; then again, because that structure is so ordered as to cultivate and mobilize the maximum of virtue in its support, it conceivably might not; and therefore the endurance of the institution that conditions virtue becomes at once virtue’s object and its measure. In what follows, I seek to demonstrate, first, the degree to which just such a temporal paradigm orients Sidney’s, Spenser’s, and Shakespeare’s respective understandings of what the republican ethic is really about, and, second, the seriousness and sophistication with which each in his very different way probes its external limits and internal tensions. My aim, then, is not to posit republicanism as a framework for the critical evaluation of Elizabethan institutions, as others have sought to do, but rather to reconstruct a series of Elizabethan frameworks for the critical evaluation of republicanism as a philosophy of institutions and action. I What is the classical republican account of political personality? Perhaps it will be easier to begin by saying what classical republicanism is, and then to work our way back to the 2 Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1945); Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975), discussed at greater length below. 2 notion of political personality—that is, the range of moral commitments, practices, and dispositions that define one as a political actor—implicit in it. As a first approximation to a definition, let us say that classical republicanism is a tradition, tracing itself to Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero, holding that the best kind of state is one in which the members of a citizen body rule and are ruled as political equals, bound by the rule of law and by the imperative to pursue the interests of the community as a whole, neither subject to the dominance of an external power nor dependent on the patronage of an internal faction. (I use classical here in both senses: “drawn from ancient texts” as well as “canonically typical but admitting of variations.” Throughout this study, unless otherwise noted, “republican” and “republicanism” may be taken as synonymous with “classical republican” and “classical republicanism.”) At this point it is customary to invoke the warning of John Adams that “there is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism”; Adams also said that on this point “any other man of sense and learning,” provided he “has any regard to his character,” would find himself compelled to say the same.3 Chastening as this may be, it should be noted that the context of Adams’s remark was his frustration at the variety of specific constitutional structures—“constitutional” in the Aristotelian sense of being concerned with the organization of political offices and the allocation of powers among them—that could be denominated as “republics” and hence their advocates as “republicans.”4 It would be more accurate, then, to say that republic is virtually an unintelligible word, because of the persisting ambiguity whether it refers to some more or less specific empirical phenomenon (say, government without a king, or government under the law) irrespective of the type of arguments by which it is justified, or 3 Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 8 August 1807. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 4, 5th series (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1878), 432. 4 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 1278b. 3 whether it is simply the name for any constitutional form whose appeal rests upon the normative principles characteristic of the republican tradition. Does one become a “republican” by supporting a “republic,” or does something become a “republic” because “republicans” can plausibly support it? In the tradition of classical republicanism, it is clear that definitional priority runs in the latter direction.

Load more