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The Subversiveness of Shakespeare
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20581 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
5,044 Words |
| Author
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Sam Schoenbaum
Sam Schoenbaum is Distinguished Professor of Renaissance
Studies at the University of Maryland and director of the
university's Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies. A
past president of the Shakespeare Association of America, he
is currently the vice president of the International
Shakespeare Association. Schoenbaum's numerous publications
include Shakespeare's Lives, William Shakespeare: A
Documentary Life, and William Shakespeare: Records and Images. |
My theme in this article is two of Shakespeares most celebrated English history plays, Richard II and Henry V. Here context holds a fascination of its own and, as I see it, well merits some preliminary recounting.
The subversive potentialities of poetry, and especially of dramatic poetry, have drawn attention from at least as far back as the fourth century B.C. In The Republic, in the extraordinary coda that comprises half of Book 10, Plato banished poets from his ideal commonwealth. Dramatic poetry appeals not to the reason but to the emotions, which like the senses are subject to illusions, and has and this is the heaviest count in the indictment "a most formidable power of corrupting even men of high character." In tragedy, "the poet ministers to the satisfaction of that very part of our nature whose instinctive hunger to have its full of tears and lamentations is forcibly restrained in the case of our own misfortunes." Comedy seduces us into enjoying buffooneries that would disgust us with their ribaldry in ordinary life. Much is at stake "more than most people suppose: it is a choice between a good man or a bad; and poetry, no more than wealth or power or honours, should tempt us to be careless of justice and virtue." Thus does Socrates argue in The Republic. His reasoning carries the day with his interlocutor Glaucon, whose contribution is limited to "I cannot but agree with you," or "That is very true," or like affirmations.
Others have, over the ages, worried, if not necessarily for the same reasons, about the dangers posed to the common wealth by its poets. In Elizabethan England, Puritan enemies of the sate were more likely to summon the Bible than Plato as witness for the prosecution, and in Deut. 22:5 they found a favored text, which Calvin himself cited: "A woman shall not be clothed with mans apparel." In Shakespeare's plays at the Globe or Blackfriars, boys, of course, took female parts, and in the comedies they frequently impersonated women disguising themselves as men. Shakespeare's troupe, the Lord Chamberlains Men, which become in 1603 (as a mark of royal favor) the Kings Men, would in time have to reckon with the implacable hostility to the stage of radical Protestantism; but throughout his playwriting career fortunately for him the actors were obliged to submit their plays for review not to the city fathers, who were Puritan in disposition, but to the Master of the Revels. In him, by Privy Council direction was vested, the power to "order and reform, authorize and put down" all plays. For a stipulated feel the Master of the Revels would read a play script, deleting any matter he found offensive, and "allow" the piece by "his hand at the latter end of the said book they do play." This was,
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