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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
players are only players.6 The genius of these intuitions is that they acknowl-
edge 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 embar-
rassed 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 com-
petent 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 puz-
zling phenomenon, but it can be explained in reference to deeply held norma-
tive 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.
Is Shakespeare a Moral Philosopher? 3
“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 evalua-
tion 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 com-
plexity 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 con-
cern. 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,
6 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 philo-
sophy 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 impor-
tance 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 Self-
Deception in Shakespeare’s Tragedies”, Keira Travis finds a different pathway
into the unconscious sources that shape a character’s action. The crucial intui-
tion 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
Is Shakespeare a Moral Philosopher? 7
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-Interpreta-
tion, 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 artificia-
lity, 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
10 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 conversa-
tions 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 unin-
formed. 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 possi-
bility 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
Martha C. Nussbaum, “Stages of Thought,” The New Republic, May 07, 2008.
2
Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare . . . (London:
Harding and Wright, 1810), p. 37. Originally published anonymously, 1769
3
Elizabeth Griffith, The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (London:
T. Cadell, 1775), p. 4.
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.
5
David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction,” in Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1983), p. 268.
6
Johnson, “Preface,” pp. 76–77.
7
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 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
8
David Davies, “Reading Fiction (1): Truth in a Story,” Aesthetics and Literature
(London: Continuum Books, 2007), pp. 49–70.
9
Dadlez, E.M., “Introduction,” What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual
Emotions (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987).
10
Davies, p. 70.
11
Lewis, p. 265.
12
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).
13
Carl Ginet, On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 4.
14
For more on strong evaluations see Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 25–52.
15
Judith Butler: Bodies That Matter (New York, Routledge, 1993), pp. 94–95.
16
Tzetvan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: the Dialogical Principle. Trans. Wlad Godzich
(Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984), p. 109ff.
17
Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003), p. 4.
18
Jon Elster, “Social Norms,” in Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 113–23.
19
Gregory Currie, “Narrative and the Psychology of Character,” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, Vol 67 (2009), pp. 61–71.
20
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.
21
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.
22
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 72.
Part I
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 influ-
ential 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 influ-
entially 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 agen-
das 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 “fault-
lines”—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 mean-
ing 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
Moral Agency in Julius Caesar 17
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 impor-
tant 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 psycholog-
ically 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 display-
ing 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
Moral Agency in Julius Caesar 19
For all that is admirable about Brutus and his Stoic self-possession, how-
ever, 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 sug-
gests, 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 psy-
chological 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 inten-
tions 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.
20 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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:
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:
There is even, in the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius (4.3), some-
thing 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 pre-
scient 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 conspira-
tors’ targets:
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 independ-
ently 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 point-
edly 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 hyper-
conscious 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:
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:
Here is articulated the play’s central insight about the interaction of larger
events and contingent choice. Historical events have their own logic, indepen-
dent 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
24 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
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 inten-
tion 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 out-
come 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 uncon-
trollable contingencies. And in Julius Caesar, these themes play out in the char-
acter 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
Moral Agency in Julius Caesar 25
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 psycho-
logy, 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
26 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
Notes
1
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; repr. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1969), xv–xxiii, pp. 3–20.
2
Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); espe-
cially pp. 60–64; Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
3
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 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
4
Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
5
Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 35.
6
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).
7
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002);
Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York: Routledge,
2003).
8
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.
9
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).
10
Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, pp. 26–57.
11
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.”
12
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.
13
René Girard, “Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar,” Salmagundi, 88
(1991), pp. 399–419; Wayne Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Cae-
sar,” Renaissance Quarterly, 43 (1990), pp. 75–111.
14
Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, pp. 180–242.
15
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in his The Prince and Other Writings, trans. Wayne
Rebhorn (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 105.
16
Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, 109–25.
17
Max Lerner, ed. “Introduction” Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses
(New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. xxvi.
18
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.
19
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 rela-
tivism. 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 scien-
tific 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
30 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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
32 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 condemna-
tion 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.
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 philoso-
phy 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 value-
laden 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 estab-
lished moral principles and in tension with the calm domain of moral reason-
ing. 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
34 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 underpin-
nings 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,
Phenomenology of Moral Conviction 35
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 cate-
gory 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 calcu-
lus 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 dramatiz-
ing 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 circum-
stances 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
36 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 signifi-
cance of the impending succession, Shakespeare provides a vivid image:
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 will-
ingness 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, pro-
viding 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
Phenomenology of Moral Conviction 37
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 imme-
diate 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
38 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 out-
side 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 representa-
tion of the moment of moral decision making:
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
Phenomenology of Moral Conviction 39
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:
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 congrega-
tion, 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:
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 Claudio-
as-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
Phenomenology of Moral Conviction 41
Notes
1
Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” The New York Times Magazine, January 13,
2008, sec. 6, pp. 32–37, 52, 55–56, 58.
2
Pinker, p. 37.
3
Jonathan Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” Science 316.5827
(May 18, 2007), pp. 998–1002.
4
Haidt, p. 998.
5
Plato, Dialogues of Plato, vol. III, ed. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Bigelow, Brown,
and Co., 1914), p. 11.
6
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a 22–26, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).
7
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).
8
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).
9
Haidt, p. 998.
10
Pinker, p. 35.
11
Ibid.
12
See 2 Henry IV (5.5.48–73).
13
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
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
Wordplay and the Ethics of Self-Deception 43
Hamlet
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
Wordplay and the Ethics of Self-Deception 47
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, neverthe-
less, think that it is worthwhile to take seriously the extent to which examina-
tion 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
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 some-
where 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
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 connec-
tion 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 success-
fully 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:
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 market-
place 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 phras-
ing 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 reflec-
tion 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 dur-
ing 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
52 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 position-
and-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 candi-
date’s gown (indeed, he goes so far as to insist that he “cannot / Put on the
gown” (2.2.131–32)), Menenius responds:
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-marginaliza-
tion of the early plays; rather, I am simply trying to develop one of many possi-
ble pedagogically generative ways of reading the tragedies.
Wordplay and the Ethics of Self-Deception 53
Notes
1
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Explain.”
2
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 dis-
cussion of the problems involved, see Margreta de Grazia, “Homonyms before
and after Lexical Standardization,” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jarbuch
(1990): pp. 43–56.
3
Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005),
pp. 134–67.
4
I got the phrase “bringing a dead metaphor back to life” from Michael D.
Bristol.
5
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon, 2004), p. 7.
6
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: Wash-
ington 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.
7
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Pack.”
8
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 Three-
Text “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.
9
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Foil.”
10
“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 gravedig-
ger 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.
11
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.
12
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.
13
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 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
14
G. Blakemore Evans, ed. King Lear, in The Riverside Shakespeare (Dallas, TX:
Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1278n.
15
Quotations from Coriolanus are from Lee Bliss, ed. Coriolanus (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
16
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Porter.”
17
Ibid.
18
Bliss, Coriolanus, 186n.
19
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
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.
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 act-
ing in a way that one cannot be blamed for, acting in a situation where one sim-
ply 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 pardon-
able, 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
56 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 respon-
sible 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 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
Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being 57
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 igno-
rance” 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 dis-
gusting 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
Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being 59
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
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:
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:
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 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):
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,”
Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being 63
or maybe the critique here is of the stance or tone that this conception gener-
ates 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-inter-
ested. 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 audi-
ence 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
64 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 explana-
tion. 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 con-
ception 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
Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being 65
Notes
1
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.
2
Quotations are from the Q2 text edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Tylor
([Arden 3]; London, 2006).
3
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.
4
See NE 1117a20.
5
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.
6
See the note in the lines in the Thompson-Tyler edition, p. 450. These editors see
both Hamlet and Laertes as straightforwardly “disingenuous.”
7
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.
8
Quotations from Othello are from the edition by E. A. J. Honigman (Arden 3; Lon-
don: Thomson Learning, 1996).
Excuses, Bepissing, and Non-being 67
9
Quotations from The Merchant of Venice are from the edition by John Russell
Brown (Arden 2; London: Methuen, 1955).
10
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.
11
This is where the Posner reading fails to capture the content of the speech.
12
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).
13
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).
14
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.
15
Kenneth Gross, Shylock is Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006).
16
NE 1148b23–30 (discussing, among other things, “sexual relations between
males”).
17
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.”
18
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).
19
See Machiavelli’s The Prince, A Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. Mark Musa
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1964), pp. 82, 94.
20
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.
21
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.
22
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.
23
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.
24
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 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
25
See The Ontological Argument: From St. Anselm to Contemporary Philosophers, ed. Alvin
Plantinga (New York: Anchor Books, 1965).
26
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
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 prob-
lems of historical materialism as an account of the development of human civi-
lization.”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
72 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 con-
struction 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 com-
manded 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 perform-
ance 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 war-
rior. 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 mem-
bers—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
Conduct (Un)becoming 75
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 characteriza-
tion, 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 unpredicta-
ble 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 country-
side (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 praise-
worthy—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
76 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
“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 habituali-
zation, 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 individ-
ual 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
78 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 move-
ment 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 ene-
mies “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
80 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 under-
standing of the unanticipated effects his act holds for him:
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 soci-
ety (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 vul-
nerability (3.4.24). Only the Queen’s fast talking prevents the supper from fail-
ing 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 main-
tain 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
Conduct (Un)becoming 81
Macbeth knows that murdering Duncan is wrong and and, even more impor-
tant, 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 privi-
lege, 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 contemplat-
ing 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:
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 fore-
most 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
Conduct (Un)becoming 83
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, com-
pleted 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 every-
day 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
Robert Weimann, “Society and the Individual in Shakespeare’s Conception of
Character,” Shakespeare Survey, 1981, pp. 25, 29.
2
Ibid., p. 27.
3
Ibid., p. 26.
4
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.
84 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
5
Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 33, 34.
6
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.
7
Toulmin, Stephen, “The Inwardness of Mental Life,” Critical Inquiry 6 (Autumn
1979), pp. 10, 19.
8
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990), p. 137.
9
Judith Butler, “Changing the Subject: Judith Butler’s Politics of Radical Resignif-
cation” in The Judith Butler Reader, Ed. by Sara Salih, with Judith Butler (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 345.
10
Butler, “Subject,” p. 345.
11
Butler, “Subject,” p. 344.
12
Butler, “Subject,” p. 344.
13
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993), p. 234.
14
Weimann, p. 26 .
15
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.
16
Bristol, p. 91; Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean
Drama (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007).
17
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.
18
Weimann, p. 26.
19
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.
20
Alan Sinfield, “Macbeth: history, ideology and intellectuals,” Critical Quarterly
28 (1986), p. 70.
21
Weimann, p. 25.
22
Weimann, p. 26.
23
Zamir, p. 92.
24
Zamir, p. 93, n.3.
25
Zamir p. 94.
26
Zamir, p. 105. Emphasis mine.
27
Zamir, p. 108.
28
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.
29
Ralf Dahrendorf, Essays in the Theory of Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1968), p. 37.
Conduct (Un)becoming 85
30
Butler, Bodies, p. 95.
31
Bodies, p. 237.
32
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY,
1959), p. 75.
33
Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1961), pp. 325, 327.
34
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.
35
Brooks, p. 34.
36
Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis:
Bobbs Merrill, 1961), p. 140.
37
Zamir, p. 93.
38
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida. 3rd Series. Ed. David Bevington.
(London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998) 3.3.116–24.
39
See also Zamir, who makes a similar point, p. 96.
40
William Shakespeare, Hamlet. 2nd Series. Ed. Harold Jenkins (London, Arden
Shakespeare, 1982), 1.2.17–24.
41
William Shakespeare, King Richard II. 3rd Series. Ed. Charles R. Forker (London:
Arden Shakespeare, 2002), 1.3.215.
42
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
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 delibera-
tion, 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 sim-
ply 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 con-
trary 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
88 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 unin-
tended 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, sui-
cide 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 sui-
cide. 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 repug-
nant.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 ambigu-
ously 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
Contagion and Agency in Julius Caesar 89
may be the last time, suggests that he might rather commit suicide than undergo
the humiliation of defeat, Brutus responds that,
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 inter-
pret. 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 under-
stood 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 recog-
nition 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
90 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 result-
ing 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), remark-
ing not only on Brutus’s conscious deliberation, the key, many would argue, to
autonomous moral action, but also indicating that this deliberation was respon-
sive 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 through-
out 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 danger-
ous 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,
Contagion and Agency in Julius Caesar 91
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 inten-
tionally.”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
Contagion and Agency in Julius Caesar 93
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 power-
ful 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 associa-
tion 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,
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:
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 cor-
rect, but he misconstrues what will be destroyed, thinking it to be Roman free-
dom 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 auton-
omy. 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 self-
mastery, since traditionally the suicide relies on a trusted comrade to accom-
plish 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
96 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 auton-
omy 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 feel-
ings 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
Contagion and Agency in Julius Caesar 97
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 real-
ity 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
All citations are taken from William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell
(New York: Arden Shakespeare, 1998).
2
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. G.P. Goold and trans. H. Rackham
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1145b.
3
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004), 27.
4
Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003), p. 4.
5
Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1997).
6
Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Classics,
1984), pp. 26–39.
7
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 176–77.
8
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar ed. David Daniell (New York: Arden
Shakespeare, 1998), p. 103, fn. 100.
98 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
9
Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), p. 126.
10
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.
11
René Girard, “Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar”, Salmagundi,
88 (1991), pp. 399–419, esp. p. 406.
12
Wayne Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar”, Renaissance
Quarterly, 43 (1990), pp. 75–111, esp. pp. 83–88.
13
Kant, p. 186.
14
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.
15
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.
16
Arpaly, p. 12.
17
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Thomas Cooley (New York:
Norton, 1999), p. 113.
18
Arpaly, p. 10.
19
Plato, IX 873c.
20
Aristotle, 1150b.
21
Aristotle, 1150b.
22
Aristotle, 1156b.
23
Rebhorn, p. 92 and Kahn, “Passions of Some Difference”, pp. 271–86.
