The Tragedy of Politics: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare uses the story of the two lovers to dramatize the tragedy of politics. The excessive love of self that characterizes the two serves as a metaphor for the larger story of Rome's descent into tyranny. Unless love of country, that is, love of one's fellow-citizens, tempers self-love, a state loses its capacity to sustain even that degree of freedom that belongs to kingly rule. But Shakespeare also depicts the love of Antony and Cleopatra for each other as something noble; there is something worthy of our love that is higher than freedom. The tragedy of politics lies in the opposition of these two loves.     

Odd bedfellows: Nietzsche and Mill on marriage

This paper examines Nietzsche's views on love and marriage in the works of his middle period. Contrary to the general consensus in the secondary literature regarding Nietzsche's ideas on these matters, it shows that he offers several positive reflections on love and marriage. Indeed, at times he accepts that friendship is possible between the genders and even models marriage on friendship. Modelling marriage on friendship creates an overlap between Nietzsche's thought and that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. However, it is argued here that, albeit for different reasons, none of these visions of marriage as friendship succeeds in fully accommodating sexuality.     

Friendship and love in the lives of two twelfth-century English saints

For twelfth-century religious the vow of chastity did not mean renouncing a rich affective life. Along with the love of God, Aelred of Rievaulx and Christina of Markyate both found room in their lives for profound emotional relationships with several individuals. These relationships were not carnal but to call them ‘friendship’ underestimates their strength and passion. The modern distinction between passionate sexual love and passionless asexual friendship is inappropriate here. ‘Spiritual love’ best describes these relationships: deep and exclusive without being carnal, involving the passions of the soul rather than those of the body. Vitae survive for both Christina and Aelred, and Aelred also wrote several treatises on the subject of love and friendship. The biographers and Aelred himself followed in a medieval tradition of using the language of erotic love to describe spiritual relationships. These spiritual love relationships did not fit the monastic ideal of love (caritas) towards all; they were particular and exclusive (in each person's life, the several relationships were sequetial, not simultaneous). But they do indicate that twelfth-century monasticism provided a channel for the emotions we today connect with erotic love, without the rupture of vows of chastity or virginity.     

Marriage and the Law: Politics and Theology in Measure for Measure

Abstract

In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare portrays a clearly political problem: a city whose citizens are so unable to govern themselves that only the most severe legal punishments appear capable of restoring civic order. Yet the play's conclusion, for all its dramatic fireworks, does not obviously resolve this problem. All that happens, it appears, is that everyone gets married. Understanding marriage's political significance, therefore, is key to unraveling the play's political teaching. By carefully framing marriage within Pauline language of sin and grace—and in particular by using the image of death and rebirth through baptism—Shakespeare offers a theological as well as a political image of a kind of self-government capable of easing the city's legal dilemmas and reconciling justice with mercy.     

A Thematic Analysis of “Love” and “Truth” in Caritas in Veritate

Abstract

The encyclical Caritas in veritate uses love as its guiding theological theme, and this innovation exposes the encyclical to critical reflections from some of the greatest theological minds of the mid-twentieth century. This article attempts to revive these critiques in order to analyze Benedict XVI’s use of caritas. Does Benedict’s use of love differ from his predecessors, and is it in any way more adequate? Are the critiques leveled against a social ethic of love merely the product of a hopelessly cynical age, or is love merely a species of interpersonal amity-inapplicable to broader social contexts? Does the fusion of love with the fundamentally contested notion of truth clarify what the Pope means by caritas, or is this conceptual marriage fraught with imprecision and inconsistencies?     

Disciplined love: the Chinese Communist Party’s wartime restrictions on cadre love and marriage

ABSTRACT

During the Chinese War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the Civil War, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) imposed restrictions on the marriage of its cadres, so as to maintain the Party’s effective control and combat cohesion. The Central Committee of the CCP did not issue uniform regulations on this topic; most decisions were made by the base areas, with the indirect support of the Central Committee. Marriage and love are personal matters, and the restrictions certainly caused emotional suffering for ordinary cadres affected. However, there were important reasons for the CCP’s implementation of these measures. Through punishment and guidance, these restrictions were carried out smoothly and did not cause great upheaval. As love and marriage became areas subject to the political power of the CCP, they unexpectedly became a focal point of the collision between individuality and Party spirit and between the individual and the group.     

