The King Peopled

In Shakespeare's history plays, the king's speech marks him out as singularly different from everyone else because he alone can conventionally refer to himself in the plural. “We were not born to sue, but to command,” Richard II declares at the start of his own tragedy. But what justifies the king's claim to being more numerous, as it were, than everyone else? In an unguarded moment as he begins his fall from power, Richard himself implies that his royal “we” is merely a figure of speech for the subjects he commands. Returning from a military expedition in Ireland, Richard learns from a faithful subordinate that he has arrived “too late” to lead a Welsh army against his rival Bullingbrook, “for all the Welshmen, hearing thou wert dead, / Are gone to Bullingbrook, dispers'd and fled.” The king turns pale at the news, and when another follower asks him why, Richard dolefully replies,

A third supporter then enters to inform the king that the rebellion against him has grown into a “stormy” deluge that threatens to “drown” England, as the rabble in Hamlet are said to flood the Danish court. Richard's ostensibly comprehensive authority drains away into a heterogeneous assemblage of subjects who are no longer content to have this one man embody their multiplicity:

The surprise of Richard II is that the fallen king eventually seeks to recapture multiplicity from his subjects by redefining his royal plenitude as a consequence of their rebellion. Kingship as Richard understands it shifts from a political to a psychological condition. In the scene where he resigns his “state and crown” to Bullingbrook, Richard represents himself as amplified no longer by his subjects but rather by the “cares” their uprising has generated within him: “You may my glories and my state depose,” he informs Bullingbrook, “But not my griefs; still am I king of those.” In one respect, this new way of thinking about his kingship helps Richard feel more singularly plural than he had before by erasing his subjects as a constitutive element of his royal “we.” “My grief,” he subsequently declares, “lies all within.” But in another respect, Richard's internalization of multiplicity damages him by shattering his faith in what he had earlier called his “unstooping firmness” as king. His erratic behavior in the scene dramatizes the difference. “Are you contented to resign the crown?” Bullingbrook asks him after Richard declares himself the king of griefs. “Ay,” says Richard; then “no”; then “no” again; then “ay.”Footnote ¹⁴ Apparently, Richard has lost more than his power to command his subjects: gone too is what we now unmonarchically call his executive function, leaving him awash in a sea of clashing and uncontrollable impulses.

During Richard's final moments in the play, both his cunning and his despair prompt him to renew his search for a kingly comprehensiveness that no longer depends on his rebellious subjects. In prison and therefore sequestered from the people, Richard nevertheless insists on thinking of his separate solitary life as peopled:

If Richard succeeds here in creating his own little world, he does so at the felt cost of his psychological coherence. Merely to begin imagining himself as singularly “populous,” he believes that he must divide his sovereign reason into two forces—the mother brain and father soul who between them beget a “generation” of “thoughts”—and these thoughts strike him as no less discontented than his subjects. Instead of replacing the people with an alternative plenitude he can master in himself, Richard manages to augment himself only by internalizing the people's fractiousness as well as their multiplicity. “Thus play I in one person many people,” he concludes, “And none contented.”Footnote ¹⁵

Moralizing on Richard's fall a play later, his usurper Henry IV criticizes him not, as we might expect, for keeping himself aloof from his subjects, but rather for becoming too entangled with them. King Henry claims that Richard “grew a companion to the common streets, / Enfeoff'd himself to popularity,” and thus undermined the mystique upon which Henry believes his own “royalty” depends:

Nothing in Richard II bears out Henry's retrospective picture of Richard cavorting with commoners: on the contrary, we see Richard speak to no one in that play below the rank of knight or baronet until moments before his murder. But Richard and later the Duke of York do both report, disgustedly, on Henry's “courtship to the common people, / How he did seem to dive into their hearts / With humble and familiar courtesy, / What reverence he did throw away on slaves.”Footnote ¹⁶ If Henry now tries to distance himself from the people by displacing his earlier courtship of them onto Richard, he nevertheless admits that he relied on their good “opinion” to help him win the crown. Like Richard in his tragedy, Henry struggles with the seemingly unkingly thought that he too is subject to his subjects.

