Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theory (review)

Subtle and complex in style while essentially simple and clear in its thesis, Julia Lupton's book is an example of first-class academic writing. It is a truly Renaissance work, easily embracing the theological, the literary, and the cultural in a political argument that concludes with an impassioned meditation on the place of the humanities in the modern university. Chapter 1, entitled "Citizen Paul," firmly places the work within the context of the recent interest of scholars such as Alain Badiou and Georgio Agamben in the role of St Paul within western political thought. Indeed, Agamben's book The Time That Remains (in the French version of 2000), in which he describes the Pauline epistles as "the fundamental messianic texts of the West," is mentioned more than once. Lupton, however, is an original thinker, subtly combining Paul's theology and indeed his life in the theme of "death into citizenship" that will be pursued through the texts which are examined in the following chapters. It is in Paul's debates with Peter, and his experience as a circumcised Jew and a citizen of Rome, that the themes of particularity and universality and the civil and the civic are established. In his letters, the shift from the literal to the hermeneutical and the metaphorical is also found, specifically in his discussions of the changing significance of circumcision, from circumcision-as-seal (sphragis) to circumcision-as-sign (semeion).

In Paul also is rooted the figure of the citizen-saint, and after him follows an unlikely company of literary citizen-saints from Kit Marlowe's Jew of Malta to Shakespeare's Shylock, Jew of Venice, Othello, Antigone, Isabella, Caliban, and finally Samson Agonistes. What holds them together is their various "deaths into citizenship." Shylock, the merchant of Venice, moves toward his conversion, from his participation in the "civil" mercantile business of the outsider in the Jewish ghetto to "civic" citizenship in the state of Venice, from the tribal to the universal. But his "naturalization" is "permanently unnatural" (100), his accession to the citizenry an act of surplus, an ambiguous and uneasy shift in which there is nothing tragic, and yet a death. For Othello, also the tribal outsider and another example of Christendom's rank attitude toward the Jew and the Muslim, the death is literal and yet again the passport to citizenship in Venice: "Indeed, it is precisely the costs of citizenship that these two plays lay at our feet, for our deliberation and judgment" (123).

In Chapter 5, the gender shifts, and it is the "adopted sisterhood" of Sophocles' Antigone and Isabella in Measure for Measure that is compared, as the one also literally dies into citizenship, her "sacrificial disappearance into the historical memory of [the] polis" (139), which frees its civic uniformity from her dangerous but necessary criminality, whereas the other becomes a citizen-saint in offering her chastity to a marriage to the state which rebinds her to the social order which she then guarantees. The subtle analysis of Measure for Measure is not limited to character but recognizes the stage-craft and physical performance of Shakespearean drama as a theatre of citizenship, the venues both courtly and suburban, and the various spaces of the Globe Theatre indicating a journey through the "world of modern liberties" toward new norms and forms of civil society. As the argument moves through the "creature" Caliban and then finally to Milton's Samson Agonistes (a shrewd shift in gear from the absolutists politics of Shakespeare's Elizabethan England to the Restoration London of post-Commonwealth England), the theological subtext becomes clearer. For the unmentioned citizen-saint is Christ himself, visually present and given due obeisance in the jacket cover which is taken from Hieronymus Bosch's Adoration of the Magi (1510), and Milton's insistent Arianism, from De Doctrina Christiana to Paradise Lost and Regained, is given an explanation. For the creatureliness of the citizen-saint, marking the radical separation of Creation and Creator, is absolutely necessary, enabling human...