The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651 9780226363493

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The Corporate Commonwealth

The Corporate Commonwealth Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–­1651 Henry S. Turner

The University of Chicago Press chicago and london

h e n r y s . t u r n e r is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of  America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16   1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-36335-6 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-36349-3 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226363493.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Rutgers University toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Turner, Henry S., author. Title:  The corporate commonwealth : pluralism and political fictions in England, 1516–1651 / Henry S. Turner. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCC 2015041265 | ISBN 9780226363356 (cloth : alk.  paper) | ISBN 9780226363493 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Corporations—Political aspects—England. | Corporations—England—History—16th century. | Corporations—England—History—17th century. | State, The—Philosophy. Classification: LCC JC478.T87 2016 | DDC 322/.3094209031—dc23 LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2015041265 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Rebecca Walkowitz and Lucy Turner-­Walkowitz

Contents

List of Figures  •  ix Preface  •  xi Acknowledgments  •  xxiii 1 Corporation as Common Constitution What Is a Corporation? Persona Ficta Pluralism, Corporations, and the State Toward a Compositional Ontolog y of Corporations

1 10 18 21 23

2

33 37 45 50

The Political Economy of Sir  Thomas Smith A New Philosophy of Value The Society of Commonwealth The Law of Commonwealth

3 Richard Hooker’s Corporate Christians Discipline as Constitution: Calvin in Geneva The Nature of the Ecclesiastical Polity The Corporate Personality of the Society Supernatural The King’s Two Publics From the Laws to Leviathan: Temporalities of the Corporation 4

The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Corporation “Fine, Try Out, Alter, Change, Reduce, Turn and Transmute”: Smith’s Society of the New Art Planting the Commonwealth: Smith’s Ulster Project

59 64 66 68 73 78

83 85 89

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“To Buy, Sel, Trucke, Change and Permute Al”: Hakluyt’s Corporate Imaginary In a Joint and Corporate Voice Translating Value Free Liberty, Power, and Authority; or . . .

96 100 103 107

5

Dekker and Company The Companies and Their Art Sharing the Company Dekker’s Corporate Theater: The Shoemaker’s Holiday The Character of the Corporate Person

117 120 125 130 138

6

Shakespeare’s Thing of Nothing Shares, Parts, and Personation: Hamlet Incorporate in Rome: Titus Andronicus and  Julius Caesar The Plague of Company in the Body o’th’ Weal: Timon of Athens and Coriolanus

145 148 156 166

Francis Bacon’s Political Ecology Collecting the Notion Common Forms: Axioms and Words Incorporate Form and Corporate Spirit The Politics of Nature The State of Nature: New Atlantis

175 178 182 188 191 195

7

8 Leviathan, Incorporated “Aristotelity” Persons Natural, Artificial, and Fictional Persons Mechanical, Theatrical, and Real

203 205 212 219

Coda: Universitas, 1216–­2016

225

Notes  •  237 Bibliography  •  273 Index  •  297

Figures

1. Friends in a garden (1518)  2 2. Utopia (1518): title page  5 3. Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir  Thomas More (1527)  6 4. “Orders set owt by S[i]r Thomas Smyth knight” (1573)  92 5. Principal Navigations: commodities and their origins  105 6, 7. Principal Navigations: Edward Wright’s world map (1598–1600) 110–111 8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

211

Preface Among the laws that rule human societies there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased. —­a l e x i s d e t o c q u e v i l l e , Democracy in America

It will be obvious to all readers, whatever their profession or convictions, that we are living in a moment when corporations have assumed an un­ paralleled cultural and political influence, along with the wealth to ensure that this influence is widely felt—­so widely, in fact, as to be almost beneath notice. Wherever we turn—­international conflicts, environmental disasters, health care, agribusiness, campaign finance law, higher education—­the fin­ gerprints of the corporation extend far beyond market transactions to touch almost all aspects of daily life, giving a new and more insidious meaning to Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand. The corporation stands before us as an uncanny presence: on the one hand, it has the status of a legal person, but on the other it is a collective association made up of many different living individuals. The corporation has a “personality,” but it is also a group; in short, it manifests what Otto von Gierke, the great nineteenth-­century his­ torian of corporations, called Gessemtpersönlichkeit: the peculiar idea of group personality.1 All of us are familiar with groups made up of individual persons: fami­ lies, teams, crowds, classes, and societies. Many readers would also accept the notion that the individual person can be said to contain multitudes, a core insight of both psychoanalysis and of sociology, in their own ways. But it is harder to think about the group person as a coincidental form—­about the person who is also a group and the group that is also a person—­and our ongoing debates about the definition and power of corporations today is a symptom of this difficulty. The notion of a group person often seems like a confusion of categories, if not a grotesque distortion of common sense and

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natural fact, with the result that we struggle to attribute to group persons characteristics that we have derived from the study of  individuals: will, agency, and action, moral ideas of freedom, responsibility and justice, expectations about voice, affect, and identity. More abstractly, many people shrink before the proposition that corpora­ tions have an ontological status that is distinct from the members that com­ pose them—­that they are somehow “real” beings with their own distinctive characteristics and qualities. Despite the fact that the natural and social sci­ ences can offer many examples of complex systems, both organic and inor­ ganic, that exhibit features that cannot be attributed to any one of their con­ stituent parts (the problem of emergent properties), and despite our own intuitive grasp of the notion that many aggregate things in everyday life have a distinctive status and even a kind of “character” (families, schools, neigh­ borhoods), we balk at the notion that group persons like corporations could somehow have “real” personalities and “real” rights. If we consider the idea at all seriously, we do so either because we view corporations as representa­ tive forms on the model of larger political groups (a view that entails its own questionable presuppositions) or with a vague sense that we are contemplat­ ing something slightly irrational, or even genuinely terrifying: a creature of science fiction, or of conspiracy theory, or of totalitarianism. The history of how the corporation became such a ubiquitous feature of our contemporary world is less familiar to us than it should be, nor do most people realize how many different kinds of corporation used to flourish in earlier centuries as an organizing principle for public, everyday life.2 The most familiar type of corporation today—­the joint-­stock, limited-­liability, for-­ profit type—­is, historically speaking, a relative latecomer to the Western world, appearing in its modern form in England only as of the 1550s. It joined a host of long-­standing corporate groups: the international church, the national kingdom or realm, Parliament, individual towns and cities, guilds and reli­ gious confraternities, universities, hospitals, even individual parish churches. All were corporations, and all enjoyed rights, powers, and freedoms whose limits could be difficult to determine, both in relation to one another and in relation to the sovereign who putatively authorized them. Even the vocabulary of the period can surprise us: the most important term for “corporation” in early modern law, for instance, was not corpus or corporatus but universitas, the root of our “university”: literally a “turning into one” comparable to that iconic signature of eighteenth-­century American politics, e pluribus unum, but an idea that looked back to the medieval and classical ideas about political community rather than forward to the contractual and liberal models of later centuries.

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The conceptual and historical fold between these two signature concepts of group life opens the space of inquiry for the book that follows. It has been motivated by an unexpected premise: the crisis of twenty-­first-­century po­ litical life is not that we suffer from an excess of corporations but that we have too  few, especially corporations of an authentically public type. We suf­ fer, in short, from a corporate monoculture of the for-­profit, commercial form, and we have forgotten how diverse and how significant corporations could be as a mode of organizing our collective purposes and our systems of  value. How did early modern writers make sense of a collectivity that was at once imaginary and material, coherent but unbounded, “many” but at the same time also “one”? What can the history of the corporation tell us about our own moment, when public goods are increasingly privatized and citizens seek new models of association and meaningful political action? Could a future for the “commons” be written inside a corporate form? For the corporation turns out to be a remarkably flexible and long-­lived person: in it we find a figure for group identity and group purpose that, while obviously changing according to historical circumstance, nevertheless has some claim to a special transhistori­ cal importance. The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–­1651 finds its inspiration in a period that was decisive in the life of cor­ porations: extending from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), it traces how corporate ideas and institutions were used by English writers to confront problems that were fundamental to their politi­ cal thought and their lived political experience. But it also aims to show how unexpected their political imagination can appear to modern eyes. Ever since Richard Helgerson’s influential Forms of Nationhood, for instance, stu­ dents of early modern culture have regarded the late sixteenth century as a generational moment when national ideas became newly prominent for En­ glish writers in many different domains of activity, from law and commerce to history writing and religious polemic to epic poetry and the public theater.3 But The Corporate Commonwealth recovers how this national imaginary was itself composed out of many overlapping and often competing corporate bod­ ies, each with its own rights and jurisdictions, its own purposes and affective characteristics, its demands for allegiance and its powers of exclusion. Indeed, corporations were fundamental to the development of many in­ stitutions that are taken to be typical of modernity: The rise of the state as a supreme political authority over national territory, and its differentiation as a secular institution from the international body of the church. The emergence of a public dimension to collective life, and with it the associated notion of civil society. A general transformation in modes of production, exchange, and

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consumption that was typical of a capitalist system, and the colonization ef­ forts that extended this system so that it eventually became a global one. The development of new scientific methods for understanding the natural world, and the collaborative institutions in which these methods were debated and made truthful. Not least, the flowering of English letters and the rise of the writer who remains the most recognizable figure of the English Renaissance, if not of all English literature, William Shakespeare. Unless they are specialists in Renaissance drama, many people are surprised to learn that Shakespeare’s theater company was also one of the most successful joint-­stock companies of his period, enduring for nearly fifty years and generating profits for him and his fellows on a scale that other actors could only dream about. But even Shakespeareans can be surprised to learn how common joint-­stock structures were becoming in Shakespeare’s moment, how many other kinds of corpora­ tions flourished alongside them, and how significant corporate institutions and corporate ideas were to almost every aspect of early modern life. Because the chapters that follow cover a long chronological span, and since each chapter introduces a different stage in the conceptual architec­ ture of the book as a whole, it will be helpful to provide a brief sketch of the book’s overall arguments and the structure of their exposition. Each chap­ ter takes up a cluster of closely related corporate figures: commonwealth, society, and Parliament; Christ, church, and “public”; joint-­stock company and colony; city, guild, and play company; actor, part, and character; phil­ osophical “notion,” animating spirit, and natural body; people, sovereign, and state. Several of these types also appear across chapters, notably “soci­ ety,” “person,” “company,” and, of course, “commonwealth.” I have arranged the chapters chronologically in order to capture the broad shift in corpo­ rate thinking that in my view characterizes the period covered by the book as a whole. This arrangement has allowed me to juxtapose different types of corporate figures and the problems they raise somewhat more sharply, while also preserving some sense of continuity among different writers. By setting More’s Utopia at one end of a long historical development and at the other the work of Hobbes as a defining horizon for our own moment, we can see a transition in political thought and in political life that the history of the corporation can help us understand. It is a movement from a world in which church, guild, city, university, or trading company together pro­ vided the zones of activity in which to forge a political identity and test its capacities to one in which the state as a whole provides that field of defini­ tion; a movement from a political subject defined through his or her many overlapping affiliations, privileges, and duties to the citizen of the seven­

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xv

teenth and eighteenth centuries, who owes his or her primary allegiance to a state defined abstractly as the sovereign legal authority over a national territory. At the same time, however, the book aims to show the limits of a theory of the state and to argue in favor of a political theory rooted in a historical un­ derstanding of the diversity of corporate associational life, an account first developed by Gierke and extended in the early twentieth century by a group of historians and political theorists loosely known as the English pluralists: Frederick William Maitland (1850–­1906), John Neville Figgis (1866–­1919), Ernest Barker (1874–­1960), George Douglas Howard Cole (1889–­1959), and Harold Laski (1893–­1950).4 At a moment when the definition of the “politi­ cal” has become one of the signature theoretical problems of scholarship across the academy—­whether in reference to the traditions of republican­ ism and ideas of citizenship; to theories of contract and liberalism; or to the more recent problematics of biopolitics, aesthetics, and phenomenology—­it is surprising to find that the ubiquity of corporatist arguments in the early modern period has generally gone unremarked.5 But the analytical value of the corporation as both practical institution and philosophical ideal, as legal fact and as fictional figure, is revealed above all in moments when it brings into view the prior question of what constitutes the “political” domain in the first place. For this reason, the history of corporations opens a window onto the way the several traditions of political thought that are characteris­ tic of the early modern period come to constitute themselves as traditions, whether by borrowing from intellectual domains that have their own dis­ tinct vocabularies and problems but intersect with political philosophy’s pre­ occupations, or by finding a new theoretical justification for activities that ultimately have profound political implications but are not exclusively or even primarily political in their purposes. The point has been especially well dem­ onstrated by recent scholarship in the area of political theology, for instance, where we see that it is impossible to separate political ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, or political representation from their entanglement in centuries of theological argument and ritual, in which corporate forms play a central role. But the resources for thinking about the problems raised by the corpora­ tion derive from many other areas besides: from theology, certainly, and from law and economy, of course, but also from philosophy, including natural phi­ losophy, or what will come to be called science, and from literature, especially the fictions of utopian writing and of theater—­the history of the corporation reveals how each domain regularly overlaps with and borrows from all the others.

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Over the book’s historicist impulse, therefore, sits a broader philosophi­ cal interest in how the corporation sheds light on different definitions for a political idea, from legal arguments about sovereignty and obedience, Par­ liament and office, and theories of contract and representation, to more ab­ stract problems concerning the place of value in the definition of political ideas, and the nature of group life in general—­including, most broadly, ways of understanding relationships between parts and whole, and of imagin­ ing the whole itself as a form that nevertheless always remains open to new structures of relations with new kinds of entities. Chapter 1 opens these prob­ lems by centering on the example of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. The chapter serves as an introduction to the book and uses More’s work as an emblem in order to establish some of the guiding theoretical issues that are implied in the corporation as a constitutional form of order for a political community. The chapter then surveys the rich legal history of the corporation as both person and group, taking up the nature of fiction as a resource for thinking about corporations and exploring the relationship between fic­tion and other areas of thought, such as philosophy, that have long been a source for political ideas. For the corporation finally suggests to us that “fiction” is best understood as a collection of formal techniques that extend across literature and law, literature and philosophy, even across literature and science.6 I introduce arguments that were typical of the English pluralists and then offer a new approach to corporate identity that emphasizes its mediated and formal qualities. The chapter outlines four dominant ontologies for the corporation that are charac­ teristic of the early modern period and may guide us in our own attempts to make sense of this most perplexing institution. Chapter 2 turns to the work of the Elizabethan jurist and statesman Sir Thomas Smith to show how the problems that More’s Utopia had in­ troduced were taken up by the next generation of humanist writers, who found their ethical, philosophical, and political categories under pressure from commercial notions of  value and who sought both a new vocabulary and a new method for introducing economic concerns into their accounts of public life. More’s work had revealed the distorting effect that economic practices such as enclosure and a legal system of private property were ex­ erting on humanist discussions of De optimo reipublicae statu, as he put it, or “the best state of the commonwealth”; for this reason, it is possible to read Utopia not simply as a work of political philosophy but as a study of what a later historical period would come to call political economy—­a succinct way of characterizing Utopia, in fact, would be to say that it shows the phrase “political economy” to be a special kind of tautology. Through a discussion

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of Smith’s A Discourse of the Commonweal of  This Realm of England (ca. 1549, pub. 1581) and De Republica Anglorum (1565, pub. 1583), the chapter tracks the emergence of a mid-­sixteenth-­century discourse of political economy, showing how categories inherited from Aristotle and Cicero came to be un­ derstood either as species of corporate ideas, on the one hand, or in need of displacement by new ideas of commercial interaction and governance. Chapter 3 then follows Smith into the tumultuous debates over the Eu­ charist and the Book of Common Prayer that preceded the so-­called Eliza­ bethan settlement of religion in 1559, continuing the book’s discussion of Elizabethan political philosophy by turning to the period’s most powerful defense of the English church and English Commonwealth as corpora­ tions on a grand scale: Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593). At every moment in Hooker’s Laws, one is reminded of how Eliza­ bethan political thought passes through the doors of church history. For in addition to many points of contention that surrounded specific rituals of the church—­baptism, public prayer, the nature of the Eucharist and of transubstantiation—­the main arguments between Hooker and the noncon­ formist writers he opposed concerned nothing less than the constitutional arrangement and jurisdictional authority of “politique societie” and specifi­ cally “of that politique societie which is the Church,” as Hooker defines it. By wielding corporatist arguments with great subtlety, Hooker formulates a philosophy of law that is without parallel among his contemporaries, in­ cluding the relation between divine, natural, and human or positive law. He offers a far-­reaching discussion of what we are apt today to describe somewhat neutrally as the “relation” between the principles of church and state, a relation that the Laws explores in all its topological difficulty and paradox by means of the category of the “person.” Hooker forges a nascent theory of the public as a corporate body that unites theological and civil life, and he articulates a major statement about the nature of sovereignty that is grounded in a detailed defense of the monarch’s ultimate jurisdiction over ecclesiastical order. Finally, Hooker’s theory of commonwealth illuminates several theoretical problems implied in the very nature of a political unity that are relevant to a more general theory of corporations, and his detailed responses to Presbyterian arguments point up misunderstandings of such a theory that remain current today. Chapter 4 marks a turning point in the book by introducing for the first time the early modern ancestors of the commercial corporations that loom so large over our own moment: the joint-­stock companies organized for coloni­ zation and international trade through a combination of royal sponsorship

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and private enterprise. The joint-­stock companies illustrate especially clearly the practical limits of the period’s philosophical arguments concerning the nature of sovereignty, and they raise a series of problems concerning corpo­ rate membership, speech, and action that are vital to understanding the long history of the corporation as a form of “body politic.” The chapter opens by returning to the problem of Elizabethan political economy by way of two corporate ventures founded by Sir Thomas Smith at the end of his life: the Society for the New Art (1573–­75), one of several projects designed to foster industry on behalf of the nascent Elizabethan state, and a separate joint-­stock company organized by Smith and his son to support the Crown’s colonization efforts in Ireland (1571–­77). Both ventures failed spectacularly, but they show how important corporate forms were be­coming to early modern statesmen as they sought to fill a perceived gap in political concepts by experimenting with new models of collective association, technological innovation, and mercan­ tile exchange. The chapter then tracks the political fortunes of these corporate ventures from Ireland to Russia and Virginia, as recounted in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589, pub. 1598–­1600). Hakluyt’s work vividly displays the salient formal features of the joint-­stock company and the challenges of what I refer to as its “compositional” nature: it shows the corporation as a system of adminis­ tration with distinctive modes of gathering, recording, preserving, dissemi­ nating, and archiving information as a form of capital; the corporation as a technological “project,” to borrow a term from the commonwealth discourse of the later sixteenth century, that aims to assemble people and things; the corporation as a group person whose head can emerge at any point and who employs the hands, eyes, and mouths of its representatives, who begin to move on its behalf and speak in its name. Over the course of Hakluyt’s sprawling history, the joint-­stock corporation appears as an apostrophic, he­ roic subjectivity endowed with fully political rights of self-­governance, free­ dom of action, and self-­regulation, answerable in theory only to the Crown but in practice often operating outside it. Confronting the history of the joint-­stock corporation, we realize that the problem of early modern politi­ cal sovereignty cannot simply be stated as one of royal power, state law, or nation formation but must be addressed as a problem that is simultaneously intra-­and transnational: the commercial corporation is less a bounded politi­ cal entity with an inside and an outside than a cluster of sovereignties and powers, freedoms and wills, a rhizomatic extension taking its shape from a series of territorial drives that perpetually press against the limits of their own horizons.

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Chapter 5 is the first of two chapters on the Elizabethan theater at the turn of the seventeenth century: on the regulation of the play companies within an urban world defined by many different corporate bodies, each with its own authorities and jurisdictions; on the status of the actor and his art; and on the companies’ systems of economic management. The focus of chapter 5 is on the guild and livery company as a corporate form, on the place of guilds and livery companies within the “body politic” of the City of London, and the relation of guilds, companies, and city to the commercial institution of the theater. The chapter explores the legal, economic, and sym­ bolic intersections among these urban corporate forms through a reading of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), a play that affirms long-­ standing and increasingly anachronistic modes of corporate affiliation over new ones, including the long-­distance trading companies and the theater itself. By means of characterization and other mimetic techniques, Dekker uses the resources of theater to intervene in an ongoing struggle over the right to assemble publicly in theaters, and to defend both actor and theater as a way of giving a symbolic structure to conflict among social groups and to produce a distinctive system of values for civic life. In this way Dekker’s play affirms a corporate theater modeled on the guild as one of many sites in a pluralistic public space—­a space composed of multiple publics and as­ sociations rather than as a single virtual “public sphere.” Chapter 6 then turns to the example of the “Shakespeare Company,” as the theatrical historian Andrew Gurr has named it, one of the most successful joint-­stock companies of the Renaissance period. Drawing on the transfor­ mational work of  Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey on actors’ parts, the chap­ ter considers the implications of the fact that the drama we often encounter today through the printed book was, theatrically considered, an assemblage of part-­scripts and cues that recycled bits and pieces from across the reper­ tory of the commercial theaters. Through a reading of Hamlet (1603) and the Roman tragedies—­notably Titus Andronicus (1594), Julius Caesar (1599), and Coriolanus (1608)—­the chapter demonstrates how Shakespeare takes up this technical aspect of theatrical performance to launch a series of meditations on the nature of theatrical “personation” and of the gaps opened in his peri­ od’s political imaginary by the demystification, dissolution, or withdrawal of traditional corporate bodies politic. Whereas Dekker had sought to contain conflict among social groups by aligning a romanticizing, comic image of the guild with the commercial and formal logic of theater, using this imagi­ native alignment to produce an distinctive identity and system of values for civic life, Shakespeare leaves this space of conflict unresolved and follows it

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to a tragic conclusion: rather than a ground for constitutional order, we find only murder, mutilation, invasion, assassination, exile, and civil war. Chapter 7 carries the book further into the seventeenth century and con­ tinues its account of the strains placed on a corporatist political imaginary, this time not through theater but through the newly empirical and induc­ tive methods of the New Science. Through a detailed account of the natural philosophy of Francis Bacon as explicated in the Novum Organum (1620), the chapter shows how an immanent and mystical idea of the corporate body, sourced in a metaphysics that can be broadly but coherently described as “Aristotelian”—­the political imaginary of Smith and Hooker, in differ­ ent ways—­is gradually replaced by arguments that view the corporate body in externalist and mechanical terms and thus anticipates the arguments of Hobbes. Peering into the world of nature, Bacon discovers a world of bod­ ies as micropolities, each characterized by distinctive constitutions, affects, and laws of action. The chapter shows how Bacon attempts to resolve the pluralism of this political ecology by turning to a political principle of sov­ ereignty. It then turns to his late work of utopian fiction, the New Atlantis (ca. 1624, pub. 1627), where we find the plurality of nature isolated and in­ strumentalized by the Society of Salomon’s House—­a political imaginary in which the topological relationship that had once characterized Hooker’s civil and ecclesiastical polities has been reproduced by the relationship of state to science. Chapter 8 then draws the book’s many themes to a close with a detailed exposition of Hobbes’s theory of Leviathan (1651): the myth of the modern state in the guise of a corporate, artificial person. In attempting to found po­ litical science as a form of knowledge that is compatible with natural philos­ ophy, Hobbes’s arguments often resemble those of Bacon, for whom Hobbes had acted as personal secretary; by locating his theory of the state within a defense of the supremacy of civil power over ecclesiastical—­especially Pres­ byterian—­claims to authority, Hobbes produces a theory of sovereignty that can be strongly reminiscent of Hooker’s. His emphasis on contracts and on the subordination of independent corporate bodies to the state extends the protoliberalism of Smith’s Discourse of the Commonweal, and the theory of the state of nature that we find in Leviathan derives partly from Hobbes’s own knowledge of English colonial policy in the New World and Ireland, as un­ dertaken by Smith and promoted by writers like Hakluyt. Finally, one of the most innovative aspects of Hobbes’s argument is its premise that fictions can be real, a premise that is only apparently paradoxical and that he derives not from a theory of legal fiction, as we might imagine, but rather from the theater and the notion of personation and mediation it makes available to him.

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For this reason, Hobbes’s theory also holds valuable lessons about the nature of corporate ontology in general that have only become more im­ portant in today’s political environment. In the coda, I conclude the book by looking at what Hobbes has left us and at where a new pluralist political theory might begin. Drawing on the history of the corporation, I explore a definition of the “political” that moves us away from current theories of sovereignty and toward the twofold problem of translating among competing systems of value, on the one hand, and, on the other, of giving form to the different associations that undertake this process of  value translation. I pro­ pose the importance of the corporation as both a historical and a theoretical concept that can ground such a theory, and I sketch out a possible place within it for the universitas—­a utopian figure for the modern university as an “open unity” that can serve as both an instrument of critique and a guid­ ing idea.

Acknowledgments

In light of this book’s subject, it seems especially appropriate to begin by thanking the many institutions, groups, colleges, and universities that of­ fered support to me during its writing, above all by creating the circum­ stances in which so many memorable conversations could flourish. It gives me great pleasure to thank the National Humanities Center, where I held the M. H. Abrams Fellowship (2010–­11), and its welcoming staff and di­ rector, Geoffrey Galt Harpham; the American Council of Learned Societies, for a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship (2012–­13); and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, guided with warmth and acuity by Lizabeth Cohen, Judith Vichniac, Sharon Bromberg-­Lim, and Rebecca Haley, where I spent a year in residence during the Burkhardt. Rutgers Uni­ versity provided generous support throughout the period of the book’s writ­ ing, including a yearlong sabbatical, which made it possible to accept these residential fellowships and also to finish the book during an immersive and uninterrupted period. I thank Douglas Greenberg, Executive Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, James Swenson, Dean of Humanities, and my Chair, Carolyn Williams, for their support during this period, and particularly for their contributions in support of the book’s publication. Finally, I express my appreciation for my union, the Rutgers Council of AAUP-­AFT Chapters, and its tireless efforts in defending public education, academic freedom, and meaningful faculty participation in university life. During the long process of thinking and writing, I was able to share ideas with many colleagues at their own universities, thanks to their gracious in­ vitations, among them Arizona State University, Barnard College, Boston

xxiv  a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

College, Brown University, the University of California–­Davis, the Univer­ sity of Colorado at Boulder, Columbia University, Cornell University Law School, Dartmouth College, Florida State University, George Washington University, the Gould Law School at the University of Southern California, Harvard University, the University of Maryland, College Park, the Univer­ sity of Michigan, New York University, the State University of New York at Buf­falo, the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Rice University, Syracuse University, the University of Texas at Austin, Uppsala University, Wesleyan University, the University of   Wisconsin–­Madison, and the University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee. Versions of the book’s arguments were also presented at conferences organized by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the BABEL Work­ ing Group, the Modern Language Association, the Northern Plains Confer­ ence on Early British Literature, the Renaissance Society of America, the Shakespeare Association of America, and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. I would like to thank everyone who helped organize these events and those who attended them for making them into such substantive and creative occasions. Many colleagues have enriched my work on the book and made our pro­ fessional life a pleasure to share; in particular, I thank Avram Alpert, Ron­da Arab, Emily Bartels, Alastair Bellany, Mary Bly, Jim Bono, Courtney Bor­ack, Matthew Buckley, Jeffrey Cohen, Ann Coiro, Mary Thomas Crane, Drew Dan­ iel, James Delbourgo, Stephen Deng, Allison Deutermann, Elin Diamond, Michelle Dowd, Curtis Dunn, Katherine Eggert, Stephen Foley, Mary Fuller, Tom Fulton, Erika Gaffney, William Galperin, Jean Howard, Wendy Hyman, Derek Jablonski, Titsi Jaji, Eileen Joy, Romuald Karmakar, András Kiséry, Aaron Kunin, Rebecca Lemon, Ron Levao, Jenny Mann, Quionne Matchett, Michael McKeon, Jacqueline Miller, Karen Newman, Adrianne Peterpaul, An­ gela Piggee, Zelda Ralph, Kelly Robertson, Cheryl Robinson, Bradley Ryner, Neil Saccamano, Laurie Shannon, Jonah Siegel, Valerie Traub, Daniel Vitkus, Carolyn Williams, Michael Witmore, and Adam Zucker. I am especially grateful for the extraordinary intellectual work that has taken place at the Center for Cultural Analysis over the past several years, with particular regard for the members of the “Public Knowledge: Institutions, Networks, Collectives” seminar, especially for my co-­convener Meredith McGill; for the members of the “Evidence and Explanation in the Arts and Sciences” seminar, especially for Jonathan Kramnick, who led the seminar with me; and for the members of the “Objects and Environments” seminar, in particular Colin Jager, Jorge Marcone, Sean Tanner, and Eric

acknowledgments 

xxv

Sarmiento. During the course of writing, I met two superb historians of early modern corporations, Philip Stern and Phil Withington, both of  whom generously listened to arguments and responded with suggestions and argu­ ments of their own. Time and again, the graduate students at Rutgers and at the University of  Wisconsin–­Madison have been some of my very best and most enjoyable interlocutors, both in seminar and outside it; for their intellectual compan­ ionship I especially thank Anupam Basu, Marcie Bianco, Liza Blake, Jason Cohen, Amy Cooper, Miriam Diller, Greg Ellerman, Stephanie Hunt, Ereck Jarvis, Erin Kelly, Justin Kolb, Alexander Paulsson Lash, Bryan Lowrance, Alex Mazzaferro, Cody Reis, Colleen Rosenfeld, Debapriya Sarkar, William Tanner, Scott  Trudell, and Katherine Williams. Along with several of the stu­ dents named above, Alyssa Coltrain, Sezen Unluonen, and Sarah Hopkinson acted as research assistants on the book at various points, and it is better for their efforts. The readers for the University of Chicago Press have my thanks for their lucid, detailed, and pointed responses to the book, which helped me to see its ambiguities and largest claims more clearly. At the Press, Alan Thomas and Randolph Petilos helped the book become a better version of itself. Several colleagues and friends deserve special mention for their sus­ tained engagement with the book’s ideas, both in conversation and on pa­ per, on single occasions or over several years: David Baker, Crystal Barto­ lovich, Amanda Claybaugh, Bradin Cormack, Mario DiGangi, Lee Edelman, Lynn Festa, Will Fisher, Valerie Foreman, David Glimp, Jeffrey Gonzalez, Devin Griffiths, Gil Harris, Katherine Ibbett, Natasha Korda, David Kurnick, Joseph Litvak, David Loewenstein, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Éric Méchoulan, Madhavi Menon, Bernadette Meyler, Mark Netzloff, Scott Newstok, Lena Cowen Orlin, Martin Puchner, Doug Rogers, Hilary Schor, Matthew Smith, Miguel Tamen, Carl Wennerlind, and Will West. Many other friends have also made the process of thinking and writing a happy one: for all their keen insights, humor, and generosity of spirit, I thank Gina Bloom, Guillermina De Ferrari, Jeff Dolven, Anthony Farley, Maria Grahn-­Farley, Marjorie Gar­ ber, Stephen Guy-­Bray, Sara Guyer, John Kucich, Michael Lemahieu, Caro­ line Levine, Jacques Lezra, Margot Livesey, Laurie Maguire, Scott Maisano, Jon McKenzie, Steve Mentz, Steven Meyer, Monica Miller, Radhika Nag­ pal, Robert Oaks, Mario Ortiz-­Robles, Feryal Ozel, Jerry Passannante, Doug Pfeiffer, Renée Poznanski, Dimitrios Psaltis, Bryan Reynolds, Elizabeth Rivlin, Dianne Sadoff, Arielle Saiber, Richard Schoch, Scott Straus, Ayanna Thompson, and Susanne Wofford.

xxvi  a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Daniel Walkowitz and Judith Walkowitz, Harriet S. Turner, my mother, and Sarah Turner, my sister, have seen at firsthand the long efforts and spon­ taneous enthusiasms that accompanied the writing of this book, and they know the satisfaction that accompanies its completion. Rebecca Walkowitz and Lucy Turner-­Walkowitz bring me happiness beyond words: this book is dedicated to them as a small measure of everything we have shared together during the time of its composition.

Portions of chapters 2 and 4 and the coda first appeared as “Corporations: Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 153–­76. Portions of chapter 4 have also appeared as “Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego: The Case of Richard Hakluyt,” in “The Future of the Human,” ed. Nancy Armstrong and Warren Montag, a special issue of differences 20.2–­3 (2009): 103–­47. Other portions of chapter 4 have appeared as “Book, List, Word: Forms of Translation in the Work of Richard Hakluyt,” in Formal Matters: Reading the Forms of Early Modern Texts, ed. Allison Deutermann and András Kiséry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 202–­36. Portions of chapter 5, with minor differences, appeared as “Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” in Affective Economies on the Early Modern English Stage, ed. Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker (New York: Routledge, 2015), 182–­97. And portions of chapter 7 appeared as “Francis Bacon’s Common Notion,” in “Commons and Collectivities: Renaissance Po­ litical Ecologies,” ed. Emily Shortslef and Bryan Lowrance, a special issue of Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13.3 (Summer 2013): 7–­32, © 2013 by The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

chapter one

Corporation as Common Constitution Then if we should watch a polis come to be in discourse, I replied, we would also see the justice and the injustice of it come to be? Perhaps, he replied. So if that happened, there is hope that what we seek would be easier to see? Yes, much easier. Do you think we should try to go through with it? For I suspect it is no small task. Think about it. I have, Adeimantus replied. Please continue. —Republic, 369b

The year is 1516, on a day. We don’t know when precisely, but it is after lunch. Two friends sit rapt in a garden as a stranger tells a story too fantastic to be believed (figure 1). He has just returned from the other side of the world, he says, where he lived among a people whom no traveler has seen before. These people have existed for a long time, and yet they remain completely unknown. They live in fabulous cities with great gardens and temples. They share all things in common, and so they know no poverty. They live a life of pleasure and learning, and yet they work more diligently and are more pious than any other community. Their sense of justice is unparalleled, the stranger claims, warming to his subject: I would gladly hear any man compare the justice that is among them with that of all other nations; among whom, may I perish, if I see anything that looks either like justice or equity. For what justice is there in this: that a nobleman, a goldsmith, a banker, or any other man, that either does nothing at all, or, at best, is employed in things that are of no use to the commonwealth [Reipublicae], should live in great luxury and splendor upon what is so ill acquired, and a mean man, a carter, a smith, or a plowman, that works harder even than the beasts themselves, and is employed in labors so necessary, that no common­ wealth [Reipublicae] could hold out a year without them, can only earn so poor a livelihood and must lead so miserable a life, that the condition of the beasts is much better than theirs?1

fi g u r e 1 . Friends in a Garden. From St. Thomas More, Utopia (1518), d1r. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

corporation as common constitution 

3

In 1516, arguments like these are almost unimaginable. And now, after sev­ eral hours of speaking, the stranger offers a final judgment rooted in his per­ sonal experience as a traveler but also in principles gleaned from authori­ ties that he and his friends recognize and respect. Because of this threefold grounding—­in experience, in principle, and in common agreement—­the strang­ er’s judgment does not rest as an opinion; it urges a general definition that would stand beyond any individual conviction: Now I have described to you, as exactly as I could, the form of that common­ wealth [Reipublicae] which I judge not merely the best but the only one which can rightly claim the name of a “commonwealth.”2

The stranger makes a strong claim, and his audience is understandably skep­ tical. Like a signature for the story that has produced it, Respublica describes not a particular place but a form of association that should characterize all political groups. In short, the stranger has described not a particular com­ munity but an idea, and in so doing he has also demonstrated something else: the way ideas in general are created from the movements of a special kind of imaginative discourse. Many readers will recognize the speaker as Raphael Hythloday, literary creation and sometime mouthpiece of Sir  Thomas More, and they will know the other name for the political community here called by its proper name, Respublica: its name is “Utopia.” The difference between the two names is the difference between philosophy and fiction, a difference that had already been measured by Socrates, Plato’s counterpart to Hythloday, in his own Republic, the most obvious inspiration for More’s own work. Like Plato, More was concerned with how philosophy might relate to the domain of pol­ itics, and like Plato he turns finally to a type of hypothetical imagination in order to accomplish his project. And as in Plato, a certain level of irony ren­ ders the result difficult to characterize. As a work of philosophy, Utopia seeks fundamental definitions for ideas, including a definition for philosophy it­ self; as a work of fiction, it explores how an act of hypothetical imagination might produce legitimate definitions of political ideas in ways that are com­ plementary to philosophy but nonetheless distinct from it. Its philosophical and formal projects run concurrently, and then run together. For all these reasons, Utopia has persistently captured the attention of later writers who seek a definition for politics, or who wish to imagine an alternative to the political forms in which they live. And yet for this reason there as many in­ terpretations of Utopia as there are writers to voice them. “Almost everything

4 

chapter one

about More’s Utopia is debatable,” the historian Quentin Skinner has writ­ ten, “but at least the general subject-­matter of the book is not in doubt. . . . His concern . . . is with ‘the best state of a commonwealth.’ ”3 De optimo reipublicae statu: a definition for the name “Utopia” (figure 2). As through a distorting mirror, we see reflected in More’s title the extended political future of the entire sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the two major historiographical traditions that have dominated accounts of early modern political thought. Although More still uses the term “state” in its ordinary sense of “condition” or “quality,” his title already anticipates the rise of the modern state as a centralizing administrative authority over a political territory, a development that Skinner himself has described in exemplary detail. In respublica, meanwhile, we hear a term frequently trans­ lated as “commonwealth” or “state” but also the distinct tradition of classical republicanism, with its emphasis on citizenship, office holding, and public virtue. Literary critics and historians alike seeking to track the origins of both traditions back to sixteenth-­century England have looked with interest at the example of Utopia, and they have found themselves wrestling with the work’s irony and complex puns, its many allusions, and its formal self-­ awareness—­in short, with its distinctively literary character. At every turn, Utopia unsettles us by consistently referring our attention away from its propositional content and toward the form in which that content has been expressed, making any conclusive statement of its political vision impos­ sible. Nevertheless, if I begin with More’s Utopia, I do so to advance a propo­ sition of my own: the work has resisted our historiographical accounts of its political imagination because More has modeled his ideal community on a form of association that was foundational to his period but whose full political potential we have forgotten. This model, which has once again be­ come central to our own debates over de optimo reipublicae statu, is that of the corporation.4 The central problem confronting More when he sat down to write Utopia was not a simple one, but it may be stated straightforwardly: how could the lived experience of participation in a world made up of corporate as­ sociations, each with its distinctive freedoms, rituals, rules, authority, and purposes, be reconciled with the aggressively expanding power of an au­ tocratic sovereign, on the one hand, and the tradition of classical thought about political community, on the other, in which these associations had little place? (figure 3). Holbein’s famous portrait of  More, robed in authority with an alert, slightly intimidating expression, conceals from us the degree to which his status, privileges, duties, income, favors, and loyalties extended

f i g u r e 2 . Title page from St. Thomas More, Utopia (1518), a1r. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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chapter one

f i g u r e 3 . Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More (1527). Copyright the Frick Collection.

across many different corporate forms at several scales, including a Carthu­ sian monastery; a residential Oxford college; the “company” or “society” of the Inns of Court; the City of  London; the Mercer’s Company; the House of Commons; that network of offices, courts, chambers, and councils that col­ lectively made up the “Crown”—­the “mysterious Crown,” as Ernest Barker

corporation as common constitution 

7

once put it, “which is responsible for nothing and serves chiefly as a bracket to unite an indefinite series of 1+1+1”—­and the enormous international body of the church.5 To invoke the figure of More as we have known him in early modern studies since his appearance as the avatar of  Renaissance self-­ fashioning almost thirty years ago in the pioneering work of Stephen Green­ blatt, we may say that to sit “at the table of the great” was not simply to learn a lesson about power and self-­appearance for others but to learn a series of difficult and painful lessons—­a mortal one, in More’s case—­about overlap­ ping sovereignties, the inevitability of mixed allegiances, and the conflicting systems of value that define “oneself ” as an ethical and political subject.6 Today we are apt to hear the word “corporation” with a sense of fore­ boding and a hiss of disapproval: the arguments of Hythloday about justice have become those of  Occupy Wall Street, whose rallying cry began circulat­ ing into the most unlikely contexts, an antibrand to fight against the logic of finance capital.  And in many respects the society Hythloday describes bears an uncanny resemblance to corporate types we know only too well. Utopia produces a uniformity of personality that many readers have found disturb­ ing. Its central government imagines citizens and food alike as quantitative units to be moved from one family or one city to another in order to achieve a rational political body—­a perfect illustration of the biopolitical management of populations that Foucault identified as characteristic of large-­scale govern­ mentality and a mode of power that today’s corporations have extended in ways that Foucault could only imagine. Daily life in Utopia is regulated by a centralized surveillance system and an utter lack of individual privacy; exile, slavery, or capital punishment face those who disturb the social order. The Utopian government pursues a manipulative foreign policy calculated to ad­ vance its own interests, facilitated by bribes and, if the occasion demands it, open war. When necessary, the Utopians expand beyond their island through a colonizing logic that imposes its system of values on new territories either by ideology or by force.7 But the closer we examine Utopia, the more we discern the outlines of a political world that looks very different from the for-­profit corporations we know today. Most famously, Utopia is founded upon a principle of com­ mon property, where all resources are shared according to need. Money holds no value there; gold is used for chamber pots; jewels and conspicu­ ous consumption provoke the Utopians’ derision. Women may serve as both soldiers and priests, and all forms of religious worship are welcome. The structure of everyday life reduces work to a minimum, leaving citizens free to attend lectures, to play games, or to improve roads, bridges, and other

8 

chapter one

public resources—­an enthusiasm for public action that sustains the com­ munity through participation and common agreement. Hythloday describes a world whose fundamental political elements are not even individuals but rather groups of all kinds: families, trade affiliations, armies, hospitals, din­ ing halls, temples, political offices, “orders” of scholars and priests.8 When Hythloday observes, at the end of his narrative, that the Utopians “have adopted such institutions [instituta] of life as have laid the foundations of the commonwealth not only most happily, but also to last forever, as far as human prescience can forecast” (151), he touches on Utopia’s essence: it is a corporation of corporations, a political totality made up of other groups and persons that endures beyond any one of its members. In seeking to provide a portrait of a corporate community organized around the common good, More has translated for his own moment a tradi­ tion of argument that extends back to the very origins of political philoso­ phy. Aristotle maintains that “the common life” is the first problem for any inquiry into the nature of the polis, and a significant portion of his Politics is concerned with specifying both the content and the form of this common good—­that is, its definition (which is finally an ethical concept of the good life lived under justice) but also the best arrangement of elements that might produce it. This formal arrangement of elements is essential to the politeia, the “polity” or the “constitution,” for “a constitution is a form of organiza­ tion of the inhabitants of a polis,” a way of “controlling the common life,” and above all for ensuring the “good life” and not “life merely,” as Aristotle argues.9 Constitutions take different forms, Aristotle continues, because every po­ litical community has different parts, each of which must be integrated into a system of governance and allocating resources. In this way, the constitu­ tion simply formalizes the fact of plurality, which for Aristotle lies at the foundation of any community that deserves to be called “political.”10 “A polis is a composite thing, in the same sense as any other of things that are wholes but consist of many parts,” Aristotle argues, sharply opposing himself to Socrates, who had taken the unity of the polis as a foundational premise and who finds in a principle of unity the essence of justice.11 But surely the end toward which Socrates aims is flawed from the beginning, Aristotle argues: I refer to the ideal of the fullest possible unity of the entire polis, which Socrates takes as his fundamental principle. Yet it is clear that if the process of unification advances beyond a certain point the polis will not be a polis at all; for a polis essentially consists of a multitude of persons, and if its unification is carried

corporation as common constitution 

9

beyond a certain point polis will be reduced to family and family to individual, for we should pronounce the family to be a more complete unity than the polis, and the single person than the family; so that even if any lawgiver were able to unify the polis, he must not do so, for he will destroy it in the process. And not only does a polis consist of a multitude of human beings, it consists of human beings differing in kind. A collection of persons all alike does not constitute a polis. (2.1.3–­4)

On the one hand, Aristotle insists repeatedly on the inevitability of plurality; on the other, he clearly states that the unity of the whole always precedes the part, on logical and ontological grounds, if not historically. The polis may arise from a collection of households, but it is “prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually. For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense” (Politics, 1.1.11). This unity becomes especially visible in a democracy, Aristotle continues, since here, “just as the multitude becomes a single man with many feet and many hands and many senses, so also it becomes one personality as regards the moral and intellec­ tual faculties” (Politics, 3.6.4). With the image of the body politic, Aristotle is again responding directly to Plato, who had used a similar analogy (Republic, 462d); the image will become one of the most enduring figures for a politi­ cal community—­for the polis that Aristotle himself describes as a “compos­ ite” substance.12 Utopia often seems pulled between the two accounts of plurality and unity that we find in Plato and Aristotle, and it focuses a series of questions that are fundamental to any act of constitutional imagination, especially to a democratic one. Is the polis to be understood as a homogeneity, a “one” made up of elements that are themselves as undifferentiated as possible within themselves? Or does the unity of the polis contain a plurality of elements, each of which contains multitudes—­even to the point where its unity is called into question? More abstractly, how are parts defined, and how are wholes imagined? At what point does a part form a new whole, and how does the whole that the part forms differ from the whole from which that part has been taken? More gives these questions an expression so novel that he founds an entire genre of writing: the genre that we call, borrowing the proper name back from him, “utopic.”13 What is it about utopic writing that makes it a necessary mode of expression for political philosophy, a mode that both Plato and Aristotle had, in their own ways, also explored? For as Aris­ totle points out, political philosophy simply cannot proceed without an act

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chapter one

of hypothetical invention, in which the entire character of a living commu­ nity may be founded from nothing and then be directed toward the future (Politics, 4.1.2). He even explains democracy with a mimetic metaphor, argu­ ing that these constitutions have been designed to “imitate” (mimeîtai) the very inequality that they have been designed to eliminate. By taking turns in office in an artificial imitation of a life that has been forgotten, Aristotle ar­ gues, citizens act as if they are superior to their fellows even though they are formally identical to them: “for some govern and others are governed by turn, as though becoming other persons” (Politics, 2.1.6). Someone must rule, after all; the constitutional arrangement of a democracy is for Aristotle a kind of mimetic supplement that restores a measure of differential power and a vertical hierarchy to an otherwise equal and horizontal field. From Plato and Aristotle to More, Smith, Hooker, Dekker, Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, and beyond, we shall see how the problems of unity and plurality, of person and group, and of form and mimesis echo throughout the history of the corporation as a body politic, contributing to its extraor­ dinary longevity as a political idea but also to the challenges that it poses to our own political life. Addressing how the corporation might once again provide a model for de optimo reipublicae statu will eventually lead us back to Utopia, which it will be necessary to examine more closely. But first it will be helpful to back away from More’s work and survey some of the key con­ ceptual difficulties implied in the idea of a corporation, beginning with the problem of its definition.

what

is

a corporation?

Our most familiar definition of a corporation is a legal one, in which the cor­ poration appears as an “artificial” or a “fictional” person created by law for its own technical purposes to be distinct from the individual members who make it up. This legal definition is ultimately of ancient origin, and it is the definition that still predominates today, when it has become fully entangled with the corporation’s overwhelmingly commercial character. For the modern scholar, legal discussions of corporations offer a diversity of opinion, a creativ­ ity of application, and a richness of intellectual tradition that is un­paralleled. Moreover, early modern discussions of corporations as legal entities draw on a much wider range of sources than we might expect, and they imply theories of fiction that deserve our attention. Nevertheless, it will finally be necessary to step beyond the corporation’s legal definition in order to grasp its full political significance. But since legal ideas of corporations are so

corporation as common constitution 

11

long-­standing and so consequential both to the early modern period and to our own, it will be helpful to review this legal tradition in some detail before setting it aside. For it happens that the two faces of the corporation as both “person” and “group” are nicely illustrated by two famous cases of early modern common law: Calvin’s Case (1608) and the case of Sutton’s Hospital (1612). And we may be surprised to find that even here Utopia is not far to seek. At issue in Calvin’s Case was the determination of the legal status of those Scottish subjects born after the accession of  James VI of Scotland to the throne of England as James I in 1603: did such subjects, known as the postnati, en­ joy the rights and protections of English law?14 Parliament proved unable to settle the question, which eventually found its way into the courts, where the case was heard by all the chief  judges of England, including Sir Edward Coke, then  James’s chief  justice in the Court of Common Pleas. Both Coke and Fran­ cis Bacon, addressing the court in his capacity as  James’s solicitor general, argued strongly in favor of recognizing the postnati as James’s subjects. And both Coke and Bacon did so by responding to what is to modern eyes one of the oddest legal theories of corporation: the theory of the king as a corpora­ tion sole.15 According to the theory, the king, in the interest of undertaking legal ac­ tions pertaining to property and feudal obligation, could stand not as a mor­ tal person but as a corporation with only one member, possessed of both a natural body and an invisible and immortal body politic. Coke provides a canonical statement that nicely captures both the artifice of the convention and its lingering theological dimension. “The King hath two capacities in him,” Coke declares, citing Edmund Plowden, the great sixteenth-­century common lawyer, “one a natural body, being descended of the blood royal of the Realm; and this body is of the creation of Almighty God, and is sub­ ject to death, infirmity, and such like; the other is a politic body or capac­ ity, so called, because it is framed by the policy of man (and in 21 Edw. 4. 39. B. is called a mystical body;) and in this capacity the King is esteemed to be immortal, invisible, not subject to death, infirmity, infancy, nonage, &c.”16 F. W. Maitland, who did much to recover the theory for modern scholar­ ship, viewed it as a legal absurdity: “If our corporation sole really were an artificial person created by the policy of man,” Maitland writes, quot­ ing Coke’s own definition of a corporation, “we ought to marvel at its in­ competence.”17 For the theory, ambiguously sourced in actual English law, upon close inspection turns out to allow few of the legal advantages that the artificial person provides. Both Coke and Bacon in fact tend to speak not

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chapter one

of corporate “persons” but of corporate “bodies,” a usage that reverses our usual understanding of the terms in modern law: in their arguments it is the “body” that is abstract and invisible, immortal, and artificial, while the “per­ son” remains concrete, mortal, and natural.18 Coke’s arguments, indeed, turn on the king’s natural person and its several “capacities” (189) rather than on any special power inhering in his immaterial body corporate. He insists, for instance, that subjects can swear loyalty only to the king’s natural person and not to the corporate body politic; for his part, the king can swear to his subjects only as a natural person, since the “body politique (being invisible) can as a body politique neither make nor take homage” (190). Presenting in the same case, Bacon makes very similar arguments. In a 1592 speech to Parliament, Bacon had praised Elizabeth by declaring that “the commonwealth is incorporated in her person”; soon he would com­ pare the “incorporation” of the Union under James to a geometrical figure, as “when the lines of two kingdoms do meet in the person of one monarch as in a true point or perfect angle.”19 Arguing now in Calvin’s Case, Bacon, like Coke, cites Plowden to assert that “though there be in the king two bod­ ies, and that those two bodies are conjoined, yet are they by no means con­ founded the one by the other.”20 Natural body and corporate body remain distinct, but they are not for that reason separate (234): they remain intimately proximate and bound together in the king’s natural person. This point is vi­ tal to the case, Bacon maintains, for while the defendants had claimed that Scotland and England constituted two separate, invisible bodies politic, each attached to the king as if he were two different people—­“cum duo jura concurrent in una persona, aequum est ac si essent in duobus” (207), a civilian phrase invoked by the defendant’s attorneys—­in fact the King’s single, natural person acts as the uniting force for the two kingdoms and their rights, even though they remain under two different parliaments and two different systems of law (195, 209–­10, 227). In chapter 3, we shall see how Richard Hooker uses nearly identical arguments to oppose Presbyterian arguments in favor of separatism and to formulate a theory of a public English church united under a single sovereign ruler. As Bacon now puts it, “although his body politic of king of England, and his body politic of king of Scotland, be several and distinct, yet nevertheless his natural person, which is one, hath an operation upon both, and createth a privity between them” (227). This is the true meaning of a “union” between the two kingdoms, regardless of whether they have been “united under one law and one parliament, and thereby incorporated and made as one kingdom” (195). So much may stand for the moment for the theory of the corporation sole, which Hobbes would dismantle entirely after the death of Charles I,

corporation as common constitution 

13

that unfortunate member of the species, to produce what is perhaps the most powerful and most enduring of modern political myths: the theory of the state as a fictional person possessed of absolute sovereignty over its citi­ zens. Hobbes found his solution partly in an idea of personhood derived from the theater, as is well known, and we shall see how early modern play­ wrights explored analogies between the idea of the king’s body corporate and the art of the actor who “personates” his role. But Hobbes also found a model for his new political science in the example of the corporation’s other long-­standing type: in what Coke called the “corporation aggregate of many,” that group formed in law in order to undertake an activity that is best pursued, or that may only be pursued, in a collective fashion. Maitland himself maintained that the true interest of the English law on corporations became visible only in reference to the corporate aggregate, and not the cor­ poration sole: “The way out of this mess,” he argued, “for mess it is, lies in a perception of the fact . . . that our sovereign lord is not a ‘corporation sole,’ but is the head of a complex and highly organized ‘corporation aggregate of many’—­of very many. I see no great harm in calling this corporation a Crown. But a better word has lately returned to the statue book. That word is Commonwealth.”21 Unlike the theory of the corporation sole, arguments about the corpo­ ration aggregate had a clear precedent in Roman law, which recognized sev­ eral types of collective associations, among them cities, colonies, guilds, and which bequeathed a technical vocabulary of great value to medieval and early modern lawyers.22 Individually, these corporations were classed as municipia, civitates, coloniae, societates, or collegia; more generally, they were grouped under the category of the universitas—­a term singled out by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations and an idea to which I shall return in due course.23 According to the Edicts of Gaius, for instance, the right to form a societas, collegium, or other type of corpus was restricted in law and could not be undertaken independently, except in cases involving metal and min­ ing companies, an exception that remained pertinent in Elizabethan En­ gland. Groups that have been granted corporate status are said to possess a body (corpus habere), and they may hold common property, maintain a common treasury, and be represented by an attorney—­called an actor or syndic—­in those transactions that are of common concern (Dig., 3.4.1). Any attorney (actor) who represents a municipality or other universitas should not be said to have been appointed by several individuals (a pluribus), Ulpian states, because he acts on behalf of the universitas or the larger community (res publica) (Dig., 3.4.2). Similarly, debts to corporations are not debts to indi­ viduals, writes Ulpian, nor can individual debts be considered corporate debts

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(Dig., 3.4.7.1). It is irrelevant to the universitas whether all its members re­ main the same, or only part of them, or whether all of them change, accord­ ing to Ulpian, but if a universitas is reduced to one member, he may sue or be sued as an individual, since the rights of all have fallen to one, and only the name of the universitas persists (Dig., 3.4.7.2). By the sixteenth century, corporations aggregate had become even more various: they were educational, ecclesiastical, charitable, political, and com­ mercial, and they ranged in size from the universal church, extending across territories and indeed across time, to the angels in heaven—­who formed a spiritual corporation, according to Richard Hooker—­to the kingdom, or the community of the realm; to Parliament; to English corporate towns; to the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge; to the new joint-­stock companies devoted to trade and exploration; and down to individual par­ ish churches, chantries, and hospitals. The case of Sutton’s Hospital (1612), indeed, the most significant statement of English common law on corpora­ tions in the early modern period and one that still receives mention in to­ day’s law journals, concerned the foundation of a charitable hospital in the former London Charterhouse. The foundation had been authorized by an act of  Parliament to Thomas Sutton, to whom James had then issued a grant of incorporation; Sutton died before he could complete his foundation, and both foundation and grant of incorporation were challenged by Simon Bax­ ter, a cousin of Sutton’s who claimed to be his legitimate heir. In a sense, the question before the court was whether an artificial person could displace a natural person as heir to one of the wealthiest citizens in England. Like Calvin’s Case, Sutton’s Hospital was heard by the most distinguished justices of the realm and was argued on one side by Bacon in his capac­ ity as solicitor general, along with two colleagues from the Inns of Court, and on the other by Elizabeth’s sergeant at law and her attorney general. Although the immediate issue was one of trespass—­Baxter had caused two of the foundation’s representatives to be arrested when they entered the dis­ puted property—­the case soon led the justices to review the basic criteria for establishing a legitimate corporation aggregate: what authority could create it, what its purpose might be, where it was to be located, by what name it was to be called, what its precise relationship was to its members, in what relation it stood to the physical property for which it had been created, and what further property rights it might possess.24 Bacon, who argued for Baxter and lost the case, was unconvincing, and yet as in Calvin’s Case his arguments demonstrate his intricate grasp of the precedents and procedures surrounding corporations that his profession was seeking to establish. Coke

corporation as common constitution 

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viewed his objections as “not worthy to be moved at the Bar, nor remem­ bered at the Bench” (1:351)—­Bacon was a long-­standing rival, and the men’s mutual hostility had become public on more than one occasion. But Coke recognized that the case provided the opportunity “For the Confirmation of Incorporations founded for works of Piety & Charity in time past,” as well as “For the better instruction how they may be after so and established that no exception may be taken to them,” as well as for “resolving of certain opinions and questions which were moved at the barre, and which might have disturbed the peace of the law” (1:377). What these questions were, Coke does not enumerate: perhaps the question of the king’s prerogative, perhaps something more. Coke’s report on the case provides an especially clear definition of corpo­ rations both aggregate and sole at the turn of the seventeenth century that is worth citing for its terminology, its examples, and its presuppositions: Every Corporation or Incorporation, or body Politick and Incorporate, who are all one, either stand upon one sole person, as the King, Bishop, Parson, &c. or aggregate of many, as Mayor and Commonalty, Dean and Chapter, &c. and these are in the Civil Law are [sic] called Universitas sive Collegium. (1:363) A Corporation aggregate of many is invisible, immortal, & resteth only in in­ tendment and consideration of the Law. . . . They may not commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate for they have no souls, neither can they appear in person, but by Attorney. . . . A Corporation aggregate of many can­ not do fealty, for an invisible body cannot be in person, nor can swear . . . it is not subject to imbecilities, or death of the natural body, and divers other cases. (1:371–­72)

After the work of Ernst Kantorowicz and the example of Calvin’s Case, we will not be surprised to see the corporation sole described as a “body politic.” But the term was a common one throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for corporations aggregate, too, from the smallest to the largest; in the course of Sutton’s Hospital, the chantry is given as an example of a “body politic” (1:359), as is the hospital itself, and the term could be applied to guilds, trading companies, towns, Parliament, the church, and the largest group of all, the “commonwealth” as a whole. In a strict sense, both private and public corporations aggregate were “bodies politic” because they could be created only by parliamentary act or royal grant, although there are rea­ sons to identify them as “political” institutions beyond their foundation by a sovereign authority—­the “bodies politic” of the joint-­stock trading companies

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and companies for plantation, in particular, give the figure a somewhat dif­ ferent meaning.25 In Leviathan, Hobbes refers to the classic definition when he classifies as “bodies politic and persons in law” those associations “made by authority from the sovereign power of the commonwealth,” distinguish­ ing them from the “private” associations that are “constituted by subjects amongst themselves” and may or may not form legal bodies (2.22.3). Hobbes also compares private joint-­stock corporations to little commonwealths; in the Elements of Law, Hobbes even claims to be the first to recognize the re­ verse principle—­that commonwealths are simply joint-­stock corporations on a large scale. Blackstone, too, calls the corporation a “little republic ” whose regulations “are a sort of municipal laws” (468); these “artificial persons,” he argues, “called bodies politic, bodies corporate, (corpora corporata,) or cor­ porations” (467), are created so that rights inhering in any single natural person may be passed down indefinitely, regardless of death, since artificial persons have “a perpetual succession, and enjoy a kind of legal immortality” (467).26 Coke summarizes all of these arguments succinctly when he writes, “It is impossible to take in succession for ever without a capacity; and a ca­ pacity to take in succession cannot be without incorporation; and the incor­ poration cannot be created without the King.”27 The principle that corporations may be authorized only by sovereign act extends back to Roman law; it is commonly referred to as the “concession theory” of corporations, especially when referred to the granting power of the monarch, and Coke defends the principle strongly in the Sutton’s Hospital case. Bacon never questions it directly. But given his own many defenses of the royal prerogative in parliamentary debate, including the power of both Elizabeth and James to create corporations in matters of trade and monopoly, it is surprising to find Bacon worrying the edges of precisely this aspect of the king’s grant. He queries the appropriateness of the hospital’s name, and he muddies the sequence of actions that led to its foundation in order to show that the language of incorporation used by the king’s own letters patent made them “repugnant in themselves and void.”28 Incorporations require a founda­ tion, Bacon argues, but Sutton had died before he could actually fulfill his in­ tentions of making one; nor could he nominate governors for the corporation “until there be an actual Hospital and poor in it,” since such governors would be “idle, or as Cyphers in Algorisme” (1:349). Similarly, he continued, match­ ing a mathematical analogy to a literary one, “there ought to be at least an actual Hospital Founded by Sutton according to his Licence, before he could nominate a Master of it; For otherwise it shall be a Mathematical or Utopical Hospital” (1:350).

corporation as common constitution 

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“A Mathematical or Utopical Hospital”: it is striking to find Bacon invok­ ing More’s Utopia at the center of the most important case of early modern corporate law, especially when we remember that Bacon’s own final piece of writing would be an unfinished work of utopian fiction. Here Bacon uses the figure of Utopia to draw out the sheer artifice of corporation as a body politic but also to assert that, without any attachment to an actual hospital with actual occupants, it remained an imaginary, empty, and nonsensical thing: a kind of placeholder, but without a place. And Bacon is also being clever, since the law stipulated that any legitimate act of incorporation re­ quired both a name and a designated place, and in his view the king’s grant to Sutton had been insufficiently specific. Coke agrees that “without a place no Incorporation can be made” (1:363), and yet he argues in return that the grant includes the entire building of the Charterhouse in which the hospital is to be housed, since “all the house and premises are baptized by the King by the name of the Hospital, &c. in which is no shadow of incertainty” (1:362; cf. 1:349, 361). The words of the king are “verba operativa,” he says, in an anticipation of our own theories of performative language, but the words assume their operative power only when issued from the king him­ self (1:364).29 And in defense of the corporation’s name, he counters with two examples of his own, hospitals founded in England that bear the name of “Jerusalem” in their titles, “although it be but a fiction, scil. that . . . Jeru­ salem was situate in England” (1:371). The term “fiction” appears only once and in passing in Coke’s account, but when we take it alongside Bacon’s playful but nonetheless serious invo­ cation of Utopia, I do not think it will be forcing a point to observe that we find two quite different ways of characterizing corporations suddenly mak­ ing a brief appearance in the Sutton’s Hospital case. Both Bacon and Coke ac­ knowledge the immaterial, artificial quality of the corporation: the question is whether this immaterial and artificial person can nevertheless be real and how it could be so. Bacon uses the figure of  Utopia to construe the corpo­ ration as a purely imaginary body politic, since it lacks any concrete foun­ dation, while Coke argues that this same immaterial and artificial person corresponds to a substantial, actually existing thing possessed of property, an endowment, and a distinguished board of governors—­a group of entirely natural persons who included, as it happens, Coke himself. The difference between the two types of fiction is the difference between the “made up” and the “made real,” as Elaine Scarry has argued.30 Under the sign of fiction, a larger ontological problem has suddenly presented itself before the bar, which the law must now adjudicate. And contrary to what we might expect,

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Coke speaks of legal fiction only in reference to the corporation’s name, an aspect so narrow as to be incidental to the judgment of the case. Instead, his arguments about the legitimacy and reality of the corporation draw upon, among other references, Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione, in a sudden burst of philosophical argument worthy of the medieval schools.31 Faced with the problem of the group person, the chief justice pauses to genuflect before Aristotle—­“Nature’s Secretary,” as he had called him in Calvin’s Case—­ and proceeds to source his defense of corporate being not only in the court’s own legal precedents but in natural philosophical categories that the court translates into its own reaffirmation of the corporation as an actually exist­ ing thing. The problem of corporate ontology has turned out to be nothing less than the question of what it means for anything to be real and how it is so, and this problem has turned out to be an eminently philosophical one. No doubt this sweeping statement can be made somewhat more palatable by phrasing it in historical terms: when early modern people thought about the reality and existence of groups, especially their political groups, they tended to turn to corporate images and arguments; conversely, the polemical heat of our own debates over corporations indicates how few resources we have for thinking publicly about metaphysical questions, especially about the rights and capacities of the group persons who confront us. p e r s o na f i c ta

The familiar definition of the corporation as a legal “fiction,” to which Coke refers when he speaks in passing of the conventional nature of corporate names, is often associated with its status as a “person”; when Coke speaks of the corporation’s immortality and lack of soul, he is repeating in his own terms a canonical definition of the corporation as a persona ficta that had de­ veloped by civilian and canon lawyers over several centuries.32 The historian J. P. Canning has gone so far as to claim that the modern concept of the legal person was invented by medieval jurists when they used the term persona to refer to corporations, with the unexpected implication that, historically speaking, the corporation is actually the first legal person and not a belated perversion of it.33 In a series of commentaries on papal decretals, Inno­ cent IV (1195–­1254) had declared that corporations were nothing but “names of law and not of [natural] persons” ( nomina sunt iuris, et non personarum) and that they were “fictional” or “feigned” persons: collegiam in causa universitatis fingatur una persona, as Innocent put it, using the etymological root of “fiction,” from fingere, “to fashion” or “to form,” often in a plastic sense.

corporation as common constitution 

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Like Innocent IV, Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1314–­57) attributed the unified personality of the corporation only to the law, observing that the jurist had an obligation to treat the corporation differently than the philosopher. Al­ though “all philosophers” (omnes philosophi ) believe that the whole does not differ from its parts, Bartolus argued, this is because they consider it only in “reality, or as it truly and properly is” (realiter, vere et proprie). But from the lawyer ’s point of view they are wrong, he continued, because accord­ ing to the logic of the legal fiction, “the corporation represents one person who is notionally something different from the members constituting it” (se­cundum fictionem juris ipsi non dicunt verum, nam universitas representat unam personam, quae est aliud a scholaribus seu ab hominibus universitatis).34 For Bartolus’s student Baldus de Ubaldis (ca.1327–­1400), the corporation was an intellectual abstraction that could be compared to the relation of form to matter, since the corporate body is “perceived rather by the intellect than by the senses” (que magis intellectu quam sensus percipitur).35 The so-­called fiction theory of corporations was made famous by Gierke, who attributed it to Innocent IV and contrasted it with his own theory of corporations endowed with a real personality sourced in a spirit of fellow­ ship that he argued was characteristic of German associational life. As Can­ ning has shown, however, the absolute opposition between a “fictional” and “real” quality of corporate personality that Gierke assumed distorted the arguments of the medieval jurists, for whom the notion of a “fictional” per­ sonality had a narrower and more practical use that was entirely compatible with their sense of the corporation’s actual existence and even its collective action.36 Innocent IV, to take the most famous example, reasoned that since the universitas was only an abstraction or a corpus intellectuale, it had neither mind nor soul; therefore it could not sin and could never be excommuni­ cated. Nor could the universitas be imprisoned or subject to capital punish­ ment, since it had no body. These formulas, along with Innocent’s declara­ tion that “it is impossible for a corporation to commit a crime” (impossible est, quod universitatis delinquat ), have become infamous in the context of today’s debates over corporate personhood. But Innocent nevertheless main­ tained that corporate bodies could be punished as collective agents for civil infractions either by legal sanction or by financial penalties.37 Bartolus, too, admits that as “something fictitious put in place of the true by us as ju­ rists” (hoc est fictum positum pro vero, sicut ponimus nos Juristae), the cor­ poration cannot itself be said to commit crimes. But he then argues that it may be held responsible for neglecting to carry out one of its duties, and he even claims that it can be liable for crimes that only the corporation as a

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body can commit (such as those relating to legislation, taxation, and juris­ diction).38 For Baldus, meanwhile, the populus or people formed nothing less than a real, autonomous, self-­governing corpus misticum that was distinct from its individual members, a corporate political community rooted in a specific territory and endowed with real rights and obligations that resulted not from the creation of a superior authority but from the spontaneous ca­ pacity of individuals to associate and form representative assemblies, hold office, and make laws.39 Coke, who repeats the medieval formulas with little modification, understood that the corporation might be an “invisible” ab­ straction that “resteth only in intendment and consideration of the Law” and yet still have perfectly real consequences. In describing the corporate person as a fiction, the jurists had empha­ sized its artificial and conventional quality rather than its illusoriness, as Ba­ con seems to have hoped the court would construe Sutton’s hospital. And yet as a theory of fiction, the so-­called fiction theory of the corporation is a relatively thin one, and I suspect that the philosophi might have said some­ thing similar about Bartolus’s concept of the group. For as important as the law may be as a mode of making real, even the jurist recognized that cor­ porations are never simply legal in nature: they derive from the practical activity and self-­expression of groups who associate for many different pur­ poses and at many different scales, and they assume their identities, their continuity, and even their powers from ideas that may have little to do with legal categories. To put the claim somewhat more broadly, I will say that the ontological question of the corporation—­the question of what kind of being corporations may be said to have, of what identity, rights, capacities for ac­ tion, or affective presence define this being and from whence it can be said to arise—­can never be answered only with reference to legal definitions and legal arguments. The law, in short, is a sufficient but not a necessary condi­ tion for corporateness, and this is precisely what Coke acknowledges when he turns to philosophical categories in order to counter Bacon’s invocation of  Utopia. Although this may strike some readers as a counterintuitive claim to derive from Coke’s Reports, one of the most influential documents in the history of English law, in the end there is nothing particularly surprising about it. Legal ideas always imply nonlegal ideas after all, as the category of the “person” makes perfectly evident; across the chapters that follow, the term describes a mystical and theological idea on the model of Christ and the Trinity, the charismatic “personality” born by an actual, concrete individual, the character “personated” by an actor, and a pragmatic juridical

corporation as common constitution 

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category—­an impersonal personality, as it were, possessed of agency, rights, and obligations that is never quite as bare as we often imagine it to be.40 These corporate persons are spoken into being, and they imply problems of voice, representation, and affect that are as poetic as they are legal.41 At the same time, this entanglement means that it will be important to distinguish a broader genus of corporation from the more technical legal species of “in­ corporation,” and to recognize how the corporation provides the conceptual ground out of which constituting power can emerge to establish jurisdiction and a distribution of authority. The figurative terrain of the corporation will thus also be one in which legal concepts encounter their limits: where they are refreshed from other intellectual traditions (some themselves already shot through with a legal legacy), where they are measured against questions of fact and circumstance, or where they are supplemented by fictions of a liter­ ary rather than a legal type.42

pluralism, corporations, and the state Some readers will recognize in my discussion the echo of arguments for­ mulated approximately a century ago by a group of political theorists and historians who extended the insights of Gierke and who came to be known loosely as the English pluralists: Frederick William Maitland (1850–­1906), John Neville Figgis (1866–­1919), Ernest Barker (1874–­1960), George Douglas Howard Cole (1889–­1959), and Harold Laski (1893–­1950).43 The pluralists rejected the premise that corporate personhood is exclusively legal in char­ acter and that it could only be bestowed by a sovereign, granting authority, precisely the argument made by Coke and Bacon and Hobbes.44 Many of the pluralists sought to show that the concession theory and the fiction theory of corporations implied one another: if the sovereign power alone has the capacity to create corporations, then the corporation thereby created will necessarily be an artificial or legal fiction. But since law always evolves out of an enduring relationship to the particularities of practical life, which it sometimes lags (and thus describes) and sometimes anticipates (and thus pre­ scribes), the pluralists argued that so-­called sovereign authority can be said not to create a fictional legal person but rather to recognize a real association of persons whose practical activity preexists legal formalization within a do­ main of state jurisdiction. Picking up on a long-­standing idea, Maitland called corporations “moral” persons, a term that will probably make some readers squeamish but that nevertheless focuses a distinction between a moral notion of order and justice rather than a juridical one.45 Faced with the living fact

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of durable, associational life, the law (however plural it proves to be both in theory and in practical administration) is left with the choice of recognizing this associational life or not recognizing it, of translating it and appropriating it into the formal categories that constitute a system of law and that refer all political power to a sovereign authority. Many of the pluralists were historians as well as political theorists—­of the law (Maitland), of the church (Figgis, Laski), of guilds and other social movements (Cole)—­and their theoretical arguments drew upon their his­ torical grasp of the fact that legal incorporation has always been only one relatively narrow dimension in the life of any association, which composes itself, changes, and endures through time independently of any recognition of its legal status. The fact is illustrated by the history of the medieval and early modern guilds, which retained important devotional and charitable purposes as well as economic ones; by the church, bound together (and riven apart) by faith and creed; and by the process through which cities and towns received their charters of incorporation, often repeatedly over many genera­ tions rather than once and for all. The very fact that the Crown found it nec­ essary to reissue grants and charters and to recognize again privileges that it had previously been forced to recognized or had already bestowed suggests a more complex relationship between law, sovereignty, and corporation than we might suspect if we view the problem as Coke or Bacon did. From the point of view of pluralist writers, however, there was another major limitation to the concession theory of corporations. For it narrowed the definition of political relationships to two actors, a supraindividual state possessed of absolute sovereignty and an equally abstract citizen whose for­ mal equivalence to his or her fellows is possible to imagine only in law and is belied by almost every other measure. Intermediate associations of all types, meanwhile, are excluded by definition from the political relationship. Furthermore, in presuming that law derives exclusively from the state and, on the other side, regarding the state simply as the enduring, institutional form of  law, the concession theory grants to both state and law a metaphysical identity that corresponds to no actual legislative, judicial, or executive prac­ tice. The “state” never makes law: laws are assembled according to an intri­ cate process of proposition, revision, and interpretation, across many different agencies, among many different people, through a variety of forms and media; they are drafted and revised, lived and tested, usually obeyed habitually but sometimes passionately refused. The history of corporations thus illustrates a lesson that the history of political thought often has trouble recognizing: the so-­called state is only ever one of several jurisdictional entities in a political field; more than this, the “state” is in fact indistinguishable from the specific

corporation as common constitution 

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persons, instruments, substances, legal formulas, and points of application for legal power that together constitute it. Where, precisely, is the state in these cases? Like the body of a corporation, the state “itself ” is impossible to grasp or point toward—­one refers only to the body of another, and the state is every­ where and nowhere at once. Shakespeare perceives this spectral dimension of state especially vividly, and it is the technology of the theater that reveals it to him, leading to a series of tragic mediations on the nature of personation and the dissolution of corporate political communities that extends from Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar through Hamlet to Coriolanus. Hobbes confronts the problem more directly than any other philosophical writer, and he, too, draws on a theatrical idea in order to try and resolve it. When Hobbes argues that the sov­ ereign “represents” or “bears” the person of Leviathan, he does not only mean that the sovereign acts as a substitute or a delegate for the commonwealth, in the way of an elected parliamentary representative. He also means that the sovereign personifies Leviathan in the way that an actor personates a role: he speaks and acts as Leviathan and not merely for it. Hobbes’s innovation was to combine a theatrical ontology with a techno­ logical one, for the person whom the monarch personates is, of course, an “artificial man,” an automaton or mechanical model of the commonwealth in its political character. And it is worth pointing out that in Calvin’s Case, Bacon, too, contrasts conventional corporations aggregate to the mystical unity of the corporation sole by using a materialist analogy. When Bacon ar­ gues that “generally in corporations, the natural body is but suffulcimentum corporis corporati, it is but as a stock to uphold and bear out the corporate body,” he does not assume that the body has become a substitute figure that stands for the corporation in the way of a delegate or a representative but rather that it supports the corporation in a structural fashion, like a frame or a beam—­it has been integrated materially and functionally with the corpo­ ration, much the way a fence post could be said to exist for the sake of the fence.46 A decade earlier in a memorandum to James, Bacon had elaborately compared the union of the kingdoms of Scotland and England to the mate­ rial “incorporation” of metals and other substances in natural philosophy, and here, too, a legal concept of corporation is conspicuously absent.

toward a compositional ontology of corporations Having begun with a legal definition of the corporation, therefore, we now see that it forms only one way of understanding the problems of corporate

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unity and corporate being, and not even the most primary one. Standing back to generalize from the examples of More, Coke, Bacon, Smith, Hooker, Dekker, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Hobbes, I will identify four fundamental modes of corporate ontology that will appear across this book: the mystical, the mimetic, the material, and the representational. Each mode describes a typical way in which the corporation is made real: endowed with integrity and identity, assigned rights and responsibilities, understood as taking action and as having force, recognized as possessing a physical and even an affec­ tive presence. The mystical ontology is rooted in theological ideas and sacred practices, which are often metonymical in their logic: the ritual incorporation of communion, participation in the eternal and invisible fellowship of the church, arguments about the nature of Christ’s body, problems of personhood and substance in both the Incarnation and the Trinity. Mimetic ontologies de­ pend on artful, creative acts of imitation, likeness, and fictional simulation, whether in theaters, in visual images, or in many kinds of imaginative writing; they include the deliberate embodiment of fictional persons on stage by actors but also the many stylistic techniques by which one person acts and speaks as another rather than as himself. Material ontologies ground their accounts of corporate reality in substance and matter, in mechanical relationships among parts and wholes and on the principles of force, movement, and action that are understood as holding parts and wholes together; they are often also “ma­ terialist” in the more familiar economic sense of the term, although the com­ mercial joint-­stock companies depend on many mimetic and representational techniques, too. Representational ontologies, finally, draw on a highly conven­ tionalized and institutionalized logic of substitution and delegation, which of­ ten has a contractual basis: on a process of acting and speaking on behalf  of or for another rather than as another, according to a metaphorical rather than a metonymic logic. Each ontological mode often mixes with the others, and each also de­ pends upon even more basic habits of thought: on quantitative categories (the very notion of “unity” itself is, of course, a quantitative idea) or on rhe­ torical techniques (style and voice, modes of address, figuration and other imaginative inventions). Legal ideas are fundamental to the mystical ontology of the corporation sole, as Kantorowicz argued, and they can be influential on mimetic arguments as well, as work in the field of law and literature has demonstrated.47 Legal concepts obviously inform a representational ontology of corporations, especially of corporations aggregate: when Coke argues in the case of Sutton’s Hospital that the corporation cannot become present or “appear in person” except through the figure of an attorney, he is drawing on

corporation as common constitution 

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a representational argument that extends back to Roman law. In these cases, the attorney acts on behalf of the corporation as a substitute or a delegate: he may or may not be a member of the corporation he represents, and his body natural is irrelevant to his role—­indeed, an attorney may be present only “in person,” abstractly, and not in body, as when a corporation is represented in writing, for instance, as corporations most often are. He speaks  for the corpo­ ration but not as the corporation: the representative convention allows him to imply the corporation’s autonomous existence while also giving it a relatively flat ontological profile.48 A corporation aggregate may also be represented not by an individual but by a group: by a minority of its members, as in the case of a board of gov­ ernors or other officers or designated agents, or by a majority of members, or even by all of its members, as in the case of Parliament, or the populus when it is understood as a corporate body possessed of political authority. It was one of Gierke’s primary arguments, in fact, that a medieval theory of corporations provided both the conceptual framework and the vocabulary for talking about the representational assemblies of a later period.49 “The parliament of the king and the lords and the commons are a corporation,” argued  John Fineux in 1522, and the point is borne out by the work of Sir Thomas Smith, as well as by seventeenth-­century writers who defended Par­ liament as a “politique corporation” that represented the universitas of the people, arguments that were influential on Hobbes, as Quentin Skinner has shown.50 Here we find an example of one corporate person (Parliament) representing another corporate person (the people or populus), and this is possible because of the legal convention whereby its individual members stand as substitutes, or delegates, for other individuals who are themselves always organized into smaller groups that often possess a formal corporate status all their own.51 But in the sixteenth century the “representational” relationship between Parliament and the people was often described using a mystical and metonymic language of real presence, and it could even be described as a form of theatrical enactment, as Oliver Arnold has argued.52 The most common meaning of the term “representation,” indeed, was still a visual one, as both Skinner and Hannah Pitkin have pointed out. Writing in 1642, the lawyer Henry Parker defended the sovereign power of Parlia­ ment because it was a lifelike picture or portrait of the people: Parliament is “vertually the whole kingdom it selfe,” a work of art composed out of geo­ metrical principles that stands as a “representation” of the “reall body of the people” and of “the whole body of the State.”53 Each of the writers who appear in this book, and each of the corporate

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forms they discuss, tend to conform to one or another of these primary modes, although they inevitably blend their ingredients together; broadly speaking, the political thought of the period that extends from More to Hobbes can be characterized as one that shifts from a mystical and mimetic to a material and representational ontology of corporations, although the precise meaning and balance of elements in each author can be unexpected—­Hobbes, for in­ stance, offers one of the most powerful theorizations of the corporation as a mimetic creature, and one of my purposes will be to recover the impor­tance of a mimetic theory of corporations for our own moment. But what­ever their approach, all of the writers I take up in this book ultimately con­front the limits of legal ideas as ways of thinking about the political dimension to corporations, and this is true even of Smith and Hobbes, Hooker and Bacon, in whose work the law has a central place, whether as a historical in­ stitution, a philosophical problem, or a professional area of expertise. Each writer turns to other corporate ideas, structures, and imaginative figures; in every case, these corporate figures are polemically charged, and they con­ cern not private relations but the composition of public, large-­scale forms of asso­ciational life. By way of conclusion, it will be pertinent at last to provide my own work­ ing definition of the corporation and the arguments that inform it. In a first meaning, the term “corporation” will designate what David Runciman has described, after Gierke, as the “plurality-­in-­unity” that is typical of the universitas: it identifies any enduring  form of activity that is undertaken collectively and in which the whole is perceived to be distinct from and even prior to its parts, since it is always in excess of the elements that compose it. The universitas is often distinguished from the “unity-­in-­plurality” that characterizes the societas, a partnership or collective entity that is coincident with its parts, which retain an aggregate rather than a synthetic relation. The distinction can be a clarifying one: it allows us to characterize crowds, masses, and other aggregate forms differently than more formally organized, institutionalized groups, precisely as Hobbes (and Shakespeare) set out to do; it can reveal the forces that attempt to disassociate formalized groups and scatter their mem­ bers; it helps explain why organized group action is often more effective than spontaneous protests but also why such protests can have an explosive and transformative political power. At the same time, however, as heuristic tool the distinction between plurality-­in-­unity and unity-­in-­plurality can result in a circular chase toward ever-­finer discriminations between two ways of characterizing group life that inevitably collapse together.54 An enduring ambiguity in terminology

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for the idea of corporate unity runs throughout the early modern period: it is visible, for instance, in Hooker’s use of the terms “society” and “corpora­ tion” interchangeably to describe the true church, which he understands to form a group whose unity is prior to its parts; or in Smith’s use of both “so­ ciety” and “corporation” to designate his joint-­stock industrial venture, the Society for the New Art, a prototypical societas, or commercial partnership, as its name implies; or in Smith’s definition of the English “Common weal,” which he understands in some moments as a protocontractual partnership and in others as a mystical body corporate. The joint-­stock companies that feature so prominently in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations display many rhe­ torical and structural aspects that allow us to characterize them as groups that are more than the sum of their parts and even as “persons” with wills, affects, and appetites. And we will be surprised to find that very similar cor­ porate bodies politic populate the world of nature that Bacon discovers. The true value of the distinction is polemical rather than analytical, as is made evident by Hobbes’s suspicion toward private corporations of all kinds, by Hooker’s heated characterization of Presbyterian “assemblies,” by Smith’s impatience with guild corporations, or by Coriolanus’s hostility toward the “fragments” and “rabble,” as he calls them, of the citizens with whom he re­ luctantly shares his play. Although I have been guided by this conceptual distinction between plurality-­in-­unity and unity-­in-­plurality, therefore, my use of the term cor­ poration throughout this book is meant rather to focus those moments where the “groupness” of a group suddenly comes into sharp relief and to concentrate our analytic attention on how this idea of groupness is established and main­ tained. I recognize that some readers may regard this use of the term “corpo­ ration” as an overly broad one. It is certainly possible to specify types of group identity along a spectrum of institutionalized forms with different degrees of agency and political power.55 But the idea of the corporation focuses our attention on the difficult problem of group personhood in a way that alterna­ tive words, such as “collective,” “community,” or “network,” do not. It points us toward the procedures through which groups of all kinds achieve agency, identity, and purpose, and it allows us to discern more clearly the competing systems of value that are attributed to them. For this reason, the term also helps us specify the differential hierarchies and forces that always structure institutionalized groups: for as Hooker and Bacon both argue, “corporation” may be a name for unity, but it is not always an equivalent for uniformity or for homogeneity. Like the medieval jurists, and like Coke, Hobbes, and Kan­ torowicz after them, my approach to the corporation presumes persistence in

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time: the longer an organized group formation of any kind endures, the more real it becomes and the more “corporate” it may be said to be.56 But enduring in time does not imply staying the same; the corporation, traditionally recognized for its immortality, is in fact most valuable for its plasticity: for the way it permits change, and even moments of radical crisis and instability, while also allowing for continuity—­this will again be a central insight of Baconian method. Like any theoretical category, therefore, the analytical value of the corpo­ ration resides precisely in its generality: in the way it allows us to identify differences among group forms while nevertheless discerning distinctive pat­ terns and common elements among them. In this way, the category of the corporation allows us to characterize these groups historically and to show how they are typical of their period, while also suggesting how these types reach beyond the early modern period and enter our own. Finally and most importantly, this approach allows us to defamiliarize the type of corpora­ tion that is most common among us today—­the private, for-­profit type—­and hence to diminish our sense of its teleological inevitability. As I argue in the coda that concludes this book, a genealogy of the corporation can also help us imagine new corporate forms that could yield a more progressive form of political power. And it leads us finally toward a definition of the “political” itself as the disposition of forces, values, and forms that either bind or dissociate chains of association. In this largest theoretical sense, we may characterize the ontology of the corporation as “compositional,” to adapt a term of the sociologist of science Bruno Latour, although as we shall see, the term composition is central, too, to Bacon’s natural philosophy, it is a term that Hooker also uses, and it could even describe the informal bonds formed by the members of the Renaissance acting companies.57 A compositional ontology of corporations may be regarded as a metaontology, in the sense that it describes the ways in which the mysti­ cal, mimetic, material, and representational modes are always deployed in conjunction with one another. For in the early modern period, corporations never simply derive their distinctive group identity from mystical theolog­ ical principles (much less from a Romantic notion of a national or ethnic spirit), but neither can they be reduced to a purely pragmatic or mechanistic bundle of external interactions among their constitutive elements. They may be understood as a series of  formal translations, which finally result in self-­ reflection: in the network of words, images, and objects of all kinds that put into circulation an idea of unity and that make possible a shared recognition, tacit or explicit, that one has become a member of a larger group. Today the point may be extended into an insight about the function of corporate brands:

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the corporate person of  Nike, for instance, lives less in its legal charter than in its ubiquitous wing of victory, an icon plastered on posters, shimmering on our screens, and stitched into the fabric of our daily life. As a sign that remains formally empty, the icon invites us to animate Nike’s corporate personality by endowing it with our passions and most vivid experiences, and ideally to do so without reflection—­here, too, the corporate person always precedes and exceeds us. Or to take a more radical and perhaps controversial counterex­ ample, we may say that Occupy  Wall Street became a magnificent and fully paradoxical anticorporate corporate form, taking shape around the blunt edges of the law, in the moment that it began to assume a collective life that was larger than any one of its members so that it could undertake group actions and articulate a group demand.58 Our current moment in the academy has furnished another term of art for this process of group constitution, and it is “mediation,” a word that Hobbes also used; I prefer to speak of the “forms” that circulate within cor­ porate groups, since in my view the principle of form is more flexible than mediation in its scale and its heuristic potential.59 The power of the corpo­ rate idea is to “formalize, unite and actuate,” in the words of Hooker, asso­ ciations of all kinds by imagining them in the guise of a singular and unified “body” and “person” (Laws, V.56.11). But at the same time, the corporation shows us how these unities tend to dissolve again into the many forms that make them up: this recombinatory aspect of the corporation, as it were, has noth­ ing inevitable about it, and an important aspect of the corporation’s analyti­ cal power thus lies in the way it focuses our attention on these threshold moments between disintegration and integration, between composition and fragmentation, between unifying concept and infinite predication. For all its limitations, the legal notion of the persona ficta is of foremost political importance precisely because it acts as a point of passage between these two poles of the corporation’s identity and coherence, drawing one corporation together into a unity and endowing it with rights and powers, even as it splits other corporate forms apart into the individual members who once had constituted it—­a double movement vividly captured, for instance, by current legal efforts to enfranchise commercial corporations while creat­ ing obstacles to labor unions of all kinds. If we perceive the materiality and artifice that always lingers in the etymology of “fiction,” the persona ficta will remind us that the corporation is always in the process of being assembled and decomposed; more broadly, it will help us think about the powers, ca­ pacities, and rights that might be attributed to any entity, whether singular or collective, that sits awkwardly among the ontological categories of person and

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thing, human and posthuman.60 And the law will remind us that this compo­ sitional process is never simply either material or intellectual but takes place through a constant translation between the two. At the same time, however, the legal theory of the persona ficta will take us only so far, as More understood. For although book I of Utopia draws openly on More’s experience as a lawyer and takes the relations among law, justice, and philosophy as its explicit theme, book II presents us with the hypothesis of a community that exists at the limits of positive law: Hythlo­ day recommends Utopian life for its comparatively few laws, its intuitive ap­ proach to legal interpretation, its ban on lawyers, and its general skepticism toward legal instruments such as treaties.61 Its character derives not from legal categories but from a practical life organized around shared philosophi­ cal ideas and maintained by a system of institutions that stand in place of law to ensure that this philosophical life is infused as widely as possible.62 “Pleasure,” “nature,” the “common,” the “public” : these have become “politi­ cal” ideas because they have reached a certain size or extension and possess the power to hold together a maximal number of elements. Utopia is thus a work of “political philosophy” in a very specific sense of the phrase: not a philosophy of politics (not a political “science”) but a portrait of how political association might emerge out of a philosophy held in common, or of a life lived in a philosophical way by a large number of people—­in short, of politics in the classical sense as a collective ethics.63 We have arrived at one of the fundamental paradoxes of Utopia, which presents us with the fiction of an actual, living community, one that “actually puts in practice” the things that Plato only “feigned” ( fingit) in his Republic (CW, 101.12–­14). This act of political constitution through mimesis, charac­ teristic of Utopia, is ongoing: just as we cannot assign a priority of cause to any one element in Utopian life, all of which are necessary for the others to persist, so Hytholoday’s narration projects a world that requires ever further details for its elaboration; these details fulfill the functions of earlier details that have already appeared, and each subsequent detail in turn is referred to the total system that the sum total of details implies. The entire process proceeds through a mental act of proportionate extension: the “success” or plausibility of the narrative (its consistency more than its realism) depends on this gesture of analogy. Hythloday can only mention enough detail to create the effect of having mentioned everything relevant; it would be impossible both in principle and in fact to represent every detail (no book is long enough to become a substitute for the world), but this proves unnecessary, since any detail we might imagine may always be inferred into the order that the act of

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reading has already created. It is the imaginative act of completing the func­ tion, of referring the detail to this larger logic of order, that constitutes the political totality of Utopia, which exists in a textual suspension; this order is then inferred outside narration to occupy a space that is somewhere between history and philosophy, idea and fact: a genre of writing unto itself, in the style that results when philosophy enters the domain of invention and when invention mixes with the abstraction necessary to philosophical thought. After More, we call this style of writing “utopic.” But a more familiar word for it is “poesy.” For the poet “coupleth the general notion with the particular example,” Sir Philip Sidney would soon argue in his famous Defense of Poesy, and in Sidney’s view the poet’s radical power was to create fictions that “figured forth” ideas and delivered them into the world so that they could become real: Neither let this be jestingly conceived, because the works of [nature] be essen­ tial, the [poet’s] in imitation or fiction; for any understanding knoweth the skill of the artificer standeth in that Idea or fore-­conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that Idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he hath imagined them. Which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as Nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him.64

Sidney in fact singles out Utopia as an example of how the “feigned image of poesy” might teach us the “way of patterning a commonwealth” better than “the regular instruction of philosophy,” even if More himself, in Sidney’s view, had not perfectly executed it (108.22–­28). And as Sidney points out, it is a mode employed with unusual skill by Plato, too, throughout his dialogues, which frequently turn to mythic and allegorical stories when the dialectical exchange begins to stall. To Plato’s objection that the fictions of poesy were deceptive and illusory, Sidney responds that poetic fiction provides access to a mode of ethical truth that is distinct from either the empiricism of history or the universals of philosophy precisely because of its artificial status as a “made” thing—­as a poetic thing, to cite Sidney’s own etymology of “poesy” from the Greek poiein, to make. From law, therefore, to literature, with the corporation emerging into view between them. For the law remains so flexible as a tool for giving structure to the real world because it, too, can be so inventive with its forms, coaxing a

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generalization out of circumstance and holding it out for our use, inviting us to reflect upon the nature of these peculiar things, ideas, and how they, too, form part of the ecology of our associational life. To the jurist who complains that Utopia remains a figment or an illusion, a “no place” without concrete, real existence, we may ask in return whether the same is not true of any idea at all: the problem raised by Utopia is the same as that raised by any fiction, for it ultimately concerns the ontology of ideas and in what way they may be said to form aspects of real life. Bacon, who spent more time than most think­ ing about the nature of ideas, arguably should have known better. But he is not the first to single out Utopia as a model for unreal, frivolous speculation, and he is not the last: both Smith and Hobbes worry that their writing will be construed as merely utopic rather than as a form of legitimate philosophical argument. Let us now look forward, therefore, and turn to Smith to see how he responded to the conceptual problems that Utopia had set in motion.

chapter two

The Political Economy of Sir  Thomas Smith The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. —jacques rancière

By 1551, More’s Utopia had been translated into English by a London goldsmith named Ralph Robynson—­More himself  had declared he would sooner burn the work than have it translated from Latin—­and the edition proved successful enough to warrant a second one five years later.1 But the work had changed, for Robynson’s translation stripped More’s text of its humanist apparatus, flattened its philosophical depth, and eliminated many of the playful effects that contributed to its distinctively literary character. The result, in the words of  David Harris Sacks, was a more practical polemic “speaking to the social, and especially the agrarian, problems of the age.”2 The years immediately preceding Robynson’s edition certainly had been tumultuous: as if in direct illustration of  Hythloday’s arguments, the 1530s and 1540s had brought relentless inflation, visible especially in rising land rents and prices for foodstuff; increased enclosure, and with it a monoculture of wool production that displaced persons from formerly common lands; and more imported consumer products, resulting in an unfavorable balance of trade with foreign merchants and the export of English precious metals. In the face of several serious uprisings—­over the new Book of Common Prayer in the southwest; over the appropriation of common lands in the northeast—­ Lord Protector Somerset had published several proclamations condemning enclosure and appointed two public commissions to examine the practice in 1548–­49. Statesmen and theological reformers alike had become newly self-­ conscious about the state of the “commonwealth,” which quickly became the dominant political concept of the period.3 Both William Sherman and Phil Withington have captured the many dimensions of meaning that animated the notion of the “commonwealth” or

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“common weal” during this tumultuous midcentury.4 A long-­standing En­ glish term for the largest political community of the realm, and one that would eventually come to describe a new concept of the “state” as an ab­ stract administrative entity, “commonwealth” could also be used for the many corporate boroughs, towns, cities, companies, and hospitals that made up the larger “common weal,” all of them communities that understood themselves to be semiautonomous body politics with distinctive privileges and freedoms.5 The urban community formed by the “state of citizens” deserved to be called “a Common wealth among themselves,” wrote the civil lawyer Thomas Wilson, because of  “the great privileges they enjoy . . . no other having authority to entermeddle amongst them.”6 “Whereas commonwealths and kingdoms cannot have, next after God, any surer foundation than the love and good will of one man towards another,” declared the author of “An Apologie of the Cittie of London,” an anonymous treatise appended to the second edition of John Stow’s Survey of  London (1603), “that also is closely bred and maintained in cities, where men by mutual society and companying together, do grow to alliances, commonalties, and corporations.”7 But the very currency of the word “commonwealth” also meant that it was ripe with polemical potential, depending upon a writer’s own position and sympathies. Most radically, it could serve as a rallying cry for rebellion or suggest democratic forms of government and ideas of common property—­ implications that many writers felt they immediately needed to disavow. Conversely, it could be used to justify more elite or aristocratic views of political rule.  John Watts has shown how a collective sense of political membership that had long been attached to the idea of communitas—­rendered in English as the “commons” or “commonalty,” the “commune,” and the “common weal”—­had always been used tactically by different groups in times of conflict or grievance; over the course of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, Watts argues, an older corporate understanding of the com­ munitas as a universitas or populus began to change under the pressure of a new “commonwealth” idea that had a more pronounced classical association with the res publica, one in which the elite played a leading role. At the same time, questions of governance became the objects of specialized expertise and administrative policy—­“political” problems become “politic,” to use the often-­pejorative term of the period.8 “The collective hubbub of the universi­ tas” was transformed into “sectional grievances,” Watts argues, as what had begun as an inclusive and “egalitarian” (258) political language became more stratified and marked by sharper status differences—­in no small measure because of the very economic dislocations that More had attacked so vividly in book I of Utopia.

