Paulina Kewes
Jesus College
SHAKESPEARE, HISTORY, AND POLITICS
MSt C-course MT2007
The purpose of this course is to explore the politics of Shakespeare’s histories, Roman plays and
tragedies written during the so-called second reign of Elizabeth. These works were the product of a
climate of uncertainty, political and economic crisis, religious dissension, and international and
domestic discord. By summoning the history of feudal England, ancient Rome, and medieval Denmark,
Shakespeare engaged, however obliquely, with the pressing issues of the day: the unresolved succession
and the concomitant fears of civil war, resistance, usurpation, and royal despotism.
The topical investment of the plays did not stop them from being hailed by later generations as timeless
literary masterpieces. In terms of their political philosophy, these texts have been variously read as
defences of divine-right kingship and as endorsements of republicanism, as exhortations to obedience
and as apologies for resistance, as assertions of royal prerogative and as affirmations of the liberty of
the subject. They have also been viewed as complex meditations on the nature of sovereignty, power,
and personal freedom that cannot be reduced to simple statements of political principle. We shall assess
the validity of these contradictory approaches by discussing in detail Shakespeare’s treatment of
sovereignty and liberty in a variety of historical and geographical settings and socio-political spheres:
the state, the nation, and the family. We shall not, however, treat Shakespeare in isolation: rather, our
aim will be to locate his late Elizabethan writings in the context that produced them. This is why we
shall read them alongside a range of works by his contemporaries: other playwrights and poets, divines,
pamphleteers, polemicists, historians, and political actors.
The course will address the following questions: Where does Shakespeare locate the source of political
authority in the state? What does his presentation of the relations between the rulers and the ruled
suggest about the rights of sovereignty and the claims of liberty? How does the advent of tyranny,
whether political, parental, or marital, shape the application of these abstract ideals to present action?
Does Shakespeare’s attitude to the acquisition and exercise of political power change by the time he
comes to write Hamlet? In what ways does Shakespeare modify his use of language and dramatic means
of expression to deal with a variety of political issues? What are the points of contact between the works
of Shakespeare and the more explicitly political writings by his contemporaries?
1. The True Tragedy of Richard III and Richard III: Providentialism or Realpolitik?
Supplementary reading: extracts from: Sir Thomas More’s The History of Richard III, Edward Hall’s
The Union of Lancaster and York, and Holinshed’s Chronicles; Richard Mulcaster, Quenes Maiesties
Passage.
Secondary reading:
Axton, Marie, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal
Historical Society, 1977).
Kewes, Paulina, ‘The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s
Works, vol. II: The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp.
170-93.
McMillin, Scott and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen's Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
Rackin, Phyllis, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1990; repr., London: Routledge, 1991).
Woolf, 'The Shapes of History', in David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999).
Worden, Blair, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare Survey, 44 (1992), 1-15.
2. David and Batsheba, Titus Andronicus and the Rules of Succession
Supplementary reading: Peter Wentworth, Pithie Exhortation (c. 1587-93); Robert Southwell, An
humble supplication to her Maiestie (c. 1592)
Secondary reading
Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Religious Factor’, in Jean-Christophe Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the
Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier:
Astraea Collection, 2004), pp. 243-73.
Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Hunter, G. K., ‘A Roman Thought: Renaissance Attitudes to History Exemplified in Shakespeare and
Jonson’, in An English Miscellany Presented to W. S. Mackie, ed. Brian S. Lee (Cape Town, 1977), 93118.
James, Heather, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Neale, J. E., account of Peter Wentworth in Elizabeth and her Parliaments, 2 vols (London: Cape,
1957).
Worden, Blair, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience’, in Republicanism: A
Shared European Heritage, vol. I: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe, ed.
Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 307-27.
3. The Troublesome Raigne of King John, King John and the Rhetoric of Anti-Popery
Supplementary reading: accounts of King John in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1583) and Holinshed’s
Chronicles (1587); William Allen, Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland
(1588) & Allen’s translation of the papal bull of excommunication, A Declaration of the Sentence and
Deposition of Elizabeth, the Vsurper and Pretensed Quene of Englande.
Secondary reading:
Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical
Society, 1977).
Hillman, Richard, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
Mayer, Jean-Christophe, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion, and the Stage (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Holmes, Peter, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
4. Richard II and Robert Persons’s Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of
Ingland (1595): Resistance and Election
Supplementary reading: account of Richard II’s fall and Henry’s rise in Holinshed, Chronicles (1587);
John Hayward, The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (1599): speeches by the
Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Carlisle)
Secondary reading:
Clegg, Cyndia, '"By the Choise and Inuitation of al the Realme": Richard II and Elizabethan Press
Censorship', Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997), 432-48.
Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Lake, Peter, 'The King, (the Queen) and the Jesuit: James Stuart's True Law of Free Monarchies in
Context/s', TRHS, 6th series, 14 (2004), 243-60.
