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Neocon and Theoprog: The New Machiavellian Moment

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Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare

Part of the book series: Reproducing Shakespeare ((RESH))

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Abstract

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of recent critical studies that read Shakespeare in the light of Machiavelli. By mapping their different preoccupations and styles onto the Hobbesian division of political theory into libertas, the space of ‘natural’ relationships between individuals, imperium, the domain of the monarchy and the state, and religio, the realm of God and the Church, I suggest that the seven authors under scrutiny have produced a multifaceted, prismatic Shakespeare with political profiles reminiscent of twenty-first-century trends: a moderate Shakespeare, a neoconservative Shakespeare, a theoconservative Shakespeare, a neomarxist Shakespeare, a Nietzschean Shakespeare, a neoprogressive Shakespeare, and a theoprogressive Shakespeare. The picture indicates that the early 2000s marked a distinct new Machiavellian moment in Shakespeare studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Vocabolario della Lingua Italiana. Il Conciso (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, 1998), 879.

  2. 2.

    Thomas Lodge, A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (London 1579), http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/lodge.html, accessed 3 September 2015.

  3. 3.

    Mario Praz, “The Politic Brain: Machiavelli and the Elizabethans” (1928). In The Flaming Heart. Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot (Gloucester MA: Peter Smith, 1966), 104.

  4. 4.

    Alessandra Petrina, Machiavelli in the British Isles: Two Early Modern Translations of The Prince (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), xi–xii. For Machiavelli on stage see Michael J. Redmond, Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy. Intertextuality on the Jacobean Stage (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 81–89.

  5. 5.

    Carlo Ginzburg, “Machiavelli, l’eccezione e la regola. Linee di una ricerca in corso”, Quaderni storici, XXXVIII, no. 1 (2003), 195–213.

  6. 6.

    Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12.

  7. 7.

    Adriano Sofri, Machiavelli, Tupac, e la Principessa (Palermo: Sellerio, 2013). See also John M. Najemy, “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6.

  8. 8.

    Michael A. Leeden, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago (New York: Truman Talley Books/St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Ian Demack, The Modern Machiavelli: The Seven Principles of Power in Business (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002); Simon Ramo, Tennis By Machiavelli (New York: New American Library, 1985). The Machiavellian test can be found at:

    https://www.blogthings.com/howmachiavellianareyouquiz/, accessed 3 September 2015.

  9. 9.

    J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

  10. 10.

    Sofri, Machiavelli, 337.

  11. 11.

    Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne. Power and Subjectivity From Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43.

  12. 12.

    Edward Meyer, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama (Weimar: Literarhistorische Forschungen, 1897); Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli. A Changing Interpretation 1500–1700 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964); Praz, “The Politic Brain”, 90–145; Petrina, Machiavelli in the British Isles.

  13. 13.

    Petrina, Machiavelli in the British Isles; Redmond, Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric.

  14. 14.

    Fredric Jameson (1995) “Radicalizing Radical Shakespeare: The Permanent Revolution in Shakespeare Studies.” In Materialist Shakespeare: an Introduction, edited by Ivo Kamps (London: Verso, 1995), 320.

  15. 15.

    Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12; cf. Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London: Arden, 2004).

  16. 16.

    Alan Stonem “For God and Country”, Boston Review, February/March 2005, https://www.bostonreview.net/stone-god-and-country, accessed 3 September 2015.

  17. 17.

    Blair Worden, “Shakespeare and Politics.” In Shakespeare and Politics, edited by Catherine Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 22.

  18. 18.

    Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 12.

  19. 19.

    Thomas Hobbes, De Cive. The Latin Version (1642) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

  20. 20.

    Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985).

  21. 21.

    E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) (London: Penguin Books, 1988). Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations. Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

  22. 22.

    Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets” (1981; 1985). In Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 26.

  23. 23.

    Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets”, 30.

  24. 24.

    “Invisible Bullets”, 65.

  25. 25.

    Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: the New Historicism”, English Literary History, 56, 4 (1989): 721–771.

  26. 26.

    Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy. Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1984) (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 4.

  27. 27.

    Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 174.

  28. 28.

    Hobbes, De Cive, xiii.

  29. 29.

    Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 16.

  30. 30.

    Dympna Callaghan, “Shakespeare and Religion”, Textual Practice 15, 1 (2001), 3.

  31. 31.

    An important exception is the aforementioned book by Viktoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric.

  32. 32.

    Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), Allan Bloom, Shakespeare’s Politics, with Harry V. Jaffa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; 1st ed. New York: Basic Books, 1964). John E. Alvis and Thomas G. West, eds., Shakespeare as a Political Thinker (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2000; 1st ed. Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1981).

  33. 33.

    John Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), x.

  34. 34.

    Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli, 206.

  35. 35.

    Shakespeare and Machiavelli, x.

  36. 36.

    Stephen Hollingshead, Shakespeare’s Answer to Machiavelli (Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), press release.

  37. 37.

    Tim Spiekerman, Shakespeare’s Political Realism. The English History Plays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 15.

  38. 38.

    Spiekerman, Shakespeare’s Political Realism, 25.

  39. 39.

    Shakespeare’s Political Realism, 165.

  40. 40.

    Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, 47. Grady has recently expanded his argument in “The End of Shakespeare’s Machiavellian Moment: Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s Historiography, and Dramatic Form”, in, Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories: Anglo-Italian Transactions, edited by Michele Marrapodi (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 119–136.

  41. 41.

    Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, 26.

  42. 42.

    Franco Ferrucci, Il teatro della fortuna. Potere e destino in Machiavelli e Shakespeare (Roma: Fazi, 2004), 3.

  43. 43.

    Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 12–13.

  44. 44.

    Shakespeare and Republicanism, 9, 11.

  45. 45.

    Shakespeare and Republicanism, 133.

  46. 46.

    Shakespeare and Republicanism, 189.

  47. 47.

    Gilberto Sacerdoti, Sacrificio e sovranità. Teologia e politica nell’Europa di Shakespeare e Bruno (Torino: Einaudi, 2002).

  48. 48.

    Sacerdoti, Sacrificio e sovranità, 328, 365.

  49. 49.

    Sacerdoti’s works will be analyzed in detail in the next chapter.

  50. 50.

    Praz, “The Politic Brain”, 145.

  51. 51.

    Giulio Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1995); Davide De Camilli, Machiavelli nel tempo. La critica machiavelliana dal Cinquecento a oggi (Pisa: ETS, 2000).

  52. 52.

    Stephen Greenblatt, Will of the World. How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), 242.

  53. 53.

    John J. Joughin, “Shakespeare and politics: an introduction”, in Alexander, Shakespeare and Politics, 3, emphasis mine.

  54. 54.

    Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, 2.

  55. 55.

    Robin Headlam Wells, “Historicism and ‘Presentism’ in Early Modern Studies”, The Cambridge Quarterly 29, 1 (2000): 37–60.

  56. 56.

    Petrina, Machiavelli in the British Isles, 6.

  57. 57.

    Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 3.

  58. 58.

    Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, viii.

  59. 59.

    Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints. Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 206.

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  1. Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

    Shaul Bassi

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Bassi, S. (2016). Neocon and Theoprog: The New Machiavellian Moment. In: Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49170-1_5

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