Politics on Stage

peter lake's new study of the Shakespearean history play is, in his own words, "a history book that attempts to use the history play broadly defined as a way to think about the political thought and culture of the Elizabethan fin de siècle" (16). That moment, Lake argues, was obsessed with a single issue: the succession to the old and childless queen. And it is through the lens of that one issue that he views a range of Shakespearean plays that address not just the English past but also classical antiquity (Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida) and post-Reformation Nordic politics (Hamlet).

The world does not lack political interpretations of these plays. What is fresh in Lake's study? In the first place, he separates himself from Marxist approaches (in which politics is merely epiphenomenal) and from more recent New Historicist readings, which he acutely recognizes as mere gestures toward history and politics, camouflaging aesthetic readings in the verbal trappings of historicism. In this account, politics has genuine agency, and "the theatre was an integral part of these attempts to create, shape, appeal to, and if regicidal push ever came to Marian shove, to mobilise, a protestant political nation" (22).

For Lake, Shakespeare did not stand above the tug and scamble of his moment. He fends off the old argument that Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time by reinterpreting the openness of the plays to multiple interpretations (which in the past has been taken as the sign of Shakespeare's cleverly wriggling free from the confines of his period) as a defensive strategy adopted in the face of severe reprisals for political heterodoxy: "The relative scarcity of instances in which we can actually watch the institutions of the state controlling, editing or suppressing a book or play should not be taken only as a function of the paucity of the sources, still less as evidence for the absence or lightness of control or 'censorship.' Rather it was a testament to the relative success of the regime in laying down clear parameters outside of which people would stray only in the most extreme of circumstances and only then by risking the most serious of consequences" (55–56). Shakespearean ambivalence is thus transformed from the signature of his myriad-mindedness to evidence of his thorough immersion in the instrumental use of the theater: "Shakespeare's serial multivocality, his entirely self-conscious and repeated determination to open up the stories being staged in his plays to multiple interpretations or applications was in itself intensely political" (50).

To what end did Shakespeare engage with what Lake asserts was the key political issue of the day, namely the succession to Elizabeth? A striking feature of Lake's discussion is his decision to read these plays in relation to the historical discussions contained in a series of Roman Catholic tracts published from the early 1570s until the mid-1590s, in particular Robert Parsons's fascinating (but surely niche?) pamphlet A Conference about the Next Succession. Lake sees Shakespeare going over the same historical ground as the authors of these tracts, but to different effect, particularly in respect of the crucial reigns of King John and Richard II (the former being the reign in which the largest number of history plays is set—an indication of the absorbing interest it held for early modern English audiences): "Shakespeare [used] his versions of the reigns of King John and Richard II definitively to reject Parsons' view, . . . that England was an elective monarchy, with a residual right, lodged in the commonwealth, to divert the succession, resist and even depose a peccant or tyrannical prince" (584–85). At the same time, Lake detects in Shakespeare's history plays a markedly anti-Puritan energy. And, turning now from the theater to politics, Lake argues for a congruence between the characteristic ambivalences and preoccupations of the Shakespearean history play and the schemes and projects emanating from the circle of...