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The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons.

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The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons

By Oliver Arnold

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007

The nature of parliamentary representation in early modern England has long been a defining idea for historians interested in seeing how Parliament and Crown came into conflict in the 1640s. For Whig historians, the embryonic but growing ideas about representation in late Tudor and early Stuart England provided fertile ground leading to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. Parliament was the sounding board through which members of the House of Commons tested their power against an increasingly powerful Crown--a clash that "inevitably" led to complete breakdown in 1642 and civil war. Key to this process was the way in which the House of Commons saw itself as a representative assembly, "the power of the whole realm," as Sir Thomas Smith commented in De Republica Anglorum (1583). Given the importance of representation in early modern England as well as the centrality to political life of Parliament, in The Third Citizen, Oliver Arnold quite rightly wonders why "the legions of critics who followed in the footsteps of [the] pioneers" of historical materialism, never turned their attention to the House of Commons (25). It is a good question, and one whose neglect Arnold's work remedies in quite brilliant detail. He starts by examining the ideas and practices of representation prevalent in the early modern House of Commons before looking at their relationship with the notions of political representation that Shakespeare assimilated into his work, focusing on the first...

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