Shakespeare and the Reason

A Study of the Tragedies and the Problem Plays

Terence Hawkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136568046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

'Mr Hawkes is a good critic, oriented towards history of ideas. He operates on the formula that Shakespeare was interested in the available distinctions between discursive and intuitive reason, and disliked a growing tendency for the first to be thought of as manly and the second effeminate. One sees how this action-contemplation polarity works, in Hamlet for instance, and Mr Hawkes thinks the kind of choices forced on tragic heroes can be better understood in terms of it.' Frank Kermode, New Statesman. In the seven plays on which the book concentrates, Terence Hawkes finds Shakespeare investigating the operation of two opposed forms of reason, and constructing dramatic metaphors such as the opposition between appearance and reality, or that between true 'manliness' and its false counterpart, which express to the full the tragic nature of the situation.

1
Reason and Intuition: Appearance and Reality

Yit Mynde, I sey to yow, be-thynke

In what perell ye be now! take hede!

(Wisdom, 11. 903–4)

IN HIS ESSAY on Troilus and Cressida G. Wilson Knight speaks of a ‘dynamic opposition’ between two faculties of the human mind and makes this the basis of a brilliant analysis of the fundamental philosophical oppositions with which the play itself is concerned.¹ He admits nevertheless that the terms he has used to describe them, ‘intellect’ on the one hand and ‘intuition’ on the other, ‘… cannot be ultimately justified as exact labels for the two faculties under discussion …’ although he finds that the faculties themselves are clearly embodied in the play.

Many critics have since disagreed with this view and have supported their arguments against it by pointing to the same lack of ‘ultimate justification’ for the terms, and by denying the existence amongst the Elizabethans of the concepts to which they refer. As J. C. Maxwell puts it, ‘… the notion of a supra-rational intuition has no place in the thought of Shakespeare or of his age.’²

The purpose of this chapter is in part to show that not only did the thought of Shakespeare and his age contain a clear-cut notion of the existence of a mental faculty of ‘supra-rational intuition’, but also that far from having ‘no place’ it might be said to have occupied a crucial position in that culture. In addition, it will be argued that some fairly ‘exact labels’ may be found which can legitimately be used to describe the opposition in the mind with which Professor Knight was concerned.

The ‘labels’ which will be suggested are ‘reason’ (in place of Knight’s ‘intellect’) and ‘intuition’ (in a sense rather different from that implied by his use of the same word). In order to complete a full contemporary picture of the end and purpose of the faculties in question two other terms will be needed and ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ will be used for these. In what follows, an attempt will be made to justify their choice, to define their use, to demonstrate the existence of the ideas about the human mind to which they refer, and to place these in an Elizabethan context.

Certain difficulties are immediately raised by such a project. First, Shakespeare did not use these terms himself in any exact way, nor would we expect him to have done so. He was primarily a dramatist, and so was concerned to make a dramatic use of ideas; to exhibit them in action on the stage rather than to discuss them with the kind of regard for precise definition that we would expect had he written philosophical dialogues and not plays. Therefore, if an understanding of these ideas (even a recognition that they existed) can illuminate without limiting the plays which contain them, it will be necessary to try to put into words, to ‘define’ matters which Shakespeare was able, much more satisfyingly, simply to enact.

Any discussion of those matters must raise another difficulty, for whatever the actual framework of ideas in a culture may be, it is not necessarily the same as that held to and acted on by the culture in practice. An age can be mistaken about itself (most are) and can be as unaware as any of its individual members of the nature of its own motivations. The same applies equally to one culture’s view of another. Little ‘objective’ truth exists in this respect, and much that we discern in Elizabethan and Jacobean civilization would have been unrecognized and possibly denied by an Elizabethan or Jacobean person. There is nothing unreasonable in this: whatever a culture believes to be true is true for that culture. But this in itself cannot deny the existence of whatever later cultures perceive in an earlier one. No civilization has any absolute claim on veracity and we need to find what we are looking for in the past as part of a process of self-identification; hence we place our own truth a fortiori over the truths of previous ages and we believe in it in order to believe in ourselves. The ultimate difficulty lies in deciding how much and to what extent ideas which seem to us to have been important in any period were in fact significant and formative in their effect on the way people lived and thought at that time. The simplest method of dealing with the problem in this case is to relieve the present chapter of half of the burden and to place that on the rest of the book. Thus, if Shakespeare’s interest in the matters discussed here can be illustrated in succeeding chapters, then that will provide a reasonable case for arguing that they were significant both for him and for his audience.

