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  • Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet
  • Lars Engle (bio)
Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity From Richard II to Hamlet. By Hugh Grady . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp x + 286. $72.00 cloth.

Over the past fourteen years Hugh Grady has emerged as one of the most important commentators on Shakespeare's relation to twentieth-century theory and criticism. The book under review in some ways carries forward the enterprise of Grady's The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (1991) and Shakespeare's Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (1996), and it shares many of their strengths: boldness in tracing critical and theoretical genealogies of contemporary interpretation, thoroughness in mapping the recent history of Shakespeare criticism, and thoughtful clarity in presenting its argument. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne differs from its predecessors, however, in that it seeks to provide "a broad historical overview to substantiate some of the theoretical notions developed in [Grady's] earlier work" (3) while discussing the four plays of the Henriad and, in somewhat less detail, Hamlet.

This historical overview comes partly through a detailed account of specific relations between the plays and their cultural moment (especially relating 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and Hamlet to the Essex crisis), but the more important historicization consists of reading Shakespeare in the light of two great sixteenth-century Continental writers—Machiavelli and Montaigne.

The triangulation Grady undertakes is such an excellent idea that it's surprising his is the first book (so far as I know) to undertake it. Montaigne and Machiavelli occupy a special place in the affections and discourse of critics who seek to read Shakespeare (and indeed any early modern author) as in dialogue with contemporary concerns without succumbing to overt and polemical presentism. Machiavelli's political realism demonstrates that modern tendencies to demystify transcendental discourses in terms [End Page 226] of the will to power had a prominent and widely known Renaissance expositor. Montaigne's bottomless self-awareness and his humane skepticism demonstrate that modern tendencies to understand human individuality in terms of psychological interiority and the capacity to retain private judgment had a prominent and widely read Renaissance exemplar. Montaigne and Machiavelli offer two distinct but conspicuously modern modes of sensibility which are visible in Shakespeare, who in many ways seems, insofar as his plays can be interpreted as items in a history of thought, less consistently modern than does either Montaigne or Machiavelli. Moreover, Montaigne and Machiavelli are not only different; they can be seen as opposed to each other on key issues, with Montaigne as a critical reader of and respondent to Machiavelli. Grady not only stresses their opposition; he makes them advocates for either side of a major theoretical issue: the question of the status of subjectivity with respect to institutionalized power. For Grady, Machiavelli is the theorist of the supremacy of power and the subordination or cooption of subjectivity, while Montaigne is the theorist of resistant, interrogative subjectivity and of a communicative discourse more or less independent of state power. Thus Machiavelli is a sixteenth-century Foucault or Althusser, while Montaigne is a sixteenth-century Habermas—and it is important to note that Grady makes this point with appropriate cautionary notes and historical caveats, pointing out that his views are in some ways a reduction of both Renaissance and twentieth-century thinkers:

I will be presupposing an alternative "Montaignean" theory of early modern subjectivity, one based much more on themes of Adorno, Horkheimer, Lacan, and others ..., rather than the "Machiavellian" French poststructuralism that has set the agenda for much previous cultural materialism. In the theory I am working with here, subjectivity cannot be reduced to the effect of static structures of domination like ideology and discourses. Instead, it participates in a relatively autonomous, socially constructed realm of meaning and communication, which rather than being static and reified is in principle open to negotiation, modification, and reconstitution through dialogue.

(24)

Though this is an agenda that would seem to privilege Montaigne—whom Shakespeareans neglect much more than they do Machiavelli, after all—Grady considers a set of plays which constitutes, as he rightly points...

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