The Shakespearean monarch who best manages the apparent contradiction of having to depend on the people for his royal difference from them is the one who brings himself most openly to what Claudius terms a public count. Henry's immediate reason for deploring Richard's fraternization with commoners is to warn his son Hal that Hal has been repeating Richard's error, “for thou hast lost thy princely privilege / With vile participation.” Hal's slumming is simply inexplicable to the king, who marvels at the “affections”—the impulses as well as the attachments—that would lead a prince so perversely to demean himself. How, Henry demands to know,

Having overheard Hal's earlier soliloquy, we know what the king does not: that Hal thinks he will ultimately shine brighter as a royal sun if at first he permits “the base contagious clouds” of rude society “to smother up his beauty from the world” and then breaks through these “foul and ugly mists” surrounding him. His goal, he explained in his soliloquy, is to secure the very mystique for himself that his father later recommends, but not through aloofness. Only by mingling with his social inferiors, Hal believes, can he demonstrate how little such vulgar company defines him. What matters most to Hal in his plans for burnishing his princeliness is that his internal state of mind be “wond'red at,” as his father says he cannot help but “wonder” at it already. Where the rebellion against King Richard so discomposed Richard as to make him act “like a frantic man,” Hal purposefully chooses to behave like a “madcap” in order to mystify his subjects.Footnote ¹⁸

The problem is that Hal's entanglement with rude society appears to confuse him along with everyone else. His uncertainty about his own motives manifests itself in more than the dubiousness of his claim that the best way to “be himself” as prince is to mix with commoners. By the end of his soliloquy, Hal has begun to insist that the whole point of his vile participation is not to be himself. Opinion, he maintains, will help him to the crown only if he manages to divide himself into two persons, the prodigal and the penitent: then “my reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault, / Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off.” According to this logic, Hal cannot simply break with vulgar company in order to impress others: he must retain the fault that makes his reformation glitter; he must internalize the break. And that is exactly how he later impresses one of his rebellious subjects in the play, Sir Richard Vernon. During the final act of Henry IV Part 1, Vernon reports on a speech of Hal's in which Hal seemed most “like a prince indeed” when

For the rebel Vernon, Hal begins to achieve the singular plurality of the royal “we” once he speaks as his own adversary.

This sovereign act of self-mastery is not once and for all, however: Hal must repeat it again and again in order to sustain his claim to a distinctive multiplicity. At the end of the second part of Henry IV, for instance, after reemphasizing “that I have turn'd away my former self,” the newly crowned King Henry V holds open the possibility, surprisingly, that he might revert to his old ways: “when thou dost hear I am as I have been,” he tells Falstaff, “approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast, / The tutor and the feeder of my riots.” In the last of his plays, Henry V, Hal actually does return to fraternizing with vulgar company. Unable to battle the French singlehandedly, he rouses his troops by once again addressing his social inferiors as if they were his “dear friends,” while the night before the battle of Agincourt, he goes so far as to mingle with his troops by pretending to be one of them.Footnote ²⁰ But this voluntary enfeoffment of himself to popularity does not work as well for the king as it had for the prince: on the contrary, it brings Hal to a more disturbing public count than he had ever experienced before. He soon finds himself in a testy exchange with several common soldiers, one of whom, Michael Williams, maintains that “if the cause” of the coming battle “be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp'd off in battle, shall join together at the latter day” and call for justice. Although Hal appears to change Williams's mind on the subject, the soliloquy he delivers after they part company suggests that his own thinking has been affected by the monstrous counterimage—the beast with many limbs as well as heads—that Williams has opposed to Hal's royal comprehensiveness. The soliloquy begins with Hal's speaking in the voice or rather the voices of his discontented subjects:

“We must bear all”: on its first appearance in his speech, Hal's royal “we” is indistinguishable from the plural self-references of the troops he has been impersonating. And when he does try to distinguish his own “greatness” from his troops, Hal immediately thinks of his kingship as divided between that greatness and its identical yet adversarial “twin,” the “hard condition” of being “subject” to one's subjects. What constitutes his royal difference from others, it now seems to Hal, is his self-alienating awareness that he cannot differentiate himself from them: the only reason a king seems greater than others, according to Hal, is that he alone feels more than his own wringing and thus suffers “more / Of mortal griefs” than “privates” do.Footnote ²¹

