I: THE TRAGEDY OF GAIUS MARTIUS CORIOLANUS
William Shakespeare was not only a great comic and tragedian writer, as well as one of the greatest artists in the genre of historical fictionalization, he was also a sharp and witty political thinker.
One of his least appreciated plays is the Tragedy of Coriolanus.
For the sake of brevity, we shall give here the gist of the plot:
A Roman nobleman, at the time of the early Republic, leads a successful attack against a valiant foe whose leader he greatly admires and despises at the same time
"There is the man of my soul’s hate, Aufidius / Piercing our Romans!"
(Act I Scene V)
"None of you but is / Able to bear against the great Aufidius / A shield as hard as his.".
(Act I Scene VI)
By his bravery and strength he achieves great victory, which brings an end to the War. Meanwhile the City of Rome itself is in the midst of political turmoil - the Plebs are resentful of their inferior station to the Patricians.
As Martius Coriolanus (our erstwhile hero) comes back to Rome seeking to convert his military glory to political currency, he discovers that the office of the Tribunes of the Plebs was created. Since he is a Patrician and an avid anti-Plebian (he even resents the need for electioneering
"And since the wisdom of their choice is rather to have my hat than my heart, I will practice the insinuating nod and be off to them most counterfeitly.").
(Act II Scene III)
The people, at first, their vanity sufficiently satisfied, vote him Consul, but the Tribunes stoke their fear and hatred of Martius and persuade them to rescind their votes. Outraged, Martius demands to be installed consul, which leads to a chain of events that see him exiled from his beloved Rome.
Vengeful, Coriolanus turn to his once enemy, Aufidius the Volpsce, and offer his services to lead a Volpscian army to conquer Rome. Aufidius agreed extatically, but just as siege is laid and Rome is about to fall, Martius' wife, child and mother are sent to beseech him to spare his native land. Unable to resist their request and overcome with re-lit love for Rome, Coriolanus withdraws with his army. The Volpscians, who no longer have a use for him, execute him for double treason - first against Rome, second against them. In sorrow and regret for their actions, the Volpscian Senate, with Aufidius, decides to grant Coriolanus a state funeral.
My rage is gone, And I am struck with sorrow.—Take him up. Help, three o’ th’ chiefest soldiers; I’ll be one.— Beat thou the drum that it speak mournfully.— Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he Hath widowed and unchilded many a one, Which to this hour bewail the injury, Yet he shall have a noble memory. Assist.
(Act V Scene VI)
II: FACTION AND LOVE.
In this story, the Bard warns us against what is often called nowadays "Tribalism" but in the founding period of the United States was often called "Faction" (a verb, not a noun), which was a constant issue on top of English political thinkers from time immemorial. Indeed, most of Shakespeare's most memorable historical plays have this problem at their center.
The English have always been a fractious people, prone to rebellions, uprisings and civil wars. The most recent open conflict at the time of Shakespeare was the disastrous, prolonged conflict known as the Wars of the Roses, which was concluded by Elizabeth I's grandfather, Henry VII Tudor in the battle of Bosworth Field against Richard III Plantagenet. These events, which Shakespeare had magnificently reproduced in his plays Richard II, Henry IV (both parts), Henry V, Henry VI (in three parts), and Richard III.
Elizabeth's father's obsession with producing a male heir is directly related to the start of this conflict - the deposing of Richard II, partially under the pretext that the Crown can be inherited only in the Male Line (at the end the argument was not advanced and Richard had to be forced to abdicate "voluntarily', but the fact remain that this was a point of contention) - a principle which Shakespeare, a loyal subject of Elizabeth, decried as inapplicable even in France.
At any rate, at the time of Coriolanus' (between 1605 and 1608) neither Europe in general nor England in particular was free of civil strife.
The open hostilities between Catholics and Protestants that defined the reigns of Henry VIII and his children were subsiding (Elizabeth had secured a decisive victory for the Protestants). Under the rule of James I (of England, IV of Scotland) the only serious rival claim was coopted, and a England would not fight wars of Royal inheritance until the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
But with the waning of Tudor rule, waned also the royal dominance of English politics and a power hitherto hidden in the background was asserting itself - namely Parliament, in particular the House of Commons.
