Radical Shakespeare

        Chris Fitter's Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career presents impressive evidence and argumentation to back the rarely argued thesis, nowadays at least, that Shakespeare was a radical dramatist. Rather then the typical portrait of Shakespeare as the stalwart young conservative providing a beauteous contra-melody in dialogue with the radical noises of the mob or a uniquely ambitious and elusive playwright whose mastery of nuance and ambiguity allows him to subsume the whole world within his drama, Shakespeare emerges here as something he's never accused of being--an iconoclastic firebrand. For Fitter, unlike Woolf, Shakespeare intervenes violently, and personally, in his drama to make it match the political concerns and the material necessities of the day, leading at times to quite a bit of awkwardness in plot (not to mention deviation from the source material). That is quite the opposite of the image of Shakespeare proffered to radical dramatists whose very conservative visage and mythology seems tailor-made to critique their own aesthetic shortcomings.

          The root of the matter is that textuality and performance is of very different though related qualities when putting a play on; there is what is read on the page and there is what is performed. Fitter takes us here to illustrate the overwhelming presence of the groundlings, the common artisans, apprentices, peasants, thieves and citizens that made up the bulk of the Globe audience, whose eyes bore down upon the actors in performance. Remarks addressed to the audience as well as remarks about the lower-classes in the casual conversation of the gentry were addressed mostly to a rowdy, drunken and surprisingly sophisticated audience of commoners. Aristocratic disdain, anger and abuse served to alienate the audience from the nobles that on the page the playwright formally identifies with; in other words, there were ways of denying sympathy even for noble characters that the audience is urged to maintain sympathy with through words or through importance of plot on the text. For instance, in the opening scene of As You Like It, Orlando complains about receiving a only 1,000 crowns for his inheritance a sum that Fitter estimates to be worth about $200,000 today, to see a character spurn such a large sum of money gained sheerly through an accident of birth could not have been endearing to the commoners who made up the overwhelming majority of the Globe's audience. There are many more examples where distance and contradiction is injected through the context (or "deicitic" as Fitter terms it) of the stage-craft.

      This might sound to the reader like Brecht's verfremdungseffect or alienation effect, and there is a good chance that this impression is not mistaken. Brecht himself in his final notes argued that Shakespeare could be performed that way with no changes as long as there was good direction.  The de jure adherence to monarchial, feudal and patriarchal prejudices demanded by the Tudor state is undermined by the de facto performance of it, in this way seemingly unaware nobility out their class prejudices by openly hurling abuse at common audiences and acting as spoilers on the carnivalesque fun of the Early Modern theatre. When this is kept in mind one is reminded of when Brecht would have characters openly proclaim themselves to be the villain in front of the other characters or audience or to out their crass class-based allegiances or plots for all to see thereby spoiling the fun and sympathy that comes with unraveling secret plot or motivation. The abuse hurled at groundlings and less noble characters could not have failed to stimulate an us vs. them class consciousness against audience members. It is arguable too, that by forcing the spectator via the circular orientation of the Globe theatre that Shakespeare even forced Noble theatergoers to assume this consciousness unwillingly. One is reminded by some of the stage cartographies and performance notes drawn by Fitter of the staging and performance of Odets  Waiting For Lefty where the mostly middle-class audience was placed within a theatre designed to imitate a Union hall and drawn into sympathy and false-class solidarity and allegiance with the worker characters of the play.  The potential to emphasize class-division amongst the audience also existed as when actors referred to the heavens, grand nobility, wealth or kings they only had to point up to the gallery where the affluent paid for the privilege for either VIP comfort or to not rub shoulders with the common audience that the theatre troupes depended on so much. Fitter's emphasis on class illuminates several classic works of the Shakespeare's early works in new ways and makes a conservative or purely gain-seeking William Shakespeare increasingly untenable as we shall see.

                         The Politics of Rebellion in King Henry VI Part II 
     
            For Fitter, the foremost challenge to the notion of a conservative early Shakespeare is King Henry VI and particularly the character of Jack Cade, the outlandish and mentally deranged peasant rebel who proclaims himself to be a King. Shakespeare's Jack Cade was modeled on William Hackett a peasant rebel who declared himself to be the King of Europe, whose 1591 "rebellion" attracted few genuine  followers but earned him a death sentence and resulted in the torture of two gentleman, one of which was driven to insanity. The disproportionate use of violence against a mostly harmless eccentric by the monarchial state repressive apparatus earned Hackett more sympathy in death then he had as a political actor in life before he was finally immortalized in a  roundabout way by Shakespeare.  Fitter argues that rather then satirizing and pouring spite upon Cade (or Hackett more properly) for being an emblem of populist idiocy, Shakespeare  subtly criticizes Cade for leading a rebellion or revolution without the support of the people. If this holds true then it is not an exaggeration to claim that Shakespeare is criticizing Cade for not being radical enough as he attempts to rally the people with pseudo-religious nonsense and bogus claims to royal heritage, rather then disputing those tools of aristocratic class control in general. To be sure, Cade's rebellion also plays the role of foil to the aristocratic power politics and in-fighting over monarchial legitimacy and succession by being so transparently fallacious it de-legitimizes the more serious contenders to power by proxy.

        Likewise, Shakespeare's transformation of Cade into a starving English veteran, out of step with what we know about the historical Cade and Hackett, was an act of deliberate sympathy for the character he had created not typical of a strawman that he had invented to mock. It was deliberate provocation too as the de-mobilization of the common military men who had been pressed into service to defend England from the Spanish Armada was a bitterly contentious source of lower-class complaint and retaliatory violence. The same heroes who fought to stave off the collapse of the Tudor monarchy at the hands of the numerically superior Spanish armada and qualitatively superior Spanish army were cast into the streets and deprived of their equipment and wages as soon as the conflagrations as over. The campaign ended, as one scholar notes, with: "the victorious English dying in the gutter; the defeated Spaniards going home to hospital beds and embroidered counterpanes." In this atmosphere, court and other literary records indicated a great many poor hoped that the Spanish would successfully conquer England and bring about the ruin of the native-born aristocracy. Far from being an invention or exaggeration by modern historians the language of class-war was bitter and real  in the deluge of what was called the "black nineties" and many commoners expected, even hoped for, a final apocalyptic class war that would extirpate the class enemy.

