Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare's stage

Introduction

… thus was I not constrained, but did it

On my free will.

[Antony, 3,6,56–7]

Free Will is a book about art and power on Shakespeare’s stage, and how the sovereignty of the playwright is complicated by his service as a player. Shakespeare’s plays and poems are full of expressions of a will to ‘liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!’ [Julius, 3,1,80], and a refrain that runs through them is that ‘I breathe free breath’ [Love’s, 5,2,705]. Repeatedly, statements such as ‘Thought is free’ [Twelfth, 1,3,58; Tempest, 3,2,123], or ‘A man is master of his liberty’ [Errors, 2,1,7], connect these works not only to the liberal ideology that ‘I was born free’ [Julius, 1,2,97], but to an aesthetic emphasis on ‘free speech’ [Measure, 1,1,70] as the ‘law of writ and liberty’ [Hamlet, 2,2,383]. They belong, that is to say, to a political culture evolving from royal to popular sovereignty, in which ‘the jolly Briton laughs from’s free lungs’ [Cymbeline, 1,1,68–9] as the signifier of emerging national identity. And if the sovereign subject is already being defined in Shakespeare’s texts by such assertions as that ‘the streets [are] as free for me as you’ [Shrew, 1,2,231], a desire to ‘speak our free hearts each to other’ [Macbeth, 1,3,153] is also keyed in them to the writer’s creative liberation, and to a confidence that ‘The fated sky / Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull / Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull’ [All’s Well, 1,1,200–2]. So this author’s drive to ‘speak freely’ [Comedy, 5,1,286] undoubtedly made him a precursor of modern aesthetic autonomy. For only a writer so conscious of ‘giving reins and spur to my free speech’ [Richard II, 1,1,55] could have had a poet utter the definitively modern idea that ‘the author’s drift’ [Troilus, 3,3,108] is released from determination to soar into aesthetic space by its own airy disinterestedness:

My free drift

Halts not particularly, but moves itself

In a wide sea of tax. No levelled malice

Infects one comma in the course I hold,

But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on,

Leaving no tract behind.

[Timon, 1,1,45–50]

‘I must have liberty / Withal’, asserts Shakespeare’s near-namesake Jaques, ‘as large a charter as the wind, / To blow on whom I please’; but his master the Duke seizes on this somatic metaphor to call him a ‘libertine’, who will breathe into ‘the general world’ (which we might consider the public space of the Globe) all the infections he ‘with licence of free foot has caught’ [As You, 2,7,47–68]. This edgy exchange about the body of the writer is thought to allude to a 1599 ban on satire; and so its ‘backward pull’ refers the will to ‘free speech and fearless’ [Richard II, 1,1,123] to an older sovereignty, and the embodied politics of patronage and personhood. As Aristotle thought the telos of tragedy was to purge its material circumstances, and Hegel considered the highest vocation of art was to dissolve itself and ‘become a thing of the past’, so Terry Eagleton reads such conflict between speech and body in these plays as ‘an allegory of class struggle’, and connects the irony that Shakespeare’s self-transcendence is ‘jeopardized by the very language in which it is articulated’ to his bourgeois subject position.¹ But in Free Will I relate the embodiment of his language to his dual role as both player and playwright, and to the founding rupture outlined by Jürgen Habermas, Ernst Kantorowicz, Carl Schmitt and others, from a regime of meaning based on personal presence to one of symbolic representation. At the same time, I suggest, Shakespeare’s human comedy ‘bodies forth’ [Dream, 5,1,14] all the twists of presence and representation traced by theorists such as Jacques Rancière. For while an author may rejoice that ‘the free breath of a sacred king’ [John, 3,1,74] has but ‘a little scene, / To monarchize’ [Richard II, 3,2,160–1], the actor fears the promise that ‘thou shalt be free as mountain winds’ [Tempest, 1,2,499] is one that only monarchs give. Shakespeare’s poetic personality is wedded to individual freedom, writes Peter Holbrook, which is ‘the signature of his art’.² Yet unlike Milton, whose keywords a generation later could be ‘liberty’, ‘justice’, ‘right’ and ‘toleration’ (but whose freedom, as Marx noted, meant that for Paradise Lost he earned a mere £5), he ends in a double-bind of willed dominance and willing submission, when his last sole-authored work resounds to cries of ‘Freedom, high-day, freedom!’ [2,2,177], as the slave Ariel is promised he will ‘to the elements / Be free’ by Prospero, a master who pleads to be ‘set free’ [5,1,321; Epi.20] himself.³

