What a Piece of Work Is Man: Shakespearean Drama as Marxian Fetish, the Fetish as Sacramental Sublime

Every individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.

—Karl Marx¹

The Blackfriars theater first opened for business in 1576, unless like a number of Protestants at the time you count the performance of the Mass, the veneration of icons and saints, even the acceptance of alms as so many elements in a massive theatrical campaign that Henry's usurpation of the papal supremacy and his subsequent confiscation of church property were supposed to have banned. In that case the Blackfriars' first premiere lies some place deeper in the medieval past. The building had been a Dominican friary before the dissolution, then a hall for Henry's parliament and the eventual site of Katherine's trial for adultery. Starting in 1576, it was leased on and off to various boys' companies until 1608, when the King's Men transformed the space into their own special venue, a theatrical cash-cow for customers of the higher end. If not before, then after the Globe burned during a performance of All Is True—our Henry VIII—the King's Men took the show to the Blackfriars and there replayed the divorce that set off the English Reformation in the very room where the real Henry had tried his wife. All is true, indeed.²

Actually the divorce and the vast changes that rode on its back heralded the end of drama as a medium for truth in the definitive form of Christian revelation. Curious, then, that the prologue to Henry VIII would still formulate the commercial theater's secular and aesthetic truth-claims in the language of faith:

            Such as give Their money out of hope they may believe May here find truth, too.³

The history of secular drama's vexed relation to its religious heritage lies somewhere embedded in the ambiguous stress of the word here, the supplemental too. Anywhere else, money given in hope of belief purchased a lie. That fraudulent transaction appeared to Protestants to have occurred as a matter of course in the Catholic Church—which is to say, in the Blackfriars as it was, now split off from the present through a radical historical dislocation whose origins Henry VIII would reenact. The here of commercial theater, really the whole presence and power of its fictitious representations, had been superimposed on a repudiated faith. People could still give money to the Blackfriars hoping to believe. But now in the wake of the dissolution they might find truth, too. Incredibly, the King's Men claimed to fulfill faith's promise through the same financial means that had betrayed the promise.

The secular drama hardly qualifies for that reason as a surreptitious restoration of Catholic ritual in the manner favored by critics on the side of a recusant Shakespeare, even less its total relinquishment, as argued by others.⁴ The Shakespearean theater reinstated Catholicism mainly in the form of its Protestant critique: a strictly commercial institution whose profits were exceeded only by the emptiness of its pretense. Unlike the Church, players could not be accused of having lapsed into worldliness, because they were already its epitome. People feared, on the contrary, that secular theater, by drawing its profits from a purely representational medium, might somehow lapse into the otherworldly—that the power of its images, although self-consciously and flamboyantly fictitious, although completely nonreligious in comparison to the former religious drama, might nonetheless provoke belief. Belief would then instigate worship. It seems actually to have increased anxiety among Protestants when sixteenth-century drama finally bowed to their ban on iconic representation. At least when drama had been openly religious, it was easier to understand why people fell prey to its fallacious charms; why, for example, they might dote on staged representations of the Virgin. That was wrong, but historically explicable. Weirder by far was this new devotion to secular figures as though they were icons—this willingness to sustain the Blackfriars as a repository of icons...