24
Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, p. 130.
25
Aristotle, Book VIII, esp. 1156b.
Chapter 7
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 respon-
sive, 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 oth-
er’s desires and needs over our own. We see evidence of this kind of relation-
ship 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 becom-
ing 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:
The twisted logic of “would not . . . must” “must not . . . am” reveals both
the depth of obligation she feels to Claudio and, simultaneously, her own
Ethical Questions and Questionable Morals 101
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 tomor-
row” (82–84). While the discourse of law depends upon such (supposed) impar-
tiality, 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:
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 com-
plicates—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 itera-
tion of the first, but at a heightened pitch. Angelo foregrounds her contradic-
tory 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
102 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 mod-
ern 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
Ethical Questions and Questionable Morals 103
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 demon-
strates, 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. Express-
ing 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:
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 “sinful-
ness” 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 couch-
ing the problem of this bribe in terms of sin actually elides the personal suffer-
ing and humiliation involved for Isabella in such a coercive sexual act.
Feminist ethics helps us identify this unspoken dimension of ethical rela-
tions 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:
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
Ethical Questions and Questionable Morals 105
that “demanding attitude toward others . . . that unselfish heed of the particular
needs and interests of others” which is constitutive of thick relations.20 As every-
thing 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:
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 funda-
mental 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:
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 obliga-
tion. 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 con-
nect 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
108 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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:
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, how-
ever, 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 paral-
lels 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
Many thanks to the participants of the Shakespeare Association seminar on Moral
Agency for their insightful comments on this essay, most especially Michael
Bristol.
2
Viki Bell, Culture & Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics, and Feminist Theory
(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), p. 47.
3
Ibid., 62.
4
Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2002), p. 7.
5
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).
6
Margalit, p. 105.
7
Quoted in Bell, p. 51.
8
Margalit, p. 87.
9
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).
10
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
110 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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.
11
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.
12
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 condi-
tions 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.
13
Bell, p. 61.
14
Ibid., p. 52.
15
Feminist Ethics: Projects, Problems, Prospects.” Feminist Ethics. ed. Claudia Card.
(Lawrence, Kansas: Kansas University Press, 1991), p. 85.
16
Jessica Slights, “Isabella’s Order: Religious Acts and Personal Desires in Measure
for Measure” Studies in Philology 95, no. 3 (1998): pp. 263–92.
17
Margalit, p. 33 and 37.
18
Levinas quoted in Bell, p. 53.
19
Bell, p. 47.
20
Margalit, p. 33.
21
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, out-
paramoured 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.
22
Edward Andrew, Shylock’s Rights: A Grammar of Lockian Claims (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1988).
23
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.
24
Margalit, p. 7.
25
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.).
26
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 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 penulti-
mate 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
The Burdens of Aging in King Lear 113
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; remem-
bering 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 Shake-
speare’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 espe-
cially 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 divi-
dends 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.
...
have clapped i’ th’ clout at twelve score, and carried you a forehand shaft a four-
teen 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
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 affirma-
tion 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), consti-
tutes 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
116 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
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 baffle-
ment 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 do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it” 4.6.33–34), and even
Edmund in his “bastard” speech wrestle with the implications of their respective
behaviors; only the “pelican daughters” (3.4.75) seem untroubled by dilemma.
Underpinning the tragic dismay visible in both plot and subplot in this play
is a set of expectations (and their disappointment) that begins in a dynamic of
family relations and radiates outward into larger social, political, and economic
connections. The matter of potency/usefulness and its inevitable link to
questions of agency is one of the most compelling—and disturbing—among
questions about old age and the reciprocal relations and obligations between
one generation and another. The theologian Abraham Heschel observed that
“every one of us entertains the keen expectation that other people will not
regard him merely because of what he is worth to them, because he is capable
of satisfying other people’s needs, but will regard him as a being significant and
valuable in himself . . . It is, moreover, obvious that a person’s service to society
does not claim all of his life and can therefore not be the ultimate answer to his
quest of meaning for life as a whole . . . What we are able to bestow upon others
is usually less and rarely more than a tithe.”10
Heschel forces his readers to confront the realization that none of us is “nec-
essary,” that “necessity,” in this sense of being needed, is “a situation of being
exposed to a demand from without,”11 and the fact that such demands diminish
or disappear as we age. Lear concurs: “Age is unnecessary.” This sense, too,
might be added to the more usual materialist/Marxist understanding of Lear’s
exasperated “O, reason not the need!” (2.2.453). “Who needs me?” Heschel
asks; “Who needs mankind?”12 and he answers his own question: “Human exist-
ence cannot derive its ultimate meaning from society, because society itself is in
need of meaning.”13 This might serve as the summative commentary on an
inquiry about moral agency, or on the Aristotelian prescript for what tragedy
imitates. It is implicit, too, in Cordelia’s explanation of the terms of the “bond”
according to which she loves her father:
If she’s right, then Becker’s identification of “the debt that cannot be repaid” is,
on second thoughts, not quite right. It is not that the debt is unpayable;
The Burdens of Aging in King Lear 117
Cordelia explains exactly how it is paid. The problem is that the payment never
satisfies; the debt is never paid by the return of the principal, because the
creditor always demands interest. Furthermore, the meaning of “moral agency”
in familial relations often seems to embed facilitation or enabling. Think of
Orlando’s complaint against Oliver early in As You Like It; Oliver has reneged on
his moral obligation as elder brother by withholding the means and opportu-
nity for Orlando’s education in “gentlemanlike qualities,” and has done so
against the instructions in their father’s will (1.1.59–62). Likewise Gloucester’s
acknowledgment of a financial obligation to his bastard son: “His breeding, sir,
hath been at my charge” (1.1.8). Sometimes moral agency is just fiscal agency.
It was exactly that for Montaigne, in his essay “On the affection of fathers for
their children,” which was available, as we know, in Florio’s 1603 translation a
year or two before Shakespeare wrote King Lear. Montaigne thought it was per-
fectly reasonable, in fact morally obligatory, for a father to take early retirement
and disburse his estate among his children while he still has a grip on his
rational faculties.
It is cruelty and injustice not to receive them into a share and association in our
goods, and as companions in the understanding of our domestic affairs . . . and
not to cut down and restrict our own comforts in order to provide for theirs, since
we have begotten them to that end. It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead
father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice
for the advancement and maintenance of many children, and let them mean-
while, for lack of means, lose their best years without making progress in public
service and the knowledge of men.14
No old age can be so decrepit and rancid in a person who has passed his life in
honor as not to be venerable, especially to his children, whose souls he ought to
have trained to their duty by reason, not by necessity and need nor by harshness
and force,15
Clearly there are other (im)moral agents at work in this play, besides Lear and
Gloucester, whose actions bring on what looks like madness. Lear’s “unbon-
neted” howling at the wind and rain is the keening of a traumatized human
being, no less so than his howling at the end when he carries in Cordelia’s
corpse.
One way to understand the “mock trial” scene as well as the king’s confronta-
tion with the storm is in terms currently used in discussions of post-traumatic
stress-disorder. Cathy Caruth’s work on PTSD has interesting implications for
reading this play. The disorder “takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucina-
tions, dreams, thoughts, or behaviors stemming from [an] event, . . . [which] is
not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its
repeated possession of the one who experiences it. . . . [The] traumatic symptom
cannot be interpreted, simply, as a distortion of reality, nor as the lending of
unconscious meaning to a reality it wishes to ignore, nor as the repression of
what once was wished.”19 This might serve as a reasonable explanation of what
we hear in Lear’s mock trial. His earlier pleas (not, incidentally, much different
from Edmund’s) to Nature and unnamed gods at several points in the play
(1.4.267–81; 2.2.378–81; 2.2.461–67) have availed nothing. He calls upon
once-familiar structures of order—courts, trials, classical hierarchies of judges
and accusers, beadles and defendants. What we should notice about this scene,
I think, is not that the king is mad but rather that the scene makes sense anyway.
Structures of jurisprudence, the civic necessity of laws and courts and trials, and
120 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
represented traumas has already been done. Of course, new damage is always
possible and unpredictable: such futures are never made explicit at the ends of
tragedies. Edgar cannot imagine more traumas than he has already seen,
enough to last a longer lifetime than remains to him or to the others left
standing.
Of course, hardly anyone else is left standing. Kent says that he must shortly
follow his master (5.3.320–21); that leaves only Albany and Edgar among the
play’s major figures. Like other “remnants” at the ends of Shakespearean
tragedies, they are left precisely because the play does not end with the deaths
of the protagonists. It ends with the promise to bear witness. Commenting on
Paul Celan’s observation that “no one bears witness for the witness,” Shoshana
Felman adds: “To bear witness is to bear the solitude of a responsibility, and to bear
the responsibility, precisely, of that solitude.”23 What Edgar is literally appointed to
do, besides taking up crown and scepter, is to bear witness to what he has seen
and lived, however briefly. Felman continues:
Edgar’s appointment is neither the first nor the last instance of such closing
testimonies in Shakespearean tragedy. Like Horatio, the Capulet/Montague
statues, Antony for Brutus, Octavius for Antony and Cleopatra, Aufidius for
Coriolanus, Edgar serves as a reiterative Shakespearean trope whose task it is to
bear witness, to testify, as if the play itself were incomplete, a chorus to some
other play or some other experience. Hamlet commissions Horatio not only to
“tell [his] story” (5.2.333) but to tell a story that exceeds ordinary credibility
and yet must be told, must not be forgotten. Some events will not make sense; all
Horatio can “truly deliver” is a narrative
Horatio can deliver a tale, perhaps not as harrowing and blood-freezing as the
one the Ghost failed to deliver (1.5.16), but no more sense-making, and beyond
what he can tell, as Hamlet said, “the rest is silence” (5.2.357–58). All these
122 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
King Lear makes a tragic mockery of all eschatologies . . . of both Christian and
secular theodicies; of cosmogony and of the rational view of history; of the gods
and the good nature, of man made in “image and likeness”. In King Lear both
the medieval and the Renaissance orders of established values disintegrate. All
that remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime is the earth—empty and
bleeding.36
I would not go as far as Kott does in reading Lear as absurdist avant la lettre, but
I can recognize the urge to find some way of making moral order out of a play
that insists so much on the dissolution of that order. The “established values” to
which Kott refers exist—if they ever existed—in a network of relationships,
familial and communal, that is systematically dismantled from the opening
violations of the play forward. At every level, as Gloucester observes in Act 1,
Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries,
discord; in palaces, treason and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father. This
villain of mine comes under the prediction—there’s son against father. The King
falls from bias of nature—there’s father against child. We have seen the best of
our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us
disquietly to our graves . . . (1.2.106–14)
“We have seen the best of our time,” says the father in Act 1; “we that are young
/ Shall never see so much, nor live so long,” says the son at the end. So the play
is orderly after all, ending with a rhetorical confirmation of a point that was
made with less thought and only coincidental evidence early on. Edgar’s last
lines bear witness to a moral order he can only hope will not need reiteration.
“We . . . / Shall never see so much nor live so long” honors the elderly dead; it
also implies a promise that will sound familiar to survivors of the twentieth
century: “Never again.”
Notes
1
Editorial commentary I have seen on these lines is generally limited to discussion
of the probable speaker (Albany in Q; Edgar in F), a debate not relevant to my
discussion. Quotations from King Lear follow the Arden 3 edition by R. A. Foakes
(London: Thomson Learning, 1997).
2
Poetics. Trans and ed. Kenneth A. Telford (Chicago: Regnery, 1961), Ch. 6,
1449b
3
Quotations from Hamlet follow the Arden 3 edition by Ann Thompson and Neil
Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006).
4
On the significance of communal memory, see Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of
Memory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 84–106,
esp. 94–96 where his words aptly condense the “kernel” of Edgar’s lines: “This
The Burdens of Aging in King Lear 125
‘we’ is an enduring body that will survive after our personal death. We shall not
be remembered personally, but we shall be remembered by taking part in events
that will be remembered for their significance in the life of the collective.”
5
Norberto Bobbio, Old Age and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Allan Cameron
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 12–13.
6
Bobbio, pp. 12–13.
7
Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), p. 221. I thank Mario DiGangi for bringing this book to my attention.
8
Quotations from 2 Henry IV follow the Arden edition by A. R. Humphreys
(London: Methuen, 1981).
9
Lawrence C. Becker, Reciprocity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1986), p. 178.
10
Abraham J. Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (New York:
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1967), pp. 75–76. See also Margalit, pp. 94–103.
11
Heschel, p. 77.
12
ibid., p. 77.
13
ibid., p. 76.
14
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 280.
15
Montaigne, p. 281.
16
Bobbio, p. 5.
17
See Foakes’ Introduction, 133 and textual note at 3.6.17–55n.
18
Even Lear rejects a draconian system that posits violent punishment for adultery:
“The wren goes to’t and the small gilded fly / Does lecher in my sight. Let copula-
tion thrive” (4.6.111–12). On the large questions of “crime and punishment”
represented in this play, it seems to me that Shakespeare offers no clear conclu-
sion at the end where Kent and Edgar differently interpret the sight of Lear
denying Cordelia’s death and calling for a mirror: “Is this the promised end? /
Or image of that horror” (5.3.261–62). Foakes’ note to this line suggests that
Kent’s line refers to Lear himself while Edgar’s invokes an apocalyptic image of
the last judgment.
19
Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 4–5.
20
Caruth, pp. 151–52.
21
On the play’s multiple instances of trauma-tropes, see Timothy Murray, Drama
Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, and Art (London and
New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 39–56.
22
Caruth p. 153.
23
Shoshana Felman “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching”.
In Caruth, ed., p. 15.
24
Felman, p. 15.
25
Alexandre Oler, “Such a Labor Place,” p. 44.
26
Oler, “The Death March,” Witness, p. 98.
27
Adapted by Jean Baudrillard; performed in Kinyarwandan with English
supertitles at Montclair State University, February 5, 2009.