Yet this inability to separate himself from his subjects is also what rescues Hal from Richard's solipsistic degeneration into the king of griefs. In his next soliloquy, Hal finds a way to share the burden of worrying about so many others by imagining his troops as the ones who are worrying about the massive size of the French army: he asks God to “take from them now / The sense of reck'ning, if th'opposèd numbers / Pluck their hearts from them.” Shortly before the battle, Hal more directly lightens the load on himself as the singular “we” who “must bear all” by broadening his royal multiplicity to include his troops. “We happy few,” he calls his soldiers as well as himself, “we band of brothers; / For he to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition.” If the emphasis in “vile” participation has now distinctly shifted from the king's degradation to the commoner's ennoblement, that change hinges on Hal's restricting the number of people who may share his greatness with him. “Wish not one man more” from England, he commands the “host” of troops assembled before him; “the fewer men, the greater share of honor”; “I would not lose so great an honor / As one man more methinks would share from me.”Footnote ²² To recover some measure of his sovereign coherence and integrity in the face of his dependence on his troops and his responsibility for them, Hal strikes a bargain with his subjects: he surrenders a portion of his greatness to them, though not to the people at large—only to a happy few.

This Distracted Globe

What light do the history plays shed on Hamlet's disintegration? They show us how hard it is for Shakespeare's royalty to escape the feeling of being internally populous. After learning from his father's ghost that he has even more reasons to loathe his mother and uncle than he had previously grasped, Hamlet decides that the best way to regain his lost sense of purpose, his executive function, is to reconstitute within himself the sovereign kingship of his father:

Hamlet wants to clear his mind of everything but the ghost's commandment, yet merely to focus on that single motive for action is to become entangled with the multiplicity of persons it involves: “O most pernicious woman!” he continues, speaking to no one but himself; “O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!”Footnote ²³ When Freud's disciple Ernest Jones elaborated his master's account of the Oedipal complex as the “true reason” for Hamlet's indecisiveness, he exaggerated the tendency in Freud to treat that complex as a psychic conflict with one person only: the “primordial” or “original” father. But the obstacle Hamlet confronts as he tries to dedicate himself wholly to his father is that he feels tied not to one but to three parents, three heads and sources, who also happen to be the three heads of Denmark. His own brain, therefore, strikes him as a “distracted globe”—as many-headed, effectively—and the conflicting impulses that he experiences within himself produce an “antic disposition” so capricious that it cannot even be safely opposed to decisiveness, since Hamlet will later kill a third father-figure, Polonius, with no hesitation whatsoever.Footnote ²⁴

But Hamlet's reference to “this distracted globe” evokes more than his troubled brain. In a confusing break with dramatic illusion, it broadens Hamlet's introspection to include everyone in the Globe theater. What do they have to do with Hamlet's distraction? During one of his grumblings about the people's love for Hamlet, Claudius calls them “the distracted multitude,” a characterization that associates them with Hamlet's own irrationality and incoherence.Footnote ²⁵ The king does not acknowledge any of the more straightforward reasons for Hamlet's popularity in the play, such as the winning habit he shares with Hal of addressing his social inferiors as his “good friends.”Footnote ²⁶ But then Hamlet himself is of two minds about commoners. Courteous to them in small numbers, so long as they do not dirty their hands with labor, he feels nothing but contempt for them en masse. And the only times Hamlet mentions having encountered the people en masse are when he speaks of going to the theater. There, he tells us, he was appalled by the ignorance of “the million” or “the general”—“groundlings,” he calls them, “who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.” Twice over, Hamlet stresses how worthless the vulgar throng of playgoers are in relation to discriminating viewers such as himself, “the censure of which one,” he instructs a company of visiting actors, “must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theater of others.” Yet the very fact that Hamlet feels he must exhort the actors to prize a single elite spectator over a mass of others shows how deeply he worries that the actors pander to the mass instead. Why, then, if he despises the hoi polloi and their debasing effect on plays, did Hamlet ever “take such delight in” visiting “the common stages,” as Rosencrantz says he did?Footnote ²⁷ The prince, it seems, was perversely drawn to the scene of divided authority in the theater, and to the theater's redefinition of that struggle as a contest not between one royal claimant and another but rather between the one and the many.

