Shakespeare and Moral Agency (Continuum Shakespeare Studies)

Shakespeare and Moral Agency Continuum Shakespeare Studies Shakespeare’s Cues and Prompts Murray J. Levith Shakespear...

Author: Michael D. Bristol

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Shakespeare and Moral Agency

Continuum Shakespeare Studies Shakespeare’s Cues and Prompts Murray J. Levith Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre Keith Gregor


Edited by Michael D. Bristol

The Continuum International Publishing Group Continuum London Continuum New York The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Michael D. Bristol and contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-4676-3 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

Contents

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Is Shakespeare a Moral Philosopher? Michael Bristol Part I The Agency of Agents Moral Agency and Its Problems in Julius Caesar : Political Power, Choice, and History Hugh Grady 2 A Shakespearean Phenomenology of Moral Conviction James A. Knapp 3 Wordplay and the Ethics of Self-Deception in Shakespeare’s Tragedies Keira Travis 4 Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being: Shakespearean Puzzles about Agency Richard Strier

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Part II Social Norms Conduct (Un)becoming or, Playing the Warrior in Macbeth Sharon O’Dair 6 To “Tempt the Rheumy and Unpurged Air”: Contagion and Agency in Julius Caesar Jennifer Feather 7 Ethical Questions and Questionable Morals in Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice Kathryn R. Finin 8 “The oldest hath borne most”: the Burdens of Aging and the Morality of Uselessness in King Lear Naomi Conn Liebler

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Part III Moral Characters Quoting the Enemy: Character, Self-Interpretation, and the Question of Perspective in Shakespeare Mustapha Fahmi

15 29

42

55

71

86

99

111

129

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Contents

The Fool, the Blind, and the Jew Tzachi Zamir 11 “Unlucky Deeds” and the Shame of Othello Andrew Escobedo 12 Agency and Repentance in The Winter’s Tale Gregory Currie 13 What’s Virtue Ethics Got to Do With It? Shakespearean Character as Moral Character Sara Coodin

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Works Cited Index

200 211

159 171

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Notes on Contributors

Michael Bristol is Greenshields Professor Emeritus at McGill University in Montréal, Québec. His publications include Carnival and Theatre (1986); Shakespeare’s America/America’s Shakespeare (1990); and Big-Time Shakespeare (1996). For several years he taught a graduate seminar on Shakespeare and Moral Agency. Since his retirement he has tried, with limited success, to become a flâneur. Sara Coodin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at McGill University. She is completing her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Philosophizing Shakespeare” on Shakespeare, virtue ethics, and the emotions. Her next project will be a study of The Merchant of Venice and the Jewish hermeneutic tradition. Gregory Currie teaches philosophy at the University of Nottingham; before that he taught in Australia and New Zealand. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and a past fellow of St John’s College Oxford. His latest book, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories, is due to be published by Oxford in 2010. When he has the time, he rings the bells at his local church. Andrew Escobedo is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He is the author of Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (2004). He is currently working on a project about personification as an expression of Renaissance ideas about the will. Mustapha Fahmi is Professor of English Literature at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. He is the author of several publications on Shakespeare in English and in French, as well as two poetry collections, The Last of the Nightingales (Casablanca, 1987) and Poems from the North (Montreal, 1993), both in Arabic. He is currently working on the relationship between literature and the environment, articulating an ecocritical reading of Shakespearean comedy based on Heidegger’s later philosophy. Dr. Fahmi is a fanatic of English football with a particular fondness for Manchester United. Jennifer Feather is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She received her PhD from Brown University in 2006. Her work focuses on depictions of violence and understanding of selfhood in early modern literature.

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Kathryn R. Finin is Assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at Oneonta where she specializes in Shakespeare and Early Modern English literature. Her work has been published in various journals, including Renaissance Drama, Renaissance Forum, and Cahiers Élisabéthains. She received the Distinguished Research Award for her work on English Renaissance Drama from Binghamton University where she earned her doctorate in 1997. She has also received numerous research grants and a Distinguished Teaching Award from SUNY-Oneonta. Fascinated with classical and medieval labyrinths since childhood, Professor Finin regularly offers various labyrinth walks on campus and in the local community. Hugh Grady is Professor of English at Arcadia University in Glenside Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World; Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification, and Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. He has edited Shakespeare and Modernity for the Accents on Shakespeare series, and is currently working on a book on the connections between Shakespeare’s plays and aesthetic theory. James A. Knapp is Associate Professor of English and Director of the University Honors College at Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books (2003) and articles in the Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, and Criticism, as well as in a variety of book collections. He edited a double special issue of Poetics Today with Jeffrey Pence, entitled: “Between Thing and Theory, or The Reflective Turn,” and served as editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory from 1999 to 2004. He is currently completing a book on the relationship between ethics and vision in Shakespeare and Spenser. Naomi Conn Liebler is Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Her publications include Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: the Ritual Foundations of Genre (Routledge, 1995); Tragedy (Longmans Critical Readers Series, 1998, co-edited with John Drakakis), and two edited essay collections: The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama (Palgrave, 2002) and Early Modern Prose Fiction: the Cultural Politics of Reading (Routledge, 2007). She has served as Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and as co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Shakespeare. Her current research focuses on “Shakespeare’s Geezers,” his negotiations of old age throughout his dramatic and poetic genres. She attended The Woodstock Festival (“Three Days of Peace and Music”) in 1969. Sharon O’Dair is Professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. She co-edited The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Cornell 1994) and is author of Class, Critics, and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars (Michigan 2000).


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She has published many essays on Shakespeare, literary theory, and the profession of English studies, and currently is working on a manuscript entitled, “The Eco-Bard: The Greening of Shakespeare in Contemporary Film.” She recently sold her Porsche 144, which had a top speed of 150 mph. Richard Strier is Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where he’s been his whole career. He has published Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry, and Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts; various essays on Luther, Milton, and Shakespeare; and has co-edited a number of volumes on writing and political engagement in the seventeenth century. He is currently completing “The Unrepentant Renaissance: from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton.” Keira Travis is currently teaching Shakespeare and seventeenth century literature at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. She holds a PhD from McGill University, and recently held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Her research studies the language of gesture and movement in Shakespeare’s work as the expression of character’s ethical orientation. Tzachi Zamir is a philosopher and a literary critic. He is Chair of the Department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds teaching positions in the department of Comparative Literature and the Faculty of Law (Hebrew University), and in the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. He has been an active member of acting companies since 2004, and has studied acting primarily in the Tel-Aviv based branch of the Jacques Lecoq school of theatre. His main publications include Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (2006), and Ethics and the Beast (2007). His current research project is about the philosophical dimensions of dramatic acting.

Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume of essays emerged from a graduate seminar on “Shakespeare and Moral Agency,” which I taught for roughly ten years, beginning in 1993. By approaching Shakespeare from the perspective of moral philosophy rather than from the more usual framework of his historical context my graduate students were empowered to recognize their own critical authority. I have learned a great deal from reading their seminar papers and I would like to thank them for their remarkable creativity in developing the research agenda represented here. If it were possible I would mention everyone by name, but the list is really too long to be included here. Some of those students are now working in the field of Shakespeare studies, but most are not. The intelligence of these non-specialists in their engagement with Shakespeare’s plays has given me a strong sense of the importance of vernacular criticism in teaching as well as in scholarship. I also want to acknowledge the support of my colleagues on the Shakespeare in Performance Research Team at McGill University. They have listened to my arguments about Shakespeare and Moral Agency over the course of many years; they have also been patient with my stories, some of which I am sure they have heard more than once. Our work has received generous support from the Fonds Québecois de la Recheche sur la société et la culture. Some of my own ideas have also been developed through work with the Making Publics project, with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. Many of the essays assembled here were initially drafted for a seminar on Shakespeare and Moral Agency convened at the 2008 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. I was surprised at the high level of interest shown in this topic. Although it has not been possible to include all of the papers presented over two days of meetings, I would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions to a thoroughly enjoyable discussion of the issues.

Introduction: Is Shakespeare a Moral Philosopher? Michael Bristol

If you ask a philosophy professor if Shakespeare is a moral philosopher there’s a good chance she will say “No!” but then, on second thought, she might say “. . . philosophers see profound thought in Shakespeare, not wrongly . . .”1 Thinking about the interpretation of Shakespearean drama and the practice of moral inquiry as mutually illuminating traditions is not a new idea. As a matter of fact it is as old as Shakespeare criticism itself. The first book to be devoted entirely to Shakespeare criticism is Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, first published in 1769. In it she declares that Shakespeare is “one of the greatest moral philosophers that ever lived.”2 Elizabeth Griffith, in The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated describes Shakespeare’s philosophy as a concern with “those moral duties which are the truest sources of mortal bliss— domestic ties, offices, and obligations.”3 Samuel Johnson lent his considerable authority as a critic to these opinions, pointing out that Shakespeare’s “. . . persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion . . . It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and oeconomical prudence.”4 The “persons” Johnson is talking about are fictional characters, the “dramatis personae” of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s an interesting equivocation. It means that it can be rewarding to engage with Shakespeare’s characters using the same means that one would use to engage in familiar conversation with actual people. There is, of course, an informal fallacy in proceeding this way, though the fallacy is often productive.5 But there is no confusion in Johnson’s mind about this. “It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited. . . . The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the

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players are only players.6 The genius of these intuitions is that they acknowledge that Shakespeare’s characters invite readers or spectators to relate to them in a self-reflexive way. Both Johnson and Montagu were fully aware of the historical situatedness both of Shakespeare and of the figures who populate his fictional universe. But they did not take this to mean that the characters in a Shakespeare play are thereby rendered opaque or that there could be no value in reflecting on their ethical disposition. What strikes these critics is that the complexity of Shakespearean drama is only fully revealed through sustained reflection on the moral disposition of its characters. I have taken the time at the beginning of this project to pay my respect to critics of the mid-eighteenth century because, in all honesty, I believe they deserve credit for the discovery of character as the salient feature of Shakespeare’s work. This has been, and continues to be an indispensable feature of all subsequent interpretation, even among those recent critics who most strenuously deny its existence.7 What they discovered has been described as “confusing characters with real people,” though, as I suggested earlier, no one was actually confused about what they were doing. As well as the average four-year old child, eighteenth century critics had a firm grasp on the principles of make believe. And in fact, among contemporary Shakespeare scholars, thinking about dramatic characters as if they were real people is something of an open secret. Everyone does it; what else would one do, exactly? At the same time there is a general understanding that it would not be comme il faut to admit doing it. And if you begin talking about characters as if they were actual people in the pub after the conference session you are expected to look sheepish and say, “oops!” Frankly, myself, I don’t see what there is to be embarrassed about. Fictional characters can be described as possible persons carrying out possible actions in a possible world.8 We know that Achilles and Hamlet and Winnie the Pooh don’t exist in the actual world, but we also know that a competent grasp of fiction entails understanding that the wrath of Achilles or the story of Eeyore’s tail are intended to be taken up as real situations involving real persons in a possible world. Our knowledge that stuffed donkeys don’t actually care about what happens to their tails is not relevant to the situation. This kind of understanding is called “getting the story.” And if we’re paying attention we may even feel sad about what happened to Eeyore and try to understand what exactly the characters did to make their situation better or make it worse. Part of the contract we make with a fiction has to do with beliefs—or, more accurately—make-beliefs about Achilles and the strange loss of Eeyore’s tail. Another aspect of that contract is openness to an emotional engagement with fictional characters. An emotional response to a fiction is in some ways a puzzling phenomenon, but it can be explained in reference to deeply held normative beliefs about what’s right and what’s wrong.9 Oddly then, it is by way of emotion that the philosophical interest of a fiction is initially sensed.

Is Shakespeare a Moral Philosopher?

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The project of reading Shakespeare’s works as the reflection of philosophical interests isn’t about trying to figure out his “world picture.” It’s possible, by means of historical research, to identify a framework of ideas that can plausibly be discovered in the plays, though this is not always that satisfying. A more genuinely philosophical approach to this material really begins with a consideration of what is called “story meaning—figuring out what’s true in the fiction.10 Analysis of story meaning is just figuring out exactly what happened in the story, but this is not always such an easy thing to do. Stories are, for the most part, incompletely determined and so understanding what happens in a fiction involves speculating about what isn’t explicitly stated.11 Our ability to understand stories depends not only on what a literary text explicitly tells us, but also on background knowledge of how the world actually works. Conditions that prevail in the actual world are also basic features of the fictional universe unless we are specifically told otherwise. Sometimes we really need to consult historical research if we are to understand how things were assumed to work in the world from which the author is writing, but in reality our ability to understand stories relies on mixed assumptions, some of which are historical and some of which are not. Raising questions about moral agency, fictional or otherwise, clearly presupposes the existence of a self. Otherwise the notion of the agent becomes unintelligible. But what assumptions can be made about the nature or even the existence of self? Is there a “history” of the self that needs to be acknowledged when we consider the problem of agency? My own view is that “self” is a basic concept that cannot be usefully historicized. When I contemplate my Martin Guitar, model 0–16 New Yorker, Serial # 179705, I’m looking at an object that can be singled out from every other Martin Guitar that has ever existed. “Self” is the term that refers to what is “singled out” from “other” objects and that has the property of persisting in its own being. The guitar has had its own history, to be sure, easily seen in the random pattern of dings and scratches, but this is logically distinct from the guitar “itself.” To historicize the concept of self involves a kind of equivocation with the term. It is entirely possible to do historical research about the renaissance philosophy of mind, and to show how beliefs derived from these systems are reflected in the self-understanding of people who live in particular places at particular times. It is even possible to show that our current notions of “inwardness” are not directly relevant to the way early modern subjects thought about themselves.12 I do not think, however, that it follows logically from any of this that “the self” didn’t exist in ancient times or that it “emerged” in the seventeenth century in connection with the philosophy of René Descartes. Such inferences really do strike me as confusing two different kinds of inquiry. The fact that certain ideas about the self became prevalent in the seventeenth century is not a reason to conclude that the concept of self cannot be applied in other, quite different historical contexts.

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Agency refers to a capacity for action; in the current philosophical literature the term can be used for any goal-oriented behavior. It is purposeful action, distinguished from mindless activity like the erosion of beaches or the heat death of the universe. Carl Ginet suggests that “. . . Nothing can count as a person unless rational agency, acting for reasons, is characteristic of it.”13 Stated in this form, however, Ginet’s stipulation is overly broad. When that red squirrel keeps getting into your bird feeder no matter how many obstacles you set up, her aptitude for complex analysis looks like acting for reasons, making the squirrel indistinguishable from a person according to Ginet. She has a goal, a repertoire of strategies for achieving this goal, creative problem-solving skills, and an ability to shift priorities when threatened by an exasperated home-owner or a Cooper’s Hawk. The squirrel on this description is an agent whose behavior is guided by the imperative of self-preservation, arguably the most basic form of moral agency. People act with purpose, but they also act with strong second-order selfconsciousness. They are not simply aware of themselves, but vividly aware of that awareness and capable of expressing that awareness to others. Human action is often less a matter of accomplishing instrumental goals than it is about maintaining the preferred narrative account of the self. Agents in this sense are singular and self-determining, but their acts are performed in relation to larger considerations in the form of moral evaluations. Self-preservation is still the over-riding purpose, but the self that seeks its own continuance is concerned with much more than biological survival. Human agents consider what things matter to them and why they are important. It is not easy to do justice to these manifold demands and at the same time maintain a coherent rapport à soi. People who are able to do this are said to have a strong character. But a strong character may not in fact be adequate for all situations. Agents also have to possess flexibility, improvisatory competences, and even the skills of dissembling in order to sustain a preferred interpretation of who they are and of where they stand. What makes Shakespeare’s dramatis personae interesting in relations to questions of moral agency is not that a set of robust character traits determines behavior in any sort of predictable way, but precisely that it doesn’t, and that’s why Shakespeare is a very great writer. Shakespeare’s characters exhibit internal conflict in the form of faulty self-knowledge, incontinence, self-deception, and other modes of subjective irrationality even within such apparently robust personalities as Macbeth and Othello. If we ask “why did Macbeth kill Duncan?” it seems obvious that the answer must be because he wanted to be king. This interpretation seems feasible because the text of Shakespeare’s Macbeth wouldn’t really make any sense otherwise. But it is clearly incomplete. Macbeth is, among other things, “full of the milk of human kindness.” We can actually see him work out his all-things-considered best judgment that leads to the conclusion that he should not kill Duncan. He knows that the murder will


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“but teach bloody instruction” and he respects his obligations to the King as kinsman and a host. And in the very next scene he carries out the murder. It is far from certain that he knows what he really wants or even if he wants to be king. Unlike the red squirrel, whose problem-solving ability is hard-wired to the aim of survival, Macbeth is capable of acting in a way that he knows will lead to his own destruction. But the complexity of Macbeth’s state of mind is not primarily of interest to us as a faulty model of moral problem-solving. I don’t think anyone needs to see a production of Macbeth to realize that we should not kill people whom we have invited to be guests in our own homes. The interest for us in these characters has a quite different basis. Shakespeare’s characters inhabit a contingent world where they are faced with novel, unpredictable, and unprecedented situations that require evaluation and judgment. The situational profile often entails a conflict between family attachments and other, more abstract or self-interested considerations. Isabel, in Measure for Measure, is interesting for us as a moral agent not because she acts in obviously the right way, but because she is engaged with the complexity of moral evaluation in ways that would appear impossible to resolve. Many readers are horrified by Isabel’s self-assurance in deciding “more than our brother is our chastity.” But the story only makes sense if those same readers have sufficient imaginative creativity to believe that the preservation of sexual purity can really be a matter of such compelling importance, worth even more than the life of a loved one. It is not so much the specific maxims used in deciding moral questions or the resolution of moral conflicts that makes Shakespeare’s characters philosophically interesting. It is more that the plays make us care about such decision-making in a way that engages our own concern. What makes Isabella important then is her persistence in seeking a more creative way to acknowledge her own claims as well as the claims of her brother, even though this leads her into consenting to the morally questionable device of the bed-trick. Shakespeare’s plays have a particular salience as the object of philosophical inquiry because of the hermeneutic density of the literary material. The only things remotely comparable are some of the stories in Scripture, which have generated illuminating commentary and exegesis for thousands of years. But the density is not just a matter of the sheer quantity of accumulated interpretation, which is itself best accounted for by the artistic quality of Shakespeare’s language and his narrative composition. From a philosophical perspective very close scrutiny of Shakespearean wordplay, rhetorical figures, and patterns of internal cross-reference are very rewarding. Equally rewarding are the styles of interpretation associated with vernacular criticism, its ability to relate to fictional characters as if they were real people. This means that the basic intuitions people use to understand their friends and relatives are also appropriate tools for getting at fictional characters. But the sheer grotesque power of Shakespearean narrative requires something more than complacent,

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pre-theoretical judgments that see Romeo and Juliet as “a story about two teenagers who fall in love.” The resources of philosophical inquiry can deepen such a preliminary insight and bring out its full complexity without diminishing the immediacy of the initial response. But not even the most insightful philosophy will be able to console us for the sense of loss we feel over the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. What we see in Shakespeare’s plays is not a set of instructions on how to live the good life, but rather a salutary imagining of the pathos of our moral existence, presented in a way that absolutely refuses the complacencies of ideology and the distractions of wishful thinking. It is abundantly clear in all the essays that compose this volume that no one works from a concept of the agent as untrammeled, lucid, or fully self-aware. At the same time, however, no one is satisfied with arguments that say, in effect “the devil made me do it.” The first section of four essays is concerned with the agency of agents; each raises questions about the possibility of self-reflexivity and freedom of action. Hugh Grady’s essay, “Moral Agency and Its Problems in Julius Caesar: Political Power, Choice, and History”, acknowledges the importance of agency for understanding drama. He re-introduces the work of Kenneth Burke, pointing out that “Drama is, fundamentally, about people doing things.” Grady then relates his account of agency to the current state of Shakespeare criticism, with its focus on the subject as the product of historical forces, rather than on the self-reflexive agent capable of self-determination. His discussion focuses in detail on Julius Caesar to show how political reality directs and interferes with the agent’s capacity to act freely. A crucial implication of Grady’s essay is that whenever there is conflict—in an election, let’s say, or a war, or even a basketball game, it’s important to remember that the other side is trying to win. Agency in Shakespeare presupposes a field of strategic interaction, as Machiavelli understood, and agents who ignore this reality, like “the noble Brutus,” end up destroying the very things they hold most dear. James A. Knapp, in “A Shakespearean Phenomenology of Moral Conviction”, is concerned with the “strong evaluations” that guide agents to adopt plans that aim at achieving some good.14 Knapp’s essay reflects on advances in the fields of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology which suggest a “moral sense” may be innate. However, science doesn’t solve the problem of moral judgment, since universal intuitions are difficult to apply outside the specific situations in which agents must act. One way or another there’s a good chance that you won’t get it right, even if you meant well. Othello learns too late that his judgment of Desdemona’s infidelity was founded in error and deception. It’s not clear that he ever considers that the moral conviction that motivated such an act is itself a larger kind of error. In “Wordplay and the Ethics of SelfDeception in Shakespeare’s Tragedies”, Keira Travis finds a different pathway into the unconscious sources that shape a character’s action. The crucial intuition here is that moral agency is represented in Shakespeare by means of a character’s “bearing” or “position” in an absolutely literal sense. Recognition of


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self and of others is revealed in a vocabulary of gestures hidden in Shakespeare’s wordplay. His language activates the dead metaphors buried in the words people use to understand who they are or what they think about other people. Agents are by definition objects in motion, but Shakespeare’s characters are only partially aware of how they move in relation to others. The essay is particularly notable for encouraging a renewed interest in philological research, reminding us that most of the time we think “less rigorously and less playfully than Shakespeare.” Richard Strier begins his essay, “Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being: Shakespearean puzzels above agency,” by introducing Aristotle’s distinction between actions that go wrong “due to ignorance” and actions done “in ignorance.” If you act wrongly because you didn’t know something about the situation it’s not your fault. But if you’ve been ignoring something you should have known when you acted, the result is your responsibility. Consideration of “moral agency” here leads into a more radical questioning of agency and of motive in the broader sense. The crucial examples are Shylock and Iago, both of whom lack not only anything that we recognize as a motive, but who also seem to lack, for Strier, any genuine rapport à soi. They don’t just ignore who they really are, like Hamlet or Macbeth, they seem to embody only vacancy, absence, or the will to annihilation that is in theological terms identical with the meaning of evil. All of these essays adopt the view that Shakespeare’s characters act intentionally and purposefully even when they end up making a mess out of things. The problem is generally taken to be either faulty knowledge or faulty selfknowledge or some regrettable combination of the two. The discussion of agency as primarily first-personal experience is followed by a consideration of social norms in establishing conditions of possibility for purposeful action. Sharon O’Dair, in “Conduct (Un)becoming or, Playing the Warrior in Macbeth”, argues that it is impossible to conceive of “self” as somehow existing over against a person’s social being. Agents don’t just act; they must perforce engage in social interaction. On this view agency is identified with Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as the “reiteration of [social] norms.”15 Her claim here is a version of what Mikhail Bakhtin has called “exotopy,” referring to all those things that come from outside the self that are necessary for its completion—language, customary habits, the prescribed behavior that belong to one’s social roles.16 The actions of Macbeth, on this view, should be seen not as the violation of the social norms of hierarchical order, as in many historical accounts of the play, but rather as his doomed attempt to “perform” the role of the warrior as if he were able to achieve his purpose without reference to the social norms that truly define who he is. The character of Brutus, in Julius Caesar, seems intent on fulfilling the traditional ideals of Republican Rome. Jennifer Feather’s essay, “To ‘Tempt the Rheumy and Unpurged Air’: Contagion and Agency in Julius Caesar” points out that one of those traditional ideals is rational agency, conceived as acting in

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accordance with one’s own all-things-considered best judgment. Following Aristotle, she argues that virtue is a type of masculine excellence that requires voluntary action. Weakness of the will, or akrasia, would be acting contrary to a person’s “strong evaluations” or to what the self holds to be most dear. In these terms Brutus presents the reader with an instance of “inverse akrasia,” acting against one’s best judgment in a way that paradoxically leads to morally praiseworthy results.17 This is possible because social norms are themselves irrational; failure to “reiterate” one social imperative may lead directly to the fulfillment of another.18 The pathos of conflicting social norms is more fully brought out by Kathryn Finin, in “Ethical Questions and Questionable Morals in Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice.” Finin develops the distinction between morality and ethics proposed by the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. The crucial feature of ethics is that it is grounded in “thick relations”—family, friendship, and, by extension, countrymen or followers of a religious tradition. Morality, by contrast, is grounded in “thin relations” that prevail between strangers. As Finin argues, the imperatives of trust and care for loved ones may come into conflict with basic respect for the humanity of others who can advance no claim on our loyalty or even our sympathy. Both Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice express in different ways the difficulties of moral actions “when everyone’s suffering matters.” In both plays characters have to respond to the demands of thick relationships even when this may entail the suffering of the stranger or, conversely, a betrayal of the self. The pathos that attaches to moral agency is expressed even more strongly in Naomi Liebler’s essay “‘The oldest hath borne most’: the Burdens of Aging and the Morality of Uselessness in King Lear.” The immediate question raised by this play is the paradox of the respect owed to aging parents when the burdens their care imposes begin to exceed the children’s capacity to meet their obligations. In King Lear this state of affairs comes about, again paradoxically, as the result of Lear’s lavish expenditure in favor of his daughters. The play envisions no resolution to the paradox, presenting instead only a nervous dance of respect and contempt, where even the elderly figures themselves waver in their opinions of themselves. Liebler’s essay focuses attention on the play’s enigmatic final scene, and on the question of bearing witness it imposes on the characters who survive, and on the audience who must attend to what Iris Murdoch has called “a death without a consolation.” The final group of essays in this collection takes up the question of the moral character of fictional characters. This requires a clear recognition of an important equivocation in the usage of character, which refers both to a particular kind of an object and a property of that same object.19 Fictional characters are interesting because they often exhibit attributes or traits that appear as the source—or maybe the explanation—of their actions. When eighteenth century critics spoke of Shakespeare’s characters they were using the term in the sense


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defined by Joseph Butler as “. . . those principles from which men would act, if occasions and circumstance gave them power; and which, when fixed and habitual in any person, we call his character.”20 A person’s “character” is not only of their psychological and social traits, but even more fundamentally their moral personality. Butler’s formulation is presented in the subjunctive, leaving open the possibility that agency may not in fact line up with character, but may instead be highly situation dependent. In Mustapha Fahmi’s essay “Quoting the Enemy: Character, Self-Interpretation, and the Question of Perspective in Shakespeare” two crucial arguments are developed at the same time. The first is that a person’s character is best understood against a background of personal narrative, a story that depends crucially on how one is oriented to others and to some more or less articulate idea of goods pursued. What a person does, then, is done primarily in the framework of self-interpretation, acting in a way that allows for the preferred idea of the self to be conserved. A stable orientation to some kind of “strong evaluation” is one of the important meanings for the notion of an “ethos” as a person’s general disposition. The second point here, however, is that there is no privileged point of view given from within the drama that would provide a reliable standard of value for an evaluative response. The multiple perspectives of dramatic action require an active engagement with the text, so that viewers assume a self-reflexive agency of their own in responding to fictional events and fictional deeds. Fahmi’s essay privileges the notion of self-reflexivity, seeing agents primarily as deliberating with themselves in their relations with the world. Tzachi Zamir, in “The Fool, the Blind, and the Jew,” emphasizes theatricality in the genesis of action. Persons don’t act in isolation, they perform in scenes with others. Self-conscious theatricality is often related in Shakespearean drama to artificiality, malicious deception, and the avoidance of mutual recognition. But truly creative performance can also be a moral act in which the other is offered a position which enables them to discover their own deeper aspirations or to liberate them from beliefs held too strongly. The complexity of Shakespearean dramatic character provides for an emancipation from “melancholia, idolatry, entrapment in the views of others, and blindness to the existence of others.”21 Zamir focuses on the scene between Launcelot Gobbo and Old Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice to illustrate how Shakespeare deploys the role of the fool first to indulge attitudes of malicious pleasure and then to exhibit the moral costs of such attitudes. Shylock performs the role of the Jew not to flatter prejudice, but to compel his audience to acknowledge the complacency of their own moral simplifications. Characters act in conformity with their beliefs about themselves and also in accordance with their beliefs about the beliefs of others about themselves. And it frequently happens then that they can be induced to believe falsely. Andrew Escobedo, in “‘Unlucky Deeds’ and the Shame of Othello” is concerned with

10


the puzzling situation of agent-regret where a character bears responsibility for unintended consequences that follow closely upon that agent’s action. In the case of Othello the character has clearly been deceived, but Escobedo argues that it is also true that in an important sense he has “no choice” in killing Desdemona. It’s really true here that “the devil made me do it.” Additionally, everyone unwittingly conspires with Iago in creating plausible evidence to support his insinuations. Even so, it is not easy to believe that a man of Othello’s character would countenance such an affront to the honor of a wife he clearly loves. And in the end Othello seeks no extenuation for his action even though what he did was not freely or rationally chosen. Othello takes responsibility for his deed because he sees that he is responsible for his character, for his irascibility, his infatuation with the role of the betrayed husband, and his failure to trust the one person who really loved him. An even more baffling situation is one in which false beliefs are generated in the imagination of the false believer. In “Agency and Repentance in The Winter’s Tale” Gregory Currie argues that Leontes’ jealousy, unlike Othello’s is fundamentally incomprehensible both to other characters in the drama and to readers or viewers of Shakespeare’s play. Like Othello, Leontes seems to have no knowledge of who his wife is or what the two of them have been to each other. In Leontes’ case the jealousy seems even more deranged since they have lived together over a period of years. But if Leontes’ jealousy seems in some sense a purely psychotic episode, the death of his child Mamilius is the brute encounter with reality that abruptly snaps him out of it. But what is truly strange in the play is Leontes’ repentance for the destruction he has caused. Currie is willing to concede that something like grace is suggested in the ending. But there is no evidence in the play of moral growth on Leontes’ part or any real willingness to assume responsibility for the immense sorrow his actions have caused. If there is one philosopher whose thought seems to predominate throughout these essays it is unquestionably the Aristotle of Nichomachean Ethics. No one, however, has made the claim that Shakespeare is “an Aristotelian.” The connection is more fully elaborated in the final essay in this volume, Sara Coodin’s “What’s Virtue Ethics Got to Do With It: Shakespearean Character as Moral Character.” Coodin rejects the idea that Shakespeare’s plays are a collection of exemplary tales that dramatize an Aristotlean program of vices and virtues. It would make roughly as good sense to claim that Aristotle is “a Shakesperean.” Coodin does show that Shakespeare would very likely have been aware of a tradition of “vernacular Aristotelianism” widely circulated in early modern society. But Shakespearean philosophy is not a derivative phenomenon. Shakespeare as a philosopher shares with Aristotle a “panoramic” view of ethics, focusing on human variety in its pursuit of the good life and on the manifold ways real people and their fictional counterparts fail to achieve it. There are a lot of smart, well-educated people who are interested in Shakespeare. They go to performances and to movies and they even read books.


11

Some of them have passed through our classrooms on the way to becoming attorneys or software designers or schoolteachers. Some of them are colleagues in academic departments other than English. When I’ve engaged in conversations with these people, I find that they have intuitions about Shakespeare’s characters, about his genius as an author, about the universality of his insights. If I respond to their remarks by telling them there are no characters in Shakespeare’s plays, that the self doesn’t exist, that Shakespeare wasn’t an author, or that universality is a perverse and dishonest ideological construct I can generally expect them to politely change the subject. They feel put down, but they also think that I’m doing it on purpose to make myself feel more important. I know. I’ve tried it. My sister’s feelings were hurt. The truth is that it’s disrespectful to dismiss vernacular intuitions as wrong-headed and uninformed. It is invidious and condescending in the way it excludes people. But what’s even worse is that it prevents us from seeing that another person may actually be on to something when they want to talk about how they have been impressed by Shakespeare. The essays in this volume are all open to the possibility of an engagement with the way people most enjoy their interactions with Shakespeare’s dramatic artistry. Emanuel Levinas, thinking out loud about the possibility of meaning over against the certainty of death, wants to talk about Shakespeare in this way. “. . . . it sometimes seems to me that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare.”22 This seems to suggest that philosophy is a meditation about Shakespeare and the fictional universe he has created. But it works in another way as well. It is Shakespeare who meditates and from this meditation characters are created. You have to be willing to take these creations seriously. But if you are, you will be able to see that Shakespeare is not only philosophical in himself, but the cause that philosophy is in others.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6 7

Martha C. Nussbaum, “Stages of Thought,” The New Republic, May 07, 2008. Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare . . . (London: Harding and Wright, 1810), p. 37. Originally published anonymously, 1769 Elizabeth Griffith, The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (London: T. Cadell, 1775), p. 4. Samuel Johnson, “Preface” and “Notes” to Measure for Measure, ed. Arthur Sherbo, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press) 16 vols. Vol. 7, 62. David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction,” in Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 268. Johnson, “Preface,” pp. 76–77. Michael Bristol, ‘A System of Oeconomical Prudence’: Shakespearean Character and the Practice of Moral Inquiry”, Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter Sabor and Paul Yachnin (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2008), pp. 13–28).

12 8

9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17

18

19

20

21

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Shakespeare and Moral Agency David Davies, “Reading Fiction (1): Truth in a Story,” Aesthetics and Literature (London: Continuum Books, 2007), pp. 49–70. Dadlez, E.M., “Introduction,” What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987). Davies, p. 70. Lewis, p. 265. Paul Cefalu, “Damnéd Custom . . . Habit’s Devil: Hamlet’s Part-Whole Fallacy and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind,” in Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Carl Ginet, On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 4. For more on strong evaluations see Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 25–52. Judith Butler: Bodies That Matter (New York, Routledge, 1993), pp. 94–95. Tzetvan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: the Dialogical Principle. Trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984), p. 109ff. Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 4. Jon Elster, “Social Norms,” in Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 113–23. Gregory Currie, “Narrative and the Psychology of Character,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol 67 (2009), pp. 61–71. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874), 2 vols. I, p. 330. Stanley Cavell, “Skepticism as Iconoclasm: The Saturation of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century, ed. Jonathan Bate (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), p. 241. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 72.

Part I

The Agency of Agents

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Chapter 1

Moral Agency and Its Problems in Julius Caesar: Political Power, Choice, and History Hugh Grady

It is difficult to think about drama without pre-supposing “agency” of some kind or other. Drama is, fundamentally, about people doing things. In Kenneth Burke’s celebrated Pentad, for example—modeled on an abstracted dramatic structure—he makes “agents” a central category, along with action, instruments (or “agency”), scene, and purpose or aim.1 Burke (1897–1993) was an American original who created over his fifty-year career a unique approach to issues of agency in literature and rhetoric by synthesizing elements of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and New Criticism, with a unique emphasis on motivation. His work is finding new readers in our own time, and he is certainly a potential source for revived thinking about agency—although here I am using him only to help introduce the topic. But while Burke’s approach and others like it had little influence in the preceding period of poststructuralist influence in Shakespeare studies, the overt connection between drama and agency that he defined has been self-evident enough that it is difficult to find a direct frontal assault on the idea of agency (moral or otherwise) in recent Shakespearean criticism—I cannot recall one. And yet one knows why at this point in critical history there might be the renewed interest in matters of agency that the essays in this anthology exemplify. We seem to be at a turning point in the development of the field when one can feel a collective decision in process that after twenty-five years of leading work in the field being shaped by New Historical or cultural materialist premises, it is time to investigate different critical possibilities. Certainly, it has been several years now, since, in a reaction to some of the less cautious theoretical claims of followers of the poststructuralist theory of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and others, one-time poststructuralist allies like Christopher Norris and Terry Eagleton sought to distance themselves from the radical uncertainties that were adopted by many poststructuralist theorists.2 It has become a familiar argument in many fields of

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literary studies—I have certainly made it myself on more than one occasion— that for all the power of poststructuralist methodology, its great weakness was precisely a neglect of the category of the “agent.” In the early Derrida’s focus on language as the subject of discourse, in Foucault’s vivid description of the subjection of individuals in a disciplinary society, and in Althusser’s highly influential re-definitions of subjectivity and ideology to describe how individuals are “interpellated” as subjects by ideology, there seemed to be no room for the traditional categories of freedom, choice, or other aspects of agency that had been the great strengths of such major figures of the philosophical tradition as, for example, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Sartre. These “anti-humanist” ideas impacted within Shakespeare studies most influentially in such works as Catherine Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy and Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy, two classic Marxist- and structuralist- influenced works of the 1980s. While both of these works were provocative interventions in critical writing that offered fresh new perspectives and bracing political agendas to the field, they each treated dramatic characters as “subjects” in the Foucauldian rather than the Kantian sense—that is, “subjects” seen primarily as the outcomes of fields of power, language, discourse, and ideology.3 They seemed to be the products of deterministic processes rather than agents who defined themselves through their action. They were to be understood solely in their relation to ideology, and whatever agency they were able to establish was thanks only to the existence of what Alan Sinfield subsequently called “faultlines”—fissures in the ideological walls, as it were, brought about because of epistemic shifts in process.4 This offered precious little space for agency. And in addition, the approach saw positive value in the literature it analyzed only in terms of the work’s ability to distance itself from the ideology of the culture that it sprang from. Shakespeare’s treatment of agency was seen as an instance of an ideology beginning to emerge, but incompletely represented in his works: “liberal humanism,” defined by “interiority” seen as “author and origin of meaning and choice,”5 soon to culminate in Enlightenment notions of a rational subject who makes rational choices based on self-interest. However, I believe, we will find few unequivocal examples among Shakespeare’s characters of this type of agency. Typically, agency for major Shakespearean characters is “mixed” or mediated. The characters’ will and even sense of self turn out on examination to come from elsewhere, not from within a transparent self. Agency in Shakespeare is always complicated, seldom an instance of an actualization of “inner meaning” of the sort posited by Belsey (as she herself recognized, in situating Shakespeare somewhere between a decentered medieval episteme and a yet-to-fully-emerge liberal humanism). After twenty years of experience, this approach has revealed its limitations; many critics have concluded that it is time to look in other directions. While for some this development has been seen as a return to traditional formalist and positivist critical methodology, for others it has meant an

Moral Agency in Julius Caesar

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opportunity to take the theoretical work of the previous generation ahead in new directions, building on it rather than discarding it.6 For example, the work of the late Derrida itself reflects this changing emphasis in what has been described as his “ethical” turn, in dialogue with French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Derrida undertook a “return” to a series of concepts that, despite their sharing in the incompleteness of meaning of all language, and despite their otherness from the real, were crucial to discussion, precisely for ethical reasons. Derrida himself described this as a “return” to “religion”—encompassing as well a return to such previously deconstructed key words as “presence”, “spirituality”, and “aesthetics”—and, implicitly, agency.7 The negative, critical phase of his early work in effect moved to a positive moment without repudiating the earlier phase. But it is a “return” that has retained something from the recent poststructuralist past—its skepticism towards a direct connection between our concepts and the phenomena they attempt to represent, its vigilance for the effects of power on the ways we represent the world, its rejection of assumptions of an available single interpretation of a work and of a single interpretation of the documents of the past. Our task then would entail a new look at what the methods before poststructuralism gave us that got lost in the newer ones without surrendering the intellectual and political gains of the recent era of literary criticism. The related terms “agency” and “subjectivity” strike me as obvious candidates for such re-thinking, and indeed I have written on this issue under the heading “subjectivity” several times before.8 Here I want to look closely at the relationship between subjectivity and power in the fictional space of Shakespeare’s Rome. Specifically I will analyze his 1599 Julius Caesar in the light of the critical framework that I developed in Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, one that combines attention to Machiavelli’s power politics along with moments of Montaigne’s subjectivity. Julius Caesar emerges in this analysis as a play whose depiction of the impact of individual moral agency on the large sweep of historical events is highly qualified. The play demonstrates moral agency, but it also shows how agency is never exercised in a vacuum—in this case by delineating how it is affected by the autonomy of reified political power, the influence of interior psychological structures, and the possibility of Providential intervention. Shakespeare’s 1599 Julius Caesar was classified as a tragedy rather than a history by the First Folio editors, but it is one of Shakespeare’s most explicit investigations of the idea of historical change and the role of individuals within it. This is the context, in my view, in which a discussion of moral agency in Shakespeare’s works is most interesting. Moral choice in Shakespeare is always situated and contextual, and it always takes place in a world which, as Agnes Heller has argued, is always “out of joint,” not just in Hamlet, but throughout the histories, tragedies, and many of the comedies. Such a world is the outcome of a severance between the subject and a sense of meaning, a permanent

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perception that things are not as they should be.9 It is a perception that can be seen in Hegelian terms as the alienation of the subject from the objective world, in Marxist terms as arising from a society dominated by the abstract values of fetishized commodities and/or reified power, or even in Christian terms as the world after the Fall. As we read Julius Caesar in the twenty-first century, all of these interpretive frameworks are relevant, but I concentrate here on the theme of reified power in the play, with a glance at Christian resonances where appropriate. Julius Caesar is a play that dates from the period 1595–1600, a brief but important era in Shakespeare’s prolific career I elsewhere called his “Machiavellian moment.”10 This was an era dominated by political plays which took a distinctly different approach to politics and history than the one he had developed in earlier works such as the first historical tetralogy and in the first Roman play, Titus Andronicus. In this period he revisits those earlier genres in an almost mirror-like fashion, producing a second historical tetralogy and another Roman play. But the approach to history in 1595–1600 displays a new kind of thinking. In these mid-career plays the earlier villainous Machiavels, like Titus Andronicus’s Aaron or Richard III, are replaced by characters of much “grayer” moral qualities. Aaron and Richard are immensely entertaining and psychologically interesting, but they are self-declared evil-doers.11 In the newer plays the political intriguers are much more morally ambiguous. Bolingbroke of Richard II and Cassius of Julius Caesar are masterful intriguers, but Shakespeare closes off their interiority to us, so that while they are highly successful in achieving their political aims, they are silent on how they see themselves morally, and they lack emotional appeal, striking most audiences as cold at best. And there is an entirely new kind of character in these later plays—impolitic but soulful heroes, unsuccessful in the Machiavellian world they inhabit, but who revel in displaying their interiority and make a strong appeal to the audience’s allegiance in their defeats—Richard II, Falstaff, and, most relevant here, Brutus. As numerous critics have pointed out, this last group seems to have sparked in Shakespeare a model to build on for the tragic heroes of some of his most celebrated works: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and perhaps even Coriolanus. All of these are politically unsuccessful heroes with complex interior lives who have strong audience and readerly appeal. And all of them are the agents of moral decisions which they make in historical circumstances not of their own choosing. Brutus—with his admirably Stoic sense of ethics, his self-control, his moral scruples and practice of introspection as well as his political ineptitude—clearly belongs in this group. One of the highlights of the play is scene 2.1—a parallel to Richard II in his prison and to Macbeth in his meditations on the justice of killing King Duncan. As in these other cases, the technique of the soliloquy allows us access to Brutus’s interior life, and we listen empathetically as he concludes that he must sacrifice his personal friendship with Caesar to the needs of the greater good.12 And a bit later, also in soliloquy, he gives us


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one of Shakespeare’s most striking images of a mind wrestling with a moral decision: Brutus: Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream. The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in a council, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. (2.1.63–69)

The metaphoric reference to political division is Brutus’s recognition that the times are out of joint, that a split between the ideal and the actual has widened, that action will be demanded of the just man if he is to honor his civic responsibility. At the same time, the analogy has a more disturbing implication. It glances at the Age’s (now waning) pre-modern vision of an integrated, unified cosmos in which humanity is intimately linked with the larger structures of state and the natural world. And it signals to us that the political struggle to which Brutus is committing will have its destructive effects on his inner life as well. There is even a suggestion that the political turmoil he has instigated is a betrayal of the inner balance which Antony evokes in the play’s final, heroic characterization of him as “the noblest Roman of them all”: His life was gentle and the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, “This was a man.” (5.5.72–74)

For all that is admirable about Brutus and his Stoic self-possession, however, he never seems to realize that he is being skillfully manipulated by Cassius; he carries out an action whose purposes are far less idealistic than his own. If we are to speak of “moral agency,” as the title of this anthology suggests, the issue of unintended consequences, as well as that of conscious intentionality, has to be taken into account. What we really accomplish in our interventions in the world is certainly as relevant to assessing the morality of our actions as our intentions. And as the case of Brutus suggests, conscious decision-making is at best a delimited part of a larger array of social and psychological forces at work in shaping our actions in the world. Not only is this the case for Brutus, but it is an important issue in many Shakespeare plays, notably Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear—all featuring heroes whose good intentions turn out to be highly problematic. Lear thinks he is avoiding future strife in dividing his kingdom, while Othello thinks he is justly punishing a miscreant wife. Hamlet, on the other hand, finds himself unable to carry out what he claims are his intentions. To the extent that Brutus is a tragic hero, he is, like these others, a figure of good intentions gone tragically wrong.

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Granting, then, that the play puts under scrutiny the sufficiency of good intentions alone in a gray world of complex political forces, it should be noted that it is precisely the issue of intention that Antony highlights in his tribute to his fallen enemy: Antony: All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar. He only, in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them. (5.5.68–71)

As both Antony and Octavius agree, distinctions need to be made, motivations and intentions must be taken into account as we judge others’ (and our own) morality. Shakespeare here seems to be leading the audience to make the kinds of distinctions we make in Richard II and in Othello. Some characters are beautiful in what they are rather than what they do; indeed, their very interior beauty leads them to make errors that lead to tragic outcomes. Richard II, as has so often been noted, is the poet-king beautiful in his speech and in his soul, disastrous in his political judgments. Othello’s noble friendship and trust are the very qualities which allow the envious Iago to bring about his downfall. And Iago notoriously tells us of his seemingly innocent victim Michael Cassio, “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly” (Othello, 5.1.19). In Julius Caesar, Cassius takes on something of the role of Iago in the later play. He, too, is a man driven to violence through his envy, and he makes no secret of his envy of Caesar even in trying to appeal to Brutus’s republican idealism.13 Rather than speak of the evils of monarchy or the danger to republican liberty in Caesar’s ascent to power, Cassius emphasizes Caesar’s mere humanity, his equality with the other aristocrats like himself and Brutus, as he feels out Brutus’s attitudes towards Caesar: Casisus: I had as lief not be as live to be In awe of such a thing as I myself. I was born free as Caesar. So were you. We both have fed as well, and we can both Endure the winter’s cold as well as he.(1.2.96–101) Although Cassius tells Brutus that “honor is the subject of my story” (1.2.94), envy is its clear driving motor. In the climax of his exhortation to Brutus, envy of greatness is made the central republican virtue: Cassius: Now in the names of all the gods at once, Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed


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That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed! Rome, thou has lost the breed of noble bloods. (1.2.149–52)

There is even, in the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius (4.3), something of Iago’s homoerotic attraction to the object of his deceiving rhetoric. And of course, like Iago, Cassius ruthlessly exploits the weaknesses of his object of persuasion. In this play, Cassius uses Brutus’ pride in his ancestry, his desire for love and approval, by forging letters of support from the populace urging Brutus to act against Caesar. But what makes this play distinctly different from Othello is its moral economy, and what makes Cassius so different in his emotional impact on the audience from Iago, is the general Machiavellian tenor of the world in which Cassius operates. While in Othello Desdemona is a saintly victim of Iago’s homosocial and homosexual passions and Cassio is at worst a well-intended gentleman with a weakness for alcohol, in Julius Caesar the enemies are themselves skillful Machiavellian politicians with the same willingness to use power, deception, and violence as their foes to achieve their ends. Mark Antony is the most flagrant example of this, and Cassius is clearly prescient in sensing a political opponent whose skill is not unlike his own. He of course urges a double assassination, adding Antony to the list of the conspirators’ targets: We shall find of him A shrewd contriver, and you know his means. If he improve them, may well stretch so far As to annoy us all—which to prevent, Let Antony and Caesar fall together. (2.1.157–61).

