SHAKESPEARE AND THE QUESTION OF LEGITIMATE POWER
Shakespeare's more successful tragedies all seem to revolve round the question of power. Hamlet, both the play and the prince, revolves round the question of a conflicted relationship with the principle of power and legitimacy embodied first in Hamlet's father and then Claudius, his uncle. Looking at what I think is the work's political subtext- it seems to me that the author of the play is not yet sure of the position he should adopt towards the principle of power and legitimacy and this is reflected in Hamlet's own indecisiveness in dispatching his uncle and taking over the mantle of rule as the 'legitimate heir' to the throne, which he thinks his uncle has usurped at his own expense. (Let's not forget that Hamlet's grievance against Claudius was conceived some time before his father's ghost told him that he had been murdered by Claudius. So the ghost found a Hamlet who was already seething with resentment against an uncle who had usurped his own 'rightful' claim to the throne. Indeed, elsewhere in the play, one of his complaints is precisely that Claudius had "Popped in between th' election and my hopes...") Hamlet represents in my opinion Shakespeare's own confusion and ambivalence towards the idea of legitimate power. Claudius may have killed Hamlet's father, but he is now King; therefore to kill him would be to 'kill' the principle he represents, the principle of rule itself, and that fact would render his own claim to kingship suspect. Shakespeare must have been fully aware by this time that, from any historical point of view, no rule was legitimate since all rule was originally founded on violence, theft, murder, conquest and other forms of skulduggery. However, he did not have enough confidence in his own insight by the time he came to write Hamlet and he prevaricated over the question in precisely the way Hamlet prevaricates over the question of whether or not to kill Claudius.
By the time he came to write Macbeth, however, he was much clearer in his mind. Macbeth represents the very essence of political power in all its nakedness. Macbeth IS power, that is to say, Macbeth is the means by which power establishes itself. It has been described as a play about the usurpation of legitimate power, but this, I think, is an evasion. Macbeth more or less tells us that these are the means by which political power always originally establishes itself. King Lear is even more pointedly about power. On the surface, of course, Lear is just a foolish old King who gives his power away and, once he divests himself of it, finds himself up Shit's Creek without a paddle. It makes for a good plot and it could have been explored as such without the trenchant critique of power which Lear produces once he's without it. "A dog's obeyed in office." indeed. Shakespeare's point of view is much more explicit here than it is in Macbeth.
Why Timon of Athens does not resonate in the way Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear do has, I believe, something to do with its being about money rather than power. This was Karl Marx's favourite Shakespeare play and no wonder. "Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? / No, Gods, I am no idle votarist / ...Why this / Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, / Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads, / This yellow slave / Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed; / Make the hoar leprosy adored, / Place thieves / And give them title, knee and approbation / With senators on the bench; this is it / That makes the wappened widow wed again; / She whom the spittal house and ulcerous sores / Will cast a gorge at, this embalms and spices / To the April day again." It is not surprising that Marx thought so highly of it, since it re-enforces his view that economics is primary and such things as political power only secondary. From a Marxist point of view, therefore, Timon of Athens should be the greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies, which, of course, is way off the mark. Money reduces us to private people, while political power makes those who wield it much more public; and this is one of the reasons why it resonates so much more with us.
Money has no connection with the question of the legitimacy of the principle of rule and doesn't bear in any way on the origin of rule, power, sovereignty or the state. According to Engels, the state emerged as a result of the accumulation of wealth and the division of the spoils of wealth according to rank and class. In other words, economic classes came first and necessitated the creation of states, even though the evidence suggests that political power - achieved through military conquest - was the precondition for the emergence of economic classes in the first place. Timon of Athens doesn't resonate the way the other tragedies do because, by taking money as its subject matter, it remains in the private rather than the public realm, the particular rather than the universal. Shakespeare may well have been describing tendencies as they had begun to emerge at the start of the capitalist era, but the question of who holds political power will always trump it when it comes to providing material for drama and holding our interest as this drama unfolds, as indeed it does outside the theatre. In the end, Timon's vision is a deeply misanthropic one. It cannot be anything else because his predicament is a private one. It does not share in larger public concerns. He is simply one private individual against other private individuals who have let him down badly and, because he confuses them with humanity at large, this turns him into a misanthrope. Not only that, but our own interest in Timon's situation is no more than that of private individuals; it is the kind of interest we might take in the fate of a bankrupt, which, of course, has nothing on the interest we might take in the terrible fate of Gaddafi - just to take one example.
