Shakespeare and Philosophy

Stanley Stewart

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415809085
• eBook ISBN: 9781135178024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Touching on the work of philosophers including Richardson, Kant, Hume, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Dewey, this study examines the history of what philosophers have had to say about "Shakespeare" as a subject of philosophy, from the seventeenth-century to the present. Stewart's volume will be of interest to Shakespeareans, literary critics, and philosophers.

1
Philosophy’s Shakespeare

Defining Terms

The rise of science in the eighteenth century led David Hume, William Richardson, and others like them to ponder ways in which literature and literary criticism were, or could be, vehicles for the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. A century later, the aim was more likely to be to think of literature in musical terms. When Pater asserts that poetry aspires to “the condition of music,” he implies that poetry increases in value in proportion to its appositeness to music. To put that point another way, Pater assumes that music is more valuable than poetry, and so that the prestige of poetry increases with its capacity to mimic the effects of music. Likewise, when one describes a piece of music as a “tone poem,” the rhetorical aim is to appropriate value in the opposite direction, toward “programmatic” music, “Pastoral” symphonies, and “Pictures at an Exhibition.” In the twentieth century, literary critics were more inclined to emulate the social scientists; presumably, their method and vocabulary were more telling, more important, than those of literary studies. In this context, it was convenient to admire literature in proportion to the way in which it reflected sympathy with one or another social cause or political movement. As partisan zeal increased, this kind of literary criticism became, in Harold Bloom’s lively characterization, the academic equivalent of “cheerleading” for paladins of the “six branches of the School of Resentment: Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians” (Bloom 1994, 527).

We need not enshrine Bloom’s characterization to wonder whether such recent efforts as Marxist Shakespeares are enough like English Studies or Comparative Literature to be grouped under these disciplines, which is not to say that, if they are not, they must be consigned to categories with less prestige. We could infer that Bloom is merely saying something about the current emphasis of literary criticism on social concerns. So we might ask: Is Marxist Shakespeares about Marx or Shakespeare or both or neither? One answer might be descriptive. Contributors to this particular collection of essays on Shakespeare are professors of English or Comparative Literature. Then if we think the tone of “An Elegy for the Canon” in Bloom’s The Western Canon is appropriate to the current status of literature in the curriculum, we would seem to share Bloom’s regret for the triumph, as Antonio Gramsci might put it, of “cultural history” over “artistic criticism in the strict sense” (Gramsci 291). Of course, Gramsci is a very different kind of critic from Harold Bloom. Gramsci considered Tolstoy, the Christian, and Shaw, the secularist, as rhetorically identical in their “moral tendentiousness.” Gramsci was a Marxist, but if he were writing today, I think he would join with Bloom in criticizing the movement on the left in literary criticism toward an apologetics of moral indignation. He would say that, in their determination to emulate the social scientists, socially motivated literary critics have, perhaps unwittingly, abandoned “artistic criticism in the strict sense”. Why, for instance, do we have Marxist rather than, say, Nietzschean or Pragmatic Shakespeares? Do “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” dominate Shakespeare criticism so completely that the field has become the intellectual equivalent of applause for “the last Marxists standing” on the “battleground” of “that strange creature ‘Shakespeare’ in our cultural politics” (Howard and Shershow 2001, xii)?

Gramsci would not be alone in such an estimate. Historians of ideas might also be amused by the whiff of Whiggish self-satisfaction in the martial figure here (of literary criticism as a “battleground”). At the same time, they might concede that Victorian critics thought they were praising poetry when, in an age that idolized Wagner, they described poetry as “musical.” In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom eulogizes literary values because, for him, they seem to be, for all practical purposes, dead. “Cheerleading” has replaced literary appreciation. In this sense, Terence Hawkes sees Marxist Shakespeares as an effort “to undermine ancient and inherited prejudices, such as the supposed distinction between ‘foreground’ and ‘background’” (Howard 2001, xi), as one of many signs of the progress of “Cultural Materialism.” A glance at the core curriculum of almost any college literature department will show that this effort to replace historical analysis with social advocacy has succeeded.