‘Las Vegas is not where we are’: Queer readings of the Civil Partnership Act

This article interrogates the United Kingdom's new Civil Partnership Act, which is intended to create a new legal status of ‘civil partner’. The Act confers benefits and imposes legal responsibilities on those same-sex couples who register their relationships. Analysing the Governmental material produced in support of the legislation, as well as Parliamentary debates, the article provides a critical analysis of the ideological underpinnings of civil partnership. A series of dichotomies—marriage/not marriage; sex/no sex; status/contract; conjugality/care; love/money; responsibilities/rights—informs the Government's construction of the category of ‘same-sex partner’. Those dichotomies lend themselves to a deconstructive analysis, applying the insights of queer theory. The result is a skepticism regarding the Act's replication of a marriage model for same-sex couples. Instead, the article concludes by advocating the search for more pluralistic and flexible legal models that better represent the diversity of relationship forms found today.     

Problematic Conjugations: Women’s Agency,Marriage and Domestic Violence in Indonesia

Abstract:

This paper examines women’s experience of domestic violence within marriage in Makassar, South Sulawesi. It analyses the meaning of marriage for men and women, the roles of men and women within marriage, shifts in marriage practices – particularly the shift from arranged to “love” marriage – and unequal gender positions within marriage. We discuss some salient issues in the “margins of marriage” in Indonesia: polygyny and constructions of masculinity that condone the practice of polygyny/affairs, and attitudes towards divorce, particularly for women. We then examine women’s perception of the causes and triggers of domestic violence as revealed by fieldwork data, using the lens of women’s agency. Our findings are that women perceive that their expressions of agency – for instance in challenging men’s authority, moral righteousness and adequacy as breadwinners – are the most common triggers for male violence within marriage. Finally, we discuss the difficulty for women of escaping domestic violence, thereby getting some purchase on the relative capacity of women to resist, deflect or deal with the violence.     

Ardent Service: Female Eroticism and New Life Ethics in Gertrude Dix's The Image Breakers (1900)

Gertrude Dix's socialist-feminist novel, The Image Breakers (1895) has perplexed twentieth-century critics by its brief, short-circuited representation of homoerotic affection between the two female protagonists. In answer, this essay roots the women's relationship in the wider social, historical context of New Life politics and ethics in the 1890s. Members of the Fellowship of the New Life heralded not merely a variety of alternative lifestyles including vegetarianism and co-education, but also extensive discussion about sexual mindfulness and generosity. The charismatic seer and inspiration for the FNL, James Hinton, preached that utopia could be achieved by practicing an erotically-charged altruism. If, as Sharon Marcus has claimed, such female mutual devotion was common and perceived as normative, it was particularly affirmed by ethical-socialist culture. In the novel, Leslie Ardent's loving service to Rosalind is fuelled by her political mission and desire for self-realization. Through this female intimacy, Dix evokes the initial phase of New Life socialism as Hinton and his followers had espoused it. By contrast, the women's heterosexual relationships are more troubling, as male comrades pressure them respectively into heterosexual marriage and free love. In order to discredit heterosexual free love, Dix paints its proponent as a disturbed anarchist, rather than admit that historically some in ethical-socialist circles had advocated polyamoury. Nor does she acknowledge the philosophical convergences between collective anarchism and ethical socialism at the fin de siècle, though she herself was engaged in radical communities. Through her indictment of free love, Dix punctures the utopian vision of a pure, selfless, erotic affection flowing between individuals; figuratively, the novel re-enacts the collapse of Hinton's own reputation from seer to seducer. Echoing scenarios by other female ethical-socialist writers, the early intimacy between Rosalind and Leslie then serves the function of nostalgia, symbolizing a now-lost stage of New Life optimism and association.     

Trading Sentiments

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between commerce, cross-cultural friendship and empire in the published Voyages of Pacific salt pork trader John Turnbull. Turnbull published two versions of his Voyages, the first in 1805 and the second in 1813. Through exposing the variations between the two versions of his Voyages and analysing the reception of each text in the burgeoning periodical literature at the time, I explore how his commercially oriented critiques of cross-cultural friendship transformed into unbridled enthusiasm in the second reprint. I explain this shift as both a consequence of a shift in genre, from commercial voyaging to scientific voyaging, and as a reflection of two competing ideas of the relationship between friendship and commerce. The first version reflects a Smithian ideal, where friendship is excluded from commerce, while the second version shows a natural law conception of friendship as commercial imperialism in its ideal, and morally virtuous, form.     