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These shifts in terminology and meaning are visible throughout Robynson’s translation. As early as 1531, Sir Thomas Elyot had objected to the trans­ lation of respublica as “commonwealth,” in part because of its associations with common property and the lack of distinctions in rank it implied.9 Now, in keeping with Elyot’s preference for “publike weal,” Robynson titled More’s work A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the best state of a publyque weale, and of the new yle, called Utopia . . . (1551), and he used the same term in his dedicatory letter to Cecil, declaring that he had published his translation “for the advancement and commodity of the public wealth of my native country.”10 But, Robynson continues, he had undertaken the work because he saw “every sort and kind of people in their vocation and degree busily occupied about the commonwealth’s affairs, and especially learned men daily putting forth in writing new inventions and devices to the furtherance of the same” (210; my emphasis), and he conflates the terms again in Raphael’s crucial concluding speech at the end of book I: “Now I have declared and described unto you, as truly as I could, the form and order of that commonwealth, which, verily, in my judgment is not only the best, but also that which alone of good right may claim and take upon it the name of a commonwealth or public weal ” (198; my emphasis). Robynson’s terminology makes evident the degree to which the “commonwealth” was finally a discursive object that receives its definition through debate and political positioning across the social hierarchy as it becomes the imagined target of projects that seek to reform its social imbalances or stimulate its economic growth. For unlike the Latin respublica, sixteenth-­century uses of “commonwealth” often carried specifically economic and reformist connotations. And as we shall see, the word could be turned around to justify not public but private forms of wealth and enterprise. The purpose of this chapter is to begin tracking these shifts in the En­ glish political imaginary by looking closely at the writings of the jurist and statesman Sir Thomas Smith (1513–­77), a man born in the generation immediately after More (1485–­1536) whose education, professional position, and intellectual interests are closely comparable to his but who adopted a very different approach to nearly identical problems. At several points throughout his career, Smith responds explicitly to the model of Utopia, almost always in order to distance himself from the portrait that More had created of the “commons” as a form of corporate political community. Educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge, where he was made both King’s Scholar and University Orator, Smith studied civil law at Padua before returning to Cambridge to become a leading English authority on Greek, a doctor and regius professor of civil law, and the vice-­chancellor of the university. He was twice

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elected to Parliament (1547, 1553), was named the provost of Eton and the dean of Carlisle Cathedral, made secretary to Edward VI (1548–­49) and later to Elizabeth (1572–­73), and twice served as Elizabeth’s ambassador to France (1562–­66; 1571–­72).11 Like More, Smith was widely regarded as one of the most learned men of his age, the “flower of the University of Cambridge,” in the words of his student the geographer Richard Eden, where he lectured in natural philosophy, encouraged the study of practical mathematics, and wrote Latin treatises on the spelling of English and on the correct pronunciation of Greek.12 Smith owned one of the great manor houses of the period, Hill Hall at Theydon Mount, which he rebuilt several times in the latest Italian architectural styles, and he accumulated an impressive library of nearly four hundred titles across the fields of theology, philosophy, civil law, history, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, poetry, drama, medicine, alchemy, astrology, geography, and mathematics.13 Today Smith is remembered chiefly for having written two of the most penetrating analyses of the Tudor “commonwealth,” A Discourse of the Com­ monweal of This Realm of England (ca. 1548, pub. 1581), an analysis of mid-­ sixteenth-­century economic problems that takes the form of a fictional dialogue among five characters, and De Republica Anglorum (1565, pub. 1583), perhaps the most important contemporary description of England’s legal and political system.14 Examining Smith’s work closely will allow us to chart how a later generation was coming to think about the definition of the political community, at several different scales simultaneously: about the market as a complex system that touches all aspects of everyday life and thereby knits the commonwealth together; about the law as an institution for ensuring that the commonwealth remains a just one; and about Parliament as a corporate body in which representational and mystical ideas are blended by means of specific formal features. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, Smith is typical of a slow but perceptible shift in English culture from organic and mystical ideas of corporate unity toward contractual forms of corporate association in which the joint-­stock company becomes an increasingly significant mode of collective identity and collective action. Comparing Smith with More will thus allow us to mark the emergence of a distinctly materialist and representational account of corporate ideas by introducing us to the problems associated with a nascent discourse of political economy, an intellectual formation that Uto­ pia had sketched, albeit in an inverse form. For if we characterize political economy not only as a set of newly scientific theories about state-­sponsored economic policy, trade, and national market mechanisms but as a series of

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competing ways to think more broadly about the problem of value—­its defi­ nition, equivalencies, and incompatibilities across varying situations—­then it becomes possible to identify the sixteenth century, rather than the seventeenth or eighteenth, as a crucial moment of transformation in the way that “economic” and “political” ideas came be to be redefined in relation to one another. Approaching the problem in this way also shows how important humanist ideas were to this process of redefinition, across a wide variety of discourses and genres of writing, even though scholarship rarely associates European humanism with the advent of modern political economy.15 Along the way, we shall see how corporatist arguments continue to underwrite political concepts on a large scale, even as on a more local scale corporate institutions are sometimes superseded or elided. We shall watch as economic ideas become increasingly important to political definitions, in ways that were sometimes difficult for humanist writers like Smith (and More before him) to accommodate within received political categories. And we shall glimpse the emergence of new political concepts, such as “civil society,” that at once translate older political ideas and introduce new categories into Elizabethan political philosophy.16

a new philosophy of value From the very origins of political philosophy it had been impossible to distinguish absolutely between “ethical” and “political” concepts; as every humanist knew—­as Utopia had reminded him—­the purpose of the polis was to foster virtue, which was in turn a defining characteristic of the citizen as a member of the political community.17 The place of economics in this ethico-­ political sphere was clear: Aristotle had defined economic activity in ethical terms—­for medieval and early modern thinkers alike, the Nicomachean Ethics was a long-­standing authority on economic and not simply moral problems—­ and he understood it as part of the household (oikos), through which it became necessary by extension to the larger political community of virtue. Since commercial activity did not take virtue as its end, it was excluded from the “political” relation properly speaking: in the Politics, Aristotle states unequivocally that “in the most nobly constituted state, and the one that possesses men that are absolutely just . . . the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life (for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue).”18 Trade concerned with the “good life” is natural, so long as it is not measured in bodily enjoyments (1.3.19) and so long as it procured “those goods, capable of accumulation, which are necessary for life and useful for the community

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of the city or household” (1.3.8). Since necessary goods are by definition limited (1.3.9), the household form of wealth is “natural” (1.3.17) and could include the exchange of objects when used for themselves. In contrast, sheer “wealth-­getting” is unnatural because it is unlimited and pursued “by means of a certain acquired skill or art” (1.3.10); it employs money as a conventional measure and has as its end wealth itself in the form of money, for which there can be no limit (1.3.13–­18). For this reason Aristotle condemns interest and usury in arguments that are well known to medieval and early modern historians. Because sixteenth-­century humanists took for granted the basic ethical and political origins of classical discussions of commerce, men who wished to enter into trading ventures—­counselors, statesmen, members of the Privy Council, and other wealthy members of Elizabethan society—­found that some of their most cherished classical authorities either disdained moneymaking as a public activity or, at best, circumscribed that activity by linking it to the magnanimity that formed the distinctive public virtue of the wealthy. Smith’s entire career is split by this contradiction, and his Discourse of the Commonweal is remarkable both for the way in which it forges a new intellectual amalgam that can justify commercial profit and for its pragmatic approach to the issues that confronted all members of English society.  The work addresses the pressing concerns of the moment as directly as possible, advancing sophisticated arguments about debasement, price mechanisms, and the internationalization of commerce that would become hallmarks of seventeenth-­century mercantilism.19 And it does so by means of a literary form long favored by humanist writers and that More had exploited to full effect: an imaginary dialogue conducted among a knight, a doctor, a merchant, a husbandman, and a capper, each representing a distinct “estate” (13) in English life. At the core of the dialogue lies a problem that the various characters identify as “diversity of opinions,” “division,” and “contention” (126, 23): the “state of the Commonweal” (11), as the anonymous narrator of the preface describes it, is the exact inverse of More’s de optimo reipublicae statu, a condition of “common and universal grief ” (13) issuing in a collective “murmur ” that sponsors hostile charges against one’s “neighbor,” the picking of quarrels, and the stirring up of “commotion” (87). In one moment every man is isolated and turning on those around him; in another moment all men are complaining in unison and threatening to revolt. The so-­called commonweal contains a “multitude” driven by antagonism, united only by universal disagreement, and ready for an equally universal accusation. As troubling as

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this “diversity of opinion” seems to the participants in the dialogue, however, it implies something even more radical: a “plurality of reals,” in the words of the political philosopher Harold Laski, based on fundamentally distinct and fully irreconcilable experiences of contemporary conditions that admit of no consensus, much less any enduring political coherence.20 As the Capper complains, men today are “set . . . together by the ears, some with this opinion and some with that, some holding this way and some another, and that so stiffly as though the truth must be as they say that have the upper hand in contention” (23). This “contention,” at once metaphysical and existential, is rooted in a special kind of solipsism, one in which large-­ scale or systemic economic dislocation can only be apprehended through immediate personal circumstances. Each character grounds his arguments in his own “expe­rience” and “perception,” both frequent terms in the dialogue: the experience of a change in price over time, measured precisely; the awareness that a for­mer abundance has eroded into a meaner, more ruthless existence. The task confronting the Doctor is not merely to furnish a singular metaphysical explanation for the causes of what he calls “common and universal dearth” (38) but to overcome the individuality of personal conviction, grounded in affect and memory, and replace it with a new account of the commonwealth as an integral and supraindividual whole that shakes individual characters free of their immediate perception and re-­presents the familiar commodi­ties and occupations that ground their identity as interlinked aspects of a larger political body. In this political body, “no man is a stranger”: this neo-­Ciceronian formula appears as the very first marginal commonplace of the dialogue, announcing its origins in classical moral philosophy and in this way establishing the epistemological authority for the analysis of economic problems that have occasioned the work and that endured into the writings of Adam Smith. The same argument serves, too, as a defensive principle for the anonymous speaker of the dialogue’s preface, who identifies himself as a “member of Philosophy Moral, wherein I have somewhat studied” (12). By pairing one key Ciceronian maxim with another—­“ That men are not born of themselves only” ( 3, 16), perhaps the most commonly cited sententia of De Officiis in the sixteenth century—­the dialogue sketches a portrait of a commonwealth in which everyone is a member but no one member is self-­sufficient or even fully self-­possessed. For the characters of the Discourse, this subjective alienation into politics takes place by means of the very economic transactions that will come to measure the limits of communal life. This new “political economy,” as we

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may call it, is at once a system of rational explanation, a mode of empirical analysis, a genre of historical description, and a set of practical “devices” for governance, and it must be justified and explained as an intellectual formation—­it cannot be taken for granted, as becomes clear when the Knight asks the Doctor to say more about the many strange new “sciences very nec­essary for every Commonweal which I never heard of before” (30).21 The Doctor has just finished a spirited defense of learning—­his specific form of “ labor ” (23), as he explains to the skeptical Capper, who would attribute the disturbing “diversity of opinions” (24) to him—­and of moral philosophy in particular as the source of political order. More than a doctor of divinity and more than a doctor of civil law, Doctor Pandolphus represents the institution of the university in general as a source of expertise in political matters because of its philosophical credentials, and his discourse in defense of “learning” is meant to situate political economy within the many arts of the official uni­ versity curriculum, on the one hand, and the special kind of “wisdom” at­ tributed to those who have experience in the practical arts of building, medicine, and husbandry, on the other, as an intellectual field necessary to the commonweal—­a set of principles necessary not only to collective daily life but to the very idea of a unified polity composed out of a plurality of interests. The distinctive value of learning, especially the “book” learning of the university, is that it transcends any individual experience and comes to stand as a repository for an immortal collective knowledge, as the Doctor explains: “For where it is denied man to live above a hundred years or thereabouts, by the benefits of learning he has the commodity of life of a thousand years, yes, two or three thousand years, by reason he sees the events and occurrences of all that time by books” (27). Because the Doctor is able to draw on his position as a spokesperson for the university and borrow the prestige of its intellectual methods, he begins to resolve the “diversity of opinions” that confront him by countering their diverging accounts of the crisis with a technical discourse on the nature of causation, broadly Aristotelian, in which a single primary cause underwrites all the others (96–­97) and which he narrows to the “one thing that is the original cause of these causes” (98): persistent debasement of English coin (101, 69). The Doctor’s detailed explanation of debasement and of how inflation follows from it forms the economic core of the dialogue and introduces the second major unifying principle of the Discourse: gold, the only substance that can translate the heterogeneity of all other substances, in all their shapes and forms, into a single value equivalent. “Marry! Iron for my plows, harrows, and carts, tar for my sheep, shoes, caps, linen and woolen

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cloth for my meinie [ household],” as the Husbandman exclaims (40); the “wines, spices, silk, armor, glass . . . oils, pitch, tar, rosin” of the gentleman (43), without which a life of “civility,” as the Doctor calls it, is impossible. Despite the Doctor’s reputation of learning and his obvious technical expertise, the other characters remain skeptical of this new “cause,” and the crux of their disagreement turns precisely on the question whether gold can be both substance and sign, at once a commodity valued for its physical characteristics and a coin whose currency is universal, “chosen by common consent throughout the world” (72, 44–­45). The Knight repeatedly wonders why the actual substance of gold matters as a measurement of value, when this value might be signified by any kind of token that passes as current under the king’s seal, “yea, though it were but leather or paper” (69–­70, 34). Citing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 5.5 in the margin—­“That the coin is the common mea­ sure,” which “is not my saying only” but “Aristotle’s the sharpest philosophy of wit that ever was” (105–­6)—­the Doctor maintains that comparing money to language is deceiving. “Well a man may change the name of things, but the value he cannot in any wise endure for any space,” the Doctor continues, “except we were in such a country as Utopia was imagined to be that had no traffic with any other outward country” (105). The sudden appearance of Utopia at this moment in Smith’s dialogue has a double function similar to its role in Bacon’s argument in Calvin’s Case: as a pure artifice of language, Utopia has no referential status to a real condition, and the Doctor regards it as a poor philosophical model for understanding the problem of “value,” which can never be transposed by an act of wishful thinking and the stroke of a pen. In the Doctor’s view, Utopia is insufficiently circumstantiated—­insufficiently historical and referential—­since it exists in blissful independence from the international system of commerce that is put­ting so much pressure on contemporary English prices. Foreign merchants “be strangers, and not within obedience of our Sovereign Lord” (41); the “universal market of the world” and “common market of all the world” (86), as the Doctor calls it, is beyond any single legal authority, which is why English statutes that aim to revalue English coins are doomed to fail. In this international world of legal pluralism and competing  jurisdictions, the only principle of sovereignty is to be found in gold and not in utopic fiction, and the only consistent law is manifested in the movement of prices and the natural tendency of all men to seek their own profit. As More had grasped, however, and as Smith found it necessary to justify, this profit principle also tends to undermine any claim to justice and makes it all the more difficult to establish the proper relation between the singular

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member and the “Commonweal.” In an exchange with the Doctor over enclosures, the Knight poses the problem most sharply as a conflict between “one,” “all,” and “some” (52). “That which is possessed of many in common is neglected of all,” the Knight advises, quoting a “civilian” and a “maxim in his law” and pointing out that “in the most countries beyond the seas they known not what a common ground means.” Owning individually and privately is always more “profitable and not hurtful to the Commonweal” (50). On this basis the Knight constructs a political arithmetic: Every man is a member of the Commonweal, and that that is profitable to one may be profitable to another if he would exercise the same feat. Therefore that that is profitable to one and so to another may be profitable to all and so to the whole Commonweal. As a great mass of treasure consists of many pence and one penny added to another and so to the third and fourth and so further makes up the great sum so does each man added to another make up the whole body of a Commonweal. (51)

But the Doctor counters with another maxim: “they may not purchase them­ selves profit by that that may be hurtful to others” (51). Nothing prevents “all” from doing what “some” are observed to do; “some” inevitably extends into “all” without restriction, but this “all” is simply an aggregate of individuals, a plurality that competes within itself with no regard for genuine political unity. Instead, the Doctor proposes the “Commonweal” as the larger entity that must be preserved through such “ordinances” as are “profitable to the most number and do hurt but to the fewest,” citing Cicero in support of his argument (116). Like the Knight, in other words, the Doctor grounds his anal­ysis of the commonwealth in a profit principle—­“every man naturally will follow that wherein he sees profit, and therefore men will the gladder occupy husbandry” (60)—­but he favors impersonal economic mechanisms, wrapped in neo-­Roman moral justifications, as a means of reforming the commonweal. His preferred solution for encouraging husbandry rather than pasturage is finally to remove price restrictions on agricultural goods, especially corn. “Some things in a Commonweal must be forced with pains and some by rewards allured,” he concludes, once more citing Cicero as his authority (59). Perhaps more than any other moment in the Discourse, the exchange between the Knight and the Doctor illustrates the difficulty that sixteenth-­ century humanists had when they tried to accommodate the new world of economic transactions and mercantilist logic surrounding them to the ethical and political categories they had inherited. Whereas Aristotle had sub­

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ordinated economic questions to ethical ones and accorded little space to economic ideas or economic practices in political life, Ciceronian political philosophy had placed contract and private property as the cornerstone of de optimo reipublicae statu. Smith views economy and politics as perfectly coincidental: touching everything and everyone, the economy provokes a reimagination of the political relation itself as one that is rooted in many small transactions and structured around an opposition between domestic and foreign spheres. In the view of all characters, the concept of “profit” assumes a moral value that should extend as widely as possible, since only in this way will it allow the “Commonwealth” to cohere as a political entity. Smith’s marginal gloss sums up the principle in maximal form: “the most durable and most universal profit is most to be esteemed than short and particular” (60). Smith’s account of English economic life in the Discourse is notable, too, however, for the way in which it downplays and even views with suspicion the types of incorporated guilds and companies that provided the structure for local political organization, speaking of “towns” and “cities” as aggregates of individual occupations—­bundles of economic activity—­rather than as the self-­determining political communities many of them had already be­ come.22 Indeed, the Doctor openly attributes the decay of towns to the excessive control that the incorporated guilds had on economic life, arguing instead for a patent system modeled on that of  Venice, in which individual expertise is protected rather than corporately organized craft knowledge: “As I have known, good workmen, as well smiths and weavers, have come from strange parts to some cities within this realm intending to set up their crafts and, because they were not free there, but specially because they were better workmen than was any in the town, they could not be suffered to work there. Such incorporations had those mysteries in those towns that none might work there in their faculty except they did compound with them first” (124; cf. 88). To the Knight’s observation that foreign craftsmen might reasonably be denied the freedoms that are normally granted to fully apprenticed craftsmen, the Doctor responds by inverting the conventional opposition between private and public, contrasting the common good of the largest form of political association—­the “public weal,” the same phrase that Robynson had used to translate Raphael’s respublica—­to what he describes as the “private liberties and privileges” (125) enjoyed by the incorporated craft guilds. A model for modern neoliberalism, the Doctor imagines a political world in which the individual has no need for intermediate-­level organizations, which stand between the individual occupation and the community

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of the realm and inhibit the flourishing of the latter: he requires only the abstract principle of “free vent and sale” (60).23 And so we may perceive the enabling paradox of the Doctor’s vision. For it is the absence of intermediate corporate bodies that has generated the polarized and solipsistic political world that has opened the dialogue, a condition of endemic conflict for which his new political economy can offer both a new explanation and a new mode of resolution. Indeed, the five-­headed dialogue itself appears now as the most logical imaginative form in which this political-­ economic condition might find expression. The participants in the dialogue meet by chance in an alehouse, a space of transient commercial transactions that is presented as a retreat from the duties of office. Face-­to-­face meetings and prior reputation facilitate the exchange of ideas and give a minimal coherence to the party: no sooner have they seated themselves “in a close parlor” than a merchant of the city enters and is invited to join them; he in turn sends for a venison pasty lying at home and two friends whom he has invited to dinner, including Doctor Pandotheus, with whom the Knight is already acquainted. Several times Smith describes the members of the dialogue as forming a “company” or as “in” company with one another ( 32, 37, 15), a usage that differentiates the group from the “great multitude” of clothiers who, “when they be idle,” the Knight declares, “then assemble in companies and murmur for lack of living and so pick one quarrel or other to stir the poor commons, that be as idle as they, to a commotion” (87).24 Again, Smith seems implicitly to associate a corporate or guild form of commercial organization with political unrest. In contrast, the five speakers of the dialogue make up a different kind of association: one that is more temporary and occasional, in which a plurality of reals may be united under a single moral philosophy that rules not by “ laws” but by “maxims,” which the dialogue extracts for the reader into commonplace form and writes into the margins of the book as its fruit. Like More, therefore, albeit with an inverse result, Smith offers an early attempt to understand “political economy” not as a contradiction in terms but as the essence of the commonwealth, a process of translating among competing systems of value that requires philosophy in order to explain it. But here, too, “philosophy” depends finally on the imaginative projection of fiction, not only through the form of Smith’s own dialogue but inside it. Twice the Knight introduces a premise to the Doctor for discussion, which he describes as “putting the case” (108, 115), and when the Doctor hesitates to tread into sensitive territory—­who, exactly, is responsible for the debasement of the coin? what remedies, precisely, might be sought to correct it?—­ the Knight prods him forward by pointing out that the entire discussion is,

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after all, a hypothetical one. “What harm is it, though we imagined here a whole Commonweal among ourselves, so it be not set forth as though we would needs have it after our devise?” (108). In spite of himself, Smith’s own character has suddenly produced the “Commonweal” as a political fiction that hovers behind the dialogue, both everywhere and nowhere at once. The result is a world in which “politics” is conducted in two distinct but interpenetrating domains, one broader than the other. The practical activities of government, such as legislation, taxation and customs policy, coinage, and the administration of justice, are relegated to specific institutions that form the core of that political fiction that will later come to be called the “state”: Parliament, the Privy Council, and the Crown.25 But these institutions do not themselves appear in the imaginative space of the dialogue, which instead delineates something approaching a modern public sphere, where discussion about matters of government is conducted more widely, outside of the institutions of government but always with reference to them.26

the society of commonwealth Some fifty years after More had traveled to Bruges and Antwerp, where he composed book II of Utopia, Smith found himself in France as Elizabeth’s ambassador to the French court in a similar moment of enforced leisure. He was stalled in Toulouse, traveling with Charles IX as he made a slow circuit around southwestern France; the journey had been punctuated by outbreaks of plague; storms and fires that ruined his possessions; a public brawl, in which several of Smith’s servants had been injured and one killed; and now a fearsome fever that caused the right side of Smith’s face to swell and his teeth to ache. He was “in a marvellous agony for money,” too, always undersupplied and forced to scramble for overpriced food and lodging.27 Marking time, he found himself moved to write, from memory, an account of that political community that he knew best: De Republica Anglorum.28 A week later he wrote from Bordeaux to Walter Haddon, a friend and former colleague in civil law at Cambridge, about the new work: “I have furnished fruitful argument for those who would debate after the fashion of philosophers on single topics and raise nice points as to justice and injustice, and whether what is held yonder in England as law be the better, or what is held here and in those regions which are administered in accordance with the Roman Law.”29 And on the book’s final page Smith described his method even more directly, invoking the very idea suggested by the Knight in the Discourse in order to reject it:

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Wherefore this being as a project or table of a common wealth truely laide before you, not fained by putting a case: let us compare it with common wealthes, which be at this day in esse, or doe remaine discribed in true histories . . . to see who hath taken righter, truer, and more commodious way to governe the people aswell in warre as in peace. This will be no illberall occupation for him that is a Philosopher and hath a delight in disputing, nor unprofitable for him who hath to doe and hath good will to serue the Prince and the common wealth in giving counsell for the better administration thereof. (142–­43; my emphasis)

“Philosophy” as a method for establishing the best state of the commonwealth, leading directly to “counsell”: Smith’s arguments could have been lifted directly from book I of Utopia, were it not for the fact that he turns sharply away from fiction and hypothesis as a mode of inquiry in favor of a quasi-­empirical method. His book will offer a comprehensive blueprint, a “project” or “table,” not a “fained” hypothetical exercise. And if we have any doubt that Smith is writing with More’s Utopia in mind, he tells us so explicitly at the very end of De Republica Anglorum: I have declared summarily as it were in a chart or mappe, or as Aristotle termeth it ως εν τυπω [Nicomachean Ethics, V 1129a 12] the forme and manner of governement of Englande and the policie thereof, and sette before your eies the principall pointes wherein it doth differ from the policie or gouernement at this time used in Fraunce, Italie, Spaine, Germanie and all other Countries, which do follow the ciuill lawe of the Romanes compiled by Justinian into his pandects and code: not in that sort as Plato made his common wealth, or Zenophon his kingdome of Persia, nor as Syr Thomas More his Utopia being feigned common wealths, such as never was nor never shall be, vaine imaginations, phantasies of Philosophers to occupie the time, and to exercise their wittes. (142)

Smith has emphatically not written in a fictional mode about things that have no being, a mode he associates both with More and with Plato (and this from the man whom Haddon had described, after hearing one his public orations at Cambridge some years earlier, as “another Socrates”).30 But despite the several nods to Aristotle, neither has Smith written something we could call “philosophy.” As Smith himself describes it: “I have written it moreover in the language of our own country, in a style midway between the historical and the philosophical, giving it the shape in which I imagined that Aristotle wrote of the many Greek commonwealths books which are no longer extant.” He has composed, in short, not only in the mode that Aristotle had used when he wrote as a philosopher about historical constitutions: he has written in the very mode that for Sidney would soon distinguish the poet as an inventor of imaginative fictions.

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The letter to Haddon and the concluding chapter of De Republica Anglo­ rum thus announce several interlinked problems in almost identical fashion. The philosophical dimension to Smith’s treatise may be found in the way it approaches the nature of political community in general as an ontological question, inviting its reader to contemplate the quality of “being” that a commonwealth might have and to evaluate its virtues, especially the nature of its justice, in relation to a normative philosophical principle by which all political communities should be judged. Today, we are apt to characterize such a project not as “philosophy” but as “political science,” or even simply as “science,” which has become our preferred mode of settling ontological questions, and Smith’s analogies to the chart and the map, the “project” and the table, anticipate those of Bacon some half a century later. But we should not be surprised to find that Smith’s own term for empirical inquiry into the nature of politics is “history.”31 De Republica Anglorum may be described as a species of history writing, insofar as it concerns a particular political community in a specific time and place; it may be compared to other living political communities, and this act of comparison is itself an important part of the method that a reader might use to evaluate the philosophical questions the treatise raises. Nevertheless, by adopting a style somewhere between history and philosophy, as Smith puts it, he also introduces a certain tension between two very different methods of rendering the ontology of a commonwealth conceived in corporate terms: it lives in the space between reality and concept, empirical reference and intellectual abstraction, between the punctuality of an immediate, contemporary moment and the reflection that would translate that moment into a transhistorical constitutional form. When historians refer to Smith’s De Republica Anglorum as one of the most detailed contemporary descriptions of sixteenth-­century England’s “constitution,” they have in mind his discussion of offices and duties, of the social orders that participate in rule, and his isolation of the principle of “rule” itself from the equally significant institutional administration of that rule (which Smith divides into separate books on Parliament and on the system of the courts).32 Smith himself uses the terms “government” and “policie” throughout his treatise, the latter as a transliteration of the Greek politea, and both words appear in the subtitle of De Republica Anglorum, The maner of gov­ ernment or policie of the Realme of England. The treatise’s three-­part structure reflects Smith’s own sense of the major components to the “constitutional” form, from the largest or most inclusive—­the community of the whole, the commonwealth properly speaking—­to Parliament, to the system of administering Justice that reaches out into the realm and brings it into order and regularity. Where the Discourse had sought a principle of political cohesion

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in economic analysis and mercantile systems of  value, De Republica Anglo­ rum seeks its unifying principle in law, an emphasis that produces a more restricted set of categories for persons and that moves away from the tactical concern for economic management and population control that characterized Smith’s earlier work. As is evident in his own comments, Smith also draws much more ex­ plicitly on the categories of  Aristotelian political philosophy in  De Repub­ lica Anglorum than he had in the earlier Discourse, and for this reason the trea­ tise provides a valuable index of the degree to which Aristotelian arguments about constitutional forms could be received through corporatist concepts, a phenomenon that is more widely visible as the sixteenth century draws to a close. The 1598 English translation of  Louis Le Roy’s French edition of Aristotle’s Politics, for instance, possibly by  John Dee, renders the classical notion of κοινωνία, often translated as “community” or “partnership,” as “com­ pany” and “fellowship,” while the term polis becomes “Citie, Corporation, or Commonweale,” and this from the book’s opening chapter, as well as in one of the most famous passages of the Politics: “But the cause of mens assembling & drawing togither into corporations & cities, is not only to liue, but rather to liue wel: for if the cause of their assembly and ioining in society, were to liue only, the city should consist of slaues, & of other creatures.”33 Equally significant is the term “society,” which both Smith and the translator of the Politics understand in two somewhat different sense simulta­ neously.  Societas was a common and long-­standing term to describe groups of persons of all kinds, and especially large-­scale groups organized under law and justice; in the work of Cicero and Augustine, for instance, societas captured many of the meanings that a term like polis also expressed, as we can see also in the passage from the Politics above.34 Smith has this general meaning in mind when he defines the “commonwealth” in De Republica Anglorum as “a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord and convenauntes among themselves, for the conservation of themselves aswell in peace as in warre. For properly an host of men is not called a common wealth but abusively, because they are collected but for a time and for a fact: which done, ech divideth himselfe from others as they were before” (20). Here Smith remains close to Roman notions of political community as founded on individual agreements, a prototheory of social contract; indeed, his definition is almost identical to that of Cicero in his Republic.35 The translator of the Politics, too, uses “society” in a nearly identical sense, glossing the phrase “everie companie is ordained for some good” (I.1) as “a companie, societie, or fellowship, is a knitting of many

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persons togither in consent, tending to some good or to some euill.” The gloss exemplifies the degree to which the three dominant keywords for voluntary association in the sixteenth century, each with distinct linguistic origins, as Withington has shown—­Romance, Latin, and Anglo-­Saxon—­could be consolidated into a new overarching political concept of “Commonweal” and “ciuill societie” that was perceived to be at once ancient and modern in its application.36 In Roman law, however, the societas could also designate a more restricted partnership formed for commercial purposes, one that was sometimes distinguished from other corporate associations such as the universitas or the col­ legium and in other moments compared to them. This corporate meaning of “society” was used widely throughout the entire sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Withington points out, from Thomas Elyot’s Latin-­English Dic­ tionary (1538) to the second edition of Edward Phillips’s New World of Words (1696), and extending to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1775.37 The term “society” thus introduces a flexibility of scale into Smith’s arguments, allowing him to amalgamate Greek and Roman concepts of the total political community with more contemporary forms of association that might have a religious, professional, or commercial purpose. The first “societie” of free people in its “least part thereof must be of two,” a “societie of man, and wo­m­an” to which “men are so naturally borne,” as Aristotle, “the prince of all Philosophers,” argues. But the “fashion of government” called “Remp.[ublicam] or politeian” (21) is also a “societie” because it “consisteth onely of freemen” (22); “although of all thinges or lyuing creatures a man doth shew him selfe most politique,” Smith continues, “yet can he not well live without the societie and fellowship ciuill” (22). The same flexibility of scale and purpose is visible across the 1598 translation of the Politics, in which “societie” can name the relationship between husband and wife and master and servant, as well as the family as a whole. The term also describes “particular societies of peculiar houses, hamlets, borowes, and other inferiour companies” (I.1), and it is a common equivalent for “Citie.” But it becomes a synonym for “a League, and a Nation” (II.1), and it finally expands to the largest community of all: “the ciuill societie or companie of a Citie or Common-­weale” (I.1), which the translator also calls a “corporation” or “the fellowship and society of ciuill government” (and which he immediately contracts again to compare to the guild-­type membership of the “Mariner,” who “is one of the fellowship and societie of nauigatours” [ III.3]). Like the earlier Discourse, Smith’s De Republica Anglorum omits small-­ scale political associations other than the family, never mentioning the many

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corporate entities that populated the sixteenth-­century English “commonwealth” and referring to “cities and burrowes” and “corporate townes” only in passing (42). Nevertheless, Smith’s discussion of the household is instructive, since he seizes on one of the few passages in the Politics where Aristotle had explicitly considered the relevance of wealth to the nature of governance, a discussion that turned on what type of authority the master has over the members of his household and what kinds of resources are available to him. Smith follows Aristotle in defining the “bondman or . . . slave” as an instrument, comparing him to the tools of the carpenter or husbandman, which also do not enter into a “political” relationship with him: “For the private wealth of the husbandman is onely regarded, and there is no mutuall societie or portion, no law or pleading between thone and thother” (21). This is because “the bondman hath no communion with his master, the wealth of the Lord is only sought for, and not the profit of the slave or bondman” (20) and “[ he] is but a reasonable and lyving instrument the possession of his Lorde and master, reckoned among his goods, not otherwise admitted to the societie civill or common wealth, but is part of the possession and goods of his Lorde” (21). Smith borrows a foundational theological concept—­ “communion,” from the ancient communio, expressive particularly of ideal or spiritual commonality, often with a strong corporatist sense—­and refashions it into an economic principle that becomes the primary source of political affiliation in civil society.38 Those who share wealth or who participate in a mutual relation through wealth are considered as fully political persons and vice versa; to be a person is to enter into legal relations over property, and only in this way to leave the private space of the household and enter the domain of “civil” relations properly speaking—­a step over the political threshold that can only be taken by a person and not a good or an instrument. The political community is literally a “common wealth” formed out of abstract legal persons, unified through their mutual share in profit to form an enormous “societie” whose resources reside in the “exchequer,” the “fiscus principis,” “aerarium publicum,” or “statarium” that represents the sum total of all revenues and the essence of the political community as a grand corporate venture.39

the law of commonwealth If arriving at a definition of the “common wealth” depends on differentiating the master from the “slave or bondman” and equating justice with strength and profit, as it did in A Discourse, this definition depends on a system of law

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and an administrative apparatus that can render this conceptual equation secure and durable, extending it as widely as possible across the entire landscape of persons. And the bulk of De Republica Anglorum is in fact concerned with the practical ways that “justice” is manufactured through a web of institutions, forms of writing, and an entire legal furniture—­tables, chairs, rooms, and closed doors—­that maintain the punctuality and full materiality of the law’s application. Smith rarely presents “Justice” as an immanent idea, treating it instead as a function of the most ordinary substances collected in particular locations for a limited period. He acknowledges this “marvelous” (69) peculiarity of the English legal system: despite the size of the country, justice is rendered only in a few places and for a limited time, “no, not the third part of the yeare” (69). He describes the site of justice, “Westminster hall,” with its different benches and entrances for different pleas; he explains the method of inquiry that translates matters of fact into questions of law; and he surveys the procedure for decision making that converts doubtful questions into settled opinion—­and only then into a principle of justice in which legal persons can share. The same level of detail extends to Smith’s treatment of commissions, quarter sessions, the court baron, the leet or manor court, common inquests, and the formation of the jury. Smith describes the formal procedures that the justices of the peace must follow, the declaration or “indictment” that declares a man into the space of a political relationship: Then the prisoners are called for by name, and bidden to aunswere to their names. And when the Custos rotulorum hath brought forth their enditements, the Judges do name one or two or three of the prisoners that are endicted, whom they will have arraigned. There the clarke speaketh first to one of the prisoners: A. B. come to the barre, hold up thy hand. The clarke goeth on: A. B. thou by the name of A. B. of such a towne, in such a countie, art endicted, that such a day, in such a place, thou hast stolen with force and armes an horse, which was such ones, of such a colour, to such a valor [sic], and carried him away feloniouslie, and contrarie to the peace of our soveraigne ladie the Queene. What sayest thou to it, art thou guiltie or not guiltie? (97)

The formalism of the indictment results as much from its minimalist narrative structure, substitutable and specifiable according to circumstance, as it does from the alphabetical blanks that allow for any name to enter as a subject under the law. Justice takes place “in the towne house, or in some open or common place” (96), a space that is both actual and virtual at the same time. Everywhere the law enters, it becomes public, but this is not an effortless

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or instantaneous extension; public spaces are then rendered private and sequestered, while the jury deliberates behind closed doors; the door opens, and private spaces become maximally public once more, potentially open to everyone. The corporate commonwealth requires purely formal legal persons who can enter into relation to the law and suffer or enjoy justice, as well as different categories of persons who can assist in the administration and application of the law; for Smith, the relevant distinction between the “parts and persons of the common wealth”—­its “gentlemen, citizens, yeomen artificers, and laborers” (31)—­is between those who rule and those who do not, those “that beare office” and those that “beare none” (30). Surprisingly, the model person for the corporate commonwealth is not the noble, knight, or squire but rather the “yeoman,” whom Smith links etymologically as well as functionally to the category of legal person in general: “I call him a yeoman who our lawes do call Legalem hominem, a worde familiar in writtes and enquestes, which is a freeman borne English, and may dispend of his owne free lande in yerely revenue to the summe of xl.s. sterling” (42). During quarter sessions, the sheriff impanels four inquests of twenty-­four yeomen each, plus a fifth “called the great enquest” and composed “out of the bodie of the shire mingled with all” (86); in cases of “hue and crie,” determined “by the olde lawe of Englande,” “everie English man is a sergiant to take the theefe” (90), and justice is distributed across the bodies of the citizens, who now move and act on behalf of the commonwealth as a whole. The yeoman is a pure generality, singular and collective, local and national at the same time, a faceless type who exemplifies all that Smith values in the formation of the common wealth.40 He has no formal distinction in rank but recognizes and honors rank in others (42). Nevertheless the yeoman has “a certaine preheminence” in the local community that derives from his manner of life—­he is the preeminent political man because he does not merely live but lives well. The yeomen “commonly live welthilie, keepe good houses, and do their businesse, and travaile to acquire riches” (42); they tend to be farmers, who participate in the economic activity of the common wealth by “grasing” and “frequenting of markettes.” The yeoman keeps servants, “not idle as the gentleman doth, but such as get both their owne living and parte of their maisters” (43). Unlike the bondsman, in other words, the yeoman and the servant share a mutual interest and cooperate in the production of common wealth, and this common relation extends political life into the household, which is itself opened up to free individual activity. The yeoman sends his sons “to schoole at the Universities” or “to the lawe of the Realme” (43), making them gentlemen as well as citizens; as a group, the yeomen are themselves “optimos cives in Republica,” in the words of “olde Cato” (43), and

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are singled out also by Aristotle. They were the honorable archers and footmen “that affraide all France” and who fight for lord and family, “countrey and nation” (44); they are “obedient” and accustomed to war but eager not to prolong it so that they may return to a free life. Given Smith’s economic theory, the most important aspect of the yeomen may be that they “tende their owne businesse” and “come not to meddle in publike matters and judgements but when they are called” and are “gladde when they are delivered thereof ” (43–­44). The yeoman, in other words, spends most of his time occupying the very space opened by the dialogue of A Discourse, a quotidian space that could be described as both “outside” and “inside” the law, or perhaps “beside” it, in that the law acts as a structuring principle for activity but does not find it necessary to designate every action and object that exists there. In this sense, the yeoman finds his negative equivalent in the figure of the “outlaw,” who manages to escape legal application despite his “indictment” or naming into the legal institutions that make up the political community (87). And the outlaw is only one of several figures at whom the “form of law,” as Smith calls it, is directed: the “heretiques, traitors, thefts, murders, manslaughters, rapes, false moniers, extortioners, riottes, routes, forcible entries, unlawefull games, and all such thinges as be contrarie to the peace and good order of the Realme” (87) and that somehow must be forced into a legal statement, and through this statement into a legitimate constitutional form. Like Aristotle and Plato before him and like most of his contemporaries, Smith is suspicious of democracy as a form of government—­“the rule or the usurping of the popular or rascall and viler sort” (11)—­because it tends toward rule by the multitude, a purely quantitative idea that never achieves either the unity or virtue that characterizes a true commonwealth. He strongly associates democracy with an entropic, antipolitical force of plurality that accentuates the potential to conflict that exists in all men (89), arguing that “the usurping of the rascality can never long endure, but necessarily breedeth, and quickly bringeth forth a tyrant” (12). Smith is also at pains to demonstrate how the mixed form of English government contrasts to the unruly pluralism of the democratic polity, and he does so by means of the image of the body politic and the corporatist arguments that define his notion of “common weal,” both of which repoliticize plurality by folding one and many, part and whole into one another. This corporatizing gesture is particularly evident in Smith’s description of Parliament—­“the most high and absolute power of the realme of En­ glande,” no less (48)—­and in particular of the union of prince in Parliament that is necessary to produce living law. In the first place, Smith regards

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Parliament itself as a corporate body composed out of a representative principle, since “everie Englishman is entended to bee there present, either in person or by procuration and attornies, of  what preheminence, state, dignitie or qualitie soever he be, from the Prince (be he King or Queene) to the lowest person of Englande” (49). The monarch is as subject to this principle of representation as any other person, since “Prince” is a formal title that may be occupied by any particular living ruler. But it is Parliament “which representeth and hath the power of the whole realme both the head and the bodie” (48–­49): Parliament is, in other words, a corporate entity who represents still another, larger corporate political community, which Smith names “the common wealth of the politique bodie of England” (63). The formal abstraction of the law acts as a multiplier that reduplicates personhood, allowing for the power of “rule” both to gather in a concentrated way and to distribute itself as widely as possible: this is why Parliament is at once a corporate body unto itself and at the same time, from another view, the “head” of a much larger corporate body, over which it “doth distribute his authoritie and power to the rest of the members for the government of his realme” (63). But this is why Smith can also describe the prince in the next breath as “the head, life and governor of this common wealth” (63): once power has been gathered and distributed into a corporate form, the head of this corporate body can change places or exist simultaneously in two “different” places at once, for these heads are really the same. The prince steps into the larger body of the commonwealth by entering into the body of Parliament, and he does so “in person”—­“the last day of that Parliament or session the Prince commeth in person in his Parliament robes, and sitteth in his state” (57), as Smith specifies—­and in doing so, the prince “give[s] life” (48) to both corporate bodies at one and the same moment. Parliament grants to the prince the body politic that by right belongs to the monarch, in other words, but the prince animates the body politic represented by Parliament by entering “himselfe in presence” (48). Only in this way can the motions and deliberations of Parliament become the full “acts” of a living body, “the Princes and whole realmes deede” (48, 57). But only in this way, too, can the prince become “the life, the head, and the authoritie of all thinges that be doone in the realme of England” (62). This act of incorporation, at once representational and mystical, material and immaterial, results in a peculiar technical detail, which Smith returns to at several different moments in his description of parliamentary procedure: the delegation of voice. Contrary to what we often believe, “political” deliber-

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ation, considered not as an individual act but as the act of a collective, group person, does not take the form of a dialogue: it is always rendered as a mode of indirect or reported speech, since one is never simply speaking for oneself but always representing the voice of another. This act of ventriloquism is at once cause and effect of political authority, the formative, constituting gesture of “rule” as the expression of political power and the vocative condition of a collective person that wishes to speak as such. “The forme of holding the Parliament,” as Smith entitles the relevant chapter, begins with the prince delegating his will into the “rescripts or writtes” that are sent “to every duke, marques, baron, and every other Lorde temporall or spirituall who hath voice in the parliament” (49). The sheriff of every shire acts as the representative of royal command by announcing an election, in which two knights will be chosen “to give their advise and consent in the name of the shire” ( 50). Once in Parliament, those who are members of the “higher house” (Lords) but who are absent “upon sicknes or some other reasonable cause” designate by a sealed writing “some one of those who be present as their procurer or atturney to give voice for them, so that by presence or atturney and proxey they be all there, all the princes and barrons and all archbishops and bishops, and (when abbots were) so many abbots as had voice in parliament” ( 50). In the upper house, “consent and dissent is given by ech man severally and by himselfe, first for himselfe, and then severally for so many as he hath letters and proxies” (51); in the lower house (Commons), in contrast, no elected member “can give his voice to an other nor his consent nor dissent by proxie,” since “the more part of them that be present onely maketh the consent or dissent” on any given bill (56). But even when speaking for oneself,  in both houses one nevertheless also speaks simultaneously as a legal representative for others: members of Parliament have two voices as well as two bodies, in other words, a politic voice and a voice natural. At the same time, and reciprocally, neither can the corporate persons of Parliament, or monarch, or commonweal be said to have their own voices: speech is always delegated through a spokesperson, seems always to originate from elsewhere, and is never addressed directly to an interlocutor. In the lower house, members “are willed to choose an able and discreete man to be as it were the mouth of them all, and to speake for and in the name of them, and to present him so chosen by them to the prince” (51). Anyone so chosen is muted by the politic voice that now issues from his own mouth: he “hath no voice in the house, nor they will not suffer him to speake in any bill to moove or diswade it” (55). He becomes an interlocutor for all others and allows collective deliberation to begin, since “everie man speaketh as to

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the speaker, not as one to an other, for that is against the order of the house” (54). This deflection of  voice allows every man to speak to every other without addressing anyone in particular; it protects against “altercation,” and it brings “a marvelous good order” to deliberations (54). Its effect is to convert a “multitude” of many persons into a single unified body: “in such a multitude, and in such diversitie of mindes, and opinions, there is the greatest modestie and temperance of speech that can be used” (55). And it allows the Commons to constitute themselves as a political body that stands at some distance from the prince even while declaring its submission to him. The speaker requests traditional liberties and privileges for the house, seeks permission for members to “franckely and freely saye their mindes . . . without offence to his Majestie,” and requests the ancient custom of punishing any offenders themselves (52). For his part, the prince, too, remains mute, speaking only through the chancellor, who is in both houses his “voyce and orator” (51). “The chancellor in the princes name doth so much declare him [the speaker] able . . . and thanketh the commons for choosing so wise, discreete and eloquent a man” (52); throughout the proceedings he “answereth in the princes name” (52), “asketh if they will have it [a bill] engrossed, that is to say put into parchment,” “asketh if they will goe to the question,” announces relevant existing law, and calls for votes (53). At the conclusion of Parliament, the prince “commeth in person” but never himself speaks; all thanks and recognition is granted through the intermediaries of chancellor and speaker (57). Parliament is finally for Smith a model for a contained plurality, a public institution through which the law is perfected, and, through the law, the voices and intentions of a diverse people made into the fully historical acts of the corporate person that is the commonwealth. This commonwealth includes everyone and extends everywhere—­it is the corporate community of the “realm,” modeled on the classical polis and realized through a system of legal administration that resembles something like a modern “state.” But Smith’s analysis also reveals another, unintended lesson: the so-­called state, and the system of law upon which it is founded, are essentially plural, since different kinds of law (common law, Roman law) and differing jurisdictions (that of the common law courts and that of Chancery; courts baron and leet; the “court” of Parliament and the assent or negation of the king) create a network of legal concepts, definitions, precedents, and application that at once converge and diverge from one another.41 This pluralist lesson also presents two very different views of the “corporation” as an analytical concept that we will encounter again in the chapters that follow, one in which the corporation is a homogenizing and unifying

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idea, independent of its material forms; the other in which the corporation is a term for the essential plurality of institutions upon which any political association depends. This twofold lesson is the inevitable result of “a style midway between the historical and the philosophical,” as Smith had put it in his letter to Haddon: his commitment to the empirical variation that results from historical description conflicts with his appeal to philosophy as a mode of thought that abstracts and generalizes historical particularity into a coherent political concept. Viewed philosophically, the English commonwealth resembles a species of corporate community in which one is composed out of many and many resolve into one; viewed historically or materially, this same commonwealth dissolves into the courts, officers, tables, documents, and grammatical formulas that bind the political community together by extending its law into everyday life. The “commonwealth,” if it is to be found anywhere in De Republica Anglorum, is to be found in a piece of paper—­a practical fact that Smith, as a lawyer, an ambassador, a secretary of state, a parliamentary representative, and a Privy Councilor would be especially well positioned to grasp and eventually sought to exploit as far as possible.42

chapter three

Richard Hooker’s Corporate Christians But the cause of mens assembling & drawing togither into corporations & cities, is not only to liue, but rather to liue wel. —Aristotles Politiqves, or Discovrses of Government (1598)

On November 17, 1558, Elizabeth I assumed the throne, and one imagines that it was to his great satisfaction that Sir Thomas Smith was “presently called to the Court, and made use of . . . in settling the public affairs both in Church and State,” as Smith’s first biographer, John Strype, somewhat blithely puts it.1 Smith had been deeply involved in settlement affairs for some time, and he seems to have taken a pragmatic approach to the many changes in official religion that characterized the period of his rising career. In 1549 he sat on a commission charged with examining Anabaptists and, in the same year, visited Cambridge to investigate university statutes that promoted “Papistry, superstition, blindness, and ignorance.”2 In December 1548 Smith offended the bishops gathered by Lord Protector Somerset for a debate in the House of Lords on the proposed Book of Common Prayer, and the doctrine of the Eucharist in particular, when he declared that the idea of the real presence was an “inconvenience” and “loathsome thing”: “For either Christ must have but a small body, or else his length and thickness cannot be there, which things declare that it cannot be no true body, or else he must want his head or his legs or some part of him. And also every other part of him must be one as big as another, the hand as much as the head, the nose as much as the whole body, with such innumerable.”3 Smith’s blunt materialism is jarring in the context of the surrounding theological discus­ sion, which lingers for four days over whether the bread remains after the consecration and the possible meanings of the phrase Hoc est corpus meum.4 To judge by his personal and diplomatic letters, Smith was more devoted to his home distilleries and chemical experiments than he was to the finer

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points of Eucharistic doctrine, and his comment is an early indication of the pressure that both a newly empirical natural philosophy and the legal­ ism of the commercial societas would come to exert on mystical modes of corporatist thought. “Reason will not serve in matters of faith,” responded Nicholas Heath, the bishop of Worcester, curtly to Smith, bluntly assert­ ing the real presence of Christ’s body in the bread: “It is real” ( 399). “The translating of the element must have another meaning and not be grossly understood” (411), argued Henry Holbeach, the bishop of Lincoln, pivoting to a more reformed position, for the mystery of the communion is that it conjoins bread with body and blood with wine rather than transubstantiating one into the other, and this mystical union, rather than physical transforma­ tion, is precisely what allows communicants to be joined with the mystical body of the church. For by declaring “Unum panis multi sumus,” “he calleth it here Bread, speaking of the Sacrament. Why he left it in bread and wine; because of many is made one, to declare the mystery of our unity. The form and accidents cannot shew us of this unity. The flesh and blood alone can­ not shew us of this unity” (410). George Day, the bishop of Chichester, then took up the argument against “trope and figure” (421) and in support of the real presence of the body in the host, only to have Smith break in once again to declare that “it is more horrible to eat flesh than to break it” and then to make a deprecating remark about the bishop’s rhetoric. Day’s sarcasm and disdain is audible even in the partial notes of the debate: “he uttered not his tale by human reason or by rhetoric, for in that Mr. Smythe is a great deal better than he” (422). Humanism had no place, it seems, at the holy table. The 1548 debate in the House of Lords marked a critical point in the deliberations by Parliament concerning the adoption of the new Book of Common Prayer. Writing to his friend Martin Bucer at the end of  December of the same year, Peter Martyr declared that “there is so much contention among our people about the Eucharist that every corner is full of it and even in the supreme Council of the state. . . . Transubstantiation, I think, is now exploded, and the difficulty respecting the presence is at this time the most prominent point of dispute.”5 Ten years later, as Elizabeth prepared to call her first Parliament, it was thought expedient that a committee of bishops again be convened—­and again under Smith’s direction—­to review the existing 1552 Book of Common Prayer in preparation for revisions and “to bring a plat or book hereof ready drawn to Her Highness.” This was the recommendation of the “Device for Alternation of Religion,” an anony­ mous memorandum of advice prepared at the end of 1558 and found among Smith’s papers, and at least one such meeting took place at one of Smith’s

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two London houses.6 Smith himself then sat for Liverpool during the 1559 sessions, where he legislated a Book of Common Prayer he had helped to as­ semble for more than a decade.7 But let us leave Smith for the moment in his house on Canon Row, or on his several government commissions, and look forward. The acrimony of the debates surrounding the Act of Uniformity and the delicacy with which the 1559 Book of Common Prayer finally approached the question of the rite of communion are emblematic of the turbulence in religion that would only sharpen over the course of Elizabeth’s reign. When Cuthbert Scot, the bishop of Chester, stood in the House of Lords to condemn the 1559 bill by quoting St. Paul “that charity is ‘vinculum perfectionis,’ the bond or chain of perfection, wherewith we be knit and joined together in one” and that with­ out it “we must needs fall one form another, in diverse parties and sects, as we see we do at this present,” he was speaking as a Catholic prelate, lament­ ing the fact that more than nine hundred years of “doctrine and form of reli­ gion” now “shall hang upon an Act of Parliament.”8 But he was nevertheless speaking a caption for the century to come. Already during the 1559 sessions it had been necessary to revise the Act of Supremacy so that Elizabeth was titled the “Governor” of the Church of England rather than its “Head,” re­ serving that term for Christ in order to placate both the reformed-­minded and the Catholic members of Parliament. And as the “Device for Alteration of Religion” had warned, speaking now of the more fervent Protestant re­ formers, “Many such as would gladly have the alteration from the Church of Rome, when they shall see peradventure that some old ceremonies shall be left still, or that their doctrine, which they embrace, is not allowed and com­ manded only, and all other abolished and disproved, shall be discontented, and call the alteration a cloaked papistry or a mingle-­mangle.”9 The story of the Puritan objections to the so-­called Elizabethan settle­ ment and the 1559 Book of Common Prayer is well known, and Patrick Col­ linson has captured especially vividly the extent to which the Elizabethan Puritan movement of the 1570s and 1580s “was torn between a genuine, if pragmatic devotion to the queen . . . and an actual state of schismatic withdrawal which in some places was already far advanced.”10 This “semi-­ separatism,” to use Collinson’s term, might include those godly Puritans who wished to remain formally associated with the church as its purer mem­bers as well as those who believed the English church was nothing less than “the discipline of the Antichrist,” as William Drewett, “a pore man” and member of a separatist congregation, avowed from Newgate prison in 1581. Drewett’s declaration captures sharply the dilemma of an individual

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conscience caught between the fact of its own isolation and the passionate conviction that it nevertheless formed a part of a true “union . . . knit to the bodye of Chryste,” despite the evident dispersal of its fellows, intra-­as well as internationally.11 In Northamptonshire in 1572, “people . . . of all degrees, from the nobility to the lowest” object to “the course of our Church,” wrote the Puritan George Carleton to Lord Burghley, “so they do and will prac­ tice assemblies of brethren in all parts of this realm, and have their own churches in companies,” which Carleton argued should either be tolerated in England or encouraged to settle in Ireland.12 As Collinson has shown, the “assemblies” and “companies” of the godly sought to establish themselves as nothing less than an alternative ecclesiasti­ cal polity of conventicles, conferences, and classes that reached from Lon­don out into the counties and that persisted despite the efforts of Archibiship Whitgift and Richard Bancroft to suppress nonconformity.13 Responding to the need for a programmatic statement of Presbyterian order, the Puritan Book of Discipline (ca. 1587) was nothing less than “a formal constitution,” in the words of Collinson, without “the slightest suggestion that these assem­ blies are dependent upon the queen’s consent for bringing them into being, arranging the time and place of their meetings or for the authority of their decisions.”14 This was a voluntary form of religion that, for all its sometime secrecy, itinerancy, and doctrinal variety, “was not at all eclectic,” Collinson observes, “but assumed predictable and consistent forms, forms which were expressive not so much of ‘individualism,’ still less of ‘anarchy,’ as of a ste­ reotyped, programmed corporateness.” 15 It was to this radically pluralist vision of a church within a church that Richard Hooker would oppose the first four books of his monumental Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in 1593, after six years of serving as master of  Temple Church and a public dispute with Walter Travers, one of the intellectual leaders of the Presbyterian movement.16 Because the core of the dispute be­ tween Hooker and Presbyterian writers such as Travers and Thomas Cart­ wright concerned the larger relationship between ecclesiastical and civil life, it is important to understand the central place that corporatist ideas and corporatist arguments had in Hooker’s defense of the established church. For Hooker’s arguments are distinctive when compared to the work of other writers on both sides of the questions that organize the Laws, and his nov­ elty lies in the way he adapts corporatist ideas that had been developed in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries to an unprecedented theological and political situation.17 The Laws’ famous analogy to a triangle, in which the civil and ecclesiastical aspects of a polity and its persons sim­

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ply formed two equal portions of the same figure (now a base, now a side) is a geometrical illustration of a corporate idea that has, we could say, a triple determination, in the sense that it receives both its content and its form from the way it draws together a series of theological, political, and legal problems into a perfect homology.18 Hooker’s refutation of the Presby­ terians’ “assemblies” and “companies,” “conventicles” and “congregations” uses a corporate figure to reformulate the debate into a contest between two competing group concepts, each of which seeks to define the nature of a polity, to define the limits of ecclesiastical and civil powers, and to establish what legal and logical relationship might either unite or separate them. Taken as a whole, the Laws thus stands as an important transitional state­ ment in the political history of corporatist arguments, since Hooker extends a sacramental and mystical model of personhood into a unifying principle for the entire political community, but he also begins to explore a model of political order based in legal contract and consent that shifts the foundation for a political community from an ethical and theological principle to a ju­ ridical one—­the very title of the Laws, after all, declares a definition of “poli­ tics” as a juridico-­theological hybrid. We have seen a similar emphasis on law as the binding agent of the political community in Smith’s De Republica Anglorum. But Hooker’s philosophy of law reaches much further than that of Smith, looking backward to Aristotle and Aquinas and forward to Bacon; Hooker’s theory of the commonwealth, too, in which spiritual, moral, and civil identity are bound together in the singular “substance” of citizen and monarch, builds on theological ideas that had little or no relevance for the pragmatic secretary of state. Hooker also uses a corporate idea to formulate a theory of sovereignty as the supreme “public” authority, and of the com­ monwealth as the largest “public” body that administers the equally “pub­ lic” body of the church, in ways that Smith simply never considered, and he opposes this vision of what I will call an integrated pluralism to a more radical pluralism that he associates both with Presbyterian writers and with republicanism, in some of the heated polemical passages in the Laws. In these moments, Hooker’s arguments begin to resemble those of Hobbes, whose Leviathan also sets out to correct the disastrous effects of the Presbyterian movement of his own day, at least as Hobbes understood them. In Hobbes, too, the result is a systematic theory of monarchical sovereignty fashioned out of corporate ideas, including theories of both the corporation sole and corporation aggregate. But Hobbes’s arguments about contract and representation invert the relationship of whole to part as Hooker under­ stands it, and Hobbes’s theory of Leviathan as a group person depends on

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materialist premises that are foreign to Hooker’s metaphysics. Nevertheless, the lines of argument about “political” problems that stretch continuously across the century between Smith and Hobbes and in which corporate ideas and analogies occupy a fundamental place pass directly through Hooker’s Laws, where we find a theory of public, civil life organized around a prin­ ciple of membership, moral duty, and the common good that is more similar to that of Utopia than it is to either De Republica Anglorum or Leviathan. For as we shall see, Hooker’s commonwealth finally depends on more than law: at its core we find a theory of the “unitary” body structured through a theo­ logical principle of “real difference,” to use Hooker’s own language, a form of intimate association that Hooker calls the “person.”

discipline as constitution: calvin in geneva In Hooker’s eyes, the urgency of the Presbyterian challenge lay in the fact that it presented nothing less than a constitutional crisis. For if the church is in fact a species of “politic society” with a distinctive jurisdiction, structure of governance, and laws; and if scripture is to be regarded as the sole source of authority for decisions regarding church government and not only ritual, then the Presbyterian argument led logically and inevitably, in Hooker’s view, toward separatism: to “the exercise of discipline without the licence of Civill powers” (pref. 8.13, 8.1). Throughout the Laws, Hooker engages in polemical exaggeration, of course, since Presbyterian writers took a variety of positions on the question of separatism and even acknowledged the limi­ tations of scripture on some points of church governance.19 Nevertheless, Calvinist  “discipline” was more than a doctrinal position or a method for  in­ terpreting scripture, for it had achieved a measure of  “instituting” power, as Calvin himself  had put it, which is one reason Hooker opens the Laws by re­ narrating its foundations.20 The subsequent conflict between Calvin, the Ge­ nevan Senate, and the Helvetian cities over the authority to excommunicate focused the essential difficulty that Presbyterianism presented to Hooker and other defenders of the established church. For the debates over excom­ munication delimited the outlines of a broader separation between ecclesi­ astical and civil polities, and they indicated the central difficulty, if not the paradox, that lay at the heart of the Laws as an exercise in political theology. Do church and civil government name two separate kinds of power? Or are they two forms of the same power that divide into two distinct zones of ju­ risdiction and two systems of administration?21 The consequences, Hooker

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argues, are profound, since “they are no small prerogatives” that the civil power would be forced to yield up. Furthermore, in cases of excommunica­ tion “it may be justly feared whether our English Nobilitie, when the matter came in tryall, would contentedly suffer themselves to be alwayes at the call, and to stand at the sentence of a number of meane persons” (pref. 8.2). Hooker’s treatment of Calvin in the preface to the Laws, while respect­ ful, nevertheless makes evident his view that the “first establishment of new discipline by M. Calvins industry in the Church of Geneva” only revealed the contention that inevitably characterized republicanism as a form of “civil regiment” (pref. 2.1). Hooker construes the Genevan polity as a state of populist confusion where mere rhetoric carries the day, and he credits Calvin with grasping “how dangerous it was that the whole estate of that Church should hang still on so slender a thread, as the liking of an ignorant multitude is, if it have power to change whatsoever it selfe listeth” (pref. 2.1). He appreciates how Calvin substituted for fickle opinion a form of church polity grounded first in the “solemne oath” against the papacy and second in the commitment to obey “the forme of their ecclesiasticall government” de­ vised in accordance with scripture (pref. 2.1). But the result, Hooker points out, was popular discontent and anger, as the people soon regretted their new order; fired by a rush to purity, Geneva descended into the “jealousies, hartburnings, jarres and discords” that characterized its internecine strug­ gles for influence and individual vainglory (pref. 2.2). Calvin is banished, only to be recalled after several years in a moment of general regret. And yet Hooker recognizes the strategic wisdom of Calvin’s “complet form of discipline” (pref. 2.4) as a form of mixed constitution for the Ge­ nevan church, for whatever its “error” (pref. 2.10), the discipline had suc­ ceeded in bringing order to the “multitude,” which Hooker regards not as the source of power in a polity (as the republican model of Geneva would have it) but as one of its most persistent threats. The notion of the “multitude” re­ curs frequently in the preface to the Laws, often in a sharply pejorative way to describe a shapeless, ignorant crowd. The “common sort of men” refuse the judgment of those “to whom in such cases they should have rather sub­ mitted their owne” (pref. 3.2–­3); they are easily persuaded (I.1.1), but they fail to grasp the implications of problems that lie beyond their capacities (pref. 3.3). The multitude or “common sort” is subject to “fancy” (pref. 3.11), “in the crasednes of their minds possest with dislike and discontentment” (pref. 3.8), show themselves to be “credulous and over capable of . . . pleas­ ing errors” (pref. 3.10) and without “certainty or knowledge” (pref. 3.5). They are quickly inflamed to zeal and form an easy source of approval for

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those who know how to manipulate them (pref. 3.7). The inevitable result of such Puritan populism, in England as in Geneva, is “high tearmes of separa­ tion . . . whereby one sort are named The brethren, The godlie, and so forth, the other worldlings, timeservers, pleasers of men not of God, with such like” (pref. 3.11). Hooker’s challenge in the Laws was thus to provide a philo­ sophically coherent argument for a form of polity that could convert the “multitude” into a fully “public” and “civil” community without at the same time depending too much upon them and granting them too direct a power over political affairs. His task was to show how the church could enjoy its own distinctive jurisdiction and legislative power as an authentic “politique societie” while at the same time remaining under the supreme dominion of a civil authority. And he resolves the problem by formulating a philosophy of law that is itself a model of integrated pluralism, on the one hand, and on the other by construing the commonwealth as a “publique,” “civil societie” that Hooker understands to be a corporation on a large scale.22

the nature of the ecclesiastical polity How then does Hooker define the church as an “ecclesiastical polity,” and what is the church’s topological relationship to the civil community of which it is a member? Like Smith’s De Republica Anglorum, the Laws broadly fol­ lows Aristotle’s account of the origin of political communities and compares the church to them, arguing for its organic emergence out of a state of pure multiplicity ( VI.2.2). The newly achieved coherence of this “society,” which Hooker equates with a principle of “common good” and “public wisdom,” has a natural derivation, but its coherence also depends on the priority of power that Hooker grants to the whole over the part, a fundamental aspect of his idea of corporate sovereignty and one that conforms to Aristotle’s own logic in the Politics: for “every whole is more than every part of that whole, be­ cause this in itself is evident” (III.8.13; emphasis in original).23 As in Smith’s De Republica Anglorum, the term “society” allows Hooker to formulate a theory of the church as a plurality-­in-­unity across different scales, using a combination of Roman-­juristic and theological meanings. He often uses “society” in its broadest Roman sense of  “politic society,” “civil society,” and “public society,” and he understands the church to be a “politic” association that conforms to this type.24 For although the church is larger and more diverse than other politic bodies, and although it has a dis­ tinctive mystical dimension, as we shall consider in a moment, the church has “the selfe same originall grounds which other politique societies have”

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in which men “consent to some certaine bond of association, which bond is the lawe that appointeth what kinde of order they shall be associated in” (I.15.2). Indeed, as a true “society” the church is distinguished from mere “assemblies,” which are less permanent and more occasional and lack the power of self-­regulation through law (III.1.14). For Hooker, “Church” names an international body unified in “mutuall fellowship and societie one with another,” despite the fact that “the Catholike Church is . . . devided into a number of distinct societies, every of which is termed a Church within it self ” (III.1.14). Each “society” is, properly speaking, a “nationall Church” ( VIII.3.1; Hooker’s emphasis) under a distinctive jurisdictional authority. As an authentic “politique societie,” therefore, the church also has the right to preserve itself, and “the chiefest part of that power consisteth in the Authority of making Laws” ( VII.14.3). Hooker’s majestic elucidation of the philosophy of law in book I is designed to derive the multiple forms of law—­natural, reasonable, celestial (angelic), human (or positive), and di­ vine (the law of revelation)—­from the single eternal law that is with God (I.3.1–­5).25 By unifying under a general definition the different kinds of laws that confront us intellectually and historically, Hooker is able to draw eccle­ siastical and civil law together as two species of a single type, and in this way he prepares the ground for book VIII, where he will argue that church and commonwealth may be regarded as two distinct but not absolutely sep­ arate “societies,” for they remain unified under a single public authority that naturally rules over them. There is a law that determines “naturall agents considered in themselves,” Hooker argues, but there is also a law that gov­ erns them “as they are sociable partes united into one bodie, a lawe which bindeth them each to serve unto others good, and all to preferre the good of the whole before whatsoever their owne particular, as we plainely see they do” (I.3.5). This law is “the law of the common weale, the very soule of a politique body, the parts whereof are by law animated, held together, and set on worke in such actions as the common good requireth” (I.10.1). The body politic, whether civil or ecclesiastical, conforms to natural law in the same way that a stone or a bird exists according to its own native principles, which tend “to their own perfection” (I.3.5). Since “all things natural have in them naturally more or less the power of providing for their own safety . . . so every politick Society of men must needs have the same, that thereby the whole may provide for the good of all parts therein” ( VII.14.3). Hooker’s philosophy of law is thus doubly “constitutional,” to use Ba­ con’s term, and many of Hooker’s formulations would not be out of place under the pen of Bacon.26 “A law therefore generally taken, is a directive

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rule unto goodnes of operation,” Hooker writes (I.8.4), and further, “that which doth assigne unto each thing the kinde, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the forme and measure of  work­ ing, the same we term a Lawe” ( I.2.1, I.3.1). Hooker’s notion of “form,” too, is similar to Bacon’s, although Hooker’s philosophy leads not to a mode of induction in which laws are derived from the observed actions of nature but rather to the assertion of deductive analogies between nature and politics—­ for Hooker, nature is the surest guide, for “nature it selfe teacheth lawes and statutes to live by” ( I.10.1). As in Bacon, however, law is the form that nature takes when it becomes “political,” and for this reason the authority that makes law always retains a natural right. By establishing the universal power of the laws of nature and of reason, and by defending the value of knowledge derived from the arts and sciences more generally (again like Bacon), Hooker is able to present positive human law as a vital dimension to the preservation of all societies, including the church. And it allows him to argue against the Presbyterian principle of sola scriptura and for the le­ gitimacy of the established church as a self-­governing body with the power to invent laws that are nowhere mentioned in scripture but that are in ac­ cordance with the moral, natural, and rational qualities that scriptural law always contains. Religion began in cities, Hooker points out ( V.80.2), and as it grew geographically, it required innovations in offices and authority to bring order to itself; phrased more mystically, “The Church is a Citie, yea, the City of the great king; and the life of a Citie is politie,” Hooker argues ( III.11.18), observing that the House of God, too, needs to be governed. This is why Augustine, Hooker argues, can defend the “positive constitutions of our owne Churches, although the same were but yesterday made by our selves alone” ( IV.5.1).

the corporate personality of the society supernatural As Hooker’s invocation of Augustine has indicated, the Laws’ theory of an international church composed out of many smaller, self-­governing na­ tional “societies” is only one jurisdictional measure of a much larger, mysti­ cal corporate community that extends continuously across an international and transhistorical scale, from Jerusalem to imperial Rome, across Europe to England, and even back to Rome again. For the church is “both a soci­ etie and a societie supernaturall” ( I.15.2), Hooker argues, a historical “sen­ siblie knowne company” ( III.1.3, III.11.14) of people who have agreed to a

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particular bond and law among themselves, and an invisible, immortal body governed by spiritual law and by communion in the mystical body of the church. Both societies are “incorporated into one company, they all make but one body,” Hooker writes, citing Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, 2:16 and 3:6 ( III.1.3). The “society supernatural” descends from Christ, “which is the head . . . unto us that are the body now invested therewith” ( VI.2.2). Indeed, Hooker argues, pointing out the radical implications of the mystical idea, “so farre foorth as the Church is the mysticall body of Christ . . . it needeth no externall politie ” ( III.11.14; my emphasis) and is strictly speaking beyond both natural and human law ( VI.2.2). Hooker’s discussion of this mystical body, which includes the apostles, the saints, and the angels, provides as clear an illustration as we could wish of that “angelomorphic” body described by Kantorowicz as “immor­ tal . . . precisely because it was invisible—­the body of an immaterial being.”27 Hooker recorporatizes this mystical body a second time, as it were, since he argues that the angels form “a kinde of corporation amongst themselves” within the corporation of the church, where they dwell “in societie or fel­ lowship with men” (I.4.2). Considered mystically, the church is “a bodie which dyeth not” ( V.8.1) and as a “body mystical can be but one; neither can that one bee sensiblie discerned by any man. . . . Onely our mindes by intellectuall conceipt are able to apprehend, that such a reall body there is, a body collective, because it containeth an huge multitude; a body misticall, because the mystery of their conjunction is removed altogether from the sense” (III.1.2). Hooker’s explanation blends juridical arguments about the nature of the corporate body as nonempirical, invisible and intellectual but nevertheless “real,” as he puts it, with a theology of the Eucharist as a mysti­ cal “conjunction” of elements. And these aspects of Hooker’s discussion of the “society” of the church establish a clear difference between his theory and those theories of political community that will become typical of the seventeenth century. Rather than opposing political society to a hypothetical state of nature, in the way of Hobbes, Hooker must align a “supernatural” community with a “natural” one, the “mystical” with the “visible,” histori­ cal church, such that a society that has no basis in any human instruments can nevertheless be explained as commensurate with the natural laws that underlie all positive human law.28 In order to effect this alignment, Hooker turns to the category of the “per­ son,” which he elaborates painstakingly in his discussion of the Incarnation in book V of the Laws. When contemplating the mystery of the Incarnation, Hooker insists, we must maintain a distinction between divine nature, on

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the one hand, and the nature of mortal man, on the other, and we must dis­ tinguish both from the category of the “person” that unites them. In Christ, divine and human natures remain utterly distinct, but they are not for that reason separate: for they “united make one person” ( V.52.4; Hooker’s italics). “Christ is a person both divine and humaine, howbeit not therefore two persons in one,” he explains, and confusion on this point has been a com­ mon source of heresies. “There is,” he writes, quoting Paschasius, “a twofolde substance not a twofolde person, because one person extinguish an other, whereas one nature cannot in another become extinct’” ( V.52.3; Hooker’s italics). The “person” named Christ conjoins divine and human natures, but it does not convert these natures into one another ( V.53.1; V.54.10). In the Incarnation, the abstraction of the person allows heterogeneous natures to be joined to­ gether: again, God and Christ are “not two persons linked in amitie but . . . two natures, humaine and divine conjoyned in one and the same person” ( V.52.2). Hooker’s arguments in book V delineate the very political-­theological core of the Laws, since the categories of “substance” and “person” extend across both domains and show them to share the same logic: they return in Hooker’s account of the citizen who participates simultaneously in the ecclesiastical and civil polities, and they provide the justification for the monarch’s sovereign authority over both domains simultaneously. Hooker explains the mystery of the Trinity and of Christ as a relation of proximity and colocation: in the Trinity, the three persons form a “connexion” ( V.56.5), while the union of two natures in the single person of Christ is, in the words of St. Cyril, a “nearness” ( V.53.2). Hooker himself describes it as a “combina­ tion” ( V.52.4) or an “association of natures in one subject” ( V.53.4; Hooker’s italics). “Lett us therefore,” writes Hooker, “sett it downe for a rule or prin­ ciple so necessarie as nothing more to the plain decidinge of all doubtes and questions about the unity of natures in Christ, that of both natures there is a cooperation often, an association alwayes, but never any mutual participation, whereby the properties of the one are infused into the other” ( V.53.3). Again, the conceptual principle that makes this unification-­in-­difference possible is that of the person, which provides the bond of association between them: “by the force of union the properties of both natures are imparted to the person onlie in whome they are, and not what belongeth to the one nature reallie conveyed or translated into the other” ( V.55.6; Hooker’s italics). In this respect, Hooker’s arguments run in exact parallel to the claims Bacon and Coke would soon make in Calvin’s Case (1608), although the supernatu­ ral and natural elements have been transposed. The “person” forms a single