Obviously, the “Cultural Materialists” consider this success benign, and it may well be so. But if in fact it is benign, it is so because literary values held by critics like Harold Bloom either were, so to speak, “unsound” or “pernicious” or in some way “unproductive”—not benign; or, if the values of these critics were not themselves pernicious, then at the very least they were predicated on perceptions which were “improper” or “biased” or “oppressive” or something of the sort. The point is that, for them, literary history qua literary history, accompanied by attempts at objective critical analysis, did not and does not encourage the “right” social outcome. Somewhere here, where literary discussion intersects with philosophy, the temptation to Whiggish self-dramatization can be, I think, both powerful and hidden. When moral judgment marches hand in hand with historical characterization, well-meaning critics may veer toward the cultural attitude of Sir John Frazer, whose analysis of “primitive” religious practices Wittgenstein severely scrutinized. Specifically, Wittgenstein found fault with Frazer for his belief, typical with Victorian anthropologists, that evolution was a process of inevitably forward progress from savagery toward late-nineteenth-century English institutions and customs. Hence, Sir John Frazer’s The Golden Bough reflected the views of enlightened Victorian society: “Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as mistakes” (RFGB 1). Frazer wrote as if there were something wrong with the practices of the people that he was studying, as if their rites and ceremonies contradicted, and so blasphemed, the one true God of Victorian England, namely, “science.” In fact, Wittgenstein suggests, since the rain dance as well as the prayers of men like St. Augustine and “the Buddhist holy-man” assert no hypotheses, it is impossible for them to contradict any hypothesis. With something like the same stricture in mind, and at the risk of appearing to be one who would hoist the banner of cultural “bias”—even that of the worst “ancient,” “inherited” kind—the following discussion will proceed on the assumption that the “distinction between ‘foreground’ and ‘background’” might help explain the history of Shakespeare as a subject of philosophy, as distinct from philosophy as a subject in Shakespeare studies.

Let me say at the outset that there are many legitimate aims of literary criticism and among them might be “liberating” readers from attitudes that well-meaning critics, whether rightly or wrongly, find pernicious. So when critics suggest that universities should replace Shakespeare in their curricula with authors more tractable to such political interests as Marxist feminism (Howard and O’Connor 1987, 1), we should probably impute a sincere, even charitable, motive to these critics. In the case in question, the argument is, if I understand correctly, that if literary critics can politicize the subject of Shakespeare, they can politicize, and in that way do as they wish, with any author. This statement about the power involved in establishing curricula reflects a view which goes back at least to Plato, and, in one way or another, probably most societies support some version of it. School boards and other “Guardians” spend a great deal of time and money making sure that younger members of society read certain books rather than others. But having said that, I am still inclined to ask: Why, in today’s university of all places, would anyone want to replace Shakespeare with an author more malleable to one or another political program? For that matter, why would anyone want to do anything “to” Shakespeare, or “to” his or any other author’s works? Returning to Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, I want to say that Wittgenstein was not arguing that religious practices of other societies were improper subjects of scientific inquiry. Rather, he was saying that, as a scholar of the subject, Frazer failed to meet his obligation to get the facts straight about the subject under consideration.

For Wittgenstein (to whom we will return in Chapter 8), description of a culture is an ethical matter, or, at least, it has an ethical component. When we characterize a cultural custom or artifact, we purport to understand it. For centuries, for instance, scholars and critics have tried to explain Shakespeare and his works. They have researched his life, his times, and his writings, and argued strenuously about the proper means of studying them. We can safely say, I think, that most of these critics share the honorable aim, as the subtitle of Colin McGinn’s Shakespeare’s Philosophy puts it, of Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays. They want not only to understand this great poet, but also to share that understanding. And yet somehow the significance of Shakespeare’s hallowed texts remains “undiscovered,” as if just out of reach of our reading or viewing, just “behind” the words and actions that we perceive or imagine as the work unfolds. Since McGinn is a professor of philosophy, it is not surprising that he approaches “Shakespeare from a specifically philosophical perspective” (McGinn viii). In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the question of the restraints, if any, that historical context imposes on authors like Shakespeare, and, for that matter, on their critics. The Marxists are not alone in this concern. For many critics, the question is: Who or what wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Was Shakespeare—the actor, playwright, and businessman—the agent or primary cause of the works attributed to him, or was he more like the warm wax upon which the seal of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture was pressed? Is it possible for an unusually gifted poet to “transcend” the commonplaces of his time, to address ideas and attitudes that neither he nor his audiences would have recognized? If so, we might legitimately claim that Shakespeare, besides being a talented playwright, was also an original thinker. We can probably trace the serious effort to characterize Shakespeare as a philosopher to Leo Strauss and his followers, Allan Bloom in particular. In Shakespeare On Love and Friendship, Bloom declares that “Shakespeare was the first philosopher of history” (Bloom 1993, 29). No less straightforwardly, Agnes Heller and Leon Craig argue that Shakespeare was a creative, philosophical mind. For Craig, Shakespeare was “as great a philosopher as he is a poet” (Craig 4). Indeed, “Shakespeare ranks high among true philosophers” (12), and, similarly, Heller writes that, along with Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Bacon, Shakespeare “opened the way for…realistic ethics” (Heller 18).

