When scholars look for a Shakespearean analogue to Queen Elizabeth I, they often look no farther than his Richard II, the deposed and effeminate king with whom Elizabeth was known to compare herself. This report seeks to broaden our reading of Shakespeare's Henriad by arguing that, in fact, there are echoes of Elizabeth in both Henry IV and Henry V, successors to Richard II. These traces of Elizabeth reveal the Henriad's fantasy of a male-dominated political sphere as just that: a fantasy. Moreover, this appropriation of maternal or effeminate characteristics is not limited to the Henriad's rulers, but occurs several times in the Shakespearean canon. This absorption becomes another way for Shakespeare's plays to manage their anxiety over threatening women even as they appropriate the authority of an aging Elizabeth. / text

Shakespeare’s Henriad delves into questions of divine authority, political process, and the role of class in society. Most importantly, however, the text tracks the shifts in leadership and kingly identity. Richard II paints the portrait of a king infatuated with his own divinity. Richard’s journey from anointed king to deposed mortal captures the dissolution of his fantasy of invincibility. Inciting Richard’s demise, Henry IV effectively disturbs the passive obedience which the king’s subjects maintain; in doing so, the kingship begins to shift away from divine authority, moving into a vacuum of rebellion and civil conflict. Meanwhile, the previously profligate Prince Hal turns towards his duties; in proving himself to his father, he begins to accumulate honor, redeeming himself as a capable heir. Hal’s ascension as Henry V and his subsequent success as a king provides a stark contrast to the discontent during Richard’s reign. As the presence of divinity recedes, the theme of honor appears more frequently throughout the Henriad. Prince Hal views honor as an external commodity which can be accumulated by an individual. Honor, as presented by Henry V, seemingly converts an intrinsic trait or virtue into a commodity with economic value, allowing for the establishment of his own political legitimacy. Using the plays in the Henriad as my primary texts, I intend to examine this political and ideological transition by connecting Richard's divine right to Hal's construction of an economy of honor.

This dissertation examines the role of aesthetic activity in the pursuit of political agency in readings of several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet (1600), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Tempest (1610), the history plays of the second tetralogy (1595-9), Julius Caesar (1599), and Coriolanus (1605). I demonstrate how Shakespeare models political subjectivity—the capacity for individuals to participate meaningfully in the political realm—as necessitating active aesthetic agency. This aesthetic agency entails the fashioning of artistically conceived public personae that potential political subjects enact in the public sphere and the critical engagement of the aesthetic and political discourses of the subjects’ culture in a self-reflective and appropriative manner. Furthermore, these subjects should be wary auditors of the texts and personae they encounter within the public sphere in order to avoid internalizing constraining ideologies that reify their identities into forms less conducive to the pursuit of liberty and social mobility. Early modern audiences could discover several models for doing so in Shakespeare’s works. For example, Hamlet posits a model of Machiavellian theatricality that masks the Prince's interiority as he resists the biopolitical force and disciplinary discourses of Claudius's Denmark. Julius Caesar and Coriolanus advance a model of citizenship through the plays’ nameless plebeians in which rhetoric offers the means to participate in Rome’s political culture, and Shakespeare’s England for audiences, while authorities manipulate citizen opinion by molding the popularity of public figures. Public, artistic ability affords potential political subjects ways of not only framing their participation in their culture but also ways of conceiving of their identities and relationships to society that may defy normative notions of membership in the community.