Tag: Shakespeare

  • Marx and Shakespeare: The Hellscape of Macbeth

    Marx and Shakespeare: The Hellscape of Macbeth

    Nought’s had, all’s spent,
    Where our desire is got without content.
    ‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy
    Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

    —Lady Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 2.

    Macbeth ranks among the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays alongside Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. It is commonly taught in primary English classes and is a frequent visitor to the stage and screen, with recent films featuring Michael Fassbender and Denzel Washington in the titular role.

    The play famously tells the story of Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, beginning with his heroic victory against Scottish rebels who have allied with Norway to depose the Scottish King Duncan. An encounter with three witches—or the Weird Sisters—sets Macbeth onto fulfilling a prophecy that he should become king.1 He accomplishes this, but in the most violent of ways: by conspiring with his wife to murder the king in his sleep overnight at Inverness Castle and frame the royal bodyguards for the crime.

    Their plan succeeds but it inflicts enormous psychic damage on the Macbeths. Aware of their criminal accession to the Scottish throne, they resort to increasingly paranoid and depraved actions to cover up their original crime and secure their power, with Macbeth arranging the murder of his friend and fellow thane, Banquo, as well as the innocent family of Macduff. Ultimately, Macduff and Duncan’s son, Malcolm, join forces to overthrow the maniacal Macbeth and restore order to the crown.

    Bad Magic

    A number of Shakespeare’s stories centre around competition for a throne or regicide or the power struggles that bring strife to a kingdom. Macbeth is no different in this regard. Unique to this play are the use of witches to foment the initial conflicts that put the plot in motion. The Weird Sisters present themselves in the very first scene, where they declare an intention to meet with Macbeth, parting with the line: “Fair is foul and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

    The precise motivations of the witches are never made explicit. As an aside, they are only referred to as “witches” in the stage directions; in spoken verse they are known as the “weyward” or “weird” sisters. They are described as having beards and “withered attire” and are best conceptualized as androgynous demonic beings set on spreading moral chaos—quite different from the caricature of broomstick-riding women wearing pointy black hats.

    In the second scene of the play, just after the Weird Sisters present themselves to the audience, we learn that Macbeth has distinguished himself in battle on the side of his king, by executing the rebel Macdonwald in a brutal fashion: cutting him open from his navel to his jaw before chopping off his head and displaying it on a parapet.2 We can deduce that the savage manner of this slaying is what drew the witches’ attention to Macbeth and summoned them to the Scottish highlands—a place where “fair is foul and foul is fair.”

    Accentuating this point is Macbeth’s first spoken verse in the play. Marching back from battle, he says to Banquo: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” The Weird Sisters possess a disordered ethics; one that revels in mortal chaos, thunderstorms and dead livestock. In Macbeth, the witches recognize a kindred spirit and fellow traveller, even though he is oblivious to this himself.

    When the sisters appear to Macbeth and Banquo along their march, Macbeth finds himself riveted by their prostration before him as both Thane of Cawdor and King of Scotland. Meeting King Duncan shortly thereafter, he is granted the Thane of Cawdor title in addition to his existing Thane of Glamis, solidifying the witches as prophetic beings in the mind of Macbeth.

    The witches also tempt Banquo’s curiosity by suggesting that his descendants will themselves be kings of Scotland. He is unmoved by this, which demonstrates a couple of facts: one, Banquo is not morally deficient as Macbeth is and, two, the witches have no real controlling power beyond suggestion. After Macbeth is made Thane of Cawdor, Banquo cautions him:

    But ‘tis strange;
    The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
    Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
    In deepest consequence.3

    Banquo’s warning affirms the widely held belief in early modern England that demonic power is not often represented by direct, physical intervention in the world but, rather, it is something that acts upon the conscience.4 Although Macbeth and his wife believed they were touched by some supranatural divination, the Weird Sisters really just activated the pair’s own ambition by stoking temptation and suspicion. At no point did they give instructions to the Macbeths to kill anybody. As they dangled the possibility of Macbeth taking the throne or pointed out threats to his power, murder—even child murder—was the reflexive response.

    The Demonic King

    Lady Macbeth is eventually consumed by unconscious guilt as she is unable to conciliate her spiritual damnation. But by Act 3 Macbeth openly acknowledges having given his immortal soul over to Satan, the “common enemy of man.”5 Resigned to spiritual destitution, Macbeth becomes even more dangerous and depraved. For him, securing the throne became a sort of moral sunk cost fallacy: if he already lost his soul by committing regicide, why should he avoid violence if it secures his Earthly gains?

