Review of Oliver Arnold. The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons.(Book review)

Oliver Arnold. The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 2007. 308pp. ISBN 9780801885044.

Alison Searle

University of Sydney

a.a.searle@gmail.com

Alison Searle . "Review of Oliver Arnold, The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons."Early Modern Literary Studies 13.3 (January, 2008) 9.1-5 .

Oliver Arnold challenges the tendency amongst early modern literary scholars to conflate theatre and power. He traces the origin of this equation to Stephen Greenblatt's seminal argument, but suggests that it has been 'merely transmitted rather than tested or developed' by subsequent critics (27); it has also been 'silently but significantly altered.' Greenblatt 'limits the claim he makes for theatrical power' - it is a primary expression, an essential mode, a crucial agent - however, later critics according to Arnold posit that 'there is nothing outside of theatrical power' (27-8). His study attempts to make this conflation of theatrical and political representation problematic. This is achieved through a fresh examination of 'Shakespeare's republican dramas...his most rigorously political works' and a careful consideration of the political functions fulfilled by the House of Commons as evident 'in the raising of taxes and the making of statute law' (24). Arnold believes this provides an important corrective to 'the new historicist map of early modern political culture' which 'has very seldom stretched beyond crown and court' (24).

He begins by examining issues of absorption and representation in the House of Commons during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Despite the fact that MPs figured their 'home' at St. Stephen's Chapel in Westminster 'as a public structure' where the people were 'deemed personally present' (through their representatives) 'they used St. Stephen's to secure unprecedented isolation from the public and to maintain secret proceedings' (47). Political representation, in effect, prevented those represented from acting for themselves. Several MPs, for example, cautioned James that 'many millions of people, are representatively present in us of this house of Commons' (69); this was a political rather than a legal fiction, but Arnold suggests 'political fictions, unlike legal fictions, tend to forget their own fictionality' (69). The fiction that the House of Commons truly represented the English people could only be maintained if they were barred from viewing the operations of the assembly; if they were not, the frequency of absenteeism threatened to undermine it. In an interesting aside, Arnold touches upon 'the intersections between early modern theological and political constructions of representation' (73-4). Following Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation completely reconfigures the concept of representation, Arnold observes that the English theory of 'representative presence' was developed in an era when the nature of the Eucharist was a matter of passionate controversy: 'Representation...no longer means 'copy'...but 'replacement'...what is represented is present in the copy' (74). By turning the Commons 'into the body of the whole realm itself,' this 'incarnationist construction' effectively 'excludes the people from the political institution they supposedly empower' (74). And, despite the occasional selflessness of MPs - Arnold quotes a 'beautiful' and 'heartfelt' example (74) - the Commons becomes accountable to nothing outside itself, as the public it purports to represent is, on this argument, contained by it.