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Abstract:

Shakespeare, `The Cause of the People', and The Chartist Circular 1839–1842 Left political critics such as Cultural Materialists are now often rather hostile towards Shakespeare, apparently agreeing with William Hazlitt that great poetry such as Shakespeare's tends to be inimical to `the cause of the people', i.e., democracy. This is a changed situation from that when the Communist Arnold Kettle, writing in the 1960s, could take it for granted that Shakespeare was an indispensable author for a radical working-class culture in Britain. This article explores the politics of Shakespeare through an analysis of how he and a selection of his plays are represented in a Chartist newspaper of the early 1840s. It argues that the Chartists saw Shakespeare as, in broad terms, an ally – they are closer to Kettle's position than Hazlitt's, let alone that of contemporary radical Bard-bashers. Nevertheless, their enthusiasm for Shakespeare did not prevent the Chartists dissenting from what they took to be conservative implications in texts such as Coriolanus and Othello – and in ways that seem to anticipate recent ideological critiques of these plays. ( Hamlet the Chartists find a vastly more sympathetic text.) Overall, the explicit political bias of the Chartists' reading of Shakespeare was valuable, alerting them to political implications of the plays, including democratic or progressive ones, that less or differently biased approaches are likely to miss.

Keywords: Shakespeare; Chartism; radical criticism; Hamlet; Othello; Coriolanus; female death; corpse; death; literature; the body

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/09502360600703492

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