Tag: Bourgeoisie

  • Marx and Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing

    Marx and Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing

    If ever the sensible Benedick bear it,
    pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead,
    and let me be vilely painted, and in such great letters
    as they write “Here is good horse to hire”
    let them signify under my sign
    “Here you may see Benedick the married man.”

    —Benedick, Act 1, Scene 1.

    One thing that Marx and Shakespeare had in common was living through periods of quantum leaps in culture and thought. The Renaissance was the cultural expression formed by increasing commerce, urbanization and loosening feudal bonds, and codified by painters like Leonardo Da Vinci, sculptors like Michelangelo and playwrights like Shakespeare.

    The Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, spurned an interest in science and rapid change reflected in the biological theories of Charles Darwin, the social theories of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic proposals of Sigmund Freud. Closer to the present, we have seen developments in mass communications and recording technologies give space to pioneering musicians like The Beatles and Bob Dylan, while the digital age has seen the rise of the viral clip and the podcast. Marx and Shakespeare trailed the material changes of society, as all revolutions in thought and culture tend to do.

    Cultural productions are artifacts. They are crystallized objects transmitting historical information about the society that produced it—the psychology, the politics, the economy, the zeitgeist. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare gives the subject of romance, love and marriage a light, comedic touch in contrast to his treatment of these subjects in crushing tragedies like Romeo and Juliet and Othello.

    Chivalry in the Court

    Saying nothing of emotional attraction, marriage evolved to institutionalize sexual reproduction and hereditary transmission of property. In Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, he notes that during the Middle Ages “the pairing marriage” was most often a “matter of convenience which was arranged by the parents.” Passion, on the other hand, “heads straight for adultery, and all the poets of love celebrated adultery.”1

    What Engels refers to is the culture of courtly love that developed among the feudal nobility, in particular the knights and ladies of the court. Engulfed by jousting matches and the dangers of battle, knights would dedicate their pursuits to a noble woman as part of the chivalric culture.2 Courtly love took place outside the bonds of marriage, layering erotic desire with both courtesy and surreptitiousness.

    Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, Much Ado About Nothing cannot be understood without contextualizing the feudal culture that the Renaissance emerged from. The rise of gunpowder had steadily diminished the scope of knighthood until it was little more than an honorific title. But the complicated culture of furtive romance and noble courtship residually remained, even as society was moving toward voluntary marriages based on love. Infidelity, once packaged as a chivalric passion, is seen across Shakespeare’s work as an ominous presence dragged down the aisle beneath the bridal gown.

    By the Renaissance period, it was armed soldiers waging battle, and the story picks up with news that Don Pedro and his men would be arriving in Messina after a successful battle. Benedick is among the arriving entourage and he carries an intense fear of being cuckolded—so much so, that he vows to never marry a woman: “Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none. And the fine is, for which I may go finer, I will live a bachelor.”

    The Timeless Art of Seduction

    Benedick’s intransigence toward marriage mark him for a sort of prank, whereby Don Pedro and his men lead him to believe that the governor’s niece, Beatrice, is in love with him. At the same time, Beatrice is led to believe that Benedick harbours feelings for her. It is a fabrication but it works, and Beatrice and Benedick are both privately delighted to be the object of the other’s affections. The speed by which Benedick accepts Beatrice’s feelings leads one to believe that Benedick’s aversion to marriage all along may have been a fear of rejection.

    In a parallel storyline, Claudio courts the governor’s daughter, Hero. This is thrown off course by Don Pedro’s jealous—and illegitimate—brother, Don John. Don John orchestrates a scheme whereby a member of his entourage advances on a chambermaid, with Claudio as a witness through the window. Claudio believes it is actually Hero being seduced and he denounces her at the altar the next day:

    Would you not swear,
    All that see her, that she were a maid
    By these exterior shows? But she is none.
    She knows the heat of a luxurious bed.
    Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

    —Claudio, Act 4, Scene 1.

    Being a comedy, the plot lines resolve through turns and ultimately conclude with the happy marriages of Benedick to Beatrice and Claudio to Hero. The scheming and side quests were, in the end, “much ado about nothing.”3 What this story does indicate is the immense anxiety and wicked humour around the prospect of female infidelity, primarily told from the point of view of the male characters. It peels back the social attitudes underpinning English coverture, which effectively rendered wives the property of their husbands.

