Bastards and Usurpers

Abstract

Perhaps we should add that no statement ever made by a distinguished and usually careful historian is harder to accept than this one. If Shakespeare’s attitude is so obscure, how, indeed, can we be sure that it is so unimportant? The importance of the unidentifiable is always difficult to ascertain. The suggestion that there are questions, moreover, “with which political history is alone concerned” suggest the limits of political history, I suspect, and, in context there is room for more than suspicion, that Pollard restricts the concerns of political history. Pollard was doubtless referring to the well-known fact that in King John Shakespeare makes no mention of Magna Carta. Yet Shakespeare was very deeply concerned with the problems of civil war. Are they not problems of political history? Of course, they are not constitutional, but extra-constitutional problems. By this fact alone we are taken beyond the ambit of Pollard’s understanding. It is best to turn directly to Shakespeare’s concerns in political history and, perhaps, the concerns that go beyond political history and that are philosophical concerns with the right political life.

No period of English literature has less to do with politics than that during which English letters reached their zenith, and no English writer’s attitude towards the questions with which alone political history is concerned is more obscure or less important than Shakespeare’s.¹

A.F. Pollard