Few scholars of the Early Modern period deny the importance of philosophy in the work of major authors such as Marlowe and Shakespeare. We have good reason to suppose that the authors of The Jew of Malta and Richard III knew Machiavelli well; “Machiavelli” delivers the Prologue in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s Gloucester, who would “get a crown” at any cost, claims that he can “set the murtherous Machevil to school” (3H6 3.2.193). As for the reaction of their audiences, as it is with discussion of Freud in the twentieth century, in the Age of Elizabeth, even people who had never read Machiavelli were familiar with ideas attributed to him. And the same could be said of other thinkers. Many dozens of scholars have shown the impress of ancient and modern philosophy on the curricula of Renaissance schools and universities. Richard Popkin has demonstrated the influence of Savonarola and Montaigne, Lily Bess Campbell of Aristotle, Robin Headlam Wells of Cicero, and so on. In a general sense, we could say that the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton exhibit a wide spectrum of reading in philosophy. But this fact does not make any one of these distinguished poets “philosophers” in the sense implied by McGinn, namely, the “specifically philosophical” sense. “Philosophy” is not a normative term. A poet’s work may embody significant philosophical substance without being an original philosophical statement. My aim here is not to refute such learned critics as Allan Bloom, Agnes Heller, and Leon Craig, but to investigate the ways in which these critics advance the case for the proposition that Shakespeare was a “philosopher” from, as McGinn puts it, “a specifically philosophical perspective.”

Consider, first, Leon Harold Craig’s argument in Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear. Here, Craig purports to represent “old fashioned views about literature” (Craig 11), while at the same time showing that Shakespeare’s plays embody “philosophical merit” (7). To accomplish this task, Craig must first get around what he regards as the prevailing trend in criticism toward philosophical relativism. For how can there be philosophical merit without wisdom, and how can there be wisdom without knowledge? And yet nowadays—especially in the humanities and social sciences—the trendy assumption that knowledge is nothing more than the assertion of raw political power has gained considerable political momentum, so much so that, in many disciplines, it goes almost without challenge. So at least in some circles, since Shakespeare knew nothing, he had no knowledge to impart. For many of the same reasons, it is improper to say that Shakespeare’s works reflect “reality,” because we have no stable, “unmediated” sense of what “reality” might be, even in our own time, much less in Elizabethan days.

But, setting these worries aside for the moment, Craig says that Shakespeare was the greatest of all contributors to the English language, and that he was so not just because of his facility with the language, which nevertheless inspired over two hundred operas (Craig 3). More to the point of his philosophical argument, Craig insists that Shakespeare’s great success reflects his understanding, his wisdom: Shakespeare was “as great a philosopher as he is a poet” (4). Indeed, “Shakespeare ranks high among true philosophers” (12). Literary criticism must not only ask, but answer, such questions as King Lear wanted Edgar, the “Theban” and “philosopher,” to address. Here, Craig admits that he is using philosophy in a normative sense, that he in fact presupposes certain value distinctions. But he prepares the way for his investigation by admitting his bias toward traditional literary and philosophical inquiry. For him, philosophy is not a statement of a particular point of view, but an activity aimed at understanding, or rather “a way of life in which this activity is the dominant organizing principle” (12). But then, since, as the subtitle of his book indicates, Craig is primarily interested in King Lear and Macbeth, it is safe to say that by philosophy he means “political philosophy.” Then, given this narrowing of the topic toward practical concerns of governmental consequences, not surprisingly, Shakespeare is a psychologist, par excellence. Thus, his philosophy derives from the concrete experience of aporia. At this juncture, Craig distinguishes between “intellectual” and “experiential” knowledge; true understanding involves both. Angelo is Shakespeare’s representation of the one without the other. It follows for Craig that Macbeth and King Lear show “what can be gained from reading Shakespeare ‘philosophically’” (21). Analyzing these two plays, Craig demonstrates that Shakespeare knew, appreciated, and used the political wisdom of Plato and Machiavelli (251).

