SHAKESPEARE AND MODELING POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY Christian D. Worlow, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS December 2013 APPROVED: Jacqueline Vanhoutte, Major Professor Robert Upchurch, Committee Member Kevin Curran, Committee Member David Holdeman, Chair of the Department of English Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Worlow, Christian D. Shakespeare and Modeling Political Subjectivity. Doctor of Philosophy (English), December 2013, 234 pp., 5 figures, bibliography, 237 titles. This dissertation examines the role of aesthetic activity in the pursuit of political agency in readings of several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet (1600), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Tempest (1610), the history plays of the second tetralogy (1595-9), Julius Caesar (1599), and Coriolanus (1605). I demonstrate how Shakespeare models political subjectivity—the capacity for individuals to participate meaningfully in the political realm—as necessitating active aesthetic agency. This aesthetic agency entails the fashioning of artistically conceived public personae that potential political subjects enact in the public sphere and the critical engagement of the aesthetic and political discourses of the subjects’ culture in a self- reflective and appropriative manner. Furthermore, these subjects should be wary auditors of the texts and personae they encounter within the public sphere in order to avoid internalizing constraining ideologies that reify their identities into forms less conducive to the pursuit of liberty and social mobility. Early modern audiences could discover several models for doing so in Shakespeare’s works. For example, Hamlet posits a model of Machiavellian theatricality that masks the Prince's interiority as he resists the biopolitical force and disciplinary discourses of Claudius's Denmark. Julius Caesar and Coriolanus advance a model of citizenship through the plays’ nameless plebeians in which rhetoric offers the means to participate in Rome’s political culture, and Shakespeare’s England for audiences, while authorities manipulate citizen opinion by molding the popularity of public figures. Public, artistic ability affords potential political subjects ways of not only framing their participation in their culture but also ways of conceiving of their identities and relationships to society that may defy normative notions of membership in the community. Copyright 2013 by Christian D. Worlow ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my thanks to the following persons and institutions: Ashley Brookner Bender Dana Hughes Donald Dalton J. Chance Peck Pearce Janice Barlow-Collier Jennifer Pacenza Jessica Oxendine Justin Jones Mark Preston Richardson Mark Sweeney Stephen Andrews The British Museum Thomas R. Preston iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 2. HAMLET AND SHAKESPEAREAN POTENTIALITY .................................... 20 Machiavelli, Control, and Freedom .................................................................................. 26 Choosing Resistance and Rejecting Impotentiality in “To Be or not to Be” .................... 43 Towards a Shakespearean Theory of Potentiality ............................................................. 55 CHAPTER 3. MAGIC, AESTHETICS, AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION .......................... 59 John Dee, Political Aspiration, and the Aesthetics of the Occult ..................................... 65 Marlowe, Entertainment, and the Failure of Imagination ................................................. 76 Shakespeare and the Triumph of Aesthetics in Politics .................................................... 88 CHAPTER 4. POLITICAL STORYTELLING IN THE HENRIAD......................................... 106 Aristocratic and Normative Narratives in the Henriad ................................................... 111 Falstaff and the Commoners as Models for Political Storytelling .................................. 131 CHAPTER 5. A MIRROR FOR CITIZENS IN CORIOLANUS AND JULIUS CAESAR ....... 160 Making a Counterpublic in the Theater .......................................................................... 166 Plebeian Voices and Rhetoric ......................................................................................... 174 Popularity and Political Public Making .......................................................................... 198 CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION................................................................................................... 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 221 iv LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: John Dee’s Sigillum Dei (large wax seal) ..................................................................... 69 Figure 2: John Dee’s hieroglyphic monad as found in this detail of the title page of Propaedeumata Aphoristica (London, 1558), courtesy of Early English Books Online.............. 70 Figure 3: “The Holy Table” with its occult characters, in John Dee, A True & Faithful Relation, ed. Meric Casaubon (London, 1659), courtesy of Early English Books Online ........................... 73 Figure 4: Dee’s map of the supernatural universe, A True & Faithful Relation, courtesy of Early English Books Online. ................................................................................................................... 80 Figure 5: Design of an astrological lamin, in A True & Faithful Relation, courtesy of Early English Books Online. ................................................................................................................... 81 v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Shakespeare offers a catalogue of possible models for political participation in the public sphere. Works like Hamlet (1600), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Tempest (1610), the Henriad (1595-9), Julius Caesar (1599), and Coriolanus (1605) stage several approaches to political action that belie Shakespeare’s traditional reputation as an apolitical author, despite his apparent reticence to endanger his social position. Audiences have long recognized something subversive and empowering in his plays. Most famously, perhaps, the Earl of Essex and his supporters commissioned a performance of Richard II (1595) on the eve of their rebellion, presumably because Bolingbroke offered a model for claiming political authority from the monarch.1 In staging Richard’s deposition, Shakespeare helps audiences imagine how depositions might occur, how such events are possible, and how people might accomplish them. The play’s narrative offers ways of imagining one’s relationship to a sovereign distinct from the normative, conservative views advocated during Elizabeth I’s reign, or so the rebels may have hoped. Essex’s supporters discovered a possible model for political subjectivity—the capacity for persons to act within the public sphere in pursuit of their political will—in Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke and adapted this model to their ends. While this framework was highly radical, concerned with political regime change, the models Shakespeare offers are not limited to this kind of extreme activity. 1 For more on the Essex rebellion and Shakespeare, see G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 469-73; R. Morgan Griffin, “The Critical History of Richard II,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Richard II, ed. Kirby Farrell (New York: G. K. Hall, 1999), 23-40; Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 128-32; and Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 27. 1 My purpose in this dissertation is to examine several possible models of political subjectivity in a selection of Shakespeare’s works to show how they afford subjects ways of conceiving alternatives to existing models of citizenship and political participation. The ability to adapt to and to reframe one’s symbolic place in the social order demands an awareness of aesthetics and an ability to use art and artifice within the public sphere. Political power is typically symbolic in nature and oftentimes a specific application of aesthetic principles. While Shakespeare himself offers no concrete declaration of a political philosophy, his works can inspire audiences towards political acts by modeling how those kinds of action often originate from aesthetic modes. In doing so, Shakespeare fashions various ways persons can negotiate the divide between private and public life. Different chapters focus on Shakespeare’s treatment of the biopolitics and political radicalism of Hamlet, the use of scopic desire and magic in his A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, storytelling as political enterprise in the Henriad, and the representation of rhetoric and popularity in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. Shakespeare does not offer these models unambiguously, let alone explicitly, for he demonstrates a persistent concern for the perils that this subjectivity can create for both the state and the individual. Political