SOURCE: Tennenhouse, Leonard. “Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII.” In Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, pp. 109-28. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

[In this essay, Tennenhouse traces changes in Shakespeare's plays concurrent with the movement from Elizabethan to Jacobean politics.]

I

For over fifty years traditional literary criticism has read Shakespeare's history plays in one of three ways: as overt political texts that can be interpreted by reference to the historical source material; as dramatic entertainments to be compared aesthetically with examples from the more familiar genres of comedy, tragedy or romance; or as part of a process of personal development which accompanied his youthful comedies and prepared him for the grand metaphysical tragedies and the mature vision of his lyrical romances.¹ Each of these positions testifies to a belief in the distinction between literature and politics and so serves the interests of modern society by imposing this belief on the past. Yet none of these can begin to explain why Shakespeare—whether alone or in collaboration—could not write a good chronicle history play at the close of his career.²

What if, on the other hand, we were to show that a play such as Henry VIII uses non-dramatic material much more the way such material was used in dramatic romance and tragicomedy than as it was used in the chronicle histories of the 1590s? And what if the histories written under Elizabeth represented political problems and resolved them in terms resembling the romantic comedies and the Petrarchan lyrics of the same period? Would we not have to rethink our notion of artistic genre, if these Elizabethan and Jacobean literary forms were found to resemble contemporaneous strategies of political argumentation more than they resembled each other? This, even when the texts compared were written by the same author over the length of his career? Were such a relationship among various forms of Renaissance writing discovered, it would indicate that the opposition between a literary use of language and a political use of the same linguistic materials is largely a modern invention. We would have to conclude that what we now call Renaissance literature displayed its politics as it idealised or demystified specific forms of power, that such a display rather than a work's transcendence or referentiality, was what made it aesthetically successful.

During the Tudor and Stuart periods the monarchy confronted different forms of political opposition over which it had to display authority by means of quite different strategies. We cannot describe this change in the exercise and representation of power as a matter of choice or whimsy on the part of the individual occupying the throne, as if James simply decided to modify Elizabeth's most characteristic policies. With the ascension of James we are not entering new semiotic territory even though there appears to be a widespread attempt on the part of the literate classes to revise the problematics of power. While the problems confronting the monarchy were taking on a recognisably modern form, James's own practice of political authority was clearly archaic in comparison with Elizabeth's. Given the abrupt shift in the strategies necessary for maintaining monarchical power between the Reformation and the Interregnum, we cannot expect the literature which idealised that power to develop according to either its own logic or that of an individual author. Quite the contrary: as the inherited prerogatives of the monarch were challenged, first by a contending faction within the aristocracy, but then later by dissenting voices outside the oligarchy, literature had to employ radically discontinuous political strategies for idealising political authority. Indeed, we find a whole set of literary genres fell out of favour with the accession of James I and a new set provided the appropriate means of setting oneself in proximity to political power. Along with such forms as romantic comedy, Petrarchan poetry and prose romance, the chronicle history play enjoyed a period of unprecedented popularity during the 1590s. And, like so many other literary forms that had been popular in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, chronicle history plays with few exceptions simply ceased to be written after 1599, the year Henry V was produced. The most notable exception to this widespread shift in literary tastes was, of course, Henry VIII.

II

To understand how political conditions made history plays virtually unwritable, one might consider exactly what the history play shared with romantic comedy and Petrarchan poetry that enabled these genres to address the interests of the same audience successfully and then hasten into obsolescence together. For all their differences, romantic comedy and chronicle history use the same rhetorical strategy to produce political order out of sexual and political relations respectively. That is, they transform patriarchal hierarchies into a state of disorder for the purpose of creating two bases for authority, and thus two competing hierarchies of power, which only the monarch can hold together in harmonious discord. To this end, Shakespeare uses his drama to authorise political authority, and political authority as he represents it, in turn authorises art.

If we take the example of Midsummer Night's Dream, a play surely characteristic of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, we can see that the problem which authority has to master is a problem with authority itself, authority grown archaic. At the outset, the law seems to serve only the will of the father. A comedic resolution obviously requires either the independence of the law or the generosity of the father. It requires, in other words, a more inclusive order. Given that romantic comedy invariably poses this problem, only one form of resolution will do, the formation of an authority figure who overrules the existing law of the father. Oberon represents the traditional alternative to patriarchal law. He is the figure of carnival, and the introduction of this principle into the play triggers a series of inversions.³ As if Titania's playing the role of an unruly woman were not enough to tell what this is all about, Puck reproduces similar forms of inversion among the Athenians—both lovers and mechanicals—who have wandered into the woods.⁴ Such inversions—of gender, age, status, even of species—violate all the categories organising Elizabethan reality itself. This Renaissance nightmare can occur precisely because patriarchal law is initially so closely identified with political authority that to violate the will of the father is to return to what Hobbes would later represent as the horrors of a state of nature.

