Shakespeare and Popular Politics

Abstract

This article defines popular politics as the tactics -ranging from grumbling to rioting -used by common people to articulate and redress economic and social injustice. Early modern popular politics were not, however, exclusively radical and were rarely antimonarchical. A study of popular politics thus pressures the conservative versus progressive binary through which most critics discuss Shakespeare's politics. Furthermore, this article contests the widely held assumption that Shakespeare was hostile in his representations of 'the people' and toward his audience. An understanding of popular politics equips one to read Shakespeare's crowds not as irrational lovers of violence but rather as stewards of the commonwealth or conscious agents of their own material interests. This article poses the theater itself as a space of popular politics, insofar as it was a space where popular politics were depicted onstage and where common people were invited to think through political issues.

The Politics of Privacy and the Renaissance Public Stage

“…Other scholars have drawn similar conclusions. Investigating the concept of ‘popularity’ – perhaps the closest early modern term to the idea of the public sphere – whereby public figures courted the opinions of private people, Jeffrey S. Doty argues that theatre was a space of popularity in which Shakespeare ‘makes private people paying attention to matters of state a topic of inquiry in itself’ (‘ Richard II ’ 183) . Focusing on the power of emotions, rather than the Habermasian insistence on rational–critical debate, Kate Welch has called attention to how the passions, and specifically, the public performance of emotion and the responses it engenders, create publics: ‘Standing elbow‐to‐elbow in the theatre, these private responses [emotional reactions to a performance] could become public’ (81).…”

“…Given the broad aims of the ‘Making Publics’ project, it is ironic that their analyses of Renaissance drama have been so narrow in focus. Predictably, given his cultural import, Shakespeare has dominated research on publics: Hamlet (1600) is a great source of interest to Yachnin (‘Social’, ‘Performing’), and Mullaney and Welch also focus on the play, while Shankar Raman examines The Merchant of Venice (1596), and Doty considers several Shakespeare plays (‘ Richard II ’; ‘ Measure for Measure ’; ‘Popular Politics’). Unlike the others, Yachnin also gestures towards the wider corpus of Renaissance drama, incorporating references to other dramatists in his essays and producing one piece focusing on how Middleton's drama ‘fashioned a public space were one did not exist before’ (‘Playing’ 32), but future work should examine the variety of the Renaissance stage in greater detail.…”