    Even for Shakespeare, Macbeth is a bleak and brooding story that likely would not have been written if it was not for the prior ascension of James I to the English throne. James believed that he had been targeted by witchcraft when he encountered storms while sailing to Denmark in order to meet his future bride. The incident inspired him to write a treatise called Daemonologie, concerning all matters of dark magic, sorcery and demonic forces at work corrupting humanity.6

    James had an acute interest in the subject, but demonic beings were an accepted presence of early modern English life at the time. The historian Kathryn Morris writes:

    Renaissance discourse included the idea of civil authority as a likely target of the demonic conspiracy. Jean Bodin claimed that political authorities (the sovereign, as well as the magistrates) should expect witches’ aggression. This clearly followed from the sovereign’s status as God’s vice-regent: the sovereign had a special obligation in the fight against the Devil, and so was especially likely to be the subject of attacks.7

    Morris goes on to explain that “legitimate, godly authority will be the target of the demonic usurper,” while “the sovereign’s authority was tied up in the ability to counter this pressing threat and to preserve epistemic stability.”8 King Duncan, his hands full with rebellious subjects, failed to recognize the demonic forces gathering in his midst. By rewarding the vicious slaying of Macdonwald, Duncan inadvertently kicked off a sequence of events that saw Macbeth transmogrify into the demonic usurper and proceed to wreak havoc on the kingdom.

    A Changing Face of Evil

    The sociologist Max Weber described modern society as one that is “disenchanted.” We no longer see the human realm as a battlefield between angels and demons, good and evil, magic and miracles, God and Satan. Macbeth can only be understood on the terms of the previously-existing traditional, enchanted society.

    For Karl Marx, it was the advancing forces of production that spurred the application of scientific rigour to all manners of the economy, and then, the society. The Industrial Revolution has purged traditional superstitions from the cultural landscape by developing a high-tech economic base with a secular, science-oriented superstructure hanging overhead.

    That said, in one instance Marx and Engels actually invoke the imagery of dark magic to describe the modern economy:

    Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells…It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence.9

    Marx and Engels’ choice of analogy was not accidental. The wars, hunger and environmental catastrophes familiar to us today by way of unchecked capital accumulation and recurring economic crises are the very things that were blamed on demonic forces during history’s previous epoch. Just as it was the God-given job of civil authorities to manage the cosmic balance of “good versus evil” during the feudal period, so it is the secular job of our leaders today to ward off economic crisis and bring forward prosperity.

    Money, like magic, has the occult power to lift collective fortunes, improve individual status, exercise power over others, pervert our conscious thoughts and cast calamities onto entire nations. Instead of witchcraft, we see today that crude monetary interest can drive people toward any sort of theft, deception and murder. Macbeth is a meditation on the impersonal forces that governed the early modern world. And Marxism is a meditation on the impersonal forces governing us today.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. In the first publication of Macbeth, the witches are referred to as “weyward” in the Early Modern English. Because the root of “weird” is the Old English “wyrd,” meaning “power to control fate,” the witches came to be referred to as the “Weird Sisters” in subsequent publications of the play. Interestingly, they are never referred to as “witches” in the spoken dialogue, only in the stage directions. ↩︎

    2. As told by the Captain: “For brave Macbeth, disdaining Fortune…Which ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to him / Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chaps / And fixed his head upon our battlements.” ↩︎

    3. From Act 1, Scene 3. Stephen Orgel, ed., The Pelican Shakespeare: Macbeth (Penguin, 2000): 12. ↩︎

    4. Gregory Dodds, “Review of The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1: 274-275. ↩︎

    5. As spoken by Macbeth in Act 3, Scene 1. Orgel, Macbeth, 42. ↩︎

    6. James RX, Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogie, (Printer to the Kings Majestie, 1597). Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25929/pg25929-images.html ↩︎

    7. Kathryn Morris, “Past, Present, and the Politics of Witch Hunts,” Renaissance and Restoration, Vol. 47, No. 4: 162. Reference to political philosopher Jean Bodin’s 1580 treatise entitled, On the Demon-Mania of Witches. ↩︎

    8. Ibid, 155, 163. ↩︎

    9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Arcturus, 2017): 43-44. ↩︎
  • Marx and Shakespeare: The Brave New World of The Tempest

    Marx and Shakespeare: The Brave New World of The Tempest

    How many goodly creatures are there here!
    How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
    That has such people in’t!

    —Miranda, Act 5, Scene 1.

    What is gratifying in looking back at four hundred-plus year old stage plays is the transmission of culture, language and custom—captured in a frozen moment of time and thawed by present consciousness. One can only imagine the interpretations that Karl Marx and his family would have had when reciting the works of Shakespeare from their Victorian-era London flat. It is a reminder that all of us are born into frozen moments along the march of history and, although our lives occupy only a sliver along the time–space continuum, it is the mountain of the past that we live and die upon.

