'To Sing Our Bondage Freely': Shakespeare's Scenes of Consent

In Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, consent is the name for the public face of the crime that Lucrece suffers, and also for the public name of the sympathy which the citizens of Rome offer Lucrece when her body is displayed to conclude the poem, when they consent to be spoken for by political representatives. This moment of theater is foundational for our theories of the emergence of representative government and for our sense of the relationship between Shakespeare's aesthetics, his practice of sympathy, and Shakespeare's understanding of politics, his practice of consent. In the poem, Shakespeare does not argue, in proto-Whig fashion, that the institution of political representatives and government based in consent is an inevitable form of political success. Instead, Shakespeare writes a poem which suggests that all of the available forms of sympathy for Lucrece, including the legal sympathy which recognizes her rape as a violation of her consent, have failed her. Shakespeare does not exempt his own poem from this failure of sympathy. My dissertation charts the terms of this failure: if the failure of consent, even and especially in moments where consent represents a conclusion that is successful in legal terms, becomes legible as sympathy, than what are the contours of this sympathy? Consent underwrites historical and political approaches to Shakespeare, because both of these modes of Shakespeare criticism assume consent either as an ideal to be reached for or as an imposition of future gains in political liberty onto a past that is imperfectly imagined. I argue, instead, that Shakespeare understands scenes of consent first and foremost as scenes of sympathy, which requires a new understanding of lyric and dramatic authority, of the analogy between political and aesthetic response, and of the consensual practice of Shakespeare's theater.;This new understanding is grounded, in my dissertation, in Shakespeare's careful presentation of scenes of consent. What is expressed as a theory about the relationship between politics and art in Lucrece is explored in practice by Shakespeare's theater, where an audience of citizens is no longer a hypothetical element. Scenes of consent on stage are powerful because the moment of agreement, or of failed agreement, presented there reaches outside the fictional confines of the work itself and suggests a mode of agreement to which the person reading or watching the scene might also agree or disagree. My first chapter argues that Shakespeare stages the failure of his lyric poetry to account for Lucrece's sympathy as a necessary corrective for the all too easy translation of the theater of her voiceless body into the politics of the people's voice. My second chapter turns to an early history play, King John, and finds lurking in the bastard's opportunistic jingoism a particularly English vision of exceptionalist consent. My final chapter reads the third scene of The Merchant of Venice, where Antonio and Shylock appear to come to terms about a loan, as a scene where consent and sympathy are tragically distanced from one another by a failed moment of hearing. In moving from the imaginary audience that so troubles Lucrece to the real audience who may or may not hear Shylock's soliloquies, I argue that the The Merchant of Venice might start to answer the question with which my dissertation begins: if an act of consent can be legally justified but result, as it does in this play, in the victimization of its supposed beneficiaries, then where do we turn to redress the wrongs of consent, especially in a legal and political system, that of the common law, which insists upon consent as the primary avenue of equitable expression itself?...