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Constance Jordan. Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. x + 224. $35.00.
In Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances, Constance Jordan sets out to revise the New Historicist assumption that Shakespeare's plays are "political." In so doing, she contests a tendency, in literary criticism after Foucault, to essentialize power. Jordan argues that power can be theorized, and that it was theorized in the Renaissance. The result is a careful and detailed account of Shakespeare's relation to political discussion in his culture.
Chapter 1,"Shakespeare's Romances and Jacobean Political Thought" begins with the premise that "England's political culture during the early years of James I's reign exhibited what might be called a divided consciousness" (6). Arguments for absolute rule affirmed the monarch's power and freedom from positive law; rebuttals focused on the contractual nature of political relations, on the people's liberties, and on the duties that cemented the bond between monarch and subject. Jordan argues that the deep fissures characterizing debate over absolute rule inform both the drama and theoretical writings about the monarchy. She seeks to describe paradigmatic relations between the texts and their contexts by insisting that monarchy, as an institution, was "represented according to different concepts which were thought to justify (more or less) its actual practices"...
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