Given this philosophical perspective, it might seem strange that Craig looks to Macbeth, which has far less philosophical discourse than, say, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, or Hamlet. Even Coriolanus is more preoccupied with political theory. Macbeth is a play marked by horrendous violence, and yet for Craig it is Shakespeare’s “most metaphysically ambitious” work (Craig 26). In this context, it is important to remember that there are serious grounds on which Macbeth might rightly claim the throne. The numerous mysteries in the play suggest, Craig argues, that Macbeth “is designed to illustrate the political teachings we associate most readily with Machiavelli’s The Prince” (31). For, although Duncan is the recognized king of Scotland, beloved rather than feared by all, he is also weak, depending as he does on others, especially Macbeth, to lead his armies in battle. In the same way, Macbeth depends on Lady Macbeth for political advice, and it is she—no Machiavelli—who thinks that no one will ask about the chamberlains’ motive for killing Duncan. Craig reminds us that the word “metaphysical” occurs only once in the Shakespeare canon, namely, when Lady Macbeth ponders the letter from her husband on his meeting with the Weyward Sisters. She wants to intervene to help the situation with which “fate and metaphysical aid doth seem / To have … crown’d” her husband.” For Craig, the diction here touches questions of reality, spirit, morality, time, and necessity. Hence, the play’s notable appositions between foul and fair, light and dark, good and evil, truth and lie. No Shakespeare play more forcefully confronts metaphysical concerns than Macbeth, and none more persistently probes philosophical questions of good and evil, freedom of the will, the nature of the world, and man’s responsibility to others. In the latter connection, it is also the author’s most unrelenting exploration of Machiavellian principles. It seems clear thus far that, for Craig, Shakespeare is a political philosopher in the sense that he had read and understood Machiavelli.

Now if Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most philosophical play, King Lear is his most misunderstood. Craig disagrees with Coleridge, who thought the first scene was not integral to the play. On the contrary, not only is it integral, but it is crucial, for, remember, Machiavelli insisted that it was harder and more important to sustain than to establish a state. So the division of the kingdom is, at bottom, wrongheaded. The King of France recognizes this, which is why he steps in so quickly to supplant Burgundy. The love test raises the same question that Edmund asks in the following scene: What does nature ask of parents and offspring? Lear and Gloucester claim to love their children equally, but one bestows “land” on his older “legitimate” rather than his younger “natural” son, and the other wants to give a “more opulent” third of the island to the youngest of his three daughters. When Edmund asks why age and custom, rather than merit, determines inheritance, damning him as “base,” he forces the audience to rethink the political reality of family structure and of the commonwealth as well. Legitimate, illegitimate, first, last—in politics, life is unfair. Insofar as the play searches into an understanding of “Nature” (Craig 168), Lear is, writes Craig, a play about the “birth of philosophy.” Thus, the play examines the difference between the “natural” and the “man-made,” which Shakespeare traces out in the “intellectual transformation” of the protagonist. Lear discovers that if, indeed, the world is “something” as distinct from “nothing,” then the world must make sense. And yet in his accustomed reason, he cannot make sense of it. Paradoxically, in his descent into madness—in his surrender of his rational” attachment to his family and the world—Lear survives with a new moral bearing, which emerges from an imaginary trial of his daughter-malefactors, and transcend...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Shakespeare
• Contents
• Bibliographical Note
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Philosophy’s Shakespeare
• 2 Philosophy’s Shakespeare
• 3 Hume’s Shakespeare
• 4 “Philosophy” in Richardson’s Philosophical Analysis of Shakespeare
• 5 Enlightenment Shakespeare
• 6 Shakespeare and Subjectivity
• 7 Pragmatism’s Shakespeare
• 8 Shakespeare and the “Limits of Wittgenstein’s World”
• 9 Shakespeare and “The Litrification of Philosophy”
• Appendix The Evolution of Richardson’s
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index