We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr
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it’s not there. But it absolutely is: our greatest playwright was no kind of democrat. In Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare, or one of his collaborators, goes further still, telling the London rebels that to rise against the king is to rise against God. And if they succeed in rebellion, by undoing authority, they undo all order and will succeed only in making the world a still more dangerous place:
… Why, even your hurly
Cannot proceed but by obedience.
Tell me but this: what rebel captain,
As mutinies are incident, by his name
Can still the rout? Who will obey a traitor?
Or how can well that proclamation sound
When there is no addition but a rebel
To qualify a rebel? You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses …
All of which is to say no more than, in Shakespearean English, ‘the revolution devours her children’. Shakespeare shows again and again his vivid understanding of the utter misery of being outcast from the state. In King Lear, the very greatest of his plays, unsocial man, torn by the storm and by madness, excluded from a functioning society, is merely a ‘poor, bare forked animal’. In the world of the theatre, clothing was very important as a sign of social standing, belonging, authority. Now King Lear rips off his own clothes entirely, to make the point.
In writing about whipped beggars with nowhere to hide, and vividly describing the hunger of people at the bottom of the heap, Shakespeare shows that his sympathies naturally spread to the poor. But nothing, or almost nothing, is as terrifying as anarchy. And it’s simply not true that Shakespeare did not know about democracy. As a widely read man he was well aware of the history of popular revolts in England, as well as the democratic experiments of republican Rome. It’s just that as a man of his time, he doesn’t believe democracy could ever work. In his Roman play Coriolanus he puts into the mouths of the common citizens themselves his explanation of why they can’t successfully rule without an aristocratic leader: one explains that they are called ‘the many-headed multitude’, and another parses the thought:
We have been called so of many; not that our heads
are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald,
but that our wits are so diversely coloured: and
truly I think if all our wits were to issue out of
one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south,
and their consent of one direct way should be at
once to all the points o’ the compass.
And we can’t be having that. In Shakespeare’s world, whether it’s Jack Cade’s rebellion in London or the common people of Rome, who sound and dress like Londoners, the crowd is always wrong, ridiculous and often menacing. Coriolanus himself, admittedly a study in overweening and arrogant ambition, simply can’t stick the idea of grovelling to the mob:
Most sweet voices!
Better it is to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.
Why in this woolvish toge should I stand here,
To beg of Hob and Dick, that do appear,
Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to’t:
What custom wills, in all things should we do’t,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heapt
For truth to o’er-peer. Rather than fool it so,
Let the high office and the honour go
To one that would do thus.
In the ancient conflict between the Roman mob and military dictatorship, Shakespeare uses an oily aristocrat, Menenius, to describe the traditional proper relationship between the different classes. In his fable, the other parts of the body rebel against the belly for gorging all the food – just as the rich take more than their fair share of social wealth. The belly replies:
Your most grave belly was deliberate,
Not rash like his accusers, and thus answer’d:
‘True is it, my incorporate friends,’ quoth he,
‘That I receive the general food at first,
Which you do live upon; and fit it is,
Because I am the store-house and the shop
Of the whole body: but, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o’ the brain;
And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live: and though that all at once,
You, my good friends,’ – this says the belly, mark me, –
First Citizen. Ay, sir; well, well.
Menenius Agrippa. ‘Though all at once cannot
See what I do deliver out to each,
Yet I can make my audit up, that all
From me do back receive the flour of all,
And leave me but the bran.’
Now of course, these are only the words of another Roman aristocrat, and Shakespeare is the master of laying off one viewpoint against another. Nevertheless, the metaphor of the state as body would have been familiar and well understood to his audience. To us it may seem hilariously self-serving, but in the context of the original play it may well have felt like simple common sense.
The flipside to Shakespeare’s distaste for anything resembling democracy is, of course, his insistence that rulers must be wise and virtuous – or rather, that any of their flaws and failings spread rapidly through the whole of society, causing distress to all. Good kings, bad kings, tyrants, the self-deluded, the saintly and the merely weak – Shakespeare is utterly obsessed by the problems of holding power. This explains, surely, the most distressing reversal in the entire canon, when lively, up-for-it Prince Hal turns on Falstaff, that great, incontinent, fleshly representation of all our baser appetites – the old slob we laugh at and we love – and coldly denies him:
I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish