what is the state in Shakespeare’s plays that has business, cares, nerves,
tricks, arguments, papers to be perused and reasons which cannot be
disclosed; that has peers as its pillars, but suffers storms and plots,
totters before conspiracies and has something rotten in it; that Othello
serves, but Prince Lewis (in King John) will not, being too high-born to
serve as the ‘instrument | To any sovereign state throughout the world’;
and that is resigned along with his crown by Richard II, accused of
crimes ‘against the state and profit of this land’?^42
Most of Shakespeare’s uses of state can be interpreted as referring to
the ‘sovereign state’ or authority that rules the commonwealth, but
some appear to slip over to meaning the organized commonwealth
within which a sovereign rules. The most important example of the
ambiguity in an official context is that of the ‘secretary of state’, as the
monarch’s principal secretary was beginning to be called towards 1600,
at the end of a century in which he emerged as the key figure in the privy
council and thus of the entire apparatus of royal administration. Soon
after the death of Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary from
1573 to 1590, two of his subordinates wrote accounts of the enormous
variety of duties of the office, than which none was more necessary
amongst the ‘places of charge in this state’; in particular, the secretary
must ‘make himself acquainted with some honest gentlemen in all the
shires, cities and principal towns and the affection of the gentry’ and ‘to
understand the state of the whole realm’, with ‘Sir Thomas Smith’s
book’ as his guide.^43
Smith had been a principal secretary in 1548–9 and 1572–6, and
while an ambassador in France in the 1560s, he had written a treatise
De Republica Anglorum(‘On the English Commonwealth’), which was
posthumously published in 1583. Strikingly this work by a civil lawyer
with a doctorate from Padua proceeds from the conventional starting-
point of the Aristotelian constitutions, which he calls different ‘estates’,
‘commonwealths’, or ‘governments of commonwealths’, and a discus-
sion as to how any commonwealth may ‘be kept in her most perfect
estate’, to a cool and practical analysis of the English legal system. In a
letter from Toulouse to a colleague, Smith said that, although he lacked
books and lawyers to consult, he had endeavoured out of a ‘yearning for
our commonwealth’, to ‘set forth the whole of its form, especially those
points in which it differs from the others’; and since in fact it was
different in almost everything, he had written (despite the title of the
treatise) ‘in the language of our own country’, in a style midway
State and sovereignty 315(^42) M. Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, vi
(Hildesheim, 1970), 3024–6; for ‘sovereign state’, see Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of
King John, V. ii. 82.
(^43) OED, s.v. secretary, 3; Elton, The Tudor Constitution, 123–7.