Kingdon, Robert M., ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550-1580’, in The Cambridge History of
Political Thought, 1450-1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), pp. 193-218.
Levy, F. J., 'Hayward, Daniel and the Beginnings of Politic Historiography', Huntington Library
Quarterly, 50 (1987), 1-34.
Salmon, J. H. M, ‘Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 15801620’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 219-53.
5. Julius Caesar, Sejanus and the Fall of the (Monarchical) Republic
Supplementary reading: Thomas Lodge, The Wounds of Civil War; Sir Henry Savile, The Ende of Nero
and the beginning of Galba; Sir Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum (extracts).
Secondary sources:
Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London:
Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 31-56, repr. in John Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London: Arnold,
1997), pp. 110-34.
Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Lake, Peter, ‘From Leicester his Commonwealth to Sejanus his fall: Ben Jonson and the Politics of
Roman (Catholic) Virtue’, in Ethan H. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant nation’: Religious
Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
Miola, Robert, ‘Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate’, Renaissance Quarterly, 39 (1985), 271-89.
Worden, Blair, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, Culture and
Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 67-89.
----- 'Ben Jonson and the Monarchy', in Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, and Rowland Wymer
(eds), Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 2000), pp. 71-90.
6. Hamlet and the Jacobean Succession
Supplementary reading: Peter Wentworth, Discourse of the True Successor; John Harington, Tract on
the Succession (extracts); Correspondence of King James VI. of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and
Others in England (selected letters).
Secondary sources:
Doran, Susan, ‘Loving and Affectionate Cousins? The Relationship between Elizabeth I and James VI
of Scotland 1586-1603’, in Tudor England and its Neighbours, ed. Susan Doran and Glenn Richardson
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 203-34.
----- ‘James VI and the English Succession’, in Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I: Ideas,
Authority and Government (Ashgate, 2006).
Kurland, Stuart M., ‘Hamlet and the Stuart Succession?’, SEL 34 (1994), 279-300.
Mallin, Eric, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley, Calif.:
University of California Press, 1995).
Parliamentary proceedings, royal proclamations & correspondence
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, The Letters of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI of Scotland, ed. John
Bruce (London: Camden Society, 1849).
----- The Letters of Queen Elizabeth, ed. G. B. Harrison, (2nd edn., New York: Funk and Wagnalls,
1968).
James VI and I, Correspondence of King James VI. of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in
England, during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. With an Appendix Containing Papers Illustrative
of Transactions between King James and Robert, Earl of Essex, ed. John Bruce, Camden
Society 78 (London, 1861).
---- Letters of King James VI & I, ed. G. P. V. Akrigg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
----- The Political Works of James I Reprinted from the Edition of 1616, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain,
Harvard Political Classics, vol.1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918).
----- Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
---- The secret correspondence of Sir Robert Cecil with James VI. King of Scotland (London, 1766).
Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, ed. T. E. Hartley, 3 vols (London: Leicester University
Press, 1981-95).
Prothero, G. W., ed. Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents, 3th edn, (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1906).
Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1973).
Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1964-69).
Secondary sources
Drama, History, and Politics
Bevington, David, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
Burgess, Glenn, ‘Becoming English? Becoming British? The Political Thought of James VI & I Before
and After 1603’, in Jean-Christophe Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late
Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea
Collection, 2004), pp. 143-75.
Clegg, Cyndia Susan, ‘“By the Choise and Inuitation of al the Realme”: Richard II and Elizabethan
Press Censorship’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997), 432-48.
Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays (London:
Hambledon Press, 1994), pp. 31-56, repr. in John Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London:
Arnold, 1997), pp. 110-34.
----- De Republica Anglorum Or, History with the Politics Put Back: Inaugural Lecture delivered 9
November 1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
----- ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British
Academy, 84 (1993), pp. 51-92.
----- ‘The Religious Factor’, in Jean-Christophe Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late
Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea
Collection, 2004), pp. 243-73.
Doran, Susan, ‘Revenge her Foul and Most Unnatural Murder? The Impact of Mary Stewart’s
Execution on Anglo-Scottish Relations’, History, 85 (2000), 589-612.
---- ‘Loving and Affectionate Cousins? The Relationship between Elizabeth I and James VI of Scotland
1586-1603’, in Tudor England and its Neighbours, ed. Susan Doran and Glenn Richardson
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 203-34.
----- ‘Three Late-Elizabethan Succession Tracts’, in Jean-Christophe Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the
Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations
(Montpellier: Astraea Collection, 2004), pp. 100-117.
----- ‘James VI and the English Succession’, forthcoming.
Dutton, Richard, ‘The Dating and Contexts of Shakespeare’s Henry V’, in Paulina Kewes (ed.), The
Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino: The Huntington Library Press, 2006).
Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Republicanism (CUP, 2005).