So what is at stake is nothing less than the nature of power and legitimate sovereignty - and, of course, also the state. But what is the state? It is not simply an expression of the domination of one group of people over others. The original nomadic herders who eventually conquered the agricultural populations on their borders and founded states, were hierarchical, patriarchal, given to warfare and a military lifestyle, misogynistic and slave-owning. But they did not have states. Why? Because they were nomadic and did not confine their economic activities to circumscribed territories. This only came about after they had conquered settled agricultural communities whose economic activities did confine them to circumscribed territories. The state emerged as an instrument for regulating the relations between the conquering and subjugated peoples, the first of whom had become a warrior-aristocracy and the second an exploited peasantry. The state, in other words, is rooted in violence and, as Franz Oppenheimer said, has no other origin. The economic exploitation of one class by another was only the cause of the state's emergence in as far as the exploited had already been conquered and made to submit to the domination of their conquerors. Domination came first, exploitation after, and the emergence of the state represented a synthesis of those two phenomena.
Shakespeare is not concerned to provide a foundational mythology that would sanctify sovereignty. He might sometimes invoke the Divine Right of Kings, as in Richard II, but his abiding concern seems to be more related to what happens when all the arbitrary arrangements of which it consists break down. He seems to be instinctively aware of its fragility and impermanence, but he also clearly fears the consequences of its susceptibility to breakdown. His feelings are purely reactive in other words. “Take but degree away, untune that string / and hark what discord follows.” However, there is no Hobbesian justification of the Sovereign based on some foundational myth such as the Social Compact in which each agrees to give up their freedom in exchange for the security they find in the Commonwealth. There is only an abiding fear of possible breakdown along with the recognition of its systemic vulnerability to breakdown. Yet despite all this, he cannot fool himself about the origin of political power in the way Hobbes does. He knows it's all based on a fraud, but a fraud he supports because he fears its being called into question. This is part of the ambiguity and irony contained in Shakespeare's justification of monarchical rule in his tragedies, despite their trenchant critiques. When people describe Shakespeare as a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of monarchical rule, they miss the irony at the heart of his plays. What Shakespeare couldn't do was fool himself about the nature of political power, despite his obvious fear of its breakdown.
Power, is a very ambiguous word, of course. In Latin languages like Spanish, the noun for "power" is the same as the verb for "to be able" - "poder", in the case of Spanish. Power thus has a connection with ability in these languages, while in English the connection has been severed. Power in English largely means the power some people have over others, rather than the power of people to do things themselves. (It perhaps partly explains why Spain has had such a strong anarchist movement in the past.) For Shakespeare too, power means political power, the power to rule and not the power to do things for ourselves. It is the flaw in Shakespeare's vision of power that makes his attitude towards it so negative, while at the same time he is so fearful of its dissolution and therefore is also its staunchest supporter.
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan exhibits none of Shakespeare's schizoid attitude towards the question of power. (Drama is perhaps the perfect medium for writers who are schizoid.) Hobbes had lived through The English Civil War, after all. For Hobbes, there was no question about it; it was always unjust to challenge the Sovereign. (Sovereign might mean the King or Parliament, a military junta, the Nazi Party in power or Plato's philosopher-rulers! [Chelsea Manning would stand condemned by Hobbes's criterion, while Heinrich Himmler would not.] For Hobbes, it was whoever held the reins of power at the time.) It would be unjust to attempt to overthrow the existing sovereign, but once you had succeeded in overthrowing that sovereign, it would be equally unjust for anyone else to attempt to overthrow you. For that reason, although Claudius was unjust to kill Hamlet's father, once Claudius was established as King, it was no less unjust for Hamlet to try to kill him. Hobbes's life overlapped with Shakespeare's to a certain extent and I assume that many of these questions regarding the legitimacy of power and sovereignty were in circulation during both of their lives, although Hobbes’s experience of the Civil War somewhat changed their complexion, making him much less ambivalent towards them. Shakespeare's attitude towards them involved him in a tragic impasse. Not so Hobbes, because he had much more certainty regarding the question of 'right' and 'wrong' in political matters, and furthermore marshalled the foundational myth of the Social Compact in support of his views. His Leviathan, after all, contains some of the most systematic arguments in favour of established rule that you will find anywhere, whether that rule was tyrannical or not. A tyrant may be immoral, but not unjust. On the other hand, to overthrow a tyrant would be extremely unjust.