In this, as events demonstrate, Cassius is absolutely right, and Brutus’s prevailing counter-arguments that such a course would appear too bloody and that Antony is helpless without Caesar are politically foolish and naïve in the extreme. That the members of Caesar’s party are themselves men of deceit and murder is emphasized in the shocking switch of points of view in scene 4.1, which opens with Antony’s declaration, “These many, then, shall die. Their names are pricked.” (4.1.1). This is an early modern instance of Foucauldian power at work, as impersonal negotiation and record-keeping with fatal consequences are pointedly enacted for us. “Look, with a spot I damn him,” Antony says of his nephew Publius, traded in exchange for the death of Lepidus’ brother (4.1.2–6). This group of Caesar’s supporters is as accepting of killing as a tool for political power as the conspirators are—and without the latter’s “cover” of political idealism. Caesar himself is never presented directly in such a light in this play, but we know of his great skill in the institutionalized violence of war and conquest, and

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we know that at least some devotees of republican ideals, the tribunes Flavius and Murellus, see something very dubious in his civil war victory against Pompey. The news of their silencing, given as a casual detail in Casca’s account of Caesar at the festival of Lupercal (1.2.286–88), is a clear sign of dangers to the republican constitution of Rome. The figure of Julius Caesar in this play is a puzzling one. Many critics have thought that the play is mis-named, that Caesar is nothing like a traditional tragic hero, and they note that his role is, in fact, a relatively secondary one. But what justifies the use of his name in the title is his metonymic function: he stands as a figure for the system with which he is so closely associated and of which he forms a crucial part, the political structure out of which his image has emerged. He represents the larger organization of power that has developed independently of any individual’s will out of the political crisis of the Roman republic. As a conventional Shakespearean character, he is a disappointment, almost a caricature. We learn nothing of his interior life, his motivation, his sense of self, as we do of Brutus. Nor do we see him displaying character traits through his actions and words, as is the case for Cassius, Antony, and even the impersonal Octavius. Instead, we learn of his physical weaknesses, represented to us pointedly in the reference to his deafness in one ear and in Cassius’s famous narrative of Caesar’s near drowning after vaunting of his courage to Cassius. And we see nothing to contest Cassius’ account of the man’s flesh and blood weakness. What is noticeable about Julius Caesar is one overwhelming trait. He is hyperconscious of his appearance as a political actor, and everything that he says and does in the play is in service to his image of unshakeable self-confidence and self-sufficiency: Caesar: These couchings and these lowly courtesies Might fire the blood or ordinary men And turn preordinance and first decree Into the law of children. Be not fond To think that Caesar bears such rebel blood That will be thawed from the true quality With that which melteth fools—I mean, sweet words, Low-crooked curtsies, and base spaniel fawning. (3.1.36–43)

He speaks of himself in the third person habitually, and he emphasizes how any decision that he makes might impact on his political image. The conspirators were well aware of this quality, as was shown in how easily they persuaded him to put aside Calpurnia’s forebodings and come to the Capitol. Caesar is merely amplifying in his words the observation about him made by the conspirator Decius Brutus the night before: Decius: . . . he loves to hear That unicorns may be betrayed with trees,


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And bears with glasses, elephants with holes, Lions with toils, and men with flatterers. But when I tell him he hates flatterers, He says he does, being then most flatterèd. (2.1.203–08)

Caesar is a cardboard figure in the play, but he is one in service to one of the play’s fundamental insights: politics is a contest of manufactured images working to draw the shifting allegiances of large political factions.14 And as Antony shows us in his famous oration that turns the political tide against the conspirators, rhetorical skill operates independently of any absolute conceptions of right and wrong. In short, like Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, King John and The Merchant of Venice—all plays written in the period 1595–1600—the play has a double focus, and critics have never been able to agree on how to resolve it into any single moral vision. We understand how Caesar reached the point he has reached, we see why aristocrats fear him as a threat to their interests and Rome’s republican liberties, and we see how Caesar’s followers become impassioned revengers and empowered political actors in response to the assassination. And we see as well the weaknesses, the foibles, and the moral misdeeds of all of these actors. The play never takes sides in the conflict, but it does represent the events in a way that allows us to understand the political dynamics involved. Rather, in this play politics and history in themselves are crucially important issues, and self-consciousness about them is displayed by virtually all the characters. Consider, for example, the famous claims of Brutus’s declaration: Brutus: There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves Or lose our ventures. (4.3.218–24)

Here is articulated the play’s central insight about the interaction of larger events and contingent choice. Historical events have their own logic, independent of our wills. But if such currents are understood and taken advantage of, they can be incorporated into political action and success. It is an idea that can be traced back to Greek and Roman historians and was famously expressed in a different metaphor near the climax of Machiavelli’s great treatise on power and history, The Prince: Fortune is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that she still leaves the other half of them, more or less, to be governed by us. And I compare her to one of these destructive rivers that, when they are raging, flood the plains, destroy trees and

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Shakespeare and Moral Agency buildings, take up earth from this side and place it on the other; everyone flies before them, everyone yields to their onslaught without being able to oppose them in any way. And although this is how they are, it does not follow, therefore, that men, when times are quiet, cannot make provision against them with dikes and embankments, so that, when they rise again, either they would go into a canal, or their impetus would not be so wild or so destructive.15

But Brutus’s sonorous observation is delivered in a context of great irony, for it is the rationale given in support of his disastrous argument that he and Cassius should give up their advantage of location in the highlands and attack the armies of Octavius and Mark Antony on their own grounds. It is welcome news, indeed, for the party of Caesar: Octavius: Now, Antony, our hopes are answerèd. You said the enemy would not come down, But keep the hills and upper regions. It proves not so. Their battles are at hand. They mean to warn us at Philippi here, Answering before we do demand of them. (5.1.1–6)

And this irony leads us to another highly relevant point in the play’s implied philosophy of the role of choice in history and morality—its pointed insistence on the fallibility of human judgments and knowledge. Here as elsewhere, Shakespeare’s skepticism greatly colors his understanding of the limits of intention in moral choice and political activity.16 Brutus is wrong in his judgment here, just as he and Cassius will prove wrong in their interpretation of the outcome of the final battle, when each in turn makes an incorrect interpretation of what they see and prematurely accepts defeat and suicide, when, in fact, the battle is still to be decided. Knowledge is imperfect, judgment is open to errors, and intentions always encounter the resistance of an opaque world of uncontrollable contingencies. And in Julius Caesar, these themes play out in the character of Brutus, the “noblest Roman of them all,” if we are to believe his arch-enemy Mark Antony at the plays’ conclusion. But Brutus is a character whose noble intentions are continuously misdirected through the unintended consequences of his moral choices. Thus, in its bracketing of issues of moral right and wrong and in its concentration on the analysis of actual, non-ideal political behavior, the play is Machiavellian in the sense implied by the many commentators who have credited Machiavelli as the first to employ scientific objectivity in the analysis of history.17 It is the play’s larger implied framework of Machiavellian analysis that gives such power to its riveting climax, the assassination scene, and subjects Brutus’s admirable qualities to searching inquiry. We watch as the killing unfolds within


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the religious and sacrificial language of Brutus as a kind of sacred act, a renewal of the primal founding of the Roman republic in the overthrow of the Tarquin kings by the first Brutus. And then we watch as Antony skillfully dismantles that interpretive framework and substitutes one of his own, portraying the killing as the murder of a great man and public benefactor unjustly cut down by butchers. This particular event, of course, is not arbitrarily chosen. The assassination of Caesar is clearly one of those moments when history seems to turn around the fate of a single individual, when the whole European future seems to be at stake, when the political system of which Elizabethan England was itself one of the historical outcomes teeters on the brink of self-destruction. It was a moment too, that played into the salvation narratives of Christianity, through the tradition that the coming of the Savior could only occur in the moment of universal peace established by Augustus in the aftermath of all the civil discord whose origin the play depicts. These are all themes repeated and, in the case of the Christian connection amplified, in this play’s sequel, the 1606–07 Antony and Cleopatra. But they are implicitly present in the cultural context for this play as well and give it resonances that ripple to our present. Like the other political plays of the Shakespearean Machiavellian moment, Julius Caesar is a study in the dynamics of political power, and one that offers us Machiavellian/Foucauldian insights into the objective nature of power, its status as a system with autonomous rules which strongly limit the freedom of activity of its agents. In this play we see a contest of rival political narratives or interpretive frames work itself out to a violent conclusion—which we know is only a prelude to further bloodshed. Viewed in these systemic terms, Brutus seems considerably less autonomous and in control of events than he thinks he is. His name itself—and Julius Caesar is another of the several Shakespearean plays that emphasize the arbitrariness of names—makes him an almost essential member of the conspiracy, given the potent republican associations of his name, a tribute to his illustrious ancestor Brutus. Cassius and the forged notes he sends to Brutus personify the force of ideology in the formation of Brutus’s identity. If he did not exist, we almost want to say, it would have been necessary to invent him, and he was, in a way, invented as an assassin in Cassius’s artful manipulations. The Stoic inner life Brutus values so highly appears in this light to be another interpellation, a taking in of an external philosophy which becomes part of the psychological armature which Cassius and the others manipulate. In other words, psychology too plays its role in the political manipulations charted in the play. Like other Shakespearean plays, Julius Caesar is deeply interested in psychology, and it is one of Shakespeare’s hallmarks as a playwright to seek always to explain the actions of his plays’ agents in plausible psychological terms (not, of course, always with success), to create a fictional inner life for the characters. The analysis of this level of the plays in fact was the subject matter of the great

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Romantic phase of Shakespearean criticism from Johann von Goethe to Sigmund Freud. But an additional phase of Shakespeare studies has taught us that in Julius Caesar, as elsewhere in the tragedies and histories, the main characters are, as it were, doubly inscribed. They occupy slots within the system of contestatory politics in the fictional Rome of the play, even while they present themselves with psychological traits which explain their motives. It was one of Shakespeare’s most characteristic strokes of genius to recognize, as I argued above, how much dramatic interest could be created by emphasizing a tension between these two character-functions. Hamlet—the avenging Prince who seems unable to be what he thinks he should become and can’t understand why—is the consummate example, but we see this strategy as well in figures like Shylock, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, and Antony, and the romantic heroines Rosalind and Viola. At one level, Brutus belongs in this group, as he is clearly a character who has made the self-cultivation of his inner life a moral priority far beyond what his social station required of him. But looked at another way, we could say that in Julius Caesar Shakespeare’s strategy seems to be simultaneously one of convergence, one in which the psychologies of the characters matches adequately and without much “surplus” the roles the plot requires them to play, and this may have something to do with why so many critics see this play as skilled and well crafted, but not one of the greatest works. In this play the characters do what they were born (dramatically speaking) to do—Caesar to be hubristically imperious, Antony to be passionate and action-oriented, Cassius to be manipulative, envious, but also patrician and loyal to his friends, and Brutus to be noble, unsuspecting, and politically inept. Thus, Julius Caesar is a play that reveals the power of reified politics to absorb subjectivity and call into question the autonomy of moral agency and choice. If the characters’ personalities are congruent with the actions they perform, we could expect them to “choose” exactly what they chose and so exemplify the kind of “fatality of character” which the Shakespeare criticism of previous generations often claimed for them. In Shakespeare, it was often said, character is fate, and something of that compatibility between psychology and historical choice seems to be implied here. Interestingly, Julius Caesar seems to raise the issue of fatality in the prominence it gives to the many portents which precede the day of the assassination. We might construe the unread warning letter written by Artemidorus, Calpurnia’s dream and the famous warning of the sooth-sayer to “Beware the ides of March,” as rational, Machiavellian predictions based on either a prudential assessment of the situation or on over-heard intelligence. But we cannot say the same of the natural—or rather unnatural—wonders that are so vividly described in the interim between Cassius’s approaching Brutus and Brutus agreeing to the plan. We are told of “a tempest dropping fire” (1.3.10), a slave’s hand on fire “like twenty torches” but unharmed (1.3.16–18), a lion outside the Capitol indifferent to surrounding humans, a group of women “transformed with fear, who swore they saw/Men all in fire walk up and down the streets”


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(1.3.23–25), and whizzing meteors or comets so numerous Brutus is able to read by them (2.1.44–45). These are the portents referred to by Polonius in Hamlet, and we recognize a similar list in Macbeth. To be sure, these natural signs are soon inscribed into the political contest of interpretations that is central to all the play’s debate. It is given to Cicero to point out to Casca that “men may construe things after their fashion/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (1.3.34–35). And we soon see the conspirators make a convincing counter-argument about their meaning to Caesar to entice him to travel to the Capitol. For all the uncertainty of their ultimate meaning, however, the signs testify to a medieval and early modern assumption, in turn inherited from the ancient world, that there is a direct link between the events of the human world and the natural world around it.18 There were, of course, skeptics about such a link in Shakespeare’s time—the modernist Edmund is one in King Lear—and Epicureans were skeptics on the same issues in Roman times. As a dramatist Shakespeare was drawn to the idea of this connection and uses it repeatedly to telling poetic effect. In this play there seems to be as well a philosophical implication—there is some foreknowledge of a political catastrophe about to unfold in Rome, regardless of which way the opposing sides interpret it, and such foreknowledge implies fatality at work. In this way the play throws into question the apparently free moral choices made by Brutus and his fellow conspirators and opens itself up to a Christian-Providential interpretation. While the events of the play are at one level nothing more than an empty if deadly political game, at another level they form part of a sequence of crucial events in salvation history—the prelude to universal peace. Here as elsewhere in the play, we cannot really choose between these interpretive possibilities. We can only consider them and hold them together as different and conflicting interpretive frames in a complex allegory.19 What I argue, then, is that while we cannot do without a category of moral agency when we read Shakespeare, we cannot rely on it too much either. As this discussion of Julius Caesar suggests, both agency and morality are ambiguous, uncertain issues in this and other plays, and none of the characters is in charge of their destiny here or in any other Shakespearean tragedy.

Notes 1

2

3

Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), xv–xxiii, pp. 3–20. Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); especially pp. 60–64; Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985); and Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (1984; 3rd ed., Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

28 4

5 6

7

8

9

10 11

12

13

14 15

16 17

18

19

Shakespeare and Moral Agency Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 35. From the large number of recent critical works attempting this development of critical theory, see particularly the essays in Ewan Fernie, ed., Spiritual Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2005); John Joughin and Simon Malpas, eds., The New Aestheticism (Manchester University Press, 2003); Andrew Mousley, Re-Humanising Shakespeare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom, and Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2007); and Peter Holbrook, Shakespeare’s Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002); Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York: Routledge, 2003). For example, Hugh Grady, “On the Need for a Differentiated Theory of Subjectivity,” in John J. Joughin, ed., Philosophical Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 34–50; Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from ‘Richard II’ to ‘Hamlet’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 22–25, 103–25. Agnes Heller, The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (Lanham, MD: Little, Brown, 2002), pp. 1–11; Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977). Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, pp. 26–57. Cf. Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision (Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 65–92. And see also his comments on the complex relation to the audience of these villains in his article for this collection, “The Fool, the Blind, and the Jew.” William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. Andrew David Hadfield (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2007), 2.1.10–15. Subsequent references to this play are from this edition and are given in the text as act, scene, and line numbers. René Girard, “Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar,” Salmagundi, 88 (1991), pp. 399–419; Wayne Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Quarterly, 43 (1990), pp. 75–111. Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, pp. 180–242. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in his The Prince and Other Writings, trans. Wayne Rebhorn (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 105. Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, 109–25. Max Lerner, ed. “Introduction” Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. xxvi. The best known discussion of this linkage, as most Shakespeare scholars will recognize, is E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943); Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 25–28. Hugh Grady, “Hamlet as Mourning-Play: A Benjaminesque Interpretation,” Shakespeare Studies, 36 (2008): pp. 135–65.

Chapter 2

A Shakespearean Phenomenology of Moral Conviction James A. Knapp

On January 13, 2008 the cover of The New York Times Magazine announced its feature article with the question: “What makes us want to be good?”1 As I was working on a book about early modern ethics at the time, the cover naturally caught my eye. I was especially interested in the suggestion that “evolutionary psychology and neurobiology are changing our understanding of what morality is.” In the article, entitled “The Moral Instinct,” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker extols the promise of new research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to settle long debates over moral universalism and cultural relativism. Recent advances in psychological and cognitive research into the genetic proclivity for moral judgment provide the ostensible context for Pinker’s discussion. While touting new research that suggests the brain is hard-wired for a “moral sense” (one in which an appeal to a moral belief-instinct—rather than a reasoned argument—governs action), the article’s primary contribution to the discussion of morality is ultimately more modest: to provide “a theory of how the moral sense is both universal and variable at the same time.”2 Rather than take a side on the age-old question of whether morality is universal (innate, natural, and so on) or local (culturally learned and thus malleable), the scientific approach yields a theory of human morality in which broad categories of universal morality allow for adaptation to particular cultural and historical circumstances. Pinker draws on psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s argument that hard-wired moral impulses fall roughly into the categories of harm, fairness, community, authority, and purity.3 Haidt accounts for cultural variability in moral judgment by looking at which category is invoked or prioritized in a given cultural setting. In other words, though the moral categories invoked to judge a particular action are different in different cultural settings, the concept of a universal moral sense remains intact: an honor killing is a moral act for the brother who is moved by the category of purity, while it is immoral for the outside observer moved by an appeal to protect from harm. The use of categories is helpful in

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explaining how both judgments can be justified on moral grounds—the moral sense, in this account, is the impulse that governs actions when they involve one of the identified universal moral categories. But science gets us no closer to understanding a fundamental difficulty with moral judgments: that while every appeal to morality feels like an appeal to a universal precept, such precepts are difficult to define outside of the particular situations in which they are invoked. Cognitive psychology’s explanation that the brother prioritizes purity while the western observer prioritizes the prohibition against causing harm will convince neither person that his or her judgment is a matter of anything but universal moral truth. Nevertheless, Haidt suggests that contradictions about morality “are dissolving,” including that “people are selfish, yet morally motivated” and that “morality is universal, yet culturally variable.”4 I begin with these recent developments in cognitive psychology because they provide a useful starting point for a discussion of what might seem a tired (or irresolvable) subject: the role of morality in Shakespearean drama. For the debate at the heart of what Haidt calls the “new synthesis in moral psychology” is the same debate that has driven discussions of morality at least since Plato posed the question at the beginning of the Meno: “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?”5 The same question seems to guide Shakespeare’s meditation on moral agency, as we watch such evil characters as Don John, Iago, and Edmund fulfill the role dictated by their iniquitous natures and moral heroes such as Hal/Henry and Cordelia embody moral virtue according to their natural disposition. Of course, Shakespeare’s characters also display moral growth, as they seem to learn (often too late) moral truths that could have enabled them to avert tragedy. For centuries, critical commentary on Shakespeare and morality has been fueled by such seeming contradictions in the playwright’s representation of morally relevant human actions. And it is appealing to argue that the reason for Shakespeare’s trans-historical and trans-cultural popularity is a result of his genius in representing universal human values. If Shakespeare often represents moral situations and his plays somehow embody universal human values, it would follow that the attentive critic could identify the moral precepts contained therein. But the treatment of moral situations in Shakespeare does not necessarily imply an interest in moral prescription. I will argue below that in order to learn from studying moral agency in Shakespeare’s plays we must abandon the traditional questions that drive discussions on morality and human action. While the question on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, for example, sets up the suggestion that science is close to unlocking the enduring human puzzle of moral judgment, it also limits the examination of moral agency by virtue of its initial assumptions: that we do in fact want to be good and that there is something that makes us this way. Before any answer can be given, the question assumes both a static cause for

Phenomenology of Moral Conviction

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moral behavior and a universal moral disposition. A more appropriate question would be: “Why do people think some actions are wrong?” The Times’ question is optimistic and future directed—What drives us to want to be good in our future actions?—while the latter question is a matter of retrospective judgment. There is less at stake in deeming an action good than in condemning it as morally wrong, but there is also more to gain from cultivating a preference for virtue over iniquity. It is not surprising that like the moral philosophers, theologians, and psychologists who came before them, Pinker, Haidt, and other cognitive psychologists are just as interested in the way people arrive at negative moral judgments as they are in determining why some strive to be virtuous. There is nothing inherently inappropriate about asking either question; both are central to the concepts of morality and moral agency. But in most discussions the initial questions are shorthand for Meno’s question to Socrates, which could be modernized into something like this: “Do people think some actions are wrong because they are naturally inclined to follow a moral law, or because they have learned a set of moral rules that are culturally constructed?” At the opening of Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle provides an answer to Meno’s question: “. . . the virtues are implanted in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature: we are by nature equipped with the ability to receive them, and habit brings this ability to completion and fulfillment.”6 The history of moral philosophy in the West is largely a (sometimes surprising) continuation of the conversation initiated by Plato and Aristotle.

Enter Shakespeare In the following pages, I will suggest that the debate summed up in Meno’s question is essentially tangential to Shakespeare’s representation of moral agency. Just as those who attempt to identify Shakespeare’s religious affiliations cite passages with biases which make out a case for one tradition or another, attempts to identify the moral relevance of Shakespeare’s plays often identify moral imperatives in the plays to put forward conclusions about Shakespeare’s guiding moral principles.7 Taking this approach suggests that situations in Shakespeare’s plays invite characters and audiences alike to draw on certain principles that govern appropriate moral judgment. We learn from Shakespeare that tyranny (The Winter’s Tale), overwrought ambition (Macbeth, Coriolanus), inaction (Hamlet), and so on are wrong, and that mercifulness (The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure), forgiveness (The Tempest), loyalty to authority (King Lear, 1 Henry IV), and so on are right. Arguments that derive these principles from the plays can be convincing, and they have the added appeal of providing a rationale for Shakespeare’s ongoing popularity because his plays demonstrate universal human values. In addition, these principles

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would seem to fit relatively well into the moral categories identified by Haidt: harm, fairness, community, authority, and purity. At the same time though, such readings invariably move away from the particularity of the plays in order to highlight the clarity of moral condemnation or praise. Of course for those of us who study Shakespeare, it is impossible to accept the suggestion that the value of the plays corresponds to their ability to convey the kinds of uncomplicated moral precepts listed earlier. Certainly a case can be made that Measure for Measure champions mercy over retribution; but the playwright’s reflection on ethical problems in the play far exceeds any didactic moral concerning the value of mercifulness. Hal’s ultimate rejection of Falstaff in favor of his responsibility to the state may support the idea that community must come before the individual (as Mr. Spock would say, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one”). But do we return to 1 & 2 Henry IV to reconfirm our understanding of this moral precept or to witness the manner in which Falstaff complicates any straightforward attempt at moralizing? Shakespeare’s masterful use of dramatic irony routinely ensures that the audience is a party to a consensus moral judgment that has been made explicit almost as soon as the actors take the stage. As a result, the power of Shakespearean drama lies less in its ability to confirm moral truths and more in what Samuel Johnson called “the progress of the fable.” Recognizing this, more nuanced accounts of Shakespeare’s relevance to moral philosophy begin from the assumption that the moral relevance of the plays resides less in their representation of moral precepts and more in Shakespeare’s dramatic representation of moral situations. Literature constitutes a (limited) middle way . . . by allowing readers to follow the details of the process in others. Do we thereby “learn” the value of parental love? This could seem too crude, no doubt because learning is associated with managing some skill, digesting some piece of knowledge, or grasping some pedantic message, rather than being an experience in which values and voices [are] interlaced with responses that are not limited to analysis.8

Such a reading redirects critical attention to our experience with Shakespeare’s moral agents, while downplaying the notion that we can clearly identify the moral lessons that experience might yield. Nevertheless the focus of this kind of moral criticism still concentrates on our ability to make reasoned judgments about Shakespeare’s moral agents. Though Zamir takes great care to honor the fictive experiences of Shakespeare’s moral agents as analogs for our own experiences, the approach still rests on the conventional debate over the adjudication of right and wrong and the quest to determine if these judgments are learned or innate. The focus of this approach, in other words, is on Shakespeare’s dramatization of moral reasoning as well as the purported invitation that his plays offer his audiences to partake in the same. We watch as


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Othello or Leontes use reason to make decisions that will have moral consequences, and as their reason falters ours is exercised and strengthened. The approach produces original and important insight into the plays, and (from the perspective of moral philosophy) a strong argument for the power of the literary text to contribute to philosophical discussions of morality. The approach suggests that there is a human universal truth at stake in Shakespeare’s staging of moral situations, and that it is our capacity—however flawed and malleable—for moral reasoning. It is not surprising that moral reasoning has been the focus of moral philosophy and moral psychology for so long. Only in reflecting on moral situations with the aid of reasoned argument can the more complex moral questions be considered. With that in mind, it is worth returning to what Haidt describes as the “the new synthesis in moral psychology,” for one of the more interesting insights of the cognitive revolution in moral psychology is the claim that moral reasoning plays a fairly minor role in guiding human action and judgment concerning moral issues and situations. When we think about sticking a pin into a child’s hand, or we hear a story about a person slapping her father, most of us have an automatic intuitive reaction that includes a flash of negative affect. We often engage in conscious verbal reasoning too, but this controlled process can occur only after the first automatic process has run, and it is often influenced by the initial moral intuition. Moral reasoning, when it occurs, is usually a post-hoc process in which we search for evidence to support our initial intuitive reaction.9

The point is not that moral reasoning has no place in our actual experience with moral situations, but that we do not as a rule employ moral reasoning prior to acting in situations where the nature of the situation has aroused a valueladen emotional response. Haidt is clear that we have the ability to override the initial intuition, and that one way to do so is to use moral reasoning to consider the situation. Literary characters are notorious for their moral reasoning prior to action, and Shakespeare’s characters would seem to be no exceptions, a fact that would seem to suggest that Shakespeare’s interest was with his characters’ facility with moral reasoning rather than their innate moral sense. But I want to suggest the opposite—that Shakespeare’s representation of moral agency focuses on the way moral conviction wells up in his characters against established moral principles and in tension with the calm domain of moral reasoning. To attribute this interest to the playwright does not suggest that he sides with those in favor of an innate as opposed to cultivated moral nature, but that his drama gains power from his engagement with the phenomenal experience of moral conviction, independent of rational deliberation. Sidestepping the nature/culture debate in this way I hope to turn attention to the process by which Shakespeare’s characters arrive at their moral convictions, a process that

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involves moral reasoning as well as moral intuition but which ultimately highlights the experience of the phenomenal world in time.

Moral Conviction I agree with Zamir that the value of examining Shakespeare and moral agency lies less in the evaluations we can make about the actions of his characters and more in the particularity of the ethical situations with which Shakespeare presents both characters and audience alike. As Zamir demonstrates, Shakespeare represents ethical situations with such vividness that it is possible to contemplate the weight of his characters’ experiences as we reflect on the moral dilemmas we face in our own lives. But beyond this, the moral failures of Shakespeare’s characters are particularly catastrophic because they are often supported by misguided moral conviction—Othello feels that it is not simply morally justified that he kill Desdemona, but that it is morally imperative. The power of this conviction has led critics to look for the cultural underpinnings of such judgments and view the tragic heroes as victims of ideology or of cultural mechanisms of social control. Leontes’ tragic judgment , for example, is a result of the misogyny of the early modern culture in which his paranoia has been cultivated. This returns me to what I see as a curious moment in Pinker’s explication of the scientific theory of categorical moral universals. He turns to an important thought experiment from neuroethics, known as the Trolley Problem: You see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five?10

It turns out that almost everyone says yes, because the action benefits the greater number of people. A variation, developed by Judith Jarvis Thompson in the same essay goes like this: You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge?11

Here, most people would not push the man. The respondents cannot articulate why they would not and the psychologists have speculated, without consensus,


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about what the relevant difference might be. Pinker sides with those who suggest that it is the active role in killing the man that makes the difference. In other words, the thought experiment allows us to glimpse a universal category of moral instinct (don’t kill people with your bare hands). For the present discussion, however, I would suggest that it is exactly the opposite: the man’s particularity alters the ethical situation (thus blocking an appeal to universal moral law). He is not simply a man, but a “fat man.” Unlike the abstract man who will die in the first example—an example that welcomes the kind of calculus that allows action to favor the benefit of the many over the one—the second example is more particular than abstract. By now, I hope you will also see the connection to one of my examples above: Hal’s sacrifice of Falstaff for the good of England. In one way, Hal’s rejection of Falstaff is a straightforward example of placing the commonwealth above individual interests. But this particular fat man is much more compelling than that moral lesson could ever be. Put in slightly different terms, the things that we might say about the build-up to the moment of rejection are much more interesting than any debates over the impact of Hal’s rejection of Falstaff on his own moral character. Is Shakespeare creating a delightful vehicle through which to deliver a message about virtue? After all, Hal does reject Falstaff, and harshly so.12 In a sense the answer is “Yes”: in representing the gestation of England’s hero king, Shakespeare is dramatizing the virtues with which Henry was associated. At the same time, though, I would argue that the plays raise a more interesting question for a discussion of Shakespearean ethics and morality: why is it that we are unwilling to throw Falstaff off the bridge? Rather than nod in agreement with the newly prudent King Henry, we, like Queen Elizabeth, yearn for more of the jovial knight. The power of the scene is heightened by the spectacle of Henry’s moral conviction, underscored by his pronouncement: “Presume not that I am the thing I was” (5.5.57). This brings me to my central thesis: Shakespeare particularizes images and thus creates ethical situations that cannot be distilled into moral precepts. To make the point clear, I need to put some pressure on the conventional distinction between morals and ethics: I use the term morals (morality) to refer to the precepts that can be considered in isolation, apart from the accidents of a particular situation. For example, “murder is wrong,” is a moral precept; it is true regardless of the particulars, and for this reason those who invoke it do so with alarming confidence (even when they look the other way when the circumstances arise—for example, in wartime). On the other hand, ethics applies to particular human situations in which moral judgments might be invoked: for example, in situations where it makes sense to evaluate human action in terms of right and wrong. Ethics cannot be thought outside an actual particularized situation, making its variability infinite, whereas morality can produce stable precepts that are often useless or unmanageable in actual situations. The heart of my argument about Shakespeare’s engagement with ethics and morality is

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that his plays demonstrate a keen understanding of the tension between ethics and morals (so defined). What appears to be an indifference to moral precepts at times in the plays can be seen as a result of the playwright’s interest in the way his characters are continually forced to confront this tension. Hal’s confrontation of this tension is made manifest in two highly charged images Shakespeare provides prior to the ultimate rejection of Falstaff. First at the height of the role playing in 1 Henry IV, we are presented with the image of the Prince as King forced to do what his place demands, that which he does, and will do (2.4.457). And again in part two when Hal recognizes the significance of the impending succession, Shakespeare provides a vivid image: Prince Harry: My gracious lord! my father! This sleep is sound indeed, this is a sleep That from this golden rigol hath divorced So many English kings. Thy due from me Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood, Which nature, love, and filial tenderness, Shall, O dear father, pay thee plenteously: My due from thee is this imperial crown, Which, as immediate as thy place and blood, Derives itself to me. [puts on the crown] Lo, here it sits, Which God shall guard: and put the world’s whole strength Into one giant arm, it shall not force This lineal honour from me: this from thee Will I to mine leave, as ’tis left to me. (4.5.33–46)

Hal is faced with the dual image of his dead father and his future majesty, frozen for a moment when neither reality has come to pass. Like his earlier willingness to banish Falstaff (while at play), the scene encapsulates the way lived experience impacts the development of moral conviction in Shakespeare’s characters. Here, the outcome is positive (for Hal), but the power of the scene is not dependent on the moral outcome. Focusing on the phenomenology of the encounter with an ethical demand, rather than the process of moral reasoning helps explain the power of Shakespeare’s representation of moral agency. Shakespeare foregrounds his characters’ experience with images that congeal around ethical situations, providing visualized thought emblems through which characters and audience alike may contemplate the moment of the ethical decision. For it is the moment of decision that constitutes moral agents in Shakespeare. We as readers and viewers make judgments after the fact, as do other characters in the plays, but Shakespeare engages directly with the problematic heart of ethical action. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare dramatically extends the moment in which Leontes decides to accuse his wife of adultery with his best friend. As he contorts


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reason to justify his suspicion and rationalize his impending action as a matter of his duty to moral law, he conjures the image of himself as a cuckold: Leontes: Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that I have, To be full like me: yet they say we are Almost as like as eggs; women say so, That will say anything but were they false As o’er-dyed blacks, as wind, as waters, false As dice are to be wish’d by one that fixes No bourn ’twixt his and mine, yet were it true To say this boy were like me. Come, sir page, Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain! Most dear’st! my collop! Can thy dam?—may’t be?— Affection! thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams;—how can this be?— With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing: then ’tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost, And that beyond commission, and I find it, And that to the infection of my brains And hardening of my brows. (1.2.128–46).

The image takes him out of the reality of his own lived experience so powerfully that he can begin to question his previously accepted resemblance to his own son.13 The consequences are significant. In making his decision to accuse Hermione he is acting as a moral agent (albeit a negative one), and the immediate result is the apparent death of another human being. Considering his moral failure, we can judge Leontes with impunity, imagining his descent into delusion as the consequences of a madness that could never touch us. But the care with which Shakespeare presents the internal workings of Leontes’ path to moral conviction suggests that the playwright was less concerned with the question of whether an action is right or wrong and more focused on the experience of becoming a moral agent (good or ill). How do we get to the point where we deem our actions moral imperatives? In Measure for Measure we are not tempted to debate whether it is a good thing for an authority figure to coerce a would-be nun to exchange sex for her brother’s life. Despite periodic objections to the play’s moral value, the moral precept—don’t proposition nuns for sex—is unscathed by the play’s action. There are quite a few more interesting moments for ethics in Measure for Measure. One comes when the Duke offers Isabel a way out of the jam that Angelo has created for her. As he describes the proposed bed-trick with Marianna, Isabel warms to the prospect, eventually exclaiming: “The image of

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it gives me content already” (3.1.260). The Duke has presented her with a choice that is much more situational than that provided by Angelo. Isabel, a strong believer in the moral precept, has no trouble with the initial decision on the question: Would you sacrifice your virginity for your brother’s life? But in the case of the proposed bed-trick, the scenario is complicated to such a degree that even the morally rigorous Isabel must abandon the precept. The situation Isabel faces goes something like this: Would you acquiesce to a raft of morally suspect behaviors (lying to Angelo; brokering a sex act; aiding sex outside of marriage, though perhaps not technically) in order to save your brother and right a wrong done against another woman? Though she has two options for saving her brother, why is Isabel willing to be a party to the latter but not the former? One could argue that the latter doesn’t involve the violation of her own body (though it clearly involves the violation of similar moral precepts). But, it would seem that it is not the preservation of her chastity that is operative when Isabel makes the decision to go along with the Duke’s plan; rather it is the image of Mariana restored that confirms her moral conviction. For how else could the image of the Duke’s plan make Isabel “content.” Surely she is not taking pleasure in the image of the foul Angelo having his way with the wronged Mariana in the dark. What makes the scene interesting for ethics, then, is the particularization of the various factors involved at the moment of decision. Isabel is a moral agent here, not because she acts in the right way, but because she is engaged with the ethical in all its phenomenal complexity. Measure for Measure will take several more turns after this point, confirming that the play’s concern is less with adjudicating human action according to a set moral code and more with examining the lived experience of moral agents. Othello provides us with perhaps the most harrowing example of the gestation of moral conviction gone wrong. Othello’s wonderful catechism on moral reasoning early in the play provides a grim prologue to the play’s representation of the moment of moral decision making: Othello: I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; And on the proof, there is no more but this— Away at once with love or jealousy! (3.3.190–92)

Prior to the actual ethical situation—the moment, with all of its attendant particularity, in which Othello will have to make a decision about his course of action—Othello has no trouble engaging in reasoned discourse about the proper application of moral law. As we soon find out, it is what Othello sees (or thinks he sees) that will be the problem. While all of Iago’s rhetorical manipulations combine to create the context for Othello, it is the image of the handkerchief in Cassio’s hand that provides the ocular proof Othello demands. His journey to the moral conviction required to enable him to commit murder is the intense focus of Act 3 scene 3. In the end there is no doubt that moral


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conviction guides his hand, for he justifies the murder in the final act on moral grounds (5.2.1–22). There is also no debate within the play or without over how to judge the moral character of his action once committed (it’s bad). And while we have no trouble condemning his murderous jealousy, I would suggest that our fascination lies with his transformation. If, with an air of moral superiority we exclaim that we would never allow such circumstantial evidence to lead us to commit an obvious moral wrong, we are less willing to consider how we might act when faced with the situation Shakespeare provided for Othello. Each detail, the sequence of events, the texture of the phenomenal world of objects like the handkerchief, all come together to provide a dense ethical situation in which our moral agent is called to act. That he knows how he should proceed— with reason and hard evidence—is no comfort for an agent pulled by the power of phenomenal experience. The image of Cassio wiping his beard with the handkerchief ensures that abstract reason will lose out to embodied experience. Shakespeare’s plays allow us to reflect on the way particular experiences arouse passion, generate moral conviction and complicate moral agency, to contemplate the experience of the ethical in all its phenomenal complexity. A final example can be found in Much Ado About Nothing. A young lover, Claudio is willing to ignore everything he knows about his beloved Hero when he is presented with the false image of her infidelity. Prior to the deception, Claudio describes Hero to Benedick as the “sweetest lady that [he] ever look’d on,” later noting to Don Pedro that love had grown as war had turned to peace: Claudio: When you went onward on this ended action, I look’d upon her with a soldier’s eye, That lik’d but had a rougher task at hand Than to drive liking to the name of love. But now I am return’d, and that war-thoughts Have left their places vacant, in their rooms Come thronging soft and delicate desires, All prompting me how fair young Hero is, Saying I lik’d her ere I went to wars. (1.1.297–305)

In describing his current condition to Don Pedro, Claudio carefully identifies the stages of intensity through which his desire grew to the point that he knew he was in love. The account sets up his later encounter with Don John and the visual deception that will lead him to publicly disgrace Hero. The emphasis on the visual is continued as Don John lays his trap. In response to Claudio and Don Pedro’s doubt about the accusation against Hero, Don John replies: “If you dare not trust that you see, confess not that you know” (3.2.119–20). Claudio’s confident response resembles Othello’s reasoning

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about ocular proof: “If I see anything tonight why I should not marry her, to-morrow in the congregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her” (3.2.123–25). Claudio is nothing if not true to his word on this count. Borachio relates the scene in which Claudio arrives at the decision to disgrace Hero. Having witnessed the deception contrived by Borachio with the unwitting Margaret: “away went Claudio enrag’d; swore he would meet her as he was appointed next morning at the temple, and there, before the whole congregation, shame her with what he saw o’er night” (3.3.159–63). Convinced of her guilt by the illusion on the balcony, at the altar Claudio chooses to focus on the true image of Hero standing before him as proof of her sexual corruption: Claudio: She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour. Behold how like a maid she blushes here! O, what authority and show of truth Can cunning sin cover itself withal! Comes not that blood as modest evidence To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear, All you that see her, that she were a maid, By these exterior shows? But she is none: She knows the heat of a luxurious bed; Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty. (4.1.33–42)

His decision to disgrace her in the most public way never fails to provoke moral outrage from my students. This judgment is possible even though Claudio’s invective at the wedding springs from his misguided but nonetheless experientially “authentic” moral conviction. In this particular example we might argue that the moral precept on which Claudio bases his rage is the problem: from our perspective, the misogynistic version of female virtue Claudio invokes would make his action morally corrupt regardless of Hero’s guilt or innocence. But if we bracket that consideration (a move supported by the fact that Hero apparently buys into the same value system) it becomes clear that Shakespeare’s ethical meditation highlights the susceptibility of Claudioas-moral-agent to the circumstances of phenomenal experience. The point is emphasized when, upon the discovery of Borachio’s deception, Claudio is able to restore the original image: “Sweet Hero, now thy image doth appear/In the rare semblance that I lov’d it first” (5.1.251–52). And though the play will end happily, with the virtuous Hero judged aright, one cannot help but feel that the final scene is haunted by Claudio’s morally righteous invective at the alter. The comfort that moral reasoning and moral principles offer Shakespeare’s characters when they are not actually faced with the moment of ethical decision making serves to emphasize the danger of what Haidt calls post-hoc moral reasoning. For Shakespeare’s moral agents no amount of moral reasoning prior to or after the fact can account for what happens at the moment of ethical


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engagement; the moment of action is the moment that we see Shakespeare’s moral agents appear in all of their ethical complexity.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12 13

Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” The New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2008, sec. 6, pp. 32–37, 52, 55–56, 58. Pinker, p. 37. Jonathan Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” Science 316.5827 (May 18, 2007), pp. 998–1002. Haidt, p. 998. Plato, Dialogues of Plato, vol. III, ed. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Bigelow, Brown, and Co., 1914), p. 11. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a 22–26, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theater, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Ewan Fernie, Spiritual Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2003–04. See also, Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Haidt, p. 998. Pinker, p. 35. Ibid. See 2 Henry IV (5.5.48–73). For a detailed reading of this passage see my essay “Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.3 (2004), pp. 253–78; and David Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams in The Winter’s Tale,” Modern Language Review 82 (1987): pp. 545–54.

Chapter 3

Wordplay and the Ethics of Self-Deception in Shakespeare’s Tragedies Keira Travis

The words that characters in Shakespeare’s plays use when they talk about knowing and being known tend to be position-and-movement words. In and of itself, this fact does not make the characters particularly strange or interesting: We all, whether we know it or not, use language of position and movement when we talk about discovering, disclosing, explaining, understanding, and so on. Consider the roots of some of these words. The notions of uncovering or opening implicit in words like “discover” and “disclose” are relatively easy to recognize, once it occurs to us to think about them; in the case of “explain,” on the other hand, the dead metaphor in the root of the word (the Latin planus, flat), and the senses of the word that stay closest to its origins—“to smooth out, make smooth,” “to open out, unfold, spread out”1—are not consciously in play for most current English speakers most of the time. The same goes for “standing” in “understanding”: Most people rarely think about it. In Shakespeare’s drama, however, the language of knowing and being known works in special ways, particularly in the tragedies written between approximately 1601 and 1608. Focusing on examples from Hamlet, King Lear, and Coriolanus, I want to show here that one of the distinctive features of the “mature tragedies” is a kind of wordplay that involves subtle but rigorous engagement with, and reactivation of, the roots of crucial words that characters use when they talk about knowing and being known. While the plays of the period in question contain some instances of what we might call overt punning2—that is, punning that gives the impression of being understood and deliberately performed by its speaker (as when Hamlet makes his obscene comment to Ophelia about “country matters”), these plays also, as Simon Palfrey has noted, include subtler homonymic play that escapes the bounds of single characters.3 This kind of wordplay not only seems to escape what an audience could imagine as the conscious control of the characters, but also implicitly comments on the characters’ blind spots. A special feature of at least certain focal postures and gestures in Shakespeare’s mature tragedies is

Wordplay and the Ethics of Self-Deception

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their involvement in intricate networks of wordplay that simultaneously: a) activate etymological, homonymic, and semantic links between words; and, b) thematize characters’ particular ways of knowing and being known. Accordingly, careful study of the enacted positions and movements of the characters should be of interest not only to actors, directors, and performance critics, but also to people interested in philosophy and philology. The plays of this period 1601–08 reward careful consideration of questions such as: When characters talk about knowing themselves, do they use the same language they use when they talk about knowing someone else? And: What sorts of words do they use when they talk about knowing people? Does their language involve them in contradictions? If so, where? And: Do the characters avoid recognizing such contradictions? If so, how? When I follow through on such questions, I find that Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination, in the plays of this period, has to do both with the bodily positions and movements that he will have his actors perform and describe on stage, and with the mental re-dramatization of non-literal position-and-movement words. He achieves this mental dramatization by means of wordplay networks that “bring dead metaphors back to life.”4 It is my contention that, by studying the workings of these networks of wordplay and their relation to enacted and described positions and movements in these plays, we can become more aware of the position-and-movement words that we use when we talk about knowing and being known. Further, I submit that “knowing it or not,” when it comes to roots of words and how they work, can matter. Matter for what? Well, when it comes down to it, what interests me most is a pedagogical project—a project of adapting for classroom use a type of criticism aimed at developing simultaneously rigorous and flexible engagement with language. I think that part of what makes Shakespeare’s mature tragedies particularly valuable in this context is the extent to which they reflect exceptionally good, consistent awareness of the dead and dying metaphors implicit in the roots of the words that people tend to use when they talk about knowing and being known. Most of us, partly because we lack such awareness, think both less rigorously and less playfully than Shakespeare. Engaging with Shakespeare’s subtle wordplay can both help us sharpen our thinking and keep us laughing at ourselves. I don’t think that last statement is a paradox, by the way. Such an approach to Shakespeare also allows me to address the question “What makes Shakespeare’s tragedies philosophical art?” without, I hope, getting Shakespeare specialists rolling their eyes or falling asleep. One problem with many attempts to formulate a response to this question is that they tend not to respect the extent to which Shakespeare, as Marjorie Garber puts it, “presents both his ideas and his character types contrapuntally.”5 Paying attention to the wordplay networks in the tragedies allows us to respect Shakespeare’s contrapuntal method, because the networks in question tend to extend well beyond particular characters—and tend, too, subtly to undermine

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characters’ avowed positions. Thus, my approach would allow me to deal with Shakespeare philosophically without ever making the philosophy of a single speech stand on its own. Now, having put forth my thesis and suggested some of its implications, I will turn to examples from Hamlet, King Lear, and Coriolanus. The approximate dates of composition for these plays are 1601, 1605, and 1608 respectively. My treatment of the examples here is necessarily brief; however, these examples are all susceptible to more extended treatment.

Hamlet In Hamlet several characters, including Hamlet himself, are depicted as imagining their own and others’ selves as containers with contents—containers that can be opened and unpacked. The specific word “unpack” is unusual in Shakespeare; in fact, it appears only once, but this one instance is in Hamlet, and it is involved in a wordplay network of the kind I have been describing. Hamlet speaks the word in an important soliloquy, the one that ends Act 2. This is the soliloquy beginning “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (2.2.577).6 He berates himself repeatedly in this speech, at one point saying with bitter sarcasm that it is “most brave” (2.2.611) of him to “unpack [his] heart with words” (2.2.614). While Hamlet is obviously speaking with a great deal of selfdisgust here, the play also implicitly develops a criticism of the character that is different from his criticism of himself. In other words, Hamlet is self-deceptive, even when he is being self-critical, and the play points to that self-deception. While Hamlet’s determined attempts to know the contents of others’ hearts imply that he believes that inner states can be exposed, he nevertheless insists (at least some of the time) on the undiscoverability of his own interiority. Most people will recall his assertion, in his first extended speech in the play, that he has “that within which passes show” (1.2.80). And yet, a fear of losing this becomes a major implicit issue in the soliloquy at the end of Act 2. His tendency to think of himself as a container with contents ends up making his desire to give appropriate expression to his feelings conflict with his desire to preserve his interiority. In this play there is a kind of emptying out of subjectivity associated with the attempt to discover, grasp, and control the contents of the self; accordingly, the more Hamlet unpacks his heart with words, the less he has “within.” He sees himself as being in a no-win situation: He is, paradoxically, empty (“unpregnant” (2.2.595)) if he keeps his feelings inside; he is full, but already in the process of emptying himself out (“unpack[ing]”), if he articulates his feelings. This “unpacking” problem is connected to postures and gestures in this play by means of a wordplay network that connects “pack” words to “foil” and “fence” words and to Hamlet’s climactic fencing match. This wordplay network is very


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much involved in Hamlet’s exploration of the implications of certain problematic ways of thinking about what it is to know a person. “Pack” in early modern English could, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, mean “[t]o plot (something); to contrive or plan in an underhand way,”7 and, in fact, the word is used in this sense elsewhere in Hamlet (for example, in Hamlet’s “[t]this man shall set me packing” (3.4.234)—a multivalent line that has do with carrying something, assembling belongings for a journey, and also plotting). It is also worth noting that Hamlet discovers Claudius’s scheme to have the king of England execute him when, on board the ship, he dares to open (the word is “unfold” in Q2, “unseale” in F) the “packet” (5.2.18) entrusted to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Q1 handles this part of the story differently than Q2 and F; if anything, though, that text does more than the others to play up the implicit wordplay around packet/packing/unpacking. In Q1, Horatio relates to the queen the events that took place aboard the ship bound for England. The more familiar versions of the play have Hamlet tell this story to Horatio. Importantly, the Q1 queen’s loyalties are much less ambiguous than are the loyalties of the Gertrude of Q2/ F; indeed, she actively conspires with Hamlet and Horatio against her husband. The Q1 passage in which we learn about Hamlet’s discovery of the “packet,” the contents of which reveal the “subtle treason that the king had plotted” (TLN 1812),8 sets up a parallel between, on the one hand, Claudius’s plotting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and, on the other hand, Hamlet’s plotting with the queen and Horatio. The word “packet” appears twice in Q1 (TLN 1814; TLN 1837): one “packet” is Claudius’s, one “packet” is Hamlet’s. The plotting/packing Hamlet unpacks Claudius’s packet/ plot, and replaces it with a packet of his own. This is the case in all versions of the play, but the language of Q1 does the most to emphasize the parallels between Hamlet’s “packing” and Claudius’s. There is an analogous swapping during the fencing match at the end of the play. The exchange of weapons—which exchange leaves Laertes holding the blunt foil and Hamlet holding the sharp, poisoned sword, the “treacherous instrument . . . Unbated and envenomed” (5.2.347–48)—has been discussed a great deal, but, to my knowledge, nobody has in this connection drawn attention to a relevant difference between current idioms involving the word “foil” and early modern idioms involving the same word. While we still sometimes speak of foiling plots or villains, or of being foiled, the early modern idiom “to take (or give, receive, or have) the foil” seems to have fallen out of use. The relevant definition given by the OED for “foil” as a noun reads as follows: “A repulse, defeat in an onset or enterprise; a baffling check. arch. In early use often in phrases: to give a or the foil, to have, receive, take a (the, one’s foil); to put to (a, the) foil.”9 When the exchange in the final scene of Hamlet is to be performed, many options are available to actors and directors; clearly, though, if a performance of the fencing match is going to follow the text(s) at all closely, the actors playing Hamlet and Laertes will both take the foil, figuratively and literally.

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It is also notable that “fencing” is one of a number of important words in this play that share the Latin root fendere, “to strike.” Such words include “offend,” “offended,” “offender’s,” and “offence.” The words “defend” and “defence” also appear. And, in the gravediggers’ hilarious routine in Act 5, there is the pseudo-legalese phrase, “se offendendo,”10 “in self-offense,” by which the character would seem actually to mean “in self-defence.” The fendere words repay close examination, not so much because of the number of times they come up in Hamlet, but rather because of where they appear and what they do. Words semantically connected to the fendere group are also important. In a number of instances, links to “strike,” “strokes,” and “strucken” are activated. What is especially interesting about the fendere / striking words in Hamlet is that, right from the very beginning, the play links words in the “offend” group to characters’ attempts to know and to characters’ attempts to strike. Recall the watchmen’s first attempt to interrogate the ghost: Horatio: What art thou that usurp’st this time of night Together with that fair and warlike form In which the majesty of buried Denmark Did sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee, speak. Marcellus: It is offended. Barnardo: See, it stalks away. (1.1.54–60)

Then note that, when the ghost comes again a bit later, Horatio again demands that it “Stay and speak!” (1.1.153), and he asks Marcellus to try to force it to stay. “Shall I strike it with my partisan?” (1.1.154), asks Marcellus. “Do, if it will not stand” (1.1.155), answers Horatio. But the ghost responds to literal striking the same way it responded to the verbal offence: it disappears. Both Hamlet and his adversaries attempt at various points to know other characters without being known. The play tends to develop this theme in terms of figurative language of striking and offending. Characters are represented as, so to speak, trying to strike or to offend in situations in which they cannot be struck or offended. The fact that the fencing match is set up so that one player has a sharp sword and the other has a blunt one can be connected to this pattern. Indeed, one thing that the exchange of rapiers and the mutual foiling can do is to make us think about whether or to what extent Hamlet’s ways of standing and moving in relation to his adversaries are symmetrical with his adversaries’ ways of standing and moving in relation to him. Especially between the “mighty opposites” (5.2.69) (that is, Hamlet and Claudius), this play depicts a symmetry of approaches and attitudes when it comes to ways of thinking about, knowing, and relating to people. That he defends himself against the possibility that other characters might, so to speak, “unpack” his heart is something of a commonplace. In addition, one could add that Hamlet seems to


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barricade himself against the possibility that he could look into his heart and really know what is there. And I want to suggest that one of the results of this defence is that he blinds himself to the fact that what he is afraid of is exactly what he tries to do to others. I have sketched out only briefly here the outlines of the wordplay network in Hamlet that points toward the main character’s self-deception. I do, nevertheless, think that it is worthwhile to take seriously the extent to which examination of the pack/foil/fence wordplay complex would seem to suggest that Hamlet is a character who is depicted as enduring tremendous and unresolved psychological suffering, and inflicting suffering, on account of, among other things, a certain way of imagining both a topography of the self (that is, as a container with contents) and what it is to know a self (that is, as a matter of unpacking the container). The play explores the possibility that one of the problems which this way of thinking can give rise to is the highlighting of the conflict between a tendency to make the logical inference that one’s self is the same type of object that one has imagined the other to be, and a desire not to think of oneself (or have others think of oneself) as such an object.

King Lear In King Lear “disposition” is a particularly interesting word. The only play by Shakespeare to contain more instances of this word is As You Like It. And, while it is a thematically important word in that earlier play, “disposition” in As You Like It is not re-dramatized by means of connection to enacted or described postures or gestures. King Lear, on the other hand, repays close consideration of the ways in which “disposition” may have to do with characters’ orientation to discovery (that is, of others) and self-discovery. One notable instance of the word “disposition” in King Lear comes in Goneril’s comment to Regan at the end of the play’s first scene: “If our father carry authority with such dispositions11 as he bears, this last surrender of his will but offend us” (1.293–95).12 This syntax of the sentence in question sets “dispositions” in an analogous (strictly speaking, chiastic) relation to “authority” (“carry authority” . . . “dispositions…bears”). “Carry” and “bears” are easily recognizable as synonyms. But why exactly would Goneril speak of “dispositions” as things one would “bear”? Why “bear” rather than, say, “have”? It may be tempting simply to take Goneril’s comment as a complaint about her father’s moodiness and not look too closely at her specific words; however, I would suggest that this play rigorously explores questions about especially the main character’s “disposition,” and suggests that it is not just about mood or temperament. “Disposition” in this play has, rather, a stronger, quasi-literalized sense having to do with characters’ ways of orienting themselves in relation to other characters. Indeed, bearing, carriage, and disposition can be close synonyms in

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Shakespeare’s mature tragedies; it is interesting that Goneril’s comment at the end of the first scene includes “carry,” “bears,” and “dispositions” all heaped into a single clause. All three words are susceptible to what I call literalization or re-dramatization. In the case of Lear, his way of wielding authority does have to do with what to his daughters are his moods, but his moods are best understood as a function of his habitual way of disposing himself in relation to other people. Nowhere in the play is Lear’s way of disposing himself in relation to his daughters more apparent than in what is sometimes called the “mock trial scene” of Act 3, scene 6. This is scene 13 of the Quarto text. This “mock trial” is absent from the First Folio text of this play, and Roger Warren has argued that the omission of this section of Act 3, scene 6 usually—though, he concedes, not always—enhances the play’s theatrical effectiveness; however, I would like here to argue for the importance of the “mock trial.”13 In this scene Gloucester and Kent have just brought Lear in from the storm. Goneril and Regan have not only shut their father out, they have also forbidden Gloucester to take him in. Lear stages the arraignment of the absent Goneril and Regan in this scene, and Edgar and the fool play along with him. In his madness here Lear displays some of the same habits of mind that he has displayed since the beginning of the play. The arraignment of the absent daughters repeats, in a more extreme form, an important aspect of the ceremony that Lear tries to stage in the play’s first scene. While Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia are present in that earlier scene, their father counts on them to play roles that are effectively dictated by him. The ceremony is not supposed to leave room for surprise: It is clear from the first lines of the play that the king has already decided how he is going to divide his territory. But, of course, by the time we get to the trial scene, Lear has come to doubt his ability to predict and control his daughters’ behaviour. So if he wants their trial to go according to plan, it is best that they not be present. As Lear’s doubts about his daughters become inescapable, his attempts to overcome his doubts by discovering and neutralizing the daughters become ever more extreme. And here, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else, his obsession with discovering his daughters is matched by his obsession with preventing their discovery of him. As the trial gets underway, Edgar’s first comment begins to bring out Lear’s double strategy of discovery and evasion: “Look where he stands and glares!” he says of the king; he then adds, “Want’st thou eyes at troll-madam?” (13.19–20). Modern editors usually emend “troll-madam” to “trial, madam.” The Riverside Shakespeare glosses “eyes at trial” as “spectators at your trial.”14 But while this gloss may capture part of the sense, it misses an important contrast: “He”—the king, that is—“stands and glares at her; but “madam”—Regan or Goneril— cannot glare back. His eyes are there, her eyes are not. He stands and glares; thou want’st eyes. This reading is reinforced by the way its sense is reversed and


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replayed in the very next scene. In Act 3, scene 7 of the conflated text (scene 14 of Q), at Gloucester’s interrogation, Regan will stand and glare, while he will lose his eyes. Regan literalizes her father’s exclusion of eyes, and visits her revenge on Gloucester, his double. Another of Lear’s strategies for exposing and evading his daughters involves his dehumanization of them. This gets increasingly aggressive in the trial scene. At one point he addresses them as “you she-foxes” (13.18). Here another dimension of the symbolic structure that Lear develops begins to emerge: The imagined court proceeding is also something of a hunt. And the idea of hunting the daughters conveys both Lear’s desire to catch them and his fear that they will evade him. Indeed, the anxiety about the possibility that they may escape overwhelms him; he suddenly calls out: “Stop her there. / Arms, arms, sword, fire, corruption in the place! / False justice, why hast thou let her scape?” (13.49–51). We see how Lear seems to feel the daughter’s imagined evasion of him as if it were her exposure of him: immediately after calling for arms, sword, and fire, the king begins to whine: “The little dogs and all, Trey, Blanch, and Sweetheart—see, they bark at me” (13.56–57). The minute the fox-daughter disappears, three other canines appear, with their attention fixed on the king. If Lear fails to evade and discover, he will be evaded and discovered: To him this apparently feels logical. The king responds to the shame of being barked at by his imaginary dogs by retaliating with an even more aggressive move to expose one of his daughters. With Lear’s next lines, we are subjected to the imagined dissection of Regan: “Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart” (13.70–71). Thinking of his daughter’s insides as the location of her secrets gives Lear somewhere to look (so to speak) if he wants total knowledge of this person. But in imagining his knowledge of her in these terms, Lear is of course also imagining his destruction of her.

