Shakespeare: Radical or Republican?

It has been a big year for big years and Shakespeare. In June, James Shapiro's magnificent 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Faber) reconstructed in meticulous detail the contexts, the writing, and the performances which enabled Shakespeare, in one giddying dramatic year, to become the most celebrated playwright of his generation. Andrew Hadfield's Shakespeare and Republicanism, though ultimately wider in scope, has at its centre a similar career-defining twelve months. The year on this occasion, however, comes slightly earlier. Hadfield's analysis of Shakespeare's writing begins in 1593–4, a period when the professional theatres were closed owing to a plague outbreak and during which actors and stage writers were forced to make their living by alternative means. The year 1594 saw, therefore, Shakespeare in print for the first time, when four of his works (The Rape of Lucrece, Venus and Adonis, 2 Henry VI, and Titus Andronicus) were produced for sale in quarto format from London's booksellers. Hadfield's account is as celebratory as Shapiro's; here we have a Shakespeare who is fruitful in times of pestilence, who brings plenty forth from dearth, who begins exploring the sources and writing styles which will crown the later achievements of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Measure for Measure, and Antony and Cleopatra.

Strictly speaking, for Hadfield, achievements are not crowned in Shakespeare, since what he sees as emerging from this period (and remaining a constant preoccupation across a writing life) is a keen interest in republicanism and non-monarchical forms of authority. From the early verse to the mature tragedies – but not, for some reason, in the comedies – Hadfield reads Shakespeare 'fashion[ing] himself as a Republican author' (p.100). Lucrece signals an early fascination with one of the foundational myths of the Roman republic; Titus Andronicus is a canny, crowd-pleasing, and occasionally parodic enquiry into 'the last days of the decaying republic' (p. 159); the Henry VI plays are, wonderfully, Shakespeare's dramatic rendition of Lucan's republican epic the Pharsalia; Julius Caesar is a meditation on the debasement of republican values; Hamlet, with its interest in regicide and the deposition of usurpers, is a 'distinctly republican play' (p. 189). With the passing of what Hadfield refers to as the 'republican moment', that period of political uncertainty towards the end of the unmarried, heirless Elizabeth I's reign, Shakespeare 'remained interested in republican issues' (p. 205), writing Measure for Measure and Othello (plays which reflect on the complex relationships between virtue and political institutions) alongside Antony and Cleopatra, that late meditation on regime change and the final destruction of the Roman republic. The arguments that develop across the course of this book's seven chapters are rich and forceful, and the author's uncluttered, unpretentious prose ensures that the reader is always engaged.

It is salutary after the long shadow cast by certain brands of new historicist analysis to come across a Shakespeare who is neither the mouthpiece for nor the unwitting prop of the Elizabethan and Jacobean authorities, and Hadfield is at his very best when engaged in the careful contextualisation of close readings. His comparison of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece as companion pieces on the effects of lust on royalty – a particularly topical issue in the 1590s given Elizabeth I's preference for chastity over marriage – is a treat. The analysis of the relationship between oratory and public culture in Julius Caesar is, similarly, superb. It is a real shame, therefore, that the quality of these local readings is not supported by a more precise and robust overarching argument. Primarily, as Hadfield acknowledges, this is a definitional problem. What does 'republicanism' really mean in England before the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth and Protectorate in the mid-seventeenth century? Can it actually be said to exist in a culture that was, before then, so completely defined by the language and assumptions of monarchy? A number of historians of the seventeenth century, chief amongst them Blair Worden, have argued that this...