      Soldiers who had been celebrated as national heroes were hung when they were caught stealing to alleviate hunger; add this to the thousands of poor hung for trifling petty crimes during the Tudor era and the horrendous tortures and arbitrary arrests carried out against even mild criticism of the Tudor monarchy. Cade's seemingly inexplicable transformation into a hungry former soldier who had loyally served his country murdered by a nobleman in cold blood with five servants in toe all the more illustrates this class divide and could not have been anything other then to create sympathy for a man that was to all extents and purposes a rebel and a traitor according to official narratives. The murder of an eclectic, if good-willed rebel, is an interesting contrast to the murders, violence, "rebellion" and astounding mismanagement perpetuated by the nobility. That Cade's execution follows upon the collapse of English military efforts in France and the descent of the nation into civil war and anarchy is no coincidence. It is as if to say that the bloodshed, military failure, rebellion and irreligion that the ruling class feared would be inflicted upon society by someone like Jack Cade was actually something that they brought upon themselves.  Shakespeare seems to be saying here that adherence to the status quo can be a thing just as traumatic as rebellion itself--not a message that literary critics often argue was the message behind his works.

      Like Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Julius Caesar, 2 Henry VII is also intimately concerned with the "politics of rebellion" as well as the attempt to establish some legitimacy for popular resistance in the culture at large. When it came to the question of when it was right for a social subordinate to resist a social superior the agents and beneficiaries of the Tudor monarchy were fairly unanimous--it did not exist.  This contrasts graphically with the discourse around "tyrants" and "tyrant-killing" that runs through Shakespeare's body of work that does indeed establish this right whatever the textual ambiguity. There are times that this ambiguity towards rebellion can be read as an assertion of militant class politics rather then mild adherence to abstract discourses of tyrant-killing developed thousands of years ago.  Such is the case in Julius Caesar when Shakespeare correctly exposes the anti-populist and plutocratic motivations of several of the plotters against Caesar.  Whether Shakespeare agreed with  actions of the plotters or not, it could not have escaped the audience that the stark class inequalities of Rome and Caesar's populist and redistributive nature made it easy for Antony to turn Rome against the plotters and bring the Empire into civil war. It's easy to see the portrayal of the crowd's reaction to Antony's  graveside speech as Shakespeare's latent anti-populism and fear of rebellion/revolution coming loose, but it should also be remembered that without earlier citizen-endorsement of the patrician coup against Caesar they would likely have been arrested, punished for their crimes, and Rome could have retained its liberties.

     Fitter argues that Shakespeare alternatively sets the characters of Gloucester and York in competition for the sympathies of the audience, and in turn exposes them both. Gloucester really did have some reputation for being a populist in his time and it comes out in some of his defensive rhetoric of England's "commonweal" or commonwealth. York finishes the play with a troupe of Irish soldiers at his back which Fitter argues would likely have been positioned around the theatre to give the audience the impression that they had been literally surrounded and confined by force of arms. Fitter contrasts the naive and folkish rebellion of Cade that was savagely repressed with the vicious force now surrounding the audience led by a gentleman ostensibly a member of the forces of order.

    It is surprising that Fitter does not see in the scene itself as constituting a limit to Shakespeare's radicality,  which Fitter is always at pains to portray as perennially sensitive to the counter-hegemonic discourses of the lower-orders and the outcasts of society.  Whether the fears that the Habsburg monarchy would use Irish forces to subordinate England were legitimate, the 1590s were an era of increasing English colonial control and dispossession in Ireland. The play portrays the English ruling class in an unsympathetic light and bumbling though they maybe, English rebels as upright lawful citizens and in this context the dissolute nature of the English aristocracy in the play which leads York to bring in an Irish army can be read as a fear of the collapse of colonial control or fear of retaliation upon the common citizens of the nation. And while it may have impeded the ruling class messages of aristocratic class domination the notion that the English nation needed to do less fighting amongst itself in order to protect its national greatness isn't a message that the shoe-string colonialist Elizabethan monarchy would have disliked being heard. The monarchy did charter the Kingsmen and allow a theatre limited independence as a social safety-valve. For this reason I don't think the conservative currents of his work can be called complete exaggeration whatever startling radically exists within it. Whether hidden in performance or not it seems unlikely that the Elizabethan regime could have failed to catch onto Shakespeare's radical performative or literary sweeps so it seems incredibly unlikely that he would be permitted to continue his work if there wasn't some aspect of it appealing to the ruling class. We will return to this and the question of "populism" later.

                                           Shakespeare And The Pirates
      An interesting scene in  2 King Henry VI that Fitter draws attention to is the arrest and execution of Suffolk by a band of patriotic pirates who arraign him on the charge on treason. This scene where a  gang of pirates, the very emblem of ne'er do-wells take a lord hostage and summarily execute him under their own martial law. It is has interesting parallels with the later execution of King Charles II, those in the audience could not have forgotten or failed to draw a parallel with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots which was largely forced onto the Tudor regime  by parliament.  In this scene it would seem, like other scenes in Shakespeare, the common lot become a responsible, good-willed and patriotic force for order against the anarchy unleashed by the nobility. It helps that piracy was not only historically accurate to the period that Shakespeare wrote about but also was a pastime of disgraced gentleman as well as at times being a chartered endeavor of the monarchy itself. The performance aspect of the execution, as lower-class pirates catch, exercise authority and execute a nobleman in front of a sea of drunken commoners could not have failed to draw electricity from the audience.