Coriolanus In Coriolanus the “custom of request” of Act 2, scene 3 makes the main character’s bearing or “portance” (2.3.210)15—one of the tribunes uses that word—the focus of attention. “Portance” is an unusual word in Shakespeare; it shows up only one other time (in Othello). It means, in the sense in which the tribune Sicinius uses it, carriage, bearing. Coriolanus’s “portance” during the “custom of request” is insulting to the plebeians, because it signals his refusal to let them know him. Contrary to the custom, he refuses to uncover his war wounds, and he refuses to narrate his military deeds. Once we start noticing other words with the root “port” in the play, interesting possibilities start to appear. “Porting” in the sense of “carrying, bearing” emerges as an important theme; “porting” in the sense of “gate-keeping” also

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comes into play. Coriolanus’s “portance” during the “custom of request” has a lot to do with the attitudes he has shown, in other parts of the play, toward “porting” in these other senses. The constellation of interrelated port- words works in Coriolanus to crystallize certain crucial qualities of the main character. One definition the OED gives for “porter” is: “One who has charge of a door or gate, especially at the entrance of a fortified town or a castle or other large building, a public institution, and so on; a gate-keeper, door keeper, janitor . . . ”16 The word “porter” is explicitly used in this sense when one of Aufidius’s servingmen reports to another that Coriolanus plans to “sowl the porter of Rome gates by th’ ears” (4.5.193–94). The sense of “porter” that is most common in current usage is the one that has to do with carrying, not gates; for us a porter is usually a “person whose employment is to carry burdens.”17 This and other related senses are in play in Coriolanus. In order to understand why porters matter, we need to think more about what the play does with the language of gates and carrying. The play uses the word “carry,” which of course is semantically linked to “portance,” in connection with a political candidate’s winning of an election, and in connection with a military leader’s expected conquering of a city. In Act 4, Aufidius’s lieutenant asks his commander whether he thinks that the exiled Coriolanus will successfully conquer Rome: “think you he’ll carry Rome?” (4.7.27), he asks. Coriolanus can be used by the people he serves—and, of course, things are complicated by the fact that his allegiances change during the course of the play—as a defender of boundaries, or as a transgressor of them. He is explicitly called the defender of Rome’s gates: “you have pushed out your gates the very defender of them” (5.2.41), says one of the Volscian guards when Menenius asks to be allowed to plead with Coriolanus to spare his city. The porter / gate-keeper, having been deported (pushed out the city’s ports/gates), is about to return to port/carry Rome. The irony here may be connected to the irony of the name Coriolanus: Caius Martius gets his additional name for conquering Corioles, not for being from there, but then he comes back to conquer Rome on behalf of the Volscians, who include the people of Corioles. So the same name ends up being apt, for new reasons, after he changes sides; analogously, he is Rome’s porter in one sense before his banishment, in another sense after he changes his allegiances. Another fact which suggests the importance of ports in Coriolanus is this: In both the first and last acts the gates of Corioles are called “ports.” In Act 1, the part of the play that includes the Roman soldiers’ crucial refusal to follow Martius through the gates of Corioles, Titus Lartius refers to the gates as “the ports” (1.7.1). In Act 5, after Coriolanus has called off the invasion of Rome, the play’s final scene begins with Aufidius speaking the following lines to his attendants: Aufidius: Go, tell the lords o’ th’ city I am here. Deliver them this paper. Having read it,


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Bid them repair to th’ market place . . . Him I accuse The city ports by this hath entered and Intends t’ appear before the people, hoping To purge himself with words. (5.6.1–8)

Not only is it notable that the play’s final scene begins with a mention of city ports, it is also interesting that this mention of ports appears in the context of an instance of ironic mirroring. We find out from Aufidius’s speech that, as in the “custom of request,” Coriolanus is again expected to appear in a marketplace and speak to the public, though in this case the marketplace is in Corioles, not Rome. And this time the character is not running for political office; rather, he is just trying to save his own life, having proven himself doubly a traitor—a traitor first to the Romans, and now to the Volscians. We soon find out, too, that this time he is much more willing to go through with the public appearance; he flatters the Volscians, and gives a rather dishonest account of his truce with the Romans—an account designed to put himself in a good light. Recall that in Act 2, scene 3 Coriolanus refuses to narrate his own deeds or to give reasons for which the plebeians should give him their voices. We should recall as well, however, that in Act 3, scene 1 he shows himself quite willing to narrate the plebeians’ misdeeds and to give his reasons for his conduct toward them. In the speech beginning “I’ll give my reasons, / More worthier than their voices” (3.1.120–21), Coriolanus complains that the plebeians, “Being pressed to th’ war,/ Even when the navel of the state was touched, / They would not thread the gates” (3.1.123–25). As Lee Bliss points out, although the parallel passage in Plutarch “is general and condemns the conscripted commoners for often refusing to go to the wars (that is, ‘thread’ the gates of Rome), the phrasing here evokes memories of the soldiers who refused to follow Martius through the gates of Corioles.”18 When the main character blames the plebeians for their refusal to thread the gates/ports, we could say that he is accusing them of bad portance. He is also saying that his behaviour during the “custom of request” is justified on the basis of their bad portance. He sees his portance (we might say “attitude”) as a reflection of theirs. Of course, they could retort that their portance in Act 3, scene 3—that is, their banishment of him (“Come, come, let’s see him out at gates!” (3.3.150))—is a reflection of his banishment, so to speak, of them during the “custom of request” with his withholding posture, his refusal to show his wounds or narrate his deeds. So, to re-emphasize, the approach attempted here depends on, among other things, a habit of thinking about attitude and approach in a range of literal and figurative terms. I particularly find the word “attitude” to be well adapted to my purposes because, at least in current usage, it can refer to something at once

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affective and more or less literally positional. The root of the word “attitude” comes from the Latin aptus, “fitted, fit”; I would like to suggest that if you think, for a minute, of attitude in terms of “fitting,” you may be able to get a clearer sense of what ethics, in the sense that interests me, has to do with positionand-movement words in Shakespeare. Understood as the constitution of the self’s relation to the self, ethics is a matter of positioning, of attitude, of fitting. In this connection, we can think of something Menenius says in Act 2, scene 2 of Coriolanus. When Coriolanus lets the senators know that he wants to be allowed to become consul without having to appear in the traditional candidate’s gown (indeed, he goes so far as to insist that he “cannot / Put on the gown” (2.2.131–32)), Menenius responds: Menenius: Pray you, go fit you to the custom and Take to you, as your predecessors have, Your honour with your form. (2.2.138–40)

These are important lines; I would suggest that it is worth thinking about this play’s major themes in terms of “fitting”. While I am at it, I will mention that “standing” and “fitting” come together in this play’s “porting” wordplay; “port” can mean both “bearing” and, via a bilingual pun, “wearing” (French “porter,” “to wear”). The main character’s refusal to fit himself to the custom has, of course, disastrous consequences for himself, his family, and his country. Even though he does end up bowing to pressure and putting on the candidate’s costume (yes, there may be wordplay on custom/ costume in Menenius’s “fit you to the custom” admonition), Coriolanus never does the kind of fitting, the kind of adjustment of his relation to his self and others.

Conclusion Now, I need, finally, to comment explicitly on the fact that I have focused here on three of Shakespeare’s so-called “mature tragedies.” I have gone so far as to say that the language of knowing and being known works in special ways in the plays of this period. This period has, of course, traditionally been considered the most glorious part of Shakespeare’s career. In recent years, however, plays by Shakespeare that had in the past had relatively little attention (early plays such as Comedy of Errors, for example, or Two Gentlemen of Verona) are coming to be more fully appreciated as distinctive achievements in their own right.19 I am, indeed, not entirely comfortable with the phrase “mature tragedies” because it implies an invidious comparison. I do not want to contest the de-marginalization of the early plays; rather, I am simply trying to develop one of many possible pedagogically generative ways of reading the tragedies.


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Notes 1 2

3

4

5 6

7 8

9 10

11

12

13

Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Explain.” I use the word “pun” at this early point in this essay for the sake of ease of comprehension for non-specialist readers. It is, however, important to note that in connection with Shakespeare’s wordplay, the application of “pun” (which word dates from the late seventeenth century) may be problematic. For a cogent discussion of the problems involved, see Margreta de Grazia, “Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization,” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jarbuch (1990): pp. 43–56. Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005), pp. 134–67. I got the phrase “bringing a dead metaphor back to life” from Michael D. Bristol. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon, 2004), p. 7. Except where otherwise noted, quotations from Hamlet are from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, eds. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992). I find this edition convenient because, while it is based on Q2, it clearly marks all Q2-only passages and all F-only words and passages. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Pack.” TLN stands for “through line number.” Charlton Hinman established this line numbering system for The Norton Facsimile, The First Folio of Shakespeare. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman use Hinman’s line numbering for their ThreeText “Hamlet” (New York: AMS, 2003). Throughout this essay, wherever I specify that I am quoting from Q1, Q2, or F (as opposed to a modernized Hamlet), in-text references are to Bertram and Kliman. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Foil.” “Se offendendo” is found in F only. Where F has “It must be Se offendendo, it cannot bee else,” Q2 has “It must be so offended, it cannot be els” (TLN 3198). Modern editors usually follow F here. Q2’s reading is, however, intelligible. The gravedigger is talking about the coroner’s ruling on Ophelia’s death. In F, the gravedigger’s phrase “It must se offendendo” refers to Ophelia’s mode of death: she killed herself in self-defence/self-offence. In Q2, on the other hand, the gravedigger may be understood as saying that there would be only one way to defend/offend the coroner’s decision: “it” in the Q2 phrase “It must be so offended” would then refer to the coroner’s decision. The Quarto text’s “dispositions” (plural) appears as “disposition” (singular) in the Folio text. See Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds. The Tragedy of King Lear, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p.1068. Except where otherwise noted, quotations from King Lear are from Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds. The History of King Lear, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 1025–61. This text is based on Q1 King Lear. Note that it contains no “Act” numbers; thus, in-text references are to scene and line. Roger Warren, “The Folio Omission of the Mock Trial,” in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 45–57.

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15

16 17 18 19

Shakespeare and Moral Agency G. Blakemore Evans, ed. King Lear, in The Riverside Shakespeare (Dallas, TX: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1278n. Quotations from Coriolanus are from Lee Bliss, ed. Coriolanus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Porter.” Ibid. Bliss, Coriolanus, 186n. See, for example, Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). It is also worth noting that there is a workshop on “The Return of the Early Comedies in Shakespearean Scholarship” planned for the 2009 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Chapter 4

Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being: Shakespearean Puzzles about Agency Richard Strier

This little sketch must begin with a disclaimer: it is going to be in some ways more interested in agency in general in Shakespeare rather than about “moral agency” in Shakespeare. It is going to point to a peculiar feature in Shakespeare’s conception of agency. This seems to me more interesting than his conception of “moral agency,” though I will begin with a puzzle about that. Insofar as moral agency involves the issue of moral responsibility—that is, the relevance to an action of (moral) praise and blame—there is one question that I wish to raise. After that, I will turn to what I take to be the deeper puzzle.

I The question that I wish to raise about moral agency in Shakespeare is whether he accepts the Aristotelian distinction between acting “in ignorance” and acting “due to” ignorance.1 Acting “due to ignorance,” for Aristotle, means acting in a way that one cannot be blamed for, acting in a situation where one simply did not know a morally relevant particular of the situation that one was in (not knowing a morally relevant general truth is wicked [NE 1110b330–33]). For instance, though one knows that buying stolen property is wrong, one buys something in a situation that one could not possibly have known (or reasonably be supposed to have known) that the object in question had been stolen. In this case, one is truly acting “due to ignorance.” Such acts, for Aristotle, are pardonable, on the one hand, and do not properly generate regret on the other. However, Aristotle holds that one is not acting “due to ignorance,” even though one is acting “in ignorance,” in a situation where one is responsible for the state that has put one into ignorance. The key examples are when a person is drunk or angry (NE 1110b16–1111a1–2). Aristotle holds that the actions performed in this state are not properly thought of as due to ignorance, but rather due to drunkenness or wrath, and are therefore morally condemnable, and generative

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of (moral) regret. The person did not have to get drunk (“had the power not to” get into such a state). That is perfectly straightforward. But Aristotle also thinks that this holds in the case of anger. If one says that one is simply the kind of person who is unable to control her anger, Aristotle holds that one is responsible for letting oneself become that kind of person (1114a1–21). Here again, one is not acting “due to” ignorance, but due to one’s character—for which Aristotle holds that one is also, in some deep sense, responsible (1114b20–1115a1–3). I am not sure whether Shakespeare grasped this distinction or not. Let’s look at the case of Hamlet. He asks Laertes, in very formal terms, to “pardon” him (presumably for killing Polonius). The reason he should be “pardoned,” he tells Laertes, is: Hamlet: What I have done That might your nature, honour, and exception Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it. Who does it then? His madness. If’t be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d— His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. Let my disclaiming from a purpos’d evil Free me so far in your most generous thoughts That I have shot my arrow o’er the house And hurt my brother [Q2, Q1; mother F).2 (5.2.208–20)

Hamlet presents his rash and excited action in killing Polonius, an action clearly done “in ignorance”—he did not know who was behind the arras—as due to ignorance. He was “not himself” at the time; his “madness” made him do it, and therefore he is among the wronged parties. He does not take any responsibility for allowing himself to get into the state in question (“madness” or whatever). He seems, moreover, to accept a very simple version of the voluntary, such that only chosen (“purpos’d”) actions are to be thought of as voluntary. (Aristotle, on the other hand, makes it quite clear that the category of the voluntary must be much larger than the category of the chosen, and he gives as an explanation of this distinction a case immediately relevant to Hamlet: “an act done on the spur of the moment [is] a voluntary act, but [it is] not the result of choice” [1111b7–10]). I am genuinely unsure whether Shakespeare wants us to see Hamlet as being disingenuous and consciously sophistical here, or not. It does seem morally relevant that Hamlet did not intend to kill Polonius—he did it, to use

Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being

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one of J. L. Austin’s very Aristotelian distinctions—by mistake, though not by accident (he meant to stab somebody).3 But the disclaimer seems too strong (“Hamlet does it not”); surely Hamlet is enough of an Aristotelian to know the argument for responsibility for one’s character, and also the argument that one’s character is most fully revealed in “spur of the moment” actions4 (he gives, after all, a fully Aristotelian account of how character is developed and changed in his speech to his mother about “habits,” and in the Q2-only speech about the power of “habit” in the discussion of the “custom / More honour’d in the breach” in Act 1, scene 4).5 Yet Hamlet seems sincere. He does seem to bear no ill will to Laertes, and perhaps to think of him as, in some sense, a “brother”—a fellow “gentleman” (“pardon’t as you are a gentleman” [5.2.205]) whom he has known since childhood, and with whom he is now indulging in innocent aristocratic “play” (5.2.185, 230). Hamlet continues the thought in speaking of the duel as “this brothers’ wager” (5.2.230). Moreover, the word or concept to which Hamlet most strongly appeals—even beyond the understanding between “gentlemen”—is the idea of generosity. “Free me . . . in your most generous thoughts,” he says. This word has been powerfully associated with Hamlet’s own character by the shrewdest observer of character in the play (Claudius), and has been proven true of Hamlet. Claudius’s claim that Hamlet will not examine the foils because he is “Most generous, and free from all contriving” turns out to be correct (4.7.133). So we are supposed to think that Hamlet indeed knows about “generous thoughts;” after all, he is condescending to explain himself—something that great aristocrats didn’t often feel obliged to do, even disingenuously. Perhaps the speech-act itself is more important than what it actually says. But that still begs the question, since the whole issue is whether, or to what extent, he is being (or we are asked by Shakespeare to see him as being) disingenuous—in however grand a mode. The puzzle only seems to me deepened by Laertes’ response. Laertes claims to be “satisfied in nature”—which “in this case should stir me most / To my revenge”—though not in honour, which he presents as requiring some sort of public ratification by “elder masters of known honour.” He tells Hamlet that, until the time of such ratification, “I do receive your offer’d love like love, / And will not wrong it.” I think it too easy simply to say that Laertes is lying here, given that he is just about to pick out, quite carefully, his poisoned and unbated foil.6 The fact that he says these particular words—even if they are disingenuous —means that he feels the force of what Hamlet has said. Hamlet has not, after all, used the word “love.” Yet Laertes recognizes that that is the term relevant to Hamlet’s verbal gesture. Laertes would not say these particular words—or rather, Shakespeare would not have given them to him—if the character did not think that they were a fully plausible reply to what Hamlet has said. He could, after all, say something to the effect of, “that’s all so much fancy talk; let’s duel,” or he could say, even more directly, that he doesn’t accept the apology. Instead, he makes a speech that fully recognizes, even enhances,

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the affective and social meaning of what Hamlet has said. Moreover, when, in the course of the duel, after Hamlet’s second “palpable hit,” Laertes assures Claudius that he will “hit” Hamlet now, Laertes says in an aside that “it is almost against my conscience.” There would be no reason for him to say this if he were not, in some sense, genuinely moved by Hamlet’s apology. And as Laertes is dying, and asks Hamlet to “exchange forgiveness” with him, Laertes frees Hamlet from responsibility not only for Laertes’ own death (Hamlet was truly acting “due to ignorance” with regard to killing Laertes), but also frees him from responsibility for Polonius’s death (“Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee”). So, to sum up this discussion, I am genuinely not sure what Shakespeare means us to think of Hamlet’s apology. Perhaps we are to see it as part of a general perception on Shakespeare’s part that persons (characters) often don’t know whether they are being sincere or not, or can offer bad arguments to support good intentions (which we are to value above the arguments), or that disingenuousness is a complex business. Whatever we are to conclude about the moment in question, I think that it cannot be taken either as a straightforward, morally responsible account or as a straightforward piece of self-justifying and self-conscious sophistry.7 Let me say a bit about another, parallel case, and then move on to what seems to me the greater Shakespearean puzzle. The other case where I am not sure how Shakespeare means for us to evaluate a character’s response to a bad action on his part responds directly to Aristotle’s first case of an action done “in ignorance” but not “due to” ignorance—an action done when drunk. Cassio behaves in a truly vile and murderous way when drunk. Verbally, he “pulls rank” in a disgusting and obviously ungospel-like way in insisting that “The lieutenant is to be saved before the ancient” (2.3.106) and he is outrageous verbally and then physically aggressive toward the gentleman (Montano) who attempts to stop him from brawling in the street; he denies that he is drunk, and seriously wounds the intervener.8 Meanwhile, Shakespeare has made it perfectly clear that Cassio is fully aware of his inability to hold his alcohol (he tells Iago, “I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking” (2.3.30–31). Certainly Cassio could—and should—have resisted the pressure to drink. He understands the full extent of what he has done—as Othello says, “in a town of war,” and so on (2.3.209–13). Cassio certainly feels regret/remorse, and seems to accept moral responsibility (for Aristotle, the existence of regret or remorse is crucial for defining the nature of the act in question [NE 1111a20], and the character of the agent [NE 1150b31]). Cassio says: “I will rather sue to be despised, than to deceive so good a commander with so slight, so drunken, and so indiscreet an officer” (2.3.273–75). The puzzle is that Cassio so readily accepts Iago’s suggestion that Cassio appeal to Desdemona to help him get his position back even though he seems to recognize, in the lines just quoted, that he is not worthy of getting his position back. Iago tells Cassio that he is, with regard to


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drunkenness, “too severe a moraler” (2.3.294), and the play seems to accept this, seems to accept that it is reasonable for Cassio to want his position back, and that it is reasonable for Desdemona to wish to help him get it back. Is it a flaw in Cassio’s character to ask Desdemona to accept this commission, and a flaw in Desdemona’s to accept it? Is Cassio “too severe a moraler” with regard to his own behavior when drunk, or is this another case where Shakespeare seems to let someone too lightly off the moral hook, perhaps giving some kind of credence to Cassio’s talk of devils? Cassio is, after all, an admirable fellow—when, that is, he is not drunk or angry. Does Shakespeare grasp Aristotle’s point about such states?

II Let me hasten now to what I take to be a deeper puzzle in Shakespeare’s conception of moral agency—or rather, as I have already suggested, in his conception of agency in general. This puzzle may be related to the possibility raised above that Shakespeare thought that persons have an oblique and complex relationship even to their own sincere utterances. The issue that I am interested in is Shakespeare’s lack of interest in (or belief in) motives. I want to make the general claim that this is true of Shakespeare, and that it is this view—that stated motives are generally inadequate as explanations of a person’s (character’s) behavior—that leads to the perception that Shakespeare is a Freudian avant la lettre. One of the key bits of proof for this claim occurs in a completely unexpected and weird speech in The Merchant of Venice, a speech that might be my candidate for the weirdest—and therefore, perhaps, one of the most important—speeches in the whole Shakespearean corpus. At the beginning of the great trial scene in Merchant, Shylock is given the opportunity to “disclaim” publicly his “strange apparent cruelty” in seeking to extract the pound of flesh penalty from Antonio. Shylock takes this as an opportunity to explain why he will not “disclaim” the pound of flesh forfeiture. Surely we know what he is going to say. We have heard before of Antonio’s treatment of him. Shylock has reminded Antonio “You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, / And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine . . . And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur.” 9 And Antonio has fully accepted this account of his behavior: “I am as like to call thee so again, / To spet on thee again, to spurn thee too” (1.3.107–126). So Shylock has perfectly good—meaning thoroughly intelligible (not necessarily admirable)—reasons for hating Antonio. And, of course, he has already given a great speech justifying hatred of one’s enemies as a completely normal human reaction (“and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?” [3.1.60]). So, it seems more than reasonable that here, in a public and judicial setting, Shylock would recount his excellent reasons for hating Antonio on the basis of Antonio’s public and

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avowed treatment of him. But instead of giving another speech about how thoroughly and regularly he has been wronged and injured by Antonio, this is what Shylock says: Shylock: You’ll ask me why I rather choose to have A weight of carrion flesh, than to receive Three thousand ducats: I’ll not answer that! (4.1.40–42)

He refuses to answer the “why” question just at the point when it seems his answer would be most à propos. The scene is set for him to reiterate, or elaborate upon, his rationale for hatred. Not only does he refuse to give the answer that would seem to be so readily to hand, and that he has given at length elsewhere, but he shifts the whole topic from the realm of reasons to an entirely different one: Shylock: say it is my humour,—is it answer’d? (43)

He knows that this would not normally be considered an “answer” to the why question, but a refusal to answer it. He goes on, however, to give an account of human behavior that does, in a sense, serve as an answer to the why question. Humours—here meaning something like wishes or whims, not chemicals in the blood—are not to be questioned; they need not have a rational basis, but are absolute in themselves as explanatory factors: Shylock: What if my house be troubled with a rat, And I be pleas’d to give ten thousand ducats To have it ban’d? what? are you answer’d yet? (44–46)

Shylock here seems to speak for absolute freedom of choice (within the realm of legality) with regard to personal expenditures. No account of his preferences need be given by the consumer who is willing to pay for what he wishes.10 So far, we seem to be in a world of wishes and preferences and choices, if not a world of rational bases for such. But Shylock’s “account” of his behavior is weirder than that.11 After this example of a (to most people) “strange” piece of behavior that is consciously chosen, Shylock then gives a picture of human behavior that has nothing to do with choice, that is truly, as Aristotle would say, non-voluntary (where the involuntary includes things chosen under duress [NE 1110b): Shylock: Some men there are love not a gaping pig! Some men are mad when they behold a cat! And others when the bagpipe sings i’ th’ nose, Cannot contain their urine—for affection


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(Master of passion) sways it to the mood Of what it likes or loathes,—now for your answer: As there is no firm reason to be rend’red Why he cannot abide a gaping pig, Why he a harmless necessary cat, Why he a woolen bagpipe, but of force Must yield to such inevitable shame, As to offend being himself offended: So can I give no reason, nor I will not, More than a lodg’d hate, and a certain loathing I bear Antonio.(4.1.47–61)

Shylock now substitutes “affection” for “humour” as his master explanatory term. “Affection” seems to mean, here, something like “general psychophysiological disposition” (it’s a term that seems to serve Shakespeare as a pointer to psychological opacity—compare the contorted speech on the mysteriously powerful “intention” of “affection” that Shakespeare gives to Leontes in the first scene of The Winter’s Tale).12 The picture is of persons helplessly under the “sway” of compulsions, of persons doing things over which they have absolutely no control. Positive cases of “affection” are mentioned in the speech—” what it likes and loathes”—but, as is appropriate for the context, all the examples are of revulsion. The examples move from the understandable (one needn’t be a Jew or Muslim to find something slightly disturbing about the pig “gaping” either from its mouth or its cut neck) to the bizarrely trivial (“a harmless necessary cat”),13 to the somewhat uncanny. The bagpipe, with its oddly produced sound (“sings i’ th’ nose”) and its strangely biological appearance (“a woolen bagpipe”) seems somewhat more suited to producing phobias. Early in the play—in a speech that Shylock could not have heard— Solanio had mentioned “strange fellows” who mechanically, inappropriately, and shamefully “laugh like parrots at a bagpiper” (1.1.51–3). Shylock sees himself, and all of us, as such “strange fellows.” But, in Shylock’s use of reactions to the bagpipe, the body obtrudes itself not merely mechanically but in a way that returns to the infantile, and utterly subverts the social—with regard to both self and others. The unstable grammar of “to offend himself being offended” exactly captures the point.14 We “understand” such phobias, in the sense of recognizing them, but they hardly count as reasons for action. We may think that Freudian psychology could answer the “why” question in individual cases, but these “answers” are certainly opaque at the time to the agent who is offending and “himself being offended.” Shylock, astonishingly, presents his own motives as such. When he returns from the account of the master power of “affection” to a named passion, he can only try to give the passion a quality of viscerality, “a lodg’d hate”; and when he re-characterizes the “hate” as “a certain loathing,” the phrase, in its odd, almost fussy detachment

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and vagueness, has just the quality of unwilled aversion that the examples support. The interesting question becomes why Shakespeare would have wanted to give Shylock this speech. I find a haunting plausibility in Kenneth Gross’s view that “Shylock is Shakespeare,”15 but whatever one thinks about that, I would argue that Shakespeare is here giving his Jew a speech that expresses, more powerfully perhaps than any other in his work, Shakespeare’s sense of the lack of access that persons normally have to the actual springs of their own behavior. I think this speech is meant to alert us to how little grip “motives”—what we say are the reasons for our behavior—have on our behavior. Shakespeare takes a case where the motives seem obvious and then has the possessor of them emphatically deny their relevance to his behavior. Shylock seems himself to be in the grip of some kind of compulsion to assert the power of compulsion, and to deny the relevance of “reasons,” even if this means offending—demeaning, shaming, verbally bepissing—himself as well as others. This is not a case of attempting to deny responsibility by appealing to irrational forces (“Hamlet does it not”) but, weirdly, of accepting responsibility because of irrational internal forces—that is who, or what, I am. And it is not even the Aristotelian point about being responsible for one’s own character. There is a strong sense in this passage that reason and choice never entered into the picture at all—not at an early or a later stage in some process (compare NE 1114a19–21). The only term that Aristotle has for such behavior is “brutishness” (which, interestingly, he associates with childhood trauma).16

III I have spent so much time on this one passage from The Merchant of Venice because, as must now be clear, I think it points to something general in Shakespeare’s conception of the human agent. Even when it looks as if there is a straightforward motive for a character’s behavior—ambition, for instance, in Macbeth (or even Richard III)—it can be shown, I think, that those characters are mistaken about what they actually want.17 Let me conclude this set of reflections by spending some time on the most famous case of “motivelessness” in Shakespeare, that of Iago. Again, my claim here will be that Iago is—not in the particular motive that he has, but in the kind of motive that he has— a normative case for Shakespeare’s conception of character and agency. The first 60 or so lines of Othello consist mainly of speeches by Iago, and they are speeches about his motives. In the first of these speeches we hear of his resentment at not getting the job of Othello’s lieutenant, a job that Iago is fully convinced that he deserved. “I know my price,” he says, “I am worth no worse a place” (1.1.10). This is framed not as vainglory but as proper pride. Maybe there is a critique here of classical ethics, of the idea of “proper pride,”


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or maybe the critique here is of the stance or tone that this conception generates in Iago, the tone of mockery and resentment (not a stance that Aristotle recommended for the person with “proper pride”).18 We might learn more from Iago’s second speech, a discourse on proper service as Iago sees it, on how manly, non- “obsequious” followers maintain the “forms and visages of duty” while truly only serving (“attending on”) themselves. This, for Iago, is to have, as he says, “some soul”—meaning, as Machiavelli would say, “spirit,” animo (not anima).19 Shakespeare would seem to be giving us a picture of a perfect hypocrite, someone fully, and with full awareness, self-contained and self-interested. The speech ends with a contempt for “outward action” based not, like Hamlet’s, on its inability to express the inward, but on the opposite, on its contemptible ability to do so, to “demonstrate / The native act and figure of my heart.” The point is not that the inner cannot be expressed but that, for the properly self-serving, it should not be. Everything is set up for the speech to end with the culminating and, in this context, properly proud assertion, “I am not what I seem.” But that is not what Shakespeare gives us. Instead we get the very strange assertion, “I am not what I am.” Either this is a slip of the pen on Shakespeare’s part—though both the 1622 quarto and the first Folio have the same line—or a slip of the tongue on Iago’s. If, as is much more probable, it is the latter, what is Shakespeare doing in this line? It is, as virtually every commentator has noted, the first and one of the most spectacular of the biblical echoes in the play. Shakespeare has Iago culminate his elaborate self-presentation with a negative version of one of the most mysterious moments in the Hebrew bible, the moment in Exodus when, in response to the request that Moses makes of God to be able to answer the query that Moses knows that he will get regarding the God in whose name he is claiming to act, “What is his name,” God either does or does not—depending on one’s interpretation—give His name, saying (in all the protestant English bibles of the century), “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14). This is an echo that Shakespeare surely expected many people in his audience to catch. But what does it mean? The figure who says this in Exodus is asserting—in all the translations of the Hebrew bible (though perhaps not in the Hebrew bible itself)—some sort of absolute ontological priority, however one understands this. Iago cannot be purposely echoing this in the negative, merely being, as Honigman says, “profane.” Shakespeare is doing something here, not Iago. The playwright wants to alert the biblically literate in the audience that his conception of this character involves not a figure with a solid if rather sinister sense of himself, but rather a figure who, in some deeper sense, does not have a self. There is no “I am” just at the point where one seemed to be powerfully unfolding. So let us pursue further the question of what the biblical/theological reference does here. It does not mean to interpret the bible. Rather, it uses the bible to interpret the character that Shakespeare is creating. The play as a whole

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can be seen as in dialogue with the founding story for the Judeao-Christian conception of history. Othello is Shakespeare’s Paradise Lost. This has many implications, but the one that I want to pursue here concerns the matter of motivation—of devilish motivation. Milton’s explanation for Satan’s behavior is Satan’s “sense of injur’d merit” in relation to the Elevation of the Son— precisely the motive that Shakespeare initially gives to Iago. Milton thought this motive truly explanatory. An injury to “proper pride” seemed very deep to Milton; it is the narrator’s as well as Satan’s own account of Satan’s motivation (see Paradise Lost, I.98, and V.665). But Milton was much more committed (in my view) to classical ethics than Shakespeare was.20 Shakespeare, the more “secular” poet, seems to have needed a deeper and more mysterious explanation. The idea of sheer negativity seems to be what drew him. What the perverted biblical echo at the end of Iago’s second speech helps us to see is that the conception that Shakespeare had of Iago’s “motives,” such as they are, is that they are not ordinary, recognizable ones like “the sense of injur’d merit” (or sexual revenge [1.3.386], or a combination of sexual revenge and sexual desire [2.1.289–95]). What Shakespeare seems to be suggesting is that it is the mere existence of goodness that drives Iago to a fury. In a Neoplatonic and perhaps biblical context—especially given the prominence of the Exodus echo—one might say that it is the fact of anything at all existing that drives him to a fury. Now that’s the kind of thing that Shakespeare seems to have thought of as a motive. The theological enters to point to a mystery. Let me try to elaborate this a bit further. Again, a “direct and directing” reference to the religious tradition helps.21 When Iago finally sees his actual plan (thanks to Cassio’s inability to hold his liquor) take shape—that is, to use Desdemona’s advocacy of Cassio as a key weapon—Iago summarizes the result he hopes for, thus: “So will I turn her virtue into pitch / And out of her own goodness make the net / That shall enmesh them all” (2.3.355–57). Again, Paradise Lost comes to our aid. Everyone who has ever taught or taken a Milton course knows that toward the end of the final Book, after the archangel Michael explains to Adam that Satan will ultimately be defeated, Adam, “Replete with joy and wonder,” bursts out: “O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / And evil turn to good” (PL XII.471–2). This is the famous theme of “felix culpa”—the “fortunate fall”—that, ever since Lovejoy’s article in 1937, everyone knows, and knows that it was widely echoed throughout the middle ages (including in vernacular and literary texts).22 Shakespeare again (I think) expects many in his audience to recognize what is going on when Iago boasts of doing the opposite of this, of making evil come out of goodness—of making goodness the direct cause of evil. In the Christian scheme, the happy cosmic outcome of the Fall is a testimony to the power and benevolence of God, and the Fall was necessary to the full revelation of this (in Christ). In Shakespeare’s inversion, the relation of the result to the original situation is more intimate. Iago knows that there is something inherent in goodness that he can use against it. He has the Neoplatonic sense of goodness


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as inherently active and overflowing.23 Again, it is not a matter of will, but of being. Desdemona simply is the kind of person who will be overflowing with charity. “She’s framed as fruitful / As the free elements” (2.3.336–37). Her goodness of being includes, necessarily includes, a happy excess of both goodness and being. So again, the principle of sheer negativity is clarified by reference to its theological opposite. Lest this still seem too fanciful, let me hasten to say that there are moments in the play when Shakespeare explicitly presents Iago in something like these terms. In the rather annoying scene in which Iago and Desdemona banter about the nature of women, and Desdemona, grand lady that she is, sets Iago the task of praising her, Iago gives a powerful reason for not wanting to play this game, a reason that again, seems to say rather more than he intends. In attempting to refuse Desdemona’s playful challenge, Iago says, “O gentle lady, do not put me to’t, / For I am nothing if not critical” (2.1.118–19). The context is playful, and Iago does pride himself on his “tough-mindedness” (which in this case, pace Eliot, is cynical),24 but Shakespeare clearly wants us to think about what it would mean to be “nothing if not critical.” It would mean, taken literally, that without an object to demean or destroy, such a person would be nothing, would not exist. Again, as in the ontological argument, existence is a good, and has a positive dimension.25 In this framework, Iago’s passion to destroy Othello must be seen to derive from Othello’s fullness of being, his grand complacency, his capacity for love and for joy. “O my fair warrior” is a truly wonderful moment (in all senses [2.1.180]). When Cassio expresses his hope to be reconciled to Othello, Cassio does so in strikingly Neoplatonic and Pauline language; he hopes “that I may again / Exist, and be a member of his love” (3.4.133). So the culpa from felix principle must be seen at work here too. Iago acknowledges— somewhat, as he sees it, against his own grain—that “The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not, / Is of a constant loving, noble nature, / And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona / A most dear husband” (2.1.287–89). And so he must be destroyed.26 Yet the clearest account of Iago’s deepest motivation comes in relation not to Othello or Desdemona but to Cassio. At the beginning of the fifth Act, we watch Iago going over the reasons why both Roderigo and Cassio must, one way or another, be killed. His motive for wanting Roderigo out of the way is, indeed, ordinary (“He calls me to a restitution large / Of gold and jewels that I bobbed from him” [5.1.15–16]), and we already know his motive (or motives) for wanting Cassio dead—Cassio beat him out for the lieutenancy; Cassio may have slept with Iago’s wife (2.1.305). Instead, however, of giving one of these straightforward and easily intelligible motives, Shakespeare has Iago say something else, something entirely unexpected, and, again, self, or non-self, revealing; Iago says of Cassio: Iago: He hath a daily beauty in his life That makes me ugly. (5.1.19–20)

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This is a deeper version of “I am nothing if not critical.” What Iago finds intolerable about Cassio is not anything that he has (a job that Iago wants) or anything in particular that he does; what he finds intolerable about Cassio is his entire way of being, his ease and happiness in his being, social and ontological. Shakespeare makes Iago aware of the void within him, of what he feels in relation to persons who have the fullness of existence that he lacks. Again, Neoplatonism helps us see the relation between the aesthetic terms and ontological ones. For Neoplatonism, they are the same: the fullness of being is goodness and beauty. Iago must make everything and everyone ugly—which means, in the logic we have been tracing, to make it cease to exist. As I have already suggested, Iago is, in my estimation, an especially clear case, one in which Shakespeare essentially tells us how to think about “motives.” But, to repeat, I take it that Iago is—not in the particular motive that he has, but in the kind of motive that he has a—a normative case for Shakespeare’s conception of character and agency. Shakespeare, in my view, had to draw on theology to find conceptions sufficiently mysterious. But I do not mean to suggest that Shakespeare was writing theological dramas. He warns us not to make this mistake; Iago does not have cleft feet—“I look down towards his feet, but that’s a fable” (5.1.283). Theological conceptions were there, for Shakespeare, not to point to theological mysteries, but to human ones.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

7

8

All quotations from the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) are from the translation by Martin Oswald (1962; Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1999). References will hereafter appear parenthetically in the text by Bekker page, column, and line numbers. Quotations are from the Q2 text edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Tylor ([Arden 3]; London, 2006). See J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, 2nd edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford, 1970), pp. 175–204, esp. pp. 184–5. See NE 1117a20. For an important essay on habit in Hamlet, see Paul Cefalu, “Damnéd Custom . . . Habit’s Devil: Hamlet’s Part-Whole Fallacy and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind,” in Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 145–72. See the note in the lines in the Thompson-Tyler edition, p. 450. These editors see both Hamlet and Laertes as straightforwardly “disingenuous.” Harold Jenkins, in his edition (Arden 2; London and New York, 1982), pp. 567–8, seems to me admirably undecided about Hamlet’s speech, as about that of Laertes. Quotations from Othello are from the edition by E. A. J. Honigman (Arden 3; London: Thomson Learning, 1996).

Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being 9

10

11 12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

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Quotations from The Merchant of Venice are from the edition by John Russell Brown (Arden 2; London: Methuen, 1955). Richard A. Posner sees Shylock as here giving voice to “a common place of liberal theory – the subjectivity of [monetary] value.” Law and Literature, Revised and Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 189; see also Cefalu, Revisionist Shakespeare, pp. 96–8. This is where the Posner reading fails to capture the content of the speech. See The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. Pafford (Arden 2; London: Methuen, 1963). Pafford struggles with this passage in an Appendix (pp. 165–67). The reason why cats are so normal as witches’ “familiars” is clearly because they are so familiar. Witchcraft makes the homely frightening (think of broomsticks as vehicles, or merely of old women—or just of women). The comma after “offend” that Q2 inserts only weakly rationalizes the line, and may actually add something to it by coordinating the social with the psychological. Kenneth Gross, Shylock is Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). NE 1148b23–30 (discussing, among other things, “sexual relations between males”). I have made some suggestions along these lines with regard to Richard III in “Shakespeare against Morality,” in Reading Renaissance Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 206–25; and have considered Macbeth in an appendix to that essay (“What about Macbeth?”) that will appear in my forthcoming book,“The Unrepentant Renaissance: from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton.” For Aristotle on proper pride (“high-mindedness,” megalopsychia) see NE 1122a18– 1123a33). The “high-minded” person “will show his stature in his relations with men of eminence and fortune, but will be unassuming toward those of moderate means” (1124b18–20). See Machiavelli’s The Prince, A Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. Mark Musa (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1964), pp. 82, 94. See Strier, “Milton against Humility,” in Religion and Culture in the English Renaissance, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 258–86. I have borrowed “direct and directing” from Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 211. A. O. Lovejoy, “Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall” (1937), rpt. in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), pp. 277–95. See A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936; New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 61–80. Plotinus is the key formulator. In Eliot’s definition of “wit,” he distinguished sharply between tough-mindedness and cynicism; see “Andrew Marvell,” in Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot, New Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1950), p. 262.

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26

Shakespeare and Moral Agency See The Ontological Argument: From St. Anselm to Contemporary Philosophers, ed. Alvin Plantinga (New York: Anchor Books, 1965). On our difficulty with “the recognition of greatness,” and how this threatens our reading of Othello (and Othello), see Reuben A. Brower, “Introduction: The Noble Moor,” Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 1–28.

Part II

Social Norms


Chapter 5

Conduct (Un)becoming or, Playing the Warrior in Macbeth Sharon O’Dair

Twenty-five years ago, in an essay not widely cited since, Robert Weimann argued that “the most original and far-reaching dimension in Shakespeare’s conception of character” is “the dimension of growth and change,” which can not “be adequately understood” without recognizing how character is effected through “the dialectic between identity and relationship, between individual action and social circumstance.”1 Accordingly, “the mere juxtaposition of character and society fails to satisfy Shakespeare’s immense sense of character. Merely to confront the idea of personal autonomy with the experience of social relations is not good enough as a definition of character. For Shakespeare the outside world of society is inseparable from what a person’s character unfolds as his ‘belongings’.”2 That is, the personal or individual is also social, emerges from and always engages with the social. As a result, suggests Weimann, a character on stage does not exist until “his private qualities are successfully (or otherwise) tested in public. The testing itself (as a process in time), not the qualities as such (as a given condition or heritage) is the dramatic source of character.”3 A classic formulation of this insight comes from Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”4 It should not surprise that the Marxist critic offers an understanding of character that is sociological, since Marxism is a branch of the discipline of sociology and as Perry Anderson notes, “the nature of the relationships between structure and subject . . . [is] one of the most central and fundamental problems of historical materialism as an account of the development of human civilization.”5 Nor does it surprise that Weimann’s argument—his processural and dialectical understanding of character—has been largely ignored by literary critics. Generations of Shakespeareans have taken for granted “that there is a distinction between the Shakespearean person and the public or political position he chooses or is forced into.”6 Such a judgment reflects and reinforces

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what philosopher Stephen Toulmin calls modernity’s “familiar metaphysical divide,” the assumption that “the sphere of the moral and the personal is essentially an inner mental world while the outer material world is essentially the sphere of indifferent, unresponsive things.”7 Indeed, this powerful assumption that the self is in some unexplained way separate from its social environment has run roughshod over subsequent attempts to disrupt it, attempts more compelling to our discipline than Weimann’s: witness the misreadings that followed Stephen Greenblatt’s reworking of an autonomous (inner) self through the notion of “self-fashioning” or, even more glaringly those that followed Judith Butler’s undermining of an essential gender identity through the concept of performativity. Butler invoked drag performance to suggest “the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency,”8 but readers did not infer from this that the structure of gender is rooted in deep-seated social norms; that as a social role, “gender is…compelled by norms [one does] not choose”9; that personal agency must, therefore, “work within” those norms because they (help to) constitute the self continuously; or that that social norms are both the condition and the limit of one’s agency. 10 Instead, readers took from Gender Trouble the notion of “radical free agency.”11 As Butler put it years later, readers thought her work meant they could “‘get up and put on a new gender today,’ or ‘…have a collective meeting and decide what gender we should perform and go perform it on the street and alter things radically’.”12 Many blamed Butler for their misconstruals; she should have written more clearly. Perhaps. Her work is difficult, dense. But I think the problem lies more with readers’, indeed the culture’s, seeming inability—still—to conceive of selfhood as located anywhere other than in an interior personal space, separate from the social. We seem unable to locate selfhood anywhere other than some voluntaristic “fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’” or ‘choice’.”13 Butler and Greenblatt challenge the idea that any gap exists between the self and the social and suggest that the two are inseparable. Yet most of their readers assert either that there is no self, or that the self is the locus of “radical free agency.” Despair about the self or an inflation of it; these seem to be our choices and most of us seem unable to acknowledge a reciprocal or a dialectical relationship between self and society, the extent to which selfhood is neither constructed nor determined, neither free nor fixed but both—and both simultaneously. Like other writers in this volume, I assume that the characters with whom I engage represent moral agents who, as Michael D. Bristol urges earlier, are faced with unpredictable social situations that require evaluation and judgment. I follow Bristol in assuming that moral agents “are singular and selfdetermining,” that is, they are very much interested in “maintaining a stable rapport à soi—coherence, or integrity, or self-respect.” At the same time, moral agents know their integrity depends upon how they negotiate the unpredictable social situations they face, situations that may—and in the drama usually do—involve conflicts between obligations and expectations that are not easily

Conduct (Un)becoming

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resolvable. In this essay, I examine Macbeth as a moral agent operating within existing social norms for behavior whose “private qualities are successfully (or otherwise) tested in public,” tested in, or through, time.14 These norms I infer not from history, though I will refer to “the facts” occasionally, but from the play itself and through a process Bristol calls “vernacular criticism,” a rigorous or studied version of the “interpretive amateurism practiced by journalists, flight attendants, or one’s own students” and based on “assumptions and presuppositions about how to account for the actions of ordinary people.”15 A number of distinguished literary critics “have found sophisticated ways to sustain” vernacular criticism, including Harry Berger and Harold Bloom, and so, too, have moral philosophers such as Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum; philosopher Tzachi Zamir offers the most recent contribution based on his work in contemporary ethics in Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama.16 My own route into vernacular criticism is through sociological theory, particularly traditions of work broadly called interactionist, which focus on small groups, subjective experience, meaning-making, and everyday processes of social life. With roots in pragmatist philosophy and the long history of theatrum mundi, interactionism is a qualitative or ethnographic approach to the study of persons in groups. Interactionists use theatrical metaphors to approach, describe, and assess persons in groups—role, act, actor, performance—which should, I think, make their work appealing to Shakespeareans and other critics of the drama and theater.17 Before discussing the “testing” of Macbeth’s character in time, I offer a sketch of the society Shakespeare constructs in the play and of Macbeth’s private qualities or character, what Weimann would call his “given condition or heritage.”18 Despite modernist condemnation of Macbeth’s actions as violations of natural order, Scotland in Macbeth stands on the brink of socio-political decay. At the outset, Scotland is under siege from within and without and Duncan’s authority—he is not in the wars himself—depends upon the strong arms of his captains, Macbeth and Banquo, upon the “doubly redoubled strokes” of their “brandished steel” against his enemies.19 Here, the words of Duncan echo those of “the devil” before those of Macbeth do (1.3.107, 1.2.67, 1.3.38), and in this world, many men—Banquo, for one, and perhaps Macduff—might look to take Glamis’ course, with better or worse results. Macbeth knows, as does Duncan himself, that the debt owed him is beyond the King’s ability to pay: “The sin of my ingratitude even now / Was heavy on me. . . / More is thy due than more than all can pay” (1.4.15–16, 21). Shakespeare intensifies the atmosphere of instability by suggesting that Duncan’s problems result partly from incompetence: Duncan prepares to place significant, if not absolute, trust in Macbeth (1.4.28–29, 54–58), but he seems not to believe that one of his nobles might betray him. Musing on Cawdor’s recent defection, Duncan observes “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face. / He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust” (1.4.11–14). Yet within fifty lines,

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Duncan not only tells Macbeth he has “begun to plant” him in his heart in order to make him “full of growing” (28–29) but also suggests to Banquo that his “harvest” from Macbeth has already been realized: “. . . he is so full valiant / And in his commendations I am fed; / It is a banquet to me” (1.4.54–56). Within fifty lines of acknowledging “there’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face,” Duncan plants, harvests, and feeds in the love of Macbeth. If Scotland under Duncan is a murky place of strong-armed politics, the text indicates, too, that the Malcolm-Macduff alliance may not provide the final “med’cine of the sickly weal” (5.2.27). Macbeth concludes—unsurprisingly— with a sense of loss and sterility: no women survive, and as critics once were fond of noting, the men who do seem puny compared with those who commanded the stage’s attention for so long. More specifically, in his final speech Malcolm invokes the image of planting which, while intended to bind Malcolm to his nobles and to recall the sweetness and light of his father’s reign, must also force the audience—because of the direct association of the son with the father—to review once more what have been the results of “plantings” in this play. Further, like his father’s, Malcolm’s victory depends upon a strong-armed captain; and if Malcolm avoids capture in battle against Macbeth, his performance does little to alter the play’s initial image of him as a “boy” in captivity (1.2.3–5, 2.2.22–25). Malcolm will be another Scots king who depends on his nobles’ strength—or on that of the English—to maintain power. As Alan Sinfield argued over twenty years ago, Macduff will be the new “king-maker”20; the play suggests a return to, a cycle of, tyranny and violence. Of Macbeth’s character we know that, above all, Macbeth is a fearsome warrior. In the play’s early scenes, Shakespeare grounds Macbeth’s character in his role as warrior, which he plays skillfully and for which he is given much honor. But one cannot say of Macbeth, as one can of Othello, that he is a stranger to his society’s graces and its games, or that he is experienced only at warfare. If in battle Macbeth plays his part with ardor and is not afraid of the “strange images of death” he makes within the rebel ranks, he nevertheless distances himself from the role such that despite accomplishment, the day is both “foul and fair” to him (1.3.97, 1.3.38). In battle Macbeth may be “valor’s minion,” a bloody executioner, but out of the wars he sees the limits society places on its members—as host, as husband, as Thane, and as warrior, even (1.2.19). He is noble, loyal, and loving both to his wife and his king; and he glories in the public honor his skills in battle bring. Not without ambition, Macbeth knows the power he commands is great in a society in which nobles fight among themselves for power and in which the populace seems willing to suspend judgment for a time while they do, until one establishes himself as most worthy to be king. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to infer that Macbeth expected Duncan to nominate him as his successor—the notion that “Chance / may crown me / Without my stir” (1.3.143–45). Ross had, after all, hailed Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor “for an


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earnest of a greater honor” and it seems odd that Shakespeare would expend so much dramatic time to announce what is commonly understand, an automatic succession from father to son. The playwright, it seems, deliberately obscures the status of the succession in order to concentrate on Glamis’ designs on the throne. Weimann, as we have seen, thinks Shakespeare’s brilliance in characterization, his ability to suggest “growth and change,” can only be realized when “the self and the social . . . are seen as entering into a dynamic and unpredictable kind of relationship.”21 Crucial to this relationship is a testing of the self, of given qualities, in public and in time.22 Does such a testing occur in Macbeth? I think it does, and I think Macbeth’s decision(s) to murder flow reasonably, or at least understandably, from his self, which as I have already said, is based primarily in the role of warrior, a role he plays well, sincerely, and with society’s full approval. The matter of testing, of seeing the self placed in an unpredictable relationship with social norms, separates my reading of the play from Zamir’s fine reading , whose Macbeth is not tested, who is from the outset unsatisfied, a man who “never enjoys his accomplishments.”23 Zamir’s Macbeth is a nihilist, the play a study in nihilism, and while I agree with much in Zamir’s reading, I wish to offer another explanation for “why Macbeth remains unsatisfied after he achieves what . . . he is after.”24 Rather than represent an exemplum of “the psychological and existential [manifestations of] nihilism,”25 Macbeth represents the sorts of behavior and judgments to which we all are subject when acting, or shall we say, interacting in public—miscalculations, failures of imagination, ethical compromises, and rejections of what one knows to be true. Here is not a “black Macbeth” raging unchecked across the Scottish countryside (4.3.52), but a man conscious of his power and position within a weak state who ambitiously yet fearfully “dare[s] look on that / Which might appal the devil” in order to secure what is for him “the ornament of life” (1.3.58–59, 1.7.42). In the beginning, murder does not seem at odds with the noble and brave self that is, as Macbeth himself says, “the disposition that I owe” (3.4.112). And the people and nobles give Macbeth time—a grace period, so to speak— to see if he will follow through on the violent Machiavellian course he initiates to become a king who is able to use cruelty well, without persisting in it. Or whether, in the end, Macbeth has occupied the position of king only to lose both that “disposition” and the sense of vital relationship to society that makes kingship the “ornament of life”—that gives kingship meaning. Macbeth’s lethal actions at first seem not just acceptable but actually praiseworthy—and not only to the principal beneficiaries but also to Banquo, most other lords of Scotland, and the country itself—partly because people expect a good deal of violence, indeed violation, to surround the position of king. Shakespeare does not establish this as a compelling social norm in the first act only to let his audience forget it under the flood of blood that follows Macbeth’s ascension. Rather he emphasizes it, in the scene in which Malcolm

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tests Macduff, suggesting that violence, violation, and self-aggrandizement are expected in the role. Macduff excuses Malcolm’s professed bottomless lust and his “stanchless avarice,” and pronounces him unfit to govern only when Malcolm denies possessing even one kingly grace, claiming that, with power, he would “pour the sweet milk of concord into hell” (4.3.50–102, 98). Note, too, that in this scene Malcolm plays Lady Macbeth to Macduff’s Macbeth, insisting upon violence to achieve power: as Lady Macbeth counsels her warrior Macbeth to ignore his obligations as kinsman and host in order to accomplish their objective, so Malcolm counsels his warrior Macduff to ignore his obligations as a surviving husband and father—to change remorse and grief into manly anger—in order to accomplish theirs. “Be this the whetstone of your sword,” Malcolm counsels, “Let grief / Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it” (4.3.228–29). For Malcolm as for Lady Macbeth, grief, remorse, or pride in a good name are motivators—or means of manipulation. Lady Macbeth chides her husband for his fear of detection; Malcolm chides Macduff for allowing sorrow to overcome the urge for revenge. And like Lady Macbeth, Malcolm succeeds in restoring to his warrior his “better part of man” (5.8.18) and in assuring him that heroic action is the only “manly . . . tune” (4.3.235). Of course, one can read this scene differently; Zamir suggests that Malcolm’s “remarks . . . border on scolding.”26 But Zamir wants this long scene to establish a fundamental contrast between Macduff and Macbeth: “Nothing less than feminizing a general is needed in order for us to…perceive the alternative metaphysics of time and commitment to value that makes this confrontation a moment in which, long before they fight, Macbeth and Macduff oppose each other through the philosophies they embody . . . ”. All of this is intended to “create . . . a reader position that responds to value when it appears and closes itself more and more to Macbeth’s nihilism as the play progresses.”27 That this reading is clever, even compelling, or that the play offers alternatives to the masculinity inscribed in the warrior’s role I do not dispute, but I think the dramatic—and social—process here is more complicated than Zamir allows. Even in reading, much less in performance, where this scene is often cut drastically, Macduff does not carry audiences with him. Macduff’s emotional response here does not shut us down to Macbeth; Macbeth’s actions do. Furthermore, Macduff’s expressed emotion does not alter the play’s definitions of what it means to be a man or a warrior, as evidenced immediately in Macduff himself, whom Malcolm restores to his “better part of man,” and later, in the experience of young Siward: “He only lived but till he was a man / The which no sooner had his prowess confirmed / In the unshrinking station where he fought / But that like a man he died” (5.9.6–9). Shakespeare does not offer competing philosophies to choose between but an image, a representation, of the ways individuals and societies construct, negotiate and test the roles and behaviors that make us who we are. This play asks us, to consider, for example,


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“how much emotion becomes a man?” or “how much violence and violation becomes a king?” Neither question is easy to answer. Roles are social prescriptions regulating behavior and interaction, originating in what sociologists call a “fundamental process of habitualization . . . endemic to social interaction,” and what Butler would call “a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms.”28 Emerging from iterability, from processes of habitualization, are expectations for behavior that govern social interaction and which, as sociologists say, “are binding on the individual, in the sense that he cannot ignore or reject them without harm to himself”29 or, as Butler says regarding gender, in the sense that the individual must perform them “under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death.”30 At the same time, these binding parts do not bind completely, and all roles—as say, man, husband, host, or warrior—allow for variety in performance; each person determines how to fulfill—or avoid—expectations for behavior associated with his positions in society. Whether such variation in performance is compelling, either socially or personally, is another matter, but sociologists suggest that significant social change can occur when persons resignfy roles through performance, just as Butler claims the question of subversion is a matter of “working the weakness in the norm.”31 Social roles and the norms surrounding them are, we might say, fuzzy around the edges. This opens up the possibility for change in them but also makes the process of learning them difficult. Erving Goffman explains that “a status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be enacted and portrayed, something that must be realized.”32 That is, a person achieves a social position immediately—he becomes Thane of Cawdor, for example, or King of Scotland—but only in time, if at all, does he becomes at ease with himself in that position. Only in time—”with the aid of use” (1.3.147)—may a new role become an internalized part of the self. And only in time can both the individual and society judge the quality of the performance and whether the new role is, in fact, an internalized part of the self: only then can all see if use has allowed the awkward “strange garments” to “cleave...to their mould” or if, instead, as in Macbeth, use reveals that the garments will not fit (1.3.146). This sociological understanding of a self’s relationship to the social group fits well with Weimann’s judgment that Shakespeare’s characterizations are compelling because of “the dimension of growth and change” achieved in a testing of the self in public, as a process in time. And I think Shakespeare emphasizes this point in his use of the image of robes and garments in Macbeth. Caroline Spurgeon and Cleanth Brooks each famously discussed this image cluster of

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robes or garments, but neither considered the placement of these images, or the oddity that after four prominent references to the image in Act 1, Shakespeare uses the image only twice more: once in Act 2 before Macbeth’s investiture, when Macduff wonders if the nobles’ positions—their roles and robes—will be less comfortable under the new king than they were under Duncan (2.4.38); and finally, in Act 5, when Angus and presumably the rest of Scotland pass judgment on Macbeth’s performance in the role of king: “Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief” (5.2.20–22). Spurgeon thinks these images suggest that “Macbeth’s new honours sit ill upon him, like a loose and badly fitting garment, belonging to someone else,” and that he is a “vain, cruel, treacherous creature, snatching ruthlessly . . . at place and power he is utterly unfitted to possess.”33 Brooks sees the situation somewhat differently, supplementing her analysis of the garment imagery with an analysis of “a series of masking or cloaking images” that suggest Macbeth is “consciously hiding [his disgraceful] self throughout the play.”34 For Brooks, the crucial point about this comparison is that “these are not his garments… they are stolen garments. Macbeth is uncomfortable in them because he is continually conscious of the fact that they do not belong to him.”35 (34). But another interpretation of those images is possible. The prominence and placement of the robe images suggest that the community condemns Macbeth as usurper or butcher only after he has proven himself incapable of playing the king’s role satisfactorily. The community, these images suggest, gives Macbeth what Goffman calls “some learner’s license”36—time to grow comfortable in his new role, and his new garments—before it passes judgment upon him. The garments—shall we call them the Levi’s 501s of the 1960s, not stonewashed Diesel jeans of 2010—are in fact his, and not perceived as stolen either by Macbeth or by the Scots; but he is unable to break them in, get comfortable in them, make them a compelling part of his wardrobe and self. Can we then account for Macbeth’s boldness in seeking a “giant’s robe”? Macbeth’s boldness manifests itself concretely in his role as warrior, which the play’s early scenes reveal he plays skillfully. Distinguishing the warrior’s role is the ability to define self in a kind of vacuum; it sanctions daring. Unlike most situations in which a person defines self in context, reflexively, by giving more than passing consideration to the presence and opinions of others (as Macbeth’s words in 1.7 clearly show), in battle a warrior “dispute[s] it like a man,” doing “but what [he] should” and confronting another warrior “with self-comparisons, / Point against point rebellious, arm ‘gainst arm” (4.3.220, 1.4.26, 1.2.56–57). Like Macbeth, he will not be afraid of what he creates—of himself or of others (1.3.96–97). Indeed, daring and fear seem essential to understanding Macbeth as he develops, as he grows and changes, in this play. In Macbeth, Shakespeare uses these words again and again—over fifty times—to suggest the limits and bounds of social role, of personal action within society.


