Shakespeare and the Body Politic

2009

Today, among political theorists, it is widely accepted that literature is of political interest, but there is much less agreement about exactly what that interest is. It is also widely accepted that political thought can be communicated through a wide range of genres. But there is less clarity about the methodological implications of this for political theorists. This paper explores these issues through a consideration of Shakespearean drama. We argue that the political theoretical interest of

Critical Survey, 2014

This paper was delivered in the plenary session of the Shakespeare Association of America's annual meeting in St Louis, April 2014, alongside papers from Ania Loomba and Jonathan Dollimore, also for the first time published in this volume. The purpose of the panel was to commemorate and celebrate two important critical texts whose anniversaries fell at that time: Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy, published in 1984, and Political Shakespeare (1985), edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, which went into its second edition in 1994. This paper discusses the impact and influence of Political Shakespeare, to which I was a contributor. Political Shakespeare Both Radical Tragedy 1 and Political Shakespeare 2 are landmark texts in a history entailing the establishing and development of an innovative critical method, explicitly named as 'cultural materialism'. The story of cultural materialism, usually in tandem or in contrast with new historicism, has often been narrated. A specifically British product, arising from the Marxist cultural criticism of Raymond Williams, who contributed an 'Afterword' to Political Shakespeare, cultural materialism registered the impact of European critical theory, especially the work of Althusser, Gramsci and Foucault, and challenged preceding critical orthodoxies such as New Criticism, 'old' historicism, the various formalisms of G. Wilson Knight, L.C. Knights, F.R. Leavis. In Political Shakespeare cultural materialism linked hands with American New Historicism, incorporating work by Stephen Greenblatt and Leonard Tennenhouse; indeed one could argue that there is very little to distinguish the other essays in the first half of Political Shakespeare from the work of those same New Historicists.

Building on 'Shakespeare and Democracy' (Troubador, 2015), this paper argues that significant changes in Shakespeare's political orientation from authoritarianism towards meritocracy took place between the two history quartets and can be traced in Edward III and King John.

2013

"This paper’s title involves a pun that, when unpacked, reveals the complex relationship between our underlying assumptions about justice, systems of exchange, and our bodies. The Latin root of “torture,” torquêre, means, “to twist.” Torture involves twisting another’s body to inflict pain. The term shares its root with a seemingly unrelated concept: a tort, or wrongful injury to another’s person, property, or reputation, is brought under the jurisdiction of compensatory law, which is founded on the notion of payback—getting your just desert. A torte, on the other hand, which bears no etymological relationship to the other two terms, is simply a pastry—getting just a dessert. A tort involves the twisting of one’s civil obligations. A torte involves the mixing together and baking of separate ingredients, the gustatory result of which cannot be readily reduced to its individual components. This paper explores the ways in which human bodies, payback, and comestibility become inescapably entangled in cultures in which honor is the prevailing virtue. Shakespeare was deeply sensitive to the social and psychological processes through which these concepts become entwined when honor is at stake—to the ways in which, as a means of corrective response, men who transgress a code of honor can be rightly reduced to their bodies, similar to how those who are not allowed to be full participants in an honor culture (most particularly women) always already are. This paper examines Shakespeare’s earliest depiction of honor cultures in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, and then briefly discusses how the ideas they trade in are further developed and complicated later in his career, focusing on Othello."

Philosophy and Literature, 2025

Charles Nicolas Independent, 2021

In my research paper, I tackled two defining features of William Shakespeare's tragedies: dark imagery, found in Macbeth, and the complexity of his characters, as found in Julius Caesar, particularly that of Marcus Brutus. I provided sources from Aristotle to the English playwright himself. I also include a brief comparison between Brutus and Macbeth, and how their tragedies seem similar but are very distinct as a result of their characterization. I talked about the deeper meaning of the dark imagery found in Macbeth, such as the phantom of the dead child. I go onto Julius Caesar and the character of Brutus, and why his morality might not be as cut and dry as some might hope it to be. In all analysis, I attempt as best I can to adhere to a presented objective standard. I use the definition of a tragic hero per the great Greek philosopher and scholar, Aristotle, who states that "There remains, then, the character between these two extremes-that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty,"(Aristotle's Poetics. Part XIII). The tragic hero has a prominent character flaw which creates a struggle within the hero. This leads to him making poor choices, ones that eventually lead to his downfall.

REVISTA Scripta Uniandrade, 2019

The present work addresses two contemporary performances of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, written in collaboration with playwright George Peele. The present work analyzes Michael Fentiman's (2013) and Lucy Bailey's (2014) productions. The focus of the analyses lies on the relationship between the most violent moments in the play and characters' submission or resistance to State power. Instead of trying to establish "Shakespeare's politics" or arguing whether the play is reactionary or revolutionary, the present work, drawing mainly on the works of Anderson, Fernie, and Gil, concludes that contemporary performances of the play reveal intricate ideas about power, freedom, and politics. It is precisely in the moments of violence that those ideas can be perceived more clearly.

Early Modern Literary Studies, 2022

Exploring a previously neglected mutual avoidance between two key characters in Troilus and Cressida, this essay contributes to the discourse of political theory and the state of exception in Shakespeare studies. Whereas scholars have shown Hamlet and Richard II to challenge Carl Schmitt’s and confirm Giorgio Agamben’s analyses of sovereignty, respectively, on philological and aesthetic grounds, this essay claims that Troilus and Cressida pushes Shakespeare’s critique of sovereignty even further. What's more, the play unfolds a performative critique of power and reveals the ultimate collusion between politics and theatricality.

2018

Two men of the sixteenth century, one a failed Italian bureaucrat, the other a successful English playwright share very little in common and live hundreds of miles apart from each other with little evidence of either knowing the other existed. Yet, through the Dramas and Comedies of an ingenious Shakespeare, we uncover motifs of political Realism, and a general pessimism for the character of mankind. Through the works of Shakespeare and through Nicolo Machiavelli's, "The Prince," and "The Discourses," we may garner some insight into a comparable world perspective that would not become consistent with that of the general public until nihilism centuries later yet remarkably similar between two markedly different household names.