The figures of festival operate to break down the hierarchical distinctions organising Elizabethan society, only—in the end—to be taken within the social order where they authorise a new form of political authority.⁵ This mutually transforming exchange places disorder within the framework of festival and displaces it on to art, as illustrated by ‘the story of the night told o'er’, Bottom's ‘dream’, as well as the mechanicals' production of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. When Theseus and his party come upon the sleeping couples lying intermingled on the ground, the Duke surmises, ‘No doubt they rose up early to observe / The rite of May …’ (IV.i.132-3).⁶ By identifying the lovers as revellers, Theseus does more than decriminalise their transgression of the law; he identifies their state of disarray with the order of art. ‘I know you two for rival enemies,’ he says to the young men, ‘How came this gentle concord in the world … ?’ (IV.i.142-3). At the same time, however, the inclusion of filial disobedience within a field of permissible illegalities, changes the construction of political authority. What had been a violation of the father's law, in other words, thus becomes a scene of harmony. Indeed, when Egeus presses Theseus to punish the youthful offenders, the Duke overrules the father.

But if Theseus authorises certain inversions of power relations by situating them within the framework of festival and art, then it is also true that the introduction of disorder into the play ultimately authorises political authority. Once Theseus includes the rites of May within the domain of the permissible, the revellers in turn fall on their knees before him. Thus brought together, revellers and Duke can comprise a harmonious political body where the juridical power of the monarch exists independently from that of the patriarch. When Theseus overrules the angry father, juridical power can no longer be identified with patriarchal power. A new set of political conditions appears where competing bases for authority are held in equipoise by the Duke. That is, his ideal role is an improvement, in terms of the play, over the punitive power he threatened to exercise at its opening. The entire last act of the play consequently theorises the process of inversion whereby art and politics end up in this mutually authorising relationship. This process is then reproduced on the stage in the form of an Elizabethan tragedy which has been converted into comedy as rude mechanicals play a range of parts from those of noble lovers to the creatures and objects of the natural world.

The popularity of such inversions becomes clear when we see how Elizabeth herself used various forms of authority against one another. It is not enough to say that the transfiguration of authority in romantic comedy resembles Elizabeth's actual style of exercising power. To be sure, she used her power as a patron to affect the power of the ruling families and thus set economically-based political authority in opposition to that based on blood. Yet this strategy was more than personal ingenuity on her part, for her characteristic strategies for expressing power were just as dependent upon the political conditions of the time as the form of a comedy such as Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Acts of Parliament of 1536 and 1543 had given Henry VIII the power to determine succession. His will not only specified that the crown would pass to Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth in that order, it also specified that if his children should die without issue, the crown would pass to his younger sister's children in the Suffolk line and not to her older sister's children in the superior hereditary Stuart line.⁷ Henry thus treated the crown as property, governed by the same common-law rules against alien inheritance as any other piece of English property. By exploiting his legal prerogative to authorise this line of descent, Henry used the civil authority of a property owner to define the monarchy in such terms. Thus he set the principle of inheritance against that of primogeniture which would be invoked later by supporters of Mary Queen of Scots and her line. During Elizabeth's reign both Catholic and Stuart spokesmen insisted on the traditional view of the monarch as two bodies, a body natural and a body mystical, in the same body.⁸ Theirs was a monolithic view of power that saw the body politic as the corporate body of the crown in perpetuity. The mystical body purged the body natural of attainder; it joined the king with his royal predecessors so that they were one and the same corporate person; and it was joined to the king, they argued, like an affair of the heart in a marital pre-contract of the blood royal.

A similar logic operates in Midsummer Night's Dream as the law and the father temporarily come into contradiction in the last act of the play. In this instance, however, the splitting of one form of power into two competing voices is hardly the dramatic problem. It is rather the comedic resolution to a problem created when authority assumed an absolute and monolithic form. Since Elizabeth's ascendancy could be justified according to her father's will and primogeniture both, her very person temporarily reconciled the competing viewpoints formulated during the debates concerning her succession. Because these arguments had spoken for competing interest groups during the succession debates, however, the monarch could no longer be understood as the mediatory figure of an earlier tradition, for such a figure maintained the distinction between inheriting the crown and inheriting property as it drew authority from blood and bestowed that authority upon the law. Elizabeth was a paradox, in other words, by virtue of the contradictory definitions of monarchal authority her succession had occasioned. Correspondingly to produce the comic resolution of dramatic conflict one had to produce a political contradiction such as that which is created between Theseus and Egeus. Indeed, in turning from drama to courtly poetry, we find the same strategy for idealising power obtains as the patron is endowed with the attributes of the reluctant lover. The puns characterising the Petrarchan mode of poetry effectively create a gulf between the power of property (in the form of economic favours) and that of blood (through marriage into the aristocracy), even as the two modes for representing power are brought together in one figure of speech. It is little wonder that Petrarchan poetry came into favour at the very time when power seemed to be exercised through the giving or the withholding of love in the form of economic favours.⁹ This poetry translated patronage relationships into sexual terms only to relegate such an ideal form of gratification to the status of pure fantasy. It is as if figures of contradiction were necessary for imagining one's relation to political authority. Such figures provided a form of self-definition for the prospective client that was inherently at odds with that figure of authority with whom the client sought to identify.