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As the play proceeds and the ears are bombarded by the repetition of “daring” and “fear” (and their negatives “dare not” and “nothing afeard”), the audience begins to understand their intimate relationship in meaning: without fear, daring loses significance, and without daring, fear loses significance. Shakespeare’s play reveals Macbeth as he loses both; it records a man’s movement by choice out of the nervous insecurity of “initiate fear” into the cool safety of “hard use” (3.4.142). At the play’s beginning Macbeth ranges far and wide in Scotland and is “nothing afeard of what [his self] didst make, / Strange images of death” (1.3.96–97). At the play’s end, he has “almost forgot the taste of fears” (5.5.9) and finds that while in better times he would have met his enemies “dareful . . . beard to beard” (5.5.6), now in Dunsinane, he is “tied to a stake”; and “bear-like . . . must fight the course” (5.7.1–2). There is, then, an immediacy to this role that is unusual and that encourages the player to merge action and desire, to make his will his act. The warrior must not let “‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’” (1.7.44). He must be “the same in [his] own act and valour, / As [he is] in desire” (1.7.40–41). For this reason, the warrior “deserves” the name he achieves—be it coward, the Thane of Cawdor, or even, perhaps, butcher—for it results from action in a social context much more free than most from the sanctions or support of one’s fellows, as is suggested both in the play’s first description of Macbeth (1.2.16–23) and in its late description of young Siward (5.8.40–43). To emphasize such deserving, however, is not to say that Macbeth himself does not sin, disrupt the social order, wade hip-deep in his friends’ blood. Shakespeare makes it plain that he does sin and that he does so knowingly: aided by his wife, Macbeth chooses to ignore his own fears about violating his double trust (and about doing more than may become a man) so that he may achieve—with one daring stroke—the name and the robe of sovereignty. Recall that in 1.7., Macbeth decides to protect, perhaps against the strong wind of pity, the “golden opinions” he has “bought” with his actions. To protect them requires that he submit to society’s expectations and avoid the act society must judge unfavorably. To be a man, he concludes to his wife, is to be social; daring, therefore, must give way to fear. Not to do so is to be no man (1.7.47–48). In reply, Lady Macbeth does not refute his arguments but denies their importance. She forces his attention to the personal level—what will she think of him, and what will he think of himself, if he lets pass this opportunity to seize the “ornament of life” (1.7.35–45). Impugning his manhood from many sides at once—sobriety, virility, valor, and the honor of his given word—she denies the “tender . . . love” that characterizes herself as a woman in order to emphasize how far he has strayed from the valor and daring that characterize him as a man and, not incidentally in this case, a warrior (1.7.55). Sure, too, that “a little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.45–6, 66), she makes society’s opinions, society’s judgments, something to be avoided practically, by deceit and a cover-up. Against her personal threats and insults, he can offer no

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argument about the social judgment he fears, but only the practical question, “If we should fail?” (1.7.59) By it he acknowledges the appeal of deviousness, of avoiding social judgment by assuring that society does not discover the deed it must judge. Unlike the poor cat in the adage and unlike Banquo, Macbeth will dare get his feet wet. Macbeth’s boldness and daring do secure the kingship for him. But even before his investiture—and this, too, suggests a testing of the self in public as a process in time—Macbeth senses that the deed is significant for him in a way foreign to his anticipation: not just the kingly robes and kingly role, but some other role is now his, which he cannot yet describe. “To know my deed,” he concludes, “‘twere best not know myself” (2.2.72). And in Macbeth’s public reaction to the news of Duncan’s murder there is more, I think, than just great dissembling or Machiavellian politics. Macbeth’s words reveal some understanding of the unanticipated effects his act holds for him: Macbeth: Had I but lived an hour before this chance I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant There’s nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of (2.3.89–94).

From the perspective urged in this paper, it is fitting that Macbeth again is required to play the role of host, and that his failure to preserve the rule of society (3.4.118–19) and to play the king’s role appropriately signals his movement into butchery and his country’s into rebellion (3.6). As in 1.4, Lady Macbeth counsels her husband to adopt a mask for the upcoming social occasion (3.2.26–27). He must not, she warns, allow his face to reveal the distemper that is his (3.2.27–28) because “To feed were best at home; / From thence, the sauce to meat is ceremony: / Meeting were bare without it” (3.4.34–36). Yet if at dinner with Duncan Macbeth was able with “false face” to hide his murderous intent (1.7.83), he is unable, as King, to hide his “saucy doubts and fears” of vulnerability (3.4.24). Only the Queen’s fast talking prevents the supper from failing completely as Macbeth publicly muses on the qualities of the murdered and admits that his behavior is at odds with what he knows of himself (3.4.74–82, 109–115). In the calm of night following the debacle of this attempt to maintain social form, Macbeth attempts to regain “the disposition that I owe” by aligning himself fully with the warrior’s role: “For mine own good / All causes shall give way. I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3.4.134–39). To rid himself of his terrible fears (of, perhaps, what he has made of himself, of what name he has achieved—”something wicked”(4.1.45), and knowing he cannot long sustain even his currently poor performance, Macbeth denies his


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responsibilities as King (3.4.134–35) and collapses into the safety of his privileges as King, into that part of the role so familiar to him, which allows action to follow directly upon impulse, which allows action to “outrun the pauser, reason” (2.3.109; cf. 4.1.145–49). Macbeth seeks security and peace in his right as king to make his will his act. “Strange things I have in head,” he tells his wife, “that will to hand, / Which must be acted ere they may be scanned” (3.4.138–39). To kill the “strange and self-abuse” that results from “initiate fear,” Macbeth decides he must “be bloody, bold, and resolute” (3.4.141–42; 4.1.79). And Macbeth does find peace in “hard use”(3.4.142) but it is a solitary peace, which suggests to him that life itself is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Perhaps as Zamir thinks, the “tomorrow” speech is emblematic of the nihilism that characterizes Mactbeth throughout the play, and this the moment when “his nihilism emerges as an explicit position.”37 Or perhaps despair is appropriate for a man who realizes that he has placed his life and his faith in “th’equivocation of the fiend.” Yet Macbeth speaks the “tomorrow” speech before he hears report that “a wood / Comes toward Dunsinane” (5.5.16–28, 33–35). It would seem rather that Macbeth’s despair is rooted in an awareness of what his choices have cost him. Early in the play Macbeth feared to lose society’s “golden opinions,” and in Act 5 he admits that he has lost not only them but also “that which should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends (5.3.24–25). Macbeth’s retreat into the privileges of his role, his increasing tendency to crown his thoughts with action (cf. 4.1.144–49, 153–54), does not lead him where he had hoped it would. It leads him into isolation and away from the society of men and women among whom he had sought to become preeminent. If we assume that Macbeth is neither fiendish nor insane, nor, as Lady Macbeth hypothesizes, drunk when he decides in Act 1 to murder the king, can we account for the irony of Macbeth’s career? I would like to offer two explanations. The irony results partly from Macbeth’s faulty reasoning in Act 1 about the importance to himself of the group’s responses to his actions, their public ratification of them. Macbeth fails to realize what Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, urges the petulant warrior Achilles to consider: Ulysses: . . . no man is the lord of anything, Though in and of him there be much consisting, Till he communicate his parts to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught Till he behold them formed in th’applause Where they’re extended—who, like an arch, Reverb’rate The voice again, or, like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat.38

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Macbeth knows that murdering Duncan is wrong and and, even more important, distasteful to his own amour propre, but he is a seasoned killer who also knows that killing has never before disturbed his sense of the “disposition that I owe.” Killing has brought him new privileges, responsbilities, power, honor— not bad dreams. For Macbeth killing has been a means to an end—the privilege, responsibility, power, and honor he receives as, say, Thane of Cawdor—and it has been from the end, not the means, that Macbeth gets to know himself.39 Macbeth is ready to abandon his wild fantasy of murdering Duncan to become king because he knows his own castle is no place to practice the warrior’s role, no place to dare to be so much more the man. Yet he yields to his Lady’s plan because he does not acknowledge, and thus cannot describe to his wife, how different is his heroic action in Act 1, issuing in a new role, the Thane of Cawdor, to the heroic action he proposes for the future that will, if all goes well, issue in a new role, the King of Scotland. In the former situation Macbeth’s new name and his new robes issue directly from the public nature of his action. In the latter situation his new name and his new robes issue directly from the private—or secret—nature of his action. Unlike his battlefield killing, his bedroom killing has no clear connection to the public honor and position he achieves. The kingship is a position society gives—”the sovereignty will fall upon Macbeth” (2.4.30)—because of the circumstances created by his private, secret action. Kingship, as such, attained in this way, Shakespeare suggests, can have little value for him, a man who cannot wear a mask, a man who has in the past defined himself through public action. And it is a mask that kingship becomes for him since this time it is from the deed (the means) and not from the office or role (the end) that Macbeth knows himself. Besides underestimating the importance of public ratification of his actions, Macbeth also badly misjudges the nature of the king’s role. When contemplating Duncan’s power, he fails to realize what Laertes describes when he talks of Hamlet, that the king may have less freedom than his subjects: Laertes: His greatness weighed, his will is not his own. For he himself is subject to his birth: He may not, as unvalu’d persons do, Carve for himself, for on his choice depends The safety and health of this whole state; And therefore must his choice be circumscrib’d Unto the voice and yielding of that body Whereof he is the head.40

Macbeth fails to realize that society limits even its most powerful member, just as it limits its husbands, nobles, and warriors. I suggest that as Scotland’s foremost warrior, Macbeth finds kingship attractive because it seems to be the one position in society in which, at his pleasure, a man may play the “warrior” at any


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time. Only in battle may the warrior make his will his act, but the king seems free to do so anywhere. That superior freedom is manifest in the king’s ability to “pronounce” everything so, to give words the force or effect of action. Shakespeare several times shows Duncan exercising the breath of kings, as in his royal imperative, “Go pronounce [Cawdor’s] present death / And with his former title greet Macbeth” (1.2.66–67) or in his elevation in Act 1 of the Captain’s narrative to the realm of imperative speech and thus to the realm of physical action (1.2. 44–45). The king need not put his body on the line to enforce his will; as both Elizabeth and James knew, power lies in “the breath of kings,” as Shakespeare puts it in Richard II,41 or in the ability, as Jonathan Goldberg puts it, “to make words facts, to affirm discourse in action.”42 Or so Macbeth thinks. It is a belief Shakespeare immediately deflates. Immediately after the murder, Macbeth discovers to his horror that he “could not . . . pronounce ‘Amen’ . . . ” (2.2.31). Macbeth has not, if you will, completed the action, nor achieved the powerful freedom he sought. Later, when he wants to murder Banquo, he is forced to acknowledge this limitation when he says to the hired killers, “though I could / with barefaced power sweep him from my sight / and bid my will avouch it, / yet I must not” (3.1.117–19). Too late, Macbeth learns there is no absolute freedom within society, no position to occupy in society that does not require submission to society—to the ritualized iteration of norms. The play is thus a powerful anticipation of the arguments of Butler and the sociologists about our world today, but the central irony of Macbeth is, I think, that a man who takes pride in defining himself publicly in action on the battlefield chooses to act in secrecy to achieve the most powerful position in society, the position that he mistakenly believes allows its incumbent full autonomy and authority to define the self publicly in everyday life. A man whose face has fully revealed his self finds, intolerably, that he must wear a mask to play the role that his daring has won him. Unable to play the role well or for long, as his face remains a true and open book of his self, Macbeth struggles to understand the self that his daring has made—a murderer, something wicked, someone outside the community of men and women. Yet in the end, having faced that self and having understood his losses, he remains the warrior who will not yield to fear: “And damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough’!”

Notes 1

2 3 4

Robert Weimann, “Society and the Individual in Shakespeare’s Conception of Character,” Shakespeare Survey, 1981, pp. 25, 29. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 26. Compare Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972), p. 437.

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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Shakespeare and Moral Agency Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 33, 34. Philip Edwards, “Person and Office in Shakespeare’s Plays” in Interpretations of Shakespeare: British Academy Lectures, Sel. and ed. Kenneth Muir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 106. Toulmin, Stephen, “The Inwardness of Mental Life,” Critical Inquiry 6 (Autumn 1979), pp. 10, 19. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 137. Judith Butler, “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignifcation” in The Judith Butler Reader, Ed. by Sara Salih, with Judith Butler (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 345. Butler, “Subject,” p. 345. Butler, “Subject,” p. 344. Butler, “Subject,” p. 344. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 234. Weimann, p. 26 . Michael D. Bristol, “Vernacular Criticism and the Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote.” Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): pp. 89–102. In suggesting that stage action can be analyzed in ways similar to the ways one analyzes reality, I do not suggest— or believe—that Macbeth, say, is a real person. Bristol, p. 91; Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007). Two examples of work in this vein are historian Ronald F. E. Weismann’s “Reconstructing Renaissance Sociology: the ‘Chicago School’ and the Study of Renaissance Society” in Richard C. Trexler (ed), Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Binghampton, 1985), pp. 39–45 and my own “Social Role and the Making of Identity in Julius Caesar” Studies in English Literature 33 (Spring 1993): pp. 289–307. Weimann, p. 26. William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Ed. Kenneth Muir. London and New York: Methuen, 1984, 1.2.1–45, 50–59; 1.2.39, 17. All subsequent citations to the play are included in the text. Alan Sinfield, “Macbeth: history, ideology and intellectuals,” Critical Quarterly 28 (1986), p. 70. Weimann, p. 25. Weimann, p. 26. Zamir, p. 92. Zamir, p. 93, n.3. Zamir p. 94. Zamir, p. 105. Emphasis mine. Zamir, p. 108. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), p. 74. Butler Bodies, p. 95. Ralf Dahrendorf, Essays in the Theory of Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), p. 37.

Conduct (Un)becoming 30 31 32

33

34

35 36

37 38

39 40

41

42

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Butler, Bodies, p. 95. Bodies, p. 237. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY, 1959), p. 75. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 325, 327. Cleanth Brooks, “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness.” The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), p. 35. Brooks, p. 34. Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1961), p. 140. Zamir, p. 93. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida. 3rd Series. Ed. David Bevington. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998) 3.3.116–24. See also Zamir, who makes a similar point, p. 96. William Shakespeare, Hamlet. 2nd Series. Ed. Harold Jenkins (London, Arden Shakespeare, 1982), 1.2.17–24. William Shakespeare, King Richard II. 3rd Series. Ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2002), 1.3.215. Jonathan Goldberg. James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 28.

Chapter 6

To “Tempt the Rheumy and Unpurged Air”: Contagion and Agency in Julius Caesar Jennifer Feather

What, is Brutus sick? And will he steal out of his wholesome bed To dare the vile contagion of night, And tempt the rheumy and unpurged air to add unto his sickness? (2.1.262–66)1

Portia’s rhetorical question to Brutus’s claim that he is sick challenges the rationality of his actions at the very moment in the play that he seems to be behaving most rationally. According to most traditional accounts, moral action requires a deliberating subject whose will overrides mere instinct. Aristotle insists that virtue requires voluntary action, avoiding what he calls “akrasia” or weakness of the will.2 In the seventh book of The Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between three kinds of moral character to be avoided—vice, unrestraint and bestiality—but focuses on the distinction between the two largest categories, unrestraint (akrasia) and self-restraint (enkrateia). Most morally culpable action according to Aristotle, is akrasia, a failure of the will, when one acts against one’s own best judgment. One of my undergraduate students once suggested that he had not completed his paper because of an attack of akrasia. Unlike students who rationalize such actions by insisting that the paper is irrelevant to their lives or to their getting a job, this student believed in the benefit of the assignment but wanted to suggest that he lacked the discipline to get the assignment done. In contrast, enkrateia, a firmness of the will, is refraining from fulfilling one’s desires when those desires conflict with one’s best judgment. When my student finally sat down to write his paper, forgoing those temptations that were distracting him, he practiced enkrateia and produced quite a good paper. Similarly, Portia, assuming that Brutus would not behave against his best judgment and “tempt the rheumy and unpurged air” posits him as a rational subject, immune to the pull of akrasia. She answers her own question in the

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negative, insisting that Brutus must have some “sick offence within his mind” (2.1.267). Because no rational person would add to her own physical sickness by going out into the cold night, Portia concludes that Brutus must have a purely psychological malady. In seeing him not as struggling with the “bodily” temptations of akrasia, but within the throes of a difficult process of deliberation, she affirms his understanding of himself as a moral subject. One might go so far as to say that Portia sees Brutus as what Aristotle, further distinguishing between self-restraint (enkrateia) and temperance (so-phrosune-), would describe as a temperate subject. However, as I will argue, understanding Brutus in terms of akrasia yields much in the way of understanding the play and the kind of moral action it dramatizes. By seeing Brutus in terms of akrasia rather than simply ascribing his actions to so-phrosune-, I will take into account the moral content not only of his rational decisions but also of his desires, challenging the idea of agency that he claims. Portia, assuming that only his process of deliberation about some weighty matter and not the illness he claims to suffer could explain his behavior, presupposes that moral action is based on deliberate action of a rational subject. Portia perceives Brutus as using his reason to guide his action, and thus, she understands him as a moral agent. He is not, like the akratic, subject to influences that work contrary to his best judgment. However, her question raises the possibility that Brutus’ deliberation is not entirely subject to his own will but susceptible to external, environmental forces. Seen in the context of early modern medicine, her question about tempting “the rheumy and unpurged air” challenges Brutus on the grounds that he would not exacerbate the vulnerability implied by his supposed illness by putting his delicate humoral balance in jeopardy. In fact, in early modern medical models, susceptibility to environmental imbalance is a common source of illness.3 Portia’s question both figures Brutus as a rationally deliberating, autonomous subject and raises the possibility of his vulnerability to the influence of the social and physical world around him. A Brutus who would “tempt the rheumy and unpurged air” would act contrary to what he understands as most essential to Roman virtue—the autonomy of the agent—and represents a notion of subjectivity that the senators associate both with physical sickness and with akrasia. In fact, Brutus does “tempt the rheumy and unpurged air / To add unto his sickness,” and the distinction between sickness of the mind and sickness of the body is not as stark as Portia implies, forcing us to rethink both the conception of Roman virtue that Brutus’s actions affirm and the basis of moral agency operating in those actions. Though the characters in the play work persistently to separate physical illness and mental struggle, thereby maintaining the autonomy of the agent, the rhetoric of the play repeatedly conflates the two, unsettling the easy association between corporeal and moral integrity. Moreover, Brutus’s actions ultimately support the Republican ideology with which he identifies even as they

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undermine his own sense of the centrality of the autonomy of the agent in that ideology. Beginning with Brutus’s suicide, I want to suggest that Brutus behaves according to what Nomy Arpaly in her book, Unprincipled Virtue, calls “inverse akrasia,” or “doing the right thing against one’s best judgment.”4 Such actions involve a failure of the will just as in Aristotle’s conception of akrasia, but this failure nonetheless produces morally laudable actions. Arpaly suggests that, for instance, when my student decides that the paper is irrelevant but completes it anyway because he gets caught up in his own interest in the argument, then he is submitting to inverse akrasia. As Hugh Grady suggests elsewhere in this collection, we cannot chose between interpretive possibilities that rely on the category of individual moral agency and those that see the agency of the characters severely limited by historical and political exigencies. Inverse akrasia takes seriously not only the agent’s conscious intentions but also the unintended consequences of his actions. Brutus’s suicide serves as an important locus of inquiry about the nature of moral agency because it challenges our assumptions about what constitutes an action, let alone a moral one. Moreover, it is particularly significant because suicide is so central to early modern conceptions of Roman virtue. As many critics have pointed out, by the time Shakespeare was writing, suicide already involved an elaborate set of social codes in imitation of Roman models, even as it was condemned by Christian theology.5 Cato’s elaborate justification of his own suicide, in which he sees his act as the success of his will, was well known through North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, which served as a source for Shakespeare’s play. In fact, to highlight the will required, Plutarch narrates Cato’s remarkable self-mastery in accomplishing his suicide. Upon “coming to himself,” Plutarch insists that Cato pushes away the physician who is attempting to help him and then tears his own bowels apart. However, contemporary Christian discourse sees it as usurping the power of God.6 Immanuel Kant, like Aristotle, places emphasis on rational actions, locating moral worth in the autonomous will and arguing that destroying a morally worthy will is not only logically problematic but also morally repugnant.7 Suicide was in the early modern period, thus, an action both admired and repudiated. Paradoxically, the sacrificial nature of this questionable act enables Antony and Octavius to raise Brutus up as the essence of Romanness, a Romanness that their actions will ultimately destroy. How can an ambiguously rational act support Roman virtue and the Republic which throughout the rest of the play seems synonymous with autonomous, rational action? This tension, dramatized in terms of Brutus’s suicide, can be resolved by reading the play’s description of contagion in terms of Arpaly’s notion of inverse akrasia. Shakespeare first dramatizes these conflicting narratives in Brutus’s own initial deliberation about suicide. When Cassius, parting with Brutus for what


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may be the last time, suggests that he might rather commit suicide than undergo the humiliation of defeat, Brutus responds that, Brutus: Even by the rule of that philosophy By which I did blame Cato for the death Which he did give himself, I know not how, But I do find it cowardly and vile, For fear of what might fall, so to prevent The time of life: arming myself with patience To stay the providence of some high powers That govern us below. (5.1.101–07)

Recognizing his own philosophy as different from Cato’s, which sees suicide as an act of self-mastery, Brutus, though he “know[s] not how,” feels suicide is cowardly and vile. Critics have found this passage notoriously difficult to interpret. Brutus is not, in fact, a Stoic but a follower as Plutarch suggests of “Plato’s sect” and hence, does not believe in suicide. This reading implies that Brutus’s suicide shows “the soldier overcoming the philosopher.”8 Because, according to such a reading, Brutus seems to go against his philosophical principles, his feelings as a soldier must be overcoming his rational will. However, the passage itself is ambiguous, and shows how the constancy implicit in both Platonic and Stoic philosophy could “require either Senecan suicide, or (in Plato’s famous image) a steadfast sticking to one’s post.”9 Moreover, Cato himself, in North’s narration, reads Plato’s Phaedo not once, but twice before committing suicide, revealing how mutually affirming Platonic and Stoic philosophy were understood to be.10 This ambiguous attitude towards suicide begins to manifest itself in Brutus’s thinking and his wavering in this passage suggests that he is not entirely sure about his philosophical principles. Though he claims still to be following a “rule” of philosophy, he also claims to “not know how” he clings to these principles. Here we begin to see Brutus responding to impulses beyond those dictated by his rational will. One might even call his response “inverse akrasia,” for Brutus argues that he blames Cato for his suicide despite his recognition of Cato’s justification. Significantly, he cannot identify why he holds principles that cause him to object to suicide, but at least initially prefers “To stay the providence of some higher powers.” As in Portia’s inadvertent acknowledgment that individual will might be susceptible to “the rheumy and unpurged air,” Brutus here shows himself, however subtly, susceptible to forces outside his rational comprehension. Though Brutus’s suicide may be ambiguously moral, even in Brutus’s own conception, it also cements his place as the paragon of Roman and Republican virtue stemming the tide of collective violence that surged after Caesar’s murder. After his death, Antony claims that Brutus is “the noblest Roman of them all” (5.5.67). Octavius then ratifies this nobility in the disposition of his

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corpse, ritually raising Brutus to the status of a heroic scion of Roman virtue and ending the bloody antagonism that has marked the play’s action. René Girard argues that Brutus’s body marks the sacrificial violence necessary for the founding of imperial Rome because it ends the “mimetic crisis” in which the very aspiration of the various aristocrats toward Roman ideals induces an ultimately destructive rivalry. Thus, the violence of the play, Girard argues, is spurred less by “individual psychology than [by] the rapid march of mimetic desire itself. . . . As the crisis worsens, the relative importance of mimesis versus rationality goes up.”11 This claim locates agency within the deadly rivalries of the mimetic world. These rivalries eventually threaten individual agency resulting in violence on an ever larger scale. Emulation which at once seeks to imitate and destroy the rival undergirds the emergence of an imperial will that precedes the collapse of the Republic. The ideology of emulation itself which attempts to solidify the place of the ruling class and thereby protect the Republic provokes its collapse.12 Girard claims that with opposition to Antony and Octavius’s camp effectively destroyed, the disparate mimetic factions reach unanimity, the ultimate exhaustion of the mimetic process. According to Girard’s reading, Brutus’s sacrifice is valuable not for the principles he espouses but because it simply exhausts the mimetic process. A closer inspection of Antony’s encomium, however, makes clearer the values that Antony rhetorically locates in Brutus’s sacrificed body. Antony, first, excludes Brutus from the rest of the conspirators who participated in Caesar’s assassination out of envy, effectively discarding the possibility that Brutus’s participation was the result of akrasia. He says, “He only in a general and honest thought / And a common good to all made one of them” (5.5.69–70), remarking not only on Brutus’s conscious deliberation, the key, many would argue, to autonomous moral action, but also indicating that this deliberation was responsive to the needs of the commonwealth. According to Kant, responsiveness to moral reasons, such as the needs of the community rather than a personal impulse toward envy, assures the moral praiseworthiness of actions such as the ones Brutus takes.13 This part of Antony’s encomium, focusing as it does on rational deliberation, bears much in common not only with traditional philosophical understandings of moral praiseworthiness but also with notions of Roman virtue which throughout the play are described in terms of autonomy and self-governance. For instance, Cassius remarks that he would “lief not be as live to be / In awe of such a thing as I myself” (1.2.97–98). Being in awe of another human being conflicts with Cassius’s sense of his own autonomy, a stumbling block to the sovereign will. Autonomy, including individual bodily governance, is absolutely essential to Cassius’s sense of himself. In response to Casca’s anxiety about the dangerous exhalations of the night, Cassius remarks on the invulnerability of the Roman body to such forces. Because the individual Roman is autonomous, he can withstand even these dangerous forces. Cassius asserts,


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Cassius: For my part, I have walked about the streets, Submitting me unto the perilous night; And thus unbracéd, Casca, as you see, Have bared my bosom to the thunder-stone. (1.3.46–49)

Cassius presents himself as so much in control of himself that his body is self-contained even against prodigious natural forces. In fact, he makes precisely the claim Portia makes in questioning whether Brutus would remain in the night air if he were sick, deciding in the negative. When Antony remarks on the deliberateness of Brutus’s actions and his ability to remain in control of envy, a specific form of akrasia, he exalts Brutus for demonstrating this widespread notion of Roman virtue. Though Aristotle himself does not mention envy as a form of akrasia, evidence in other early modern texts suggests that envy would fit into this category. In Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which culminates with Guyon’s defeat of Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss, Arthur’s enkrateia is tested by the lady Prays-desire who seeks to outshine all competitors in aspiring to honor (2.2.9.39). Like Cassius and the faerie knights, Brutus has held his autonomy against the akratic force of envy that might overtake his will. However, Antony continues his panegyric with a surprising description of Brutus’s virtue, praising his constitution not in terms of its invulnerability but in terms of its mix of natural elements. He claims that Brutus’s “Life was gentle, and the elements / So mixed in him that nature might stand up / And say to all the world ‘This was a man’” (5.5.72–74). Though Antony’s conflation of masculinity and nobility is not surprising, his invocation of the humoral body, with its susceptibility to environmental influence, at least suggests a different kind of subjectivity than the preceding description of self-control. At the very least, it implies that Brutus’ s status as a man is ratified by nature itself because it is a “natural,” if extraordinary, mixing of elements. Unlike Cassius’s selfdescription, which pictured him as walled-off from nature, this image presents Brutus as in harmony with nature, possessing its elements in perfect proportions. Such a notion of gentleness as a mixture of elements suggests a kind of Roman virtue less reliant on autonomous action than Cassius’s self-congratulatory bravado. Rather than seeing Brutus’s virtue in terms of its invincibility and its autonomy, Antony praises it in terms of a balance of multiple influences. The Roman virtue intimated in Antony’s description of Brutus as a balance of elements gives us a different way of understanding Brutus’s suicide and ultimately his participation in the conspiracy. The ambiguous status of suicide evident in Brutus’s own initial uncertainty appears more subtly in his final decision to kill himself. Some Renaissance authors embraced the idea that suicide was a sign of self-mastery. Thomas Wyatt argues that the Assyrian king, Sardanapalus, “Murdered himself to show some manful deed.”14 Brutus too invokes this idea. When asking Voluminus to hold the sword while he runs

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himself on it, he says “Our enemies have beat us to the pit, / It is more worthy to leap in ourselves / Than tarry till they push” (5.5.23–25). Rather than leave his fate to another, he would prefer to commit the act himself, asserting his absolute autonomy. However, Brutus initially offers another justification, resorting to the rhetoric of Stoic philosophy only when Volumnius remains unpersuaded. Earlier Brutus claims that Caesar’s ghost is responsible for the suicides of his comrades, saying “O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet. / Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords / In our own proper entrails” (5.3.94), bewailing the power of Caesar’s ghost over the autonomous judgments of the various suicides. In so doing, he presents decisions based on supernatural sources as against their perpetrator’s best judgments, admitting the power of external influences. However, he initially presents his motivation in a similar light “The ghost of Caesar hath appeared to me . . . I know my hour is come” (5.5.17–19). Though this explanation fits into Stoic justifications, it also implies that Brutus may not be entirely possessed of his faculties, at least in the terms established by Cassius. Brutus resorts to the accepted language of manly virtue precisely because Volumnius remains reluctant after hearing Brutus’s initial rationale based on the appearance of Caesar’s ghost. Rather than seeing Brutus’ suicide either as an act of self-mastery or an irrational succumbing to delusion, Antony’s depiction of Brutus as a perfect fusion of elements suggests a balance between the two models. Despite the seeming irrationality of Brutus’s acts, they ultimately confirm the picture of society Brutus has championed. In it, autonomous agents are nonetheless swayed by brotherhood rather than by envy. The social drive toward emulation, or mimetic rivalry, present in both Renaissance England and Shakespeare’s depiction of Republican Rome, inherently involves both envy and brotherhood. Without the latter, the social system would have destroyed itself from the beginning.15 Brotherhood, because it is not rational and relies on bonds of affection rather than reasoned judgment, ultimately succumbs to ambition in a system that equates moral worth solely with autonomy. Thus, the mimetic impulse leads to ever-expanding collective violence. However, Brutus’s suicide can ratify that sense of brotherhood which separates republican and imperial notions of agency by replacing mimetic crisis with a hybrid form of subjectivity. If we reconceive agency not as absolute autonomy but as “a mixture of elements” we explain how Brutus could have chosen to destroy his closest friend and how his suicide promotes a Republican ideal that even the Republic may not have achieved. This conception of agency has much to do with both Portia’s idea of contagion and Arpaly’s notion of inverse akrasia. Arpaly theorizes a conception of moral worth that does not rely on autonomy to explain everyday encounters. She argues that “one can think of a variety of cases in which one forms irrational beliefs—those that are contrary to evidence—casually but not intentionally.”16 The model that assumes a rationalizing self cannot account for these cases and therefore fails to account for what Arpaly calls “inverse akrasia,” that


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is doing the right thing against one’s best judgment. In other words, one may give in to an irrational impulse, such as Brutus’s suicide, that one has not fully subjected to deliberation or in fact an impulse that one has subjected to deliberation and decided against, and still behave morally. She gives the powerful example of Huck Finn who, having resolved to turn the slave Jim in because it is the morally right thing to do, at the last moment decides not to turn him in because doing the right thing is too much trouble.17 As Arpaly explains, Twain does not understand Huck’s actions as Aristotelian “natural virtue” or Kantian “mere inclination,” but as “Huckleberry’s long acquaintance with Jim [making] him gradually realize that Jim is a full-fledged human being . . . . While Huckleberry does not conceptualize his realization, it is this awareness of Jim’s humanity that causes him to be emotionally incapable of turning Jim in.”18 Thus, Huck remains morally praiseworthy, despite the fact that he behaves against his best judgment and thus is not autonomous, but rather susceptible to unformulated thoughts. Though his evaluation of the situation is incomplete, his action concurs with his deeper sense of what is right. Emotions not subject to his rational control guide his decision. Along these lines, I would like to argue that given the early modern association between moral and physical sickness, Brutus’s susceptibility to Caesar’s ghost and his resulting suicide are both a tempting “of the rheumy and unpurged air” and an early modern example of inverse akrasia. As I have discussed, the various conspirators understand autonomy and invulnerability to both persuasion and sickness as central to Roman virtue. Hence, Brutus’s susceptibility to the ghost can be understood as akratic, that is against Brutus’s own better judgment. In response to Brutus’s claim that Caesar’s ghost has visited him, making him certain of his impending death, Voluminus remains unconvinced of this, forcing Brutus to call on the language of Stoic self-mastery. Not only does Cassius, in his refusal to be susceptible to the prodigious night air, share Voluminus’s suspicion, both Decius and Caesar himself evince a similar set of assumptions. Decius suggests, Decius: It were a mock Apt to be rendered, for someone to say, ‘Break up the Senate till another time When Caesar’s wife shall have better dreams.’ If Caesar hide himself, shall they not whisper, ‘Lo, Caesar is afraid’? Pardon me, Caesar, for my dear, dear love To your proceeding bids me tell you this, And reason to love is liable. (2.2.96–104)

Decius warns Caesar that listening to a woman’s dreams may be worthy of mockery; Caesar responds by rebuking Calpurnia and chiding himself: heeding dreams is foolish. Following a ghostly visitation, like following a dream,

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is something of which to be ashamed. However, Brutus does follow a “dream,” and is then able to enshrine the very notion of Romanness that he held so dear, even if the Republic itself fails. Given traditional understandings of moral agency, including Brutus’s own, he is morally responsible for the violence and disorder unleashed by Caesar’s death and his suicide is justified as punishment. Even Plato, who condemns suicide in general, claims an exception when shame at an immoral action prompts the suicide.19 Thus, following the impulse of the dream, feeling guilt prompted by a supernatural vision, can be understood as inverse akrasia, as “doing the right thing against one’s own judgment.” Such a conclusion works against the model of moral agency operating throughout the play, in which autonomy is the great virtue and akrasia, associated with physical illness, is the great moral failure. The play consistently opposes Roman masculinity, and hence Roman virtue, to effeminate vacillation and physiological fluidity. When arguing against the need for an oath to bind the conspirators, Brutus says that their cause bears “fire enough / To kindle cowards, and to steel with valour / The melting spirits of women” (2.1.19–21). Because they are not women, they have steadfast rather than melting spirits. Similarly, Brutus chides Portia, saying “It is not for your health thus to commit / Your weak condition to the raw cold morning” (2.1.234–35), and though some have argued that Portia may be pregnant or tainted by the conspiracy, her weakness is probably best understood as constitutional. Aristotle himself distinguishes the akratic from those who are constitutionally soft due to heredity or disease like Scythian kings and the female sex, implying that women are akratic by nature.20 The characters within the play consistently conceive of virtue in terms of masculine autonomy in comparison to feminine weakness and susceptibility to illness. However, I would argue that this susceptibility, while roundly criticized throughout the play, is something like the virtue that Antony praises. In this context, one can better understand Caesar: So in the world: ‘tis furnished well with men, And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive. Yet in the number I do know but one That unassailable holds his rank Unshaken of motion. And that I am he. (3.1.66–70)

Caesar is unassailable, not subject to fleshly impulses. This susceptibility is figured not only as female fluidity but also as contagion. When Cassius describes Caesar’s epileptic fit in Spain, he remarks that he required assistance “As a sick girl” (1.2.128) and calls him, “A man of such feeble temper” (1.2.129). In fact, Aristotle himself directly compares akrasia to epilepsy.21 Similarly, when Brutus goes to persuade the sick Ligarius to join the conspiracy, he calls it “A piece of work that will make sick men whole” (2.1.326). Sickness is womanish weakness,


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and Roman honor is capable of making the sick whole by restoring to them their masculine autonomy. According to the beliefs that Brutus espouses, then, to protect this stalwart autonomy is to protect his vision of Rome. Brutus’s further description of the enterprise paints an even starker picture: Brutus: 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 (2.1.129–39).

Their identity as Romans is an oath in and of itself, making them secure in the mettle of their spirits. Were they to break even an unmade oath, they would prove themselves not Roman at all, and be guilty of “a several bastardy.” Indeed, those who require oaths are “old and feeble carrions” that “welcome wrongs.” The oath is necessary only to fight the akrasia of “such creatures as men doubt.” The entire conspiracy is based on a notion of Roman virtue that equates turpitude with inconstancy and effeminate fluidity. Brutus’s surrender to womanish fear of the supernatural, then, is perplexing in the extreme, unless one considers that Brutus is wrong about what drives him. Perhaps, as in Arpaly’s conception, he is responsive to moral reasons of which he is unaware. Brutus’ fears that Roman virtue will be destroyed are correct, but he misconstrues what will be destroyed, thinking it to be Roman freedom and autonomy, when in point of fact he fights for brotherhood rather than autonomy. Friendship is as much at the heart of Republican virtue as autonomy, and the characters in the play obsess about it even as they assert their own autonomy. Aristotle himself praises friendship between those who “are alike in their virtue.”22 Although the conspiracy is the result of emulous rivalry, nevertheless emulation creates deep affective bonds.23 Suicide is not the ultimate act of selfmastery, since traditionally the suicide relies on a trusted comrade to accomplish his purpose.24 Brutus calls on the friendship not only of Volumnius but also of Clitus and Dardanius as well, ultimately convincing only Strato to hold his sword while he runs on it. He says “I prithee, Strato, stay thou by thy lord. / Thou art a fellow of good respect. / Thy life has some smatch of honour in it” (5.5. 44–46). Brutus considers the holding of the sword an act of friendship. Strato, for his part, insists, “Give me your hand first” (5.5.49). Even as suicide is

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an act that saves one from the humiliation of defeat, it is also an act committed for and in friendship. Throughout the play, brotherhood proves more essential to the Republic than autonomy, which serves the imperial cause as well. If we look again at Decius’s attempt to persuade Caesar to go to the Senate, one is struck by the fact that he warns Caesar of possible mockery as a point of friendship, saying “Pardon me, Caesar, for my dear, dear love / To your proceeding bids me tell you this, / And reason to love is liable” (2.2.96–104). The friendship he owes to Caesar has made him forgo reason. It has made him act against his best judgment. Of course, Decius’s friendship is a false one, but his use of friendship to persuade Caesar implies that the senators do take friendship seriously. Caesar confides in Decius solely because he considers him trustworthy, saying to him that he will let Decius know the true cause “for your private satisfaction, / Because I love you” (2.2.73–74). His private relationship gives Caesar grounds for trusting Decius. Decius and Caesar both present this private friendship as important enough to override rational calculation. His friendship with Caesar becomes the center of the conflict between autonomy and affection that Brutus experiences. In describing his relationship with Caesar, Brutus says “for my part / I know no personal cause to spurn at him / But for the general” (2.1.10–12). Brutus makes a distinction between his personal relationship and Caesar’s effect on the populace. Clearly, these feelings of friendship are precisely what make Brutus’s decision so difficult. His decision is between the the general good, what traditionally counts as moral action, and his individual relationship with Caesar, which is also an important virtue.25 Brutus impulse to friendship is so powerful that it persists even while he takes Caesar’s life. He says of himself that he “did love Caesar when [he] struck him” (3.1.182). His intentions are not quite as clear as his freely chosen action would suggest. Whether or not his emotional impulses prevail, they remain an important part of his deliberation. As Arpaly claims, such impulses may have as much moral content as deliberate actions. Brutus’s conflict between the demands of friendship and of autonomy appears as a disruption of corporeal harmony. He remarks to Antony on the disjunction between the acts of his hands and his heart, “Though now we must appear bloody and cruel, / . . . / . . . see you but our hands / . . . / Our hearts you see not” (3.1.167–69), making his actions seem less than entirely willed. Indeed, he describes his state of deliberation, by saying that “The genius and the mortal instruments / Are then in council, and the state of man, / Like to a little kingdom, suffers then / The nature of an insurrection” (2.1.66–69). These images imply not the willed action that make sick men whole but the force of his dissenting conscience rebelling against him. These impulses ultimately manifest in his heeding the ghost of Caesar. His dying words addressed to Caesar are “I killed not thee with half so a good a will” (5.5.51). Brutus himself claims that his suicide is done with a greater sense of good will and affection


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than his assassination of Caesar. Taking these impulses into account implies a competing model of moral worth that relies not on autonomy but on less than fully rationalized impulses and their ultimate legacy. Actions contrary to rationality are the result of akrasia and hence, the agent cannot be held praiseworthy for them. However, as Arpaly’s account reveals, acting against one’s own best judgment can be a kind of inverse akrasia and can nonetheless generate actions, like Brutus’s, for which the agent must be admired. Brutus’s friendship for Caesar causes him to restore order and a sense of Romanness, even if that sense is ultimately overturned by Antony and Octavius. Such a reading of the play forces us to reconsider what constitutes Roman virtue. I suggest that we look to the early modern rhetoric of sickness to develop a picture of agency that goes beyond autonomous action. Even though he may be assimilated into Antony and Octavius’s imperial project, Brutus’s final act points toward the Republicanism he cherished, which relies ultimately not on the assertion of autonomy alone but on brotherhood as the basis of identity. This reading relies significantly on taking characters seriously who are not serious about what they say. Portia does not truly believe that Brutus has tempted the rheumy and unpurged air nor that he is sick. Decius’s protestations of friendship for Caesar are disingenuous as is Antony’s praise of Brutus. Even Cassius’s bravado may be posturing which he does not fully believe. However, Arpaly’s discussion would suggest that such rhetoric can constitute the basis of moral action. I would argue that the suicide of Brutus lends the necessary reality to these falsifications and thus preserves the Republic, if only mythically. Such a mythology may ultimately be the basis of much of our moral action, making Brutus precisely the hero Antony disingenuously claims he is.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6

7

8

All citations are taken from William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (New York: Arden Shakespeare, 1998). Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. G.P. Goold and trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1145b. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004), 27. Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 4. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1997). Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Classics, 1984), pp. 26–39. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 176–77. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar ed. David Daniell (New York: Arden Shakespeare, 1998), p. 103, fn. 100.

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10

11

12

13 14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Shakespeare and Moral Agency Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 126. Thomas North, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Englished by Sir Thomas North anno 1579, with an introduction by George Wyndham (London: David Nutt, 1895), esp. pp. 174–77. René Girard, “Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar”, Salmagundi, 88 (1991), pp. 399–419, esp. p. 406. Wayne Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar”, Renaissance Quarterly, 43 (1990), pp. 75–111, esp. pp. 83–88. Kant, p. 186. Sir Thomas Wyatt, “Th’ Assyrians king, in peace with foul desire” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th Edition, Vol, 1B, M.H. Abrams, Stephen Greenblatt. et al. eds. (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 572. Rebhorn, pp. 75–111. See also Coppélia Kahn, “‘Passions of Some Difference’: Friendship and Emulation in Julius Caesar” in Julius Caesar:New Critical Essays, ed. Horst Zander (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 271–86. Arpaly, p. 12. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Thomas Cooley (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 113. Arpaly, p. 10. Plato, IX 873c. Aristotle, 1150b. Aristotle, 1150b. Aristotle, 1156b. Rebhorn, p. 92 and Kahn, “Passions of Some Difference”, pp. 271–86. Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, p. 130. Aristotle, Book VIII, esp. 1156b.

