The specifically theatrical glamour of early modern monarchy has attracted much critical attention in the field of literary studies; representative politics, in contrast, seems so ordinary as to be nearly invisible to most literary scholars. But as Oliver Arnold points out, early modern republicanism was as different from twenty-first-century ideas of democracy as monarchy is, and no less strange in early modern England than monarchy is to us now. In his fine book The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons, Arnold looks at the practices of representative democracy in early modern England, in particular through their representation in Shakespeare's plays. What has sometimes seemed to modern historians and political theorists like Whiggish progress toward democracy was, according to Arnold, not such a pretty picture for Shakespeare, whose plays mourn “the loss of power, the fall from dignity, the false consciousness, and the grief peculiar to the experiences of representing and of being represented” (4). Arnold's strongest contribution in this book is toward an outline of this particular Shakespearean pathos. Despite its title, the book says more about the theater and the Globe than about the House of Commons.

Only Arnold's first chapter, “‘An Epitome of the Whole Realm’: Absorption and Representation in the Elizabethan and Jacobean House of Commons,” directly takes up issues that are literally concerned with political representation. Here Arnold looks at the relation of the parliament to the people that it was said to represent rather than the shifting power relations between the parliament and the Crown. This interesting chapter portrays a House of Commons jealous of its position as mediator between the queen and the people and eager to preserve its own privileges. Its principal success was in convincing both prince and people that it did somehow stand for the commonalty as a whole. Members of Parliament were keenly aware that their status relied both on their ability to claim to speak for all Englishmen and on their separation from them as a group. As a consequence, parliamentary power relied on monopolizing the voice of the people and delegitimizing any expression of it but their own. The Commons vigorously policed its traditional right to private debate by excluding all non-MPs from its chamber. But since Arnold argues that the presence of agents of the Crown and the Lords was an open secret, the group principally excluded—and the group whose offenders the Commons could actually punish—were those the Commons claimed to represent. Thus, the political representation of parliament abused its power differently than monarchy did. While monarchical power mystified its sources, political representation demystified them—one sees that the political agent is made by human activity—and disempowered them, since one mistakes one's own activity in selecting a representative as retaining agency. In fact, Arnold argues over the course of the book, the power to take direct action inheres in the presence of those who want to act, not in its representation.

Subsequent chapters turn away from the history and rhetoric of the Commons to the theatrical representation of political representation in Shakespeare's first tetralogy (chap. 2), Titus Andronicus (chap. 3), Julius Caesar (chap. 4), and Coriolanus (chap. 5). As Arnold rightly observes, there is a substantial difference between political and theatrical representations in the context of sixteenth-century England. In fact, Arnold argues that the homonymy of terms is positively misleading, for the two kinds of representation produce a disanalogy (34). For Shakespeare these forms of representation stand almost at opposite poles: theatrical representation in the mutual presence of spectators and actors in the theater structure publicizes conversation and decision, while political representation by the mediation and exclusion of the actual people from the House of Commons hides them. Arnold's title comes from Coriolanus, where a “Third Citizen” says, and maybe sees, how the institution of political representation in the figures of the tribunes has in fact disempowered the Roman people. Now leashed in because they have surrendered their voices, unable to do other than assent to what their representatives propose to them, the plebs’ surrogation of agency is lamented by the Third Citizen: “We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do” (2.3.4–5). Those who are represented politically are less able to act against power that serves its own interests rather than theirs, because they mistake their power as having been transferred elsewhere volitionally. Political representation thus makes people disappear as agents. But, as Arnold convincingly argues, this kind of actual presence of the people, their ability to be heard, and the transparency of actions are more typical of the physical Shakespearean theater than of the House of Commons.

I was not surprised, but was a little disappointed, to find that theatrical representation and political representation have little in common, which Arnold's title at first challenges and then confirms. Arnold's strategy of arguing against bringing them together gives his argument a slight whiff of anticlimax (in spite of their apparent dissimilarities, they really are dissimilar). His linking of theatrical and political representation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries relies heavily on a few suggestive speeches. William Hakewill, for instance, is invoked several times for noting that an MP “must laye downe the respectes of our owne persons and put on others” (34ff., 89, 90, 158, 177). Much is made of speaker and erstwhile playwright Christopher Yelverton's claim that Parliament “represents” England's people (2, 62, 78, 223 n. 1; Coke also uses “represent” and is cited several times: 15, 35, 157) and also of Arthur Hall's counterargument that the Commons cannot truly speak for the commons (72, 157). While these show that a likeness between the Commons and the theater was occasionally invoked, theatrical metaphors are so pervasive during the period, and the ones Arnold finds so oblique and so concentrated in a few speakers, that one wonders how far this analogy should stretch. The book is left making its argument most convincingly on how Shakespeare theatrically represents political representation rather than on political representation. In describing the power of the audience to approve its plays, Arnold's book hits its stride. The book is strongest in discussing how Shakespeare represented the community of the theater—not what it represented, but what its existence enabled in terms of bringing together many different classes and interests.