28
Felman, p. 16.
29
Felman, p. 17.
126 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
30
Felman, p. 16.
31
Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 201.
32
Felman, p. 17.
33
The Theatre and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove
Weidenfeld, 1958), p. 79.
34
Jan Kott, “King Lear or Endgame.” Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw
Taborski (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1966), pp. 130, 135.
35
“Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” Brecht on Theatre, trans. John
Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), p. 71.
36
Kott, p. 147.
Part III
Moral Characters
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Chapter 9
In the opening chapter of Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor singles out “three
axes” of ethical thinking: our obligations to others, our understandings of what
makes a life worth living, and our sense of dignity.1 The first axis has to do with
the kind of actions we ought to take in our dealings with those around us, the
second concerns the kind of persons we want to be, and the third amounts to
our ability to command other people’s good opinion. Character criticism of
Shakespeare has often favoured the first axis, focusing on the actions a charac-
ter takes or fails to take. Why does Richard II stop the duel? What prevents
Hamlet from killing Claudius? Why does Isabella sacrifice her brother’s life?
In what follows, I focus on the second and, to a limited extent, third axes, and
on the way they are tied to the notion of self-interpretation. Through examples
from Hamlet and Richard II, supplemented by references to other plays, I want
to argue that Shakespeare’s characters make sense of themselves through
a language of that constitutes their true identity. I draw on the hermeneutic
tradition in general, but I am particularly indebted to Charles Taylor’s idea that
self-interpretations are shaped by the pursuit of a certain good deemed higher
than the other goods.2 The “good” here is what Taylor defines as “the object
of our love or allegiance.”3 I also argue that there is a strong sense in which
130 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
in a novel written with our own words. “To ask who a person is, in abstraction
from his or her self-interpretations,” says Taylor, “is to ask a misguided question,
one to which there couldn’t be in principle an answer” (1989, p. 34). To be sure
information available to an external observer, such as colour, gender, and social
status might be interesting to know, but has only partial bearing on the way we
make sense of our own characters from a first-personal point of view. It matters
little if the way we view ourselves is totally erroneous; for even if it is, it still
reflects the image we want to present, hence the essential link between self-
interpretation and ethics. Wanting to be recognized as someone in particular
implies that we possess a specific image of the good, an image that we strive to
embody. To interpret ourselves in this sense is not to give an accurate account
of who we really are, but rather to give our life a direction towards a certain
purpose that we regard as higher than the other purposes, and which we want
other people to recognize. The capacity to distinguish between higher and
lower goods is one of the underlying conditions of agency in Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s agents seem to act out of a certain conviction that the good they
pursue is not only higher and worthier than other goods, but also more likely
to lead them to happiness. In Measure for Measure, for instance, Isabella must
choose between two unhappy alternatives: sacrificing her brother’s life or her
chastity. Without the slightest hesitation, she makes what most contemporary
readers regard as the wrong choice: “more than our brother is our chastity”
(3.1.184). In the world of Vienna, a world of sexual laxity and moral decadence,
chastity is the pursued good that can give Isabella’s life a meaning and
a direction towards self-affirmation and happiness. It is important to take
Isabella’s choice seriously, for she is nothing if not chaste. Identity and the good
cannot be separated.
Nor can we invent our way of defining ourselves. Self-interpretations are gen-
erally made available to us by our culture, and are developed in interaction with
other people:
My discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation, but
that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others . . .
My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others.8
crucial idea that we go through an identity crisis not so much when other
people question who we really are as when they question who we want to be, or
the role we strive to play in the theatrum mundi.
The histrionic dimension of Shakespeare’s characterization is a common-
place in contemporary criticism. The plays abound in situations where individ-
uation is reached by means of role-playing. Shakespeare’s men, it has been
argued, play at being men, his women play at being women, his kings play at
being kings.9 But to put the matter this way, I am afraid, is to confuse role-play-
ing with self-interpretation. The theatrical roots of selfhood can hardly be
denied; and the Bard never misses an opportunity to remind us of this psycho-
logical fact. The world, says Antonio to his friend Gratiano in The Merchant of
Venice, is “a stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one.”
To which Gratiano replies, “Let me play the fool! / With mirth and laughter let
old wrinkles come” (1.1.77–80). Coriolanus’ vision is scarcely different. “Like a
dull actor now / I have forgot my part and I am out,” he says when his mother
kneels before him in supplication to save Rome from his long awaited revenge
(Coriolanus, 5.3.40–41). But what can one infer from these examples?
That human beings play at being themselves? Not really. Life, according to
Shakespeare, is a theatre in which people move, like professional actors, from
one role to another with nothing in between. The roles they choose reflect less
their reality than the ideal they want to achieve. To live happily, according to
Gratiano, is to fight the ravages of time with mirth and to laugh at everything
and everyone, including oneself. But what happens when one stops acting?
One simply loses all sense of identity and feels, like Coriolanus, totally in the
void. Shakespeare’s characters do not play at being themselves, as some critics
believe, they enact their own image of the good. Nor can acting, in this sense of
course, be separated from the notion of dignity.
To deprive people of speaking or walking or behaving publicly in a certain
way is to deny them the possibility to conform to the image they have of
themselves, which may amount to no less than a loss of dignity. To understand
this is to understand, among other things, why Lear insists so much on keeping
the appearance of a king even after giving away his entire kingdom. Without
the title and the hundred knights to follow him, Lear will not command the
respect and admiration of those who see him in public. And it is hardly surpris-
ing that the dissolution of Lear’s identity begins with a reference to his com-
portment: “Does any here know me? / This is not Lear / Does Lear walk thus,
speak thus?” (King Lear, 1.4.206–08).
of himself or herself. What this implies as well is the idea that the motive for
action or inaction does not have necessarily to lie in the character’s past; it may
sometimes be located in the future too, that is, in the objective that directs the
action or stops it. Even a notoriously complicated case such as Hamlet’s
inaction may prove intelligible if read against the background of the young
prince’s own self-definition.
Conventional character criticism tends to read Hamlet’s character in terms of
the action he fails to take: killing Claudius. But judging action or inaction is, as
I have already pointed out, a way of talking about oneself. No wonder that most
of the critics of the play, as it has quite often been mentioned, end up seeing in
the young prince either their own image or the image of their concerns.
Another aspect that Hamlet’s critics share has to do with their attempt to locate
the hero’s problem in his past, giving little consequence to the purpose that
shapes his life and gives it meaning. To be sure, the young prince has all sorts of
trouble converting his thoughts into deeds, but his delay, his ambivalence, and
his constant questioning are intelligible only if seen from the perspective of the
intellectual life he wants to lead, and from which he draws the verbal brilliance
that enables him to articulate his dilemma powerfully:
Richard has nothing but his royal birth and title to justify his misbehavior, and
these are not enough to save him from the consequences of his crimes and follies.
He acts flippantly toward Bolingbroke and Mowbray, insolently toward his uncles
Gaunt and York, and illegally toward his banished cousin. Dissolute and avari-
cious, and “basely led / By flatterers,” he converts his “sceptered isle” into a “pelt-
ing farm” and himself into the “landlord” of the realm.10
Richard is consistently more impressive and majestic in appearance than his rival
Bolingbroke . . . He eloquently expounds a sacramental view of kingship, accord-
ing to which “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off an
anointed king.” Bolingbroke can depose Richard but can never capture the aura
of majesty that Richard possesses; Bolingbroke may succeed politically, but only at
the expense of desecrating an idea.11
What these readings (and dozens of others like them) suggest is that asking
whether Richard is a good or a bad person depends on the framework of
evaluations within which we articulate opinions of good or bad, right or wrong.
136 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
The passages quoted above are more likely to give us an insight into their
authors’ moral values than to provide any deeper insight into the king’s
character. The answer might as well depend upon our ability to see through
Shakespeare’s perspectivism, and to resist condemning the king by quoting his
enemies or celebrating him by quoting his friends. It is crucial then for a better
understanding of the play to consider the way Richard views himself rather than
the way he is viewed by the others, especially his enemies. Self-interpretation is
the royal road to character.
The play opens with a duel: two mighty lords, Bolingbroke and Mowbray,
accuse each other of high treason in the presence of the king and are ready to
die in single combat to prove who is right (1.1.46). Richard takes great delight
in the show taking place in front of him, as it allows him to enjoy the role of the
one who can give life or death. After considering the consequences that the
duel might have on the future of the two families as well as that of the realm,
Richard asks Bolingbroke and Mowbray to “forget, forgive, conclude and be
agreed” (1.1.156). But the two contenders have gone too far in their confronta-
tion to accept a peaceful solution; they reject the king’s offer. What the dukes
ignore, however, is that a suggestion made by God’s deputy is no less than a
divine order. Refusing such an order is a serious challenge not only to Richard’s
authority but also to God’s will. The situation in which Richard finds himself at
this point in the play is scarcely unusual in Shakespeare. It has to do with that
moment when every Shakespearean character is asked to make a choice between
what he wants and what he should do, between his inclination and his duty, his
preference and his safety. It is also the moment when an important question
needs to be answered, a question upon which depend both the identity of the
leader and the future of his subjects. It is Richard’s first dilemma. Whether or
not to let the duel take place is the first of a series of crucial questions with
which he is faced. But questions of this nature can be answered only against a
background of intelligibility, a point of perspective from which one can decide
what to accept and what to oppose. “To be able to answer for oneself,” says
Taylor, “is to know where one stands, what one wants to answer.” (1989, p. 29)
Richard defines himself as a god on earth, a definition that not only shapes the
meanings things have for him, but also supplies him with the rich language of
expression that he uses to answer both those who recognize his self-interpreta-
tion (the Yorkists) and those who do not (the Lancastrians). For Richard, there
is no such thing as a competent or incompetent ruler; there are only legitimate
kings and usurpers. A legitimate king cannot be wrong, for all his actions and
decisions are sanctioned by heaven. A usurper cannot be right, since his very
existence is a sacrilege. In other words, Richard has little choice as to the way in
which the quarrel of the two dukes should be handled. If he is a god, then he
must act as a god and demand total obedience. Any other decision would be a
denial of his identity, for if not a god on earth there is little else that Richard
would like to be.
Quoting the Enemy 137
Richard’s decision to stop the confrontation and banish both Mowbray and
Bolingbroke is hardly a popular decision among contemporary critics. Quite a
few of them believe that the duel would have rid the king of one of the two
powerful dukes. Perhaps. But to allow the duel to take place is also to bend to
the contenders’ will, which is, in Richard’s eyes, a blow not only to his authority
but also to his ability to command the respect of those around him. In this
respect, the dukes’ refusal to be ruled by their sovereign has much more
dangerous implications for Richard’s image than their banishment. It is impor-
tant as well to note that those who blame the decision on Richard’s incompe-
tence, and argue that the whole episode is meant to show how unfit for his
office the king is, tend to judge Richard’s actions from their own moral space,
or at least from the point of view of deontological ethics, according to which
people ought to take actions in conformity with their duty: the king’s duty being
the stability of the realm and the welfare of its people. But if the main purpose
of studying a literary character is to understand his or her behavior and motives,
then the critics, who disregard the kind of leader that Richard wants to be in
favour of the actions that a good leader ought to take, are probably mistaken;
for only when seen as part of an ethical orientation can a character’s action be
elucidated. To be sure, shrewdness is one of the qualities of a good leader, but
who said that Richard would want to be praised for his shrewdness? What Rich-
ard wants is to be recognized as God’s deputy. Nor does he need to be shrewd
to remain in power. All he needs, actually, is to satisfy the moral requirements
of the one virtue upon which his position depends, reciprocity, something he
fails to do when he decides to deprive Bolingbroke of his inheritance.
Richard’s crown, like Gaunt’s fortune and lands, is a gift of the past that the
king owes less to his hard work than to tradition. The principle of reciprocity
requires that all gifts be returned; yet there seems to be only one way that the
gifts of the past can be returned, and that is by being bestowed on successor
generations.12 When Richard stops the process by seizing his uncle’s lands, he
not only provokes the nobility of England, but also strips his position of all
legitimacy. If the right of inheritance is not that important, as Richard’s gesture
seems to imply, then the rightful king does not have to be the first in line of
succession. And this is what York tries to explain to the king:
Giving increases the authority of the person who gives, and enables him to gain
a certain control over the recipient.13 Richard’s failure to grant Bolingbroke
what God, law and tradition have given him, decreases his authority and
138 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
broaches a deep gap in the ground on which he stands; and it is only a matter
of time before his royal carpet is pulled from under his feet. The aristocrats’
right to pass on their property to their heirs was protected by Magna Carta.14
Only conviction for treason could prevent an heir from getting his father’s
property. The implication here is that Richard could have, in all legality, appro-
priated his uncle’s estates to finance his Irish wars, had he waited a little; for by
the time of Gaunt’s death Bolingbroke is already preparing to invade his own
country. But, unlike Henry V, Richard needs no tennis balls to put to execution
what he already has in mind. He is above human laws, and therefore needs no
justification.
The Shakespearean character moves in a space of questions that have to be
answered sooner or later. As long as his sense of himself is strong and the good
he pursues is clear and well defined, the character will have no problem answer-
ing for himself. It is when his self-interpretation is questioned or denied
altogether that his capacity to answer questions is lost, and with it his sense of
identity. The crucial scene that takes place before Flint Castle best illustrates
this situation. When Richard meets the rebels, one feels that he still has what
Max Weber calls institutional charisma, the kind of charisma which is often
“inherited, or passed along with accession to an office, or invested in an institu-
tion”.15 The rebels themselves, especially Bolingbroke, are amazed and intimi-
dated by his appearance:
Bolingbroke’s reaction here shows him as the champion of the old order, in
which degree, priority and place are all observed. He does not seem to object
to Richard’s staying in power as long as his right to inherit his father’s property
is not taken away from him. It is very important to imagine this scene on stage.
