The Politics of Happiness in Richard Brome’s The Queen and Concubine

In this article, I discuss Richard Brome’s tragicomedy The Queen and Concubine (1635–1636), focusing on how the play reflects the iconography of Charles I as well as Stuart ideals of statecraft. I argue that the play’s representation of a royal ruler in a pastoral setting draws on Van Dyck’s portraiture and on Charles I’s masques, as well as on Lipsius’s political concept of ‘love’. I claim that the play promotes a ‘politics of happiness’ which affirms the Caroline ideology of royal rule. My reading of Brome’s play aims at furthering the critical understanding of the cultural and political concerns shared by court drama and drama written for the commercial theatre in the Caroline period.

The Politics of Happiness

With its annual World Happiness Report, Gallup has been ranking the feelings of different nations since 2012 (Figure 1). In the latest contest, Finland edged out Denmark for happiest nation on earth. The United States placed nineteenth. South Sudan came in last. The results are based on surveys with queries such as the following: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” and “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” Respondents also report whether they have made charitable donations, and whether they have smiled, laughed, or experienced feelings of enjoyment or happiness recently.

Lacan's Sade: The Politics of Happiness

This article assesses the contemporary relevance of Sade's work and thought by returning to Jacques Lacan's interpretation of it. It is argued that if the Sadean emphasis on sexual freedom has been co-opted by neoliberal capitalism, this is in part thanks to avant-garde intellectuals of the twentieth century who approached Sade through a simplistically libidinal reading of Freud. By contrast, the article argues that Lacan's more sophisticated reading of Freud enables him in turn to situate Sade amidst eighteenth-century philosophical and political debates regarding, not sexual pleasure or revolutionary desire, but happiness. Lacan shows that Sade was already challenging the modern, and today market-based, notion of a ‘right to happiness’ with the ‘maxim for jouissance’ he asserted in La Philosophie dans le boudoir. This more troubling Sade, it is claimed, opens up the possibility of a perverse ethic distinct from the ‘polymorphous perversity’ characteristic of contemporary consumer culture and its related conceptions of happiness.