"And the Middle Ages really weren't that bad..."

Tonight I saw a production of Henry IV--both parts--that was pure theatre magic. But even pure theatre magic isn't always enough to keep me entranced, especially while watching a Shakespeare history, and often I find myself thinking about the politics of the play. Not of writing it, per se--I'm not a scholar of the Elizabethan Age, nor do I claim to be (I just have a semi-ridiculous level of familiarity with the canon)--but of the era it evokes.

In Henry IV, for example, there's much discussion among the nobles (both rebel and loyal) of someone's "powers," by which they mean the number of soldiers at his command. If you think about it, this is almost absurdly republican; you can't win a battle unless you can inspire men to lay their lives on the line for you. That means you either have to "run on the issues" (i.e. convince the prospective soldiers that their lives will be significantly better if the revolt succeeds, or, if you're a loyalist, significantly worse) or provide saludary benefits compelling enough that it's worth the risk of death to obtain them, meaning you're improving quality of life among the commoners.

Monarchy is often thought of as a system of government so static as to be stifling, but that's probably more a flaw of the absolutist monarchy of the 18th century from which so many of our arguments for republicanism were spawned. Medieval monarchy, with all its fiefdoms and instabilities, did give power to the people in this way. Sure, they weren't involved in the day-to-day governance of the polis, but that's just a slightly more conservative form of republicanism than the one we have today; no one who values popular sovereignty or democratic participation does so because they want to decide when the garbage gets picked up each week.

And I won't address the line-of-succession thing vis-a-vis the Hillary candidacy except to say this: we do expect our leaders, then as now, to be moral examples for the country as a whole, and it's reasonable to assume that the most direct beneficiary of the moral teachings of a strong king will be his son. (This is why Hal's delinquency is so important to the instability of the realm under his father, of course, and why Henry IV has no ability to muster his strength against his failing health for the sake of the throne; at the end of the day, it's his own reign that has failed, not the prospect of his son's.) It's like an endorsement, but without the calculus of expediency; a man with whom the man I trust spends his time is a man to whom my trust extends.

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By the way, last week's YDN column will actually run next Tuesday. Expect fantastic policy extrapolations.