The First Folio’s stage direction tells us that Richard “enter[s] on the walls”
which implies that at this point Richard assumes a Godlike position above the
rebels. This not merely increases his authority, it strengthens as well his sense of
who he is (3.3.72–81). If we judge by Northumberland’s deferential answer,
the rebels seem to be immensely impressed by Richard’s confident speech.
Bolingbroke wants no more than what has been taken away from him by the
king, his father’s land and title. Richard seems disposed to accept this compro-
mise, but not without some reluctance, as a compromise might affect the image
he has of himself, and which he wants other people to recognize. And, just like
Lear, he is much concerned with his comportment in public, something he
Quoting the Enemy 139
directly associates with his sense of dignity: “We do debase ourselves, cousin, do
we not, / To look so poorly, and to speak so fair?” (3.3.127–28). And the second
major question that Richard must answer in the play is whether or not to accept
compromise. What happens next is a remarkable example of the way in which
a person loses his background of intelligibility and with it his capacity to take
action. Before he even hears Bolingbroke’s message, Richard gives his answer,
an answer that bears no relation whatever to what the rebels have to say: “What
must the king do now? Must he submit? / The king shall do it. Must he be
depos’d? / The king shall be contented. Must he lose / The name of king?
A God’s name, let it go” (3.3.143–46). The dialogue between Richard and his
peers is broken, because the relation between what has been uttered so far and
his excessive reply is missing. Who talked about deposition? What the rebels
want is a compromise; but Richard would rather leave the stage than play a role
that is so decidedly below his dignity: “We are not born to sue but to command”
(1.1.196). By asking him to “come down” and negotiate with them, the rebels
force Richard to give up the part he has always played in favour of a new part,
one in which he is less a god beyond human laws than a man among men.
Richard cannot accept. Like Hamlet, he lacks the language to articulate the
new part; and this is what he expresses admirably later:
A person like Richard, who places more importance on symbols than what the
symbols stand for, would have laughed at the censors who decided during
Elizabeth’s reign to remove the so-called “abdication scene” (4.1).16 The real
abdication, at least for Richard himself, is his descent to the “base court”
(3.3.178–82). What happens later in Westminster Hall is no more than the for-
mal confirmation of an event that has taken place before ,and there is a sense
in which the show staged by Richard is his own idea of a good revenge.17
Richard’s easy and wilful abdication could be usefully read in terms of Milan
Kundera’s concept of litost. According to Kundera, litost is “a state of torment
caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self”.18 This feeling is usu-
ally followed by a strong desire for revenge, a desire to make the person who
caused your misery share your torment. Now, if your counterpart is weaker than
yourself, you merely insult him or her under false pretences. In other words, if
two of your subjects offend you by declining your offer, you banish them and say
that it is in order to avoid another civil war(1.3.125–39). But if your counterpart
is stronger, if he has a whole army behind him, you avenge yourself by destroy-
ing yourself. Litost, in this sense, is an attempt to seek revenge through self-
destruction; and a man obsessed with litost, whether his name is Richard or
140 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
Werther, will always opt for the worst defeat, his consolation being that those
who have caused his torment and misery will regret their deeds or get punished
by some providential power. What this suggests is the idea that those like
Richard who suffer from litost are constantly in dialogue with a “super-addressee”
beyond their present interlocutors: somebody will one day understand their
behavior. In this light, Richard’s self-dramatization and self-pity are not so much
addressed to his enemies as to an eventual audience, those who will remember
his abdication with regret when they see the “disaster” it has caused England
and the pains it has inflicted upon its people. Richard is not totally wrong: in
1 Henry IV, Northumberland prays God to forgive him for the role he played in
the deposition of “the unhappy king” (1.3.146), and Hotspur calls Richard
“that sweet lovely rose” (1.3.173).
Notes
1
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 15.
2
pp. 45–76.
3
p. 3
4
My work on Shakespeare in general is deeply influenced by Michael Bristol’s
philosophical criticism. In 1996, when the departments of English throughout
North America were still busy historicizing Shakespeare’s plays, Bristol gave a
seminar at McGill University called “Shakespeare and Moral Agency.” To me, as
well as to the other graduate students attending the seminar, the language used
by Bristol to make sense of the plays was so fresh that the plays themselves looked
new, the work of a newly discovered dramatist.
5
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1968) p. 267.
6
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H.
Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 468.
7
Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers 1: Human Agency and Language (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 45–76 .
8
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord: Anansi, 1996), p. 231.
9
Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays
(New York: Harper Collins, 2006), p. 160 .
10
Herschel Baker, (1974) “Introduction to Richard II,” The Riverside Shakespeare,
ed. G. Blakemore Evans. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 801.
11
Bevington 1988.
12
Lawrence Becker, Reciprocity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),
p. 231.
13
Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 142.
14
Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Introduction to Richard II,” The Norton Shakespeare
(based on the Oxford edition), gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton,
1997), p. 946.
Quoting the Enemy 141
15
Charles Lindholm, Charisma (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 24.
16
Baker, 1974, p. 801.
17
Thomas F. Laan, Role-playing in Shakespeare (Toronto:University of Toronto Press,
1978), p. 122.
18
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim
(New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 122.
Chapter 10
“Don’t look down! A fool never attempts to hide his humiliation. On the contrary,
he lets others perceive it as clearly as possible. I know, we all know, that you cannot
sing in Armenian! What just took place was a pathetic effort on your part to pre-
tend to do so! Now, look up!”1
An obtuse son plays a cruel and tasteless joke on his blind father (The Merchant
of Venice, Act 2). The son (Launcelot) has been away from home for a long time.
The father (Gobbo) is seeking directions to his son’s house. Launcelot first
provides meaningless directions. He then informs Gobbo that his son is dead.
Once the joke goes too far, Launcelot discloses his true identity to his grieving
father:
This essay will offer an analysis of the humor in this exchange. I know that
performing such close-reading will not escape censure. The interpreter of
laughter is doomed to be regarded either as prudish or obsessively cerebral.
The Fool, the Blind, and the Jew 143
I am willing to risk these ascriptions since I believe that the philosophical pay-
offs of such analysis offset a compromised reputation.
***
The text offers several options to the actor playing Launcelot. He can choose to
deliver “I know not what I shall think of that” as a tease. He can also express
shock at the discovery of his mother’s unfaithfulness (he assured the audience
that she was “an honest woman” a few moments ago, in line 15). For the
audience the effect is much the same. Either the joke boomerangs through
Launcelot’s discovery that he is a bastard, or Launcelot’s amusement at his
father’s cuckoldry is pathetic given his blindness to its consequences in terms of
his own status.
144 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
his father’s shame. Like children who aim to provoke laughter by slapping
themselves, Launcelot is unwittingly joking at his own expense and humilia-
tion.5 That the audience then unexpectedly becomes privy to Gobbo’s denial of
paternity vis-à-vis Launcelot and thus jeopardizes the latter’s legitimacy turns
the tables. Launcelot’s condescending confidence is eroded.
By positioning satire itself beyond Launcelot’s reach, comedy undermines a
different comforting thought than the one unsettled by the first comic kernel
above. Satire pivots around our ability to detach ourselves and watch life’s
commotion from afar. Disinterestedly realizing our limitations, we are bemused
by our shortcomings. The accessibility of such a vantage point entails also the
availability of wisdom, where wisdom is understood as the ability to serenely
contemplate things from a distance.6 Satirizing tragedy (the first comic kernel)
establishes distance from the theatricality of emotional gesture and a comfort-
ing epistemology of value. A failure in this parody (the second kernel) has
comic consequences because it unleashes the second distinct anxiety that such
a distance cannot be maintained. Wisdom’s vantage point is accessible only
momentarily. Launcelot’s incapacity to maintain comedy is itself comic. The
inability to uphold the distance associated with wisdom awakens the disturbing
prospect that we must reconcile ourselves to our foolishness rather than flatter
ourselves for those moments of wisdom intimated by the possibility of satire.
The strands of this short but immensely pregnant comic exchange hinge on
theatrical genres. Tragedy and satire are being unsettled by undermining the
optimism upon which they rely. Tragedy implies that depth of emotion and
value exist. Satire assumes that wisdom is both possible and accessible. Both
theatrical genres are being undercut. The problematization itself is achieved
by a third theatrical convention: the fool. A fool, at least this kind of fool (not
the masked philosophers-in-a-coxcomb type such as Lear’s fool, Hamlet’s grave-
digger or As You Like It’s Touchstone), is a man inescapably inhabiting the space
of shame. In this particular exchange, one of the fools (Gobbo) is blind. This
enables the fool-type not only to mobilize the undermining of dramatic genres,
but also to occasion self-criticism. Fool-humor in this scene is self-reflexive,
articulating its own moral dubiousness.
We access this dimension once we no longer take for granted the soundness
of the underlying assumption of the fool convention: the legitimacy (moral,
aesthetic) of staging and taking delight in the intellectual inferiority of another.
Indeed, evidence suggests that pitying fools rather than mocking them, was not
an unknown experience for Elizabethans.7 Shakespeare delineates in this scene
a profound overlap between the fool and the blind. Our awareness of the
disturbing nature of Launcelot’s mockery of a physical limitation to some
146 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
We then suspect that this clown is morally reckless. Launcelot marks an unsta-
ble liminality between seemingly unbridgeable worlds (Christian-Jew/Mooress,
white/black), casually crossing over insurmountable cultural divides:
How is the fool function related to the graver themes foregrounded by the
Merchant? Is it, for instance, linked to the central role played by money and its
potential to be literally replaced by human flesh in a proto-Capitalist economy?
Is fool humor somehow connected to the celebration of the triumph of mercy
and Christianity over the legalistic discourse of duties that is imposed upon
Judaism, willy-nilly?14 I have already suggested that Launcelot’s disruptive
liminality tacitly links him to Shylock’s “hath not a Jew eyes” speech. Launcelot’s
blurring of the Christian-Jew or white-black polarities entails implementing in
deed the sameness that Shylock’s speech seems to celebrate in memorable
words: a human nexus that all people share, regardless of their skin color or
their religious affiliation. But there is another connection forged between
Launcelot and Shylock. Both are presented as limited. Shylock’s raspy insulation
from the gospel of mercy which smoothly trickles from Portia’s lips to every
listener’s hearty approval is not some personal disability pertaining only to him.
Shylock instances the inaccessibility of Jews as such, confined as they are to a
highly restricted sense of justice and revenge, unable to fathom the rich depths
of agape and its power to transform personal relationships. “On what compulsion
must I? Tell me that” (4.1.183), he demands of Portia, betraying his religion’s
affiliation with the language of command and duty rather than with an experi-
enced interpenetration of life and action with hope, faith, charity, mercy and
love. Shylock’s inability to internalize Portia’s sermon reverberates with a far
more ancestral inability of Jews to fathom the liberating language of Christ’s
preaching. Shakespeare thus projects onto Shylock the same moral obtuseness
one perceives in the Jews’ deafness in the New Testament: The sense conveyed
is not one of comprehending the proposed morally novel content prior to its
rejection. It is rather of some built-in inability to grasp the profoundness of the
Gospel in the first place.15 Gobbo stands for physical limitation; Launcelot’s
limitation is intellectual; Shylock’s is moral. Shylock cannot fathom the
language of God even when it is thrust in his face. His obstinate refusal to make
use of the chances repeatedly offered him to tone down his demand does not
merely expose the unsalvageable hardened villain that Venice perceives, but
conveys, even celebrates, a Jew’s incapacity to comprehend a superior moral
language, one predicated not on justice or fairness but on love, a form of love
that if it could only universally prevail, would render courts and law itself
superfluous.
Compassion towards Shylock can arise precisely because his insulation from
grace lies beyond his control. In order to maintain our sympathies with the
Christians under attack by the blood-sucking usurer, the Merchant must neutra-
lize the possibility of pitying Shylock. Thus it mobilizes the same rhetoric we
have noted before with regards to the clowns: Blind Gobbo was mercilessly
manipulated by his son, who turns his father’s handicap into a source of (his)
The Fool, the Blind, and the Jew 153
comic delight. Yet Launcelot fails to control his own lame jokes. He thereby falls
short of the wit he believes he possesses. Such failures elicit our comic response.
We were able to laugh freely because the play had already subtly dissociated us
from Launcelot and the possibility of pitying him by pointing at his unscrupu-
lousness. Similarly, the manipulation of Shylock’s moral limitation at the trial
scene heightens the Christian spectator’s sense of moral superiority due to his
confidence that he belongs to the right religion. Such a manipulation is ren-
dered morally permissible through a progressive and systematic alienation of
the audience from Shylock.
A “cannibalistic” villain, Shylock instances, at the trial scene, the most
gruesome anti-Semitic blood libels regarding Jewish ritualistic slaughter. Audi-
ences have—at least from the nineteenth century on—responded to Shylock’s
capacity to evoke understanding for his cause. “The poor man is wronged”
exclaimed a moved spectator within the hearing of Heine.16 Yet no audience
sympathizes enough with Shylock’s pain to wish him to actually succeed in
obtaining the pound of flesh. Shylock basically attempts to compel a court of
law to sanction, legitimate and audit a murder. He powerfully stages for the
court and for us the monstrosity of a legally sanctioned immorality, an immoral-
ity constituted by the contract, the cornerstone of law. The more horrid the trial
scene, the easier it becomes for the audience to follow and even endorse the
didactic exploitation of a man’s moral limitation as well as the celebration of
the moral abjection of his religion.
Moral Fantasies
We know, and Shakespeare’s audience was well aware, too, that moral
responsibility expires once a person is unable to prevent a reprehensible
action due to a constitutional incapacity, be it physical or mental (Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics, III. i). The Merchant is not a deterministic play. And yet the
process I have described does hamper the ascription of responsibility to
Shylock. Shakespeare weaves together two distinct threads that jointly under-
mine Shylock’s explicit acknowledgment of accountability (“My deeds upon my
head”). The first relates to the crushing pain of losing a daughter, sufficient in
itself to render his suit understandable. The second is the one surveyed earlier:
Shylock’s inability to fathom any principle higher than justice.