Chapter 7

Ethical Questions and Questionable Morals in Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice Kathryn R. Finin

In a recent episode of NCIS, one of the many crime scene programs on television these days, Dr. Mallard, aka “Ducky,” explains the difference between morals and ethics this way: “The ethical man knows it is wrong to cheat on his wife. The moral man wouldn’t do it.”1 Linking ethics to the study of what is right or wrong and morals to the acts which follow from such distinctions is commonplace. While this distinction is etymologically sound, it doesn’t take us very far where Shakespeare’s plays are concerned. The apparent clarity of these terms quickly dissolves as characters find themselves immersed in situations which are multiply fraught. In Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, for example, the gendered dynamics, combined with the plays’ problematic themes, discerning what is ethical or what is moral is anything but clear. More specifically, this essay explores the questions raised by Isabella’s refusal to trade her body for her brother’s life and the equally troubling questions raised by Portia’s trial of Shylock: both of which take us into the complex web of human relations. Ethics, in its most general sense, concerns the “quality of spaces between people,” and as cultural theorist Vikki Bell argues, it is “exhausting, and never exhausted. Infinite responsibility.”2 This responsibility not only involves responding to the call of the other, but responding to one’s own response as well: “an ethics of self-interrogation.”3 Isabella engages in this doubled responsivity while Portia ignores it; however, the plays involve different kinds of relationships which necessarily shape the characters’ responses. Avishai Margalit’s distinction between “thick” and “thin” relations provides a way to analyze the fundamentally different nature of the relationships in the two plays: differences which, I argue, contribute to Isabella’s status as a moral agent even as they prevent Portia from taking up such a subject position. “Thick” relations, “grounded in attributes such as parent, friend, lover, countrymen” mark the ethical for Margalit, whereas “thin” relations, “grounded in the attribute of being human— the stranger, the remote” mark the moral.”4 The distinction, then, is not one of

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ethics as theory versus morals as practice, but loyalty to loved ones and respect for the basic humanity of others, especially when the claims of both come into conflict. Margalit’s poignant exploration of the Israel-Palestine conflict from this perspective is the main subject of The Ethics of Memory. His central claim throughout this book is, in fact, that while the ethical is marked by a partiality for those with whom we are thickly related, it cannot be at the loss of the moral obligation we still have to those with whom we are only thinly related. Shakespeare’s plays are rife with the competing values both within and between such relations. Not only does this heighten the emotional valence of the plays, it also allows us to witness how certain cultural values shape what constitutes value or suffering, how we understand whose responsibility it is to be responsive, and, finally, the limits of that responsiveness. One of the markers of thick relations is the degree to which we care for someone and are willing to act in ways that may require us to privilege the other’s desires and needs over our own. We see evidence of this kind of relationship between Isabella and her brother when Lucio informs her of Claudio’s arrest and of Angelo’s determination to make an example of him. “Assay the power you have,” he says “Go to Lord Angelo; / And let him learn to know, when maidens sue, / Men give like gods” (1.4.79–81).5 Despite doubting her power, Isabella promises to “see what I can do” and says, “I will about it straight . . . commend me to my brother” (84–88). Exercising her agency on behalf of Claudio, despite her affinity for the convent where she is on the verge of becoming a votarist, seems like an obvious kind of decision in the face of her brother’s execution. No one is obliged, however, “to be engaged in ethical relations. It remains an option to lead a polite solitary life with no engagements and no commitments of the sort involved in ethical life.”6 Isabella is on the verge of detaching from such thick relations with the secular world when she displays that moment of what Levinas calls “pure responsiveness, of non-indifference” in the face of her brother’s crisis.7 This response, the ethical moment, challenges Isabella in ways she cannot imagine when she sets out to persuade Angelo to show mercy and commute the sentence against Claudio. As soon as Isabella arrives at the court of justice to plead for Claudio, we see the tension between her sense of responsibility to her brother and her own, very different, concerns. She begins her suit by admitting: Isabella: There is a vice that most I do abhor, And most desire should meet the blow of justice, For which I would not plead, but that I must; For which I must not plead, but that I am At war ‘twixt will and will not. (2.2.29–33)

The twisted logic of “would not . . . must” “must not . . . am” reveals both the depth of obligation she feels to Claudio and, simultaneously, her own

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moral code. As the one comes up against the other, Isabella must chose between conflicting ethical responses to self and other. She does so by separating the man from the sin in a consummate Augustinian articulation : “I do beseech you, let it be his fault, / And not my brother” that is “condemned” (35). Angelo rejects such an argument, along with the ones which follow, and makes a counter claim: “It is the law, not I, condemn your brother. / Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son, / It should be thus with him. He must die tomorrow” (82–84). While the discourse of law depends upon such (supposed) impartiality, especially where thick relations are concerned, ethics demands partiality, “that is, favoring a person or group over others with equal moral claim.”8 The central ground of Isabella’s protest is demonstrating that Claudio’s moral claim to live is equal to all others who have committed this crime, but who have not died for it. Initially, however, Isabella struggles to articulate a compelling reason for Angelo to commute the harsh sentence he has delivered. She also finds it difficult to display the emotional fervor Lucio believes she needs to sway Angelo, but hearing that Claudio will be executed the next day cuts through the sense of conflicted obligations between self and other which have created these problems: Isabella: Tomorrow? O, that’s sudden! Spare him, spare him! He’s not prepared for death… ... Good my lord, bethink you: Who is it that hath died for this offence? There’s many have committed it. (85–91)

The exigency of her brother’s imminent death here trumps the abstract moral code to which she is so committed. No longer “at war ‘twixt will and will not,” Isabella has been changed by the act of responding to her brother’s need, despite her basic moral belief that what Claudio has done is wrong.9 She sees other aspects of what was so fully unambiguous before and such revision complicates—thickens—Isabella’s relation to him and to her own sense of self. The second scene in which Isabella and Angelo meet serves as a kind of iteration of the first, but at a heightened pitch. Angelo foregrounds her contradictory commitments to Claudio and her own moral code with the test he devises as a way to satiate his own newfound sexual desire: “Which had you rather: that the most just law / Now took your brother’s life, or, to redeem him, / Give up your body to such sweet uncleanness / As she that he hath stained?” (2.4.52–54). Angelo deflects his responsibility to avoid tyranny by finding mercy within justice, and at the same time, he shifts the ground of decision making, that is, of saving Claudio, to Isabella. In effect, Angelo asks her what is the real extent of your willingness to save your brother? How much will you risk or give up of

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yourself to save him? How much do you really love your brother? Not getting through to Isabella the first time, Angelo repeats his bribe more baldly: “Admit no other way to save his life . . . but that either / You must lay down the treasures of your body / To this supposed, or else to let him suffer—/ What would you do?” (88–98). Faced with such utter violation of moral agency on Angelo’s part, Isabella’s response signifies the doubled responsibility she has exhibited all along. She asserts: “As much for my poor brother as myself” (99). That is, I would do for him the same as I would do for myself, which is suffer any kind of punishment rather than “Yield / My body up to shame” (99,104). On one level, Isabella says all the right things, culturally speaking, by privileging her chastity above all else. On another level, however, her unwavering commitment to such a stance has often been read as too cold and unfeeling. Both she and her brother face self-annihilation, although what is at stake differs given the gendered dimensions of the conflict.10 Isabella’s insistence that the overlapping integrity of her body and selfhood is as valuable as Claudio’s life actually signifies her status as a moral agent in the play.11 In order to achieve agency at all, Isabella must act in the world of her play based, in part, on her own judgments. Any unthinking show of devotion to Claudio, even to save his life, would mark her as a servile instrument. Isabella refuses this stance repeatedly.12 Faced with Angelo’s coercive bribe, she carves out that which is most integral to her selfhood, her chaste body, even as she expresses a willingness to give up her life for Claudio. This is the crux of her moral agency: loyalty and devotion to Claudio, but not at the cost of her own humanity. Much of this play’s power lies in the way Shakespeare stages such a moment and then refuses to have Isabella, like so many of her counterparts in early modern drama, sacrifice her agency in the interests of her male family members. In fact, her status as a moral agent in this play comes from the strength of her engagement with the complex web of ethical relations she experiences. One of the most disturbing aspects of this problem play is the way Angelo’s extortive quid pro quo prompts questions about the gendered relation of the self to the other, particularly “what are the conditions and limits of my care for others?”13 Measure for Measure stages those limits and raises questions about whether loyalty to the female self is as integral a part of thick relations as loyalty to the male other. The soliloquy with which Act 2 ends underscores Isabella’s agency as a critical aspect of this play. Articulating a keen sense of the inability to denounce Angelo publicly, Isabella concludes: Isabella:I’ll to my brother ... he hath in him such a mind of honour That had he twenty heads to tender down


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On twenty bloody blocks, he’d yield them up Before his sister should her body stoop To such abhorred pollution. Then Isabel live chaste, and brother die: More than our brother is our chastity. (177–85)

Isabella’s conviction here that Claudio would sacrifice his life twenty times over indicates her sense of their relationship: the care for and loyalty to each other which define thick relations. In fact, she conceives of his response to Angelo’s lecherous bribe as identical to hers in this soliloquy. And yet, as Act 3 demonstrates, each of these siblings has to confront the profound alterity of the other, along with the ethical responsivity such alterity creates. The gendered loyalty which colors the thick relations between Isabella and Claudio lies at the heart of their first face-to-face encounter in the play. Expressing male expectation of what a women’s traditional role should be, Claudio greets her with “Now sister, what’s the comfort?” (3.1.52). Isabella’s response, interestingly, displays none of the emotional valence we saw in Act 2: “Why as all comforts are: most good, most good indeed” (53). Far from bringing news of a reprieve from death, however, she explains: Isabella: Lord Angelo, having affairs to heaven, Intends you for his swift ambassador, Where you shall be an everlasting leiger. Therefore your best appointment make with speed. Tomorrow you set on. (54–58).

Isabella’s tone here seems difficult to understand unless we connect it with her subsequent lines: “O Claudio, I do fear thee . . . and I quake / Lest thou a feverous life shouldst entertain, / And six or seven winters more respect / Than a perpetual honour” (72–75). Since he poses no physical threat to Isabella, what she fears is what he will ask of her. Ethics is “always a response to the other, but also relies on [individual] freedom . . . on the temptation of [one’s] own non-ethical impulses.”14 Perhaps the strangely cheerful finality with which Isabella greets Claudio, then, is an attempt to forestall the very request he will make of her: a request which will bring her to that vulnerable moment where her freedom is called into question by the presence of the other. Such is the entangled nature of thick relations, however, that questions of responsibility and responsivity go both ways. Finally, Isabella reveals the twisted means of Claudio’s potential salvation: Isabella:Dost thou think, Claudio: If I would yield him my virginity,

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Shakespeare and Moral Agency Thou might’st be freed ... This night’s the time That I should do what I abhor to name, Or else thou diest tomorrow. (3.1.95–101)

Claudio’s initial response exhibits all the care and loyalty Isabella expressed hope for at the end of Act 2: “O heavens, it cannot be . . . Thou shalt not do’t” (98, 102). Facing death is, however, “a fearful thing,” Claudio admits (116). Musing on the reality of going “we know not where; / To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot,” he claims that “The weariest and most loathed worldly life . . . Can lay on nature is a paradise / To what we fear of death” (129–32). Seeking relief from his own fear, Claudio articulates an alternative reading of Angelo’s offer: “Sweet sister, let me live. / What sin you do to save a brother’s life, / Nature dispenses with the deed so far / That it becomes a virtue” (134–37). The “sinfulness” of acquiescing to Angelo is, perhaps, the only legitimate ground from which Isabella can refuse, since no one is ethically required to sacrifice their soul for the life of another. Nevertheless, the primary issue here is how couching the problem of this bribe in terms of sin actually elides the personal suffering and humiliation involved for Isabella in such a coercive sexual act. Feminist ethics helps us identify this unspoken dimension of ethical relations between Claudio and Isabella. As Alison Jaggar observes, feminists have “enlarge[d] the concerns of traditional Western ethics which has [traditionally] devalued or ignored issues or spheres of life that are associated with women.”15 The specifically gendered dimension of suffering and humiliation in abusive sexual acts is one such issue and raises questions about what counts as ethical in the thick relations between these two siblings in Measure for Measure. Isabella herself is quiet on this aspect of her situation; however, the force of her response to Claudio’s request suggests something more lies under the surface: Isabella: O, you beast! O faithless coward, O dishonest wretch, With thou be made a man out of my vice? Is’t not a kind of incest to take life From thine own sister’s shame? What should I think? ... Take my defiance, Die, perish! (3.1.137–45)

As this outburst makes clear, Claudio’s interests are not the same as Isabella’s. She is willing to sacrifice her life for her brother, but not her self. Earlier we saw Isabella re-evaluate her belief in the absolute sinfulness of illicit sexuality since such commitment to abstract morality produces the very kind of injustice her brother faces. As a result, it would be hard to argue that the real reason she explodes in anger is because her immortal soul is endangered.16


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Claudio’s request registers as a betrayal for Isabella because it violates the loyalty and caring which constitute the very nature of their thick relations. Such caring is a “demanding attitude,” an “unselfish heed of the particular needs and interests of others; as Margalit argues, “it calls for more than mere moral rights and wrongs.”17 Claudio draws upon the moral codes of thin relations (that is, the “sin” or lack thereof) when Isabella expects the ethical responsiveness of thick relations. Ironically, the strength of Isabella’s anger and her utter rejection of his claim serve to protect Claudio from having to confront the implications of his request, although Shakespeare hints at it when Claudio says to the disguised Duke, “Let me ask my sister pardon” (172). Nevertheless, in Act 3, both Isabella and Claudio have to face “the strangeness of the other,” the “irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions” in the face of the other.18 While the suffering and humiliation Isabella would suffer at Angelo’s hands remains unspoken, the play pushes us to the very limits of what thick relations require of these two siblings. In the end, both are saved from the full weight of the demands of caring for the other by the Duke’s bed-trick option. But this, along with the Duke’s proposal, presents as many problems as they solve given the gendered dimensions of thick relations—especially where the people involved are not similarly situated. The Duke’s proposal to Isabella, which he frames as inevitably beneficial for her, seems as problematic as Claudio’s request for her to acquiesce to Angelo’s bribe. Isabella’s decision to join the order of St Clare clearly stems from an inner desire and demonstrates her sense of agency, not a lack of viable marriage offers. Thus, what possible response could she make in the face of such a request—a request which renders completely invisible her desire for a very differently motivated kind of community—except a stunned silence? Instead of taking us deep into the ethical complexities of thick relations, The Merchant of Venice stages the chasm between thick and thin relations. This play reveals just how fully moral agency concerns the “quality of spaces between people” with whom we are not thickly related, even as we become entangled in each other’s lives.19 Portia saves Antonio’s life, but her lack of any self-interrogation, especially that “doubling moment” concerning her response to Shylock undermines Portia’s status as a moral agent. We should note that Isabella achieves this very kind of agency in the process of refusing to save her brother’s life. The irony of such an alignment only serves to foreground the challenges and the limits of responding to the call of the other. No part of the play exhibits the chasm between thick and thin relations more powerfully than the trial scene of Act 4. Shylock is asked to extend mercy at least three different times in this scene alone. The Duke and his friends take as self-evident that extending mercy to their friend Antonio is the right thing to do. The obvious “moral” here is that Shylock should care for the life of Antonio. He doesn’t. He wants revenge and is poised to get it, in yet another example of irony, through legal means. To exhibit concern for Antonio’s life would require

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that “demanding attitude toward others . . . that unselfish heed of the particular needs and interests of others” which is constitutive of thick relations.20 As everything in the play attests to, however, Shylock and the Venetians are connected in the thinnest of possible ways; neither side seems willing to cross the divide in a way that would encourage such a shift. Using Shylock’s name for the first and only time in the scene, the Duke says: “Shylock, the world thinks—and I think so too—/ That thou but lead’st this fashion of thy malice / To the last hour of act, and then ‘tis thought / Thou’lt show thy mercy . . . ” (4.1.16–20). Shylock’s only response is to reiterate his “purpose . . . to have the due and forfeit of my bond,” admitting there is no “why” except “to say it is my humour” (4.1.34, 42). In a mutual attack on the alterity of the other, Shylock compares Antonio to “a rat” and a “gaping pig” (4.1.43, 46), while the Duke and his friends refer to Shylock only as “Jew,” liken him to “Turks and Tarters,”21 and describe him as an “inexorable dog,” and a “ravenous” wolf (4.1.31, 127, 137). If ethics concerns the “quality of spaces between people,” then this opening castigates everyone from an ethical perspective. Indeed, each subsequent request for mercy only reveals how little intercourse exists between Shylock and the people whose city he shares. When the Duke asks “How shalt thou hope for mercy, rend’ring none?” (4.1.87), Shylock replies: “What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong?” (4.1.88). He dismisses the question, preferring instead to castigate the Duke for employing a double standard: Shylock: You have among you many a purchased slave Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules, You use in abject and in slavish parts Because you bought them. Shall I say to you ‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs. Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates Be seasoned with such viands.’ You will answer ‘The slaves are ours.’ So do I answer you. (4.1.89–97).

As many commentators have observed, this speech beautifully exposes the hypocrisy of Christian culture. While audiences often respond to the truth of such claims, no one in the play is willing to complicate—to thicken—their relationship with him by doing so. Edward Andrew makes the surprising claim that Shylock at first wants to build a deeper friendship with Antonio and that this is what accounts for his proposal to make an interest-free loan.22 Far from trying to deepen his relationship with Shylock, the Duke refuses to engage him at all, claiming: “Upon my power I may dismiss this court” (4.1.103). This speech, like Shylock’s famous “Hath not a Jew eye’s,” reveals his willingness to speak truth to power. At the same time, however, Shylock continually elides the issue of how


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his bond, while seemingly legal, was never moral.23 Whether we define “moral” in the conventional sense, as that which concerns “right or principled conduct,” or as Margalit does, as that which is “grounded in the attribute of being human—the stranger, the remote,” Shylock refuses to acknowledge the fundamental obligation we all have not to take the life of another human being.24 As such, he undermines whatever moral ground his words establish. Ultimately, his refusal to engage the moral issue at the heart of this bond, especially given his marginal cultural status, is what renders him so vulnerable to destruction. When Portia enters the courtroom and certifies the legality of the bond, she decrees that Shylock “must be merciful” (4.1.177). Responding to this third such demand, Shylock asks, “On what compulsion must I? Tell me that” (4.1.178). In a speech which reiterates the requisite Christian virtue of mercy, Portia launches into her lengthy, stirring and completely ineffectual speech on mercy. Emphasizing that “the quality of mercy is not strain’d,” she claims: Portia: It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: ‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway; It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. (4.1.180–92)

Yoking the power, images and language of religion to that of law, Portia’s narrative takes as obvious, natural and true—as divinely ordained—that sympathy for the human condition should overrule any other considerations legal or otherwise. Portia is, in many ways, right. Even thin relations entail some obligation. Nevertheless, Portia’s speech is also troubling. Even though all the major characters rely upon this value to establish their superiority over Shylock, this is no authentic effort to reach across the divide of thin relations and connect with the other in a meaningful way. Instead, this rhetorical display comes off as a staged performance: one which seems directed at everyone but Shylock.25 Predictably, given what Shylock has revealed in the earlier parts of the play, he rejects Portia’s mode of reasoning. ”My deeds upon my head!” he replies, “I crave the law, / The penalty and forfeit of my bond” (4.1.201–02). Rather than “proff[er] any moral opinions of his own,” Shakespeare prefers to “[provide] us with the materials with which to evaluate . . . it is left to the audience’s

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moral sense to supply the moral assessment.”26 Obviously, no one’s moral sense here is that Antonio should die. But Portia’s unwillingness to engage Shylock in an authentic way, along with his equal degree of unwillingness, reveals a problematic repetition: everyone in this trial scene refuses to cross the divide between thick and thin relations. In what increasingly feels like a cat and mouse game, Portia shifts tactics a bit. Expressing a moral obligation outside the bond itself, Portia indicates that Shylock should provide a surgeon “To stop [Antonio’s] wounds, lest he do bleed to death” (4.1.258). Suspicious of such an interpretive approach, Shylock refuses unless it is specifically “nominated in the bond” (4.1.258). Portia says, “It is not so express’d, but what of that? / ‘Twere good you do so much for charity” (4.1.260–61, italics added). Using Shylock’s rigid mode of reasoning to set the fixity of patriarchal writ against him, Portia awards Shylock his pound of flesh, but institutes her famous caveat: Portia: Tarry a little, there is something else. This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood; The words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh.’ … But in the cutting of it, if thou dost shed One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods Are by the laws of Venice confiscate Unto the state of Venice. (4.1.305–12, italics added)

Emphasizing the law’s partiality to “Christian blood,” we see the limits of Portia’s salvific, but morally questionable response. Far from bridging the chasm between thick and thin relations, Portia emphasizes it here, going far beyond what she needs to do in order to save Antonio’s life. Not only does she deny Shylock his principal payment, but she confiscates all his wealth, which becomes “forfeit to the state” (4.1.360). While the Duke commutes the sentence of death Shylock faces “for seek[ing] the life of [a Venetian] citizen,” Shylock observes: “Nay, take my life and all, pardon not that. / You take my house when you do take the prop / That doth sustain my house; you take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live” (4.1.346, 369–72). Finally, in a move which recalls Isabella’s distinction between her life and her self, while Shylock is granted life, he is forced to convert to Christianity. Unlike Isabella, however, whose silence ends Measure for Measure, Portia forces Shylock to respond: “Art thou contented, Jew? What dost thou say?” (388). Marking the dissolution of what Shylock defines as the core of his selfhood, he speaks the words that have been scripted for him: “I am content” (389). Despite saving Antonio’s life, Portia’s excessive condemnation of Shylock raises questions about her own motivation. Ultimately, Portia’s overly-legalistic and harsh reading of the bond renders her as “tyrannous” as Angelo in Measure


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for Measure. Moreover, Isabella’s description of Angelo works equally well here for Portia, disguised, of course, as Balthasar: “man, proud man, / [Cross] Dressed in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what [s]he’s most assured” (2.2.120–22). Portia’s ignorance lies in the very lack of responding to her own response concerning Shylock here in the courtroom. In Measure for Measure, the issue is one of self to other when both are at risk. In The Merchant of Venice, however, the issue is one of cui bono—who benefits? This difference has everything to do with the moral agency of Isabella and Portia. In a dramatic act that parallels the initial drama of Antonio’s bond, we see Portia brutally annihilate Shylock’s self in order to break Antonio’s emotional hold on Bassanio. Saving Antonio’s life seems to be a partial motivation at best. Once the triangle is severed, Bassanio is Portia’s completely. In their different ways, Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice reveal the difficulties of moral agency when everyone’s suffering matters. Both plays foreground the intersecting obligations of those to whom we are thickly and thinly related, even as we must simultaneously respond to the obligations of self. In so doing, they reveal the disturbing effects of ethical and/or moral acts which disregard a doubled responsivity, especially where one person stands to benefit through the sacrifice, whether willing or unwilling, of an other. Perhaps Bell’s “infinite responsibility . . . exhausting and never exhausted,” is a utopian dream, but Shakespeare stages the ugly alternative in these two plays whose moral and ethical questions have troubled audiences for centuries.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6 7 8 9

10

Many thanks to the participants of the Shakespeare Association seminar on Moral Agency for their insightful comments on this essay, most especially Michael Bristol. Viki Bell, Culture & Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics, and Feminist Theory (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), p. 47. Ibid., 62. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 7. All references to Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice are from The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1997). Margalit, p. 105. Quoted in Bell, p. 51. Margalit, p. 87. Isabella also calls into question the justice of applying the law so strictly to one man only: “it is tyrannous” she claims and attacks the legitimacy of Angelo’s judgment: “man, proud man, / Dressed in a little brief authority, / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured” (2.2.120–22). Historically, of course, the concerns and suffering of the female self have been denied and/or put into the service of the “larger good” of the family, community

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11

12

13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21

22

23

24 25

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or state. For more on the ethical dimensions of this historical situation, see Ruth Ginzberg’s “Philosophy Is Not a Luxury,” in Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence, Kansas: Kansas University Press, 1991), pp. 126–45. See also Mary Thomas Crane, “Male Pregnancy and Cognitive Permeability in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no 3 (1998): pp. 269–92; Donald R. Wehrs, “Touching Words” Embodying Ethics in Erasmus, Shakespearean Comedy, and Contemporary Theory,” Modern Philology 104, no. 1 (2006): pp. 1–33. For a related discussion of agency in this play, along with Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice, see Peter Meidlinger who argues that Shakespeare “evince[s] a remarkably coherent vision” in his “ongoing concern with the conditions that enable one to choose the good over the right, while they demonstrate the difficulty of creating social conditions that compel characters to modify their lives’ projects in order to make them more valuable and less destructive” “When Good Meets Right: Identity, Community, and Agency in Shakespeare’s Comedies” (Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 83 no. 3–4 (2000): pp. 701–22. Bell, p. 61. Ibid., p. 52. Feminist Ethics: Projects, Problems, Prospects.” Feminist Ethics. ed. Claudia Card. (Lawrence, Kansas: Kansas University Press, 1991), p. 85. Jessica Slights, “Isabella’s Order: Religious Acts and Personal Desires in Measure for Measure” Studies in Philology 95, no. 3 (1998): pp. 263–92. Margalit, p. 33 and 37. Levinas quoted in Bell, p. 53. Bell, p. 47. Margalit, p. 33. As Gönül Bakay argues, “again and again in Shakespeare, the Turks appear as exemplars of ‘unchristian’ behaviour: ‘What! Think you we are Turks or infidels? / Or that we would, against the form of law, / Proceed thus rashly in the villain’s death.’ (Richard III); ‘Wine, Loved I deeply, dice dearly, and in woman, outparamoured the Turk.’ (Edgar in King Lear); ‘Why, Tis a boisterous and a cruel style, / A style for challengers; why she defies me, / Like Turk to Christian’ (Rosalind in As You Like It).” “The Turk in English Renaissance literature” Open Democracy. 14 Feb. 2003. Edward Andrew, Shylock’s Rights: A Grammar of Lockian Claims (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Introduction” The Merchant of Venice. In The Norton Shakespeare, Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1997), p. 1081. Margalit, p. 7. Kathryn Finin, “Performative Subversions: Portia, Language and the Law in The Merchant of Venice” in Justice, Women and Power in English Renaissance Drama. Eds. Andrew Majeske and Emily Detmer-Goebel (Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.). McGinn, Colin. Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 179. See also Meidlinger, pp. 710–11.

Chapter 8

“The oldest hath borne most”: the Burdens of Aging and the Morality of Uselessness in King Lear Naomi Conn Liebler

I begin with a confession: I do not understand—have never understood—the closing line of King Lear: “The oldest hath borne most: we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (5.3.324–25).1 Is some special worthiness attached to being worn down by life? What does it mean to predict on behalf of “we that are young” that the burdens that ground down our elders will never be ours? What kind of act is bearing a burden? Is it heroic, an “action having magnitude” (as Aristotle defined tragic action2)? Domesticated animals bear burdens, and so do some human beings who have lost (or been deprived of, or were never granted) degrees of dignity. For Hamlet, “bearing” either “fardels” or Time’s and proud men’s contempt is so shameful that only dread of “the undiscovered country” would make him “rather bear those ills we have” and “lose the name of action” (3.1.69–87).3 “Bearing” in this sense, as he clearly states, is the opposite of action. How is Edgar’s meaning different from Hamlet’s? Edgar appears to give it the greatest significance—a tragic significance, and thus, arguably, a moral one—when he identifies it as something he and his cohort will never be able to do. Perhaps the morality of “bearing” depends upon what is borne, and with what degree of consciousness and, since we are talking about a tragedy, with what degree of choice. When Lear “bears” the burdens that are the results of his actions in Act 1, what choice does he have? The contexts for his actions after Act 1—seeking shelter in successively straitened conditions and then challenging the thunder—do not offer much opportunity for actively chosen “bearing.” Gloucester—the other “oldest” to whom Edgar must be referring— tries to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff that isn’t there. Up to that point in the play (4.6.41), there was not much in his “bearing”—other than the cost of supporting his bastard son—that one could call “moral” or “ethical.”

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Here, as in Hamlet’s sense, “bearing” means enduring, which Gloucester says he cannot do: Gloucester: Oh you mighty gods, This world I do renounce and in your sights Shake patiently my great affliction off. If I could bear it longer and not fall To quarrel with your great opposeless wills, My snuff and loathed part of nature should Burn itself out.(4.6.34–40)

If Edgar is right, if “the oldest hath borne most,” he must be speaking of endurance over their full fictive lives, before and beyond the scope of action represented in the play. It’s also true that Lear does “bear in” Cordelia’s body from the place where she was hanged, and while he does so, he seeks and gets confirmation from the “Officer” (Q) or “Gentleman” (F) with him that he “kill’d the slave that was a-hanging” her (5.3.273). He can “act,” if not much or often. And he can reminisce: “I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion/ I would have made them skip: I am old now” (275–76). Lear remembers. It is not difficult to assess the value of “memory” for aging protagonists (or even for thirty-year-olds like Hamlet); but what is the value to the larger community, the ethical agency of that act of “remembering”?4 Does reminiscing constitute “action having magnitude”? Is memory what “the eldest hath borne most”? When he was 87 years old, just about Lear’s age, the Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio (who died in 2004 at the age of 94) commented on the significance for old people of acts of memory: The world of old people, all old people, is to a greater or lesser extent the world of memory. People say that ultimately you are what you have done, thought and loved. I would also say that you are what you can remember . . . Remembering is a mental activity that you often fail to engage in because it is either arduous or embarrassing. But it is a healthy activity. By remembering you rediscover yourself and your identity, in spite of the many years that have passed and the thousands of events you have experienced.5

For Bobbio, then, remembering is not only a kind of action but is the penultimate kind (just before dying), an important kind. It is no less important than any other kind of action; it is in fact the important action of old age: The past is the dimension in which the old live. Their future is too short for thoughts of what is going to occur. Old age, as the sick man said, does not last long. But precisely because it doesn’t last long, you have to use your time not for making plans for a distant future that is no longer yours, but in trying to

The Burdens of Aging in King Lear

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understand, if you can, the meaning of your life or the lack of it. Think hard. Do not waste the little time left. Retrace your steps. Your memories will come to your aid.6

Bobbio gives an old man’s memories a poetic, even an encouraging cast; remembering is the business of the old, no less important than the more physically active engagements of youth. Shakespeare seems to take a chillier or less sentimental view. No one pays much attention to old men’s memories anywhere in Shakespeare’s work—nor, probably, in the world it reflected. As a measure of human significance, memory alone can be cold comfort. This may have been so especially for old men during the early modern period, as Alexandra Shepard notes. “Men . . . had more to lose than to gain in later life; their access to patriarchal dividends diminished as they became physically debilitated with age, and they had less recourse to the potent alternative sources of manhood rooted in excess, strength, and bravado adopted by so many of their younger counterparts.”7 King Lear is not the first of Shakespeare’s plays to take up the realpolitik of old people’s memories. 2 Henry IV devotes substantial stage time to the matter in dialogues between two elderly country justices. When Silence and Shallow, cousins-in-law and colleagues, meet in 3.2, they exchange family news for a brief moment before turning to reminiscence and nostalgia. Shallow. I was once of Clement’s Inn, where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet. Silence. You were called ‘lusty Shallow’ then, cousin. Shallow. By the mass, I was called any thing, and I would have done any thing indeed too, and roundly too. There was I, and little John Doit of Staffordshire, and black George Barnes, and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squele, a Cotsole man—you had not four such swinge-bucklers in all the Inns o’ Court again; and I may say to you, we knew where the bona-robas were and had the best of them all at commandment. Then was Jack Falstaff, now Sir John, a boy, and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. Silence. This Sir John, cousin, that comes hither anon about soldiers? Shallow. The same Sir John, the very same. I see him break Scoggin’s head at the court-gate, when a was a crack, not thus high; and the very same day did I fight with one Samson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray’s Inn. Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent! And to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead! Silence. We shall all follow, cousin. ... Shallow. Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet? Silence. Dead, sir. Shallow. Jesu, Jesu, dead! ’A drew a good bow, and dead! A shot a fine shoot. John a Gaunt loved him well, and betted much money on his head. Dead! ’A would

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have clapped i’ th’ clout at twelve score, and carried you a forehand shaft a fourteen and fourteen and a half, that it would have done a man’s heart good to see. . . . And is old Double dead? (3.2.12–52)8

The pair’s meta-commentaries are focused on their personal histories and nostalgia for their long-lost glory days. For them in ways quite different from King Henry’s (or King Lear’s, for that matter), the personal is political, politics are local, and remembered action is the only action they can manage. They do not—perhaps never did or perhaps can no longer—concern themselves with depositions, usurpations, displacements, who’s in, who’s out (as Lear puts it: 5.3.16); those are matters for monarchs. As King Henry pivots between memories of the king he displaced and apprehension of the son who, in 4.5, performs his displacement, the “history in all men’s lives” alternates with the “hatch and brood of time” (3.1.80, 86). Shallow’s chronicle of days and nights at Clement’s Inn is remembered only there, “where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet,” if at all, and is of no wider political consequence. But it’s different with kings and with tragedies of state. As the story of a king and a kingdom, Lear’s chronicle, which only Edgar and Albany are left to record, must present “action having magnitude.” The play offers an unusually large number of such actions. Before we are out of the exposition set in the very first scene, we see in rapid succession the unthinkable division of the kingdom and the king’s unsanctioned retirement, the stupidity of the love-test, Cordelia’s rejection by her father and one of her two suitors, the redistribution of the divided kingdom, and Kent’s banishment. All of these actions break bonds that are the supporting structures of civilization: familial and feudal bonds as well as the divinely ordained obligation of a monarch to rule until God takes him off. So when Gloucester observes in the next scene that “These late eclipses in the sun and the moon portend no good to us; . . . Nature finds itself scourg’d by the sequent events . . . All ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves“ (1.2.103–14), it really does look as if the bonds that hold the world together have come undone. Lawrence Becker writes of “the debt that cannot be repaid” as a specifically familial matter,9 as perhaps it is in the modern world. But the opening scene of King Lear and the whole of the play’s actions that unfold from it occur in a domain in which un-payable debts can occur; these actions address a complex world of such debts in both the represented feudal and the audience’s real-world early modern circumstances. They encompass emotional debts as well as those of action (and this is Edgar’s other point in his closing lines—we must “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” [5.3.323]). All of these debts constitute moral proving grounds in this play. Cordelia makes much of the obligatory nature of her bond of love to her father—she loves “according to [her] bond, no more nor less” (1.1.93). (I note that she seems a bit miffed that Burgundy leaves her when the bond of her dowry is broken [1.1.249–51]: evidently it’s OK for her to hold to the letter


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of a bond and “owe” nothing more, but not for a prospective husband to do likewise.) Her commitment to her father is both ethical and moral. But Lear hears it as a breach of all bonds, as intolerable ingratitude. Perhaps he must hear it this way because he himself is quite busy in that first scene slashing the bonds of divine ordination to kingship, of the maps and boundaries of his kingdom, and of the unconditional loyalty of the Earl of Kent. What Lear calls upon Cordelia to affirm is Becker’s “debt that cannot be repaid” and the importance of that indenture in the chain of civilized being. But if it “cannot be repaid,” why should Lear—or any other parent (or child, for that matter)— think that it ought to be? (I shall revisit this question later.) Contrast Lear’s unreasoning with the irrefutable, if cold, logic of Edmund’s “bastard” speech (1.2.1–22). Such bonds as the law affords (for example, legitimacy) have no bearing upon his life, simply because his father behaved immorally (“For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines / Lag of a brother” 1.2.5–6) and compounded the offense by bragging or jesting about it at the beginning of the play (1.1.12–23) when he introduced Edmund to Kent. Shakespeare’s uncomfortable inquiry into the relation of bonds to moral agency seems to conclude in despair. Questions about another kind of ethical and/or moral relation—not exactly a legal one and nowhere (that I know of) codified—disturb this play, as expressed in Lear’s haunting complaint: “Age is unnecessary” (2.4.155). The idea that necessity or utility or even action should be a requirement for civic/ civilized life is unsettling. “We that are young” can never be certain that we live useful or necessary lives; many of “we that are old” have long since given up the luxury of self-deception in that regard. Lear of course wants to be all things to himself, to his daughters, and to his subjects, despite knowing that the affirmation he once demanded is and always was false: They flattered me like a dog and told me I had the white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. . . . When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men o’their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof. (4.6.96–104)

He itemizes some instances of what, for a king (or at least for this king), constitutes or gives evidence of “agency”: making the thunder stop, keeping off the rain and wind. That these are not royal prerogatives (in so far as they not even human prerogatives) puts to question the meaning of “age” and “agency” and of both as conditions of potency or usefulness. Besides identifying the doubt that attaches to royal flattery, Lear here sneaks in notice of a cultural consensus regarding age—that it confers or carries wisdom, and that a young man who still lacks even a black beard can be flattered by the imputation of “white hairs.” But the play in many places discloses that

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this cultural agreement is an ethical principle only—by which I mean that it can stand as an ideal or a collectively held fiction, but, like Hamlet’s recollection of the custom of wassail in his father’s time, it is one “More honoured in the breach than the observance” (1.4.16). Gloucester identifies a blunter bafflement when attacked in his own castle by his “guests” who submit neither to the ethics of comitatus nor to the morality of reverence for the aged (3.7.29–41). Kent (“be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad” 1.1.146–47), Edgar (“Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it” 4.6.33–34), and even Edmund in his “bastard” speech wrestle with the implications of their respective behaviors; only the “pelican daughters” (3.4.75) seem untroubled by dilemma. Underpinning the tragic dismay visible in both plot and subplot in this play is a set of expectations (and their disappointment) that begins in a dynamic of family relations and radiates outward into larger social, political, and economic connections. The matter of potency/usefulness and its inevitable link to questions of agency is one of the most compelling—and disturbing—among questions about old age and the reciprocal relations and obligations between one generation and another. The theologian Abraham Heschel observed that “every one of us entertains the keen expectation that other people will not regard him merely because of what he is worth to them, because he is capable of satisfying other people’s needs, but will regard him as a being significant and valuable in himself . . . It is, moreover, obvious that a person’s service to society does not claim all of his life and can therefore not be the ultimate answer to his quest of meaning for life as a whole . . . What we are able to bestow upon others is usually less and rarely more than a tithe.”10 Heschel forces his readers to confront the realization that none of us is “necessary,” that “necessity,” in this sense of being needed, is “a situation of being exposed to a demand from without,”11 and the fact that such demands diminish or disappear as we age. Lear concurs: “Age is unnecessary.” This sense, too, might be added to the more usual materialist/Marxist understanding of Lear’s exasperated “O, reason not the need!” (2.2.453). “Who needs me?” Heschel asks; “Who needs mankind?”12 and he answers his own question: “Human existence cannot derive its ultimate meaning from society, because society itself is in need of meaning.”13 This might serve as the summative commentary on an inquiry about moral agency, or on the Aristotelian prescript for what tragedy imitates. It is implicit, too, in Cordelia’s explanation of the terms of the “bond” according to which she loves her father: You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. (1.1.96–8)

If she’s right, then Becker’s identification of “the debt that cannot be repaid” is, on second thoughts, not quite right. It is not that the debt is unpayable;


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Cordelia explains exactly how it is paid. The problem is that the payment never satisfies; the debt is never paid by the return of the principal, because the creditor always demands interest. Furthermore, the meaning of “moral agency” in familial relations often seems to embed facilitation or enabling. Think of Orlando’s complaint against Oliver early in As You Like It; Oliver has reneged on his moral obligation as elder brother by withholding the means and opportunity for Orlando’s education in “gentlemanlike qualities,” and has done so against the instructions in their father’s will (1.1.59–62). Likewise Gloucester’s acknowledgment of a financial obligation to his bastard son: “His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge” (1.1.8). Sometimes moral agency is just fiscal agency. It was exactly that for Montaigne, in his essay “On the affection of fathers for their children,” which was available, as we know, in Florio’s 1603 translation a year or two before Shakespeare wrote King Lear. Montaigne thought it was perfectly reasonable, in fact morally obligatory, for a father to take early retirement and disburse his estate among his children while he still has a grip on his rational faculties. It is cruelty and injustice not to receive them into a share and association in our goods, and as companions in the understanding of our domestic affairs . . . and not to cut down and restrict our own comforts in order to provide for theirs, since we have begotten them to that end. It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children, and let them meanwhile, for lack of means, lose their best years without making progress in public service and the knowledge of men.14

Shakespeare shows us what happens when Montaigne’s relatively comfortable cautions are stretched or magnified by the tragic imagination, applied to kings rather than to the burghers Montaigne apparently had in mind. To the latter’s insistence that No old age can be so decrepit and rancid in a person who has passed his life in honor as not to be venerable, especially to his children, whose souls he ought to have trained to their duty by reason, not by necessity and need nor by harshness and force,15

Shakespeare replies, yes it can and often is. The material emphases of Montaigne’s instructions to fathers remind us that money is often implicated in ideas about morality—or at least it was for him. The modern world has another approach to the kind of “legacy” the old should leave to the young. Its summation in Bobbio’s essay restores what might be for some a more “ethical” dimension (because unsullied by the taint of lucre) to this notion of legacy. The “new” currency is not property but wisdom.

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In static traditional societies that evolve slowly, an old person encapsulates a community’s cultural heritage more fully than any of its other members. The old person knows from experience what the others have yet to learn in terms of morals, customs, and the techniques of survival. The fundamental rules that govern community life, the family, work, moments of play, the treatment of diseases, attitudes to the next world, and relations with other groups do not change, and the skills involved are passed on from father to son. In developed societies, the accelerating change in both custom and the arts has completely overturned the relationship between those who possess knowledge and those who don’t. Increasingly the old are not in the know, while youth is, mainly because of its greater ability to learn.16

Because King Lear ends on a represented brink of modernity, a condition of accelerated change sprung in part by a breach in direct royal lineage, it is unclear whether the world of King Lear better fits Bobbio’s description of “traditional societies” or “developed societies.” It is also never clear, at least in King Lear, whether anyone, young or old, is completely in possession of anything that can be called “wisdom.” Edgar may be right when he says that he and his cohort shall never see so much or live so long: in this play, the consequence of change, of “progress” or progression, is that there’s nothing for the old to pass along to the young, and the young don’t last long enough to become old. King Lear’s inquiry about age-related wisdom is probably unanswerable, and that unanswerability may be one key to the play’s enduring resonance. Its relation to questions of moral agency, on the other hand, is not so deeply buried as to evade discovery. It has long been a critical commonplace to cite Lear’s moral culpability—his tragic agency—in setting the “love-test,” in dividing the kingdom, in taking early abdication, and in banishing Cordelia and Kent. Daughter Regan jumps quickly to reason that the king’s behavior in Act 1 reflects “the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself” (1.1.294–95) and that he gave over the State “in good time” (2.2.439). These lines, oddly enough, suggest that she knows her father better than he knows himself—an arrogance we have no particular reason to credit and hardly evidence of her perspicacity or superior insight—and that the old man was not entirely responsible for his behavior. Enough, I think, has been said about Lear’s refusal to hear what Cordelia and Kent are trying to tell him. Many crimes and moral transgressions are committed in this play. But the only move made to adjudicate them in anything like a civilized court is the one represented by inversion in the problematic “mock” trial in Lear’s hovel in 3.6. Critics generally and understandably dismiss Lear’s commentary there as the raving of a lunatic.17 As it may well be. (Notice that the three mad men—one genuinely mad, one professionally mad, and one pretending to be mad—all understand each other perfectly; no one in this exchange seems not to know what the other two


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are talking about, so “raving” may be in fact a perfectly appropriate form of discourse.) The old king certainly sounds mad, and his lunacy has satisfied many not only as an explanation of his actions but also as a fit consequence—some might say a morally fitting punishment—for his early actions in the play. Is the moral agency behind these horrific actions, or of the play’s subsequent actions, his alone? Is Lear the agent of his own despair and of his own madness? Does Gloucester deserve to have his eyes gouged out in his own home by his “guests”? Edgar seems to think so, citing the coincidence of Gloucester’s fate and his brother’s: “The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes” (5.3.170–71). “The oldest” may have “borne most,” but it’s not so easy to argue that they got what they deserved,18 or that they were the sole agents of this represented disintegration. As Kent says to the knight who reports the “unbonneted” Lear “contending with the fretful elements” (3.1.4–14), If on my credit you dare build so far To make your speed to Dover, you shall find Some that will thank you, making just report Of how unnatural and bemadding sorrow The King hath cause to plain. (3.1.31–35)

Clearly there are other (im)moral agents at work in this play, besides Lear and Gloucester, whose actions bring on what looks like madness. Lear’s “unbonneted” howling at the wind and rain is the keening of a traumatized human being, no less so than his howling at the end when he carries in Cordelia’s corpse. One way to understand the “mock trial” scene as well as the king’s confrontation with the storm is in terms currently used in discussions of post-traumatic stress-disorder. Cathy Caruth’s work on PTSD has interesting implications for reading this play. The disorder “takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts, or behaviors stemming from [an] event, . . . [which] is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. . . . [The] traumatic symptom cannot be interpreted, simply, as a distortion of reality, nor as the lending of unconscious meaning to a reality it wishes to ignore, nor as the repression of what once was wished.”19 This might serve as a reasonable explanation of what we hear in Lear’s mock trial. His earlier pleas (not, incidentally, much different from Edmund’s) to Nature and unnamed gods at several points in the play (1.4.267–81; 2.2.378–81; 2.2.461–67) have availed nothing. He calls upon once-familiar structures of order—courts, trials, classical hierarchies of judges and accusers, beadles and defendants. What we should notice about this scene, I think, is not that the king is mad but rather that the scene makes sense anyway. Structures of jurisprudence, the civic necessity of laws and courts and trials, and

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most important, the widespread hypocrisy societies use in “maintaining” orders everyone violates anyway all come under indictment in this scene. The trauma of psychological violence at the hands of his daughters, whether real (Goneril and Regan) or perceived (Cordelia), is replayed through the framework of a familiar judicial system of various crimes and punishments. Caruth’s terms are useful, I think, toward a synthesizing of these scenes in the middle of the play with something that is not only “not-mad” (or as Kent says of the Fool’s discourse, “not altogether fool” [1.4.151]), but makes perfectly good sense, considering what has happened up to that point. “Trauma . . . does not simply serve as record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned. . . . The ability to recover the past is thus closely and paradoxically tied up, in trauma, with the inability to have access to it. And this suggests that what returns in the flashback is . . . an event that is itself constituted, in part, by its lack of integration into consciousness.”20 What in psychoanalytic terms is called a “symptom” functions in dramatic terms as a trope. This play offers us quite a few such tropes for trauma ranging from individual representations (Goneril’s and Regan’s steady and systematic dismantling of their father’s estate and thus of their father, Cordelia’s excruciating “nothing,” Gloucester’s blinding violating all rules of hospitality) to macroevents: the king’s vivisection of the kingdom, the vault-cracking storm.21 Lear remembers his daughters’ bad behavior, and perhaps his own toward Cordelia (4.7.71–74), but does not seem to remember having abdicated; at least there is no mention of that, though he relives in his speeches much of the familial violation we have already seen and heard from the play’s beginning. The trauma occurred not only to the “gored state” but also to his own mind, so unthinkable was his triple act of stepping down, handing over, and banishing. He is still “every inch a king” holding court in the hovel, but cannot recall exactly how he got there. In Caruth’s terms, the horror of what has transpired cannot be absorbed or rendered intelligible through representation; “In its repeated imposition as both image and amnesia, the trauma thus seems to evoke the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence.”22 Perhaps this is one more implication of Edgar’s closing couplet; it isolates and frames the play’s ruptures at every level—state, family, individual. This play really has performed multiple traumas. Edgar’s line is a prediction, of course, and as such it has little impact on an unpredictable, as-yet-unknowable future. What it can express is an anxiety or anxiousness about what his new dual role of king and witness entails. Edgar had no genealogical warrant for this kingship; he’s simply the only one left of sufficient rank to take it up, and was Lear’s godson (2.1.91), a fact surprisingly unremarked in this play that spends so much time and poetry upon relationships. Thus far, he has no children with whom to play Lear’s love-game; the state has already been divided (“gored”); his envious and disenfranchised brother is dead. The damage of the play’s


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represented traumas has already been done. Of course, new damage is always possible and unpredictable: such futures are never made explicit at the ends of tragedies. Edgar cannot imagine more traumas than he has already seen, enough to last a longer lifetime than remains to him or to the others left standing. Of course, hardly anyone else is left standing. Kent says that he must shortly follow his master (5.3.320–21); that leaves only Albany and Edgar among the play’s major figures. Like other “remnants” at the ends of Shakespearean tragedies, they are left precisely because the play does not end with the deaths of the protagonists. It ends with the promise to bear witness. Commenting on Paul Celan’s observation that “no one bears witness for the witness,” Shoshana Felman adds: “To bear witness is to bear the solitude of a responsibility, and to bear the responsibility, precisely, of that solitude.”23 What Edgar is literally appointed to do, besides taking up crown and scepter, is to bear witness to what he has seen and lived, however briefly. Felman continues: The appointment to bear witness is, paradoxically enough, an appointment to transgress the confines of that isolated stance, to speak for others and to others. . . . Emmanuel Levinas can thus suggest that the witness’ speech is one that, by its very definition, transcends the witness who is but its medium, the medium of realization of the testimony. “The witness,” writes Levinas, “testifies to what has been said through him. Because the witness has said ‘here I am’ before the other.”24

Edgar’s appointment is neither the first nor the last instance of such closing testimonies in Shakespearean tragedy. Like Horatio, the Capulet/Montague statues, Antony for Brutus, Octavius for Antony and Cleopatra, Aufidius for Coriolanus, Edgar serves as a reiterative Shakespearean trope whose task it is to bear witness, to testify, as if the play itself were incomplete, a chorus to some other play or some other experience. Hamlet commissions Horatio not only to “tell [his] story” (5.2.333) but to tell a story that exceeds ordinary credibility and yet must be told, must not be forgotten. Some events will not make sense; all Horatio can “truly deliver” is a narrative Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and [forc’d] cause, And in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads. (5.2.381–85)

Horatio can deliver a tale, perhaps not as harrowing and blood-freezing as the one the Ghost failed to deliver (1.5.16), but no more sense-making, and beyond what he can tell, as Hamlet said, “the rest is silence” (5.2.357–58). All these

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speech acts translating unspeakable violence and violation make no sense, cannot be explained, any more than the Shoah can be explained. I survived, a witness, only to show you. You personally— To make you a witness.25

These lines were written to accompany one of dozens of drawings made by David Olère, a Polish Jew who had emigrated to Paris long before the war, and the only artist who survived the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camp. Arrested and assigned to the Sonderkommando, the corps of prisoners who moved the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria, he survived his assignment because his artistic and linguistic skills—he could draw and could also speak and write several languages—made him especially useful to the SS officers. No photographs were taken of the activities inside the crematoria; when he returned to Paris after the liberation, David committed the rest of his life and work to recording in his drawings and sculptures what he had seen and survived in the camp between 1943 and 1945, to testify on behalf of those who were murdered. Some of his portraits, scenes, and diagrams literally testified in the prosecution of numbers of Nazi war criminals. After he died in 1985 at the age of 83, his son Alexandre (who resumed the original spelling of the family name) donated his father’s work to Holocaust museums in Europe, Israel, and the Unites States. Alex wrote the poems collected in Witness and reproduced his father’s words: “I must survive. I walk and my assignment walks ahead of me. I am able to show, so I must show, so I will show or nobody else will.”26 David Olère was my cousin; his mother and my maternal grandfather were siblings. I met him when he was 82, in the last year of his life. We talked mostly about family. There was not much else to say on that afternoon. He had indeed “seen so much” and “borne most,” unspeakably “most”; he had lived so long, he said, to be “un témoin,” a witness. Genocide, alas, continues. A troupe of Rwandan actors recently revived Peter Weiss’s post-Auschwitz play, The Investigation, which coincidentally takes the form of a courtroom trial.27 They were shocked, they explained in a postperformance question-and-answer session, to learn that there had been another holocaust before their own in the 1990s. Much of that discussion focused on “testimony,” on “bearing witness.” “Testimony,” Felman writes, “seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be construed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our full frames of reference.”28 Testimony is not explanation; it tells, or rather “vow[s] to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth,”29 but it cannot rationalize nor offer “a completed statement, a totalizable account of . . . events.”30 Tzachi Zamir follows this line of thinking


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as well: “Knowledge is structuralized, meaning that if one does not undergo certain experiences, one never fully understands. King Lear also suggests that experiences matter not only epistemologically but also metaphysically.”31 I wonder whether Shakespeare’s original audience, including the king, would have been terrified by the images of disintegration at every level understood to be the organized universe. Is the play’s imagined dismantling of foundational principles the content as well as the context of its testimony to the unspeakable? In this context, also, Felman’s commentary is helpful. In a courtroom, testimony “is called for when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt, and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question. The legal model of the trial dramatizes, in this way, a contained, and culturally channeled, institutionalized, crisis of truth.”32 King Lear challenges various testimonies and their “crises of truth,” from the love-test in Act 1 to the mock trial in Act 4, when Edgar, still disguised, tells us in an aside that no testimony could convey what he sees and hears: “I would not take this from report; it is, / And my heart breaks at it” (4.6.141–42). What exactly is the “it” to which Edgar/Tom refers, implicit in his final lines as well: the eldest hath borne most [of what?]; we that are young / Shall never see so much [of what?] nor live so long [for what?]. What is this floating signifier that both eludes and provides the measure of significant human experience? The question begs another—to what does tragedy itself testify? What is the trauma it inscribes, reiterates, and commemorates? A generation ago, a handful of European theater theorists answered that question by intoning (in various accents): cruelty. For Antonin Artaud, writing in 1938, theater that mattered (in the West, only Jacobean tragedy) signaled “not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies [which was willful and unnecessary] . . . but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.”33 Jan Kott, echoing Artaud, observed that “the cruelty of Lear was to the Elizabethans a contemporary reality, and has remained real since. But it is a philosophical cruelty. … The cruelty of the absolute lies in demanding . . . a choice [between opposing values] and in imposing a situation which excludes the possibility of a compromise, and where one of the alternatives is death. The absolute is greedy and demands everything; the hero’s death is its confirmation.”34 For Bertold Brecht, the sufferings commemorated in great art “appall me because they are unnecessary.”35 These claims that tragedy signals something both cruel and unnecessary take the moral onus off the “character”— indeed, each of these theorists has argued against the notion of “character”—and situate it in something experiential, something that transcends (or transgresses or translates) the specificity of particular settings or circumstances. For Kott, it was nothing less than “the meaning of this journey [from cradle to grave], into the existence or non-existence of Heaven and Hell”:

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King Lear makes a tragic mockery of all eschatologies . . . of both Christian and secular theodicies; of cosmogony and of the rational view of history; of the gods and the good nature, of man made in “image and likeness”. In King Lear both the medieval and the Renaissance orders of established values disintegrate. All that remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime is the earth—empty and bleeding.36

I would not go as far as Kott does in reading Lear as absurdist avant la lettre, but I can recognize the urge to find some way of making moral order out of a play that insists so much on the dissolution of that order. The “established values” to which Kott refers exist—if they ever existed—in a network of relationships, familial and communal, that is systematically dismantled from the opening violations of the play forward. At every level, as Gloucester observes in Act 1, Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction—there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature—there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves . . . (1.2.106–14)

“We have seen the best of our time,” says the father in Act 1; “we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long,” says the son at the end. So the play is orderly after all, ending with a rhetorical confirmation of a point that was made with less thought and only coincidental evidence early on. Edgar’s last lines bear witness to a moral order he can only hope will not need reiteration. “We . . . / Shall never see so much nor live so long” honors the elderly dead; it also implies a promise that will sound familiar to survivors of the twentieth century: “Never again.”

Notes 1

2

3

4

Editorial commentary I have seen on these lines is generally limited to discussion of the probable speaker (Albany in Q; Edgar in F), a debate not relevant to my discussion. Quotations from King Lear follow the Arden 3 edition by R. A. Foakes (London: Thomson Learning, 1997). Poetics. Trans and ed. Kenneth A. Telford (Chicago: Regnery, 1961), Ch. 6, 1449b Quotations from Hamlet follow the Arden 3 edition by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). On the significance of communal memory, see Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 84–106, esp. 94–96 where his words aptly condense the “kernel” of Edgar’s lines: “This


5

6 7

8

9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29

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‘we’ is an enduring body that will survive after our personal death. We shall not be remembered personally, but we shall be remembered by taking part in events that will be remembered for their significance in the life of the collective.” Norberto Bobbio, Old Age and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 12–13. Bobbio, pp. 12–13. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 221. I thank Mario DiGangi for bringing this book to my attention. Quotations from 2 Henry IV follow the Arden edition by A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1981). Lawrence C. Becker, Reciprocity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 178. Abraham J. Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1967), pp. 75–76. See also Margalit, pp. 94–103. Heschel, p. 77. ibid., p. 77. ibid., p. 76. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 280. Montaigne, p. 281. Bobbio, p. 5. See Foakes’ Introduction, 133 and textual note at 3.6.17–55n. Even Lear rejects a draconian system that posits violent punishment for adultery: “The wren goes to’t and the small gilded fly / Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive” (4.6.111–12). On the large questions of “crime and punishment” represented in this play, it seems to me that Shakespeare offers no clear conclusion at the end where Kent and Edgar differently interpret the sight of Lear denying Cordelia’s death and calling for a mirror: “Is this the promised end? / Or image of that horror” (5.3.261–62). Foakes’ note to this line suggests that Kent’s line refers to Lear himself while Edgar’s invokes an apocalyptic image of the last judgment. Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 4–5. Caruth, pp. 151–52. On the play’s multiple instances of trauma-tropes, see Timothy Murray, Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, and Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 39–56. Caruth p. 153. Shoshana Felman “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching”. In Caruth, ed., p. 15. Felman, p. 15. Alexandre Oler, “Such a Labor Place,” p. 44. Oler, “The Death March,” Witness, p. 98. Adapted by Jean Baudrillard; performed in Kinyarwandan with English supertitles at Montclair State University, February 5, 2009. Felman, p. 16. Felman, p. 17.