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abstract principle that unifies two entirely different “natures,” and the mys­ tery of the Incarnation lies in the way these natures may be associated or connected with one another in the most intimate way possible and yet still remain themselves. God takes up “habitation” ( V.54.5) in the mortal body and produces many “glorious effectes” ( V.54.5) upon it, even though it re­ mains a natural body. As a “man,” or “a creature of this particular kinde” ( V.55.5), Christ cannot be “everie where present” (V.55.8), because this is not a property of natural bodies, which remain “restrained and tied to a certain place” ( V.55.7). But as a “majesticall bodie” he can be present everywhere, because the association between mortal nature and divine nature in a single person can be “no where severed ”: it always remains “whole” and cannot be separated into “partes” ( V.55.6–­8). Once having explained the principle of the human mortal’s association with God in the person of Christ, Hooker is then able to clarify Christ’s as­ sociation with the church and, through Christ and the sacraments, human participation in the church as both a society and a mystical body. Our “par­ ticipation” in Christ is an “inherent copulation” ( V.56.1), a “mystical con­ junction” ( V.56.7) or “mysticall copulation” ( V.56.10) whereby we receive “reall adoption into the fellowship of his Sainctes in this present world” and “actual incorporation into that societie which hath him for theire head and doth make together with him one bodie (he and they in that respect havinge one name)” ( V.56.7). Once again, Christ’s unity with his church and our unity with him result from the continuity of his “person, which can in no waie devide it self, or be possest by degrees and portions” ( V.56.10). Every member of this church has Christ “personallie in them by way of mysticall association” ( V.56.13), which is made possible by the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist ( V.67.1–­2).29 On the vital theological question of the Eucharist, Hooker is moderate and conciliatory. He succinctly summarizes the differences in positions and urges his readers “to meditate with silence what wee have by the sacrament, and lesse to dispute of the manner how” ( V.67.3). Instead of wading too deeply into controversy, Hooker offers the same generalizing explanations of cause and person that he has employed through the Laws. “The bread and cup are his bodie and blood because they are causes instrumentall,” and “our soules and bodies quickned to eternall life are effectes the cause whereof is the person of Christ” ( V.67.5). Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Theo­ deret, Hooker claims, all “teach that Christ is personallie there present, yea present whole, albeit a parte of Christ be corporallie absent from thence” ( V.67.11; Hooker’s italics).  “ Take therefore that  wherein all agree,”  he advises,

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for “it is on all sides plainely confest . . . that this sacrament is a true and reall participation of Christ, who thereby imparteth him self even his whole intire person as a mysticall head unto everie soule that receiveth him, and that everie such receiver doth thereby incorporate or unite him self unto Christ as a mystical member of him” ( V.67.7–­8; Hooker’s italics). Because our union with Christ is “onlie a mysticall participation” ( V.67.11) and not a “literall corporall and orall manducation of the verie substances of his flesh and blood” ( V.67.9), it is “unnecessary” to argue for any consubstantia­ tion or transubstantiation ( V.67.11), when “in this, where they all speake but one thing theire discourses are heavenlie, theire wordes sweete as the honie comb, theire toungues melodiouslie tuned instrumentes, theire sentences meere consolation and joy” ( V.67.12). Hooker’s defense of the church as a distinctive plurality-­in-­unity depends on a further premise that emerges especially clearly in the passages con­ cerning the nature of the Incarnation and the Eucharist, as well as in his discussion of other sensitive points of ritual: for Hooker, unity does not imply uniformity. It is unreasonable to assume, he argues, that all “Chris­ tian Churches ought for unities sake to be uniforme in all ceremonies,” be­ cause “it is not possible that the lawe of nature and of reason should direct all Churches to the same things” ( IV.13.8). Hooker defends variation as the inevitable result of the church’s authority to legislate for itself. Indeed, he stresses the difference between “unity” and “uniformity,” arguing that a unity defined by faith will always manifest itself outwardly in different ways: the key question, he argues, lies in “the maner of their unity” ( IV.13.2). It is Presbyterian writers like Cartwright who are “over extreme and violent” in their demand for conformity, Hooker argues, citing Augustine, Calvin, and Gregory the Great in his defense, since, as Gregory writes, “Where the fayth of the holy Church is one, a difference in customes of the church doth no harme” ( IV.13.4). Hooker’s notion of unity should not be misunderstood as an endorsement of a principle of equality, of course; indeed, his refusal of uniformity and his interest in differential power results in his famous defense of a hierar­ chically ordered society, which he presumes as a matter of both reason and fact ( VIII.2.1–­2; cf. V.70.4 and VII.18.10). In his defense of bishops, above, we see the aristocratic and antirepublican commitments that are entailed by Hooker’s argument. To the Presbyterian objection that the episcopacy breeds inequality, Hooker responds with an open affirmation of inequality and “a permanent superiority of power mandatory, judicial, and coercive” of bishops over ministers as “a thing allowable, lawful, and good ( VII.3.1)—­he

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even cites Calvin, “forced by the evidence of truth,” who compares bishops to Roman consuls ( VII.6.9). Hooker’s argument follows upon his strong anti­ populism, which he construes as a species of radical pluralism: “For where number is,” he maintains, “there must be order, or else of force there will be confusion” ( VII.8.5). If pastor and people come to “grievance,” how will it be resolved without an impartial judge? The Presbyterian synod cannot serve this purpose, Hooker argues, since it would be “as if in the Common­ wealth the higher Magistrates being removed, every Township should be a State, altogether free and independent; and the Controversies which they cannot end speedily within themselves, to the contentment of both parties, should be all determined by solemn Parliaments. Merciful God! where is the light of wit and judgment, which this age doth so much vaunt of, and glory in, when unto these such odd imaginations, so great, not onely as­ sent, but also applause is yielded?” ( VII.18.11). Without “some one principal Mover” in matters of deliberation, all councils would come to nothing but “jarrs and contradictions” ( VII.8.5); this type of populist pluralism, Hooker implies, turning the words of  Travers’s Explicatio against him, leads inevita­ bly to tyranny ( VII.14.7). Nor could any “particular multitude” or historical group of worshippers have a power that supersedes “they whom the whole Church hath from the first beginning used as her Agents, in conferring this power” ( VII.14.10). Hooker is precise in his terminology: these are “persons Ecclesiastical . . . onely such persons Ecclesiastical have been authorized to ordain both [deacons and presbyters], and to give them the power of Order, in the name of the whole Church” ( VII.14.10; my emphasis). The “power” and “force” of the corporate church “may reach far and wide indefinitely,” as Hooker puts it, and is manifested in the person who stands both for and as the church. “Such were the apostles, such was Timothy, such was Titus, such are bishops” ( VII.14.10).

the king’s two publics Having established the legitimacy of hierarchy and the public power of the bishop as the corporate “person” of the church, Hooker is now prepared to shift  to  the central  point  of  dispute with Presbyterian writers:  whether  or  not the monarch, as the supreme civil authority, may also exercise a determining power over the ecclesiastical polity. His elucidation of the question draws on the logic of the Laws’ earlier books. Just as the person of Christ maintains two distinct natures in a single body, so also the person of the monarch may combine civil and ecclesiastical authority—­for the king or queen is, like the

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bishop, a natural person exercising supreme authority over the public body of commonwealth, and “it cannot but clearly appear unto reasonable men,” Hooker maintains, “that Civil and Ecclesiastical Functions may be lawfully united in one and the same person” ( VII.15.3). Like the category of the per­ son, the notion of a “public” body now allows Hooker to specify two civil and ecclesiastical societies but also to unite them under a single idea. He points out that biblical kings always had the power to “change the publique face of religion” ( VIII 1.1), as if to remind Presbyterian writers that the very possi­ bility of a Protestant ministry in their own day depended upon the establish­ ment of a reformed religion in England by Elizabeth, and by Henry before her, in ways that were indissociable from the Act of Royal Supremacy. Mere assemblies of Christians are not enough to constitute a “publique” church, despite what Presbyterian writers assert, since “the onlie thinge which ma­ keth anie place publique is the publique assignment thereof unto such du­ ties” ( V.12.2). A legitimate ecclesiastical polity, in short, always requires the legitimation of a public sovereign power. Hooker often resorts to an idea of a “publique” church that is corporate in its character and that he opposes to the private “assemblies” and “privie conventicles” ( V.12.2) of nonconformists. The public quality of worship is manifested above all in the act of communal prayer, which is why a defense of the established Book of Common Prayer is so important to him.30 “Sup­ pose wee the bodie and corporation of the Church so just,” he asks, that it need never reflect on “those faltes and transgressions” that are “common to the whole societie which conteineth all” ( V.72.14)? “The force of pub­ lique prayer” ( V.24.1) is superior to private devotion, Hooker argues, cit­ ing Tertullian, because we ask for things that are good in the judgment of all and that answer to a common consent. In public ceremonies, the entire church is strengthened by affirming the bond among its members ( V.39.1). Presbyterian “assemblies,” in contrast, take place in “anie blinde and se­ cret corner” ( V.25.5) and fall into “manifolde confusions . . . where everie mans privat Spirit and guift (as they terme it) is the onlie Bishop that or­ deneth him to this ministerie.” Their result, Hooker continues, warming to his subject, is “irksome deformities whereby through endles and senseles effusions of indigested prayers they oftentimes disgrace in most unsuffer­ able manner the worthiest parte of Christian dutie towards God” ( V.25.5). These secret meetings are temporary and have no lasting power, which is why they are mere “assemblies” and no true church: once their “actions be­ ing ended, the assembly dissolveth it self and is no longer in being, whereas the Church which was assembled, doth no lesse continue afterwards than before” ( III.1.14). Presbyterian conventicles encourage “heretiques,” “mali­

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tious persons,” and others who “privilie will soonest adventure to instill theire poison into mens mindes” (V.12.2). The reason that “the Church is so much troubled about the politie of the Church,” as Hooker adroitly puts it, is because some men, “their disposition unframeable unto societies wherein they live,” have taken to “following the law of private reason, where the law of public should take place” and in this way “breed disturbance” (I.16.5–­6). In this way, the Laws presents us with several distinct components of a “public” concept, which Hooker sometimes locates in performative, com­ munal worship and at other times identifies with a legal authority and a con­ stitutional form.31 In still other moments, the “public” imagined by the Laws resembles the discursive community that is familiar to us from theories of the public sphere.32 And because Hooker links his “public” idea so closely to his international and corporate understanding of the church, he frequently presents his reader with the notion of a “universal” public that is pulled away from circumstances, offering a placeless, immanent idea of publicness defined as the participation in a virtual body that persists as a unified mysti­ cal abstraction even as it is implemented in different individual rituals and local acts of worship.33 For this reason, we could say that Christ appears as the most “public” figure of the Laws, and the Christian’s common participa­ tion in Christ through public worship is thus also, paradoxically, his or her most intimate and private relation of all. But in keeping with Hooker’s own corporatist logic, we may also reverse the proposition and say that the monarch, as the private person who pre­ sides over the combined “publique” and “politique” societies of church and commonwealth, is the civil equivalent of Christ. When we compare Hook­ er’s account of the “person” of Christ, “which can in no waie devide it self ” (V.56.10), we realize that in Hooker’s view the Presbyterians have formu­ lated something akin to a political-­theological heresy. For they argue in fa­ vor of a “necessarie separation perpetuall and personall between the Church and Commonwealth” ( VIII.1.2; Hooker’s italics), maintaining that each “so­ ciety” is an independent corporate body. “In their opinion,” he writes, “the Church and the Commonwealth are corporations not distinguished only in na­ture and definition, but in subsistence perpetually severed” (VIII.1.2). However, Hooker responds, two societies may be “distinct,” and they may exhibit many kinds of “difference,” but they are not thereby “separate” (VIII.1.2).34 In some historical cases we may identify a full separation be­ tween civil and ecclesiastical life, he concedes, as in the situation of the first Christians living under the Roman Empire. And yet for Hooker even these cases—­in which “a Christian society be planted amongst their professed enemies, or by toleration do live under some certain State whereinto they

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are not incorporated”—­illustrate the importance of ecclesiastical and civil authority “lawfully united in one and the same person,” since “the wisest in things divine, may be also in things humane the most skilful” (VII.15.3). The central question of the monarch’s sovereignty is thus inseparable, Hooker maintains, from the larger problem of the nature of the relation between church and commonwealth, ecclesiastical and civil societies. His explanation is justifiably famous and deserves to be quoted in full: With us therefore, the name of a Church importeth only a Societie of men first united into some publique forme of regiment and secondly distinguished from other Societies, by the exercise of Christian religion. With them on the other side the name of the Church in this present question importeth not only a multitude of men, so united and so distinguished, but also further the same divided neces­ sarily and perpetuallie from the body of the Commonwealth. So that even in such a politique Societie, as consisteth of none but Christians, yet the Church of Christ and the Commonwealth are [ in the Presbyterian view] two corporations inde­ pendently each subsisting by itself. We hold that seing there is not any man of the Church of  England, but the same man is also a member of the Commonwealth, nor any man a member of the Commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England, therefore as in a figure triangular the base doth differ from the sides thereof, and yet one and the selfsame line, is both a base and also a side; a side simplie, a base if it chance to be the bottome and underlie the rest: So albeit properties and actions of one kinde do cause the name of a Commonwealth, qualities and functions of another sort the name of a Church to be given unto a multitude, yet one and the selfsame multitude may in such short be both and is so with us, that no person appertaining to the one can be denied to be also of the other. ( VIII.1.2; Hooker’s italics)

The point is not whether church and commonwealth differ, a point that Hooker immediately concedes, but rather in what way this difference may be said to be “real” and yet nevertheless be resolved into a unity. Are church and commonwealth “evermore two societies in such sort severall and dis­ tinct”—­“two severall impaled societies,” as Hooker puts it—­or are they “per­ sonally one societie” possessed of two systems of laws and offices under a single authority ( VIII.1.4)? Again Hooker invokes the logic of “person” he has been using throughout the Laws. “Doth it not hereby appeare,” he asks, voicing Cartwright’s argument, that the Church and the Commonwealth are thinges evermore personallie sepa­ rate? Noe, it doth not herby appeare that there is perpetually any such separa­ tion. We may speake of them as two, we may sever the rightes and causes of the

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one well enough from the other in regard of that difference which we graunt there is between them, albeit we make no personall difference [my emphasis]. For the truth is that the Church and the Commonwealth are names which import thinges really different [my emphasis]. But those thinges are accidentes and such accidentes as may and should alwayes lovingly dwell together in one subject. Wherefore the reall difference [my emphasis] between the accidentes signified by those names doth not prove different subjectes for them always to reside in. (VIII.1.5)

By distinguishing a continuous subject from accidents that may vary, Hooker ingeniously resolves a long-­standing debate between nominalist and realist definitions of corporate bodies, advancing a theory of “real difference” that nonetheless admits of the conventionality of the name. Designations such as “Church” and “Commonwealth” name entities that have a substantial reality unto themselves—­they are more than the sum of their members and not mere tokens of identity—­and yet at the same time they refer to a single philosophical principle of the subject, joined now to its theological-­legal complement, the “person.” Plurality-­in-­unity is reflected in the fact that the same person has at once a “triple state, a naturall, a civill, and a spirituall ” ( VIII.1.6)—­and may thus stand simultaneously in different relations to civil and spiritual authority. Throughout these sections of the Laws, Hooker’s arguments also demon­ strate how clearly he understands the metonymic logic that informs mysti­ cal ontologies of the church as a corporate body. Seizing directly on the Presbyterian objections to the use of the term “Head” to describe the mon­ arch’s position in the church, rather than being reserved only for Christ—­the very objections raised in the 1559 Parliament—­Hooker affirms the unique position of Christ as head of the church and then distinguishes between “mystical” and “visible” or “external” authority, pointing out that the mon­ arch’s headship consists only of the latter kind ( VIII.4.5). Although “Christ is never from his bodie nor from any part of it” and “spiritually alwayes united unto every part of his body which is the Church,” nevertheless in this capacity he has no “visible and corporall presence” and is “removed as farr as heaven from earth is distant” ( VIII.4.7). Therefore kings have been insti­ tuted “for the exercise of visible regiment,” and for this reason there may be many kings and many heads ( VIII.4.7). To the Presbyterian argument that by granting the title of “Head” to the king we exclude him from the body of the church, Hooker responds that heads always remain parts of their bodies and are not opposed to them, and that furthermore the “head” of the visible

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church always also remains a “part” of the spiritual body of which the vis­ ible church is itself only a historically and geographically limited portion. To the more extravagant argument that making the king a head produces a complete and perfect person, to which Christ cannot be added without making a monster that has two heads, Hooker responds easily: “The adding of Christ the universall Head over all unto a Magistrate’s particular Headship is no more superfluous in any Church than in other Societies it is to be both severally each subject unto some Head and to have also an Head Generall for them all to be subject unto. For so in armies and in civill corporations we see it fareth. A body Politick in such respectes is not like to a naturall body; in this moe Heads then one are superfluous, in that not” ( VIII.4.7; Hooker’s italics). And to the assertion that churches in “popular” or democratic poli­ ties will have as many heads as there are members, which is also monstrous, Hooker declares that this is no monstrosity but the very condition of popu­ lar sovereignty, in which “a multitude should to it self be both body and Head,” since the “Headship” may after all reside in many persons “in a collec­ tive body that hath not derived as yet the principallitie of power into some one or fewe.” In these cases, “the whole of necessitie must be Head over each part” if it is to then delegate power to a single ruler ( VIII.4.7). Presbyterian writers, in short, misunderstand every aspect of the corporate form: that it makes possible the delegation of authority, not its multiplication; that it al­ lows for a differentiation in function while still retaining a unity of purpose; that it permits an ongoing specification of members and of their modalities of relation to one another, rather than a homogenizing synthesis; that it al­ lows for a bidirectional relation between particular and general, part and whole, each of which may contract or expand into the other.

from the laws to leviathan: temporalities of the corporation It is worth pointing out that for all Hooker’s commitment to the bishops and to the monarchy, his political philosophy leaves no room for a theory of royal exception: the corporate logic of his argument makes any notion of un­ conditioned, absolute power impossible.35 The monarch may have “power of Dominion or supreme power” over any “forreine state or Potentate” or any “state or potentate Domesticall” ( VIII.2.3), but the monarch’s author­ ity does not extend to changing laws without the consent of Parliament, for instance, and a similar restriction is all the more significant in matters ecclesiastical, where he or she may rule only in conformity with the laws of

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the church ( VIII.3.3). “Where the King doth guide the state and the lawe the King,” Hooker observes, “that commonwealth is like an harpe or melodious instrument, the stringes whereof are tuned and handled all by one hand” (VIII.3.3). Throughout his entire discussion of the monarch’s “right to the power of dominion,” Hooker threads a narrow argumentative needle, since this right is held “with dependencie upon the whole entire body politique over which they rule as Kings,” and yet this does not mean that kings re­ ceive this authority personally as a gift from the people “at the time of his enterance into the sayd place of sovereigne governement.” Instead, Hooker argues, “the cause of dependencie is in that first originall conveyance,” and “originall influence of power from the bodie into the King is cause of the Kings dependencie in power upon the bodie” (VIII.3.2). Monarchs are not elected, but they are nonetheless delegated their power by the people and are subordinate and subject to them; sovereign power is supreme and sin­ gle, but it is nevertheless split between king and people much the way the power to act resides in the head but depends on the capacity of the body to possess that same power. Hooker is at pains to distinguish his position from those who advocate the outright election of monarchs, regardless of birth; he cites the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos and what he calls “unjust and insolent positions” and “strange untrue and unnaturall conceits sett abroad by seeds­ men of rebellion” ( VIII.3.2). But the awkward fact was that the Vindiciae had sourced its own counterarguments in the very corporatist tradition that Hooker now sought to employ.36 Hooker’s evident turbulence in these passages indicates the extent to which the Laws occupies a transitional moment in English political thought, for Hooker is caught between an older and an emergent solution to the prob­ lem of accounting for the origins, nature, and limits of royal sovereignty. The constitutional paradox is a familiar one: the power to make law presumes a prior, legally constituted power to legislate, and Hooker resolves the difficulty by appealing to a corporate logic.37 In Hooker’s view, laws are legitimate be­ cause they live on in the life of a society that is immortal: the corporate na­ ture of the body preserves the law, even as the law preserves the corporate nature of the body. He makes the argument explicitly when defending the right of the church, as a “politique society,” to be self-­determining in matters of ritual: “Now forasmuch as Corporations are perpetual, the Laws of the ancienter Church cannot choose but binde the latter, while they are in force. But we must note withal, that because the body of the Church continueth the same, it hath the same Authority still, and may abrogate old Laws, or make new, as need shall require” (VII.14.3). The power of Hooker’s theory

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derives in no small measure from its embrace of the peculiar temporality of the corporation, which may always be described in historical terms but which also collapses past, present, and future together: the identity of the corporate commonwealth as a real body can be said to be now only because it has always been and will always continue to be. The Laws thus could be said to take its shape from the two temporalities implied in the very idea of a historical church, which forms one of Hooker’s most important strategies of argument. As both “visible societie” or “sensiblie knowne company” and a “supernatural societie,” the church has left a concrete, empirically verifiable record of practices and laws, but it is also always vanishing before our eyes into an eternity that is somehow always with us. This same tension between a historical and a mystical temporality also characterizes the commonwealth that includes the church, however, which leads Hooker to make his famous arguments about the origin of all civil pol­ ities, too, namely that members of a commonwealth must understand them­ selves always to be in a condition of tacit consent. The authority of public law, and indeed the authority of the monarch himself, Hooker argues, de­ pends on the assent of the people. But it is not necessary to give this assent in person; indeed, the corporate nature of political communities renders this individual consent impossible but also for this same reason unneces­ sary. As Hooker puts it: “Wherefore as any mans deed past is good as long as him self continueth: so the act of a publique society of men done five hundred years sithence standeth as theirs, who presently are of the same so­ cieties, because corporations are immortal” (I.10.8). By arguing that consent is delegated to an abstract corporate person who exists independently of the individual, including the king, and who endures beyond both monarch and subject, Hooker sidesteps some of the more radical implications of his theory, embracing neither a doctrine of popular sovereignty nor a theory of unconditioned monarchical authority—­instead, the “bounds and limits” of authority are established by “the entire community ( VIII.8.9).38 But the logic of Hooker’s own argument against sola Scriptura means that he must always ground this mystical process historically, and he turns to two examples in order to do so. Like Smith he identifies Parliament as the institution that makes corporate civil life possible, for in Parliament, “although we be not personallie our selves present, notwithstanding our assent is by reason of others agents there in our behalfe. And what we do by others, no reason but that it should stand as our deed, no lesse effectually to binde us than if our selves had done it in person” ( VIII.10.8). And like Hobbes, Hooker mod­ els the tacit consent of the commonwealth on “all societies companies and

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corporations,” in which “what severally each shalbe bound unto it must be withall their assentes ratified” ( VIII.6.7).39 The close resemblance between Hooker and Hobbes on these questions can be attributed to the fact that each is employing a corporatist argument from different sides of an historical divide.40 For Hooker, the corporate to­ tality of the church is understood to be ontologically prior to its parts and precedes any contractual agreement made by individuals, who are shown always to be living in a state of collective association of one or another corporate type. For Hobbes, in contrast, the corporate whole results from the conjunction of parts, who come together individually in a hypothetical moment of general agreement to name a representative who will retrospec­ tively bestow unity upon them. In these moments Hobbes simply reformu­ lates the mystical temporality of the corporation by means of the entirely hypothetical notion of a state of nature, as well as through a pragmatic no­ tion of “fiction” that he derives partly from the theater, as we shall see. Hooker himself can be said to be moving toward a Hobbesian argument in the passages on dependency and consent, above, as well as in a detailed and striking passage early in book I that speculates on the originary moment of what Hooker calls “composition and agreement.” “We all make complaint of the iniquitie of our times: not unjustly; for the dayes are evill,” Hooker admits. Nevertheless, compare them with those times, wherein there were no civill societies, with those times wherein there was as yet no maner of publique regiment estab­ lished . . . and we have surely good cause to thinke that God hath blessed us exceedingly, and hath made us behold most happie daies. To take away all such mutuall greevances, injuries, and wronges, there was no way, but only by grow­ ing unto composition and agreement amongst themselves, by ordeining some kind of government publike, and by yeelding themselves thereunto, that unto whom they graunted authoritie to rule and governe, by them the peace, tran­ quilitie, and happy estate of the rest might be procured. Men always knew that when force and injurie was offered, they might be defendors of themselves; they knew that howsoever men may seeke their owne commoditie, yet if this were done with injurie unto others, it was not to be suffered, but by all men and by all good means to be withstood; finally they knew that no man might in reason take upon him to determine his owne right, and according to his owne determination proceede in maintenance therof, in as much as every man is to­ wards himselfe and them whom he greatly affecteth partiall; and therefore that strifes and troubles would be endlesse, except they gave their common consent all to be ordered by some whom they should agree upon. (I.1.10.3–­4)

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Replace “God” with “Mortal God” and the similarity with Hobbes’s later hy­ pothesis of a state of nature and the political covenant is remarkable—­one suspects that Hobbes was taking careful notes on the passage. But Hooker’s corporatism differs from that of Hobbes not only because of its mystical, theological foundation or because it retains an Aristotelian and broadly medieval notion of the priority of the whole over the part, the group over the individual. It differs because it implies a fully political-­theological notion of the “publique” that preserves a sense of the autonomous, corpo­ rate unity of the church; indeed, since the church has the specific purpose of preserving moral life, and since moral life is essential to the definition of any political community, the church is the elementary political body within the larger commonwealth ( V.6.1). Nothing could be further from Hobbes’s arguments. In Hooker’s view, both church and commonwealth are “politi­ cal” not only because they are self-­determining and self-­preserving. They are “political” in the fullest Aristotelian sense of the term because they en­ dure for the sake of the good life and not life merely, as Hooker argues: “for of every politique societie that being true which Aristotle hath, namely, That the scope thereof is not simplie to live, nor the duety so much to provide for life as for meanes of living well” ( VIII.1.4; Hooker’s italics). “Politique society”—­ the polis or “corporation and citie,” as the anonymous English translator of Aristotle’s Politiques will put it only a few years later—­arises not only as a natural and logical necessity but from an ethical obligation to the whole. As Hooker insists in another famous passage, “The good which is proper unto each man belongeth to the common good of all as part of the wholes perfection. But yet these two are thinges different; for men by that which is proper are severed, united they are by that which is common. Wherefore besides that which moveth each man in particuler to seek his private, there must of necessity in all publique societies be also a generall mover, directing unto the common good and framing every mans particular to it” ( VIII.3.4). For Hooker, the “common” is not constituted out of the characteristics of individuals who are collected together and joined by contract, as in later political theories; as in Utopia, the “common” is a prior principle that allows individuals to recognize themselves as “individuals” because of their par­ ticipation in a shared idea of the Good, through which they form part of a larger whole and from which they receive their defining qualities. Only such a “publique” form of commonwealth, Hooker argues, deserves the name “political.” And only such a common notion can preserve us from “the very over throw of ourselves” (VIII.3.4).

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The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Corporation The tribunes, when they had a mind to animate the people against the rich and the great, put them in mind of the antient division of lands, and represented that law which restricted this sort of private property as the fundamental law of the republick. The people became clamorous to get land, and the rich and the great, we may believe, were perfectly determined not to give them any part of theirs. To satisfy them in some measure, therefore, they frequently proposed to send out a new colony. But conquering Rome was, even upon such occasions, under no necessity of turning out her citizens to seek their fortune, if one may say so, through the wide world, without knowing where they were to settle. She assigned them lands generally in the conquered provinces of Italy, where, being within the dominions of the republick, they could never form any independent state; but were at best but a sort of corporation, which, though it had the power of enacting bye-­laws for its own government was at all times subject to the correction, jurisdiction, and legislative authority of the mother city. The sending out a colony of this kind, not only gave some satisfaction to the people, but often established a sort of garrison too in a newly conquered province, of which the obedience might otherwise have been doubtful. A Roman colony, therefore, whether we consider the nature of the establishment itself, or the motives for making it, was altogether different from a Greek one. The words accordingly, which in the original languages denote those different establishments, have very different meanings. The Latin word (Colonia) signifies simply a plantation. The Greek word (αποιχια), on the contrary, signifies a separation of dwelling, a departure from home, a going out of the house. —Adam Smith, Wealth of  Nations (1776) How say you now, haue I not set forth to you another Eutopia? —A Letter sent by I. B. Gentleman vnto his very frende . . . (1572)

Hooker’s theory of the “ecclesiastical polity” marks a philosophical high point in English theories of sovereignty before Hobbes, and yet by 1593, when the first four books of the Laws were published, Hooker’s image of an integrated national church was manifestly a polemical aspiration rather

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than a statement of fact, as the necessity of the 1593 Conventicle Act and the increasingly severe repression of Puritan nonconformists made evident. Hooker’s own account of the monarch’s supremacy had been qualified by his argument that kings (and queens) were always subject to law and to the consent of the “people,” which he understood to form a civil corporation, or “politique society,” at the largest scale. And like Sir Thomas Smith, Hooker regarded the ultimate legal authority of the realm to lie with the king in Parliament. As we have seen, Smith’s own analysis of the Tudor commonwealth had blended mystical and representational arguments to ease the subtle question of a sovereignty divided between Parliament and monarch, on the one hand, and to give a unified form to the system of courts and procedures through which a notion of justice was distributed on a national scale, on the other. But this still left open the question of corporate bodies that were transnational and subnational in their scale and purpose. For Hooker, after all, the enduring power of the church as a visible “politique society” lay in its international and transhistorical life as an invisible “spiritual society” endowed with the right of self-­governance, while Smith’s comparative treatment of the Republica Anglorum had opened up a similar international horizon of pluralist legal regimes. As a way of pursuing further the extranational dimension to the political life of early modern corporations, it will now be necessary to return to the problem of sixteenth-­century “political economy” and to the increasing prominence of what is, for us, the most familiar type of corporation aggregate: the commercial joint-­stock company. Although distantly based on the contractual model of the Roman societas, the early modern joint-­stock companies introduced new purposes for collective association, new ways of justifying membership and of understanding what it meant to participate in them, and new technologies for managing the company as an institutionalized group. Of all the early modern corporate forms, the joint-­stock company was the most overtly materialist in its purpose and its ontology, and not only because of its profit motives; as we shall see, the enduring be­ ing of the joint-­stock companies depended in critical ways on the physical substances that they collected, as well as on the ships, bodies, and instruments that they bound together through intricate physical and conceptual transformations. These combined to give the company’s legal person its reality and purchase on the world; at the same time, the joint-­stock companies de­ veloped a set of  mimetic and representative protocols to distribute the agency of this new group person, to process information for it, and to transmit its commands across vast distances.

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I begin the genealogy of the joint-­stock company that follows by looking at Sir Thomas Smith’s own experiments with corporate forms, which he undertook in the final years of his life. I then turn to the writings of the geographer, historian, colonial promoter, and “Preacher,” as he sometimes signed his work, Richard Hakluyt the younger (1552–­1616). My goal is to juxtapose the early history of the joint-­stock companies with the philosophical account of politics and “civil life” that we have seen in Smith’s earlier work and in the work of Hooker (an almost exact contemporary of Hakluyt’s at Oxford), in order to show how important the institution of the corporation was to Elizabethans like Smith and Hakluyt as they attempted to reconcile humanist and commercial domains of value with one another and sought to expand the categories of their political thought. The companies will introduce us to the legal and territorial complexity of international political entities, familiar from recent studies of colonization and empire, and they will show us how our categories for thinking about political power in the early modern period are often much too narrow.1 The narratives collected in Hakluyt’s massive The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; 1598–­1600), for which Hakluyt drew extensively on documents furnished by the trading companies themselves, will also allow us to add to our analysis of the formal problems implied in the idea of the joint-­stock company as a group person. For in order to become a new source of political ideas and to function as a de facto political institution, the joint-­stock company depended on abstract categories that could extend over many particulars and unify its many parts. It required a broad spectrum of rhetorical modes of address, images that could justify action, and narrative structures to organize its accounts of itself. But above all, it required money, and this is where Sir Thomas Smith found that he had to begin.

“fine, try out, alter, change, reduce, turn and transmute”: smith’s society of the new art If Smith’s corporate notion of “society” in De Republica Anglorum can be traced in part to his training as a civil lawyer, it found practical application in two joint-­stock companies that Smith formed in the 1570s, one of them ushered through the process of legal incorporation by Smith himself. The “Society of the New Art,” as Smith named it, sought to capitalize on the promises of an alchemist named William Medley, who approached Smith in 1571 with the claim that he could transmute iron into copper by mixing

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it with vitriol, or sulfuric acid. Since imported vitriol was expensive, Medley claimed that he could make the vitriol himself and thus produce the copper more cheaply. Smith, who had a long-­standing interest in alchemy and astrology and who had himself conducted extensive chemical experiments in his home distilleries, enlisted William Cecil (newly made Lord Burghley and Elizabeth’s secretary of state), the Earl of Leicester, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert in a joint project.2 Copper was a vital commodity to the Crown, used for armament and for the wire cards necessary for wool production, and the grant for Smith’s society invoked all of the well-­established rationales for an industrial “project” of this type, as Joan Thirsk has described it: novelty, profit, and “benefit of the commonwealth.”3 The grant named Smith “Governor” of the society for life and Leicester, Cecil, and Gilbert as the remaining members; the society would be “one body politic and corporate forever,” with a common seal, the power to purchase land, sue and be sued, assemble, keep courts, make rules for the “good government” of all workmen, and exclusive right to “fine try out alter change reduce turn and transmute iron ore and every thing that doth or may come or proceed of iron or iron ore into any kind of copper” (22). The society could use any necessary “device or devices whatsoever,” to exchange, sell, and ship its product anywhere “at their wills and pleasures,” excluding to known enemies, paying forty shillings tax on every £100 of copper and £5 on every £100 of quicksilver to the Crown (23), in addition to an annual payment for five years. For its part, the Crown exempted the society from any other duty or custom and from all statutes prohibiting the export of metals. In addition, the Crown committed the full power of its prerogative to punish any persons or corporate bodies who sought to encroach upon the privileges of the society. The grant limited total membership in the society to twenty, prescribed that all charges be borne equally among the members, and forbade any single member from trading “for his own commodity lucre or gain” (28). Despite the legal structure of the society, it seems clear that Smith bore most of the financial burden. In July 1572 he had been appointed secretary under Cecil; now, in early 1575, he wrote to update him on his efforts toward a second patent for the project: Yesternight by candlelight I got the patent of the societie signed, and I make all the haste I can to have it passe the signit, & privie seale, and so to the great seale. Now I pray yr L. to confer with my L. of Leicester how to procede to the perfit begynnyning of the work in the maner of a societie. It hath long enough lien in

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suspennce & no profite comm of it but charges & expenses to me & others. And yr LL. lacked both the profite & honor, which I trust shall rise upon it.

Smith urged Cecil to appoint one or two men who could keep the society’s books and report back to them on its weekly earnings, as well as to imitate other similar societies in order to draw up “som good statutes & ordres . . . of such as be necessary, & without which a societie can not well stand. For I am in mynd that in this corporacion & societie, wherein is so fewe, & they for your ii partes nobler men, & of honor, & for our part, I trust, men of discrecion, the fewer statutes & well kept, the better.”4 The new corporate society would be defined through a minimal statutory structure: Smith seems to trust entirely in (and hopes to profit from) the moral quality of the persons who constitute it. But after further investment and more stalling from Medley, who predictably enough turned out to be a charlatan, the venture collapsed for good; Smith had lost a considerable amount of money, and soon after Smith’s death in 1577 Medley washed up in debtor’s prison. In financial terms, the venture was a total failure. But Smith had every reason to expect success, since the Crown had been pursuing a policy of fostering industrial invention and investment via letters patent since the 1550s, much the way Smith’s own Doctor Pandotheus had recommended in A Discourse of the Commonweal of  This Realm of England.5 These ancestors of modern venture capital, such as the Society of the Mineral and Battery Works and the Society of Mines Royal—­both incorporated only four years before Smith’s Society for the New Art—­profited from investment by some of the most powerful statesmen of the period, including Cecil, the Earl of Leicester, and even the queen herself. In fact, the two mining societies were so exclusive that Smith himself did not participate, a fact that may have driven him to seek his own incorporated society in 1572 with two of the most prominent members of the other companies. It has become conventional to view Elizabeth’s grants of incorporation to the mineral companies as examples of state intervention in early industrial development, since, unlike earlier guild or municipal corporations, the mineral societies operated on a national rather than a local scale and were designed to allow a maximal degree of capital investment and technical innovation and not for the regulation of production, as the traditional guilds had done.6 From the point of  view of the Crown, the incorporated societies were important instruments of the royal prerogative, especially where the Crown sought to extend its authority over territories or substances, like precious metals, where its authority might be subject to question.7 As Francis

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Bacon would put it in a 1601 speech to the House of Commons, “The Queen, as she is our Sovereign, hath both an enlarging and restraining liberty of her Prerogative” to grant patents, and “if any may out of his own wit, industry, or endeavor find out anything beneficial to the Commonwealth, or bring any new invention which every subject of this kingdom may use,” the queen might reward him with an exclusive right to do so. Bacon acknowledges that some individual monopolies are onerous, but he argues that patents granted to “a number of burgesses or a corporation . . . is no monopoly,” and he urges his fellow MPs “not to deal or judge or meddle with her Majesty’s Prerogative.”8 It is notable that throughout all the debates over monopolies in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, complaint tended to target grants by letters patent to individuals and not groups incorporated by charter; indeed, corporations of all kinds, craft and guild, municipal and trade, were specifically exempted from the parliamentary debate over monopolies in 1601, from James’s proclamation suspending monopolies in 1603, and from the Statute of Monopolies of 1624.9 The 1568 grants of incorporation for the Society of the Mines Royal and the Society of Mineral and Battery Works are especially clear cases where the Crown sought a legal instrument that would allow it to further establish its rights and to do so by invoking a broader public benefit. Looking back on the history of the mining companies in 1670, Sir  John Pettus ob­ served that “the first Reason of the Queens committing them to Corporations was, that the Crowns Prerogative therein might be permanent; for our Laws say that Corporations never die” and that in doing so Elizabeth had sought to correct the “Inartificialness of former Ages in this Concern” by fostering a “Publick” good, in accordance with “the Civil Law (which is the ground of most of our Laws concerning Arts)” and with ancient Roman practice.10 But he concludes with a further claim: “But the fifth and chief reason of those Incorporations (as is conceived) was, that they might stand as Mediators between the strictness of the Kings Prerogative, and the Subjects presuppositions of an Equitable propriety. And this was the great Prudence of that Queen and Her Council to erect such Moderators, lest . . . others might raise further Disputes” (31). As “mediators” and “moderators,” the corporations were imagined as forming a distinct zone of jurisdiction between subject and Crown and operating independently of both. By delegating its power, the Crown had effectively created subsidiary agencies that began to enjoy an independent authority, in principle operating under royal permission but in practice conducting activities that the Crown itself was incapable of pursuing on its own. All three mineral societies are explicitly named as “bodies politic” as

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well as “bodies corporate”—­the Society of the Mines Royal was officially the “Commonalty of the Mines Royal,” “commonalty” being a frequent term for political bodies in late medieval and “commonwealth” discourse—­and they are best viewed as entities in which expertise, instruments, substances, persons, and competing measurements of value were bundled together into an enduring form. Here the society, which is defined by its technical purpose (it is the Society for the New Art ) has become a political agent because it is technological and economic, a conjunction that would become central to the ongoing life of the joint-­stock company as it sailed over an international horizon.

planting the commonwealth: smith’s ulster project For the Society for the New Art did not exhaust Smith’s interest in the possibilities of the corporate form. In 1572, at the very moment he was forming his mineral society, Smith was also organizing a joint-­stock company that would colonize territory in Ulster County in Northern Ireland. For several years, Sir Henry Sidney, Elizabeth’s lord governor in Ireland, had been advocating a new policy that relied partly on military governors and partly on a program of colonization projects organized—­and funded—­privately by individuals.11 Because the areas around Ulster were so resistant to English rule, Sidney argued, they needed to be gradually accustomed to the English through a permanent colony. When Sidney resigned the post of deputy and returned to England in the summer of 1571, he joined a special committee formed by the Privy Council to manage Elizabeth’s Ireland policy—­a committee that included Smith, who had been named to the council in March of that year. Smith moved quickly to propose his own colonization scheme.12 An earlier letter from Smith to Cecil, written only a few months after he had finished De Republica Anglorum, had recommended the very policy that Sidney now advocated. “In my mind it [ Ireland] needeth nothing more than to have colonies,” Smith wrote, “to augment our tongue, our laws, and our religion in that Isle, which three be the true bands of the commonwealth whereby the Romans conquered and kept long time a great part of the world.”13 His reading of Roman history had suggested an analogy: as Ireland was to England, so England had been to Rome, “as uncivil as Ireland until colonies of Romans brought their laws and orders.”14 Now he took the next logical step, petitioning Elizabeth in partnership with his son Thomas for a grant of lands in the territory of the Ards, a peninsula in northeast

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Ulster that he promised “to make the same civill and peopled with naturall Englishe men borne.”15 An indenture from the Crown was issued on October 5, 1571, with letters patent issued on November 16 for approximately 360,000 acres. The grant was for seven years, at which point the Smiths would lose any title to land that they had not occupied.16 As D. B. Quinn first pointed out, the novelty of the Smiths’ project lay in the joint-­stock structure of its financing, which was applied here for the first time to a colonizing venture. Total funding for the project was projected at £12,000–­£13,000 and would be collected according the contribution of individual members: a venturer who served as a horseman would contribute £20, and a footman, £12. Soon the plan added a provision for the investor who wished to contribute only money.17 Immediately after receiving his letters patent, Smith published a broadsheet announcing the venture and inviting anyone who wished to invest; this was followed by a pamphlet, A Letter sent by I. B. Gentleman (1572), putatively written by one anonymous investor to an equally anonymous friend, who had expressed cautious interest in the project but who still harbored reservations.18 The project attracted considerable interest, but Brian O’Neill, Irish lord of the newly granted territory, and William Fitzwilliam, the lord deputy, began agitating against the project; the queen herself complained that the book “passed forth without our knowledge or allowance either of us or of our privy council,” and she ordered that “the parties therein offending shall be punished for such a presumption.”19 By May 1572, Thomas had nevertheless managed to assemble some eight hundred adventurers in Liverpool, with Cecil himself contributing £333 to the project.20 But the queen refused to allow the adventurers to proceed; many deserted without actually paying their pledges, and other investors pulled out upon learning that Smith himself had been sent as ambassador to France.21 Thomas had to borrow £350 from London merchants and then another £100 from the wife of the lord deputy himself upon his arrival in Ireland on August 30. Underfunded and undermanned, he encountered stiff resistance from the Irish and made little headway, fighting into the spring only to be killed in October 1573 by two of his Irish servants. Despite this inauspicious beginning, and whether out of conviction or obligation under the terms of the grant, Smith began drafting a new set of plans. He had returned to England from France in July 1572 and been named secretary to Elizabeth, and he had already raised a second round of investment in the summer of 1573, using it to arm reinforcements for Thomas. These had never arrived. Now he sought a third round of participants for a venture to be directed jointly by his brother George and Jerome

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Brett, who had prior military experience in Ireland.22 Smith’s original commission granted him and Thomas the right “to execute martial law” and “power to enter the great and little Ardes with an army, and expelling all rebels and seditious persons, to possess and inhabit the same; to govern the soldiers and inhabitants; to determine all civil causes except pleas of land, and punish all criminals except traitors and coiners; and to assemble the inhabitants for defence of the country.”23 He had sought a commission as “colonel” for himself and for Thomas because the title best corresponded to ancient practice, as he pedantically explained to Fitzwilliam: “The name of Coronel or Colonel in French is the leader of footmen, as marshal is of horsemen. Here it betokeneth a leader forth of men to inhabit and till waste and desolate places, who in ancient time were Deductores Coloniarum, and the action was called deducere coloniam. It is no name either of high honour or authority, yet wherewithal we are best content because it sheweth the nature of our actions.”24 Now he sought the same title for his brother George, since “the truth is that I & my deputies be in dede Coloniae ductores, the distributors of land to english men in a forein contrey, And as they who so take land be Coloni, or Coloners, So we that do distribute it may be called coloniae ductores, or Colonells, a new name for an old doing but now by me a renewed thing.”25 Copies of Smith’s plans survive in his own hand in the Essex Record Office, and they make evident that he had projected an entire commonwealth in miniature, attempting to put into practice the arguments of  A Discourse of the Commonweal and De Republica Anglorum (figure 4).26 The venture would begin in a condition of total war and gradually establish itself as a constituted form of polity under English law, partly by imposing a written framework of rules and ordinances and partly by physically transforming the territory. “Firste untill the Colony be settled,” Smith wrote, “that you haue quietnes for the artificers to worke in the towne, husbandmen in the fielde, and the marchanntes to travell into faires, and markettes w[i]thin the territorie of the Colony, yt must be understanded, that you are either wholly in the warre, or half in warre and half in peace. And bicause you must begin as you were all in warre, these officers be necessarie.”27 “War” appears as a state of exception that justifies every action and that is as necessary to the erection of the new colony as it is dangerous to it. The colony was to be commanded by a “Chieftayne or Deputie Colonell,” advised by a “Privie Counsell” and by a common counsel; an earlier letter from Smith to his son Thomas speaks of colonists acting as “senators aldermen or cownselers to the Colonells,” also referring to them as “patricii or senators or lords of

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f i g u r e 4 . “Orders set owt by S[i]r Thomas Smyth knight . . .” (1 December 1573). Reproduced by courtesy of the Essex Record Office, MS D/Dsh O1/2.

thassemble.”28 A second, longer document outlined the organization of the body as a military force, by rank and by division of arms, as well as its legal form: how the land would be organized and titles distributed, the types of courts that could be held there, for how often, and for what purpose.29 The territory would be organized into parishes, with the provision that “within eveerie parish the chirch shalbe the firste house erected” (14); there would be schools for Irish children but also laws forbidding Englishmen from wearing Irish clothing, and vice versa, in order to prevent a “retourne . . . to barbarousnes” (14). Nor would any “Irishman borne of Irish race and brought up Irishe” be allowed to buy land, hold office, serve on juries, act as a witness to any legal action, or be apprenticed in any “science or arte that maie indomage” the members of the colony (14). Protected by racial laws, the colony would also be fortified by a “frunture” with “watchtoures” and

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paid for by an annual common levy, and it would have a central “fort” or “city” named “Elizabetha.”30 Throughout his plans for the colony, Smith insists on the importance of establishing a city as a strategic, commercial, and political center, again with ancient examples at the forefront of his mind. In a letter to Thomas from France he wrote: “I marvell that ye have no care of one and your pryncipall citie, which I wold were called Elizabetha . . . . Mark Rome, Carthage, Venice and all other where any notable beginning hath been. Although it be litle at the furst yt may grow.”31 The Essex plans repeat much of this advice, arguing that “the chief strength to fortifie a Colony is to haue a prinncypall Cytie or towne of strength well walled & defended against thenemy where Cytezens & all other theweake & unarmed of the colonie may be sure” and again comparing it to classical precedent. It must defend the territory as at “Alba Naples for the Colony of the Grecyans, Carthage of the Tyrians, Cologne of the Romans amonge the Almaynes.” Without this fortified city, “th’enemy comynge with an huge multitude, may sweepe as it were in a nett all before him on a sodein, & so deface & over ronne all the Colony.”32 To Smith, the Irish “multitude” were the entropic, apolitical force glimpsed at the edges of the law in De Republica Anglorum, the “rascals,” as Fitzwilliam later called them, using the very term Smith himself had also used, who “caused Maister [ Thomas] Smithe to be eaten up with dogges after he had been boiled.”33 Projected onto this surging, violent landscape, Smith imagined an ideal community spontaneously organizing itself according to civic humanist principles—­a corporate commonwealth that even he seems to have regarded partly as a utopian fantasy. The sheer fact of dwelling together, Smith argues in a letter to Thomas, “engendereth civility, policy, acquaintance, consultation, and a firm and sure seat . . . for the manner of man is, the more they resort together, and have common profit or peril, the more civil and obedient they be; else they wil be and grow beastly and savage, which hath been hitherto one cause of the ruin of Ireland.”34 A Letter sent by I. B., probably also written by Smith himself, had used nearly identical language, pledging that the territory “may be replenished with buildings, ciuill inhabitantes, and traffique with lawe, iustice, and good order, what shal let, that it be not also as pleasant and profitable, as any parte of England, especially when it shall be furnished with a companie of Gen­ tlemen, and others that wil live frendly in felowship togither, reioysing in the frute & commoditie of their former trauaile” (Fiiiv). Ireland “lacketh only inhabitants, manurance, and pollicie” (Biv), the speaker of A Letter declared confidently, for tillage was “a mainteyner of Ciuilitie in my opinion” (Diiiir).

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In his own preparations Smith also stressed the importance of cultivation, making it “a perpetuall law” that each colonist shall plant wheat, rye, barley, oats, peas, and other foodstuffs: the more each plants, the more “he is worthie to be reconid the better member of the comonwealthe.”35 This was the exact argument he had made in A Discourse of the Commonweal some twenty years earlier. As an amalgam of classical models, contemporary commonwealth ide­ ology, martial law, and joint-­stock organization, Smith’s venture suggests how important new political forms such as the “plantation” and “colony,” the “company” and “corporation” had become in the second half  of  the six­ teenth century and how they could be used as extensions of, and perhaps even as replacements for, older political units such as the “realm,” the respublica, civitas, or polis, and even the oikos, the “home” or “household.”36 Across these concepts, the corporation extended as both an idealizing type and a brutal practical fact. At one end of the spectrum, Rowland White’s “Discours touching Ireland” (ca. 1569–­71), a copy of which had been presented to Burghley in March 1571 and which almost certainly had a direct influence on Smith, could argue that successful reform of Ireland depended not only on law but on a more general apprehension of belonging, participation, and common purpose, which he calls “unyversall comynaltie” (446) and which he describes in corporatist terms: “Therefore for their entrie into the first degree of perfecte subjection. It behoveth that they be all sworne to be faithfull liege people to her highness and successours kings of Englande forever . . . and then (their unyversall subjeccion so begonne, as the corporacion of an unyforme faith and obedyence) they may the worthier be participate, accepted, and allowed, in the affaires of her Majestie.”37 At the other, an ongoing sequence of ventures in the Ulster region organized in a corporate fashion: a 1565 proposal by William Piers and Henry Sidney for an incorporated “body politique” that would exercise martial law to “plante fowr thousand inhabitants of her naturall subiectes in that Northe cuntrey”;38 a proposal for a corporation to colonize Munster by Sir Warham St. Leger, in 1569;39 a subsequent proposal by Piers to fortify and colonize the Ards in 1578, again through “a company that will beginne this enterprise and joyne togyther as a bodye pollytyque.”40 Piers’s project explicitly modeled itself on Smith’s grant, asking in addition for exclusive commercial rights in the region, promising to cut off Scottish trade, to develop a standing navy, and to build a fortified town “of our owne costes and charges” (88)—­all actions undertaken by “we of the body politique” as a collective agent.41 Twenty-­five years later, Irenius in Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland

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(1596) would emphasize the importance of incorporated towns in his survey of current conditions and his severe recommendations for pacification. Smith’s venture reminds us that despite his training in civil law, his own political imaginary was, like More’s before him, as informed by historical example, by contemporary economic theory and practice, and by philosophical and theological ideas as it was by legal ones. The point is borne out by White’s “Discours,” since White’s invocation of corporatist imagery is a quintessential “political theological” statement—­the reformed realm will be “the corporacion of an unyforme faith and obedyence” (452)—­and his entire treatise is written from the point of  view of a territory that is not yet under English law but should be. For all of  White’s emphasis on law as the means by which “cyvill strength” (457) might be secured, it would be equally true to say that his “Discours” presents law as the means whereby a prior, non-­legal sense of belonging and “comynaltie” can be made civil: that the “corporacion” marks a conceptual and historical space beyond legal application, out of which and in which jurisdiction and sovereign authority may be established. Twice White refers to his treatise as the product of his “ymagynacion” (456) and his “ymagynynge” (447), as if his attempt to synthesize theological and legal concepts into a new political reality requires a special kind of hypothetical or even “literary” thinking. And if we have any doubt that Utopia was in Smith’s mind as he looked west toward Ulster, we may listen to the speaker of A Letter Sent by I. B., who invokes “the persuasions which Moses vsed to Israel . . . that they shall goe to possesse a lande that floweth with milke and hony” (Dir). “How say you now,” he asks, “haue I not set forth to you another Eutopia?” (Eir). In composing Utopia, More himself had drawn on contemporary Spanish ventures in the New World, and whatever Smith’s ambivalence about Utopia as a model in his own earlier work, the analogy captures something of the nature of all colonial projects, which take place at the threshold of the law by moving from one zone of legal jurisdiction to another. A Letter argues that the reason Smith’s venture had met so many objections was precisely because “they are actions apperteyning to the increase or furtheraunce of a whole gouernement” (Aiiv). That it would do so without royal support was, of course, a major selling point for the proposal. But this very promise also implied a limit to royal authority, as the speaker boldly points out: “the first foting of Englishe men in that Land,” he boasts, was done “not by the King’s power” but by the Earl of Chepstow in the time of Henry II, “at his owne charges, and the charges of his adherents . . . plantyng it will Englishe inhabytants, and placing Englishe Lawes, vntil the

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King enuying his proceedings, and fearing to haue so great a Subiect, enforced him to surrender his right” (Biiv). No doubt this was a rhetorical step too far for Elizabeth to tolerate.

“to buy, sel, trucke, change and permute al”: hakluyt’s corporate imaginary Since the pioneering work of D. B. Quinn and Nicholas Canny, the Elizabethan colonizing projects in Ireland have been recognized as a training grounds for similar ventures in the New World, although the role played by incorporated societies and companies in a transatlantic system of  “political economy” has only begun to receive close attention.42 Nowhere is this influence more in evidence than in the work of the geographer, historian, and colonial promoter Richard Hakluyt.43 Educated at Oxford, where he claimed to have introduced the use of maps, globes, and other navigational instruments to the study of geography, Hakluyt was an ordained minister in the Church of England and served for five years as chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, where he provided diplomatic intelligence to the Crown on matters of religion, French involvement with North America, and the probable intentions of England’s perennial national enemy, Spain.44 Hakluyt assiduously pursued foreign narratives of travel and discovery, which he published, often at his own cost, in the centers of the European book trade: London, Paris, Frankfurt, and even Madrid, his name displayed prominently in Spanish on the title page.45 Prefaces and dedicatory letters to the books associated with Hakluyt allow us to locate him within the patronage networks of Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Wal­ ter Ralegh, and they demonstrate Hakluyt’s firm grasp of the geopolitical implications of foreign trade, which he regarded as essential to the economic well-­being of the realm and to the military dominance of England over Spain.46 A pamphlet on “the commodity of the taking of the straight of Magellanus” (ca. 1579–­80) envisions the possibility of a quasi-­independent English colony there; a separate digest of the same document recommends the project in Machiavellian terms as a way to “so depryve all the inlandes of the kingdome of Sp[ain] of vittell that the multitude shalbe redie to starve or sh[ou]ld fall to rebellion, into the secret and importance whereof fewe man hav entered into the consideration.”47 The dedicatory letter to Hakluyt’s first collection of travel narratives, the Divers Voyages (1582), imagines the English planters as “Bees . . . led out by their Captaines to swarme abroad”

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and recommends “deducting” the poor out of the realm, emptying the prisons and sending them to the New World. Hakluyt compares the project to the Portuguese colonies in Brazil, “where they have nine baronies or lordships, and thirty engennies or suger milles, two or three hundred slaves be­ longing to eche myll, with a Judge and other officers, and a Church: so that every mill is as it were a little commonwealth; and that the country was first planted by such men as for small offences were saved from the rope.”48 Hakluyt’s scattered statements suggest that, as for Smith, the “corporation,” along with the “colony,” the “plantation,” and the “company,” had begun to rival the “commonwealth,” civitas or polis as a unit of political and not simply economic organization. Indeed, we may go further and propose that sixteenth-­century writers occasionally found the major concepts of classical political philosophy too narrow to capture the variety and forms of political association in which they had begun to participate. Hakluyt was certainly well informed of the traditions of classical political thought, having lectured on Aristotle’s Politics for two years while at Oxford and redacted it into an “Analysis,” a detailed manuscript summary complete with quaestio-­ like propositions and counterpositions.49 By its nature, the “Analysis” suggests little that is original in Hakluyt’s own political philosophy. But it nevertheless shows that Hakluyt’s efforts in publishing, translating, and editing accounts of foreign travel were undertaken with a detailed knowledge of Aristotelian political categories, including a discussion of mercantile activity that was, at best, rendered in ambiguous terms—­it was easy enough to present trading ventures as the procurement of commodities that were necessary to the “common wealth.”50 One of the two surviving manuscripts of the “Analysis” is a presentation copy that Hakluyt gave to Elizabeth in 1584 while on a trip back to court from Paris, and alongside it was another gift: Hakluyt’s own “Discourse of Western Planting,” a long manuscript treatise in support of exploratory projects to North America by Ralegh and Christopher Carleill ( Walsingham’s stepson) and a comprehensive blueprint for English plantation efforts in the New World.51 Today Hakluyt is best known for his magnum opus, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in London in one volume in 1589 and then again in a revised and expanded three-­volume edition from 1598 to 1600.52 Sprawling over some eighteen hundred folio pages, the Principal Navigations gathered out of libraries and private collections, from letters, direct interviews, and third-­party reports, any document that pertained to the history of English global exploration, from the earliest historical accounts to the most recent projects of Hakluyt’s

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own day. Each individual text has a brief title, which sometimes indicates its origin or how Hakluyt had come across it. He collects diplomatic letters that sought to secure or expand corporate privileges; intracorporate inventories that provided information about stock, transportation routes, and political circumstances necessary to the conduct of trade; lists of products that are typical of different geographical areas; and corresponding lists of the words used in native languages to designate them. Hakluyt also prints the royal charters that extended to the trading companies the legal rights associated with their newly acquired corporate status: the charters for the Russia Company (1555), the East India Company (1600), and the Virginia Company (1609), to take three of the most famous examples, serve the joint-­stock company as microconstitutions, creating an autonomous person in law with rights that are at once those of a collective and an individual nature. The charter of the Russia Company—­the first commercial joint-­stock company of the modern era—­declares that Philip and Mary “doe incorporate, name, and declare by these presents” that the merchants “shalbe from henceforth one bodie and perpetuall fellowship and communaltie of themselves. . . . And that they and their successours, shall and may bee for ever able persons and, capax in the lawe.”53 Eleven years later Elizabeth confirmed the grant using the same language while also shortening the name of the society.54 Membership in the corporate person is purchased by share; conversely, individuals dismissed from the venture must be “allowed proportionably the value of that he shall have deserved to the time of his dismission or discharge” or agree “to repay the overplus of that he shall have received, which he shall not have deserved,” as Sebastian Cabot’s ordinances for the company stipulated ( PN, 2:198). Among the four founding members of the first Virginia Company (1606), we find Hakluyt himself; three years later, the company’s second charter of 1609 had expanded its membership to more than seven hundred, including “Richard Hakluit, Minister,” holding two shares of £12 10s. each.55 He participates alongside Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Shakespeare’s patron; Sir Edwin Sandys, patron and friend of Richard Hooker; Sir Humphrey Weld, then lord mayor of  London; and Sir Francis Bacon, among many others. We find earls, lords, knights, gentlemen, captains, merchants, goldsmiths, grocers, haberdashers, coopers, stationers, and shoemakers, as well as more than fifty separate commercial companies, each itself subscribed as an independent corporate body. We find only two women: Katharine West and Millicent Ramsdent, widow. As economic instruments, these incorporated “companies” and “societies” differed from the older medieval regulated companies in several respects.

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Under the structure of a regulated company, members traded with their own capital investment and were obliged to follow the rules of the company, which generally sought to protect monopolistic privileges; the incorporated joint-­stock company, in contrast, “itself traded as a body,” in the words of T. S. Willan, and “was designed, not for laying down general rules for the conduct of trade by members individually, but for actually conducting trade on behalf of the company as a whole.”56 As legal persons, trading companies were recognized as abstract entities distinct from their constituent members, with the right to purchase, alienate, and bequeath property, especially over generations, to bring suits in law, and to be sued in turn by other parties. As a consequence, incorporated ventures were more enduring than non­ incorporated partnerships; they could accumulate capital more effectively and use it more flexibly; and they offered limited protections for individual members from the debts of the association when ventures turned bad.57 But the organizational and conceptual problems raised by the international joint-­stock trading corporations should be understood not simply as problems of economic management but as fully political problems of the type that were debated in both classical and humanist writing, including republican thought: the nature of a community of equals ruled by all members rather than by a monarch; the prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice of the exemplary merchant adventurer and his active pursuit of wealth on behalf of the common good; the need for constitutionally defined rules and for the authority to regulate the common good at the expense of individual action and gain. John Davis describes the joint-­stock corporations as nothing less than “institutions of government” and distinguishes them from the older regulated companies on precisely these grounds, observing that regulated companies came into being where political and diplomatic relations already existed, while corporate companies were formed only when this was not the case. Similarly, regulated companies were generally formed after trade had been established, while corporations were formed before trade had been established and in order to develop it.58 This “political economy” of the incorporated joint-­stock companies, a phrase that we may again take in its most literal sense, is visible in Cabot’s ordinances for the Russia Company, which include the following provisions: 20 Item . . . all wares, and commodities trucked, bought or given to the companie . . . to be booked by the marchants, and to be wel ordered, packed, and conserved in one masse entirely, and not to be broken or altered . . . the whole companie also to have that which by right unto them appertaineth, and no

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embezelment shall be used, but the truth of the whole voyage to bee opened, to the common wealth and benefite of the whole companie, and mysterie. . . . 21 Item, no particular person, to hinder or prejudicate the common stocke of the company, in sale or preferment of his own proper wares, and things, and no particular emergent or purchase to be employed to any severall profite, until the common stocke of the companie shall be furnished and no person to hinder the common benefite in such purchases or contingents, as shal fortune to any one of them, by his owne proper policie, industrie, or chance . . . but every person to be bounden in such case, and upon such occasion, by order, and direction, as the generall captaine, and the Councell shall establish and determine, to whose order and discretion the same is left: for that of things uncertaine, no certaine rules may or can be given.59

Cabot’s orders circle around a fundamental question that is simultaneously economic and political: what forms of value, what rules, what method of governance can balance the one with the more than one? If achieving the proper balance between “private gain” and “common good” was one of the most important points of debate in sixteenth-­century discussions about the economic regulation of the “commonwealth,” as David Harris Sacks has argued, then achieving this balance was in a sense the raison d’être of the corporate form, in which the “common stock” and the “mass” provided a conceptual template for thinking about problems of aggregation into group formations of different types and scales. The passage shows, too, how the corporate form provided a durable mode of organization in which the merchant’s “adventure” and “enterprise”—­his risk-­taking speculation, his investments, his accounting projections, his attempt to capitalize on chance and on time—­intersected with a long tradition of prudential reasoning that derived from Aristotle and Cicero and that was fundamental to many areas of Renaissance political thought: the nature of maintaining justice in the public community, including the distinction between private and common property, the upholding of contracts and obligations, and the calculation of relative value among heterogeneous objects, as well as the nature of deliberation and decision making when the outcome of action remains unknown, or the skill of “seeing into future” that Cicero describes as so necessary to the statesmen who would rule other men.60

in a joint and corporate voice Despite their formulaic character, the corporate documents collected by Hakluyt also raise figurative and formal questions that are critical to under-

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standing how the joint-­stock company functioned as a group person.61 To describe these questions as figurative is, first, to invoke a tradition of critical writing on anthropomorphism, prosopopoeia, and apostrophe in the lyric inaugurated by Paul De Man and developed by his students, most notably Barbara  Johnson, in a series of essays on the problem of trope, personhood, and legal corporation.62 The corporate person is “apostrophic” in the sense that it is absent, dead, or virtual until addressed and spoken to, for the corporation cannot speak for itself: we encounter in Hakluyt’s documents not a single voice but a cacophony of voices speaking across vast distances to one another. Every enunciation is collective; names signed at the bottom of a letter speak as representatives of the corporate person rather than in their own voices. The company is managed by “certaine grave and wise persons,” in the words of Hakluyt, here translating from the Latin account of the first Russia Company voyage by Clement Adams, who act “in maner of a Senate or companie, which should lay their heads together, and give their judgements, and provide things requisite and profitable for all occasions” ( PN, 2:240). The corporate person bears not one but many heads, except that those heads can suddenly pass into the hands of its body, into the roving eyes of its factors and agents and into their mouths. At the same time, there is no corporate person without the commands of this “Senate or companie,” which always emerges from the mouth of another. Like Smith’s parliament, the corporation feeds on reported speech and indirect discourse; to paraphrase De Man, “corporation” is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament. The corporate person contains multitudes; it is an aggregate entity dispersed into a network of narrative relays, itineraries of topographic displacements, lists and inventories, sudden accidents and unmotivated events reported in letters and other accounts passed from outpost to ship, from factor to agent to merchant and finally to Hakluyt back in London. Infor­ mation swamps identity and renders it irrelevant; first person shifts suddenly to third person, in the midst of narration; subjects turn and objectify themselves. As “I” and “we” become interchangeable, singularity gives way to the collectivity of the group person: the corporation has stolen the collective first person from the monarch. Here is a relatively ordinary example: A remembrance given us by the Governours, Consuls, and Assistants of the company of Merchants trading into Russia, the eight day of May 1561, to our trustie friend Anthonie Jenkinson, at his departure towards Russia, and so to Persia, in this our eight journey: First you shall understand that we have laden in our good ship, called the Swallow, one Chest, the keyes whereof we doe heere deliver you, and also a

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bill, wherein are written particularly the contents in the sayd Chest, and what every thing did cost: and because, as you know, the sayd Chest is of charge, we desire you to have a speciall regard unto it, and when God shall send you unto Mosco, our mindes and will is, that you, with the advise of our Agents there, doe appoint some such presents for the Emperour and his sonne. ( PN, 3:9)

Among the many questions we might ask of these passages and others like them, perhaps the simplest is, who speaks? Who is spoken to? As the “wes” and “ours” multiply and contract into “you” and “me,” it is impossible to say exactly. Although we find occasional references to hope, fear, admiration, and other forms of heightened emotion in the accounts that Hakluyt collects, these are rare, as though the abstraction necessary to constitute the group person saps speakers of their personality and replaces it with a neutral style that any natural person may employ in turn. This objective voice is the stylistic signature of the “representative” principle that organizes the joint-­stock corporate form and allows it to function over great distances. It is an institution ventriloquizing a person, and a person speaking with an in­ stitutional voice. Even more than money, the international trading corporation requires writing, “to the end that the marchants of that new adventure may the better understand how the wealth of that new frequented trade will arise,” as the 1555 Articles for the Russia Company merchants resident in Russia advise ( PN, 2:273).63 The steward and cook on board the company ships must keep a record of all “victuals, as wel flesh, fish, bisket, meate, or bread, as also of beere, wine oyle, or vineger, and all other kinde of victualling under their charge” that is purchased and consumed by the members of the corporate body ( PN, 2:197–­98). The infinite variety of the world must be quantified through the categories of number, weight, and measure;64 physical substances must be combined and compacted into a single coherent “masse” and then transported through a network of distribution in which differing zones of value must be reconciled with one another.65 The corporation expands by constructing physical networks of materials, as the corporate body comes to live in its assemblages. Its agents and factors are deputized “for the whole body of this companie, to buy, sel, trucke, change and permute al, and every kind and kindes of wares, marchandizes and goods . . . the same to utter and sell to the best commoditie, profit and advantage of the said corporation” ( PN, 2:281). “To utter and sell”: the act of trade is literally an act of corporate speech.66 The agent generates the written forms that he and other agents, captains, and the governing “senate or companie” use to

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evaluate conditions, remember itineraries and profitable combinations and to project future action: 9 Item, that the said Agents shall in the ende of everie weeke, or oftener as occasion shall require, peruse, see and trie, not onely the Casshers, bookes, reckonings and accounts, firming the same with their handes, but also shall receive and take weekly the account of every other officer, as well of the Vendes, as of the empteous, and also of the state of the houshold expenses, making thereof a perfect declaration as shal appertaine, the same accounts also to bee firmed by the saide Agents hands. . . . 13 Item, that all the Agents doe diligently learne and observe all kinde of wares, as wel naturals as forrein, that be beneficiall for this Realme, to be sold for the benefit of the company, and what kinde of our commodities and other things of these West partes bee most vendible in those Realmes with profite, giving a perfect advise of all such things requisite.67

In preparing its foreign outposts, the corporate person imagines a home, or oikos—­the etymological origin of all “economy”—­ruled by its agent and managed by its merchant, who is cast as a “houswife” ( PN, 2:287). The agent is also imagined as a handicraftsman who literally shapes the informational material of the venture with his own hands, “permut[ing] al” on behalf of the larger collective of  which he is a part ( PN, 2:281) so that the corporate person can represent its own workings to itself in its transactions with a world that it does not understand.68

translating value The work of this agent deserves further comment: borrowing a term from the anthropologist and philosopher of science Bruno Latour, I will call it the work of “translation,” and it is vital to the life of the joint-­stock company as a corporate person, as well as to understanding the complexity of its materialist dimension.69 In a first and most conventional sense of the word, the agent facilitates linguistic translation by recording many examples of foreign words and their English counterparts. Strictly speaking, however, the list contains no natural things, only deracinated names for objects that have in some sense already become—­that are on their way to becoming—­ commodities.70 To translate these foreign words is to assist in the act of commodification, therefore, but it is also to grasp commodification itself a translation process, an alienation of substance through transformation

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and the addition of a supplementary form. Hakluyt understood the process clearly enough, since his Discourse of Western Planting recommends, among scores of other interventions, the erection of sawmills that can convert the fantastic and even overwhelming varieties of trees that the English found in the New World, so that “wee may with spede possesse infinite masses of boordes of these swete kindes, and those frame and make ready to be turned into goodly chests, cupboordes, stooles, tables, deskes &c.”71 And should the natives resist, he suggests ominously to the Virginia Company adventurers, they must “handle them gently, [for] while gentle courses may be found to serue, it will be without comparison the best: but if gentle polishing will not serue, then we shall not want hammerours and rough masons enow, I meane our old soldiours trained up in the Netherlands, to square and prepare them to our Preachers hands.”72 This second sense of “translation” reflects a specifically early modern sense of the word, one that was utterly commonplace in Hakluyt’s period. To early moderns, “translation” described a change of shape, as when a glover reused leftover leather to fashion a new pair of gloves, or when Shakespeare (a glover’s son) employs the term in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to describe a weaver who has been transformed into a man with an ass’s head: “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated!” (3.1.113).73 This idea of translation is at root artisanal, and it includes all actions of modification and physical transformation. After Latour, we may construe it to include all actions that assemble an enduring network, whether by physical transformation and coupling or by conceptual and figural appropriation. To “translate” is to alter and combine substances in order to make them valuable, but it is also to make a problem comprehensible to others, to reframe it so as to enlist their interest.74 “Translation” is material, therefore, but it is also ideational and rhetorical. The joint stock corporations may be described as relatively durable assemblages of human persons and nonhuman things; of technologies, economic practices, and information-­gathering procedures; of places, ports, and trading sites; of archival structures and legal systems; of diverging interests, representatives, and spokespersons—­all held together by many different points of translation. We find in the corporate accounts inventories of commodities and of the industrial processes necessary to produce them—­ fishes, furs, flax, hemp, honey, and wax, the perfect emblem of the metamorphic translation process—­alongside lists of geographic points of origin and distances to other trading sites, accounts of the many substances, men, and skills, and instruments necessary to the physical construction of the fleets ( PN, 2:224–­25, 239–­41; figure 5).

f i g u r e 5 . Commodities and their origins. From Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (1598–­1600). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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The corporate person’s “action” and its self-­narration are thus never fully distinct: they run alongside one another, sometimes overlapping, sometimes lagging, as the corporate agent shuttles back and forth between material and linguistic assemblages.75 In formal terms, the variety, complexity, and extent of corporate narration corresponds to the variety, complexity, and extent of the network it traces; indeed, the network as such, however independently it may exist in the historical world, is rendered for the corporate person primarily through the narrative units and combinations that its agents generate. We often encounter “functions,” elements that open a sequence only to be closed later on, as in the completion of an electrical circuit.76 At the same time, embedded within this self-­narrating process—­visible to us only as this process—­the commodity networks translated by corporate discourse display a homologous structure. Here the “function” describes any sequence of substances in a trading network: rum, sugar, and slaves is an infamous example from a later historical period, but it might also include the combination of ingredients that compose a single object (the use of hemp to make rope; the use of pitch to produce the tar necessary to build boats). The agent seals particular objects in the world with a certain quota of value and then submits these objects to various permutations in order to displace and manipulate that value through commodity networks. Those networks that endure, endure because they are profitable, and enduring networks are rendered in prose form. Over time, those assemblages that are most enduring fade from the narrative account into the zone of a nonnarrated field—­a black box we seal with the concept of the “market” or the “world,” or “nature”—­while other assemblages that do not endure will never rise to the level of narrative representation in the first place.77 Much the way significance or “meaning” arises from the network of relations that constitute any narrative, in corporate discourse, too, significance becomes more complex as the accounts unfold. Gradually the narratives collect a greater number and a greater diversity of details, and thus finer grades of distinguishing among them; over time, these differences stabilize into recognizable functions and patterns, a total field of relations in which value may be assessed, noted, and reported. Initially the corporate agent only recognizes known combinations of elements and seizes familiar opportunities for generating value; eventually he begins to think more creatively and to create new combinations, as the skilful eye comes to recognize potential functions latent within a single object; his judgment resides in this ability to “interpret” material assemblages and even to invent new assemblages that may become profitable in the future.78 One of the main forms of suspense in the company accounts derives from

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the fact that its functions are new and thus relatively unformalized: to the corporate eye, a single object, action, or event may always form part of a hitherto unrecognized function, and everything depends on whether it can be functionalized, that is, brought under the mastery of the corporation so that it can proceed and survive. This explains the importance placed on “opportunity” and “occasion” in the corporation narratives; on the courage and “judgment” of the corporate representatives, who are valued for their prudence and virtu. We often find the agent poised precisely at the point where the banal neutrality of the fact shimmers with a potential significance that remains opaque, unknown, indiscernible, and hence dangerous: the very condition and threshold of “discovery.” This essential mystery often contributes to the narrating voice a mood of anxious hesitation, one best captured by the images of fog, mist, and sensory imperceptibility that many corporate narrators in Hakluyt eventually touch upon, some to the point of virtual obsession.79

free liberty, power, and a u t h o r i t y ; o r   .  .  . The formal axiom of the corporate agent may thus be stated succinctly: to represent is to value.80 For the purpose of the joint-­stock corporation is to translate among different domains of value by means of narration and thereby to reduce all values to a quantitative, money equivalent. It is precisely because of its translating process that we should regard the joint-­stock corporation as a politico-­economic body of first importance. But the companies were political for more conventional reasons, too, including the pressures they began to place on conventional notions of sovereignty. Here also the Principal Navigations is instructive, for it shows us a historical movement in models of sovereignty from a feudal and monarchical to a contractual and constitutional form. On the one hand, the ordinances drafted by Cabot for the incipient Russia Company organize persons into “nested” group formations that are immanent to the whole and subordinated in allegiance, by oath, in a “stacked” model of sovereignty: from king to company counselors to the captain general “with the pilot major, the masters, marchants & other officers, to be so knit and accorded in unitie, love, conformitie, and obedience in every degree on all sides, that no dissention, variance, or contention may rise or spring betwixt them and the mariners of this companie, to the damage or hinderance of the voyage.”81 Within the corporate community of the English realm, the trading company is restricted in sovereignty by

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being explicitly subject to the Crown and circumscribed by competing corporate persons of various types. The 1555 royal charter to the Russia Company limits the corporation in the following terms: “we will that . . . their acts, statutes and ordinances bee not against our prerogative, lawes, statutes, and customes of our realmes and Dominions . . . nor also to the prejudice of the corporation of the Maior, communalties and Citizens of our Citie of London, nor to the prejudice of any person or persons, bodie politique, or corporate, or incorporate, justly pretending, clayming, or having any liberties, franchises, priviledges, rightes or preheminences” ( PN, 2:311; emphasis mine). Once outside of England, however, the trading corporations quickly probed the limits of their privileges and freedoms and began to emerge as nothing less than rivals to the Crown, exercising a jurisdictional authority that encompassed many of the traditional attributes of sovereignty, including the right to govern and create legislation, to declare martial law and try capital cases in their own courts. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this power was to be exploited to the utmost by the East India Company, as both Richmond Barbour and Philip Stern have shown.82 But the joint-­stock company’s political capacity is evident already in the privileges granted by the Russian Emperor to the Russia Company in 1555: 3 Item, we give and graunt, that the said Marchants, shal and may have free libertie, power, and authoritie to name, choose and assigne brokers, shippers, packers, weighers, measurers, wagoners and . . . give unto them . . . a corporall othe, to serve them well and truly in their offices, and finding them or any of them doing contrary to his or their othe, may punish and dismisse them . . . without contradiction, let, vexation or disturbance, either of us, our heires or successors, or of any other our Justices, officers, ministers or subjects whatsoever. 4 Item . . . [the company] shal have ful power and authoritie to governe and rule all Englishmen that have had, or shall have accesse, or repaire in or to this said Empire and jurisdictions . . . and may minister unto them, and every of them good justice in all their causes . . . and assemble, deliberate, consult, conclude, define, determine and make such actes and ordinances, as [they] shall thinke good and meete for the good order, government and rule of the said Marchants, and all other Englishmen repairing to this our saide empire and dominions. ( PN, 2: 300–­301; emphasis mine)

If Hakluyt shows us how the merchant becomes a distinctive member of the commonwealth through his prudential intelligence, fortitude, and “justice,” in other words, he also shows us how the merchant fulfils his role as a “political” agent only insofar as he ventures beyond the bodies politic in

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which he usually dwells. Whether we regard the joint-­stock corporation as an “internal” commercial entity on the model of Smith’s Society of the New Art or as an “external” trading body in a global system of colonization and trade, as in Smith’s Ulster project or in Hakluyt’s geography, we find that the corporation thrives best either below or beyond the scale of the nation.83 Similarly, the joint-­stock corporations open a history not only of the “State” but of those institutions that mimic the state and exist alongside it; it suggests that one of the important influences on (and effects of ) a system of political economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, indeed of the so-­called transition to capitalism in general, is less the state itself but the actions of bodies politic that supplement and even exceed the state within a patchwork of simultaneous, semiautonomous legal zones.84 Bound inside some copies of the 1599 edition of the Principal Navigations we find a striking visual image of the corporation’s networked and territorializing form: Edward Wright’s famous world map, otherwise known as the Molyneux map and mentioned by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night (figures 6 and 7).85 It would be a mistake to look into the map and see only nations, only empires, only land and sea. For the map illustrates not bounded entities but itineraries and vectors of movement—­as cartographic artifact, the coastline is, after all, the trace of an itinerary. It shows crisscrossing navigational rhumb lines that spread from multiple foci or vanishing points; it is a diagram of corporate desire stretching itself across the body of the earth. Wright’s world map thus also implies a distinctive topographic footprint for the trading corporation. Rather than a center ringed by a periphery or a body with a clearly delimited inside and outside, the companies have no “depth” and no inside: they have only surface, only outside. The company narratives are composed by links, thresholds, joints, hinges, points of  juncture and modification; they describe chains of translation that are longer or shorter, denser and looser, more and less durable, at every scale imaginable, from the minuteness of a plant and its roots and flowers, to the parts of the walrus, the organization of military divisions and camps, the ships that transported the adventurers to the coastlines that received them, and the enormous seas that yawned beneath each and every single “action,” as the ventures are often called. The map allows Hakluyt and his readers to imagine these networks as a “global” one; it gives a totalizing geographical shape to networks and processes that occur across many different scales, through thousands of points of conjuncture that could never be glimpsed in one glance. Where is the “global” in the English Renaissance? In a literal sense, it is not in the West Indies, not in Cathay, not in the dream of a Northwest

f i g u r e s 6 a n d 7 . Edward Wright’s world map. From Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (1598–­1600). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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Passage. It is to be found inside the covers of the second edition of the Principal Navigations, and it runs throughout every single narrative venture that its pages subsequently collect together and then unfold.86 As the sixteenth century drew to a close, this global dimension of the joint-­stock company became especially visible in the establishment of the new American colonies, several of which derived their structure of colonial government directly from the charters of the private companies that founded them.87 On April 10, 1606, James I granted to the Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company all commercial rights to land in the New World between 34 and 45 degrees latitude, while retaining for the Crown the political authority necessary to rule the colonies that the companies established. The Virginia Company’s second charter of May 23, 1609, then expanded its political powers by naming it “one Body or Commonalty perpetual . . . [with] perpetual Succession and one common Seal to serve for the said Body or Commonalty” (para. 3) and vesting it with many of the legal rights that had traditionally defined the nature of sovereignty, among them the rights to make, ordain, and establish all Manner of Orders, Laws, Directions, Instructions, Forms and Ceremonies of Government and Magistracy, fit and necessary for and concerning the Government of the said Colony and Plantation . . . (para. 13) [to] have full and absolute Power and Authority to correct, punish, pardon, govern, and rule all such the Subjects of Us, our Heires, and Successors as shall from Time to Time adventure themselves in any Voyage thither, or that shall at any Time hereafter, inhabit in the Precincts and Territories of the said Colony as aforesaid . . . as well in Cases capital and criminal, as civil, both Marine and other. (para. 22) [with] full Power and Authority, to use and exercise Martial Law in Cases of Rebellion or Mutiny. (para. 23)88

The company’s third charter of March 12, 1611, then went even further in securing its autonomy as a political, and not merely as a commercial, entity, first naming it again as “one Body politick, incorporated by the Name of The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the city of London for the first Colony in Virginia” (para. 1). The charter then declared the need for four annual assemblies, which “shall and may have full Power and Authority . . . to elect and chuse discreet Persons . . . and to nominate and appoint such Officers as they shall think fit and requisite,

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for the Government, managing, ordering, and dispatching of the Affairs of the said Company” (para. 8). Ten years later, the company counsel itself issued “Ordinances for Virginia” ( July 24–­August 3, 1621), thereby declaring their intent “to settle such a Form of Government there, as may be to the greatest Benefit and Comfort of the People” (para. 1) and instituting the first rep­resentative assemblies in the New World, a “Council of State” and a “Gene­ral Assembly, wherein . . . all Matters shall be decided, determined, and ordered, by the greater Part of the Voices then present” (paras. 2–­4). And if we leap forward some 150 years, we find in the “Constitution or Form of Gov­ern­ment, Agreed to and Resolved Upon by the Delegates and Repre­ senta­tives of the Several Counties and Corporations of Virginia” ( June 29, 1776), as the colony-­becoming-­State is still called, the provision that the legislative and executive powers of the State should be separate and distinct from the judiciary; and [so] that the members of the two first may be restrained from oppression, by feeling and participating the burdens of the people, they should, at fixed periods, be reduced to a private station, return into that body from which they were originally taken, and the vacancies be supplied by frequent, certain, and regular elections, in which all, or any part of the former members, to be again eligible, or ineligible, as the laws shall direct. (Section 3 [ sic; for Section 5])

The corporate body has become the body of a people, who declare themselves “by nature equally free and independent . . . [with] certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety” (section 1). If this language sounds familiar, it is because we will find it again a week later in the Declaration of Independence of the United States. And so we find the corporation as it wishes itself to be: powerful, willful, coherent, legitimate, enduring, and free, a dream that continues far beyond 1776, as we well know. But as we reach the middle of this book, The Principal Navigations has left us with two possible alternatives for an ongoing history of the corporation and a decision about which one to pursue—­or the possibility of pursuing both simultaneously. Like Hakluyt, we may assist the corporation in its sovereign self-­image by continuing to trace how, as a specific type of legal and commercial institution, the joint-­stock corporation contributed to the development of the national and statist political ideas that we know so well and that find their first modern articulation in the work of

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Hobbes. For in light of Principal Navigations, we may begin to suspect that Hobbes’s Leviathan was a philosophical countermeasure, formulated within the restricted sphere of properly “political” discourse, to the commercial corporation, which was quickly growing in its practical political importance precisely in Hobbes’s period. As a distinct domain of intellectual inquiry, seventeenth-­century political theory would seem to define itself against the corporation by drawing an exclusionary line around matters economic and practical. Hobbes, after all, was himself a shareholder in the Virginia Company who attended the meetings of its governing council, and he may have understood its growing political and commercial power only too well.89 But at the same time, The Principal Navigations has described the limits of any history, of any philosophy, or of any science that attempts to theorize the group as a coherent and bounded totality.90 For despite the corporation’s promise of immortality, such totalities, whether “companies,” “states,” or “nations,” never endure forever; they are reservoirs of affect, collective projections invented to give enduring  form to an assemblage of many different kinds of things and persons. From one point of view, the corporation may seem to resemble a little state and to borrow its rights and powers, even as the state reveals itself to be a species of corporation on a large scale. But from another point of  view the corporation reveals to us the pluralistic, fragile, and assembled nature of all political entities; the corporation constantly dissolves into its networks and relays of substances, disperses itself into its collective pronouns, and borrows the mouths and bodies of its natural representatives, without which its personhood would never exist. Our alternative to maintaining a corporate fantasy, therefore, will be to examine what other assemblages the corporate person conceals and the compositional procedures it employs to create new ones, for many different purposes, only to dissolve them in turn. For like any person, the corporation will at one moment reveal to us the many processes of translation that are necessary to sustain it and in the next moment throw up grand images that it will use to deflect our interest—­if the “body politic” is always there, unified through abstraction and an immediate “representative” principle, then bodies do not need to be assembled. And yet the corporate body must assemble itself at every moment, and always at enormous cost, both to itself and to others. In order to follow the implications of these two insights, I turn now to another form of joint-­stock company that was becoming increasingly profitable, and increasingly public and popular, at the turn of the seventeenth century: the theater companies of  Thomas Dekker and William Shakespeare. Both playwrights display vividly the unifying potential of

