Ideology and Subversion in the Shakespearean Set Speech

Abstract

In the opening chapter of Radical Tragedy, Jonathan Dollimore makes a distinction in regard to Montaigne that can be profitably applied to Shakespeare as well. Contending that We need to recognise . . . how a writer can be intellectually radical without necessarily being politically so,' Dollimore broaches a possibility that is seldom acknowledged by Shakespeareans who assume that the playwright's apparent political conservatism is firmly rooted in his identification with the received ideas of his time, conveniently summarized in the still influential model of the Elizabethan world picture. Thanks to a generation of Renaissance scholars, we are now able to recognize that this model itself may be in need of drastic revision, indeed that it may well constitute a unitary myth of our own century's making, and therefore an extremely reductive view of an age that was actually engaged in an intensive interrogation of its received ideas.2 It would be premature and equally reductive to apply the insights of these new historicists to Shakespeare in a manner that overestimates his intellectual radicalism, that substitutes, for example, a figure of subversiveness in place of that of the wise embodiment of moderation or, at worst, the apologist for Tudor absolutism.3 As Felix Raab has suggested in his survey of Machiavelli's reception in Tudor England, though the providentialist assumptions of the past were clearly being threatened throughout the last half of the sixteenth