Asquith Clare - Shakespeare and the resistance: the Earl of Southampton, the Essex Rebellion, and the poems that challenged Tudor tyranny

T HE PRACTICE OF detecting covert contemporary references and hidden political allusions in the works of Shakespeare has a long and derided history. The Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne joked that Romeo must be a hidden caricature of Elizabeth Is all-powerful minister, Lord Burghley, precisely because of the cunning dissimilarity. Shakespeares universality, the fact that he speaks to us all on a profound level, means that we resent any attempt by academic, social, nationalist, religious, or political groups to appropriate him, to label and therefore limit him. This has not stopped thousands from trying. He has been variously portrayed as an Italian, a covert homosexual, a Jesuit, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford; he has been by turns a loyalist, a dissident, a Tudor apologist, an atheist, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Puritan, an elitist, a populist, a proto-Marxist, and the love-child of Elizabeth I.

The unenviable task of Shakespeare scholars is to preserve the integrity of the text in the face of this barrage. But two awkward elements stand in their way. One is Shakespeares famously undocumented background, which has been fully exploited by biographical fantasists in particular. The other is the fact that Literary critics locate the genesis of this conflicted material either somewhere in his shadowy private life or in the source of his universalityhis insight into human nature.

Over the past fifteen years, however, certain historianssome of them, like Peter Lake, cautiously deferential, others, like Curtis Breight, angrily incensedhave begun to invade the territory of Shakespeare scholarship. Initially this was to challenge the recent New Historicist angle on the sixteenth century, which aimed to reassess the literature and drama by setting it in what was understood to be the cultural and intellectual context of the time. Normally the first step in studying the creative work of the past, this approach, especially in the case of the context-free Shakespeare, was long overdue. But the historicists found they had stumbled into a hornets nest. Elizabeths reign, the last years in particular, have been undergoing a lengthy and contentious process of reassessment. According to many current historians, the New Historicists were working on an outdated and misconceived version of the period. They had been given the wrong handbook.

Stephen Greenblatts influential 1989 analysis of the plays, Shakespearean Negotiations, drew on a series of long-held assumptions about Elizabeths reign. Power lay with the queen: yet, in material terms, she was weak. She had no standing army, no bureaucracy, and no police force to speak of. She relied instead on theatrical display and rhetorical persuasion: and with such success that, though a weak and feeble woman, she retained power for almost fifty yearsand commanded the devotion of her subjects throughout, which, as she often declared, I do esteem more than any treasure or riches. This was an age, then, when theatricality was the source of power: a great starting point for Shakespeare scholars.