Patrick Gray

Shakespeare and Henri Lefebvre's 'Right to the City' : subjective alienation and mob violence in Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and 2 Henry VI.

ABSTRACT In his treatise, The Right to the City, published in Paris just before the student riots of 1968, Henri Lefebvre claims that inhabitants have a ‘right to the city’ which supersedes the rights of property owners and advocates ‘re-appropriation’ of the city, resulting in ‘collective ownership and management of space’. Present-day movements such as the Occupy protests continue to cite Lefebvre’s radical proposals as their inspiration. Shakespeare presents a nightmare counterpoint to this utopian dream. In 2 Henry VI, an analogue of ‘the right to the city’ appears as might be called ‘the right to the commons’. The Jack Cade Rebellion, however, quickly degenerates into horrifying bloodshed. In Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, Shakespeare likewise seems to oppose anarchic populism. Shakespeare and Lefebvre share common ground, however, in their sense that mob violence is a response to subjective alienation. Like Hegel, they see the desire for recognition as the engine of political conflict. More than any material change in what Marx would call the ‘conditions of production’, Shakespeare’s peasants and plebeians want to be recognised as worthy of respect; in the language of Coriolanus, they want their ‘voices’ to be heard. Riots and rebellions are their way of protecting that right.

Shakespeare and the other Virgil : pity and imperium in Titus Andronicus.

The influence of Virgil’s Aeneid in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is more extensive than has been recognized to date, largely because Shakespeare studies, surprisingly, still has not entirely acknowledged or addressed the more ambiguous reading of the Aeneid put forward in recent decades by the so-called ‘Harvard School’ of Virgil criticism. This interpretation of the Aeneid draws attention to Virgil’s sympathy for human suffering, especially his pity for the fallen enemies of Rome. Revisionary critics such as Adam Parry, Wendell Clausen and Michael Putnam argue that the ‘melancholy’ tone of the poem, resigned, mournful and at times finely ironic, arises from a sense of sorrow at the human cost of establishing the Roman Empire, undermining its ostensible purpose as Augustan propaganda. Virgil’s ‘private voice’ of compassion undercuts his ‘public voice’ of praise for Augustus’s pax Romana. Although associated today with criticism that emerged in America in the wake of the Vietnam War, as Craig Kallendorf has shown, this ‘pessimistic’ reading of the Aeneid, what he calls ‘the other Virgil’, was available in England in the Renaissance, and arguably dates back to antiquity.1 As apparent from his allusions to Virgil in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s reading of the Aeneid is in keeping with this vision. Virgil’s epic is the touchstone and the model for his own critique of Romanitas.