The New/Old Feudalism

 Corporations have perhaps been the most persistent and pervasive way that feudalism has survived, maybe starting centuries ago.  

With web 2.0, maybe I, maybe like many, experienced a sense of freedom, for some time, years even, from their demands, constrictions, even economic and emotional predation.  The owners of all this technology seemed to be satisfied with simply being significantly rich and sticking to the work they were satisfied with, which I found benefits in, frequently and soon daily, for free.

I don't know when the combination came to my attention of their overwhelming wealth and their companies' invasive, relentlessly invasive really, harvesting of, sucking up of, whole consumption of, and wholesale marketing of, my information.  What first seemed optional for me to give, at some point, stopped being that way.  And that began to make a sick sense--to them I am, or my identity is, a product.  The old or ancient corollary started to come to light:  for the lord of the manor, are the peasants human workers, or are they livestock?  For the sake of the manor, perhaps, it doesn't matter.

But feudal power structures were, and are, qualitatively different from those of democratic institutions.  So the manor essentially ends at the ballot box, at the voting booth.  Or it did.  Then came Citizens United.  Then came the Heritage Foundation.  Somewhere in there came Reagan.  Charisma with no skill for governance, perhaps with no conscience--useful, feudal, for feudally minded people.  But not enough, and neither of course was Clinton, though his economic policies did make the rich richer.  But then, then came Trump.

To have a king, a malleable one, with no soul politically speaking, no ideals, nothing except the same craving for wealth and power as theirs, and with some of Hitler's horrific gifts for stirring up the worst sorts of darkness in his followers, not to say "This is sick but we'll heal from it together," but to say "you are right, our enemies are outside of us and can be identified by their differences from us," and to plunder not just castles and museums like Hitler did but the wealthiest country in history, natural resources included.  So, they lined up, and, as lords must do to their king, even one they ultimately control, they bowed down.

Fearful of what's ahead, and of not being able to find more freedom.  Grateful, though, that I am very loved and not alone.

The epic reliquary in Shakespeare's Hamlet

 The characterization of Hamlet by Northrop Frye as presenting a “titanic spirit” in its main character certainly is not unusual by type, and, naturally, the adjective he uses could simply be taken as “massive.”  But the original one, or a more original one, “of the quality of the Titan’s,” may offer another and less problematically monolithic way of reading the play.  The Titans aren’t prominent in current classical discourse, but in a sense hide behind the pantheon of gods that they prefigure.  There may be no way to know now how displaced they were as literary figures by the Homeric epics, but for centuries or more, they have been, thoroughly. 

Both the Homeric and the gods appear in the monologue by the first player, or player king, who, narrating the scene between Priam and Pyrrhus, departs from the play’s focus, disrupts the unity of action, abandons Aristotelian conventions to present a gruesome scene that reinstates the theme Shakespeare would read and reread in Ovid:  the rule of all, more or less for the worse, by the unbridled wills of elites, by the passion of the gods.  Along with the return to the Ovidian, by acting and speaking the Player King’s part himself, Shakespeare backtracked from the Aristotelian to the Platonic, taking on the role of rhapsode performed by Ion in the dialogue of the same name.  Translating Homer for and to this new audience, not as any theater titan himself but as performer of a character, Shakespeare offers moments of epic reliquary, of Homeric remnants or fragments in a setting that invites an audience beyond the play. 

To focus on that moment may be to see the play not as an entity unto itself but as massively involved outside of Aristotelian confines, shadowed by its intertexts, full of multiplicities, putting characters into play who themselves are multiplicities as Deleuze and Guattari might say, none in command, none bound by or given justice, all available for a viewer to interact with multiplicitously as well.  Perhaps it actuated what was done to the playwright by the death of his son. 

Plot and Subplot in Shakespeare's Henry V

 W.H. Auden made the claim that King Lear was the first of Shakespeare’s plays since Henry IV to have a subplot, overlooking the one in the next Henry, or the next of the Henriad, Henry V.  It’s an odd omission, since, as he observed about King Lear, the subplot of Henry V parallels the plot—Harry, driven by disaster, goes to war in France in the plot, and in the subplot, Harry’s former partners in crime, driven by disaster, go to war in France.  It’s not important whatever might have led Auden to overlook it, but the nature of the relationship between plot and subplot very well may be. 

The death of Sir John Falstaff, the disaster that set his former followers off to war, is in a sense a victory for Harry—not that the death itself benefits him necessarily, but that it represents his shedding of his old, essentially dead self—as one of Sir John’s ‘minions of the moon.”  The “use we made” of those times does not require any of the characters in it to ascend with him, and the obvious use that Sir John attempted to make of hi, to leverage an advantage that might let him continue his myriad forms of harm in immunity, meant that nothing like love or genuine friendship had ever connected them. 

The parallel appears clearly in Bardolph’s parody of Harry, his “On, on, on, on, on!  to the breach, to the breach!” counterpointing the king’s rallying cry, and offers a point of contact and contrast, as Harry is taking this new territory, his drive having transcended the insult that instigated it, while these essentially destitute men have no more drive, are more or less dragged in the same direction as the rest of Harry’s army. 

So, the death that leads to more death for them has given life, or land, or both, to him. 

Foundational Subjectivity in Shakespeare's Richard III

 For Hazlitt, Richard III’s drive “to be greater than he is” continues throughout the play, and includes his trying to be seen as higher in worth than the already-lofty social station he was born into; “making use of these advantages to commit unheard-of crimes” might not seem great on its face, but Hazlitt  seems to be assuming that what Richard finds great can also be monstrous.  That idea certainly holds up with his seduction of the woman whose husband he has murdered—he’s crowing, alone, “Was ever woman in this humor won?” may show him in competition with everyone in his memory, for the most reprehensibly persuasive behavior.  He may stay in that mode, of striving for the worst of all time at least toward his enemies (and maintaining a level playing field by seeing everyone else as an enemy), but, contrary to Hazlitt’s characterization, he does end up unable to keep chasing greatness when he ends up alone, with “none else by,” trying to maintain his villain façade, but finding it falls away in the face of his crimes:

Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.                                          Is there a murderer here?  No.  Yes, I am.

In this soliloquy, his archly wicked rhetoric gives away to debate and stumbling repetition:

Alack.  I love myself.  Wherefor?  For any good                         That I myself have done unto myself?                                     O, no!  alas, I rather hate myself                                         For hateful deeds committed by myself.

Harold Bloom dismissed this, basically, as bad writing, and went on to pinpoint a far more obscure moment in Shakespeare’s oeuvre as the one where the subjective human being was born, but if that’s anywhere in Shakespeare’s work, I believe it’s here.  A character dissembling and coming disassembled sees that he has more than one self—he is able to regard and treat himself as an other.