Shakespeare's Politics (book) - Essays

Essays

Bloom contributes three of the four interpretive chapters of the work. In the first, "On Christian and Jew: The Merchant of Venice," Bloom first outlines how an early 17th-century audience would have thought of Venice as a successful republic that, in its success, substitutes Biblical religion for a commercial spirit as the subject of men's passions; in this way, it was a precursor to modern liberal democratic nations. He later grounds his argument on the thesis that Shylock and Antonio act as representatives of Judaism and Christianity, respectively, and that it is Shylock's absolute deference to the law that necessarily brings about his downfall. In this interpretation, Bloom illustrates the limits of law as to its ability to ultimately protect and maintain justice. Shylock's equality is in the law, but his remedy in law is tragic.

Whereas in the first essay Bloom reflects on the interfaith aspect of Venetian society, in the second, "Cosmopolitan Man and the Political Community: Othello," Bloom reflects on its interracial nature. He argues that, in seeking to be cosmopolitan, Othello necessarily could not be considered a nobleman in Venice, where, as in any political community, the "careers are by their nature bound to the fortunes of cities of men, all of which have special needs and traditions." From this Bloom concludes that Shakespeare uses the play to warn of the dangers of introducing foreign influences into a city. In the third essay, "The Morality of the Pagan Hero: Julius Caesar," Bloom argues that Shakespeare's Romans are authentic (in opposition to Goethe's view that they were Englishmen), and reads the play initially in contrast with Coriolanus in order to discern Caesar's populist support and godlike ambition. He then looks at Brutus's Stoicism and Cassius's Epicureanism as the motivations behind the actions of each, and concludes that Caesar is the "most complete man who ever lived combined the high-mindedness of the Stoic with the Epicurean's awareness of the low material substrate of political things."

In each of his contributions, Bloom looks for a binary or set of binaries within a play, and locates in the tension within those binaries the meaning of the entire play. Examples of this are the tension between Jew and Christian in The Merchant of Venice, between citizen and cosmopolitan man in Othello, and between Stoicism and Epicureanism in Julius Caesar. Bloom also makes philosophical extrapolations from these tensions to such an extent that his evaluations of characters no longer look like the characters themselves.

Jaffa's contribution, "The Limits of Politics: King Lear, Act I, scene i," is a thorough reading of the opening scene in which Jaffa argues that Lear's love test was not irrational or vain but rather the result of Lear's sensible and profound reflection on how best to secure stability following his succession, and that the plan necessarily fails to show the audience the limits of politics: namely, the ultimate irreconcilability of truth and justice. Jaffa also maintains that the opening of King Lear is Shakespeare's "presentation of the ultimate in human existence" as the result of a logical progression in which it is assumed that Lear is the greatest king, monarchy the greatest form of government, and that Shakespeare regarded man as a political animal.