    Romance during the age of chivalry was replaced in the modern age with something far more transactional and economical and potentially humiliating. Shakespeare’s play reflects the social anxieties of the commercial revolution as it transformed courtly love into the modern marriage.

    The historical construction of romance and marriage was largely passed down from a position of male accommodation, however. Gender relations since the advent of class society has been a disaster. This is because the economic scarcity created by property relations—through slavery, serfdom and meagre wage labour—has squeezed the bulk of humanity onto the lower rungs of the economic hierarchy, and women were largely pushed off the ladder altogether. Recent movement toward gender equality has burst into the open only since capitalism has demanded the labour-power of more and more people, men and women alike.4

    Universal Exploitation

    As the economic inequality between men and women have shrunk, so have the legal and cultural discriminations. But they cannot be done away under a system that freely discriminates against all people on the basis of economic class. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: “Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.”5 The latter bit about “seducing each other’s wives” is clearly what fixates Benedick and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing.

    But think about the financial elites with proletarian wives and daughters “at their disposal.” Think about Jeffrey Epstein and associates feasting on the bodies of working class children. Think about Thomas Jefferson’s sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Think about Harvey Weinstein and the “quid pro quos” demanded of aspiring actresses.

    Sexual exploitation is the sharpest edge on the Luciferian tower of economic exploitation. But the solution isn’t to smooth the edges—it’s to get rid of the tower. Given the current reality of exploitation in Shakespeare’s world and our own, we cannot expect the double standards set between rich and poor, whites and non-whites, men and women to disappear outright. They won’t. 

    For all the fixations of the male characters in Much Ado, it is Don Pedro’s attendant who implores the ladies of the court to forgive the transgressions of men even though they are unwilling to do the same in kind. He sings:

    Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
    Men were deceivers ever,
    One foot in sea, and one on shore.
    To one thing constant never.
    Then sigh not so, but let them go,
    And be you blithe and bonny,
    Converting all your sounds of woe
    Into hey nonny, nonny.

    —Balthasar, Act 2, Scene 3.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Friedrich Engels, “The Monogamous Family” in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. ↩︎

    2. It should be noted that detailed information and artifacts of this chivalric culture are disputed and sketchy. The historians that Engels leaned on drew heavily from the poetry of Provençal troubadours. ↩︎

    3. Of interest is Shakespeare’s usage of “nothing,” which carried a triple entendre: it is nothing, as we would say today, and it also denotes “no-thing” between the legs of a woman. Additionally it was homophonic to “noting” in Elizabethan English—with “noting” being a colloquial term for gossip and rumour. ↩︎

    4. David Harvey elaborates on the massive integration of the human population into the global capitalist system in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014): 108. ↩︎

    5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Arcturus, 2017): 79. ↩︎
  • Marx and Shakespeare: Writing Nationalism with Henry V

    Marx and Shakespeare: Writing Nationalism with Henry V

    Now entertain conjecture of a time
    When creeping murmur and the poring dark
    Fills the wide vessel of the universe.

    —Chorus, Act 4.

    It is a staple of nationalistic fervour where the leader of a country personally vanquishes its enemies, as if embodying the nation itself. Friedrich Nietzsche admired the daring coup d’état of Napoleon’s nephew in France, “which made his own sovereign will ‘seem like the will of the entire nation.’”1 And where historical examples cannot be found to mythologize, they can also be invented.

    The United States does this frequently with their presidents in film. Fictional American heads of state have flown fighter jets against alien invaders, overtaken terrorist hijackers of Air Force One with cunning and deployed martial arts against invading North Koreans.

    Whether a king or president, a head of state adds a layer of profundity to an action hero that defies obvious absurdities to the storyline. They possess “two bodies”—the body of their person and the body politic of the nation that they represent. Shakespeare himself was very conscientious about the king’s two bodies, which he directly explored in plays like Richard II, Hamlet and Henry V.

    It is important to note that the concept of a singular nation-state was only emergent in Shakespeare’s time and he was an influential participant in the formation of English identity through his many history plays. Shakespeare’s histories are understood to be among the most popular in his lifetime, although today these plays are amongst the least produced and least known of his oeuvre.  The reason for this is mainly that the historical figures involved are not very well known to today’s modern audiences as compared to Renaissance England.