These movements, subtle yet influential, disturb the hierarchies that govern
spectatorship. Ultimately, they threaten to sabotage the existing power scheme
by undermining the moral condemnation of Shylock. At the same time, the
play’s rhetoric prevents us from pursuing such routes. The play repeatedly
obstructs the possibility of experiencing empathy towards Shylock whenever
such a moment might arise. The Merchant is thus able to reconcile in one
dramatically satisfying image a deservedly punished villain who, due to his
154 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
Notes
1
A critique barked at me by Javier Katz, my instructor in a workshop on clowning
and buffoonery in the Lecoq school of physical theatre in Tel-Aviv, Israel.
2
The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series, J. R. Brown Ed. (London: Arden Shakespeare,
2001 [1955]). I shall use this version of the text throughout this essay.
The Fool, the Blind, and the Jew 157
3
Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1999), p. 170.
4
Brown’s commentary (Arden) calls attention to: “The Heauens are just, murder
canot be hid: / Time is the author both of truth and right, / And time will bring
this treacherie to light.” Kyd, Spanish Tragedy (2.6.58–60).
5
Judith Rosenheim, “Making Friends of Stage and Page: A Response to Alan
Rosen,” Connotations 1999/2000, 9.3: 257–68, p. 260).
6
D. R. Robinson, “Wisdom Throughout the Ages,” in Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins,
and Development, ed. R. J. Sternbeg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 13–24, particularly p. 20.
7
James Black, “ Shakespeare’s Mastery of Fooling” in Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays
in Honour of G.R. Hibbard, ed. J.C. Gray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1988), p. 83. R. H. Goldsmith, Wise Fools in Shakespeare, Michigan State University
Press: Michigan, 1963, p. 6.
8
“Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost”, in
Players of Shakespeare 4, Ed. R. Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press , 1998) p. 23.
9
Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social & Literary History (London: Faber and Faber,
1935), p. 273.
10
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. McPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1974), 125.
11
Roger Ellis “The Fool in Shakespeare: A Study in Alienation,” Critical Quarterly,
1968, 10:3: 245–68 claims that such indifference is a pretense.
12
See Terry Eagleton’s reading of the language of Macbeth’s witches as hovering
between sense and non-sense in William Shakespeare (Rereading Literature Series)
ed., J. Elsom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 2–3.
13
G. Gordon, Shakespearian Comedy and Other Studies (London: Oxford University
Press, 1944), p. 64.
14
Demarginalizing Launcelot begins with Dorothy C. Hockey’s rather diffident
“The Patch is Kind Enough,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1959):
pp. 448–50. See also J. Bulman’s Shakespeare in Performance: The Merchant of Venice,
and Alan Rosen, “Impertinent Matters: Lancelot Gobbo and the Fortunes of
Performance Criticism,” Connotations, 1998/9, 8.2: 217–31. Rosen mentions
productions that eliminate Launcelot entirely and some that rendered him
a pivotal character. In Komisarjevsky’s production (1930), he is the first and last
character on stage.
15
For other links between Gobbo’s blindness and the blindness of Judaism in light
of the play’s invocation of biblical allusions, see Judith Rosenheim, “Allegorical
Commentary in the Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies 24, 1996: pp. 156–210;
John Scott Colley, “Launcelot, Jacob, and Esau: Old and New Law in ‘The Merchant
of Venice’”, The Yearbook of English Studies, 10, 1980: pp. 181–89; Rene E. Fortin
“Launcelot and the Uses of Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Studies in English
Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 14, No. 2, (1974): pp. 259–70.
16
For this remark and a performance history, see Mahood’s introduction to
The New Cambridge Shakespeare version of the play (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), particularly p. 44.
158 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
17
Louis Althusser, “‘The Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht—Notes on
a Materialist Theatre,” Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: the Politics of Theatricality in
Contemporary French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 199–215.
18
I am grateful to Sanford Budick, Elizabeth Freund and Talia Trainin for
comments and criticisms on an earlier draft of this essay.
Chapter 11
In his final speech, Othello characterizes the events that have led to this
point in the drama as “these unlucky deeds.”1 This sounds suspicious: how can
holding a pillow to your wife’s face until she suffocates amount to “unlucky”?
And beyond that, can a deed even be unlucky? We call events lucky or unlucky,
but deeds are what we choose to do. “Unlucky deeds” may thus represent
Othello’s bad faith effort to assuage his guilt through self-deception, what
T.S. Eliot described, in reference to this final speech, as “the human will to see
things as they are not.”2 With some interesting exceptions, subsequent critics
have tended to follow Eliot in their evaluation of the moral questions raised by
the play’s last scene. Critics are eager to demonstrate Othello’s bad faith,
I think, in an effort to avoid letting him off the hook: his moral agency under-
scores the culpability of his freely chosen action. In terms of moral responsibi-
lity, luck had nothing to do with it.
Yet there is a different possible implication lurking in the phrase “unlucky
deeds,” namely, that our deeds do depend on luck to a considerable extent,
luck that nonetheless does not allow us to disclaim moral responsibility for
those deeds. Factors not entirely in our control may determine our actions and
may produce consequences we did not foresee, yet these unlucky conditions
will nonetheless sometimes saddle us with moral culpability. The man who
drives home drunk deserves blame, but the man who kills a pedestrian while
driving home drunk deserves more blame, even though the difference between
the two is mere luck. We might draw a similar example from the plot of Othello:
the lieutenant who becomes drunk on duty is blameworthy, but the drunk lieu-
tenant who is provoked into a fight while on duty is more blameworthy. Again,
the difference between the two lieutenants is one of luck.3 It is disturbing to
grant this claim, but equally disturbing to deny it. The line between action and
event becomes vanishingly small. The philosophers who write about the impact
of chance on moral culpability have dubbed the phenomenon “moral luck,”
and I suggest that it is a version of moral luck that Shakespeare has in mind
when he puts the phrase “unlucky deeds” in Othello’s mouth.4 Othello is not
160 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
trying to weasel out of the responsibility for murdering his innocent wife, but
rather acknowledging that a man can be an instrument and an agent at the
same moment.
In the final scene of the play Othello also asks rhetorically, “who can control
his fate?” Fate and luck, although we might initially think of them as opposed,
play overlapping roles, both denying the agent full control over his actions.
Tragedy is the place where the confluence of unlucky circumstance starts to
seem like the product of a hostile fate. Yet tragic fate generally stops short of a
fatality that would render the human will irrelevant, expressing instead a densely
layered determinism that may disable the alternativity of choice but leaves intact
the spontaneity of will. In Othello, fate is the product of a peculiar combination of
one’s character and one’s luck. Specifically, the play asks us to take seriously the
distasteful idea that a man of Othello’s character, faced with the unlucky
circumstances in which he finds himself, has no choice but to kill his wife. It will
take me some time to explain satisfactorily what I mean by claiming that
Othello has “no choice,” but I can say from the outset that it does not mean
immunity to moral responsibility. Rather, it suggests a different criterion of
assessing such responsibility, one that relies partly on the pronouncement of
Heracleitus that ethos anthropoi daimo-n: a man’s character is his fate. Shakespeare
asks us to read this formula backwards as well as forwards.
Criticism tends to account for Othello’s culpability in one of two ways. Some
commentators offer psychological readings to reveal why he did it but not who
he is. Others do focus on the question of character, but suggest that he becomes
someone else in the final scene. The Moor’s “long spiritual death” involves “the
acquisition of an alien sensibility and its principles,” argues Harold Skulsky.5
E. A. J. Honigmann, in an account of Othello’s secret motives, insists more
generally that “in [Shakespeare’s] greatest tragedies the hero is invaded or
possessed by an alien personality, and, challenged in his inmost being, appears
to be ‘taken over’.”6 The “alien” in these sentences does a good deal of work: it
sensibly avoids the idea that the hero’s character is inherently villainous
(as Leavis came close to arguing about Othello),7 and it also suggests that the
hero culpably fails to resist an outside influence. Yet “alien” misstates the rela-
tionship, in tragedy, between the daimo-n that possesses and the ethos that allows
the possession to take place, eventually obliging the hero to own that possession
as an act of will, if not exactly a “choice.” The manner in which a tragic
agent ends up responsible for an external imposition emerges conveniently in
Aristotle’s notion of hamartia.
In Chapter 13 of the Poetics, Aristotle uses the concept of hamartia to describe
our experience of the relation between a certain kind of moral character
and a certain kind of action. If an extremely virtuous person suffers a downfall,
the spectacle of undeserved (anaxion) suffering strikes us as merely disgusting,
not piteous or fearful. Likewise, if an extremely wicked person suffers a
downfall, no one feels pity for deserved suffering. “This leaves,” writes Aristotle,
Unlucky Deeds 161
“the person in-between these cases. Such a person is someone not preeminent
in virtue and justice, and one who falls into adversity not through evil and
depravity, but through a kind of error [hamartia].”8 This error, a misjudgment
or missing the mark (as the etymology of the word suggests), does not signal
degenerate character, but it does reflect the imperfection of a character whose
errors produce suffering that is not simply anaxion.9 It is an act not exactly
intended or chosen that nonetheless sticks to the agent.
A version of hamartia also makes an appearance in the Rhetoric (1374b6), but
I am most interested in the role it plays in the treatise specifically about moral
behavior, the Nichomachean Ethics. In Book 3, Aristotle makes a distinction
between actions that are hekousia or akousia (translating roughly, voluntary or
involuntary) and between actors who are arche- or organon, the origin or instru-
ment of an action. Simplifying grossly, we can say that Aristotle argues that cul-
pability obtains only when the first term of each set applies.10 In Book 5, however,
during his discussion of justice, he offers a subtler account of culpability. Aristo-
tle calls an action hamarte-ma “when, though not contrary to reasonable expecta-
tion, it is done without evil intent . . . for an error is culpable when the cause
[arche-] of one’s ignorance lies in oneself, but only a misadventure [atuche-ma]
when the cause lies outside oneself.”11 Leaning against the wall of a house
that unexpectedly collapses on the people inside might illustrate atuche-ma;
bulldozing a house without confirming it is empty might illustrate hamarte-ma.
Whatever the exact relation in Aristotle’s mind between hamartia and hamarte-ma,
the concept again loosens the link between intention and blameworthiness: an
agent can have within her a culpable arche- without her action being hekousia,
willing, and this culpability stems as much from character as from choice.12
We do not know if Greek tragedians thought about their plays in these terms,
and still less if Shakespeare did; we do not even know if Aristotle ever saw the
versions of the tragedies that have come down to us. Nonetheless, at the least
we can say that Aristotle’s suggestion that hamartia blurs a firm distinction
between hekousia and akousia speaks to tragedy’s disinclination to use inten-
tion to determine responsibility for injury. This disinclination takes at least
three forms. (1) The case of Sophocles’s Oedipus, in which unintended con-
sequence makes an otherwise justifiable action hideously culpable. (2) The
case of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in which necessity forces the agent choose
between two options he loathes (sacrifice his daughter or his fleet), each of
which entails an act of impiety. Finally, most relevant to Othello, (3) the case of
Euripides’s Heracles, in which divine interference pushes a character already
inclined toward irascibility to the point of horrifying violence (the massacre of
his wife and children). These examples all suggest the limits of moral auton-
omy (although not of moral responsibility), indicating the degree to which, as
Martha Nussbaum puts it, “interference from the world leaves no self-
sufficient kernel of the person safely intact.”13 In this respect, Greek tragedy
sometimes appears alien to modern audiences because Oedipus, Agamemnon,
162 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
and Heracles do not appear to feel guilt about their actions; instead, they feel
shame.
The philosopher Bernard Williams has used Greek tragedy to develop ideas
about moral luck, agency, and shame. Tragedy can teach us, he suggests, to
recognize the extent to which the moral evaluation of our actions often depends
on factors outside the control of our choices. In promoting this recognition,
Williams advocates an ethic of shame as a supplement to the more normative
ethic of guilt in moral philosophy. The contrast between guilt and shame in the
social sciences is well known. Guilt expresses the feeling of remorse for actions
we have chosen to perform, often involving the desire to make reparation, if
possible, to the people we have injured. We sometimes even feel guilty about
actions that the community approves of but that we privately feel are wrong.
Shame, on the other hand, expresses the feeling of violating social or cultural
values, compromising our social identity, our sense of our standing in the com-
munity.14 Shame often includes the impression of being looked at, caught in
the act as we make such violations, even when no one is actually looking. When
we feel shame we want to escape from the view of others, like Edmund
Spenser’s character in The Faerie Queene: “And Shame his ugly face did hide
from living eye” (2.7.22). But when we feel guilt, the discomfort appears to
come more from the inside than the outside. As Williams describes it: “[Shame]
is not even the wish, as people say, to sink through the floor, but rather the wish
that the space occupied by me should be instantaneously empty. With guilt it is
not like this; I am more dominated by the thought that even if I disappeared, it
would come with me.”15
Commentators have sometimes suggested that guilt represents a more sophi-
sticated moral consciousness than shame. Shame always risks the charge of
heteronormativity: an action that violates norms in one community may be the
confirmation of norms in another community. It is hard to formulate abstract
moral law out of shame. Also, since shame depends on our sense of our stand-
ing in the community, it can appear merely instrumental or self-interested,
expressing a regard for saving face rather than a personal concern for those we
have injured. Aristotle, for his part, insisted that shame (aidos) was not a virtue,
and philosophers up to Kant and onward have agreed.16 Guilt, by contrast,
involves an awareness that we have harmed others—whatever the community
may say—and promotes a sense of our responsibility to those others. Ideally,
this sense of responsibility for particular others translates into a sense of respon-
sibility for others in general, manifesting the abstract moral law that obliges us
to feel such responsibility in the first place. Guilt, in this sense, signals a mature
conscience. Describing the effects of guilt in Pauline thought, Paul Ricoeur
suggests that “with guilt, ‘conscience’ is born; a responsible agent appears, to
face the prophetic call and its demands for holiness.”17
Without denying guilt’s power to motivate ethical behavior, Williams takes
issue with the philosophical partiality for guilt over shame. Guilt’s emphasis on
Unlucky Deeds 163
individual moral autonomy leaves out the social expectation inherent in shame,
the agent’s responsibility to a concrete community. Construing guilt too
narrowly as moral law might encourage us to ignore the injury we have done to
others simply because it was unintended. Guilt also risks leaving out the whole
person, isolating moral choices from the character in which they originate:
guilt asks why the agent acted, but less often who the agent is. Shame recovers
the importance of character and circumstance in moral evaluation; as Williams
puts it: “By giving through the emotions a sense of who one is and of what one
hopes to be, [shame] mediates between act, character, and consequence, and
also between ethical demands and the rest of life.”18 Greek tragedy depicts
agents apprehending moral responsibility vis-à-vis the experience of shame,
which obliges them to see their actions as both the consequence of their moral
identity and as a demand on this identity. In Euripides’ Heracles, Theseus, trying
to dissuade his friend from suicide, never resorts to the argument that Heracles
can disclaim responsibility for slaughtering his own family because Hera
inflicted him with madness. The daimo-n of madness possesses Heracles from
the outside, but this possession nonetheless follows immediately upon, and
resonates with, the righteous wrath with which he kills the tyrant Lycus.