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corporations as bodies politic at a moment of ever-­greater pluralism at all scales of English life, and both grasp how these bodies politic are sustained by a variety of poetic and mimetic effects. Both also anticipate the violence that follows from the dissolution of corporate forms into a vacuum that has not yet been filled by the institution of the state—­this insight will motivate some of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. After a detailed consideration of these theatrical fictions, I will subsequently pass to the two writers who ar­guably confronted the philosophical difficulties of the corporate form more directly than any of their contemporaries: Francis Bacon and, finally, Hobbes himself.

chapter five

Dekker and Company Of the difficulties that lie in the way of an editor of Henslowe’s Diary—­at least if he regards his work as historical rather than romantic—­not the least is to avoid writing a general history of the Elizabethan stage. There is no such thing as a clearly defined historical field; facts are linked to other facts in all directions, and investigation merely leads to further and yet further questions. Every custom and every institution at once raises the problem of its own origin; every corporation and every social fact is influenced by other corporations or reacts on other social facts. —W. W. Greg

In 1593, as the plague spread rapidly through London, a group of players under the patronage of Lord Strange received permission from the Privy Council to travel outside the city, in the form of a warrant authorizing the company “to exercize their quallitie of playing comedies, tragedies and such like in any other cities townes and corporacions where the infection is not, so it be not within seaven miles of London or of the Coort.”1 The order presumably brought some relief both to the players, who found themselves shut out of their usual Rose Theatre, and to the London authorities, who had complained about Lord Strange’s men specifically only a few years ear­ lier and had sought to suppress playhouses and players for decades.2 As the lord mayor put it in a 1580 letter to the Privy Council, all “the players of playes which are vsed at the Theatre . . . are a very sup[er]fluous sort of men, and of such facultie as the laws haue disalowed”; their “playes are matter of great daunger,” for they “make assembles of Cittizens and their familes” and encourage the spread of infection, “drawing Gode[s] wrath and plage vpon vs” and “pestering . . . the Cittie w[i]th mvltitude[s] of people,” especially “strangers & foren Artifficers.”3 The council eventually agreed, is­ suing orders in July 1581 for all the theaters to be closed.4 Four months later, however, the council reversed its position, and with the Christmas revels approaching, it wrote to the lord mayor, pointing out that the plague had abated and that the players needed to be prepared “for her highness solace.” Five months after that, the council again wrote and asked the mayor “to

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reuoke your late inhibition against . . . playeng.”5 But the mayor remained firm, pointing out once again the many inconveniences caused by the per­ formances and again invoking the specter of the plague.6 And so the skirmishes continued: the Privy Council wrote to the lord mayor, or to the aldermen and lord mayor and members of the Common Council, signing their own letters collectively or individually, sometimes is­ suing orders in the name of counselors who were sometimes not present at the meeting, writing impersonal “Acts” on behalf of the queen that were sometimes enforced and at other times utterly disregarded, or on behalf of a king whose “pleasure therein shalbe to you all a lawe,” as Sir Edward Coke pointedly wrote to the lord mayor in 1615.7 Their ongoing exchanges doc­ ument how the nascent commercial theater gradually took hold in a plu­ ralist landscape of competing interests, powers, and jurisdictions, both de facto and de jure, not only between the City and the Crown but within the city itself. The story has been told vividly by early twentieth-­century theater historians, notably W. W. Greg, E. K. Chambers, and T. W. Baldwin, all of whom wrote in a moment when pluralist arguments had become influential in other domains of English historiography and the structuring influence of corporations at all levels of English life more widely acknowledged.8 In 1559 Elizabeth had issued a proclamation forbidding “all maner Interludes to be played eyther openly or priuately, except the same be notified before hande, and licenced within any Citie or towne corporate, by the Maior or other chiefe officers of the same”; the 1572 act for the punishment of vaga­ bonds similarly subjected all unlicensed “Comon Players in Enterludes” to the authority of “the Justices of the Peece or Maior or Cheef Officer of Cities Boroughes and Townes Corporate within the Countye Cytye Boroughe or Towne Corporate, where the Apprehention shall happen to bee.”9 But as the Crown gradually shifted the responsibility for approving plays from local au­ thorities to the more centralized Revels Office, the towns grew more jealous of their authority. For the players kept visiting, as the 1593 permit for Lord Strange’s Men to play in “cities townes and corporacions” makes evident. Be­ tween 1582 and 1603, Phil Withington observes, “city commonwealths, cities, and boroughs” made up between 80 and 90 percent of the touring destina­ tions of the Queen’s Men, “vastly outnumbering alternative sites such as the country house, royal palaces, universities or cathedral liberties.”10 As both Withington and Robert Tittler have shown, the century after 1540 saw a remarkable increase in the number of incorporated English towns, growing from 38 in 1500 to 130 in 1600 to 161 in 1640.11 The free­ man who enjoyed the rights of citizenship now formed part of a “legally

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constructed ‘fictional person,’ ” in Withington’s terms, that could file suits in law; he could help constitute juries, choose justices of the peace, elect the town’s parliamentary representative, and consult with the town recorder and the town clerk for legal advice.12 But the paradox of the royal charter was that it granted rights that the towns already enjoyed, and citizens were keenly aware of the need to assert their autonomy.13 England differed from “other kingdoms and Christian provinces, governed by civil and imperial laws,” wrote the Venetian Giovanni Micheli in 1557, since here justice de­ pended on the law of “municipalities, almost like a republic”; in London, Micheli noted, the alderman have “ultimate power, without the king nor his ministers being able to intervene.” For Richard Butcher, the town clerk of Stamford, “Cities or Towns Corporate” were “small County Palatinates within themselves,” with the right “to make Laws, Constitutions and Ordi­ nances, to bind themselves and every member within their jurisdiction.” The Common Hall, Butcher continued, was like a “little court of Parliament,” in which the mayor “represents the Person of the King” and is surrounded by the burgesses “as so many Peers of the Upper House” and as “the Repre­ sentative Body of the whole Town,” and the entire system is a “small Model” and “Representation of the highest and greatest Government.” For Henry Manship, the town clerk of Great Yarmouth, the town corporation was “a certain community of Society, both of life and goods, which makes a civil body, formed and made of diverse members, to live under one power, as it were under one Head and Spirit, and more profitable to live together in this mortal life, that they may the more easily stain unto the life eternal for ever.”14 This was a quasi-­mystical notion of communitas rooted in theological ideas, mingled with legal discussions of corporate identity and transformed into a neo-­Ciceronian vision of common profit and common morality that was virtually identical to the new philosophy of political economy articu­ lated by Sir Thomas Smith in his Discourse of the Commonweal of  This Realm of England (1548) and De Republica Anglorum (1565).15 Although it would not officially incorporate until 1608, the “Commune” or “Commonalty” of London had for centuries received grants that be­ stowed the rights and duties typical of independent corporate towns, in­ cluding structures for representative governance and a strong sense of its authority over its own commercial and political life.16 Indeed, the Corpora­ tion of the City of London, as it is still known formally today, consisted of a plurality of corporate groups, all of which played a direct and vital role in governing the city’s population, regulating its commerce and provid­ ing charitable assistance. London’s Court of Common Hall, its largest body,

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included all members of the incorporated Livery Companies, and together they nominated candidates for aldermen, confirmed the City’s sheriff, and elected the City’s parliamentary representatives. All aldermen and the mem­ bers of City’s third primary body, the smaller Court of Common Council, were similarly drawn from among the liveried members of the companies and assumed authority over the City’s financial matters, including taxes, as­ sessments, and property. Complicating matters for the City, some of its own incorporated companies had a history of commissioning players to perform in their halls or renting out their halls to the players, even as individual members of the companies (including some of their officers) either them­ selves participated in public performances or sponsored performances on their own properties. These practices, too, the City had sought to regulate and in several cases had found it necessary to issue bonds against its own citizens—­among them George Tadlowe, the haberdasher, merchant, and moneylender who had encouraged Ralph Robynson to publish his English translation of More’s Utopia in 1551 and who himself  went on to become a member of the Court of the Common Council.17 Asserting its rightful authority to license inns and taverns, the Common Council issued major acts against playing in 1574 and again a decade later. When the Privy Council responded to the City’s acts by issuing new let­ ters patent to George Tilney, the queen’s master of the revels, granting him sole authority to review and approve all plays, the City promptly turned to Archbishop Whitgift, seeking his assistance in “refourming & banishing of so great evill out of this Citie, w[ hi]ch o[u]r selves of loong time though to small pourpose have so earnestly desired and endeavoured by all means that possibly wee could.” They asked him to lobby  Tilney on their behalf, and they grandly pledged to “benefit, & bynd vnto [ him] the politique state & government of this Citie, w[hi]ch by no one thing is so greatly annoyed & disquieted as by players & playes.”18 But however much the City of London might invoke the authority of its “politique state,” the players had incontro­ vertibly become an established institution inside its walls but never com­ pletely within its jurisdiction.19

the companies and their art Theater historians agree that the second half of the sixteenth century was a period of ever-­greater efforts at control over the players and, in response, of greater formalization in company structures. More recently, these argu­ ments have been accompanied by a new emphasis on the role of the com­

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pany, rather than the author, as the most important influence on the formal development of Elizabethan drama, from its generic innovation to its dis­ tinctive use of parts, acting styles, and characterization, and even to its stylistic and other formal features of composition.20 And yet both lines of inquiry raise a prior question that theater historians and critics alike rarely pause to ask: to what, exactly, did all parties, from Privy Counsellors to lord mayors to theater managers and even the players themselves, refer to when they referred to the acting “company”?21 Withington has argued that “com­ pany” was one of the most flexible contemporary terms for associations of persons, encompassing everything from the formally incorporated society to much more occasional and sociable groups; indeed, the term appears throughout the civic correspondence and regulatory documents of the pe­ riod to describe both licensed and unlicensed groups of players as well as the threatening “multitudes” and “assemblies” that seemed to spring up spontaneously at every theatrical opportunity.22 Given our own habits of nomenclature, it is surprising to find that most of the surviving warrants, licenses, and other documents of control contain comparatively few references to a “company” as such, even into the sev­ enteenth century. Nearly all the licenses are granted to named individuals rather than to “companies,” and while this feature has made them of great value to theater historians, it also suggests that the play company was re­ garded less as a stable body than as a group of “Assosiates,” to use a term from the 1604 license establishing the King’s Men, who worked together in a consistent way but who might always drift apart and change affiliations, as actors are known to have done throughout the period.23 From the point of view of the authorities, naming the players individually made good sense, since it helped to ensure that only those players who were actually licensed ended up performing, and it allowed each member to be held responsible in­ dividually for the activities of the group (as they routinely were). The benefit of naming players individually was specifically singled out by the City in its response to a petition by the Queen’s Men to the Privy Council in 1584, in which the players had asked for permission to play in the city; the anony­ mous author of the City’s response includes for the council’s reference an annotated copy of the City’s own earlier acts and advises that “it may please you to know that the last yere when such toleration was of the Quenes players only, all the places of playeing were filled with men calling themse­ lues the Quenes players. Yo[u]r L[ordship]s may do well in yo[u]r letters or warrants for their toleration to expresse the number of the Quenes players and p[ar]ticularly all their names.”24 In this context, the 1593 warrant to the

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Lord Strange’s Men is of special interest, since it shows the license to be a formalizing instrument that seeks to impose a coherent group identity on a set of individuals who might otherwise lack it and to limit the privileges as­ sociated with the new group to those appointed. The warrant identifies the players as “being al one companie,” even as it names six of the members individually (leaving others unnamed) and goes on to list Edward Alleyn as a member of the group who is nonetheless “servaunt to the right honorable the L. Highe Admiral,” that is, as a member with a separate affiliation. However, as the 1593 warrant to Lord Strange’s players also makes evi­ dent, the most important name in the licenses is not that of any of the play­ ers themselves but the name of their patron.25 The players might write in the collective first person and speak of “our dueties” and “oure Companie,” but they nevertheless signed under the authority of their patron as “The righte honorable the Lord Straunge his servant[s] and Plaiers.”26 Licensed by a patron, the players had the legal status of liveried servants and were bound by sworn oath, and this secured them the freedom to play publicly in Lon­ don and to tour, both nationally and internationally, under his protection. In the cases of the most powerful patrons, such as the lord chamberlain, the queen, or the king, the privilege even granted the players an extraordinary legal status, since they could not be arrested except by special permission.27 Nor could they be impressed to serve as soldiers. Despite the persistence of patronage as both a legal and tactical organiz­ ing principle for the companies, however, many players were not merely “servants” of their patron but fully vested members of other guilds or livery companies. The picture composed by actors’ wills and guild records is one of overlapping membership in several different corporate entities at once, with actors forming relationships to one another through existing guild mem­ berships, often across regions, and enjoying the freedom of the city that guild membership afforded them. Several theater historians, notably Ro­ salind Knutson, David Kathman, and John Astington, have proposed a col­ laborative, collective, and “horizontal” organizational model for the compa­ nies that resembled formally incorporated guilds and even depended on the guilds’ legal rights and occupational practices.28 This was possible in part because the guilds and companies were themselves changing in their struc­ tures and their activities, in response to ever-­greater capitalization on the part of the larger companies, urban immigration both foreign and domestic, and the more informal economic practices that began to take place in the city’s suburbs—­precisely the environment in which the commercial theaters flourished, as Natasha Korda has shown.29

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Mastership in one of the companies generally came with the privilege of setting up shop in an entirely different craft and to train apprentices in the skills necessary to it, especially if that craft had no formalized company system of apprenticeship.30 And the acting companies did maintain a regu­ lar apprenticeship system for their boys, either indenturing them formally through the guilds to which the senior actors belonged or through bonds that specified wages and terms of service. John Heminges, a founding mem­ ber of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men who acted with them for some twenty years and was later one of the two men who produced the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works in 1623, had completed an apprenticeship as a grocer and apprenticed a series of boy actors to the company formally as appren­ tice “grocers.” He was also a churchwarden and thus a leading member of the corporate life of his parish, as was his fellow actor Henry Condell and Philip Henslowe, the infamous theater owner and company manager.31 Both John Brayne, who built the playing space at the Red Lion Inn outside the city in Stepney in 1567 and went on to build the Theatre with James Burbage in 1576, and Richard Hickes, associated with the early playhouse at Newing­ ton Butts (also probably ca. 1576), were grocers.32 Robert Armin, the famous fool of King Lear, Touchstone of As You Like It, and Feste of  Twelfth Night, had apprenticed as a goldsmith, as had John Lowin, one of the longest-­serving members of the Lord Chamberlain’s–­King’s Men.33 James Burbage identified himself as a joiner in his lease for the Theatre in 1576, and although the join­ ers had a license from the City granting them a monopoly and a formal ap­ prenticing process, they did not possess a royal charter until 1571. William Ingram speculates that when the company was empowered to regulate its members more closely, Burbage moved more decisively toward a profes­ sion in the theater.34 Edward Kynaston, the Restoration actor famous for his women’s roles in the 1660s (and whose story is told in the 2004 film Stage Beauty) had originally apprenticed to John Rhodes, a draper who worked as a bookseller who moonlighted as a stagehand at the Blackfriars. This was a nonacting master who encouraged his draper apprentice to become an actor when the stages reopened and seems to have tutored him in how to specialize in women’s parts.35 Chambers observes a pattern of greater pro­ fessionalism and respectability in the way that regulatory documents of the period describe the actor’s work: the “vagabond” of 1572 had acquired an “arte and facultye” by 1574, then a “trade” (1581) and a “profession” (1582), and finally a “qualitie” (1593), the term that became most common in the seventeenth-­century licenses and probably best corresponded to the players’ own growing sense of gentility.36 The critics of the stage were quick to pick

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up on the players’ own self-­organizing tendencies, as Korda has pointed out: in 1615 John Stephens caricatured the “common player” as a “counterfeit” who is “politick also to perceive the common-­wealth doubts of his licence, and therefore in spight of Parliaments or Statutes hee incorporates himself by the title of a brotherhood.”37 Bearing in mind the many enduring links between playing and other crafts, we may return to the licenses and compare them to the patents for in­ corporated industrial companies, as T. W. Baldwin first suggested. Baldwin presumed that the licenses were temporary measures intended to secure the players’ corporate privileges, although they lack several of the most impor­ tant features of the patents, most obviously the explicit language of incor­ poration that we have seen in chapter 4.38 Nevertheless, there are striking similarities between them, as Baldwin intuited. The only surviving license from the Elizabethan period, for the Earl of Leicester’s acting company in 1574, describes their rights in the following terms: Elizabeth by the grace of God quene of England &c To all Iustices Mayors Sheriffes Baylyffes head Constables vnder Constables and all other our officers and mynisters gretinge. knowe ye that we of oure especiall grace c[er]ten knowledge and mere mocion haue licenced and auctorised and by these p[res] entes do licence and auctorise oure livinge Subiectes Iames Burbage Iohn Perkyn Iohn lanham will[ia]m Iohnson and Rob[er]te wilson seruauntes to our trustie and welbeloued Cosen and Counseyllor the Earle of lycester to vse ex[er]cise and occupie the arte and facultye of playenge Com[m]edies Tragedies Enterludes stage playes and such other like as they haue alredie vsed and stud­ ied or hereafter shall vse and studie aswell for the recreacion of oure loving subiectes as for oure solace and pleasure when we shall thincke good to see them As also to vse and occupie all such Instrumentes as they haue alredie practised or hereafter shall practise for and during our pleasure And the said Com[m]edies Tragedies Enterludes and stage playes to gether with their mu­ sicke to shewe publishe ex[er]cise and occupie to their best com[m]oditie dur­ ing all the terme aforesaide aswell within oure Citie of london and lib[er]ties of the same as also within the lib[er]ties and fredomes of anye oure Cities townes Bouroughes &c’ whatsoeu[er] as without the same thoroughte oure Realme of England. willynge and comaundinge yow and everie of yowe as ye tender our pleasure to p[er]mytte and suffer them herein withoute anye yowre lettes hynderaunce or molestacion duringe the terme aforesaid Anye acte statute p[ro]clamacion or comaundement heretofore made or hereafter to be made to the contr[ar]ie notwithstandinge Prouyded that the said Com[m]edies Tragedies enterludes and stage playes be by the master of oure Revells for the tyme beynge before sene & allowed And that the same be not published or shewen

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in the tyme of com[m]on prayer or in the tyme of greate and com[m]on plague in our said Citye of london. In wytnes whereof &c’ wytnes oure selfe at west� the xth daye of Maye. [1574] ( MSC, I.3, 262–63)

The license authorizes an “art or faculty” that should be understood less as an aesthetic category than as a special kind of intellectual property similar to the other commercial and industrial societies of the period: the players are literally technicians of theater. This sense is reinforced by the explicit mention of the right to “use and occupie” specific instruments necessary to the art, a phrase that implies musical instruments, of course, but also an entire category of tools, props, clothing, and other devices that are neces­ sary to the realization of the performance.39 Grants for industrial companies include the same protections, as we have seen in the example of Smith’s Society for the New Art, since an important purpose of the patent was to secure a right to use a specific machine or chemical process that had been developed by the applicant. We also find the somewhat surprising notion that literary categories such as “comedy” and “tragedy” are products of a special type, new and in need of protection, subject to a similar type of in­ dustrial regulation. By issuing the licenses, the Crown was thus not simply regularizing and restricting patronage: it was approaching the play compa­ nies as a distinctive “art” and “craft” that needed protection on commercial grounds, as well as regulation for reasons of public health, civic cooperation, and ideology. The license, like grants of incorporation for the early mining and mineral companies, create a market as a specific zone where forms of knowledge and expertise can be bound to objects and circulated in a con­ trolled way, including “literary” objects and the actor’s professional skill in personating his roles.

sharing the company The other major structuring principle for the companies was, of course, a joint-­stock system for assessing costs and allocating profits, and this is per­ haps the single most significant point of comparison between the playing companies and the other joint-­stock industrial societies of the period, as well as their most familiar corporate feature. Indeed, Jonathan Gil Harris has argued that the Admiral’s Men, the most famous and enduring com­ pany managed by Phillip Henslowe over his long career, stands out as an especially clear example of how the play companies were shifting from one form of corporate organization to another, a point we may extend more

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broadly to describe a shift in corporate forms across the period as a whole.40 Whereas the guilds of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries defined their notions of “property” and “rights” in terms of craft skill and still retained a traditional devotional and fraternal purpose—­all of which culminated in the guild’s contributions to the annual mystery plays, as Harris shows—­now the companies had become structured around a joint-­stock mode of organi­ zation in which property had become increasingly dematerialized through an elaborate system of shares and part shares that could be bequeathed and inherited or sold to and purchased by investors who had little if anything to do with the day-­to-­day operations of the theaters.41 But what exactly were the players holding with their shares, and what were others buying? As in the trading companies, the share denoted a por­ tion of ownership in the “stock” of the company, identifiable concretely as the plays, the many articles of clothing, and the props and instruments that appear in Henslowe’s Diary, for instance, or in the 1589 deed of sale from the actor Richard Jones to Edward Alleyn of all his “parte and porcion of playing apparrelle[s] playe books, Instrumente[s], and other comodities whatsoeu[e]r belonging to the same.”42 More abstractly, the share was a measure of value that Henslowe, and all the parties involved in suits over company shares, were perpetually adding up and attributing to the company as a collective enterprise. We tend to think of the share as a promise of fu­ ture income, and players, their descendants, and other investors certainly regarded it in this way. But one man’s income is another man’s debt, and it is equally clear that the share functioned as a quota of obligation, as a 1608 indenture drawn up between Henslowe and Edward Alleyn, on the one hand, and the actor Thomas Downton, on the other, makes evident. Downton would bind himself to Henslowe and Allen for thirteen years, for which he would receive “one Eight parte of a ffowerth parte” of all playing at the Fortune.43 For his one-­thirty-­second share, Downton would pay £27 10p. in cash, as well as a quarterly rent of ten shillings, and he agreed to bear the same one-­thirty-­second portion of the costs of repairing the playhouse. Most important, Downton agreed that he would “not att anye tyme here­ after Duringe the saide terme give over the facultye or qualitye of playinge but shall in his own p[er]son exercise the same to the best and most benefitt he Cann” within Henslowe’s Fortune playhouse. Furthermore, Downton agreed that for thirteen years he would not “play or exercise the facultye of stage playinge in any Com[m]on play howse nowe erected or hereafter to be erected within the said cittye of London or Twoe Myles Compasse thereof.”44 Nor was Downton permitted to “give graunte bargaine sell or

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otherwise doe away or departe with” his share to anyone without the prior agreement of Henslowe and Alleyn. Thirteen years, nearly twice the usual period of apprenticeship, for a thirty-­second share: perhaps Henslowe and Alleyn went too far, for the in­ denture was never executed. But it is nevertheless telling about Henslowe’s company management, for the share is manifestly less a measure of value than a way of monopolizing the actor’s “quality,” the correlative instrument to the bond that was so necessary to the legal structure of the companies, as Amanda Bailey has shown.45 Similar provisions appear in articles of agree­ ment drawn up in 1614 between Henslowe, his partner Jacob Meade, and the actor Robert Dawes, whom Henslowe and Meade were recruiting into a new company. The articles show Henslowe aggressively managing Dawes’s employment by defining the latter’s obligations in the most specific terms. Dawes agreed to “plaie with such company as the said Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob Meade shall appoynte” for three years, “at the rate of one whole Share accordinge to the custom of players,” and also to pay twelve pence in fine to Henslowe and Meade if he was late to rehearsals, two shillings if he missed the rehearsal entirely, three shillings if he was not “ready appareled” by three o’clock in the afternoon on the day of performance, ten shillings if he “Happen to be overcome with drinck at the tyme when he [ought to] play,” and twenty shillings if he was simply absent from the performance altogether, without being sick or without any license from the rest of the company. Dawes further agreed not to “depart or goe out of the [ howse] with any [of their] apparel on his body” once the play had ended or to re­ move any of the properties, and to pay forty pounds to Henslowe and Meade if he was caught doing so or if he failed to report that others had done so.46 Dawes’s is an extreme case, and the involvement of the other members of the company in regulating his behavior suggests that he had a reputation as an unreliable player. But his articles illustrate the way in which the “com­ pany” comes into view most clearly as a self-­identified group in moments when players begin to regulate one another, as well as in the players’ dis­ putes among themselves or with Henslowe over measures of value. A com­ plaint brought against Henslowe in 1615 by one of his companies illustrates a sharpening opposition between a system of management that sought to isolate the actors by bonding them individually and a sense on the part of the actors themselves that they had more to gain by working collectively—­ but the depositions also show how effectively Henslowe managed to exploit the difference between these two approaches to company business. Two years earlier, Henslowe and Meade had combined players from the Queen’s

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Revels company and Henslowe’s own Lady Elizabeth’s Men, equipped with stock purchased from Philip Rossiter, the manager of the Queen’s Revels company. The players were initially represented in the transaction by Nathan Field, the actor and playwright, and they refer to themselves collectively as “the Company” throughout the complaint.47 They required Henslowe to pay any money due to them “Every night to any one that shall by the Company be appointed there vnto,” and they retained the further rights to request, by majority vote, that Henslowe and Meade “remove and putt out of the saide Company any of the saide Company of playere[s],” to pay them any mon­ ies due from “any forectures for rehearsalle[s] or suche like payment[s]”—­ presumably from any player who had not observed his obligations to attend rehearsals, like Dawes, or who had been removed from the company, or who had left it of his own will—­and also to “sue [and] ar[rest any] p[er]sons by whom any forfecture shalbe made as aforesaid.”48 Problems began immediately, when “the Company,” as the complaint describes them, borrowed eighty pounds from Edward Griffin, a scrivener closely associated with Henslowe. Henslowe held the debt, and he added it to a running total he claimed the players had incurred. A year later Henslowe dissolved the company to form a new one, and he “seized all the stocke” as payment of the total debt. But he nevertheless “p[er]swaded Mr Griffyne afterward[s] to arrest the Companie for his 80ll: whoe are stil in daunger for the same,” as the players pleaded with understandable frustration. At the same time, the players accused Henslowe of overvaluing his portion of the stock owned by the company; furthermore, they claimed, he had sold “stock of Apparell” that he held for the company without crediting it to them. He individually lent two members of the company £30 and £20, respectively, but “Cunninglie put theire said privat debts into the general accompt,” and he pocketed £14 from a third “ffellowe of the Company” that rightfully be­ longed to them. His agreement with the actors for the new company then bonded them to play with him for three years and awarded them half the takings from the galleries, but, the complaint alleged, he had preemptively claimed these takings as collateral against the company’s remaining debt. When Henslowe then offered to bond individually with each member of the new company for £200 and the promise of an appropriate sum for apparel, four sharers in the company had entered into the bond, but Henslowe and Meade managed to defer bonding themselves. They made separate settle­ ments with Field but charged these to the company as a whole; they brought in two new actors, including Dawes, promising them additional takings from their own portion of the galleries (in different amounts) and extend­

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ing a similar offer to Field, whom they were especially eager to retain. But a month later Henslowe “Called the Companie together” and informed them that these new payments would in fact be taken from the company’s own receipts, and he threatened “those w[ hi]ch would not Consent therevnto to breake the Companie and make vpp a newe w[i]th out the[m].” Because the players knew that the bond ran only one way and that Henslowe himself was under no legal obligation to them, at least two of the “three-­quarter sharers” agreed to the arrangement and increased their portion of the com­ pany to a full share, by purchase—­thereby further increasing Henslowe’s own revenue! Breaking up his companies and then reconstituting them so as to in­ crease his leverage over the individual players seems to have been one of Henslowe’s regular practices: as the players complained in their deposition, the moment he realized that “the Companie drewe out of his debt,” he im­ mediately broke them up by “w[i]thdrawing the hired men from them” and selling their stock. And “the reason of his often breakinge w[i]th us,” the company alleged, was acknowledged openly by Henslowe himself, for “he gave in these worde[s] [that] should these fellowes Come out of my debt, I should have noe rule w[i]th them.” The accusation, however partial, rings true, for Henslowe had acted throughout his career as a combination of accountant, banker, and pawnbroker to purchase playbooks and costumes on behalf of his companies and advancing loans to the players individually, as in the case of Downton, or Robert Daborne, or Thomas Dekker. Dekker was a prolific playwright and one of Henslowe’s regulars: in 1599 alone, he wrote nine plays either singly or in collaboration, for the Admiral’s Men and for other companies.49 Dekker is likely to have had a hand in approxi­ mately seventy plays and other occasional dramatic pieces over the course of his career, including prestigious pageant commissions for King James’s Royal Entry (1603) and three lord mayor’s shows (1612, 1628–­29). But nei­ ther playwriting nor pamphleteering, Dekker’s other source of income, was especially lucrative, and public writing in general could be positively dangerous, as several more unfortunate contemporaries of Dekker’s even­ tually discovered. Even Dekker, as prolific as he was, had persistent prob­ lems with debt throughout his life: in the same moment that Henslowe was buying Dekker’s plays in 1598, he was also advancing money to bail him out of debtor’s prison, and in 1613, Dekker was again imprisoned for debt, this time for seven years. If the “Thomas Decker, householder” buried at St. James’s Church in the former priory of Clerkenwell on August 25, 1632, is the writer of Henslowe’s account books, then he almost certainly died in

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poverty, since his widow appeared in court to renounce any claim to his estate. There was nothing left to inherit but debt.

dekker’s corporate theater: the shoemaker’s holiday How did the players themselves respond to the regulatory and organiza­ tional challenges that confronted their emerging profession, in a city that had long been antagonistic to players and their public performances and had used all of its jurisdictional authority to curtail them? For both poets and players were acutely aware of the difficulties entailed in establishing theater as a commercial venture, and they could be quite sophisticated in the ways they countered them, often by associating themselves with the many corporate bodies that exercised such a powerful influence on the nature of urban life, as we have seen. Moreover, the very notion of a “mayor rep­ resenting the Person of the King,” as Richard Butcher had put it in his de­ scription of Stamford’s Common Hall, implied formal problems that were fundamental not only to a corporatist political imaginary but to the nature of theater, whose actors exercised the very specific skill of “personating” ideas and characters of all kinds, to use a term of art from the regulatory documents of the period, and this was not lost on playwrights, whose play companies were themselves awkwardly positioned within a predominantly corporate urban landscape. It will now be useful to look closely at a play that takes as its explicit subject the way in which theater might contribute to a coherent sense of corporate civic identity, in spite of the many conflicts over the theaters and the tensions among the many different corporate bodies that these conflicts revealed. We could find no better example than Dekker’s own The Shoemak­ er’s Holiday, Or the Gentle Craft (1599). The play is a famous example of “Lon­ don comedy” or “chronicle comedy,” as Jean E. Howard has called it, since Dekker draws on Thomas Deloney’s popular The Gentle Craft (1598), which had fictionalized the story of the historical Simon Eyre, a young draper’s ap­ prentice who became sheriff of  London (1434) and then lord mayor (1445) and who rebuilt an existing thirteenth-­century building known as the Lead­ enhall (for its lead roof  ) into a public granary, which he donated to the city of London and its citizens.50 By the late sixteenth century, the building was used as a leather market and as a center of the shoemaking trade, and both Deloney and Dekker follow popular tradition in ascribing its foundation to Eyre, strengthening the symbolic bond by transforming the historical

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Eyre from a draper to a fictional shoemaker. As Dekker’s Eyre rises from the shoemaker’s workshop through the political hierarchy of London, he assumes the chains and robes of office and becomes increasingly identified with Guildhall, the official space of civic administration; his foundation of Leadenhall at the end of the play then introduces a second, more explicitly commercial institution that aims to position the craft guilds at the symbolic and economic center of the city, but it also establishes a place of assembly in which they could express a measure of political power. Ever since Richard Helgerson’s pioneering work on the representation of English nationhood during the sixteenth century, literary critics and histo­ rians of all stripes have recognized the importance of national ideas to the period’s political imagination.51 Interpretations of The Shoemaker’s Holiday have followed suit, often aligning the play’s national historical plot—­the wars with France that bookend its opening and closing scenes—­with what is usually described as the play’s “class” politics, as figured in its detailed por­ trait of trade and commerce. This interpretive gesture is itself a measure of how powerfully The Shoemaker’s Holiday imagines the economic dislocations of its own moment in terms of collective affective experience: the conflicts of Dekker’s play are conflicts among groups and not among “subjects” or individuals, a feature that accounts also for the strongly emblematic nature of its characterization.52 But however useful the notions of nation or class have proved to be for readings of the play, criticism has tended to reduce all types of group inter­ est, group affiliation, or group experience to one of these two categories, emphasizing in particular the “unconscious,” structural, or impersonal na­ ture of class relations and in this way obscuring the degree to which “class” or “nation” are only two of the group phenomena in the play, and hardly even the most explicit. Whether we regard The Shoemaker’s Holiday as forg­ ing a new national imaginary that can either integrate or exclude the foreign worker, or as creating new ideological alignments among the aristocracy, urban mercantile elite, and laboring guild members, or as asserting the pri­ macy of masculine, homosocial economic structures over a household world in which women might retain a distinctive agency—­to name several prob­ lems that have engaged some of the best criticism on the play—­we should recognize that the play’s primary means of staging these relationships is to juxtapose different models of corporate identity with one another. The play’s hybrid historical sensibility thus illustrates especially clearly the de­ gree to which incorporated guilds and livery companies were not anachro­ nistic medieval institutions persisting in a newly early modern landscape

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but had themselves become important vehicles for integrating new modes of highly capitalized investment and the values of a consumer-­oriented mar­ ket into urban, and even national, society.53 As a way of advancing this argument forward a step, it will be helpful to consider Weber’s distinction between “class” and “status” (Stände) groups. For Weber, “classes” are defined exclusively by their access to the market and hence by their power and flexibility over market processes. As a so­ cial category, “class” is a sociological artifact, an analytic abstraction recon­ structed through sociological observation that we derive from considering people only in relation to market forces and especially in relation to prop­ erty.54 For Weber, “class” is not primarily a self-­identified grouping, except in moments of opposition around market relations; “class,” in short, becomes self-­conscious in moments of social action and is most visible when classes, or social groups positioned differently with regard to property and market, mobilize against one another. “Status,” in contrast, describes a highly self-­ conscious and highly ritualized way of defining group identity that depends on the possession and recognition of social honor. In this sense, “status” is always also a semiotic and ethical category, since it depends upon what Weber calls “style of life” (932). In status terms, consumption implies the accumulation and expenditure of symbolic capital as the primary mode in which participation in the group is secured; success depends on knowing how to manipulate signs and appearances to produce symbolic capital and knowing how to consume it—­as well as knowing how to leverage symbolic capital in order to position oneself advantageously in relation to the eco­ nomic market. Using Weber’s categories, we may distinguish more clearly between social position relative to economic circumstances and social position relative to symbolic power; we may see how status groups always overlap with class groups (as when honor produces privilege over goods and a market advan­ tage); and we can understand how status groups always secure power by means that are distinct from their economic position. Thus the “aristocracy” would at one moment be considered as a “class” (in relation to the produc­ tion, distribution, and consumption of wealth) and at another would be con­ sidered as a “status” group (in its relation to symbolic power), and it is pre­ cisely in the interplay and changing relationship between these two aspects that large-­scale transformations in social life become thinkable. But Weber’s categories also illuminate the importance of corporate insti­ tutions in early modern society, since the guilds and companies were eco­ nomic instruments that at the same time conferred social status.55 Corporate

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forms of all types allowed economic and symbolic forms of capital to be brought into alignment, in part by allowing different forms of wealth, such as land, labor, goods, money, or credit, to persist within the same collective institution. They also delimited lines of exclusion and differentiation: be­ tween those who were members of incorporated bodies and those who were not, between different companies in the same economic and political com­ munity, or between “class” groups located within the structure of the com­ pany itself.56 In the sixteenth century, in short, one didn’t have a corporate position in addition to a class position, or corporate identity instead of a class position: one’s class position was a function of one’s corporate membership (or lack thereof ), in a market that was profoundly shaped by corporate activ­ ity.57 It is important to emphasize that the guilds and companies themselves were instrumental in creating oppositions between “capital” and “labor” that we associate with the period and that these corporate bodies took their own shape from the conflicts between economic and status position that they generated. Again, these conflicts unfolded within the structure of the guild were not independent phenomena with their own “transitional” logic: they were the direct result of the companies’ own activities and policies. The ongoing legal challenges between the Cordwainers (or shoemakers) and the Curriers in the late sixteenth century provide a useful illustration of this point, since they resulted from “class” tensions among traders, mid­ dlemen, and craftsmen who were situated within each company as well as across them. Here the corporate bodies of the Cordwainers and the Cur­ riers have given a new shape to a division between traders and craftsmen that had existed from the earliest examples of organized guild activity; both companies responded to this antagonism by exercising their respective au­ thorities and by seeking new authorities from royal or civic officials, in this way reasserting themselves as institutional forms that had the power to regulate their members.58 But when compared to other social and administrative groups such as the parish or the ward, the guilds and companies display a distinctively corporate character not only because they exercised a specific set of legal and economic powers, which their charters only strengthened. They had a pronounced corporate identity because they had a more elaborate symbolic means for mediating this identity to their members and to others. To We­ ber’s distinction between class and status, we may add Bourdieu’s insight that “class” always describes a struggle over meaningful acts of classification.59 For Bourdieu, it is this conflict over the authority to bestow meaningful cat­ egories upon social experience that constitutes the essence of “political”

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conflict, and this is because the gesture of classification always also implies a representational principle: A class exists in so far as—­and only in so far as—­representatives with the plena potentia agendi may be and feel authorized to speak in its name. . . . What we have [in the concept of “class”] is a sort of existence in thought, and existence in the minds of many of those who are designated by the different taxonomies as workers, but also in the minds of those who occupy the positions furthest re­ moved from the workers in the social space. This almost universally recognized existence [of class] is itself based on the existence of [those] who have a vital interest in believing that this class exists and in spreading this belief among those who consider themselves part of it as well as those who are excluded from it; [those] who are capable, too, of giving voice to the “working class,” and with a single voice to evoke it, as one evokes or summons up spirits, of invok­ ing it, as one invokes gods or patron saints; [those] who are capable, indeed, of manifesting it symbolically through demonstration, a sort of theatrical deploy­ ment of the class-­in-­representation, with on the one side . . . the entire symbolic system that constitutes its existence—­slogans, emblems, symbols—­and on the other side the most convinced fraction of the believers who, by their presence, enable their representatives to give a representation of their representativeness. (741–­42)

Bourdieu might well be describing the associational world of The Shoe­ maker’s Holiday, since the play offers us “representatives” of several types who “stand for” the members of different groups and who, in doing so, endow those members with an explicit sense of group identity rather than a merely individual one. The play’s conflicts are structured around these dif­ ferent representative figures and the competing categories of group identity that they animate, and this conflict among group identities is played out in the “minds” of the other characters who identify with them but also, of course, in the minds of the audience—­for these are characters who “stand for” economic and status positions that exist both within and outside the fictional world of the play. The play is thus literally a “theatrical deployment” of the process of how group identity emerges as a result of a shared belief in representatives and in the meaningful categories of social classification they embody, even by those who are not members of the group. As is often noted, Dekker polarizes his characterization around aristo­ cratic and national political alignment on the one hand and models of urban citizenship rooted in corporate guild membership on the other, although the latter is in fact composed of two strata, each with distinct markers of status and commercial resources: the grocers, as figured in the character of Oatley, and the shoemakers who surround Eyre throughout the play. Oatley sits

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between the aristocratic Lincoln and the craftsman Eyre, since he opens the play as the lord mayor and often invokes “Guildhall” (1.65, 70) as a base for symbolic gestures of authority; twice Oatley speaks of his “brethren” (1.66), by which he seems to mean both fellow guild members and fellow holders of civic office, and once Eyre has been elected sheriff, Oatley congratulates him for having “entered into our society” (11.9), a term with marked corpo­ rate meaning in the period, as we have seen. But this assertion of a shared corporate membership obfuscates the fact that Oatley, in his ambition and his forms of wealth, as well as in the locations that characterize him—­he resides outside the city in the village of Old Ford, where he entertains both Lincoln and Eyre, as well as inside the city on Cornhill Street—­is pulled to­ ward the aristocratic pole of the play’s symbolic field. Aristocracy and mem­ bership in the retail guilds are both shown to be forms of oligarchy, defined either by conspicuous consumption (Lincoln) or by investment in overseas trade (Oatley). The many different economic transactions that structure Dekker’s play and provide much of its historical texture, therefore, always position char­ acters in relation to the competing systems of value that define a status posi­ tion and result in different capacities for political power. The fact that Eyre, too, comes to profit from a speculation on Dutch commodities and that he does so in partnership with Oatley (and Scott) is doubly significant: first, because it legitimates a mode of speculative investment that was otherwise often viewed with suspicion, folding it into the possible forms of wealth that a common urban citizen with a corporate membership might access; and secondly because the alignment between Eyre and Oatley is only tem­ porary—­it is merely a partnership and not the more enduring form of as­ sociation that corporate guild or chartered company membership provides. Similarly, when Oatley says, “Let’s have your company” (11.72) to Eyre later in the play as he ushers him offstage and into Old Ford, he expresses a weak bond, one that is occasional or circumstantial and nothing like that of shoemakers. We may contrast this contractual arrangement, undertaken solely for individual profit, with Firk’s cry at the end of the play, when he is asked by Oatley and Lincoln to reveal where Lacy, disguised as “Hans,” may be found. “Shall I cry treason to my corporation?” (16.96), he demands, a betrayal that would be far more serious to the system of apprenticeship and civic power that depends on it than is Lacy’s own evasion of military service, and hence his obligation to king and nation, at the opening of the play.60 What are the characteristics of this corporate group that the play displays so prominently for us? Most obviously, they are to be found in the entire system of values that animates the world of the workshop: in the dancing,

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singing, and jocular festivity that the play is at pains to demonstrate; in its awareness of the “generation and blood” of the guild, as Eyre comments to Rose at one point (11.45), voicing a corporate alternative to the aristocratic preoccupation with blood lineage that Lincoln articulates in the play’s first scene; in the roving bands of shoemakers who dispense a rough justice in order to bring the marriage plots to a resolution; in the idioms, the oaths, and slang and insult, the mythical and literary references, many of them taken directly from the theatrical repertory system itself, that circulate among the shoemakers. The figure of Hammon shows corporate membership to be as exclusionary as it is inclusive: he suffers a kind of civic excommunication from the world of the play, since although he claims to be “a citizen by birth” (6.61), he seems to have no membership in the many corporate bodies that make up the political, economic, and affective life of London. As a con­ sequence, his moral personality is shown to be hollow, a shell that he tries to fill by speaking one of a variety of clichéd sonnet and romance idioms (e.g., 6.31–­33 and 9.40–­48). As Eyre declares to Rose, when told of Oatley’s plan to marry her to Hammon, “those silken fellows are but painted images—­ outsides, outsides, Rose; their inner linings are torn” (11.42). Hammon is indeed a perfect dramatic illustration of ambiguity around the identity of the “gentleman” that has been well documented by social historians, a sta­ tus position that depended exclusively on a style of life, or on the ability to sustain the performance of status, without any of the traditional grounds for identity, whether blood, land, lineage, craft, or corporate membership. But Hammond is also a figure for the bad actor  —­Eyre’s characterization might have been lifted from the mouth of Gosson, or Stubbes, or Northbrooke—­ since he is nothing but a shallow mimetic projection that can gather no po­ litical, ethical, or even comic force. His language is as empty as his motives and as the price tag that he sees dangling from every hand (12.27, 18.76–­85). The reaction of the shoemakers to Hammon’s pursuit of  Jane is extreme because they espouse such different systems of value: the shoemakers, de­ spite all the scenes in which they seem to work and to make shoes, do not in fact espouse a strongly commercialist worldview; indeed, the entire plot of Jane and Ralph provides a qualitative and affective moral ground for shoe­ making as a corporate enterprise, as opposed to the purely quantitative com­ modity logic associated with Hammon. The shoemakers, furthermore, speak and act not on their own behalf but on behalf of Ralph, one of their corpo­ rate fellows, which concentrates the force of their objection—­it is a whole collective who speaks against Hammond, many voices against one. Ralph is, after all, physically incomplete, having returned from the wars in France

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with a severely damaged (if not missing) leg, and it would seem that the violation of his physical integrity somehow threatens the integrity of the corporate body, which needs now to be reasserted as emphatically as pos­ sible. Earlier in the play, Hodge and Firk had already moved to rehabilitate the corporate body by exhorting Ralph work all the harder: when Ralph returns and laments that his wife Jane “will be poor indeed / Now I want limbs to get whereon to feed” (10.78–­79), Hodge reminds him that his cor­ porate identity is to be found instead in his hands: Limbs! Hast thou not hands, man? Thou shalt never see a shoemaker want bread, though he have but three fingers on a hand. (10.80–­82)

Eyre has already asserted the same rhetorical equation to Jane in the play’s opening scene, upon Ralph’s conscription and departure: Let me see thy hand, Jane. This fine hand, this white hand, these pretty fingers must spin, must card, must work. (1.210–­11)

The act of physical labor becomes a signifier for corporate belonging, filling the absence of the marriage bond; the hand that shifts the shuttle or pricks with the awl is suddenly neither  Jane’s hand nor Ralph’s hand but the hand of all shoemakers, a ghostly limb animated by a corporate personality that is as relentless and demanding as it is nourishing or comforting.61 But Dekker also uses his play to recompose an idea of national belonging from the legal and affective structures of the corporate forms that the play’s central scenes represent to us. The war between England and France that preoccupies the aristocratic characters is pushed to the edges of the play; it sweeps up Ralph, who disappears for much of the play’s action and then reenters as a masterless man who must be reintegrated into the corporate image of the guild; by the end, even the king invokes a corporate idea in order to rally the shoemakers to the wars, vowing to “incorporate a new supply” of troops to those who are already fighting in France (21.138–­41) and in this way to transpose an idea of corporate belonging from the work­ shop to the national community. The gesture can be read either as the final comic fulfillment of a collective idea—­a celebration of corporate communitas in which even the king becomes a member, rather than its head—­or, more cynically, as a call to arms that Lacy will again evade and from which Ralph will only suffer more injury. But however we interpret the play’s conclusion, the form of imaginative fellowship is “national” only insofar as it has been accumulated out of overlapping corporate ideas, the nation built up out of

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the city, city from workshop, workshop from shoemakers—­shoemakers who are also actors and who find their representative in a larger-­than-­life char­ acter who comes to stand for all of them, and for the community they form together: Simon Eyre.

the character of the corporate person Eyre is best understood not as an individual, dramatic portrait, nor as a fic­ tionalized historical figure, nor even as an impersonal, quasi-­allegorical comic type: he is a figure for the peculiar idea of the corporate person, a formal envelope projected off the actor’s body that can become a repre­ sentative container and filled with a range of collective identities, each of which might conflict with any of the others but each of which may be lay­ ered upon the actor’s frame. He is shown donning the trappings of corpo­ rate power, first the gold chain that is a sign of his “worshipful vocation of Master Sheriff ” (10.4–­5) and later the “velvet coat and alderman’s gown” (7.104, stage direction) that he borrows in order to meet with the Dutch ship captain. But this multiplication of identity results not in a fragmentation of personhood but in its concentration: when Eyre asks Hodge “how do I look,” Hodge can only respond, “Why, now you look like yourself ” (7.114). Whereas Marjorie shows herself to be acting and only ends up missing the mark, in this way opening herself up to satire, Eyre manages to gather his own representational power into himself, inflating the corporation with his own personality even as he derives his identity from the signifiers of office. These props multiply his personality, since in the gown he becomes not one person, and not two—­Simon Eyre the shoemaker and a City officeholder—­ but at least four: When I go to Guildhall in my scarlet gown I’ll look as demurely as a saint, and speak as gravely as a Justice of Peace; but now I am here at Old Ford, at my good Lord Mayor’s house, let it go by, vanish, Madgy; I’ll be merry . . . prince am I none, yet am I princely born! (11.11–­15)

Shoemaker, citizen, sheriff, saint: Eyre is a large presence on stage because he is stuffed full of corporations, the principle of the King’s Two Bodies translated into a semigrotesque comic figure. Critics have often noted Eyre’s metatheatrical qualities, but it is more ac­ curate to describe him as “intertheatrical,” to use a term of  William West’s.62 As a character, Eyre has been assembled out of stylistic tics that have been designed to be remembered, across the play but also within a citational rep­

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ertory system. He typically speaks either in the mode of the rhetorical ques­ tion or the mode of the command, as though Dekker had conducted a formal experiment in the minimal grammar necessary to constituting a theatrical character; his epithets echo plays that were contemporaneous with Dekker’s own.63 He is a kind of Falstaff-­in-­the-­workshop, swaggering with the same bravado against the French, but also a Fluellen speaking stage Welsh: Tawsoone, my fine Firk, tawsoone! Peace, scoundrels. See you this man, cap­ tains? You will not release him? Well, let him go. He’s a proper shot: let him vanish! Peace, Jane, dry up they tears, they’ll make his powder dankish. Take him, brave men. (1.1.163–­67)

Eyre also allows Dekker to remind his audiences, including Elizabeth ( be­ fore whom the play was also performed), of Shakespeare’s earlier successes with Falstaff, whom Elizabeth had liked so much, and with the genre of the history play more generally—­Henry V had only just appeared on stage at the brand-­new Globe Theatre, presenting its own version of the period’s wars between the French and the English. And in Shoemaker, too, the play’s coup de théâtre lies in its ability to create a character who is able to fill the stage so completely, drawing on its power to gather all the identificatory energy into himself, from other characters in the play world but also from the au­ dience.64 By the end of the play, workshop, office, London itself have been saturated by Eyre’s bombastic jocularity, always somewhat defensive in its self-­assertion; his oaths string together London neighborhoods, landmarks, saints, and national holidays, sometimes all at the same time, as in the case of St. Hugh, patron saint of the cordwainers but also the traditional memo­ rial saint of Elizabeth’s Accession day. Dekker, in short, has borrowed some of the most important mecha­ nisms of corporate membership—­oath, trade, religious devotion, gift, legal bond—­in order to bind together several collective identities at once, locat­ ing in theater the source of an immanent corporate personality that had previously been rooted in the symbolic gestures of the guild’s old fraternal core: the collective feasts and processions, the masses and funeral rites, the charitable collections and disbursements, the veneration of the craft’s pa­ tron saint.65 For the workshop really is a theater: we see actors acting like shoemakers who act as if they are working but actually produce nothing but the gestures of work, a symbolic activity that is itself interrupted by dances, songs, puns, and other theatrical forms, out of which the workshop scenes, and the larger play, has been composed.66 Scene 13 shows the shoemakers making shoes, but they do not exactly make commodities, in the sense that

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the primary purpose of the shoe that they make is not to be convertible to a price equivalent; one of the play’s more fantastic aspects is that it tries to imagine something like a purely artisanal mode of production in which sin­ gular, nonreproducible objects are made to fill an individualized use value without at the same time having an exchange value, to use Marx’s language, which is why all the shoes mentioned in the scene also have proper names attached to them. The paradigmatic example for the symbolic and theatrical logic I have been describing is, of course, the pair of shoes that Ralph presents to Jane at the opening of the play, the “rings for women’s heels,” as he describes them, “cut out by Hodge, / Stitched by my fellow Firk, seamed by myself, / Made up and pinked with letters for thy name. (1.228–­34). As a collective artifact, the shoe is a metonym for the corporate personality that offers it as a gift, through Ralph, with the purpose of incorporating Jane, too, into the fellowship even as she slips her heel inside the shoe. Marriage acts as an equivalent to apprenticeship, a logic that Sybil makes explicit later in the play when she declares of Rose, who has seen through Lacy’s disguise, “To­ morrow, if my counsel be obeyed, / I’ll bind you prentice to the Gentle Trade” (11.85–­86). A similar image of reincorporation returns at the end of the play, when Ralph is presented with Jane’s shoes by one of Hammond’s servants and asked to make a copy of them: ralph: How? By this shoe must it be made? By this? Are you sure, sir? By this? servingman: How “by this”? Am I sure, “by this”? Art thou in thy wits? . . .  Dost understand me? Canst thou do’it? ralph: Yes, sir, yes. Ay, ay, I can do it.—­By this shoe, you say? I should know this shoe. Yes, sir, yes, by this shoe, I can do’t. (14.8–­19) The conceit of the shoe as an utterly singular, nonreproducible object is cap­ tured through the scene by the force of the repeated “this,” which strains to designate an object that can only exist as a concrete, immediate, singular presence: the shoe has a theatrical immediacy that words, and the transla­ tion of the play into print, cannot capture. This theatrical significance is all the more concentrated by the fact that the shoe is now also a structural link back to the opening of the play, a measure of the distance that has since unfolded and the bearer of all the symbolic value that resides in the rela­ tionship between Jane and Ralph, as well as a structural link  forward to the resolution of the play and the final defense of the mystical body from the threats of Hammon and the commercial logic of the market he represents.

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If  Jane’s shoe has become more than a mere commodity, it has also be­ come more than just a prop: it has become one of the key elements that holds the play together, circulating among characters, collecting the play’s most important values, and becoming an index of their relation to one an­ other, like a radioactive isotope in the theatrical tissue. The shoe reveals how plays in general emerge out of an assemblage of things that are also signs and signs that are also things, some of which act as standards of relative measure for the significance of all the others. The gold chain that Eyre wears offers another point of reference for this calibration of theatrical value, as does Firk the character, or the word “princely”: all are privileged signifiers around which the play’s imaginary comes to hang. All can be described as theatrical fetishes, a function that Jane’s shoe makes especially obvious; the importance of the shoe, in particular, derives from the fact that it is a shared fetish among many different characters, as well as from the different fanta­ sies that it holds together: the fantasy of shoemaking as a guild fellowship; the fantasy of marriage and reincorporation into the fellowship of shoe­ makers, despite a loss of physical integrity; the fantasy of a play, which is it­ self an imaginary construct unfolding before its audience.67 Through the movements of  Jane’s shoe, we grasp that the peculiar onto­ logical condition of the corporation as a fictional-­real hybrid results from the complex relays of signification that it puts into motion, through the ob­ jects, language, images, and other formal resources that come to character­ ize it. And at the same time, reciprocally, the idea of the corporation allows us to grasp more clearly how the theater is a particularly complex example of such a hybrid fictional-­real assemblage, a collection of objects, words, gestures, movements, scenic combinations, ideas, character forms, and other intertheatrical elements, all of which come to cohere into the temporary unity we call a “play.” This corporate dimension to theater can be measured by the difference between the play that unfolds on stage, in all its distinc­ tiveness and contingency, and the brief narrative “argument” of the play that the epistle to the first printed edition of The Shoemaker’s Holiday ad­ dresses to us as readers. As a bare sketch, the “argument” possesses none of the detail, none of the mechanism, none of formal translation that makes the play come to life; it lacks every dimension of  how the play comes to be generated and apprehended as a theatrical event (in a word, it lacks em­ plotment). Nor does the argument capture any of the play’s interest in the associational life of corporate forms, the symbolic oppositions among the characters who actually make up those forms and bring them into being, or the play’s unusual ideological efforts to maintain a sense of corporate unity and corporate belonging at all costs.

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By showing theater to be an institution that can provide a coherent per­ sonality for the city as a corporate entity—­and to do so, moreover, by recon­ ciling several different competing ideas of collective association with one another in a single figure—­Dekker shows theater to be necessary to the city. He activates the symbolic and practical means by which corporate life was sustained beyond or in addition to a formal charter, whether at the level of the guild or the city itself. In this way, theater could receive a measure of corporate identity from its association with urban institutions, on the one hand, while also securing its legal footing through its association with an aristocratic or royal patron. When the king appears at the end of the play to consecrate the foundation of Leadenhall by Eyre, he shows that corporate life, however self-­sustaining, always requires some form of legitimating au­ thority to ensure its continuity, even if that legitimating authority remains at some level merely symbolic. The scene captures perfectly the historical situ­ ation of the guilds, which, as George Unwin has shown, always remained distinct from the legitimating authority of the church, the Crown, or the mayor and Commonalty of London and indeed constantly moved among them, appealing to each of them in different moments as the fraternal body’s right to an independent jurisdiction was in some way challenged.68 But the scene also captures perfectly the historical situation of the play companies, for whom the monarch also acted as a royal patron, and Eyre’s founding of Leadenhall as a place for the shoemakers to continue their symbolic “work” can thus also be understood as addressing the play companies own need for a theater, a place of commerce and assembly that could become the equiva­ lent of their guild hall—­much like the town halls where players had long been performed or the company halls that the players had rented through­ out the 1540s and which, in the case of the Blackfriars Theatre, would be­ come an actual hall after all.69 For this reason, The Shoemaker’s Holiday is finally not only a romantic staging of the economic transformations and new political alignments that followed from a pluralist corporate world but a subtle defense against the antitheatrical polemic that would prevent such a staging in the first place. The play proposes theater as a legitimate art and institution of assembly, in which many people might gather independently of their other associations and affiliations to watch plays come to life before their eyes: the incorpo­ ration into theater, by means of theater, of a general fellowship available for a penny.70 If the aldermen objected that plays represented “nothing but vnchast matters, lascivious devices, shiftes of Coozenage, & other lewed & vngodly practizes . . . which they repr[e]sent Contrary to the rules & art

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pr[e]scribed for the makinge of Comedies eaven amonge the Heathen,” then Dekker devises a comedy lifted straight from a saint’s life and from London’s own civic history.71 If the lord mayor complained that players dis­ tracted apprentices and servants from their work and into “evill and riotous companie,” drawing “the same into example of imitation & and not of avoid­ ing . . . lewd offences,” as John Spencer wrote in a 1594 letter to Burghley, here we see apprentices, servants, and tradesmen working assiduously and affirming both urban and national allegiance.72 And if antitheatrical polemi­ cists objected to the theaters on the grounds that they were “publique as­ semblies of prophane plaies,” as Anthony Munday put it, or “brainesicke assemblies” and “the Counsell of the vngodly,” in the words of Stephen Gos­ son, where “the common people” “runne together by heapes” to form “a monster of many heades, a[n] assemblie of Tailers, Tinkers, Cordwayners, Saylers, olde Men, yong Men, Women, Boyes, Girles, and such like,” with no “grave, sober, discreete, wise” judgment that is “well exercised in cases of gouvernement,” then Dekker responds by showing his shoemakers form­ ing a corporate community that can encompass both city and nation with a cordwainer for a lord mayor at their head.73 By the turn of the seventeenth century, in short, theater had assumed a potential “political” importance not only because plays might stage controversial ideas or serve as an instrument of Crown propaganda, although companies of players had been maintained by monarchs and statesmen throughout the sixteenth century for precisely this reason, which provided an important motive for the early institution­ alization of playing under a system of royal and aristocratic patronage.74 Theater had become “political” because it had itself become a distinct mode of association alongside, and in many ways outside, other corporate groups such as the guilds, companies, or the City itself: it was this associational po­ tential that fueled some of the most enduring antitheatrical arguments and civic restrictions on playing, and it was a principle that playwrights and act­ ing companies needed to affirm if theater was to continue as a commercial venture in public life.

chapter six

Shakespeare’s Thing of Nothing What is this quintessence of dust? —Hamlet

The Shoemaker’s Holiday was Dekker’s first published play; as the epistle and title page advertised, it had been performed at court by the Lord Admiral’s Men before the queen on the evening of New Year’s Day, 1600, and it had almost certainly been performed by the company at the Rose Theatre six months earlier, since on July 15, 1599, Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose and manager of the Admiral’s Men, made a note in his diary of a three-­ pound payment for “A Boocke of thomas dickers Called the gentle Craft.”1 Henslowe’s diary and associated papers form one of the great archives of theater history, but they open a window onto a professional world that looks very different from the festivity of The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Looking for a figure homologous to Dekker in his own play, we find that it is not Lacy, the class-­crossing master of disguises who improvises his way through the overlapping communities of the city, but Ralph, the wage-­earning, jobbing apprentice who loses a limb in service to the king.2 For like most playwrights, Dekker was in the position of a hired man, rather than a full shareholder in Henslowe’s company, and his income was substantially less than any of the shareholding players would have received.3 Nor did he have any of the protections, formal or informal, that actors seem to have extended to one another as members of a self-­identified “company.” A 1613 letter from the actor Charles Massy to Edward Alleyn asks him for fifty pounds to pay his debts, pledging as surety the fact that “the composisions between oure companye,” as Massy refers to it, award seventy pounds to any player who leaves “w[ith] consent of his fellowes,” a contractual practice that seems to have been regular among the players and that served to bind them together in a common interest.4

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Henslowe’s diary makes obvious his severe ingenuity in manipulating the legal instruments of the share and the bond, and it is tempting to imagine that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—­a play so finely attuned to problems of lending and owing, contract and obligation, public law and private bond—­has the rival Admiral’s Men and the Shylockian Henslowe distantly in mind.5 Most theater historians contrast Henslowe’s companies with the Chamberlain’s-­King’s Men, viewing the “Shakespeare Company,” as Andrew Gurr has called it, as an exceptional case distinguished by a more egalitarian form of self-­organization. The grounds for Gurr’s judgment lie in the fact that the financial structure of the Chamberlain’s-­King’s Men differed from those of other companies in one significant respect: a core of share-­owning “housekeepers” collectively owned the land lease for the theater, as well as the theater building itself, first the Globe and then, as of 1608, also the Blackfriars.6 The housekeepers together received half of the income from the galleries, and those housekeepers who were actors also received their regular share of the other half of the profits from the galleries and from the door. In exchange, the householders paid the rent on the lease of land where the theater building stood, they maintained the building, and they furnished clothing and other properties to the players—­who in many cases were also themselves. Expenses for the hired men in the company, for music, and for its playbooks were paid out of the actors’ portion of the profits. Gurr regards the arrangement as unique among the companies and as evidence for an unusual level of collaboration and “corporate spirit,” as he puts it, pointing out that the players frequently referred to one another as “fellows” and even as members of a “brotherhood.”7 He attributes the commercial success and enduring life of the Chamberlain’s–­King’s Men to its “team”-­oriented ethos, and he maintains that for this reason the company is “not like a modern limited liability company,” for housekeepers and actor-­ shareholders alike always remained liable for the company’s debts.8 But the closer one looks at the Chamberlain’s-­King’s Men, the more it seems to resemble the Admiral’s Men, for as the ongoing disputes surrounding the company’s shares make clear, here, too, the instrument of the “share” served primarily to bind actors to the company, effectively monopolizing their skills; the novel housekeeping arrangement simply extended the conventional sharers organization to the theatrical property itself, even as it formalized and sharpened the two-­tier hierarchy of sharers and hired men that existed in all of the companies—­after all, as the players under Henslowe understood all too well, “fellowship” and “brotherhood” can be other names for managed antagonism.9 When we remember that Cuthbert Burbage, elder son of  James, was never an acting member of the company,

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he begins to look more similar to Henslowe than we usually imagine, and his brother Richard to resemble Alleyn, Henslowe’s acting-­company partner.10 While the initial housekeeping arrangement had been structured so as to prevent the passing of shares through inheritance or dowry, over the course of the company’s existence shares in the playhouse quickly became a valuable form of alienable property that might be bequeathed to children, to spouses and, through them, even to second husbands, an inconvenient fact that contributed to several legal disputes.11 As in the case of the Admiral’s Men, the suits over King’s Men’s housekeeping arrangements make it clear that the “share” was much more than an index of collaboration: it had become a form of real property to be carefully protected from the outset by complex legal means—­often by John Heminges, who seems to have acted as the company’s financial manager, much like Henslowe—­and monopolized when others sought to acquire it. And so one is tempted to say that Gurr is correct when he argues that the company was not like a modern limited liability company: it was more like a modern private equity firm.12 The 1635 dispute brought by Robert Benfield, Eliot Swanston, and Thomas Pollard, petitioners, against John Shanks, Cuthbert Burbage, Winifred Burbage (widow of Richard) and other housekeepers over the purchase of  housekeeping shares testifies to the promise of sheer wealth associated with the share after more than thirty years of playing, as well as its role in managing the company’s “labour” relations, to use the term that the actors themselves used.13 Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard were regular actor-­sharers who had hoped to purchase shares as housekeepers but who found that Shanks had already “surreptitiously” bought them from William Heminges, John Heminges’s son. The actors complained that the original two-­tiered structure had resulted in “an vnreasonable inequality,” whereby housekeepers made four times the daily gains that an actor did; they pointed out that two other actors had recently been permitted to purchase housekeeping shares and that they regarded their own “labours, according to their seuerall wayes and abilityes, [as] equall to some of the rest” (363). Above all, they emphasized, the majority of the existing housekeepers were “neither Actors nor his Ma[ jes]t[i]e[s] servant[s]” (363) and “yet reape most or the chiefest benefitt of the sweat of their browes” (364). They now sought housekeeping shares so that they themselves “might reape some better fruit of their labours than hitherto they have done” (362), in order to increase their “profit & meanes of Liuelyhood” (363), and they asked the Lord Chamberlain to force such a sale upon the existing housekeepers (which he did; 365). The petitioners’ request seems reasonable enough—­they sought only one

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share each of the Globe and one share among them (i.e., one-­third share each) of the Blackfriars, to be sold by those who already held multiple shares themselves—­and yet Shanks resisted. He was “an old man in this quality” who had long served the company, but he had “made noe provision for him selfe in his age, nor for his wife, Children, and grandchild” and had purchased the Heminges shares “for his and their better liuelihood” (367), and he “hopeth hee shall not bee hindred in ye injoying the profitt therof ” (368). The actors, he claims, each made £180 in the last year, “a very sufficient meanes to satisfie & answere their long and patient expectation,” which is more than they ever before earned or ever could earn with another company. Swanston already owned a part share in the Blackfriars, Shanks reminds the court, and only paid a third as much for it as Shanks himself (368). Moreover, he argued, suddenly waxing eloquent in terms that ring very much of the seventeenth century: “That in all the affayres & dealing[s] in this world betweene man & man it was & is euer held an inviolable principle, that in what thing soever any man hath a lawfull interest & property Hee is not to bee compelled to depart w[i]th the same against his will” (369). In Shanks’s view, this principle of private property manifestly overrode any active professional association with the theater company, since William Heminges had profited from the shares for four years “though hee never had any thing to doe w[i]th the sayd Stage” (369). “That which they pretend shall tend to the better gouuernm[en]t of the company,” he warned, “will bee rather to the destrucc[i]on of the Company & disabling of them to doe service to his Ma[ jes]tye” (370). And in any case, Shanks admitted, he couldn’t sell the shares to the petitioners even if he wanted to, because he had already mortgaged them to his wife’s uncle.

shares, parts, and personation:

hamlet

So the “share” had always been: a pension relied upon, a form of investment and return, an instrument of governance (but also of dissolution), and a means of keeping the “men soe soone shott vp,” as Cuthbert Burbage put it, in their place (370). But the share was manifestly also a measure of the actor’s “quality,” his abilities and status as a practitioner of  his art. Throughout the deposition, both parties link financial vestment and artistic practice especially closely, referring to a player’s or housekeeper’s portion in the company interchangeably as a “share” or as a “part” and in this way tacitly acknowledging how the financial reckonings of the account books always reflected the nature of the theatrical enterprise as an association of actors

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whose skill was, above all, the art of “personation.” For to be a “sharer” in the company meant that an actor could expect to receive a role, however minor; as Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey have shown in their groundbreaking work on actor’s parts, actors each worked from individual sections of the play text that contained only the lines they were expected to perform on stage, plus cue words from the immediately preceding speech in the scene. The part was thus also the focus of the playwright’s creative attention, as he wrote to “fit” the actors of his company or revised the part for a new actor and subsequent performances of the “same” play, for “plays” as we tend to think of them were rarely composed all at once but were written piecemeal, in individual scenes, each of which was itself approached as a collection of parts allocated to different actors. And actors seem to have retained their parts as their individual possessions, pasting parts from several different plays into a single book or passing on the parts as a collection of different roles to the actors in the company who eventually succeeded them.14 Whether as share, as scroll, or as role, the part captures the compositional complexity of the play “company” as a corporate idea, for the part holds the company together as a group even it fissures and breaks the group into its constituent members, or indeed because it individuates them. The so-­called company was constantly decomposing itself into the actors who made it up, who left to study their parts in private or to receive individual instruction in their roles, and then recomposing itself again for the occasion of performance. If the bond and the share were contractual instruments that formed the legal skeleton for the company, the part added an additional layer, which was nothing less than the bond of mimesis, the association formed through the simultaneous effort to create the play in performance, with its fictional persons, props, motives, and circumstances. Across plays, the part also created distinctive types of characters, actions, and “humors,” establishing continuities within the company’s long-­standing repertory and thereby creating a distinctive identity for the company as a group, as several theater historians have argued.15 In some cases, that repertory could then be folded back into a singular role again, in exactly the type of condensation that produced the character of Eyre in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and that can be identified in many characters across the work of other playwrights, whether because parts and plays passed from playwright to playwright through the actors and companies who owned them, or because playwrights consciously sought to imitate one another’s characterological innovations. For the actor, the part literally became a new “whole” that contained everything he needed to know; it endowed him with the fictive person to

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which he in return endowed his body and his passions.16 This is the alchemy that transfixes Hamlet before the “tragedians of the city” who have come to Elsinore, one of the most theatrically self-­knowing scenes in all of early modern drama. He inquires about the players’ fortunes, and about those of rival companies; he greets them familiarly, teasing them about their physical appearance; he asks for a favorite speech, begins it for them, evaluates the play from which it has been taken, and evaluates his own evaluation (“as I received it, and others whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine” [2.2.429–­30]).17 Soon he pens a part of his own for them to learn, instructs them in how to speak it, and frames it with the most current theoretical precepts on dramatic art. When the First Player transforms himself into the “fiction . . . a dream of passion” (2.2.540), he becomes a goad for Hamlet’s own ongoing self-­reproach: O what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his whole conceit That from her working all his visage waned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing. For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do, Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? (2.2.537–­50)

Hamlet responds not to the notion that the projection of character is so lifelike but that the technique of the actor is so spectacular, as if he can see the strings that the actor is pulling and nevertheless be moved by him. The entire scene presents us with a virtual lesson in Renaissance theories of mimesis, as these were taken up by the play companies: the part the Player plays is the character of Aeneas, who himself plays the part of narrator for Dido, probably in imitation of  Marlowe’s own Dido, Queen of  Carthage; in short, he is an epic figure leapt from the page to stage of the Rose Theatre and thence now to the Globe, where he stands personated by an actor who proceeds to narrate himself into the character first of Aeneas, then Pyrrus, then Priam, then Hecuba and who caps the performance by producing “real” tears that fall on the stage before his audience.18 Hamlet might have asked not for  whom

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the tears fall are but whose tears they actually are, had the theatrical situation of the entire episode not made the question irrelevant: they are at once Hecuba’s, and the Player’s, and the player’s, and the whole point is that we are not supposed to be able to tell the difference. Hamlet’s preoccupation with acting and appearance, being and seeming, and the tension between outward show and “inward man” under the pressures of a court in the midst of a political succession crisis has constituted one of the most long-­standing themes of criticism on the play. But critics have generally failed to recognize the degree to which the play’s formal self-­ consciousness and its political imaginary are both responding to a world in which older corporatist ideas have been splintered and rent asunder.19 “The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body” (4.2.25–­26), Hamlet declares, in a riddling summary of the play’s primary political problem: Old Hamlet’s natural body has been too vulnerable, his “ear” too open; his ethereal body politic, which once moved within his living frame, now stalks the ground outside Elsinore reduced to the corporation sole it always was—­this “mere ghost of a fiction,” as Maitland called it (perhaps after returning from an evening at Hamlet).20 The so-­called state (1.1.69) of Denmark is “rotten” (1.4.65), in “strange eruption” (1.1.69), “warlike” (1.2.9), “disjoint and out of frame” (1.2.20); outside the castle, the multitude threatens to overrun the Danish court as it rages and clamors for Laertes, a mere offstage echo of the populus who once possessed an authentic sovereign power. “Elsinore” names a political vacuum in which residual corporate forms blow across the stage like so many figural scraps; we find the imagery of organs and body parts littered through the speeches of the play, poetic fragments of a corporate political idea that no longer finds coherence and appears all too fictional, all too staged, all too open to appropriation. In this respect, the political imagination of Hamlet, like many of Shakespeare’s tragedies, is a far cry from the romanticizing world of Dekker’s comedy: in play after play, Shakespeare seems gripped not by the unifying potential of the corporate form as model for political association but rather by its inherent violence and inevitable instability. Hamlet explores the problem by finding in theater, and above all in acting as an art of “personation,” a secular alternative for a mystical political theology that has become unsustainable, to be replaced only by so many flickering appearances and translations through the many modalities of theatrical performance. The process begins where the play itself begins: with the ghost. For the ghost rep­resents a theatrical effect of a very particular type. It begins everything by telling Hamlet information that has not been staged, and as a diegetic principle

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translated into a performative device—­as a demonstration of the way in which early modern theatricality positively depended on the simultaneous presence of embodied mimesis and recounted story, of action suited to word and word to action—­the ghost is a complement to the First Player later in the play.21 It forms the shell of a character, the minimal form that is necessary for any “personation” to begin, a kind of visual echo: it is “like the King that’s dead” (1.1.41); it looks “like the King” (1.1.43); it is “Most like” him (1.1.44). When Marcellus asks yet again, in wonder, “Is it not like the King?” (1.1.58) and Horatio answers him with “As thou art to thyself ” (1.1.59), he speaks an unwitting truth, for the ghost is a figure for the theatrical character’s origin and destiny: to live silently upon and within the body of another that resembles you in every particular; to speak, and suddenly find yourself suspended in an artificial life. “If it assume my noble father’s person,” Hamlet declares, “I’ll speak to it though hell itself should gape” (1.2.246–­47): the ghost is the “form and pressure” (3.2.23) of a person, as it were, that has been peeled away from the actor and that is waiting for him to come and repersonate it. It is, like the king, a “thing . . . of nothing” (4.2.27–­28). In this way the ghost introduces a problematic that the play as a whole goes on to explore in any number of events, formal set pieces, and thematic registers, large and small, from the demonstration of the First Player to the layered metadrama of The Murder of Gonzago, complete with Hamlet’s own commentary, a supplementary dumbshow, and a full dramatic enactment of Old Hamlet’s murder, to Polonius’s passing comment, just before the play within the play is about to begin, of his own turn as an actor at the university: hamlet: . . . My lord, you played once i’th’ university, you say? polonius: That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor. hamlet: And what did you enact? polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed I’th’ Capitol. Brutus killed me. hamlet: It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.—­Be the players ready? (3.2.91–­99) The moment is so compressed, so vertiginous and virtuosic and yet at the same time rendered through such a banal vehicle, that it verges on the absurd. Polonius is utterly oblivious to the moment’s concentration of theatrical effect: he is a virtual creature, giving a virtual account of a virtual death now past, living on to tell about it from the point of view of a doubly virtual

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afterlife, as the player winks through the role back to the King’s Men’s own repertory. Like the Player’s King Gonzago, like the Player’s Priam, his Pyrrhus, his Aeneas, like Polonius’s Caesar, like Polonius himself, the ghost has been dis­ patched to live in a state of mimetic repetition; it is an ambassador from offstage who carries with it the reeking breath of fiction, which surrounds the open playing space like a dark cloud or a foggy atmosphere. Suspended between being and nonbeing, the ghost enters not only from the backstage space of the tiring house, or from the Elizabethan repertory system, or from the pages of Senecan precedents, or from purgatory: it enters from the virtual world that defines “Elsinore” and the shadowy events that happen there.22 It is a “thing” (1.1.21, 4.2.26) but also a “vacancy” in “th’incorporeal air” (3.4.110–­11), as Gertrude puts it later in the play, whose reality or ontological status—­its identity, its properties, its causes, its motives or ends—­is indefinite and subject only to question, both a “fantasy” (1.1.23) and “more than fantasy” (1.1.54), an “apparition” (1.1.28), and an “illusion” (1.1.109). Or as Horatio says, “Tis strange” (1.1.64). The awful knowledge that has come to grip Hamlet—­the knowledge that his “antic disposition” (1.5.179) and manic punning desperately seeks to keep at bay—­is that he and everyone else in the play are living in the same ontological half-­life, without escape. As much as Hamlet wishes to differentiate himself from the First Player—­his grief is mere “fiction,” but mine is real—­he finds only that the mimetic passion is more real and more consequential than the so-­called actual one. He has discovered, in short, the enabling premise of theater, and his ensuing soliloquy only transfers the First Player’s theatrical rapture to himself, as the performative relationship between actor and character, “personator” and “person,” is thrown into mimetic relief. Even when Hamlet stands alone, it would be as true to say that the audience sees two bodies on stage, each coincident and identical to the other, as it would be to say that it sees one. If the First Player has given us a bravura performance of the actor mastering his art, in the figure of Hamlet we find the reverse: here it is as if the character suddenly becomes conscious of the fact that he is speaking “lines,” in a play that bursts forth around him in the very moment that he questions what language this could be that appears in his mouth, animated by a stranger’s tongue. Of course such a creature would appear diffident, passive, introspective: what kind of action could he realistically undertake, if it were always to be attributed to another and never to “himself ”? Of course such a creature would beweep his state, imprisoned by a body that is not his own, and cry for a measure of freedom:

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“O that this too too solid flesh would melt / Into a dew” (1.2.129–­30). Ophe­ lia gives us a poignant description of what a theatrical character looks like when it becomes self-­aware and stares into the mirror of mimesis: He took me by the wrist, and held me hard. Then goes he to the length of all his arm, And, with his other hand thus o’er his brow, He falls to such perusal of my face As he would draw it. Long stayed he so. At last, a little shaking of mine arm, And thrice his head thus waiving up and down, He raised a sign so piteous and profound That it did seem to shatter all his bulk And end his being. (2.1.88–­97)

We can imagine what Hamlet wonders: are you, Ophelia, like me—­are you the same kind of creature? He has become the completed portrait for which the ghost is merely a sketch: a fictional person living in a dis-­incorporated condition. To the many hollow corporate bodies in the play, dispossessed of their power to act or to provide structuring principles for the lives of their members, we may add that of the university—­an originary universitas—­and the epistemological and moral authority it sought to command over the most significant ontological problems. In this world of secrecy and opacity, of acting and violence, Hamlet drifts untethered from the university and the promise of its “philosophy,” which has become irrelevant to the shifting and increasingly bloody circumstances in which he finds himself.23 “There is something in this more than natural,” he muses, “if philosophy could find it out” (2.2.362–­63). He has returned from Wittenberg to find a world in which a crisis in sovereignty has become a crisis of knowledge, for the ghost may “assume some other horrible form, / Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason” (1.4.51–­52), as Horatio, also a “scholar,” puts it in a warning to his friend. When Hamlet rejoins Horatio after speaking with the ghost and confesses that “There are more things in heaven and earth . . . / Than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (1.5.174–­75), he is not only referring to problems of a theological type: he is referring to the fictions of theater, which can begin only when philosophy has withdrawn and left a space to fill.24 In Hamlet, this theatrical space opens alongside, and perhaps even as a consequence of, Reformation debates over the nature of the Eucharist and purgatory, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued, crises that were always also

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political theological crises insofar as they provoked the most heated polemics (not to mention religious massacres, persecutions, and public executions) over principles that underwrote the very definition of a “political” community: the nature of sovereignty and governance; of law, jurisdiction, and office; of belief and conformity; of membership and exclusion, to name only a few.25 As we have seen, these political-­theological problems had received their primary definition through reference to corporatist arguments and established practically through corporate institutions of all kinds; when these corporate institutions began to splinter from the pressures of a reform­ ing impulse, or began to mutate in response to perceived opportunities for profit and commercial value, they threw into relief the problem of their own composition and the instruments necessary to their continuity as a group person with the power to speak and act in their own names. Hamlet steps into this breach as self-­consciously as we could wish: even as Shakespeare and his “fellows” were experimenting with the legal, financial, and imaginative devices that were necessary to constitute themselves as a company and exploring what freedoms and opportunities this “company” membership im­plied, they produce a play that examines the nature of theater in all its dimensions—­aesthetic and economic, fictive and real, embodied and narrated, natural and artificial, present and absent—­and they use the theatrical insights they gain to probe the consequences of a world in which traditional corporate institutions might no longer provide for an enduring political life. Onto the stage wanders the player, who explores the capacities and limits of his art, only to be shadowed by the character, who begins to contemplate questions that the player cannot quite pose for himself. When is a person also an idea, and when is an idea also a person? What kind of entity is this “fiction” that somehow stands before me? Could a personated abstraction, especially a person of the kind that I am, ever accede to any form of authentic political power? Hamlet’s “madness”—­indeed all of the soliloquizing introspection and seeming psychological depth that has made Hamlet so famous—­is simply the symptom of a fictional creature who has become aware of his own fictiveness and who has begun to wonder how far the capacities of this fictiveness really extend. When compared with other characters in the Shakespeare canon who seem especially alive to the potential of theatrical fiction—­Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Rosalind of As You Like It, to take two famous examples—­Hamlet seems “tragic” because his dawning self-­awareness leads finally to capture, to repetition, to stasis: as the corpses fill the scene and Fortinbras orders that the bodies be placed “high on a stage” for his noble “audience,” theater seems painfully inadequate to the

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task of filling the vacuum in political concepts that its own mimetic procedures have revealed.26

incorporate in rome: and julius caesar

titus andronicus

Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the disintegration of corporate political structures, especially in their urban, civic forms, and the anarchic world of civil war and opportunism that results from their dissolution, is typical of his exploration of tragedy as a genre more broadly, from his earliest plays. In Titus Andronicus (1594), where Ovidian themes of sexual violence, revenge, and dismemberment predominate over the institutionalized polit­ ical conflict and personal agons of the later Roman plays, we nevertheless find that the play’s opening and closing scenes bookend the action with the constitutional problem of succession, presented as a debate among different mechanisms for the transfer of power.27 In this respect, Titus resembles no play so much as Hamlet, which, as Julia Reinhard Lupton has shown, is haunted by the specter of constitutional crisis.28 The terms of the confrontation between Saturninus and Bassianus are familiar from republican discourse, as figured, for instance, in the discussion between Hythloday and More in the first book of Utopia over the nature of true nobility: Saturninus appeals to the “patricians” and “patrons” for his “right,” which he bases on his patrimony, while Bassianus pitches his appeal to the Romans as “friends”; invokes “virtue . . . justice, continence, and nobility”; and urges the Romans to recognize his “desert in pure election” by exercising their “freedom in [their] choice” (1.1.9–­17).29 Marcus attempts to mediate between them in his capacity as tribune, the representative authority of “the people of Rome, for whom we stand / A special party” and thus also a figure for a constitutional order in which “election for the Roman empery” is by “common voice” (1.1.21–­22). The people have chosen Titus, and Marcus soon presents him with the white robe that signifies his status as “candidatus” for “election for the empire” (1.1.186–­88), so that he may become “a head on headless Rome” (1.1.189). As Marcus’s choice of figure makes evident, however, the corporate body has already begun its process of disintegration, despite Titus’s several invocations of Rome as a collective group and “commonweal” (1.1.231, 251). Less than fifty lines later, Titus has refused the robe and thrown his election to Saturninus, Bassianus has fled with Lavinia, and Titus has killed his own son, Mutius; when Tamora, now having married Saturninus, declares her-

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self “incorporate in Rome” (1.1.467), we see that Saturninus has engrossed the public power of incorporation for the sovereign, absorbing it from the civic body of the “commonweal” and shrinking it radically into a relation between two people, an intimacy that the play makes conspicuous. Since the emperor’s private concerns are always public, the use of the figure of in­corporation disturbs any conventional political opposition between the public and the private, showing the very opposition to be meaningless under the totalizing power of Saturninus’s tyrannizing appetites; legally speaking, Tamora has now become Saturninus’s heir, according to the Roman practice of adoption, and all of Rome has been instantly converted into so much incorporeal property. As a foreign Goth and mortal enemy to Rome, Tamora could be integrated into the city only through a blatant legal fiction, and the gesture is such a naked device for seizing power that the contingency underlying the continuity of all sovereignty, as well as the force necessary to maintain it, is laid bare, and the very idea of a meaningful corporate personality for Rome suddenly seems equally tenuous. As in Hamlet, too, Titus’s intense focus on physical embodiment almost immediately becomes the occasion for a metatheatrical study of the power of theater to fashion artificial persons but also of the way in which theater always tends to turn bodies into corpses, an inert prop cluttering the stage to be stepped over, dragged away, or (as in the case of Mutius) even forgotten.30 The play stages an ongoing theatrical assassination of any unifying concept of corporeal integrity, from Lavinia’s savage rape and dismemberment by Charon and Demetrius to Titus’s self-­amputation and his murder of Charon and Demetrius and their digestion by Tamora, in a perverse form of reincorporation and even of communion. Scene after scene reliteralizes the characters’ elaborate metaphorical speech by calling attention to the body on stage and to the way in which physical violence always reduces the body to an “object,” as Martius describes Bassianus’s corpse (22.204) and as Lucius describes Lavinia (3.1.65), a physical substance to be “lopped and hewed” (2.3.17), “cut . . . and trimmed” (5.1.93) into its parts, which then recede behind the many possible prosthetic substitutes that the actor might use to render them. These include, of course, the prosthetic of the word, and yet even the word is denied to Lavinia, who is the most awful example of this theatrical experiment, leaving us to wonder which is more terrible: to be subject to a rape and dismemberment that imposes a brutal meaning (dominance, defilement, political terrorism) and left in the condition of a mute spectacle for others to interpret, or to be subject to a violence whose purpose is to reveal one’s own body as beyond any meaning, as bare flesh, blood, and