Her use of her sexuality—which includes her refusal to marry—indicates the degree to which Elizabeth maintained her political identity as the source of economic benefits, the patron of patrons, over and above that which descended upon her as legitimate bearer of blood. Her first two Parliaments frequently pressed her to resolve the succession question either by marrying and having issue or by naming her successor, but she refused to do either. It better served her interests to maintain a situation which frustrated all competing factions and alienated none of them. After 1571 the debate moved from Parliament to the Inns of Court and into polemical tracts as well where it split predictably along religious and nationalist lines.¹⁰ The dominant Protestant and English view tended to support the legality of Henry's will and so emphasised the contractual nature of the kingship, in contrast with Catholic and with Scottish views which continued to mystify the crown. When in her last hours Elizabeth finally named her successor, James VI of Scotland seemed the obvious choice particularly since he had been reared a Protestant. By naming her successor, the Queen acted in accordance with a view of the crown as an object of property, which was therefore dispensed according to the will of its owner. By naming James rather than an English claimant, however, she also acted according to the law of primogeniture.

III

Jonson's masque of Oberon (1611) written for the investiture of Henry as Prince of Wales, provides a useful comparison between the Elizabethan and Jacobean strategies for idealising political authority. Jonson evidently found it advantageous to revise the Elizabethan figure of misrule and thus the artistic authority associated with him. One purpose of the masque was the undoing of the opposition between the carnivalesque and the law of the father, an opposition, as we have seen, upon which such a comedy as Midsummer Night's Dream depends for its comic resolution. Various forms of carnival, particularly those associated with mayday festivities, became increasingly controversial during Elizabeth's reign. These were evidently viewed as recalcitrant practices that persisted despite the Reformation and, as such, were considered to be sacrilegious by certain radical Protestant factions. These reformers bolstered their theological arguments with economic and political ones, claiming that festival pastimes and maygames interrupted the work week, distracted apprentices, interfered with economic productivity, and mocked established forms of order. Certainly, Elizabeth's government felt some threat in the figures of inversion and boundary dissolution, and yet the government's response was mixed. On the one hand, as Stallybrass has argued, when Elizabeth's accession day, 17 November, became a national holiday it was clearly an attempt on the part of the State ‘to harness and appropriate the forces of misrule’.¹¹ On the other hand, Elizabeth was careful not to arouse opposition to the central administration either by actively supporting traditional festival celebrations or by enforcing rules that would suppress them. Also her government frustrated attempts to make into law the practice of sabbatarianism despite the growing support this movement enjoyed in the industrial areas and urban centres.¹² These very same towns were also enacting legislation against theatrical performances and entertainments, and it is this legislation that reveals the political motivation most germane to my project.

Margot Heinemann summarises the letters from the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London to the Privy Council in 1597 listing their objections to the theatre. Not only did they condemn plays for drawing people away from sermons on Sunday, she notes, but the city fathers also felt such entertainments were a source of social disruption: ‘they encouraged apprentices to absent themselves from work … they caused traffic jams and spread infection in time of plague: and they gave an opportunity for the unemployed and idle to meet in riotous assemblies. Indeed, unruly apprentices and servants had admitted that they foregathered at stage plays to organize their “mutinous attempts”, “being also the ordinary places for masterless men to come together”.’¹³ Yet even as they condemned the popular theatre, ‘the Aldermen themselves freely staged shows, plays, and masques privately in their own houses. They lavished thousands of pounds on Lord Mayors' pageants to impress Londoners with the wealth and glory of their city, and to preach, through allegorical tableaux, the virtues of industry and thrift’ (p. 31). It was not theatre per se that disturbed the town fathers. What was at stake was not the nature of the performance, not a moral issue, but a political one: who had control of the means for representing power. Only those performances could be authorised in London which in turn authorised the governing powers of that city.

In contrast to Elizabeth, James made it a matter of royal policy not only to seek control of the theatre but also to advocate the celebration of festivals and the practice of various maytime sports. In the Basilikon Doron he approves of the practices of the traditional festivities, and in the infamous Book of Sports (1618) he argues that participating in sports and festivities did more than improve the health of the labouring poor and make them fit for the army. It actually prevented the populace from engaging in subversive political activities. In declaring his position openly, he necessarily defined his authority in opposition to radical Protestantism where Elizabeth had successfully avoided such confrontation. Maygames and misrule thus became a highly charged political language and ‘… to advocate such pastimes became tantamount to a declaration of loyalty to the king and conservative Anglicanism …’.¹⁴

What more effective way, then, of revising the figures of Elizabethan literature than using revels to represent the investiture of the heir to the English throne? What better way to dramatise the new concept of political power than by using Oberon to portray the future monarch of England and thus to symbolise a rebirth of the powers of blood? In this masque he thus inhabits a palace along with the noblest knights of history now ‘Quickened with a second birth’.¹⁵ As a figure for the prince, Oberon's costume incorporates the signs of Roman, Arthurian, and Jacobean nobility, and two white bears draw his chariot toward the centre of power to the accompaniment, significantly, of this song:¹⁶

Melt earth to sea, sea flow to air,
          And air fly into fire,
Whilst we in tunes to Arthur's chair
          Bear Oberon's desire,
          Than which there nothing can be higher
Save James, to whom it flies:
But he the wonder is of tongues of ears, of eyes.