Shakespeare was a bourgeois, the son of a glover whose business went down the tubes. Nevertheless, he must have passed on to his son his commercial outlook on life, which seems to have served Shakespeare well when it came to building up a theatrical business and, later in life, as a dealer in grain and land. In the basically feudal set-up of Elizabethan and Jacobean times, the bourgeois class to which Shakespeare belonged must have had considerable ambivalence towards feudal rule, not to mention the royal monopolies that existed at the time. On the one hand, the feudal order provided a certain amount of stability for businesses like Shakespeare's to flourish, but it still restricted opportunities to really expand. Questions of its legitimacy were eventually to boil over during the Civil War, and there is no reason to think that people did not discuss them before - during Shakespeare's time, for example.
My purpose in bringing up these questions is not to debunk Shakespeare, but to situate him in his time and his place, as a bourgeois in an age in which the bourgeoisie had not yet come to political power and thus felt considerable ambivalence towards those who did hold power. Nowadays, we don't feel the same sense of conflicted deference towards our 'betters' as Shakespeare felt; like Shakespeare, we know they're a bunch of bastards, but we have much less reticence about overthrowing the bastards. The only question is how it can be done without repeating the mistakes of the past. In other words, what methods we adopt to empower ourselves without relinquishing that power to some usurping authority or self-appointed vanguard, which will then constitute a power over and above us. Nevertheless, we know that it is ultimately up to us and, for that reason, we do not confront the same tragic impasse that Shakespeare confronted.
Comment 1 - Marc Connelly: I thoroughly enjoyed your Shakespeare and Power post. Thank you for that.
But I must let you know that it is very hard to read large type, set on black, justified across the full width of the screen. Picking up lines becomes very difficult, especially in justified type, at over 14 picas in length. Just for ease of use, you may wish to reconsider your format.
Reply: As I have had 2 complaints about the white type on black background. I have decided to change it. Hopefully, people will find the present arrangement easier on the eye than the previous one.
Comment 2 - Donald O'Donovan: Right on, Richard. Your article resonates with me. Liked the part about social classes coming before the origin of the state. It's the nobles, the one-percenters, who set up the states. My people, the serfs, don't have time for that because we're too busy scrambling to survive. The class system is so deeply ingrained it's almost like breathing. I grew up in a tiny American town that was more or less owned by a very rich family, and we, the townies, were for all intents and purposes their peasants. We often referred, my friends and I, as well as my family, to rich folks as our "betters," and this without rancor or any sense of irony.
Reply: I think domination came before exploitation and that states represented a synthesis of the two, a means of controlling and regulating the relationship that had been set up between the dominators/exploiters and the dominated/exploited. In an email to me John Bennett writes. "The only place I differ with you to some extent concerns the role of "money" in the exercise of power. I think you are right when applying this to the past, but somewhere in the past 75 years or so I see a shift taking place in which money (wealth) became so concentrated that the institutions of power are now by-and-large mere instruments of wealth. Where this is heading at an escalating rate, the way I see it, is the dominion of Moloch, which nullifies all our past dualistic concepts, good and evil, power and domination included." I agree. The two things now are so interfused that they are impossible to separate. But that also creates the opportunity of people seeing the relationship between class and power for what it is. At least, I hope it does.
Comment 3 - Eric Chaet: An excellent essay, for which, thanks. I have often thought & written on these matters. I note that William the Conqueror (Wm. the Bastard, previously) conquered England militarily, then divvied the place up among his supporters, per feudal loyalty linkages. Feudility.
I note also that the SECOND English revolution, of 1688-9, was of the bourgeoisie, hiring a king to represent its interests, versus the old aristocracy, as much as against the old peasantry---which peasantry was in the process of being cleared off the land by the old aristocracy, for more efficient sheep grazing.
In the USA, currently, there are two basic concepts of "freedom" in conflict---freedom of speech, assembly, etc.; versus those freedoms plus & especially freedom to get rich by financial aggregation, at the expense of others, who are free to defend themselves capably or fall prey.
As I say, I've often thought & written on these things, as in my "100 Peculiarly Useful So-Called Poems" & "How To Change the World Forever For Better." But, long ago, I also read most of Shakespeare's plays---long before I had much understanding of power, or knowledge of history, & it boggled the mind, & has remained so, lo, these decades. You have helped me transform that boggling, the maintenance of which steals energy, into an intellectual asset, which provides energy.
For that, I say, You the man!