       Fitter contextualizes the pirates as agents by pointing out what he dubs the incipient democracy in practice aboard their ships. This can be judged as an exaggeration on Fitter's part as both private and naval vessels were notoriously hierarchal with crews kept in line with the threat of brutal corporal punishments. But privateers did have looser hierarchies and regulations to some degree as officers found it necessary to pry the crew and involve them in order to get them to endeavor to brave combat and to take the risks of operating outside the laws of the sea and to keep them from mutinying to take the loot. Generally, privateer captains were either disgraced aristocrats/aristocratic younger brothers or hailed from outside the noble sphere altogether. It follows in some ways the romance of the gentry-led commoners rebellion or criminal gang which goes outside the law to restore traditional rights or to get back what was stolen. An example of such land piracy in Shakespeare would be Jacques leadership in the matter of poaching a deer on noble lands, a widely celebrated peasant practice that entailed brutal punishments for anyone caught poaching. Like pirate ships, gangs of poachers often had a pseudo-democratic structure even if disaffected nobility, like those of As You Like It,  played a disproportionate role in such gangs.

      In the opening of The Tempest Shakespeare critiques the absurdity of aristocratic hierarchies and obsessions onboard naval vessels as the gentleman onboard the ship hassle, harass, and insult the crewmen as they desperately try to stop the ship from sinking. The obsession of the gentleman onboard with class hierarchy as the ship literally sinks and the lives of all hang in the balance is perhaps one of the most stark visual critique of class-based ignorance, privilege and impunity in Shakespeare. It doesn't take much to view the sinking ship as England itself and to extend the logic that not only is a more democratic order desirable for the peculiarities of a naval environment but for the whole of England itself. Perhaps the fear that pirates might actually change something wasn't just an idle fear of the authorities, in the early 1710s a group of sailors discharged from service the wars of Spanish succession or fleeing the Jacobite wars actually established the New World's first democratic Republic in the Bahamas. They even freed slaves and ran their ships democratically. Fitter argues that Shakespeare was in-tune with the subaltern proletarian order of the pirate ship and the latent desire for democracy and equality that prevailed onboard merchant ships and port-cities. It is possible that he could perceive this and sympathize with the agency of the sailors and mariners without endorsing their furthest articulated aims. Certainly, the word "proletarian" matches the description and outlook of sailors and pirates far closer then other lower-class strata in the Early Modern world that are often liberally given that description. The activity of privateers and merchant vessels also better approximates "capitalism" or "primitive accumulation" then other economic activities of that age given those titles. The humor of Caliban's interaction with the sailors in itself is interesting but also suggests a common lot as, textually at least, both the Caliban the slave and the crew of sailors who were either impressed or wage-slaves seem equally ridiculous.
   
   Another interesting naval scene in Shakespeare is Act I Scene II of Twelfth Night where Viola merrily asserts that she will make her own way in Ilyria amidst the beached shipwreck among the surviving crew. She gives the Captain gold just for saying that he had seen her brother holding tightly onto some debris with their best man; such actions were almost always visual displays of privilege when done by noble characters in Shakespeare. One might think that after a shipwreck the first impulse would be to pool resources and help other survivors but Viola, secure in her class privilege, endeavors to go her own way as if she were a common sailor who had disembarked in a port after serving his term. Indeed, although Viola claims she wishes to make her own way in the world she insists that the Captain introduce her in disguise to Duke Orsino. It should be noted that Sebastian betrays his friend and rescuer Antonio, a common sailor who only desired Sebastian's love. We might see Viola and Sebastian as petulant spoiled rich children who violently intrude into commoner-dominated pathways of the Sea and later into the social world of a foreign nation. Was Shakespeare reflecting  here the complaint of the common sailor against the gentleman? It is surprising that Fitter did not do an in-depth reading of this play in this book on the early career.

                       Shakespeare And Gatsby: Young, Rich, and Out of Control 
       
       The story of Romeo and Juliet is at bottom, a story about two well-off families whose violence and sense of impunity bred by hereditary social privilege sets about their own downfall.  Fitzgerald through the pen of the protagonist Nick famously described  blue-blooded Tom and Daisy as "careless people" and the Montagues and Capulets match that characterization exactly. Fitter reads the confrontation initiated by Sampson and Gregory as the result of a common tactic of English nobility of the time which was to try to incite their servants against the servants of the masters they are quarreling against. Gregory tries to disabuse Sampson of his visions of martial glory and irrational hatred of the Montague servants by arguing: "The quarrel is between our masters and us, their men." Gregory emphasizes that the real war is between the masters and the servants (some of which were undoubtedly slaves) and Sampson acts here a lot like a dumb gullible slave disregarding his own interests and his class interests for those of his masters. It is a lot like Malcolm X's famous dichotomy about field slaves vs. house slaves in that as a servant of the house of Capulet Sampson identifies with his masters; that puts aside the question of the actual historical veracity of X's narrative about such a dichotomy among US slaves.

     Tybalt chooses to view Benvolio's attempt to quell the violence as heartless bullying of a social superior against the servants of his house but it is likely that the situation merely presented an ample opportunity to strike. The patriarchs of the houses leap into the violence at whim suggesting that perhaps they had been anticipating this moment or they had even orchestrated it. They are  like Gatsby's Daisy and Tom in that they seem to be destructive and angry middle-aged children rather then individuals with the moral capacities and social values that society expects out of people in that age range. Nick's description of the wealthy as "careless people" indicates more then just a devil-may-care attitude that society may find eccentric and out of place in older individuals but intones that they live without care for the consequences of their actions, much like children before a mature level of socialization. It isn't surprising then that Daisy and Tom act a lot like children because society is their caretaker since they have been wealthy all their lives. Lady Capulet leaves the rearing of Juliet to her Nurse and maintains an odd coldness towards her that doesn't seem quite like mother and child, this resembles the distance and rarity of the presence of Daisy's own child in the Great Gatsby who is likewise left to a servant. The Nurse had a child about Juliet's age who had died and it seems highly-suggested by Shakespeare that poverty was the reason for the divergence in the fates of the two girls. A perverse and unnatural parallel is presented in the relationship between Nurse and Juliet with Nurse playing surrogate mother to a child whose mother is living under the same roof and Juliet doing likewise in the role of daughter. Juliet then is like the egg of an invasive cuckoo bird laid in the nest of another bird species. Could Shakespeare have failed to consider that and its implications? The images and actions of the cuckoo bird and a near-obsession with cuckolding and marital infidelity that pervades the ribald humor of the plays make that seem unlikely.