(ll. 220-6)

As the father of Prince Henry, James is the origin of his son's power. In the guise of Oberon the son acknowledges the principle of genealogy as he places all the powers traditionally opposing the patriarch—those of youth, nature, and the tradition of romance—in the king's service.¹⁷ Thus we learn Oberon and his knights pay homage to James, ‘To whose sole power and magic they do give / The honour of their being …’ (ll. 49-50). Moreover the costume which Inigo Jones designed for the faery king in this masque alludes to the three monarchies James claimed to unite within himself. It was as if the masque brought all the traditional signs of authority under the governance of the contemporary monarch for the sole purpose of identifying that monarch as an historically earlier, more monolithic, and mythical form of political authority.

It was particularly appropriate for the royal masque to present the monarch in the grandly hierarchical terms we find in Oberon, furthermore, for throughout the previous year the king had been locked in debate with Parliament over precisely this issue of whether there were two competing basis for political power or, indeed, only one. The year before Jonson's Oberon was produced at Court, the king and Parliament were negotiating the Great Contract.¹⁸ This proposal would have had the crown give up certain traditional sources of income in exchange for a large subsidy and a yearly grant of money. After six weeks of debate it was clear that James's use of royal prerogatives, his notion of an absolute monarchy, and his notorious liberality all contributed to Parliament's unwillingness to accept Cecil's proposals on behalf of the king. Parliament's refusal to co-operate readily in relieving his debts infuriated James, making him less willing to compromise on crucial issues. In his speech to Parliament on 21 March 1610 James tried to force Parliament into helping him solve his financial dilemma by redefining their refusal to do so as a violation of divine law. He would have the political hierarchy understood in terms of the same mystical notion of patriarchy that shapes Jonson's Oberon, for his speech identifies the monarch's power with that of God and with that of the father: ‘The State of MONARCHIE is the supremest vpon earth: For Kings are not only GODS Lieutenants vpon earth, and sit vpon GODS throne, but euen by GOD himselfe they are called GODS … In the Scriptures Kings are called GODS, and their power after a certaine relation compared to the Diuine power. Kings are also compared to Fathers of families: for a King is trewly Parens Patriae …’.¹⁹ The monolithic figure of State power is not simply how authors imagined the king wanted his authority represented; these are the very terms in which the king imagined political power.²⁰ His logic (‘but’, ‘for’) is overwhelmed by his use of repetition, which at first allegorically links secular power with divine power but ultimately makes ‘King’, ‘God’, and ‘father’ into interchangeable concepts. James elaborated these points by drawing further analogies between the king's power and God's: like God and like the father (according to the law of nature), kings have the power to raise up, to reward, to make low and to punish. The king's authority in this system of belief is not only a metaphysical fact (he is called God) but a social fact (he is a father), as well as a fact of nature (he is the descendent of kings). Such political rhetoric allows for no legitimate form of authority other than his.

Establishing this view of monarchical authority would certainly serve James's interests in dealing with Parliament, for in the three previous sessions the king's finances had been the major point of contention. When James came to the throne he inherited a sizeable debt from Elizabeth, a soaring inflation rate, diminished land capital of the crown, and decreasing supplies of revenue to meet the rapidly increasing costs of government. The economy had become quite complex, and the system of patronage which managed the crown's sources of income was grossly inefficient. To hear many in Parliament tell of it, however, James's most serious liability was his extravagance. To maintain his household, which performed many government functions, cost more that double Elizabeth's expenses during her last years. Worse still, the grants of honours and annuities he made were five times those of the late Queen.²¹ While Parliament was unwilling to turn against the very power that authorised it to sit, its relations with the monarch took a turn under James that would eventually make his preferred model of authority into a figure of misrule. When, by the end of the year 1610, the king had refused to give up his feudal rights of wardship and purveyance, fearing his exercise of hereditary authority would become subject to the control of Parliament, Parliament refused to yield the king £600,000 in subsidy and the yearly grant of £200,000, fearing in turn that the king would grow financially independent of Parliament and never feel pressed to call them to sit, or worse, that he might grow still more extravagant. The debates over the Great Contract reached a stalemate as parliament granted James a small subsidy of £100,006, and James dismissed Parliament, preferring to rely chiefly on his hereditary prerogatives for financing both the royal household and the government.

