Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (review)

Hugh Grady's Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne is a clever, intelligent, and well-written (though slightly ponderous) book that lives right on the edge of the schematic, sometimes falling into it and sometimes successfully avoiding it. The scheme in question is provided by the second and third proper names in the book's main title. Machiavelli and Montaigne are used to symbolize two different and, in Grady's view, opposed discourses available to Shakespeare: a discourse of instrumental rationality and a discourse of flowing interiority. What gives the book its distinct flavor, however (and its cleverness), is the way in which this (more or less) historical claim about the late Renaissance is mapped on to a historical claim about Anglo-American literary criticism in the late twentieth century. Foucault and Althusser are seen (again with some plausibility and historical basis) as articulating a "Machiavellian" worldview, while Lacan is linked to Montaigne. Literary criticism is seen as moving, and needing to move, away from the "Machiavellian moment" of New Historicism to a more Montaignean moment. Whatever one ends up thinking about this book, its intellectual and scholarly seriousness cannot be called into doubt.

Grady focuses on what he calls a Machiavellian moment in Shakespeare's career, the period from 1595–1600 (a disastrous typo in the first chapter title turns 1600 into 1660). Grady acknowledges the arbitrariness of picking out five of the ten or so plays Shakespeare wrote in this period, but it seems fair enough to focus on the Henriad, with Hamlet as a coda. The distinctive feature of his selected plays, according to Grady, is their "relative positivity" about political power conceived in a secular, realistic, "Machiavellian" way (26). This is an interesting thesis that has some truth in it — neither Bolingbroke nor Hal are entirely negative figures — but it leads to an overly simplified view of the anti-Machiavellianism of the earlier plays, especially Richard III. Grady sees the earlier plays as having been committed only to a negative view of the Machiavellian and also to a providentialist framework. This hardly does justice to Richard III, in which Richard has more than a certain contained allure, and in which the providential scheme is no clearer than it is in the Henriad.

The other defining feature of the Machiavellian moment in Shakespeare's career, for Grady, is that this moment has a non-coincidental relation to "the spectacular climax of the career of the Earl of Essex" (27). This claim gives the book a New (or very Old) Historicist tinge, and it is intermittently argued throughout the book. With regard to Richard II, the chronology, of course, is a problem: Richard II was probably composed in 1595, years before Essex's abortive rebellion in 1601. So Grady is reduced to the weak claim that Shakespeare's play "may have been among the stimuli which shaped the imagination of Essex" (37). At times Grady suggests that Essex somehow had a unique relation to Machiavelli, but how Essex's hare-brained march on the court was Machiavellian is not clear. The Essex material works as part of the general background to these plays rather than as a more particular framework. Grady himself must acknowledge, as he says, how "carefully qualified" the allusion to Essex is in the chorus that opens the fifth act of Henry V (241).

The chapter on Richard II is a mixed success. Its Marxist moments — Richard as working within a cash nexus — are some of its worst, as is true of such moments throughout the book. On the other hand, the way in which this chapter critiques both the apolitical "authentic self" reading of Richard (93) and Dollimore's complete evacuation of subjectivity (104) is one of the book's triumphs. This is the balancing act toward subjectivity that Grady wishes to enact. He is certainly correct about the play's "complete and strategic...