The seditious empowerment of “that great master the multitude” was a constant theme of Renaissance antitheatrical literature. On the common stages, as one critic lamented in 1603, only the weaknesses of monarchs were augmented: “There is no passion wherewith the king, the sovereign majesty of the Realm[,] was possess'd, but is amplified, and openly sported with, and made a Maygame to all the beholders.” Another critic in 1615 declared that, while theater companies might nominally serve the Crown, the “wages and dependence” of an actor “prove him to be the servant of the people.”Footnote ²⁸ Our most important recent commentator on the subject, Oliver Arnold, agrees with this contemporary assessment. The Shakespearean theater, he argues, was “a market enterprise rather than a courtly institution,” and the result of its catering to “a mass audience” instead of “the monarch or great nobles” was the unprecedented creation of “a plebeian public sphere in which opinions might be shaped and political effects achieved” by the people themselves.Footnote ²⁹ According to Arnold, Hamlet was right to be disturbed by the impact of the million on the theater: by the time his tragedy was first performed, the common stages of England had become the sites of a burgeoning new popular sovereignty.

Within the play itself, Hamlet's differentiation of elite from vulgar spectators is magnified by the distance between the public theaters and the royal court, which the actors can reach only by going on a tour that brings them less “in reputation and profit” than “their residence” in the city does. But the actors have nevertheless come “to offer” their “service” to the Crown, and when they act, no groundlings affect their performance: the play they stage is chosen by the prince of Denmark, who edits it, oversees it, and repeatedly disrupts it. Hamlet reflects the complex reality that Shakespeare's theater company served two masters, the monarchy as well as the people. The issue was more than a matter of wages. The relentless hostility of London officials towards commercial theaters meant that Shakespeare and his fellow actors depended for their livelihood on what the theater historian Glynne Wickham calls the “stubbornly protectionist attitude” of the Court.Footnote ³⁰ Over and over again throughout Shakespeare's career, the Privy Council rejected the City's petitions “for the present stay & final suppressing” of London's common stages on the grounds that “public playing” kept actors “in exercise” for the monarch, who was “pleased at some times to take delight and recreation” in them.Footnote ³¹ If the people enjoyed a new collective authority in playhouses, as Arnold says they did, then they needed the monarch's support to do so. Exclusively tied neither to king nor to commoners, the commercial Renaissance theater occasioned an almost unique form of power sharing between them.

Almost unique, because Parliament was thought to instantiate such power sharing, too. Taking the comparison between Parliament and the theater more seriously than other scholars have, Arnold highlights several crucial differences between the two institutions. Parliament, he argues, only pretended to represent the people, when it actually stripped them of their power to represent themselves, and the illusion of Parliament's fidelity to the people required draconian “practices of secrecy” that excluded the people from its proceedings. In a remarkably persuasive series of readings, Arnold demonstrates just how rigorously Shakespeare himself pursued these same critiques throughout his Roman tragedies. From Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus, Arnold shows, “political representation is almost always a catastrophe” for the people, who lose their “power to judge and decide” whenever “they invest representatives with their voices.” According to Arnold, moreover, Shakespeare recognized that there was no more “resonant place to play out the tragedy of political representation” than in the theater, where the audience experience “precisely the kind of authority… that political representation, on Shakespeare's account, denies its subjects in the political field proper.” Far from resembling Parliament, then, “a theater overflowing with people” constituted “its radical alternative.”Footnote ³²

To reach this conclusion about the populism of Shakespeare's theater, however, Arnold must downplay several of the theater's basic features besides its royal patronage. First, the audience was not the only interest group inside Renaissance playhouses. Admirers and detractors alike emphasized just how powerfully dramatists and actors could manipulate spectators: “such force have their enchantments of pleasure to draw the affections of the mind,” one critic declared in 1580, that “no man” is safe once he is caught in their “webs.” Actors, moreover, were said to be the “puppets” of dramatists, as dramatists were said to be “subject” to actors: Hamlet takes on the role of the playwright as the embattled king of the stage when he hectors the visiting actors about the right way to deliver “my lines” and then demands that their clowns “speak no more than is set down for them.”Footnote ³³ Diverse and divided forces competed for power in the distracted Globe, and Arnold's vision of a theater overflowing with people obscures not only the disunity of interests there but also the limits of the theater's own inclusiveness. Although Arnold claims that “the impenetrable House of Commons stands in stark opposition to an open theater of judgment,” performances of Hamlet were not available to everyone: you had to pay to get in, and the Globe, though large, could hold only so many.Footnote ³⁴ “We happy few,” says Hal not merely to a handful of troops but also to the thousands in his outnumbered army, and when the actor playing Hal speaks these words, he similarly addresses not merely the handful of people on the stage but also the thousands who have paid their way into the audience.