     It should be noted that the Citizens attempt to break-up the fighting of the Montagues and Capulets in the opening scene and that one citizen actually makes a Citizen's arrest of Benvolio after the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio.  Romeo flees as the Citizens move to take action to enforce the laws of Verona. Again, it is the common citizens who act responsibly and the aristocracy who bring about chaos, anarchy, law-breaking and wanton-violence without regard for the consequences to the lives of others. Fitter argues that Romeo is deliberately an unsympathetic character because he whines and whines seemingly unaware of his own class privilege even in the face of so much suffering around him. He is never at a loss for gold and, crucially, his actions revolve a great deal around food and his dialogue is littered with references to food. This has some import during the black nineties when England experienced some of its worst harvests on record and the Tudor government moved to fix the wages of laborers while rampant inflation wracked the country. The brutal punishments meted out for violating these statutes even went so far to punish masters who decided to grant higher wages of their own volition these acts received special treatment in volume one of Capital. Food riots wracked London in the 1590s and gangs of apprentices roamed the street attempting to enforce just-price doctrine, a form of incipient labor-theory of value developed in medieval church, which had de jure recognition in English law but often lacked enforcement in practice. At Juliet's tomb  Romeo characterizes death as being: "Gorged with the dearest morsel of the Earth" he is here referring to the practice of engorgement which was to buy up essential items during scarcity or otherwise attain a monopoly on consumer goods, usually food, in order to resell it at a much higher profit. Common apprentices had been murdered by the state not long before the writing of the play for merely attempting to enforce the laws against food speculation and monopoly-pricing. Not too long after the play was initially performed there were riots circa 1600 calling specifically for the abolition of monopolies. It is hard not to see a parallel in Shakespeare's virtuous Verona citizens enforcing the laws against feuding with the London citizens who merely demanded the enforcement of the law about market-pricing which the authorities "winked on" much in the same way that the Prince winks on fighting of the two families.

    The parallels drawn by the play were literal as well as allegorical and metaphorical; dueling was a common sport and practice of English nobility at the time and the rising popularity of the deadly rapier was leading to skyrocketing mortality in noble feuding. Martial skill and a willingness to inflict  direct interpersonal violence had long been a hallmark of the outlook of the European nobility as well as its class dominance. Fitter is correct that the class-nature of the violence of the play has long-gotten the short-shift in comparison to the "macho" or gender-based aspect of it. New weaponry associated with the fire-arms age was making the nobility increasingly antiquated as necessity in actual combat and the extension of bourgeois republican strictures and discourses concerning violence and the rule of law increasingly left less room for aristocrats to enforce their dominance against each other or against subordinated classes via direct interpersonal violence. Ironically, the invention of the rapier made noble training and violence more effective while paradoxically making the practice of dueling less tolerable to the mass of European society. Fitter argues that the introduction of the rapier led to an explosion of noble inter-personal deaths in England which better allows us to understand the surprise that Lady Capulet after the death of Tybalt when she exclaims that no one had died in the last brawl. It should be noted that the older gentlemen brandished their heavier and less lethal broadswords and the fray had involved mostly the simple weapons one would imagine would be carried by citizens and servants. The rapier was also by no means a noble monopoly as Mercutio dialogues to Benvolio about the newfangled nature of the weapon and how it was favorite weapon of upstarts. That makes sense too because fighting with one required neither horse, nor armor like the knights of medieval battles were known to employ; one imagines it took less physical training and conditioning to use because of its weight too.

       The railing of established nobility against "upstarts" whether new gentry-men, merchants, or rich peasants/artisans seems to be endemic in Shakespeare's plays. There is a good historical-economic reason for this: gold and silver from the New World poured in introducing massive monetary inflation  into traditional European societies. Inflation tends to devalue certain asset-categories like land prices and rents a category of economic power  which the aristocracy had a near-monopoly, if not complete control. The effect of 16th century inflation was to devalue set rents and long-term leases, reduce the purchase price of land for prospective buyers and provide much needed amelioration for debtors. Money usurers too had been a fixed, even if officially condemned, component and feature of pre-capitalist ruling classes and economies. Inflation both corroded the power of the traditional ruling class and made money easier for commoners to acquire therefore also increasing the convenience of acquiring goods produced for market. From the perspective of the English ruling class then it is not surprising that it sees itself inundated with "upstarts" both in the form of new gentrymen and outright untitled commoners. The divide between new and old money is one of the central themes of Fitzgerald's work as outsiders of sturdy relatively common stock struggle to gain acceptance and entry into plutocratic worlds that they neither fully-understand, nor can ever fully attain acceptance in. It is significant that the first real threat that Tom receives to his private world of privilege does not come from a  Negro or from any insurrection of the colored races in the vein of Stoddard whose work he is obsessed with but rather from a poor country boy turned wealthy bootlegger whose rise to prominence is assisted by a Jewish gangster.  The skill with which Gatsby passes his illegitimacy as legitimacy makes Tom's "legitimacy" seem all the more ridiculous prompting something like an identity crisis for him. Similarly, as Mercutio berates a new generation of upstarts that he compares to flies (perhaps in both number and perceived danger) he finds this complaint personified in the person of Tybalt who is a master of the new style of rapier combat and the fashionable politesse of manners that he derides. Tybalt's obsessive quest to fully adhere to his preconceptions of what it means to be a lord which is itself determined by new fashions and trends render his authenticity as a nobleman false to Mercutio. It is as if Tybalt is too much of a gentleman to  really be a gentleman.