Heracles marks an apt place at which to begin to turn toward the final scene in
Othello. This scene owes practically nothing to Cinthio’s story in the Hecatomithi,
but probably owes a good deal to Seneca’s Hercules Furens (translated into
English by Jasper Heywood in 1560 and reissued in the popular Seneca anthol-
ogy edited by Thomas Newton in 1581). Latin tragedy, as present in Elizabethan
schoolbook editions, routinely included an apparatus by commentators such as
Donatus that employed the Aristotelian concepts of error and reversal.19
But Seneca’s plays especially offered a rich example of the classical notion of
tragic shame. Hercules Furens in particular follows the tone and structure of its
Greek original. Seneca, like Euripides, makes clear that Hercules’s sense of
culpability derives from a shameful diminution of character, not from remorse
for the harm he has done to his family. Seneca’s Theseus even gives Hercules
the option of disclaiming responsibility because his madness caused him to
mistake his victim: “Who ever yet to ignorance hath given name of crime?”;
Hercules replies darkly, “Full often times did error great the place of guilt
[sceleris] obtain.”20 Crucially, as in Euripides, Hercules understands his culpabil-
ity in terms of a inclination for wrathful justice that has marked his character up
to this point: “Shall he give pardon to himself, that to none else it gave?”21
Hercules believes he has polluted himself and the land around him, and the
prospect of continuing to live on earth threatens an unbearable feeling of
shameful exposure: “Where shall I hide myself?”, he asks.22 The Latin play closely
translates from its Greek original the ideas of character, pollution, and shame.
Several critics have discussed the impact that Hercules Furens on Shakespeare’s
play. Robert S. Miola has made a persuasive case for the presence of numerous
verbal and tonal echoes from the Seneca play in Othello.23 Gordon Braden has
164 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
traced the influence of Hercules Furens less directly, but equally compellingly,
through the tradition of Senecan furor, especially as it was transmitted through
Renaissance plays featuring the Herod and Miriam theme.24 Tristan l’Hermite’s
La Mariane, Lodovico Dolce’s Marianna, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of
Miriam offer a Herod who, as a kind of Senecan tyrant, orders the execution of
his wife Miriam out of jealousy prompted by false charges of Miriam’s infidelity.
This has intriguing parallels for Othello, whose rage and despair in the final
scene is reminiscent of the rage and despair of these Seneca-inspired Herods,
and who in the Folio version of his last speech compares himself to “the base
Judean,” who “threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe” (5.2.352–53).
Both Miola and Braden thus suggest important ways that Seneca’s tragedy
influenced the final scene of Othello. Yet they tend to describe this influence
according to the protocols of guilt rather than of shame. For example, Miola
suggests that Seneca’s Hercules is afflicted with “guilt and a desire for infernal
punishments. Invoking the fiends in Hades, Hercules imagines himself pun-
ished there.”25 Yet in what Miola goes on to quote, Hercules does not actually
ask for punishment; instead, he asks for seclusion: “If any [places] yet do lie /
Beyond Erebus, yet unknown to Cerberus and me, / There hide me, ground.”26
Seneca’s Hercules in fact never asks to be punished for what he has done to his
family, but rather considers suicide because he cannot stand to be himself any
longer. Likewise, the Seneca-inspired Herods that Braden describes revise their
Classical heritage by dwelling not on the shame of what they have become, but
instead on their guilt for what they have done to innocent Miriam and their
wish for punishment. Tristan’s Hérode, for example, calls on his people “to
punish my sin” and assures his wife in heaven that “I feel a remorse quite strong
and quite palpable.”27 Seneca’s Hercules, by contrast, offers no such pointed
expressions of remorse for those he has harmed. Shakespeare, of course, was as
capable as Tristan and Dolce of turning tragic shame into Christian guilt, but
we should also leave open the possibility that as he wrote the final scene of
Othello Shakespeare recognized that Hercules Furens derived moral culpability
from the protagonist’s character and not from his intentions.
What would it mean to apply the determinism of character and the ethics of
shame to this final scene? To start, such an application would have to concede
that Othello is not literally possessed by frenzy in the way Hercules is. He is
surprisingly calm as he speaks to Desdemona, compared to his behavior in
Act 4. Shakespeare seems to suggest instead that Othello is trying to integrate
the proposition of killing his wife into his personality. It is not easy: he has to
talk himself into it, to some degree. We see this in his first speech, as he looks at
his sleeping wife. He keeps the “cause” that he cites at the beginning carefully
vague, and he distances his wife’s humanity by objectifying her as “monumental
alabaster” (5.2.5). He also attempts to verbally unstitch his purposed action and
her consequent death: “when I have plucked the rose / I cannot give it vital
growth again, / It needs must wither” (13–15) and “Be thus when thou art dead
Unlucky Deeds 165
and I will kill thee / And love thee after” (18–19). All these things give the
impression of a mind seeking to dull the horror of the act before it.
But if it is a mind not at rest, it is a mind basically resolved. Nothing he says in
this speech suggests that he is still deciding whether or not to kill Desdemona.
He has already decided, and he implies reasons for his decision that follow
from the expression of his character seen earlier in the play. Even if
Shakespeare invites us to flinch in distaste at Othello’s account of himself as
“Justice” (17) and his intended deed as a “sacrifice” (65) rather than a murder,
we have little reason to think that he does not believe himself, even deep down.
He has already demonstrated a moral sensibility ready to mete out swift punish-
ment in the name of justice and order, as when he interrupts the brawl in the
streets of Cyprus: “He that stirs next to carve for his own rage / Holds his soul
light; he dies upon his motion” (2.3.169–70); and he has made clear his willing-
ness to place justice before affection: “Cassio, I love thee, / But never more be
officer of mine” (2.3.244–45). In the final scene he has made up his mind,
he gives reasons that resonate with earlier indications of his character, and
he appears to understand the finality of what he proposes to do: “I know not
where is that Promethean heat / That can thy light relume” (5.2.12–13).
To note that he also objectifies Desdemona as “alabaster” (5) does not count
against this last point; rather, it indicates that he misunderstands what the final-
ity of her death will do to him, that it will turn him into stone instead of her.
Yet what does this determinism of character amount to? After all, Othello
could choose not to kill Desdemona, could he not? The answer depends on what
range of options the play encourages us to ascribe to him at this point. Othello is
a drama in which ethos and daimo-n carry out closely related functions, provid-
ing both a detailed portrait of character and intense pressure from an outside
malevolent influence. Iago is the “demi-devil” (5.2.298) who tempts Othello to
lose faith in Desdemona and also the voice already in Othello’s head, like the
daimones of Greek literature. Othello’s jealousy, unlike that of Leontes in
The Winter’s Tale, explicitly begins with an outside influence, yet once it starts his
inclination toward passion lends it power. As he warned the street brawlers
earlier, “My blood begins my safer guides to rule / And passion, having my best
judgement collied, / Assays to lead the way” (2.3.201–03). Othello’s susceptibi-
lity to passion is also mentioned by Lodovico, whose comment gets Othello’s
predicament both right and wrong after he sees the Moor slap Desdemona:
We’ve already seen that passion could indeed shake Othello all along, but this
assessment does rightly suggest the manner in which chance overlaps with
166 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
Othello’s indulgence in passion. The astonishing scope of luck in the plot, all
of it bad—the losing and finding of the handkerchief, Desdemona’s ill-timed
vehemence on Cassio’s behalf, Cassio’s entrance at the moment of Othello’s
faint—all these unlucky circumstances conspire with the momentum of
Othello’s character to produce the sense of claustrophobic fatedness that so
many readers have detected in the play. Significantly, Shakespeare gives Othello
no scene, prior to his act of violence, in which he deliberates about the options
before him, as the playwright gives to Brutus in the Julius Caesar (2.1) and to
Macbeth throughout the first two acts of his drama. As I indicated at the begin-
ning of this essay, the lack of an alternativity of choice does not mean that
Othello is not culpable, both for his lack of faith and for the murder. But his
culpability emerges not so much from a deliberate choice as from a hideous
hamartia reflecting an imperfect character.
If the above description of Othello’s moral agency is accurate, we should
expect that the expression of his responsibility will be shame—and to a consid-
erable degree it is, as we will see. As I noted earlier, however, Othello is not
Seneca’s Hercules or Euripides’s Heracles. No daimo-n of madness literally
possesses him; he holds the pillow to his wife’s face knowing that she is his wife.
After he discovers that Iago has misled him, he voices painful remorse for the
injury he has done to her:
This is the first time he speaks to her after learning of his error. He reanimates
her corpse with personhood in order to imagine her just censure at Judgment
Day, to imagine the agency of her just retribution (“hurl my soul from heaven”),
and to imagine the just punishments that will torture him (“blow me,” “roast
me”) and perhaps contain the seeds of amends (“wash me”). Here we have guilt
in all its psychological richness, a nightmare of self-loathing and desire worthy
of Hawthorne, Poe, or Zola. In this vision, Othello does not get to vanish; he has
to stay with himself. To quote Williams again: “With guilt . . . I am more domi-
nated by the thought that even if I disappeared, it would come with me.”
The above expression of Othello’s guilt is so compelling that it sometimes
prevents modern audiences and readers, I think, from appreciating the other
Unlucky Deeds 167
dimension of his culpability that he voices: his shame. His shame articulates
not only what he has done and why, but who he is now that he has done it.
The passage quoted above is only the second half of a speech that begins rather
differently:
find this place somewhere else, say, in the modern novel. Tragedy, by contrast,
might force the recognition that our capacity to do right by the other is limited
by circumstances outside our control, circumstances for which we nonetheless
bear some responsibility. Tragedy might insist that the good we are able to do
depends on who we are, and that who we are will sometimes depend on things
like luck, necessity, and a sense of shame.
Notes
1
William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames:
Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 5.2.339. All subsequent quotations of the play
will be from this edition.
2
T.S. Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927), rpt. in Selected Essays,
3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 131.
3
Notice that luck encompasses equally cases of arbitrary happenstance
(a pedestrian happens to cross the street at the wrong moment) and calculated
malevolence (Roderigo did not happen to pick a fight with Cassio—it was part of
a plan). In both cases, external forces deprive of the agent of control over his
immediate actions and the agent does not expect these forces to impinge on his
actions.
4
The two seminal accounts of moral luck come from Bernard Williams, “Moral
Luck” (1979), reprinted in Moral Luck and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), pp. 20–39; and Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” Mortal
Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 24–38. There is a
sizable industry in recent moral philosophy of seeking to deny the claims of moral
luck. Good places to start are Brian Rosebury, “Moral Responsibility and Moral
Luck,” Philosophical Review 104 (1995): pp. 499–524; and Darren Domski, “There
is No Door: Finally Solving the Problem of Moral Luck,” Journal of Philosophy 101
(2004): pp. 445–64.
5
Harold Skulsky, Spirits Finely Touched (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976),
pp. 234–35.
6
E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited (1976, revised and rpt.
New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 13.
7
F. R. Leavis, “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero,” in The Common Pursuit
(New York: George W. Stewart, 1952).
8
Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,
MA.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1452b27–1453a9.
9
See E. R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the ‘Oedipus Rex’,” Greece & Rome 13.1,
2nd Ser. (1966): pp. 37–49, esp. 38–42.
10
Anthony John Patrick Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1979), pp. 27–37. Also see Sarah Broadie’s commentary in her edition
of the Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 311–22.
11
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), V.8.1135b15.
12
See also Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986, rpt. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 382–89.
170 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
13
Nussbaum, p. 381.
14
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1951), Chapter. 2; Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 17–46.
15
Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993), p. 89.
16
Ethics IV.9.1128b1–28.
17
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 143.
18
Williams, Shame, p. 102.
19
Donald V. Stump, “Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy: Four Indirect Routes
from Athens to London,” in Hamartia: The Concept of Error in the Western Tradition:
Essays in Honor of John M. Crossett, eds. Donald V. Stump, James A. Arieti, Lloyd
Gerson, Eleanore Stump (New York: Edwin Mellon, 1983), pp. 224–26.
20
Seneca his Tenne Tragedies, Translated into English (London: Thomas Marsh,
1581), 19r.
21
Seneca, 19v.
22
Seneca, 20r.
23
Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992), pp. 124–43.
24
Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 153–71.
25
Miola, p. 138.
26
Seneca, 19r.
27
Qtd. in Braden, p. 160, 163.
28
For example, E. A. J. Honigmann, “Introduction,” Othello, ed. Honigmann
(Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 1–111, at 72; Jane
Adamson, Othello as Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980),
pp. 264–301; Katherine S. Stockholder, “Egregiously an Ass: Chance and Accident
in Othello,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 13.2 (1973), pp. 256–272,
at 271.
