Shakespeare and Moral Agency (Continuum Shakespeare Studies)

Shakespeare and Moral Agency

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

Shakespeare and Moral Agency

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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

22

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

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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

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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

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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.

54 14

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

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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).

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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.

68 25

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

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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

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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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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.

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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.

98 9

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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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

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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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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

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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