    The Tempest is a remarkable work. From the vantage point of today, with settler-states dominating the global community of nations, it is easy to forget that it was not so long ago when the United States and Canada and Israel and Brazil and Australia did not exist. Although the story takes place within a single day, The Tempest opens a window to that time. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest foregrounds the accounts of New World voyagers that imbue vivid colour onto the setting.1

    The Island

    Prospero’s island is nominally in the Mediterranean but references to Bermuda, South American deities and West “Indians” signal a New World inspiration.2 The supernatural is strong here, as the island is meant to invoke a mythical space in the minds of the audience. The island is inhabited by the former Duke of Milan, Prospero, who was overthrown at home by his brother. He is there with his daughter Miranda, an airy spirit named Ariel and a “savage and deformed slave” named Caliban.3

    We learn that Prospero and Miranda had themselves washed up on this island in the wake of his overthrow in Milan. With magic, Prospero is able to put Caliban in bondage and impress the powerful native spirit Ariel into his service. The play begins when a boat carrying Prospero’s usurping brother Antonio passes by the island. Also aboard is the King of Naples and his son, along with a small coterie of servicemen, lesser lords and councillors. With Ariel’s help, Prospero kicks up a storm—a tempest—in order to maroon the ship and exact a long-awaited revenge over his deposal.

    It is this mystical, vaguely New World premise of The Tempest that gathers the most interest from a Marxist perspective. Large economic and cultural changes were well-underway during Renaissance England, as New World discovery and plunder began filling merchant coffers. Accustomed to filthy cities, rampant disease, backbreaking rural labour, a stifling social hierarchy and the pervasive threat of war, the European imagination was full of awe by accounts of voyagers trickling back: empty, far-away lands overgrown with verdant leaves, soils with rippling veins of gold, oceans teeming with fish and small communities of peaceful people living half-naked. 

    The abundance of nature and the freedom afforded by open spaces posed a radically unique situation for Europeans settlers in the New World—namely, the complete absence of Old World class relations. This was the primary differentiation that Marx flagged in Capital when discussing the trajectories of capitalist development in the Old World and the New. For example, he relates the story of one Mr. Peel:

    Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women and children. Once arrived at his destination, ‘Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’ Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of the English relations of production to Swan River!4

    The abundance of readily-available means of subsistence meant that feudal and capitalist relations were simply not compatible with the newly broken lands of the New World. Because almost all European land was titled and cities were crowded, they transitioned to wage labour quickly and en masse once industrial technology was developed. But these conditions could not be exported to the New World and the colonies leaned much more heavily on forced labour in the form of race-based slavery and indentured servitude.5 As far as free labour was concerned, it was generally much more palatable to become a yeoman farmer than it was to toil for a wage.

    The Powerful Illusion of Class

    Shakespeare was writing from pre-revolutionary England, decades before the bourgeois Glorious Revolution. As such, his work largely reflects the ruling class attitudes of his time, relegating working people to secondary roles and ignoring the peasantry altogether. The theoretical framework of economic relations and forces of production were obscured in his era and he hewed the line of social expectations. Shakespeare was thus presented with a problem: if Prospero was a righteous duke in Italy, how can this dignified standing be duplicated in the context of largely uninhabited island?

    Shakespeare devises a clever workaround to a setting absent class relations by granting Prospero magical powers. Practicing magic was suppressed in Europe and outlawed in the England of Shakespeare’s day, but the unexplored island setting grants Prospero an unbridled freedom to practice sorcery. With these powers he proceeds to repeat a rather typical colonial pattern by ruthlessly exploiting nature and indigenous slave labour.

    Nature is represented in the play by Ariel, who is able to clap thunder, command winds and soothe men to sleep with susurrating blows of air to the ear. These powers are harnessed by Prospero who uses sorcery to release Ariel from the oak tree where the spirit had been imprisoned. With magic as a substitute for advanced European technology and command of labour, the “free gifts of nature” open up to the “civilized” man when his instruments meet the bountiful oceans and lands of the New World.

    Then there is the “savage and deformed” Caliban, whose physical grotesqueness attaches a heavy stigma to his being throughout the play.6 He was discovered on the island by Prospero and he stands in as a native inhabitant. He says to Prospero in the opening act: 

    And then I loved thee,
    And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
    The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.
    Cursed be that I do so!
    For I am all the subjects that you have,
    Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
    In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
    The rest o’ th’ island.

    This recalls the many accounts of indigenous assistance provided to alien settlers only for it to blow back on the native population time and time again. Shakespeare had demonstrated sensitivity to slavery throughout his work, in particular during Shylock’s courtroom speech in The Merchant of Venice. Caliban was enslaved specifically as punishment for attempting to violate Prospero’s daughter Miranda and people “this isle with Calibans.”