    The Henriad

    Most of Shakespeare’s histories are embodied by the eight-play Henriad series that depicts a chain of English kings ruling between 1377 and 1485—about a century or two before the time of writing. They tell the long story of the turbulent period between the deposing of the divinely-ordained King Richard II which ultimately resulted in the devastating Wars of the Roses. The series concludes with the ascension of the House of Tudor to the throne.

    Henry V serves as a kind of mid-series climax to the Henriad; the peak of English power before the fall into civil war. The story opens with a discussion surrounding the English claim to the French throne. When the Dauphin sends an insulting “gift” of tennis balls to the young King Henry V, the decision to pursue the claim is sealed. Henry assembles his army and leads them into the ferocious siege of Harfleur across the English Channel. Despite difficulties, Henry is almost able to will victory into being with his speech:

    Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
    Or close the wall up with our English dead.
    In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
    As modest stillness and humility,
    But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
    Then imitate the action of the tiger.
    Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
    Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage.2

    Upon taking Harfleur, the next is the Battle of Agincourt. This battle occupies a privileged space in English national lore to this day—something akin to the Battle of Thermopylae, fictionalized in the movie 300. This is because the English were badly outnumbered on the battlefield, five to one.3 Acknowledging that his army lacks size, Henry delivers one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches:

    But we in it shall be remembered,
    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
    For he today that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition.
    And gentlemen, in England now abed
    Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
    Any hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.4

    Language and Nation

    The French receive a bloodletting on the battlefield and Henry executes prisoners that he does not believe his small army can guard. Henry is shown to be tactical and shrewd, as he is rousing and patriotic. A warrior, the play concludes with his awkward courting of the French princess Katherine, thus accomplishing his aim of ascending the French throne.

    Henry V demonstrates the horrors of war—and its proud glory. It shows a heroic king—and a morally blemished man. And through these contradictions, it shows something even more important which is the forging of a state, a United Kingdom. This is achieved with Henry’s forming of a coalition army—including Welsh, Scots and Irish—under one king and one language. Shakespeare takes care to emphasize that it will be English adopted into his marriage with Katherine and the French throne, asserting a reversal of fortunes for a French language that was considered superior and sophisticated, one that had dominated England for centuries prior. 

    Prior to the Renaissance and early modernity, languages and dialects tended to be disparate—varying wildly between villages and noble courts. The standardization of national languages arose with the centralization of palace authority and became the mark of a unified nation-state. In Spain, this process began as early as the 1200s; in France, the 1500s. Italian was only standardized in the 1800s with national unification.

    English did not undergo an official standardization but the works of Shakespeare and the printing of the King James Bible are seen as landmark events. It is interesting that Shakespeare, the greatest individual contributor to a standard English language, consciously lifted it to such heights in Henry V. He was not only showing the arrival of a language, but the arrival of a modern nation.

    Nationalism is a powerful social construction that binds people to causes that they may not otherwise support. Shakespeare demonstrates this eloquently in his play. Any moment his men cast rational doubt on the cause they are fighting for or the sacrifice they are prepared to make, Henry arrives with a dazzling display of rhetoric stoking nationalistic pride and dispelling all doubts.

    The Marxian Superstructure

    Marx recognized the role of fabled leaders and national mythology to the creation of a nation-state, which is the necessary cradle for the capitalist market. In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte he wrote: 

    But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy…Thus the awakening of the dead served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles.

    And so it was for Henry V. At the time of writing, England was locked in a formative national struggle against Spain for naval supremacy and access to New World plunder. Shakespeare wrote for a highly diverse audience, including London’s nascent and well-paying bourgeoisie class of lawyers, traders and merchants. With reference to Marx, Henry V is best understood as a heroic play written for a bourgeois audience roused by war, although far from fighting it.

    It is almost a purpose-built story, uniting in the imagination the kingdom’s collection of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish, together against a common enemy. As a product of early modernity it prodded a national language—a national consciousness—into being. It offers an early glimpse of the national vessel that would eventually subjugate all four corners of the Earth, and lay down a modern capitalist empire on which the sun never set.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky, eds. Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 24. Karl Marx, of course, took a dim view of Louis Bonaparte III. ↩︎

    2. From Act 3, Scene 1. ↩︎

    3. Contemporary historians posit a much narrower differential between armies, with the French advantage being 4:3 or 2:1. ↩︎

    4. From Act 4, Scene 3. Saint Crispin’s day celebrates two shoemakers martyred in Roman times, and was marked in the English calendar until shoemaking became mechanized in the 18th century. ↩︎