II
Ideals in the Modern World
4
Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self
Shakespeare, we are told, invents the human. This is a statement full of consequential truth, though not quite the truth that its originator conceives. Harold Bloom says that âthe humanâ as we know it comes into being when the playwrightâs characters display a certain interior life. Shakespeareâs characters are distinct not only because their speech reveals their minds and hearts so brilliantly. They are also distinct because they can reflect on their own utterances, and through their reflections change their sense of who they are. Shakespeareâs characters read and interpret themselves. âI think, therefore I am,â Descartes asserts. Shakespeareâs characters, according to Bloom, think about their own thought, and so represent a level of being that makes them different not in degree but in kind from previous representations of human beings.
One of Shakespeareâs most ferocious villains, Edmund, about to die, cries out âYet Edmund was beloved.â He surprises himself by what he saysâup until this point Edmund has thought he was incapable of love and completely unlovable. He overhears himself and he has to reconceive himself. He is not quite the being he thought he was: heâs more capable of affection and generous feelings than he had imagined. He calls out to the guards to try to save Cordelia and Lear, whom he has sentenced to death; his final breath is, surprisingly to himself and everyone else, a generous one.
Perhaps what Bloom says about self-overhearing and change is so. Maybe Shakespeareâs characters are, to use Bloomâs idiom, âstrong mis-readersâ of themselves. But the most significant truth about Shakespeareâs âinvention of the humanâ is both simpler and more complex. Shakespeare does not quite invent the human as we know it. Rather he makes way for the flourishing of a new human type, a type that he does not especially endorse, or perhaps even like terribly much. Shakespeare helps create the grounds for the presiding form of modern subjectivity through his acts of demolition as well as through his acts of representation. He clears the way for the triumph of the Self. His work helps open a space in which it can unfold and triumph. In Shakespeareâs world only Self lives on and thrivesâthough this fact is no cause for celebration to him and surely it shouldnât be to us. Shakespeare is the first great secularist; the first authentic renderer of the marketplace philosophy, pragmatism, and the primary artist of life lived exclusively in the sublunary sphere. Seen from Shakespeareâs vantage, the pragmatic life is not especially enticing or glorious, but it is all we genuinely have. Shakespeare is the ultimate poet of worldliness.
What is perhaps the best-known sentence of literary criticism is devoted, not surprisingly, to Shakespeareâand it is extremely misleading. The sentence comes from John Keats and deals with a quality he believes Shakespeare to have possessed more fully than any other author and, presumably, more than any other man or woman, negative capability. That is, Keats says, when an individual is capable of being âin uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.â Keatsâs line, which comes from a letter to his brothers Tom and George, has been glossed in numberless ways. But the most common interpretation is that Shakespeare, poetic genius that he is, actually holds no perceptible views. Read the plays as closely as you like, Keats suggests (and virtually all critics have concurred), and you still will never know what he thinks about any consequential subject: about religion, monarchy, marriage, love, honor, what have you. Shakespeare preserves sublime neutrality. He stands above his creatures, aloof as a god, staring down into the universe that heâs made.
But suppose that matters are actually rather different. Suppose Shakespeare does have a worldview and a strong one. Suppose that his work, subtle as it is, brilliant as it is, is replete with values. Imagine that Shakespeare has designs upon us. But. But suppose that we cannot readily perceive those values because they are so much our own. Weâve become enclosed within them. We have, without quite knowing it, adopted most of Shakespeareâs vision of experience. (This is a very real sense in which Shakespeare has created the human.) What he fears and dismisses, we too fear and wish to dismiss. The world he renders is the world we live inâand he admits the reality of no other world. As bad as that world may be, it brings a sort of comfort to believe that it is the only possible world and that to ask for something more or something different out of life would be vain. Shakespeare seems to believe nothing because most of us, on some level below articulation, believe rather precisely what he did. Shakespeareâs beliefs, we might even say, have become our assumptions. He has created the most powerful literary mythology that the Western world has ever seen.
How does Shakespeare gather his amazing energy? Close to forty plays, then long poems, sonnets, collaborations, a career as an actor and a businessman: where does the vitality come from? It is not possible to say with certainty. But one might speculate that beyond his unparalleled inborn powers, the poet taps a broad collective force. He writes so much and so well in part because he writes with the concentrated energy of a world- transforming movement. He expressesâin a sense he isâthe power of a rising middle class, a class tired of the arrogance of nobility but still fascinated by what is (or what might be) noble. This is a class that disdains high heroic honor but delights to see it renderedâand undone. Shakespeare also writes for and as a figure within a class that has little use for deep religion, the religion of compassion. His audience is Christian, but does not seem especially drawn to what Thomas Ă Kempis called âthe imitation of Christ.â And he writes for a class with no real use for high thoughtâthough Shakespeare is from time to time tempted by the ideal of contemplation.
