Vinculum Fidei: The Tempest and the Law of Allegiance
2008; Routledge; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1525/lal.2008.20.1.1
ISSN1541-2601
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoAbstractIn English constitutional law, Calvin’s Case (1608) laid down a new, deeply affective basis of personal allegiance; the bond between sovereign and subject was now to be understood in personal, embodied terms as a tie of obligation and love between natural men. This essay argues that Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a work of hypothetical constitutional commentary designed to illustrate the fragility and awkwardness of this new norm at home and abroad; it is, more over, intended to rebuke the theoretical ambitions of James I. The late Shakespeare, in this account, is not a political quietist but a skeptical constitutional theorist who in his play outlines a proleptic vision of the affective costs of personal sovereignty.Keywords: ShakespeareconstitutionalismallegianceThe Tempestsovereignty Notes1. I would like to thank Brian Walsh, Lukas Erne, Desmond Manderson, and Lawrence Manley for their comments and suggestions on this essay.2. William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 144–5 [Google Scholar].3. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Uses of Power,” 44 New York Review of Books, 76 (2007) [Google Scholar]. In this recent essay, Greenblatt revises his deeply influential reading of Prospero as a study in mastery and the psychology of colonial domination. Greenblatt’s earlier Prospero is a prince whose chief ambition is to “harrow the other characters with fear and wonder and then to reveal that their anxiety is his to create and allay.” His rough magic is the principal “instrument for shaping the inner lives of others” or reforming the soul of the disobedient or sinful subject; this was a point not lost on the West Indian writer George Lamming who in i960 had described Ariel as nothing more than a “lackey … and a figure of the perfect and unspeakable secret police.” Greenblatt’s original reading is in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) while Lamming’s reading of The Tempest unfolds in The Pleasures of Exile (London: Jonathan Cape, i960). The postcolonial readings of the play have been thoroughly unfolded, nuanced, and supplemented and revised in, for example, Paul Brown, “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) [Google Scholar]; Peter Hulme and Francis Barker, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-Texts of The Tempest,” in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (New York: Methuen, 1985) [Google Scholar]; John Gillies, “Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque,” 53 English Literary History, 673 (1986) [Google Scholar]; Meredith Skura, “Discourse and the Individual: Colonialism and The Tempest” 40 Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1989) [Google Scholar]; Barbara Fuchs, “Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest,” 48 Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1997) [Google Scholar]; David Scott Kastan, “‘The Duke of Milan / And His Brave Son:’ Old Histories and New in The Tempest,” in Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999) [Google Scholar]; Jonathan Goldberg, The Tempest in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) [Google Scholar].4. James I, “Speech to Parliament, March 21, 1610,” in J. P. Sommerville, ed., The Political Writings ofJames VI & I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 181. [Google Scholar] My reading of James I’s writings andspeeches is indebted to the following: J.N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (New York: Harper &Row, [1896] 1965) [Google Scholar]; J.M. Gough, Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1955 [Google Scholar]); Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) [Google Scholar]; Debora Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred andthe State in “Measure for Measure” (New York: Palgrave, 2001). [Google Scholar]5. The most sustained study of late Shakespeare in relation to public law is Constance Jordan, Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Late Plays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) [Google Scholar]. John Bender’s study of the seasonal objectives of the play, in light of its first performance on Hallowmas Eve, underscores the play’s cozy relation to the court. See Bender, “The Day of the Tempest,” 47 English Literary History, 235 (1980) [Google Scholar].6. Coke, Ellesmere, and Bacon all wrote accounts of Calvin’s Case; given the subsequent rivalries between these men, the fact that their accounts of this case were relatively similar is noteworthy. The view that Calvin’s case is a watershed in English constitutional ideas of citizenship is commonplace, but for the lasting American impact of the new model of allegiance, see Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) [Google Scholar].7. See Jordan, supra note 4 at 7. I am arguing against the fairly widespread supposition that The Tempest is not concerned with law, but only with power. See, for example, John Gilles “Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque,” supra note 2.8. On the skeptical political critique in late Shakespeare, see Jordan, supra note 4; Andrew Hadfield, “The Power and Rights of the Crown in Hamlet and King Lear: ‘The King—The King’s to Blame’” 54 Review of English Studies, n.s., 217 (2003) [Google Scholar]; and Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) [Google Scholar]. On the literary forms of parrhesia, or bold speaking, in Jacobean England, see David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) [Google Scholar].9. Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) [Google Scholar]; John Bender’s essay “The Day of the Tempest” reads the play as a local response to a seasonal pattern—a work designed to consolidate the messy energies of summer in preparation for the crawl towards winter—that is nonetheless written in the service of the crown’s public program. See Bender supra note 4 at 57.10. Julia Reinhard Lupton, “The Minority of Caliban: Thinking with Shakespeare and Locke,” 22 REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 1–35 (2006) [Google Scholar].11. The phrase “popular constitutionalism” belongs to Larry Kramer, who uses it in a sweeping way to describe the manner in which constitutional decisions are both shaped and interpreted in public culture outside the courts. See The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). William MacNeil offers a more sweeping review of the image of law in popular culture in Lex Populi: The Jurisprudence of Popular Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). On Shakespeare as a political theorist, see Martin Dzelzainis, “Shakespeare and Political Thought” in David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) and John Cox, “Shakespeare and Political Philosophy,” 26 Philosophy and Literature, 107 (2002) [Google Scholar]. In this article, I differ from Paul Yachnin, who has elegantly distinguished Shakespeare the literary writer from Shakespeare the polemicist: for Yachnin, late Shakespearean plays express “literature’s willingness to allow the emergence of ideological contradiction and its unwillingness to attempt to police the production of meaning.” See Yachnin, “Shakespeare’s Politics of Loyalty: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in Antony and Cleopatra” 33 Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 343 (1993) [Google Scholar]. While I agree that in general Shakespeare thrives on the unresolved presence of ideological contradiction, the late plays themselves seem to resist the utopian or transcendental impulse and hence do seem deliberately designed to narrow the interpretive horizon or police certain forms of meaning. In my reading, The Tempest demonstrates not just the persistence of the bonds of allegiance between sovereign and subject, but also the implausibility of any sort of leave taking for the greener world of aesthetic and religious contemplation.12. See Kastan, supra note 2, passim.13. “Calvin’s Case, or The Case of the Postnati,” originally published in Coke’s Reports, vol. 7. The Writings of Sir Edward Coke, vol. 1. Steve Shepherd, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), 171.14. E. R. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) [Google Scholar]. I am indebted to the excellent recent work on Shakespeare’s skeptical portrait of sacral kingship and the mixta persona—and more broadly on Shakespeare as a constitutional theorist—by Anselm Haverkamp and Lorna Hutson. See Lorna Hutson, “Not the King’s Two Bodies: Reading the Body Politic in Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV Parts 1 & 2’” in Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson, eds., Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 [Google Scholar]) and Anselm Haverkamp, “Richard II, Bracton, and the End of Political Theology,” 16 Law and Literature, 313 (2004) [Google Scholar].15. See Coke, supra note i2at 181.16. Sir William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol. IX (London: Methuen & Co, 1926), 78. [Google Scholar]17. Thomas Egerton, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, on “The Case of the Postnati,” in T.B. Howell and C. Cobbett, Cobbetts Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. II (London, 1809), 663–96 [Google Scholar], esp. 691–92. Ellesmere’s speech was printed individually as The Speech of the Lord Chancellor of England, in the Exchequer Chamber, Touching the Post-Nati (London, 1609).18. See Holdsworth, supra note 14 at 81.19. The classic study of the “common-law mind,” to which I am indebted, is J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957) [Google Scholar].20. For an account of natural law jurisprudence in and after the decision, see Polly Price, “Natural Law and Birthright Citizenship in Calvin’s Case” 9 Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, 73 (1997) [Google Scholar].21. See Coke, supra note 12 at 195–6.22. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and D. D. Heath, eds., The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 7 (London, 1857), 665. [Google Scholar]23. See Coke, supra note 12 at 197–8.24. See Smith, supra note 5 at 47–8.25. Daniel Hulsebosch, “The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke’s British Jurisprudence,” 21 Law and History Review, 439 (2003) [Google Scholar]; see Holdsworth, supra note 14 at 83–86; see Smith, supra note 5 at 42–69.26. On Prospero’s desire to harrow and command the souls of others, see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, supra note 2 at 129–164.27. Harry Berger, “‘Miraculous Harp’: A Reading of The Tempest in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) [Google Scholar].28. