Shakespeare's English history plays: The problems of legitimacy and the relation of politics and morality.

摘要

This dissertation focuses on the problem of political legitimacy as presented in Shakespeare's History plays. I am concerned with the question of how the ruling element of a political order acquires--and how it loses--legitimate authority to rule. In the introduction, I briefly sketch the three most prominent justifications for legitimate political authority (custom, nature, and force), drawing on the ideas of Pocock and Machiavelli. I then turn to an analysis of five of Shakespeare's History plays (King John, Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V), where the problem of legitimacy reveals itself in the most concrete way. Shakespeare is concerned in these plays with men who rule or who desire to rule, and their struggles for power form the basis of his plots. His political actors seek more than power: they seek legitimate power, if only because it is more secure. We are treated in the History plays to a dramatic investigation of that illusive thing, legitimacy, witnessing actual men in an actual polity as they struggle to acquire it.