The new practices and theories of parliamentary representation that
emerged during Elizabeth's and James' reigns shattered the unity of
human agency, redefined the nature of power, transformed the image of
the body politic, and unsettled constructs and concepts as fundamental
as the relation between presence and absence.
In The Third Citizen, Oliver Arnold argues that recovering the
formation of political representation as an effective ideology should
radically change our understanding of early modern political culture,
Shakespeare's political art, and the way Anglo-American critics, for
whom representative democracy is second nature, construe both. In
magisterial readings of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus,
and the First Tetralogy, Arnold discovers a new Shakespeare who was
neither a conservative apologist for monarchy nor a prescient, liberal
champion of the House of Commons but instead a radical thinker and
artist who demystified the ideology of political representation in the
moment of its first flowering. Shakespeare believed that political
representation produced (and required for its reproduction) a new kind
of subject and a new kind of subjectivity, and he fashioned a new kind
of tragedy to represent the loss of power, the fall from dignity, the
false consciousness, and the grief peculiar to the experiences of
representing and of being represented. Representationalism and its
subject mark the beginning of political modernity; Shakespeare's
tragedies greet political representationalism with skepticism,
bleakness, and despair.