The Tudors had used acts of Parliament as both cudgel against disfavored and a tool to advance their government and ecclesiastical reforms. During the reign of Henry VII this institution was so accommodating and obedient it was rarely assembled and when it did, it was to pass laws such as the Ordinances of Corporations Act of 1503 which forced all corporation to acquire the King's assent to their bylaws (interestingly enough, this act was not fully repealed until 1998) and Act XI which safeguarded royal officers against the annoyance of being "Attaynt of Treason" (SIC) (this statute is still in power).
But the Crafty Monarch's heir found a better use for Parliament.
It was through Parliament that Henry VIII had rid himself of four of his six queens, not to mention several of his advisors. It was through Parliament that the Tudors passed their departure, return and departure again from Rome. It was the House of Commons that voted money to the Tudor monarchs and enabled them to build their fleets and field their armies.
But while Parliament was a good servant to the Tudors, it became bolder and bolder under the Stuarts. James foreign birth (a half Scot, half Frenchman), manners and approach to justice and Law (his new subjects were horrified when, during his Accession Progress down to London, he ordered to execute a thief without a trial), all made the English grumble under the yoke of this learned prince. Theses seeds of resentment would not blossom to full conflict until late in the reign of his son, but for an earthy and erstwhile London entrepreneur and a pillar of his local community such as Shakespeare, they were clearly visible and worrisome.
In his Roman History Plays he showed the Theater going public the results of faction, whereby the love for a particular component of One's country - a region, a class, an institution, a person or a group of people - either overcomes the love of the country as a whole or creates the illusion of the identity of that component with the whole - that loyalty to it IS loyalty to the country, that it contained in it the essential core of all that's good in the community and that all else was chaff that can be easily discarded without danger - and with significant utility- to the whole.
As always, Shakespeare's saving virtue is Love, particularly, the simple, familiar loves of hearth and home. It is in the Love for his family that Coriolanus finds again the love of all his countrymen, even to the vile, conniving tribunes. It is Mark Anthony's love to his friend Caesar that inspires the people to abandon the faction of the Conspirators, but false love hits again, when it stirs Mark Anthony away from his love of Rome- only when he is betrayed by Cleopatra does he understand his grave error.
III: ON THE KINDGOM OF DARKNESS AND THE EDUCATION OF CHARLES II
Charles II was no more than 18 years old when he was exiled from his birthright in 1648. In his long exile (lasting until his Restoration in 1660), in which he routinely was involved in begging, cajoling and calling upon favors in various continental courts, attempting harebrained schemes, a short lived reign over Scotland and even acting as an "ally" (in fact, a glorified mercenary) of Spain, he was not a man who could indulge in such seemingly romantic notions as Love and Justice ruling all human affairs, he developed an attitude to politics which was at the same time cynic and stoic, pessimistic and half-amused, world weary and licentious. In the ragtag court of the Exile King, as event in England itself (where the Commonwealth and the Protectorate were going through their birth, maturity and decay in preternatural speed) seem to be proving beyond any doubt, the ruling theory was that Politics is the province of human foibles, error and weakness, that One should navigate this stormy ocean using One's own wit and luck and that virtue had little to do with it.
Against this spirit, Thomas Hobbes offered an alternative. First serving as Charles' Mathematics tutor, his influence on the future monarch is often exaggerated (after all, Hobbes was dismissed from this role in 1647, a full year before Charles' exile- the most important period of the latter's life).
Although he had held (and expressed in his 1642 work De Cive) similar opinions, the events of the Civil War and his exile in Paris near the English Court in Exile had reinforced his notion that the real danger to the State (and to Society) is not the overabundant love to a single component of it and the joint ambitions of Faction, but the greed and vices of individuals for whom factions are merely tools and temporary alliances. The main virtue of the State was, in his opinion, that it CREATED societies by forcing men to live joint lives under the laws of Peace and to abandon the Brutish, nasty and short life afforded by the State of Nature whereby each person is an enemy to all others engaged in eternal combat against them. In Other words, the State, and Society as a whole do not exist to achieve a Common Good, the Sum of all Goods which all members of society, bound by common love strive towards. Rather, all Citizens are bound by common fear and suspicion, that their product, the Law, set by the Sovereign (rather than obeying some eternal logic and notions of Justice) binds them to live in peace. Factions are the start of the atavistic process reverting societies to the State of Nature.
