Description
The new practices and theories of parliamentary representation that emerged during Elizabeth's and James' reigns shattered the unity of human agency, redefined the nature of power, transformed the image of the body politic, and unsettled constructs and concepts as fundamental as the relation between presence and absence.
In The Third Citizen, Oliver Arnold argues that recovering the formation of political representation as an effective ideology should radically change our understanding of early modern political culture, Shakespeare's political art, and the way Anglo-American critics, for whom representative democracy is second nature, construe both. In magisterial readings of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and the First Tetralogy, Arnold discovers a new Shakespeare who was neither a conservative apologist for monarchy nor a prescient, liberal champion of the House of Commons but instead a radical thinker and artist who demystified the ideology of political representation in the moment of its first flowering. Shakespeare believed that political representation produced (and required for its reproduction) a new kind of subject and a new kind of subjectivity, and he fashioned a new kind of tragedy to represent the loss of power, the fall from dignity, the false consciousness, and the grief peculiar to the experiences of representing and of being represented. Representationalism and its subject mark the beginning of political modernity; Shakespeare’s tragedies greet political representationalism with skepticism, bleakness, and despair.Reviews
"A compelling, lucid, and critically important intervention in a series of overlapping fields: Shakespeare studies, Renaissance studies, and cultural studies. In addition to startlingly fresh and persuasive interpretations of familiar plays, Oliver Arnold offers a whole new way of understanding the politics of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater."—Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University"Arnold's dense book explores the fertile ground left mostly unturned by new historicist approaches of early modern politics . . . Brilliant and well-documented analysis of Shakespeare's 'representational plays'."—Marie-Dominique Garnier, Cercles "A compelling historical refinement . . . Recommended."—Choice "Remarkably scholarly . . . This seminal redrawing of power and politics in late Tudor and early Stuart England takes its authority from the tight analogies it makes between political events and governmental practice in Shakespeare's time and its detailed examination of key scenes in a half-dozen of his plays."—Arthur F. Kinney, Renaissance Quarterly
Author Information
Oliver Arnold is an associate professor of English at Princeton University.
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The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts