Jeffrey S. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere

Abstract

Refreshingly, Jeffrey S. Doty writes like an historian. In the tradition of Christopher Hill, Keith Thomas, and Keith Wrightson, he seeks to master complexities, rather than to exacerbate them through fashionably oblique postulation and self-regarding intricacies of hypostatization. His clean prose pursues with honest clarity the topics outlined in his title, Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere, to produce a slim, but learned, and perhaps seminal volume. Elizabeth I and James I, he reminds us, each remarked disconsolately that monarchy occupied a public stage, recognizing thereby the vulnerability of supreme power to assessment by the ogling multitude. ‘Public performance could win assent and adoration; publicity could also stain, degrade, and produce resistance’ (4). Officially, the commoners’ political role was reverential passivity; they were ‘things created’, in Coriolanus’ exasperated words (3.2.9–12), ‘to show bare heads, / In congregations, to yawn, be still, and wonder’ (169). Peter Lake and Steven Pincus have shown, however, that through the sixteenth century, elite incitements of commons support cumulatively created a post-Reformation public sphere, establishing the widespread recognition that authority might be buttressed by ‘popularity’ (The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Manchester University Press, 2007). ‘Popularity’ remained nonetheless a dirty word, stigmatizing those who courted it illegitimately as pandering to the potential many-headed monster. Thus, whilst Elizabeth’s calculated showcasing of ‘love’ to her people on progresses comprised an unprecedented and successful stratagem, the Earl of Essex’s competitive street-wooings had him proclaimed in Star Chamber in 1601 ‘a popular traytor’ (16). The trick, for non-royal political actors, was to grasp the substance without incurring the stain. Prince Henry’s wiles in the Henry IV plays succeed here deftly: determinedly sullying himself at Eastcheap, his reformation upon accession glitters o’er his fault, to win him the popularity that he appears, falsely, not to have courted (74). It was Shakespeare’s prescient and timely achievement, argues Doty, to dramatize the political imperative of popularity for any regime: a phenomenon whose ubiquity today obscures recognition that ‘Shakespeare’s integration of publicity into political action has no precedent in early modern drama’ (3, 191).