The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy

Craig Bourne, Emily Caddick Bourne, Craig Bourne, Emily Caddick Bourne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781032569802
  9781138936126
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317386896
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Iago's 'I am not what I am' epitomises how Shakespeare's work is rich in philosophy, from issues of deception and moral deviance to those concerning the complex nature of the self, the notions of being and identity, and the possibility or impossibility of self-knowledge and knowledge of others. Shakespeare's plays and poems address subjects including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and social and political philosophy. They also raise major philosophical questions about the nature of theatre, literature, tragedy, representation and fiction.

The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy is the first major guide and reference source to Shakespeare and philosophy. It examines the following important topics:

• What roles can be played in an approach to Shakespeare by drawing on philosophical frameworks and the work of philosophers?
• What can philosophical theories of meaning and communication show about the dynamics of Shakespearean interactions and vice versa?
• How are notions such as political and social obligation, justice, equality, love, agency and the ethics of interpersonal relationships demonstrated in Shakespeare's works?
• What do the plays and poems invite us to say about the nature of knowledge, belief, doubt, deception and epistemic responsibility?
• How can the ways in which Shakespeare's characters behave illuminate existential issues concerning meaning, absurdity, death and nothingness?
• What might Shakespeare's characters and their actions show about the nature of the self, the mind and the identity of individuals?
• How can Shakespeare's works inform philosophical approaches to notions such as beauty, humour, horror and tragedy?
• How do Shakespeare's works illuminate philosophical questions about the nature of fiction, the attitudes and expectations involved in engagement with theatre, and the role of acting and actors in creating representations?

The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in aesthetics, philosophy of literature and philosophy of theatre, as well as those exploring Shakespeare in disciplines such as literature and theatre and drama studies. It is also relevant reading for those in areas of philosophy such as ethics, epistemology and philosophy of language.

Part I

Situating Shakespeare

1

SHAKESPEARE, MONTAIGNE, AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANTI-PHILOSOPHY

Philip Smallwood

Cognitive content and enacted thought

Shakespeare, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, was Michel de Montaigne’s ‘best reader’, and ‘from his earliest notes on Shakespeare’, as Alan D. Schrift has observed, ‘Nietzsche shows himself to be interested not simply in Shakespeare’s evocative power as a dramatist but in his specifically philosophical insights too. … [H]e makes his dramas correspondingly thought-provoking, “full of ideas”’ (Schrift (2000: 46)). This conception of Shakespeare as ‘full of ideas’ brings the study of the plays and the work of philosophy into the orbit of Shakespeare’s relationship with Montaigne. Literature has a place in philosophical understanding and the proposition invites us to think of Montaigne’s responsibility for helping Shakespeare become a ‘thought-provoking’ dramatist of ideas and a contributor to intellectual life. From the time that Edward Capell first suggested a Montaignian source for Shakespeare in the second volume of his editorial Notes and Various Readings (1779–80), studies of a Montaignian background to the plays have mounted in number – the online ‘Montaigne Studies’ lists around a dozen discussions dating from the later years of the nineteenth century to the last few decades. Terence Cave, whose critical scholarship on Montaigne is among the most perceptive to date, can in consequence write world-wearily of ‘the eternal question of whether and how far Shakespeare was familiar with the Essais’ (Cave (2007: 117)).¹ If, however, Shakespeare’s familiarity with Montaigne is a question destined to remain unanswered, little will be settled on the matter of ‘whether and how far’ Montaigne made Shakespeare ‘full of ideas’. But equally at issue is whether ‘ideas’ per se constitute the philosophical signature of either writer, or if they do not, what philosophical justification, if any, brings them together? As Raimond Gaita has observed, philosophers have always acknowledged that literature can provide food for the thought of philosophers, ‘but only’, he warns, ‘when what is nourishing to thought – genuinely cognitive content – can be abstracted from literary style’ (Gaita (2004: xxxv)).

In this essay I suggest that the perspectives of Shakespeare and Montaigne are fundamentally discontinuous with some of the categories of philosophical disquisition commonly applied to their comparison, and that in order to distinguish the sense of enacted ‘thought’ from the ‘cognitive content’ of philosophy held within the Shakespearean embrace as ‘ideas’, we should place more value on the probings or soundings into the nature of things implicit in the term essai – in the French sense of ‘trial’ or ‘attempt’. Statements having intellectual content abound in both Shakespeare and Montaigne, as do hypotheses for philosophical examination; but we do not always apprehend the philosophical value of Shakespeare and Montaigne in this sense. Montaigne’s ‘thought’ we construe through a compound of anecdote, self-analysis, reflections on ways of living and dying, classical quotations, stories from the past and the present, autobiographical wanderings and unchecked digressions, complaints about excruciating stones in the kidneys, or extensive disquisition on the reason and unreason of natural religion. The monologue of the Essais presents an extended sequence of thoughts, gestures, and observations unshaped by philosophy’s latter-day disciplinary conventions. Their effect, in William D. Hamlin’s formulation (marking Montaigne’s artistic bond with Shakespeare), is ‘dramatic in feeling if not in form’ (Hamlin (2013: 38)).² Correspondingly the experience of ‘thinking’ philosophically inspired in the reader or spectator by powerful Shakespearean drama includes, in Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the Socratic mode, ‘pondering reflection [that] does not produce definitions and is… entirely without results’ (Arendt (1971: 413)). This quality in Shakespeare derives from having statement, action, poetical language, and the psychology of character plumb the abyss of a real not necessarily reasonable world outside the familiarly lived. In neither case is the thought of the writer explicable as a body of doctrine.