From a commercial perspective, it made sense for Shakespeare to emphasize the specialness of the experience “within the girdle of these walls,” as the Chorus to Henry V puts it. But that restriction also helped Shakespeare conceptualize the multiplicity of agencies within the theater as a form of power sharing. Without such limits, Hamlet repeatedly suggests, multiplicity degenerates into a mass without distinction, like the ocean overpeering its list. In the final act of the play, both Hamlet and Laertes reflect this view as they contend with one another at Ophelia's grave for the sovereignty of grief. Enraged that Laertes should try to “outface” him in woe, Hamlet insists that “forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum.” Laertes, however, expresses a similar bias against amassment, which he imagines as marking greatness only by burying it: “Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead, / Till of this flat a mountain you have made / T’ o'ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head / Of blue Olympus,” he exclaims, to which Hamlet replies in turn, “let them throw / Millions of acres on us, till our ground, / Singeing his pate against the burning zone, / Make Ossa like a wart!”Footnote ³⁵ The “millions” that Hamlet had previously located in the theater now manage to “o'ertop” Olympus as an age-old standard of loftiness not by reaching higher than such classical heights but rather by amplifying the “flat,” just as Hamlet had thought of the “ground” in the theater as amplified by its “groundlings.” What Hamlet cannot envision, even in the context of Denmark's elective rather than hereditary monarchy, is that the many might constitute a sovereign force. The rest of the play supports this narrow-mindedness to a degree, insofar as its nearly exclusive focus on the court allows the people no room to exercise any legitimate political authority. And yet it is precisely as “a riotous head” that the Danish people most closely match the “distracted globe” of their prince, which in turn corresponds to an actual social model for such a conjunction: the divided little world of the Globe, where a mass audience provisionally joins forces with playwright, actors, and the monarchy.

What is the nature of the social intermixture that Shakespeare thought his theater might enable? On the one hand, his refusal to offer a single sovereign reason for Hamlet's grief suggests that Shakespeare committed himself to a dramaturgy that could instead accommodate the broad range of interpretations in a diverse audience—and, perhaps, that could cohere only in relation to such an audience. “The subtleties missed by one” of Shakespeare's spectators, as Alfred Harbage long ago maintained, were “not missed by his neighbor”: “Shakespeare's meanings” were “caught in the mesh of a thousand minds.”Footnote ³⁶ On the other hand, by allowing the title character of Hamlet to dominate the play and speak more than a third of its lines, Shakespeare unmistakably empowered the one over the many.Footnote ³⁷ But it is a strange authority Hamlet exercises in his play. He lords it over others by adapting the very behavior of the many that Claudius believes disempowers them: their wildness and inconsistency. Like the “madcap” Prince Hal and the “frantic” King Richard before him, the “antic” Prince Hamlet does more, indeed, than participate in the distraction of the multitude: he models it for them. In 1632, one admirer made a similar point about “rare” Shakespeare, who “alone” could mix comic and tragic strains so inextricably as to “effect” the “wonders” of generating “two different passions,” “two contraries,” in the “rapt soul” of each beholder.Footnote ³⁸ Towards the end of Hamlet, Shakespeare himself points to such internal divided rule as the common ground that his audience share with his royalty and with each other when the grave-digging clown speaks to Hamlet, without knowing that he is speaking to him, about Hamlet's having gone to England. “’A shall recover his wits there,” says the clown, pluralizing Hamlet's single brain—“or if ’a do not, ’tis no great matter.” “Why?” Hamlet asks. Because “there,” the clown answers, “the men are as mad as he.”Footnote ³⁹