Bloom says that Christopher Marlowe is Shakespeareâs primary precursor and that Shakespeare overcomes him easily. Not quite. Shakespeareâs primary precursor is not the fledgling genius Kit Marlowe, who dies young, murdered (as the legend goes) over âa great reckoning in a little room.â Shakespeareâs major influence is the most accomplished prior writer in the Western tradition, Homer. The war between the two is not primarily a war over originality. It is a war over vision. A significant proportion of Shakespeareâs work is an assault on Homer, The Iliad, and on what we have called Homeric values. At the same time, Shakespeare derives no little profit from the allure of the ultimate Homeric theme, the theme of honor. Repeatedly Shakespeare kills the Homeric hero (or his descendant) on the stage. Then he revives that hero again (so great is our fascination with him) for one sacrifice more in another brilliant play.
Shakespeare, as Jonson said, had âsmall Latin and less Greek.â He had not been to the university; he was no classical scholar. But Shakespeare did have access to George Chapmanâs translation of Homer, which began appearing in 1598. He would have seen the opening books, and would have known a great deal about Homerâs depiction of Achilles. So too would Shakespeare have had access to other legendary sources about the Trojan War, including Chaucerâs Troilus and Criseyde, on which he bases his most unrelentingly polemical play. No one who has read Shakespeareâs Troilus with any care can readily believe in Shakespearean negative capability.
Almost all lovers of Shakespeareâs art are united in one wish, the wish that Shakespeare did not write Titus Andronicus. Yet the play is his first tragedy, and it has a central part in his development. As the critic Katharine Maus says: âhe returns to the Machiavellian villain in Richard III, to the urgency of revenge in Hamlet, to the old man unwisely relinquishing power in Lear, to questions of race and intermarriage in Othello and The Tempest, to important moments in Roman history in The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Anthony and Cleopatraâ (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 371). All this is true, but Titus matters for our understanding of Shakespeare in a cruder and more central way. In this play Shakespeare begins his strife with heroic values. The image of Titus and the torments that Shakespeare visits upon him never seem to leave his mind. The degradation, torture, and disgrace of this, his first tragic protagonist, is a great Shakespearean resource, and the playwright will draw upon it again and again.
What is tragedy in its essence? A question with many answers, no doubt. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche speculates that tragedy is the drama of the rise, apotheosis, then the torture, dismemberment, and death of the deity. For the deity, substitute the heroâthe vividly Homeric heroâand you will begin to approach the inner form of Shakespeareâs martial tragedies. And no Shakespearean hero is as brutally tortured and sacrificed onstage as Titus.
Titus has been daring or foolish enough to embrace the Roman code of honor as it has been passed down through Homer and his heroes. He has fought and fought well for Rome, much as Shakespeare will depict Coriolanus and Caesar and Antony as having done. When the play begins, he has lost twenty-one of his twenty-five sons to the wars. As Maus observes, âTitus ⊠in his austere patriotism, his intolerance of dissent, his acute sense of personal and family honor, his traditional piety, and his ferocious commitment to patriarchal hierarchy ⊠is a recurrent Roman personality typeâ (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 372). Titus is an exemplar of the peculiarly Roman version of the warrior ideal:
Rome, I have been thy soldier forty years,
And led my countryâs strength successfully.
And buried one and twenty valiant sons,
Knighted in field, slain manfully in arms,
In right and service of their noble country.
(I.i.193â197)
Titus is at the end of his life and feels justified in proclaiming that he has fulfilled a high ideal. Titus is not Achillean: he does not seek glory for himself. He isâor wishes to beâa descendant of Hector.
Titus demands that the eldest son of Tamora, queen of the defeated Goths, be sacrificed to the memory of his own slain sons. The sacrifice, Titus claims, has the status of religious rite. It is intended to appease the suffering shadows of the departed, his sons killed in the wars, and so it must take place. Not long afterward, Titus kills one of his remaining sons for opposing him when he declares that Lavinia, his daughter, will marry the newly proclaimed emperor, Saturninus. Titus hasâhonorably, noblyâceded his right to the imperial seat to Saturninus and intends to give him absolute loyalty, whatever the cost. When Titusâ son, Mutius, tries to block the marriage, Titus draws his sword and kills him. In Roman life, it was often considered an act of nobility to put the state or oneâs conception of honor before family. Maus mentions Horatius, who killed his own sister for lamenting the death of her husband, whom Horatius killed in battle; Titus Manlius Torquatus, a general who had his own son executed for too eagerly anticipating an order to close on the enemy; and Appius Claudius, who murdered his daughter when her honor was undermined (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 372). Perhaps the best-known example of such action, though, is Lucius Junius Brutus, who killed his sons for siding with Tarquin. (Lucius turns up in Book VI of The Aeneid, where Virgil calls him âinfelix.â) When Titus kills his son for defying the emperorâs wish, he is following in a long line of distinguished Romans, following their version of the code of honor.