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tears that are anterior to a concept of “body” and to be forced to display this concrete tissue like a palpating statue or “bubbling fountain” that bleeds through its “conduit with three issuing spouts” (2.3.23, 30).31 Lavinia is not permitted the choice—­she suffers both fates. Late in the play, when a frightened Young Lucius compares her to “Hecuba of Troy” who “Ran mad for sorrow” (4.1.20–­21), we realize that Lavinia is in the inverse position of the First Player in Hamlet, whose eloquence animates his own action and moves Hamlet in spite of himself. Like Hamlet, but to a far more extreme degree, Lavinia has been trapped by mimesis and is desperate to communicate beyond the suspended animation of “dumb shows” and “dumb action” that now defines her expressive limits (3.1.132, 3.2.40). She demonstrates how difficult any action becomes for the actor without speech, a condition that extends partially to Titus, too, who points out to the brooding Marcus that “Thy niece and I, poor creatures, want our hands / And cannot passionate our tenfold grief / With folded arms” (3.2.5–­7) and later makes the same observation to Tamara (“How can I grace my talk, / Wanting a hand to give it action?” [5.2.17–­18]). Young Lucius’s comparison between Lavinia and Hecuba is in fact one of two moments that link Titus to Hamlet via the use of Trojan material: at the end of the play, Marcus, too, is compared to Aeneas by one of the Roman lords, who urges him to speak When with his solemn tongue he did discourse To lovesick Dido’s sad-­attending ear The story of that baleful burning night When subtle Greeks surprised King Priam’s Troy. (5.3.80–­83)32

Marcus has just promised to draw a therapeutic lesson from the violence that has flooded the stage and to restore corporate integrity to the drifting multitude: You sad-­faced men, people and sons of Rome, By uproars severed, as a flight of fowl Scattered by the winds and high tempestuous gusts, O let me teach you how to knit again This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, These broken limbs again into one body. (5.3.66–­71)

But Marcus seizes up, confessing that he will be overcome with grief and thus unable to move his audience as he should. His therapeutic lesson is left unarticulated (in the shadow of Lavinia, the term seems inescapable),

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leaving the Roman lord to urge Rome instead to “Do shameful execution on herself ” (5.3.75). Faced with this startling call for corporate suicide, Marcus defers to Lucius, who has returned with the Goths to march on Rome and “who threats in course of this revenge to do / As much as Coriolanus ever did” (4.4.66–­67), as Emmilius declares to Saturninus a few scenes earlier. The part of Lucius thus runs forward and backward to connect Titus to both Hamlet and the later Roman plays: as the man “the common people love so much,” who enjoys “the citizens favour,” and receives the office of the emperor by cry of “common voice” at the play’s conclusion (4.4.72, 78; 5.3.139), he is the more fortunate cousin of Laertes, but he is also like a more diplomatic Coriolanus, standing as “no vaunter” before the Romans with the “scars” that “witness, dumb although they are, / That my report is just and full of truth” (5.3.112–­15). When we remember that Titus, too, had returned to Rome in much the same manner, albeit as its defender rather than its conqueror; that Marcus had, as tribune, named him as the choice of “the people of Rome . . . / . . . by common voice / In election for the Roman empery” (1.1.20–­22); but that, in another anticipation of Coriolanus, he had refused the robe of the candidatus, we can see that Lucius now occupies the position that Titus did at the opening of the play. Lucius and Marcus are thus the only parts that might connect this play to itself, as well as to the plays that follow it, although we may suspect that the future of Rome is no more secure than when the play began. Shakespeare seems to have been drawn to the example of Rome because its political history was so contentious; considered over time, Rome offered especially vivid examples of tensions and even violent change among several different constitutional forms and thus also of the competing systems of value that sought to legitimate rival claims to supreme authority.33 In 1599, the very year that the Admiral’s Men first performed The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Shakespeare was also thinking about craftsmen and their political allegiances: the Cobbler and Carpenter who appear on stage at the opening of Julius Caesar (1599) might have entered directly from the conclusion of Dekker’s play, flush with the celebration of future English victories, only to find themselves in a very different historical and political scene. At the very end of the sixteenth century, both playwrights were thinking about corporate ideas as sources for political identity and political conflict, and both play­wrights were already working in highly self-­conscious ways with the formal capacity and mimetic conventions of theater: Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V, Dekker in Old Fortunatus—­which seems to have one eye on Shakespeare’s stage experiments with the chorus—­

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and in The Shoemaker’s Holiday. But while Dekker had turned to the history of London and its guilds to produce a romanticizing, comic vision of urban community founded on self-­sustaining membership and political representation, Shakespeare was turning to Plutarch in order to explore the possibilities of tragedy and the limits of a corporate political imaginary. Plutarch’s life of Brutus, above all his account of the events leading up to and following Caesar’s assassination, focused these problems especially sharply, since the episode allowed Shakespeare to isolate several competing models of associational life, from the most private to the most public, and show how their collision results in a political crisis of the most extreme type. It is a measure of the play’s transitional or “early modern” political sensibility that many of these associational models are figured in corporate terms and that none are able to withstand the consequences of the conspirators’ actions toward a putative republican future. Having committed to the destruction of Caesar, Brutus and Cassius are unable to solve the problems of political representation that corporate ideas and institutions had been able to resolve, and the result is the radically negative vision of political life that characterizes the play’s second half: mob violence, war, unstable alliances, and suicide. From the very opening scene, the play juxtaposes the republican and explicitly civic model of political organization that Flavius, Marullus, Brutus, Cassius, and the conspirators invoke with the imperial, absolutist form of sovereignty attributed to Caesar, leaving the “commons” (3.2.130) between these contrasting models as a group whose allegiance is unsettled, contingent, and open to manipulation.34 As in Dekker’s play, the Carpenter and Cob­bler are identified with corporate guild membership, although at the play’s opening they have set aside this membership to appear as members of an undifferentiated multitude.35 Flavius and Marullus berate the craftsmen for appearing in support of Caesar rather than Pompey, using as their pretext the fact that the tradesmen appear in the streets “without the sign / Of your profession” (1.1.4–­5). In the eyes of the tribunes, the Cobbler and Carpenter chase spectacle and the glorious reputation of Caesar rather than the more substantive, civic-­directed accomplishments of Pompey; they represent a fickle-­minded populism that undermines the republican tradition that the tribunes themselves represent and that would putatively convert this populism into a coherent political force. Caesar is a “king” (1.1.79), “become a god” (1.1.116, 121); “he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a colossus” (1.1.135–­36), in the words of Cassius, but both Flavius and Marullus, too, understand that his superhuman aura derives from his ability to manipulate his public representation through his own self-­appearance and “im-

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ages,” which Flavius identifies repeatedly as a source of his growing power (1.1.64, 68). As in the opening exchange with the Carpenter and Cobbler, the tribunes here introduce one of the play’s central insights, namely that corporate identity always inheres in the signs that put that identity into circulation so that it may be consumed or appropriated by others. Will “Rome” receive its identity from the mystical, quasi-­divine and monarchical presence of Caesar, who absorbs the entire city into his person? Or will “Rome” persist as a co­ herent political entity because of its republican traditions, its offices, and its representative form of government, one wielded by the “noblest-­minded Romans” (1.3.122) who regard the commons as so many “sheep” before the “wolf ” of Caesar, the “hinds” to his “lion,” the “trash,” “rubbish,” and “offal” of Rome (1.3.103–­9)? These are the two alternatives that surface in the rival interpretations of Calpurnia’s dream, one in which the radiant body of Caesar becomes a sacred fount that nourishes all of Rome and its citizens, the other in which that body must be murdered and in this way rematerialized, punctured with gaping holes and made to bleed away its sovereign essence. Brutus’s decision to join the conspirators is premised on a clear understanding of the quasi-­incarnational logic of a monarchical form of sov­ereign power, and he understands, too, the need to demystify the sacred body into material corpse: Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius, To cut the head off and then hack the limbs, Like wrath in death and envy afterwards, For Antony is but a limb of Caesar. Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius. We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar, And in the spirit of men there is no blood. O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit And not dismember Caesar! But, alas, Caesar must bleed for it. (2.1.163–­72)

Later in the play, the ghost of Caesar appears to Brutus on the battlefield because his actions have severed it from the body natural in his attempt to destroy a mystical mode of sovereignty: Brutus has put one form of corpo­ rate political concept to death, but he has been incapable of forging an alternative model of collective association that might replace it. Cassius perceives the mystical political philosophy that Caesar embraces to be nothing more than superstition, like the signs and portents that Casca fears and that Cassius is quick to refigure into proof of  Caesar’s unnatural

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ambition and the “monstrous state” of Rome (1.3.71). Like Flavius and Marullus, and for that matter like Caesar also, Cassius grasps that power depends on the “opinion” of others and self-­appearance (1.2.315): these are the terms in which he first approaches Brutus, offering to act as a “glass” that will reflect back Brutus’s public image to his own “eyes” and in this way establishing a depth of person—­a concealed, inner virtue—­that Brutus himself fails to recognize (1.2.60–­62, 66–­70, 90–­91). Once committed, Brutus himself quickly adopts a similar line of reasoning, since he perceives that Caesar’s assassination will require manipulating appearances in order to constitute a legitimate political action: This shall make Our purpose necessary, and not envious; Which so appearing to the common eyes, We shall be called purgers, not murderers. (2.1.178–­81)

His reaction captures a philosophical problem that is foundational to the play’s “republican” political imaginary, one that presses all the more acutely now that the mystical ontology of power, as personified by Caesar, has been marked for assassination. If the notion of group action depends on a plurality of agents acting as one and no one acting as or on behalf of himself alone, what does an impersonal, collective, group action look like unless it appears under the sign—­the name, the reputation, the face—­of a single character? Once Caesar has been killed, some representative figure must justify the assassination and reestablish a legitimate political bond, as all the conspirators understand, which is why they have come to Brutus in the first place. As Casca declares, Brutus sits high in the people’s hearts; And that which would appear offence in us His countenance, like richest alchemy, Will change to virtue and to worthiness. (1.3.157–­60)

Their dilemma is that the political world of Rome tends to recognize as legitimate only the action of individual, virtuous figures who can authorize the actions of the group—­a group that, alone, can appear only as “faction” and “conspiracy,” as even Brutus himself condemns it (2.1.77). One of the most notable aspects of the play’s political imaginary, in fact, is the way it uses the notion of conspiracy to sketch a definitional space for the public and private domains by tracing a winding line between them, which it then follows as they collapse into one another. The conspirators constitute

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a limit case for the largest possible group that may be formed through the kind of intimate affective bond that normally characterizes spouses, friends, fellow soldiers, and even servants and masters, as exemplified by Mark Anto­ ny’s moving personal tribute to Caesar, by the scenes between Brutus and Cassius alone in their tent at the end of the play, and above all by the scenes between Portia and Brutus. Even this most intimate relation is presented to us by Portia in corporate terms: I charm you, by my once commended beauty, By all your vows of love, and that great vow Which did incorporate and make us one, That you unfold to me, your self, your half, Why you are heavy, and what men tonight Have had resort to you. (2.1.272–­77)

Their intimacy delineates a “private” dimension in a play that otherwise tends to spill outward into public spaces of encounter and collective action. But this bond, too, as eloquently and forcefully as Portia represents it, is shown to be fragile, shadowed by secrecy, and strained by Brutus’s self-­isolation; Portia herself dies offstage and becomes the subject of mere battlefield report, as though the assassination and subsequent descent into open war has sapped the corporate marriage bond not only of whatever ethical force it may have had but also of its dramaturgical power. As it approaches its conclusion, the political world of the play has shifted so dramatically that it seems unable to accommodate the corporate bond of the household; in the exchanges between Cassius and Brutus, we could say that the “private” reasserts itself as an exaggerated rhetorical bubble within the extreme “public” world of the battlefield, were it not for the fact that by this point the scene has moved so far beyond a world structured by public and private domains that we need a different political language to describe the spaces of interaction that we find here. Situated somewhere between “friends” and “faction,” the conspirators form a private group that is poised to become public through its collective action; they are joined by bonds between individual members but stretched to the point where no single member feels a strong affective attachment to all the others. Cassius understands the conspiracy to be a type of corporate bond, using language identical to that used by Portia: he describes Casca to Cinna as “one incorporate / To our attempts” (1.3.135–­36), and he declares of Brutus himself that “Three parts of him / Is ours already, and the man entire / Upon the next encounter yields him ours” (1.3.54–­56). Cassius is in

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this sense Portia’s rival. But when Cassius proposes sealing the conspiracy with a formal oath, Brutus rejects it vehemently: Swear priests, and cowards, and men cautelous, Old feeble carrions, and such suffering souls That welcome wrongs; unto bad causes swear Such creatures as men doubt; but do not stain The even virtue of our enterprise, Nor th’insuppressive mettle of our spirits, To think that or our cause or our performance Did need an oath, when every drop of blood That every Roman bears, and nobly bears, Is guilty of a several bastardy If he do break the smallest particle Of any promise that hath passed from him. (2.1.129–­40)

Earlier Brutus has invoked “Rome” partly out of genuine commitment to the “general good,” as he puts it to Cassius (1.2.85) but partly also to shift the burden of representation from himself and onto a larger collective principle that can distribute the agency for the act that the conspirators are about to commit, as well as to diffuse the more limited and factional energy that would collect around the gesture of the oath. Dismissing as superstitious, wavering, and insincere the associational devices of corporations like the guild or the religious confraternity, Brutus is left only with the dubious invocation of “the even virtue of our enterprise,” which he tries to make more concrete by comparing it to a material, quasi-­Lucretian substance that runs like blood through the body but has no real identity of its own. The play exposes the thinness of the figure when Cassius exhorts his fellows to “remember / What you have said, and show yourselves true Romans” (2.1.223–­24)—­urging them to act decisively when the critical moment arrives—­and Brutus immediately qualifies his comment by comparing the conspirators to actors in a theater: Good gentlemen, look fresh and merrily. Let not our looks put on our purposes, But bear it as our Roman actors do, With untired spirits and formal constancy. (2.1.225–­28)

The thrust of his comment is less to underscore Cassius’s call for stoic resolution than to point out the necessity of dissembling in order to maintain a public persona that seems to act for the public good while at the same time

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concealing a private motivation (or a private doubt). To be “Roman” is to manufacture one’s public identity as a performance of participation in the group, a participation that is “formal” not in the sense that it is “empty” but rather that it is purely conventional and may even be at odds with one’s actual purpose and intent. Only in this way, Brutus argues, will the conspirators be able to act as a group in a political fashion—­“political” because they act collectively, in public, to make a strike against one model of sovereign power (“Caesarism”) in order to replace it with another, a “republicanism” that is the slim remainder of a corporate politics.36 We could call Brutus cynical, but a better term would be histrionic, since the scene locates the conspirators within an “ensemble” dynamic that is familiar from stage work, and it shows their “plotting” to be an effort at self-­ constitution out of multiple parts, an effort that precedes the assassination and makes it possible to appear as a collective act rather than as a series of individual blows. The scene in Brutus’s orchard demonstrates the same process of self-­assembly, this time from the solitary, individual actor’s point of view: when he reads Cassius’s anonymous letter, he is engaging in a technical study of the part that he must play, cues and all:

Opens the Letter, and reades. Brutus thou sleep’st; awake, and see thy selfe: Shall Rome, &c. speake, strike, redresse. Brutus, thou sleep’st: awake. Such instigations haue beene often dropt, Where I haue tooke them vp: Shall Rome, &c. Thus must I piece it out: Shall Rome stand vnder one mans awe? What Rome? My Ancestors did from the streetes of Rome The Tarquin driue, when he was call’d a King. Speake, strike, redresse. Am I entreated To speake, and strike? O Rome, I make thee promise, If the redresse will follow, thou receiuest Thy full Petition at the hand of Brutus.37

We see the private self beginning to “personate” a public self, who can then replace the private one and begin to act on its behalf; Brutus’s private “part,” as he calls it earlier in the scene, gives him “no personal cause to spurn at” Caesar (2.1.10–­11), and so he must refashion his particular nonmotive into an all-­encompassing public one—­he will act “for the general” (2.1.12), that is, for a vocative “Rome” that he imagines in corporate terms (2.1.56). Like

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Hamlet, Brutus experiences the transformation from person to personation as a terrifying disembodiment into a virtual state: Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream. (2.1.63–­65)

But having pulled himself up by his own mimetic bootstraps, Brutus is consumed by the fantasy that he can simply walk off the stage and continue acting as a virtual person before a real audience (who is, of course, as fictional as he is): if Brutus can turn the public marketplace into a public theater and extend the fiction of his motive so “generally” that it encompasses the entire world of Rome, he can reincorporate the political body that he is about to puncture full of holes. The problem for Brutus is that he has stepped into a world in which the distinction between person and personation, private husband and public man, has become impossible to discern: he is no longer exactly sure who acts and what he has really become. Rather than creating a comfortable equation between theatrical action and political action—­the equation of Hobbes, as we shall see, but also of the Parliament of Shakespeare’s own period, as Oliver Arnold has shown—­the play uses theater to trace only the negative outline of a politics based on hypocritical self-­interest and a calculated manipulation of public images.38 The actions of the conspirators have ultimately resulted in a world so violently convulsive and unstable that no political life seems possible. For all its republican associations, “Rome” turns out to be nothing more than an epithet, a pose that could never organize a world in which legitimate power is attached to no one and in which any group might suddenly act, and upon acting then dissipate or shift into another configuration. Assassinating Caesar, Brutus plunges his fist into the play’s political heart “up to the elbows” (3.1.107), only to find wisps of images, portents, superstitions, fickle opinions, shifting alliances, and theatrical disappearance.

the plague of company in the body o’th’ weal: timon of athens and coriolanus Looking forward from Titus and Julius Caesar, we see that whenever Shakespeare looked to the political institutions of the ancient world, he tended to think of them in corporate terms that were, strictly speaking, alien to them. Although nominally a “Greek” play, for instance, Timon of Athens,

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Shakespeare’s collaboration with Thomas Middleton, is populated almost entirely by Roman characters and was at least partially derived from North’s translation of Plutarch’s The liues of the noble Grecians and Romanes (1579; 1595), and probably composed in the same period as Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Timon’s famous misanthropy is opposed not simply to “the whole race of mankind, high and low” (4.1.40) but to the offices, institutions, and systems of value that knit the city of Athens together as a corporate body that he renounces just as it had renounced him.39 The Senate rejects his pleas for money “in a joint and corporate voice,” as the Steward reports (2.2.208); that is, they reject him in their capacity as the constitutional representatives of the City and not as individuals. Shakespeare may have seen the usage in North’s translation of Plutarch’s life of  Theseus, which credits him for having brought “all the inhabitantes of the whole prouince of a t t i c a , to be within the citie of a t h e n s , and made them all one corporation, which were before dispersed into diuerse villages, and by reason thereof were very hard to be assembled together, when occasion was offered to establish any order concerning the co[m]mon state”—­a feat accomplished in part by erecting a new town hall and a council hall.40 But Shakespeare (and North) may also have had the local London authorities in mind, since Titus soon makes fun of “a City feast” (3.6.66) when he invites the lords to sup on steam and lukewarm water, and his long, vituperative speech to the walls of Athens includes attacks on every possible law, norm, and principle of order that might sustain the many corporations of the City as a body politic:

Piety and fear, Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth, Domestic awe, night-­rest and neighourhood, Instruction, manners, mysteries and trades, Degrees, observances, customs and laws, Decline to your confounding contraries; And yet confusion live! (4.1.15–­21)

As a radical cry against all the principles in which Athens finds its meaning, uttered from a position of absolute political exile as well as withdrawal from the Ciceronian and Senecan moral culture of friendship and “benefits” that putatively grounds ancient civil life (but which the play has already shown to be so much pretense and hypocrisy), the speech is an especially powerful example of the satiric impulse against collective life that we glimpse in many of Shakespeare’s characters, both tragic and comic (e.g., Lear, but also

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Jaques).41 Rather than swearing the affirmative corporate oaths of a Lacy or a Simon Eyre, Timon hurls an extended anticorporate curse that wishes infection, contagion, and disease upon the body politic: Plagues incident to men, Your potent and infectious fevers heap On Athens ripe for stroke! Thou cold sciatic, Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt As lamely as their manners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Itches, blains, Sow all th’Athenian bosoms, and their crop Be general leprosy! Breath infect breath, That their society, as their friendship, may Be merely poison! (4.1.21–­25, 28–­32)

The symbol of the “plague” becomes one of the plays’ primary antitropes that Timon wields against the rhetoric of friendship and corporate unity, a force of dissolution that spreads across every boundary and inverts every hierarchy, insinuating itself even into the notion of “company” itself. “The plague of company light upon thee!” (4.3.353–­54), Apemantus swears, recognizing that Timon’s malcontented nature has matched even his own and that he has exiled himself in defiance against any form of sociable relation. “Therefore be abhorr’d / All feasts, societies, and throngs of men!” Timon pledges (4.3.20–­21), cursing the entrance of Apemantus as “More man? Plague! plague!” (4.3.199), followed by “Consumption catch thee!” (4.3. 203). His exile refutes all forms of association, from friendship, of course, to the “captainship,” “absolute power,” and “authority” that the senators promise him if he will return to the “public body” of Athens (5.1.160–­62, 144) and defend against the approaching Alcibiades. “Be Alcibiades your plague, you his,” Timon responds (5.1.188), suggesting that if “Athens” wishes to “stop affliction,” its residents should simply hang themselves, one by one, upon a tree: a prescription for corporate suicide that echoes the cry of the Roman lord in Titus. A few years later, Shakespeare and company performed a brand new play: Coriolanus (1608). The play is famous for its fable of the body politic and famous, too, for the many interpretations the fable of the belly and its “incorporate friends” has sponsored, and it illustrates with brutal clarity the tragic collapse of the corporate form as a civic, “commonwealth” idea when it comes under pressure from a modern concept of the “state” in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Like Hamlet, Titus, and Julius

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Caesar, Coriolanus concerns the disintegration of a corporatist model of political association, of which it provides an anatomy, or perhaps I should say an autopsy, laying out the forces that once animated a body politic composed out of living corporations that was itself understood to be possessed of a mystical, real personality but has now become a ghost. The citizens of the play should by rights enjoy a status as a unified, autonomous agent within the political field, a status that derives from their “liberties and the charters that you bear / I’th’ body of the weal” (2.3.176–­77), as Brutus, their new tribune, reminds them—­an echo of contemporary arguments over the City of London’s rights to tax victuallers, which ultimately led James to grant a new charter of incorporation to the City in 1608, the very year of Coriolanus’s composition.42 But as Oliver Arnold has argued, the citizens are immediately betrayed by the new principle of representation that has inserted itself into the government of the city: the office of the tribune, an office newly granted at the play’s beginning as a concession to the popular voice, has become a source of instability, contingency, and rival authority.43 Brutus and Sicinius are shown manipulating the citizens, berating them, instructing them in how to answer Coriolanus in his plea for the consulship and stirring them up in revolt. The newly granted office of the tribune has fragmented the body of citizens for which it was supposed to speak as its passive “tongue” or “voice”—­they are the “tongues of the common mouth,” as Coriolanus describes them (3.1.23)—­and has instead begun to speak with a voice of its own. It is impossible to hear the tribunes’ invocation of the “public weal” or their corporatist declaration that “the city is the people” (my emphasis) as anything other than empty rhetoric or sheer demagoguery, which after all amount to the same thing. Fractured by representation and the artificial supplement of office, the people splinter into a condition of pure multiplicity, a scattered aggregate that can only multiply itself ineffectively:

third citizen: He’s not confirmed, we may deny him yet. second citizen: And will deny him. I’ll have five hundred voices of that sound. first citizen: I’ll have five hundred, and their friends to piece ’em. (2.3.205–­8)

“Piece” is indeed the telltale verb, fractioning even as it multiplies, since no quantitative addition of citizens can substitute for the qualitative translation into unity that a corporate idea seems to promise. This atomization

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takes as its theatrical form the fact that, from the very first scene of the play, the citizens can scarcely hold themselves together as a group for more than the moments that they occupy the stage together or speak in mindless unison.44 These accidents of unity, transient and occasional, dissipate before the quivering violence and magnetic power of Coriolanus, as if the latter had stolen the personhood that might have characterized the people as a source of political authority and reserved it all for himself, much the way he has stolen their voices from them, one by one, in the scenes where he solicits their assent for the office of Consul. The scenes crackle with energy not only because of the intense negative affect that each side feels for the other but because they show direct, face-­to-­face democracy giving way to democracy by proxy, a swelling toward representation whose tension is like that of a glass of water filled precisely to the brim, before it spills over. Can a single figure ever stand for a group? How many voices are necessary for the election of a sovereign? The play works through these fundamental political questions by opposing singularity to multiplicity and attaching corresponding systems of value to each with an almost Nietzschean clarity. Coriolanus is a paragon, “noble,” an emblem—­though a reluctant one—­for a patrician form of  virtue whose sense of superiority is reflexive and absolute; before the play’s first scene has elapsed, he has called the citizens “dissentious rogues” (1.1.161), “scabs” (1.1.163), “curs” (1.1.165), “slaves” (1.1.196), the “rabble” (1.1.215), “fragments” (1.1.220), “rats” (1.1.247), and apparently also “the many-­headed multitude,” as the First Citizen memorably claims later in the play (2.3.15), a figure comparable to Menenius’s own “multiplying spawn” (2.2.76) who stand as “thousand to one good one” (2.2.77). In this confrontation between a politics of singular personality—­the hypercharacter of Coriolanus, in all his physical and psychological concen­ tration—­and a politics of groups, masses, and crowds that possess “charac­ teristics” such as rage, hunger, and violence but no personality whatsoever, the principle of “corporate unity” has become nothing but a fiction, an amusing fable told by Menenius in the play’s famous first scene in order to stall the citizen revolt. The “pretty tale” of the belly and his “incorporate friends” is an obviously ideological mystification, which the citizens easily apprehend. As in Hamlet, the corporate concept fragments into a series of metaphors and images to be sown throughout the play’s dialogue: “heart,” “mind,” “tongue,” “voice,” “breath,” “teeth,” “limbs,” and, of course, “blood,” all exchanged, all passed from mouth to mouth, the linguistic substance of a political relation in which, as Cavell might have put it, figure has been substituted for food.45

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This theatrical deconstruction of the corporate form also dismantles the corporate form of the “state,” a term that appears in its modern sense more often in Coriolanus than in any other play by Shakespeare and that is deployed by both the patrician senators and the plebian tribunes. When Cominius enters the Senate to recount the feats of Caius Martius in the war against the Volscians at Corioles and to announce his new title as “Coriolanus,” the First Senator receives him grandly and then turns to the tribunes with a unmistakably patronizing gesture:

Speak, good Comenius. Leave nothing out for length, and make us think Rather our state’s defective for requital Than we to stretch it out. Masters o’th’ people, We do request your kindest ears and, after, Your loving motion toward the common body To yield what passes here. (2.2.46–­52)

Like his colleagues, the First Senator simply takes for granted a constitutional arrangement that the tribunes, and Coriolanus, understand as the ultimate source of the play’s political crisis: what is the relationship between the “common body” and the “state” of Rome? Is one a member of the other, and if so, which is which? At stake in this topological problem is the very notion of sovereignty, as Coriolanus bluntly reminds everyone:

You are plebians If they be senators, and they are no less When, both your voices blended, the great’st taste Most palates theirs. They choose their magistrate, And such a one as he, who puts his “shall,” His popular “shall,” against a graver bench Than ever frowned in Greece. By Jove himself, It makes the consuls base, and my soul aches To know, when two authorities are up, Neither supreme, how soon confusion May enter ’twixt the gap of both and take The one by th’other. (3.1.103–­14)

The play animates the tragic potential of all mixed constitutions, lifting the lid on the “state” of Rome and revealing it to be the compromise formation that Aristotle, Cicero, and Machiavelli always knew it to be: the result of inevitable and irresolvable antagonisms among the parts of a body politic that

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has become “gangrened” (3.1.309), rife with “infection” (3.1.312), “plague,” and “red pestilence,” and made to “famish” (1.1.78). As the figure who would putatively unite these contrasting political imaginaries, Coriolanus has been caught between several distinct corporate regimes, none of which is able to ground an enduring political concept. He refuses to be caught up in the mystical ontology of power wielded so powerfully by Caesar and necessary to a corporatist notion of the body politic as a whole.46 The play dramatizes its lapse most explicitly in the election scenes, when the Third Citizen disdainfully refuses “to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them; so if he tell us his noble deeds we must also tell him our noble acceptance of them” (2.3.6–­7). No one in the play finds this variety of political ventriloquism appealing; the Third Citizen prefers to keep his tongue in his own head, and Coriolanus speaks rather of the immaterial “voices” that he tries to snatch out of thin air. His wounds are physical, not metaphysical; they are the “large cicatrices” (2.1.144) and “unaching scars” (2.2.147) that he is reluctant to “stand naked” (2.2.136) and show. He might allow his wounds to exude a minimal emblematic glow, like “the whole name of the war” (2.1.131) that he agrees to wear, while they sponsor the narrative report that the noble class favors as its mode of representing persons (as the Third Citizen also understands). But Coriolanus quickly grows impatient with these stories, too, claiming, “I had rather have my wounds to heal again / Than hear say how I got them” (2.2.67–­68), and he certainly refuses to “brag” to the citizens in the same way, saying, “Thus I did, and thus” (2.2.146). As much as Coriolanus wants to be consul, he bristles equally when he is forced to approach it as an elective office, that is, as an institutional abstraction that can be filled by any singular body and that endures beyond its occupant (for Comenius has also been consul, as he reminds the citizens). This form of representation, too, as Arnold has argued, the play rejects as corrupt, inherently unstable, and leading only to violence. Coriolanus understands the evacuation of person that a parliamentary politics requires, the formal, abstract personhood that replaces the living body and its action in favor of a pseudoaction in the form of elective choice. Nor does the play present a Hobbesian solution to the political “gap of both” that Coriolanus has opened: it offers no mythic, originary contract, no Leviathan-­like sovereign who would replace the king and make a new corporate commonwealth. For a moment we get a remarkable glimpse of the future in Menenius’s description of Coriolanus as he approaches Rome at the head of the Volscian army: “When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before

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his treading. He is able to pierce a corslet with his eye, talks like a knell, and his hum is a battery. He sits in his state as a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done is finished with his bidding. He wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in” (5.4.18–­24). It is a small step to the “artificial man” of Leviathan, with its springs and wheels, “that Mortal God to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defence” and that enjoys an “artificial eternity of life” (Leviathan, 2.19.14). But the tragedy of Coriolanus, of course, is that he is entirely mortal, the scars of his heroic action transforming his body into a corpse before our eyes (the butterfly returning to the grub, to reverse Menenius’s Hamlet-­like figure for metamorphosis in the same passage). “Where is this viper / That would depopulate the city and / Be every man himself?” asks Sicinius (3.1.265–­67), eager to throw him off the Tarpeian rock, but his accusation is misplaced: Coriolanus refuses the role of the group person, the unifying figure who is collective and singular at the same time, whether by delegation, by anointment, or by exemplary virtue. His will remains his own: unique, ungeneralized, and undistributed, engrossed like the corn the citizens clamor for. Coriolanus has become all too aware of the representational power that seeks to capture him in its magnifying shimmer, swallowing him into a political fiction that he cannot accept. And yet from this exposure to political fiction there can be no escape, for it is required by Rome in order to ground its republican self-­conception, a condition of representation that depends on everyone acting as if they are actually in reality, when they are in fact acting only virtually, or by proxy. Facing the citizens, Coriolanus finds that his body both is and is not his own: he has been caught between several possible parts that have been scripted for him by others, and scripted differ­ ently. In spite of his best efforts to “stand / As if a man were author of him­ self,” as he puts it late in the play (5.3.35–­36), he watches as his own character assumes its form out of the friction caused by several possible roles intersecting in the theatrical space that he occupies, a process that we usually describe as “collaboration” or “ensemble work” but that here seems to result only in stubbornness, in stalling, and in sharpening differences. He suffers from pride, certainly, as so many characters in the play acknowledge, but ultimately his fate is sealed by his antitheatrical attitude, one that prefers the deed itself to the representation of the deed and that apprehends even the half-­truths of pragmatic speech as flattery and outright deceit.47 Volumnia does her best to prompt him forward, urging Coriolanus to speak only “such words that are but roted in / Your tongue” (3.2.57–­58), and she gives him careful instruction in how to play his part, emphasizing visual spectacle

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over narration—­“Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ignorant / More learned than the ears” (3.2.78–­79)—­berating him, exhorting him, cajoling him. “To have my praise for this,” she urges, “perform a part / Thou hast not  done before”  (3.2.111–­12). But  Coriolanus  has  already  declared  it  “a part / that I shall blush in acting” (2.2.143–­44) and complains that “You have put me now to such a part which never / I shall discharge to th’life” (3.2.111–­12). “Like a dull actor now,” he declares to Virgilia and Volumnia at the end of the play, “I have forgot my part, and I am out / Even to a full disgrace” (5.3.40–­42). The play’s political dilemma, in short, has generated an acute theatrical crisis. Every refusal to act renders the cue to act more visible, with the result that the theatrical fiction, like the political fiction it represents, threatens to unravel, leading only to pauses, to bodies standing in silent expectation, and to mere endings without significance. For Coriolanus’s antitheatrical attitude sits awkwardly with the theatrical fact that in this play he is also a star. Is it possible, the play asks, to generate out of a singular representative body a fiction that can have a collective cohesive power? Can a lone actor, through mere speech and physical presence, project a world so powerfully that others will believe in it, be moved by it, and begin to act under its influence? Put another way, can a single character come to stand “for” the play and hold its title? In this way, The Tragedy of Coriolanus offers us two signal insights into the political ontology of corporations more generally in the first decade of the seventeenth century. It shows us that theater, like politics, is always a corporate enterprise, from the projection of a fictional body out of the body of the actor to the composition of several different fictional persons into a common world composed out of many different part forms. But the play also shows us that the unity of the corporate body, whether as character, as city, or as company, is as fragile as the forms that bear it: we watch as unity emerges before us, the result of intricate procedures that attempt to hold that unity together as long as possible, only to see this unity disperse again before our eyes into other elements that are only temporarily unities in their own right. As player and personation begin to separate, the company, too, begins to drift apart, its bonds to weaken, its antagonisms to flourish: we see factions once again, senators confronting citizens and sharers confronting hired men, who seek a hall in which to act but who are left with nothing to sell but their voices.48

chapter seven

Francis Bacon’s Political Ecology Talent is courtesy toward matter; it consists in giving song to what was dumb. —j e a n g e n e t For interpretation is the true and natural work of the mind when freed from impediments. —f r a n c i s b a c o n

On March 24, 1603, Elizabeth I died, after three weeks of “a settled and unremoveable melancholy,” in the words of the court observer John Cham­ berlain, but the crisis of succession that had preoccupied Privy Counsellors and Parliaments for decades never came to pass: within a day, James VI of Scotland had been proclaimed James I of England, and he quickly issued warrants confirming the continuity of office for all of Elizabeth’s minis­ ters.1 The transition proceeded so quickly that a forty-­three-­year-­old lawyer named Francis Bacon was overlooked.2 After several approaches to well-­ placed friends, Bacon wrote a brief letter to the king offering his service, declaring himself “thirsting after the happiness of kissing your royal hand” and excusing his letter with a tactful mention of his “habit of like liberty, which I enjoyed with my late dear Sovereign Mistress.”3 To his cousin Rob­ ert Kempe, Bacon wrote that he “hoped that as the State here hath per­ formed the part of good attorneys to deliver the King quiet possession of his kingdom, so the King will redeliver them quiet possession of their places; rather filling places void, than removing men placed.”4 To the Earl of Northumberland, he enclosed a sample of his work, in the hopes that Northumberland would pass it along to James. This was a draft of a procla­ mation designed “for the cherishing, entertaining, and preparing of men’s affections” (67) for their new monarch, and it touched on all the major is­ sues of the day: it praised Elizabeth and vowed to imitate her example; it vowed to end the wars in Ireland and “to populate, plant, and make civil all the provinces in that kingdom” (69); it pledged “openness of trade with all foreign nations” (69); and it expressed James’s “unspeakable comfort in the great and wonderful consent and unity” shown by his subjects, as well as

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his joy at being the divine “instrument and as it were the corner-­stone, to unite these two mighty and warlike nations of England and Scotland into one kingdom” (68). Bacon’s draft proclamation was never used, but James seems to have re­ ceived it favorably, for Bacon was formally reappointed, and he soon turned his attention to his first substantive contribution to the new regime: the problem of the Union.5 Composed in a moment when Bacon was making plans for an early version of his Great Instauration, “A Brief  Discourse  Touch­ ing the Happy Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland” illustrates how he was already looking for analogies between natural and political or­ der.6 Invoking Heraclitus, Bacon declares “a great affinity and consent be­ tween the rules of nature, and the true rules of policy: the one being nothing else but an order in the government of the world, and the other an order in the government of an estate” (90). For this reason, he advises James, ancient kings were schooled in the “Persian magic,” a “secret literature” that took “the fundamental laws of nature, with the branches and passages of them, as an original and first model, whence to take and describe a copy and imi­ tation for government” (90). By comparing rulers to the “examples of the celestial bodies, the sun, the moon, and the rest,” Bacon argues, now adapt­ ing the very argument that Hooker had made before him, the ancients “did express and expound . . . the fundamental law of nature”: “which is, That every thing in nature, although it have his private and particular affection and appetite, and doth follow and pursue the same in small moments, and when it is delivered and free from more general and common respects, yet nevertheless when there is a question of case for sustaining of the more gen­ eral, they forsake their own particularities and proprieties, and attend and conspire to uphold the public ” (91). This ancient wisdom has nearly been lost, Bacon writes, because it is so difficult for “one man to embrace both philosophies,” natural and civil. “It resteth therefore,” he continues, “but that . . . I set before your Majesty’s princely consideration the grounds of na­ ture touching the union and commixture of  bodies, and the correspondency which they have with the grounds of policy in the conjunction of states and kingdoms” (92). It will perhaps surprise no one to learn that Bacon’s term for this “union and commixture of bodies” is “incorporation,” a term that he uses through­ out the “Discourse ” in a chemical rather than a legal sense, however, despite the obvious relevance of legal ideas to the question of the Union and Bacon’s own detailed knowledge of the law of corporations. Instead, Bacon speaks of “Union” as a natural process that may conform to one of two types. These are compositio, a “composition” or “putting together,” as Bacon calls

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it, and mistio, a “mixture” or “mingling,” “the one being but a conjunction of bodies in place, the other in quality and consent” (94). Only mistio results in true “incorporation,” Bacon advises, since only then are substances “so united, as without great subtlety of art and force of extraction they cannot be separated and reduced to the same simple bodies again” (94; cf. 98). The difference between the two is measured, Bacon argues, by the introduction of a new “form”: whereas “compositio is the joining or putting together of bodies without a new form,” Bacon explains, “mistio is the joining or putting together of bodies under a new form. For the new form is commune vinculum, and without that the old forms will be at strife and discord” (94). And he illustrates the point with political examples both historical and contem­ porary. Compositio, he argues, is “the mother of sedition and alteration” (94), as we see in Spain: although Aragon and Castile have been “united . . . by marriage and not by conquest,” it has “continued in a divided government, and not well incorporated and cemented with the other crown” (96). Mistio, in contrast, results in “peace and continuance” (94), and here Bacon points to the empire of Rome—­on “the authority of Nicholas Machiavel”—­because “the state did so easily compound and incorporate with strangers” (96). Such were Bacon’s arguments to his new king, who was famous for his broad learning and whom Bacon may already have sought to recruit for his new “Instauration.” My aim in what follows is to examine what happens to this somewhat tidy and self-­consciously illustrative analogy between natural and political bodies in Bacon’s most developed statement of his method, the Novum Organum (1620). For the Novum Organum unsettles entirely the opposition between compositio and mistio that we find in the “Discourse on Union,” and in doing so it reveals to us not a distinct domain of “politi­ cal thought” opposed to an equally distinct “natural philosophy” but the prior conceptual ingredients necessary to both domains: the work refracts existing political ideas in order to reveal their natural composition, but it also “politicizes” (as in “polarize” or  “catalyze ”) natural philosophical ideas by endowing them with a new application or new set of meanings.7 Ba­ con’s account of induction thus sheds considerable light not only on how his natural philosophy implies a political philosophy, and vice versa, but on the prior problem of defining philosophy itself—­a metaphilosophical proj­ ect that runs throughout his work. This project includes problems that are fundamental to corporatist thinking as we have seen it unfold in previous chapters: whether wholes are distinct from the sum of their parts, and the issues of scale and ontology this question implies; what forces might con­ stitute unity out of plurality or, conversely, dissolve unities into pluralities once again; what role virtue, action, or law might play in endowing physical

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and political bodies alike with enduring form. Bacon’s philosophical proj­ ect alters these problems so significantly that the architecture of corporate thinking, as it were, has been disassembled; for this reason, we may use Ba­ con’s work to gauge how mystical and theological elements of corporatist thought, in particular, began to assume a new shape by the third decade of the seventeenth century, now under the pressure not of the contractual­ ism of the joint-­stock company or the mimetic procedures of theater but in response to the materialist and inductive “method” that Bacon sets out to formulate. In order to track this tendency in the Novum Organum, I will be concen­ trating first on Bacon’s arguments about the concept or “notion” and how it is assembled through many procedures of translation, from collecting, mea­ suring, and comparing, to varieties of physical manipulation and the many modes of inscription and writing that characterize Baconian method. Fol­ lowing closely how Bacon accounts for the formation of notions will clarify how he understands the ontology of ideas in general and their relationship to words, on the one hand, and things, on the other. But it will also reveal his deep interest in “commonness” as a principle that gives formal coher­ ence to an ongoing movement between unity and plurality, the particular and the universal, the different and the same—­a movement that for Bacon defines the basic ontology of natural bodies but that also drives the epis­ temology of his method. This analysis will lead us, in turn, to some unex­ pected insights about the forms that reside in Bacon’s philosophy of nature. For in Bacon’s work, as in Aristotle’s and Hooker’s before him, natural bod­ ies provide conceptual templates for thinking about political bodies; Ba­ con’s “corporatism” is in this sense not a political theology but a political ecology with implications for our own current theories about sovereignty and about the challenges that a pluralist ontology of nature poses to it.8 Fi­ nally, I turn to Bacon’s late experiment in Utopian writing, The New Atlantis (ca. 1624, pub. 1627) to show how he attempted to resolve some of the po­ litical philosophical difficulties that his account of induction in the Novum Organum had raised. In the “Society of Salomon’s House,” we shall see how the pluralism of nature is contained and harnessed for a new political no­ tion: the corporate form now named the “State.”9

collecting the notion One of the most important elements of Bacon’s critique of received phi­ losophies is that they rely too much upon naïve experience, too much upon

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unsystematic inquiry, too much upon the syllogism (the signature of both Aristotelian and scholastic logic) and therefore on their hastily derived re­sult: what Bacon sometimes calls “primary notions,” sometimes “vulgar notions,” and sometimes “common notions.” “There is no soundness in our notions, whether logical or physical,” Bacon declares. “Substance, Qual­ ity, Action, Passion, Essence itself, are not sound notions; much less are Heavy, Light, Dense, Rare, Moist, Dry, Generation, Corruption, Attraction, Repulsion, Element, Matter, Form, and the like; but all are fantastical and ill-­defined” (1:15). Left to its own devices, the human mind (anima) or under­ standing ( intellectus) is prey to conjecture, imagination, or stubborn fixation on one or two pieces of hard-­won evidence. Bacon constantly warns us away from these pseudophilosophies, which proceed without method and from a primary philosophical narcissism: the wishful need for everything in the world to conform to how one already believes it to be. Bacon calls them “sci­ ences as one would” (1:49). To hedge against this inevitable tendency in human thought, Bacon pro­ poses “helps” ( auxilia) ( 32.34), and legitimate philosophical thought emerges only out of this artificial method, which Bacon calls “induction” ( inductio) and which I would now like to examine more closely.10 Bacon tends to de­ scribe induction in negative terms, by distinguishing it from the syllogism and from the mind’s own tendency to leap from particulars to the most ab­ stract, universal conclusions. Most important, for Bacon syllogistic notions remain entirely verbal: “the syllogism consists of propositions, propositions of words; and words are the tokens and signs of notions” (1:14). Entangled in its vehicle of signification, the syllogism reverses the ontological priority of the notion, which, properly understood, does not follow from words but has an existence distinct from the words that express it: the notion is “the soul of words and the basis of the whole structure” (p. 19), as Bacon puts it in the preface to the Novum Organum. The syllogism “commands assent . . . to the proposition, but does not take hold of the thing” (1:13); Aristotle is “always more solicitous to . . . affirm something positive in words, than about the inner truth of things” (1:63). However, when it comes to outlining his new inductive method, Bacon makes a surprising comment, that “no one successfully investigates the na­ ture of a thing in the thing itself; the inquiry must be enlarged to things that have more in common with it” (sed amplianda est inquisitio ad magìs communia).11 Having so often invoked the “thing” as the source of all epistemo­ logical authority, what can it now mean for Bacon to say that “no one suc­ cessfully investigates the nature of a thing in the thing itself,” an observation

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that he makes several times in the Novum Organum? Taking Bacon’s claim in its larger context, I propose, leads us to a central insight about his method: the importance he grants to communia, or “common” properties, and thus also the nature of “commonness” as a principle of coherence and identity operating across several scales, from his account of the commune vinculum in the “Discourse on Union” to his method of forging notions and axioms, the discovery of the all-­important “Forms” of nature, and finally to the natural bodies that are found in nature and that soon acquire a political description. For Bacon, all true philosophical knowledge depends on communia, which has both an operative and an intellectual dimension: communia is at once the source of all notions and the content of a notion that returns to inform the formation of all others. This twofold dimension is visible, first, in the fact that Bacon’s method depends on acts of collecting materials, the first step of his “natural and ex­ perimental history” ( p. 6). Once these particulars have been assembled, the “interpretation” of nature, as Bacon repeatedly calls it, proceeds by sorting them into a formal arrangement so that they may be presented to the un­ derstanding. Only then can true induction proceed (2:10).  “Experiment,” in other words, begins with the writing of a list: with the imposition of a form that can sort through the variety of  nature, which otherwise “confounds and distracts the understanding” (2:10).12 This is not to say, however, that we can evade confusion by confining ourselves to local examples that would seem to have something obvious in common, since we again find only what we already recognize and know falsely; Bacon calls such gestures “anticipa­ tions,” which collect only familiar occurrences close at hand and “fill the imagination” (1:28) with their vivid and seemingly self-­evident truthfulness. True “interpretation,” in contrast, deliberately embraces variety and collects “widely dispersed facts” (1:28). But these facts, at the same time, cannot be too diffuse, and herein lies the value of the list and the table. The defect of existing natural history, Bacon complains, is that it is insufficiently rigor­ ous in its procedures of collection (1:98); pursuing natural philosophy in this haphazard or myopic way, Bacon argues, would be similar to govern­ ing a state according to the gossip of the streets rather than by the reports of ambassadors and “trusted messengers”—­“such exactly is the system of management introduced into philosophy with relation to experience” (1:98) under current practice. Instead, true science must proceed differently, and the “strongest means of inspiring hope,” Bacon advises, “will be to bring men to particulars, es­ pecially to particulars digested and arranged in my Tables of Discovery . . . since this is not merely the promise of the thing but the thing itself  ” (1:92; my

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emphasis). Here again we find a variant on Bacon’s earlier phrase, with the important modification that now the “thing itself ” can never be grasped by itself but only in relation to other things to which it is compared and from which it is differentiated, in a constant mental act of synthesis and analysis that is enabled by “experimental” forms of writing such as the table and the list. Bacon is very clear that this logical sorting, although it takes place in the mind, is equivalent to and aided by the physical manipulations of experi­ ments (2:7), and this operative mental procedure is nicely captured by the Tables of Discovery, which are, after all, artifactual products that begin to think for us, on our behalf: they are the form of communia, in other words, as this principle is translated through the procedures of experiment. We look for the thing “itself ” and find it only embedded among other things, which are no less themselves when considered alone; each particular instance is one thing, but it is also in some sense less than one, since its integrity is bestowed upon it by a larger collection of particularities, no one of which is any more integral than the others. The act of assembling and collecting instances so that they can become authentic evidence for knowledge de­ pends on this constant gesture of comparison, in which the attention can settle only temporarily on any one instance before immediately moving to another in search of similarity and difference at once. A leap and split, on­ going and infinite: “For no man can rightly and successfully investigate the nature of anything in the thing itself; let him vary his experiments as labori­ ously as he will, he never comes to a resting-­place, but still finds something to seek beyond” (Preface, 11). “Philosophy” turns out to be another name for cultivated distraction, and “induction” the process of guiding and directing this infinitely extendable movement, hanging the understanding down with weights so that it does not immediately “jump and fly” (1:104) up to the broadest axioms imaginable but at the same time spurring it onward so that it never settles into a false knowledge of the “thing itself.” Two important implications follow from this procedure. The first is that the act of collecting is always . . . collective.13 No more than a single thing could contain true philosophical knowledge, no one person could accom­ plish the collection of particulars that would constitute an adequate natural history and thus lead to new notions and new axioms of reformed philo­ sophical knowledge. Bacon often writes of the importance of instituting this procedure, whether as an act of sovereignty or in the form of new orga­ nizations in which the newly scientific method might prosper as a collec­ tive enterprise. James should be like Solomon, in that he should take “or­ der for the collecting and perfecting of a natural and experimental history, true and severe (unencumbered with literature and book-­learning ), such as

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philosophy may be built upon” (Preface, 6 ). These foundations will compen­ sate for the current practice—­again a defective one—­that men currently asso­ ciate only through a discourse that distorts their vision; instead, a scientific association will take place through proper method, over the facts, notions, and definitions that it makes possible. Only then will we be led “to things themselves and the concordances of things” (ad res ipsas, & rerum foedera adducimus); only then will we “add and contribute to the common stock,” as Spedding, Ellis, and Heath have it, or, more literally, “collect things to­ gether in common” (vt ipsi videat, quid habeant, quid arguant, quid addant, atque in commune conferant; Preface, 14). And the knowledge that results from this collective method of collecting in common will be drawn from the “greater or common world” (communi ) (1:42) rather than from the domains of immediate, subjective experience that for Bacon characterizes the Idols of the Cave, or those “Idols” that result from the distortions particular to our “own proper and peculiar nature,” from our education, the books we hap­ pen to have read, the authorities we respect (1:42).14 How, in contrast, does Bacon view the current condition of natural phi­ losophy? The ancients lived in a state of confused pluralism, “torn and split up into . . . vague and multifarious errors” (1:76); in Bacon’s time, despite in­ creased agreement, “still on parts of philosophy there remain innumerable questions and disputes, so that it plainly appears that neither in the systems themselves nor in the modes of demonstration is there anything certain or sound” (1:76). To the one side, the tyranny of the multitude and the vulgar, to which exceptional men have bowed; to the other, the “dictatorship” of those few authors who have managed to secure a place of authority. In this world, private persons who exercise “liberty” and who try to investigate on their own produce only “mediocrities and middle ways” ( Preface, 9–­10). Closing his preface, Bacon exhorts us “to lay aside all emulations and prej­ udices in favor of this or that opinion” and to “join in consultation for the common good” (exutis opinionum zelis & praeiudiciis, in commune consulant; Preface, 16), an exhortation that Spedding, Ellis, and Heath translate as issuing from the first-­person singular (“I”) but that in fact appears in Latin throughout the work as the first-­person plural (“we”)—­the voice of the Novum Organum itself is the grammatical expression of a collective subjec­ tivity engaged in a common enterprise.15

common forms: axioms and words There is a second important dimension to Bacon’s comment that true knowledge never lies in the thing itself, and this is because “philosophy” de­

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pends not on particulars but on the discovery of more general axioms, both axioms of knowledge and axioms of works (1:103). These axioms, too, de­ pend on the procedures of collection, analysis, and synthesis that generate proper notions; in fact, the notion is a kind of contracted axiom, as we shall see in a moment. In order to generate axioms, induction works in a “gradual” way, like walking up a very long flight of steps: Bacon describes it as a “ris­ ing” from particulars to midlevel conclusions and from there to even more important controlling ideas. It can be understood as a process of definition by means of appropriate generalization, in contrast to syllogistic reasoning, which, as we have seen, encourages the mind to “leap” immediately from particulars up to the highest, universal claims about nature:16 “Now my plan is to proceed regularly and gradually from one axiom to another, so that the most general are not reached till the last; but then, when you do come to them, you find them to be not empty notions but well defined, and such as nature would really recognize as her first principles, and such as lie at the heart and marrow of things” (“ The Plan,” 20; cf. 1:19). Axioms are true gen­ eralizations about particulars, and they unify them, despite their perceived difference, by revealing the more common natures that they share. The axi­ oms also generate new experiments, new tables, and new lists of particulars so that new natures, and the axioms that can generalize about them, in turn, can be further discovered. “For axioms rightly discovered and established,” Bacon advises, “supply practice with its instruments, not one by one, but in clusters, and draw after them trains and troops of works” (1:70). If the act of experiment always assumes a series of forms, the axiom is one of the most important; there are different scales of axioms, and differ­ ent positions of axioms in relationship to one another. Currently existing, defective axioms are “just large enough to fit and take . . . in” (ad mensuram eorum facta, & extensa) a few particulars, and only those of a most gen­ eral occurrence. “For the lowest axioms differ but slightly from bare ex­ perience, while the highest and most general (which we now have) are notional and abstract without solidity” (1:104). More useful is the “middle” axiom, which “are the true and solid and living axioms, on which depend the affairs and fortunes of men” (1:104). The middle axiom is generalized thought of a certain extent: once again, Bacon uses spatial, measuring imag­ ery to describe it: “But in establishing axioms by this kind of induction, we must also examine and try whether the axiom so established be framed to the measure of those particulars [ad mensuram factum eorum particularium] only from which it is derived, or whether it be larger and wider [ amplius, & latius]. And if it be larger and wider, we must observe whether by indicat­ ing to us new particulars it confirm that wideness and largeness as by a

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collateral security” (1:106). For this reason the axiom can also be said to have a territorial relationship to other axioms and other notions: a “mid­ dle axiom,” for instance, is really just a “ limitation” (1:104), a specification or a contraction, of a general axiom, which is its genus and has an even larger extension. At the other end of the scale, the act of generalization takes a more con­ tracted form, which is really that of the “notion” itself: “this induction must be used not only to discover axioms, but also in the formation of notions” (1:105), Bacon tells us, and “it is necessary that both notions and axioms be derived from things by a more sure and guarded way” (1:18). Existing vulgar notions “are ill-­drawn from the impressions of the senses, and are indefinite and confused, whereas they should be definite and distinctly bounded” (terminatas et bene finitas; 1:69). But Bacon also condemns the empirical school of philosophy because it  fails to make use of the “light of common notions” (notionum vulgarium; 1:64). The simple notions—­heat, whiteness, consistency, solidity, weight, motion, humidity, and others like them, to cite several of Bacon’s examples—­these are, when properly understood, porta­ ble generalizations, or generalizations in a handy, compact form. They are the building blocks out of which we assemble our axioms about nature, and they are themselves actively produced by the reformed method. And if we make them correctly, the notions will become themselves condensations for the axioms that explain them. One large generalization will collapse into a smaller one, or the smaller one will expand into the larger. Once we have assembled the natural history of heat, in other words, and we have gath­ ered particulars and bound them together, as it were, with the form of the generalization—­for simple experience is no better than a “broom without its band,” as Bacon puts it (1:82)—­then we are able to produce axioms about the “form” of heat. We will have grasped nature and axiom all at once: we will hold a bouquet of notions, with their axiom stems, or the notion will be like a translucent marble, and we will peer into it and see the axiom threaded through its center.17 Understood in this way, it becomes clear that Bacon is developing noth­ ing less than an experimental procedure for testing notions and, more im­ portant, for inventing new ones—­for manufacturing or making notions out of the operative method he describes. Those notions in current use must be evaluated against the particulars that have been collected and scrutinized by means of induction, and these notions must be either dispensed with or redefined so that the notion conforms to the knowledge that has been gen­ erated by the axiom. This process happens as a series of formal translations,

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as we have seen: “induction” and “experiment” are species of formalism, terms for different kinds of forms when they are realized concretely as prac­ tical tools. And the “notion,” too, is translated into the written form of the word. There is poetry in Bacon’s method, and it is to be found in his nomi­ nation of notions: in the way that verbs become adjectives and adjectives become nouns; in the way that notions suddenly crystallize before us on the page, like a distillation or tumbling through the sieve of the plain style. “Attraction, repulsion, attenuation, conspissation, dilatation, astriction, dis­ sipation, maturation, and the like” (1:66): Bacon’s method may be described as a machine for producing nouns, verbs, and adjectives, aphorisms and sen­ tences; an apparatus for description, but also for subordination; an “art” for interpreting the natural syntax of the world. Taken as an entire process, induction thus translates one kind of “com­ monness” into another, the merely vulgar into the truly philosophical. This procedure requires a double movement, both a negative procedure of distinc­ tion or separation and a positive procedure of joining and assembling—­the virtue of generalization as a principle of  Bacon’s philosophy is that it enables both procedures to take place simultaneously. First, negation, leading to affirmation: the induction that proceeds by simple enumeration is childish; its conclusions are precarious and exposed to peril from a contradictory instance; and it gener­ ally decides on too small a number of facts, and on those which are at hand. But the induction which is to be available for the discovery and demonstration of sciences and arts, must analyze nature by proper rejections and exclusions; and then, after a sufficient number of negatives, come to a conclusion on the affirmative instances. . . . And this induction must be used not only to discover axioms, but also in the formation of notions. (1:105; cf. 1:69)

Elsewhere Bacon observes that “it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed toward both alike. Indeed, in the establishment of any true axiom, the nega­ tive instance is the more forcible of the two” (1:46). The act of induction is thus at one level a procedure of separation and distinction; the formation of the notion, and from the notion of the axiom, a process of paring away or of sculpturation. Bacon immediately states, however—­we have just seen it at the end of the previous passage, above—­that by means of this negative process induction begins to isolate and define basic elements so that they emerge in a positive fashion:

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In the process of exclusion are laid the foundations of true induction, which however is not completed till it arrives at an affirmative. (2:19) Men’s labor therefore should be turned to the investigation and observation of the resemblances and analogies of things, as well in wholes as in parts. For these it is that detect the unity of nature, and lay a foundation for the constitu­ tion of the sciences [ constituere Scientias ]. (2:27)

This principle of unity, here built on resemblance and analogy, determines Bacon’s method as strongly as does the principle of negation; it defines the ultimate goal of his philosophy, although this unity is, again, accomplished only through the various negative operations that he describes. One can­ not read the Novum Organum without feeling that Bacon remains, in spite of his occasional Platonism and commitment to unity, a strongly pluralist thinker who is fascinated by abundance and the constant differentiation this implies: “in all generation and transformation of bodies [ generatione & transformatione Corporum], we must inquire what is lost and escapes; what remains, what is added; what is expanded, what contracted; what is united, what separated; what is continued, what cut off; what propels, what hinders; what predominates, what yields; and a variety of other particulars” (2:6). Do we see a subject, or do we see a subject multiplied and swamped by its predicates—­new predicates precipitated into new actions and new verbs out of the innumerable motions of matter?18 It is the essence of Bacon’s method to resolve this question and to prolong its suspension as far as possible; his work is fascinating and novel precisely because of his dogged commitment to exhaustive description, to taxonomy and fine categorization—­to subtlety, in a word, and a drive to multiply examples and uncover hitherto unrec­ ognized actions, motions, and forces. So when Bacon claims that “no one successfully investigates the nature of a thing in the thing itself; the inquiry must be enlarged to things that have more in common with it” (1:70), we see in the principle of communia both centripetal and centrifugal movement, an assemblage and a disintegration, a dilating of particularity into general­ ity and a telescoping of generality back into particularity again. And this movement of rising and falling, of compression and dilation, of collecting together and anatomizing into parts, is not an accidental phenomenon, an “immanent” effect of  which Bacon himself is unaware: it is an integral as­ pect of his “scientific” method. It is absolutely necessary for the reformation of philosophy into a solid, living body of knowledge, and it is fundamental to the operative dimension of Bacon’s philosophy. This double movement can easily be tracked throughout the Novum Organum. It accounts for Bacon’s persistent interest in particulate images: the

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letters of the alphabet, to which he returns several times as an analogy for the many forms of nature; the notes of music; the famous “seeds of things,” which contain much “latent virtue,” or the “scattered rays of light itself ” (1.121). These latent processes, he insists, are nothing like the visible pro­ cesses that men currently study but are, instead, “perfectly continuous” and “for the most part escape the sense,” since “every natural action depends on things infinitely small or at least too small to strike the sense” (2:6). For all his insistence on minute particles, however, Bacon does not consistently espouse an atomist ontology of nature; indeed, he explicitly denies that the particles of which he speaks are the same as those of the ancient atomists, since these imply the existence of a vacuum and the “unchangeableness of matter.” Instead, he says, “we shall be led only to real particles, such as re­ ally exist” (2:8). His emphasis falls less on the existence of particles than on their “latent configuration in bodies” ( latentis Schematismi in Corporibus; 2:7), that is, on their arrangement as parts within a larger whole and on the processes that allow a whole entity to be assembled out of smaller parts. These natures are “bound together and embodied in a structure”: they are “Naturas concretas, siue Collegiatas,” as Bacon puts it, employing, in “collegia­ tas,” a specifically corporate term that he will later use for Salomon’s House in the New Atlantis.19 Several of Bacon’s “instances,” too—­the rules for operations in experi­ ment that help determine judgment and isolate natures—­work by identify­ ing singular or unique natures that do not conform to other natures. But they do so only to better identify the “common” nature that underlies both of them. Such is the case of the “Singular Instances,” also called “Irregular” or “Heteroclite”: “They are such as exhibit bodies in the concrete, which seem to be out of the course and broken off from the order of nature, and not agreeing with other bodies of the same kind. For conformable instances are like each other; singular instances are like themselves alone. The use of singular instances is the same as that of clandestine, namely, to raise and unite nature for the purpose of discovering kinds of common natures ( communes naturas), to be afterward limited by true specific differences” (2:28). Furthermore, when Bacon goes on to argue in the same passage that “we are not to give up the investigation until the properties and qualities found in such things as may be taken for miracles of nature be reduced and com­ prehended under some form or fixed law, so that all the irregularity or sin­ gularity shall be found to depend on some common form [  forma communi ]” (2:28), we see how closely he associates a principle of form with the idea of commonness, which appears now as the effect of an underlying regularity and repetition throughout nature. The form sits across both negative and

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positive movements at once; it is the “true specific difference” or “nature-­ engendering nature” (2:1), but it is also that which emerges positively out of the negative process of induction: “after the rejection and exclusion has been duly made,” Bacon advises, “there will remain at the bottom, all light opinions vanishing into smoke, a form affirmative, solid, and true and well defined. This is quickly said; but the way to come at it is winding and intri­ cate” (2:16).

incorporate form and corporate spirit Once identified, the form emerges as the primary unifying principle in Ba­ con’s philosophy, for “whosoever is acquainted with forms embraces the unity of nature in substances the most unlike. . . . From the discovery of forms therefore results truth in speculation and freedom in operation” (2:3).20 Natural bodies are collections of simple natures, and the natures may be correlated perfectly with their forms; understanding a body in a philo­ sophical way requires us to hold it in a kind of suspension, disaggregating it into its simple natures and then recombining them to produce a new body according to the universal regularities that characterize the domain of na­ ture and make all individual bodies possible. Bacon’s discussion of gold is a famous example: In gold, for example, the following properties meet. It is yellow in color, heavy up to a certain weight, malleable or ductile to a certain degree of extension; it is not volatile and loses none of its substance by the action of fire; it turns into a liquid with a certain degree of fluidity; it is separated and dissolved by par­ ticular means; and so on for the other natures which meet in gold.  This kind of axiom, therefore, deduces the thing from the forms of simple natures. For he who knows the forms of  yellow, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity, solution, and so on, and the methods for superinducing them and their graduation and modes, will make it his care to have them joined together in some body, whence may follow the transformation of that body into gold. (2:5)

In the earlier “Discourse” and Advancement of  Learning , Bacon was impatient with the alchemists, objecting that they “pretendeth to make separation of all the unlike parts of bodies which in mixtures of nature are incorporate.”21 Now, however, the relationship between art and nature has become less a distinction than a congruence, and thus a way of ensuring human power over nature. The name “gold” is exemplary not only as a substance of  value but as a signifier of ontological unity in general, as well as of the potential

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of Baconian method to generate that unity, and to do so, moreover, on the model of nature’s own ordinary habits. This operative dimension to Bacon’s philosophy is perhaps its most fa­ mous and “modern” aspect: as Antonio Pérez-­Ramos has shown, Baconian philosophy is a “maker’s knowledge” because it locates both its epistemo­ logical and its ontological certainty in the fact of material operation.22 If a given nature “is,” then it can be known through a definition, but it can be known and defined only because it can be made or reproduced. And if it can be reproduced, then it can be confirmed to exist as an actually existing thing: “For since the form of a thing is the very thing itself, and the thing differs from the form no otherwise than as the apparent differs from the real, or the external from the internal, or the thing in reference to man from the thing in reference to the universe, it necessarily follows that no nature can be taken as the true form, unless it always decrease when the nature in question decreases, and in like manner always increase when the nature in question increases” ( 2:13). One body changes and mutates, takes many dif­ ferent particular forms, joins and separates with other bodies and other na­ tures. But another body resides immanently within it, and Bacon’s reformed method attempts to reveal the metaphysical body that resides within the body natural: “Thus, let the investigation of forms, which are (in the eye of reason at least, and in their essential law) eternal and immutable, constitute Metaphysics; and let the investigation of the efficient cause, and of matter, and of the latent process, and the latent configuration (all of which have reference to the common and ordinary course of nature, not to her eternal and fundamental laws) constitute Physics ” (2:9). The passage provides yet another commentary on Bacon’s earlier statement that “no one successfully investigates the nature of a thing in the thing itself; the inquiry must be enlarged to things that have more in common with it [ sed amplianda est inquisitio ad magìs communia]” (1:70). This “commonness” is to be found not in the thing but in the form, the more general, active principle in nature that underlies all particularity and is its true ontological principle. Along with his treatment of “forms,” Bacon’s discussion of the “spirits” of nature reveals the most speculative and metaphysical dimension of his philosophy, since the “spirit” is a mysterious substance, fully material and quantifiable but nevertheless “without weight” (2:40), a substance either “copious and turgid, or meager and scarce, fine or course, akin to air or to fire, brisk or sluggish, weak or strong, progressive or retrograde, interrupted or continuous, agreeing with external and surrounding objects or disagree­ ing, etc.” (2:7).23 The spirit is distributed “throughout the corporeal frame,

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with its pores, passages, veins and cells,” and from its “disposition” emerge “the rudiments or first essays of the organized body” (2:7). “Thus let the nature in question be the action and motion of the spirit enclosed in tan­ gible bodies,” Bacon continues, in one of the more mystical passages of the Novum Organum: For everything tangible that we are acquainted with contains an invisible and intangible spirit which it wraps and clothes as with a garment. Hence that threefold source, so potent and wonderful, of the process of the spirit in a tangible body. For the spirit in a tangible substance, if discharged, contracts bodies and dries them up; if detained, softens and melts them; if neither wholly discharged nor wholly detained, gives them shape, produces limbs, assimilates, digests, ejects, organizes, and the like. . . . For in every tangible inanimate body the enclosed spirit first multiplies itself and, as it were, feeds upon those tangible parts which are best disposed and prepared for that purpose and so digests and elaborates and turns them into spirit; and then they escape together. (2:7)

As in a kind of negative theology of nature, spirit becomes visible to the senses only through its “conspicuous effects,” as in the rusting of metals, when the spirit “is compelled to push and drive before it the tangible parts themselves, so that they go out along with it ”; or in the diminution of  weight that follows upon the process of desiccation, wherein the quantity of both spirit and body, both distinct, are likewise reduced, and the hardness of the body that follows, along with its “rents, contractions, wrinklings, and shriv­ eling” ( 2:40). But when the spirit abides in a body and “makes trials and experiments within its prison house, and meets with tangible parts that are obedient and ready to follow,” it results in nothing less than life itself, “the forming of an organic body and the development of organic parts, and all the other vital actions as well in vegetable as in animal substances” (2:40). The ultimate purpose of the investigation of spirit is to render visible an invisible property or power: to “make manifest to the senses,” as Bacon re­ peatedly puts it, the life-­giving principle in all bodies by means of a series of experiments and operations. Again, a frequent term for this process of composition and decomposition of spirit is “incorporation,” especially in relation to gold and other metals.24 In general, Bacon advises, “some bodies are mixed together and incorporated easily, but others with difficulty and reluctance” (2:50). The experiments collected in the Historia Densi et Rari are even more detailed.25 “Every tangible body with us has a pneumatic body or spirit united and inclosed within it” (263), Bacon observes, which “approach very nearly to the nature of breaths. . . . They have two natures; the one of crude, the other of living spirits; whereof the former exist in every tangible

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body, the latter only in such as are animated, whether of the vegetable or sensitive world” (194–­95). Bacon’s experiments are designed to fragment natures into their corporeal parts and release the spirit that unites them, but only so that this spirit may be recaptured to form a newly incorporated body. The Inquisitions Touching the Compounding of Metals, a short treatise on the art of alloys, is a series of experiments on the “incorporation” of  vari­ ous metals with one another: iron with flint, iron with brass, silver with tin, silver with gold, and even the making of gold (“a thing scarcely possible”) and the making of silver (which “seemeth more easy”).26 Already in 1607, Bacon had reversed completely his position in the “Discourse on Union,” now complaining of those men who maintain the foolish “opinion . . . that Composition is the work of man, and Mixture is the work of nature ” (italics in original), since this belief tended only, in his view, “to the circumscription of man’s power, and to artificial despair, killing in men, not only the com­ fort of imagination, but the industry of trial.”27 By the time of the Novum Organum, his method has utterly collapsed the difference between natural, harmonious mistio and the more violent and unstable compositio. Bacon’s natural philosophy has translated an older, mystical corporate ontology into an empirical, materialist, and vitalist method in which bodies are in­fused by spirit and composed out of many different “forms” that can serve as a set of rules for action with which to produce new compositions, both within individual bodies and with other bodies outside them.

the politics of nature What, then, are the characteristics of the nature that Baconian method dis­ covers? Bacon describes it as a pluralist universe made up of independent bodies, each with its own characteristic “appetites,” as he calls them, and each following its own actions according to the forms that make it up: “For though in nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies [Corpora indiuidua], performing pure individual acts according to a fixed law [edentia actus puros indiuiduos ex lege], yet in philosophy this very law, and the investigation, discovery, and explanation of it, is the foundation as well of knowledge as of operation. And it is this law with its clauses [Paragraphos] that I mean when I speak of forms” (2:2). Baconian method aims to reveal these “fundamental and universal [communes] laws” that are shared across all bodies and that “constitute forms” (2:5). As both the “true differences of things” and “laws of pure act” (leges Actûs puri; 1:75), the “form” is a law not just of action but of  free action. And it is also a law of governance and rule: “For when I speak of forms, I mean nothing more than those laws

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and determinations of absolute actuality which govern and constitute [ordinant & constituunt ] any simple nature” (2:17). As a principle of commonness, the form serves as nothing less than a constitution for the natural body, which has its own schema or internal configuration.28 As Bacon writes of the “Instances of Companionship and of Enmity,” “he who well knows the con­ stitution or configuration [Constitutionem aut Schematismum] of such a body will not be far from bringing to light the form of the nature under inquiry” (2:33). Since an important goal of Bacon’s inductive method is to discover these “schematisms” so that they may be altered and modified, Baconian sci­ ence suddenly begins to resemble a philosophy of constitutional innovation and even of revolution: “all violent motion is also in fact natural” (1:66), as he declares, after all, a point that James himself had made when comment­ ing on his own unnaturally calm succession to the throne.29 For Bacon, “bodies are not acted upon except by bodies” (2:35); they have “a desire for mutual contact,” or “of resuming their natural dimen­ sions or tension” or “a desire of congregating toward masses of kindred nature” (2:66). And this political ecology only becomes more interesting the closer we look. Here is Bacon on “Instances of Companionship and En­ mity,” which is worth reading closely and at length: Among Prerogative Instances I will put in the eleventh place Instances of Com­ panionship and of Enmity, which I also call Instances of Fixed Propositions. They are those which exhibit a body or concrete substance in which the na­ ture inquired into constantly attends, as an inseparable companion; or in which on the contrary it constantly retreats, and is excluded from companionship as an enemy and foe. For from such instances are formed certain and universal propositions, either affirmative or negative, in which the subject will be a body in concrete, and the predicate the nature itself that is in question. For particu­ lar propositions are in no case fixed. I mean propositions in which the nature in question is found in any concrete body to be fleeting and moveable, that is to say accruing or acquired, or on the other hand departing and put away. Wherefore particular propositions have no prerogative above others, save only in the case of migration, of which I have already spoken. Nevertheless even these particular propositions being prepared and collated with universal propo­ sitions are of great use, as shall be shown in the proper place. Nor even in the universal propositions do we require exact or absolute affirmation or negation. For it is sufficient for the purpose in hand even if they admit of some rare and singular exception. (2:33)

Henceforward we should describe all Schmittian political analysis as neo-­ Baconian, since induction reveals an entire political ecology structured

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around the relationship between the friend and the enemy who is “excluded from companionship”—­“from the Company,” as Rees translates Comitatu—­a relation that Bacon figures as a state of exception and embeds within a state­ ment about the epistemological status of particulars, which exhibit an un­ decidable tendency. This “undecidability” lies in the mutations of natural bodies, in the infinitely self-­differentiating or self-­translating movement of nature itself, which proceeds by adding, subtracting, engrossing, or dissolv­ ing predicates and which Bacon understands as a process of “migration,” or a movement between one body and another. Over this “complex” political ecology, the form stands as an executive sovereign principle, commanding order and common resolution so that uni­ versal propositions, however incomplete, unfinished, or undecidable they may be, are nonetheless useful, recycled into the new products of a legiti­ mate philosophical method. Who decides the exception? Certain uniquely virtuous subjects endowed with both a body natural and a “body formal,” which is defined as the capacity to act upon and rule over others. Here is Bacon on “Striking Instances . . . which I also call Shining Instances, or In­ stances Freed and Predominant”: They are those which exhibit the nature in question naked and standing by itself, and also in its exaltation or highest degree of power; as being disen­ thralled and freed from all impediments, or at any rate by virtue of its strength dominant over, suppressing and coercing them. For since every body contains in itself many forms of natures united together in a concrete state, the result is that they severally crush, depress, break, and enthrall one another, and thus the individual forms are obscured. But certain subjects are found wherein the re­ quired nature appears more in vigor than in others, either through the absence of impediments or the predominance of its own virtue. And instances of this kind strikingly display the form. (2:24)

The aphorism provides an especially clear view of Bacon’s ontology of na­ ture, in which one subject has the power to rule over all bodies and thereby generate legitimate philosophy principles out of a “common” relation. It is enough to read the many prefatory materials to the Great Instaura­tion or the Advancement of Learning, not to mention the “Discourse on Union,” to see what importance a principle of sovereignty has in Baconian philoso­ phy; the very notion of “Prerogative Instances,” too, reminds us that James had been forced to defend the royal prerogative, the most important prin­ ciple of sovereign exception, in the face of legal challenge from the courts of common law and the House of Commons, and that Bacon had often

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argued on his behalf, as he previously argued for Elizabeth. And several passages in the Novum Organum point toward a politics of nature under­ stood in monarchical terms, as in the great aphorism on varieties of natural motion, where Bacon identifies the “ royal (as I call it) or political motion, , by which the predominant and commanding parts in any body curb, tame, subdue, and regulate the other parts, and compel them to unite, separate, stand still, move, and range themselves, not in accordance with their own desires, but as may conduce to the well-­being of the commanding part; so that there is a sort of government and polity exerted by the ruling over the subject parts.”30 But for all of Bacon’s rhetoric about royal motions and pre­ rogative instances, a principle of sovereignty turns out to play a relatively small role in constituting the world of nature that he describes in the Novum Organum. Unlike Hooker, Bacon can no longer derive the law of nature from natural law and then subordinate both to a principle of sovereignty once and for all. The deductive logic that had made it possible to assert the priority of the whole over the part has disintegrated, under the force of Baconian “method,” into a natural world of movement, constant strife, and pure force in which what Bacon calls “the intrinsic nature of a body” is revealed to be nothing more than “the coarser and as it were mechanical arrangement of the parts” (2:32). Some natures show us how unity might be accomplished: the actions, the violence, the affects that are necessary to unification into a common composition. But other natures pull against one another, or struggle, or simply refuse, in an act of natural passive aggression, to participate in any larger commonalty. Aphorism 48 in book II, on the nineteen different motions of nature that Bacon collects under the head­ ing Instantias Luctae, is a fascinating study of this compositional political ecology; Spedding, Ellis, and Heath translate Instantias Luctae as “Instances of Strife,” but Rees’s translation (as amusing as it may sound) is probably more accurate: they are “Instances of  Wrestling.” I have already cited some examples of the key movements that characterize this natural polis, but they also include, among the minor and major motions, “resistance,” “connection and contact,” “delight,” “liberty” and “desire,” “escape,” opportunism and al­ liance, “embracing,” “hostility,” “need,” “appetite,” “exciting friction,” “ma­ lignancy,” “friendship,” “choice,” “flight” and “antipathy,” “dominance,” “as­ similation,” “self-­multiplication,” “excitation,” “order,” “force,” “command,” self-­love or self-­enclosure, “trepidation,” “perpetual captivity,” “uneasiness” and “trembling,” “restlessness” and “striving,” and the motion that Bacon describes as “aversion to movement” or “the motion of refusal to move.” I will let the fourteenth motion stand as an emblem for all the others: “Let

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the fourteenth motion be the motion of configuration or position, by which bodies seem to desire not union or separation, but position, collocation, and configuration with respect to others. This motion is a very abstruse one and has not been well investigated” (2:48). Bacon’s politics of nature, in short, is defined by the tension and even violence that inheres between a notion of the “common” and that of the “collective”: bodies may be “collections” of simple natures drawn together in a single form, but these natures are not al­ ways in agreement and are not always in common with one another. And yet these natures nevertheless somehow come to constitute unified bodies that endure over time and assume identifiable properties, characteristics, and qualities: this is the mystery that drives Baconian method forward and that sustains his entire philosophy, in both its “natural” and “political” aspects.

the state of nature:

new atlantis

By way of a conclusion, I would now like to examine Bacon’s most fa­ mous description of a civil body politic rather than a natural one: the New Atlantis, his late experiment in utopian fiction and a work undertaken with More’s precedent directly in mind. Written only a few years after the Novum Organum (1620), the New Atlantis (ca. 1624, pub. 1627) inverts the perspec­ tive of the earlier work: there, Bacon had peered into the world of nature to find a constitutional theory mirrored back to him; here, “politics” describes an invisible field of force stretched between two corporate poles, the “state” of Bensalem, on the one hand, and the “Society of Salomon’s House” on the other, whose purpose is to contain the plurality, unpredictability, and infinity of natural processes and harness it for the enduring life of the politi­ cal community.31 From its opening sentence, the New Atlantis reads like an account taken directly from Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, spinning the information of a ship’s log into a minimal narrative form by joining geographic reference points with vectors of direction, calibrated by compass direction and ex­ tended by measures of time elapsed. “Events” are as momentary as a change in the wind’s direction, their “meaning” nothing but their bare function of advancing the sentences further down the page to create an initial narra­ tive field of space and time. Bacon has converted the process of empirical discovery—­the inductive “method” of the Novum Organum—­into a fictional mode, which gathers details to place them in a structure of relationship to other details and in this way establishes a skeletal framework for endow­ ing events, things, and persons with significance.32 Bacon concentrates his

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attention on comparatively few aspects of the world he invents, making no effort to provide the same consistency, the same systematic and deductive logic of completeness that had organized More’s account, a formal differ­ ence visible in his decision to focalize his narrative from the first-­person point of  view of his anonymous traveler rather than the universalizing sur­ vey offered by Hythloday, which permits a comprehensive blueprint of Uto­ pia as a comprehensive system. Unlike More, too, who contains the narrative voice in a single, disembod­ ied speaker, Bacon layers the narrative by passing the descriptive voice from one mouth to another in a relay of descriptions, interviews, and reports. The epistemological mystery that drives the narrative forward—­the con­ stant question about what Bensalem is, as disclosed by the narrator’s periodic hesitation before events that have not yet become fully legible signs—­is only partially resolved by the promises of disclosure made by each of Bensalem’s representatives in turn: knowing only as much as he is told, the narrator’s knowledge is as thin as the thread of the sentence unfolding on the page before us, leaving veils and shadowy areas wherever the light of discourse does not penetrate. This formal effect results in a specific political imagi­ nary: if the final effect of More’s narration is to create the impression of an open corporate body, fully integrated in its parts and available to a total view, the effect of Bacon’s narration is one of opacities and partial glimpses, of mystery and unresolved questions about the nature and modes of power that give the community of Bensalem its political life. In this way, the New Atlantis defines the negative outlines of the state as a form of corporate entity: as the narration proceeds, it elaborates a world in which the state always remains hidden behind the many details that fill in the portrait of this mysterious world through the spokespersons who rep­ resent it, from the governor-­priest of the Strangers’ House who introduces the visitors to the history of Bensalem and its conversion to Christianity, to the “good Jew” ( 394) who has been assimilated into Bensalem and speaks so warmly of its chastity and its family customs, to the Father of Salomon’s House, who describes the astonishing facilities of the great laboratory and its wondrous capacities. The “State” is mentioned repeatedly—­it defrays the cost of the strangers’ residency on the island ( 382), it grants them the term of their residency ( 368, 385), it pays its representatives ( 364), it funds the Feast of the Family ( 386)—­but the final effect is that it appears only as a fictional point of reference, located elsewhere, for an omnipotent power to effect decisions at the very moment “here” where the narrative has temporarily alighted before it moves on to the next speaking voice and the next detail in

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its sequence.33 In this way the state exists by projection and implication but always remains concealed from view; it appears only through its interruptions to the surface of the narrative, as interviews are repeatedly interrupted by the appearance of a messenger from elsewhere, who speaks a word that the narrator cannot overhear and causes his interlocutor to excuse himself—­ only to return again after the elapse of time between sentences. Floating behind narration, the state is the immanent force and the insti­ tutional structure that the narration itself creates despite the minute perfora­ tions in its fabric. For this reason, the state is also never subject to empirical verification, and thus never fully stabilizes as an object of knowledge; it re­ tains something of the mystery that characterizes corporate bodies like the church or the Crown and extends through the different “offices” that make up the state as a system of bureaucratic administration. All three figures who meet the strangers upon their arrival show their functional duty and posi­ tion in “office” conspicuously; all three smile mysteriously and refuse the offer of pistolets (a variety of Spanish gold coin) by the narrator and his group, indicating that it is against the ethic of their office; the governor of the Strangers’ House identifies himself as “by office governor . . . and by vocation Christian priest” ( 368), in this way acknowledging the conjunction between ecclesiastical and civil bureaucracy that sustains Bensalem. The nar­ rator senses this mysterious aspect but is unable to identify it precisely; as politely as possible, he avows that there is “somewhat supernatural in this island” but hastens to qualify “rather as angelical than magical” ( 375), since it has become clear from the governor’s reactions that the Bensalemites are disdainful of magic and offended at any suggestion that their power and their knowledge have occult sources. But the ultimate source of the narra­ tor’s question is clear enough: he wonders how it could be that an entire political community could remain unknown to the wider world, when all other communities know one another and exchange a “mutual knowledge” ( 374). As a prototype for an intelligence-­gathering state, as John Archer has argued, Bensalem knows everything but is itself beyond knowledge: Bacon has replaced the geographical “no place” of More’s Utopia with a society that is more or less precisely designated on a map but which receives its power by remaining an epistemological nullity. Bensalem differs from Utopia in another significant respect, however, which is that its corporate dimension has been concentrated into two pri­ mary forms, the state that looms invisibly over everything, on the one hand, and the “College” ( 371, 383) or “Order or Society” of Salomon’s House ( 383), on the other, which act as poles for the political community and which have

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siphoned off, as it were, the self-­organizing, public-­oriented, purposive en­ ergy that Utopia distributes across many different institutions.34 The narra­ tor and his companions threaten Bensalem, indeed, because they constitute an unforeseen autonomous group that does not fit into its institutions and fields of force. The narration is predominantly in the first-­person plural (“we” is the first word of the narrative) and the narrator is revealed to be the leader of the group because he has the power to “call our company together,” that is, to “assemble” them as a “company” (366), as they are repeatedly called, and who answer him “with one voice” (367). Only gradually does the narration differentiate into a single subjective “I”—­a sign, in fact, that the carefully man­ aged reception of the strangers into Bensalem has successfully absorbed their corporate potential. For the Strangers’ House is, after the state and Salomon’s House, the other major corporate institution that the narrative describes, a hybrid of hospital, monastery, and prison. It is possessed of its own endow­ ment, it serves a “collegiate diet” (366), and its architecture—­a reception area, gallery, dormitory, individual “chambers,” and many “cells” for the sick, each one partitioned by cedar wood (365)—­has been designed to receive groups and isolate their members before releasing them into Bensalem, in a kind of ontological as well as medical quarantine. The College, Order, or Society of Salomon’s House is the most famous aspect of the New Atlantis, but it remains, like so much of Bensalem, sur­ prisingly opaque, despite the abundance of description that the narrative provides; indeed, it is the very fact of this description, offered to the narra­ tor as a substitute for his own eyewitness account, that manages to display the awesome power of Bensalem while at the same time concealing its most important features. In a classic example of defensive political display, the Father of Salomon’s House reiterates, over and over, the fact that Salomon’s House possesses innumerable resources (“we have” is his most frequent tic) and what effects it can accomplish but never how it does so—­the very secrets of nature that the Novum Organum had pursued so assiduously are removed into a tacit space of mystery and replaced with a fantasy of pure potentiality and instrumental power. This power includes that of generating precisely the “gentle heats” that Bacon had wished for in his natural and experimen­ tal histories, and with it “the simples, drugs, and ingredients of medicines” in “exact forms of composition, whereby they incorporate almost, as they were natural simples” (404). But this power of incorporation has become incidental among the astonishing array of substances and methods that the Father describes: far more important is the total assemblage of these sub­ stances and methods into an institution that exists only to discover more

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and more of them, and to do so by engaging in what the Father repeatedly describes as acts of “imitation” and “representation.” Surprisingly, Bensa­ lemite “science” turns out to be a species of mimesis, a philosophy of re­ production and repetition that obscures the precise mechanical effects and natural principles that putatively makes that science possible, and which the Novum Organum was at such pains to discover. The ubiquity of mimesis at this climatic moment Bacon’s narrative de­ serves some comment, since the Father’s speech is more than simply a reiter­ ation of the ancient truism that “art imitates nature,” a notion that remained current in many areas of early modern thought and that retained particular relevance to the so-­called occult sciences of astrology, alchemy, and natural magic, all of which were often understood to function through a principle of imitation, likeness, or “sympathies.” The Father, in fact, like the governor earlier in the narrative, is at pains to distinguish the experiments of Salo­ mon’s House from the operations of “magic,” which he presents as an art of falsehood and simulation. And Bacon himself, of course, has strong words for those philosophies that “devise mimic ( simiolas) and fabulous worlds” ( Novum Organum, “The Plan,” 23), calling them “fanciful and tumid and half-­poetical” and under the strong “influence of the imagination” (1:65). But in the New Atlantis Bacon’s object was not, after all, to write a work of natural philosophy: it was to write a form of political philosophy that could contain nature inside it, so that nature could then be imitated as a model for political power. The Father of Salomon’s House never explains how nature works because his actual purpose it to show the capacity of the state to do anything it wishes, while also wrapping the state in nature’s mysteries. And it is even to preserve a certain autonomy for the Society as the source of the state’s power, for the fellows take an “oath of secrecy” and consult over which “inventions and experiences . . . shall be published, and which not . . . some of those we do reveal sometimes to the state, and some not” (411). There is another institution lurking inside Salomon’s House, however, which the state has isolated and immured alongside nature, so that it, too, can be studied and even imitated when necessary. As the Father explains to the narrator, among the many “houses” contained within Salomon’s House are “houses of deceits of the senses; where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions; and their fallacies. . . . But we do hate all impostures and lies: insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not show any natural work or thing, adorned or swelling; but only pure as it is, and without all affectation of strangeness” (409). In one department, imitations sourced in

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nature and that remain redirected back toward it, communicating knowledge simply, truthfully, and with purpose: “perspective-­houses,” “sound-­houses,” “engine houses,” a “mathematical house.” In another, strange, affected, pomp­ ous imitations that communicate only falsehood, deceiving the senses or amusing them without purpose. There is another term for such “houses of deceits”: it is theater, and the Father’s polemic rings with an antitheatrical sen­ timent that is as old as Plato and as current as the Puritans and City Fathers of Bacon’s own moment. The passage suggests how any discussion of imita­ tion, representation, and the imagination in the early modern period tends to slide almost inevitably toward theater—­Bacon’s own chosen metaphor in the Novum Organum for those “Idols which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies.”35 And it reminds us once again how close the theater remained to the many practical arts and technical de­ vices that characterized the early industrial projects, as well as Bacon’s own investigative methods. But given Bacon’s own obvious ambivalence toward mimesis, how, finally, are we to characterize the New Atlantis? We have seen how Bacon regarded Utopia as an example of an unreal and nonsensical mode of writing, and ac­ cording to William Rawley, Bacon’s executor, Bacon deliberately decided to set the example of More’s work aside. Although he had originally sought “to have composed a frame of Laws, or of the best state or mould of a common­ wealth,” he was instead “diverted” by his “desire of collecting the Natural History,” which led him to the idea of Salomon’s House, “to the end that he might exhibit therein a model or description of a college instituted for the interpreting of nature and the producing of great and marvelous works for the benefit of men, under the name of Salomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days’ Works. . . . Certainly the model is more vast and high than can possibly be imitated in all things; notwithstanding most things therein are within men’s power to effect” ( 357). We often refer to the New Atlantis as a “fiction,” but in doing so we overlook the degree to which Bacon has in fact bifurcated the term, splitting it into a mode of writing that is either merely simulative (and thus false or empty) or genuinely artful, productive, and generative of new knowledge, much the way he imagined his own “maker’s knowledge” method to be.36 Rawley’s “fable” and “model,” “description” and “imitation,” “frame” and “mould” thus nicely capture the protoempirical and constructivist mode of inquiry that characterizes “good” mimesis in Salomon’s House, as well as Bacon’s own exercise in the utopian genre. For whatever his objections to Utopia and to the type of imaginative writing it represented, Bacon’s New

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Atlantis is finally willing to credit fiction with an epistemological potential that neither history nor philosophy could provide. He uses it to model the outlines of an obscure but supremely powerful political agency that was still relatively new in his own period and to capture its peculiar quality as both word and thing, idea and substance, legal fiction and practical fact—­for as Bacon had remarked to his cousin Robert Kempe upon the accession of James, it was “the State” that had secured the continuity of the kingdom by putting the monarch on the throne, and not the other way round. With the New Atlantis, he imagined a constitutional form in which the figure of the monarch has faded into history and persists only as a memory, his place oc­ cupied by a corporate commonwealth that harnesses the power of mimesis to survive long after his death. When this corporate commonwealth became not only a “State” but also a person—­a fully group person, performed into being through an act of mimesis that translated a fiction into a fully conse­ quential reality of contracts, obligations, and the force necessary to sustain them—­then politics as we know it would assume its modern form.

chapter eight

Leviathan, Incorporated The fairies, in what nation soever they converse, have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope. The ecclesiastics are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. The fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves. The ecclesiastics walk in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches, and church-­yards. The ecclesiastics have their cathedral churches, which (in what town soever they be erected) by virtue of holy water and certain charms called exorcisms have the power to make those towns cities (that is to say, seats of empire). The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantic ghosts that domineer over the regions round about them. —Leviathan

Leviathan is haunted by ghosts, and by the memory of Shakespeare. Hobbes is never more contemptuous than when he addresses what he calls the “inventions of ghostly men”: the collective belief in “fairies and walking ghosts,” the practice of exorcism, or the use of crosses and holy water, all devices that the church uses to bolster its spiritual power and claims to political authority. “If this superstitious fear of spirits were taken away,” Hobbes argues, “and with it prognostics from dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience.”1 The purpose of Leviathan (1651) was to make good on this premise, and Hobbes devoted more than half of the work to the claim that “no argument can be drawn that the right of supremacy in religion was not in kings” (3.40.12), a position that might have been taken directly from Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Dedicating his Latin edition of Leviathan to Francis Godolphin in 1668, Hobbes emphasized that the topic of the book was not simply “this my discourse of Commonwealth,” as he had described it 1651, but “this treatise on the Civil and Ecclesiastical Power.”2

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Of course Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty was intended to encompass far more than the question of church and state, since he believed that Leviathan offered an entirely novel theory of politics in general that could account for the origins and persistence of civil life, a theory that, like Bacon (for whom he had acted as secretary), Hobbes understood to be a form of “science.”3 And like Hooker, Hobbes understood the political relationship to be a species of corporate membership. But where Hooker had drawn closely on Aristotelian arguments that presumed the primacy of the whole over the part, Hobbes proceeds by arguing that the composition of the whole is precisely what requires explanation.4 How do a multitude of men, living independently of one another in an atomistic state of nature and a condition of universal antagonism, come to constitute a community that is distinct from the sum of  its individual parts and endowed with the power to determine all matters of order and justice? As is well known, Hobbes compares this community to an enormous “artificial man” he names “Leviathan,” which he endows with absolute sovereign power. And he claims to borrow two of his most important concepts, those of “representation” and of the “person,” not from the law, as we might expect, but from the theater, the very institution that Shakespeare had made famous. In what follows, I examine Hobbes’s arguments in some detail in order to assess how he responded to the tradition of corporatist political thought that preceded him, as well as to the growing influence of corporate institutions in economic and political life.5 My aim is also to explain why theater should have suggested itself to Hobbes as he sought to solve what he viewed as the defining question of the “political” as a distinctive existential condition, and to do so, moreover, on the grounds not of a classical ethical or political philosophy but rather in conformity to Hobbes’s own natural philosophical principles.6 As we shall see, the theatrical analogy allowed Hobbes to refigure mystical ideas about a corporate body politic in light of his materialism and his nominalism: he found in theater a pragmatic and entirely nonmetaphysical example of the “person” and of the idea of representation the category of person implied. Both concepts allowed Hobbes to compose a corporate commonwealth that was “imitated” from nature by human art, as he put it, and that possessed the power to act concretely—­in reality—­des­pite being a nominalist abstraction. Equally important, however, the analogies that Hobbes drew from theater helped him distinguish Leviathan from the other corporate institutions of his period, even as he was deriving many structural features of  Leviathan directly from them. He is outraged by parliamentary claims to authority, of course, but he has sharp words, too, for commercial

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societies, and he reserves his most extreme rhetoric for the church and its institutional allies, the universities. By examining Hobbes’s criticisms of these corporate “rivals,” we can use his arguments to take the measure of how ideas about corporation had changed over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in relation to theories of representation, church and state, and philosophical accounts of politics. And perhaps most important, we may arrive at some valuable insights into the nature of corporations that remain relevant today.