As he attempted to suppress the contradictions Elizabeth incorporated within her very person and acted out through political policies, however, James seems to have reawakened the conceptual dualism informing the succession debate and, what is more, to have shot this dualism through with new political meaning. James's first year and a half as King of England saw numerous complaints about the inefficiency of his bureaucracy and his misuse of what remained of feudal sources of revenue.²² Throughout his first parliament there were serious disagreements over who constituted the law, James claiming for himself the power to be the lex loquens while the Commons countered that he could only be the law speaking with the aid of a sitting Parliament.²³ To justify their rejection of the king's requests, ironically enough, Parliament did not contest the hereditary prerogatives of the king. Indeed, they accepted those prerogatives as the basis of their own authority but then claimed for Parliament a separate history of rights and privileges which arose with—but often contested—that of the king. While they granted that James was the source of authority, even their own, and thus had a right to request funds of them, Parliament did in fact distinguish those of his needs which were needs of the political body from those which were illicit forms of display, thus driving a wedge in the figurative logic of a tradition that identified the display of wealth and title with the proper exercise of aristocratic authority. Speaking for many in Parliament, Sir Henry Neville told the king, ‘Where your Majesty's expense groweth by Commonwealth, we are bound to maintain it, otherwise not’.²⁴ To challenge the mystical identification of the political body with the inherited power of blood was to pave the way, semiotically, for the day when, as Jacques Donzelot puts it, ‘the state was no longer the end of production, but its means: it was the responsibility of the state to govern social relations, in such a manner as to intensify this production to a maximum by restricting consumption’.²⁵

At least until the Interregnum England could hardly see extravagant displays of State authority as a form of misrule; the traditional opposition between licit and illicit displays of power held. But as the State came to be seen more as the means than as the end of production, what had been the legitimate—if not primary—function of the monarch, his extravagant displays of State authority, would be equated with misrule. Throughout the Renaissance, of course, this counter-argument had a voice. The anti-theatrical propaganda and the sabbatarian tracts and sermons commonly represented the figures of carnival as something that corrupted the social order from within. The government's position, on the other hand, seems to have been that such transgressions of civil and religious law were ultimately the less threatening for being incorporated in the official rituals, pageants, and games of the State.²⁶ A conflation of opposing political figures—the display of legitimate power and the illicit practices of popular festival—would eventually become the libertine figure of the ancien régime early on in the process of making a modern society, the process which Williams so aptly named ‘the long revolution’.²⁷ As Harry Payne has convincingly demonstrated, the formulation of this libertine figure succeeded in identifying the qualities of ‘blood, magic, belief, and tradition’, all signs of aristocratic privilege, with the gross sensuality of the populace, thus authorising a new aristocracy of fiscally responsible, rational intellectuals as the proper agents of moral reform.²⁸

IV

Though they may seem to have little to do with politics, such forms as Petrarchan lyrics or romantic comedy are openly and expressly political in the strategies by which they idealise State authority. We must assume the chronicle history play can hardly be less so. But what makes it difficult to perceive these strategies operating in the material of chronicle history is not quite the same as the obstacle we confront in attempting to historicise romantic comedy. Shakespeare's use of political rather than psycho-sexual subject matter in his history plays entices many to make that material allude to contemporary events, which is to prevent us from seeing his work as a symbolic activity of a piece with and giving shape to those events. In fact, it is fair to say that the form of the history play is so completely that of the Elizabethan controversies, that the materials of chronicle history cannot be so assembled once the official strategies for mastering those controversies have changed.

In certain respects, Henry V can be called a piece of political hagiography. Henry discovers domestic conspirators as if by omniscience and punishes them. He secures his borders against Scottish invaders, unifies the dispirited and heterogeneous body under his authority, and wins the battle of Agincourt, thus taking control of territory which had been claimed by French inheritance law and contested by English laws of succession. The hagiographical theme of this play understands power as the inevitable unfolding of order. But to idealise political authority Shakespeare evidently found it necessary to catch this theme up in a contrary one.

Here history is nothing else but the history of forms of disorder, over which Henry can temporarily triumph because he alone embodies the contradictions that can bring disruption into the service of the State and make a discontinuous political process appear as a coherent moment. Thus the Epilogue continues on past a comedic resolution to remind the Elizabethan audience that the very marriage which secured the peace with France and established the line of succession eventually led to the War of the Roses:

Henry the Sixt, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France, and made his England bleed …

(ll. 9-12)

Providence temporarily comes under the control of the monarch. Working against political order, however, it provides a tide that one can ride into power but against which one must struggle vainly in order to remain there. This seems to be the point of Richard III's rise, of Henry Richmond's victory over Richard, of Bolingbroke's successful challenge to Richard II, but particularly of Hal's defeat of Hotspur and his subsequent victory as king over the French. In each case, State authority does not descend directly through blood. Rather, it pursues a disrupted and discontinuous course through history, arising out of conflicts within the reigning oligarchy as to which bloodline shall legitimately rule. Together these chronicle history plays demonstrate, then, that authority goes to that contender who can seize hold of the symbols and signs legitimising authority and wrest them from his rivals, thus making them serve his own interests. What else is accomplished, however perversely, by Richard III's incarceration of the young princes? Or Bolingbroke's public ceremony in which Richard is forced to hand over the crown? And surely Hal's self-coronation, pre-emptive though it may be, dramatises the same principle, that power is an inversion of legitimate authority which gains possession, as such, of the means of self-legitimisation.