     The irony is reciprocated when Nurse demands of Romeo that he reveal the identity of the "saucy merchant"( i.e. Mercutio) who humiliated and harangued her. Mercutio understands that his position gives him a certain amount of license and as perhaps the most powerful young noble in Verona and he exercises it boldly and liberally, testing both the patience of others and social convention. Nurse mistakes this royal perogative for a nouveau riche merchant's ambition, vulgarity, and skepticism towards established social mores. The princes of Italian city-states often had real limits on their power and it might've been inevitable that at some point that Mercurio's gallantry became the mirror image of a swashbuckling riotous under the constraints of the law. In spite of himself, his own culture and conduct is being conditioned and dictated by the fashions and ideas of the nouveau riche,  as evidenced in the Queen Mab speech where wondrously articulate literary and religious education is used to express brash, defiant skepticism of Romeo's superstition that dreams provide omens of warning in the real world. This can be read as the result of an outpouring of revolutionary new modes of scientific epistemology produced by Francis Bacon and other renaissance thinkers who often were bourgeois or sympathetic to the bourgeoisie and republican ideologies as well as rediscovered ancient religious skepticism. Mercutio implicitly places this dynamic new scientific culture against the sensuous, colorful, intricate conceits of medieval aristocratic literary culture and the echoes of popular peasant mythology recorded in it. He makes Romeo seem a fool by comparing his belief in the forecasting power of dreams with extravagant folk fantasies that neither modern science, scholarship, or even the modern church itself could subscribe to. Implicit in this is that if Mercutio accepts this  bleeding edge of Early Modern science, and his general irreverence makes it seem like he does, then his social position cannot be justified using traditional conceits of religious ideology.

       The unconvinced may observe Mercurio's stance towards Tybalt which is a harshly confrontational one that seeks to prove once and for all who is the better man. But notably this takes place in the realm of a rapier-duel which Mercutio proves himself knowledgeable of but not skilled enough to win. It would seem that Mercutio knows the scientific theory of the rapier's use but is not a skilled user of the weapon as indicated by Benvolio's retort to Mercutio that if he had Mercurio's aptitude for fighting he would have long since passed on. That such hot-tempered brawlers as Tybalt and Peter shy away from conflict with Mercutio is due to their keen knowledge of their social inferiority and desire not to end up on the wrong side of the law, even when a technically legal opportunity has presented itself. It is possible that Mercutio has been sheltered from the consequences of his actions for so long that he has never fought a real duel or experienced real combat and to a degree that might explain why he so glibly involves himself in gang-like street feuding that he has no real direct stake in.

      Which brings us back to the gang-like behavior of the young nobles of both houses and the meaning of their rebellious actions and spirit. Perhaps the most important thing to observe is how liberally they spurn the law of Verona and there is good reason for this besides ancient rivalry and youthful angst. That is they despise modern republican law which is designed to have a universal hold on all citizens not merely legislate privileges, nor provide a simple rubber stamp for their class rule. The opening scene with the citizens is telling in which they yell: "Down with the Capulets! Down with the Montagues!" as an expression of clear directed class anger. Common citizens in Italian renaissance city-states often acted in concert to drive the nobility out of their republics. One favorite tactic was to focus on a particularly hated faction of it in order to deal a blow to its power as a whole in the name of law & legitimacy, but it often did not end there. No wonder the Prince mentions more than once that he had tolerated and winked on the feuding between the two families. His benign neglect constitutes a form of covert class solidarity that aims to uphold aristocratic unity even if it comes at the cost of prudence, law, the good of the city, and even the broader interests of the ruling class itself. The frequently misunderstood republican theorist Machiavelli gave voice to this popular Italian urban struggle against aristocracy by defending the actions of German burghers who violently assassinated noblemen, drove them from their towns, and even barred them from entry. Of course it is not true that the nobility of both houses hate the law and law enforcement rather they hate the part of it that entails their own compliance to popular will. They have use enough for it when it comes to putting the poor and servile in their place. They are at perfect liberty to fashionably roam the streets late at night and put on lavish balls while visible signs of hunger stalk the play. Fitter argues that the case of the servant asking another servant to save a piece of pie during the famous ballroom scene is basically one of hunger amidst plenty. The musicians at Juliet's wedding to Paris talk of hanging around the party to get their hands on food. Capulet threatens Juliet not just with disinheritance but also to throw her into the streets to starve and die. An allusion to the fact that there was starvation and paupers dying daily in London's streets in the year the play was written.

      It is notable that the nobility play both sides of the law and this includes even the younger generation such as Romeo himself.  Fitter argues that Romeo plays the role of the hated Elizabethan government informant by fingering the starving apothecary in the letter to his father that he hands Balthazar. It is notable that he bullies the apothecary into selling him poison before disclosing to him a radical opinion on the truth of the law's nature: "The world is not thy friend nor the world's law. The world affords no way to make thee rich. Then be not poor, break it, and take this." The apothecary finally consents after a great deal of bullying, sweet-talking and bribery in other words, Romeo does act in much the same way as a government informant seeking to entrap a suspect. The necessity of mentioning his deal with the apothecary in print is questionable and seems to overlap with his overarching goal of getting back to Verona in this case by winning himself back into the Prince's good graces.  The Prince receives the letter and mentions the apothecary and on looking at the scene declares that all are punished. Then the prince later declares that some will be punished and some will be pardoned and Fitter argues that given the pattern of elite impunity it will be the poor characters such as the apothecary and nurse who will actually be punished. Montague and Capulet finish the play by bragging about who will build a larger statue of the other's child suggesting that the rivalry has not disappeared despite the destruction of their family lines. Fitter argues that dysresolution is an important and overlooked aspect of Shakespeare's work and that it is a thing less apparent in the text then it would have been in performance. The plays generally end with the restoration of social order and harmony in order to pass the censor but clues in the text and what we know about its environment and performance suggest that the author himself does not believe in the formal ending. In the ending of Romeo and Juliet formal reconciliation hides yawning divisions.

