Tag: England

  • 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. ↩︎
  • Marx and Shakespeare: The World of Romeo and Juliet

    Marx and Shakespeare: The World of Romeo and Juliet

    My only love sprung from my only hate,
    Too early seen unknown and known too late.
    Prodigious birth of love it is to me
    That I must love a loathed enemy.

    —Juliet, Act 1, Scene 5.

    The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm once described Karl Marx as the archetypal humanist, an embodiment of Enlightenment thought, “the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought.”1 Indeed, his daughter Eleanor Marx once said about her upbringing: “As to Shakespeare he was the Bible of our house, seldom out of our hands or mouths. By the time I was six I knew scene upon scene of Shakespeare by heart.”

    Both Alike in Genius

    Karl Marx himself had been introduced to Shakespeare at a young age by his father-in-law and cited the Bard no less than 176 times throughout his published work. This may seem curious, given that Shakespeare himself was no revolutionary or proto-socialist. He was ahead of his time in respect to his artistry but he nonetheless straddled the fence line of the 16th and 17th centuries as a product of the English Renaissance. Capitalism was only nascent here—in its “primitive accumulation” phase, as Marx described it.

    There were many social transformations underway by the time of Shakespeare and these changes followed in the wake of the discovery of the Americas and successive waves of the Black Death. Labour shortages combined with riches pillaged from far-away continents to elevate a commercial class into the chief coordinators of the economic base. The Renaissance was the cultural reflection of this new economy, appearing in an otherwise feudal superstructure. 

    The rich tapestry of Shakespearean dramas no doubt gave living colour to Marx’s theories of human history. Marx summarized his conception of social transformation as follows: 

    In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.2

    Marx was able to discover the base and superstructure of human society given his location in history, where the Industrial Revolution met Enlightenment philosophy. Likewise, Shakespeare was able to capture a wide spectrum of European society in the dramatic form given his placement at the historical intersection between mercantile proto-capitalism and Renaissance culture. While Marx could observe the society of his present, Shakespeare gave him a valuable glimpse into the past. Adjusting for creative license, the plays of Shakespeare allowed Marx to back-test his theory of history and dialectical method.

    In Fair Verona

    Explicit historical references and socio-economic details are left vague in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a play which was sourced from an earlier Italian novella and English poem. Verona was a prominent city-state during the Italian Renaissance, ruled by the House of Della Scala before internal divisions led it to be folded into the Venetian Republic during the 1400s.

    In the play, it is Prince Escalus who stands in for Della Scala, and rules a Verona that is sharply divided by the feuding Montague and Capulet families. Even Escalus’ own House is not immune to this division, as his cousin Mercutio favours the Montagues while Count Paris is partial to the Capulets. The feud between the Montagues and Capulets is emblematic of the actual strife between elite factions and warring states of northern Italy between 1200 and 1500.

    The rediscovery of trade routes during the Crusades led to the commercial revolution that underpinned a Renaissance cultural transformation, enriched the merchant class and spurred the maritime activity that culminated in the European colonization of the Americas. Verona is a logical setting for Romeo and Juliet, given that northern Italy was ground-zero for the burgeoning mercantile economy.

    The Veronese setting suggests that the Montagues and Capulets belong to this newer wealthy merchant class and Shakespeare refrained from assigning them specific hereditary titles in his dramatis personae. References to members of either family as “lord” or “lady” are best understood as courtesy titles common to the Renaissance period, acknowledging a family’s high social standing despite lacking feudal lands or noble lineage. 

    The only characters in Romeo and Juliet with hereditary titles reign from the House of Escalus—the ruling house of Verona. The Prince is thus able to threaten the Montagues and Capulets with execution over their escalating violence, as the latter families enjoy wealth but are deprived of political power. This detail recalls Marx’s observation that revolutions in the political superstructure occur only after the economic transformation is complete.

    At the time of the Renaissance, feudal hierarchies were the political reality as the turn toward capitalism was only just gathering steam. The contradictions between the prevailing feudal order and rising capitalist one are therefore integral to the plot of Romeo and Juliet. Without this wealthy urban elite living under feudal auspices, the Montagues and Capulets would not have existed nor have entered a blood feud. The “ancient grudge” between the two households surely stemmed from economic competition over trade which was bloody and fierce in Renaissance Italy.3 

    Civil Blood and Civil Hands

    Competition between merchant families may have been especially violent in this era because they lacked hereditary nobility and relied solely on financial accumulation to claim status. Market competition can turn any investment or transaction sour—ruining in an instant a great merchant house that had taken decades to build its standing.