Such a rhetorical strategy guarantees that figures of carnival will play a particularly instrumental role in the idealising process that proves so crucial in legitimising the State. It cannot be accidental that the Henriad, which produces Shakespeare's most accomplished Elizabethan monarch, should also produce his most memorable figure of misrule. The complete king was by birth entitled to the throne, but a youth misspent in low-life activities, at the same time, lends him the demonic features of the contender, a potential regicide, whose power has yet to be legitimised. The various conflicts comprising Henry IV, Parts I and II, by virtue of resembling the vicissitudes of fate, in actuality cohere as a single strategy of idealisation. In opposition to legitimate authority, Hal takes on a populist energy. At the same time, the law of the father seems to have atrophied and grown rigid to the degree that it can be inverted by the likes of Falstaff, whose abuses of legitimate authority, like those of Oberon, take on a menacing quality when unconstrained by the forest glade or tavern. Thus Shakespeare uses the figures of carnival to represent a source of power which poses a contradiction to that power inhering in genealogy. However, the various confrontations between licit and illicit authority in the Henriad more firmly draw the distinction between aristocracy and populace even as they overturn this primary categorical distinction. The figures of carnival ultimately authorise the State as the State appears to take on the vigour of festival. We see this, for example, in Vernon's account of Hal and his men preparing to do battle with Hotspur:

Glittering in golden coats like images,
As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer;
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.

(IV.i.100-3)

The same process transfers what is weak and corrupt on to the tavern folk where it is contained and finally driven even from that debased world. Legitimate order can come into being only through disruption according to this principle, and it can maintain itself only through discontinuous and self-contradictory policies.

If Henry V appears to be Shakespeare's ultimate monarch, it is because in this king historical sources provided the author with material that met the Elizabethan conditions for idealisation. Yet these semiotic conditions for producing the ideal political figure are precisely what make Henry V so resistant to modern criticism's attempts at recuperating him for a post-Enlightenment humanism. The king's identity coalesces and his power intensifies as he unifies those territories that are his by hereditary law under his authority. But as this occurs, one finds that the figure of the monarch breaks apart and disappears into many different roles and dialects. He uses the strategies of disguise and inversion to occupy a range of positions from humble soldier to courtly lover and several in between. As a consequence, the king is virtually everywhere. He occupies the centre of every theatre of social action and in this way constitutes a State that to modern readers appears to have no centre at all, neither a continuous political policy nor an internally coherent self. To make sense to an Elizabethan audience, we must therefore assume, the king's body did not have to behave as if it were that of the modern individual in either his self-enclosed or his abstract totalising form. That body had to behave, semiotically speaking, as if blood had conspired with the disruptive operations of Providence to produce it. In becoming so many functions and dialects of a single political body, he makes the various social groups he thus contains lose their autonomy but he gives them their ideal identity. In other words, he instates a political hierarchy by practising forms of inversion.

In Henry VIII, on the other hand, Shakespeare uses quite different means to idealise political authority. This work of the mature playwright suppresses the discontinuities and contradictions which give Elizabethan history plays, as well as the monarchs which came to dominance in them, their distinctive form. Shakespeare's belated history play consequently resembles more the dramatic romances and masques that come into favour under James than it does the chronicle history play.²⁹ Operating in violation of the very strategy he so perfectly realised right through the end of the Epilogue of Henry V, Shakespeare makes genealogy one and the same thing as Providence in Henry VIII. The events which constitute this model of history are those which reproduce Henry VIII and thus perpetuate the power of blood; Henry's divorce from Katherine, for example, and the union with Anne from which Elizabeth is subsequently born. Operating under this imperative, the playwright has no cause to engender sympathy for Katherine or endow his monarch with it. He may in fact equate the unproductive mate with Wolsey and Buckingham—as being opposed to legitimate political authority—because they obstruct genealogy. Buckingham represents a contending line of succession and Wolsey's populist energy serves only his own ambitions. These, we must remember, were the very figures that lent the Elizabethan hero power and enabled him to seize the throne. As these figures came to define the forces conspiring against the Tudor and Stuart lines, Shakespeare rather obviously used them to revise the politics of his Elizabethan plays.

