Monograf Journal Edebiyat ve İktidar (2014 / 1) | Page 26

ODAK

26 • Anthony P. Pennino
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;-- (II.i.123-32)
Such sentiment places Gonzalo, and seemingly Shakespeare, within the same conceptual space as the Romantics and, coupled with
the character’s later rejection of a “need of any engine”, in opposition to the political and economic elites of the new Industrial Era.

Chartists, of course, were manipulating Shakespearean
text to their own ends. In the aforementioned series “Chartism
and Shakespeare” in The Northern Star, quotations from the
playwright’s works were employed that might best echo then
contemporary radical views of the political situation. For instance, the following appeared from Antony and Cleopatra,
“What poor an instrument/May do a noble deed! he brings me
liberty” (V.ii.236-7). Out of context, of course, these lines would
seem almost a call to arms in the battle for liberty against an implacable foe. In context, however, these are the words Cleopatra
utters when she receives the asp in order to commit suicide. Similarly, the paper quoted from Henry IV, Part I, “The better part of
valour is discretion” (V.iv.120-1). Again, on the face of it, this is
a noble sentiment. However, the sentiment is spoken by Falstaff
after he “plays dead” in order to avoid engaging Hotspur in battle.

The Chartist constructed a Shakespeare who was “one
of the people”, someone the historical Shakespeare would not
have recognized.He may have engaged (as much as we can determine from the scanty evidence of surviving documents) in

The Reconstructed Bard: Chartism and Shakespeare • 27

the enclosing of land around his native Stratford-upon-Avon;
Edward Bond in his 1971 play Bingo explored this possibility.
If true, this fact places Shakespeare as the diametric opposite
of the Levellers. To further belie the Shakespeare-as-Leveller
argument, other than historical anachronism, comes the question of Shakespeare’s personal political beliefs. Did Shakespeare share with the Levellers a belief in popular sovereignty
and republican form of government? Andrew Hadfield, in his
study Shakespeare and Republicanism, posits that late sixteenth-century republicanism was significantly different from
nineteenth-century republicanism. In Shakespeare’s era, republicanism was a movement meant simply to curb some of the
greater excesses of the monarchy by surrounding the person of
the sovereign with wise and judicious advisors, a position more
in accord with that of nineteenth-century Whigs than