Anthony Miller

Matters of state

Shakespeares comedies touch on “matters of state” in two ways: the workings of law or the exercise of authority may give them a threatening or problematic edge; and, despite their exotic settings and fantastic actions, some of the comedies also bear the impress of the political conditions and anxieties of early modern England. Four plays – The Comedy of Errors , The Merchant of Venice , Measure for Measure , and The Tempest – turn dramatically on legal or political questions. In three of them, persons appear under guard or in chains, and death sentences impend; The Tempest employs the invisible or virtual chains of Prosperos magic, and death is a possible though unspoken penalty for his traitorous brother. All four plays climax in scenes of trial or judgment. In all, the principle of mercy or the bounty of fortune eventually overrides or skirts or deflects the rigors of law – at least on the face of it, and at least for some persons. Yet both justice and mercy prove questionable, through their arbitrariness, their incompleteness, or their very theatricality. The same four plays, like most Shakespearean comedies, are set in remote or fabulous realms – Ephesus, Venice, Vienna, and “an uninhabited island” somewhere between Tunis and Naples – where things are sometimes delightfully and sometimes disturbingly different. But these places would also have had a familiar aspect for Elizabethan and Jacobean playgoers. They are versions of London or England, or of their possible futures, and their dukes shadow Englands rulers, or their menacing foes and rivals. No less than modern audiences and critics, Shakespeares original audiences were alert to the political resonances of plays – their “application,” as it was called. These four comedies offer ample materials for the practice of “application.”

Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture

List of Plates Preface Introduction Roman Models Humanist Transmission Elizabethans and the Armada Marlowe and Spenser The Stuart Peace Shakespeare and Stuart Drama Civil War and Commonwealth Marvell and Milton Notes Bibliography of Classical Texts Index

The Stuart Peace

Until Charles I found himself fighting a civil war, the Stuart kings showed little enthusiasm or aptitude for the martial virtues. James I made peace with Spain, and in his monarchical self-presentation adopted the Erasmian model of rex pacificus. Charles I began his reign with naval campaigns against Spain and France, after which inauspicious ventures England played little part in the military affairs of Europe. Both James and Charles, and their adherents, nevertheless cultivated the triumph, translating its martial discourse into terms compatible with their policies.1 For their part, Protestant militants continued, as under Elizabeth, to assert their alternative policies and to criticize royal inactivity by recuperating the triumph. The first decade of James’s reign abounds in complimentary triumphs of peace, magnificence, and wisdom; only a few writers used the triumph to urge the King to combat the papist enemy. Admonition became sharper with the tensions of the 1610s. In 1612 England joined the Protestant Union, and in 1613 James’s daughter married the Protestant Elector Palatine, developments that James sought to balance by a renewed opening to Spain. Protestant enthusiasts, however, saw England again taking its place in an alliance against the Hapsburg foe. They expressed their hopes and their urgings through literary triumphs for James’s heirs and for the heroes of the continental wars.

Civil War and Commonwealth

The travails and conflicts of the English Civil War and Commonwealth were typically conceived in Judaeo-Christian terms: Israel neglects its covenant and suffers the captivity of Egypt or Babylon; God in his mercy delivers it through the prowess of a Joshua or a Gideon. Roman precedents also contributed: King Charles was identified with Tarquin or Caesar, Parliament and its generals with the Bruti or Cato. Fairfax’s New Model army and Cromwell’s navy were admired for reviving a republican discipline.1 The apocalyptic excitement, the conviction that God was active in political affairs, imparted the sense of national uniqueness and imperial destiny that Romans celebrated in the triumph. Both sides appropriated the conventions of triumph, to celebrate victories and for other purposes as well. In difficult times, consolatory triumphs promised eventual vindication. In defeat, the noble deaths of the king or his soldiers created the paradoxical triumphs of martyrdom. In the Civil War, royalist uses of triumph generally reconstruct Roman convention more accurately, while Parliamentary adaptations are more varied and resourceful. In the 1650s, this balance is redressed, or even reversed. Some Commonwealth writers produce triumph poems of baroque grandeur and endow Cromwell with the traits of an Augustus, though others contest this ostentation. Royalist writers prophesy vindicatory triumphs with a feverishness that recalls Puritan apocalyptics.

