As the English-speaking world remembers Shakespeare, let students of politics celebrate as well.
As the English-speaking world remembers Shakespeare, let students of politics celebrate as well.
‘A ll the world’s a stage.” So wrote William Shakespeare, the English language’s greatest playwright. The Bard’s birthday is remembered on April 23. In that birth and life, we have much to celebrate — especially those of us who study politics. Shakespeare saw the political world as a stage. Indeed, from the stages that present his esteemed works, we can glean far more than mere entertainment.
As a format, plays provide a fresh lens through which to study politics. We often consider histories, treatises, and speeches when thinking about political principles and practices. Plays present a level of nuance unavailable to many of these other mediums. A playwright can direct the tragedy (or the comedy) where he wishes. As he does so, he can display the intricacies of human thought. They show the tensions — between mind and heart, between passion and calculation, no less than between good and evil — that real humans face and that good art displays. Shakespeare is without parallel in displaying human nature in its variety and often baffling inconsistency.
In his plays he uses the advantages of format, then, to present the essential issues confronting political life. Though perpetual, they are also timely to our own experience. Several plays focus on the question of who should rule. Julius Caesar, for example, shows a man of superior ability placed in a republic based on political equality. The tension between the excellence of one and the commitment to human similarity results in civil war. Richard II discusses the argument for the divine right of kings. What seems a silly doctrine at first leaves, once it fades away, a gaping hole in the political community, which itself is then filled with constant political infighting. The later triumph we see in Henry V comes when a king learns more about how to rule with the people’s consent, even love.
Beyond who rules, we see Shakespeare display how to rule. Many times, those lessons come through negation. In tragedies, we see the folly of rulers result in the downfall of their political orders. In Macbeth, we find both a weak king, Duncan, and the development of a tyrant, Macbeth himself. These tragic opposites both prove unequal to the task of good rule. One has justice undermined by weakness; the other involves strength that serves despotism. Richard III shows evil at its most fully formed, its most manipulative, ruthless, and bloody.
One other option exists for rule, a rule not by men but by laws, such as in our own system in the United States. We see this political system in The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Both take place in Venice, a cosmopolitan, commercial republic based in law. Racial and religious divisions, though, threaten the city’s peace, including its ability to transcend the differences by means of commercial transactions and the rule of equal laws. In our current arguments over religion and race, we can find insight within these centuries-old plays.
To the divisions of race and religion, Shakespeare adds class, in, for example, Coriolanus, set in ancient Rome. We see a city divided by bitter partisanship between elite nobles and the common man. The two sides express such disdain, such vitriol toward each other that it seems like two Romes exist, not one. Much like our conversations about contemporary America, Coriolanus asks a critical question: What holds a country together?
Finally, Shakespeare’s plays consider the standard of justice by which we can assess right rule. King Lear gives an extended meditation on the role of nature in political life. The other option for rule is convention — the traditions and normative practices that build up in a political community. Lear is a tragedy that shows the need for both. While we need nature as a guide to justice, that nature must reveal a good, not simply what exists for fallen humanity. Convention does well when it cements nature by habit, not when it indulges its own distinct fancies. Again, in our present moment, there is much to be gained from this knowledge. We seem bent on eliminating both nature and convention. We eliminate nature in our views of sex, of rights, and of truth itself. We destroy convention when convention is rebranded as codified oppression. Shakespeare would correct us on both counts.
As the English-speaking world remembers Shakespeare, let students of politics celebrate as well. In his work we see so many contemporary issues confronted, from who should rule, to the role of law, race, religion, and class, and to questions of the standards of justice. “All the world’s a stage.” From his wisdom, the American part of the world’s stage still has much to learn.