    Blood feuds and vendettas between families were a staple of justice in the feudal era owing to the lack of centralized secular authority. However, the uptake of the blood feud tradition by wealthy urban families was greatly disruptive to the commerce and social order of emergent Renaissance cities. This is why we see Prince Escalus attempt to suppress the feud between the Montagues and Capulets in Verona whereas a similar feud between rural families would not have drawn such condemnation at this period in time. 

    This brings us to another salient point of Marx’s thought; namely, the absence of any “universal ideal” of justice that exists outside of social relations. Justice is enmeshed within the web of social relations that form under a given mode of production.4 This view explains the historical acceptance and rejection of slavery, evolving marital relations and family law, the administration of justice between generations, the practice of usury, and the regulation of property from the Paleolithic period up to the present day—to name a few examples. In Renaissance Europe, social relations were very much in flux as the importance of commerce spurred urbanization and the merchant class climbed nearer in rank to the landed aristocracy, not in terms of political power, but in terms of wealth. 

    An interesting outcome of this social fluctuation was the rise of “disorderly conduct” in Renaissance Verona, characterized by gambling, street fights, ribaldrous music and festive dance parties. These debaucherous activities drew members of all classes into subversive contact with one another, as they were undertaken without regard for social rank or hereditary privilege. Chief among these disorderly gatherings was the unsanctioned masque party.5 At a masquerade with identities concealed, a knight could break bread with a porter, a noble could pour wine for a cobbler or a Montague could fall in love with a Capulet.6

    The masque party hosted by Capulet is the pivotal scene of the story: the moment when Romeo notices the young Juliet from across the ballroom is also when Tybalt becomes aware of Romeo’s presence and seeks to violently remove him from the party. Capulet interrupts Tybalt and prevents him from disturbing Romeo, demonstrating the patriarch Capulet’s commitment to the spirit of the masquerade—a suspension of social hierarchy and normative relations. 

    A Death-Marked Love

    Born of a subversive gathering, the romance between Romeo and Juliet is embedded with a seditious quality that threatens long-standing customs. Whereas the Count Paris pursues Juliet through a traditional courtship, negotiated between himself and Capulet, Romeo and Juliet consent to marry each other from a place of fiery passion for one another and without the approval of their parents. Love marriages would not become become a norm in the West until the 17th and 18th centuries but they were emergent as the Renaissance began sweeping through western Europe.

    The relationship between Romeo and Juliet represents early modernity. On the other hand, the relationship between Paris and Juliet represents the declining feudal order—just like his hereditary title of Count. The language Juliet uses with Count Paris is formal and terse; he mistakes gaining Capulet’s consent with gaining Juliet’s affection.7 For this mistake he pays with his life when Romeo kills him during a confrontation at the Capulet tomb—a place he had no business lingering.8

    The blood feud is the other declining feudal custom that clashes violently against the romance between Romeo and Juliet. In the play it is like a fire and it consumes the lives of Tybalt and Mercutio as when lend it fuel. Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech foreshadows the agony of modern aspirations against the ferocity of feudalism’s twilight: valiant soldiers toasting wine before they are soaked by the blood of slit throats; civic lawyers and honourable clergymen corrupted by the pursuit of money; the tender kiss between those in love becomes a scourge of venereal disease and swollen pregnant bellies. 

    There is a deep cynicism attached to the story of Romeo and Juliet, reflecting a Renaissance era draped over the coffins filled by victims of bubonic plague; when wealth was asserted by means of warfare in Europe and unspeakable colonial violence abroad. The blood feud between the Montagues and Capulets could never end peacefully. The modern aspiration represented by the marriage between Romeo and Juliet was ultimately shattered by the “ancient grudge” between their two families. But they destroy the old order when they refuse to acquiesce to it. In their joint-suicide, they bury not only themselves but also the blood feud that came between them. Modernity prevailed in Romeo and Juliet just like modernity prevailed in history—at a tremendous cost priced in blood. 

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man (Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961). ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎

    3. See Thomas F. Arnold, “Violence and Warfare in the Renaissance World” in A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (Blackwell Publishing, 2007): 460–474,  for more on this subject.  ↩︎

    4. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital Volume 2 (Verso, 2013): 189. ↩︎

    5. Zoe Farrell, “Connections and Community in Sixteenth-Century Verona” in Journal of Social History, Vol. 59, No. 4: 10-13. ↩︎

    6. In Freudian terms, they become each other’s object-cathexis, a conscious and unconscious register of libidinal energy. The “love at first sight” concept was accepted in Shakespeare’s day, as Cupid’s spell could be cast with mere eye contact. ↩︎

    7. See Act 4, Scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet for a good example of this. ↩︎

    8. This confrontation has been edited out of prominent screen adaptations of the play for the purpose of making Romeo appear more sympathetic. Both Baz Luhrman and Frank Zeffirelli removed it. ↩︎