Measuring Inequality: A Fortran Program for the Geni Index,Schutz Coefficient,and Lorenz Curve

Abstract

A new occupational stratification scale, “HISCAM” (historical CAMSIS), has been developed to facilitate the analysis of data coded to the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations. This article describes the derivation and properties of the HISCAM measure. The scale was derived using patterns of inter-generational occupational connections, replicating a method of “social interaction distance” analysis which is widely used in contemporary sociology. Analysis was performed on data for the period of 1800–1938, principally derived from marriage registers covering Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and encompassing over two million inter-generational relationships. Researchers report how several different HISCAM scales were evaluated and show how this approach can explain social stratification and inequality in the past.     

Cross-cultural sexual narratives and gendered reception in Republican China

ABSTRACT

This article examines nonfiction sexual narratives inspired by foreign thought in Republican China. It highlights female viewpoints to recover their hidden voices in history and shows the socio-cultural significance of the gendered reception of cross-cultural theories. I focus on three foreign female thinkers – Ellen Key, Emma Goldman, and Alexandra Kollontai – whose works stood for different schools of free love and drew numerous adherents in China. My study shows a nuanced but telling difference in the focuses of sexual narratives along gender lines. Whereas male writers sought to modernize marriage and liberate sexuality from socio-eugenic perspectives, female writers pursued sexual autonomy from relatively more personal stances. The rhetorical feature of Chinese female essayists, I argue, was essentially iconoclastic towards sexual conventions and yet reticent about free sexuality, as opposed to the progressive eloquence often shown in male writings about sexual matters. In sum, this article illustrates how Chinese female essayists retained gender propriety when openly addressing intimate matters, while male writers glamorized free sexuality and free love as a panacea for nation-strengthening and social/racial progress in a cross-cultural context.     

The Uses and Abuses of Amity in Mid-Tudor Diplomacy, 1542–1560

Abstract

Amity, an affective as well as pragmatic political relationship, was the primary mechanism of mid-Tudor foreign policy. It was often the first step toward a formal alliance, but it did not constitute a binding agreement in itself. In fact, political friendship’s inherent legal ambiguity allowed the Tudors to work around the strictures of existing international treaties when diplomatic circumstances changed and it became necessary to reevaluate relationships abroad. Amity’s flexibility could also limit its effectiveness as a collaborative partnership. This was especially the case if two parties challenged a consensus in the international community. In negotiating amity diplomats appealed to moral, affective, and contractual obligations simultaneously. They did not acknowledge any categorical difference between emotive personal friendship and utilitarian public amity. Rather, they asserted that loving friends at once promoted each other’s strategic advantage and growth in virtue. Friendship was ultimately grounded in mutual trust, which was established by personal encounters and reinforced through law and ritual. This essay considers the application of amity in Anglo-Imperial, Anglo-Schmalkalden, and Anglo-Scottish contexts in 1542–1560 as a basis for comparative analysis.     

Marina Carr’s Hecuba: agency,anger and correcting Euripides

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on Marina Carr’s 2015 adaptation of Hecuba for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hecuba sees Carr return to a fascination with Greek tragedy, difficult female characters and reimagining foundational myths. Of all Euripides’ plays Hecuba has rarely been popular, yet the themes Carr prises open – of violence, desire, gendered experience and the politics of perspective – are acutely topical. Indeed, Hecuba seemed to anticipate the frustrations that erupted on 28 October 2015 in response to the Abbey Theatre’s “Waking the Nation” programme. Drawing on twentieth and twenty-first century debates around the politics of tragic form, Roland Barthes theorising of myth, and the tradition of Greek adaptation in modern Irish drama, this paper examines how Hecuba reorients its sources. It goes on to assess the outcomes of these reorientations in order to problematise the critical predisposition to find an inevitably progressive poetics/politics in her engagement with tragic myths.     

Is Francesco Patrizi’s L’Amorosa Filosofia a heterodox reading of the Symposium?

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on L’Amorosa Filosofia, perhaps the most compelling response to Ficino’s De Amore produced in the sixteenth century, as it is centered on the notion of love as philautia, based upon a naturalistic and psychological interpretation. The learned lady Tarquinia Molza, the most important interlocutor of Francesco Patrizi, affirms that love, from its beginnings in the inner self to its end, when reaching the divine, cannot but be a phenomenon that engages the sense of touch, showing a naturalistic attitude toward the body and an interest in the mediation between matter and spirit. Contrary to popular notions of self-love as selfish and callous, an honest man must necessarily love himself first in order to love others. In The Praise of Folly, Erasmus also tackles the concept, making Folly praise Philautia as a fundamental means for happiness. More relevant to Patrizi’s work, in Mario Equicola’s De Natura de Amore, there is a long digression on the virtues of self-love.     

