Plato's Republic and Shakespeare's Rome: A Political Study of the Roman Works (review)
the play that do not glorify war or nationalist expansion as “inadvertent,” as part of the play’s “political unconscious” (209). Henry V’s rhetorical prowess is always taken as somehow transcending its context. Henry’s revival of Hal-like “charm” is insisted upon against Ellis-Fermor’s “much-quoted dictum” that “there is no Henry, only a king” (221) The obvious bad faith in Henry’s dialogue with Williams is noted, as is the shockingness of Henry’s order to slay the French prisoners, but these moments are seen as ones that somehow “get lost in the bigger ones that follow” (239). Here Grady’s scheme is cutting against his own critical awareness. Grady’s epilogue on Hamlet reasserts the most important strand in the argument of his book: the rejection of Althusserian or Foucauldian devaluation of subjectivity. Grady notes that the critics who follow this line (Barker, Eagleton, Belsey) are “radically insensitive to the positive potentiality of Hamlet’s unfixed subjectivity” (252). Yet Grady ties himself into knots trying to avoid any hint of “essentialism,” and has trouble himself supplying any positive content to Hamlet’s interiority. It only exists as resistance — a position that Grady critiqued in Dollimore — and never as an instance or plea for authenticity. Grady reads Hamlet’s first great speech, his rejection of (mere) seeming, as if Hamlet were asserting only the transparency and not also the opacity of his inner feelings. Hamlet’s embrace of “theatricalism” is seen as the key to his positive but nonessentialized selfhood, whereas Hamlet’s embrace of theater at the end of act 2 is precisely based on his humanist belief in the power of theater, especially tragic theater, to get at a person’s inner core. Grady’s discussion of Hamlet, like his discussion of 1 Henry IV, allows him to validate his point about Shakespeare’s effort to imagine what might be called a positive Machiavellianism in these plays, and Grady’s discussion of Hamlet makes it clear how difficult and how important an endeavor it is to assert a positive conception of selfhood within a postmodern theoretical framework. RICHARD STRIER The University of Chicago