“a r i s t o t e l i t y ” Throughout Leviathan, and especially in the later Behemoth, his historical account of the causes of the English Civil War (1668, pub. 1679), Hobbes is equally hostile to Catholic apologists and Presbyterian ministers, both of whom he names as the collective “authors . . . of this darkness in religion” that threatened to consume the commonwealth.7 “As there have been doctors that hold there be three souls in a man,” he warns his reader, “so there be also that think there may be more souls (that is, more sovereigns) than one in a commonwealth, and set up a supremacy against the sovereignty, canons against laws, and a ghostly authority against the civil ” (Leviathan, 2.29.15). Hobbes argues that “the true interpretation of the word h o ly  . . . is a word which in God’s kingdom answereth to that which men in their kingdoms use to call public, or the king’s” (3.35.14), since God is himself a king, and the king, or sovereign, is properly taken as “the public person.”8 More fundamentally, he claims that the term ecclesia originally had a political meaning: “Church (when not taken for a house) signifieth the same that ecclesia signified in the Grecian commonwealths, that is to say, a congregation or an assembly of citizens, called forth to hear the magistrate speak unto them” (3.39.2).9 When the term ecclesia is used for “a congregation assembled of professors of Christianity” ( 3.39.3), he argues, the church should be understood as a corporate political community like that of the state, since “the Church can be taken for one person, that is to say, that it can be said to have power to will, to pronounce, to command, to be obeyed, to make laws, or to do any other action whatsoever” ( 3.39.4). Nevertheless, the church fell unambiguously under the authority of the civil sovereign, Hobbes argues; the very notion of “temporal and spiritual government,” he sneers, “are but two words brought into the world to make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign.” On the contrary, “that governor must be one, or else there must needs follow faction and civil war in the commonwealth:

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between the Church and State; between spiritualists and temporalists; between the sword of justice and the shield of faith; and (which is more) in every Christian man’s own breast, between the Christian and the man” (Leviathan, 3.39.5). Making arguments that are nearly identical to those of Hooker before him, Hobbes maintains that this troubling self-­division may be resolved simply by recognizing that “the church, if it be one person, is the same thing with a commonwealth of Christians, called a commonwealth because it consisteth of men united in one person, their sovereign; and a church, because it consisteth in Christian men united in one Christian sovereign” ( 3.33.24; cf. 3.39.5). Both Leviathan and Behemoth make plain Hobbes’s belief that the ultimate source of the church’s “ghostly authority” derived neither from Rome nor from the English pulpit: it was bred in the universities, which Hobbes associated with Presbyterian claims to authority in particular.10 In Hobbes’s view, the schoolmen had joined with the ministers to form “a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavor by dark and erroneous doctrines to extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel, and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come ” (4.44.1). The universities had originated by papal decree, and they had supported papal authority consistently ever since, even under the Tudors.11 The universities in turn educated the ministers, who promoted their own authority among the people and sought thereby to reverse the proper relation between church and state. “The Universities have been to this nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans,” Hobbes declares in Behemoth, and they succeeded in “[igniting ] a civil war in which many thousands of citizens were killed, and the king slaughtered in a most unworthy death.”12 Hobbes’s antipathy toward the universities was deep and long-­standing, and it fueled some of his sharpest and most public controversies over the course of his career. Both Seth Ward and John Wallis responded strongly to Hobbes’s comments about the universities in Leviathan and published increasingly ad hominem attacks on his arguments, his facts, his geometrical knowledge, his style, even his grammar.13 And few passages in Leviathan are more heated than when Hobbes contemplates the universities, which seemed capable of overturning every principle upon which his commonwealth rested. He is well informed about their ecclesiastical origins and their status as one of the earliest examples of a universitas, defining “an University” as “a joining together and an incorporation under one government of many public schools in one and the same town or city” (4.46.13).14 This pluralist memory inflames Hobbes’s sensibilities and provokes a steady

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stream of criticism. At the university, the people might learn to admire the governments of other nations more than their own and hence be encouraged to disobedience. “Take away . . . the obedience (and consequently the concord of the people) and they shall not only not flourish, but in short time be dissolved,” Hobbes warns, comparing the people to “the foolish daughters of  Peleus” in Medea, who “cut him in pieces and boil him, together with strange herbs, but made not of him a new man” (2.30.7). At the university, the people will learn to admire especially talented fellow subjects or to transfer their loyalties to an “assembly” that is not sovereign (2.30.8); they will learn to “speak evil” of the sovereign, to “dispute his power,” and to “use his name irreverently” (2.30.9). Before he has closed even the first chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes takes an ironic swipe at the “frequency of insignificant speech” that characterizes the “philosophy-­schools” and their master, Aristotle (1.1.5). The universities promulgated not the authentic scientific philosophy that Hobbes sought to establish but a dubious “metaphysics” of essences, as he viewed it, that led to all manner of theological absurdities and politically dangerous superstitions. “The enemy has been here in the night of our natural ignorance and sown the tares of spiritual errors,” Hobbes warns portentiously, “mixing with the Scripture divers relics of the religion and much of the vain and erroneous philosophy of the Greeks (especially of Aristotle)” (4.44.3). This “vain philosophy,” Hobbes jeers, is more properly called “Aristotelity,” and it is responsible for all demonology, all belief in consecration, in exorcism, and in other false rituals. Deluded by Aristotle, the universities maintain the theology of purgatory, the doctrine of the Eucharist as a real presence, and belief in the immortality of the soul, which by the time of Leviathan Hobbes had come to deny. Hobbes assails no writer more vehemently than Aristotle, with the possible exception of Cardinal Bellarmine: “I believe that scarce anything can be more absurdly said in natural philosophy,” Hobbes maintains, “than that which now is called Aristotle’s Metaphysics; nor more repugnant to government than much of that he [Aristotle] hath said in his Politics; nor more ignorantly than a great part of his Ethics” (4.46.11). Some of the most radical dimensions to Hobbes’s materialism emerge in his comments about the “Aristotelity” of the universities, which in the 1668 Latin Leviathan he calls a “painted, chattering whore” and which is the most entrenched obstacle to Hobbes’s own project of reforming philosophy in neo-­Baconian terms (e.g., 1.5.6 and 4.46.1). As he declared in the opening chapter of De Corpore, “The principal parts of philosophy are two. For two chief kinds of bodies, and very different from one another, offer themselves

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to such as search after their generation and properties; one whereof being the work of nature, is called a natural body, the other is called a commonwealth, and is made by the wills and agreement of men.”15 Nevertheless, Hobbes argued that the same underlying principles needed to be observed in natural, moral, and civil inquiry: even as he justified his intent to publish De Cive (1642, 1647) in advance of De Corpore (1655, 1668) and De Homine (1658, 1668), the other two sections of his system, in light of the recent civil wars, he claimed that his discussion of the “generation and form” of “civil government” employed the very method that he had developed in De Corpore to arrive at a scientific knowledge of natural bodies.16 His definition of “cause” as the aggregation of accidents that together produce an identical effect in a natural body (De Cor., 2.9.3) resembles closely his discussion of the “multitude” and the act of covenant in Leviathan and in the Elements of Law (1640), composed in the same period as De Corpore (ca. 1630–­40). “Power and act,” he argues, are “correspondent to cause and effect” (De Cor., 2.10.1), an equation that Leviathan later completes by translating it into an axiom for a new political science. For “the greatest of human powers is that which is composed of the powers of most men, united by consent in one person, natural or civil, that has the use of all their powers depending on his will, such as is the power of a commonwealth” (Leviathan, 1.10.1–­2). Hobbes opens Leviathan with an efficient set of arguments designed to demonstrate the sensory foundation of all knowledge and the importance of words, or “names,” as the tokens whereby all knowledge is communicated.17 Natural bodies are subject to motion, the basic principle of all change and all causation in the universe, and as these bodies move through the world, they leave sense impressions upon our minds, impressions that Hobbes calls “images.” For Hobbes, the mind is continuous with the body (Hobbes is not Cartesian in this respect), and it, too, is therefore subject to motion and to “continual change.” Over time, this motion “destroys . . . the parts which in the sense were moved,” leaving the imagination and memory as residues of these decaying images (1.2.3, 1.3.2). These mental images form more or less organized sequences, and they constitute what Hobbes calls our “mental discourse,” or our conscious life (1.3.1). From this mental discourse emerges our capacity for understanding, which Hobbes declares is “common to man and beast ” (1.2.10). Unlike beasts, however, men have an additional faculty that translates thoughts into words: the faculty of speech (1.4.3). This “most noble and profitable invention,” Hobbes writes, consists “of names or appellations, and their connexion, whereby men register their thoughts, recall them when

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they are past, and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation, without which there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves” (1.4.1). Hobbes uses the same term, “connexion,” to describe the way men use words to “signify (by their connexion and order)” what they are thinking (1.4.3) and also to describe the “understanding” that we have when we hear this speech (1.4.22). This understanding is achieved by the act of reasoning, which Hobbes famously describes as the operation of adding and subtracting names in a quantitative way: “When a man reasoneth, he does nothing else but conceive a sum total from addition of parcels, or conceive a remainder from subtraction of one sum from another; which (if it be done by words) is conceiving of the consequence of the names of all the parts to the name of the whole, or from the names of the whole and one part to the name of the other part” (1.5.1). Hobbes’s commitment to a political “science” predicated on geometrical demonstration, logical order, and quantitative reasoning is nowhere more visible than in these sections of Leviathan, which now restates as a process of verbal “reckoning” (1.5.2) the proposition in De Corpore that “in the sciences we have more knowledge of the causes of the parts than of the whole. For the cause of the whole is compounded of the causes of the parts; but it is necessary that we know the thing that are to be compounded, before we can know the whole compound” (De Cor., 1.6.2). In his natural philosophy, Hobbes even seems to imagine the relationship of part to whole in representational terms, since, as he puts it, “that which is so put  for all the severals of which it consists [ pro omnibus ex quibus constat; my emphasis], is called the w h o l e ; and those severals, when by the division of the whole they come again to be considered singly, are parts thereof; and therefore the whole and all the parts taken together are the same thing” (De Cor., 2.7.8–­9). Although “Aristotelity,” too, proceeds from the basis of “names” and right definitions, it is “repugnant to natural reason” and “supernatural” (4.46.14) because it takes names as the necessary expressions of the essences of things rather than as the arbitrary tokens that they actually are. Hence Aristotle encourages a mistaken belief in a principle of essence more generally and in related terms, such as “entity,” “essential,” and “essentiality,” that mistake a relation of identity for an actually existing substance.18 This error, Hobbes argues, results from the ancient Greek tendency to use the verb “is” as both substantive and copula; as a copula, Hobbes argues, the term “is” expresses “the consequence or repugnance of one name to another” and not a substantive being.19 As the revised Latin edition of the same chapter argued,

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Aristotle was not so much concerned with things as with words. So when he understood, for example, what things were comprehended under the two names man and animal, he was not content with that, but diligently sought further, to know what thing was to be conceived under the copula is, or at least under the infinitive term, to be; for he did not doubt that the name to be was the name of some thing, as if there were something in nature whose name was being or essence. From this absurdity he fell into another still worse, viz. he affirmed that certain essences are separated from their beings. . . . An essence, therefore, is not a thing, either created or uncreated, but only a name feigned out of guile. It is only Aristotle who has given birth to new, bastard and empty beings of this kind, the first principles of a philosophy which St. Paul calls empty deceit. (Lev. [1678], 4.46.17)

Throughout the early chapters of Leviathan, we see especially clearly how Hobbes’s materialism makes impossible any belief in a mystical corporate body. All of the errors of the universities are symptoms of a larger tendency to believe in “incorporeal substance,” which for Hobbes is an oxymoron and a philosophical absurdity (1.4.21; cf. 1.12.7). Since “substance and body signify the same thing . . . therefore, substance incorporeal are words which, when they are joined together, destroy one another, as if a man should say an incorporeal body ” (3.34.2; cf. 1.4.21, 1.12.7). “The definition . . . of body,” he declared in De Corpore, “is that, which having no dependance upon our thought is coincident or coextended with some part of space.”20 In Hobbes’s view, the physical universe is nothing less (and nothing more) than “the aggregate of all bodies”; furthermore, “there is no real part thereof that is not also body; nor anything properly a body, that is not also part of (that aggregate of all bodies) the universe” (3.34.2). The danger of “the errors which are brought into the Church from the entities and essences of Aristotle,” Hobbes continues, is that it encourages a belief in souls that are immortal, in spirits and ghosts that stalk the graveyard, in a Eucharist that looks and tastes like bread but that is said to be “no bread,” and “a great many other things that serve to lessen the dependence of subjects on the sovereign power of their country” (4.46.18). “To be a body, to walk, to be speaking, to live, to see, and the like infinitives,” he argues, “are the names of nothing ” (4.46.17; cf. 1.2.8). Like Hamlet, Hobbes has left the university behind, and into the vacuum of the civil war he ushers in a new sovereign figure: the corporate state named Leviathan (figure 8).

f i g u r e 8 . Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) (f  Typ 605.51.454). Reproduced by courtesy of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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persons natural, artificial, and fictional Although Hobbes’s earlier versions of his political arguments employed the notion of the “person” to describe the unity of a people once they had agreed to recognize a common authority, not until Leviathan did he elaborate the notion of the person and integrate it into a detailed theory of representation that could refigure received ideas about the mystical “body politic.”21 In this Hobbes takes a step further arguments that were also being employed by parliamentary writers in the same period, as Quentin Skinner has shown, and that extend continuously back through Hooker to the jurists of the fourteenth century and the scholasticism of the thirteenth.22 Leviathan “is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person” (2.17.13). As Hobbes puts it in a climactic passage, This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a C o m m o n w e a l t h , in Latin C i v i t a s . This is the generation of that great L e v i a t h a n , or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defence. . . . . And in him consisteth the essence of the commonwealth, which (to define it) is one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defence. (2.17.13)

Through the act of covenanting with one another, men consent to renounce their natural rights to all things, leaving this right exclusively to the sovereign they recognize as their common authority. This agreement generates a new, abstract person who exists only through the representative relationship, so long as this endures; this new person is corporate insofar as it is distinct both from the many individual men who make it up and from the sovereign who represents or “bears” it (2.17.13), like the soul of an artificial body. Hobbes is clear on this point: “whosoever beareth the person of the people, or is one of that assembly that bears it, beareth also his own natural person” (2.19.4); soon he again states that the sovereign has “two capacities, one natural and another politic (as a monarch hath the person not only of the commonwealth, but also of a man)” (2.23.2). As Hobbes’s argument makes evident, his theory of unity through representation folds the association whose person is represented by the representative agent into the representative agent himself, when he acts for someone or something else (i.e., not for himself ).23 In Hobbes’s terms, “persons” are anyone who can “own” words and actions as their proper author: “natural”

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persons are in a relationship of ownership and authority to their own words and actions, while “artificial” persons speak and act on behalf of another who has the right to assign those words and actions to him. In this respect, Hobbes has reversed the traditional definition of the jurists, for whom the artificial person was the association represented by the representative agent, not the representative agent himself.  The opening paragraphs of chapter 16 in Leviathan set out the definition in the following terms: 1. A person is he whose words or actions are considered either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction. 2. When they are considered as his own, then is he called a natural person; and when they are considered as representing the words or actions of another, then is he a feigned or artificial person. With the notion of the “feigned or artificial person,” Hobbes has in mind specifically the fact that natural persons become artificial persons when they become representatives of “things,” as he calls them, such as a church, a hospital, or a bridge, or of natural persons who lack the capacity to represent themselves—­his examples are children, fools, and madmen. Since these entities do not have the authority to assign words and actions to a personating representative, Hobbes argues, in these cases the authority to act as a representative comes from the state itself. He characterizes the relationship as one “by fiction,” and he goes on to say that “there are few things that are incapable of being represented by fiction” in this way (1.16.9). In the most penetrating discussion of these aspects of Hobbes’s thought, David Runciman has argued that Leviathan, too, should be considered as a “fictional person,” a category that remains largely implicit in Hobbes argument, in Runciman’s view, but that should be strictly distinguished from the notion of the “artificial person” that is so prominent in chapter 16. As we know, Hobbes explicitly compares Leviathan to an enormous “artificial man,” and elsewhere he describes it in corporate terms as having an “artificial eternity of life” (Leviathan, 2.19.14), since it is bound together by civil laws, which he calls “artificial chains . . . fastened at one end to the lips of that man or assembly to whom [men] have given the sovereign power, and at the other end to their own ears” (2.21.5).24 But if the artificial person is, strictly speaking, the person who can act and speak for another, Runciman argues, then Leviathan cannot be an artificial person in the sense that Hobbes has given the term. The state does not represent or act for anyone—­

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this is what the sovereign does, when he “bears” this person and represents it. The sovereign is the “artificial” person who acts as the state, and as such he also acts for or on behalf of all people who are members of it. By calling Leviathan “the essence of the commonwealth” and defining it as “one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author,” Hobbes clearly intends the category of “person” to extend to both figures, the representer and the represented. The only logical conclusion, Runciman argues, is that Hobbes regarded Leviathan as a fictional person, on the model of the bridge or the hospital, but with a special distinction: it is a fictional person who can make real threats and whose actions have real consequences.25 As Hobbes himself writes of Leviathan, “it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person” (2.17.13; my emphasis). Runciman has put his finger squarely on what I take to be the most important aspect of Leviathan as a corporate person, which I will rephrase somewhat more sharply to say that Leviathan is not simply a fictional person that somehow has real effects attributed to it: it is fictional and therefore also real; it is real because it is fictional. We can understand this seemingly paradoxical statement more clearly when we situate Hobbes’s arguments in the context of his nominalism, his use of mechanical analogies, and his extended discussion of the joint-­stock companies as examples of “bodies politic.” I propose, in fact, that Hobbes eventually turned to the example of theater for the crucial ingredients in his political theory because he became aware of two critical limitations inherent in the model of the joint-­stock companies: their foundation in a notion of legal fiction, which could not be extended to the prepolitical condition that Hobbes sought to explain, and their association with democratic forms of government, which Hobbes wished to deemphasize in his theory of sovereignty. But first, in what way can Leviathan be said to be a “fictional person”? When Hobbes declares that few things “are incapable of being represented by fiction,” it is worth pointing out that the phrase says nothing about persons, only that very few things cannot have representatives act for them (it does not say what types of things are excluded). The following sentence would then seem to make this claim more precise by stating that “inanimate things (as a church, an hospital, a bridge) may be personated by a rector, master, or overseer” (1.16.9), but the word “personated” does not necessarily imply any new attribution of personhood to the thing: it simply means that inanimate things may enter into a representational relationship with a human being who acts as artificial person on their behalf. In the moment that

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a bridge engages in a representative relationship with an artificial person, the most we can say is that it enjoys a kind of reflected personhood: that it has a personhood by association. This seems to be what Hobbes has in mind in paragraph 11, when he writes that idols, which are a “mere figment of the brain,” can be “personated,” that is, hold possessions and other goods by means of a human representative. The idols and the gods they stand for—­or of which they form an inextricable part, or which they “are,” depending on how one views it—­display all the characteristics of human, natural persons, such as emotions, will, rights, and duties. Whatever the ontological status of the thing—­whether it remains a thing that has a personal representative acting and speaking for it, or whether it has become a kind of hybrid thing that is understood, in retrospect and when viewed through its association with a personal representative, to have some kind of personal quality, as Hobbes seems to present the matter in the later Latin edition of Leviathan—­one thing is clear. Such a thing does not have the capacity to authorize actions. In Hobbes’s words, it is not an “author,” and it lacks “authority.” This authority is instead bestowed for it, on its behalf, by its (human) governors, whose authority is backed by the state, or it comes from the state itself. Hobbes’s use of the phrase “by fiction” here is the closest he comes to the traditional persona ficta of the jurists. But he has in fact said very little about “fiction”—­the word has appeared only twice in the chapter—­and he has said nothing at all about “fictional persons.” The shadow of fictional personhood has fallen across the bridge, and it seems to quicken into life most vividly in the idol, a type of entity that evokes Hobbes’s strong suspicion. But the prominent idea is that of artifice and the artificial person; the word “feigned,” often a synonym for fiction, is in this case used as a synonym for “artificial.” Hobbes’s other example of representation “by fiction” is the incorporated joint-­stock company: to these “artificial and fictitious bodies,” Hobbes declares, its “letters patent are like capital” (2.22.10). Along with the church and the universities, the joint-­stock companies are Hobbes’s primary example of an incorporated group, and Leviathan includes detailed discussions of their accounting practices, their deliberative procedures, and the question of their responsibility. Hobbes himself was a member of the Virginia Company, having received a gift of shares from his employer and patron, Lord Cavendish, and attended the meetings of the court of the company from 1622 to 1624. He was also a member of the Somer Islands Company, attending several of its court meetings, too, and was given the task of drafting a company response to a list of grievances from the company’s colonists in Bermuda. So

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he had a direct personal involvement with the companies and could observe them from the vantage point of their governing body: the minutiae of their procedures, the often heated struggles over governance between rival factions, the company’s theoretical arguments justifying colonization in terms of conquest, Christian conversion, and the royal prerogative.26 These sections of Leviathan suggest that Hobbes has taken several elements of his theory, including the idea of the covenant and the idea of the collective fictional person, directly from the example of the incorporated joint-­stock companies. In the earlier Elements of Law, indeed, Hobbes claimed to have been the first to recognize that the commonwealth had the same structure as a private corporation: “And though in the charters of subordinate corporations, a corporation be declared to be one person in law, yet the same hath not been taken notice of in the body of a commonwealth or city, nor have any of those innumerable writers of politics observed any such union.”27 The example of these corporations was significant, in Hobbes’s view, because they illustrated the all-­important distinction between a collection of individual people who decide to form an incorporated society and the new group person that they form by virtue of this incorporation. “Men cannot distinguish,” he observes in Leviathan, “without study and great understanding, between the one action of many men and many actions of one multitude” (1.11.20). In the Elements, he had expressed the same idea as the problem of collective will, distinguishing between mere “consent” and true “union.” Properly understood, Hobbes argues in the Elements, the idea of “consent” describes the many actions of a multitude: consent is not “one will of many men, for every man hath his several will, but many wills to the producing of one effect” (Elements, 1.12.7). In contrast, “when many wills are involved or included in the will of one or more consenting,” he argues, “then is that involving of many wills in one or more called u n i o n ” (Elements, 1.12.8, 1.19.6). “This union so made,” he continues, “is that which men call now-­a-­days a b o d y p o l i t i c or civil society; and the Greeks call it πóλις that is to say, a city; which may be defined to be a multitude of men united as one person by a common power, for their common peace, defence, and benefit.”28 In the very next paragraph Hobbes directly compares this union to “a subordinate union of certain men, for certain common actions to be done by those men from some common benefit of their, or of the whole city.” “These subordinate bodies politic,” he continues, “are usually called c o r p o r a t i o n s ; and their power such over the particulars of their own society, as the whole city whereof they are members have allowed them” (Elements, 1.19.9). Like all genuine bodies politic, they depend on the true “union of many men” and not their mere “concord” (Elements, 2.7).

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The joint-­stock companies thus illustrated to Hobbes how the originary covenant might come to be undertaken, and hence how men might step out of the antagonistic state of nature and into the political condition properly speaking. And they lead Hobbes to propose that democracy would naturally appear as the first political form—­“it must be so of necessity” (Elements, 2.2.1)—­and only subsequently generate the aristocratic and the monarchical models (2.1.3, 2.2.1). “A multitude of men, about to unite themselves into a body politic,” he writes, exist first in sheer plurality, “for their persons are many, and (as yet) not one; nor can any action done in a multitude of people met together, be attributed to the multitude, or truly called the action of the multitude, unless every man’s hand, and every man’s will (not so much as one excepted) have concurred thereto” (Elements, 2.1.2). Since men never agree with one another and they are still “in the whole . . . in a state of hostility, and not of peace” (Elements, 2.1.2), their first decision must be “that they allow the wills of the major part of their whole number, or the wills of the major part of some certain number of men by them determined and named; or lastly the will of some one man, to involve and be taken for the wills of every man. And this done they are united, and a body politic” (Elements, 2.1.3). Democracy is necessarily “the first in order of time,” Hobbes argues (2.1.1), because it marks the first moment when an actual unified sovereign authority appears: For it cannot be imagined, that the multitude should contract with itself, or with any one man, or number of men parcel of itself, to make itself sovereign; nor that a multitude, considered as one aggregate, can give itself anything which before it had not. Seeing then that sovereignty democratical is not conferred by the covenant of any multitude (which supposeth union and sovereignty already made), it resteth, that the same be conferred by the particular convenants of every several man . . . to stand and obey, whatsoever the major part of their whole number, or the major part of such a number of them, as shall be pleased to assemble at a certain time and place, shall determine and command. And this is that which giveth being to a democracy. (Elements, 2.2.1)

Hobbes soon describes this democratic “body politic” as “a fictitious body,” a quality made visible by the question of its responsibility in the event that a law of God or a law of nature is violated by a sovereign assembly. In such cases, the body politic itself cannot be deemed unjust, because “a body politic, as it is a fictitious body, so are the faculties and will thereof fictitious also.” Only those who voted for the action can be deemed unjust, Hobbes concludes, and this is because “To make a particular man unjust . . . there is required a natural and very will” (Elements, 2.2.4).

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By the time of Leviathan, Hobbes had come to deemphasize the place of democracy in his theory of originary covenant, and his suspicion of any incorporated body that is not the commonwealth had become far more pronounced.29 Skinner has demonstrated how closely Hobbes seems to have read the arguments of parliamentary writers, many of whom used the terms “representer,” “person,” and “Author” and formulated claims to parliamentary authority in explicitly corporatist terms.30 For Henry Parker or William Prynne, echoing Aristotle, “politique corporations” of all kinds emerged naturally from the “Pactions and agreements” of the people, who retained their power to authorize a sovereign representative and thus also their freedom to limit his authority.31 This power derived from the fact that the “people” were not just a multitude of individuals but a genuine universitas, or “politique corporation,” possessed of a unified “will and voice.”32 In Leviathan, Hobbes took to a logical conclusion his own earlier arguments, and he amplified the rhetorical gestures of other royalists in the 1640s, many of whom had described the multitude as a shifting, variable collection of parts rather than as an enduring organized body.33 No matter how great the multitude, Hobbes writes, as long as they remain “particular” in their judgments and appetites, they will never be safe from injury (2.17.4). The only solution “is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will, which is as much to say, to appoint one man or assembly of men to bear their person, and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act, or cause to be acted” (2.17.13). The phrase “assembly of men” shows that Hobbes still acknowledged the possibility that the sovereign might not be a single, monarchical person, and this ghost of democracy, as it were, is especially visible in Leviathan’s discussion of the private joint-­stock companies.34 But although Hobbes recognizes that the “variety of bodies politic is almost infinite,” he takes pains to establish the priority of the commonwealth over the corporations, classifying corporations as “systems” that are by definition subordinate to the authority of the sovereign. “Regular” associations such as the joint-­stock companies are “bodies politic and persons in law,” and they resemble little commonwealths except for the fact that they are limited by means of their charters.35 The true commonwealth, also a “regular” body politic, has an “absolute and independent” quality (2.22.2) and no need for a written constitution, since it is limited only by “the unwritten law of nature” (2.22.7). Like Sir Thomas Smith, Hobbes identifies ancient Roman provinces and colonies as important models of legitimate bodies politic, likening them to

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the “children of the commonwealth” (2.24.14), and he compares them to the contemporary plantations of Virginia and the Somer Islands (2.22.16). But he tends to downplay the corporate quality of private joint-­stock companies, emphasizing instead their multiplicity and their individualistic basis.36 Even those private persons who “bind themselves up in one corporation” (2.22.18) remain, in Hobbes’s view, a collection of individuals, since their purpose is “not a common benefit to the whole body (which have in this case no common stock, but what is deducted out of the particular adventures, for building, buying, victually and manning of ships) but the particular gain of every adventurer” (2.22.20). Above all, Hobbes objects to the commercial corporations on the grounds that they are double monopolies, with exclusive rights both to buy and to sell, and “the end of their incorporating,” he argues, “is to make their gain the greater” (2.22.18; cf. 2.2.19). Making the most of his ongoing analogies between the body politic and the body natural, Hobbes compares monopolies to a “pleurisy,” as “when the treasure of the commonwealth, flowing out of its due course, is gathered together in too much abundance in one or a few private men, by monopolies or by farms of the public revenues.” “The great number of corporations,” he continues, “are as it were many lesser commonwealth in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man” (2.29.21). He identifies “the immoderate greatness of a town” as one of the several “infirmities” in the body politic that are a threat to sovereign authority (2.29.21), along with other unlawful systems, such as “corporations of beggars, thieves, and gipsies” and “corporations of men . . . that unite themselves” under a foreign authority, “for the easier propagation of doctrines, and for making a party against the power of the commonwealth” (2.22.27). His account of  joint-­stock companies has merged with his critique of the church and the universities: all are “wens, biles, and apostems, engendered by the unnatural conflux of evil humours” (2.22.34).

persons mechanical, theatrical, and real It is fair to say that throughout his discussion of incorporated bodies politic, Hobbes is probably not drawing as sharp a conceptual distinction between “fictional” and “artificial” persons as is sometimes attributed to him, and this close association between fiction and artifactuality was registered in the early modern period in the etymological derivation of “fiction” from fingere, to fashion or to form. Rather than looking for an opposition between fiction and truth or fiction and reality in Hobbes’s work, we should understand his use of “fiction” and of “imitation” as species of the larger category of

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the artificial, which can be fabricated and for that reason both true and real, as in the work of Bacon before him. This dimension to Hobbes’s thought is illustrated especially clearly by his famous description of Leviathan as an automaton or “artificial man” “imitated” by art in the elaborate analogy that introduces Leviathan; or when he argues that “the principles of reason” that govern the “art of well building” are like those necessary to make a civil “constitution . . . everlasting” (2.30.5); or when, in the “Preface to the Reader” of De Cive, he argues that the “generation and form” of civil government is “best understood by its constitutive causes,” “as in a watch or some such small engine” (EW, 2:xiv). In these cases, Hobbes is not simply making the point that the commonwealth is a manufactured state of affairs composed out of human instruments. He is illustrating the entirely materialist and mechanistic idea that the commonwealth is not a thing but a structured set of relations: relationships of cause and effect, agent and patient, force and movement, and, most generally, of whole to part.37 “Person” is his term for the enduring unity that results from this coordination of parts, and Hobbes’s account of the political union in fact consistently italicizes words of unity rather than words of person: “A multitude of men are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular. For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one. And it is the representer that beareth the person, and but one person, and unity cannot otherwise be understood in multitude” (1.16.13). This same “unity” has a negative corollary, which is that it is not a hypostasis, not a substance, and not even a “body” in the usual sense of the word. In the grammatical and philosophical terms that motivate Hobbes’s critique of the universities, we could say that the person of Leviathan exists in the way that anything exists when it is expressed by the verb “to be” in a copulative manner. It is not a metaphysical thing but the proper name for a relationship of association in the most integral way possible between two or more entities, a nominalist abstraction precipitated out of a tautological statement of equivalence. The mystical body of the scholastic, the civilian, and the common lawyer has been replaced by a fictional person with an artificial body whose composition may be explained in mechanical terms. This “person” is the technical abstraction that men create when they agree to recognize a single sovereign authority and come to understand that authority as a performative one: the power to act as this person so that it may continue to exist in the future. How could this future persistence come about? Again the key lies in Hobbes’s arguments about the artificial quality of civil polities: both democ-

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racies and joint-­stock companies are artificial in the sense that they have been deliberately “instituted” by men who agree to covenant with one another; indeed, since the covenant is itself an “artificial” device used only by men and not by animals (1.17.12), all forms of covenanted commonwealths are artificial, whether their sovereign “persons” are representative assemblies or representative monarchs.38 This is precisely why “civil philosophy is demonstrable” in the same way that geometry is, Hobbes writes in the dedicatory letter to his Six Lessons (1656), “because we make the commonwealth ourselves” in the same way that we draw the lines and figures we use to reason about geometrical problems.39 The covenant is thus not the natural result of a spontaneous impulse toward association, as Aristotle had described it, but an “instrumental” tool that men use to exercise their power “to obtain some future apparent good” (1.10.1). Hobbes’s term of this transfer of rights is “mutual translation” (1.14.16), a term that denotes the usual meaning of “carrying across” but which for Hobbes also describes a continuous passage from one time to another—­from the present act of promising to the future fulfillment of that promise by another person (1.14.11, 1.14.16).40 As a consequence, this translation is also a transformation from something unreal to something real: the virtue of the covenant is not simply that it makes a promise into an “obligatory” agreement but that it creates a real relationship out of a purely imaginary idea. For the future, as Hobbes defines it, is nothing but a “fiction”: “The present only has a being in nature; things past have a being in the memory only; but things to come have no being at all, the future being but a fiction of the mind, applying sequels of actions past to the actions that are present” (1.3.7). The covenant translates the person of  Leviathan into being because it represents men’s agreement to remain associated or to become “involved” with one another, not only at the moment of promise but also in the future. This projection forward in time allows Leviathan as a corporate person to appear as an entity distinct from the members who make it up, and this “translation,” to return to Hobbes’s term, is the very “essence of the commonwealth,” which (to define it) is one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient for their peace and common defence. And he that carrieth this person is called s o v e r e i g n , and said to have s o v e r e i g n p o w e r , and every one besides, his s u b j e c t . (2.17.13–­14)

Once created, Leviathan assumes the power to enforce the very covenant that has created it: like Hooker, Hobbes has employed the peculiar temporality

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of  the corporate idea to resolve the paradox of constituting and constituted power, but unlike Hooker he has done so by combining a materialist, a representational, and a mimetic ontology of corporations into a single figure. For the sovereign acts as the fictional person of Leviathan—­he “carrieth” or “bears” the person of Leviathan like an actor in the theater—­but when he acts in this way, he does so in his capacity as a representative for the people, who are the true authors of Leviathan’s acts. The people have used the artifice of the covenant to create Leviathan as a fictional but nonetheless real group person, an “arbitrary institution of many men assembled together,” Hobbes writes, that “is like a creation out of nothing by human wit” (2.1.1). We can now understand why Hobbes may have turned to the theater for his notion of the “person” and the principle of “representation” it implied, for the theater performs the nominalist tautology of identity as the definitive gesture of mimesis: actor and character “bodied forth” in such a close coincidence of identity that the distinction between the real and the fictional is temporarily suspended, and may even become irrelevant. Here is how Hobbes puts it: The word Person is Latin, instead whereof the Greeks have prosopon, which signifies the  face, as persona in Latin signifies the disguise or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage, and sometimes more particularly that part of it which disguiseth the face (as a mask or vizard); and from the stage hath been translated to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals as theatres. So that a person is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate is to act, or represent, himself or another; and he that acteth another is said to bear his person, or act in his name. (Leviathan, 1.16.3)

To act in the name of another is, of course, to act as an “artificial” person in the terms of Leviathan, but De Homine (ca. 1630–­40, pub. 1658, 1668) explicitly calls this act of impersonation “fictional,” devoting a chapter to what Hobbes calls “De Homine Fictitio, sive de Persona.” Here Hobbes provides a briefer account of the same arguments, giving even more prominence to the notion of fiction and with it to the play between persona as “person” and persona as “character”: What the Greeks call prosopon, the Latins sometimes call the facies or the os of a man, and sometimes persona: facies, if they referred to a real man, persona if they wished to speak of a fiction [ fictitio], as was the custom in comedies and tragedies in the theater. For in the theater it was understood that the actor himself

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did not speak, but someone else, such as Agamemnon, when the actor assumed the fictional appearance [ faciem fictitiam] of Agamemnon and was Agamemnon during that time. And yet afterward he was understood without this fictional aspect [ facie ficta] to be showing himself as the actor he was, rather than as the character [ personam] he had been acting. Nor are fictions of this kind any less necessary in the commonwealth [civitate] than in the theater, since in commerce and in contracts men may be absent from one another. Therefore, since the use of the person [ personae] extends to the civil affairs [civilem], it may be defined as follows: a person is anyone to whom words and actions may be attributed, either as his own or as another’s: if his own, the person is natural; if another’s, it is fictional [ fictitia]. Even as the same actor can assume different characters [ personas] at different times, so any man can represent several men. As Cicero said, I alone bear three persons [ personas], mine, my adversaries, and the judge’s, as if he had said that one Cicero may be considered to be me, my adversary, and the judge.41

In Leviathan Hobbes extends this same understanding of the person to his theory of the Trinity, in which God is represented or “impersonated” in an earthly capacity at three different historical moments, first by Moses, then by Christ, and then by the Holy Ghost “speaking and working in the Apostles.”42 This representational understanding of persona avoided the error of the Greek fathers, Hobbes argued, who interpreted the Greek term prosopon, which is “properly a face, and metaphorically a vizard of an actor upon the stage,” to mean “ ‘hypostasis,’ which signifies substance; from whence it might be inferred, that the three persons in the Trinity are three Divine substances, that is, three Gods.”43 “In the kingdom of God there may be three persons independent, without breach of unity in God that reigneth,” Hobbes concedes, “but where men reign, that be subject to diversity of opinions, it cannot be so” (Leviathan, 2.29.16). Seeking a new ontology for Leviathan, therefore, Hobbes found in the theater an alternative to the immaterial essences of the university. While we might have expected Hobbes to derive this notion of the “person” from the law, and while his own account shows that he had legal models of personhood directly in mind, his theory also required the category of the person both to precede the law—­indeed to make any civil law possible—­but also to exceed it, since, as Hobbes infamously argued, “the sovereign of a commonwealth, be it an assembly or one man, is not subject to the civil laws” (2.26.6). Hence we find Hobbes turning to a theatrical analogy in order to explain the problem of  how the political group somehow leaps out of the state of nature to constitute itself as a fictional person in a single performative gesture. In

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theater, as in life, the “person” appears when natural bodies endowed with the capacity to will, speak, and act begin to act not merely “for” another but as another, and even “as” themselves—­for Hobbes, even the individual self is the effect of a primary mimetic relation of likeness and comparison.44 The theater showed Hobbes how the category of person could be a pragmatic and nominalist fiction—­one is “called a natural person,” Hobbes writes in Leviathan—­rather than a metaphysical thing.45 And it showed him how the “person” could be an abstraction that is distinct from the members who make it up but at the same never become invisible and mysterious like the “ghosts” of the schoolmen: Leviathan is always visible in the form and body of the sovereign representative, to which it is attached or with which it is associated in such an intimate and permanent way that it could and should never be separated from him. This involvement is made enduring through covenants, and it becomes real only through an act of instantaneous, collective translation. This act suggests, in turn, a more general principle that we may use to evaluate the reality of any corporate association: the longer it lasts, the more real it becomes. If this formula could be removed from the theater and extended indefinitely into the future, then the corporate person of Leviathan really could live forever: this was the promise, and the fulfillment, of the covenant.

coda

Universitas, 1216–­2016 Nothing is so delightful as to incorporate. —­The Earl of  Shaftesbury

It says something about Hobbes’s temperament that he believed covenants could only be made enduring through a negative principle—­the fear of punishment and of an insecure condition of general war—­rather than through an affirmative, ongoing commitment to a set of ideals or a shared purpose beyond security and self-­protection. As Hobbes famously wrote in his verse autobiography, his birth on April 5, 1588 had been occasioned by his mother’s apprehension at the coming of the Spanish Armada, so that she “Did bring forth twins at once, both me and fear.”1 Nonetheless, it can come as a surprise to find, after all of Leviathan’s resounding definitions and arguments, that Hobbes remained haunted by the fear that his work would remain a mere literary exercise—­that it would amount to nothing but a fiction in an unreal and insubstantial sense. “I am at the point of believing this my labour to be as useless as the commonwealth of Plato” (2.31.41), he confessed, adding in the Latin edition that “I fear that this writing of mine will be numbered with Plato’s Republic, [More’s] Utopia, [Bacon’s New] Atlantis, and similar amusements of the mind.”2 His only hope of making his arguments fully real was for his book to “fall into the hands of a sovereign” who could ensure its “public teaching” (2.31.41): Therefore, I think it may be profitably printed, and more profitably taught in the Universities (in case they also think so, to whom the judgment of the same belongeth). For seeing the Universities are the fountains of civil and moral doctrine, from whence the preachers and the gentry, drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle the same (both from the pulpit and in their conversation)

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upon the people, there ought certainly to be great care taken to have it pure, both from the venom of heathen politicians and from the incantation of deceiving spirits. (Leviathan, “A Review and Conclusion,” 16)

The sentiment captures Hobbes’s full ambivalence about the universities, since for all his criticism of the faculties in Leviathan, he also believed that no institution could be more important to a commonwealth and, consequently, none more in need of reform.3 The “grounds” by which the sovereign held his rights were difficult to understand, he argued, and they must be “truly taught,” because they cannot be maintained by any civil law or terror of legal punishment” (2.30.4). Therefore the sovereign should have right of “appointing teachers and examining what doctrines are conformable or contrary to the defence, peace, and good of the people” (2.30.3; cf. 3.42.73, 3.42.78), so that the universities may “hereafter do as much to defend the royal power as formerly they did to defend the papal power” (Lev. [1678], 4.47.29). The ghost of democracy must be wiped away from the people once and for all, and only the universities could ensure that “democratic ink is . . . washed away by preaching, writing, and disputing,” as he put it in the Latin Leviathan (4.47.29). For “the common people’s minds . . . are like clean paper, fit to receive whatsoever by public authority shall be imprinted in them.”4 This was a utopian political philosophy, in which the universities would occupy the place that the church had occupied in Hooker’s account of the relation between ecclesiastical and civil power and that Salomon’s House did in Bacon’s New Atlantis: a corporate institution, separate and quasi-­autonomous but nonetheless absolutely subordinate to the sovereign, in which the most radical ideas might be translated into reality. The time has come for a brief conclusion: a look backward at the central problems raised by the history of the corporation and at what insights this history offers into our own moment, as well as to a possible future for corporations in practical life and in political theory. Hobbes has left us at a critical point in this history—­what exactly has he left us with, and what is missing? Most obviously, in his theory of the state in the guise of a corporate person Hobbes leaves us with an antipluralist theory of political obligation whose historical novelty lies both in its institutional abstraction and its absolutism. In the words of Quentin Skinner, our obligation is now “owed to an agency . . . rather than to the person of a ruler,” and this political obligation no longer extends “to a multiplicity of jurisdictional authorities, local as well as national, ecclesiastical as well as civil in character.” For both reasons, Skinner argues, Hobbes’s work “can thus be viewed as marking the end of

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one phase in the history of political theory and the beginning of another and more familiar one.”5 Leviathan is so compelling because it wears the two possible faces of the group person at the same time: it is an automaton, a mechanism, an assemblage of parts coordinated in their exterior relations, which Hobbes explains in quantitative terms as the sum total of relations of force, but it is also the immortal “soul” of the commonwealth, both the form of an idea and the idea of a form that can transform this assemblage into an integral and perpetual unity. For this reason, Hobbes’s account of Leviathan is especially valuable for thinking about the ontology of corporations more generally as entities that are real because they are fictional and that are sustained through forms, translations, and mediations of all kinds. Extending beyond Hobbes’s theory, however, implies multiplying the many forms out of which corporations are composed, in order to specify with greater variety and empirical precision the means by which they are maintained and can be said to maintain themselves. This methodological problem, fundamental to the work of Bacon, as we have seen, implies a somewhat different notion of “form” than is sometimes understood by the term: a materialist notion of form, broadly speaking, that recognizes a principle of continuity across change and of similarity across difference but that nevertheless does not foreclose difference as a constitutive ontological or ethical category.6 Only in this way will we arrive at a more flexible and more detailed analysis of how political collectivities are formed and ordered and for more nuanced discussion of the ontology of those essential political substances, force and value. By “ontology” I mean the quality and form of being—­and especially institutionalized, concretized, enduring being—­that force and value may assume. For it is only when force and value are made real and recognized as having a measure of “being” that they become the tools of political power and the objects of political contestation. Adopting such an approach will require a renewed and reinvigorated empirical method: not a naïve objectivity but a fully mediated, formally self-­conscious mode of inquiry in which concrete singularities are translated into meaningful categories and exemplary circumstances by the actors themselves in any given moment or situation.7 This methodological project has been sharpened by the widespread adoption of assemblage and network models of analysis in many different fields of the academy, especially those inspired by the actor-­network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour.8 By resolving unities into their constituent parts or by multiplying the number of elements, entities, or modes of relation in any given situation, the insights of ANT-­inspired approaches lies in specifying

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modes of relation or in-­betweenness, even to the point of denying any concept of unity at all. And yet ANT exhibits strain at the very moment when it attempts to shift the scale of its analysis and reimagine the assemblage as a provisionally stable, whole entity endowed with a structuring power over collective life and to provide an account of the ontology of this whole entity that recognizes both its enduring institutional agency and its fully contingent nature.9 Latour has himself employed the figure of the “body corporate” and the “artificial person” in passing as a way to designate a version of this precise problem, and so I offer the figure of the “corporation” back to actor-­network theory as a solution to the problem of scale that sometimes bedevils it.10 The power of the corporate figure, visible across all of the writers featured in this book, is that it focuses our attention on this problem of scale; it invites us to analyze the forces of translation whereby wholes become parts and parts become new wholes again, either in themselves (in a regressing a combination of immanent parts) or through the new modalities of relation that are established among them to form a new whole that itself in turn mutates and changes. Whose unity, at what scale, and in accordance with what forces and systems of value, will endure? What is the nature of a “unity” that remains open in this way? How many unities may coexist simultaneously and achieve some medium of ordering power and self-­expression? What we often identify as a moment of “political” conflict is in fact a moment of conflict across scales of “whole” entities whose systems of value have become incommensurable with one another and are seeking to maintain their own provisional integrity, often because they are themselves changing their shape or are resisting such change. Inspired by the work of the English pluralists, and in light of the many different roles played by the corporation in the early modern period, I propose that adopting such an approach will provoke a necessary shift in our account of political agency and will result, among other consequences, in a displacement of the concept of the state.11 For as long as we maintain the notion of the state in our historical and theoretical analysis, we risk ignoring other forms of institutionalized, collective association that are equally if not more important, and we look past the fact that the state is itself always a pluralist composition of powers distributed among many different agencies and persons. Grasping at thin air, we assign causes and explanations to a ghostly abstraction rather than to the concrete institutions, buildings, and materials—­from simple pen and paper to weaponry, machines, and all manner of political furniture—­that sustain our political communities and carry out actions of all kinds in their name. Pluralism is thus not only a prescriptive theoretical goal: it is a description of political fact. Whether the question

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is one of war, health care, financial crisis, election law, higher education, gun control, police violence, or any number of urgent problems, contemporary American culture has never been more fractured and never more explicitly preoccupied with the problems of pluralism: with the limits and sources of political authority, the powers of the state (and the states), and the capacities of corporations of all types. I also suggest that a historically informed theory of corporations can serve as a necessary supplement to the decisionist theories of the “political” as articulated by the jurist Carl Schmitt that have been the subject of so much recent attention across a wide range of fields in the academy, from literature to law, philosophy to history, anthropology to geography. Schmitt himself found pluralist arguments wanting as a source for political theory: he argued that pluralism could never provide an adequate definition of the “political” because it could never explain why groups of people find it necessary to form an association that transcends other associations, as the state does. Nor did pluralist arguments acknowledge the power and the right of this supra-­association to make a decision between friend and enemy and hence to motivate armed conflict.12 But the problem of the decision over the friend-­enemy relation cannot rest as the final, determinative signature of a political concept, and the explanation ultimately leads back to a pluralist theory of corporations. For the decision never comes from nothing: it may be unpredictable or radically contingent, it may “[contain] a moment of indifference from the perspective of content” and “[add] an element that cannot be derived either form the content of the legal idea or from the content of a general positive legal norm.”13 But one cannot finally isolate the “political” decision from moral, aesthetic, religious, scientific, or economic decisions, which always constitute a field of values, more or less formalized and more or less explicit, that determine how, when, and in application to what sort of persons or conditions any “political” decision can be made. Schmitt himself presumes the uniqueness of the friend-­enemy antithesis, asserting that it is “independent” in the sense that it cannot be reduced to other “relatively independent” antithesis and does not depend upon them, and he acknowledges that moral, religious, or economic decisions can in principle intensify to the point where they transform into “political” decisions in the instant they bring about an act of conflict.14 But it is not at all clear that such axes of value are independent; indeed they most often confront us in the guises of one another, and Schmitt’s axiomatic procedure of definition sidesteps the very processes of translation that constitute the political act of valuation, especially in a public setting (but of course not only there). Similarly, Schmitt’s repeated appeal to the “real” possibility of killing,

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the “real” enemy, the “actual participants” and “concrete situation” (27), that is, to a condition of pure decision or bare confrontation removed from any intellectual, psychological, material, or institutional entailments, in fact masks the degree to which this theoretical appeal constitutes a kind of ultimate hypothesis, on the order of Hobbes’s state of nature (or the so-­called ticking time bomb scenario), whose purpose is to terminate any deliberative process and wipe away any other “ liberal” residue. And yet as Leo Strauss has shown, Schmitt’s own affirmation of the political as a condition of war is finally itself an undeclared moral affirmation of a certain determination of human life and its “meaningfulness,” one that sits within a series of associated judgments in regard to all “culture” and “pacificism” or, as Strauss puts it, “more fundamentally: of civilization.”15 In Strauss’s words: “Now the polemic against morals—­against ‘ideals’ and ‘normative prescriptions’—­does not prevent Schmitt from passing a moral judgment on humanitarian morals, on the ideal of pacifism. Of course, he takes pains, as we have shown, to conceal this judgment. An aporia finds expression in this concealment: the threatened status of the political makes necessary an evaluative statement on the political; yet at the same time insight into the essence of the political arouses doubt about all evaluative statements on the political” (119). This aporia takes the form of a “political” decision that is ultimately radically private and individual, visible throughout The Concept of the Political, rather than a notion of the decision as a collective and collaborative one; that is, Schmitt seems to preclude any possibility of a decision by a group person, despite his interest in Hobbes, who drew on the history and theory of corporations to provide a model for just such a thing. In light of Bacon’s work, we may even propose that pluralism is the condition of the sovereign decision and makes it necessary, insofar as the “space” of the Schmittian decision requires a pluralist horizon of competing groups in order to appear between them (“between” and not “among,” as in Bacon: Schmitt’s antipluralism is visible in the fact that decisions usually take a binary form). More fundamentally, insofar as a decision qualifies as a true “decision” as Schmitt understands it and not as a mere calculation or the technical implementation of a rule, it presupposes a system of values that is more or less loosely structured, more or less open, more or less explicit and self-­ reflective and that has always been determined by a pluralist landscape of institutions in which those values find definition, mediation, and reinvention. The notion is familiar to us from theories of civil society and the public sphere, especially when these are understood not as monolithic or purely “virtual” domains of discourse but as a fully institutionalized world consist-

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ing of multiple affiliations and the overlapping, often competing systems of value that these affiliations imply, and when the agents and “persons” that populate this world are no longer simply individuals, citizens, or philosophical subjects denuded of membership but participants in group persons of many different scales, types, and purposes.16 For sovereigns never grow up alone: even Socrates’s Guardians are raised collectively and share all things in common. With these arguments I do not mean to suggest that problems raised by a concept and a history of sovereignty are irrelevant to an analysis of the corporation as a political entity—­quite to the contrary, as More, Smith, Hooker, Hakluyt, Dekker, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Hobbes all show, in different ways. But as enduring, institutionalized forms of association in which competing systems of value are continuously translated into one another, corporate groups of all kinds reveal themselves to be integral to one of the oldest definition of politics, defined not as “life merely”—­the agon of both Hobbes and Schmitt—­but as “the good  life,” as Aristotle described it at the dawn of political philosophy. This “political” life can only be lived collectively among institutions of all kinds, which make it possible to think together about how such a “good” or “just” life might find definition. And the “political” itself will thus require restatement not as a problem of extralegal decision between the friend and the enemy, nor as a monopoly of legitimate violence, nor as the administrative apparatus necessary to government, a straightforward “statist” definition. The “political” will become that which translates among the competing domains of  value that underwrite all action, whether of an individual or a collective nature, and in this way establishes the “common” as an open totality: a persistence in and through and even beyond the problem of difference. For in the end, the “political” admits of no “exterior,” no “outside”; the form of the “political” is a network of associations, of many different types and scales, through which the so-­called nonmember or nonparticipant is always placed into relation with the citizen, and the citizen always displaced from itself. The “common” is thus also not a closed, univocal concept but a relational structure, more or less ordered, more or less homogeneous, more or less open, that takes shape out of the many domains of value that determine relations and that they in turn reinforce and make visible; the “political” is in this sense not only an “aesthetics” (a system of forms and of formalized sensibility) but a mode of economy, if by “economy” we understand the definition, distribution, and translation of values. What are some of the concrete forms in which the “political” process as I have described it might take shape? I will conclude by turning first to an essay titled “The Discredited State” written a century ago by Ernest

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Barker. Barker had become unsatisfied both with the pluralists’ assertion of the “real personality” of corporations and with the nominalist arguments of those who opposed them. I quote Barker at some length: What is a group? Has it a personality beyond the persons of its members, and a will beyond their wills? . . . The problem is perhaps the simplest and most terrible of all problems. It is the problem of universals: the problem of identity and difference. It is as easy for a mind without the philosophic compass to drift into the res praeter res, and to see all identity, as it is to run up against the nomen de rebus, and to see all difference. Perhaps neither fits the facts; perhaps the Identical, in this matter of groups, is neither a real person nor a nominalist fiction. Let us call it an idea, and see into what dim port we drift with that pilot. William of Wykeham had an idea, somewhere about 1378; today there is a group, or fellowship, of St. Mary College of Winchester in Oxford, and this paper has been written in a room that belongs to this idea, and its writer is somehow, being Fellow of Wykeham’s college, related to this same idea. What has happened is that this idea has entered into a continuous succession of persons. They have retained their personality, but they have coloured their personality with the idea: a new personality has not arisen, but a new organizing idea has served as a scheme of composition for existing personalities. We have it on Aristotelian authority that the State is the same as long as its scheme of composition is the same. Its identity resides not in any single transcendent personality but in a single organizing idea permeating simultaneously and permanently a number of personalities. As for the State, so for all fellowships; there may be oneness without any transcendent one.17

Those who would forge a newly pluralist political theory of group identity, group purpose, and group action will find it necessary, first, to take a cue from Barker’s comment and furnish themselves with a new ontolog y of ideas: with a new account of the specific modes of being that ideas assume, of how we live with them and of how they often live parasitically through us.18 One of the arguments of this book is that we will find the resources for such a theory in an expanded account of fiction that reaches across law, literature, philosophy, and science. For the history of the corporation suggests that our new ontology of ideas will quickly become an inquiry into the ontology of fiction as a way of ensuring that ideas are made real, substantial, and endowed with political power.19 Students of early modern literature will recognize why Utopia has had a special place for writers and philosophers of all kinds who think hard about political problems, from Plato to Smith, Bacon, or Hobbes, whatever their ambivalence toward Utopia as a mode of thought and not merely as a type of imaginative fancy. For fiction

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provides the medium in which new ideas may be composed and used to give form to the many scales of association to which we attach ourselves, from the most fragile assemblages to more stable networks to highly self-­ conscious groups with detailed organizational structures and a vivid public persona. And anyone who attends to Shakespeare will recognize that one of the best models for this fictional ontology of ideas is to be found in theater. For since theater is a collective art, it invites us to ask where the magnetic force of ideas comes from, especially those ideas that are powerful enough to hold us together—­ideas that we can thus characterize as “political” ideas properly speaking. “Ideas are, and are not, fictions,” Barker writes, “they have hands and feet; but they are not persons, any more than they are fictions” (113). Ideas that have hands and feet, that are, and are not, fictions: Barker might be speaking of Hamlet, staggering before the memories of corporate bodies that would normally have sustained him and worrying over problems that lie at the heart of the corporate person as a mimetic creature. But the results of Hamlet’s theatrical experiment are, of course, ambiguous at best: what person, what authority, what institution can step in to fill the “gap of both,” as Coriolanus puts it, that his play has opened? Hamlet, Coriolanus, Titus, Julius Caesar, all are clear about one thing: whatever comes next, it cannot be a theory of power or of politics as sovereignty. Sovereignty and its institutions have resulted in the scenes we see before us at the end of the plays, and a politics of sovereignty will only repeat them. Instead, the plays invite us to ask what comes after sovereignty, what model of the “political” might replace it. With this book, I have tried to show how the “corporation” has been one of the most powerful and enduring ideas of political association, and also one of the most powerful ways of organizing persons around ideas, perhaps because it uses the idea of personhood to do so. But Barker has suggested a third institution that should be of concern not merely to Shakespeareans or to philosophers but to everyone who cares about the political future: the university. The university is the very institution to which Hobbes attributed all the intellectual errors and sources of political instability in his period, but it is also the institution he hoped could translate his ideas about political life into a living reality. And I will now rename this institution as the universitas, a translation that has several virtues. Like Utopia, the idea of the universitas hangs before us as an imaginary place, an experiment in thought, a guiding ideal but also as a tool of critique. It reminds us that every time we hear the word “corporation” we may think not of commercial behemoths that narrow all forms of value to a money

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equivalent, leaving nothing but spoliation and exploitation in their wake, but rather of those institutions that seek to coordinate as many forms of value as possible and to make as open as possible the means whereby these systems of value come to define the objects and subjects of our knowledge. And at the same time, the word universitas reminds us to continue our scrutiny of our universities as carefully as possible, so as to prevent them from lapsing any further toward their for-­profit cousins—­or worse. Like Utopia, too, of course, the notion of the universitas will no doubt encounter a measure of skepticism. Most people are surprised to learn that the term of art in Roman and medieval law for “corporation” was universitas and that many aspects of our modern theories of corporate personhood originate in debates over the identity, authority, and freedom of the University of Paris in the first decade of the thirteenth century.20 When colleagues speak with distress about the so-­called corporatization of the university, I sympathize with their complaints. But I am tempted to point out that they are pronouncing a tautology. For the truth of the matter is that we must start taking this tautology as seriously as possible. We have stopped speaking as a body, to the public, in the name of the university. The true tragedy of Hamlet may be that it invents the modern individual but forgets the group, and like Hamlet himself, we are confronted by a mere ghost of our potential, for we have forgotten how to act as a collective, group person—­or if we have not forgotten, we hesitate to do so. And yet we must do so, because our rightful authority over knowledge is at this very moment being taken away from us.21 Our universities today need not a further defense of the “humanities,” as is often argued, but rather a defense of the arts and sciences as a whole, against revenue-­generating programs and so-­called professional schools that have attached themselves parasitically to the universitas and threaten to usurp both its identity and its resources. The ancient division of the university into the faculties of arts, law, medicine, and theology has been preserved after all, with the difference that business schools now occupy the place that theology once held, its “Doctors” articulating a new corporate logic and wielding it back upon everyone else. I for one suspect that this defense may lead us, among other places, back to the question of a canon, understood now not only as a fixed body for allocating cultural capital (as it will remain, of course) but as an open, evolving totality of exemplary forms: of texts, equations, specimen creatures, models, paradigmatic problems, and forms of argument that extend across our fields, across our departments, across the faculty of arts and sciences, as it is often called, to become a constitution for the universitas—­the DNA, ever-­mutating,

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of a group person who has become newly self-­aware. And we must recognize that the purpose of the universitas is not to engross knowledge and convert it into a form of capital to be enjoyed by the few but rather to collect together as many ideas as possible, in all their forms, and then distribute them as widely and as publicly as possible: to distribute them universally. Many of us are embarrassed by this term, which is contained in the universitas, or we are skeptical of it. But I have begun to wonder whether the time has come to rethink the idea of the “whole” or the “unitary” once again: to rediscover the old presupposition, familiar to Aristotle and Plato, that knowledge can reside only in the whole or the totality—­and I hope it can go without saying that all “unities” are not “uniformities” (as Hooker and Bacon have both reminded us) and that all “totalities” are not totalitarian. How can the universitas assume its rightful place as a fully political institution in which the good life, rather than life merely, again receives a meaningful, active, open definition? Those of us who care about the universitas will find this to be the defining question of our careers. In conclusion, therefore, a final prospect. At the opening of this book, I proposed that the problem of our political culture is not that there are too many corporations in our political life but that there are too few. If you accept this premise, then your task will be to reanimate the potential of the universitas and awaken it to its own capacities as an artificial person. But we may go a step further and propose the further task of looking for corporations everywhere and, further still, of forming new corporations of a genuinely public type. In Democracy in America,  Alexis de Tocqueville writes that “citizens who are individually powerless do not very clearly anticipate the strength that they may acquire by uniting together; it must be shown to them in order to be understood” (2:116). You have sat still and read enough: nothing is so delightful as to incorporate.

Notes

preface 1. Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, partially translated into English by Maitland as Gierke, Political T heories of the Middle Age; by Barker as Gierke, Natural Law and the T heory of Society, 1500 to 1800; by Heiman as Gierke, Associations and Law; and by Fisher as Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective. Good discussions of Gierke’s thought may be found in Maitland’s introduction to Political T heories of the Middle Age; Hallis, Corporate Personality, 137–­65; Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, 34–­63; Black, Guilds and Civil Society, esp. 26–­8, 65, 210–­17. 2. One of the best synthetic histories of corporations remains Davis, Corporations; in a growing body of scholarship on the corporation in the early modern period, see esp. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic; Harris, “ ‘Long-­Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge”; Barbour, “A Multinational Corporation”; Barbour, Third Voyage Journals; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth; Withington, “Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation”; Withington, Society in Early Modern England; Stern, T he Company-­State. Literary critics have been slower to take up the interest of corporate forms, but see the succinct summary of the term’s several meanings and theoretical implications by Robertson, “Keyword: Corporate”; Targoff, Common Prayer; Picciotto, Labors of Innocence; Phillips, English Fictions of Communal Identity; Michaels, T he Gold Standard, esp. 54–­57, 181–­214; Newfield, T he Emerson Effect; and Christensen, America’s Corporate Art. Notable cultural and theoretical critiques of the corporation include Bakan, T he Corporation (also made into a film); the essays collected in Bose and Lyons, Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation; and Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty. Barkan’s genealogy of the corporation, which I discovered late in the process of completing this book, is essential reading and pursues a series of arguments similar to my own. 3. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. It is remarkable that so many of the texts and authors that Helgerson made central to his argument can be explained within a corporatist rather than a national tradition of thought; see also Phillips, English Fictions, 2. 4. There is an extensive literature on the problem of pluralism in contemporary political theory, not all of which refers to the more historically oriented work of the English pluralists; limitations of space have made it impossible to do justice to this literature, which I hope to take up in future work. 5. A focus on institutions has always been central to the dispositif of biopolitics, but the development of the problematic in terms of sovereignty and “bare life” has tended to reduce this institutional dimension, as I argue in the coda. Agamben, T he Highest Poverty, contains much that is relevant to a philosophical history of corporations, albeit obliquely; Santner, in T he Royal Remains,

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rejoins Kantorowicz’s corporatism with biopolitics, as does Barkan, in Corporate Sovereignty, esp. 9–­12, 76–­79, 165 (advocating an “affirmative biopolitics”). Esposito has articulated a theory of biopolitics that is opposed to all forms of  “corporate” membership ( broadly characterized as Chris­ tian by Esposito), while nevertheless taking seriously the philosophical genealogy of its component concepts. See esp. Communitas; Immunitas, 112–­44; and Third Person. On aesthetics and phenomenology as resources for thinking about the “political,” see esp. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 39–­ 40, 56–­59, on the movement between “incorporation” and “disincorporation” as fundamental to the political power of literature. 6. On this point, see especially Aït-­Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos, esp. 191–­201.

chapter one 1. More, Utopia, in Open Utopia, ed. Duncombe, 185–­86. English translations of Utopia vary widely in their stylistic accessibility, their conceptual precision, and their fidelity to historical usage; Duncombe’s edition follows the 1684 translation of Bishop Gilbert Barnet, per the free Project Guttenberg e-­text edition (http://theopenutopia.org/full-­text/sources/) and often reaches a reasonable accommodation among these competing imperatives. Parenthetical citations in other passages are from the stand-­alone edition by Surtz (1964), which reprints the English translation of T he Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4 (CW ), making my own occasional modifications as noted. Latin has been taken from the corresponding passages in CW. 2. Surtz, Utopia, 146; “form” modified in light of  CW, 236.31–­33. Raphael recalls Socrates: “You are happy, I replied, in thinking there is any other city worthy of the name, except the kind we are founding” (Republic 422e). 3. Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism,” 123; Skinner, Foundations, 1:255–­62; Skinner, Visions of Politics, 2:213–­44. See also Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, esp. 209–­18; Curtis, “The Best State of the Commonwealth,” 93–­112; Nelson, Greek Tradition, 19–­48. 4. More includes many details that undercut Hythloday’s arguments (starting with his name), all of which have been well discussed in scholarship; Utopia is a serious joke, however, and I have approached its philosophical project in this spirit. In arguing for the corporate nature of Utopia, I follow an interpretation first put forward by Chambers, Thomas More, esp. 88, 131–­32, 257–­58, a reading contested by both Skinner, Foundations, 1:255, and Hexter, introduction to CW, xliv–­xlv, but see Hexter, More’s Utopia, 85–­91; Ames, Citizen Thomas More, 97–­98, 100–­103;  Jones, “Thomas More’s Utopia and Medieval London”; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 53–­54; Phillips, En­ glish Fictions, 43. 5. Barker, “The Discredited State,” 101. As a former undersheriff of London who was famous across Europe as the most learned lawyer in England, we may be sure that More was familiar with every technicality of corporatist arguments; see Guy, Thomas More, 128; Levack, Civil Lawyers in England; Cormack, Power to Do Justice, 86–­87. On More’s legal work for the City of  London, includ­ ing advocating for the city over the Act for Corporations (19 Henry VII, c. 7 [1504]), see Ramsay, “A Saint in the City.” 6. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-­Fashioning, 11–­73, esp. 41–­42. 7. Bartolovich, “Utopia and Its New Enemies,” makes the ingenious argument that many of the objectionable aspects of Utopia are the symptoms not of Utopian society but of everywhere else: of the world that surrounds Utopia, that is not yet ready for the Utopian premise, and that makes necessary a set of practices that should be understood as temporary. 8. CW, 132.6. The Utopians are particularly taken with the “common way of  life” of Christianity, found among Christ’s apostles “and still in use among the truest societies of Christians” (Surtz, Utopia, 131–­32); another marginal gloss refers to the “cenobic” character of the Utopian food halls,

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and their simple dress recalls the monastic habit. More spent four years living among the Carthusians at London’s Charterhouse, where he lectured on Augustine’s City of God; see Roper, T he lyfe of Sir  Thomas Moore, 6.7–­11; Guy, Thomas More, 32–­33. Surtz and Hexter note several similarities to the Carthusians, including the practice of gardening, the wearing of wool, and vegetarianism (CW, 395, 412–­13, 534–­35, 537, 550, 556). 9. Politics, 3.4.2–­3, 3.5.13–­15. 10. Arendt, in The Human Condition and The Promise of Politics, emphasizes the point. 11. Aristotle, Politics, 3.1.1; compare Republic, 423a–­d, 433a–­434e, 443d–­e, 462a. 12. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies; Hale, T he Body Politic; Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art, esp. 61–­ 115; Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic. 13. The problem of common property, in other words, so often taken to be the signature of Utopia, turns out to be a species of a much larger one: the problem of defining unity in the first place, of how “one” may be composed out of  “many” and “many” at the same time end up resolving into “one.” On More’s rejection of private property see especially Marin, Utopics; Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches”; Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 136–­75; and Phillips, English Fictions, 41–­78. 14. On the case see Galloway, Union of England and Scotland, 148–­57; Price, “Natural Law and Birthright Citizenship.” 15. The theory of the corporation sole was made famous by Kantorowicz in his influential study of medieval political theology, T he King’s Two Bodies; Hutson, in “Imagining Justice” and “Not the King’s Two Bodies,” queries Kantorowicz’s use of Plowden and the way his account of the king’s corporate personality was taken up in by New Historicism, drawing on Norbrook, “The Emperor ’s New Body?” On the legacy of Kantorowicz and political theology more generally, see especially a special forum in Representations 106.1 (2009) titled “Fifty Years of T he King’s Two Bodies,” ed. Lorna Hutson, esp. Kahn, “Political Theology and Fiction”; Hutson, “Imagining Justice”; and Halpern, “The King’s Two Buckets”; also Kahn, Future of Illusion; the essays collected in Hammill and Lupton, Political T heology & Early Modernity; Hammill, T he Mosaic Constitution; Santner, Royal Remains; Lupton, Citizen-­Saints; Zizek, Santner, and Reinhard, T he Neighbor. The history of corporatist thinking and the work of Gierke in particular (and, to a lesser extent, that of Schmitt) were so important to Kantorowicz that one would expect scholarship on the tradition of political theology to have addressed it more directly; see, however, Rust, “Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum”; Kahn, “Political Theology and Fiction,” esp. 83–­88, 98n21, reprinted in Kahn, Future of Illusion, 55–­81; Hutson, “Imagining  Justice,” esp. 120–­26; Merlin-­Kajman, Public et littérature, esp. 59–­87; Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, esp. 5–­9. 16. Coke, Selected Writings, 1:166–­232 (189). 17. “Corporation Sole,” 240. Of Plowden, Maitland is especially derisive: “I do not know where to look in the whole series of our law books for so marvellous a display of metaphysical—­or we might say metaphysiological—­nonsense” (“Corporation Sole,” 249). 18. In the Institutes, 1.1.1 (2a; also 2b, 8b, 67a), Coke draws the same distinctions in terms of “persons.” 19. “Mr. Bacon’s Discourse in the Praise of his Sovereign” (ca. 1592), in T he Letters and T he Life of Francis Bacon (hereafter L&L), 1:126–­43 (128); “A Draught of a Proclamation Touching his Majesty’s Stile,” L&L, 3:235–­40 (236). 20. Works of Francis Bacon (hereafter Works), 15:193–­247 (231). See also Galloway, Union of England and Scotland, 151–­57; Levack, Formation of the British State, 7, 52–­53, 183–­84. 21. Maitland, “Crown as Corporation,” 259. 22. See the edicts of Gaius and Ulpian in Digest, book 3, title 4, sections 1–­2 and 7, in Krueger et al., Corpus Juris Civilis, 1:43; English trans. in Watson, Digest of  Justinian, 1:96–­97; Buckland, Textbook of Roman Law, 173–­77. Correlatively, Roman law of property distinguished between res singulorum, or things that were the property of individuals, and res universitatis, or things owned

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publicly by the collective, municipal body; see Institutes, book 2, title 1, principium, and book 2, title 1, section 6, in Krueger et al., Corpus Juris Civilis, 1:10; Hunter, Introduction to Roman Law, 57–­58; Hunter, A Systematic and Historical Exposition of Roman Law, 314–­15; Buckland, Texbook of Roman Law, 183–­85. 23. Gierke provides extensive documentation of corporate terminology throughout his work; see also Michaud-­Quentin, Universitas; Holdsworth, History of English Law, 3:362–­76; Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law 1:493–­96; Black, Guilds and Civil Society, esp. 49–­65 and 149–­50; Duff, Personality in Roman Private Law, esp. 1–­50. “All such incorporations,” writes Smith of the craft guilds, “were antiently called universities; which indeed is the proper Latin name for any incorporation whatever. The university of smiths, the university of taylors, &c. are expressions which we commonly meet with in the old charters of antient towns.” Wealth of Nations (1776), vol. 1, book 1, ch. 10, pt. 2, 136. 24. Coke, Selected Writings, 1:347–­78. 25. See Coke’s classic definition in his Institutes, book 3, ch. 6, sect. 413 (250a). 26. Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. 1, ch. 18, 467–­82. 27. Selected Writings, 1:355; cf. 1:356, 374–­75. 28. Ibid., 1:349. Bacon’s arguments in the case survive only in Coke’s point-­by-­point summary. Bacon had expressed his objections in a private memorandum to James (ca. 1612); he recognized Sutton’s good intentions but felt that the Charterhouse, “a building fit for a Prince’s habitation,” was too fine to be turned into what he calls “a corporation of declared beggars”; see L&L 4:247–­55 (249, 251). 29. Compare Bacon’s remarks in “An Argument of the King’s Solicitor in the Lower House of Parliament” (1610), L&L, 4:189–­201, asserting that grants made by merchants without a charter “considered in themselves are void in law” because such “merchants, either strangers or subjects . . . are no body corporate, but singular and dispersed persons.” They lack the power to issue legally binding grants of any kind, and “their grants being not corporate are but noun adjectives without the King’s power to impose” (193–­94). In 1615, Bacon prepared a patent of incorporation for a reconstituted company of the Merchant Adventurers and wrote a detailed memorandum to the king; see L&L, 5:169–­72 and 6:72–­75. 30. Scarry, “Made-­Up and Made-­Real.” 31. Coke, Selected Writings, 1:369–­70. 32. See Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, esp. 193–­232, 270–­71, 302–­6, 306n81, 336–­82; Kahn, “Political Theology and Fiction,” esp. 82–­88; Hutson, “Imagining  Justice” and “Not the King’s Two Bodies”; Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects, 99–­116. In legal scholarship the spectrum of views on the problem of corporate personhood and legal fiction is well represented by Brown, “The Personality of the Corporation and the State”; Machen, “Corporate Personality [ I ]” and “Corporate Personality [ II ]”; Vinogradoff, “Juridical Persons”; Dewey, “The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality,” arguing for a pragmatic conception of the legal person that emphasizes not essence but “consequences” or “ ‘what—­it—­does’ . . . being stated in terms of specific effects extrinsically wrought in other things” (660–­61; italics in original), and yet drawing the line at examples such as molecules or trees; Radin, “The Endless Problem of Corporate Personality,” a valuable survey of historical terminology that is skeptical of the attribution of real personality to corporate persons; Wolff, “On the Nature of Legal Persons,” esp. 505–­16; Hallis, Corporate Personality, xiii–­ lxiii and passim; French, “Corporation as a Moral Person.” Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty, 65–­86, offers a helpful overview of American arguments; I have also benefited from Riles, “Is the Law Hopeful?,” shared in advance of publication. 33. Canning, “Corporation in the Political Thought of the Italian Jurists,” 15; see also Post, “Parisian Masters as a Corporation,” a detailed discussion of the formation of the University of Paris as a legal universitas; Kelly, “Civil Science in the Renaissance,” 67; Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 16–­22, 24–­26; Black, “The Individual and Society,” 598–­604, esp. 598; and Michaud-­Quantin,

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Universitas, 28. It is worth pointing out that Roman law did not recognize a notion of corporate “personhood”: it distinguished between particular, actual existing groups and their classification into abstract types; it assigned property and rights to groups as abstractions, but it did so without assigning personality or will to these abstractions or extending to them all the rights enjoyed by natural persons. See Duff, Personality in Roman Private Law, esp. 1–­25, 48–­50, 206–­36; Buckland, Textbook of Roman Law, 173–­77; Buckland and McNair, Roman Law and Common Law, 54–­56. 34. I quote Bartolus from Ullmann, “Delictal Responsibility,” 86. 35. Cited by Canning, “Corporation in the Thought of the Italian Jurists,” 13–­14. 36. Canning, “Corporation in the Political Thought of the Italian Jurists,” 15–­19; Rodriguez, “Innocent IV and the Element of Fiction,” 316–­17; see also Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics, 57n1; Tierney, Foundations of Conciliar T heory, 98–­103; Lewis, “Organic Tendencies in Medieval Political Thought.” 37. Cited by Canning, “Corporation in the Thought of the Italian Jurists,” 16–­17. Innocent reasons that the act of excommunicating an entire group will inevitably include members of the corporation who are not guilty; he declares that those members who are guilty certainly can be excommunicated, and in the same commentary he argues that corporate bodies may in fact commit crimes and may be punished for them as a body either by “suspension or interdiction” or by financial penalties; see Rodriguez, “Innocent IV and the Element of Fiction,” and Ullmann, “Delictal Responsibility.” 38. Ullmann, “Delictal Responsibility,” 87. 39. Canning, “Corporation in the Thought of the Italian Jurists,” 22–­23, 27–­31; Canning, T he Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis, 185–­208 (esp. 190–­91), 215–­17; Canning, “Law, Sovereignty and Corporation Theory,” esp. 473–­76; Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics, 59, 62–­71; Skinner, “State of Princes,” 268–­413, esp. 380 and 387–­94. 40. See my further comments in Turner, “Corporate Persons, between Law and Literature.” 41. A central insight of Barbara Johnson’s work on apostrophe, prosopopoeia, and personifi­ cation; see her influential “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law” and “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion”; also Johnson, Persons and Things; on early modern figurations of persons, see esp. Fowler, Literary Character, esp. 16–­17, 24–­28. 42. Compare Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty, 163–­ 64; both Hammill, Mosaic Constitution, esp. 11–­16, 22–­23; and Kahn, Wayward Contracts, esp. 1–­20, have emphasized fiction, imagination, and mimesis as sources of  “constitutional” thinking in ways that are similar to what I am proposing, although without reference to the corporate traditions I discuss and without the same interest in how they might illuminate the limits of legal concepts (but cf. Kahn, “Political Theology and Fiction,” 83–­88, 98n21). The larger implications of the problem are well illustrated by Kantorowicz’s use of corporate ideas and vocabulary, which focus some of his book’s lingering ambiguities, especially in its blend of “organic” with “juristic” and “secular” or “sociological” ideas of corporateness, to use Kantorowicz’s own terminology. Over the course of several centuries, Kantorowicz argues, the idea of the mystical body of Christ, properly a liturgical, sacramental, and ontological problem pertaining to the mystery of the Eucharist and Christ’s two natures, migrates to characterize the “sociological” phenomenon of the church as an “administrative” and “corporate” unit; in this way, he writes, “the Church organism became a ‘mystical body’ in an almost juristic sense: a mystical corporation” (201; cf. 209, where the corpus mysticum “acquired a corporational character signifying a ‘fictitious’ or ‘juristic’ person”). The result, Kantorowicz argues, is “thereby to ‘secu­ larize’ he notion of the ‘mystical body,’ ” and one of the central ambiguities of  T he King’s Two Bodies is what it finally means to “secularize” a theological concept: is it to strip it of its mystical meaning, or is it to extend that meaning by giving it a wider application and hence a new set of connotations and ideological potential? The problem is precisely the one that the phrase “political theology” captures, which both Lupton and Hammill have tried to preserve as a difficulty rather than to resolve away; another way to put it would be to ask whether the phrase “political theology” in the

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book’s subtitle describes a dialectical or a metaphorical structure. Similarly, what precisely does Kantorowicz mean by “a ‘mystical body’ in an almost juristic sense” (201; my emphasis) or when he says that the “lofty idea of the Church as corpus mysticum cuius caput Christus was inflated with secular contents, corporational as well as legal” (207; my emphasis)? The question is central to a pluralist history of corporations because if “corporational” is not at this moment coextensive with “legal” (as it usually is in Kantorowicz’s argument), then it is because it is equivalent to other “secular ” ideas that are “sociological” or “social” (i.e., problems of lived collectivity and groupness). But the question then becomes how this “groupness” is to be thought outside reference to either a legal or a theological idea, a question that is made more difficult, it seems to me, since Kantorowicz’s own exposition tends to determine the category of “fiction” strongly in a legal sense, despite his turn to Shakespeare, Dante, and even Aristotle at key moments in his argument, as both Kahn and Hutson have pointed out. 43. The term “pluralistic” was first used by Laski, who was prompted by William James’s 1908 Hibbard Lectures on pluralism at Manchester College, Oxford, in which James had responded to the “monistic” arguments of the neo-­Hegelian idealist Francis Herbert Bradley; James’s lectures were soon published as A Pluralistic Universe (see esp. 75–­80, 106). Not all writers now associated with pluralism adopted the same views on the nature of group personality or the place of the state; see esp. Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State; Hirst, introduction to T he Pluralist T heory of the State; Nicholls, T he Pluralist State; and Schmitt’s own “Ethic of State and Pluralistic State,” where Schmitt locates Laski within “that intellectual and historical array of phenomena which I have called ‘political theology’ ” (197). 44. Representative statements may be found in Figgis, Churches in the Modern State; Barker, “The Discredited State”; Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty; Laski, Foundations of Sovereignty; Laski, State in T heory and Practice; the work of Maitland, including his introduction to Gierke, Po­ litical T heories of the Middle Age, the most influential exposition of Gierke’s work in English. 45. A primary opposition within pluralist thought, as Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, elucidates, esp. 36, 78; see also Maitland, “Moral Personality and Legal Personality”; Black, Guilds and Civil Society; French, “Corporation as a Moral Person.” 46. Works 15: 231, the term “stock” denoting a structural element or frame, and perhaps also the trunk of a tree, and metaphorically of a body; see OED, “stock,” A.I.7, A.II; A.I.1.a; 2.a, b; A.I. 5. 47. In addition to the works already cited, see esp. Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction; Wilson, T he­ aters of Intention; Hutson Invention of Suspicion; Cormack, Power to Do Justice; Syme, T heatre and Testimony. 48. I draw on Pitkin, Concept of Representation, esp. 1–­143, 241–­52, making similar distinctions between “mystical” and “representational” ideas and providing a historical sketch of their intersections. My term “mystical” corresponds more or less to Pitkin’s “symbolic” representation (92–­111) and my “mimetic” to her “descriptive” representation (60–­91), the two modes of her darstellen, although with some overlap between them; my term “representational” corresponds to her notion of “acting for,” or vertreten (112–­43). Phillips, English Fictions, also emphasizes the importance of “mystical identification” in constituting group identity (2–­3). 49. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 64–­67. 50. Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 156–­59. Fineux is cited by Maitland, “Corporation Sole,” 217, and “Crown as Corporation,” 247. Compare Arnold, Third Citizen, citing  John Hooker’s (Richard Hooker’s uncle) description of the House of Commons as “as it were one body, having many eyes to se, many feet to go, and many hands to labour withal” (17). 51. One of the privileges of incorporation for a town or borough was the right to elect a representative in the House of Commons; see Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, esp. 8, 40. Both Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 245–­50; and Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 162–­63, argue that the term “representation” is not used in its modern political sense of standing for a constituency until the mid-­seventeenth century.

n o t e s t o p a g e s 2 5 – 3 0 

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52. Arnold, Third Citizen, esp. 4–­7, 15, on the “secular magic ” of parliamentary representation. 53. I quote Parker from Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 160–­65 (163–­64); see Pitkin on “descriptive representation,” 60–­91, 245–­50. The sense is still active in the American constitutional context; see Slauter, State as a Work of Art, 123–­66, contrasting visual ideas of representation (the likeness of the painting, portrait, and miniature) with verbal ideas (the transcript and note) and pointing out that a Federalist like Madison could also invoke “mimetic” ideas of speaking for the people to give them voice (136). 54. As Runciman has argued, Leviathan is such a compelling figure because it combines the individualistic and contractual qualities that are typical of the societas with a notion of integrated, corporate unity that is the classic feature of the universitas; see Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, 13–­33, comparing Oakeshott’s distinction between the societas and the universitas in On Human Conduct, 185–­326. Cf. Phillips, English Fictions, on the distinction between “corporate bodies” and “collective selves” (2–­3), a somewhat different usage; Gierke, Natural Law, 1:45–­46, on the transition from universitas to societas; Black, Guilds and Civil Society, opposing the two group forms of his title and periodically querying the notion of “the group as a real whole separate from the individuals composing it” (65). 55. See Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, and Withington, Society, esp. 113–­16; Withington limits the formal definition of the corporation to a legal category, although he acknowledges “the fluid and overlapping” nature of the “associational ‘types’ ” he describes (Society, 116). 56. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 310–­11. Establishing the continuity of the respublica in time was one of the defining principles of Florentine political thought, as Pocock famously argued in T he Machiavellian Moment, esp. 92, 333–­40. Pocock’s influential history of republicanism minimized the importance of corporatist ideas and institutions, and one of my purposes is to show both the tensions and the compatibilities between the two traditions; the same problem has been taken up by Black, Guilds and Civil Society (e.g., 149); Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth; and Withington, Society. See also Turner, “The Problem of the More-­ Than-­One,” with additional bibliography. 57. Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto.’ ” Latour’s work and especially his notion of “translation” have been formative on my arguments; citations appear in chapter 4 and the coda, below; readers familiar with Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, and DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, will recognize their influence, too, on my arguments throughout. 58. A complete exposition of this idea is beyond my scope here, but it would include attention to the many handmade signs, letters, and other modes of group “speech” that characterized the movement, its ventriloquism and “human microphone,” its circulating public library, and, of course, the urgency, formal integrity, and open-­ended plasticity of its slogan: Occupy! On models for new “associations, bonds, linkages, and networks” and the importance not just of spontaneous protest but of “structures that will be sustained” and of “real functioning communities” see Chomsky, Occupy, 45, 34–­35, 73, 75, 80, 84. 59. The concept of form is central to the work of Latour; see Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science,” with additional bibliography. I have benefited from many conversations with Caroline Levine over the years; see her Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. 60. Including, above all, the status of the so-­called animal, a current problem across the academy; within early modern studies, see the powerful arguments of Shannon, Accommodated Animal, esp. 1–­28, 29–­66, emphasizing the role played by Genesis as a constitutional account of an original relation between people and animals rather than an ontological gap (32), a political-­theological dispensation that is at once beyond the legal contracts of “human jurisdiction” (44) but at the same time always already legal in a natural sense (42–­46); see also 228–­40, on the all-­too-­human justice visited upon animals in legal cases, as well as the practical and juridical problems posed by swarming animals such as weevils and rats. 61. Compare Cormack, Power to Do Justice, 85–­129, esp. 125–­29.