   As a final note Romeo's careless violence parallels that of Daisy's reckless driving in the Great Gatsby. Fitter treats us to two parallel lovers: Paris, holding flowers at the sepulcher of the Capulet family for his beloved "wife" and Romeo who comes with tools in hand ready to pry open and defile the tomb. References to necrophilia are rife in Romeo's dialogue and his descent into the tomb seems much like a descent into hell. Much like the charming Daisy of Fitzgerald's novel by the end of the play the natural reaction of a critical audience would be to move from sympathy for the character to horror and revulsion as the simultaneously pathetic and monstrous characteristics of the character comes more and more out into the open.

                                          Shakespeare And The Puritans 

       The final part of this post will tackle some of Fitter's interpretation of "puritan" characters in Shakespeare's work but also the assertion of what he deems an essentially puritan set of "vestry values" that Shakespeare was in opposition to. In doing so it will briefly attempt to handle the question of what is "radical" and "conservative" in this time, what is "populist" and what is "elitist" as  well as the question of Shakespeare's own relation to the State and what that means for the position that he was a radical. Fitter's interpretation of As You Like It has a lot to do with what he calls "vestry values" which represents the unholy marriage between the gentry and the rich country bourgeois in a incestuous oligarchical opposition to the ruined peasantry and nascent rural proletariat on the basis of enclosure and bad new-fashioned "puritanical" protestant work ethic. The transition debate surfaces here yet again because unsurprisingly how you view history affects how you view the bleed-through of history in Drama. Fitter, following the Brenner thesis, believes it to be the case that as much as 25% of the peasantry in Shakespeare's time were rural proletarians which leads to some awkward questions that I've addressed elsewhere like: why do land surveys in later centuries make small-scale farming a much larger percentage of population? why is there also historical evidence that the wage earning population only reached such a large figure in later centuries? why did economic growth and industrialization precede so slowly if the process started in earnest so early? Why did it take so long for English and French agriculture to diverge in output as Blaut showed if British agriculture was the leading edge of capitalist development etc...

     Now this isn't just a theoretical axe of mine to grind coming out but it actually interprets how you see the plays. Here's an example: Fitter sees Adam in As You Like It as a Puritan character much like Malvolio and therefore sees Orlando and Adam's relationship as much like the vestry values he sees Shakespeare decrying: an unsavory marriage between an unnaturally thrifty and miserly servant who is startlingly wealthy for his position and the younger-brother gentleman turned highway robber. He describes them as forming an anti-populist partnership in the "heaven of early capitalist accumulation" that was the English countryside. I am not sure that Adam is such a bad character as Fitter makes him even from the point of view of an alienated audience, the fact that he has accumulated 100 crowns through thrift and loyal service: as much money as Orlando was supposed to get for merely existing.  Fitter's interpretation of Adam is essentially just like Malvolio which unfortunately itself pretty standard: Shakespeare basically used Malvolio as a Puritan whipping boy. But notably Malvolio does not fall from grace until he dreams that he will have a young noblewoman's hand in marriage this can be read as a conservative message of not to try to reach or marry above your station but it also can be read radically--Malvolio falls because he forgets that the nobility are the class enemy of the Third Estate and desires to be like them. If read this way, the humorless, sober and capable Malvolio donned in black was not such a bad guy but merely was meted out such harsh treatment because he forgot where he came from. The lame single line of Countess Olivia that much harm had been done to Malvolio has to be one of Drama's all-time understatements after he was imprisoned in the cellar as a nutcase it could not have failed to stick with common audience members. Malvolio's vow to get revenge is another excellent example of Shakespearean dysresolution. Perhaps much like the ease and callousness that Oliver dispenses with his loyal and aged servant Adam is meant to show how the rich  repay the loyalty of their servants. The more traditional view that Shakespeare these were characters he created to satirize puritanism could be true too.

    But a lot of this assumes we all agree on what "puritanism" is since if it is anything it was a catch-all term of abuse thrown around by the Anglican church that liked to demonize anything not Anglican to uphold its tenuous stake on legitimacy--then Puritanism actually encompasses some of the most progressive strains of Christianity in the 17th century (See Hill's The World Turned Upside Down for a more in-depth view). And assuming Shakespeare takes special delight in thrashing it does that make him a conservative, some early opponent of capitalist values before it truly came of age, or merely self-interested? Fitter argues that Shakespeare has special sympathy for the religious dissidents of his time both Catholic and Protestant but stresses that it has hard to read the plays and believe him to be a religious man. That is very possible but its hard to know the religious beliefs of a man who left no surviving correspondence or journal entries; his will suggests he died a conforming Anglican. Puritanism was the type of religious ideology that was gaining followers and adherents amongst the very people who came to the globe theatre middle class people of various types, young artisans/apprentices, sailors and a slim population of nascent proletarian textile workers. It expressed a demand for democracy, social mobility and was well-suited for the language of class war. If Shakespeare was sensitive to all the oppositional discourses of his time as Fitter argues why does he pivot against this one (assuming he really does)?

