How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays by Peter Lake (review)

By the 1590s in England, even heavy makeup, extravagantly bejeweled gowns, and a bright red wig could not conceal the fact that Queen Elizabeth was nearing the end of her long reign. She was, as her courtier Sir Walter Ralegh delicately put it, “a lady whom Time has surprised.” Having refused to marry, she had no heirs, and she was steadfastly unwilling to name a successor. It was in this political situation of intense uncertainty that Shakespeare first made his name, writing for his contemporaries a series of extraordinary history plays and tragedies. The plays are all situated securely in the past—either ancient Rome or the England of a century or more earlier. But, as the historian Peter Lake shows in this long, thorough, and carefully argued study, Shakespeare found powerful ways to address the anxieties of his age.

Elizabethan England had no legally protected freedom of expression. Writers who addressed current political concerns courted danger; even indiscreet conversations in the alehouse could be denounced to the authorities and lead to serious trouble. In print, the most important direct discussions of the fraught succession question were, as Lake observes, clandestinely published tracts written by dissident Catholics. But in the public theater, under the cloak of historical drama, thousands of spectators could grapple with probing representations of their most pressing dilemmas.

Shakespeare was writing plays, not political briefs. Even when he skated close to contemporary issues, as he clearly did in plays like Richard II, King John, and Henry V, he not only maintained the cover of history but he also left open a range of possible interpretations. Lake is exceptionally deft at teasing out these possibilities, and, though he is himself cautious, he ventures to propose where Shakespeare’s hidden sympathies lay. The playwright, he argues, put his hopes upon the Earl of Essex. Though Essex turned out to be a bad bet, “all that proves,” Lake concludes, “is that it is not necessary to be politically correct, or at least correct about politics, to write plays that last.”