[In the following excerpt, Wells maintains that Shakespeare's works are topical, not in the sense that they contain direct references to contemporary events, but in their treatment of general social and political issues.]

'He was not of an age, but for all time.' These famous words have been echoed by countless Shakespearean critics in a sense in which their author, Ben Jonson, probably did not intend them to be understood. It is true that, in praising Shakespeare's plays for their timeless quality, Jonson is expressing the neoclassical belief, summed up by his 18th-century namesake, that 'Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature' (Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare. But it is unlikely that a satirist as topical as Ben Jonson would have shared the view—still widely held—that Shakespeare was 'interested in politics only insofar as they afforded him an opportunity of identifying himself with human characters undergoing the tugs and stresses of public life' (Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare. Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature and his skill in portraying the mechanisms of self-deception are not in dispute.

But to argue that he shows an indifference to political questions in the histories and tragedies is to ignore the topicality of these plays. They are topical not in the sense of alluding to contemporary events but in the sense that they reflect and embody subjects of current debate. These plays are essentially political. They are, as Jan Kott says, about 'people involved in history' (Shakespeare Our Contemporary).

Contrary to the impression which E.M.W. Tillyard gave in his influential Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), the twenty-year period when Shakespeare wrote most of his plays was not one of intellectual uniformity, but a time of social unrest and energetic political controversy. It was ironically in the years following England's triumphant success in her first great naval battle that the country suffered the worst economic depression it had known since the Tudors came to power. The national euphoria generated by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was short-lived. The combined effects of inflation, of crippling taxes made necessary by the continuing war with Spain, of a series of appallingly bad harvests and of new outbreaks of plague had a devastating effect on national morale. In 1596 starving workers rioted in Oxfordshire. In the following year a Norfolk grain barge was seized by the populace. In Canterbury in the same year carts loaded with grain for export were hijacked.

The boundaries with which historians demarcate their particular periods of specialisation are always to some extent arbitrary. Yet Elizabethans themselves clearly sensed that an age was coming to an end. 'All our beauty, and our trim, decays,' wrote John Donne in 1597, 'Like courts removing, or like ended plays.' The sense of national insecurity which is such a characteristic feature of the time is reflected in the emergency legislation of the 1597-8 parliaments. What is significant in this legislation is not so much the measures which were passed—they were largely designed to ameliorate the lot of the urban poor—as the role taken by the House of Commons in formulating them.

In the long-standing struggle between Elizabeth and her parliaments over the question of royal prerogative the queen had been under constant pressure from the Commons to acknowledge their right to initiate legislation. For Elizabeth it was a losing battle. But although she was increasingly unsuccessful in her attempt to exclude the Commons from what she regarded as 'matters of state' (that is, religion, foreign policy, monopolies and the problem of the succession), the House was careful not to upset a balance of power which was vital to national security. For example, when Peter Wentworth, a leading figure in the Puritan campaign for parliamentary reform, launched a particularly virulent attack on the royal prerogative in 1576 it was not the Privy Council but an embarrassed House of Commons which decided to remove him from the chamber and let him cool off in the Tower.

Like Catholic plots, the more extreme forms of Puritan agitation had the effect not of undermining but of consolidating parliamentary support for the crown. By the 1590s, however, both of these threats had lost much of their force and as the need to close ranks on religious and foreign policy became less urgent, so demand grew in the Commons for the right to initiate legislation. It is significant that when it became clear in 1597 that drastic measures were needed to remedy the country's social and economic problems, it was the House of Commons and not the government which framed the new bills. This legislation marks, in J. E. Neale's words, 'a significant advance in the "winning of initiative" by the House of Commons, which was to be the outstanding theme of the Jacobean Parliaments, and in course of time was to effect a constitutional revolution' (Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, Vol. II).

However, although the Commons was undoubtedly beginning to replace the Privy Council as the centre of power in Elizabethan England, there is no real analogy between the disputes of the 1590s and 1600s between crown and parliament and the conflicts of the 1630s when, for the first time, there began to emerge a truly radical Puritan opposition. Friction between Elizabeth and James and their parliaments took place within the context of a conservative desire on both sides to preserve the existing order. One of the issues which had caused the Elizabethan Commons most frustration was monopolies, a question on which Elizabeth stubbornly refused to yield her prerogative. Originally designed as a form of protective patent, monopolies had by the end of the century become in effect a system of perquisites handed out to officials and courtiers whom the queen wanted to reward. The issue came to a head in 1601 when the Commons angrily demanded a wholesale reform of the monopolies system. Yet when Elizabeth capitulated, the Commons made no attempt to capitalise on its victory. Instead of using its advantage to press for further constitutional reform, it offered the queen a deputation of thanks.