    This plot device morally justifies Prospero’s enslaving of Caliban, retaining audience sympathy for the main protagonist. But Shakespeare relies on serious stereotypes to accomplish this, drawing on differing sexual mores between “primitive” and “civilized” cultures set by the standards of Christian Europe: Caliban’s “attempt to ‘violate the honour’ of Miranda may have seemed, from his point of view, less like an attempted rape than the response of a natural sexuality that cannot comprehend the concern with sexual honour so dear to Prospero and his culture.”7

    Whereas Europeans enslaved by way of cargo ships and the bullwhip, Prospero does it with sorcery—threatening to deliver cramps and stinging pinches to Caliban should he refuse an order. Unwittingly, Shakespeare upholds a Marxian standard of productive relations throughout the play by substituting magic for the means of production.

    Liberation at Last?

    The final characters to note in the play are that of Trinculo and Stephano. A jester and a butler, respectively, they recognize a newfound freedom from Milanese class relations upon their stranding on the island. Resorting to another trope, Shakespeare has his butler and jester win Caliban’s favour with a drink of “celestial liquor.” The trio then decide they no longer have to toil in the service of a king, as their new circumstances afford them the chance to shed their masters and become rulers themselves.

    As we saw in Marx’s anecdote about Mr. Peel, Stephano and Trinculo were transported to the island as servicemen. But once landed on this uninhabited terrain, they were suddenly free of their Old World bonds and underwent a revolution of consciousness. This situation obviously could not be endured by Shakespeare’s Renaissance English audience and so the social hierarchy is restored by the discipline of Prospero’s magic at the play’s end. 

    The Tempest is a terrific historical product that helps to backtest historical materialism. Shakespeare himself was not a revolutionary in any modern sense of the word. But with his incredible talent, he captured the social relations of the proto-capitalist mode of production, providing dramatic examples of Marx’s bold proclamation: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”8

    Thanks for reading!


    1. See Charles Frey, “The Tempest and the New World,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1: 29–41 for more on this subject. In particular, the island of Bermuda is a notable influence. ↩︎

    2. Ibid, 29. ↩︎

    3. This is the description of Caliban given to us in the dramatis personae. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019): 543. ↩︎

    5. Further explored in the following pages of ibid, 544-5. ↩︎

    6. Jeffrey Wilson compares Caliban’s state to a variety of disability and racial stigmas in “‘Savage and Deformed’: Stigma as Drama in The Tempest,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, Vol. 31: 146–177.  ↩︎

    7. Peter Holland in The Tempest (The Pelican Shakespeare, 2016): xxxiv. ↩︎

    8. From the preface to Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎
  • 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: The Merchant of Venice

    Marx and Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice

    Farewell; and if my fortune be not crossed,
    I have a father, you a daughter, lost.

    —Jessica, Act 2, Scene 5.

    It is known that Timon of Athens was Karl Marx’s favourite Shakespeare play, due to its powerful treatment of the effect of money on our individual lives. It is referenced extensively in Marx’s Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts and also makes an appearance in Capital. The Merchant of Venice is the runner up for many of the same reasons: it animates Marx’s observations about money, anti-Semitism, the social relations of capitalism, and it earns multiple citations throughout his work.

    The Merchant of Venice ranks among Shakespeare’s “problem plays”—it is officially labelled a comedy but the justification for this is mainly the absence of a death toll typical of Shakespearean tragedies. In the Elizabethan era a comedy meant a happy ending; a story without loose ends and where harmony prevails. Like every Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice has humorous plot devices. But it is a serious meditation on the economic relations and financial precarity of Renaissance Europe, as illustrated by a cast of duplicitous characters who plunge headlong into an uncertain future.

    Venetian Waves

    First there is the titular merchant of Venice, Antonio, who has his capital invested in ships importing goods from afar. His friend Bassanio is handsome but cash-poor. He requires a loan from Antonio in order to travel to Belmont and court Portia, the wealthy heiress of the manor. With Antonio’s money at sea, he turns to the Jewish usurer, Shylock, for a loan that he can give to Bassanio. Here we learn that Antonio has often publicly abused and insulted Shylock on account of his Jewish identity. For this, Shylock is willing to forgo interest on the loan but demands a pound of flesh from Antonio should he default. At the same time, Shylock’s daughter Jessica is preparing to abandon her Jewish faith and the legal restrictions that go with it. She steals her father’s ducats and jewelry, elopes with Lorenzo and the pair abscond to Belmont as part of Bassanio’s entourage. 

    In Belmont, Portia’s deceased father has set up a sort of lottery of caskets that Portia’s potential suitors must win. Despite this, Portia is a woman with a lot of agency in the story which is a pleasant departure from the stifling patriarchal air of a play like Othello. Portia manipulates her suitors to her liking and subtly aids Bassanio to the correct choice of casket so that he wins her hand. She favours Bassanio because she sees him as pliable, lacking fancy hereditary titles or a fortune of his own. We then learn of great misfortune striking Antonio—all three of his ships at sea have met with doom, leaving him vulnerable to his bond with Shylock. 

