Class, Class Consciousness and Specters of Marx in Shakespeare's History Plays

Abstract

While Shakespeare's history plays suggest the formation of a type of national identity based on new definitions of what it means to be English in the late sixteenth century, they also provide evidence of another type of group identification – one reflecting modern accounts of class consciousness. In their representation of the parameters of the newly developed relationships between subjects in a changing economic system, plays such as Richard II, Henry VI, Part 2, Richard III, and King John bear witness to the emergence of what many critics consider to be proto-capitalist class affiliations. In this Viewpoint article, I trace the debate over the viability of class identification in Shakespeare's England. The article amplifies existing discussions of class formation to include recent articulations of labile, even contradictory class affiliations that characterize Shakespeare's history plays. Seeing class as a process and not as a fixed category, I argue, enables new critical approaches to Renaissance literature that consistently represents the strategic and constant formation and dissolution of group affiliations, which is evidence of emerging capitalism redefining class-ifications as it re-organizes the relationships between English subjects and their economic and social institutions.