from Thomas More, The History of King Richard III (ca. 1515)
[the context: Richard and Buckingham, in engineering their takeover of the realm, have staged a scene in which Buckingham, before a large group of citizens, offers Richard the crown several times, but he bashfully refuses--until he is compelled by the shouts of 'the people' (not really the citizens, but their hired plants in the crowd).]
With this there was a great shout, crying kyng Richarde king Richard. And then the lordes went up to the kyng (for so was he from that time called) and the people departed, talkyng diversly of the matter every man as his fantasye gave hym. But muche they talked and marveiled of the maner of this dealing, that the matter was on both partes made so straunge, as though neither had ever communed with the other thereof before, when that themselves wel wist there was no man so dul that heard them, but he perceived wel inough, that all the matter was made betwene them. Howbeit somme excused that agayne, and sayde all must be done in good order though. And men must sometime for the manner sake not bee a knowen what they knowe. For at the consecracion of a bishop, every man woteth well by the paying for his bulles, that he purposeth to be one, & though he paye for nothing elles. And yet must he bee twise asked whyther he wil be bishop or no, and he muste twyse say naye, and at the third tyme take it as compelled ther unto by his owne wyll.
And in a stage play all the people know right wel, that he that playeth the sowdayne is percase as sowter. [that is, the actor playing the sultan is actually a shoemaker]. Yet if one should have so little sense to shewe out of seasonne what acquaintance he hath with him, and calle him by his owne name whyle he standeth in his magestie, one of his tormentors might hap to break his head, and worth[il]y [so] for marring of the play. And so they said that these matters bee Kynges games, as it were stage playes, and for the more part plaied upon scafoldes. In which pore men be but the lokers on. And thei that wise be, wil medle no farther. For they that sometyme step up and play with them, when they cannot play their partes, they disorder the play & do themselves no good.
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Few passages from early modern literature capture better the signature chiasmus of the new historicism, "the theatricality of power and power of theatricality," than More's incisive description of the crowd's response to Richard III's usurpation of the crown. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Stephen Greenblatt argues that this passage ties into More’s own problematic response to the demands that power makes on the individual. For Greenblatt, the theatrical metaphor is central to understanding the destructive tensions between the monastic and intellectual inner life he craved and the relentless performance and self-fashioning that life at court demanded. Greenblatt argues that “the theatrical metaphor turns inward, expressing his tragicomic perception of life lived at a perpetual remove from reality. All men are caught up in receding layers of fantasy: the spectator laughs or is angry to see another pride himself on a mere fiction, while he himself is no less a player, no less entrameled in fantasy. More’s sense of human absurdity then at once leads him to social criticism and undermines that criticism, enabling him to ridicule the ideology of the powerful but severely limiting the practical consequences of that ridicule.”
“But why should men submit to fantasies,” Greenblatt asks, “that will not nourish or sustain them? In part, More’s answer is power, whose quintessential sign is the ability to impose one’s fictions upon the world: the more outrageous the fiction, the more impressive the manifestation of power.”
I love Greenblatt’s reading, and especially his definition of power here, but I also want to resist the deeply existential turn of Greenblatt's thought as it relates to how More understood power. More is writing about a world in which political authority has been evacuated of its metaphysical force through an openly grotesque and coercive ritual display, one in which the performative powers of state and religion have become mere performance. It is the brute power of tyranny. But More could imagine, I think, that after the removal of the tyrant, the state could be reconstituted in a way to reclaim some metaphysical authority (a return, in other words, to political theology).
What is the regular person to do, how does one find a basis for action? One choice is to foolishly call out the truth, like the naïve audience member who recognizes the sultan as the shoemaker. More depicts this as a death-wish and, cannily, it was for him once he entered that stage/scaffold. Is another choice to see the political as existing in a sphere entirely separate from the everyday, not unlike professional theater?
And for those inhabiting the modern liberal state, where “liberty” and “rights” are the closest approximations to a metaphysical grounding for political authority, isn’t—or shouldn’t—our understanding of power be close to Greenblatt’s (as opposed to the recuperation that a political theology provides More)?
how much of greenblatt's approach was fueled by the political shenanigans of the early 1970s? i know he's influenced by european post-structuralist thought, but this passage feels like it could also be a reading of the nixon administration and its own "receding layers of fantasy."
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