    When Shylock drags Antonio to the Duke of Venice’s court to acquire his pound of flesh, Portia arrives in disguise to adjudicate the case. Through rhetorical trickery and technical loopholes, she absolutely devastates Shylock, as he is denied his pound of flesh and is stripped of all his wealth. He is also subject to a forced conversion to Christianity, rendering him socially and economically destitute. She saves Antonio but it is implied that Portia has had a hand in manipulating events when she produces a letter stating that all three of Antonio’s ships had arrived safely to port after all.1 We learn that Lorenzo had an eye on Shylock’s money when pursuing Jessica, just as Bassanio had an eye to Portia’s wealth when pursuing her. Antonio exits the play alone and isolated from his newly-wedded friends.

    “On The Jewish Question”

    The character that has attracted the most controversy in The Merchant of Venice is undoubtedly Shylock. A Jewish usurer hungry for the Christian blood of Antonio has provoked much discomfort in post-World War II audiences allergic to overcooked stereotypes around moneylending and blood libels. But Shylock is anything but a one-dimensional caricature. Shakespeare endows him with a humanity and honesty that is unique amongst the characters of the play and this makes sympathy toward his plight difficult to resist:

    He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million;
    laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation,
    thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies—
    and what’s his reason? I am a Jew.
    Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;
    fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
    subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
    warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
    If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
    If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
    If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
    If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. 
    If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.2

    Although Jews have worn a certain money-grubbing stereotype thanks to the material realities of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare endows Shylock with a transparency of intentions absent in the other characters of the play. He has an integrity that contrasts sharply with Antonio, Bassanio, Jessica, Lorenzo and Portia, who are all prone to degrees of hypocrisy: they marry for money, they engage in theft, they seek loans from those they abuse, they leverage their fortune to manipulate others.3 Shylock points out the hypocrisy of Christian society in general, as attendees of the Duke’s court sit in possession of involuntarily enslaved humans yet cast judgement on his voluntarily signed, mutually agreed upon contract. 

    It has been pointed out that Renaissance England did not have Jewish moneylenders but they did have Italian ones and they were much loathed: “It was not axiomatic to an Elizabethan theatre audience that Italian merchants were more economically virtuous than Jews; Robert Wilson had a good deal of success in the 1580s and 1590s with The Three Ladies of London, a play that pitted a morally upright Jewish merchant against a thoroughly unscrupulous Venetian.”4

    Through the play, Shakespeare reveals that Jews and Christians are at least as equal in ethics as they are in body. In doing so, he renders the foamy saliva and slurs hurled at the Venetian Jews of his play to be completely unjust.

    Marx, separated from the Renaissance by centuries, was writing during a period of heightened anti-Semitism in Germany and across Europe. Although he had a rabbinical heritage, his family was forced to convert to Christianity so that his father could evade a ban on Jews practicing law. Like Shakespeare, Marx recognized this social discrimination to be unjust, with anti-Semitism only masking a collective distaste toward the capitalist economy and predatory finance. 

    Scapegoating as Capitalist Projection

    In Capital, Marx twice likens the capitalist seeking the sweat of labour to Shylock seeking his pound of flesh: “Aye his heart. So says the bond.” Marx also delivers one of his most misunderstood lines in Chapter Four: “The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.” 

    Marx’s reference to “inwardly circumcised Jews” is a direct citation of Romans 2:29 in the New Testament: a Christian, a follower of Jesus, is circumcised by an inward, spiritual cut to the heart instead of the genitals.5 Similarly, commodity production and trade seeks an inner value that will express itself in surplus.6

    Surplus value is what Antonio needs his ships to deliver and it is what every capitalist needs to reproduce their class. Marx makes this analogy in order to emphasize the universal profit motive of capitalist commodity production. Marx and Shakespeare converge on the idea that profit-seeking is not some noxious Jewish attribute—it’s capitalism.

    By setting his play in Venice, the commercial capital of Renaissance Europe, Shakespeare had foreshadowed the total conquest of commerce over global society. The result is a world where, in Marx’s words: “Money is the pimp between need and object, between life and man’s means of life…Money appears as an inverting power in relation to the individual and to those social and other bonds which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, nonsense into reason, and reason into nonsense.”7

    As we observe in our own world, so it is in The Merchant of Venice. Marriages, familial bonds, friendships and even hatreds are all mediated by the need of money. With money as our pimp, the reduction of individuals into venal objects can always be justified. Morality is inextricably bound to how we collectively produce and reproduce our lives. It is not the characters of The Merchant of Venice who are amoral—it is the economic system that produces them.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Robin Russin, “The Triumph of the Golden Fleece: Women, Money, Religion and Power in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,” Shofar Vol. 31, No. 3: 124. ↩︎

    2. See Act 3, Scene 1. ↩︎

    3. For Antonio is full of hubris when he offers a pound of flesh to secure a loan against even Shylock’s advice; Bassanio and Lorenzo seek women to stabilize their financial standing and Portia uses her wealth to misinform Antonio about the fate of his ships, even going so far as to orchestrate a dramatic courtroom standoff where she casually destroys Shylock after a passionate speech about the value of mercy. ↩︎

