The Political Unconscious of the Allusion: Shakespeare's Habits of Mind and the Cultural Politics of Reading Chaucer in Early Modern England

Every allusion has a political unconscious, an aspect that reveals how the author using the allusion unknowingly oriented herself or himself toward contemporary ideologies. This is because allusions generate more meaning than what can be contained in the text itself. They also reflect and reflect on the authors who create them, especially when placed in the context of broader reading habits. Central to allusive practice is authorial anticipation: authors anticipate that readers will understand that they are referring to another text and that this reference will enrich the meaning of their own work. However, it is unlikely that they anticipate that readers will situate the allusion in the context of the print culture of the author's time. This is what I will do with an allusion that Shakespeare makes to Chaucer's House of Fame in King Lear, demonstrating how the intertext acts as a window into the author's habits of mind.

Before continuing, I want to clarify my use of the phrase "political unconscious."1 I take the term from Fredric Jameson, but use it very loosely. While Jameson sees literature as an allegory for the class struggle, I am not reading Shakespeare symptomatically to find a repressed history of the ideological underpinnings of early modern English culture. Still, i am engaging with the cultural politics of reading in early modern England. By analyzing a previously unnoted allusion in King Lear, I argue that Shakespeare unconsciously displays three things: an independent habit of mind, skepticism toward the literary canon, and a preference for subversive artistic practice.

Shakespeare alludes to The House of Fame near the end of King Lear when Lear waxes poetic about his future with Cordelia:

We two alone will sing like birds i'th'cage;

When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too-

Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out-

And take upon's the mystery of things,

As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,

In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones

That ebb and flow by th'moon.

(5.3.9-17)2

The phrase "God's...