Hurstfield, Joel, ‘The Succession Struggle in Late Elizabethan England’, in id., Freedom, Corruption
and Government in Elizabethan England (London: Cape, 1973), pp. 104-34.
Knowles, Ronald, ‘The Political Contexts of Deposition and Election in Edward II’, Medieval and
Renaissance Drama in England, 14 (2001), 105-21.
Mayer, Jean-Christophe (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics,
Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea Collection, 2004),
McLaren, Anne N., Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 15581585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Skinner, Quentin, Foundations of Modern Political Thought.
Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘Puritan Politicians and King James VI and I, 1587-1604’, in Thomas Cogswell,
Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain:
Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 2144.
----- ‘The Quest for a King: Gender, Marriage, and Succession in Elizabethan England’, Journal of
British Studies, xli (2002), 259-90.
Nenner, Howard, The Right to be King: The Succession to the Crown of England, 1603-1714
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
The ‘History Play’ as a Genre
Danson, Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Griffin, Benjamin Lewis, Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama, 1385-1600
(Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001).
Hunter, G. K. ‘Truth and Art in History Plays’, Shakespeare Survey, 42 (1989), 15-24.
--- ‘Religious Nationalism in Late History Plays’, in Literature and Nationalism , ed. V. Newey and A.
Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 88-97.
--- English Drama, 1586-1642: The Age of Shakespeare, The Oxford History of English Literature, 6
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Kamps, Ivo, Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
Kewes, Paulina, ‘The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s
Works, vol. II: The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell,
2003), pp. 170-93.
Linderberger, Herbert, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago, Ill.:
University of Chicago Press, 1975).
Longstaffe, Steve, ‘What is the English History Play and Why are They Saying Such Terrible Things
About It?’, Renaissance Drama 2 (1997), 1-14.
McMillin, Scott and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
Rackin, Phyllis, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1990; repr., London: Routledge, 1991).
Ribner, Irving, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press,1957; 2nd edn. London: Methuen, 1965).
Schelling, Felix E., The English Chronicle Play: A Study in the Popular Historical Literature
Environing Shakespeare (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902).
Snyder, Susan, ‘The Genres of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (eds),
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
pp. 83-97.
Wikander, Matthew H., The Play of Truth and State: Historical Drama from Shakespeare to Brecht
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
Shakespeare’s Rome
Cantor, Paul A., Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).
Charney, Maurice, Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).
Cohen, D., The Politics of Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1993).
Cox, John, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton, 1989).
Daly, James, 'The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth-Century England', The Historical Journal
21/2 (1978), 227-50.
----- Cosmic Harmony and Political Thinking in Early Stuart England, Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society (1979), 69/7.
Dutton, Richard, 'Shakespeare and Marlowe: Censorship and Construction', YES, 23 (1993), 1-29.
Giovanni, G., 'Historical Realism and the Tragic Emotions in Renaissance Criticism', PQ, 32 (1953).
Greenblatt, Stephen, 'Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion',
Representations, 1 (1983), 1-29.
Greene, Gayle, ‘“The power of speech / To stir men’s blood”: the language of tragedy in Shakespere’s
Julius Caesar, Renaissance Drama, II (1980), 67-93.
Gruen, Erich S., Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992).
Hampton, Timothy, Writing From History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Culture (Ithaca
and London: Cornell UP, 1990).
Hillman, Richard, Intertextuality and Romance in Renaissance Drama: The Staging of Nostalgia
(1992).
Historical Drama, Themes in Drama (1986).
Howard, Jean E., The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London, 1994).
Kahn, Coppelia, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997).
Kalmey, R. P., ‘Shakespeare’s Octavius and the Elizabethan Roman History’, SEL (1978), 275-87.
Leggatt, Alexander, Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London:
Routledge, 1988).
Miles, Geoffrey, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Miola, Robert S., Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca.
----- Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: CUP, 1983).
----- ‘Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate’, Renaissance Quarterly, 39 (1985), 271-89.
Pechter, Edward, 'Julius Caesar and Sejanus: Roman Politics, Inner Selves and the Power of the
Theatre', in E. A. Honigmann, ed., Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison
(Manchester, 1986), 60-78.
Platt, Michael, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare (rev. ed. Lanham, Md., 1983).
Ramsey, P. A., ed., Rome in the Renaissance (1982).
Siegel, Paul, Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays: A Marxist Approach (Rutherford:
Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1986).
Simmons, J. L., Shakespeare's Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1973).
Sohmer, Steve, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999).
Spencer, T. J. B., 'Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans', SS, 10 (1957), 27-38.
Stampfer, Judah, The Tragic Engagement: A Study of Shakespeare's Classical Tragedies (New York:
Funk & Wagnalls, 1968).
Stirling, Brents, The Populace in Shakespeare (Columbia UP, 1949).
Thomas, Vivian, Shakespeare's Roman Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
Wilders, John, The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays (London,
1978).