    4. It is also worth noting that Shylock consistently forgoes profit in order to maintain the prospect of exacting revenge on Antonio for his abuse. Shylock is therefore much less “money hungry” than others in the play—including his daughter Jessica as well as Bassanio and Lorenzo. ↩︎

    5. From the New King James version of the Bible: “He is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God.” ↩︎

    6. Expressed in the formula: M-C…C’-M’ (money to commodity, commodity + surplus value to money + surplus value). The principal sum of money is thus transformed into a greater quantity. ↩︎

    7. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010): 137, 140. ↩︎
  • 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: Unracing Othello

    Marx and Shakespeare: Unracing Othello

    If virtue no delighted beauty lack,
    Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

    —Duke of Venice, Act 1, Scene 3.

    The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a Shakespeare play that carries an echo of the European imagination that lasted beyond Karl Marx’s lifetime. “Moor” was a term used by Europeans to refer to the Muslim North Africans who had conquered and ruled the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 1492. The Muslim population of Al-Andalus—modern day Spain and Portugal—were quite heterogeneous and did not use the Moor identifier themselves. Even after the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, “Moor” was a common European designate applied to continental Africa and the Middle East.

    The term was derived from the ancient Roman province of Mauretania—modern day Morocco and Algeria— and it eventually came to denote virtually anyone of a darker complexion. Marx, a German and ethnic Ashkenazi, was nicknamed “the Moor” by friends and family owing to his swarthy skin tone, hair and eyes.

    The Moor label—applied to Marx but also by Shakespeare to his Othello title character—is emblematic of European perceptions of race as they evolved through centuries. Since the era of ancient Rome, people of North African, Middle Eastern and sub-Saharan African origin worked and lived in continental Europe. Yet “the ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism; black skin colour was not a sign of inferiority.”1

    The ancient world was hardly free of prejudice; individuals were judged harshly according to their occupation, cultural identity or status as citizens. But the concept of race did not exist and physical differences between groups were thought only to be the effects of climate on the human body. This view of race and ethnicity largely held through Europe’s medieval era and into Elizabethan England: “The theory of the humours, the basis of Elizabethan psychology, maintained that men were of different complexions, statures, and countenances of mind and body according to the climate of their birth.”2

    Lacking a social construction of race, ancient Rome based their in-group identity on citizenship. And medieval Europe and Renaissance England did much the same thing, only with Christianity as the defining in-group characteristic. This began to change in many parts of Europe during Shakespeare’s lifetime with the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Othello therefore occupies a blurry space somewhere at the dividing line between the western religious sorting of peoples and the systematic racial categorization that would later come.

    A World of Sighs

    At the open, we learn that Othello has married Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian senator. Othello descends from a vague “Moorish” nobility but lives as “a Christianized black in Venice” who has risen to the rank of an esteemed general in the Venetian military.3 Iago serves as Othello’s trusted ensign but he has an axe to grind: Othello has passed him over for the position of lieutenant in favour of Cassio. This enrages Iago but he carefully keeps his feelings hidden. With discretion, Iago alerts Desdemona’s father to her betrothal and appeals to him with charged language in order to rouse opposition: “You’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse…I tell you your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs.”4

    Desdemona’s father, betrayed by his daughter marrying without his permission, appeals to the Venetian senate to overturn the ceremony. However, the senators are not persuaded. Desdemona had married with full consent and besides, they require the “valiant Moor” to defend Cyprus from an invading Turkish fleet. Iago then embarks upon a set of hateful schemes designed to ruin Cassio’s reputation, snatch money from Roderigo and destroy Othello’s otherwise happy marriage to Desdemona.

    Iago holds the crown amongst Shakespeare’s villains because of the sociopathic manner in which he weaponizes the trust that other characters place in him. Eventually snared by his own web of lies, Iago’s malevolent nature is laid bare in the last act before a bed loaded with the lifeless bodies of Desdemona, Othello and even Emilia, Iago’s wife.

    There is exceptional wickedness displayed here, as Iago ruthlessly manipulates Desdemona, Emilia, Cassio and Roderigo in order to convince Othello that his wife was unfaithful to him. But interest in Othello lingers due to the uniqueness of Shakespeare’s choice of protagonist. Shakespeare did not invent the character of Othello whole-cloth; he was devised from a “Moorish” character in a short story by the Italian poet Cinthio. Shakespeare’s version leaves open the possibility that Othello is an Arab or Berber noble of some type, but there are also a number of references to Othello’s appearance that suggest a black complexion.5 This was a bold choice for Elizabethan audiences as only an estimated 300-500 Black people are thought to have resided in England over that period of time. 