Shakespeare and Stuart Drama

Shakespeare’s Roman plays date from both sides of 1603, making it necessary to return briefly to the Elizabethan context of his earlier stage triumphs before discussing his more richly developed Jacobean versions. This mixture of reigns, though formally untidy, draws attention to the fact that the memory of Elizabeth’s victories and gloriously paradoxical triumphs persisted into the Stuart years as political weapon and imaginative stimulus. The triumphs of Titus Andronicus derive part of their energy from the sense of peril and of nationhood generated in the Armada years. The play is akin to Tamburlaine not only in date and bloody horror but also in its use of triumph to redraw the boundaries of civility. In Julius Caesar, political interests and ideologies define themselves through conflicting uses of the Roman triumph. The contestation between Caesar’s hubris or magnanimity, his opponents’ resentment or principle, and Roman reverence for the memory of Pompey, mirrors the conflicts and manoeuvres of the Essex years. Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes the advent of the pax augustana, the model for James’s pacific triumphalism, but the text gives Caesar’s Actium triumph little of the imaginative gravity that it has in Virgil and Horace, and Shakespeare’s Caesar is at best a lustreless compliment to James. Cleopatra’s witty appropriations of triumph reintroduce the transgressive figure of the female triumphator, and admiringly recall the audacious heroism of Elizabeth and her victories.

Marlowe and Spenser

No early modern English text makes more comprehensive or more historically informed use of triumph than Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, nor does any treat the triumph with such a disconcerting combination of bedazzlement and scepticism. The word sounds obsessively through the two texts, and triumphal rhetoric and spectacle shape the major confrontations between the plays’ protagonist and established monarchs. Tamburlaine possesses ad extremum the martial prowess and bloodiness of the triumphator. Before doing battle with the Turkish emperor Bajazeth at the centre of Part I, Tamburlaine promises Zenocrate that he will return ‘Triumphing over him and these his kings / Which I will bring as vassals to thy feet’; the episode concludes with the proclamation of this promised triumph.1 At the centre of Part II, yet more savage prophecies of triumph precede his battle with Bajazeth’s successor Callapine; after it, comes the spectacle of a procession that outdoes any Roman triumph in dreadfulness: ‘[Enter] Tamburlaine, drawn in his chariot by Trebizond and Soria with bits in their mouths, reins in his left hand, in his right hand a whip, with which he scourgeth them.’2 When Tamburlaine’s appearance of godlike invincibility succumbs to mortality, this turn of Fortune’s wheel fulfils the warning of the triumphator’s attendant.

Elizabethans and the Armada

In appropriating the triumph for England, Protestant polemic first denied it to papal Rome. For Biondo, the continuity between Rome’s pagan and papal triumphs amalgamated temporal and spiritual rule in a renouatio imperii. For Barnabe Googe, in The Popish Kingdome, or Reigne of Antichrist (1570), papal triumphs represent mere temporal presumption. Googe repeats Erasmus’s criticisms of the indecorous warrior demeanour and military triumphs of Julius II, which have transformed Christian shepherd into marauding wolf: Thus glistering all in armour brave, with spoyle and pillage rife, He closeth stately townes with trenche, and threatneth losse of life Unto his foes, with cannon shot he battereth downe a pace, The loftie walles, or lying long doth cause them sue for grace. And yelde for feare of famine up, their townes and goods withall, Then puttes he whome he list to sworde, for wordes and trespasse small. And so to Rome returneth straite, his triumph with him ledde.1

Marvell and Milton

In a wittily unjust passage of ‘Tom May’s Death’, Marvell lampoons the practice of Romanizing English politics and history. Consigned in Elysium to the company of ‘novice statesmen’, May will pursue his deluded and ignorant comparisons: Tell them of Liberty, the Stories fine, Until you all grow Consuls in your wine… Transferring old Rome hither in your talk, As Bethlem’s House did to Loretto walk. Foul Architect that hadst not Eye to see How ill the measures of these States agree.1