126 30 31

32 33

34

35

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Felman, p. 16. Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 201. Felman, p. 17. The Theatre and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958), p. 79. Jan Kott, “King Lear or Endgame.” Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1966), pp. 130, 135. “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), p. 71. Kott, p. 147.

Part III

Moral Characters


Chapter 9

Quoting the Enemy: Character, Self-Interpretation, and the Question of Perspective in Shakespeare Mustapha Fahmi

An action in itself is perfectly devoid of value, it all depends on who performs it Nietzsche, The Will to Power

For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, Whose end, both at first and now, was and is . . . to show virtue her feature . . . Hamlet (3.2.19–23)

In the opening chapter of Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor singles out “three axes” of ethical thinking: our obligations to others, our understandings of what makes a life worth living, and our sense of dignity.1 The first axis has to do with the kind of actions we ought to take in our dealings with those around us, the second concerns the kind of persons we want to be, and the third amounts to our ability to command other people’s good opinion. Character criticism of Shakespeare has often favoured the first axis, focusing on the actions a character takes or fails to take. Why does Richard II stop the duel? What prevents Hamlet from killing Claudius? Why does Isabella sacrifice her brother’s life? In what follows, I focus on the second and, to a limited extent, third axes, and on the way they are tied to the notion of self-interpretation. Through examples from Hamlet and Richard II, supplemented by references to other plays, I want to argue that Shakespeare’s characters make sense of themselves through a language of that constitutes their true identity. I draw on the hermeneutic tradition in general, but I am particularly indebted to Charles Taylor’s idea that self-interpretations are shaped by the pursuit of a certain good deemed higher than the other goods.2 The “good” here is what Taylor defines as “the object of our love or allegiance.”3 I also argue that there is a strong sense in which

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action-oriented criticism is incompatible with Shakespeare’s perspectivism, one of the most distinctive features of his dramatic vision. Nor am I indifferent to historical specificity. Shakespeare and Taylor belong to different cultures and different historical periods; the human subject they have in mind is hardly the same. However, I do believe that there are common characteristics and points of convergence as well as a serious possibility for dialogue across these differences.4

Nothing Good or Bad When Hamlet compares the world to a prison, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern disagree, ”we think not so, my lord” (Hamlet, 2.2.246). However, instead of trying to convince them of his point of view, or ridicule them, as he does with almost everyone in the play, the young prince acquiesces. “Why then ‘tis none to you,” he says, “for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.250–51). Despite its proverbial status, Hamlet’s statement has rarely been cited as an expression of one of the most fundamental laws of the Shakespeare universe, perspectivism. When we talk about perspectivism the name that usually springs to mind is Nietzsche, who has a great deal to say in his writings about this aspect of life. “Facts are precisely what there is not,” he says in The Will to Power, “only interpretations.5 But if facts do not exist, how can interpretations exist? An interpretation, one would argue, must be the interpretation of something. Shakespeare’s perspectivism is less controversial; it questions not so much the facts themselves as the objectivity and the validity of the values that we attribute to the facts. The existence of the world, for example, is a fact that few people would wish to deny, but whether the world is good or bad is a matter of perspective. For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are the prince’s fellows and the king’s trusted men, the world is a great place. With a murdered father, a stained mother, and a lost crown, Hamlet sees things differently. For him, the world is a prison though a “goodly one” (2.2.246). Nor is the importance of perspectivism limited to Hamlet’s powerful statement; it applies, in my view, to the very way in which the Bard structures his plays. One of the things we learn from the study of Shakespeare’s sources is that whenever he takes a story from someone else, and a story is always a story of someone doing something, he usually starts by removing any clear motive underlying the action. By so doing, he opens his characters’ actions and omissions to a variety of different readings. For example, in Hamlet’s source, we know why the prince feigns madness. He is still a child and needs to distract his enemy’s attention until he is old enough to translate his bloody thoughts into action. In Shakespeare’s play, the absence of an obvious motive for the prince’s antic disposition is the subject of a notorious debate.

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The other striking feature of Shakespeare’s treatment of his sources has to do with the question of perspective itself. Stories are always told from a particular perspective, and it is Shakespeare’s custom to add an opposite perspective to the one he inherits from his source. This not only makes his stance towards life more balanced than that of his authorities, it also allows one perspective to expose both the strengths and the weaknesses of the other. But the two perspectives are usually so balanced, so opposed, and so persuasive that it is almost impossible to know what Shakespeare thinks about his own characters. Is Henry V an ideal leader who inspires a whole nation and leads it to glory? Or is he a subtle and unscrupulous king who spares no means to legitimize a usurped crown? Is Coriolanus a great hero betrayed by those he has always defended and protected? Or is he a proud and condescending snob, who despises those to whom he owes his power and privileges? Quite often, readers adopt one of the perspectives of the drama and present it as the dramatist’s own point of view, which is probably the surest way to misread Shakespeare’s purpose. For no matter what perspective is chosen, the arguments in its favour will always be defeated by the textual evidence in support of the other perspective. But Shakespeare’s perspectivism, as I have already intimated, is a double-edged sword: a delight for readers, perhaps, but a problem for critics, and more particularly for directors, who feel compelled, when rendering the plays, to foreground one perspective at the expense of the other. Those who try to transpose the balanced view of the text onto the stage often end up offering stale and dull performances. One of the dominant features of conventional character criticism, as I have already pointed out, is that it tends to read literary characters in terms of the actions they take or fail to take, a type of reading that quite often leads to judgemental interpretations that rely on ideological formations such as the principles of social hierarchy. For an action can scarcely be good or bad, wise or foolish, significant or insignificant in itself. An action whose value is totally independent of human interpretation is an illusion. Indeed, we talk more about ourselves when we judge an action than about the action itself.6 A renewed character criticism, I propose, should concern itself a bit less with the action than with the ethical purpose that directs the action.

The Purpose of Playing In his critique of behaviorism, which seeks to give an objective account of a person through a scientific study of his or her behavior, Charles Taylor maintains that any attempt to develop a theory of human action that does not consider such distinctive human properties as self-understanding and selfinterpretation is incomplete.7 What distinguishes human beings is that we articulate a definition of who we are; we view ourselves as if we were characters

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in a novel written with our own words. “To ask who a person is, in abstraction from his or her self-interpretations,” says Taylor, “is to ask a misguided question, one to which there couldn’t be in principle an answer” (1989, p. 34). To be sure information available to an external observer, such as colour, gender, and social status might be interesting to know, but has only partial bearing on the way we make sense of our own characters from a first-personal point of view. It matters little if the way we view ourselves is totally erroneous; for even if it is, it still reflects the image we want to present, hence the essential link between selfinterpretation and ethics. Wanting to be recognized as someone in particular implies that we possess a specific image of the good, an image that we strive to embody. To interpret ourselves in this sense is not to give an accurate account of who we really are, but rather to give our life a direction towards a certain purpose that we regard as higher than the other purposes, and which we want other people to recognize. The capacity to distinguish between higher and lower goods is one of the underlying conditions of agency in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s agents seem to act out of a certain conviction that the good they pursue is not only higher and worthier than other goods, but also more likely to lead them to happiness. In Measure for Measure, for instance, Isabella must choose between two unhappy alternatives: sacrificing her brother’s life or her chastity. Without the slightest hesitation, she makes what most contemporary readers regard as the wrong choice: “more than our brother is our chastity” (3.1.184). In the world of Vienna, a world of sexual laxity and moral decadence, chastity is the pursued good that can give Isabella’s life a meaning and a direction towards self-affirmation and happiness. It is important to take Isabella’s choice seriously, for she is nothing if not chaste. Identity and the good cannot be separated. Nor can we invent our way of defining ourselves. Self-interpretations are generally made available to us by our culture, and are developed in interaction with other people: My discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others . . . My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others.8

We become selves, according to this account, through a continuous exchange with other people, real or imagined, especially those whose views matter to us, whether they are friends or enemies. This scarcely means that our interlocutors have to share our cultural background. Our dialogue may involve people from various cultures or various periods of time, or even figures dwelling in the realm of imagination. Don Quixote and Emma Bovary, for example, are powerful illustrations of the way in which people can define themselves through dialogue with fictional characters. Both the mad knight and the beautiful Emma undergo a severe identity crisis when they realize in the end that those around them do not view them the way they view themselves. What this brings to light is the

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crucial idea that we go through an identity crisis not so much when other people question who we really are as when they question who we want to be, or the role we strive to play in the theatrum mundi. The histrionic dimension of Shakespeare’s characterization is a commonplace in contemporary criticism. The plays abound in situations where individuation is reached by means of role-playing. Shakespeare’s men, it has been argued, play at being men, his women play at being women, his kings play at being kings.9 But to put the matter this way, I am afraid, is to confuse role-playing with self-interpretation. The theatrical roots of selfhood can hardly be denied; and the Bard never misses an opportunity to remind us of this psychological fact. The world, says Antonio to his friend Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice, is “a stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one.” To which Gratiano replies, “Let me play the fool! / With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come” (1.1.77–80). Coriolanus’ vision is scarcely different. “Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part and I am out,” he says when his mother kneels before him in supplication to save Rome from his long awaited revenge (Coriolanus, 5.3.40–41). But what can one infer from these examples? That human beings play at being themselves? Not really. Life, according to Shakespeare, is a theatre in which people move, like professional actors, from one role to another with nothing in between. The roles they choose reflect less their reality than the ideal they want to achieve. To live happily, according to Gratiano, is to fight the ravages of time with mirth and to laugh at everything and everyone, including oneself. But what happens when one stops acting? One simply loses all sense of identity and feels, like Coriolanus, totally in the void. Shakespeare’s characters do not play at being themselves, as some critics believe, they enact their own image of the good. Nor can acting, in this sense of course, be separated from the notion of dignity. To deprive people of speaking or walking or behaving publicly in a certain way is to deny them the possibility to conform to the image they have of themselves, which may amount to no less than a loss of dignity. To understand this is to understand, among other things, why Lear insists so much on keeping the appearance of a king even after giving away his entire kingdom. Without the title and the hundred knights to follow him, Lear will not command the respect and admiration of those who see him in public. And it is hardly surprising that the dissolution of Lear’s identity begins with a reference to his comportment: “Does any here know me? / This is not Lear / Does Lear walk thus, speak thus?” (King Lear, 1.4.206–08).

Back to the Future The character criticism I propose here is scarcely an invitation to sacrifice action in favour of self-interpretation; what I mean, rather, is that an action may be more comprehensible if read in the light of the image that the character has

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of himself or herself. What this implies as well is the idea that the motive for action or inaction does not have necessarily to lie in the character’s past; it may sometimes be located in the future too, that is, in the objective that directs the action or stops it. Even a notoriously complicated case such as Hamlet’s inaction may prove intelligible if read against the background of the young prince’s own self-definition. Conventional character criticism tends to read Hamlet’s character in terms of the action he fails to take: killing Claudius. But judging action or inaction is, as I have already pointed out, a way of talking about oneself. No wonder that most of the critics of the play, as it has quite often been mentioned, end up seeing in the young prince either their own image or the image of their concerns. Another aspect that Hamlet’s critics share has to do with their attempt to locate the hero’s problem in his past, giving little consequence to the purpose that shapes his life and gives it meaning. To be sure, the young prince has all sorts of trouble converting his thoughts into deeds, but his delay, his ambivalence, and his constant questioning are intelligible only if seen from the perspective of the intellectual life he wants to lead, and from which he draws the verbal brilliance that enables him to articulate his dilemma powerfully: Hamlet: What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused. (Hamlet, 4.4.33–39)

Hamlet defines himself as a man whose life is dedicated to philosophical reflection; and his crisis stems from the sad fact that those around him, with the exception of his friend Horatio, do not recognize his self-interpretation. In the eyes of the Ghost, of Claudius and of Ophelia, he is respectively an avenger, a challenger to the crown, and a lover. Ironically, Hamlet identifies with none of the above. He lacks language to articulate any of the roles given to him by the others. And if his best poetry in the play expresses his philosophical insights, the passages where he talks about his interest in the crown or, more particularly, his love for Ophelia are perhaps his poorest. Rather than a barrier to action, deep thinking is the good that gives Hamlet’s life a meaning and a direction. Hamlet does not procrastinate, he philosophizes. And he does so in the manner of a poet who sees things as if for the first time, taking nothing for granted. In this sense, such questions as “why does Hamlet refuse to act?” or “are the motives that Hamlet gives to account for his inaction plausible?” should probably be dropped in favour of questions like “how does Hamlet make sense of himself?” or simply “what kind of person does Hamlet want to be?”

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Playing God: The Case of Richard II The characters of Richard II seem to move in a world totally commanded by divine powers. Gods are expected to come down at any moment and intervene in people’s affairs, or send their angels to support the legitimate king and punish the rebels (Richard II, 3.2.60–62). The king compares himself to Christ on a number of occasions; and Bolingbroke and his followers are Judases (4.1.170), or sometimes Pilates trying in vain to wash their hands of the horrible crime of deposing another god (4.1.239–42). Indeed, the play in its entirety appears to be the tragedy of a man who defines himself as a god on earth, only to realize in the end that few people around him recognize his self-definition. Richard’s belief in the sanctity of his position has provoked the indignation not only of his enemies but also of a number of critics. Some of these critics have gone so far in their indignation as to use Lancastrian arguments—sometimes Lancastrian words—to condemn the king. Hershel Baker says that, Richard has nothing but his royal birth and title to justify his misbehavior, and these are not enough to save him from the consequences of his crimes and follies. He acts flippantly toward Bolingbroke and Mowbray, insolently toward his uncles Gaunt and York, and illegally toward his banished cousin. Dissolute and avaricious, and “basely led / By flatterers,” he converts his “sceptered isle” into a “pelting farm” and himself into the “landlord” of the realm.10

Besides taking at face value Gaunt’s judgement, which is certainly obscured by his son’s banishment, Baker seems as well to take literally what most editors of the play consider to be no more than a metaphorical exaggeration of a usual practice. Richard does not “farm” his whole “royal realm” (1.4.45), he merely grants the profits from the royal taxes to particular persons in exchange for an immediate sum of money to finance the war. This right is usually granted to the highest bidder. But if Richard’s detractors see things from a Lancastrian point of view, his admirers tend to emphasize the Yorkist argument of legitimacy. Thus, David Bevington maintains that, Richard is consistently more impressive and majestic in appearance than his rival Bolingbroke . . . He eloquently expounds a sacramental view of kingship, according to which “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off an anointed king.” Bolingbroke can depose Richard but can never capture the aura of majesty that Richard possesses; Bolingbroke may succeed politically, but only at the expense of desecrating an idea.11

What these readings (and dozens of others like them) suggest is that asking whether Richard is a good or a bad person depends on the framework of evaluations within which we articulate opinions of good or bad, right or wrong.

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The passages quoted above are more likely to give us an insight into their authors’ moral values than to provide any deeper insight into the king’s character. The answer might as well depend upon our ability to see through Shakespeare’s perspectivism, and to resist condemning the king by quoting his enemies or celebrating him by quoting his friends. It is crucial then for a better understanding of the play to consider the way Richard views himself rather than the way he is viewed by the others, especially his enemies. Self-interpretation is the royal road to character. The play opens with a duel: two mighty lords, Bolingbroke and Mowbray, accuse each other of high treason in the presence of the king and are ready to die in single combat to prove who is right (1.1.46). Richard takes great delight in the show taking place in front of him, as it allows him to enjoy the role of the one who can give life or death. After considering the consequences that the duel might have on the future of the two families as well as that of the realm, Richard asks Bolingbroke and Mowbray to “forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed” (1.1.156). But the two contenders have gone too far in their confrontation to accept a peaceful solution; they reject the king’s offer. What the dukes ignore, however, is that a suggestion made by God’s deputy is no less than a divine order. Refusing such an order is a serious challenge not only to Richard’s authority but also to God’s will. The situation in which Richard finds himself at this point in the play is scarcely unusual in Shakespeare. It has to do with that moment when every Shakespearean character is asked to make a choice between what he wants and what he should do, between his inclination and his duty, his preference and his safety. It is also the moment when an important question needs to be answered, a question upon which depend both the identity of the leader and the future of his subjects. It is Richard’s first dilemma. Whether or not to let the duel take place is the first of a series of crucial questions with which he is faced. But questions of this nature can be answered only against a background of intelligibility, a point of perspective from which one can decide what to accept and what to oppose. “To be able to answer for oneself,” says Taylor, “is to know where one stands, what one wants to answer.” (1989, p. 29) Richard defines himself as a god on earth, a definition that not only shapes the meanings things have for him, but also supplies him with the rich language of expression that he uses to answer both those who recognize his self-interpretation (the Yorkists) and those who do not (the Lancastrians). For Richard, there is no such thing as a competent or incompetent ruler; there are only legitimate kings and usurpers. A legitimate king cannot be wrong, for all his actions and decisions are sanctioned by heaven. A usurper cannot be right, since his very existence is a sacrilege. In other words, Richard has little choice as to the way in which the quarrel of the two dukes should be handled. If he is a god, then he must act as a god and demand total obedience. Any other decision would be a denial of his identity, for if not a god on earth there is little else that Richard would like to be.

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Richard’s decision to stop the confrontation and banish both Mowbray and Bolingbroke is hardly a popular decision among contemporary critics. Quite a few of them believe that the duel would have rid the king of one of the two powerful dukes. Perhaps. But to allow the duel to take place is also to bend to the contenders’ will, which is, in Richard’s eyes, a blow not only to his authority but also to his ability to command the respect of those around him. In this respect, the dukes’ refusal to be ruled by their sovereign has much more dangerous implications for Richard’s image than their banishment. It is important as well to note that those who blame the decision on Richard’s incompetence, and argue that the whole episode is meant to show how unfit for his office the king is, tend to judge Richard’s actions from their own moral space, or at least from the point of view of deontological ethics, according to which people ought to take actions in conformity with their duty: the king’s duty being the stability of the realm and the welfare of its people. But if the main purpose of studying a literary character is to understand his or her behavior and motives, then the critics, who disregard the kind of leader that Richard wants to be in favour of the actions that a good leader ought to take, are probably mistaken; for only when seen as part of an ethical orientation can a character’s action be elucidated. To be sure, shrewdness is one of the qualities of a good leader, but who said that Richard would want to be praised for his shrewdness? What Richard wants is to be recognized as God’s deputy. Nor does he need to be shrewd to remain in power. All he needs, actually, is to satisfy the moral requirements of the one virtue upon which his position depends, reciprocity, something he fails to do when he decides to deprive Bolingbroke of his inheritance. Richard’s crown, like Gaunt’s fortune and lands, is a gift of the past that the king owes less to his hard work than to tradition. The principle of reciprocity requires that all gifts be returned; yet there seems to be only one way that the gifts of the past can be returned, and that is by being bestowed on successor generations.12 When Richard stops the process by seizing his uncle’s lands, he not only provokes the nobility of England, but also strips his position of all legitimacy. If the right of inheritance is not that important, as Richard’s gesture seems to imply, then the rightful king does not have to be the first in line of succession. And this is what York tries to explain to the king: York: Take Hereford’s rights away, and take from time His charters, and his customary rights; Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day: Be not thyself. For how art thou a king But by fair sequence and succession. (2.1.195–99)

Giving increases the authority of the person who gives, and enables him to gain a certain control over the recipient.13 Richard’s failure to grant Bolingbroke what God, law and tradition have given him, decreases his authority and

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broaches a deep gap in the ground on which he stands; and it is only a matter of time before his royal carpet is pulled from under his feet. The aristocrats’ right to pass on their property to their heirs was protected by Magna Carta.14 Only conviction for treason could prevent an heir from getting his father’s property. The implication here is that Richard could have, in all legality, appropriated his uncle’s estates to finance his Irish wars, had he waited a little; for by the time of Gaunt’s death Bolingbroke is already preparing to invade his own country. But, unlike Henry V, Richard needs no tennis balls to put to execution what he already has in mind. He is above human laws, and therefore needs no justification. The Shakespearean character moves in a space of questions that have to be answered sooner or later. As long as his sense of himself is strong and the good he pursues is clear and well defined, the character will have no problem answering for himself. It is when his self-interpretation is questioned or denied altogether that his capacity to answer questions is lost, and with it his sense of identity. The crucial scene that takes place before Flint Castle best illustrates this situation. When Richard meets the rebels, one feels that he still has what Max Weber calls institutional charisma, the kind of charisma which is often “inherited, or passed along with accession to an office, or invested in an institution”.15 The rebels themselves, especially Bolingbroke, are amazed and intimidated by his appearance: Bolingbroke: See, see King Richard doth himself appear, As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fiery portal of the east, When he perceives the envious clouds are bent To dim his glory and to stain the track Of his bright passage of the Occident. (3.3.62–67)

Bolingbroke’s reaction here shows him as the champion of the old order, in which degree, priority and place are all observed. He does not seem to object to Richard’s staying in power as long as his right to inherit his father’s property is not taken away from him. It is very important to imagine this scene on stage. The First Folio’s stage direction tells us that Richard “enter[s] on the walls” which implies that at this point Richard assumes a Godlike position above the rebels. This not merely increases his authority, it strengthens as well his sense of who he is (3.3.72–81). If we judge by Northumberland’s deferential answer, the rebels seem to be immensely impressed by Richard’s confident speech. Bolingbroke wants no more than what has been taken away from him by the king, his father’s land and title. Richard seems disposed to accept this compromise, but not without some reluctance, as a compromise might affect the image he has of himself, and which he wants other people to recognize. And, just like Lear, he is much concerned with his comportment in public, something he

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directly associates with his sense of dignity: “We do debase ourselves, cousin, do we not, / To look so poorly, and to speak so fair?” (3.3.127–28). And the second major question that Richard must answer in the play is whether or not to accept compromise. What happens next is a remarkable example of the way in which a person loses his background of intelligibility and with it his capacity to take action. Before he even hears Bolingbroke’s message, Richard gives his answer, an answer that bears no relation whatever to what the rebels have to say: “What must the king do now? Must he submit? / The king shall do it. Must he be depos’d? / The king shall be contented. Must he lose / The name of king? A God’s name, let it go” (3.3.143–46). The dialogue between Richard and his peers is broken, because the relation between what has been uttered so far and his excessive reply is missing. Who talked about deposition? What the rebels want is a compromise; but Richard would rather leave the stage than play a role that is so decidedly below his dignity: “We are not born to sue but to command” (1.1.196). By asking him to “come down” and negotiate with them, the rebels force Richard to give up the part he has always played in favour of a new part, one in which he is less a god beyond human laws than a man among men. Richard cannot accept. Like Hamlet, he lacks the language to articulate the new part; and this is what he expresses admirably later: Richard: Alack, why am I sent for to a king Before I have shook off the regal thoughts Wherewith I reign’d? I hardly yet have learn’d To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my knee. (4.1.162–65)

A person like Richard, who places more importance on symbols than what the symbols stand for, would have laughed at the censors who decided during Elizabeth’s reign to remove the so-called “abdication scene” (4.1).16 The real abdication, at least for Richard himself, is his descent to the “base court” (3.3.178–82). What happens later in Westminster Hall is no more than the formal confirmation of an event that has taken place before ,and there is a sense in which the show staged by Richard is his own idea of a good revenge.17 Richard’s easy and wilful abdication could be usefully read in terms of Milan Kundera’s concept of litost. According to Kundera, litost is “a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self”.18 This feeling is usually followed by a strong desire for revenge, a desire to make the person who caused your misery share your torment. Now, if your counterpart is weaker than yourself, you merely insult him or her under false pretences. In other words, if two of your subjects offend you by declining your offer, you banish them and say that it is in order to avoid another civil war(1.3.125–39). But if your counterpart is stronger, if he has a whole army behind him, you avenge yourself by destroying yourself. Litost, in this sense, is an attempt to seek revenge through selfdestruction; and a man obsessed with litost, whether his name is Richard or

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Werther, will always opt for the worst defeat, his consolation being that those who have caused his torment and misery will regret their deeds or get punished by some providential power. What this suggests is the idea that those like Richard who suffer from litost are constantly in dialogue with a “super-addressee” beyond their present interlocutors: somebody will one day understand their behavior. In this light, Richard’s self-dramatization and self-pity are not so much addressed to his enemies as to an eventual audience, those who will remember his abdication with regret when they see the “disaster” it has caused England and the pains it has inflicted upon its people. Richard is not totally wrong: in 1 Henry IV, Northumberland prays God to forgive him for the role he played in the deposition of “the unhappy king” (1.3.146), and Hotspur calls Richard “that sweet lovely rose” (1.3.173).

Notes 1

2 3 4

5

6

7

8 9

10

11 12

13 14

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 15. pp. 45–76. p. 3 My work on Shakespeare in general is deeply influenced by Michael Bristol’s philosophical criticism. In 1996, when the departments of English throughout North America were still busy historicizing Shakespeare’s plays, Bristol gave a seminar at McGill University called “Shakespeare and Moral Agency.” To me, as well as to the other graduate students attending the seminar, the language used by Bristol to make sense of the plays was so fresh that the plays themselves looked new, the work of a newly discovered dramatist. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) p. 267. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 468. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers 1: Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 45–76 . Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord: Anansi, 1996), p. 231. Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 160 . Herschel Baker, (1974) “Introduction to Richard II,” The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 801. Bevington 1988. Lawrence Becker, Reciprocity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 231. Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 142. Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Introduction to Richard II,” The Norton Shakespeare (based on the Oxford edition), gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 946.

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18

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Charles Lindholm, Charisma (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 24. Baker, 1974, p. 801. Thomas F. Laan, Role-playing in Shakespeare (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 122. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 122.

Chapter 10

The Fool, the Blind, and the Jew Tzachi Zamir

“Don’t look down! A fool never attempts to hide his humiliation. On the contrary, he lets others perceive it as clearly as possible. I know, we all know, that you cannot sing in Armenian! What just took place was a pathetic effort on your part to pretend to do so! Now, look up!”1

An obtuse son plays a cruel and tasteless joke on his blind father (The Merchant of Venice, Act 2). The son (Launcelot) has been away from home for a long time. The father (Gobbo) is seeking directions to his son’s house. Launcelot first provides meaningless directions. He then informs Gobbo that his son is dead. Once the joke goes too far, Launcelot discloses his true identity to his grieving father: Launcelot: Do you not know me, father? Gobbo: Alack sir, I am sand-blind, I know you not. Launcelot: . . . Well, old man, I will tell you news of your son, —[kneels.] Give me your blessing,—truth will come to light, murder cannot be hid long, a man’s son may, but in the end truth will out. Gobbo: Pray you sir stand up, I am sure you are not Launcelot my boy. Launcelot: Pray you let’s have no more fooling about it, but give me your blessing: I am Launcelot your boy that was, your son that is, your child that shall be. Gobbo: I cannot think you are my son. Launcelot: I know not what I shall think of that: but I am Launcelot the Jew’s man, and I am sure Margery your wife is my mother. Gobbo: Her name is Margery indeed,—I’ll be sworn, if thou be Launcelot, thou art my own flesh and blood . . . (2.2.79–88).2

This essay will offer an analysis of the humor in this exchange. I know that performing such close-reading will not escape censure. The interpreter of laughter is doomed to be regarded either as prudish or obsessively cerebral.

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I am willing to risk these ascriptions since I believe that the philosophical payoffs of such analysis offset a compromised reputation. *** Apart from poking fun at another’s disability, the Launcelot-Gobbo exchange is a farcical re-enactment of a tragic recognition scene. The scene foregrounds a consciously theatricalized sense of mutual acknowledgment. Like Lear’s recognition of Cordelia (“I think this lady/ To be my child Cordelia” [4.7]), Gobbo is wrenched out of grief and despair into acknowledging his son, reciprocating Launcelot’s burlesque self-revelation (“your boy that was, your son that is, your child that shall be”). The joke is that prior to the ostensibly moving acknowledgment, Gobbo coldly rejects Launcelot (“I cannot think you are my son”). The biblical allusion to the kneeling Jacob seeking a patriarchal blessing from blind Isaac, the echo of Job in Gobbo’s name, the preposterously chivalric undertones in the name ‘Launcelot,’ the Jew’s servant, the tacit invocation of the Gloria of the Prayer Book (“As it was in the beginning, is now, and euer shall be”),3 and the echoes of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy,4 all intensify a sense of ludicrous bombast. If the exchange was intended to move us, if it was in fact of a tragic nature, Launcelot’s recognition of his father should have been immediately reciprocated by the father’s acknowledgment of his son. Gobbo’s denial of filial connections with his son spoils Launcelot’s dramatic orchestration of the scene. Theatre is here satirizing one of its own genres. It mocks the theatricality of gestures through which tragedy structures intimacy. We are granted an amusing unilateral scene of “tragic” recognition. “I was, am and will be your son!” cries Launcelot in a language that mimics the pathos of reunion. “No you are not!” retorts his perplexed and uninspired father. Things degenerate even further. It is part of a fool’s charm that his deeds turn awry. Even a practical joke backfires. Launcelot’s jollity at staging the mock recognition is followed by the suggestion that his father has been cuckolded. Gobbo: I cannot think you are my son. Launcelot: I know not what I shall think of that. . . . I am sure Margery your wife is my mother”.

The text offers several options to the actor playing Launcelot. He can choose to deliver “I know not what I shall think of that” as a tease. He can also express shock at the discovery of his mother’s unfaithfulness (he assured the audience that she was “an honest woman” a few moments ago, in line 15). For the audience the effect is much the same. Either the joke boomerangs through Launcelot’s discovery that he is a bastard, or Launcelot’s amusement at his father’s cuckoldry is pathetic given his blindness to its consequences in terms of his own status.

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Ideally, reunion should involve a deepening of the value of another; in the light of new knowledge, the relationship is purified and reborn. Launcelot is obviously not undergoing any of this. His father spoils the comedy by turning the recognition scene from a theatricalized spectacle jokingly staged into the tedious and anxiety-ridden matter of producing proof. The witty superiority required for satire is beyond the reach of a fool like Launcelot, who is immediately drawn down from the safe position of a haughty wit into sweaty entanglements. Thus, the comic movement ignited by the exchange entails a twofold collapse of theatrical genres. Tragedy is deflated by satire. Satire then opens up to the disturbing possibility that the one satirizing is in danger of being exposed as a bastard. The first step to analyzing such humor is to recognize that the comic is a language designed to touch, among many things, powerful anxieties. When possible, analysis should thus seek to connect the planned creation of an occasion for laughter with particular and distinct anxieties being tapped. Such a framework yields important outcroppings in understanding the comic effect produced in this particular scene. The reach of the first comic kernel is deep. By momentarily mocking tragic reunion, comic distance addresses a particular histrionics of emotion. It also undermines the epistemology of value implied by tragic recognition (learning through suffering, the birth of fresh apprehension, the crystallization of value). In tragedy one learns through suffering; distance and pain genuinely effect a sharpening of values. Tragedy thus presupposes that depth exists, that the meaning of another can be vividly apprehended, that values are not merely skin deep, and that we would divine this if the veil of daily obtuseness were lifted through pain’s capacity to occasion such an awakening. Such assumptions are comforting, especially when contrasted to the dismal alternative: there is no intensity or depth. Nor is there a state in which the other attains the significance which he has always justly merited. We ourselves will never be fully acknowledged. By satirizing tragic recognition firstly through hyperbole, secondly, by making it unilateral and thirdly, by its degeneration into a banal fare of misunderstanding and worry, the Gobbo-Launcelot exchange fleetingly yet effectively touches upon the fear that the ordinary, benumbing, tiresome hustle and bustle is all that exists. The second comic kernel, the fool’s inability to sustain the satire, partakes of the general pattern of clownish humor. The fool overreaches and then falls flat on his face, completely exposed. Gobbo furnishes the unimpressive foil for Launcelot’s failure. Wedding fools to each other is a staple of Shakespeare’s artistry. Doubling or tripling professional fools, buffoons, and ironists, Shakespeare constructs momentary hierarchies between them that, once pretentiously erected, are then skillfully collapsed, delighting the onlooker. Launcelot does not, for instance, realize that by tricking his blind father for his audience’s pleasure, he is not merely establishing his own superiority through


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his father’s shame. Like children who aim to provoke laughter by slapping themselves, Launcelot is unwittingly joking at his own expense and humiliation.5 That the audience then unexpectedly becomes privy to Gobbo’s denial of paternity vis-à-vis Launcelot and thus jeopardizes the latter’s legitimacy turns the tables. Launcelot’s condescending confidence is eroded. By positioning satire itself beyond Launcelot’s reach, comedy undermines a different comforting thought than the one unsettled by the first comic kernel above. Satire pivots around our ability to detach ourselves and watch life’s commotion from afar. Disinterestedly realizing our limitations, we are bemused by our shortcomings. The accessibility of such a vantage point entails also the availability of wisdom, where wisdom is understood as the ability to serenely contemplate things from a distance.6 Satirizing tragedy (the first comic kernel) establishes distance from the theatricality of emotional gesture and a comforting epistemology of value. A failure in this parody (the second kernel) has comic consequences because it unleashes the second distinct anxiety that such a distance cannot be maintained. Wisdom’s vantage point is accessible only momentarily. Launcelot’s incapacity to maintain comedy is itself comic. The inability to uphold the distance associated with wisdom awakens the disturbing prospect that we must reconcile ourselves to our foolishness rather than flatter ourselves for those moments of wisdom intimated by the possibility of satire.

The Blind and the Foolish The strands of this short but immensely pregnant comic exchange hinge on theatrical genres. Tragedy and satire are being unsettled by undermining the optimism upon which they rely. Tragedy implies that depth of emotion and value exist. Satire assumes that wisdom is both possible and accessible. Both theatrical genres are being undercut. The problematization itself is achieved by a third theatrical convention: the fool. A fool, at least this kind of fool (not the masked philosophers-in-a-coxcomb type such as Lear’s fool, Hamlet’s gravedigger or As You Like It’s Touchstone), is a man inescapably inhabiting the space of shame. In this particular exchange, one of the fools (Gobbo) is blind. This enables the fool-type not only to mobilize the undermining of dramatic genres, but also to occasion self-criticism. Fool-humor in this scene is self-reflexive, articulating its own moral dubiousness. We access this dimension once we no longer take for granted the soundness of the underlying assumption of the fool convention: the legitimacy (moral, aesthetic) of staging and taking delight in the intellectual inferiority of another. Indeed, evidence suggests that pitying fools rather than mocking them, was not an unknown experience for Elizabethans.7 Shakespeare delineates in this scene a profound overlap between the fool and the blind. Our awareness of the disturbing nature of Launcelot’s mockery of a physical limitation to some

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degree hampers laughter at a mental limitation. Indeed, in some performances, for example, Trevor Nunn’s 1999 production, Gobbo (played by Oscar James) is crushed to such an extent upon learning of his son’s death, that the scene would probably not elicit any laughter. “. . . there’s no denying the pain that [Launcelot] Gobbo inflicts on his blind father,” says actor Christopher Luscombe on playing the role, “. . . it seemed important to face up to this unattractive trait in the character and not smooth it out to suit our 90s sensibilities.”8 By having a fool pranking at the expense of the blind, Shakespeare is, on one level, breaking up the complex idea of the “natural” fool as a person who “in the real world . . . made his living by exploiting his defects.”9 A son mocking his blind father acts out the usually self-contained structure of the imbecile/ “innocent”/clown-dwarf who capitalizes on his own deformity. On another level Shakespeare implements a sanctioning of fool-humor as such, conceived as well-deserved retribution. We may laugh at Launcelot because a son who manipulates his blind father deserves punishment. But beyond nemesis, Shakespeare also reflects back to the audience an unsettling dimension of comic spectatorship, highlighting the implications of the aesthetic consumption of fools as morally legitimate comic targets. This last operation is no longer funny. It is a process wherein the explicit staged material is being tacitly duplicated between real spectators and staged fictional matter (Launcelot wallows in his father’s physical limitation; we revel in his mental one). The parallelism between intellectual and physical limitations discloses a possible source of the dramatic effectiveness of buffoons. Ridiculing a blind man entails casting a comic gaze upon someone who is not himself a spectator. The blind person cannot reciprocate another’s look, cannot even recognize his own flesh and blood. Could the limitations of fools effect the same kind of comforting distance, allowing spectators to, in Cavell’s sense, remain unacknowledged or, in Nietzsche’s sense, merge with the Dionysian? Safely tucked in unparticularized superiority, the fool enables his audience to remain undisclosed, escaping specificity and individuation. We are merely above his reach. Even when the fool permits himself to look back at us, ignoring the fourth wall, he perceives only a relationship in which he is inescapably in thrall to his audience’s good will. By casting himself as completely and helplessly otherdefined, by allowing the audience to be unreachably beyond him, the fool, through his own highly particular exposure, enables the audience to dissolve into an undifferentiated, unperceivable superiority. Theatre thus offers not merely a union of the elect but a momentary escape from the burden of particularized personal experience and the weight of being individually perceived. De-individuating the audience through comic effect allows advancing our understanding of comic superiority. Shakespeare’s coupling of the fool and the blind enables rethinking the well-known Hobbesian theory of laughter as superiority (“The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from


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some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”)10 Pace Hobbes, we do not laugh simply because we are rendered superior. We seek superiority rather, because it is a state occasioning the pleasure of release from one’s particular selfhood. At the same time, the unindividuated audience is being directly and complexly addressed. “Mark me now,” says Launcelot: “now will I raise the waters”. Launcelot draws on the convention of the aside to, in effect, offer a play for the audience in which his father will be made to cry (hyperbolically “raising the waters”). Inviting the audience to witness a cruel prank is also a means for making the audience party to the ruse, even a cause of it. The audience is allowed to maintain moral distance by censuring Launcelot. Rhetorically, such a process is widespread in the theatre: appease the audience’s possible moral misgivings regarding its own delight at performed cruelty. Achieve this by allowing the audience to direct its moral condemnation at a character rather than at itself and the dubiousness of its own voyeuristic pleasure. A fool like Launcelot can succeed even more in deepening our resistance to pleasure in cruelty because, unlike villains like Richard III or Iago, he does not exert fascination. He lacks the charisma that would otherwise hamper our own best judgment. On the contrary, there is nothing impressive about the Jew’s servant. Launcelot was introduced moments ago by making a travesty of his deliberation whether or not to leave the Jew through an abysmal parody of a deliberation speech. He facilitates distance (and thereby illicit pleasure) by yoking together the superiority felt towards a fool to a withdrawal from empathy when he mocks his blind father. We should obviously not be surprised to witness theatre transforming into an imaginative space for the impermissible. Fiction and theatre often invoke an overly sharp didactic stance in order to facilitate immoral identification. Shakespeare elsewhere draws out morally dubious responses and interests in such ways. The uncontestable moral condemnation of Tarquin and rape in The Rape of Lucrece, for example, allows the narrator to smoothly glide into erotically suffused descriptions of a sleeping woman’s body. Falstaff’s clustering the deadly sins of gluttony, sloth, avarice and pride, unequivocally determines his immoral status, inscribing it into his incontinent flesh. At the same time his inferior status enables him to marshal a scathing critique of the chivalric values that control the worthier characters around him. Launcelot’s summoning of the audience in his aside differs from these examples. “Mark me now” is unnecessary in terms of the information required for the success of the joke. We already know that he is Gobbo’s son. We would readily see that he is playing a joke on his father when he tells Gobbo that his son is dead. “Mark me now” is aimed at pacifying the audience, inviting it to be a party to a scene, but also reassuring it of its own spectatorship, rather than its complicity. “You will only be watching” is what Launcelot seems to be telling us, constituting us as mere watchers and constituting spectatorship as a position detached from moral

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agency. The status of uninvolved onlooker is rendered morally acceptable, whereas agency entails responsibility. The idea of a distinction between imagining/watching and agency is a mirage. The status of watching is, undoubtedly, a less innocent position. It involves imaginative participation and a mode of objectionable pleasure-seeking. It also occasions the prank Launcelot plays. On a deeper level, it tacitly commissions the very writing, performing and staging of the scene. Comic “release,” comedy as a playing out of the morally impermissible, depends in this instance upon restricting morality to action rather than witnessing. Launcelot’s prologue to his prank renders visible a link between theatricality and the illusion of the suspension of moral agency. Such a withdrawal from moral responsibility is not some unproblematic structural given of spectatorship but is itself negotiable, and needs sometimes to be established by theatre’s rhetoric. Theatre edifies, as numerous defenders of it have argued throughout the ages. But, as its detractors have claimed, it also traffics with a fantasy of the capacity to shed moral responsibility within its walls. One of theatre’s more subtle manipulations involves pretending that the audience is not really there. Morally unburdened, invisible, released from the frosty grip of particularized agency, one can laugh at the blind and enjoy the witticisms of a murderer. The grim reality is that there are no permissible holidays one can take from moral responsibility.

Foolishness and Liminality Launcelot will be immediately aided by Gobbo to switch from his former master to serving Bassanio, thus becoming yet another constituent of a plethora of goods flowing from Shylock into his Christian context. He thus participates in the play’s progressive correction of the distortion entailed by the existence of a rich Jew. Shylock’s daughter elopes and converts. He loses his money. He is forced to become a Christian. Relocating into Bassanio’s service, Launcelot importantly contributes to the movement of parental, religious and pecuniary capital by mending the structural—possibly even religious—oxymoron of a Christian serving a Jew (“For I am a Jew if I serve the Jew any longer” he angrily declares as he walks towards Bassanio). For Falstaff, in another play, the lowest imaginable existence is that of a Jew—“I am a Jew else: an Ebrew Jew” (1 Henry IV, 2.6.152–153). Launcelot’s position is even more inferior. Obsessively, the Merchant’s text situates him again and again in the indigestible position of being “the Jew’s man.” He is described as “serving” the Jew, calling Shylock “the Jew, my master.” Given Launcelot’s ironically chivalrous name, such self-positioning is even more degrading. Anomalies proliferate when Lorenzo later admonishes Launcelot for “getting up of the negro’s belly: the Moor is with child by you Launcelot!” (3.5. 35).


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We then suspect that this clown is morally reckless. Launcelot marks an unstable liminality between seemingly unbridgeable worlds (Christian-Jew/Mooress, white/black), casually crossing over insurmountable cultural divides: Lorenzo: Whither goest thou? Launcelot: Marry, sir, to bid my old master the Jew to sup tonight with my new master the Christian. (2.4.16–18)

Proudly declaring the religious affiliation of his new master, Launcelot’s language heightens, but at the same time trivializes religious affiliation. Judaism and Christianity strike us as no more than X’s and Y’s, interchangeable variants in a self-serving calculus. The shifting back and forth between Jewish and Christian masters and his indifference at impregnating a mooress enables this clown and his humor to erode the rigid differentiating categories that seem to govern so many of the other characters. “Seem” should remind us that some of the strongest moments in the play involve a crossing over (Portia and Nerissa would cross gendered boundaries, Jessica trespasses a religious one, Bassanio woos a woman outside the pale of his social position and Shylock, in the most famous speech of the play, would appeal to constitutional sameness and fluidity between Jews and Christians and, by implication, between human beings in general). Yet these other transitions are marked by the gravity of the context (the harsh legal context of the trial, the genuine erotic energies that characterize Portia’s and Bassanio’s relationship or the one between Jessica and Lorenzo, the real pain animating Shylock’s lines). Launcelot, on the other hand, expresses flippant disregard for the all-important social categories he travels between and which his culture strives so hard to set apart (then and now). The clown’s function here is not merely to destabilize or overturn some given cultural hierarchy. It is to undermine categorization as such. Launcelot’s cavalier gallop between religions and skin colors forms a comic corollary to Shylock’s plea for human sameness. Launcelot’s capacity to gear his asides to collapse the audience-actor divide (“Mark me now”) enables him to even cross over from the space populated by fictional entities into the spectator’s nonfictional world, threatening to obliterate this last distinction as well. His father is perhaps even more subversive: Gobbo’s ignorance is such that he thinks that “Jew” is a proper name! (“I pray you, which is the way to Master Jew’s”? 2.2.36). Launcelot’s undermining of oppositions questions the very value of the categories that define subjective experience. When Portia and her maid cross over gendered borders, when Shylock demarcates a shared human experience that transcends religious affiliations, when Jessica frees herself from the old religion, when Bassanio woos a rich woman with borrowed money, the categories of class, religion and gender are being transcended. But, at the same time, such categories become entrenched in our mind. The dramatic effectiveness of

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Portia’s disguise in court depends upon the audience’s persistent awareness that she is a woman pretending to be a man. Shylock is so obsessively preoccupied with distancing himself from Christians in language (note his use of “moneys” in 1.3), deed, and space, that we question the sincerity of his transgressing speech, particularly given the irony of his advocating a diabolical cause while drawing on the arguments that uphold human equality. Trespassing socio-cultural boundaries, Portia, Shylock, Jessica and Bassanio paradoxically heighten our sense of them; Launcelot (and his father), on the other hand, render these divisions irrelevant.11

Wisdom and Pseudo-Wisdom This disregard for cultural or religious divides is intimately interwoven with a distrust of language, the vehicle through which distinctions are drawn and sustained. There are two different ways whereby language enables Shakespeare’s characters to seem to rise above life. The first is philosophical, solemn, respectful. It usually invokes some sententious generalizing about life. Macbeth associating life with empty role-playing, Prospero characterizing life as a dream, Hamlet situating “man” betwixt angels and beasts, Lear’s disenchanted musings over “unaccommodated man.” Memorable, frequently quoted, self-commending, this kind of philosophizing (usually bad philosophizing on the part of these characters) bespeaks the value of human life and the beauty of thought, even when the thoughts are wrong, simplistic or partial. Although often underlining life’s meaninglessness, such speeches also disclose life’s grandness by exhibiting the human capacity to create beauty through language. Well-crafted sentences interlock, flowing into each other on the rhythmic pulsation of iambic pentameter. Language is being celebrated. But then there is a second way in which Shakespeare’s characters move beyond (or below) life. It is revealed when language crumbles due to agonizing pain (Lear’s howling when he enters with dead Cordelia). It comes to the fore, too, when the grip of language and its categories is relaxed due to madness (Lear, Ophelia), or through witchcraft,12 or through the constitutional ignorance of a buffoon such as Launcelot. George Gordon has divided Shakespeare’s fools into two groups, those who control language and those who are controlled by it.13 Launcelot belongs in the latter (though he might fancy himself to belong to the former). See what happens when he introduces himself to the audience: Launcelot: Certainly, my conscience will serve me to run from this Jew my master: the fiend is at mine elbow, and tempts me, saying to me, “Gobbo, Launcelot Gobbo, good Launcelot,” or “good Gobbo,” or “good Launcelot Gobbo, use your legs, take the start, run away.” (2.2.1–5)


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To flee or not to flee? While hyperbolically presenting his agonizing dilemma— to stay or leave his Jewish master—Launcelot is sidetracked into irrelevancies. Which is the precise way in which he is named by the hypothetical fiend? Compare this state to the one of tragic heroes. For tragic characters, attaching a description to themselves, narrativization as such, is never a problem. The only important issue is which narrative is appropriate to them, pleading to others to remember them according to what they were rather than what they presently are (Othello or Antony come to mind). By contrast, Launcelot’s intention to convey a dilemma is thwarted. He is overpowered by the gap between himself and irrelevantly different terms through which he can be addressed. He is unable to tell a story. The smoothness of telling evades him. Anyone who systematically blunders when asked to tell a joke can sympathize with Launcelot’s social malfunction. But Launcelot’s failure does more than forge a momentary linkage between him and joke-bunglers. Shakespeare is exploiting the comic potential of sidetracking. A fool is unable to stick to a planned course of action. The discrepancy between narrative intention and actual telling highlights the capacity of language to attain control over its wielder. Rather than a docile expressive means, language turns into a formidable jinnee which, once released, exerts its resistance and may even overpower its users. The unruliness of language is a salient feature in Shakespeare’s plays. Mercutio is uncontrollably carried away in his Queen Mab speech. Prince Henry is unable to restrain his verbal creativity in describing Falstaff’s fatness. The pedants in Love’s Labors Lost take such great pains to find the precise Latin expression that they altogether lose the capacity to communicate, burying themselves under a pile of erudite words. Rather than taking resolute action, Hamlet becomes absorbed in eloquent bemoaning. Egeus describes in sumptuous detail the hateful candy which won his daughter to deceitful Lysander. Like the characters in cartoons that continue to energetically run when the ground is no longer beneath their feet, Shakespeare repeatedly allows his characters to be engulfed by signs that become dissociated from intention. Rather than exposing human weakness, the recurring pattern highlights the frailty of the quintessential human feature—language. Whereas language can ennoble the mind and become the means whereby Shakespeare mesmerized his age and ours, language is also that which can playfully enthrall, manipulate and debilitate, rendering us pathetically powerless. In the specific context of the Merchant, Launcelot not only instances the capacity to disregard the human/ social division into categories of gender, race, culture and religion but also exemplifies the capacity of language to assume control rather than be a mere means of human interaction. The exposure of the instability and unreliability of language contributes further to a rocking of the cultural divides that uphold the more solemn features of this play.

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Foolishness, Blindness, and Judaism How is the fool function related to the graver themes foregrounded by the Merchant? Is it, for instance, linked to the central role played by money and its potential to be literally replaced by human flesh in a proto-Capitalist economy? Is fool humor somehow connected to the celebration of the triumph of mercy and Christianity over the legalistic discourse of duties that is imposed upon Judaism, willy-nilly?14 I have already suggested that Launcelot’s disruptive liminality tacitly links him to Shylock’s “hath not a Jew eyes” speech. Launcelot’s blurring of the Christian-Jew or white-black polarities entails implementing in deed the sameness that Shylock’s speech seems to celebrate in memorable words: a human nexus that all people share, regardless of their skin color or their religious affiliation. But there is another connection forged between Launcelot and Shylock. Both are presented as limited. Shylock’s raspy insulation from the gospel of mercy which smoothly trickles from Portia’s lips to every listener’s hearty approval is not some personal disability pertaining only to him. Shylock instances the inaccessibility of Jews as such, confined as they are to a highly restricted sense of justice and revenge, unable to fathom the rich depths of agape and its power to transform personal relationships. “On what compulsion must I? Tell me that” (4.1.183), he demands of Portia, betraying his religion’s affiliation with the language of command and duty rather than with an experienced interpenetration of life and action with hope, faith, charity, mercy and love. Shylock’s inability to internalize Portia’s sermon reverberates with a far more ancestral inability of Jews to fathom the liberating language of Christ’s preaching. Shakespeare thus projects onto Shylock the same moral obtuseness one perceives in the Jews’ deafness in the New Testament: The sense conveyed is not one of comprehending the proposed morally novel content prior to its rejection. It is rather of some built-in inability to grasp the profoundness of the Gospel in the first place.15 Gobbo stands for physical limitation; Launcelot’s limitation is intellectual; Shylock’s is moral. Shylock cannot fathom the language of God even when it is thrust in his face. His obstinate refusal to make use of the chances repeatedly offered him to tone down his demand does not merely expose the unsalvageable hardened villain that Venice perceives, but conveys, even celebrates, a Jew’s incapacity to comprehend a superior moral language, one predicated not on justice or fairness but on love, a form of love that if it could only universally prevail, would render courts and law itself superfluous. Compassion towards Shylock can arise precisely because his insulation from grace lies beyond his control. In order to maintain our sympathies with the Christians under attack by the blood-sucking usurer, the Merchant must neutralize the possibility of pitying Shylock. Thus it mobilizes the same rhetoric we have noted before with regards to the clowns: Blind Gobbo was mercilessly manipulated by his son, who turns his father’s handicap into a source of (his)


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comic delight. Yet Launcelot fails to control his own lame jokes. He thereby falls short of the wit he believes he possesses. Such failures elicit our comic response. We were able to laugh freely because the play had already subtly dissociated us from Launcelot and the possibility of pitying him by pointing at his unscrupulousness. Similarly, the manipulation of Shylock’s moral limitation at the trial scene heightens the Christian spectator’s sense of moral superiority due to his confidence that he belongs to the right religion. Such a manipulation is rendered morally permissible through a progressive and systematic alienation of the audience from Shylock. A “cannibalistic” villain, Shylock instances, at the trial scene, the most gruesome anti-Semitic blood libels regarding Jewish ritualistic slaughter. Audiences have—at least from the nineteenth century on—responded to Shylock’s capacity to evoke understanding for his cause. “The poor man is wronged” exclaimed a moved spectator within the hearing of Heine.16 Yet no audience sympathizes enough with Shylock’s pain to wish him to actually succeed in obtaining the pound of flesh. Shylock basically attempts to compel a court of law to sanction, legitimate and audit a murder. He powerfully stages for the court and for us the monstrosity of a legally sanctioned immorality, an immorality constituted by the contract, the cornerstone of law. The more horrid the trial scene, the easier it becomes for the audience to follow and even endorse the didactic exploitation of a man’s moral limitation as well as the celebration of the moral abjection of his religion.