After the first scenes, the play consists in the humiliation, the debasement, and finally the destruction of Titus. By the close of the tragedy, the once valiant, noble Roman is as depraved as the human fiends who torment him. His daughter is raped. She has her tongue cut out. Her hands are sawed off. The corrupt emperor arrests Titusâ oldest remaining son. Aaron the Moor, an enemy of Titus with connections at court, informs Titus that if he will cut off his own hand and send it to the emperor, the emperor might spare his son. Titus severs the hand and sends it as a gift. The emperor laughs and kills his son anyway. By the end of the play, Titus is a mad, disfigured animal. He kills the two men who have raped and mutilated his daughter and bakes them in a pie and invites their mother to eat it. She does. Then Titus kills Lavinia to spare her further shame, or so he says. Titus dies a self-justified but ruined man, his body maimed, his spirit destroyed.
Titusâ loyalty to the emperor and to the values of republican Rome doesnât elevate him, not in the least. It debases him. In his own terms, Titus does virtually nothing wrong. But the play shows us time after time that everything Titus does, from murdering his own son to taking bloody revenge on Tamora to sawing his hand off in hopes of saving his son is completely, almost insanely, wrong. When the heroic code collides with the harsh exigencies of life, the result is more absurd than it is tragic. Titus dies not only debased, but also ridiculous. It is Titusâ commitment to the old Roman martial values that causes his destruction. His honor is his undoing.
Titus is Shakespeareâs tragic beginning, and he never travels as far away from its spirit as one might wish. In time, he will become a more sophisticated assassin of the heroic ideal. But the modus operandi will remain: the glorious must be debased. Then, in future plays, it will be brought back to life again to be debased once more.
That Shakespeareâs Othello is a figure with epic stature is beyond doubt. Those around Othello recognize him as a hero: when trouble arises, he is the one the citizens depend on to save Venice. But we also know that Othello is a hero because he tells us so. Homer sings the song of Achilles and Hector; Othello sings the song of himself. Early in the play he tells the story of how he wooed and won Desdemona by rendering the tale of his own life. He wrote a compressed epic poem about himself: his battles and triumphs, his privations, and his wanderings.
Like Odysseus, Othello describes the wonders he has seen and the amazing events that have befallen him. Othello is a heroic figure in a literary production of his own devising. So to Brabantio and then to his daughter Desdemona, Othello tells the tale
of most disastrous chances:
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth scapes iâthâ imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my [travelâs] history;
(I.iii.134â139)
Othello finishes his story with a flourish, speaking of âthe Cannibals that each [other] eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / [Do grow] beneath their shouldersâ (I.iii.143â145). At the end of Othelloâs grandiloquent recitation, Desdemona expresses the wish that âheaven had made her such a manâ (I.iii.163).
For Othello there is one central truth in life. It is the epic truth of Othello, the victor who has come through struggles, who is the safeguard of the city of Venice and the lover and husband of the beautiful Desdemona. He has no desire to inquire into the validity of his terms for self-rendering. The Othello we meet at the beginning of the play clearly believes that there is one truth (his) and a set of words that perfectly expresses that truth (his as well). He has no awareness of (or no use for) ambiguity, complexity, or irony. Not for him what Nietzsche calls a âperspectivalâ seeing, in which there is no central truth about a person or event, only multiple interpretations. Othello is immune to the idea that every human occurrence is charged and changed by virtue of being seen from a different angle. He is incapable of entertaining the idea that there is no disinterested, determining vantage. The notion that perspectives compete with each other and that one perspective ascends to something called truth because of the authority of the perceiver, or the force of institutional power that underwrites him, is not available to Othello.
Othello is a truth-teller. When he is accused of bewitching Desdemona, Othello confronts the elders of Venice with his reputation and his faith in his power to tell absolute truth. âMy parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightlyâ (I.ii.31â32). But the world is changing, and truth is no longer so simp...