Therefore, argues Hobbes, the chief virtue of the Citizen is to obey the Law and the Sovereign that makes it (be it a king, an aristocratic elite or a democratic assembly) and of the Sovereign, to do whatever is needed to preserve his power and transmit it undiminished to his successor.
Religion, for him, with its high ideals of love, holiness and a supreme good, is a mere tool in the hands of the Sovereign to make the running of Society and the enforcement of the Law easier and smoother. But this tool, he warns, when it excessively obscure Reason and the Truth of the World (namely, according to Hobbes, the unreality of these high ideals) are a grave danger, since it gives individuals a pretext to coalesce into factions opposing the Sovereign in the name of Love, Holiness and the Supreme Good that would eventually bring down the State and Society and bring about the return to the State of Nature.
III: JOHN LOCKE AND THE RETURN OF LOVE
If we truly want to understand the nature and spirit of the Reign of Charles II, we need to turn our eyes away from the influence of Hobbes that never had to work within the framework of the actual relationship between the Crown and Parliament (indeed he wrote theory for a prince in exile, with little power and responsibility), and towards John Locke.
For John Locke was at the heart of Restoration English politics.
An associate of the earl Anthony Ashly Cooper of Shaftsbury and the Whig movement which the latter started. In practical terms, they can be said to occupy the Parliamentarian side of English politics (as opposed to the Tories which always favored the Crown), but Lord Shaftsbury's faction was hardly above currying favor with the King. They were Whigs, but loyal, moderate ones.
The long and short of all this is that Locke was deeply involved not just in administrative problems (he served as a member of the Board of Trade and secretary of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina), but also in the actual POLITICS of his age. So deep was his influence that when a plot (known as the Rye House Plot) to assassinate the Prince of Wales (later James II) was discovered, Locke was implicated (probably erroneously) and had to flee to the Netherland. He would not return to England until the Glorious Revolution, when he would serve in the court of William and Mary.
Unlike Hobbes, Locke was a devout Christian, albeit of unconventional and shifting opinions. He had abandoned the Calvinism of his youth since he couldn't believe that the sin of Adam alone could in justice implicate the descendants of Adam who, after all, had no part in the decision.
This denial of original sin is an important part of his philosophy since it stresses his belief in both individual responsibility and his basic belief in the goodness of human nature. While Shakespeare posits Love as the SOLUTION to the problem of politics, Locke presumes it at the BASIS of politics.
It is out of this view that Locke is set out, in his Second Treatise on Civil Government, to turn Hobbes nightmare vision on its head.
Locke believes that there is a real and objective difference between Good and Evil besides the tastes of Man. In particular he believes that Man comes to this world as a Tabula Rasa without any inherent opinions, which are acquired only by education. Human beings are amenable to education since we are creatures of reason by nature, and Reason by itself points us towards the Good, which includes the love, Toleration and Protection of our neighbors, as well as towards Justice and Utility:
The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions:
for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.
Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.
(Chapter II: Section 6)
It is to those ends, argues Locke, that Man invents such useful things as families, governments and money. The first gives him a framework in which he can defend and provide for those he care most. The second allows him to join his neighbors in common defense and improvement of their land. The last allows him to convert whatever value they had created into a lasting treasure and avoid waste and spoilage of good things.
The crux of Locke's principle is that Society and all its institutions are fruit not of ambition, fear and greed, but of Reason, which leads Man to Love and Duty, in particular the duty to:
execute that law, and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders.
(Ibid, Section 7)
Locke places this Duty in the hands of every person and therefore, the moral duty t o preserve the institutions of society. In Hobbes' Leviathan, That inimitable Ruler whose word IS the Law and is able to rein in everyone's ambition and greed by the power of the common Fear of War, Locke sees nothing but a person AT WAR with the rest of society, since he destroys the very thing for which protection Society came to be: the Law of Nature, which is the same as the Law of God, to Love One's neighbor.
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