“Mock not Flesh and Blood/With Solemn Reverence”: Recovering Radical Shakespeare

Abstract

Predominantly conservative construal of Shakespeare’s politics in the 19th and early twentieth century was followed by a pervasive emphasis upon his allegedly unalignable ambiguation: a conclusion largely undisturbed by New Historicist and Post‐Structuralist approaches. The discovery by major Left critics in the 1960s and 1980s of a populist Shakespeare, radical in critiques of power, effected curiously little impact upon that governing paradigm. Recognition of Shakespeare’s radicalism has subsequently begun emerging sporadically, incrementally, and almost involuntarily. Such revaluations draw strength, however, from fuller historical study of Shakespeare’s world, recognising both the radical social distress of the 1590s, and the Elizabethan inheritance of multiple lines of Tudor political dissent.

Shakespeare and Popular Politics

“…The more common view is that Shakespeare’s “penchant for even‐handedness leaves central issues in doubt” (Bevington 68). Chris Fitter criticizes the application of “Liberal Humanism’s traditional celebration of benign plurality” because he says the image of a disinterested, Janus‐faced Shakespeare obscures his radical politics (“Mock” 421). Shakespeare’s ambiguity, Fitter claims, is better explained by his attempts to evade censorship than by his aristocratic political thinking 4 .…”