Shakespeare's Jacobean strategy for idealising power is no less tautological than the Elizabethan strategy it effectively revises. It should be noted that, unlike the political heroes of an earlier stage, Henry VIII does not have to overpower those who possess the symbols of authority in order to make his line legitimate. Quite the contrary: in possessing the blood, his body is in fact a living icon in relation to which all other signs and symbols acquire meaning and value. This is acknowledged when the king removes his mask after he and his revellers, disguised as shepherds and dressed in gold costumes, intrude upon Wolsey's banquet. Not only is Henry's presence felt by Wolsey and his guests before the king removes his mask to appear in his own guise, but once he does reveal himself the festivities reorganise around him. Wolsey simply cedes his position to one ‘More worthy this place than myself, to whom / (If I but knew him) with my love and duty / I would surrender it’ (I.iv.79-81). Henry need not struggle with his opponents because they possess no power except that which he confers on them. It is as if they exist only to demonstrate the absolute supremacy of his blood by their utter subjection to it. Wolsey's famous advice to Cromwell just before the deposed Cardinal goes off echoes Katherine's and Buckingham's last words by acknowledging Henry as the source of all earthly power:

Serve the King, and—prithee lead me in.
There take an inventory of all I have,
To the last penny, 'tis the King's. My robe
And my integrity to heaven, is all
I dare now call my own.

(III.ii.450-4)

This is the triumph of the hagiographical theme: to locate the essence of the fully realised figure in the original. In perfectly realising this political strategy, however, history gives way to a slow procession of tableaux which convert all metonymy into the same static and hierarchical figure of political power.

Shakespeare's use of the carnivalesque in this play provides us with a useful means of comparing this idealising strategy with that giving the materials of chronicle history their Elizabethan form. As his identity makes itself known, the King instantly assumes Wolsey's role as the king of misrule. The illicit practices of this ‘keech’, or lump of suet, as Buckingham calls him become the legitimate prerogatives of the State:

                                                                                                                        Let's be merry,
Good my Lord Cardinal: I have half a dozen healths
To drink to these fair ladies, and a measure
To lead 'em once again, and then let's dream
Who's best in favour. Let the music knock it.

(I.iv.104-8)

In this play the disruptive power associated with the erotic, the demonic, and the folk never constitutes a field of contention. Indeed, we find all that is politically threatening caught up, sexualised and aestheticised in the official ceremony of Anne's coronation:

                                                                                                                        Such joy
I never saw before. Great-bellied women,
That had not half a week to go, like rams
In the old time of war, would shake the press
And make 'em reel before 'em. No man living
Could say, ‘This is my wife’ there, all were woven
So strangely in one piece.

(IV.i.75-81)

Such a strategy for harnessing populist energy clearly maintains the absolute identification of power and genealogy.

It is no mere accident of history, then, that the ending of Henry VIII presents such a striking contrast to the Epilogue of Henry V. The blessing of the infant Elizabeth heralds the fulfilment of divine prophecy and guarantees the corporate nature of the Crown in perpetuity. It does not usher in a period of controversy and misrule over which a new contender will triumph. The poetics of Jacobean politics aim at transforming all such change into continuity. The fulfilment of this prophecy is none other than King James, whom Cranmer's speech unites with both Elizabeth and Henry VIII in the corporate identity of the crown.

V

If nothing else, Shakespeare's inability to write an Elizabethan chronicle history play for a Jacobean audience indicates the degree to which Renaissance drama was a political activity. I have not even attempted to show—as well one might in describing the political Shakespeare—how the individual writer immersed in this milieu sought to question political authority. By examining how he includes recalcitrant cultural materials and dramatises their suppression under the pressure of official strategies of idealisation, we could identify such a subversive Shakespeare.³⁰ My point is rather to suggest that during the Renaissance political imperatives were also aesthetic imperatives. As political circumstances changed and presented the monarch with new forms of opposition, then the strategies for legitimising that authority changed. In the Elizabethan history play, art authorises genealogy. That is, to legitimise blood one must acquire the signs and symbols of authorisation, which is to question the iconicity of the king's body and entertain the possibility of its arbitrary relation to the laws and ceremonies of State. Shakespeare's only Jacobean history play declares itself a contradiction in terms by emphatically cancelling out this notion of power. Genealogy authorises art in this play, and the production of art consequently comes under the political imperative to display wealth and title. Shakespearian drama could not hold up a constant mirror to political events any more than it could display the unfolding of a formalist logic or point to the development of a single personality; circumstances called forth discontinuous strategies for idealising power.

If art politics defined the same domain of truth when Shakespeare wrote, we must assume his art was always political and that it is our modern situation and not his world of meaning which prevents our finding his politics on the surface and seeing his strategies of displacement as political strategies. In contrast with the Renaissance, the modern brand of humanism opposes the literary use of language to its use as political discourse. Such a definition of literature obviously sets our tradition of reading apart from that of the Renaissance and makes the political Shakespeare invisible. Yet this explanation for the elusiveness of the political Shakespeare, however accurate, cannot remain unquestioned. To leave my argument at such a point would be to conclude that our critical tradition of reading does not let us see the politics of Renaissance writing because ours is not a political discourse. I must insist, to the contrary, that modern literature's attempt to produce transcendent truth is a terribly effective strategy for idealising political authority. Given the panoptical nature of authority in a modern society, however, we must conceal that authority in order to idealise it. Thus art makes power invisible as it makes the political operations of language itself invisible and locates that power both in the individual's subjectivity and in the object world which such language constitutes. It seems to me nothing else but this imperative to conceal the fact that language continues to idealise power can explain why the most obvious political features of Shakespeare's texts have gone largely unnoticed in Anglo-American literary criticism.