29
The two relevant articles are “Impertinent Trifling: Desdemona’s Handkerchief,”
SQ 47 (1996): 235–50, and “Acts of Silence, Acts of Speech: How to Do Things
with Othello and Desdemona,” Renaissance Drama 33 (2004), pp. 3–35.
30
Berger, Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), xiii. Berger makes these remarks in the context
of disagreeing with the emphasis on shame in Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of
King Lear.
31
Cavell, Disowning Knowledge (1987, rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), p. 138.
Chapter 12
Winter’s Tale begins deep in the psychological world of friendship and rivalry,
jealousy and trust. It ends, apparently, with characters playing their parts in
events which either abandon motive for magic, or where motivation has lost all
believability. The wife we believed dead either turns from stone to life or,
artfully disguised as stone, emerges from years of hiding in a “removed house”
at the bottom of the garden, wordlessly reconciled with the husband responsi-
ble for her crushing losses. Attempts to accept the device of the statue have
sometimes been rather strained. Leonard Barkan says “All of Shakespeare’s art
consists of statues coming to life.”2 Allan Bloom declares the final scene to be
“one of the strangest tales in all literature.”3
Is this because the disaster and disintegration we witnessed in the first
half is just too comprehensive to allow a psychologically plausible repair? The
question assumes that the ending is a restitution, and so it appears. Leontes,
convinced of his wife Hermione’s infidelity with Polixenes, has ordered her
to prison and the baby she is about to be delivered of to exiled abandon;
at her trial the news of the death of their son has brought Hermione to an
apparently fatal collapse. Suddenly Leontes is freed from his rage-filled belief
in Hermione’s guilt, spending the next sixteen years in off-stage repentance
under the moral tutorship of “good Paulina.” Finally, he is reconciled with King
Polixenes of Bohemia and with his advisor, Camillo, both of whom he had
declared his mortal enemies; his daughter, Perdita, returns, bringing the pros-
pect of a royal marriage; Paulina, to whom he owes his moral recovery, is repaid
with marriage to Camillo. All exit to share the recounting of their adventures.
For Leontes and Hermione, it is, at best, a partial restitution: Mamillius, their
son, is dead; Hermione has aged—as Leontes notes—and there will be no more
children; it is impossible that they will regain their former contentment. There
are “deep strains of melancholia” that underwrite the “measured celebrations.”4
Inga-Stina Ewbank notes “the human suffering that has gone before . . . that
weighs so heavily on the play right till the very end.”5 Going somewhat further,
I’ll argue that it is not merely the shadow of the past which compromises present
172 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
Jealousy
Jealousy is a primary theme of both Othello and The Winter’s Tale. But it is treated
very differently in these two plays. Othello takes us on a carefully constructed
journey that makes Othello’s jealousy explicable without relieving him
altogether of culpability for the jealousy itself, and not merely for the actions
that flow from it. Othello is made jealous by the carefully planted suggestions
and—crucially—bits of evidence provided by Iago, who plans to destroy him.
He has good reason to put faith in both Iago’s truthfulness and in his judge-
ment, and he is understandably taken in by Iago’s displays of reluctance
to speak against either Desdemona or Cassio. What Iago tells him about the
handkerchief coheres with Desdemona’s own behaviour—she can’t find the
handkerchief, and wants only to talk of Cassio’s case, which Othello fatally but
understandably misconstrues. There are moments when Iago over-reaches
himself and a more reflective, secure mind than Othello’s might have become
suspicious at the suggestion that Iago saw Cassio casually wiping his beard with
the handkerchief. But few believers are fully rational believers. Given Othello’s
outsider status, the newness of his marriage, a tendency towards jealousy which,
after a certain point, turns into vengeful action rather than continued scrutiny
of the facts, his action presents no epistemic puzzle.
By contrast, jealousy in Winter’s Tale emerges fully formed and very early
(within 150 lines of the beginning) and on such a thin basis of fact and
inference as makes the start of the play as hard to interpret as the end. Those
around Leontes find all this as perplexing as we do, and their loyalty to the King
and to the social fabric he represents is strained by their inability to see things
from anything like his perspective. Not that he gives them much help. The first
to hear his opinions, Camillo, is treated to a lurid account of events (“kissing
with inside lip”) from the darker recesses of Leontes’ imagination; Camillo’s
response is to beg him to “be cur’d of this diseased opinion” (1.2, 297–98).
When Leontes confronts Hermione he offers nothing but insistence on her
guilt; when the Lords urge the impossibility of what he claims he merely
replies “we need no more your advice” (2.2, 168). The disorder of excessive and
Agency and Repentance 173
Delusions
The Lords’ perplexity naturally turns them to the thought that some
“putter-on” has poisoned Leontes mind (2.1, 141–43), reminding us of the plot
of the earlier Othello. But Leontes is manifestly the originator of his own notions
of infidelity, and for the first one-third of the play the primary question is to
determine how this fancy can be sustained so long. A natural thought is found
in Camillo’s already noted urging to Leontes to “be cur’d of this diseased opin-
ion.” For Leontes is, surely, the victim of some delusion. True enough, but it
doesn’t explain much without substantial supplementation. It is not, after all,
clear what sorts of mental states delusions are, and the term may in fact cover a
variety of psychological kinds. Leontes’ own later diagnosis of his troubles—
“I have too much believed mine own suspicion”—suggests the more or less
orthodox view that delusions are beliefs: peculiarly irrational ones, unsup-
ported and impervious to counter evidence. Yet there is some tendency, among
professionals and laypersons, to associate delusions with imagination, and
references to Leontes’ “jealous imaginings” are common in the literature of
criticism.8 It is not always easy to know what people have in mind when they
speak of imagination in this context—just as it is not clear what people mean
when they commonly say that someone merely “imagined something.” Do such
claims constitute denials that the person in question believes something, or is
this a way, a rather uncomfortable way, of saying that their believing has become
like imagining in some as yet unspecified respect?
This is not a question to which the play gives us any direct answer, and it is
unlikely to have occurred to Shakespeare in quite this form. We must tread
carefully, not imposing the pattern of a current philosophical and psychiatric
dispute on his conception. But there is a fixed point to guide us, and it is this:
174 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
within the play, it is a datum that Leontes is responsible for his actions; neither
he nor anyone else ever suggests that he might claim diminished responsibility
on grounds of madness. But what is it, precisely, that he has done or failed to do
for which he is culpable?
One thing generally said to distinguish imagining from belief is the subjec-
tion of imagination to what is quaintly called “will.” Roughly speaking, the world
impresses beliefs on us; we generate and sustain our imaginings. Imaginings are
not always happily called voluntary, still less deliberate; yet we recognise
a category of actions—things people do—which are yet done without setting
ourselves to do them and which are, in a sense done “against our will,” as with
compulsive shoplifting; for that reason I’ll avoid saying that imagining depends
on the will. But imagining is something we do, and we can sensibly ask whether
someone is responsible for this or that imagining, though the answer may
sometimes be no.
I don’t quite accept this picture, holding that there are imaginings generated
by processes that don’t entitle us to count them as acts, even involuntary ones.
Still, the picture is useful; the test of action-dependency serves to distinguish a
lot of imaginings from beliefs, and its helps in the case of Leontes. His delu-
sional state consists, I think, of a mixture of belief and imagination, perhaps
together with cognitive states that don’t fit easily into either category and for
which we have no accepted labels. The core of the delusion is the conviction
that Hermione is unfaithful, and this is sustained and magnified by an emotion-
ally destabilizing set of imaginings. We need to see how imagination causes this
conviction to flourish in a context where the evidence is so hostile to it.
The opening scene with Leontes, Hermione and Polixenes can be played in
such a way as to highlight things that make understandable the thought of
her unfaithfulness: the fragment of conversation overheard; the not entirely
sincere plea to Polixenes to stay longer, agreement to which Hermione so deftly
secures; Polixenes’ unfortunately resonating reference to the nine months he
has been in Sicilia already. While there are signs of tensions in this early scene
between Leontes and Polixenes, I don’t see evidence for what Michael Bristol
calls “a bitter and potentially deadly struggle for honour and prestige.”9 It is not
astonishing that Leontes should have the thought of unfaithfulness; it is
astonishing that the thought should immediately rise to a certainty beyond all
question. It is a thought that ought to have at this stage a very low credence
indeed; after all, it is Hermione we are speaking of, and everything we will come
know about her, and everything that Leontes does know about her, makes the
idea so improbable. But something allows this thought to become the map by
which Leontes will steer for the next two acts. It is not that Leontes misjudges
the evidence; rather, his credence is independent of the evidence. He is just not
interested in getting any evidence, and certainly not in hearing the arguments
of those around him, of Paulina who later points out the baby’s likeness to him,
of all the Lords whose judgement is that the idea is utterly impossible—and
Agency and Repentance 175
himself feel the shock” What more likely place is there to “feel the shock”
than at the death of a child?12
Repentance
A moment later she says that “What’s gone and what’s past help / Should be
past grief . . . I’ll speak of her no more, nor of your children / I’ll not remember
you of my own lord / Who is lost too: take your patience to you / And I’ll say
nothing.”
These two speeches, so different in emotional tone, have something in com-
mon, if we take the first at face value. According to both, Leontes should not
repent: first because no repentance can equal the crime; second because these
things are “past help.” In the highly charged atmosphere of the scene it is not
helpful to look for a logic to the arguments, but their common conclusion does
stand in marked contrast to what, as we come to know, actually happened dur-
ing the next sixteen years. Far from saying nothing, Paulina has filled that time
with vivid recollections of Leontes’ offences, keeping him chained to a daily
round of exhausting penitence. What has been its effect?
The answer of many commentators is that Paulina’s efforts have been
rewarded by a moral and psychological renewal which justifies the reconcilia-
tion portrayed in the play’s ending. L. C. Knights typifies this view: “It is only
with the full and continued recognition of what he has done—resolutely assisted
by Paulina—that we hear at his court the note of new life . . .”13 Others, while
inclining the same way, recognize that mere human psychology is not here
equal to the task of getting us to a positive conclusion, given all that has
happened; they frame their accounts in transcendent terms: Coghill tells us
that “a man who believed himself to have destroyed his soul by some great sin
might, after a long repentance under his Conscience, find that that very con-
science had unknown to him kept his soul in being and could at last restore it
Agency and Repentance 177
to him alive and whole.”14 In the final scene, says Frye, there is only “the sense
of a participation in the redeeming and reviving power of a nature identified
with art, grace and love.”15 For Mahood “Hermione represents the grace of
heaven towards Leontes.”16 Bethel declares simply that “Leontes and they are
all born again,”17
We ought not to legislate entirely against such notions. But a reasonable
constraint on their application is that they should illuminate the actions and
persons of the play. And these invocations of grace, the economy of soul and
conscience, the power of art and nature, seem disconnected from the psycho-
logical realities of desire and responsibility made vivid in the play’s early part.
Grace in particular seems too easy a substitute for a forgiveness the play itself
fails to motivate. As Michael Bristol puts it:
I agree with Bristol that we need an account of the play’s ending that sheds light
on psychologically efficacious rather than merely allegorical or symbolic aspects
of its characters. And there’s an important clue in his observation that the
“the living statue is the ultimate in luxury goods, a lavish promise of consumer
satisfaction;” I’ll argue that Leontes’ acceptance of Hermione-as-statue is an
indication that, whatever suffering he has undergone, he is not significantly
more in touch with moral reality at the end than at the beginning. But I shall
part company with Bristol when he says that “Leontes’s ‘redemption’ is . . . the
result of his own bold, risk-taking decisions,” arguing that, to the contrary,
Leontes’ moral disconnection is a kind of incapacity for action.
Others merely assume that after his sixteen years of suffering and repentance,
“knowledge gained through suffering brings knowledge gained by virtue.”21
And while for some more recent commentators, Leontes’ “reformation remains
a work in progress,”22 they also suggest that the courtiers’ plea to him to end his
“performance of a saint-like sorrow” signals his commitment to the habitual
practice of character formation which Aristotle identified as the way to virtue.23
Appeals to Aristotelian virtue are particularly inappropriate here. On Aristotle’s
account,
. . . the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the
arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by
doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the
lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts,
brave by doing brave acts.24
The picture is of moral growth through moral action—both mental acts that
generate, control and interrogate our reasons, and the bodily dispositions that
put our decisions into effect. Saint-like sorrow and the saying of endless prayers
do not provide for this activity in either form, though some would think them a
worthy accompaniment to it in a case such as this. Julia Annas, discussing
Aristotle’s view, says something relevant to understanding how Paulina, for all
her steadfastness and good sense, fails in her project of renewal:
The learner depends on the expert to learn in the first place, but the goal of
learning is to have your own understanding of what you have learned from the
expert. The expert in a practical field aims not to produce clone-like disciples
who will mimic what she does, but pupils who will go on to become experts them-
selves, which they can do only if they acquire their own understanding of the
subject.25
Leontes has not acquired his own practical understanding of right action; he
has learned merely to accept the judgement of the expert. Leontes does see
vividly that he was wrong, has done wrong, and is very sorry for it; to this extent
there has been progress. But it is a mistake to picture him, at the end of the
play, on the path to virtue, merely with some way to go. For all his remorse, he
has not grown morally in the intervening years; if anything he is a weaker
character, entirely at Paulina’s command. And remorse, unaided by practical
moral skills, is not a promising basis for a renewed relationship under such
difficult circumstances. “The brute fact of change is dramatically foregrounded,
but ideas of growth or of lived experience or of any sequence of developmental
steps or incremental stages are repressed.”26
Why have commentators struggled to see an ending with Leontes at least
partially restored? A significant barrier to accepting the points I have just made
Agency and Repentance 179
is the vivid picture the play gives us of Paulina as its moral centre; our convic-
tion that Leontes is to some extent morally revived depends a good deal on our
sense that he has been worked upon by an agent who unites moral and practical
sense with firmness of purpose.27 In the face of Leontes’ anger, Paulina is
fearlessly rational in defence of Hermione, not merely insisting on Hermione’s
innocence, but pointing carefully to the evidence in her favour. Her interven-
tions contrast with the ineffective sighing of the Lords who “creep like shadows
by him [Leontes]” and “nourish the cause of his awaking” (2.3.33–39). The
most doubtful element of her counsel—that Leontes not remarry, which jeop-
ardizes the succession—seems finally vindicated by the survival of Hermione
and the reappearance of Perdita. But while her forceful and uncompromising
activity is an appropriate response to Leontes’ fury, it requires a significant
modulation in the latter part if he is to regain the status of a moral agent for
himself. It is not, I think, a significant criticism of Paulina that she fails to
provide it: merely a reminder that her moral resources have human limits.