Moreover, the way in which the plays deal with these concepts may also illuminate them; a ‘two-way’ interchange takes place in such matters which considerations of the relationship between literature and society too often discount. ‘Popular’ forms of communication like the drama can determine as well as reflect human thinking. For example, in our own time not only may television claim to be ‘like’ life, but it can also be the means of causing life to become disturbingly like itself. The same applies, to an admittedly lesser extent, to Shakespeare’s plays in their period, so that whilst all great drama must invariably be congruent with its own culture, to designate particular ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ in what amounts to an extremely complex rapport can be misleading.

It is particularly so when the less concrete manifestations of human activity in any period are relegated to the limbo of ‘background’. Drama makes use of a ‘conversational’ method of communication both in itself and between itself and the civilization which constitutes its audience. To think of it as making ‘statements’ before a back-cloth of historical events and ideas creates a quite improper distinction between modes of human self-consciousness which in fact co-exist and inter-act ‘conversationally’ as parts of a whole greater than themselves. The notion of ‘congruency’ necessitates those of equality and interdependence and the designation of the elements involved in it as ‘back’- or ‘fore’-ground destroys such balance. Those distinctions may perhaps be avoided in the present case by giving some indication of the way in which the ideas in question formed part of the totality of the age’s experience and pervaded it on the levels both of thought and of action; they will be seen, it is hoped, through the minds of those who thought about them and heard, however variously and amorphously expressed, in the many voices which spoke of them. If they, and the problems they created, can be discerned in a conspectus of this kind, then it will be possible to approach Shakespeare’s own particular and powerful formulation of them in a manner both appropriate to its status and indicative of it.

The result will not be to set up a Procrustean bed and to fit Shakespeare’s plays to it so much as to sketch out a small part of the Procrustean bed which his own age (like all ages) had constructed for itself, and to which his own plays (like all great plays) are well fitted perhaps because they themselves had helped in the construction.

Of course, any modern critic who considers issues of this nature will find himself faced with the problem of talking about the ideas of one culture in the language of another. For whatever the extent to which our own civilization may be a development of the earlier one and may use a language which springs from a common source, it nevertheless differs from it in many ways, and different preoccupations of all kinds surround the words it uses. Shakespeare’s civilization is so unlike that of modern Britain that it may by now be almost less misleading to treat it as an alien culture than to attempt to cope with the difficulties which arise from the presumption of an identity which no longer exists. Neither course is completely satisfactory, and for this reason it has seemed easier to try to give some sort of historical perspective to these notions in order to by-pass some of the confusion which surrounds them in the modern world.

Most human ideas have a long and complex history which resists codification, but it seems reasonable in this instance to suggest two focal points; that is, points in time at which their form was crystallized and given new significance by notable thinkers who had, for their own purposes, gathered together and unified most of the disparate accretions of thought which such concepts usually attract to themselves. In the case of the notion of a human mind which had two major faculties, one rational and the other intuitive, its two most important formulations prior to Shakespeare’s time seem to have been those of Aquinas and Ficino. And in so far as the juxtaposition of these names, one of a medieval Scholastic, the other of a renaissance Neo-platonist, both great writers of ‘summations’ of human thought, evokes so powerfully the intellectual climate of the Elizabethan period, it gives support in itself to the judgement that these represent points at which any account should be fuller than at others. Accordingly an attempt has been made to correlate the work of these two thinkers, and thus to demonstrate the kind of fusion between their conclusions which the Elizabethans were able for many reasons to make. The history of the concepts of reason and intuition and of appearance and reality at points other than these will in consequence be only slightly treated, and in a manner intended simply to show the means by which a connection between these two became possible.

It must of course be said that the terms which will be used are not easily defined for our own culture, although this will have to be briefly attempted. Questions which concern the human mind, and the nature of its reason or of its perception of reality are of an order of complexity in the twentieth century which would have surprised a man of Shakespeare’s sensibility in the seventeenth. So many different issues are involved in each case that it is difficult even to think of them as the same questions. The world was smaller then, if no less complicated, and much that could be safely labelled ‘rational’ or ‘real’ has for us passed out of those realms into others of a psychological or sociological nature.

We should remember nevertheless that however diffracted such ideas may be in our own time, the culture of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period had a firm hold on them; so firm, that it did not feel the need to talk about them with the kind of precision which we would require of our modern spokesmen. That in itself is one of the major differences between our civilization and theirs, and it lies behind some of the difficulties mentioned above whilst raising a final one which concerns succee...