In Free Will I argue that Shakespeare’s plays rehearse what political theorists like Claude Lefort describe as the ‘dissolution of the markers of certainty’ that made possible the advent of modern democracy, whereby the power embodied in the person of the prince, and tied to a transcendental authority, was eclipsed by new institutions in which power became ‘an empty place’.⁴ But before he pledges Ariel ‘thou shalt have thy freedom’ [5,1,98], and begs the audience for freedom for himself, Shakespeare’s sorcerer also renounces his ‘rough magic’ in a speech that both enacts and effaces his ‘so potent art’ [5,1,50], and that critics therefore read as his creator’s own obviation, or farewell to the stage. This valediction has been the focus of two of the most vital yet distinct conversations in recent Shakespeare studies, which Free Will attempts to bring together. One of these is about the sovereignty Prospero surrenders, which, as Stephen Greenblatt remarks in Will in the World, has a scope of which a ‘Free and Absolute’ monarch such as King James could only dream, but that, as the exception to every rule, the artist is now thought to possess: ‘it is an excess of power, more than any mortal should have’.⁵ This debate is therefore concerned with the extent to which these plays not only stage the endgames of sacred kingship, but inherit its political theology of presence, the incarnational doctrine that sovereignty borrows its form from God. The myth of Shakespeare as a devoted royalist may be in retreat; but one of the themes of Free Will is how stubbornly royalty persists; and in criticism it has merely mutated into a yet more alarming religiosity that opposes the plays to representative democracy, as idealizations of a ‘high Christian royalism’ said to be the heart of any ‘Christian social order’.⁶ In this way political theology connects these Renaissance texts to the messianic religious current in contemporary philosophy, and by extension, to American realpolitik. Deriving from Schmitt’s infamous maxim that ‘Sovereign is who decides on the exception’, the importance of this latest spiritual turn for criticism has therefore been that it compels us to question how much Shakespeare’s ‘free foot’ is itself simply another measure of sovereign exceptionality.⁷

The other debate that has energized recent Shakespeare studies has taken place in blithe innocence of political theology, let alone its presidential implications, yet it raises many of the same issues, as it concerns Prospero’s decision to ‘drown [his] book’ [57], and so is about the degree to which his creator participates as an authorial agent in the emerging regime of print. For even as the notion of Shakespeare as mystic monarchist wanes, critics are busy replacing it with a new version of the sovereign author. Thus, in Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship, Patrick Cheney asserts that by juxtaposing printing and playing in the magus’s grand renunciation, the dramatist highlights his own singularity as ‘the consummate man of the theatre paradoxically engaged with the art of printing poetry’. For this branch of criticism, therefore, the fact that it is based on Shakespeare’s favourite printed book, Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses makes Prospero’s speech an affirmation, rather than abdication, of authorial sovereignty. So, when this artist-magician summons his theatrical ‘demi-puppets’ to dance upon the sand with the ‘printless foot’ [34–6] of his poetic metres, we should regard this, Cheney maintains, as an invocation of the disembodied ‘counter-authorship’ which Shakespeare constructed in reaction to the guileless self-presentation of contemporaries: a poetic ‘omnipotence’ that is all the more universal or ‘occult’ for being that of a deus absconditus.⁸ What this return to the hidden authorship of Shakespeare has in common, therefore, with the taste for political theology is an unreflecting commitment to a poetry of sovereignty, and so to Hazlitt’s Schmittian mystification that because ‘the language of poetry naturally falls within the language of power’, Shakespeare’s ‘poetry is right-royal’, the exception of a ‘lordly beast’.⁹

In contrast to the current doxa of Shakespeare as the exemplar of either sacred monarchy or monarchic selfhood, Free Will argues that his plays are systematically engaged in untying freedom from royalty by dismantling sovereignty in all its forms. They thereby confront the perennial problem that has been acutely analysed for our time by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who writes that between free will and determinism human beings could have enough of what he calls the ‘elbow room’ to act as if they were free agents, were it not for ‘the self-imposed bondage we create by the very exercise of our freedom’.¹⁰ Just as Dennett’s ‘elbow room’ is the human capacity to break the endless repetitive series that perpetuate behaviour in other species, so Shakespeare’s ‘elbow room’, I propose, is that of the actor differentiating a given part, even as his default position or bearing is the alert but incumbent one of attentiveness involved in waiting for a prompt, as if on starter’s orders, that he associates with a player’s ‘pause’ [Hamlet, 2,2,467]. In Free Will his work is thus interpreted in terms of the primal scene of attendance on the other in which he situates his actor Bottom: ‘When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer’ [Dream, 4,1,196]. Instead of a ‘subject position’, Shakespeare seems, therefore, always to fall back to what might be better termed an abject position. For it is in this doubled and ironic act of waiting that his plays cheat determination, I conclude, with something close to Simone Weil’s conviction in ‘Human Personality’, her meditation on impersonality, that ‘The only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation’:¹¹

If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. [Hamlet, 5,2,158–61]

Between a politics of presence and a poetics of representation, or the rival absolutisms of state and stage, the convolutions of dramatic creativity in Shakespearean culture are neatly illustrated by the fact that the first English play ever dedicated to a patron, one Lady Cheyney, in 1573, was Henry Cheeke’s Free Will. That the sovereign and the creature remain mutually dependent and determining in the circularity of such creation is an idea made explicit in The Tempest itself, a work seemingly designed to show how the emancipation of the slave enacts only new forms of enslavement, as the age-old intimacy of liberty and bondage makes it ‘impossible to envision freedom independent of constraint or personhood and autonomy separate from the sanctity of property or proprietal notions of the self’.¹² But the actor’s promptitude for a service ‘as willing / As bondage e’er of freedom’ [3,1,89] shapes the notion of agency, I contend, throughout these works, where ‘our bending author’ [Henry V, Epi.2] returns again and again to the craven body language of a resistance that depends upon restraint. Thus, when the former galley-slave Othello demands to ‘know thy thoughts’, Iago counters that ‘I am not bound to that all slaves are free to’ [Othello, 3,3,140;166]. And in The Tempest itself, the music accompanying the seductive song ‘Thought is free’ turns out to be ‘the tune of our catch, played by the picture of Nobody’ [3,2,118–22]. No doubt the self-effacing ‘Nobody’ who created such scenes of ressentiment saw the joke that the great emancipating declaration ‘Thought is free’ was made in the first line of the first poem published by his own real royal master, James.¹³