Modern philosophers on Shakespeare and Montaigne

If Shakespeare is not the most conspicuous example in literature of a writer committed to intellectual discourse, Montaigne’s apparent inescapability as a source of thematic or theoretical content congenial to Shakespeare pervades key studies by professional philosophers. ‘It is as if’, writes A.D. Nuttall of Montaigne in his Shakespeare the Thinker, ‘the intense religious experiences of [Shakespeare’s] early years were gradually cocooned in a benign Montaignian skepticism’ (Nuttall (2007: 18)). In Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare Stanley Cavell likewise implies Shakespeare’s links with the same overarching system. He finds ‘skepticism… in various Shakespeare plays’. Of Othello he observes that ‘the philosophy or moral seems all but contained in the essay Montaigne entitles “On Some Verses of Virgil”’, and he cites Montaigne writing in misanthropic mode: ‘What a monstrous animal [is Man] to be a horror to himself, to be burdened by his pleasures, to regard himself as a misfortune!’ From the Shakespeare ‘all but contained in’ Montaigne, Cavell reads a Montaignian Othello on topical-thematic grounds:

The essay concerns the compatibility of sex with marriage, of sex with age; it remarks upon, and upon the relations among, jealousy, chastity, imagination, doubts about virginity; upon the strength of language and the honesty of language; and includes mention of a Turk and of certain instances of necrophilia. One just about runs through the topics of Othello if to this essay one adds Montaigne’s early essay ‘Of the Power of Imagination,’ which contains a Moor and speaks of a king of Egypt who, finding himself impotent with his bride, threatened to kill her, thinking it was some sort of sorcery.

(Cavell (2003: 3, 139))

The ‘topics of Othello’ found in Montaigne here arise as categories of philosophical disquisition. Such perspectives are valuable to literary criticism of Shakespeare because they balance developments that emphasize stage rather than page – the enthusiasm for ‘Stratford Shakespeare’, the creative prestige accorded to directing and design when ascertaining the ultimate experience of Shakespeare, and the place in this experience given to the privileged authority of thespian witness. Against this background the philosopher Colin McGinn can draw attention in Shakespeare’s Philosophy to core intellectual and psychological insights available independently of theatrical presentation – Montaigne’s philosophical thinking on (say) the nature of dreams bringing out the underlying theory of Shakespeare’s Dream. Many individual arguments, ‘topics’, and ‘ideas’, as Nuttall, Cavell and McGinn have shown, are capable of being read across the space between their respective texts.

This fact may reasonably invite the suggestion that Shakespeare must have known Montaigne, and forms the background to the recent gathering of anglicized passages from the French by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt under the rubric of Shakespeare’s Montaigne (Greenblatt & Platt 2014). But while the editors of this volume can appeal to a traditionally classical topos to underpin Shakespearean arguments against the fear of death, they maintain that the contemporary translation by John Florio is the Montaigne that Shakespeare actually read. There is the suggestion that reflections from ‘That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die’ (I.19),³ Montaigne’s great essay reasoning in company with the latter part of the third book of Lucretius’s epic poem De rerum natura, came specifically to mind in the famous consolatory address to the condemned Claudio by the Duke in Measure for Measure (performed in 1604):

Be absolute for death: either death or life

Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

That none but fools would keep.…

… Thy best of rest is sleep.

(III.i. 5–17)⁴

The ‘Shakespearean’ passages printed by Greenblatt and Platt support the selection of fully nineteen texts from Florio’s translation. But they also express a tension between the scholarly demand for proof that Shakespeare actually cast his eyes on the pages of Montaigne before writing his plays (or some of them) and the broad critical productiveness of speculation about Shakespeare in company with the Essais/Essayes.

Speculation versus proof: the case of Hamlet

The Tragedy of Hamlet, the play perhaps most often invoked by philosophers and literary critics alike to suggest how Montaigne might generate philosophical echoes in Shakespeare, illustrates this tension. Matthew Arnold suggests that Hamlet calls strikingly to mind Montaigne’s plasticity of intelligence, his fluid demeanour, and undogmatic humanity:

Shakespeare conceived this play with his mind running on Montaigne, and placed its action and its hero in Montaigne’s atmosphere and world. What is this world? It is the world of man viewed as a being ondoyant et divers, balancing and indeterminate, the plaything of cross motives and shifting impulses, swayed by a thousand subtle influences, physiological and pathological.⁵

‘If there is a single book’, writes Jonathan Bate, ‘that brings us close to the mind of Hamlet, it is Montaigne’s Essays’ (Bate (2008: 420)). William M. Hamlin, in Montaigne’s English Journey, a comprehensive study of Florio’s English reputation and impact, cites approvingly the work of Lars Engle and Peter Mack to endorse an approach whereby, quoting Mack, we ‘think about the revealingly different ways the two authors treat the same issue’ (Hamlin (2013: 110)), and he gives the example of ‘conscience’: ‘Like the essays of Montaigne, the plays of Shakespeare abound with explorations of human conscience, one of the primary instances being that of Claudius in Hamlet’. With respect to Montaigne’s ‘Of Conscience’, he goes on to note that: ‘The play-within-the-play is… imagined to function in a manner quite structurally similar to that of judicial torture in Montaigne’s account’ (Hamlin (2013: 114–15)). McGinn, in his turn, writes of ‘the philosophical ideas embedded in Shakespeare’s text’ (McGinn (2006: viii)) – an insight he illustrates by passages from Montaigne suggestive of moments in Hamlet:

Montaigne has some interesting remarks in this connection… In another passage Montaigne could almost be speaking of Hamlet. … I like to think that the work Hamlet is perusing when Polonius confronts him is Montaigne’s Essays.

(50–1, 58)

‘Could almost be speaking of…’; ‘I like to think that…’: such formulations register both the explanatory pleasure of the thought that Shakespeare could compose the play with Montaigne in mind and a reluctance to sound categorical, and therefore open to challenge, on the possibility of Shakespeare’s access to Montaignian texts. Other philosophical topics on which McGinn links Shakespeare and Montaigne introduce further thematic overlaps: they include cruelty, nothingness, grief, imagination, other minds, and the nature of the self. In this way the drama is nourished by philosophical thought. Certainly Hamlet contains speeches appearing as ‘embedded’ chunks of quasi-philosophical deliberation: ‘To be, or not to be’ (III.i. 55).

How far these are the best terms in which to foster philosophical comparisons, I suggest, is open to doubt, while the suggestion that Montaigne is a frequent ‘source’ of the plays has proved difficult to establish. The exception is I.31 of the Essais, ‘Des cannibales’ (‘Of the Caniballes’), first identified by Capell (I.30 (Florio (1603), ‘The First Book’, Ch. 30: 258–9)). Though there are different views on whether Shakespeare was following the original or Florio’s translation, Montaigne is here an indisputable, undisputed, source, and his title most likely contributes anagrammatically to the figure of Caliban. The text in question is the address by the old counsellor Gonzalo in The Tempest (possibly written 1610–11) – speaking as if with the voice of Montaigne. The passage, adapted as a speech by Shakespeare, defines how the ideal commonwealth might sustain life innocently lived according to the principles of nature:

I’th’ commonwealth I would, by contraries,

Execute all things; for no kind of traffic

Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,

And use of service, none; contract, succession,

Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;

No occupation, all men idle, all;

And women too, but innocent and pure;

No sovereignty –

(II.i. 148–57; Capell (1779–80, 2: 63⁶))

– an exalted notion immediately undercut by Sebastian’s sarcastically deflating remark on Gonzalo’s rhapsody of ungoverned perfection:

Yet he would be king on’t.

(II.i. 58)

While other echoes of Montaigne in Shakespeare are by contrast uncertain, many allusions and lines of plot confirm Shakespeare’s textual knowledge of Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (first edition 1579, based on the French translation of Jacques Amyot of 1559). A sense of dramatic narrative and rhetorical form (as manifest in the ‘Roman’ plays and particularly Coriolanus) here demonstrates that Shakespeare had indeed read the Plutarchian text. But if we seek empirical evidence of Shakespeare as Nietzsche’s ‘best’ – or in any sense – ‘reader’ of Montaigne, we find that the chronological order of texts and the conditions of Shakespearean publication rule out or make it very difficult to establish the philosophical role of Montaigne.

Thus Florio’s Montaigne was published in 1603, and as Gree...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Situating Shakespeare
• Part II Philosophy of language
• Part III The ethical and the political
• Part IV Epistemology and scepticism
• Part V The existential
• Part VI Self, mind and identity
• Part VII Art and the aesthetic
• Part VIII Performance and engagement
• Index