With Elizabeth's death the uneasy relations between crown and parliament became even more strained as James declared his belief in the divine authority of kings and the Commons reasserted its right to formulate policy. Matters came to a head once more in 1604-5 when debate on the question of purveyance (the requisitioning of provisions for the royal household) became so heated that for a time all London waited eagerly for news of the day's parliamentary exchanges. When a bill for the restraint of purveyance was drawn up by parliamentary committee James declared that this was an intolerable invasion of his prerogative. The authors of the bill, John Hare and Lawrence Hyde, replied in equally uncompromising terms. So inflammatory were their attacks on the king that Hare and Hyde were compared with the tribunes of republican Rome (Zeeveld, 'Coriolanus and Jacobean Politics'). As one contemporary observer wrote, 'Hyde yielded many reasons why we should not yield more unto the King than we did; with many invectives, and so far put the house in distaste, as that expectation grew of the sequel. And if your lordship had heard them, you would have said that Hare and Hyde had represented the tribunes of the people' (Birch, The Court and Times of James the First, Vol. I).

But once again a potentially explosive situation was defused. James, recognising the need for conciliation, remained clam in the face of these attacks and eventually Hyde was persuaded to moderate his language in what amounted to an apology to the Lords.

In James' first parliament power was undoubtedly shifting towards the Commons but mounting pressure for constitutional reform should not be interpreted as a demand for the kind of republican constitution which Shakespeare portrays in Coriolanus. Hare and Hyde may have been popularly compared with the tribunes of republican Rome but, unlike Sicinius and Brutus in Shakespeare's play, their constituency was not the populace as a whole but the House of Commons. What Hare and Hyde were demanding was not sovereignty of the people but increased legislative rights for the House of Commons. Only with the pamphlet debates of the middle years of the 17th century does popular demand for individual rights and liberties begin to be articulated. Although Shakespeare writes about societies in crisis it would be wrong to see the assassinations, the coups and the revolutions he portrays as reflections of a contemporary democratic radicalism. In Shakespeare's lifetime not even the most vociferous critics of the monarchy advocated universal suffrage. To have done so would have been illogical. In the 1590s and 1600s conservatives and radicals almost without exception appealed in their writings to a view of the universe and of human nature which would have made the kind of revolutionary egalitarianism that appeared in the 1640s and '50s unthinkable. The fact that Elizabethan writers do not share our axiomatic belief in democracy does not of course mean that they accepted without question establishment doctrines of authority. To avoid anachronistic readings of Shakespeare the modern student must begin, as Elizabethans themselves did, with the debate on human nature.

The Renaissance inherited from the Middle Ages a theory of cosmos which had its origins in ancient Greek philosophy. Of the various metaphors commonly used to express the order and rationality of the universe, the most familiar is the Chain of Being. This prototypal image of multiformity reduced to unity is rarely absent from medieval and Renaissance discussions of world order and was not finally abandoned as a model for social and personal harmony until the middle of the 18th century. But the Chain of Being was not simply a static symbol of world order; for Renaissance humanists it was a dynamic image expressive of the individual's potential for either amelioration or degeneration. Classical and Christian writers both describe the prelapsarian world as a time when human passions were naturally held in check by reason. However, at the Fall humanity lost its natural temper with the consequence that it now occupied a unique position in the universal scheme of things, still retaining elements of a former god-like reason yet sharing with the beasts a propensity to obey natural impulses. But if human nature was susceptible of improvement, it was only through the discipline of civilised life that the effects of the Fall could be repaired.

Although … this traditional view of human nature was subject to radical criticism from both religious and secular thinkers in the 16th century, political pamphleteers continued on the whole to base their arguments on familiar premises. In debating the relative merits of monarchies, aristocracies and democracies Elizabethan writers appealed to the principle of analogy. The essential unity of the universe was apparent from the fact that the same principles of order operated on every plane of existence. Just as one god ruled the universe, so it followed by analogy that one man must rule the state; or to turn the analogy round, as reason should control man's lower faculties, so the inferior members of society should be governed by a single figure of authority. But while conservatives claimed that absolute monarchy was the only natural form of government, writers anxious to limit the powers of the crown argued in support of a mixed constitution which embodied all three types of government, though even the latter argument claimed to be based on the laws of nature. One point on which both critics and apologists of the Tudor monarchy were agreed, however, was the uncertainties and dangers of democracy. Critical as Shakespeare is of rulers who abuse the trust placed in them as guardians of social order, he makes it clear that democracy is no answer to the problems of a society divided against itself. Exploited the plebeians undoubtedly are in a play like Coriolanus but, as Elizabethan writers never tire of reminding us, an innately feckless and indecisive populace is not to be trusted with political power.

Irrespective of whether or not it was accepted that the principle of monarchy was sanctioned by an indubitable law of nature, in practice national welfare in Reformation England was closely dependent on the wisdom and astuteness of the king or queen. It is not surprising, therefore, that much political discussion in the 16th century was concerned with the character of the ideal ruler. To the medieval mind a king was to be seen as God's deputy on earth, ruling with the same loving care that a father showed for his family and expecting in return the obedience and respect of his subjects. Such a view of kingship was highly convenient to the Tudors, faced as they were with the problems of a disputed right to the throne and, after 1534, of establishing a semblance of national unity on the emotive question of religion. But while pro-establishment writers continued to appeal to the medieval conception of kingship, it was clear that qualities other than benevolence and integrity were necessary for survival in the dangerous world of Reformation politics. In Shakespeare's most successful ruler, Henry V, can be seen a new and at times ruthless political realism which owes much to the writings of Machiavelli.