Moral Fantasies We know, and Shakespeare’s audience was well aware, too, that moral responsibility expires once a person is unable to prevent a reprehensible action due to a constitutional incapacity, be it physical or mental (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III. i). The Merchant is not a deterministic play. And yet the process I have described does hamper the ascription of responsibility to Shylock. Shakespeare weaves together two distinct threads that jointly undermine Shylock’s explicit acknowledgment of accountability (“My deeds upon my head”). The first relates to the crushing pain of losing a daughter, sufficient in itself to render his suit understandable. The second is the one surveyed earlier: Shylock’s inability to fathom any principle higher than justice. These movements, subtle yet influential, disturb the hierarchies that govern spectatorship. Ultimately, they threaten to sabotage the existing power scheme by undermining the moral condemnation of Shylock. At the same time, the play’s rhetoric prevents us from pursuing such routes. The play repeatedly obstructs the possibility of experiencing empathy towards Shylock whenever such a moment might arise. The Merchant is thus able to reconcile in one dramatically satisfying image a deservedly punished villain who, due to his

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religious physiology, was unable to act differently than he did. Such an achievement brings out the limits of staging moral agency. Suppose that Shylock was, in fact, a person rather than a theatricalized character. A moral assessment of his actions would then necessitate a further probing into his obsessive pursuit of Antonio’s flesh. We would wish to know more about Antonio’s actual involvement in Jessica’s elopement. We would have to factor in Shylock’s alternative routes for action, taking into account his dire predicament and the possibility that he was wronged. But Shylock is not a moral agent. He is part of an overall fictional creation. The audience, moreover, is not some ethics-debating society attempting to determine the moral rationale for Shylock’s deeds. Plays configure an overall impression shaped by numerous strands of meaning. Moral content certainly plays a part—sometimes a decisive part—in this process. But aesthetic distance often enables the entertaining of alien moral notions. We extend momentary sympathies which would and should be avoided in non-fictional contexts. To contemplate, understand or sympathize are obviously not the same as to justify. But the moral dimensions of theatrical response are too fraught to be neatly transferable to non-fictionalized moral agency. Shylock instances this hiatus between life and theatre. In life it would be implausible to demand punishment for actions that lie beyond the perpetrator’s control. One would have to demonstrate that enough control has been retained to warrant responsibility. In fiction, this tension does not have to be relaxed. On the contrary, the response can include a heightened sense of a character’s lack of responsibility (Shylock’s inability to grasp a superior spiritual content) coupled with a demand that he should be punished. In life, a moral evaluation should strive for clarification, consistency, generality, and the possibility of reapplication. In the theatre, moral response is often vague, conflictive, undecided. Such differences suggest that when moral or immoral conduct is being staged, when a moral response is being configured by the rhetoric of a play, when, in short, morality is being theatricalized, one should access the moral content with an eye wide open to theatre’s unique mode of addressing and illuminating moral content. Theatre often follows our moral intuition and is able to inform and clarify them for us. But theatre is also able to shuffle and shift these intuitions, to juggle and rearrange them in variegated ways. One such way is theatre’s capacity to fashion a fantasy out of our moral intuitions. The “villain” accommodates the fantasy of nothing more than inexcusable and unpardonable evil that merits categorical annihilation. The “fool” accommodates the fantasy of nothing more than structural inferiority. Theatrical types embody other fantasies: the pantaloon is nothing more than the unsympathetic obstacle to love. Such simplifications enable generation of the mirage of moral clarity. When touching upon morality, theatre thus involves not merely an aesthetically plausible presentation of moral agency. It also sometimes undertakes to create the space for moral fantasy, for moral evaluation unburdened by the clutter of details that plague any actual non-fictional evaluation. Few would oppose this contention. Bombarded as we are with countless


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cinematic productions that simplify a chunk of life by neatly separating the good from the bad, we need little convincing. Drama—theirs and ours—satisfies the need to consume fantasies of a moral space purged of the multilayered complexities of actual ethical evaluation, enabling public figures to then package an intricate reality through the deceptively simplified trappings that assimilate moral life into moral fantasy. Does Shakespeare allow us to develop a keener perception of the fine line dividing morality and moral fantasy? Failing this, does he, at least, help us realize when we are succumbing to the seductive simplifications of a moral fantasy? If he does, it is, again, through his fools and anti-heroes. One thinks of Falstaff’s “honor” speech or his defense of alcohol, of Edmund’s plea on behalf of bastards, or, in the Merchant, of Launcelot’s inability to fit himself either to a tragic or a comic articulation. Such episodes highlight a wedge inadvertently inserted between a character and a dominant ideological framework. Indeed, in moments such as these, anti-heroes bring out an implicit dimension of heroism as such: The “hero” is the one who manages to totally obliterate the gap between reality and ideology. Consider Prince Hal or Othello or Coriolanus. The hero is fully at home in a contingent cultural myth, the admirable, highly intelligent character who embodies an ideologically governed narrative, suppressing any fissures that threaten to open up between perceived complexities and the story to be lived. Like the villain, the hero appeals because he is a simplification. But whereas the villain invites condemnation by lacking attributes that would predictably mitigate our assurance regarding his blame, the hero resists or is altogether blind to the discrepancy between life and some culturally sanctioned narrative regarding that which makes life worthwhile. Heroes thus accommodate the fantasy of a smooth transition between life and a socially approved version of it. The Merchant’s audience is enticed into consuming the moral fantasy in which a villain limited by his social circumstances is nevertheless also morally responsible for his deeds. The experience of theatrical spectatorship does not prompt us to probe further the plausibility of this conflicted response. We thereby access the double nature of theatre’s relations to moral content. On the one hand, theatre may promote moral understanding by heightening and crystallizing values, by exposing latent movements that underlie moral life, or by sharpening sensitivities and exposing processes by which an opening up to others is attained. But, on the other hand, theatre can also hamper moral understanding, not only by obfuscating the distinction between moral life and moral fantasy, but also by feeding and creating such fantasies. Theatre thus contributes to and shapes a public life in which ethical complexities risk being subsumed under fictional categories and aesthetic processes. “Villainy,” the sought for “happy” or “tragic” end, the narrativization of life, they all risk simplifying and distorting complexities into moral myths, the distortions and simplifications used to maintain self-contradictory institutions. I am not subscribing to the more far-reaching Marxist attacks on theatre as a replaying

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of a culture’s ideology by theorists such as Brecht or Althusser.17 Nor am I trying to resuscitate the idea that we can and should draw on a non-aestheticized rendering of reality. There exists no mode of articulating moral life that is truly purged of the literary dimensions which are part and parcel of any attempt to narrativize non-fictional life in any satisfying and complex way. I am focusing rather on the ways whereby the Merchant exposes theatre’s contribution to the fictionalization of the moral imagination by creating a specific moral fantasy. But a lovely feature of the Merchant is how it also mobilizes a critique of life-following-drama patterns in the Launcelot-Gobbo exchange. The pinpricking in relation to tragedy and comedy from which I began ridicules dramatic genres and highlights life’s inability to mimic art. It is precisely this moral fantasy which renders the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech even more striking than some pithy and moving appeal to human sameness which ought to override religious differences. Shylock is not merely advocating equality or tolerance. He is detheatricalizing the category of a “Jew.” Judaism is not really a human category in the play. It is rather a type (“Enter Shylock the Jew”), a religiously colored subcategory of some villainous vice. Sentences such as “I hate him for he is a Christian,” or “I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him,” or “Cursed be my tribe if I forgive him,” leave little room for a different take on this man. But then, as often in Shakespeare, one suspects that he begins with some set type and then allows it to evolve without imposing a predetermined sense of its nature. It is then that the birth of a highly particularized character takes place. Demanding the audience to perceive the person underlying the Jew, with eyes, hands, senses, dimensions, affections and passions, Shylock is not merely undermining the importance ascribed to religious differences. Through what is in fact a highly repetitious speech, Shylock presses against the theatrical illusion by undermining the type he is supposed to peacefully embody. He invites, even compels his audience to acknowledge the particular character with its idiosyncratic speech, peeping behind the theatrical type, the submerged particular momentarily breaking the surface of a moral simplification. In momentarily annihilating the plausibility of his marginalization by his culture through his repetitive de-theatricalization of Judaism, Shylock duplicates the unsettling of norms, categories and cultural divides that was already set in motion by his servant.18

Notes 1

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A critique barked at me by Javier Katz, my instructor in a workshop on clowning and buffoonery in the Lecoq school of physical theatre in Tel-Aviv, Israel. The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series, J. R. Brown Ed. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001 [1955]). I shall use this version of the text throughout this essay.

The Fool, the Blind, and the Jew 3

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Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), p. 170. Brown’s commentary (Arden) calls attention to: “The Heauens are just, murder canot be hid: / Time is the author both of truth and right, / And time will bring this treacherie to light.” Kyd, Spanish Tragedy (2.6.58–60). Judith Rosenheim, “Making Friends of Stage and Page: A Response to Alan Rosen,” Connotations 1999/2000, 9.3: 257–68, p. 260). D. R. Robinson, “Wisdom Throughout the Ages,” in Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development, ed. R. J. Sternbeg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 13–24, particularly p. 20. James Black, “ Shakespeare’s Mastery of Fooling” in Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G.R. Hibbard, ed. J.C. Gray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 83. R. H. Goldsmith, Wise Fools in Shakespeare, Michigan State University Press: Michigan, 1963, p. 6. “Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost”, in Players of Shakespeare 4, Ed. R. Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 1998) p. 23. Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social & Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), p. 273. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. McPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 125. Roger Ellis “The Fool in Shakespeare: A Study in Alienation,” Critical Quarterly, 1968, 10:3: 245–68 claims that such indifference is a pretense. See Terry Eagleton’s reading of the language of Macbeth’s witches as hovering between sense and non-sense in William Shakespeare (Rereading Literature Series) ed., J. Elsom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 2–3. G. Gordon, Shakespearian Comedy and Other Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 64. Demarginalizing Launcelot begins with Dorothy C. Hockey’s rather diffident “The Patch is Kind Enough,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1959): pp. 448–50. See also J. Bulman’s Shakespeare in Performance: The Merchant of Venice, and Alan Rosen, “Impertinent Matters: Lancelot Gobbo and the Fortunes of Performance Criticism,” Connotations, 1998/9, 8.2: 217–31. Rosen mentions productions that eliminate Launcelot entirely and some that rendered him a pivotal character. In Komisarjevsky’s production (1930), he is the first and last character on stage. For other links between Gobbo’s blindness and the blindness of Judaism in light of the play’s invocation of biblical allusions, see Judith Rosenheim, “Allegorical Commentary in the Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies 24, 1996: pp. 156–210; John Scott Colley, “Launcelot, Jacob, and Esau: Old and New Law in ‘The Merchant of Venice’”, The Yearbook of English Studies, 10, 1980: pp. 181–89; Rene E. Fortin “Launcelot and the Uses of Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 14, No. 2, (1974): pp. 259–70. For this remark and a performance history, see Mahood’s introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare version of the play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), particularly p. 44.

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Louis Althusser, “‘The Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht—Notes on a Materialist Theatre,” Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: the Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 199–215. I am grateful to Sanford Budick, Elizabeth Freund and Talia Trainin for comments and criticisms on an earlier draft of this essay.

Chapter 11

“Unlucky Deeds” and the Shame of Othello Andrew Escobedo

In his final speech, Othello characterizes the events that have led to this point in the drama as “these unlucky deeds.”1 This sounds suspicious: how can holding a pillow to your wife’s face until she suffocates amount to “unlucky”? And beyond that, can a deed even be unlucky? We call events lucky or unlucky, but deeds are what we choose to do. “Unlucky deeds” may thus represent Othello’s bad faith effort to assuage his guilt through self-deception, what T.S. Eliot described, in reference to this final speech, as “the human will to see things as they are not.”2 With some interesting exceptions, subsequent critics have tended to follow Eliot in their evaluation of the moral questions raised by the play’s last scene. Critics are eager to demonstrate Othello’s bad faith, I think, in an effort to avoid letting him off the hook: his moral agency underscores the culpability of his freely chosen action. In terms of moral responsibility, luck had nothing to do with it. Yet there is a different possible implication lurking in the phrase “unlucky deeds,” namely, that our deeds do depend on luck to a considerable extent, luck that nonetheless does not allow us to disclaim moral responsibility for those deeds. Factors not entirely in our control may determine our actions and may produce consequences we did not foresee, yet these unlucky conditions will nonetheless sometimes saddle us with moral culpability. The man who drives home drunk deserves blame, but the man who kills a pedestrian while driving home drunk deserves more blame, even though the difference between the two is mere luck. We might draw a similar example from the plot of Othello: the lieutenant who becomes drunk on duty is blameworthy, but the drunk lieutenant who is provoked into a fight while on duty is more blameworthy. Again, the difference between the two lieutenants is one of luck.3 It is disturbing to grant this claim, but equally disturbing to deny it. The line between action and event becomes vanishingly small. The philosophers who write about the impact of chance on moral culpability have dubbed the phenomenon “moral luck,” and I suggest that it is a version of moral luck that Shakespeare has in mind when he puts the phrase “unlucky deeds” in Othello’s mouth.4 Othello is not

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trying to weasel out of the responsibility for murdering his innocent wife, but rather acknowledging that a man can be an instrument and an agent at the same moment. In the final scene of the play Othello also asks rhetorically, “who can control his fate?” Fate and luck, although we might initially think of them as opposed, play overlapping roles, both denying the agent full control over his actions. Tragedy is the place where the confluence of unlucky circumstance starts to seem like the product of a hostile fate. Yet tragic fate generally stops short of a fatality that would render the human will irrelevant, expressing instead a densely layered determinism that may disable the alternativity of choice but leaves intact the spontaneity of will. In Othello, fate is the product of a peculiar combination of one’s character and one’s luck. Specifically, the play asks us to take seriously the distasteful idea that a man of Othello’s character, faced with the unlucky circumstances in which he finds himself, has no choice but to kill his wife. It will take me some time to explain satisfactorily what I mean by claiming that Othello has “no choice,” but I can say from the outset that it does not mean immunity to moral responsibility. Rather, it suggests a different criterion of assessing such responsibility, one that relies partly on the pronouncement of Heracleitus that ethos anthropoi daimo-n: a man’s character is his fate. Shakespeare asks us to read this formula backwards as well as forwards. Criticism tends to account for Othello’s culpability in one of two ways. Some commentators offer psychological readings to reveal why he did it but not who he is. Others do focus on the question of character, but suggest that he becomes someone else in the final scene. The Moor’s “long spiritual death” involves “the acquisition of an alien sensibility and its principles,” argues Harold Skulsky.5 E. A. J. Honigmann, in an account of Othello’s secret motives, insists more generally that “in [Shakespeare’s] greatest tragedies the hero is invaded or possessed by an alien personality, and, challenged in his inmost being, appears to be ‘taken over’.”6 The “alien” in these sentences does a good deal of work: it sensibly avoids the idea that the hero’s character is inherently villainous (as Leavis came close to arguing about Othello),7 and it also suggests that the hero culpably fails to resist an outside influence. Yet “alien” misstates the relationship, in tragedy, between the daimo-n that possesses and the ethos that allows the possession to take place, eventually obliging the hero to own that possession as an act of will, if not exactly a “choice.” The manner in which a tragic agent ends up responsible for an external imposition emerges conveniently in Aristotle’s notion of hamartia. In Chapter 13 of the Poetics, Aristotle uses the concept of hamartia to describe our experience of the relation between a certain kind of moral character and a certain kind of action. If an extremely virtuous person suffers a downfall, the spectacle of undeserved (anaxion) suffering strikes us as merely disgusting, not piteous or fearful. Likewise, if an extremely wicked person suffers a downfall, no one feels pity for deserved suffering. “This leaves,” writes Aristotle,

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“the person in-between these cases. Such a person is someone not preeminent in virtue and justice, and one who falls into adversity not through evil and depravity, but through a kind of error [hamartia].”8 This error, a misjudgment or missing the mark (as the etymology of the word suggests), does not signal degenerate character, but it does reflect the imperfection of a character whose errors produce suffering that is not simply anaxion.9 It is an act not exactly intended or chosen that nonetheless sticks to the agent. A version of hamartia also makes an appearance in the Rhetoric (1374b6), but I am most interested in the role it plays in the treatise specifically about moral behavior, the Nichomachean Ethics. In Book 3, Aristotle makes a distinction between actions that are hekousia or akousia (translating roughly, voluntary or involuntary) and between actors who are arche- or organon, the origin or instrument of an action. Simplifying grossly, we can say that Aristotle argues that culpability obtains only when the first term of each set applies.10 In Book 5, however, during his discussion of justice, he offers a subtler account of culpability. Aristotle calls an action hamarte-ma “when, though not contrary to reasonable expectation, it is done without evil intent . . . for an error is culpable when the cause [arche-] of one’s ignorance lies in oneself, but only a misadventure [atuche-ma] when the cause lies outside oneself.”11 Leaning against the wall of a house that unexpectedly collapses on the people inside might illustrate atuche-ma; bulldozing a house without confirming it is empty might illustrate hamarte-ma. Whatever the exact relation in Aristotle’s mind between hamartia and hamarte-ma, the concept again loosens the link between intention and blameworthiness: an agent can have within her a culpable arche- without her action being hekousia, willing, and this culpability stems as much from character as from choice.12 We do not know if Greek tragedians thought about their plays in these terms, and still less if Shakespeare did; we do not even know if Aristotle ever saw the versions of the tragedies that have come down to us. Nonetheless, at the least we can say that Aristotle’s suggestion that hamartia blurs a firm distinction between hekousia and akousia speaks to tragedy’s disinclination to use intention to determine responsibility for injury. This disinclination takes at least three forms. (1) The case of Sophocles’s Oedipus, in which unintended consequence makes an otherwise justifiable action hideously culpable. (2) The case of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in which necessity forces the agent choose between two options he loathes (sacrifice his daughter or his fleet), each of which entails an act of impiety. Finally, most relevant to Othello, (3) the case of Euripides’s Heracles, in which divine interference pushes a character already inclined toward irascibility to the point of horrifying violence (the massacre of his wife and children). These examples all suggest the limits of moral autonomy (although not of moral responsibility), indicating the degree to which, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, “interference from the world leaves no selfsufficient kernel of the person safely intact.”13 In this respect, Greek tragedy sometimes appears alien to modern audiences because Oedipus, Agamemnon,

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and Heracles do not appear to feel guilt about their actions; instead, they feel shame. The philosopher Bernard Williams has used Greek tragedy to develop ideas about moral luck, agency, and shame. Tragedy can teach us, he suggests, to recognize the extent to which the moral evaluation of our actions often depends on factors outside the control of our choices. In promoting this recognition, Williams advocates an ethic of shame as a supplement to the more normative ethic of guilt in moral philosophy. The contrast between guilt and shame in the social sciences is well known. Guilt expresses the feeling of remorse for actions we have chosen to perform, often involving the desire to make reparation, if possible, to the people we have injured. We sometimes even feel guilty about actions that the community approves of but that we privately feel are wrong. Shame, on the other hand, expresses the feeling of violating social or cultural values, compromising our social identity, our sense of our standing in the community.14 Shame often includes the impression of being looked at, caught in the act as we make such violations, even when no one is actually looking. When we feel shame we want to escape from the view of others, like Edmund Spenser’s character in The Faerie Queene: “And Shame his ugly face did hide from living eye” (2.7.22). But when we feel guilt, the discomfort appears to come more from the inside than the outside. As Williams describes it: “[Shame] is not even the wish, as people say, to sink through the floor, but rather the wish that the space occupied by me should be instantaneously empty. With guilt it is not like this; I am more dominated by the thought that even if I disappeared, it would come with me.”15 Commentators have sometimes suggested that guilt represents a more sophisticated moral consciousness than shame. Shame always risks the charge of heteronormativity: an action that violates norms in one community may be the confirmation of norms in another community. It is hard to formulate abstract moral law out of shame. Also, since shame depends on our sense of our standing in the community, it can appear merely instrumental or self-interested, expressing a regard for saving face rather than a personal concern for those we have injured. Aristotle, for his part, insisted that shame (aidos) was not a virtue, and philosophers up to Kant and onward have agreed.16 Guilt, by contrast, involves an awareness that we have harmed others—whatever the community may say—and promotes a sense of our responsibility to those others. Ideally, this sense of responsibility for particular others translates into a sense of responsibility for others in general, manifesting the abstract moral law that obliges us to feel such responsibility in the first place. Guilt, in this sense, signals a mature conscience. Describing the effects of guilt in Pauline thought, Paul Ricoeur suggests that “with guilt, ‘conscience’ is born; a responsible agent appears, to face the prophetic call and its demands for holiness.”17 Without denying guilt’s power to motivate ethical behavior, Williams takes issue with the philosophical partiality for guilt over shame. Guilt’s emphasis on

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individual moral autonomy leaves out the social expectation inherent in shame, the agent’s responsibility to a concrete community. Construing guilt too narrowly as moral law might encourage us to ignore the injury we have done to others simply because it was unintended. Guilt also risks leaving out the whole person, isolating moral choices from the character in which they originate: guilt asks why the agent acted, but less often who the agent is. Shame recovers the importance of character and circumstance in moral evaluation; as Williams puts it: “By giving through the emotions a sense of who one is and of what one hopes to be, [shame] mediates between act, character, and consequence, and also between ethical demands and the rest of life.”18 Greek tragedy depicts agents apprehending moral responsibility vis-à-vis the experience of shame, which obliges them to see their actions as both the consequence of their moral identity and as a demand on this identity. In Euripides’ Heracles, Theseus, trying to dissuade his friend from suicide, never resorts to the argument that Heracles can disclaim responsibility for slaughtering his own family because Hera inflicted him with madness. The daimo-n of madness possesses Heracles from the outside, but this possession nonetheless follows immediately upon, and resonates with, the righteous wrath with which he kills the tyrant Lycus. Heracles marks an apt place at which to begin to turn toward the final scene in Othello. This scene owes practically nothing to Cinthio’s story in the Hecatomithi, but probably owes a good deal to Seneca’s Hercules Furens (translated into English by Jasper Heywood in 1560 and reissued in the popular Seneca anthology edited by Thomas Newton in 1581). Latin tragedy, as present in Elizabethan schoolbook editions, routinely included an apparatus by commentators such as Donatus that employed the Aristotelian concepts of error and reversal.19 But Seneca’s plays especially offered a rich example of the classical notion of tragic shame. Hercules Furens in particular follows the tone and structure of its Greek original. Seneca, like Euripides, makes clear that Hercules’s sense of culpability derives from a shameful diminution of character, not from remorse for the harm he has done to his family. Seneca’s Theseus even gives Hercules the option of disclaiming responsibility because his madness caused him to mistake his victim: “Who ever yet to ignorance hath given name of crime?”; Hercules replies darkly, “Full often times did error great the place of guilt [sceleris] obtain.”20 Crucially, as in Euripides, Hercules understands his culpability in terms of a inclination for wrathful justice that has marked his character up to this point: “Shall he give pardon to himself, that to none else it gave?”21 Hercules believes he has polluted himself and the land around him, and the prospect of continuing to live on earth threatens an unbearable feeling of shameful exposure: “Where shall I hide myself?”, he asks.22 The Latin play closely translates from its Greek original the ideas of character, pollution, and shame. Several critics have discussed the impact that Hercules Furens on Shakespeare’s play. Robert S. Miola has made a persuasive case for the presence of numerous verbal and tonal echoes from the Seneca play in Othello.23 Gordon Braden has

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traced the influence of Hercules Furens less directly, but equally compellingly, through the tradition of Senecan furor, especially as it was transmitted through Renaissance plays featuring the Herod and Miriam theme.24 Tristan l’Hermite’s La Mariane, Lodovico Dolce’s Marianna, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Miriam offer a Herod who, as a kind of Senecan tyrant, orders the execution of his wife Miriam out of jealousy prompted by false charges of Miriam’s infidelity. This has intriguing parallels for Othello, whose rage and despair in the final scene is reminiscent of the rage and despair of these Seneca-inspired Herods, and who in the Folio version of his last speech compares himself to “the base Judean,” who “threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe” (5.2.352–53). Both Miola and Braden thus suggest important ways that Seneca’s tragedy influenced the final scene of Othello. Yet they tend to describe this influence according to the protocols of guilt rather than of shame. For example, Miola suggests that Seneca’s Hercules is afflicted with “guilt and a desire for infernal punishments. Invoking the fiends in Hades, Hercules imagines himself punished there.”25 Yet in what Miola goes on to quote, Hercules does not actually ask for punishment; instead, he asks for seclusion: “If any [places] yet do lie / Beyond Erebus, yet unknown to Cerberus and me, / There hide me, ground.”26 Seneca’s Hercules in fact never asks to be punished for what he has done to his family, but rather considers suicide because he cannot stand to be himself any longer. Likewise, the Seneca-inspired Herods that Braden describes revise their Classical heritage by dwelling not on the shame of what they have become, but instead on their guilt for what they have done to innocent Miriam and their wish for punishment. Tristan’s Hérode, for example, calls on his people “to punish my sin” and assures his wife in heaven that “I feel a remorse quite strong and quite palpable.”27 Seneca’s Hercules, by contrast, offers no such pointed expressions of remorse for those he has harmed. Shakespeare, of course, was as capable as Tristan and Dolce of turning tragic shame into Christian guilt, but we should also leave open the possibility that as he wrote the final scene of Othello Shakespeare recognized that Hercules Furens derived moral culpability from the protagonist’s character and not from his intentions. What would it mean to apply the determinism of character and the ethics of shame to this final scene? To start, such an application would have to concede that Othello is not literally possessed by frenzy in the way Hercules is. He is surprisingly calm as he speaks to Desdemona, compared to his behavior in Act 4. Shakespeare seems to suggest instead that Othello is trying to integrate the proposition of killing his wife into his personality. It is not easy: he has to talk himself into it, to some degree. We see this in his first speech, as he looks at his sleeping wife. He keeps the “cause” that he cites at the beginning carefully vague, and he distances his wife’s humanity by objectifying her as “monumental alabaster” (5.2.5). He also attempts to verbally unstitch his purposed action and her consequent death: “when I have plucked the rose / I cannot give it vital growth again, / It needs must wither” (13–15) and “Be thus when thou art dead

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and I will kill thee / And love thee after” (18–19). All these things give the impression of a mind seeking to dull the horror of the act before it. But if it is a mind not at rest, it is a mind basically resolved. Nothing he says in this speech suggests that he is still deciding whether or not to kill Desdemona. He has already decided, and he implies reasons for his decision that follow from the expression of his character seen earlier in the play. Even if Shakespeare invites us to flinch in distaste at Othello’s account of himself as “Justice” (17) and his intended deed as a “sacrifice” (65) rather than a murder, we have little reason to think that he does not believe himself, even deep down. He has already demonstrated a moral sensibility ready to mete out swift punishment in the name of justice and order, as when he interrupts the brawl in the streets of Cyprus: “He that stirs next to carve for his own rage / Holds his soul light; he dies upon his motion” (2.3.169–70); and he has made clear his willingness to place justice before affection: “Cassio, I love thee, / But never more be officer of mine” (2.3.244–45). In the final scene he has made up his mind, he gives reasons that resonate with earlier indications of his character, and he appears to understand the finality of what he proposes to do: “I know not where is that Promethean heat / That can thy light relume” (5.2.12–13). To note that he also objectifies Desdemona as “alabaster” (5) does not count against this last point; rather, it indicates that he misunderstands what the finality of her death will do to him, that it will turn him into stone instead of her. Yet what does this determinism of character amount to? After all, Othello could choose not to kill Desdemona, could he not? The answer depends on what range of options the play encourages us to ascribe to him at this point. Othello is a drama in which ethos and daimo-n carry out closely related functions, providing both a detailed portrait of character and intense pressure from an outside malevolent influence. Iago is the “demi-devil” (5.2.298) who tempts Othello to lose faith in Desdemona and also the voice already in Othello’s head, like the daimones of Greek literature. Othello’s jealousy, unlike that of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, explicitly begins with an outside influence, yet once it starts his inclination toward passion lends it power. As he warned the street brawlers earlier, “My blood begins my safer guides to rule / And passion, having my best judgement collied, / Assays to lead the way” (2.3.201–03). Othello’s susceptibility to passion is also mentioned by Lodovico, whose comment gets Othello’s predicament both right and wrong after he sees the Moor slap Desdemona: Lodovico: Is this the nature Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue The shot of accident nor dart of chance Could neither graze nor pierce? (4.1.265–68)

We’ve already seen that passion could indeed shake Othello all along, but this assessment does rightly suggest the manner in which chance overlaps with

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Othello’s indulgence in passion. The astonishing scope of luck in the plot, all of it bad—the losing and finding of the handkerchief, Desdemona’s ill-timed vehemence on Cassio’s behalf, Cassio’s entrance at the moment of Othello’s faint—all these unlucky circumstances conspire with the momentum of Othello’s character to produce the sense of claustrophobic fatedness that so many readers have detected in the play. Significantly, Shakespeare gives Othello no scene, prior to his act of violence, in which he deliberates about the options before him, as the playwright gives to Brutus in the Julius Caesar (2.1) and to Macbeth throughout the first two acts of his drama. As I indicated at the beginning of this essay, the lack of an alternativity of choice does not mean that Othello is not culpable, both for his lack of faith and for the murder. But his culpability emerges not so much from a deliberate choice as from a hideous hamartia reflecting an imperfect character. If the above description of Othello’s moral agency is accurate, we should expect that the expression of his responsibility will be shame—and to a considerable degree it is, as we will see. As I noted earlier, however, Othello is not Seneca’s Hercules or Euripides’s Heracles. No daimo-n of madness literally possesses him; he holds the pillow to his wife’s face knowing that she is his wife. After he discovers that Iago has misled him, he voices painful remorse for the injury he has done to her: Othello: Now: how dost thou look now? O ill-starr’d wench, Pale as thy smock. When we shall meet at compt This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl, Even like thy chastity. O cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils, From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur, Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon! Dead! O, O! (5.2.270–79)

This is the first time he speaks to her after learning of his error. He reanimates her corpse with personhood in order to imagine her just censure at Judgment Day, to imagine the agency of her just retribution (“hurl my soul from heaven”), and to imagine the just punishments that will torture him (“blow me,” “roast me”) and perhaps contain the seeds of amends (“wash me”). Here we have guilt in all its psychological richness, a nightmare of self-loathing and desire worthy of Hawthorne, Poe, or Zola. In this vision, Othello does not get to vanish; he has to stay with himself. To quote Williams again: “With guilt . . . I am more dominated by the thought that even if I disappeared, it would come with me.” The above expression of Othello’s guilt is so compelling that it sometimes prevents modern audiences and readers, I think, from appreciating the other

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dimension of his culpability that he voices: his shame. His shame articulates not only what he has done and why, but who he is now that he has done it. The passage quoted above is only the second half of a speech that begins rather differently: Othello: Behold, I have a weapon, A better never did itself sustain Upon a soldier’s thigh. I have seen the day That with this little arm and this good sword I have made my way through more impediments Than twenty times your stop: but, O vain boast, Who can control his fate? ’Tis not so now. Be not afraid, though you do see me weaponed: Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt And very sea-mark of my utmost sail. Do you go back dismayed? ’tis a lost fear; Man but a rush against Othello’s breast And he retires. Where should Othello go? (5.2.258–69)

The final question here approximates the question of Seneca’s Hercules: “Where shall I hide myself?” In his guilt Othello imagines an afterlife of torture, but here in his shame he sees an ending: “Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt / And very sea-mark of my utmost sail.” This ending is the ending of himself: Othello cannot have been duped into killing his innocent wife and still be Othello. He will disappear, because he realizes the difference between the man he used to be and the man he is now. Certainly, this difference conforms to the masculinist language of prowess and weaponry, but the play has never concealed the fact that this constituted one of the cores of Othello’s identity. The loss of this identity signals his recognition that the social values that once guaranteed his virtue are the same ones that deny his worth now. This is the burden of his later reply to Lodovico: “That’s he that was Othello? Here I am” (281). The template of shame allow us to read this line not so much as a psychoanalytic instance of internal rupture, but rather as an entirely public confession of lost social identity. Othello makes this confession in response to Lodovico’s comment on his combined negligence and bad luck—“Where is this rash and most unfortunate man” (282)—reminding us of the extent to which Othello’s sense of shame overlaps with his view of human action as subject to fate and chance: “It is the very error of the moon” (108), “Who can control his fate?” (263), “ill-starred wench” (270), “unlucky deeds” (339). Critics have commonly take these statements as evidence of Othello’s attempt to deny his moral responsibility for what he has done.28 These assertions, they suggest, are bad faith, and bad faith is the provenance of guilt. Harry Berger comes close to this position in his fascinating

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interpretation of the play’s characters as collaborating in their own destruction.29 The loss of the handkerchief, Desdemona’s appeal for Cassio, Othello’s ignorance of Iago’s game—according to Berger all these things proceed from the characters’ partly-conscious will to make them happen. This reading has virtues almost beyond count, yet it also interprets luck right out of the play because, in Berger’s view, deep down these people really know what they are doing. This view matches the priority that Berger gives to guilt over shame in the introduction to his Making Trifles of Terrors: shame’s fear of self-exposure “presupposes a fear of what has been revealed to oneself,” and emphasizing shame in Shakespeare’s art “diverts attention from . . . the varied pressures of conscience on speakers’ self-interpretation.”30 Yet it is far from clear that shame always presupposes a more primordial guilt, or that self-interpretation derives more profoundly from conscience than from social expectation. Although Berger doesn’t intend it, these assumptions might incline us to ascribe a greater degree of autonomy to the characters in Othello than the play appears to warrant. We might be tempted to agree with the critical assessment that sees Othello’s appeal to the forces of chance as bad faith. But to assume this is to suggest that guilt is the only legitimate expression of culpability. In none of the above statements is Othello simply trying to disjoin his action from himself. He acknowledges rather that this action sticks to him at a variety of levels. In this tragedy, the error of the moon, the vagaries of cosmic forces, do make men mad. Desdemona is ill-starred. The handkerchief, which in Cinthio’s version Iago skillfully filches from Desdemona, Emilia finds by chance in Shakespeare’s version. The unlucky deeds that have befallen Othello are the same ones he owns when he thrusts the sword into his body. The character in the play most likely to scoff at the question of “who can control his fate?” is Iago: “’Tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus. Our bodies are gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners” (1.3.320–22). Iago appeals to a model of will that exerts absolute dominion over life, one that precludes the possibility of unlucky deeds, making it immune to shame. Some readers, following T.S. Eliot, are dissatisfied that Othello’s death speech says so little specifically about Desdemona and what he has done to her. Our response to this speech will depend partly on what we expect from tragedy. Modern audiences and readers have come to expect guilt, from Shakespeare at least. Perhaps, along with Harry Berger, the richest recent account of hidden interior motives in Othello comes from Stanley Cavell, who argues that the Moor secretly wants to believe Iago’s slanders on Desdemona’s chastity because he has come to realize that he cannot be complete without her (she makes his autonomy both possible and impossible), and for this he can never forgive her. Cavell concludes that “Tragedy is the place we are not allowed to escape the consequences, or price, of this cover: that the failure to acknowledge a best case of the other is a denial of that other, presaging the death of the other.”31 Yet, for all the insight of Cavell’s reading, it may turn out that tragedy, as a classical inheritance, is not the place that demands recognition of the other. We might

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find this place somewhere else, say, in the modern novel. Tragedy, by contrast, might force the recognition that our capacity to do right by the other is limited by circumstances outside our control, circumstances for which we nonetheless bear some responsibility. Tragedy might insist that the good we are able to do depends on who we are, and that who we are will sometimes depend on things like luck, necessity, and a sense of shame.

Notes 1

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11

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William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 5.2.339. All subsequent quotations of the play will be from this edition. T.S. Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927), rpt. in Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 131. Notice that luck encompasses equally cases of arbitrary happenstance (a pedestrian happens to cross the street at the wrong moment) and calculated malevolence (Roderigo did not happen to pick a fight with Cassio—it was part of a plan). In both cases, external forces deprive of the agent of control over his immediate actions and the agent does not expect these forces to impinge on his actions. The two seminal accounts of moral luck come from Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck” (1979), reprinted in Moral Luck and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 20–39; and Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 24–38. There is a sizable industry in recent moral philosophy of seeking to deny the claims of moral luck. Good places to start are Brian Rosebury, “Moral Responsibility and Moral Luck,” Philosophical Review 104 (1995): pp. 499–524; and Darren Domski, “There is No Door: Finally Solving the Problem of Moral Luck,” Journal of Philosophy 101 (2004): pp. 445–64. Harold Skulsky, Spirits Finely Touched (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), pp. 234–35. E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited (1976, revised and rpt. New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 13. F. R. Leavis, “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero,” in The Common Pursuit (New York: George W. Stewart, 1952). Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1452b27–1453a9. See E. R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the ‘Oedipus Rex’,” Greece & Rome 13.1, 2nd Ser. (1966): pp. 37–49, esp. 38–42. Anthony John Patrick Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 27–37. Also see Sarah Broadie’s commentary in her edition of the Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 311–22. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), V.8.1135b15. See also Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986, rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 382–89.

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Nussbaum, p. 381. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), Chapter. 2; Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 17–46. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 89. Ethics IV.9.1128b1–28. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 143. Williams, Shame, p. 102. Donald V. Stump, “Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy: Four Indirect Routes from Athens to London,” in Hamartia: The Concept of Error in the Western Tradition: Essays in Honor of John M. Crossett, eds. Donald V. Stump, James A. Arieti, Lloyd Gerson, Eleanore Stump (New York: Edwin Mellon, 1983), pp. 224–26. Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, Translated into English (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581), 19r. Seneca, 19v. Seneca, 20r. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 124–43. Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 153–71. Miola, p. 138. Seneca, 19r. Qtd. in Braden, p. 160, 163. For example, E. A. J. Honigmann, “Introduction,” Othello, ed. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 1–111, at 72; Jane Adamson, Othello as Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 264–301; Katherine S. Stockholder, “Egregiously an Ass: Chance and Accident in Othello,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 13.2 (1973), pp. 256–272, at 271. The two relevant articles are “Impertinent Trifling: Desdemona’s Handkerchief,” SQ 47 (1996): 235–50, and “Acts of Silence, Acts of Speech: How to Do Things with Othello and Desdemona,” Renaissance Drama 33 (2004), pp. 3–35. Berger, Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), xiii. Berger makes these remarks in the context of disagreeing with the emphasis on shame in Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of King Lear. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge (1987, rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 138.

Chapter 12

Agency and Repentance in The Winter’s Tale1 Gregory Currie

Winter’s Tale begins deep in the psychological world of friendship and rivalry, jealousy and trust. It ends, apparently, with characters playing their parts in events which either abandon motive for magic, or where motivation has lost all believability. The wife we believed dead either turns from stone to life or, artfully disguised as stone, emerges from years of hiding in a “removed house” at the bottom of the garden, wordlessly reconciled with the husband responsible for her crushing losses. Attempts to accept the device of the statue have sometimes been rather strained. Leonard Barkan says “All of Shakespeare’s art consists of statues coming to life.”2 Allan Bloom declares the final scene to be “one of the strangest tales in all literature.”3 Is this because the disaster and disintegration we witnessed in the first half is just too comprehensive to allow a psychologically plausible repair? The question assumes that the ending is a restitution, and so it appears. Leontes, convinced of his wife Hermione’s infidelity with Polixenes, has ordered her to prison and the baby she is about to be delivered of to exiled abandon; at her trial the news of the death of their son has brought Hermione to an apparently fatal collapse. Suddenly Leontes is freed from his rage-filled belief in Hermione’s guilt, spending the next sixteen years in off-stage repentance under the moral tutorship of “good Paulina.” Finally, he is reconciled with King Polixenes of Bohemia and with his advisor, Camillo, both of whom he had declared his mortal enemies; his daughter, Perdita, returns, bringing the prospect of a royal marriage; Paulina, to whom he owes his moral recovery, is repaid with marriage to Camillo. All exit to share the recounting of their adventures. For Leontes and Hermione, it is, at best, a partial restitution: Mamillius, their son, is dead; Hermione has aged—as Leontes notes—and there will be no more children; it is impossible that they will regain their former contentment. There are “deep strains of melancholia” that underwrite the “measured celebrations.”4 Inga-Stina Ewbank notes “the human suffering that has gone before . . . that weighs so heavily on the play right till the very end.”5 Going somewhat further, I’ll argue that it is not merely the shadow of the past which compromises present

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happiness. The psychological richness of the beginning and the thinner formality of the conclusion represent in different ways the same unresolved tendencies to fantasy, illusion and irresponsibility that enduringly characterize the person of Leontes. Forgiveness there is, but the play severely limits the hope that can be drawn from it with this thought: that virtue arises from action, not from an inactive repentance, however sincere. I will begin with the nature of Leontes’ motivational state at the point where he becomes jealous. This is crucial to understanding the beginning and the end of the play.

Jealousy Jealousy is a primary theme of both Othello and The Winter’s Tale. But it is treated very differently in these two plays. Othello takes us on a carefully constructed journey that makes Othello’s jealousy explicable without relieving him altogether of culpability for the jealousy itself, and not merely for the actions that flow from it. Othello is made jealous by the carefully planted suggestions and—crucially—bits of evidence provided by Iago, who plans to destroy him. He has good reason to put faith in both Iago’s truthfulness and in his judgement, and he is understandably taken in by Iago’s displays of reluctance to speak against either Desdemona or Cassio. What Iago tells him about the handkerchief coheres with Desdemona’s own behaviour—she can’t find the handkerchief, and wants only to talk of Cassio’s case, which Othello fatally but understandably misconstrues. There are moments when Iago over-reaches himself and a more reflective, secure mind than Othello’s might have become suspicious at the suggestion that Iago saw Cassio casually wiping his beard with the handkerchief. But few believers are fully rational believers. Given Othello’s outsider status, the newness of his marriage, a tendency towards jealousy which, after a certain point, turns into vengeful action rather than continued scrutiny of the facts, his action presents no epistemic puzzle. By contrast, jealousy in Winter’s Tale emerges fully formed and very early (within 150 lines of the beginning) and on such a thin basis of fact and inference as makes the start of the play as hard to interpret as the end. Those around Leontes find all this as perplexing as we do, and their loyalty to the King and to the social fabric he represents is strained by their inability to see things from anything like his perspective. Not that he gives them much help. The first to hear his opinions, Camillo, is treated to a lurid account of events (“kissing with inside lip”) from the darker recesses of Leontes’ imagination; Camillo’s response is to beg him to “be cur’d of this diseased opinion” (1.2, 297–98). When Leontes confronts Hermione he offers nothing but insistence on her guilt; when the Lords urge the impossibility of what he claims he merely replies “we need no more your advice” (2.2, 168). The disorder of excessive and

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unreasonable jealousy which psychiatrists have identified is sometimes called Othello syndrome.6 Given the difference between these two plays, it would be better renamed the Leontes syndrome. I referred just now to unreasonable jealousy and it is important to see the legitimacy of this category. There is a tradition of thinking about The Winter’s Tale according to which there is no problem in accounting for Leontes’ jealousy because “it is the nature of jealousy that it has neither rational cause nor adequate motivation, that its fantasies are created out of nothing; otherwise it is not jealousy.”7 In fact we recognize a category of reasonable jealousy, as we recognize reasonable anger and distress; we think it natural to be jealous in certain circumstances, and indeed that it would be pathological not to be jealous if one knew that someone deeply loved had deceived and been unfaithful. We cannot put off the burden of explaining Leontes’ state simply by pointing out that he is jealous.

Delusions The Lords’ perplexity naturally turns them to the thought that some “putter-on” has poisoned Leontes mind (2.1, 141–43), reminding us of the plot of the earlier Othello. But Leontes is manifestly the originator of his own notions of infidelity, and for the first one-third of the play the primary question is to determine how this fancy can be sustained so long. A natural thought is found in Camillo’s already noted urging to Leontes to “be cur’d of this diseased opinion.” For Leontes is, surely, the victim of some delusion. True enough, but it doesn’t explain much without substantial supplementation. It is not, after all, clear what sorts of mental states delusions are, and the term may in fact cover a variety of psychological kinds. Leontes’ own later diagnosis of his troubles— “I have too much believed mine own suspicion”—suggests the more or less orthodox view that delusions are beliefs: peculiarly irrational ones, unsupported and impervious to counter evidence. Yet there is some tendency, among professionals and laypersons, to associate delusions with imagination, and references to Leontes’ “jealous imaginings” are common in the literature of criticism.8 It is not always easy to know what people have in mind when they speak of imagination in this context—just as it is not clear what people mean when they commonly say that someone merely “imagined something.” Do such claims constitute denials that the person in question believes something, or is this a way, a rather uncomfortable way, of saying that their believing has become like imagining in some as yet unspecified respect? This is not a question to which the play gives us any direct answer, and it is unlikely to have occurred to Shakespeare in quite this form. We must tread carefully, not imposing the pattern of a current philosophical and psychiatric dispute on his conception. But there is a fixed point to guide us, and it is this:

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within the play, it is a datum that Leontes is responsible for his actions; neither he nor anyone else ever suggests that he might claim diminished responsibility on grounds of madness. But what is it, precisely, that he has done or failed to do for which he is culpable? One thing generally said to distinguish imagining from belief is the subjection of imagination to what is quaintly called “will.” Roughly speaking, the world impresses beliefs on us; we generate and sustain our imaginings. Imaginings are not always happily called voluntary, still less deliberate; yet we recognise a category of actions—things people do—which are yet done without setting ourselves to do them and which are, in a sense done “against our will,” as with compulsive shoplifting; for that reason I’ll avoid saying that imagining depends on the will. But imagining is something we do, and we can sensibly ask whether someone is responsible for this or that imagining, though the answer may sometimes be no. I don’t quite accept this picture, holding that there are imaginings generated by processes that don’t entitle us to count them as acts, even involuntary ones. Still, the picture is useful; the test of action-dependency serves to distinguish a lot of imaginings from beliefs, and its helps in the case of Leontes. His delusional state consists, I think, of a mixture of belief and imagination, perhaps together with cognitive states that don’t fit easily into either category and for which we have no accepted labels. The core of the delusion is the conviction that Hermione is unfaithful, and this is sustained and magnified by an emotionally destabilizing set of imaginings. We need to see how imagination causes this conviction to flourish in a context where the evidence is so hostile to it. The opening scene with Leontes, Hermione and Polixenes can be played in such a way as to highlight things that make understandable the thought of her unfaithfulness: the fragment of conversation overheard; the not entirely sincere plea to Polixenes to stay longer, agreement to which Hermione so deftly secures; Polixenes’ unfortunately resonating reference to the nine months he has been in Sicilia already. While there are signs of tensions in this early scene between Leontes and Polixenes, I don’t see evidence for what Michael Bristol calls “a bitter and potentially deadly struggle for honour and prestige.”9 It is not astonishing that Leontes should have the thought of unfaithfulness; it is astonishing that the thought should immediately rise to a certainty beyond all question. It is a thought that ought to have at this stage a very low credence indeed; after all, it is Hermione we are speaking of, and everything we will come know about her, and everything that Leontes does know about her, makes the idea so improbable. But something allows this thought to become the map by which Leontes will steer for the next two acts. It is not that Leontes misjudges the evidence; rather, his credence is independent of the evidence. He is just not interested in getting any evidence, and certainly not in hearing the arguments of those around him, of Paulina who later points out the baby’s likeness to him, of all the Lords whose judgement is that the idea is utterly impossible—and


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when it comes to understanding action and motive the judgment of others is often the best evidence. Instead, the thought is sustained by a defensive barrier of vivid and emotion-generating images of lust, cuckoldry and shame.10 He instantly and fatally makes the thought the centre of an imaginative project, “constructing an intense moral drama in which he enacts the role of the deceived husband.”11 This puts him in the position of one almost entirely disconnected from reality, a role few of us could afford to sustain for long. Paradoxically, it is the great power of Leontes’ kingship that makes it possible for him to be absorbed in the make-believe; his transactions with reality can, for a while at least, be reduced to giving a few orders, a point I’ll come back to directly. The end of Leontes’ obsession comes as a result of something which has only an indirect bearing on the question whether Hermione really is unfaithful. Leontes has just heard the judgement of the Oracle, that Hermione is innocent, and rejected it. But then the death of his son, Mamillius, is announced, at which point he declares “I have too much believed mine own suspicions” (3.2.151). By contrast, Greene’s Pandosto abandons his suspicions immediately he hears the judgement of the oracle. Immediately he announces a programme of recovery and reparation: reconciliation with Polixenes, renewal of love with Hermione (this before he is told she is dead), calling home Camillo who he had denounced as a traitor. Why this very sudden change? Leontes was prepared, without hesitation, to reject the Oracle when its judgement went against him; he is suddenly brought to accept it on the news of his son’s death. The death of a child is an extreme instance of the capacity of the real world to force itself upon us in ways that can’t be denied, reinterpreted, or explained away. Throughout the period of his madness (allowing, for the moment, this description of his state) Leontes, because of his position of unchallengeable authority, has been able to dictate the course of events, and the most he has had to put up with is, first of all, Camillo’s defection to the cause of Polixenes, which Leontes treats as further proof of Polixenes’ guilt, and the arguments of Paulina, who Leontes is able simply to order out of his presence. Leontes is in the position of being able to sustain his fancy through his mastery of circumstance. Until, that is, the death of his son is announced: a devastating event which constitutes, as it were, his running straight into the brick wall of reality. A statement, even one from an Oracle, may be interpreted; the death of a son allows no interpretation. I suggest that it is at this point that his fancy crumbles because he has, at last, to deal with reality from a standpoint within reality itself, and cannot manage events from the shell of his imagining. Cavell, for whom the death of Mamillius is central, says this: “Of course you can say that the consequences of Leontes’ folly have just built up too far for him to bear them any further and that he is shocked into the truth. This is in a general way undeniable but it hardly suggests why it is here that he buckles, lets

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himself feel the shock” What more likely place is there to “feel the shock” than at the death of a child?12

Repentance Leontes is not the only character to undergo a dramatic reversal of outlook on the deaths of Mamillius and (apparently) Hermione. At one moment Paulina is angrily assuring Leontes that no penitence, however long and painful, could match the enormity of his crime: Paulina: Do not repent these things, for they are heavier Than all thy woes can stir; therefore betake thee To nothing but despair. A thousand knees Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting, Upon a barren mountain and still winter In storm perpetual, could not move the gods To look that way thou wert (3. 2. 208–14)

A moment later she says that “What’s gone and what’s past help / Should be past grief . . . I’ll speak of her no more, nor of your children / I’ll not remember you of my own lord / Who is lost too: take your patience to you / And I’ll say nothing.” These two speeches, so different in emotional tone, have something in common, if we take the first at face value. According to both, Leontes should not repent: first because no repentance can equal the crime; second because these things are “past help.” In the highly charged atmosphere of the scene it is not helpful to look for a logic to the arguments, but their common conclusion does stand in marked contrast to what, as we come to know, actually happened during the next sixteen years. Far from saying nothing, Paulina has filled that time with vivid recollections of Leontes’ offences, keeping him chained to a daily round of exhausting penitence. What has been its effect? The answer of many commentators is that Paulina’s efforts have been rewarded by a moral and psychological renewal which justifies the reconciliation portrayed in the play’s ending. L. C. Knights typifies this view: “It is only with the full and continued recognition of what he has done—resolutely assisted by Paulina—that we hear at his court the note of new life . . .”13 Others, while inclining the same way, recognize that mere human psychology is not here equal to the task of getting us to a positive conclusion, given all that has happened; they frame their accounts in transcendent terms: Coghill tells us that “a man who believed himself to have destroyed his soul by some great sin might, after a long repentance under his Conscience, find that that very conscience had unknown to him kept his soul in being and could at last restore it


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to him alive and whole.”14 In the final scene, says Frye, there is only “the sense of a participation in the redeeming and reviving power of a nature identified with art, grace and love.”15 For Mahood “Hermione represents the grace of heaven towards Leontes.”16 Bethel declares simply that “Leontes and they are all born again,”17 We ought not to legislate entirely against such notions. But a reasonable constraint on their application is that they should illuminate the actions and persons of the play. And these invocations of grace, the economy of soul and conscience, the power of art and nature, seem disconnected from the psychological realities of desire and responsibility made vivid in the play’s early part. Grace in particular seems too easy a substitute for a forgiveness the play itself fails to motivate. As Michael Bristol puts it: It is usual to . . . interpret the play’s conclusion in terms of reconciliation. This may explain what the restoration of Hermione means as an allegory of divine grace. However, this type of religious interpretation fails to provide any kind of plausible motivation for Hermione’s willingness to be restored to Leontes. To put the question as crudely as possible, why does Hermione agree to take Leontes back and why on earth would she want him?18

I agree with Bristol that we need an account of the play’s ending that sheds light on psychologically efficacious rather than merely allegorical or symbolic aspects of its characters. And there’s an important clue in his observation that the “the living statue is the ultimate in luxury goods, a lavish promise of consumer satisfaction;” I’ll argue that Leontes’ acceptance of Hermione-as-statue is an indication that, whatever suffering he has undergone, he is not significantly more in touch with moral reality at the end than at the beginning. But I shall part company with Bristol when he says that “Leontes’s ‘redemption’ is . . . the result of his own bold, risk-taking decisions,” arguing that, to the contrary, Leontes’ moral disconnection is a kind of incapacity for action.

