1st Edition
Majesty and the Masses in Shakespeare and Marlowe Western Anti-Monarchism, The Earl of Essex Challenge, and Political Stagecraft
This book is a landmark study of Shakespeare’s politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature, history and philosophy, tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates, thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power, and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution, formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that "Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy", it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare’s Histories and Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, in five chapters of close literary critical readings, paying innovative attention to performance values.
Part Two focuses Queen Elizabeth’s principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex, England’s most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that, far from being an admirer of the war-crazed, unstable, bi-polar Essex, as is regularly asserted, Shakespeare launched in Richard II and Henry IV a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl, exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth’s throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile, likewise, to the rash militarist, Essex, who would fling England into permanent war against Spain.
Founded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought, this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism, studies of Tudor England, and the history of ideas.
Preface
PART ONE: THE DIVINE ROUT OF KINGS? WESTERN TRADITIONS IN NEGATION OF MONARCHY
Chapter 1: Surveying the Inheritance of Indictment
- Ancient Greece and Rome
- Biblical Legacies
- Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
- The Reformation
- The Italian Renaissance, Humanist Values, Republican Thought
- Humanism and Republican Thought in England
- Tyranny and Resistance Theory
- Plebeian Perspectives and the Commonweal Touchstone
- Freedom of Speech
Chapter 2: Collapsing the Foundations of Tudor Sacral Kingship: Ernst Kantorowicz, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas Elyot
Chapter 3: Countering Monarchic Propaganda: Shakespeare and royalism, Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, and Shakespeare’s Richard III
PART TWO: KINGSHIP AND THE ESSEX CHALLENGE
Chapter 4: Richard II as Elizabethans Received it: Dating, Dissidence, and Essex 1596 vs. Essex 1601
Chapter 5: Richard II and the Politics of Stagecraft: Audience Relations and the Negative Dialectic
Chapter 6: "Opposed Eyes": Popular Crisis, Class-Surveillance, and the Turn against Kingship in I Henry IV
Chapter 7: King Henry, Hotspur, Essex: Negating the Negation, and the Plebeian Commonweal Paradigm
Bibliography
Biography
Chris Fitter was educated at Oxford, taking his doctorate from St. John’s College. Professor of English at Rutgers University at Camden, his three previous books are Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory (Cambridge, 1994); Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (Routledge, 2012); Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History (Oxford, 2017). He is author also of twenty journal essays and book chapters, and two dozen book reviews.
"Chris Fitter's survey of Western anti-monarchism "spans the first two chapters (134 pages), which review Greek, Roman, Biblical and medieval sources as well as an international set of humanists. The range here is impressive: more than forty writers, some of whom are represented in multiple texts. . . The quotations are well-chosen, and the overview is fascinating. . . Fitter handles the complexities of humanist statecraft in a compelling fashion. . .Energetic readings of plays keep their artistic status front and center, making a refreshing argument for political interpretation. . . Any future effort to locate Shakespeare in a royalist camp will have to reckon with this book."
--Theodore Nollert, Ben Jonson Journal
