IT WAS ALL a long time ago, in a society with a very different political system, one that lacked the constitutional protection of free speech and the basic norms of democratic society. When Shakespeare was a child, a wealthy Catholic, John Felton, was drawn and quartered for posting a copy of a papal bull and for asserting “that the queen had never been true queen of England.” A few years later, a Puritan, John Stubbs, had his right hand chopped off by the public executioner for writing a pamphlet that denounced the queen’s proposed marriage to a French Catholic. The pamphlet’s distributor was similarly maimed. Comparably severe punishments for acts of speech and writing that were adjudged criminal by the authorities continued all through the reigns of Elizabeth and James.
Shakespeare no doubt attended some of the ghastly spectacles. Along with marking the boundaries of acceptable expression that it behooved him to observe, they revealed a great deal about the human character at moments of insupportable pain and suffering. They revealed, as well, much about the fears and desires of the crowd, precisely the passions that were the playwright’s stock-in-trade. His power as an artist derived from the people. He set himself the goal not to be a coterie writer, finding a niche in the household of a sophisticated patron, but a popular entertainer, luring the masses to part with their pennies in exchange for deep thrills.20
Those thrills frequently bordered on transgression—hence the constant calls by moralists, ministers, and civic officials to close all the theaters down. But Shakespeare understood where the danger lay. He certainly knew that it was treason “by writing, printing, preaching, speech, express words or sayings” to affirm that the sovereign is a “heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper of the crown.” And he knew that for a playwright, any critical reflections on powerful contemporary figures or on contested issues were at once alluring and risky. His colleague Thomas Nashe fled from an arrest warrant for sedition; Ben Jonson languished in prison on similar charges; Thomas Kyd died shortly after being tortured in the course of an investigation into his roommate, Christopher Marlowe; Marlowe was stabbed to death by an agent in the queen’s secret service. It was important to tread carefully.
Master of the oblique angle, Shakespeare prudently projected his imagination away from his immediate circumstances. And avoiding imprisonment was not his only motive. He was not an embittered malcontent, set on undermining the authority of this lord and that bishop, let alone challenging his sovereign or stirring up sedition. He was on the way to making himself a wealthy man, with steady income from playhouse receipts, real estate investments, commodity trading, and occasional quiet moneylending. Disorder was not in his interest. His works bespeak a deep aversion to violence—even, or perhaps especially, so-called principled violence—directed against established leaders.
But his works bespeak, as well, an aversion to the government-sanctioned platitudes rehearsed in texts like the “Homilies on Obedience,” reactionary commonplaces parroted by orators at public events like elections and executions, and expatiated on by time-serving priests eager to snatch a superior benefice. Perhaps Shakespeare thought that the official strategy—the celebration of those in authority, a belligerent refusal to acknowledge gross economic inequity, the perpetual invocation of God’s partisan support for whoever was on top, and the demonizing of even the most modest skepticism—had the very opposite effect of what was intended. For it only reinforced a sense that the whole system of values—who is honorable and who is base, what counts as goodness and what is branded as evil, where the boundaries are drawn between truth and lies—was a monstrous fraud. It was Sir Thomas More, from whom Shakespeare borrowed so much of his portrait of Richard III, who put the matter most clearly almost a hundred years earlier: “When I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world,” More wrote in Utopia, “I can’t, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich.”
Shakespeare found a way to say what he needed to say. He managed to have someone stand up onstage and tell the two thousand listeners—some of whom were government agents—that “a dog’s obeyed in office.” The rich get away with what is brutally punished in the poor. “Plate sins with gold,” his character continued,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks:
Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it.
If you said words like these at the tavern, you stood a good chance of having your ears cut off. But day after day they were spoken in public, and the police were never called. Why not? Because the person who spoke them was Lear in his madness (King Lear 4.5.153, 160–61).
As we have seen, Shakespeare reflected throughout his life on the ways communities disintegrate. Endowed with an uncannily acute perception of human character and with rhetorical skills that would be the envy of any demagogue, he deftly sketched the kind of person who surges up in troubled times to appeal to the basest instincts and to draw upon the deepest anxiety of his contemporaries. A society locked into bitterly factionalized party politics, in his view, is particularly vulnerable to the fraudulent populism. And there are always instigators who arouse tyrannical ambition, and enablers, people who perceive the danger posed by this ambition but who think that they will be able to control the successful tyrant and to profit from his assault on established institutions.
The playwright repeatedly depicted the chaos that ensues when tyrants, who generally have no administrative competence and no vision for constructive change, actually get possession of power. Even relatively healthy and stable societies, he thought, have few resources that enable them to ward off damage from someone sufficiently ruthless and unscrupulous; nor are they well-equipped to deal effectively with legitimate rulers who begin to show signs of unstable and irrational behavior.
Shakespeare never looked away from the horrible consequences visited upon societies that fall into the hands of tyrants. “Alas, poor country,” laments one of the characters in Macbeth’s Scotland,
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing
But who knows nothing is once seen to smile;
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy. (Macbeth 4.3.165–70)
Shakespeare registered, as well, the full measure of the violence and misery that are generally required to get rid of those who cause such suffering. But he was not without hope. He thought that the way forward was not assassination, a desperate measure that in his view usually brought about the very thing it was most attempting to prevent. Rather, as he imagined toward the end of his career, the best hope lay in the sheer unpredictability of collective life, its refusal to march in lockstep to any one person’s orders. The incalculable number of factors constantly in play make it impossible for an idealist or a tyrant, a Brutus or a Macbeth, to remain securely in charge of the course of events or to see, as Lady Macbeth dreams she does, “The future in the instant” (1.5.56).
As a playwright, Shakespeare strikingly embraced this unpredictability. He wrote plays that intertwined multiple plots, jumbled together kings and clowns, routinely violated generic expectations, and conspicuously ceded the control of interpretation to actors and audiences. There is in this theatrical practice an underlying trust that an extremely diverse, random body of spectators will ultimately work things out. Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson once floated the fantasy that the members of the audience should be permitted to assess a play according to how much they paid for their seats: “It shall be lawful for any man to judge his six pen’orth [i.e., pennyworth], his twelve pen’orth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half a crown, to the value of his place.”21 Nothing could be further from Shakespeare’s evident conviction that everyone in the theater has an equal right to form an opinion and that the results in the aggregate, however messy, will finally confirm the success or failure of the enterprise.
A comparable conviction seems to underlie the depiction in Coriolanus of the city’s narrow escape from tyranny, an escape that emerges from a confused tangle of causes: the autocratic hero’s psychological instability, his mother’s persuasive power, the small measure of agency conferred upon the people, the behavior of the voters and their elected leaders. The playwright knew that it is easy to become cynical about these leaders and to despair about the all-too-human men and women who place their trust in them. The leaders are often compromised and corruptible; the crowd is often foolish, ungrateful, easily misled by demagogues, and slow to understand where its real interests lie. There are periods, sometimes extended periods, during which the cruelest motives of the basest people seem to be triumphant. But Shakespeare believed that the tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of the people who steadfastly remained silent when they were exhorted to shout their support for the tyrant, or the servant who tried to stop his vicious master from torturing a prisoner, or the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice. “What is the city but the people?”