There is a spontaneous joy that comes from reading Shakespeare’s plays and in seeing them performed. Part of that joy comes from seeing our political natures staged in dramatic fashion, a staging informed by Shakespeare’s political wisdom. Credit is due to the generations of scholars who followed the ground-breaking work of Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa in highlighting this wisdom. This list includes David Lowenthal, Paul Cantor, John Alvis, Leon Craig, Jan Blits, and John Briggs. The work of these scholars and those whom they inspired (a cohort too vast to list here) is an indispensable gift. For it recovers from an academic literature obsessed with reading Shakespeare through the distorting lenses of race, class, and gender, a poet-philosopher alive to the full range of concerns that animate our lives as political animals.
Many of the scholars noted above dedicate no small part of their readings to justifying Shakespeare’s focus on the vexatious questions facing political actors, such as “who has the best claim to rule?” and “on what basis can that claim be rationally defended?” And while they make the case for Shakespeare’s studied presentation of natural right with varying degrees of plausibility, their focus tends to pay insufficient attention to the character of the ruled. If, following Aristotle, we understand free political life to require knowing how to rule and be ruled in turn, then knowledge of the virtues of the ruled should form an indispensable part of our education in republican politics. What, then, does Shakespeare have to teach us about the virtues belonging to free citizens?
Nicolas McAfee helps us explore this important question in his Political Wisdom in Late Shakespeare: A Way Out of the Wreck, and he does so by examining some of Shakespeare’s so-called “late plays”: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, and The Tempest. McAfee’s analysis, which dedicates a chapter to each one of these plays and is framed by an introduction and conclusion, reflects a panoptic grasp of the dramas. But his work’s focal point is Shakespeare’s portrayal of royal courtiers. More specifically, he explores how the various courtiers’ embodiments of piety, patience, clemency, fidelity, and diligence fare amidst the sturm und drang of political life in both its pagan and Christian forms. And while his analysis hews closely to the political and moral insights of these dramas, it is also attentive to Shakespeare’s literary artistry; McAfee’s treatment thus deliberately foregrounds the “primary theatrical devices … that invite and sustain inquiries into what human beings ought or ought not to do: ironic ignorance, arresting philosophic questions, and interpretive framing/reframing” (p. 5).
McAfee’s careful reading of the rulers and courtiers in these plays, those Shakespeare invites us to admire as well as those we are to condemn, leads him to conclude that the virtues they embody (the five listed above, but especially that of piety) are “broadly consonant with a variety of common (though not exclusively) Christian theological notions, for example, trust in supervening providence, the redemption of suffering, atonement for sin, eschatological judgment, and cooperation between divine and human agency” (p. 158). To be sure, McAfee does not read Christian motives into Shakespeare’s pagan peoples. But he does argue forcefully that, in Shakespeare’s hands, the traits quoted above are perfectly at home amidst the rough and tumble of political life; they need not make men pious simpletons or goody-goodies vulnerable to the vicious. Rather, their exercise can make one a self-possessed and active citizen, capable of facing, managing, and navigating politics’ hard-headed realities.
McAfee thus contends that in Cymbeline’s Pisanio and Cornelius or in The Winter Tale’s Paulina, Camillo, and Antigonus, Shakespeare portrays those who would serve the genuine good of their masters, service which, in some cases, requires their use of deception, shame, or psychological manipulation. In the characters of Katherine, Buckingham, and the converted Cardinal Wolsey of Henry VIII, one can see how the principled defense of the common good is (or would be) best served by patience, a clemency toward one’s enemies, and confidence in heavenly honors, virtues that also render their possessors independent of a capricious king even as they risk martyrdom at his hands. It is Wolsey’s belated use of his “empirical and biblical insights into human nature” which reveals the need for “a corresponding form of courtly conduct,” a conduct that Wolsey eschewed for most of his career, but which is “worth aiming at independently of the ‘burden[some]’ honor seeking (vv. 384–85) that fuels ambition, corruption, and the politics of envy” (p. 64). This, McAfee argues, is the courtly “way out of the wreck” (to paraphrase Wolsey at HVIII, 3.2.437) that Shakespeare invites his politically and morally serious readers to pursue if they will secure genuine goods for themselves and their fellow man.
On the whole, McAfee’s analysis is clear, his prose is graceful, and he provides a serious treatment of characters and plays that, with the exception of Prospero and The Tempest, are rarely studied by political theorists. Were it not for his work’s many other virtues, this rarified focus alone would make his book “worth the price of admission.” And while those familiar with Shakespeare and the scholarship on him will find material to quibble with here and there (for me it’s McAfee’s defense of a pious Prospero), Political Wisdom in Late Shakespeare will be read with pleasure and profit by Shakespeare enthusiast and specialist alike.
Of course, the real contribution of McAfee’s work hinges on the status of those moral and theological virtues that too many of Shakespeare’s politically minded readers neglect or dismiss. McAfee opposes his particular reading to those who understand Shakespeare to dramatize, and presumably endorse, “a Machiavellian criticism of Christianity” with its elevation of human agency and its searching criticism of Christianity’s “‘high moral demands’—too high, indeed, for a ruler to satisfy without exception” (p. 2). But this so-called “Erastian” (p. 2) reading covers many scholars, among whom he includes myself, and not all of whom agree about its significance for Shakespeare. Moreover, it is one thing to argue that Shakespeare’s histories capture the triumph of the English state over the Roman church and quite another to think that Shakespeare endorses that particular development and its presumably Machiavellian grounds. McAfee concedes this possibility, but that doesn’t lead him into deeper engagement with his scholarly “rivals.”
It is also consistent with Machiavelli to defend the view, as McAfee does, that “convictions about the providential cosmic order” are “often quite conducive to a more dignified and energetic pursuit of one’s obligations” (p. 3). The difference between the two Nicks here concerns the grounds of that defense. Is it merely politically salutary? Or is it rooted in the truth about man and his world? To see how Shakespeare allows us to answer these questions would require, among other things, backdropping an even broader reading of the “late plays” against those dramas where the coherence of such virtues gets tested, as in Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Merchant of Venice. Undertaking such a journey has its own perils, to be sure, but McAfee’s Political Wisdom in Late Shakespeare allows us to avoid any “wrecks” along the way by compelling us to take seriously Shakespeare’s presentation of patience, clemency, fidelity, diligence, and piety. For that, we must be grateful.
