Shakespeare and the Reactionary Mind: Counterrevolution, Fascism, Militarism – Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, 31 August 2024

Speakers – John Gillies, Amy Lidster, Björn Quiring, Jennifer Rust and Richard Ashby.

Booking via Eventbrite

Conservatives have always tended to claim Shakespeare as one of their own. In the 1950s, E. M. W. Tillyard developed the influential thesis that
Shakespeare’s plays uphold the traditional social hierarchies and suggest that these hierarchies are embedded in nature. Ulysses’ speech on “degree”
in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ serves as one of the key witnesses in this context. Since Tillyard’s time, scholars have persistently pointed out elements of Shakespeare’s plays that do not fit this assumption: the actions on stage persistently seem to contradict and subvert the noble proclamations of Ulysses and his peers. In the histories and tragedies, the persons on top of the hierarchy mostly seem to end up there by a combination of luck, political manipulation and, first and foremost, the effective use of violence, rather than by any apparent inborn excellence.

Accordingly, Shakespeare’s plays represent a volatile social order in which communal life unfolds as perpetual warfare between interest groups – sometimes open, sometimes covert. With Corey Robin and others, one might venture the hypothesis that this apparent discrepancy between words and deeds delineates a symptomatic ambivalence that characterizes the reactionary worldview: while reactionaries claim to be conservative, their enforcement of traditional hierarchies often takes on the form of a violent interruption of these very traditions. In the name of nature and of “real life”, they voice unprecedented demands that those who are destined to rule may finally be allowed to rule as they must and to keep their inferiors in the subjugated position they deserve. The most extreme form these demands can take is that of fascism, a militant movement of
revolutionary conservatism that, according to Hannah Arendt, has the inherent tendency to destroy everything it ostensibly holds sacred (such as the family, the state and the nation). Shakespeare’s plays (first and foremost, ‘Coriolanus’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘King Lear’ and ‘Hamlet’) have been used to explore this ambivalence, by reactionaries and fascists as well as by their opponents. This one-day symposium aims to investigate this complex relationship.