Being and Having in Shakespeare by Katharine Eisaman Maus (review)

Though modest in size and cover design, this book is deceptively dense and nuanced. Its project is framed against the materialist tendency in early modern studies suggesting not only that the relationship between “subject” and “object” is “dialectical, mutually constitutive” (3), but also, and more radically, that subjects are constituted by their objects. With the first of these propositions, Maus has no problem; it is with the second argument that she takes issue, writing “their narrative of a Fall into commodification seems . . . too pat. . . . it is possible to notice the significance of property without eliminating the subject–object distinction: that is, to accept . . . the materialists’ weak argument, without subscribing to their stronger one” (6). So far so modest. Yet the modesty is more than compensated by the subtlety and depth with which Shakespeare’s texts and early modern property regimes are found to complicate the “dialectical” interdependence of subject and object. What Maus offers us here is “‘a poetics of property’” (15), where the poetics is less a synonym for an underlying material system than the restless dialectical interrogation of subject-object paradoxes by the Shakespeare texts themselves.

Maus begins by underlining the stronger of the two materialist positions: Richard II is found to bear out Machiavelli’s observation that men are readier to forgive the murder of a father than the plunder of an inheritance (1). Thus Bolingbroke launches his insurrection only when his property is stripped from him, not at the murder of Woodstock. The point is that landed property (“seisin” [11]) is more than material. Richard’s title relies on his symbolic participation in the feudal bond. If the king treats property as a mere commodity however—the leasehold “tenement or pelting farm” (22)—then his title is hollow. Bolingbroke’s invasion then is less materialistic than the quote from Machiavelli suggests. Its true cause lies in Gaunt’s feudal ideal. Yet, here—as Maus points out—Shakespeare flies in the face of contemporary practice. As early as the twelfth century, feudal tenants acquired the right to alienate some of the land notionally belonging to their feudal lord. The distinction between feudal “socage” (11) and leasehold was growing ever more blurred. Paternal entailments could be broken by the means of elaborate legal fictions; feudal homage could be cashed out as a money payment. Gaunt’s ideal was patently obsolete at the time of the play. What then is going on in Richard II? It isn’t entirely clear. The book might have benefited at this point from a comparison with Woodstock where a similar juxtaposition of a quasi-feudal ideal of custodianship with Elizabethan-style commodification functions as a strong contemporary critique.¹

In a highly original analysis of 1 Henry IV, the priority of landed over alienable property is found to be reversed. Hal is imagined in terms of consumables or chattels. This kind of exchange has neither feudal nor blood-kin implications. Thus the site par excellence of the Hal subplot is the tavern, “the commodified double of a repudiated domesticity” (47). Chattel exchange here has a positive value. It gives Hal a freedom of movement and fertility of resource denied to his father. Specifically, Hal is able to substitute his way out of the potentially fatal contradiction of being both heir and prodigal. Prodigality even becomes a form of prudence. While fungibility is stifled in the closed-circuit world of Richard II, where all returns to a poisonous identity, it is vital to the reinvention of legitimacy in the later play. “Time” in the later play is not merely claimed but “redeemed”—bought back but also compounded. It seems clear that a materialist reading of 1 Henry IV would be beside the point. Chattels do not take the place of subjects here, they are merely catalysts in the games of substitution that subjects play with each other.

How did Shakespeare manage the imaginative leap from Richard II to 1 Henry IV...