Virtue and Agency It’s of the nature of grace to be undeserved, an exogenous restitution for which we claim no credit.19 Recourse to it in the context of this play is appealing for those who want a recovery but who can’t find a naturalistic path to it. I sympathize with them; notably absent is any evidence for moral change in Leontes, surely a necessary condition, though perhaps not a sufficient one, for the looked for re-establishing of relationships. Pafford, acutely aware of the problem, says, despairingly, that “we must assume that [Leontes] had a noble heart” despite the fact that “from the text it is difficult to see that he is changed: there is no evidence that he has . . . come to know himself and to be aware of his littleness.”20

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Others merely assume that after his sixteen years of suffering and repentance, “knowledge gained through suffering brings knowledge gained by virtue.”21 And while for some more recent commentators, Leontes’ “reformation remains a work in progress,”22 they also suggest that the courtiers’ plea to him to end his “performance of a saint-like sorrow” signals his commitment to the habitual practice of character formation which Aristotle identified as the way to virtue.23 Appeals to Aristotelian virtue are particularly inappropriate here. On Aristotle’s account, . . . the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.24

The picture is of moral growth through moral action—both mental acts that generate, control and interrogate our reasons, and the bodily dispositions that put our decisions into effect. Saint-like sorrow and the saying of endless prayers do not provide for this activity in either form, though some would think them a worthy accompaniment to it in a case such as this. Julia Annas, discussing Aristotle’s view, says something relevant to understanding how Paulina, for all her steadfastness and good sense, fails in her project of renewal: The learner depends on the expert to learn in the first place, but the goal of learning is to have your own understanding of what you have learned from the expert. The expert in a practical field aims not to produce clone-like disciples who will mimic what she does, but pupils who will go on to become experts themselves, which they can do only if they acquire their own understanding of the subject.25

Leontes has not acquired his own practical understanding of right action; he has learned merely to accept the judgement of the expert. Leontes does see vividly that he was wrong, has done wrong, and is very sorry for it; to this extent there has been progress. But it is a mistake to picture him, at the end of the play, on the path to virtue, merely with some way to go. For all his remorse, he has not grown morally in the intervening years; if anything he is a weaker character, entirely at Paulina’s command. And remorse, unaided by practical moral skills, is not a promising basis for a renewed relationship under such difficult circumstances. “The brute fact of change is dramatically foregrounded, but ideas of growth or of lived experience or of any sequence of developmental steps or incremental stages are repressed.”26 Why have commentators struggled to see an ending with Leontes at least partially restored? A significant barrier to accepting the points I have just made


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is the vivid picture the play gives us of Paulina as its moral centre; our conviction that Leontes is to some extent morally revived depends a good deal on our sense that he has been worked upon by an agent who unites moral and practical sense with firmness of purpose.27 In the face of Leontes’ anger, Paulina is fearlessly rational in defence of Hermione, not merely insisting on Hermione’s innocence, but pointing carefully to the evidence in her favour. Her interventions contrast with the ineffective sighing of the Lords who “creep like shadows by him [Leontes]” and “nourish the cause of his awaking” (2.3.33–39). The most doubtful element of her counsel—that Leontes not remarry, which jeopardizes the succession—seems finally vindicated by the survival of Hermione and the reappearance of Perdita. But while her forceful and uncompromising activity is an appropriate response to Leontes’ fury, it requires a significant modulation in the latter part if he is to regain the status of a moral agent for himself. It is not, I think, a significant criticism of Paulina that she fails to provide it: merely a reminder that her moral resources have human limits.

Responsibility Aristotle’s observations on habituation to virtue bear on a question raised earlier: Leontes’ responsibility for the events of the play’s earlier part. If we think him deluded in the first part of the play, in what sense is he responsible for the admittedly terrible events that follow from his delusions? One way we can be responsible for bad things is by having bad motivations—evil desires and intentions, from which evil actions flow. But there are other ways to be responsible for bad outcomes, and one of them is to fail to develop the right kind of habits of thinking. One important such habit is that of questioning the ideas that form within your mind to see whether any of them have arisen in ways which make them untrustworthy, especially when those ideas are emotionally highly charged and apt to generate lurid imaginings. Leontes, long accustomed to the privileges of kingship, has not developed these habits; there have presumably been few occasions on which his orders have been questioned and, where his actions have produced bad consequences, he is likely to have been sheltered from them. One question that we should ask when we feel driven by strong emotion to some course of action that may have bad consequences for others is simply: “Am I imagining all this?” Leontes gets close to this question in the notably obscure passage: Leontes: Can thy dam?—may’t be?— Affection! thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicatest with dreams;—how can this be?— With what’s unreal thou coactive art,

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Shakespeare and Moral Agency And fellowst nothing: then ’tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost, And that beyond commission, and I find it, And that to the infection of my brains And hardening of my brows (1.2.137–46).28

But by this time he can get no purchase on it. The idea that in his present state things rationally regarded as impossible seem possible, as they do in dreams, quickly gives way to a disordered conclusion without determinate content, though the words put us in mind of the idea that an unreal trait may apply to a real person—faithlessness to Hermione in this case.29 Leontes seems to want to accept both the unreality of Hermione’s offence and the rightness of his violent response to it. Whatever the conclusion, the passage indexes a fatal veering from the path of reason. Leontes, at the height of his delusion, did not exercise due diligence in interrogating his own reasons because—an Aristotelian is likely to say—he had never developed the habits of mind that would make that possible in times of stress. The most positive arc of development for the latter half of the play would be to show a moral recovery that focused on strengthening habitual ways of thought and action that would be proof, to some degree, against the dangers of excessive imagining. This is not what we get. Throughout the delusional period, Paulina has made it her business to be an external check on Leontes’ beliefs— and getting nothing but threats of execution for her pains. But once Leontes has turned from vengeful madman to biddable penitent, she—despite her earlier promise to “say nothing”—is not able to allow him to recover the critical faculties necessary for regrowth. She sees to it that he does not forget his actions, keeping him in a continual state of repentant inactivity, all his energies devoted to recalling the enormity of his crime—and his debt to her.30 The result of this has been the imprinting of patterns of thought and speech, but not the right ones. Leontes’ greeting to her at the beginning of the final scene, “O grave and good Paulina, the great comfort I have had of thee!” (5.3.1–2) has the sound of habitual and formulaic deference. Everywhere, she is “good”, “grave and good”, “true” Paulina, who always “speaks the truth.”31 From Leontes’ now supine position, everyone looks uniformly elevated: Polixenes, whom he once so easily believed to be Hermione’s seducer is, by the end, “a holy father”, “sacred”, “blest”; an exchanged glance between Hermione and Polixenes which would once have been further proof of adultery is now itself “holy.”32 When, in response to Cleomenes’ entreaty, Leontes says he cannot forgive himself as long as he remembers what he has done, Paulina is quick to reinforce his mood of morbid resignation: Paulina: Too true, my lord: If, one by one, you wedded all the world, Or from the all that are took something good,


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To make a perfect woman, she you kill’d Would be unparallel’d (5.1.12–16),

To which Leontes’ reply, “Say so but seldom,” suggests that her speaking thus has not been seldom at all. Hermione’s only words are addressed to Perdita, making it clear that her reason for being at these odd proceedings is at last to see her daughter (5.3.122–127). Later, Paulina, having revealed the so life-like statue, tempts Leontes with “I could afflict you further,” to which he—not knowing what is to come, and expecting only a further opportunity to wallow in sorrow—replies “Do Paulina, for this affliction has a taste as sweet as any cordial comfort” (75–77). On seeing the statue—what he takes to be a statue—Leontes is overcome by its life-likeness, and Paulina says she will cover it in case he comes to believe it is alive. Leontes replies, Leontes: Make me to think so twenty years together! No settled sense of the world can match the pleasure of that madness (5.3.71–73)

I suggest that the “coming to life” of the statue represents what is in fact a continuation of Leontes’ fantasy state—a state in which he can, repentant but otherwise unchanged, suppose it possible to pick up again a full relationship with someone he has deeply wronged. Leontes has not achieved—nor is he likely to achieve—a “settled sense of the world”, and the artifice of the ending—magical or not—seems to reflect his failure, here as at the beginning, to come to terms with real things. When Hermione descends, she “hangs about his neck,” yet says nothing to him, while he focuses on Paulina’s need for a husband.33 Hermione’s arrival, however contrived, seems to be more in the nature of a present from Paulina than an act of will on her part; as Leontes says to Paulina, “Thou shouldst take a husband by my consent as I by thine a wife.”34 Hermione’s revival, standing uneasily between magic and the merely unbelievable, is a culmination to Leontes’ sweet affliction: a silent, unreal presence that enables him to imagine himself restored to a grounded human existence, without having undergone the practice that would make that existence possible.35

Notes 1

This essay began life as a contribution to a seminar on Shakespeare and Moral Agency which Michael Bristol organized at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Dallas, 2008. My thanks to Michael for his invitation to that meeting and for the insightful suggestions which have helped me to revise the essay. As will be clear, we remain at some distance from agreement about the play; but there is no likelihood that he will be blamed for my errors.

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Leonard Barkan, “‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale,” English Literary History, 48 (Winter, 1981), pp. 639–67. Allan Bloom, Shakespeare on Love and Friendship (University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 123. James Knapp says that “characters and audience alike are confronted with an impossibility that somehow gestures toward a deeper truth” (“Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly. Fall 2004. Vol. 55, pp. 253–78; the quotation is on p. 253). The present essay is an attempt to develop my own account of this deeper truth (Thanks to Michael Bristol for bringing Knapp’s essay to my attention). Jean E. Howard, Introduction to The Winter’s Tale,The Norton Shakespeare, volume 2, (W.W. Norton & Company Ltd ,Second Edition, 2008), p. 1150. Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The triumph of time,” A Review of English Literature, 5:2 (1964): pp. 83–100, p. 113. Todd, J. and Dewhurst, K. “The Othello syndrome: A study in the psychopathology of sexual jealousy,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1955, 122, pp. 367–74. Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) p. 214. Lawrence Danson. “‘The Catastrophe is a Nuptial’: The Space of Masculine Desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Survey Volume 46: Shakespeare and Sexuality. Ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.77. Colin McGinn also suggests that Shakespeare gave an unprecendentedly large role to the imagination as a source of human behaviour (Shakespeare’s Philosophy (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Michael Bristol, “In Search of the Bear: Spatiotemporal Form and the Heterogeneity of Economies in ‘The Winter’s Tale’,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 145–67, p. 156. See again Knapp, “Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale,” p. 274. M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957). Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 2003), p. 195. L. C. Knights, “‘Integration’ in ‘The Winter’s Tale’”, Sewanee Review, 1976, 84.4, pp. 595–613. Neville Coghill, “Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Survey Volume 11: The Last Plays. Ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). N. Frye, “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale,” Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honour of Hardin Craig, ed. R. Hosley (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 197. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, p. 154. S. L. Bethel, The Winter’s Tale: A Study (London: Staples Press, 1947), p. 102 “In Search of the Bear,” p. 166. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast” Eph 2:8–9. In his 1963 Arden Shakespeare edition of The Winter’s Tale, pp. lxxii–lxxiii.

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Kenneth J. Semon, “Fantasy and Wonder in Shakespeare’s Last Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974), pp. 89–102, 97–8. “Hard-won maturity and wisdom, no less than the miracle of youth and love, allow both young and old to join the final comic dance” (Scott Colley, “Leontes’ Search for Wisdom in ‘The Winter’s Tale’,” South Atlantic Review, 48.1 (Jan., 1983), pp. 43–53, p. 44). Introduction to The Winter’s Tale, Susan Snyder and Deborah Curren-Aquino (eds) (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.60. Ibid., p.42. Nicomachean Ethics, Part II, Book 2. Ross’ translation (Clarendon Press, 1998). “Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78 (2004) pp. 61–74. Thanks to Neil Sinclair for drawing my attention to this essay. Bristol, “In Search of the Bear,” p. 146 On the theme of counsel in Winter’s Tale and its relation to historical circumstances at the time of writing see Stuart M. Kurland, “We Need No More of Your Advice”: Political Realism in The Winter’s Tale, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 31 (Spring, 1991), pp. 365–86. Mark van Doren called this “the obscurest passage in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare (Henry Holt and Company, 1939), p. 316). I am indebted here to Harold Goddard (Meaning of Shakespeare (Phoenix Books University of Chicago Press, Volume 2, 1963), p.651; see also Knights, “‘Integration’ in ‘The Winter’s Tale’”: “Dreams are ‘unreal’ . . . so if affection can work on such insubstantial material, how much more likely that it can join with what is actually there” (p.126). For a different reading see David Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams in The Winter’s Tale,” The Modern Language Review, 82.3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 545–54. Even Curren-Aquino describes the sixteen years as “an endless cycle of potentially numbing sameness” (Introduction to Winter’s Tale, Cambridge edition, p.45). 5.1.49; 5.3. 151; 5.3. 1; 5.1. 81; 5.1. 55; 5.3.70. 5.1.169–73; 5.3.148. Hermione’s only words are addressed to Perdita, making it clear that her reason for being at these odd proceedings is at last to see her daughter (5.3.122–27). 5.3.136–37. If this interpretation is right it is very natural to take the lines following: But how is to be question’d; for I saw her, As I thought, dead; and have in vain said many A prayer upon her grave . . .

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as a weak minded and confused parenthesis which interrupts the flow of his firmer thought concerning Paulina’s marriage, resumed halfway through 141. Curran-Aquino insists that “Leontes has the last word and exits the play issuing orders” (Introduction to The Winter’s Tale, Susan Snyder and Deborah CurrenAquino (eds) (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56). His instruction is in fact “Good Paulina, lead us from hence” (5.3.152). As they later remark, “agency is now imparted to someone else and the speaker relegated to object” (p. 58).

Chapter 13

What’s Virtue Ethics Got to Do With It? Shakespearean Character as Moral Character Sara Coodin

What does it mean to ‘philosophize’ Shakespeare? How and in what way is Shakespeare “a moral philosopher?” The question has gained currency recently with the publication of at least two new books by philosophers, and other work currently in progress, including the present volume.1 Not everyone will see this as a positive development. Within modern culture moral philosophy is frequently understood as a system of universally binding rules abstracted from the messy particulars of day-to-day life represented in Shakespeare’s stories and the subjective irrationality exhibited by his characters. At least, that is how Aristotle’s Ethics has typically been understood in relation to Shakespeare’s plays and their characters. So it may seem like an odd choice to introduce a discussion of Shakespearean character by talking about a philosophical concept like moral character. Nevertheless, moral character is a principle that helps us get closer to Shakespeare’s most complex fictional agents. I am referring in particular to Aristotle’s concept of ethos and to the potential usefulness of his ideas within the enterprise of character criticism. Aristotle views moral character, a person’s ethos, as a life-long process of philosophical striving, in which a person’s every resource is marshaled in the service of moral growth towards eudaemonia, variously understood as happiness, human flourishing, or simply living a beautiful life. In the pages that follow, I make the claim that Aristotle’s moral understanding of character can be usefully applied to the critical examination of Shakespearean literary characters, in ways that suggest at important new points of connection between Shakespeare and moral philosophy. Rather than viewing Shakespeare’s characters as verbal patterns, or as interpellated “subjects,” I prefer to engage with them as if they were actual people.2 One of the main differences in this approach is the degree to which our background knowledge comes to be included and invested in the literary analysis of fictional beings. That knowledge is largely expressed or transposed via the kinds of emotional connections we feel towards literary characters. In the first section I discuss the way Aristotle’s ethical thought has been construed by many critics.

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Following this, I point out some challenges to this conception by critics who have approached Shakespeare through the lens of moral philosophy. I then argue that there are important points of contact between those critically innovative perspectives and some of Aristotle’s most fundamental ideas about character, particularly as they were understood by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Finally, I suggest ways in which understanding Shakespearean character as essentially moral in nature can specify and elaborate concepts of agency that will form the basis for a more truly philosophical understanding of the makebelieve people who inhabit Shakespeare’s fictional universe.

I David Beauregard’s Virtue’s Own Feature is one of the most detailed of the recent attempts to cross-read Aristotle’s ethical thought with Shakespeare through intensive consideration of the relationship between Thomistic Aristotelianism and Shakespearean character. Beauregard describes the relationship between the two as a clear and evident line of influence, but one which the modern estrangement from Classical virtue ethics has unfortunately occluded.3 His study, which proposes to “clarify an important part of the ethic implicit in [Shakespeare’s] plays,” proceeds under the assumption that Shakespeare’s plays represent a clear ethic, or at least one that would have been perceived clearly by early modern audiences.4 Our inability to appreciate that ethic, he maintains, stems from our modern expectation that literary forms endeavor to treat “general ideas, the exploration of problems and themes, or the representation of irreducible dualities and antinomies.” “The sixteenth-century poet,” Beauregard argues, “saw poetry as primarily mimetic, rhetorical, and corporate: that is, the poet ‘imitated’ an object, he tried to move his audience to affective and moral dispositions, and he tried to contribute to the ‘commonweal,’ or good, of the body politic.”5 Beauregard’s treatment of Thomistic Aristotelianism is admirable in its historical detail, and yet his grasp of early modern Aristotelianism remains rather schematic. The discussion is focused on Aristotle’s Ethics understood as deontology, a unified body of knowledge that deals with binding moral obligations. This, unfortunately, leads to the impression that Aristotle and his early modern followers were thoroughly doctrinaire. However, according to Paul Oskar Kristeller, Aristotelian thought in the Renaissance was anything but a “body of common doctrines” or a stable corpus of received ideas transmitted in a pure form over time. It was rather a group of thinkers with many diversified opinions on many different issues. Those thinkers “shared a common terminology, a common method of argument, and the reference to a common body of authoritative texts,” but produced varying conclusions about those texts.6 Renaissance Aristotelianisms, as Charles Schmitt terms them, are more accurately

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understood as attempts to digest and creatively adapt Aristotle’s philosophical insights by different thinkers in order to meet pressing contemporary exigencies.7 Perhaps most unsatisfying in Beauregard’s criticism is the sense that historically-motivated reflections about philosophical influences on Shakespeare come at the cost of psychologically satisfying accounts of character, motivation, and action. Shakespearean character for Beauregard is a concrete manifestation of abstract philosophical concepts. Although he inserts an extremely complex set of parameters into the philosophical concepts he applies to characters like Hamlet, the basic framework he uses to understand the concepts of philosophy and character remains fundamentally typological— characters simply represent or somehow “embody” philosophical abstractions. Aristotle amounts to a system of ideas that is ultimately mapped onto the aesthetic surface of a Shakespeare play. The view of philosophy as a system of static concepts is perhaps understandable for modern readers approaching Aquinas for the first time, where Aristotle can indeed read like an elaborate list of prescriptions. Applying philosophy to literature can, under this conception, appear like an exercise in deontological reasoning where the particularity of Shakespeare’s characters are measured according to their conformity to Aristotelian imperatives. Characters under this schema become manifestations of virtues and vices rather than agents who make use of and modify received ideas in unexpected and varied ways. The notion that mapping static concepts onto Shakespeare constitutes philosophical activity, however, actually mirrors the pejorative sense behind “scholastic” as the dull, academic rehearsal of ideas, more than it accounts for actual philosophical practice in early modernity, and still less the complex ways in which Aristotle was being interpreted and used. Beauregard’s literary-critical understanding of Aristotle as a fundamentally schematic and narrowly prescriptive thinker is symptomatic of a more pervasive modern prejudice, that conceives of not just Aristotle, but moral philosophy categorically as fundamentally deontological. Kantian philosophy, whose role in shaping modern philosophy is hard to overestimate, insists adamantly on the importance of deontological rules and duties. According to Kant, categorical imperatives are not only universally binding moral codes, they are also universal in the sense of being abstracted from the particulars associated with subjective experience. A similarly deontological conception of what defines the philosophical as a category has also arguably informed Shakespeare scholarship in a variety of ways. In recent decades, studies of Shakespeare and character criticism have implicitly cast philosophy as a form of un-historical analysis that ignores the particular exigencies of early modern culture. Margreta de Grazia’s discussion of Hegelian idealism in “Teleology, Delay, and the ‘Old Mole’” is a good example; even though she aims to single out the particular kind of philosophical idealism that she sees as a precursor of character criticism, she is not particularly careful about pointing out that Hegel represents only one form of


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philosophical inquiry.8 De Grazia’s work, in fact, consistently targets eighteenth century philosophy, marking it as the point of origin for our own modern critical preoccupation with character and psychological interiority—a critical preoccupation de Grazia equates with a kind of universalizing arrogance. Among the many scholars who, like de Grazia, have adopted new historicist perspectives, philosophy is either ignored, or treated as a wrong-headed critical strategy—sometimes dismissed as “presentism”—that aspires to rise above the social and cultural particulars of the early modern period. For a majority of Renaissance literary scholars today, socio-historical considerations represent the bread and butter of critical investigation. Philosophy can appear wholly out of line with historically-focused literary scholarship when the philosophical is conceived as an exclusively deontological enterprise. In this sense, there is no philosophizing Shakespeare, at least not in a way that would yield anything new or valuable.

II Recently, a small number of scholars writing under the auspices of moralphilosophical approaches to Shakespeare have begun to suggest that philosophy is not solely or even most accurately defined by deontological rule-seeking or abstracting from situational particulars. Both Michael Bristol and Mustapha Fahmi have focused on philosophy as a mode of inquiry tied to situated reasoning and questions of moral agency in Shakespeare. Bristol has explicitly argued for a view of philosophy as a form of vernacular moral inquiry—a perspective that he locates in both eighteenth century character criticism as well as in the musings of airline flight attendants.9 Vernacular inquiry presumes that there is little or no meaningful distinction between fictional characters and actual persons when it comes to thinking about why people do and say the things they do, and Bristol’s mode of critique basically treats Shakespeare’s characters like actual people. There is nothing all that new about this way of thinking about the motivations and interior lives of fictional characters—it has long been an important factor in characterological criticism, most famously in the work of A. C. Bradley. By attempting to legitimize this kind of character criticism, however, Bristol also questions pervasive assumptions about what it means to engage in philosophical speculation. His article “How Many Children Did She Have?” calls into question the logic behind L. C. Knights’ dismissal of Bradley’s style of character criticism. Knights’ self-proclaimed critical superiority over Bradley is, in large part, fuelled by a belief that stripping critical insights of their connection to subjective experience is a hallmark of critical legitimacy.10 Bristol attempts to demonstrate that legitimate critical perspectives do not necessarily traffic in logical abstractions, universal rules, or subject-free forms of evaluation. In fact,

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literary interpretation is more often represented in the attempt on the part of audiences to piece together satisfying responses to important questions using a variety of intellectual resources, including their own background knowledge and life experiences. Those moments most worth reflecting on in Shakespeare, Bristol argues, are not scenes that purport to impart privileged, universally true points of view. Instead, the episodes most worthy of critical speculation are the ones where audiences must insert themselves and grapple with the plays’ most salient unresolved questions.11 For Bristol, this kind of speculation counts as a legitimate form of moral inquiry—one characterized by vernacularism. Moral inquiry is vernacular for Bristol in the sense of being something most of us practice every day; it is a common and useful practical instrument we rely on in order to make sense of other people’s motivations and actions. Bristol identifies this kind of moral inquiry with the eighteenth century literary critics and their practice of reading into the interior lives of Shakespeare’s characters. This understanding of philosophical inquiry as an everyday tool connected to practical judgment and knowledge, however, was hardly invented by the eighteenth century critics, though they did exercise it a great deal in their treatment of Shakespeare. Rather, vernacular, practical moral inquiry is also very much the way that ethics and economics—those branches of philosophical inquiry associated with self-regulation and the management of households—were being discussed in Shakespeare’s own era. Vernacular English Renaissance discussions of the moral life often address this feature of moral inquiry via the concept of prudence, a virtue associated in early modernity with practical reason and situated decision-making. English Renaissance writers also tend to associate prudence with Aristotle’s ethical thought. Aristotelian moral philosophy serves as an important point of departure for a wide range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century speculations about the moral life, particularly within vernacular writings. Within many vernacular discussions of the moral life, prudential reasoning represents a starting point for more effective examinations of human happiness. Prudential reasoning and the exercise of prudential judgment involve reflecting about the kinds of things that matter to us both in an immediate sense, and in a larger, more fully considered, sense. They constitute a species of small but regular commitments to moral self-inventory. Miles Sandys’ 1634 discussion of prudential intelligence in Prudence: The First of the Foure Cardinall Virtues, defines the prudent individual as someone “who can well consult concerning those things, which are good, and profitable for himself or others, not alone for some particular part, but for the whole course of well living.”12 For Sandys, prudence is defined as a species of worldly deliberation about which course of action will prove most beneficial. “According to that in Aristotle,” he writes, “those are prudent who can rightly take Counsell in those things, which are good and profitable to themselves, not which is ad valetudinem aut vires; but altogether to reason of


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our well-living: again, hee [Aristotle] termes it a virtue of the understanding, by which wee may consult of Good and Evill things which belong unto Felicitie.”13 Prudence amounts to a situated form of insight about the things that are useful to us, according to Sandys, but situated reasoning about what is “profitable” nevertheless remain importantly linked to a more comprehensive form of insight, too. Long-term thinking about the moral life for Sandys takes place within contingent, shifting circumstances, but the choices made within those contingent circumstances are also important to the overall, lifelong project of cultivating happiness. Sandys encourages readers to conceive of prudential reasoning as a potentially expansive form of insight that can mitigate against shortsightedness both in the situational here-and-now and over the longue durée of a person’s moral life, or “whole course of well living.” He frames this in terms of an Aristotelian eudaemonism, or concern for “felicitie,” but we might also describe it in Bristol’s terms, as a basis for ethical and political reflection.14

III Some modern philosophers have, in recent years expressed a desire not unlike that of philosophically-inclined literary critics, to reorient philosophy away from the deontology associated with Kant towards a conception embedded in the subjective particulars of lived experience. This has frequently been expressed in a nostalgic way, as a desire to return to Classical philosophy’s virtue-centered pursuit of human flourishing, eudaemonia. Modern philosophers refer to this return to Classical moral philosophy as virtue ethics, and virtue ethics has, in recent decades, become an increasingly popular approach to moral philosophy that can be said to account for the critical contributions of philosophers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Williams, and even Hannah Arendt, to name just a few. Each of these figures has posited an account that features a Classically-based, character-focused alternative to non-Classical modes of moral philosophy. Despite its characteristic tendency to return to Classical philosophical models, virtue ethics is also a distinctly modern way of thinking about philosophy that stems from a present-day discontent with modern moral-philosophical inquiry. David Norton, a celebrated Hume scholar, has recently outlined a series of arguments in “Moral Minimalism and the Development of Character,” which contrasts modern with ancient, and describes some of the ways in which Classical philosophy out-performs modern moral approaches.15 He is deeply critical of the tendency within modern moral philosophy to exclude entire domains of human experience from its discussion of the moral life. Modern morality’s characteristic “minimalism” exists in distinct and unflattering counterpoint to ancient ethical theory, which Norton believes offers a much fuller sense of what

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constitutes ethical decision-making and the well-lived life. Norton makes no apologies for claiming that modern conceptions of morality have resulted in a “dilution of moral thought and moral life.”16 Two of the central claims that underwrite his argument about Classical ethics’ superiority are: (1) that virtue ethics is superior to modern morality because of its inclusiveness, which deems each and every human life-situation and predicament worthy of moral investigation and scrutiny; and (2) that virtue ethics’ concern with human flourishing provides an indispensable incentive to the cultivation of virtue, without which moral thriving is unlikely to occur. Norton’s first point refers to a basic contrast between modern and ancient modes of moral thought—one drawn by a variety of philosophers writing under the auspices of virtue ethics. The Classical conception, and Aristotle in particular, insists that moral inquiry involves the scrutiny of all aspects of lived experience, without exception. Ancient moral philosophy is thereby not only a way of doing philosophy when particular situations deemed to have moral content arise. Rather, virtue ethics can be more usefully understood as a way of life responsive to all domains of human experience. Under a Classical virtue ethical conception, everything counts as fodder for the life-long enterprise of moral reasoning about ends, because every human predicament represents a site for the potential cultivation of moral character. Norton phrases it simply and effectively: “‘The moral situation’ is the life of each person in its entirety.”17 Conversely, modern morality, and Kantian philosophy in particular, is characterized by a highly selective understanding of what constitutes a properly moral situation; many instances where individuals are faced with the possibility of having to make a choice do not constitute moral predicaments at all in the Kantian view. Modern culture has proven just as exceptionalist in its release of entire domains of human experience from moral scrutiny; as Norton points out, the highly influential realms of business management and science have resolutely refused to place themselves under a moralizing gaze, and have instead flourished by virtue of their claim to be value-free.18 The modern study of philosophy has been marked by a preference for exceptionalist approaches to moral problems. Martha Nussbaum has argued that virtue ethical theorists’ strong objections to modern moral philosophy’s exceptionalist tendencies ought to be read as expressions of dissatisfaction with the undergraduate and post-graduate educational experiences of their day.19 That era’s program for philosophical study focused on the analysis of so-called problem situations and instances involving isolated examples of human choice, usually in the form of desert-island type counterfactuals. Under this brand of philosophy, questions of character tended to be avoided completely because they were thought to represent something outside the frame of what was considered ‘proper,’ that is, legitimate philosophical inquiry. There is an obvious analogy to be drawn here, between this type of approach, which marginalizes allegedly extra-philosophical considerations, and New Critical practices within


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literary studies, which similarly propose to focus exclusively on the language of the text without reference to anything outside of it, particularly actual people. Bristol’s attempt to legitimize vernacular speculation about Shakespeare’s characters has important parallels with the kind of panoramic moral vision advocated by Norton and other virtue ethical philosophers. Both attempt to recuperate and legitimize those dimensions of human life typically considered too messy, subjective, or indeterminate to form part of rational critical practice. Classical ethics’ panoramic focus means that no situation is exempt from moral scrutiny. For Aristotle, the focal point of philosophical effort and striving is the cultivation of ethos or moral character. Ethos is both a way of life in the practical-habitual sense of the way we choose to live, as well as a more essentialist sense that encompasses intangibles like intentions, moral ideals, and dispositional proclivities. As much as an ethos is determined by actions, moral character also functions as a sort of back-story that stands behind actions and provides a highly personalized interpretive context for understanding and assessing their value. Moral character’s function as orientation that can help make sense of and contextualize behavior becomes clearer when we consider a concept like prohairesis. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes prohairesis, which some translators render as ‘choice’ and others as ‘responsible action,’ as importantly tied to moral character. Aristotle remarks that prohairesis “cannot exist without both intellect and a moral condition of the mind.” “In the sphere of action,” he writes, “good action and the reverse cannot exist without intellect and moral character.”20 Aristotle’s conception, which effectively makes choice not only expressive of, but contingent upon character, is admittedly problematic for modern readers. We tend to understand choice nowadays as the act of selecting from among a range of available options. Choice is an existential issue, not a characterological, much less moral one. When faced with the decision about whether to eat carrot sticks or a chocolate éclair for my mid-afternoon snack, my choice, typically understood, is whichever food I actually end up eating, provided I am given free access to both snacks. There is no question of my characteristic set of attitudes about snacking, or to my habitual snacking practices: only to my particular decision in this instance. Conversely, for Aristotle, the notion of choice, or prohairesis, is qualified by the two things excluded by the modern understanding of choosing: my characterological disposition, in this case, as either a health-conscious or selfindulgent person; and my habitual proclivity to actually snack on either pastries or vegetables on a regular basis. Only when there is a correspondence between the two (sweet tooth and chocolate éclair, or healthy eater and carrot stick) in relation to the actual choice I have made in this instance do we have an example of choice. When there is a non-correspondence, say, if I am a healthconscious person but eat the éclair today, we do not, in Aristotle’s view, have an

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instance of choice, but rather an instance of akrasia, or uncontrolled desire for ends known to be self-harming. Gertrude Anscombe’s seminal essay “Thought and Action in Aristotle” explores this dimension of Aristotelian thought, and succeeds in emphasizing prohairesis’ estrangement from modern notions of choosing. Her categorization of Aristotle’s notion of prohairesis as a less-than-winning concept, unlike his notion of practicality, which has persisted to this day in the modern vernacular understanding—manages to emphasize just how great a disparity there is between a moral philosophical view centered on ethos and one that is, to use Norton’s phrasing, much more minimalist, and wholly unconcerned with characterological orientation.21 For Aristotle, both essentialized and practical dimensions of a person’s identity must be taken into account when considering whether something like a moral choice has occurred. The two elements—habitual practice, and essential identity, are mutually constitutive, and inseparably linked for Aristotle, and there is really no separating them when it comes to a concept like moral character. Mustapha Fahmi’s approach to Shakespearean character endeavors to sketch out a conception of character remarkably consonant with Aristotle’s concept of ethos. Fahmi proposes that we think about identity in Shakespeare as a function of both essentialist principle and practical action. His article “Shakespeare: The Orientation of the Human” appears in a collection of essays devoted to discussing the critical contribution of Harold Bloom, and its argument seeks to address Bloom’s well-known theory of Shakespeare’s characters as self-overhearers. Fahmi’s central point is that Shakespeare’s characters are not self-overhearers, in the sense that they do not develop, nor are they constituted through a mysterious self-generating process of growth via the sheer exuberance of their own supra-human personalities. Instead, Fahmi advances the far more modest and moderate claim that Shakespeare’s characters, in fact, develop and are constituted by the relationships or dialogues in which they engage with the individuals who matter to them.22 The notion of dialogically-shaped personhood, and of dialogism in general, is rooted in Bakhtinian theory, but despite the Bakhtinian genealogy Fahmi claims for his argument, this idea shares a great deal with Aristotle’s approach to ethics. Fahmi uses Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to mediate between the bookends of character represented by Bloom’s idea of Shakespearean subjectivity as self-generating on one end, and Foucault’s sense of social constructivism that insists on human subjectivity as nothing but an empty husk on the other.23 He argues that Shakespeare’s fictional agents are imbricated within the social worlds they inhabit, in a way that opposes both Bloom’s sense of the social as merely ornamental, and Foucault’s sense of it as completely constitutive. Instead, for Fahmi, characters engage with circumstances according to the lights of their own unique ethical perspectives. Character, so conceived, resists being reduced to either essentialist or existential concepts, but is rather revealed


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in the way that characters reason about their own moral ends, and attempt to fulfill them.

IV Mustapha Fahmi has proposed that Shakespeare’s characters are best understood as agents endowed with moral investments. Borrowing from Charles Taylor, Fahmi suggests that the identity of Shakespeare’s characters functions as a source of orientation in a space of moral questions. That orientation is comprised of strong evaluations about the things that matter to them, that remain subject to continual revision as they confront the tangible parameters of contingent circumstance.24 The moral orientations that characterize Shakespeare’s fictional agents are highly idiosyncratic, with different kinds of moral investments. One way of figuring out what those investments are, according to Fahmi, is by paying attention to the kinds of models individuals aspire to emulate. Fahmi’s character criticism has therefore already made good use of one of the main insights articulated by virtue ethics: moral ideals represent important ways of determining people’s moral identities. Fahmi has advanced the claim that getting to know who characters themselves aspire to be is the only way to get to know them at all.25 A goldmine of expressive content is made available when characters reveal their own ideals. Taking such statements as indices of character has the added benefit of helping to establish a more bias-resistant mode of characterological criticism than simply accepting any one critic’s opinion that Hamlet is a tortured, sensitive soul, or a bloodthirsty disinherited prince. Understanding who Hamlet is according to his own estimation, resists turning him into a mere reflection of who I, the critic, want him to be, or a misplaced embodiment of who I myself aspire to be in my own private life. Characterological criticism thus becomes a less circular, impressionistic undertaking, and instead gains a modicum of well-deserved legitimacy. What literary criticism has been unwilling to recognize is the motivational component Norton is so keen to emphasize and praise in Classical moral philosophy. Norton’s point about virtue ethics is that moral ideals are not only important for the kind of expressive information they provide about the kinds of things people value. Ideals also have an enormous power to impact human behavior, and motivate moral growth. For Norton, moral ideals help form clear and detailed pictures of what individuals imagine the good life to be about that then inspire them to actualize their goals. What literary critics have been even less apt to recognize, however, is that those goals, in turn, entail a series of moral responsibilities. If Hamlet’s sense of himself is characterized by the concept of a good and loyal son, then part of that sense of identity entails an ethical commitment to exact revenge for his

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father’s murder, according to the codes of honor by which his father lived. The “I am” associated with an ontological view of character is dependent, for Aristotle, on a “what I do” as well as a “what I ought to be doing.” The “I ought” expresses the way in which an individual moves from the ontological into the phenomenological, and literally completes and enacts character, or ethos, teleologically. The continuum between thought and action so central to Aristotle’s conception of the ethical life ensures that any essentialized notion of character becomes inseparable from a conception of what a character of that sort ought to be doing. The “ought to” is another way of describing moral responsibility, and the kind of moral responsibility hard-wired to Aristotle’s conception of moral character means that, within Classical ethics, notions of character are also inextricably linked to moral obligations. It is not only typical for modern philosophers like Norton to view moral character as a concept with strong ties to moral accountability. The assumption that moral living is comprised of a kind of responsibility or self-awareness in the face of choice, is also a function of the way in which moral-philosophical writers in the Renaissance conceived of the moral life. Levinus Lemnius’ The Touchstone of Complexions explains that making wise choices begins with an awareness of our own disposition, which for him amounts to an acquaintance with our humoral constitution. In a section whose marginal note reads “every man must search out his own inclination and nature,” Lemnius suggests the following prescription designed to improve and mitigate temperamental excesses: Thus if a man throughe abundance of humours, and stoate of bloude and spirites, feel hymselfe prone to carnalitye and fleshiye luste, let him by altering his order and diet, enjoyne to himselfe a most strict ordinary and frame his dealings to a more stayed moderation. But if hee feele himself to bee of a nature somewhat sulleyne and sterne, and given somewhat to a wayward, whining testye, churlish, and intractable then reason sylleth, such a one to be reclaimed to an order and trade of life, gentler and pleasaunter, insomuch it shall not be ill for such a one to frequent dancing, singing, womens flatteryes, allurements, and embracings, provided always, that all the same be not otherwise done nor meant, but in honestye and comeliness, within a reasonable measure.26

The kinds of decisions that arise in daily life about whether “it shall not be ill for such a one to frequent dancing, singing, womens flatteryes, allurements, and embracings” are here explicitly connected to the issue of constitution. Lemnius deploys the language of humoral physiology which, in his day, was the most readily understood description for individuals’ underlying dispositions, and one that also carried strong moral connotations. The fungibility associated with humoral character brings to the fore Fahmi’s idea of social imbrication in a distinctly material language in which the body was literally imagined as the


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site of transformation, of imbalances and excesses which required continual moderation and repair. Typological discussions were not, however, intended to offer exhaustive catalogues that could then be applied to a set series of circumstances. Texts like Touchstone represent the act of choosing an appropriate course of action as a crucial determinant of successful self-regulation. For Lemnius, choosing wisely requires the instrumental application of insight about our own humoral character in the face of unpredictable, often uncontrollable external cues. Moments of choice are represented as moments of temptation in which a desire to pursue a pleasurable but ultimately harmful course of action runs strong. In order to prove useful, typological expositions like these have to be selectively and intelligently applied to a series of specific empirical circumstances—circumstances whose ultimate outcome was thought to have a morally determinative effect on character. No choice is regarded as too insignificant to merit moral scrutiny in Renaissance discussions of temperamental self-regulation and management of the passions. Selecting an appropriate vocation, choosing the right diet and exercise, and all of the routine activities associated with habitual action are thought to have an impact on character, and ultimately relate to the eudaemonistically-conceived life. In The Passions of the Minde, Thomas Wright emphasizes vocational choice when he narrates the following anecdote about a merchant who fails at his profession, only to discover his true vocation as a preacher: No man ought to be employed to any office, act, or exercise contrary to his natural passions and inclination. This rule concerneth all sort of superiors in the employments of their subjects, all parents for the education of their children, schoolmasters for the training up of their scholars. The ground of this rule dependeth of long experience, and reason. For by experience we learn that men be oftentimes employed to one trade and never can profit therein: contrariwise, when either they of themselves or others do change that course to another whereunto they were inclined they become very excellent men. I knew one in Flanders employed of his friends to be a merchant, against his inclination; but he never scarce could abide to deal in merchandise, and so at last therewith awearied left them and turned his course to study, wherein he excelled, and became one of the rarest preachers there. I myself heard him preach after, very godly and learnedly; a hundred such examples I could bring you.27

In Wright’s view, the choice of an appropriate vocation contains not only a practical incentive, but also a social aspect with far-reaching implications. The subject of Wright’s anecdote, a failed merchant-turned-preacher who “never scarce could abide to deal in merchandise” becomes not just a story about personal vocational fulfilment, but insofar as Wright’s subject serves as a moral exemplum (“a hundred such examples I could bring you,” Wright assures us),

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it also carries the implication that social phenomena such as economic failure and religious apathy are indeed functions of human agency and human choice. In Renaissance discussions like Wright’s, practical choices and their farreaching social effects have important ties to character. It would, however, be a mistake to reduce the Renaissance concept of character outlined by these writers to a merely passive receptacle through which environmental or social forces circulate. Rather, the two dimensions—corporeal and environmental, inward and outward—are imagined in a relationship that draws extensively on Aristotelian teleology. For Aristotle, inward states represent potentials capable of being actualized in accordance with their natural, logical ends. Prudential reasoning of the kind outlined by Sandys and discussed extensively by Aristotle in Book VI of the Ethics becomes centrally important because that form of thinking excels at formulating practical plans that can help actualize intentional dispositions in effective, concrete ways. Choice for both Aristotle and vernacular Renaissance philosophers like Lemnius is envisioned as a crucial opportunity to align inward states, both emotional and intentional (providing they are rationally-conceived) with their logical and teleological outcomes. Successful self-regulation, however, requires awareness and self-presence in the face of choice. In Lemnius’ terms, this amounts to an honest appraisal of the kind of person I am—a lusty bon-vivant whose vices are exacerbated by gaming, dancing, and beautiful women, or a moody introvert for whom those pursuits represent harmless, even beneficial distractions. Aristotle is even more explicit on this point, and makes the concept of choice itself contingent upon character, as we have seen with his discussion of prohairesis. The divide between pre-modern and modern visions of the ethical life centers not only on the intensive focus accorded to character under a Classical model, but more significantly, in the basic sense of what the concept of character itself actually entails. The Classical conception involves a comprehensive, lifelong focus on moral development that contains an idealistic dimension— one that helps provide a strong motivational push towards actualizing objectively worthy goals. The Classical concept of character, in other words, does not consist of abstract, or inert qualities, that is; the ideal of a good and loyal son, much as those qualities and concepts do form an important part of the overall picture. Character is neither inert nor static according to Aristotle. As we have seen from both Renaissance discussions and in the recent dialogically-focused model of character advanced by Mustapha Fahmi, individuals’ basic dispositions are extremely responsive to external phenomena, and remain importantly tied to the realm of contingent circumstance in Shakespeare. Classical ethics understands character as fundamentally responsive, and a person’s ethical character depends not only on inward, dispositional states, but envisions and calls for the completion and actualization of those states in physically manifest, socio-political terms. Moral character therefore entails a sense not only of who


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I am, but also calls for activities that correspond with and actualize those contents. The basic self-presence required for moral responsibility in Classical ethics posits that I cannot simply forget who I am, viz. my strengths and weaknesses, my constituent dispositions and tendencies, when faced with a moment of choice. To do so is to behave akratically, or step outside of myself characteologically, effectively becoming morally incomprehensible to myself and devoid of identity. One way of thinking about this is to imagine that shrinking from moral responsibility drains the very lifeblood of ethical identity. When Hamlet says to Laertes, “Was’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? / Never Hamlet. / If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, / And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, / Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it,” he disclaims identity at precisely the moment when what seems most required is an honest avowal of moral responsibility in the deaths of Laertes’ father and sister.28 These disavowals of identity and moral accountability call for a more concerted exploration of Classical concepts like akrasia, and topics like emotion—topics which consistently preoccupy Classical and Renaissance moral philosophers. Philosophizing Shakespeare, however, can also address a different kind of problem—a historical one. Hamlet’s frustrated exclamation that he is a “pigeonlivered and lack[s] gall to make oppression bitter,” that is, that he lacks the requisite humoral constitution, in this case, bile, for courageous action, suggests that his inability to act decisively is fundamentally a reflection of his weak character.29 If, as I have been arguing, Shakespearean character is importantly tied to the Aristotelian notion of ethos or moral character, Hamlet’s proclamation does more than describe a humoral imbalance; it also declares that he is aware of his own inability to meet those moral obligations he envisions for himself, and which he himself acknowledges to be ethically and characterologically definitive. He is quite literally unable to be himself in the full sense implied by the term ‘character,’ though he remains saddled with the knowledge of both who he is inwardly and how he is supposed to behave. This is a problem suggestive of more than just a failure to take moral responsibility—it suggests that on some level, the failure is bound up with the virtue ethical sense of character itself, despite its importance to Hamlet’s own sense of himself as a moral agent. What I hope a more extensive study of the Shakespearean character’s relationship to Aristotelian ethical thought will fill out is the sense in which that failure resonates not only as an instance of botched revenge and dashed hopes—that is to say, resonates not only on an individual moral-characterological level, but also on a cultural and historical one. My view of literary character as importantly connected to moral character proposes that such failures entail the collapse of an entire ethical mode—one that we have only begun to investigate and theorize, but which for a culture preoccupied and deeply invested in recovering modes of ancient thought, would have been experienced as a crisis of epic proportions. A closer examination of characters like Hamlet in light of a

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virtue ethical conception may well help us better conceive of how such failings are construed and experienced, just as a more careful examination of Classical philosophical insights about moral character can lend dimensionality to our understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare’s characters as moral agents.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Martha Nussbaum has recently reviewed both books, along with A. D. Nutall’s Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) in “Stages of Thought,” The New Republic 238 (May 7, 2008): pp. 37–41. On treating Shakespeare’s characters like actual people, see Michael Bristol, “How Many Children Did She Have?” in Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John Joughin (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 18–33. See also Mustapha Fahmi, “Shakespeare: The Orientation of the Human” in Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 97–107. David Beauregard, Virtue’s Own Feature: Shakespeare and the Virtue Ethics Tradition. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995). Beauregard, Virtue, p. 9. Beauregard, Virtue, p. 22. Paul Oskar, Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 113–14. Charles Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Margreta de Grazia, “Teleology, Delay, and the ‘Old Mole,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (Fall 1999): pp. 251–67. Michael Bristol, “Vernacular Criticism and the Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote,” Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): pp. 89–102. L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” in Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New York: George W. Stewart, 1947), pp. 15–54. Bristol, Vernacular, p. 98. Miles Sandys, Prudence: The First of the Foure Cardinall Virtues (1634), p. 50. Sandys, Prudence, p. 49. Bristol, Children, p. 33. David Norton, “Moral Minimalism and the Development of Moral Character,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume XIII: Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue, eds. Peter French, Theodore Uehling, and Howard Wettstein (Notre Dame: University of Norte Dame Press, 1988), pp. 180–195. Norton, “Minimalism,” p. 180. ibid., “Minimalism,” p. 183. ibid., “Minimalism,” p. 184.

What’s Virtue Ethics Got to Do With It? 19

20

21

22 23

24 25 26 27

28

29

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Martha Nussbaum, “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” The Journal of Ethics 3 (1999): pp. 171–73. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Book Six, trans. and ed. L. H. G. Greenwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 1139a. Gertrude Anscombe, “Thought and Action in Aristotle,” in Articles on Aristotle 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, and Richard Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1975), pp. 61–71. Fahmi, “Orientation,” p. 99. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998). Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed., intro. Donald Bouchard. Trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Fahmi, “Orientation,” p. 100. Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions (1581), p. 6. Thomas Wright. The Passions of the Minde in Generall. Newbold Critical Edition, The Renaissance Imagination, vol. 15 (New York: Garland, 1986), p. 163. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Ed. G. R. Hibbard. 5.2.179–182. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.565.

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Index

action 4, 6–10, 15–16, 19, 23, 26, 29–31, 33–41, 55–6, 58, 61, 63, 71, 76–9, 81–4, 86–8, 90–1, 93–4, 96–7, 111–12, 114–15, 129–31, 133–4, 137, 139, 148, 151–4, 159–62, 164, 167–8, 172, 174–5, 177–80, 186, 188, 191, 192, 194–5, 197 akrasia 8, 86–95, 97, 192, 197 Althusser, Louis 156 Anderson, Perry 71, 84 Andrew, Edward 106, 110 Annas, Julia 78 Anscombe, Gertrude 192 Aristotle 8, 10, 16, 31, 41, 55–63, 67, 86–8, 91, 94, 97–8, 111, 153, 160–2, 169, 178, 184–6, 188–92, 194, 196 Arpaly, Nomy 88, 92–3, 96–8 Artaud, Antonin 123 Baker, Hershel 135 Beauregard, David 185–6 Becker, Lawrence C. 14 Bell, Vikki 99 Belsey, Katherine 16 Berger, Harry 73, 167–8 Bloom, Alan 171 Bloom, Harold 73, 192 Bobbio, Norberto 112–13 Braden, Gordon 163–4 Brecht, Bertold 123, 156 Bristol, Michael 72–3, 174, 177, 187–8 Brooks, Cleanth 77–8 Burke, Kenneth 6, 15 Butler, Joseph 9 Butler, Judith 72, 77, 83

Cavell, Stanley 73, 168, 175 Coghill, Neville 176 Coriolanus 18, 31, 42, 44, 49–52, 121, 131, 133, 155 Currie, Gregory 10 De Grazia, Margreta 187 deception see also self-deception 6, 9, 21, 39–40 delusion 37, 92, 173–4, 180 Derrida, Jacques 15, 17 Eagleton, Terry 15 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 65, 159, 168 Ewbank, Inga-Stina 171 Fahmi, Mustapha 187, 192–3, 196 Foucault, Michael 15 Frye, Northrop 177 Garber, Marjorie 43 Ginet, Carl 4 Girard, René 90 Goffman, Erving 77–8 Goldberg, Jonathan 83 Gordon, G. 150 Grady, Hugh 6, 88 Haidt, Jonathan 29–33, 40 Hamlet 2, 7, 17–19, 26–8, 31, 42, 44–7, 56–8, 62, 82, 111–12, 121, 129–30, 134, 139, 150–1, 186, 193, 197–8 Heller, Agnes 17 Heracleitus 160 Heschel, Abraham J. 116 Honigmann, E. A. J. 160

212

Index

imagination 10, 43, 75, 117, 132, 156, 172–4 intention 20, 24, 37, 41, 61, 151, 161, 179 Jaggar, Alison M. 104 Johnson, Samuel 1–2 Julius Caesar 6–7, 15–17, 86–7 Kant, Immanuel 16, 88, 90, 162, 186, 189 King Henry IV, Part 1 31, 140, 148 King Henry IV, Part 2 23, 31–2, 36, 113–14 King Lear 8, 19, 27, 31, 42, 44, 47, 111–24, 133 King Richard II 18, 20, 23, 83, 129, 135–40 Knights, L. C. 176, 187 Kott, Jan 123–4 Leavis, F. R. 160 Lemnius, Levinus 194, 196 Levinas, Emmanuel 11, 17, 100, 121 Liebler 8 Macbeth 4–5, 7, 18, 26–7, 31, 62, 71–83, 150, 166 Machiavelli, Niccolò 6, 17, 24, 63 Mahood, M. M. 177 Margalit, Avishai 8, 99, 105, 107 Marx, Karl 71 Marxism, Marxist 15–16, 18, 71, 116, 155 Measure for Measure 5, 8, 31–2, 37–8, 99–109, 132 Merchant of Venice, The 8–9, 23, 31, 59–62, 99–109, 133, 142–56 Miola, Robert 163–4 Montagu, Elizabeth 2 Montaigne, Michel de 17, 117 moral luck 159, 162, 166–9 moral responsibility see responsibility

motivation, motive 7, 15, 22, 62, 64–6, 92, 108–9, 130, 134, 171, 173, 185, 177, 186 Nietzsche, Friedrich 130 Norris, Christopher 15 Norton, David 189–91, 193–4 Nussbaum, Martha 73, 161, 189–90 Olère, David 122 Palfrey, Simon 42 Pinker, Steven 29, 31, 35 Plato 30–1, 94 poststructuralism, poststructuralist 15–17 prudence 1, 188–9 rationality 86, 90, 97 responsibility 7, 10, 19, 32, 55–8, 62, 82, 99–103, 109, 121, 148, 153–4, 159–63, 166–7, 169, 174, 177, 179–81, 194, 197 Ricoeur, Paul 162 Sandys, Miles 188–99, 196, 198 Schmitt, Charles 185 self-deception 4, 6, 44–9, 61, 63, 115, 159 Seneca 163–4 Shepard, Alexandra 113 Sinfield, Alan 16 Skulsky, Harold 160 Spurgeon, Caroline 77 Strier, Richard 7 Taylor, Charles 73, 129–32, 136, 193 Toulmin, Stephen 72 Troilus and Cressida 81 Weimann, Robert 71, 73, 75 Williams, Bernard 162–3, 166 Wright, Thomas 195–6 Zamir, Tzachi 9, 32, 34, 73, 76, 81, 122

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