Renaissance Power and Stuart Dramaturgy: Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden

Renaissance Power and Stuart Dramaturgy: Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden John D. Cox Dryden himself was the first to comment on differences between Restoration and early Stuart drama, written by "the Gyant Race, before the Flood." Dryden frames his contrast entirely in stylistic terms, thus establishing precedent for generations of critical analysis to follow and laying the groundwork for one of the fundamental distinctions in British literary history—the distinction between late medieval (or "Gothic") style and its neo-classical successor. What Dryden described in purely aesthetic terms, however, is increasingly recognized to be political as well. Even Dryden's allusion to the "Gyant Race" is politically loaded and dismissive, as we shall see. With the political commitments of style clearly in mind, we can perceive greater continuity between Shakespeare and Milton than is sometimes recognized: in effect, Milton also belongs to the giant race that Dryden dismissed. What I want to suggest here is that both Shakespeare and Milton respond to the dramaturgy of the Stuart court in the same way and for the same reason: because of a common heritage of Christian political realism. Ultimately traceable to Augustine, this heritage for Shakespeare is indirect, deriving not from his reading but from the particular dramatic tradition in which Christian realism had been formative and in which it was still residual at the end of the sixteenth century.1 The prophetic strain in medieval religious drama is emphatically political, as it is in the Hebrew prophets: characters like Pharaoh and Herod, or Annas and Caiaphas, are cunning and tyrannical not merely because they are nonChristian but because they manifest what Augustine calls libido JOHN D. COX is Associate Professor of English at Hope College. The present essay is an offshoot of his forthcoming book, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power, to be published by Princeton University Press. 323 324Comparative Drama dominandi, the love of power for its own sake, a love they share (as a defining characteristic) with devils and Vices. Though they swear by "Mahound," thus reflecting the contemporary menace of Turkish Islam, their behavior is modelled in close detail on fifteenth-century political and legal abuses, indicating that the playwrights perceive libido dominandi to be the chief motivation of rulers in contemporary Christian Europe.2 Frequent derogatory allusions to this behavior as "new" or the "new fashion" reflect a moral evaluation of social and political change that we have since learned to associate with an expanding market economy and the centralization of power. Shakespeare's debt to the political realism of medieval religious drama is profound. It is most obvious in characters who derive from Vice tradition, like Richard ILT, lago, and Edmund. These characters have usually been studied psychologically (following Coleridge) or as aspects of the secular transformation of dramaturgy in the sixteenth century. If viewed politically, however, their continuity with medieval religious drama is striking. All are personally or politically ambitious, all stop at nothing to gain what they want, and all manifest a certain degree of Italianate affectation—the Renaissance "new fashion." In short, they enact libido dominandi and thus perpetuate conservative medieval resistance to the changes wrought by centralized power, which the Tudors achieved with hitherto undreamed effectiveness, as Thomas More discovered to his undoing. Not all power is manifested so diabolically in Shakespeare , of course, but even in the history plays power is treated with unprecedented realism that creates ironies and complexities unknown to (and impossible for) an idealizing genre like the court masque. The almost savage humiliation of royalty in King Lear has powerful medieval precedent, as Maynard Mack has pointed out, and the appearance of such a portrait in 1 605 is strongly at odds with the innovative strains of royal adulation encouraged by the new king.3 From the outset, Milton is more committed to Renaissance neo-classicism than Shakespeare, and Milton therefore has no affinity with the popular dramatic tradition in which Shakespeare worked all his life. Indeed, Milton's qualified praise of Shakespeare was influential in identifying him with the neo-classical topos of the primitive poet who is possessed of natural genius but lacks sufficient refining judgment.4 Nonetheless, Milton discovered what were, in effect, the roots of medieval...