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Peter Holland, ed. (New York: Penguin, 1999), V, i, 312. [Google Scholar]29. See Jordan, supra note 4 at 186.30. Paul Yachnin, “Judgment,” In re Attorney General for Canada; ex parte Heinrich [2003]; Shakespeare Moot Court, available at http://www.mcgill.ca/shakespearemoot/. As Yachnin writes, “Shakespeare sets a premium on political obedience—not blind obedience to be sure, but obedience based on the subject’s sense of the value of the integrity and stability of the structure of rule. That is John of Gaunt’s position in Richard 2 when he tells his sister-in-law that he cannot raise a hand against the king even though the king is clearly implicated in the murder of Thomas of Woodstock. It is Gonzalo’s position implicitly in The Tempest; and he is praised to the skies by Prospero, the very man whose ouster he oversaw. Gonzalo, who is Alonso’s counselor, followed Alonso’s command to get rid of Prospero, but he followed it in such a way as to give Prospero a minimal chance of surviving his ordeal. Prospero’s terms of praise are precise: Gonzalo was his ‘true preserver’ and ‘a loyal sir / To him thou follow’st.’ Even where subjects defy direct orders, they disobey not so much out of democratic or constitutional conviction as from a persistent personal devotion to the well-being of their political masters. King Lear’s counselor Kent is the outstanding example of this kind of allegiance.” [Google Scholar]31. On Caliban as the figural child of Prospero, see Skura, supra note 2.32. See Lupton, supra note 10 at 14–17.33. By figuring Sycorax, and likely Caliban, as blue-eyed, Shakespeare attaches the identity of the gothic barbarian to these two islanders, casting them as either anachronistic or contemporary expressions of a national racial past—Sycorax and Caliban are thus either Pictish savages from the past or their contemporary counterparts—the Irish. Accounts of the Irish reading of the play are in Fuchs, “Conquering Islands,” and Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women (New York: Routledge, 2000) [Google Scholar].34. See Kastan, supra note 2 at 186. For a fuller illustration of the legal and political backgrounds of Caliban’s claim of dominion, see also Patricia Seed, “This Island’s Mine: Caliban and Native Title” in William Sherman and Peter Hulme, eds., The Tempest and its Travels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) [Google Scholar].35. I cannot agree with Jordan’s assertion that Caliban is an illustration of “Prospero’s failure to create a subject worth ruling,” a point that depends upon a comprehensive view of the Prospero-Caliban tie as one of mimetic self-government. In her view, Prospero’s failed self-discipline, his inability to manage his impetuous political will, creates Caliban as the demonic literalization of misrule; see Jordan supra note 4 at 160–209. Such a claim ironically reduces Caliban once again to a position of subjection—in her reading, Caliban is a bestial slave whose function is to illuminate Prospero’s ill-tempered mastery rather than a resistant native whose aspirations are crushed by superior force. But I suggest that the play is designed to describe not mastery but fatigue, not commanding princely omniscience but frustrated transcendence of the political. Shakespeare may be providing a more subtle analysis of the problems of colonial sovereignty—a situation in which the prince longs for that condition in which all of his subjects do what they know they should do—submit to the rule of law. For an elaboration on the play’s ambition to solicit obedience, see Paul Yachnin, “Shakespeare and the Idea of Obedience: Gonzalo in The Tempest” 24 Mosaic, 1 (1991) [Google Scholar].36. See Shakespeare, supra note 27 at II, ii, 158–161.37. See Jordan, supra note 4 at 202.38. See Shakespeare, supra note 27 at V, i, 272–276.39. This claim takes influential shape in Brown, supra note 2 and “This Thing of Darkness” and Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), 141–59 [Google Scholar].40. See Shakespeare, supra note 27 at I, ii, 97; 84–5.41. See Kastan, supra note 2 at 190, and Katrin Trüstedt, “Secondary Satire and the Sea-Change of Romance: Reading William Shakespeare’s The Tempest” 17 Law and Literature, 345 (2006) [Google Scholar].42. See Shakespeare, supra note 27 at V, i, 74–79.43. See Shakespeare, supra note 27 at V, i, 130–135.44. The salient passage is the famous Ovidian soliloquy at the opening of Act V, in which Prospero abjures his so potent art: “But this rough magic / I here abjure; and when I have required / Some heavenly music (which even now I do) / To work mine end upon their senses that / This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book.” See Shakespeare, supra note 27 at V, i, 49–57.45. From a contrary view, Greenblatt compares Prospero to Elizabeth I insofar as each sovereign seems willing to let inward dissent slide so long as the subject produces the external display of conformity to law. Prospero does not seek a window into Antonio’s soul; see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, supra note 2 at 142–146. Prospero certainly seems far from content with Antonio’s sullen silence, and as I suggest, promises to keep watching his disgraced and treacherous brother well into the future.46. See Shakespeare, supra note 27 at V, i, 26–129.47. W.H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” Arthur Kirsch, ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 14. [Google Scholar]48. Id. at 14.
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