Elizabethan political thought represents an amalgam of medieval theories of society modified by the particular problems of a Reformation state. The simile so widely employed by 16th-century writers in which the state is compared to a living organism, all of whose parts contribute to the welfare of the whole body, was traditional. However, the doctrine of absolute obedience to the crown which is such a distinctive feature of Tudor political theory was something new. After the chaos of the Wars of the Roses a return to powerful monarchy was welcomed by a rising trading class, for whom social stability was a paramount concern. With the break from Rome in 1534 the need for strong central government became even more imperative. Having rebelled against established authority itself, the Henrician regime had to guard against counter-reform by measures designed to minimise the threat of rebellion. In an age when religion aroused stronger feelings than any other public issue, the most effective way to do this was to emphasise the sin of disobedience. That the state's publicly proclaimed doctrine of non-resistance received such widespread acceptance is a measure of the success of the new monarchy. However, that is not to say that its official propaganda went unchallenged. From the 1530s onwards a small but steady stream of dissident writers had reasserted the medieval belief in the rights of subjects to rebel against unjust authority. By the 1590s, when the threat of invasion from Catholic Europe had largely been averted, moderate opinion became increasingly sceptical of the idea, so forcibly expressed by Shakespeare's Richard II, that kings are sacrosanct. As van Baumer writes, 'Before 1588 the cult of authority was fashionable in England. After that date it became to a certain extent an object of ridicule, and was cultivated by only a minority' (The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship).

Assertions by some of Shakespeare's characters of the inviolability of kings must, of course, be seen in their dramatic context. In a similar way we cannot assume, when the same characters declare their belief in an avenging deity who punishes usurpers for the sin of disobedience, that these views are necessarily Shakespeare's own. Theories of history were undergoing radical change in the 16th century. While the English chronicle sources on which Shakespeare relied for much of his historical material showed only a limited interest in political questions, the so-called 'new' historians were concerned less with the workings of providence than with the practical lessons to be learned from a study of the past. That providence performs an active role in human affairs is something which is taken for granted by many of Shakespeare's characters. But in claiming, as some critics have done, that Shakespeare endorses their belief in an avenging deity who with relentless logic punishes the wicked and rewards the virtuous, there is a danger of reducing the plays to doctrinaire theological tracts. If there is one thing which clearly emerges from Shakespeare's dramatisation of history, it is the complexities of political life and the intractability of its problems.

New interest in the human factors involved in history may be seen as one aspect of a larger tendency in the 16th century to challenge traditional theological assumptions about the basis of human societies. This involved a re-evaluation of the meaning of natural law. For the conservative Elizabethan the foundations of social justice lay in hierarchical order. The fact that this principle was so widely accepted does not mean that Elizabethans were incapable of serious speculative thought. Hierarchy was a principle inscribed in the very structure of the universe; it was an axiomatic law of nature no more open to question than the circular revolutions of the planets. Yet it was precisely these things which were being questioned in the later 16th century. As the astronomers Brahe and Kepler were redrawing the map of the heavens, thinkers like Montaigne began the work of demolition which was ultimately to leave the beautiful, orderly, rational structure of the medieval cosmos in ruins. With the collapse of the old world-view, theories of natural law underwent a radical transformation. Originally signifying that system of duties and mutual obligations which defined man's place in the divinely instituted order of the universe, natural law was beginning by the 1650s to be taken to mean the inalienable rights of free and equal individuals.

However, traditional patterns of thought die hard. If Elizabethan writers were clearly conscious of the fact that they were living at a time of intellectual transition, we should be wary of attributing to them exactly those ideas which they found most threatening. Two hundred years after Shakespeare's death poets like Pope and Thomson could still appeal to the universal Chain of Being as a model for social order and expect to be understood by their readers.

Shakespeare's own position in the debate on the meaning of natural law is notoriously difficult to determine. So finely balanced are the rival points of view which form the dialectic of his plays that it is often assumed that, being primarily concerned with human character, he was indifferent to political and philosophical questions. But the balancing of one point of view or set of interests against another should not necessarily be interpreted simply as a desire for impartiality. One of Shakespeare's most characteristic techniques is to present us with evidence whose apparently self-contradictory nature makes it seem impossible for us to make a rational judgement on the character or problem concerned. An obvious example of this technique is the portrayal of characters like Antonio and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. Antonio and Jessica stubbornly resist our natural wish to slot them into neat categories of good and evil, not just because we possess insufficient information about them but because the facts we are given cancel each other out. The same principle is true of more abstract problems, such as the question of natural justice in King Lear. In this play the characters themselves are for the most part unambiguously good or evil. What makes it so difficult to adjudicate between their mutually contradictory views of nature and the gods is that the evidence on either side seems to be so finely balanced. On one level these techniques have the effect of reproducing in the audience the dilemmas experienced by the characters on stage as they attempt to make sense of their world; on a broader level they reflect with unique fidelity 'the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure'.