Sir Charles Grandison,Natural Law and the Fictionalised English Gentleman

This article enquires into the relation between enlightened humanist conceptions of natural law and the period novel's fictionalization of the English gentleman in the context of its marriage plot. Marriage played a key role in enlightened theorisations of natural law precisely as an institution capable of grounding familial and civil life in an emerging concept of human nature. Yet public debate about the state's role in the regulation of marriage in mid-eighteenth-century England demonstrates that natural law lent itself to very different models of sovereignty and governance. The antinomies that characterized natural law's circulation in the English context are uniquely fictionalized in Samuel Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), a lengthy parallel narrative of failed courtship and matrimonial felicity that draws upon Pufendorf's model of natural law, yet is only partly implicated in its secular humanism. The novel's eponymous gentleman hero – a ‘Man of Religion and Virtue’ – exemplifies a mix of Anglican piety, civic virtue and disinterested sympathy that is sanctioned by natural law and sealed by the English marriage plot.     

Tocqueville: Democratic Politics and the Modern Soul. Introduction

Abstract

This paper explores Prince Hal's relationships with his great friend Falstaff and his great enemy Hotspur, who dominate the young prince's life as he prepares to rule England and conquer France. Hotspur and Falstaff could not be more different, and seem deliberately drawn by Shakespeare to represent distinctive and opposing points of view: Hotspur is an honor-loving and courageous warrior who covets danger and fame, Falstaff a selfish and dishonorable rationalist who has no regard for danger or fame. I will argue that the lessons Hal learns from Hotspur and Falstaff, especially concerning honor, are the key to his stunning political success. While Hal seems to stand somewhere between these two extremes, and so might be characterized as moderately attached to honor, I will question this conclusion and suggest another.     

Ohitorisama,Singlehood and Agency in Japan

Abstract:

Postwar Japanese society has experienced significant demographic shifts. Of particular note are trends in marriage delay, increased divorce, increased rates of lifelong singlehood and an increased proportion of life spent unmarried. In this context, singlehood is increasingly experienced by women, for at least some period in their adult lives. Nonetheless, while greater numbers of Japanese are living as singles for a greater portion of their lives, marriage and childbearing remain key markers of contemporary Japanese womanhood. Living outside marriage – as a single, divorced or widowed person – suggests divergence from the ideal, even if it is just an unavoidable temporary state. This paper explores singlehood as a contested space of ideals and practices, and presents the notion of ohitorisama as one model of contemporary female singlehood.     

Resistance,Charity, and Rebirth in Roberto Rossellini's Rome,Open City

Abstract

With its use of contemporary events, location shots, and a plot that mixes comedy, tragedy, and passion play, Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Rome, Open City founded the movement known as “Italian Neo-Realism.” The film vividly presents the Christian teaching on the relation between religion and politics. Rossellini asserts that a Christian Europe can be reconstructed only on a foundation of charity rather than hate, vengeance, or even justified punishment for Nazi crimes. It is not on the basis of tales of resistance that Italians and Europeans can be reborn, Rossellini argues, but on the basis of the Christian command to “love your enemies.” European rebirth means the installation of a moral order that makes parenthood feasible and respectable. By reflecting on Rossellini's masterpiece, I examine the triumph and the tragedy of the Christian Democratic Europe that Rome, Open City foretold and helped to found.     

Ta‘isi O.F. Nelson and Sir Maui Pomare Samoans and Māori Reunited

ABSTRACT

This paper unearths the friendship between Samoan nationalist leader Ta‘isi Olaf Frederick Nelson and Māori politician Sir Maui Pomare during the early period of New Zealand's administration of Samoa. It examines the role this friendship played – especially as a line of communication between the Samoan protest movement or Mau, of which Nelson was a leader, and the highest echelons of the New Zealand government – in those years of fraught relations between Samoa and New Zealand. It also explores the significant historical connections that were made, or remade, through this friendship. The relationship between these two men brought Polynesian peoples together in new ways and also directly linked Parihaka, a 19th-century Māori community known for its non-violent resistance against European colonialism, with the later Samoan Mau.