    Bootless Grief

    Shakespeare takes measures to ensure that the foreign Othello is perceived favourably by his audience. He possesses a Christian identity, his nobility and rank bless him with a majesty of speech and his bravery in battle has earned him the respect of the Venetian ruling class.6 Even spiteful Iago acknowledges Othello’s virtues that would make him a good husband to Desdemona:

    The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not,
    Is of a constant, loving, noble nature,
    And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona
    A most dear husband.7

    When Othello capitulates to jealousy and slays Desdemona, the labour that Shakespeare undertook establishing his merits persuade the audience to interpret Othello’s horrendous act as contrary to his nature. It is Iago’s scheming that appropriates the blame for this crime and Othello’s motivations are not presented by Shakespeare as “different from any white husband.”8 The extremely patriarchal relations of Renaissance Europe are fully displayed in Othello, without question. But despite the use of vulgar language on the part of antagonistic characters, Othello is assuredly not a racist play.

    While Shakespeare lived in a time just prior to the establishment of the concept of race, by Marx’s age this terrible social construction had reached a zenith. It is difficult to imagine that a story like Othello could be devised during the Victorian era without being subsumed by the social relations of race. In Capital, Marx asserted that racism and the capitalist mode of production shared a common origin during the age of colonial exploitation:

    The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.9

    While Elizabethan society viewed Christianity as a positive civilizing force, by the Victorian era Marx found a Christian society that was completely subordinate to capital accumulation and its accordant crimes:

    The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the Earth.10

    Destructing the Construction

    We can therefore assert that race and racism is a byproduct of economic relations born from the spiral of capital accumulation which early on necessitated colonial subjugation, forced labour and abject slavery. The impoverishing impacts of these economic forces have had profound effects upon global society into the present day, where we remain haunted by these spectres of history. If race is a social construction burnished by the capitalist paradigm then its demolition can only commence with the creation a new economic order.

    It was the Nigerian-British poet Ben Okri who said it best: “If Othello did not begin as a play about race, then history has made it one.” Indeed, Othello’s own race is as shapeless as the concept was during Shakespeare’s lifetime. But the aspiration today cannot be a return to feudalism or mercantilism or the harsh economies of antiquity. 

    Concerning race-based slavery, Marx wrote: “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Ending the systematic subjugation of labour along racial lines is one step of a larger emancipatory project. A society that does not sort individuals by race is one thing; a society that does not sort individuals by class is quite another.

    Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of universal liberty will be seen through the eyes of a classless people that recognize the interconnectedness of the universe, of humanity, of all things living. Once the predatory fetters of competition are shed, cooperation will prevail by the motto: “The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”11

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Frank Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Harvard University Press, 1970): 169. ↩︎

    2. Philip Butcher, “Othello’s Racial Identity” in Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 3: 246. ↩︎

    3. Peter Erickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance” in Criticism Vol. 35, No. 4: 505. ↩︎

    4. Excerpts from Act 1, Scene 1. ↩︎

    5. Philip Butcher goes as far as saying that Othello is “undeniably black” in “Othello’s Racial Identity,” 247. ↩︎

    6. Russ McDonald writes, “Early-seventeenth century Europeans thought of Moors, Turks and Africans as pagan, but Othello is a Christian, a baptized convert whose Christianity is an important marker of his assimilation into Venice and the values of “civilization.” Russ McDonald, ed. Othello (Penguin, 2016): xxxvi. ↩︎

    7. From Act 2, Scene 3. ↩︎

    8. Ruth Vanita quoted in Rebecca Olson, “‘Too Gentle’: Jealousy and Class in Othello” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies Vol. 15, No. 1: 6. ↩︎

    9. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019): 533. ↩︎

    10. Ibid, 534. Quoting W. Howitt. ↩︎

    11. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎
  • Marx and Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Alienation

    Marx and Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Alienation

    But orderly to end where I begun,
    Our wills and fates do so contrary run
    That our devices still are overthrown
    Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

    —Player King, Act 3, Scene 2.

    Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s most studied play, owing to its layered themes and rich rhetorical devices. It is a literary work drawn on by John Milton for Paradise Lost, it helped Sigmund Freud to develop his theory of Oedipus complex and inspired and two compositions from Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Karl Marx’s deep appreciation of Shakespeare is well known, and Hamlet is a work that he directly references in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.1

    The Play’s the Thing

    Hamlet almost exclusively takes place at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, which is a real place and one of the Renaissance era’s most prominent. Shakespeare was a product of the Renaissance era, and this setting is crucial to contextualizing many of Shakespeare’s plays because it sits on the demarcation line between the Middle Ages and modernity, between superstition and reason, between feudalism and liberalism, between religion and science, between the aristocracy and commerce. The tensions of this era are very important to understanding Hamlet’s inner conflict, just as it is important to understanding the romance between Romeo and Juliet or the racial attitudes embedded in Othello.