       It seems for Fitter that Shakespeare was post-bourgeois in the sense that he had rejected the money-hungry misery of the middle classes in favor of a pro-peasant, pro-artisan, and pro-proletarian perspective. At this time, however, the bourgeoisie and the working classes had not fully emerged disentangled as separate classes pursuing separate class interests. Spengler once said that the bourgeoisie was the "class that isn't a class" referring to its own assertions that it represents all the people, that membership in it is based on merit, as well as its seemingly invisible but very real class firewall. This perspective gives us some inkling of how Shakespeare could seem to be all things to all men in the centuries to come. Since both the proletariat and bourgeoisie were in primitive states in England at the time it wasn't much of a contradiction to fight on behalf of sailors and Elizabethan galley slaves and well-to-do artisans and untitled farmers. Even the new gentrymen and cast-off younger brothers can be treated to some sympathy as they run into either the barriers of entry to the aristocratic social world or they are a discarded symptom of its decay. As You Like It itself is an attack and critique of the English system of primogeniture (i.e. the dominance of the older brother in inheritance) and it is possible to see how it can be attacked from a self-interested radical bourgeois perspective: the further division of noble estates would make land-markets more competitive and easier to buy into for the untitled. The English primogeniture system was the most strict in Europe serving as a mechanism for maintaining noble power and property but at the cost of casting out its membership and promoting in-fighting. According to Hill and some other sources great many of the urban artisans and apprentices in London were cast-off younger sons and grandsons of noble families. Orlando's descent from unaware wealth and privilege into misery and crime perhaps struck a chord in groundling audiences that we might not expect. It may have also gained the sympathy of the young students and nobles of the Globe theatre as well. In As You Like It Shakespeare appears to take the side of all those who have no or are not secure in their power (mainly the Duke and Oliver) and in the medieval Carnivalesque comedic tradition turns the world upside down. The precondition of such revelry is that the world ends right-side up which Fitter argues is undermined by another quiet Shakespearean dysresolution with the blasphemous marriage performed by Hymen and the return of the other de Boys brother from school after all the lands and titles had been shared out--laying the ground for future conflict.

         In Early Modern England the broad liminal intersection between cast-off sons, nouveau riche merchants, lawyers, hard working master-artisans, rich peasants, apprentices, wage-workers and even bonded laborers could be subsumed within radical bourgeois activism. If the "vestry" values of the English province was the expression of early bourgeois hegemony then it does pose some awkward questions about Fitter's assertion that England was an "undeclared Republic" and the issue of Shakespeare's radicalism. Shakespeare's republicanism, which Andrew Hadfield documents, does not seem all that radical if 1. an undeclared republic already existed in Tudor-Stuart England 2. the provincial voting practices and local governance of said undeclared republic was merely an excuse for oligarchy and anti-popular repression in the pursuit of early capitalist accumulation. Then we go right back to seeing Shakespeare as a conservative again or perhaps argue he was ambiguous or changed his mind about republicanism. The truth is that England in 1600 was not a modern republic undeclared or otherwise, parliaments and limited voting franchise had long been utilized by feudal regimes when it suited them such as in Poland where the aristocracy elected the monarch. Enclosure, or perhaps to put in a more modern terms: privatization, was not uniquely or primarily a bourgeois weapon as it had been a weapon of the aristocracy utilized for sometime from Ancient Rome to the concentration, fragmentation, and privatization of monarchial lands that occurred during the Baronial Revolt that birthed the Magna Carta.  English enclosure did not follow a uniquely capitalist pathway, nor was it as radically extensive in this time period as commonly portrayed. If anything as Albritton  argued the commons were seedbeds of early capitalism where early manufacturers set up shop in order to avoid rent, taxes, and aristocratic interference. They also often preferred the countryside due to the availability of waterpower and other resources. So if Shakespeare takes the side of the peasantry and romanticizes the commons in As You Like It it is not necessarily because he is criticizing the bourgeoisie through his critique of "vestry values" or because he is opposed to capitalism.  Puritanism did not uphold aristocratic enclosure either if anything its oppositional elements sanctified commons and small peasant and artisanal property. I believe it was Albritton who argued that ironically traditional long-term lease relationships worked better for the bourgeoisie in this period because monetary inflation substantially devalued the real value of ground-rent. The people who benefited the most from enclosure were the aristocracy who could get rid of long-term tenants, seize common lands improved by efforts not their own and raise rents/withhold production or sale of their property to raise land or corn prices.

      The English gentry were not the capitalist rationalizers dispensing with "extra-economic" coercion in favor of the market as imagined by Brenner. They retained traditional power-relations where possible such as the semi-serfdom of Northern England or the widespread practice of bonded labor--a type of temporary slave-labor far more common and long-lasting than most traditional histories allow. As alluded to earlier, gentry-controlled parliament fixed English wages during record inflation and crop failure to cheaply maintain their serving classes and push away the problem of unemployment caused by enclosure. They did not leave the fate of wages of the nascent urban working class to be determined by the will of the market but relied on brutal extra-economic coercion. And this reaction was spawned more by the decay of feudalism then the birth of capitalism specifically as English wages rose in the face of inflation, diminishing de facto aristocratic dominance and income of the nobility and growing demand and demands by labor. Robert C. Allen argues that high-wages of English workers both in European and global comparison was a key-factor in the Industrial Revolution. This a matter of sorting out correct cause effect and dialectic: 1. Enclosure was pursued by British nobles precisely because they were losing power 2. labor combination, a legally fixed maximum wage and minimum hourly day and punishment of "vagrancy" was pursued because the cost of labor was already so high. If we confuse the popular bourgeois revolutionary impulse with that of reaction to it then we lose sight of what was revolutionary about the bourgeoisie and capitalism in the first place. In the case of capitalism itself, it is the transition away from an economic system based on rent and "tribute" in Amin's words towards a system based on profit. Why there was a revolution in England less then 30 years after Shakespeare wrote his last play is incomprehensible otherwise. Why the revolutionaries cited Jonson and Shakespeare in their propaganda to a far greater extent then their royalist opponents is also a mystery then. Why the bourgeoisie continued to hate and struggle against the British aristocracy long after gaining de facto hegemony would also be a mystery if they were the beneficiaries of enclosure and had no serious conflict with it. Well into the 19th century it was a program of bourgeois democrats in England to nationalize all land in England and put rent from it towards the benefit of the public welfare. It didn't happen obviously, but the hatred for inherited privilege and the proliferation of a wide variety of similar less radical proposals suggest that this contradiction continued for some time.

