In late Elizabethan England, political appeals to the people were considered dangerously democratic, even seditious: the commons were supposed to have neither political voice nor will. Yet such appeals happened so often that the regime coined the word 'popularity' to condemn the pursuit of popular favor. Jeffrey S. Doty argues that in plays from Richard II to Coriolanus, Shakespeare made the tactics of popularity - and the wider public they addressed - vital aspects of politics. Shakespeare figured the public not as an extension of the royal court, but rather as a separate entity that, like the Globe's spectators who surrounded the fictional princes on its thrust stage, subjected their rulers to relentless scrutiny. For ordinary playgoers, Shakespeare's plays offered good practice for understanding the means and ends of popularity - and they continue to provide insight to the public relations strategies that have come to define modern political culture.

This article defines popular politics as the tactics -ranging from grumbling to rioting -used by common people to articulate and redress economic and social injustice. Early modern popular politics were not, however, exclusively radical and were rarely antimonarchical. A study of popular politics thus pressures the conservative versus progressive binary through which most critics discuss Shakespeare's politics. Furthermore, this article contests the widely held assumption that Shakespeare was hostile in his representations of 'the people' and toward his audience. An understanding of popular politics equips one to read Shakespeare's crowds not as irrational lovers of violence but rather as stewards of the commonwealth or conscious agents of their own material interests. This article poses the theater itself as a space of popular politics, insofar as it was a space where popular politics were depicted onstage and where common people were invited to think through political issues.

This essay uses King James I's rejection of Elizabethan practices of “popularity” during his accession progresses as an entry point into how Measure for Measure explores tensions between absolutism and a public sphere. Like James, Duke Vincentio dislikes performing affability with his subjects; Shakespeare expands the Duke's reticence into a larger rejection of the public and its networks of news, analysis, and gossip. The Duke sees this public, whose noise he seeks to control, as the chief impediment to his authority. When the play ends with the Duke's successful return to absolute power and a sense of real presence (which is instantiated in his silencing of the other characters), Shakespeare teaches playgoers how to interact with their new king without offending him (to be silent and still). But even as Measure for Measure critiques the London public that demanded “popularity” from James, its critique of that consuming public is simultaneously undercut by the play's own use of news and its analysis of “popularity.” In other words, Measure for Measure retails the very thing it purports to discipline—news and analysis about politics. (J. S. D.)

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