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notes to pages 30–36

62. Hythloday often singles out the idea of Utopian “institutions” (instituta), which are not the same as laws or leges, the term Raphael uses when describing their “few laws”; Surtz, Utopia, 114; CW, 194.4–­29; cf. CW, 102.28–­30, a clear distinction. Even Utopian religion, famous for its toleration, finally depends on a shared belief “in a certain single being, unknown, eternal, immense, inexplicable, far above the reach of the human mind, diffused throughout the universe not in mass but in power. . . . All alike call him Mithras in their native language” (130–­31). Utopian temples, in short, resemble nothing so much as its communal food halls or its famous storehouses, and in their similarity we see the principle that holds Utopia together as a corporate community: a perfect homology between the distribution of people, the distribution of material resources, the distribution of faith, and the distribution of ideas. 63. I draw on Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life; Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?; and Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?” 64. Sidney, Apology, 101.1–­13.

chapter two 1. On Robynson, see Sacks’s edition of Robynson’s Utopia (1556), 59–­61; Guy, Thomas More, 93–­94; Baker, Divulging Utopia, 106–­8; Phillips, English Fictions, 64–­69. For More’s comment, see T he Co[n] futacyon of  Tyndales answere (1532), 2:cxxix. 2. More, Utopia, ed. Sacks, 64–­68 (68); Baker, Divulging Utopia, 111–­25. 3. On the “commonwealth” idea see Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, esp. 279–­314 and 363–­97; Jones, T he Tudor Commonwealth; Lowe, “War and the Commonwealth in Mid-­Tudor England”; McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I, esp. 80–­90, 198–­234; Sherman, John Dee; Sherman, “Anatomizing the Commonwealth”; Glimp, Increase and Multiply, 5–­7 (with reference to Smith); Withington, Politics of Commonwealth; Withington, Society, esp. 134–­68. 4. Sherman, “Anatomizing the Commonwealth,” 106–­7; Withington, Society, 134–­68. 5. Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 8–­15, 17–­48 (esp. 38, 40), 51–­84 (esp. 66–­67); Withington, “Public Discourse”; Withington, Society, esp. 102, 155, 139, pointing out that the term “commonwealth” actually originates in local government. Withington’s work is strongly influenced by that of  Tittler, T he Reformation and the Towns, and Tittler, Townspeople and Nation, as well as by Watts and Collinson and is an important corrective to historiography that sees the rise of public, civic consciousness only as of the interregnum of the seventeenth century, as exemplified, for instance, by Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth. 6. Cited by Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 11. 7. Stow, A Survey of London (1603), 2:198; cited by Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 215. 8. Watts, “Public or Plebs”; Withington, Society, 142–­48; and (more generally) Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State. 9. T he Boke Named the Gouernour, vol. 1, ch. 1, 2. 10. Quoted by Sacks in his edition of Utopia, 61 (my emphasis); cf. Phillips, English Fictions, 70–­78 (esp. 72–­74); Withington, Society, 143–­44, 157–­59. 11. On Smith see Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith; Strype, Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith, quotes many letters and prints several valuable documents as appendixes. See also Archer’s essay on Smith in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers .edu/view/article/25906, accessed 29 May 2013; Nichols, “Some Additions to the Biography of Sir  Thomas Smith,” printing Smith’s own autobiographical manuscript diary (BL Sloane 325) as well as selections of his astrological marginalia and letters; Lipscomb, T he History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham, 4:595–­98, printing a detailed inventory of Smith’s property at Hill Hall from 27 September 1569. 12. Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 1–­2, citing Eden’s preface to his translation of Cortez, T he Art of Navigation (1561).

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13. See Drury et al., Hill Hall. Smith’s own inventory of his library (1 August 1566), is printed as appendix VI in Strype, Life (274–­81), and has been partially analyzed by Stephanie Hopkins Hughes (http://politicworm.com/oxford/oxfords-­education/sir-­thomas-­who/sir-­thomas-­smiths-­library -­list-­of-­1566). 14. Dewar, “The Authorship of the ‘Discourse of the Commonweal’ ”; see also Dewar, “The Memorandum ‘For the Understanding of the Exchange’: Its Authorship and Dating,” on other mone­ tary works by Smith. All citations are to A Discourse of the Commonweal of  This Realm of England, ed. Dewar. 15. For Adam Smith, the “commercial, or mercantile System” was one of two forms of what he called “political oeconomy,” and his sarcastic discussion of  Thomas Mun allowed him to clear the way for his new theory of wealth; see Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, book 4, intro and ch. 1, 428–­ 29, 431–­35. See also Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit, esp. 17–­43; the essays collected in Stern and Wennerlind, Mercantilism Reimagined; Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, 66–­91, esp. 72–­74, and 130–­31; Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy; McKeon, Secret History, esp. 7–­10, 24–­26, 380–­81. 16. Since the sixteenth-­century term “civil” described the system of Roman law, as well as retaining close associations with the key Latin words of classical political thought, civis and civitas, there are important differences between early modern notions of “civil society” and modern theories, which tend to regard “civil society” as a distinct domain of everyday life that has been separated from politics and define “politics,” in turn, as a narrower and more technical term for the actions of the state, its administrative agencies, parliamentary representation and party organizations, and elections. One of Gierke’s central projects was to trace how this movement came about; see Natural Law, esp. 1:45–­47 and the many references in Gierke’s detailed notes. The same problem (although from an entirely different perspective) is central to Arendt, Human Condition, and Habermas, Structural Transformation; see also McKeon, Secret History, 3–­48, esp. 3–­4, 12; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, which emphasizes the connections between commercial activity and political identity in the “city commonwealths”; Withington, Society, esp. 113–­16; Harris, “From Richard Hooker to Harold Laski”; Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 32–­43, 76–­85, 96–­109; Pincus, “The State and Civil Society in Early Modern England.” On the limits of a modern notion of civil society, see esp. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political T heory. 17. My arguments are particularly indebted to Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, esp. 92–­106, 279–­ 314; Sacks, “The Greed of  Judas”; Sacks, “The Countervailing of Benefits”; Sacks, “Private Profit and Public Good”; Kaye, Economy and Nature; Grassby, Business Community, esp. 29–­52; Muldrew, Economy of Obligation; Sullivan, Rhetoric of Credit; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1–­30. 18. Politics, 7.8.2. 19. Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, esp. 145–­46, 150–­51, 287–­307, 355–­62; Glimp, Increase and Multiply, 1–­11, 16–­24, 27–­36; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, 22–­25; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 25–­27; Withington, Society, 149–­51, 167–­68. 20. Laski, “The Sovereignty of the State,” in Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, 1–­25 (1), where Laski quotes and responds to Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 140–­43. 21. On Smith’s “political economy” see Wood, “Cicero and the Political Thought of the Early English Renaissance”; Wood, “Foundations of Political Economy”; Wood, Foundations of Political Economy, 191–­235; Glimp, Increase and Multiply, 1–­36; Kitch, Political Economy, 9–­10. 22. See Black, Guilds and Civil Society, esp. 3–­31, 56–­58, 66–­75, 76–­85, 123–­28; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 1–­15, 16–­48, 51–­84; Withington, Society, esp. 139–­141, 149–­51. Ironically, the borough of Walden, home to the Smith family, received a grant of incorporation in 1549, the very year in which Smith wrote his Discourse; this corporation replaced the existing religious fraternity and created a new structure of civic governance, in which Smith’s brother John (“the chief instrument and procurer” of the grant, according to Strype, Life, 4), his father, and his uncle were all named to office. See Dewar, Sir  Thomas Smith, 34. 23. Two centuries later, Adam Smith would elaborate upon the same sentiment in nearly identical terms in Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, book 1, ch. 10, pt. 2, 135–­59.

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notes to pages 44–48

24. On the several meanings of the term “company” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from formal institutions (including corporations) to informal groups, see Withington, Society, 106–­33, esp. 113–­14; Withington, “Company and Sociability in Early Modern England,” 297–­303. 25. See Glimp, Increase and Multiply, esp. 2–­6. On changing structures of governance and the formation of the state in the sixteenth century, see inter alia Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State; Hindle, T he State and Social Change, emphasizing developments in sixteenth-­century law, ju­ risdiction, and local institutions; Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England; and the papers collected in Hindle, “When and What Was the State?”. 26. On ideas of “public discussion” and an emerging “public sphere” in the sixteenth century, see Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, esp. 134–­61; Habermas, Structural Transformation, still a foundational study; Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England”; Pincus, “The State and Civil Society”; McKeon, Secret History, 43–­48 (esp. 45), 69–­84 (esp. 75, 83), 106–­9; Withington, “Public Discourse”; Wilson and Yachnin, introduction to Making Publics. 27. Dewar, Sir  Thomas Smith, 104–­5. 28. We know the date and circumstances of Smith’s reflections because he tells us so: “as Englande standeth, and is governed at this day the xxviij of  March Anno 1565.” Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Alston, 142, which follows the first edition of 1583; I have also consulted the edition from surviving manuscripts by Dewar. 29. G. Haddoni . . . lucubrationes . . . (1567), 305–­7, translation by Alston, in his introduction to Smith, De Republica Anglorum, xiii–­xiv. 30. Dewar, Sir  Thomas Smith, 16. Armitage, Ideological Origins, 50n77, cites a marginal notation of Gabriel Harvey’s that suggests Harvey had read Smith’s passage: “ We live in Smith’s Republic, not in More’s Utopia or in Plato’s Republic or the kingdom of Xenophon. The profit of such fantastical republics can only be equally fantastical” ( Vivimus in Smithi Rep: non in Mori Utopia; aut Platonis Politeia; aut regno Xenophontis. Phantasticarum Rerumpublicarum Usus tantummodò phantasticus). 31. In Smith’s 1566 library list, history constitutes by far the largest category, with more than twice as many titles as theology or civil law. 32. See, for example, Mosse, “Change and Continuity in the Tudor Constitution”; Collinson, “De Republica Anglorum; or, History with the Politics Put Back”; Collinson, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I”; McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth,198–­234; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, calling Smith’s work “the constitutional bed partner of Elizabethan political economy” (37) and describing the reception of Aristotelian categories into the English corporate system (66–­67); Withington, Society, 130, 149–­50. 33. Aristotles Politiqves, or Discovrses of Government (1598), III.6, 151; compare “The Argument or Contents of the First Booke of Government”: “Afterward by increasing many households into a street or hamlet, and many streets into a Citie, Corporation, or Commonweale: he sheweth the same to haue a naturall constitution, and to be the most perfect companie, and the end thereof to be of the best sort, as which comprehendeth all the other endes, and whereunto they be all referred” (Ciiiir ). 34. See Maitland’s introduction to Gierke, Political T heories of the Middle Age, xxii–­xxiv; Michaud-­Quantin, Universitas, 64–­69, 70–­75; Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, 13–­16, 34–­37, 48; Black, “Individual and Society,” 588–­606, esp. 589, 591, 598–­604; Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 20, 37, 78, 84–­85, 151–­52; Merlin-­Kajman, Public et littérature en France, 91–­101; and Withington, Society, 102–­33, the best recent discussion of the term. 35. See Cicero, De Re Publica, 1.25: “a commonwealth [res publica] is the property of a people [ populi ]. But a people is not any collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good [multitudinis iuris consensus et utilitatis communione sociatus],” cited by both Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 54, and Wood, “Cicero,” 191.

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36. Withington, Society, esp. 107–­22. 37. Ibid., 108; in a detailed analysis of printed title pages from the period, Withington observes that incorporated “societies” and “companies” appear far more frequently than unincorporated ones, peaking in the 1550s and then again in the 1610s and 1680s, and that, among these incorporated uses, “society” was the most frequent term, especially before the end of the seventeenth century (115, 120). 38. See Michaud-­Quantin, Universitas, 156–­66, on the classical and the medieval-­Christian sense of the term communio, including its Eucharistic meaning; he observes that thirteenth-­century jurists distinguished the commonness of communio, or association without contract, from the regulated commonality of the societas (158–­59) and that the term became used more generally for “a movement of spontaneous association that realizes itself outside the institutional frameworks that exist for creating such associations anew” (160). See also Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 49, 58, 64, with additional bibliography. 39. On the fisc as a corporate idea, see Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 172–­92. Smith adds a topographic sense: “the stable place to account for the revenues of the crowne . . . a place stable, continual and appointed for to recken and account” (76). 40. Again Smith downplays the corporate dimension of the yeoman as a distinctive group within the guilds and companies of the period; see Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 219–­32. 41. On the pluralism of early modern law, see Cormack, Power to Do Justice, esp. 2–­3; MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession, 25–­31; Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures; Benton, Search for Sovereignty. 42. Compare Watts, “Looking for the State”: “It seems that, inasmuch as an English state existed in this period, it was still, d’après Michael Clanchy and Rees Davies, principally a written, recorded and routine affair” (267).

chapter three 1. Strype, Life, 56–­57. 2. Ibid., 37. 3. Gasquet and Bishop, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer, 399; MacCulloch, Thomas Cramner, 404–­8. 4. Gasquet and Bishop, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer, manuscript notes from the debate, appendix V, 395–­443; see also MacCulloch, Thomas Cramner, 405; Richardson, “Cramner and the Analysis of Eucharistic Doctrine”; Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation, 106–­ 10, 265–­69, a helpful summary of the Eucharistic theology of the Thirty-­Nine Articles of 1563. 5. Gasquet and Bishop, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer, 174–­75. 6. “And Sir Thomas Smith do call them together, and to be amongst them,” preferably “at Sir Thomas Smith’s lodgings in Canon Row.” Although one of the surviving copies of the “Device” indicates that it has been taken “Out of a book of Sir Thomas Smith,” it is not in Smith’s hand; see Gee, T he Elizabethan Prayer-­Book and Ornaments, 5–­19, 23–­31, 67–­77, printing the “Device” on 195–­202 (200–­202); Strype, Life, 56–­57; Neale, “The Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity”; Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation, 81–­119, 130–­34; Jones, Faith by Statute, 22–­25, 47–­50; Salt, Church and State, 67–­68. 7. In July, Smith was named to the new Court of High Commission charged with enforcing the recent Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity and the associated injunctions, and Strype (Life, 58–­59) conjectures that Smith also “had a great hand, and was a special director” in a set of June 1559 orders for the enforcement of the acts, which was to be carried out by every justice of the peace. 8. Gee, Elizabethan Prayer Book, 236–­52 (237, 241, 239); on the place of the Book of Common Prayer in English literary history, see esp. Targoff, Common Prayer. 9. Gee, Elizabethan Prayer Book, 197.

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notes to pages 61–66

10. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 145, 329; I draw also on the classic account of fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­century English religious life by Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, esp. “Corporate Christians” (131–­54). 11. Drewett’s declaration is calendared among a collection of Puritan documents from ca. 1593 in Peel, T he Seconde Parte of a Register, no. 100, 1:152–­53; it is identical to an earlier document from ca. 1567–­71 (nos. 32–­33), 1:55–­59; cited and discussed by Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 89–­90. 12. Cited and discussed in Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 144–­45. 13. Ibid., esp. 21–­22, 322–­29, 333–­82. 14. Ibid., 293, 302. 15. Collinson, T he Religion of Protestants, 251, responding to the arguments of Hill in “Individual and Communities.” See also Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, describing the Presbyterian movement as seeking to solve “problems that are fundamental to the organization of communities as old as the Greek polis or a medieval cathedral chapter, as contemporary as the modern industrial corporation or university department” (298). On the implicit political philosophy of Cartwright and other Puritan writers more generally, see Pearson, Church & State. 16. All citations from Hooker’s Laws are from T he Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, by book, chapter, and section number (and page where relevant). On Travers see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 271, 369; Hill, “The Evolution of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” 118–­29; Archer, Richard Hooker, 9–­13; Shuger, “Faith and Assurance.” 17. See Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 145–­238; on Hooker’s corporatism see esp. Eccleshall, Order and Reason, 59, 62–­71, 133–­36, 140, 145–­49; Munz, Place of Hooker, 82–­89 (esp. 83); Turrell, “Uniformity and Common Prayer.” Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 269–­84, either overlooks or mischaracterizes the corporatist tradition of argument that organizes the Laws (e.g. 267). 18. Notable discussions of Hooker within the tradition of political theology and literary history include Shuger, Habits of Thought, esp. 17–­46; Shuger, “Society Supernatural”; Shuger, Political T heologies in Shakespeare’s England, 46–­47, 123–­24; Targoff, Common Prayer, 47–­56. Hammill, Mosaic Constitution, mentions Hooker only once and in passing (237), but his study of political theology in Spinoza, Hobbes, and Harrington, in particular, is directly relevant to my discussion in what follows. On Hooker as a political thinker, see esp. Allen, History of Political Thought, 184–­98; Munz, Place of Hooker, 1–­19, 68–­111, 112–­46; Kearney, “Richard Hooker”; D’Entrèves, Medieval Contribution, 105–­42; Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society’ ”; Hanson, Kingdom to Commonwealth, 265–­80; Eccleshall, Order and Reason, 126–­50; Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 197–­ 213; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 146–­53. 19. See esp. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 72–­85; Lake, Moderate Puritans, 77–­92; Pearson, Church & State, esp. 1–­8, 9–­40, 56–­64. 20. Pref. ch. 2. Hooker seizes upon the term “instituted” in his discussion of Calvin (pref. 2.7–­ 8), and uses the term to describe God’s “institution” or “establishment” of natural law (I.3.2). On Hooker’s relationship to Calvin and Calvinism, see Poole, Supernatural Environments, 152–­56, with further bibliography. 21. The problem is central to Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, in which Hooker appears as one of the last spokespersons for a worldview that regards church and state not as two separate societies but as a single society in which authority is differentiated between its ecclesiastical and its civil forms; see esp. 108–­9, 183, 190–­91, 214–­16, 218, where Figgis attributes to William Warburton the first modern articulation of a theory of church and state as distinct “corporate personalities.” Figgis is building on Gierke, who, surprisingly, never discussed Hooker, but see Gierke, Political T heories of the Middle Age, esp. 9–­30, 49–­61; Forte, “Richard Hooker’s Theory of Law,” 155–­56; Munz, Place of Hooker, 72–­78. 22. Compare McKeon, Secret History, xix–­xx, who does not cite Hooker but who nevertheless makes the essential point using language identical to him: “In ‘traditional’ cultures, the differential

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relationship between public and private modes of experience is conceived as a distinction that does not admit of separation. In ‘modernity,’ the public and private are separated out from each other” (xix); also Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, on the way the “sacred corporate person” (7) became an imaginative template for seventeenth-­century notions of the public understood as a practice of collective truth production; and Merlin-­Kajman, Public et littérature, 59–­87, citing Aquinas on the multitude’s lack of “being” (61) and following Kantorowicz in describing the movement from a mystical ontology of the political body to the juridical fiction of the king as “public person” (70–­73). 23. On Hooker’s Aristotelianism see Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 146–­53; Munz, Place of Hooker, 101–­4, 112–­46; Cargill Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’ ” 36–­37, 58; Hanson, Kingdom to Commonwealth, 269; on Aristotelianism in Puritanism, see Pearson, Church & State, 133–­47. 24. See esp. Harris, “From Richard Hooker to Harold Laski.” 25. On Hooker’s philosophy of law see Forte, “Hooker’s Theory of Law”; Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’ ” 22–­35; Munz, Place of Hooker, 49–­59; Hanson, Kingdom to Commonwealth, 266–­67; Kirby, “Richard Hooker ’s Theory of Natural Law”; Poole, Supernatural Environments, 153–­56; and compare the rich discussion of natural law in Shannon, Accommodated Animal, 38–­53. 26. Forte, “Hooker’s Theory of Law,” 137, 139–­40, traces it to Aquinas. 27. King’s Two Bodies, 304. 28. See esp. Munz, Place of Hooker, 55–­56, 63–­64, 68–­69, 93–­96; Shuger, “Supernatural So­ ciety”; Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 160–­62, 49–­53 (on Cartwright and Whitgift). 29. See Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 176–­82, and compare Rust, “Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum,  ” 102–­21. 30. See Lake,   Anglicans and Puritans?, 164–­76, esp. 164, 168; Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 276; Targoff, Common Prayer, 14–­56, esp. 47–­56, pointing out a shift in the 1552 prayer book from an individual “I” to a “collective we” that results in a new act of “corporate speech” (28–­29; cf. 33, 48–­49). 31. Targoff, Common Prayer, 14–­56, esp. 46–­56, on Hooker’s “public” church; Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 164–­76. 32. I will call this the Laws’s “implicit” or “bibliographic” public, in order to distinguish it from the conceptual definition of the “public” that is one of Hooker’s political-­theological signatures; we glimpse it in the way the Laws presumes a community of readers who will respond to Hooker’s own moderate, self-­consciously “reasonable” arguments, in Hooker’s own polemical self-­awareness, in his citation habits and his ventriloquizing effects. These moments allow us to connect Hooker ’s own conceptual arguments about the nature of the public to the phenomenon of the Laws itself as a “public” book composed, printed, and circulated as part of a coordinated policy effort on the part of Burghley, Sandys, and others; see Sisson, T he Judicious Marriage of Mr. Hooker; Hill, “The Evolution of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity”; Edelen, “Publishing History,” xiii–­ xxi. On notions of the early modern public sphere, see the works cited in chapter 2 above and the coda, below. 33. Compare the arguments of  Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, esp. 123–­24, 159–­86, many of which turn out to be germane to a discussion of the notion of the “public” in Hooker; the Laws is a good example of how in the late sixteenth century, the “public” as “a special kind of virtual social object,” in the words of  Warner (56), derives to a significant degree out of political-­theological discourse and the corporatist ideas it employs; also Merlin-­Kajman, Public et littérature, 59–­87; Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, esp. 5–­9. 34. Hooker has again sharpened the point; see Pearson, Church & State, 9–­40, esp. 19. 35. See Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’ ” 48–­49, comparing Hooker’s broadly Aristotelian notion of sovereignty as residing in law to Bodin’s theory of the sovereign as

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a ruler who remains above or beyond the law; also Allen, History of Political Thought, observing the surprising absence of Bodin’s Les Six Livres de la République in the Laws (185), which Hooker cites only once, in its 1586 Latin edition. 36. Skinner, “State of Princes,” 389–­93. 37. On this problem see the recent and clear account in Hammill, Mosaic Constitution, esp. 4–­ 7, emphasizing its inevitable theological dimension; much of Hammill’s argument is relevant to what follows. 38. See Forte, “Hooker’s Theory of Law,” 146–­47, 152; Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’ ” cites the crucial passage (34) but overlooks its corporate dimension. On the question of consent Hooker found himself making arguments that were nearly identical to those of Cartwright; see Pearson, Church & State, 42–­51, 2–­3. 39. Forte, “Hooker’s Theory of Law,” 145–­47. 40. See Eccleshall, Order and Reason, 47–­75, 126–­50, esp. 136; Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’ ” esp. 7–­12, 21–­22, 40–­43, 50–­52, 64–­65; D’Entrèves, Medieval Contribution, 105–­42, esp. 125–­30; Allen, Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, 190–­92; Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics, 153–­54; Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth, 269. Scholarship has emphasized Hooker’s debts to Aristotle and Aquinas and to the corporatist tradition in civil law, especially as this was synthesized in Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, although Hooker cites the Defensor Pacis only once; see Munz, Place of Hooker, 93–­101, 199–­204; Previté-­Orton, “Marsilius of Padua”; Kearney, “Richard Hooker,” 307–­11; Thompson, “The Source of Hooker’s Knowledge of Marsilius of Padua.” The Defensor Pacis had been translated into English in 1535 by William Marshall, who had already presented the work as a defense of the royal supremacy and of the English church against Rome; see Lockwood, “Marsilius of Padua.”

chapter four 1. See esp. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures; Benton, Search for Sovereignty; Pagden, Lords of All the World; Canny, Origins of Empire; Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession; Stern, Company-­State. 2. Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 149–­55, adding to Strype, Life, 100–­5. On Smith’s interest in stills, medicinal “spirits,” and “experiments,” see Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 139, 140, 142. 3. Carr, Select Charters, 20–­28 (20), includes the first charter for the society (4 December 1572) and notes to revisions in the second (28 January 1575). On the industrial projects of the period, see Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects. 4. Smith to Burghley, 28 January 1574/5. 5. Pettus, Fodinae Regales (1670); Scott, Constitution and Finance, 2:383–­405, 413–­29; Price, English Patents of Monopoly, 49–­60; Carr, introduction to Select Charters, esp. lxi, xciii–­civ; Donald, Elizabethan Monopolies; Rees, Industry before the Industrial Revolution, 2:367–­424; Ash, Power, Knowledge, and Expertise, 19–­54; Harkness, Jewel House, 142–­80 (discussing Smith’s society on 173–­74). 6. The distinction is made in Price, English Patents of Monopoly, 3–­7, 35–­37. 7. Rees, Industry before the Industrial Revolution, 2:367–­70, 378, 380. 8. “Speech in the House against a bill for the Explanations of the Common Law in certain cases of Letters Patents,” L&L, 3:26–­27; cf. L&L 3:29, making the same point in a speech the following day. 9. Price, English Patents of Monopoly, 21–­22, 139 (the Statute of Monopolies, article 9, which explicitly exempts municipal, craft, and trade corporations from the statute despite its earlier invocation of “bodies politic or corporate whatsoever”), 155 (citing Bacon’s speech); Carr, introduction to Select Charters, lxii–­lxviii; Unwin, Gilds and Companies, 317–­18; Gadd and Wallis, “Reaching beyond the City Wall,” 302.

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10. Pettus, Fodinae Regales, 20–­21, 29. 11. See Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 29–­44, 45–­65; Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 544; Mac­ Millan, Sovereignty and Possession, 32–­41, 79–­99; Cormack, Power to Do Justice, 136–­40. 12. For Smith’s Irish venture, see esp. Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith”; Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 156–­70; Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 84–­88; Morgan, “Colonial Venture”; Thompson, “Sir  Thomas Smith’s Forgotten English Colony”; Glimp, Increase and Multiply, 15–­16; Withington, Society, 204–­ 15; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, 35–­40; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 18, 64–­65; Cormack, Power to Do Justice, 134–­36. 13. Smith to Cecil, 7 November 1565; quoted in Dewar, Sir  Thomas Smith, 157. 14. Quoted in Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 546. 15. Kingsford et al., Historical Manuscripts Commission Report, 2:12–­15 (12). 16. Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 548. 17. Ibid., 555. 18. The offer and order giuen forth by Sir  Thomas Smyth (1572); A Letter sent by I. B. Gentleman (1572). Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 551 and n. 37, describes the documents as “the first printed publicity for an English colonial project” and perhaps even as “the first direct printed publicity in England for any business venture.” 19. Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 551 and 551n33. See also William Piers to Fitzwilliam, 3 January 1572, announcing the arrival of “news in print, that Sir  Thomas Smyth hath gyft of part of Ulster and the Ardes, and his sonne is comming over with a grete nomber of men to possesse and inhabyte the same”; Piers to Fitzwilliam, 8 February 1572; Fitzwilliam to the queen, 27 June 1572, enclosing a copy of the book to her, and 28 June 1572; Smith’s defense of his actions in a letter to the council, 16 April 1572; Smith to Cecil, 10 April 1572. 20. Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 556. 21. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 87; Elizabeth to Fitzwilliam, August 1572. 22. Brett seems also to have been closely associated with a separate colonization venture; see Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 79. 23. Nicholls, T he Irish Fiants of the Tudor Sovereigns, 2:275, nos. 2149 and 2150. 24. Smith to Fitzwilliam, 17 July 1572; quoted by Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 547, who has shown how important the example of Roman colonial policy was to Smith; Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire, 47–­51, noting the possible influence of Utopia on Smith’s Irish project (50) as well as its neo-­Roman roots. 25. Smith to Fitzwilliam, 31 July 1574; quoted by Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 547. Quinn attributes the phrase to Caesar and Cicero, but Smith may well have Livy’s Roman History in mind (see 9.28 and 9.46); see Jardine and Grafton, “Studied for Action,” esp. 40–­42, 51–­52, 54–­59, an account of the staged debate over Livy’s first decade at Hill Hall among Smith, his son Thomas, Humphrey Gilbert (Smith’s partner in the Society for the New Art and active in several Irish ventures), and Walter Haddon (to whom Smith had first announced De Republica Anglorum) in late 1570 or early 1571, just as they were planning the Irish venture. 26. “Offices necessarie” and “Orders set owt by Sr  Thomas Smyth.” 27. “Offices necessarie.” 28. Ibid.; Smith to Thomas Smith, 18 May 1572, quoted in Quinn, “Sir  Thomas Smith,” 557n89. 29. “Orders set owt by Sr Thomas Smyth.” 30. Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 547, 557–­58. 31. Smith to Thomas Smith, 20 May 1572 (SP 70/146 ff. 79–­80); quoted in Quinn, “Sir  Thomas Smith,” 547. 32. “Orders set owt.” Compare Smith’s letter to Thomas of 20 May; Quinn, “Sir  Thomas Smith,” 547. 33. Quoted in Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 139. 34. Smith to Thomas Smith, 20 May 1572; Quinn, “Sir  Thomas Smith,” 553 n 53. 35. “Orders set owt by Sr  Thomas Smyth.”

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36. MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession, 31–­33, 89–­120, has shown how claims to cultivation and “plantation” were central to Elizabethan territorial claims in the New World; Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith,” 548n19, 558, points out that the grants to Humphrey Gilbert in Newfoundland were remarkably similar in structure to those that Smith had received, and Gilbert had been active in the Irish military campaigns since the mid-­1560s. 37. White, “Rowland White’s ‘Discors Touching Ireland,’ ” 452 (my emphasis). White was an Ulster native who became a Dublin merchant and viewed himself as a loyal subject of the Crown, and Smith assumed the wardship of  White’s son John upon his death at the end of September 1572, just as the Irish venture was getting under way; see Canny’s introduction to the “Discors.” 38. See SP 63/9/83 ff. 179–­84 (f. 181r), as discussed by Canny in Elizabethan Conquest, 70–­76. 39. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 79–­80. 40. Kingsford et al., Historical Manuscripts Commission Report 2:87–­91 (88). On Piers, see Canny, Making Ireland British, 85–­91. 41. Kingsford et al., Historical Manuscripts Commission Report, 2:90. 42. See esp. Benton, Search for Sovereignty; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; Stern, Company-­State, esp. 83–­99; Withington, Society, esp. 167, 227–­31. 43. For the details of Hakluyt’s life, see Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, especially the valuable chronology (1:263–­331); Hakluyt, Original Writings; Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography; Watson, Richard Hakluyt; Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages; Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise. Sacks, “Hakluyt’s Navigations in Time,” explores the implications of Hakluyt’s ecclesiastical career on his geographical work. 44. Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook 1:278, 281. 45. See Turner, “Book, List, Word.” 46. See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 181–­87. 47. Hakluyt, Original Writings, 1:139–­46, 163–­64 (143); Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, 1:272. 48. Divers Voyages (1582), ¶1r–­v; Hakluyt, Original Writings 1:176. 49. “Analysis sev resolutio perpetua in octo libros Politicorum Aristotelis” (ca. 1584), presentation copy for Elizabeth; a second copy, dated 1588 and in Hakluyt’s hand (BL MS Sloan 1982), was probably used as a practical working text by Hakluyt and his Oxford students. See Ryan, “Richard Hakluyt’s Voyage into Aristotle,” 74–­79; Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, 1:280; Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism, 57–­58n164; Sacks, “Hakluyt’s Navigations in Time,” 36, 40, 56. 50. On the importance of the “Analysis” to the political imagination of the Discourse, see Armitage, Ideologies of Empire, 72–­76. 51. Only a single copy of the “Discourse” survives in manuscript, now in the New York Public Library; it is printed in Original Writings, 2:211–­26 and has been edited by Quinn and Quinn in a full facsimile edition as Discourse of Western Planting. On its date and purpose, see Hakluyt, Original Writings, 2:343–­44; Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, 1:284–­87; Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, xvi–­xvii, xx–­xxi. 52. All citations are to Hakluyt, T he Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1927–­28), hereafter PN. 53. PN, 2:305, 308; Willan, Early History, 1–­18, 19–­47. Despite the mention of a “grant of corporation” in the 1553 “ordinances” drafted by Sebastian Cabot, Willan claims that the company did not fully incorporate until the grant of 26 February 1555 (6–­10 and 6n5); see also Carey, “Hakluyt’s Instructions,” 171–­74. 54. PN, 3:84, 86–­87; Willan, Early History, 7. 55. A transcription of the first company charter and a history of its foundation may be found in Barbour,  Jamestown Voyages, 1:13–­34; see also Davis, Corporations, 2:160–­69. Barbour calls Hakluyt “the most prominent” (1:15) of the original four patentees named for the southern Virginia colony; on Hakluyt’s holdings, see Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, 1:324. The company’s formal incorporation appears only as of the second charter (23 May 1609), but Barbour suggests that the Russia

notes to pages 99–103 

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Company and the East India Company provided models for the first 1606 charter (1:14–­15). For the company’s second charter, see the Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century /va02.asp, sourced from Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions. 56. Willan, Early History, 19–­21; cf. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, book 5, ch. 1, 733–­34; Holdsworth, History of English Law, 4:319n5, 8:206–­7, 9:206; Davis, Corporations, 2:153. 57. Scott, Constitution and Finance, 1:1–­104, esp. 17–­21, 44–­45, 59–­63, and 2:36–­54; Heckscher, Mercantilism, 2:326–­455, esp. 373–410. Hakluyt, PN 2:284 and 2:46, attests to the importance of the corporate name in cases of debt. 58. Davis, Corporations, 2:85, 107, 110–­11, 156. 59. PN, 2:201–­2 (my emphasis); see also the captain’s and master’s oaths administered by Hugh Willoughby for the company, PN, 2:215–­16. 60. Cicero, De Officiis, 1.40.142–­43, 2.9.33, 1.4.11. Compare  John Dee’s account of  King Edgar’s voyage in AD 973 in his General and rare memorial pertayning to the perfect arte of navigation (1577), which Hakluyt excerpts (PN, 1:16–­24), using the language of providence mixed with classical prudence in terms drawn directly from De officiis. The accounts often emphasize the virtuous and chivalric qualities of the men chosen to lead commercial expeditions; see Clement Adams’s account of the Russia Company’s 1553 expedition led by Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancelor, as told by Chancelor and printed in PN, 2:239–­78. See also Sherman, John Dee, 131–­37, 141–­147, 152–­ 62; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America, esp. 20–­57; Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 168–­81. On mercantile systems of value and literary writing in the period, see esp. Sullivan, Rhetoric of Credit; Foreman, “Transformations of Value”; Foreman, Tragicomic Redemptions, esp. 1–­6, 13–­16, 96–­97, 114–­21, 147–­56; Kitch, Political Economy, esp. 19–­74. 61. See Fuller, “Making Something,” 11–­38, esp. 19, identifying “a kind of corporate authorship” as typical of Richard Eden’s Decades of the New World (1555), an important predecessor and source for the Principal Navigations; Fuller, Voyages in Print, observing that if travel writing “ ‘made’ individuals, it was to make them into large corporate or national bodies” (11; cf. 15, 141–­74, esp. 142); Sacks, “Hakluyt’s Navigations in Time,” 31; Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 153; Barbour, “A Multinational Corporation”; and my further discussion in Turner, “Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego.” 62. De Man, “Autobiography as De-­Facement,” 67–­81; de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” 239–­62; Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion”; Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law”;  Johnson, Persons and Things. 63. A major point of Fuller, Voyages in Print, esp. 1–­15; also Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 171–­ 81; see also Barbour, Third Voyage Journals. 64. See the brief description of the “coines, weights, and measures used in Russia” written in 1554 for the company by John Hasse (PN, 2:273–­78). 65. See item 20 of Cabot’s 1553 ordinances (PN, 2:201); also the 1556 instructions for taking inventory and assembling the stock in its different forms (PN, 2:317–­22). 66. See OED, “utter,” I.1.a (“To put [goods, wares, etc.] forth or upon the market”); II.5.a (“To send forth as a sound; to give out in an audible voice”); II.6.a (“To give utterance to [words, speech, a sentence, etc.]”). 67. “Articles conceived and determined . . . for the second voyage, 1555” (PN, 2:283–­84). See also item 12 (PN, 2:284), item 7 of the original “ordinances” for the first voyage (PN, 2:197), and the “instructions” to the pursers for the third voyage of 1556, esp. items 1 and 2 (PN, 2:317–­18). 68. See esp. Harris, “Long-­Distance Corporations,” an excellent discussion that shares many of my concerns and also turns to the work of Latour; also Ash’s discussion of the “merchant advisor” in “ ‘A Note and Caveat for the Merchant,’ ” esp. 9–­12, 13–­21, 27–­29. 69. See my further discussion of “translation” as a way of understanding Hakluyt’s materialism in Turner, “Book, List, Word.” 70. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 174–­75, makes a similar point.

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71. Discourse of Western Planting, ch. 16, p. 79, ll. 1883–­86; the entire passage is relevant. 72. Dedication of Virginia Richly Valued to the Virginia Company adventurers, A4r (15 April 1609); Quinn, Hakluyt Handbook, 1:323; Original Writings, 2:499–­503. 73. OED, “translate,” II.3; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Holland. 74. See Latour, “Circulating Reference,” 24–­79, 87–­98, 311; Latour, “Drawing Things Together”; Latour, Science in Action, 117, 129; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 119; Latour, Aramis, 33, 42, 207–­11. When the primary purpose of translation involves commercial value, it describes the commodification process (as Marx also understood). 75. Fuller, Voyages in Print, has demonstrated the point nicely, as has Harris, “Long-­Distance Corporations,” 272–­74, 293–­94. 76. I take the term from Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” 92–­ 94; for Barthes, functions are syntagmatic and metonymic relations through which the significance of an initial event is completed by a second event further on in the narrative (purchasing a revolver and using it; picking up the telephone and setting it down). 77. Hasse concludes his account with a final sentence that marks this exact threshold: “There are many other trifles in Russia, as sope, mats, &c but I thinke there will bee no great account made of them” (PN, 2:278). We should remember that the so-­called “market” does not precede the corporation but results from its activity; the “market” exists only in relation to specific corporate ventures, which create their own economies in their wake as they pursue their goals; cf. Latour, Aramis, 133, 181, 183. 78. Among many examples, see Hasse’s account, PN, 2:276. Killingworth’s (the company’s first agent in Moscow) letter of 27 November 1555 includes even more detailed information (PN, 2:291–­97). 79. As in the account of Master Steven Burrough in 1556 (PN, 2:324) and many other passages. 80. On the problem of “value” in Hakluyt’s narratives, see Fuller, “Making Something,” and Fuller, “Writing the Long-­Distance Voyage.” 81. PN, 1:195; see also items 2 and 3 in Cabot’s ordinances. 82. Barbour, “A Multinational Corporation”; Stern, Company-­State; Benton, Search for Sovereignty, esp. 279–­99. 83. Helgerson argues that “insistence on the nation as ultimate actor is what distinguishes” Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations from its European models; see his influential discussion in Forms of Nationhood, 151–­55 (152), 163–­91, stressing its fundamentally economic purpose and noting “a certain ambiguity” and “passive constructions” around the question of agency in Hakluyt’s narratives, which blend monarch and nation together (165). Given Hakluyt’s own title for the Principal Navigations, Helgerson’s claim seems indisputable; nevertheless, as elsewhere, my aim is to show how corporate structures and forms of expression made this project of nation building possible, since it seems equally if not more accurate to characterize the corporate person and its representatives as the primary actors of the Principal Navigations. 84. On this point see Benton, Search for Sovereignty; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 150–­52. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, adopts a networked approach to the problem of the “State” that significantly advances our understanding of political power; nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that if “political power is distinctive in being territorially based, functionally limited and backed by the threat of legitimate physical force” (9), then all three qualities were also characteristic of the power wielded by early modern corporations; see also Withington, Society, 134–­68 (esp. 155), 216–­27; and Stern, Company-­State, esp. 3–­15, both arguing a similar point. 85. Skelton, “Hakluyt’s Maps,” 67–­68; Wallis, “Edward Wright and the 1599 World Map,” with an image of the map reproduced on 62–­63. 86. Compare Harris, “Long-­Distance Corporations,” 274–­79, and Harris, “Networks of  Travel, Correspondence, and Exchange”; also Vitkus, “The New Globalism”; and Vitkus, “ ‘ The Common Market of all the World’.”

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87. Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; Withington, Society, 204–­ 7; Davis, Corporations, 2:197–­98, 206–­8. 88. I cite the Virginia charters from the Avalon Project (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject _menus/statech.asp), by paragraph. 89. See Malcolm, “Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company.” 90. Compare Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, esp. 208–­31, 351–­87; DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, esp. 8–­25.

chapter five 1. Greg, Commentary, 74; my epigraph comes from vii. 2. In 1589 the players had ignored an order by the mayor to desist playing and had spoken to him “in very Contemptuous manner,” he wrote (Greg, Commentary, 69). Sending players on tour as a way of placating city authorities was not unprecedented; see Malone Society Collections (MSC ), I.1, 51–­52. 3. MSC, I.1, 46–­48; I have excerpted from two separate letters from the Lord Mayor, written on 12 April and 17 June 1580, respectively. 4. MSC, I.1, 50. 5. Ibid., I.1, 51, 53. 6. Ibid., I.1, 54, 55. 7. Ibid., II.4, 59. 8. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 1:269–­307, a classic overview; McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 2–­3, 8–­9, 11–­17, 18–­36, querying the “city vs. court” narrative; Mullaney, T he Place of the Stage, 1–­59. 9. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, appendixes D.x (263–­64) and D.xxiv (269–­71); Ingram, Business of Playing, 84–­85; Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 8, 29–­30, 36–­40. 10. Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 45; Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns, 322–­30; Tittler, Architecture and Power, 139–­50; McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 170–­88. 11. When charters of reincorporation are included, 247; see Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 18, 10, 16, 38; Tittler, T he Reformation and the Towns, esp. 87–­96, 161–­76, 188–­95; Tittler, Townspeople and Nation, 23–­29, 46–­48; Tittler, Architecture and Power, 4–­5, 84–­85, 89–­97; also Shrank, “Civility and the City.” 12. Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 8, 40. 13. Ibid., 40, 56; Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns, 89–­90; Tittler, Architecture and Power, 84–­85. 14. Micheli, Butcher, and Manship are all cited by Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 57–­ 58, 11. 15. Compare the discussion of guilds and urban culture in Europe in Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 44–­85. 16. Pearl, London and the Puritan Revolution, 9–­44, esp. 31–­37, and 45–­68, on the tensions between City and Crown during the 1630s over the latter’s efforts to form a new, separate incorporation of the city suburbs and liberties, some already under the City’s jurisdiction; Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 121–­72. On the role of the guilds and companies, see Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 199–­234; Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 22–­36, 173–­83, 184–­284 (esp. 184–­88); Archer, Pursuit of Stability; the essays collected in Gadd and Wallis, Guilds, Society, & Economy in London; Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 160–­212; Shrank, “Civility and the City,” 412; Withington, Politics of Commonweal, 16. 17. Kathman, “The Rise of Commercial Playing,” 25. Kathman observes that the “earliest antitheatrical efforts recorded” in the records of the Court of Common Council and the Court of Aldermen is an April 1542 proclamation by the Lord Mayor “against playing in company halls” (20).

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18. MSC, I.1, 68–­69 (1592). See Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:287–­88, 294; the 1574 act is printed in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, app. D.xxxii (273–­76), and MSC, I.2, 175–­79, from its reissue in 1584; see also Ingram, Business of Playing, 83–­91, 120–­49. 19. See MSC, I.1 79–­80, a 1597 letter of complaint from the Lord Mayor and aldermen to the Privy Council. 20. See especially McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, xii; the essays collected in Ostovich, Syme, and Griffen, Locating the Queen’s Men; Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels; Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans; Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites; Stern, Rehearsal; Stern, Documents of Performance; Van Es, Shakespeare in Company. 21. This is precisely the question raised in Ingram, “What Kind of Future?,” 220–­21. The problem is whether the company can have a biography as a corporate body and not only as a collection of individuals; see also Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce, 46–­47, making a similar point. Picking up on the early modern sense of the term “company,” Gurr, Shakespeare Company, writes that “originally a ‘company’ meant an assembly of people, a community. . . . An Elizabethan company was a gathering of like-­minded people, a theatre audience or a group of players conjoined to produce a play” (19). I return to Gurr’s characterization in the next chapter. 22. See Withington, “Company and Sociability,” 297–­303; Withington, Society, esp. 107, 109, 114–­23. 23. MSC, I.3, 264, naming “theise our Servaunt[e]s Lawrence ffletcher Will[ia]m Shakespeare Richard Burbage Augustyne Phillippes Iohn hening[e]s henrie Condell Will[ia]m Sly Rob[er]t Armyn Richard Cowly and the rest of theire Assosiates freely to vse and exercise the Arte and faculty of playing Comedies Tragedies histories Enterludes moralls pastoralls Stageplaies and Suche others like as theie haue already studied or hereafter shall vse or studie aswell for the recreation of our loving Subject[e]s as for our Solace and pleasure when wee shall thinke good to see them duringe our pleasure.” See also Ingram, Business of Playing, 84, making a similar point about an earlier period; Baldwin, Organization, 25. 24. MSC, I.2, 174. 25. Elizabeth’s 1559 and 1572 proclamations restricting retainers in noble households, as well as the 1572 statute against vagabonds, all made patronage relations, as well as regulating the growing practice of patronage itself, more necessary. Ingram, Business of Playing, 84–­91, 236–­37; Ingram, “What Kind of Future?,” 221–­22. 26. Henslowe Papers, MS 1, art. 16. 27. Both Henslowe and Burbage took advantage of the privilege; see Baldwin, Organization, 3–­8, in which he points out that the practice seems to have been so common that in 1610 Parliament petitioned James “that it might be lawfull to arrest the King’s Servants without leave” (a request that James refused). Burbage invoked the name of Lord Hunsdon when he was arrested as part of the 1584 order of the City of London to pull down his Shoreditch playhouse; see Maclean, “Adult Playing Companies, 1583–­93,” 49, 52. The same freedom was extended to musicians and other hired members of the companies during the Revels period; see Baldwin, Organization, 8, 10. 28. See esp. Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce, which emphasizes the limits of a “vertical” history of the theater companies organized around the role of patronage, the abilities of individual players, and the antagonism of rival playwrights; Kathman, “Grocers”; Kathman, “Rise of Commercial Playing”; Astington, Actors and Acting; Korda, Labors Lost, 180–­81; Arab, Manly Mechanicals, 28–­31, 34–­35. Baldwin also invokes the guild model; see Organization, 15, 25–­26, 37n127, 88–­89, 148. Cf. Van Es, Shakespeare in Company, 9–­10, 46, noting the limits of the guild analogy. It is surprising to find Gurr, in Shakespeare Company, dismissing meticulous scholarship by Knutson on the guild structure of the companies (18n24 and 34n50), especially when so much of his evidence supports a similar view. Ingram, Business of Playing, 28–­29, 49–­50, points out that actors and managers often had income from other nontheatrical sources, and the City complained about this precise issue in their 1584 answer to the Queen’s Men’s petition to be allowed to play in the city (MSC, I.2, 172).

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29. Korda, Labors Lost, 22–­25. 30. Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 91, 110–­17. 31. Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 26. 32. See Ingram, Business of Playing, 153–­77, 243–­55 (on Hicks and the possible circumstances surrounding the Newington Butts playhouse), 100–­111 (on Brayne). 33. Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 27. 34. Ingram, Business of Playing, 98–­100. 35. Kathman, “Grocers,” provides the detail for all of these cases and devotes a section to Rhodes and Kynaston (43–­46); Astington, Actors and Acting, 76–­107; Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce, 21–­47. 36. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 1:309. 37. Stephens, Essayes and characters, 300–­301, cited in Korda, Labors Lost, 180. 38. Baldwin, Organization, 10–­15, arguing that the royal patent “was used for permanent organizations, and the license of the Master of the Revels for the temporary organizations” (12) and explicitly comparing several play companies to “corporations” on 42, 95. 39. It is worth pointing out that this technological dimension to performance was specifically singled out by the City in its sweeping acts of 1574 and 1584 as a cause for their suppression, namely “soundrye slaughters and mayheminges of the Quenes Subiectes have happened by ruines of Skaffoldes fframes and Stagies, and by engynes weapons and powder used in plaies” (MSC, I.2, 175). 40. Harris, “Properties of Skill,” to which I am particularly indebted for my discussion in what follows; Korda, Labors Lost, 24–­25. For the history of the Admiral’s Men see esp. Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites; Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 230–­57. On the share system of commercial organization see Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 97–­100; Cerasano, “The Business of Shareholding”; Van Es, Shakespeare in Company, 103–­8. 41. Thomas Evans, one of the seven housekeepers in the Blackfriars in 1608, had no other professional relationship to the company; see Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 113. See also a 1622 agreement by Edward Alleyn to lease the land under the old Fortune Theatre (which had burned down) to the actor Charles Massy; Alleyn then leased the remaining twenty-­three shares to other parties, both actors and nonactors. Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, 165–­71; Henslowe Papers, Mun. 58 (28–­30). 42. Henslowe Papers, MS 1, art. 2 (31–­32); Baldwin, Organization, 22–­23. 43. Henslowe Papers, Mun. 33 (13), excerpting the indenture, which is printed in full in Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, 86–­89. 44. Henslowe Papers, Mun. 33 (13–­14). 45. Bailey, Of Bondage, 14–­19, 28–­37. 46. Henslowe Papers, appendix I, art. 2 (123–­25). 47. Compare the bond of 29 August 1611 between Henslowe and twelve players for £500; the terms of the agreement do not survive, but it is worth pointing out that the obligation is undertaken by the named players individually (“eache and every of their p[ar]t[e]s”) rather than by the “company” (as Baldwin has it, Organization, 19); see Henslowe Papers, Mun. 47 (18–­19) and MS 18.9 (111); Greg, Commentary, 66, 137–­40. 48. Henslowe Papers, Mun. 52 (23–­25, 24). The document is damaged, and my bracketed emendations are conjectural. 49. Price, Thomas Dekker. 50. All citations are to Dekker, T he Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Parr. See Howard, T heater of a City, 20; Morgan-­Russell, “ ‘How Far Is It, My Lord, to Berkeley Now?” On Dekker’s use of London history, see Novarr, “Dekker’s Gentle Craft”; on the play as a work of romantic historiography, see Walsh, “Performing Historicity”; on the overlapping, multiple temporalities that the play activates through its references to London landmarks, see Harris, “Ludgate Time”; on Leadenhall, see Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 54–­56.

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51. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood; Cohen, Drama of a Nation; Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation; McEachern, Poetics of English Nationhood; Shrank, Writing the Nation. 52. See Mortenson, “The Economics of Joy”; Kastan, “Workshop”; two paired essays by Paul Seaver, “The Artisanal World,” and David Bevington, “Theatre as Holiday”; Smith, “London Apprentices as Seventeenth-­ Century Adolescents”; Straznicky, “End(s) of Discord”; Arab, “Work, Bodies, and Gender”; Wall, Staging Domesticity, 127–­28, 146–­58; Montgomery, “Speaking the Language, Knowing the Trade”; Deng, Coinage and State Formation, 161–­86; Korda, “The Sign of the Last.” Cañadas, Public T heater, 77–­106, esp. 89, points out the importance of a group imaginary to Dekker’s play. See also the recent essay by Christopher L. Morrow, “Corporate Nationalism in Thomas Dekker’s T he Shoemaker’s Holiday,” especially 441–­44, making arguments similar to my own. 53. On this aspect of the London guilds, see esp. Gadd and Wallis, “Reaching beyond the City Wall,” with additional bibliography. 54. Weber, “Class, Status, Party.” 55. Unwin, Gilds and Companies, 160; Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 215–­84, 302–­311, 345–­ 67, 380–­87; Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 3–­31; Tittler, Architecture and Power, 105–­22, on the intricate social performances surrounding the Lord Mayor. 56. The same is true of charters of urban incorporation, as both Withington and Tittler point out; see Tittler, T he Reformation and the Towns, 162, 164, 182–­244; Tittler, Townspeople and Nation, 29–­31; Tittler, Architecture and Power, 98–­105, emphasizing the oligarchic nature of incorporated town governance; see also the related arguments of Archer, Citizen Shakespeare, esp. 15 and 45, tracking the presence of a “company” imaginary throughout the plays of the period. 57. See esp. Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 90–­91, 110–­17, 184–­88; Gadd and Wallis, “London Guilds.” 58. Unwin, Gilds and Companies, 84–­85, 166, and 253; Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 31–­32, 184–­88, 201–­14, 38–­85; Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 204–­6, 212–­14, 228–­32; Kastan, “Workshop,” citing Dekker ’s own Seven Deadly Sins: the guilds “that were ordained to be communities, had lost their first privilege, and were now turned monopolies” (326–­27); Arab, Manly Mechanicals, esp. 47, 56; Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 146–­47. 59. Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.” 60. Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 30–­31, identifies apprenticeship as one of the most important mechanisms for constituting a corporate identity for the towns; Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, 22–­36, 232–­38. 61. See Arab, Manly Mechanicals, 55. 62. West, “Intertheatricality.” 63. See Cañadas, Public T heater, 80, 82. 64. Hunter, “Bourgeois Comedy: Shakespeare and Dekker,” 9, compares Eyre to Falstaff. 65. On this dimension of Eyre’s characterization, see Harris, “Ludgate Time”; on the fraternal basis of the guilds, see Unwin, Gilds and Companies, esp. 53, 93–­109, 110–­26; Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 206–­7. 66. Kastan, “Workshop,” 335–­37; Korda, “Sign of the Last,” 590–­91. 67. Stern, Documents of Performance, points out that a term of derision for playwrights in the period was “play-­patcher,” “because of the common perception that a play was pieced together out of a collection of odds and ends: it was not a single whole entity,” and observes that Dekker himself compared the “play-­patcher” to “a Cobler of Poetrie,” imagining the act of play composition to be like shoemaking (1). 68. Unwin, a strongly pluralist thinker, repeatedly emphasizes the self-­constituting nature of the guilds and their practical and legal autonomy; Gilds and Companies, 28–­29, 47–­71, 80–­81, 94, 105–­6, 108, 159, 161–­62. “Legal incorporation was needed to consolidate the new type of association whilst it was still in process of formation, but when the type had become firmly established by the incorporation of a score of the leading companies, its features might easily be copied by

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companies that were not incorporated” (169). “It would be a great mistake,” Unwin continues, “to regard the legal formalities of incorporation as in any way essential to the corporate spirit ” (172). Compare Rapport, Worlds within Worlds, 184–­88; Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 207–­11. 69. Unwin, Gilds and Companies, 165, argues that the grant of a hall gives the company “hold on the imagination of its members” so that gifts and donations flow to it; Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, 216–­17, 224; Tittler, Architecture and Power, 89–­97, emphasizing the “semiotic” importance of the town hall (93), 129–­36; Rivlin, T he Aesthetics of Service, 93, on guild fraternity versus court patronage in the play. 70. See the related arguments of Menzer, “Crowd Control,” on the theater’s commercial imperative to transform an unruly crowd into an everyday audience. 71. MSC, I.1, 80, “the inconueniences that grow by Stage playes abowt the Citie of London,” appended to a 1597 letter from the Lord Mayor and aldermen to the Privy Council requesting the suppression of the playhouses outside as well as inside the city. 72. MSC, I.1, 75, with identical complaints in 1595 (77). Witney, “The Devil His Due,” argues that Dekker may have had Spencer in mind as a model for the character Oatley. 73. Munday, A Second and third blast of retrait from plaies and theaters (1580), 71; Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue actions . . . (1582), B5r, B7r, D1r, C8v. 74. Ingram, Business of Playing, 76–­81; McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 18–­36; White, T heatre and Reformation, 42–­66.

chapter six 1. Henslowe’s Diary, 122. 2. Or Jane, as Korda argues; “Sign of the Last,” 591. 3. Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 107. 4. See OED, “composition,” III.22, 25.a–­b, and “compound, v.,” II.8.a–­b, II.10, II.12; Henslowe Papers, MS I, Art. 67 (64–­65; 64). Baldwin, Organization, 22–­23, cites several other examples across the period 1589–­1614, including the householders among the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. 5. But see Bailey, Of Bondage, 28–­29, 32–­37, which argues that Timon is a more apt figure. Leinwand connects privateering, joint-­stock company shareholding, and the economy of playing in T heater, Finance, and Society, 110–­39. 6. At the inception of the arrangement, the housekeepers included one nonactor, Cuthbert Burbage, and six actors in the company, among them Cuthbert’s brother Richard and Shakespeare; this group expanded and contracted over the years; see Baldwin, Organization, 92–­117, and Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 31–­36, 111–­19. 7. Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 12–­23, esp. 19, and 31–­35. Gurr draws a strong contrast between the benevolent “generosity and fellowship” of the Burbages and the “profiteering” of a “capitalist and authoritarian system” run by financiers such as Henslowe and Alleyn; several times he goes so far as to call the company “the nearest thing to a democratic and nonauthoritarian management system in the largely monopolistic Tudor and early Stuart economy” (85, 87–­88; cf. 33–­25, 112). 8. Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 19. 9. Baldwin points out that from a legal point of view the housekeeping arrangement is nearly identical to the relationship between Henslowe and his companies, only now the position of the landlord for the house is occupied by a “syndicate” and “corporation,” as he calls it, rather than by a single individual (Organization, 92, 95); he also emphasizes the housekeepers’ “comradeship,” “traditions,” and “customs” as the source of their success, “rather than . . . any legal devices” (93); see Ingram, Business of Playing, 115–­18, on historical narratives about Burbage versus Henslowe. 10. Both Cuthbert and Richard had inherited the leases and the theater buildings from their father, and together they retained fully one-­half of the shares in the Globe property, while the other

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housekeepers each only received one-­fifth of the remaining half; for Cuthbert, in particular, these shares constituted a primary source of income throughout his life, well after the death of the other housekeepers; Baldwin, Organization, 96–­97. 11. Baldwin, Organization, 96–­117, and Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 23–­24, recognizing that the householder’s share is a form of property but casting the 1635 suit as a “team” of loyal members threatened in by three younger, angry, and violent “rebels.” 12. Leinwand, T heater, Finance, and Society, 110–­39, draws a similar analogy; in a fascinating essay that touches on many of my concerns, Holland, “Shakespeare’s Two Bodies,” takes up the modern corporate culture of the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose purpose is to translate the Shakespearean text into logos and branding efforts. Holland draws a distinction between the early modern “company” (smaller, organic, directly participatory) and the modern “corporation” (more abstract, profit driven, larger, and diffused over many theaters and actors). 13. The so-­called Sharers’ Papers; all citations are from MSC, II.3, 362–­73; see Gurr, Shakespeare Company, 24, 113–­14, 118. 14. Stern, Rehearsal; Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts; Astington, Actors and Acting, 108–­73. 15. See chapter 5, n. 20. 16. Compare Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 3, 52. For my discussion of acting and character in what follows I draw also on Stern, Rehearsal; Astington, Actors and Acting; States, Great Reckonings; States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character; Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice; Worthen, Idea of the Actor; Syme, T heatre and Testimony, esp. 111–­23 and 131–­52; Lopez, “Imagining the Actor’s Body,” addressing the problem specifically from the perspective of the company and the repertory system; Dawson, “Performance and Participation,” emphasizing analogies between acting and Eucharistic “participation” in the “real presence” (11–­12). 17. I cite from Hamlet, ed. Hibbard. 18. The entire scene illustrates “the narrator hiding in the actor, just as there is an actor hiding in the rhapsode,” as States has perceptively put it in his reading of the scene (Reckonings, 123). 19. Kantorowicz launched a similar argument through his famous reading of Richard II in King’s Two Bodies, 24–­39, but Hamlet is arguably an even better example; among recent critics, De Grazia, “Hamlet” without Hamlet, esp. 30–­35, 69–­70, 79–­80, 87–­98, has resituated the play in relation to the key problems of succession and the possession of land; see also Halpern, “Eclipse of Action,” on emergent ideas of political economy in the play. 20. Maitland, “Corporation Sole,” 241. 21. See Syme, T heatre and Testimony, 11–­12, 238–­56, 209n14; Lopez, “Dumbshow.” 22. On the emergence of  “offstage” as a fictional rather than sacred or social space, see Womack, “Off-­Stage”; and Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 151–­257, a reading of the ghost in relation to theological problems surrounding the nature of transubstantiation and purgatory, a shadowy place often associated with the fictions of the poets, as Greenblatt points out. 23. On Hamlet as a university student, see esp. Hanson, “Fellow Students.” 24. On the ghost as a figure for the limits of philosophy in the play and as an “ontological intermediate thing” see Guillory, “ ‘To Please the Wiser Sort,’ ” 90. 25. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory; compare Agnew, Worlds Apart, 101–­48. 26. Compare Wong, “Steward of the Dying Voice,” which argues that the play is caught between a monarchical and a popular model of sovereignty. I find myself departing from two especially powerful readings of the play that find in it the echo of a political promise: Lupton, “Hamlet, Prince,” which identifies in Hamlet’s status as princeps, or “first citizen,” and his references to “election” the echoes of a protoparliamentary politics, crossed with a Machiavellian hybrid, that cuts across the play’s vertical hierarchies of monarchical sovereignty and command; and Kottman, Politics of the Scene, 143–­47, 155–­65, which finds in the play’s final scenes the possibility of a new politics of “plurality” (165) based on witnessing and acknowledged speech, a reading extended in a somewhat more tragic key in Kottman, Tragic Conditions, 44–­77.

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27. Arnold, Third Citizen, observes that Titus “has never been taken very seriously as a political play” and points out that the election scenes are Shakespeare’s own invention (101); see his detailed reading of the election scenes, 101–­13, 118. 28. Lupton, “Hamlet, Prince.” 29. I cite from Titus Andronicus, ed. Bate. 30. A famous aspect of the play; see Rowe, Dead Hands, 52–­85, linking the play’s imagery of dismemberment to its political imaginary, especially in relation to agency and to Hobbes’s discussion of the person. 31. See Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, esp. 117; Rowe, Dead Hands, 73; Mary Fawcett, “Arms / Words / Tears”; Palmer, “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable”; and compare the powerful reading of T he Rape of Lucrece by Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, 152–­97. 32. See James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 42–­84. 33. See Paster, Idea of the City, 58–­90. 34. I cite from Julius Caesar, ed. Humphreys. 35. Arnold, Third Citizen, 140–­78, takes the Carpenter and the Cobbler as figures for the people as a political agent: “here is the ‘we’ of collective power in the absence of representation” (147). To Arnold’s admirable reading, I would simply add that the people are always constituted as a “people” through their own corporate institutions (the Worshipful Companies of the Cordwainers and the Carpenters, in the case of the Cobbler and the Carpenter) or through their identification with the body, actions, words, signs, and dreams of Caesar (and now of Brutus). To put the point more broadly: the play suggests that the notion of the “people” is simply one more corporate form at a large scale, but one that resolves into an undifferentiated unity the smaller-­scale groups that constitute it, thereby effacing the institutions that make all “political” conditions inherently pluralist and conflictual—­a world of groups of all kinds perpetually constituting and reconstituting themselves in order to claim some measure of practical authority and some degree of coherent ethical purpose. This, in my view, is the political insight that emerges from the Roman plays, along with the fact that the play companies and theaters are becoming groups with special “mediating” capacities of their own, sustained by an evolving theoretical discourse, legal protections, financial structures, and so forth. On mediation and authority, see Syme, T heater and Testimony, 1–­17, discussing Julius Caesar on 12–­13. 36. I take the term “Caesarism” from Arnold, Third Citizen, e.g., 42, 146–­47. 37. I have cited the passage as it appears in the First Folio, since it captures typographically the process of rehearsing with a part that the scene employs; see Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), 112, which I have used in digital facsimile from Octavo Digital Editions and the Folger Shakespeare Library (http://shakespeare.folger.edu/other/folio/ShaF1B.pdf ), accessed 13 August 2014. The passage appears at 2.1.46–­58 in Humphreys’s edition. 38. Arnold, Third Citizen, esp. 4–­7, 15. 39. I cite from Timon of Athens, ed. Oliver. 40. Again identified as the “corporation of . . . Athens”: Plutarch of Chaeronea, T he lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes compared . . . (1579), 12–­13. 41. See esp. Lupton’s reading of the play’s economy of friendship and Timon’s “impolitical untheology” in Thinking with Shakespeare, 131–­59; Bailey, Of Bondage, 27–­50, on the penal debt bond; Leinwand’s analysis of debt, credit, and Timon’s “anti-­economic gambit” in T heater, Finance, and Society, 32–­38 (34). 42. I cite from Coriolanus, ed. Parker, who discusses the 1608 dispute between City and Crown on 40–­41. See also Shrank, “Civility and the City in Coriolanus,” placing the play in the context of civic incorporation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially that of Stratford (1553), where Shakespeare’s father played a leading role for twenty years (411); Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 160–­212, esp. 202–­12; Paster, Idea of the City, 58–­59. In emphasizing the play’s interest in the dissolution of corporate political forms and the anarchic vision of politics that results, I depart from readings that find in it the promise of a protoliberal subject and a republican model of

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politics, a reading influentially articulated by Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, 120–­53. For a thoughtful survey of this tradition and a counterargument that finds in the figure of Coriolanus not the bounded subject of liberalism but an “open” and self-­“undoing” subject, see Kuzner, “Unbuilding the City,” expanded in Kuzner, Open Subjects. 43. Arnold, Third Citizen, reading the play in light of early modern procedures of election to office, both local and national, and ongoing disputes within the civic corporation of  Warwick, 179–­ 214; compare Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 69–­74, on the contested process of incorporation in the Shropshire borough of Ludlow in the 1590s. 44. See Arnold, Third Citizen, 204; Paster, Idea of the City, 61–­65, 79–­81. 45. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 143–­77; compare Kenneth Gross’s probing reading of “rumor,” noise, and anger in Shakespeare’s Noise, 131–­60. 46. Arnold, Third Citizen, makes a similar point about Marcus in Titus, who “incarnates” the people into his plural “we” (107), citing Gadamer on how the Christian idea of mystical incarnation changes the idea of representation itself (243n14) . See also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, esp.159–­86, drawing on the work of Claude Lefort to describe the public as a “mass subject” that depends on abstraction (described as both “incorporation” and “disincorporation” by Warner, the latter emphasizing the erasure of the body and its markers). 47. On Coriolanus’s antitheatricality, see especially Sanders, “The Body of the Actor in Coriolanus,” esp. 398; while I agree with Sanders that “[Shakespeare’s] position in Coriolanus is that the distinction between real-­life action, conceived as truthful and straightforward, and theatrical performance, conceived as contrived and deceptive, is untenable” (410), the “tragic” quality of the play is visible in the fact that Coriolanus himself never comes to understand this idea, and that his failure to understand it leads to civil war and to the collapse of any political life in Rome as a whole. 48. “What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues, / That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, / Make yourselves scabs?” (1.1.161–­63): Coriolanus before the citizens, or Burbage coming upon the hired men? Cf. Holland, who in “Shakespeare’s Two Bodies,” 46–­47, observes that today’s corporate use of Shakespeare tends to disembody the actor, focusing instead on a simplified, idealized notion of character that reduces it to the idea of the voice, so that the text of Shakespeare is made to speak through the actor and subordinate his efforts to the text as a corporate product.

chapter seven 1. L&L, 3:54. 2. Although Bacon had been serving as Learned Counsel to the Crown since 1596, he had occupied the post at the pleasure of the queen without formal appointment; L&L, 3:72. 3. L&L, 3:63. 4. Ibid., 3:74, 67–­71. 5. Ibid., 3:72, 78, 217; for a detailed account see Galloway, Union of England and Scotland. 6. “A Brief Discourse Touching the Happy Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland,” L&L, 3:90–­99. 7. Compare the similar arguments of Rogers, Matter of Revolution, who does not discuss Bacon in the context of the later vitalist moment he identifies, perhaps because Bacon’s pluralistic natural philosophy does not fit as easily with the individualistic, decentralized, and protoliberal political philosophy he discerns in vitalist theories (e.g., 12); I would describe Bacon’s political philosophy as “pluralist” rather than as protoliberal. See also Pérez-­Ramos’s methodological comments on conceptual “ingredients” in Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science, 44–­47. Shapin and Schaffer, in Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, tell the next chapter in the story I am telling about Bacon here, as does Picciotto, Labors of Innocence. See also Albanese, New Science, New World, 92–­120; Solomon, Objectivity in the Making; Cohen, “Political Power in Francis Bacon’s Systems of Natural Knowledge.”

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8. Bacon’s work has fallen outside the canon of reference in recent studies of political ecology, notably that by Bennett, Vibrant Matter, and yet Bacon’s entire project anticipates many of the concerns that Bennett finds in the work of Spinoza, for instance, or in that of Deleuze and Guattari; compare also the essays collected in Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter. Although my own inspiration has tended to be the work of Latour, esp. Politics of Nature, rather than that of Bennett or geography, many of Bennett’s arguments about “vibrant matter” are relevant to what follows, esp. 20–­38, 94–­109; the emergence of political ecology as a critical idiom seems to me to provide valuable conceptual tools for making sense of Bacon’s project in ways that has often eluded Bacon scholarship. 9. All English citations from the Novum Organum are from the edition by Anderson, which uses the Spedding, Ellis, and Heath translation. I cite the Novum Organum by book and aphorism number or (for citations from the preliminary materials) by page number. Latin citations are from T he Instauratio magna: Part II, Novum Organum, ed. Rees, by page and line number. In a few instances, I have used the English translation by Rees, as noted parenthetically. Citations from other works are from Works. All italics are original unless otherwise noted. 10. In addition to the works cited in the notes that follow, especially those by Pérez-­Ramos and Jardine, a good introduction to Bacon’s method may be found in Malherbe, “Bacon’s Method of Science,” pointing out that Bacon is not an “empiricist” in any simple sense (82–­83). 11. 1:70; compare variations on the passage at 1:88 and in the preface, 11. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath render the final phrase as “so as to become more general.” 12. On Bacon’s use of lists and tables, see Jardine, Francis Bacon, 120–­32, 135–­41; Rossi, Francis Bacon, 202–­6, 214–­15; Malherbe, “Bacon’s Method,” 86–­89; on lists more generally, see Eco, Infinity of Lists, esp. 113–­18, 371–­77; Delbourgo and Müller-­Wille, “Listmania.” 13. A major problem in Bacon’s work; see Sargent, “Bacon as an Advocate for Cooperative Scientific Research,” an account that tends to overemphasize the “democratic” impulse in Bacon’s project; Attié, “Selling Science,” esp. 418–­20; Attié, “Re-­Membering the Body Politic,” esp. 515–­30, on the Royal Society as a “philosophic corporation” that is “unified without being uniform” (519–­ 20); Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, esp. 116–­28, 129–­87. 14. In his note on the passage, Rees points to Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, 1:134, 74–­75, as a source and comparison: “he most expressly declares that the common reason [ton koinon logon] is the criterion, and that the things which appear in common are trustworthy as being judged by the common reason, whereas those which appear privately to each man are false” (Novum Organum, ed. Rees, 509, n. to 1:42, ll. 15–­17). 15. On Bacon’s collaborative habits of composition, especially in his early work, see Stewart, “The Making of Writing in Renaissance England,” esp. 89–­93; Harkness, Jewel House, esp. 248–­ 51, contrasts Bacon’s self-­image to the collaborative and corporate nature of scientific inquiry in London. 16. On generalization in Bacon’s work, see Jardine, Francis Bacon, 80–­81, 133–­149 (in natural philosophy), 150–­68 (in ethics and civics); also her account of philosophia prima, 101, 104–­7, 104 n1; Anderson, Philosophy of Francis Bacon, 85–­90; on Bacon’s notion of the axiom, see Jardine, Francis Bacon, 8, and Rossi, Francis Bacon, 145, both of which trace it to Ramus, as does Fletcher, “Francis Bacon’s Forms”; and Pérez-­Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science, 239–­69, esp. 243–­44, 254–­55, an account that tends to emphasize the role of negative or eliminative procedures in Baco­ nian induction rather than those of assembling and collecting (to the point of suggesting that Bacon’s lists and tables do not primarily generate “data conducive to generalizations” [260], a point that seems obviously disputable). 17. In the earlier Partis instaurationis secundae delineatio et argumentum (1607), Bacon offers a geometrical analogy: the axiom forms the solid part of a truth, while the simple notion is an image of its upper surface (haec enim est veritatis portio solida, cum simplex notio instar superficiei videri possit); Works, 7:41–­55 (51), cited by Anderson, Philosophy of Francis Bacon, 88.

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18. On Bacon’s ontological pluralism, see Pérez-­Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science, 88, 97–­ 105; on Bacon’s Platonism and the importance of unity (over multiplicity) in his thought, see Anderson, Philosophy of Francis Bacon, 127–­31. 19. Bacon’s view of matter is more Paracelsian than Lucretian; see Rees, “Francis Bacon’s Semi-­ Paracelsian Cosmology”; Rees, “Matter  Theory”; Rees, “Atomism and ‘Subtlety’ ”; Kargon, Atomism in England, 43–­53, 70–­79; Anderson, Philosophy of Francis Bacon, 70–­79; Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-­Modern Philosophy, esp. 175–­220; Barbour, “Bacon, Atomism, and Imposture.” On Bacon’s use of Democritus and Epicurus to think through problems of political authority and the nature of divine providence, see Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics, 21–­36, 79–­ 91. On Bacon’s hybrid atomism and the importance of Lucretius to his own ethical, scientific, and political project, see Cohen, “Political Power in Francis Bacon’s Systems of Natural Knowledge,” 197–­218. On Lucretius as a figure for the continuity of knowledge over time in Bacon’s work (by way of a meditation on Homer), see Passannante, Lucretian Renaissance, 91–­92, 122–­53. 20. See Jardine, Francis Bacon, 109–­14, 114–­17; Rossi, Francis Bacon, esp. 1–­35, and his account of the forms, 201–­2; Pérez-­Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science, esp. 91–­132; Anderson, Philosophy of Francis Bacon, 89–­90, 154–­63; Emerton, T he Scientific Reinterpretation of Form, 66–­69; Passannante, Lucretian Renaissance, 142–­43, arguing that Bacon’s notion of form is Lucretian rather than Platonic or Aristotelian. 21. The Advancement of Learning, in Works, 6:127; cf. Filum Labyrinthi, in Works, 6:416–­18. 22. Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science, esp. 48–­62, 67, 106–­14, 117, 135–­49, 150–­66. 23. In addition to the works cited in n. 19 above, see also Rees, “Bacon’s Speculative Philosophy,” 125–­29, 137–­41. 24. Bacon’s uses of “incorporation” in a natural philosophical sense are not confined to his experiments on metals, however; see Sylva Sylvarum, in Works, 4:208 (Cent. I.80, the incorporation of water by sponges, wool, and sugar), 304 (Cent. III.298, the incorporation of powders and liquors together), 347 (Cent. IV.387, the incorporation of odors into a smell, which, like sound, is sweeter at a distance than when we discern the individual parts), 359 (Cent. V.411, confirming that drink incorporated or infused with meat nourishes better than drink and meat consumed separately), 393 (Cent. VI.504, the possibility of incorporating vines into trees), 415 (Cent. VI.572, observing that plants rarely grow in sand because “the sun exhaleth the moisture before it can incorporate with the earth and yield a nourishment for the plant”). 25. Historia Densi et Rari, in Works, 4:27–­117; English trans. as T he History of Dense and Rare, in Works, 10:177–­265; see also 227–­28. 26. Works, 7:385–­93 (390). See also “Articles of Questions Touching Minerals,” subtitled “The Lord Bacon’s Questions and Solutions concerning the compounding, incorporating, or union of metals or minerals; which subject is the first letter of his Lordship’s Alphabet,” Works, 7:394–­409, the first question of which is “with what metals gold will incorporate by simple colliquefaction, and with what not? And in what quantity it will incorporate; and what kind of body the compound makes?” (394). 27. Cogitata et Visa de Interpretatione Naturae, in Works, 7:102, in English as Filum Labyrinthi, in Works, 6:449. 28. Cf. Rogers, Matter of Revolution, identifying the problems of “agency” and “organization” as central points of conceptual translation between natural philosophy and politics (esp. 2–­8). Bacon’s notion of  “Schematismus” is usefully understood in light of Roger ’s treatment of the idea of “organization” in seventeenth-­century English thought. On relations between scientific and legal concepts in Bacon’s work, see Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy, emphasizing the influence of Bacon’s legal training on his theory of induction; Pérez-­Ramos,  Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science, 123–­32 (on natural law). 29. Noted by Bacon in “A Brief Discourse Touching the Happy Union,” L&L, 3:90–­99 (91). 30. 2:48; cf. 1:127. Jardine, Francis Bacon, 153, 159–­68, esp. 161, has pointed out the several

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ways in which Bacon sought analogies between natural, ethical, and civil philosophies across his work; see also Peltonen, “Bacon’s Political Philosophy,” 290–­95. 31. All parenthetical page citations are to Works, vol. 5. For an overview of the place of the New Atlantis in Bacon’s life and oeuvre and its later reception, see Price’s introduction to Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis,” 1–­27; for a detailed discussion of the New Atlantis and the tradition of political philosophy from Plato to Hobbes, see Hale, Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis”; on the blend of mercantile and neocommonwealth ideology that infuses the New Atlantis and Bacon’s scientific project more generally, see Attié, “Selling Science.” 32. On Bacon’s use of fiction and his narratological technique, see Albanese, New Science, New World, 94–­97, 102–­7, 112–­18; Boesky, Founding Fictions, 56–­83, esp. 65–­80; Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History, 81–­118; Salzman, “Narrative contexts for Bacon’s New Atlantis”; Kelly, “Experience Has Not Yet Learned Her Letters.” 33. Compare Albanese, New Science, New World, 107–­12, who sees a basic equivalence between the “corporate, if faceless,” state and the kingdom “incorporated by a titled head” (107–­8); Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence, 139–­54, on the surveillance state as the central political category of the New Atlantis; and Guillory, “The Bachelor State.” 34. In this respect the image of Salomon’s House also condenses and effaces the historical practice of Bacon’s own moment, as Harkness, Jewel House, 211–­53, 142–­80, has argued; also Serjeantson, “Natural Knowledge in the New Atlantis.” 35. 1:44; “Sunt denique Idola quae immigrarunt in animos hominum ex diversis dogmatibus philosophiarum . . . quae Idola Theatri nominamus; quia quot philosophiae receptae aut inventae sunt, tot fabulas productas et actas censemus, quae mundos effecerunt fictitios et scenicos”; I have slightly modified the Spedding, Ellis, and Heath translation, which renders fictitios as “unreal.” 36. Aït-­Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos, has shown how powerful fiction could be as a mode of thinking scientifically in the seventeenth century; see especially 191–­97.

chapter eight 1. Leviathan, 1.2.8. All citations are to Leviathan, ed. Curley, by book, chapter, and paragraph num­ ber; all italics are in the original unless otherwise noted. Curley includes modern English transla­ tions of substantive variants and passages from the Latin edition of Leviathan published in En­ gland in 1678, itself a reprint of the Latin edition published in Amsterdam in 1668; where relevant, I have cited these as “Lev. (1678)” and have included page numbers in Curley’s edition when necessary. Citations to the other English works are to the English Works, ed. Molesworth (hereafter EW ); citations to the Latin are to Opera Philosophica, ed. Molesworth (hereafter OP). Information for other editions appear in the notes below. 2. Lev. (1678), “Letter Dedicatory,” 1n3. 3. According to John Aubrey, “His lordship would often say that he better liked Mr. Hobbes’s taking his thoughts, then any of the other, because he understood what he wrote”; Brief Lives, 1:331 (also 1:70). Cited and discussed by Malcolm, “A Summary Biography of Hobbes,” 6; see also Malcolm, “Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company,” 73. On the political implications of Hobbes’s notion of “science,” as opposed to the experimentalism of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society, see the now-­classic study by Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, esp. 80–­ 109, 146–­54. 4. See Spragens, Politics of Motion, 107, 99–­100, citing and discussing Politics 1.2.1252b–­53a; Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics, comparing Hooker to Hobbes, 153–­54. 5. On Hobbes’s attitude toward associational groups and the antipluralism of his theory, see esp. Boyd, “Thomas Hobbes and the Perils of Pluralism”; on the tradition of corporatist thought and Hobbes’s work, see Gierke, Natural Law and the T heory of Society, 1:44–­61, where Gierke refers

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to the emergence of “a conception of the single personality of the State” (50; emphasis in original), and 79–­84; also Springborg, “Leviathan, Christian Commonwealth Incorporated,” making arguments similar to my own; Pettit, Made with Words, 55–­83; Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, 6–­33, 223–­65; Runciman, “Debate: What Kind of Person Is Hobbes’s State?,” responding to a series of essays by Skinner: “State of Princes,” esp. 387–­94, 309–­404; Skinner, “Humanism, Scholasticism, and Popular Sovereignty”; Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation”; Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State.” 6. The problem has received excellent discussion in scholarship on Leviathan; see esp. Vieira, Elements of Representation in Hobbes; Kottman, Politics of the Scene, 54–­96; Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 14–­37. 7. Leviathan, 4.47.4; also 2.22.28–­29, 2.22.32. 8. Leviathan, 3.35.15; compare Marks . . . of  John Wallis, EW, 7:395–­97. 9. Compare De Cive, 17.19–­22, in OP, 2:394–­98, in English as On the Citizen, ed. Tuck and Silverthorne, 219–­22. Hammill, Mosaic Constitution, 215, argues for the relevance of “the history of religion” on Hobbes’s theory of contract, calling attention to his discussion of Moses as a personation of God and linking it to his larger philosophical critique of scholastic metaphysics (216–­17). 10. Leviathan, 4.47.4; other passages representative of Hobbes’s views of the universities include Leviathan, 4.46.14, and Lev. (1678), 4.46.23; Elements of Law, ed. Tönnies, 2.9 (183–­84); Behemoth, in EW, vol. 6, esp. 167–­68, 190–­98, 233–­35, 257–­58; Six Lessons, in EW, vol. 7, esp. 335, 343–­45; Marks of . . . John Wallis, in EW, 7:395–­96, 399–­400. 11. Leviathan, 2.30.14 and 226n8, 4.47.16; Behemoth, in EW, 6:184–­85, 213–­15. 12. Behemoth, in EW, 6:213; Lev. (1678), 4.46.23. 13. Serjeantson, “Hobbes, the Universities, and the History of Philosophy”; Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, 57–­72. 14. In Vindiciae Academiarum (1654), Ward singled out Hobbes’s definition and replied that “however the Ordination of them hath formerly been, the two Universities have since the casting off the Papall Yoke, been regulated by the Civill power, and been conformed to it, so that the Discourse of the Romish Religion or Law, with reflexion upon us, is disingenuous, and nothing to this purpose” (57–­58). In Six Lessons Hobbes again calls the university “a corporation or body artificial” but defends himself against Ward by arguing that he was criticizing not the university per se but only “particular men, that desire to uphold the authority of a Church, as of a distinct thing from the Commonwealth” (EW, 7:345); see also Marks . . . of  John Wallis, in EW, 7:399–­400, making the same defense and conspicuously declaring his respect for the universities. Serjeantson, “Hobbes, the Universities, and the History of Philosophy,” argues that Hobbes may well have the University of Paris in mind at this point in Leviathan, rather than the English universities, and that he is writing for a French audience and voicing similar critiques by French authors, notably Gassendi; compare Behemoth, in EW, 6:213–­14. 15. De Corpore, in EW, 1:1.1.9. 16. On the dates of composition and publication of the Elementa Philosophiae, see Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 295–­96, 314–­16, 336, 341; and Tuck’s introduction to On the Citizen, xi–­xv. The relationship between Hobbes’s natural, moral, and political philosophy has been the subject of considerable debate, with Hobbes’s own comments supporting several different views on the question; see esp. Malcolm, “Hobbes’s Science of Politics and His Theory of Science”; Spragens, Politics of Motion, esp. 130–­33, 151–­52, 164–­76. In De Corpore Hobbes argues that one may arrive at scientific, analytical knowledge of civil philosophy even without a knowledge of physics or geometry (EW, 1:1.6.7). The preface to the 1651 English translation of De Cive (Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, a translation not by Hobbes, although with a dedicatory letter from him to the Earl of Devonshire) describes the discussion of civil philosophy as “grounded on its own principles sufficiently known by experience,” so much so that “it would not stand in need of the former sections” on physics and human psychology (EW, 2:xx); Leviathan, 1:9, includes a

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schematic table of the sciences that separates “bodies natural” from “politic bodies” (Leviathan, p. 48). 17. On what follows see esp. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 285–­96; on the argumentative force of Hobbes’s rhetoric and his philosophy of language, see Silver, “Fiction of Self-­Evidence.” 18. On this aspect of Hobbes’s method and its relation to Aristotle, as well as to the skepticism of Mersenne, Descartes, Gassendi, see Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 285–­96, 298–­305, 329–­30; Spragens, Politics of Motion, 77–­96, 138–­41; Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 30–­43, 130–­41; Paganini, “Hobbes’s Critique of the Doctrine of the Essences and Its Sources”; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 92–­99, 310–­19. 19. Leviathan, 4.46.15–­19; compare De Corpore, in EW, 1:1.3.4, 1.5.3–­4; Six Lessons, in EW, 7:348. 20. De Corpore, in EW, 1:2.8.1. 21. In addition to the works cited in n. 5, above, see esp. Attié, “Re-­Membering the Body Politic,” placing Hobbes’s political theory in the context of the “corporate” aspect of Restoration science (515); Hequembourg, “Hobbes’s Leviathan: A Tale of  Two Bodies.” 22. See Malcolm, “Hobbes and Spinoza,” 37–­38; Pettit, Made with Words, 55–­56; Skinner, “State of Princes,” 390–­94; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 312–­13, 327–­28. 23. See Pitikin, Concept of Representation, 15–­16; Pettit, Made with Words, 56, 71, 78–­79; and the works of Skinner and Runciman cited below; cf. Dumouchel, “Persona,” 72–­74, calling Hobbes’s theory of representation not an “image” but a “mask” (75). 24. See Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 174–­75, which finds a possible model for Leviathan in covenanting theologians such as William Perkins and Thomas Goodwin, who argue that Adam and Christ were both “common persons” who represented mankind. 25. Most sharply put in Runciman, “Concept of the State”; also Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, 120; and Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State?,” 271–­76, where Runciman discusses the meaning of the term “feigned” (271) and aligns the “fictional” with the “unreal,” adducing the example of a feigned or “forged” painting, which he distinguishes from a “fictitious painting” on the grounds that the former is fake but real, while the latter is nonexistent. The actions of Hobbes’s representatives, he argues, are “feigned” in the former sense of “forged,” that is, they are “actions performed under another’s name” (271). 26. Malcolm, “Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company,” 54–­59, pointing out that as secretary to Cavendish Hobbes formed part of a faction within the company that included Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir John Danvers, and Sir Dudley Digges, all men strongly aligned with the parliamentary cause and whose belief in a prepolitical theory of natural law ran counter to Hobbes’s own arguments in Leviathan (57–­58); on the influence of Hobbes’s involvement with the companies on his political theory, and especially its corporatism, see Aravamuden, “Hobbes and America.” 27. Elements of Law, 27.7. Pettit, Made with Words, 77, cites the same passage and points out that Hobbes either ignores or is unaware of the fact that Bartolus and Baldus had advanced similar arguments (although if Hobbes is referring specifically to the joint-­stock companies, he has in mind a structure of corporation that Bartolus and Baldus would not have known). 28. Elements of Law, 1.19.8; see also Leviathan, 1.16.14. 29. On the evolution of Hobbes’s theory and the waning place of democracy in it, see Tönnies’s introduction to his edition of the Elements, xvi–­xx; Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 63–­71; Pettit, Made with Words, 80–­81; Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics, 155–­61; Malcolm, “Hobbes and Spinoza,” 37–­38; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 310–­14. 30. Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” esp. 156, 157, 162–­63, 167. 31. Parker, Observations (1642), 1, cited in Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 157, 159; see also Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 95–­104, esp. 97, 99. 32. Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 158, citing Parker, Observations, 18, and the anonymous Maximes Unfolded (1643), 26.

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33. On this point see Pettit, Made with Words, 72, citing other “derogatory and dismissive” references to the multitude in Hobbes’s work: they are “an ‘aggregate’ or ‘heap’ of agents” (Elements, 21.11), “a disorganized crowd” (On the Citizen, 7.11) a “throng” (Leviathan, 1.6.37), and in a typical reference in which Hobbes discusses excommunication in terms that are very similar to Hooker’s, a disjoined or “dissolute number of individual persons” (Leviathan, 3.42.27). See also Malcolm, “Hobbes and Spinoza,” 37–­38, and On the Citizen, 6.1, with a long note by Hobbes on the meaning of multitudo as a “collective word . . . understood to signify more than one object,” distinguishing this from the “people” as a unified subject of acting and willing (On the Citizen, 76–­77), and 7.5 and 12.8, drawing the same distinction. See Tuck’s discussion in his introduction to On the Citizen, xxxii, and on the choice to translate civitas as “commonwealth” (xxxix–­xl); also Gierke’s discussion in Natural Law, 1:44–­61 of the people as a distinct corporate personality and Hobbes’s response, and compare Gierke, Political T heories of the Middle Age, 37–­48, 67–­100 (but without mention of Hobbes). 34. See, for example, Leviathan, 2.22.20, where Hobbes argues that the best form of governance for a legally incorporated society is for the entire membership to make up a single assembly, in which “every member of the body may be present at the consultations, if he will”; also De Cive, in OP, 7.5. Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, also observes the lingering importance of the representative assembly (10n8) and points out that it features in Hobbes’s discussion of joint-­stock companies (15–­16, 26–­31). 35. In addition to Elements of Law, 1.19.9, see also On the Citizen, 5.10, contrasting the “civil persons” formed by merchants with the true commonwealth; discussed by Pettit, Made with Words, 76; Boyd, “Hobbes and the Perils of Pluralism,” 393–­96. 36. E.g., Leviathan, 2.22.18, where he distinguishes between actual incorporated societies and regulated companies, in which merchants “join together in one society, where every man may either participate of the gain, according to the proportion of his adventure, or take his own, and sell what he transports or imports at such prices as he thinks fit.” “But this is no body politic,” he continues, “there being no common representative to oblige them to any other law than that which is common to all other subjects.” 37. See Malcolm’s illuminating discussion of the watch image in “Hobbes’s Science of Politics,” 149–­51, emphasizing the intentional aspect of mechanical objects; Spragens, Politics of Motion, 151–­52, argues that the passage connects Hobbes’s theory of politics directly to the methods of Descartes and Galileo. 38. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 60–­67, has shown how important the distinction between the natural and the artificial is to understanding Hobbes’s work; the legacy of artifactual and corporatist ideas on American attempts to fashion the “body politic ” is taken up by Slauter, State as a Work of Art, 11–­14, 43–­55. 39. EW, 7:184. 40. Compare Kahn, Wayward Contracts, 156–­60. 41. De Homine, 2.15.1, in OP, 2:130–­32, translation mine. The English translation of this section of De Homine by Wood, Scott-­Craig, and Gert in Man and Citizen renders “fictitio” as “artificial” throughout, a decision that ends up obscuring the centrality of the notion of fiction in Hobbes’s account, even if it has the virtue of drawing out its proximity to the “artificial.” 42. Leviathan, 1.16.12; 2.29.16; 3.41.9; 3.42.3. On Hobbes’s use of persona and of “representation” in his theory of the Trinity, see esp. Warner, “Hobbes’s Interpretation of the Doctrine of the Trinity”; Edwards, “Calvin and Hobbes,” 121–­25, 127–­30; Springborg, “Leviathan, Christian Commonwealth Incorporated,” 180–­83; Hammill, Mosaic Constitution, 215–­19. On the theatrical origins of the term persona and its theological fortunes, see the excellent discussion by Parker, “Persona.” 43. Hobbes, “An Answer to a Book . . . ,” in EW, 4:311, cited and discussed by Spragens, Politics of Motion, 91–­92; see also chapter 1 of Hobbes’s appendix to the Latin Leviathan (1668), “On the

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269

Nicean Crede,” translated and printed by Curley in his edition of Leviathan, pp. 498–­521, an expanded discussion of the problem of persona, hypostasis, and substance. 44. See Kottman, Politics of the Scene, 68–­70, which captures much of the complexity of Hobbes’s account. My only hesitation with Kottman’s discussion is that he subtly but persistently associates the term “ontological” with the “natural” (e.g., 55, 68); I would adjust his claim to account for the fact that Hobbes’s argument shows less an “absence of ontological bond” than a different kind of ontological bond: the challenge of Hobbes’s theory of politics is precisely to invent an ontology for the artificial and fictional person; he turns to theater, since it, too, forces us to confront the ontology of fictional beings (which is also why it has sponsored so much antitheatrical critique). See also 69, where Kottman argues that “the distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ person has no ontological ground in Hobbes,” a statement I would again amend to say that both natural and artificial persons have come to have the same ontological ground: that of the made, the artifactual, and the fictive. 45. Leviathan, 1.16.2; emphasis on “called” mine; “natural person” italic in original. I am indebted to Pettit, Made with Words, 146n1, 55–­69, esp. 55, who argues that Hobbes departed from scholastic notions of the person by considering it “not as a metaphysical concept” but as a “role concept” borrowed partly from legal theories of corporations and partly from theater. Kottman seems to me to overstate the case when he claims that Hobbes’s notion of representation “has absolutely nothing to do with dramatic action” and that his theory “marks a definitive perversion of the term ‘person’ itself,” going on to attribute to Arendt the genealogy that links “person” to “legal personality” (72). On Hobbes’s debt to theater (albeit an attenuated or narrowed idea of theater, as Kottman establishes), see Agnew, Worlds Apart, 98–­103; Dumouchel, “Persona,” esp. 69–­70, 72–­74; Vieira, Elements of Representation in Hobbes, esp. 75–­103, although all of  Vieira’s study is relevant to what I am calling the “representational” ontology of corporate persons.

coda 1. Vita, ll. 25–­26, in OP, 1:lxxxvi, first pub. 1679 and cited here in an anonymous English translation of 1680 printed in Leviathan, ed. Curley, liv–­lxiv. 2. Lev. (1678), 244n15. 3. Cf. Six Lessons, in EW, 7:343–­45; Marks . . . of John Wallis, in EW, 7:399–­400. Ward twice singled out Hobbes’s fear of being compared to More and Plato and made fun of it in his Vindiciae Academiarum, 10, 53, adding that “the only thing which paines him is the desire that Aristotelity may be changed into Hobbeity” (58). 4. Lev. (1678), 2.30.6; see also Elements of Law, 2.9. 5. Skinner, “State of Princes,” 368. 6. The concept of form is central to the work of Latour; see my further comments in Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science,” with additional bibliography, and Levine’s far-­reaching discussion of form as a political concept, Forms, esp. 3–­11, 24–­48. 7. In this vein, the best critical work on corporations is being done by anthropologists; see esp. Rogers, “The Materiality of the Corporation”; Golub, Leviathans at the Gold Mine; Kirsch, Mining Capitalism; Welker, Enacting the Corporation; from the perspective of science studies, see Mailet, Hawking Incorporated, which shows how the scientific body and subject (what we could call a neo-corporation sole) is always an assemblage of human and nonhuman actors. As Mailet puts it, “If Hawking is a corporation, he also has an extended body, or, more precisely, a multiplicity of extended bodies, of which he is at once an element and a product” (194). 8. See esp. Reassembling the Social; Pandora’s Hope; Aramis; or, T he Love of  Technology; also Bennett’s influential Vibrant Matter; the essays collected in Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter; and the valuable survey of recent work in Robbins, Political Ecology.

270 

notes to pages 228–232

9. For all its clarity and excitement, these limitations are visible in Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, esp. 94–­109, and result from her tendency to regard politics as “not . . . a formed thing or fixed entity, but as an unruly activity or indeterminate wave of energy” (106). Latour’s discussion of the “public” in “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik” is less satisfying in this respect than earlier works such as Science in Action, Pandora’s Hope, and (above all) Aramis, which provide a much more detailed account of the formalizing and institutionalizing methods by which knowledge and value are translated across different scales of political problems. Levine, Forms, offers a powerful statement in favor of the analytical necessity and political value of form, particularly at the moments of intersection between a “network” and a “whole” model of form, 115–­31. 10. Pandora’s Hope, 192–­93; cf. Daniel, Melancholy Assemblage, 7–­17, 29–­30, twice using the “corporate” metaphor in passing for the idea of a body. The problem of scale is a central organizing concept for DeLanda, Assemblage T heory of Society, esp. 6–­7, 17–­19, 31–­34, 40–­41 (arguing against the notion of the “state” on 85). On scale in political ecology, see Robbins, Political Ecology, esp. 132–­35; Paulson and Gezon, Political Ecology across Spaces, esp. 14, 148. 11. This is a primary argument, too, of Stern, Company-­State, esp. 3–­15; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, esp. 53; Withington, Society, 204–­5, 217; it is a major implication of the work of Latour and Bennett, too, in different ways, and of their theoretical inspirations; see also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 124, 209–­23. 12. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 24–­25, 37–­45, 47–­48, 52–­53; Schmitt, Political T heology, 3, 24–­26; Schmitt, “Ethic of State and Pluralistic State,” 195–­208. Further insight into Schmitt’s attitude toward pluralism can be found in his Idea of Representation, where he aligns a parliamentary theory of representation with the “joint-­stock companies and other juridical persons” that are typical of seventeenth-­century bourgeois political economy, viewing both as a vitiation of a concept of representation that he calls “Catholic” (e.g., 38, 43); see also Kahn’s succinct account of how Schmitt’s notion of personhood and representation differs from that of Kantorowicz in “Political Theology and Fiction,” 83–­88, 98n21. 13. Schmitt, Political T heology, 30. I have discussed the political nature of the decision in reference to Derrida’s reflections on Schmitt in Turner, “The Problem of the More-­Than-­One.” 14. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 26, 38–­39. 15. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt,” 116. 16. Compare the comments of Lupton, Citizen-­Saints, 4–­10, invoking Michael Walzer’s “associational pluralism” (8) as way of thinking about civil society as a mode of political theology that stands as an alternative to Schmitt’s sovereign decisionism; also Wilson and Yachnin’s introduction to Making Publics, emphasizing the importance of the notion of “association” and of multiple “publics” rather than a single “public sphere” (esp. 4–­5); Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, often describes the “public ” in corporate terms (e.g., 74, 86–­ 87, 123, 159–­86), taking a discursive and “poetic” approach that resembles my own arguments, although Warner’s definition of the “public” as “lacking any institutional being” and as “virtual entities, not voluntary associations” (88) runs counter to the more specific formal and institutional analysis that the notion of “corporation” as I am using it would make possible; compare also McKeon, Secret History, esp. 69–­84, 106–­9, 165. For Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, the idea of the public is a strongly corporatist idea rooted in the model of Adam and the collective production of truth; see also Merlin-­Kajman, Public et littérature, esp. 1–­32, 35–­57, on the public as “autre chose que ‘ensemble des particuliers, autre chose qu’un ‘ensemble’—­autre chose qu’un collectif de particuliers”: the corporate nature of the public, as I would put it, is understood by Merlin-­Kajman to proceed from an irreducibly relational structure that is nonlogical and “difficult to think” (51). 17. Barker, “The Discredited State,” 110–­11. 18. I take inspiration from Méchoulan, D’où viennent nos idées?, and Puchner, T he Drama of Ideas. 19. Compare Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics: “Politics and art, like forms of  knowledge, construct

notes to page 234 

271

‘fictions,’ that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done” (39). 20. See esp. Post, “The Parisian Masters as a Corporation”: “not until 1245 does the address of an original papal bull directed to the master and students contain the word universitas. This late appearance, however, of the term universitas in the address cannot be taken as the first possible date of a legal corporation. . . . By 1215 . . . nearly all the terms used by lawyers for corporations are found in the sources relating to the masters at Paris. But a final conclusion cannot be drawn from terminology alone; more important than terminology, which is not fixed, is the question, when did the masters act as a legal corporation?” (425; my emphasis; Post identifies the period 1208–­15). Innocent IV (1195–­1254) argued explicitly that “men in any profession”—­his example is teachers of “grammar ”—­had the right to establish themselves in partnership or to “form a college” “by their own authority if they wish”; cited by Black, Guilds and Civil Society, 21. Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty, 139–­60, has made arguments similar to the ones I articulate here, arguing for an “anticapitalist corporatism, where corporatism stands for an autonomous politics of being in common” (141) and drawing inspiration in part from a self-­published pamphlet by Kantorowicz written in 1950 in protest of the anticommunist loyalty oath mandated by the University of California regents. 21. Christopher Newfield, one of the first critics to identify a persistent corporatist strain in American letters, has shown how the “massive open online course” (MOOC) and related digital learning environments are only the most recent steps in a long-­standing culture war over the university, a struggle that is itself simply a proxy for a much wider class war fought under the alibi of budget constraints. See Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, and the articles and essays published at Remaking the University, the blog on the politics of American higher education written and edited by Newfield and Michael Meranze (http://utotherescue.blogspot.com).

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. actor-­network theory ( ANT), 227–­28 Adams, Clement, 101 Aït-­Touati, Frédérique, 265n36 Albanese, Denise, 265n33 Alleyn, Edward, 122, 126–­27, 145, 147, 257n41, 259n7 animals, 243n60 apprenticeship, 123, 127, 258n60 Aquinas, 63, 248–­49n22, 250n40 Archer, John, 197 Arendt, Hannah, 245n16, 269n45 Aristotle: Bacon’s critique of, 179; on citizens, 53; on constitutions, 8–­10, 171; defini­ tion of politics and, xvii, 8–­10, 37, 50, 66, 82, 171, 218, 221, 231; De gene­ratione et corruptione, by 18; democracy and, 53; Edward Coke’s turn to, 18; English reception of his political categories, xvii, 246n32; Ernst Kantorowicz’s turn to, 241–­ 42n42; ethics versus economics and, 37–­38, 41–­43; Hobbes’s critique of, 207, 209–­10, 218, 267n17; on households, 50, 246n33; invention in political philosophy and, 9–­10; knowledge in the whole and, 235; natural bodies and political bodies and, 178; nature of causation and, 40; Nicomachean Ethics by, 37–­38, 41, 46; plurality and unity and, 8–­9; political economy and, xvii, 37–­38; Politics by, 48–­50, 59, 66, 82, 97, 239n11, 246n33; prudential reasoning and, 100; Richard

Hakluyt and, 97, 100, 252n49; Richard Hooker and, 63, 66, 82, 249–­50n35, 250n40; in Thomas Smith’s writings, 46, 48; whole and parts and, 66, 204 Armin, Robert, 123 Arnold, Oliver: on Parliament and representation, 25, 166; on the people in Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 261n35; on representation in Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 169, 172; on Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 261n27, 262n46 assemblage: commonwealth and, 246n35; corporations and, 102, 104, 106, 114, 269n7; group person and, 227–­28; in­ corporation and, 198; plays as, xix, 141; scales of association and, 233 assembly and assemblies: in ancient Greece, 167; Bacon’s method and, 178, 180–­81, 184–­87, 263n16; democracy and, 217; joint-­stock companies and, 108, 112–­13; personhood and, 212, 213, 222; places of, 131, 142; purpose of corporations and, xviii, 48, 59; religious, 27, 62–­63, 67, 74, 205; representative, 20, 25, 218, 221, 268n34; right to assemble and, xix, 86; self-­assembly, 165; sovereignty and, 223; theater audiences as, 117, 121, 143; theater company as, 256n21; universities and, 207 Astington, John, 122 Attié, Katherine Bootle, 263n13, 267n21

298  i n d e x attorneys, 13, 24–­25 Aubrey, John, 265n3 Augustine, 48, 68, 72 Bacon, Francis: alchemy and, 188–­89, 191, 264n24, 264n26; analogies among natural, ethical, and political philosophies and, 264–­ 65n30; atomism and, 186–­87, 264n19; axioms and, 182–­88, 263n17; Calvin’s Case (1608) and, 11–­12, 14, 23, 41, 70; collective habits of composition and, 181, 182, 263n13, 263n15; commonness and, 178, 180, 185, 187; composition as term and, 28; critique of Aristotle by, 178–­79; democratic impulse and, 263n13; Elizabeth I (England) and, 12, 193–­94; empiricism and, 263n10; Historia Densi and Rari by, 190–­91; Hobbes and, xx, 204, 265n3; induction and, 179–­81, 184–­86, 188, 192–­93, 195, 263n11, 263n16, 264n28; James I (England) and, 175–­76, 181–­82, 193–­94; meaning of corporation and, 26–­27; method and, 178–­81, 184–­ 86, 188–­89, 191–­92, 195, 200, 263n16; monarch’s grant of incorporation and, 16–­ 17, 21, 22, 88, 240n29; movement and, 193, 194–­95; New Atlantis by, xx, 178, 187, 195–­ 201, 225–­26, 265n31, 265n34; ontology of nature and, 187–­89, 193; personhood and, 220; philosophical difficulties of corporate form and, 115; pluralism and, 186, 195, 230, 269n7; political ecology of, 178, 192–­93, 263n8; politics of nature and, 191–­95; as protoliberal, 269n7; Richard Hooker’s philosophy of law and, 63, 67–­68; royal prerogative and, 16, 88, 192–­93; sources for, 263n14, 264n19, 264n20; sovereignty and, 22, 178, 181, 193–­94; Sutton’s Hospital (1612) and, 14–­15, 16–­17, 240n28; theory of form and, 188–­89, 191–­92, 193, 227, 264n20; union of England and Scotland and, 176–­77; Utopia (More) and, 17, 20, 32, 41; Virginia Company and, 98. See also Novum Organum (Bacon) Bailey, Amanda, 127, 259n5 Baldus de Ubaldis, 19 Baldwin, T. W., 118, 124, 257n38, 259n9 Bancroft, Richard, 62 Barbour, Philip L., 252–­53n55 Barbour, Reid, 264n19 Barbour, Richmond, 108, 237n2, 253n63, 254n82

Barkan, Joshua, 237–­38n5, 271n20 Barker, Ernest, xv, 6–­7, 21, 231–­33, 238n5 Barnet, Gilbert, 238n1 Barthes, Roland, 254n76 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 19–­20 Baxter, Simon, 14 Bellarmine, Robert Cardinal, 207 Benfield, Robert, 147 Bennett, Jane, 263n8, 270n9 biopolitics, xv, 237–­38n5 Black, Antony, 243n54 Blackfriars Theater, 123, 142, 146, 148, 260n11 Blackstone, William, 16 body politic: Aristotle and, 9; assemblage of, 114; in Bacon’s New Atlantis, 195; in Bacon’s world of nature, 27, 177–­78, 180, 191, 195; body natural and, 219; in Calvin’s Case (1608), 11–­12; City of London as, xix, 15, 167–­68; Church as, 15, 66–­67; commonwealth as, 67, 79, 218; consent and union and (Hobbes), 216–­17; corporations as, 10, 15, 17, 115, 216, 250n9; corporatist model of political association and, 168–­ 69; corpus mysticum and, 20, 241–­42n42; definition of, 15–­16; democratic, 217; joint-­stock companies as, 86, 88–­89, 94, 108–­9, 214, 216, 218, 250n9; law as soul of (Hooker), 67; in Leviathan (Hobbes), 16, 204, 212, 218–­19, 266–­67n16, 267n21, 268n36; mineral societies as, 88–­89; Parliament as, 15, 53–­54; representation and, 114; in Shakespeare, xix, 151, 167–­68, 169, 171–­72; in Sutton’s Hospital (1612), 15, 17; theater companies as, 115; types of, 15–­16 Bodin, Jean, 249–­50n35 Book of Common Prayer, 33, 59, 60–­61, 74 Bourdieu, Pierre, 133–­34 Boyle, Robert, 265n3 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 242n43 Brayne, John, 123 Brett, Jerome, 90–­91, 251n22 Bucer, Martin, 60 Burbage, Cuthbert: relation of to Cham­ berlain’s Men, 146–­47, 259nn6–­7, 259–­ 60n10; dispute over company shares and, 147, 148 Burbage, James, 123, 124, 256n27 Burbage, Richard, 147, 256n23, 259nn6–­7, 259–­60n10, 262n48 Burbage, Winifred, 147

i n d e x   299 Burghley (Lord), 62, 94, 143. See also Cecil, William Butcher, Richard, 119, 130 Cabot, Sebastian, 98, 99–­100, 107, 252n53 Caesar, 152–­53, 160–­63, 165–­66, 172, 251n25 Calvin, John, and Calvinism, 64–­66, 72, 73, 248n20 Calvin’s Case (1608): Bacon and, 14, 23, 41, 70; corporation sole as body politic and, 15; corporation sole versus corporations aggregate and, 23; Edward Coke and, 11–­12, 18, 70; legal definition of corporations and, 11–­12; Utopia and, 41 Canning, J. P., 18, 19 Canny, Nicholas, 96 Carleill, Christopher, 97 Carleton, George, 62 cartography, 109, 110–­11, 112 Cartwright, Thomas, 62, 72 Cavendish (Lord), 215, 267n26 Cecil, William, 35, 86–­87, 89, 90. See also Burghley (Lord) Chamberlain, John, 175 Chambers, E. K., 118, 123, 238n4 Charles I (England), 12–­13 Charles IX (France), 45 Christ: body of, 24, 59–­60, 241–­42n42; as head of church, 61, 69, 77–­78; mystical participation with, 60, 71–­72, 73, 75; personhood and incarnation of, 20, 69–­71, 73, 75, 223, 267n24 Church: Church of England and, 61, 74; colonization and, 216; commonwealth and, 67, 82; communion in, 50, 247n38; corporate membership and, 237–­ 38n5; corporate personality of, 68–­73; corporate totality of the church and, 81; as corporation xii, xiv, 7, 14, 15, 27, 68–­74, 197, 215; ecclesiastical and civil power and, 203–­4; ecclesiastical versus civil life and, 62–­63; Elizabethan settlement and, 61; English Civil War and, 205; Eucharist controversy and, 59–­61, 71–­72, 154, 207, 260n16, 260n22; head of the church and, 77–­78; Hobbes’s critique of, 203–­4, 206, 210; legitimation by the sovereign and, 74, 75–­76; as mystical body, 69, 71, 78, 241–­ 42n42; mystical ontology of corporations and, 24, 77; personhood and the Trinity in, 20–­21; personhood of Christ and, 69–­71,

73; as politic society and polity, xvii, 64, 66–­68, 75, 79, 82, 84, 205; power of bishops and, 73–­78; power to make laws and, 67, 68; Presbyterian movement and, 61–­64, 68, 72–­73, 77–­78, 248n15; as public body, 63, 73–­75, 249n31; Puritans and, 61–­ 62, 65–­66, 84; and state, 59, 64, 66, 76–­77, 203–­6, 226, 248n21; as supernatural, 68–­ 69; Trinity and, 70, 222–­23; unity versus uniformity in, 72; and universities, 207–­10, 215, 219, 226, 266n14. See also Calvin, John, and Calvinism; political theology Cicero: colonization and, 251n25; contract and private property and, 42–­43; maxims of, 39; meaning of commonwealth and, 246n35; political economy and, xvii; societas and, 48; state of Rome and, 171–­72; tradition of prudential reasoning and, 100 civil corporation, 78, 84 civil law and civilian lawyers: Bacon and, 175; corporatist tradition and, 250n40; definition of corporations and 15, 271n20; Doctor Pandolphus and, 40; ecclesiastical law and 67; Edmund Plowden and, 11; Henry Parker and, 25; personhood and, 18, 220; public good and 88; Roman law and, 13; silence and, 213; sovereignty and, 223, 226; Thomas More and, 30, 238n5; Thomas Smith and, 35–­36, 57, 85, 95, 246n31; Thomas Wilson and, 34; Walter Haddon and, 45 civil philosophy, 176, 221 civil power, civil polity, and civil authority: artificial quality of civil polities and, 220–­21; church under civil authority and, 66, 205; civil body politic and, 195; ecclesiastical authority and, 76; ecclesiastical power and, xx, 63, 64–­65, 203, 226; monarch as supreme authority and, 73–­74; origin of civil polities and, 80 civil society and civil life: associational pluralism and, 270n16; body politic and, 216; communion and, 50; corporate, 80–­81; culture of friendship and, 167; emergence of as concept, 37; origins and persistence of, 204; philosophical accounts of, 85; public dimension of collective life and, xiii–­xvii; public sphere and, 230; Roman sense of society and, 66; theological and civil life and, xvii, 62; theories of, 64, 245n16

300  i n d e x Clanchy, Michael, 247n42 class, 132–­33 Coke, Edward: Bacon and, 14–­15; Calvin’s Case (1608) and, 11–­12, 18, 70; on corporations, 13, 20; on legal fiction, 18; monarch and City of London and, 118; monarch’s grant of incorporation and, 16, 21, 22; Sutton’s Hospital (1612) and, 14–­15, 16–­18, 24–­25, 240n28 Cole, George Douglas Howard, xv, 21–­22 Collinson, Patrick, 61–­62, 244n5, 248n15 commons, the, xiii common weal. See commonwealth commonwealth: church and, 67, 76, 82, 205–­6; civil persons versus, 268n35; civitas as, 268n33; commonalty and, 89; consent and, 80; as corporation, 97, 216, 218; corporation aggregate of many and, 13; in De Republica Anglorum (Smith), 46, 48, 50, 53, 57, 247n39; in A Discourse of the Commonweal (Smith), 44–­45; imitation from nature and, 204; law and, 50–­57; Leviathan as essence of, 213–­14, 221; meaning of, 33–­34, 49, 50, 244n5, 246n35; merchants as members of, 108–­9; morality and profit and, 43; in New Atlantis (Bacon), 201; private gain versus common good in, 100; private property and, 42; respublica as, 3, 4; Richard Hooker’s theory of, xvii, 63, 64; society of the, 45–­50; versus state in Shakespeare’s works, 168–­69; Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) and, 157; universities’ importance to, 226; in Utopia (More), 35; whole and parts and, 220; yeoman’s role in, 52–­53 communitas, 34, 119 composition: agreement and, 81; of associational life, 26; Bacon’s method and, 176–­77, 190–­91, 194, 198, 263n15; of corporate institutions, 155; corporate person and, 114; Elizabethan drama and, 121, 174, 258n67; joint-­stock companies and, xviii; ontology of the corporation and, 28–­30; of powers, 228; real personality of corporations and, 232; theater companies and, 149; whole and parts and, 104 Condell, Henry, 123 constitutions: Aristotle and, 8–­10, 48; in Bacon’s natural philosophy, 192–­95, 201; corporate charters as, 98–­99, 107; corporate towns and, 119; “discipline” and, 62, 64–­ 66; in Hobbes, 220; Hooker’s theory of

law and 67–­68, 79; narration and, 30; in Shakespeare, 156, 159, 171; universitas and, 234, 241–­42n42; in Virginia, 113 Cormack, Bradin, 238n5, 242n47, 243n61, 247n40, 251nn11–­12 corporate ontology: Bacon and, 191; as compositional, 28; four major theories of, 24–­26; as legal question, 20; Leviathan (Hobbes) and, 227; material and materialist, 24, 26, 28, 36, 84, 191; meaning of ontology and, 227; mimetic, 24, 26, 28, 174, 222; mixing of ontological modes and, 24–­26; mystical, 24, 25, 28, 77, 172, 191; nature of, xxi; as philosophical question, 18, 177; representational, 24–­26, 28, 36; in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Dekker), 141; in Smith’s writing, 47; Coriolanus and, 174 corporations: in actor-­network theory, 227–­28; aggregate, 13–­14, 15, 24–­25, 63, 101–­2; anthropological study of, 269n7; anticapitalist corporatism and, 29, 271n20; as artificial or fictional persons, 10, 16–­21, 29–­30, 114, 234, 240–­41nn32–­33, 269n45; authority in, 78, 142; bishop as corporate person and, 73; bodies versus corporate persons and, 11–­12; body as frame for, 23, 242n46; characteristics of, 13, 26–­27; class versus status groups and, 132–­33; as clusters of sovereignties and powers, xviii; concession theory of, 21, 22; contractual forms and, 36; coordination of forms of value and, 233–­34; corporate brands and, 28–­29; corporate membership and, 237–­38n5; corporatist model of political association and, 115, 168–­69, 261–­62n42; criminal potential of, 19–­20, 241n37; definitions of, 10–­18, 26–­27, 77, 243n55; definitions of the public and, xix, 8, 26, 45, 56, 63–­64, 66–­67, 73–­75, 88, 157, 196, 205, 230–­31, 235, 270n16; fiction theory of, 19, 21; group personality and, xi–­xii, 230–­31; as idealizing type and practical fact, 94–­95; as intrinsic to early modern life, xiii–­xiv; legal and nonlegal ideas and, 23, 26, 241–­ 42n42; legal status of, xi; monarch’s grant of incorporation and, 16–­17, 21, 22, 87, 240n29; as moral persons, 21; multiple types of, xii–­xiii, xv, 14, 28; parliaments as, 25, 218; pluralism and plurality and, 21–­23, 26–­27, 56–­57, 229; real personality of, 19, 232; sole, 11–­13, 15, 23–­24, 26, 63, 239n15,

i n d e x   301 239n17, 269n7; the state and, xx, 196–­97, 201, 226, 265n33; temporalities of, 27–­28, 78–­82, 88, 114, 253n56; theater companies and, 130; universitas and universities and, xii, 215, 234, 235, 266n14; whole and parts and, xvi. See also corporate ontology; incorporation; joint-­stock companies; universitas and universities covenants, 221, 224, 225 crime, 19–­20 currency, 41 Daborne, Robert, 129 Dante, 241–­42n42 Danvers,  John, 267n26 Davies, Rees, 247n42 Davis, John, 99 Dawes, Robert, 127, 128–­29 Dawson, Anthony D., 260n16 Day, George, 60 debt, 13–­14 Declaration of Independence, 113 Dee, John, 48, 253n60 De Grazia, Margreta, 260n19 Dekker,  Thomas: corporate ideas for political identity and, 159; financial problems of, 129; theater company of, 114–­15; on theater’s value to the city, 142. See also Shoemaker’s Holiday, The ( Dekker) Deleuze, Gilles, 263n8 Deloney, Thomas, 130 De Man, Paul, 101, 253n62 democracy, 53, 217, 220–­21, 226 Democritus, 264n19 De Republica Anglorum (Smith): Aristotle and, 46, 48, 49–­50, 66; commonwealth in, 46, 48, 50, 53, 57, 247n39; communion in, 50; corporate notion of society in, 85; England’s constitution and, 47–­48, 53–­54; as history writing, 47; household in, 50; justice in, 50–­52; law as binding agent in, 63; meaning of societas and, 49, 66; multitude in, 93; Parliament in, 54–­56; philosophical dimension of, 47; pluralist legal regimes and, 84; political economy and, 119; theory of civil life and, 64; Utopia (More) and, 45–­46, 246n30; writing of, 45–­46, 246n28; yeomen in, 52–­53, 247n40 Dewey, John, 240n32 Digges, Dudley, 267n26

Discourse of the Commonweal, A (Smith): classical thought and, 39, 40, 42–­ 43; dialogue in, 38–­42, 44; English economic life and, 43–­44, 47–­48; political economy and, 39–­41, 42–­43, 44–­45, 119; protoliberalism of, xx, 43; Utopia and, 41 Downton, Thomas, 126–­27, 129 Drewett, William, 61–­62 Dumouchel, Paul, 267n23 Duncombe, Stephen, 238n1 East India Company, 98, 108, 252–­53n55 Eden, Richard, 36 Edgar I ( England), 253n60 Edicts of Gaius, 13 Edward VI (England), 36 Elizabeth I (England): Bacon and, 193–­94; Church of England and, 61, 74; death of, 175; grants of incorporation and, 16, 87; Ireland policy of, 89–­90; religious controversies and, 60–­61; Richard Hakluyt and, 97; Russia Company and, 98; theater and, 118, 139, 145; Thomas Smith and, 36, 45, 59, 89–­90 Ellis, Robert Leslie, 182, 194, 265n35 Elyot, Thomas, 35, 49 enclosure, 33 England: constitution of, 47–­48; economic conditions in, 33; election procedures in, 262n43; incorporation of towns in, 118–­19, 258n56, 261–­62n42; industrial investment by, 87; representation of English nation­ hood and, 131, 137–­38; union of with Scot­ land, 23, 176–­77. See also London English Civil War, 205, 210 Epicurus, 264n19 Esposito, Roberto, 237–­38n5 equality, xi Evans, Thomas, 257n41 Eyre, Simon, 130–­42, 149, 168, 258nn64–­65 fiction: commonwealth as, 45; construction of, 270–­71n19; corporations as fictional persons, xv–­xvi, 10, 17–­21, 240–­41nn32–­33; corporations as legal persons and, 10, 29–­30, 119; etymology of, 29; extension of, xvi; fictional persons and, 222–­24, 268n41, 269n44; fictional versus feigned and, 20, 30, 267n25; fictional versus real corporate personhood and, 19; fiction theory versus concession theory of corporations and,

302  i n d e x fiction (cont.) 21; Hobbes and, xx, 81, 213–­16, 219–­25; legal versus nonlegal ideas of corporations and, 241–­42n42; literary versus legal, 21, 239n15, 241n42; made up versus made real and, 17; New Atlantis (Bacon) and, 195, 200–­201; offstage in theater and, 153, 260n22; ontology of ideas and, 32, 232–­ 33; philosophy and, 3, 44; poesy and, 31; political and, 170, 173–­74; reality of, xx, 31, 214, 227; representation and, 213, 214–­15; scientific thinking and, 265n36; as source of constitutional thinking, 241–­42n42; the state as, 10, 45, 196; in Sutton’s Hospital (1612), 17–­18; theater as fictional-­real hybrid and, 141, 149, 150–­51; theatrical characters and, 149–­55, 165–­66; Utopia ( More) and, 3; in work of  Thomas Smith, 36, 41, 44–­46, Field, Nathan, 128–­29 Figgis, John Neville, xv, 21–­22, 248n21 Fineux, John, 25 Fitzwilliam, William, 90, 91, 93 Fletcher, Angus, 263n16 Foucault, Michel, 7 Fuller, Mary, 253n61, 254n75, 254n80 Gaius, Edicts of. See Edicts of Gaius Genet, Jean, 175 Gierke, Otto von: civil society and, 245n16; corporate terminology and, 240n23; on corporations as plurality-­in-­unity, 26; on corporations’ group personality, xi; diversity of associational life and, xv; En­ glish pluralists and, 21; fiction theory of cor­ porations and, 19; influence of, 239n15; on real personality of corporations, 19; representational assemblies and, 25 Gilbert, Humphrey, 86, 251n25 Globe Theater, 146, 148, 259–­60nn10–­11 Godolphin, Francis, 203 Goodwin, Thomas, 267n24 Gosson, Stephen, 143 Grafton, Anthony, 251n25 Greenblatt, Stephen, 7, 154–­55, 260n22, 260n25 Greg, W. W., 115, 118 Gregory the Great, 72 Griffin, Edward, 128 Guattari, Félix, 263n8

guilds: Adam Smith on, 240n23; autonomy of, 258–­59n68; blood lineages and, 136; capital versus labor and, 133; class tensions and, 133; corporate character of, 133, 137; in A Discourse of the Commonweal (Smith), 43, 44; legitimating authority and, 142; versus mineral societies, 87; as monopolies, 258n58; multiple purposes of, 22, 126; opposition to, 27; persistence of, 131–­32; in Shakespeare’s plays, 160–­61, 261n35; in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Dekker), 160; the­ ater and, 122, 123, 256n28; urban citizen­ ship and, 134, 136; yeomen in, 247n40 Gurr, Andrew, xix, 146–­47, 256n21, 256n28, 259n7 Habermas, Jürgen, 245n16 Haddon, Walter, 45, 46–­47, 57, 251n25 Hakluyt, Richard the younger (1552–­1616): Aristotle’s Politics and, 97; background and career of, 85, 96; English colonial policy and, xx; geography and, 109; joint-­stock companies and, 27; leaders of commercial expeditions and, 253n60; on merchants as members of the commonwealth, 108–­ 9; New World colonization and, 96–­97; Virginia Company and, 98, 252–­53n55. See also The Principle Navigations (Hakluyt) Halpern, Richard, 239n13, 239n15, 260n19 Hamlet (Shakespeare): constitutional crisis and, 156; corporatist model of political association and, 168–­69, 170; fiction in, 150–­55, 166, 170, 173–­74; ghost as theatrical effect in, 151–­54, 260n22, 260n24; individual versus group in, 234; limits of philosophy in, 260n24; mimesis in, 149–­50, 152–­54, 156, 158; political imaginary of, 151–­52, 154–­56; Reformation debates and, 154, 260n22; spectral dimension of the state and, 23; theatrical self-­consciousness of, 150–­53, 156, 157, 233, 260n18; Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) and, 158–­59; university in, 154, 210 Hammill, Graham, 241–­42n42, 248n18, 266n9 Harkness, Deborah, 263n15, 265n34 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 125–­26 Harvey, Gabriel, 246n30 Hasse,  John, 254n77

i n d e x   303 Hawking, Stephen, 269n7 Heath, Douglas Denon, 182, 194, 265n35 Heath, Nicholas, 60 Hegel, G. W. F., 242n43 Helgerson, Richard, xiii, 131, 237n3, 254n83 Heminges, John, 123, 146–­48 Heminges, William, 147–­48 Henry VIII (England), 74 Henslowe, Philip: Admiral’s Men and, 125; antagonism in companies of, 146; authoritarianism of, 259n7; church life and, 123; diary and papers of, 145–­46; dissolving and starting companies and, 128–­29; financial management and, 128–­29, 146–­ 47, 257n47; housekeeping arrangements in theater and, 259n9; legal status of per­ formers and, 256n27; personnel man­ agement and, 127–­28; theater company shares of, 126–­27; Thomas Dekker and, 129 Heraclitus, 176 Hexter, J. H., 238n4, 238–­39n8, 238n4 Hickes, Richard, 123 historiography, 117, 118 Hobbes, Thomas: antipluralism of, 206–­7, 226, 265–­66n5; “Aristotelity” and, 207, 209–­10, 269n3; Bacon and, xx, 265n3; Behemoth by, 205–­6; consent and, 80, 216; corporations’ persistence in time and, 27–­28; corporatist thought of, 204, 265–­66n5; on covenants, 217–­18, 221, 224, 225; critique of scholastic metaphysics and, 207–­10, 266n9; critique of the church and, 203–­4, 205–­6, 219; decision by a group person and, 230; De Cive, De Corpore, and De Homine by, 207–­ 8, 210, 220, 222, 266–­67n16, 268n41; definition of politics and, 231; Elements of Law by, 216; English Civil War and, 205, 210; excommunication and, 268n33; fear of lack of influence and, 225, 269n3; joint-­ stock companies and, 16, 113–­14, 216–­19, 221, 368n34; legal and nonlegal ideas of corporations and, 26; materialism of, 207, 210, 221–­22; monarch as corporation sole and, 12–­13; monarch’s grant of incorporation and, 21; the multitude and, 218, 220, 268n33; natural versus artificial in works of, 268n38; natural versus artificial persons and, 269n44; nature of corporate ontology and, xxi; nominalism of, 204, 214; originary contract and, 172;

paradox of constituting and constituted power and, 221–­22; parliaments and, 25, 204–­5, 218; the person and, 204–­6, 212–­24, 261n30; personhood and, 212–­ 15, 219–­21; philosophical difficulties of corporate form and, 115; political science and, 209, 268n37; on power of corporate idea, 29; rejection of Christian doctrines by, 207; Richard Hooker compared to, 81–­82; Roman and British colonies and, 218–­19; science and, 204, 265n3; Six Lessons by, 221, 266n14; Somer Islands Company and, 215–­16, 219; state of nature and, 69, 230; theater and, 204, 214, 222–­ 24, 269nn44–­45; theatrical action and political action and, 166; theory of contract and, 266n9; theory of politics and, 204, 226–­27, 267n21, 268n37, 269n44; theory of representation and, 63, 214–­16, 220, 222–­24, 267n23, 267n25, 269n45; theory of sovereignty and, 63, 205, 226; theory of the Trinity and, 223; universities and, 205–­8, 210, 215, 219–­20, 223, 225–­26, 233, 266n14; utopic writing and, 32; Virginia Company and, 114, 215–­16, 219, 267n26. See also Leviathan (Hobbes) Holbeach, Henry, 60 Holbein, Hans, 4, 6–­7, 6 Holland, Peter, 260n12 Hooker, John, 242n50 Hooker, Richard: on angels as spiritual corporation, 14; church and state and, 206; civil society as corporation and, 66; composition as term and, 28; dispute between Walter Travers and, 62, 73; Edwin Sandys and, 98; excommunication and, 268n33; Hobbes and, 81–­82, 212; genealogy of the joint-­stock company and, 85; influences on, 250n40; John Calvin and Calvinism and, 65, 248n20; law of nature and, 176; legal and nonlegal ideas of corporations and, 26; Leviathan (Hobbes) and, 63–­64; meaning of corporation and, 27; natural bodies and political bodies and, 178; opposition of separatism and, 12; paradox of constitut­ ing and constituted power and, 221–­22; philosophy of law and, xvii, 63, 67–­68; Presbyterian movement and, 62–­63, 64, 68; relationship of church and state and, 226, 248n21; replacement of political imaginary

304  i n d e x Hooker, Richard (cont.) of, xx; theory of commonwealth and, xvii, 63, 64; theory of politics and, 204; theory of sovereignty and, 63, 79–­80, 83–­84, 204, 249–­50n35; theory of the commonwealth and, 63; whole and parts and, 204. See also Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker) Howard, Jean E., 130, 257n50, 258n51 Hutson, Lorna, 239n15, 240n32, 241–­42n42, 242n47 idea: in Bacon’s philosophy, 177–­78; created by literary imagination, 3, 31; as effect of translation, 28, 104, 221, 226; as notion, 178–­85; ontology of, 32, 178, 232–­33; on stage, 130, 138, 141, 155; as unifying principle, 28–­30, 137, 201, 227, 235, 242–­43n42 imperialism and colonization: claims to cultivation and, 252n36; colony versus the commonwealth and, 97; English colonial policy and, xx; Ireland as training ground for, 96, 252n36; joint-­stock companies and, 109, 112, 216; justifications for, 216; limit of royal authority and, 95–­96; ongoing sequence of Ulster ventures and, 94; printed publicity for colonial projects and, 251nn18–­19; Roman colonies and, 83, 89, 218–­19, 251n24; sources of colonists and, 96–­97; Spanish ventures in the New World and, 95; Thomas Smith’s Ulster project and, 89–­96, 251nn18–­19; Utopia (More) and, 95 incorporation: Bacon’s use of term, 12, 17, 23, 190, 198–­99, 264n24; Blackstone on, 16; English towns and cities and, 118–­20, 169, 258n56, 261–­62n42; limits of legal idea of, 21–­22; monarch’s grant of, 16–­17, 21–­22, 87, 240n29; Parliament and, 14; representation as privilege of, 242n51; Sutton’s Hospital (1612) and, 14–­15; union of England and Scotland and, 176–­77 Ingram, William, 123, 256n21, 256n28 Innocent IV, 18–­19, 241n37, 271n20 Ireland, xviii, xx, 89–­96 Irenaeus, 71 James, William, 242n43 James I (England): accession to the throne by, 175–­76, 192, 201; Bacon and, 175–­76, 181–­82, 193–­94; broad learning of, 177; challenge to royal prerogative of, 193;

legal status of subjects of, 11, 12; London’s charter of incorporation and, 169; mon­ arch’s grant of incorporation and, 16; monopolies and, 88; Plymouth Company and, 112; Royal Entry of, 129; Sutton’s Hospital (1612) and, 14, 240n28; union of Scotland and England and, 23; Virginia Company and, 112 James VI (Scotland). See James I (England) Jardine, Lisa, 251n25, 263n16, 264–­65n30 Johnson, Barbara, 101, 241n41 Johnson, Samuel, 49 joint-­stock companies: artificiality of, 220–­ 21; assessing costs and allocating profits in, 125; cartographic representation of, 109, 110–­11, 112; choice of leaders for expeditions and, 253n60; colonization and, 112, 216; common weal and, 27; contractualism of, 178; creation of markets and, 254n77; financing structures of, 90; generation of value and, 106–­7; as group persons, 85, 100–­103; Hobbes and, 214–­19, 221, 368n34; importance of corporate forms and, xviii; limitations of, 214; as little commonwealths, 16; versus medieval regulated companies, 98–­99; membership in, 98; mineral societies and, 86–­87; nature of sovereignty and, xvii–­xviii; origins and genealogy of, 84–­85; parliamentary theory of representation and, 270n12; personhood of, 27; as political-­economic bodies, 107, 108–­9; private gain versus common good in, 100; relation to the state and, 107–­8, 109; Russia Company and, 98; Society for the New Art and, 89; sovereign self-­image of, 113–­14; theater companies and, xix, 125–­26; Thomas Smith’s Ulster project and, 89; translation and commodification and, 103–­4, 106–­7; writing required for, 102–­3, 253n61. See also theater companies Jones, Richard, 126 justice, 21, 50–­52 Kahn, Victoria, 239n15, 240n32, 241–­42n42, 267n31, 268n40, 270n12 Kantorowicz, Ernst: anticommunist loy­alty oaths and, 271n20; church as angelo­ morphic body and, 69; church as mystical body of Christ and, 241–­42n42; corporate vocabulary and, 241–­42n42; corporation sole as body politic and, 15; corporations’

i n d e x   305 persistence in time and, 27–­28; corporatism of, 237–­38n5; influences on, 239n15; on legal ideas and mimetic arguments, 24; legal versus nonlegal ideas of corpora­ tions and, 241–­42n42; monarch as cor­ poration sole and, 239n15; monarch as public person and, 248–­49n22; per­ sonhood and, 270n12; on Richard II (Shakespeare), 260n19 Kathman, David, 122, 225n17 Kempe, Robert, 175, 201 Knutson, Rosalind, 122, 256n28 Korda, Natasha, 122, 124 Kottman, Paul, 260n26, 269nn44–­45 Kynaston, Edward, 123 Laski, Harold, xv, 21–­22, 38, 242n43 Latour, Bruno: actor-­network theory (ANT) and, 227–­28; compositional ontology of the corporation and, 28; form and, 243n58, 269n6; political ecology and, 263n8; on the public, 270n9; translation and, 103, 104, 243n57 law: Baconian form and, 191–­92; civil strength and, 95; of commonwealth, 50–­57; consent of the governed and, 80–­81; in De Republica Anglorum (Smith), 45, 48, 63; flexibility of, 31–­32; limitations of, 21, 30; multiple forms of, 67; natural, 176, 248n20; people inside and outside, 53; personhood in, 223, 269n45; persons in, 16; power to make laws and, 79; preservation of the corporate nature of the body and, 79; Richard Hooker’s philosophy of, xvii, 63; sovereignty residing in, 249–­50n35; state in making of, 22–­23; universitas and, 14. See also civil law and civilian lawyers; Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker); Roman law Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker): antipopulism in, 72–­73; Aristotle and, 66, 82; Book of Common Prayer controversy and, 74; Christ’s unity with the church in, 71–­72; church and commonwealth and, 67, 76; church as mystical body in, 69; church as plurality-­in-­unity and, 72; church as political society and, 64, 67, 79, 82; consent of the governed and, 80–­81; defense of English church and commonwealth and, xvii; ecclesiastical versus civil life and, 62–­63; Eucharist controversy and, 71–­72; extent of monarch’s power and, 78–­79;

head of the church and, 77–­78; monarch’s civil and ecclesiastical authority and, 73–­74; personhood of Christ and, 69–­71, 73; polemical style of, 249n32; political theology and, 64–­65, 66–­67, 70, 249n32; Presbyterian movement and, 73–­75, 77–­78; public church versus private assemblies and, 74–­75; the public in, 75, 249nn32–­33; Puritan populism and, 65–­66; relationship of church and state in, 66; religion and monarchy and, 203; roots of religion in, 68; selection of the monarch and, 79; sola scriptura and, 80; theory of sovereignty and, 79–­80, 83–­84; transitional moment in En­glish political thought and, 79–­82; whole and parts in, 63, 66, 82 Leicester, Earl of, 86, 87, 124 Leinwand, Theodore B., 259n5 Le Roy, Louis, 48 Leviathan (Hobbes): “Aristotelity” and, 207, 209–­10; bodies politic in, 16, 368n36; as countermeasure to commercial cor­ poration, 114; covenants in, 221, 224, 225; critique of the church and, 205–­6, 219; frontispiece for, 211; Hobbes’s theory of politics and, 203–­4, 227; Hobbes’s theory of representation and, 212–­13, 214–­16, 222–­24, 268n34; Hobbes’s theory of the Trinity and, 223; incorporated society and, 216, 368n36; Leviathan as corporate person and, 214, 221, 224; Leviathan as essence of the commonwealth and, 213–­14, 221; Leviathan as fictional person and, 213–­14, 220; Leviathan as group person and, 63–­64, 222; models for Leviathan and, 267n24; the multitude in, 218, 220, 268n33; personhood in, 212–­15, 222–­24; political science and, xx, 209; purpose of, 203; Shakespeare and, 203; theater and, 222–­24; theory of civil life and, 64; universitas and universities and, 206–­8, 210, 243n54; whole and parts and, 204 Levine, Caroline, 243n59, 269n6, 270n9 literature: meaning of fiction and, xvi; poesy and, 31; political power of, 237–­38n5; utopic writing and, 31–­32 Livy, 251n25 London: 1593 plague in, 117; incorporation and governance of, 119–­20, 169; sup­ pression of theater in, 120, 130, 142–­43, 257n39, 259n71

306  i n d e x Lowin, John, 123 Lucretius, 264n19, 264n20 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 156, 239n15, 241–­ 42n42, 260n26, 261n28, 270n16 Machiavelli, 171–­72, 177 MacMillan, Ken, 247n41, 250n1, 252n36 Madison, James, 243n53 Maitland, Frederick William, xv, 11, 13, 21–­22, 151, 239n17 Malcolm, Noel, 268n33, 268n37 Malherbe, Michel, 263n10 Manship, Henry, 119 Marlowe, Christopher, 150 Marshall, William, 250n40 Marsilius of Padua, 250n40 Martyr, Peter, 60 Marx, Karl, 140 Mary I (England), 98 Massy, Charles, 145, 257n41 McKeon, Michael, 245nn15–­16, 246n26, 248–­49n22, 270n16 Meade, Jacob, 127, 128 mediation, as term, 29 Medley, William, 85–­86, 87 Menzer, Paul, 259n70 Merchant Adventurers, 240n29 Merlin-­Kajman, Hélène, 248–­49n22, 270n16 Michaud-­Quentin, Pierre, 247n38 Micheli, Giovanni, 119 Middleton, Thomas, 167–­68 mimesis: corporate commonwealth and, 201; in democracy, 10; legal ideas and, 24; mimetic ontology of corporations and, 24, 26, 28, 222; New Atlantis (Bacon) and, 199–­ 200; representation and, 243n53; as source of constitutional thinking, 241–­42n42; theater and, 151–­52, 222; Utopia (More) and, 30 mining companies and mineral societies, 86–­89 monarchy: Christ and, 75; church and, 74, 75–­76; civil and ecclesiastical power and, 203; consent of the governed and, 80, 84; extent of monarch’s power and, 78–­79; joint-­stock companies’ relation to, 107–­8, 112; monarch as artificial person and, 23, 248–­49n22; monarch as corporation sole and, 11–­13, 239n15, 239n17; monarch as head of the church and, 77–­78; monarch’s

civil and ecclesiastical authority and, 73–­78; monarch’s grant of incorporation and, 16–­17, 21, 22, 87–­88, 240n29; in New Atlantis (Bacon), 201; royal prerogative and, 193–­94; the state and, 201; ultimate legal authority and, 84 monopoly, 88, 250n9, 258n58 morality, 21, 43 More, Thomas: background of, 36; Carthu­ sians and, 238–­39n8; legal work of, 238n5; mixed allegiances and, 7; political economy and, 44; political imaginary of, 95; portrait of, 4, 6–­7, 6; private property and, 239n13; profit principle and, 41–­42; travels of, 45. See also Utopia (More) Moses, 266n9 Munday, Anthony, 143 Newfield, Christopher, 237n1, 271n21 New Historicism, 239n15 Nike, 29 North, Thomas, 167 Northumberland, Earl of, 175 Novum Organum (Bacon): axioms and, 182–­ 88; Baconian method and, 178–­81, 184–­86, 188–­89, 191–­92, 195; Bacon’s philosophical project and, 177–­78; collective subjectivity and, 182; compositio versus mistio in, 177; English translations of, 182, 193, 194, 265n35; induction and, 179–­81, 184–­86, 188, 192–­93, 195; knowledge and the “thing itself ” and, 179, 181, 182–­83, 186, 189; negation and affirmation in, 186–­87; versus New Atlantis (Bacon), 198–­200; ontology of ideas or notions and, 178, 184–­ 85; political ecology and, 192–­93; politics of nature and, 194–­95; sources for, 263n14; spirits of nature in, 189–­91; syllogism and, 183 Oakeshott, Michael, 243n54 Occupy Wall Street, 7, 29, 243n58 O’Neill, Brian, 90 Palfrey, Simon, xix, 149, 260n14, 260n16 Parker, Henry, 24–­25, 218 parliaments and Parliament: as contained pluralities, 56; as corporate bodies, 53–­54; as corporations, 25, 218; delegation of voice in, 54–­56; in De Republica Anglorum

i n d e x   307 (Smith), 54; extent of monarch’s power and, 78–­79; guilds and, 27; Hobbes’s disapproval of, 204–­5; legal and nonlegal ideas of corporations and, 26; parliamentary theory of representation and, 270n12; personhood and, 54, 172–­73; as portrait of the people, 24–­25; the prince and, 54–­56; religious controversies and, 59–­61; theatrical action and political action and, 166, 173–­74 Passannante, Gerard, 264n19 patents, 43, 86–­88, 124–­25 Pérez-­Ramos, Antonio, 189, 263n16 Perkins, Williams, 267n24 Person and personhood: in Calvin’s Case (1608), 11–­12; Carl Schmitt and, 270n12; Christ and the Trinity and, 20–­21, 24, 69–­71, 73; corporate, 101–­2, 138, 234, 248–­49n22; corporate brands and, 28–­29; corporations as legal persons and, 16–­21, 29–­30, 114, 240–­41nn32–­33; corporations as moral persons and, 21, 136; fictional persons and, 16–­21, 138–­39, 148–­55, 222–­24, 268n41, 269n44; in Hobbes’s politi­cal arguments, 204–­6, 208, 212–­16, 218–­21; Hobbes’s theory of representation and, 222–­24, 269n45; individual versus group and, xi–­xii, 9, 56, 173, 217–­18, 230–­31; versus instruments or tools, 50; joint-­stock com­ panies and, 27, 85, 98–­103, 106, 108; law and, 50–­52, 223, 269n45; in Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker), 63, 70– ­80; Leviathan (Hobbes) and, 63–­64, 214, 220, 221, 222–­23; monarch as artificial person and, 23; natural versus artificial persons and, 11–­12, 14, 17–­21, 212–­15, 269n44; ontology of, 269nn44–­45; par­ liaments and, 54–­55, 172–­73; persistence of, 220–­21; representation and, 24–­25, 54, 170, 172, 204; of the state, 9–­10, 213–­14, 226, 265–­66n5; in Sutton’s Hospital (1612), 15 personation: corporate person and, 138–­39; Leviathan (Hobbes) and, 214–­15; Moses as personation of God and, 266n9; theatrical, xix–­xx, 23–­24, 148–­55, 157, 161–­62, 165–­ 66, 174 Pettus, John, 88 Philip II (Spain), 98 Phillips, Edward, 49 Phillips,  Joshua, 237nn2–­3, 238n4, 239n13, 242n48, 243n54, 244n1

Picciotto, Joanna, 237n2, 239n15, 248–­49n22, 263n13, 270n16 Piers, William, 94 Pitkin, Hannah, 25, 242n48, 242n51 Plato: fiction and, 46, 246n30; plurality and unity and, 9; poesy and, 31; polis and, 1, 9; Republic by, 3, 9, 30, 46, 225; suspicion of democracy and, 53; Utopia (More) and, 3 Plowden, Edmund, 11, 12, 239n15, 239n17 pluralism and plurality: Bacon and, 177–­78, 182, 186, 191, 195, 230; Carl Schmitt and, 229–­30, 270n12; City of London and, 119–­20, 142; commonwealth and, 53; corporations and the state and, 21–­23; definitions of the political and, 8–­9, 42, 53, 57, 114, 217–­18, 228, 232; in English historiography, 118; English pluralists and, xv, 21–­22, 228, 232; Hamlet (Shakespeare) and, 260n26; Hobbes versus, 206–­7, 217–­18, 226, 265–­66n5; integrated, 63, 66; legal, 22, 41, 84; literature on, 237n4; versus monism, 242n43; of nature, 178; versus nominalism, 232; origins of term, 242n43; parliament and, 56; plurality-­ in-­unity and, 26–­27, 66–­67, 72, 77, 177; plurality of reals and, 39, 44; Puritanism and, 62; radical pluralism and, 63, 73; theater companies and, 115 Plutarch, 160, 167 Plymouth Company, 112 Pocock, J. G. A., 243n56 political, the: versus civil society, 245n16; classical thought and, 4, 8–­9; as condition of war, 229–­30; definitions of, xv, xxi, 3, 8–­9, 28, 143, 231; in A Discourse of the Commonweal (Smith), 44–­45; form and, 227, 270n6, 270n9; friend-­enemy antithesis and, 229–­30; Hobbes’s theory of politics and, 204, 209, 268n37, 269n44; joint-­stock companies and, 114; philosophy versus political science and, 47; pluralism and, 229; political theology and, 64–­65; politics as the good life and, 231; sovereignty and, 233; value and, 231; whole and parts and, 204, 209. See also pluralism and plurality political economy: Adam Smith and, 245n15; classical thought and, 37–­38; in A Discourse of the Commonweal (Smith), 39–­41, 42–­43; emergence of sixteenth-­century discourse of, xvii; English towns and, 119; as essence of

308  i n d e x political economy (cont.) commonwealth, 44; joint-­stock companies and, 84, 99–­100; nascent discourse of, 36–­37; problems of value and, 37; profit principle and, 41–­42, 43; Thomas Smith’s corporate ventures and, xviii; Utopia (More) as study of, xvi political theology, 154–­55, 230, 241–­42nn42–­43 Pollard, Thomas, 147 Post, Gaines, 271n20 Principle Navigations, The (Hakluyt): cacophony of voices in, 101–­3, 253n61; commodities and their origins in, 105; creation of markets and, 254n77; items collected in, 97–­98, 109, 110–­11, 112; joint-­ stock companies and, xviii, 85, 100–­103; limits of history and philosophy and, 114; models of sovereignty and, 107; Molyneux map in, 109, 110–­11, 112; mysteries in, 107; predecessors of, 253n61; structure of, 195; title of, 254n83; translation and commodification and, 103–­4 property, 42, 239–­40n22 protest, 26, 243n58 Prynne, William, 218 public, the: corporations and, xiii, xix, 26, 230, 234–­35; in Hobbes’s work, 205–­6, 225–­26; in Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker), 64, 66–­67, 73–­75, 80; the political and, 30; the public sphere and, 230, 246n26, 248–­ 49n22, 249nn32–­33, 262n46, 270n9; in Shakespeare’s plays, 157, 160, 162–­66, 168–­ 69; theater and, 121–­22, 125, 143; in Thomas Smith’s writings, 45, 50, 52, 56; in Utopia, 8, 35 Quinn, D. B., 90, 96, 251n18, 251nn24–­25, 252n36 Radin, Max, 240n32 Raleigh, Walter, 96, 97 Ramsdent, Millicent, 98 Ramus, Peter, 263n16 Rancière, Jacques, 237–­38n5, 270–­71n19 Rawley, William, 200 Red Lion Inn, 123 Rees, Graham, 193, 194, 263n14 representation: body politic and, 114; in Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 172–­73; English

towns and, 119; fiction and, 213, 214–­15; Hobbes’s theory of, 212–­16, 220, 222–­ 23, 267n23, 267n25, 368n34; Leviathan (Hobbes) and, 222; London’s charter of incorporation and, 169; meaning of, 25, 242n51; mimesis and, 243n53; mystical identification and, 242n48; New Atlantis (Bacon) and, 199–­200; parliamentary theory of, 270n12; personation and, 214–­15; personhood and, 204, 222–­23; as privilege of incorporation, 242n51; representational ontology of corporations and, 24–­25; theatrical action and political action and, 173–­74; types of, 242n48; value and, 107; visual versus verbal ideas of, 243n53 Rhodes, John, 123 Robynson, Ralph, 33, 35, 43, 120 Rogers, Douglas, 269n7 Rogers, John, 264n28 Roman law: as civil, 245n16; corporate personhood and, 240–­41n33; corporations and, 13–­14; in De Republica Anglorum (Smith), 45; property in, 239–­40n22; societas in, 49; types of collective associations and, 13. See also civil law and civilian lawyers; law; Rome, ancient Rome, ancient: in Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 171–­74; in Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 159–­66; Roman colonies and, 83, 89, 91, 218–­19, 251n24; in Shakespeare’s plays, 156–­57; state of, 171–­72; in Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 156–­58, 168. See also Roman law Rossi, Paolo, 263n16 Rossiter, Philip, 128 Rowe, Katherine, 261n30 Royal Society, 263n13, 265n3 Runciman, David, 26, 213–­14, 237n1, 242n42, 243n54, 246n34, 265–­66n5, 267n25, 268n34 Russia Company, 98–­103, 107–­8, 252n53, 252–­53n55 Sacks, David Harris, 33, 100, 245n17, 252n43, 253n61 Sanders, Eve, 262n47 Sandys, Edwin, 98, 267n26 Santner, Eric, 237–­38n5 Sargent, Rose-­Mary, 263n13

i n d e x   309 Scarry, Elaine, 17 Schmitt, Carl, 192–­93, 229–­31, 239n15, 242n43, 270n12 Scot, Cuthbert, 61 Scotland, 12, 23, 176–­77 Serjeantson, Richard W., 266n14 Sextus Empiricus, 263n14 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 225 Shakespeare, William: ancient Rome in works of, 156–­57, 158–­66; connections among plays of, 158–­59; Coriolanus by, 23, 27, 167–­74, 233, 261–­62n42, 262nn47–­48; corporate ideas for political identity and, 159, 161, 162–­63, 164–­65; corporatist model of political association and, 168–­ 71, 261–­62n42; definition of public and private domains and, 162–­63, 164–­66; disintegrating political structures and, 156–­57; Elizabeth I’s enjoyment of plays of, 139; Ernst Kantorowicz’s turn to, 241–­ 42n42; Henry V by, 159; Julius Caesar by, 23, 159–­66, 168–­69, 233; Leviathan (Hobbes) and, 203; The Merchant of Venice by, 146; A Midsummer Night’s Dream by, 155, 159; Molyneux map and, 109; the people as political agent in works of, 170, 261n35; Plutarch and, 160, 167; political imaginary of, 160, 162–­63, 172, 233, 260n26; Richard II by, 260n19; satiric impulse against collective life and, 167–­68; state in, 151, 162, 167, 168–­69, 171, 173; theater companies and, xiv, 114–­15, 155, 259n6; theatrical action and political action and, 166, 173–­74, 262n47; Timon of Athens by, 166–­67, 259n5; Titus Andronicus by, 23, 156–­59, 168–­69, 233, 261n27, 261n30, 262n46; tragedy as a genre and, 156; translation as term used by, 104; As You Like It by, 155. See also Hamlet (Shakespeare); personation Shanks, John, 147–­48 Shannon, Laurie, 243n60, 249n25 Sherman, William, 33–­34, 244nn3–­4, 253n60 Shoemaker’s Holiday, The (Dekker): class and status in, 132–­34; corporate civic identity and, 130, 134–­35; corporations and theater and, 141; as defense against antitheatrical polemic, 142–­43; English nationhood and, 131, 137–­38; genre and, 130; group identity and, 134; intertheatrical aspects of, 138–­40; models of corporate identity and, 131–­34;

performances of, 145, 159; repertory and, 149; shoe in, 139–­41; sources for, 130–­31; systems of value and, 135–­37 Shrank, Cathy, 255n16, 258n51, 261–­62n42 Sidney, Henry, 89, 94 Sidney, Philip, 31, 46, 244n64 Skinner, Quentin: on Hobbes’s theories, 212, 218, 226–­27; on meaning of representation, 25, 242n51; parliaments as corporations and, 25, 218; rise of modern state and, 4; on Utopia (More), 3–­4, 238n4 Smith, Adam: on craft guilds, 240n23; on political economy, 245n15; on Roman versus Greek colonies, 83; on universitas, 13; Wealth of Nations by, 245n23 Smith, George, 90–­91 Smith, John, 245n22 Smith, Sir Thomas: background and career of, 35–­36, 38, 45, 59–­60, 85–­86, 90, 247n7; colonization in Ireland and, xviii, 89–­96, 92, 109, 251nn18–­19; Elizabeth I (England) and, 36, 45, 59; fiction and, 44–­ 46; history writing and, 46–­47, 57, 251n25; incorporation of Saffron Walden and, 245n22; influences on, 94, 95, 251nn24–­25; on the multitude, 44, 48; parliaments and, 25, 80, 101; political economy and, 37–­38; profit principle and, 41–­42, 43; property of, 36, 60–­61; representative principle and, 54; Roman colonial policy and, 218–­19, 251n24; Rowland and John White and, 252n37; Society for the New Art and, 27, 85–­89, 109, 125, 251n25; suspicion of democracy and, 53; Utopia (More) and, 35, 46; utopic writing and, 32. See also De Republica Anglorum (Smith); A Discourse of the Commonweal (Smith) Smith, Thomas (son), 89–­93, 251n25 societas, 26–­27, 48–­49, 60, 84, 243n54, 247nn37–­38 society, idea of: city life and, 34; corporate meaning of, 49, 135; ecclesiastical polity and, 66–­68; laws and, 79–­80; monarch’s two publics and, 73–­75; politique society and, 82, 84; “Society of Salomon’s House” and, 178, 195, 197–­99; society supernatural and, 68–­73; theater companies and, 121; Thomas Smith and, 27, 48–­50, 85–­89; town corporation and, 119. See also civil society and civil life; societas

310  i n d e x Society for the New Art, 85–­89, 251n25 Society of Mines Royal, 87, 88–­89 Society of the Mineral and Battery Works, 87, 88 Socrates, 3, 8–­9, 231, 238n2 Somer Islands Company, 215–­16, 219 Somerset (Lord Protector), 33 sovereignty: Baconian philosophy and, 178, 181, 193–­94; divided, 84; gold and, 41; Hobbes’s theory of, xx, 13, 63, 204, 205, 214, 217, 221–­22, 226; joint-­stock companies and models of, xviii, 107–­8, 112; limits of as theory, xxi, 22, 107, 231– ­33; per­sonhood of the sovereign and, 213– ­14; po­litical theology and, xv; Richard Hook­er’s theory of, xvii, xx, 63, 66, 76, 78–­80, 249–­50n35; Schmitt and, 230, 270n16; in Shake­speare, 154–­55, 157, 160–­61, 171 Spedding, James, 182, 194, 265n35 Spencer, John, 143 Spenser, Edmund, 94–­95 Spragens, Thomas A., 268n37 Stafford, Edward, 96 state, the: Bacon and, 175–­78, 195–­99, 201; church and, 59–­82, 203–­6, 226, 248n21; City of London as, 120; concession theory of corporations and, 22; as corporate entity, 114, 168–­71, 196–­97, 201, 226, 265n33; displacement of the concept of, xv, xviii, 109, 114, 228–­29; as fictional person, 13; joint-­stock companies’ relation to, xviii, 109; personhood of, 265–­66n5; pluralism and plurality and, 21–­23, 56, 178; political theory of, xiv–­xv, 21–­23; in Shakespeare’s works, 151, 162, 167, 168–­69, 171, 173; Thomas Smith and, 34, 45, 56–­57 States, Bert, 260n18 Stephens,  John, 124 Stern, Philip, 108, 237n2, 245n15, 250n1, 252n42, 254n82, 270n11 Stern, Tiffany, xix, 149, 256n20, 258n67, 260n14, 260n16 St. Leger, Warham, 94 Stow,  John, 34 Strange (Lord), 117, 118 Strauss, Leo, 230, 268n38 Strype, John, 59 Surtz, Edward, 238n1, 238–­39n8 Sutton, Thomas. See Sutton’s Hospital (1612)

Sutton’s Hospital (1612), 11, 14–­18, 20, 24, 240n28 Swanston, Eliot, 147–­48 Tadlowe, George, 120 Tertullian, 71, 74 theater: group identity in, 134–­36; Hobbes’s theory of politics and, 204, 214, 222–­24, 269nn44–­45; Leviathan (Hobbes) and, 222–­24; mimetic conventions and, 159, 178; New Atlantis (Bacon) and, 200; patronage of, 142, 143, 259n69; physical embodiment in, 157–­58; players’ self-­organizing tendencies and, 124; playwright’s status in, 145; as political, 143; regulation of, 117–­18, 120, 130, 142–­43, 225n17, 255n2, 257n39, 259n71; technological dimension of, 257n39; theatrical action and political action and, 166, 173–­74, 223–­24, 262n47. See also personation, theater companies theater companies: actors and parts in, 149–­50; Admiral’s Men and, 125, 145, 146–­47, 159; apprenticeship system in, 123, 127; versus authors in development of Elizabethan drama, 120–­21; Blackfriars and, 257n41; corporations and, xix, 114–­15, 130, 142, 147, 259n5, 260n12; creation of market for, 125; descriptions of actors’ work and, 123–­24, 125; financial management in, 126–­ 29, 146, 148–­49, 257n47; housekeepers and householders and, 146–­47, 257n41, 259n9; income sources for players and, 123, 124, 256n28; King’s Men and, 121, 123, 146–­47, 153; labor relations in, 146–­ 47; Lady Elizabeth’s Men and, 128; Lord Chamberlain’s Men and, 123, 146, 259n4; Lord Strange’s Men and, 118, 121–­22; managed antagonism in, 146; meaning of company and, 121, 256n21; names on li­ censes and, 121–­22, 256n23; organizational models for, 122, 125–­26; patronage and, 122, 256n25, 256n28; Queen’s Men and, 118, 121, 256n28; Queen’s Revels and, 127–­28; repertory of, 149; rights and legal status of performers and, 122, 124–­25, 256n27; Royal Shakespeare Company and, 260n12; Sharers’ Papers and, 260n12; shares in, 126–­ 27, 146–­56; wealth in, 147–­48, 259–­60n10. See also joint-­stock companies; theater Theatre, the, 123

i n d e x   311 Thirsk, Joan, 86 Thompson, Cargill, 250n37 Tilney, George, 120 Tittler, Robert, 118, 244n5 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xi, 235 Travers, Walter, 62, 73 Tuck, Richard, 268n33 Ulpian, 13–­14 Uniformity, Act of, 61, 247n7 uniformity, as quality of groups and persons, 7, 27, 72 universitas and universities: Adam Smith on, 13; canon and, 234–­35; communitas and, 34; as corporation, 234, 235; culture war over, 271n21; defense of the arts and sciences and, 234; formation of, 271n20; in Hamlet (Shakespeare), 154; Hobbes and, 205–­8, 210, 215, 219–­20, 223, 225–­26, 233; importance of, 233–­34; parliaments and, 25; plurality-­in-­unity and, 26; societas and, 26, 243n54; universitas as term and, 234, 271n20; universities’ importance to the commonwealth and, 226 University of Paris, 234 Unwin, George, 142, 258–­59n68, 259n69 Utopia (More): Christianity’s common way of life in, 238–­39n8; common property in, 7, 239n13; constitution of the polis and, 8; corporation as model for de optimo reipublicae statu and, 10; definition of commonwealth in, 1, 3; De Republica Anglorum (Smith) and, 45–­46, 246n30; economic dislocations and, 34; English translations of, 33, 35, 43, 120, 238n1; enthusiasm for public action in, 7–­8; features of Utopian life in, 30; Hobbes’s assessment of, 225; versus New Atlantis (Ba­ con), 196–­98, 200–­201; ontology of ideas and, 32; paradoxes of, 30; plurality and unity in, 9, 239n13; poesy and, 31; po­lit­ical economy and, 36–­37; Raphael Hythloday figure in, 238n2, 238n4; Spanish ventures in the New World and, 95; Sutton’s Hospital (1612) and, 17; theory of civil life and, 64;

Thomas Smith and, 35, 95, 251n24; virtue as purpose of the polis and, 37 Virginia Company, 98, 112–­14, 215–­16, 219, 252–­53n55, 267n26 virtue, 37 voice, as feature of corporations, 21, 24; in joint-­stock company documents, 100–­102, 107, 113; in Shakespeare, 159, 167, 169–­72, 174; in Thomas Smith’s account of Parliament, 54–­56 Wallis,  John, 206 Walsingham, Francis, 96, 97 Walzer, Michael, 270n16 Warburton, William, 248n21 Ward, Seth, 206, 266n14, 269n3 Warner, Michael, 249n33, 262n46, 270n11, 270n16 Watts, John, 34, 244n5, 247n42 Weber, Max, 132–­33 Weld, Humphrey, 98 Wennerlind, Carl, 245n15 West, Katharine, 98 West, William, 138, 258n62 White,  John, 252n37 White, Rowland, 94, 95, 252n37 Whitgift (Archbishop), 62, 120 Willan, T. S., 99, 252n53 Wilson, Bronwen, 270n16 Wilson, Thomas, 34 Withington, Phil: on Aristotle in English corporate system, 246n32; citizens as fictional persons and, 118–­19; on corporate identity of towns, 258n60; definition of the corporation and, 243n55; influences on, 244n5; meaning of commonwealth and, 33–­34, 49, 244n5; meaning of company and, 121; meaning of societas and, 49, 247n37; touring destinations of the Queen’s Men and, 118 Wong, Timothy, 260n26 Wriothesley, Henry, 98 Yachnin, Paul, 270n16