     Given this it is conceivable how Shakespeare could support capitalism and popular struggles and traditional common-rights. In As You Like It characters commonly praise "these woods" referring to the Globe Theatre itself given the audience-interactive acting of the time. The Kingsmen had built the Theatre just outside the London city limits to avoid harassment and regulation by busybodies like the Lord Mayor of London. It would seem much like the early textile-manufacturers (men like Shakespeare's father)  who found a sanctuary in the commons and woods outside the reach of noblemen the Kingsmen found a sanctuary on the outside of London. It is interesting that there is still hunger in the woods that where the "good" Duke and his entourage keep council and as Fitter notes  the exiled Rosalind restores the land and wages of the commoners she comes into conflict. It maybe traditional noblesse oblige but it also pays deference to the nature of the woods where "masterless men" formed new relationships and pursued their self-interest as Hill argues.  It is also key that Rosalind is also a subversive figure and Shakespeare's most verbose heroine. Fitter sees in Rosalind a moment where Shakespeare not only transcends populism in form of "progressive conservatism" in the sense of adopting traditional forms to progressive ends but becomes radical in a modern sense.  Fitter acknowledges the problematization of traditional patriarchy in puritan discourses that promoted male chastity and monogamy as well as the primacy of female choice in marriage as being radical and progressive. Fitter does not question whether alleged Shakespeare's negative portrayal of puritanism in other realms is a sign of conservatism. Fitter's emphasis on Shakespeare's "populism" which is often bent or contains tendencies that serve conservative ends unfortunately obscures and dilutes his attempt to prove that Shakespeare was fundamentally radical, that he sought to position on the side of modernity in seeking fundamental change to the hierarchal feudal society he was born into.

     Unfortunately, no attempt is made to interrogate Shakespeare's own relationship to the Tudor State but is is noted that he never attended a royal function or wrote a letter of congratulations directly to an incoming or sitting monarch.  Something contemporaries noticed. But antipathy towards the state is not fundamentally progressive as Shakespeare draws out in plays like Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar etc. Why Shakespeare agreed to ostensibly serve the agenda of the absolutist Tudor state that he criticized could possibly be found in greater hatred of the private civil power of the nobility and their tendency conservative rebellion. Even some Enlightenment reformers opposed the restoration of parliament at the cost of reinvigorating the private power of the nobility. Fitter notes that the laws punishing workers and vagrants passed by parliament were more brutal then what Tudor bureaucrats were willing to enforce. Perhaps Shakespeare's republicanism was not of his time or of the Kingdom but that of an implicit future republic, the old dream of a commonwealth without gentry.

    Lastly, it should be noted that Antonio provides a cogent critique of usury in The Merchant of Venice a goldmine of class conflict that unfortunately is not treated to an-depth reading by Fitter. Antonio's practice of lending out money gratis is closer to the program of Enlightenment economics and business ethics then Shylock's vicious creditor ideology. While Shylock's loan is zero-interest the punishment for breaking is designed to bring about the death of his competitor.  Shylock's obsession with making sterile money breed more money to paraphrase Antonio leads him to seek a man's life to please a creditor's whim. The creditor's drive to seek more and more of his debtors property and labor until he bleeds both the debtor and society at large is critiqued as Shylock seeks Antonio's life in place of greater monetary compensation as punishment for breaking the bond. Shylock comes to embody the inhuman nature of the creditor as the simple mathematics of compound interest inevitably grows beyond the ability of society and the individual to pay.  Unswayed by reason and emotion Shylock acts almost as if he himself is the slave of the legal trapping of his bond replying to all counter-offers merely with: "it isn't in the bond." In reply to Antonio's critique of usury in the opening of the play Shylock tells a fallacious story about two rams coming of age--a common metaphor and echo of babylonian ideas about debt. Antonio's counter-reply that money isn't like sheep that it doesn't produce any product other then itself is hotly though again fallaciously met with the charge that dogs do not have money. As a sidenote, usury is also condemned in  Judaism itself if not as strongly as in Christianity. While Antonio clearly comes closer to Shakespeare's idea of proper business ethics as he aims to enhance the wealth of venice with his fleets and generous zero-interest loans to fellow entrepreneurs it is only the fact that he is a Christian and therefore allowed to own property that permits him to be so generous and follow proper business ethics. Shylock's defense of his absolute property-rights as a creditor is justified by the widespread practice of chattel slavery in Venice and thus by seeing the slaveholder and the creditor in symbiosis and alliance as it was in the Ancient world and in biblical pro-debtor discourses thus offers an implicit critique of slavery as an institution to the audience. Shylock draws out the comparison so clearly between the rights of the creditor and the rights of the slaveowner that the audience cannot find Shylock to be acting unjustly while condoning chattel slavery at the same time. It is a mistake to see Shylock as a noble character as some critics seem to but he is rendered as a human one who is driven to such extremes partly by the discrimination he suffers from. That Shakespeare can condemn usury, chattel slavery, and anti-semitism all at the same time indicates a startling radicality to my mind.

     A burning question to consider now is: was Shakespeare more radical then his contemporaries? Or was he one radical dramatist among a coterie of radical dramatists of his generation? The former proposition seems unlikely to me as he never drew the ire of the censors and authorities in the way Jonson, whom Fitter sees embodied in the bi-polar Jaques, nor did he pay the ultimate price as Kyd did. Of course lack of repression is not proof of lack of radicalism. But I personally have not so far seen anything in Shakespeare's canon like Johnson's play The Alchemist which is made up almost entirely of common characters. That is understandable too since Jonson's father was bricklayer and not a wool merchant like Shakespeare's father. The question of who was the most radical playwright in renaissance England is personally more interesting to me then the question of who was aesthetically superior.  Hopefully Fitter will seek to resolve this and other questions in the second volume.