    In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:

    Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. this connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a “history” independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which would hold men together on its own.2

    In most of Renaissance Europe, the aristocracy maintained a monopoly on political power, derived from ownership over lands worked by a large peasantry. The rise of an urban merchant class figures heavily in some of Shakespeare’s plays, but in Hamlet we are concerned only with the palace intrigue at the top of the Danish royal hierarchy. There is a multiplicity of love triangles, petty schemes from palace courtiers, eavesdroppers and personal grievances that must constitute trivial drama in comparison to the hardship of life for many of the era. In the grand movement of history, palace intrigue is little more than the “political nonsense” that Marx identified.

    The Apparition Comes

    At the outset, the story establishes that Prince Hamlet’s father has died and his Queen mother had hastily remarried with his uncle Claudius who then consolidated the Danish nobility behind his rule. This turn of events has Hamlet already deeply unsettled and melancholy, exacerbated by a visit from his father’s ghost who wanders the Earth while in spiritual Purgatory. The ghost reveals to Hamlet that he was victim of a “murder most foul, strange and unnatural” by the poison of his brother Claudius.3

    Apparitions, witches, potions and magic were accepted forces of nature in Shakespeare’s time and come regularly into his plays as plot devices guiding a character’s arc. Whereas today uncertainty over someone’s cause of death could be resolved by a medical autopsy or forensic crime scene investigation, Hamlet could only shelter under his suspicions until he was contacted from beyond the grave. 

    But the ghost’s revelation confronts Hamlet with demands on his position. In the aristocratic world of hereditary privilege—so far from modern law and commerce—kinship largely determined one’s station in life. Notions attached to honour and nobility depended heavily on defence of kin, and there was no legal authority that Hamlet could appeal to; indeed, his corrupted family was the legal authority.

    Hamlet understands what is expected from the son of a slain father but revenge is complicated by the aristocratic hierarchy of which he is merely a component part. With a murdered father, a mother joined in marriage with the killer and childhood friends in the service of his usurping uncle, Hamlet finds himself completely alienated from the social relations that grant him his identity as a prince. 

    The ensuing conflict of the play is an internal struggle to overcome this experienced alienation, immortalized by Hamlet’s famous speech: 

    To be, or not to be, that is the question:

    Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

    The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

    And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

    No more; and by a sleep to say we end

    The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

    That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation

    Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

    To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:

    For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

    When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

    Must give us pause—there’s the respect

    That makes calamity of so long life.

    For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

    Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

    The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

    When he himself might his quietus make

    With a bare bodkin?

    This speech could be rephrased “to live or not to live?” If Hamlet chooses to live as his father’s son by seeking revenge against King Claudius he will certainly perish in the process. On the other hand, he cannot bear an existence as an obedient prince under these circumstances. To live his proper life is a death sentence but to avoid death he must surrender life.

    The Readiness is All

    There is a duality that opens up here between Hamlet’s blood instincts and his social status as a prince. Marx described alienation as characteristic to humanity’s estrangement from productive activity and the reduction of social relations to class standing, when “man feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, and procreating—while in his human functions, he is nothing more than an animal.”4

    As he is estranged from his family and friends by the revelation of his uncle’s homicide and arrogation of the throne, Hamlet ponders his alienated state: 
    “What is a man
    If his chief good and market of his time
    Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.” 

    It is Ophelia that bears the brunt of Hamlet’s dislocation, his rage against the animalistic propensity toward violence and sex. While they had been engaged in a genuine courtship prior to the events of the play, she becomes “the focus of his disgust with the whole sexual process.”5

    Seeing the characteristics of his being stripped of all virtue, Hamlet dismisses any love he once had for Ophelia as brutish lust and he condemns her to a lifetime of abstinence: “If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery. Go, farewell.”

    For Marx, alienation will ultimately be resolved when we take conscious control of our circumstances, when we reconcile our productive activity with both our individual selves and species-being. Hamlet’s internal conflict is resolved when he encounters the army of the crown prince of Norway, Fortinbras, on the march through Danish territory. Hamlet’s father had killed Fortinbras’ father in a duel decades earlier and the Norwegian prince had finally arrived to seek his just revenge.

    Hamlet then grasps the unity of opposing forces; to be an obedient prince is the same as to be his father’s son; to be in love is to be lustful; to live is the same as to die; to be is not to be.6 Before throwing himself, his mother and his uncle to their doom, he says: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Let be.”

    Thanks for reading!


    1. For more on Marx’s personal interest in Shakespeare, see Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man (Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961). ↩︎

    2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Martino Publishing, 2011): 18-19. ↩︎

    3. The “most foul” and “unnatural” aspects of the murder lie in it being committed by Claudius against his own flesh and blood. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010): 91. ↩︎

    5. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (Arden Shakespeare, 1982):151. ↩︎

    6. This is an observation in advace of the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat. ↩︎
  • 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. ↩︎