The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (review)

Oliver Arnold’s book The Third Citizen deals with Shakespeare’s attitude toward parliamentary politics and thus promises a fresh and original approach. As he notes, New Historicism has remained fixated on “crown and court” (24), and an “ocean of parliamentary discourse remains unexplored” (26). Arnold is well prepared for this voyage of discovery. He has made a careful study of the records of parliamentary proceedings, and he knows the work of older Whig historians like J. E. Neale and more recent revisionists like Mark Kishlansky. Yet, despite his solid knowledge of a relatively unfamiliar subject, the conclusion he reaches is familiar and depressing even as he offers his own variation on a now familiar formula: “We have power, no end of power, but it is not (quite) for us” (221). This predictable finale is attributable not only to the acknowledged influence of “Stephen Greenblatt’s remarkable work” (275 n. 6). It also stems from a monolithic conception of a force called “the movement of history” (221) and from a teleology no less determinist than the Whig myth of progress. Arnold’s treatment of historical debates is shrewd and incisive, and his analysis of specific plays can be sophisticated and persuasive. But his theoretical overview seems tendentious and schematic, drained of the messier rough-and-tumble of real political struggle.

In Arnold’s view, representative democracy is a snare and a delusion. Consent is no sooner exercised than it is usurped by bogus representatives. He mocks “Whig” critics like Annabel Patterson who would make Shakespeare not only our “contemporary” but our “colleague” by enlisting him as spokesman for their own liberal politics (224 n. 5), but Arnold recruits Shakespeare for his own agenda by claiming that “political representation is almost always a catastrophe for Shakespeare’s ‘people’” (12). Moreover, “Shakespeare invariably represents the relation between representative and represented as hierarchical and antagonistic” (13). Finally, his plays show that “oppression typically takes the form of representation, and representation is always oppressive and violent” (14). The roots of Arnold’s aversion to what he calls “representationalism” (4) can be traced to French thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Althusser, Bourdieu, and Foucault. Rousseau’s contempt for English electoral politics is explicit and harsh: “The English people think it is free; it is greatly mistaken, it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as they are elected, it is enslaved; it is nothing.” For Arnold, this passage has a transcendent oracular authority, and, lest we miss the point, he cites it three times (1, 191, 218).

At the same time, Arnold offers compelling evidence of the bad faith and self-serving practices of early modern politicians by amply citing their speeches. The specious sophistry employed by the more ingenious is fascinating. The most egregious rationalizations involve excuses for absenteeism and proxy voting. Francis Bacon justifies both by claiming that in Parliament “all men are present, wherfore this scruple needs not that the party to be bound should be here seene, for all men are here present representatively” (4–5). As Arnold astutely summarizes it, “Political representation, on Bacon’s account, is an act of faith, a belief in things unseen” (6), but these “were leaps of faith that Shakespeare could not make, flights of fancy he refused to take” (7). Politicians often condescend to the impractical fancies of artists, but, as Arnold shows, legal and political fictions can be just as extravagant as any permitted by poetic license. Lawyers may have as many affinities with the lunatic and lover as poets, though there is a self-serving method and motive in the madness of politicians.

Arnold’s comparisons of the theater and Parliament are especially intriguing. Shakespeare’s Chorus in Henry V invokes the principle of representation of multitudes by a few, and just as “one actor stands for a thousand in the theater,” so every MP is supposed to represent...