Notes

1. This tendency for criticism of the history plays to divide along such predictable lines was first noted by Harold Jenkins, ‘Shakespeare's History Plays: 1900-1951’, Shakespeare Survey, 6 (1953), 1-25. His categories still hold, as recent criticism of the history play shows.

2. R. A. Foakes, in his Introduction to the Arden edition of King Henry VIII (London: Methuen, 1957; rpt. 1968) offers the argument for Shakespeare's sole authorship. Cyrus Hoy, who has argued for Fletcher's share in the play, holds the work is nevertheless largely Shakespeare's, ‘The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (VII)’, Studies in Bibliography, 15 (1962), 76. For the purposes of this paper, however, it does not matter whether the play is in part or in whole by Shakespeare, but rather why this Jacobean text took a different form from that of Elizabethan chronicle histories.

3. My discussion of the rhetorical figures of carnival and misrule owes a debt to Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968) and Michel Foucault's Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). For Bakhtin in particular, carnival represents those cultural practices which oppose the norm enforcing ceremonies and institutions of the State. In this critical tradition, then, carnival is neither a literary phenomenon nor an archetypal one. It is a means of describing certain material practices of the body as they underwent literary displacement—or resisted it—in the making of modern society. Throughout this essay I am indebted to the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White who have traced this process of the displacement of carnival from the Renaissance to the modern period in their forthcoming The Politics and Poetics of Trangression. The authors very generously allowed me to consult portions of their book in manuscript and to cite their research.

4. For a discussion of the ‘unruly woman’ as a feature of carnival, see Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 124-51.

5. The many references to festival and misrule in this play have been discussed in a different fashion by C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: a Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 155-62.

6. The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All citations of the plays are to this edition.

7. The problems with Henry VIII's will and the succession have been discussed by Mortimer Levine, The Early Elizabethan Succession Question: 1558-1568 (Stanford University Press, 1966); see especially pp. 99-162.

8. This summary draws upon Marie Axton's admirable study The Queen's Two bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton University Press, 1957) traces the origin of this controversy.

9. On this point see Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh and the Literature of Clientage’, in Patronage in the Renaissance, eds. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 235-58 and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘“Love is not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,’ ELH, 49 (1982), 396-428.

10. See Axton, pp. 18-37.

11. In the paper, ‘Carnival Contained’, delivered at MLA, New York, December, 1983.

12. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker and Warburg, 1964; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1967), p. 160.

13. Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 32.

14. Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, ‘Herrick's Hesperides and the “Proclamation made for May”’, Studies in Philology, 76 (1979), 52. Throughout this section, my discussion has drawn upon Marcus's argument.

15. Ben Jonson: the Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), l. 105. Citations of the text are to this edition.

16. For a discussion of the implications of Prince Henry's costume see Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 66-70.

17. Jonathan Goldberg has discussed the many ironies in Jonson's presentation of this act of homage, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 123-6.

18. Alan G. R. Smith has analysed the contending positions during the debate on the Great Contract in ‘Crown, Parliament and Finance: The Great Contract of 1610’, The English Commonwealth 1547-1640: Essays on Politics and Society, eds. Peter Clark, Alan G. R. Smith and Nicholas Tyacke (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), pp. 111-27. See also Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons, 1604-1610 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 225-434.

19. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), p. 307. Citations in the text are to this edition.

20. See Goldberg, pp. 85-112 and Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: the Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975).

21. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558-1640 (Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 403-49.

22. R. C. Munden, ‘James I and the “growth of mutual distrust”: King, Commons, and Reform, 1603-1604’, Faction and Parliament, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 43-72.

23. The Political Works of James I, pp. 310-16 and Notestein, pp. 278-327.

24. Notestein, p. 421.

25. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1979), p. 13.

26. Jonas Barish, The Anti-theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 80-131.

27. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto, 1961).

28. ‘Elite versus Popular Mentality in the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 8 (1979), 21.

29. For discussions of the features of masque and romance Henry VIII exhibits, see Ronald Berman, ‘Henry VIII: History and Romance’, English Studies, 47 (1967), 112-27; H. M. Richmond, ‘Shakespeare's Henry VIII: Romance Redeemed by History’, Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968), 334-49; Lee Bliss, ‘The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare's King Henry the Eighth’, ELH, 42 (1975), 1-25; Edward I. Berry, ‘Henry VIII and the Dynamics of Spectacle’, Shakespeare Studies, 12 (1979), 229-46.

30. For an important study of Jacobean drama from just such a perspective, see Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester, 1984; University of Chicago Press, 1984).