Responsibility
But by this time he can get no purchase on it. The idea that in his present state
things rationally regarded as impossible seem possible, as they do in dreams,
quickly gives way to a disordered conclusion without determinate content,
though the words put us in mind of the idea that an unreal trait may apply to a
real person—faithlessness to Hermione in this case.29 Leontes seems to want to
accept both the unreality of Hermione’s offence and the rightness of his violent
response to it. Whatever the conclusion, the passage indexes a fatal veering
from the path of reason.
Leontes, at the height of his delusion, did not exercise due diligence in
interrogating his own reasons because—an Aristotelian is likely to say—he had
never developed the habits of mind that would make that possible in times of
stress. The most positive arc of development for the latter half of the play would
be to show a moral recovery that focused on strengthening habitual ways of
thought and action that would be proof, to some degree, against the dangers of
excessive imagining. This is not what we get. Throughout the delusional period,
Paulina has made it her business to be an external check on Leontes’ beliefs—
and getting nothing but threats of execution for her pains. But once Leontes
has turned from vengeful madman to biddable penitent, she—despite her
earlier promise to “say nothing”—is not able to allow him to recover the critical
faculties necessary for regrowth. She sees to it that he does not forget his actions,
keeping him in a continual state of repentant inactivity, all his energies devoted
to recalling the enormity of his crime—and his debt to her.30 The result of this
has been the imprinting of patterns of thought and speech, but not the right
ones. Leontes’ greeting to her at the beginning of the final scene, “O grave and
good Paulina, the great comfort I have had of thee!” (5.3.1–2) has the sound of
habitual and formulaic deference. Everywhere, she is “good”, “grave and good”,
“true” Paulina, who always “speaks the truth.”31 From Leontes’ now supine posi-
tion, everyone looks uniformly elevated: Polixenes, whom he once so easily
believed to be Hermione’s seducer is, by the end, “a holy father”, “sacred”,
“blest”; an exchanged glance between Hermione and Polixenes which would
once have been further proof of adultery is now itself “holy.”32 When, in response
to Cleomenes’ entreaty, Leontes says he cannot forgive himself as long as he
remembers what he has done, Paulina is quick to reinforce his mood of morbid
resignation:
To which Leontes’ reply, “Say so but seldom,” suggests that her speaking thus
has not been seldom at all. Hermione’s only words are addressed to Perdita,
making it clear that her reason for being at these odd proceedings is at last to
see her daughter (5.3.122–127). Later, Paulina, having revealed the so life-like
statue, tempts Leontes with “I could afflict you further,” to which he—not know-
ing what is to come, and expecting only a further opportunity to wallow in sor-
row—replies “Do Paulina, for this affliction has a taste as sweet as any cordial
comfort” (75–77). On seeing the statue—what he takes to be a statue—Leontes
is overcome by its life-likeness, and Paulina says she will cover it in case he
comes to believe it is alive. Leontes replies,
I suggest that the “coming to life” of the statue represents what is in fact a con-
tinuation of Leontes’ fantasy state—a state in which he can, repentant but
otherwise unchanged, suppose it possible to pick up again a full relationship
with someone he has deeply wronged. Leontes has not achieved—nor is he
likely to achieve—a “settled sense of the world”, and the artifice of the end-
ing—magical or not—seems to reflect his failure, here as at the beginning, to
come to terms with real things. When Hermione descends, she “hangs about
his neck,” yet says nothing to him, while he focuses on Paulina’s need for a
husband.33 Hermione’s arrival, however contrived, seems to be more in the
nature of a present from Paulina than an act of will on her part; as Leontes
says to Paulina, “Thou shouldst take a husband by my consent as I by thine a
wife.”34 Hermione’s revival, standing uneasily between magic and the merely
unbelievable, is a culmination to Leontes’ sweet affliction: a silent, unreal
presence that enables him to imagine himself restored to a grounded human
existence, without having undergone the practice that would make that
existence possible.35
Notes
1
This essay began life as a contribution to a seminar on Shakespeare and Moral
Agency which Michael Bristol organized at the Shakespeare Association of
America meeting in Dallas, 2008. My thanks to Michael for his invitation to that
meeting and for the insightful suggestions which have helped me to revise the
essay. As will be clear, we remain at some distance from agreement about the play;
but there is no likelihood that he will be blamed for my errors.
182 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
2
Leonard Barkan, “‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale,”
English Literary History, 48 (Winter, 1981), pp. 639–67.
3
Allan Bloom, Shakespeare on Love and Friendship (University of Chicago Press,
2000), p. 123. James Knapp says that “characters and audience alike are
confronted with an impossibility that somehow gestures toward a deeper truth”
(“Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly. Fall 2004.
Vol. 55, pp. 253–78; the quotation is on p. 253). The present essay is an attempt
to develop my own account of this deeper truth (Thanks to Michael Bristol for
bringing Knapp’s essay to my attention).
4
Jean E. Howard, Introduction to The Winter’s Tale,The Norton Shakespeare,
volume 2, (W.W. Norton & Company Ltd ,Second Edition, 2008), p. 1150.
5
Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The triumph of time,” A Review of English Literature, 5:2
(1964): pp. 83–100, p. 113.
6
Todd, J. and Dewhurst, K. “The Othello syndrome: A study in the psychopatho-
logy of sexual jealousy,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1955, 122,
pp. 367–74.
7
Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1972) p. 214.
8
Lawrence Danson. “‘The Catastrophe is a Nuptial’: The Space of Masculine
Desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Survey Volume 46:
Shakespeare and Sexuality. Ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 1993),
p.77. Colin McGinn also suggests that Shakespeare gave an unprecendentedly
large role to the imagination as a source of human behaviour (Shakespeare’s
Philosophy (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
9
Michael Bristol, “In Search of the Bear: Spatiotemporal Form and the
Heterogeneity of Economies in ‘The Winter’s Tale’,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42,
No. 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 145–67, p. 156.
10
See again Knapp, “Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale,” p. 274.
11
M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957).
12
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 2003), p. 195.
13
L. C. Knights, “‘Integration’ in ‘The Winter’s Tale’”, Sewanee Review, 1976, 84.4,
pp. 595–613.
14
Neville Coghill, “Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Survey
Volume 11: The Last Plays. Ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1958).
15
N. Frye, “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale,” Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan
Drama in Honour of Hardin Craig, ed. R. Hosley (London: Routledge, 1963), p.
197.
16
Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay, p. 154.
17
S. L. Bethel, The Winter’s Tale: A Study (London: Staples Press, 1947), p. 102
18
“In Search of the Bear,” p. 166.
19
“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own
doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast”
Eph 2:8–9.
20
In his 1963 Arden Shakespeare edition of The Winter’s Tale, pp. lxxii–lxxiii.
Agency and Repentance 183
21
Kenneth J. Semon, “Fantasy and Wonder in Shakespeare’s Last Plays,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 25 (1974), pp. 89–102, 97–8. “Hard-won maturity and wisdom, no less
than the miracle of youth and love, allow both young and old to join the final
comic dance” (Scott Colley, “Leontes’ Search for Wisdom in ‘The Winter’s Tale’,”
South Atlantic Review, 48.1 (Jan., 1983), pp. 43–53, p. 44).
22
Introduction to The Winter’s Tale, Susan Snyder and Deborah Curren-Aquino
(eds) (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.60.
23
Ibid., p.42.
24
Nicomachean Ethics, Part II, Book 2. Ross’ translation (Clarendon Press, 1998).
25
“Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing,” Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association 78 (2004) pp. 61–74. Thanks to Neil Sinclair for
drawing my attention to this essay.
26
Bristol, “In Search of the Bear,” p. 146
27
On the theme of counsel in Winter’s Tale and its relation to historical
circumstances at the time of writing see Stuart M. Kurland, “We Need No More
of Your Advice”: Political Realism in The Winter’s Tale, Studies in English Literature,
1500–1900, 31 (Spring, 1991), pp. 365–86.
28
Mark van Doren called this “the obscurest passage in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare
(Henry Holt and Company, 1939), p. 316).
29
I am indebted here to Harold Goddard (Meaning of Shakespeare (Phoenix
Books University of Chicago Press, Volume 2, 1963), p.651; see also Knights,
“‘Integration’ in ‘The Winter’s Tale’”: “Dreams are ‘unreal’ . . . so if affection can
work on such insubstantial material, how much more likely that it can join with
what is actually there” (p.126). For a different reading see David Ward, “Affection,
Intention, and Dreams in The Winter’s Tale,” The Modern Language Review, 82.3
(Jul., 1987), pp. 545–54.
30
Even Curren-Aquino describes the sixteen years as “an endless cycle of
potentially numbing sameness” (Introduction to Winter’s Tale, Cambridge
edition, p.45).
31
5.1.49; 5.3. 151; 5.3. 1; 5.1. 81; 5.1. 55; 5.3.70.
32
5.1.169–73; 5.3.148.
33
Hermione’s only words are addressed to Perdita, making it clear that her reason
for being at these odd proceedings is at last to see her daughter (5.3.122–27).
34
5.3.136–37. If this interpretation is right it is very natural to take the lines
following:
But how is to be question’d; for I saw her,
As I thought, dead; and have in vain said many
A prayer upon her grave . . .
as a weak minded and confused parenthesis which interrupts the flow of his
firmer thought concerning Paulina’s marriage, resumed halfway through 141.
35
Curran-Aquino insists that “Leontes has the last word and exits the play issuing
orders” (Introduction to The Winter’s Tale, Susan Snyder and Deborah Curren-
Aquino (eds) (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56). His instruction is in fact
“Good Paulina, lead us from hence” (5.3.152). As they later remark, “agency is
now imparted to someone else and the speaker relegated to object” (p. 58).
Chapter 13
Following this, I point out some challenges to this conception by critics who
have approached Shakespeare through the lens of moral philosophy. I then
argue that there are important points of contact between those critically
innovative perspectives and some of Aristotle’s most fundamental ideas about
character, particularly as they were understood by Shakespeare’s contempo-
raries. Finally, I suggest ways in which understanding Shakespearean character
as essentially moral in nature can specify and elaborate concepts of agency that
will form the basis for a more truly philosophical understanding of the make-
believe people who inhabit Shakespeare’s fictional universe.
David Beauregard’s Virtue’s Own Feature is one of the most detailed of the recent
attempts to cross-read Aristotle’s ethical thought with Shakespeare through
intensive consideration of the relationship between Thomistic Aristotelianism
and Shakespearean character. Beauregard describes the relationship between
the two as a clear and evident line of influence, but one which the modern
estrangement from Classical virtue ethics has unfortunately occluded.3 His
study, which proposes to “clarify an important part of the ethic implicit in
[Shakespeare’s] plays,” proceeds under the assumption that Shakespeare’s
plays represent a clear ethic, or at least one that would have been perceived
clearly by early modern audiences.4 Our inability to appreciate that ethic, he
maintains, stems from our modern expectation that literary forms endeavor to
treat “general ideas, the exploration of problems and themes, or the represe-
ntation of irreducible dualities and antinomies.” “The sixteenth-century poet,”
Beauregard argues, “saw poetry as primarily mimetic, rhetorical, and corporate:
that is, the poet ‘imitated’ an object, he tried to move his audience to affective
and moral dispositions, and he tried to contribute to the ‘commonweal,’ or
good, of the body politic.”5
Beauregard’s treatment of Thomistic Aristotelianism is admirable in its
historical detail, and yet his grasp of early modern Aristotelianism remains
rather schematic. The discussion is focused on Aristotle’s Ethics understood as
deontology, a unified body of knowledge that deals with binding moral obliga-
tions. This, unfortunately, leads to the impression that Aristotle and his early
modern followers were thoroughly doctrinaire. However, according to Paul
Oskar Kristeller, Aristotelian thought in the Renaissance was anything but a
“body of common doctrines” or a stable corpus of received ideas transmitted in
a pure form over time. It was rather a group of thinkers with many diversified
opinions on many different issues. Those thinkers “shared a common termino-
logy, a common method of argument, and the reference to a common body of
authoritative texts,” but produced varying conclusions about those texts.6
Renaissance Aristotelianisms, as Charles Schmitt terms them, are more accurately
186 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
II
III
Some modern philosophers have, in recent years expressed a desire not unlike
that of philosophically-inclined literary critics, to reorient philosophy away
from the deontology associated with Kant towards a conception embedded in
the subjective particulars of lived experience. This has frequently been expressed
in a nostalgic way, as a desire to return to Classical philosophy’s virtue-centered
pursuit of human flourishing, eudaemonia. Modern philosophers refer to this
return to Classical moral philosophy as virtue ethics, and virtue ethics has, in
recent decades, become an increasingly popular approach to moral philosophy
that can be said to account for the critical contributions of philosophers as
diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Williams, and even
Hannah Arendt, to name just a few. Each of these figures has posited an account
that features a Classically-based, character-focused alternative to non-Classical
modes of moral philosophy.
Despite its characteristic tendency to return to Classical philosophical mod-
els, virtue ethics is also a distinctly modern way of thinking about philosophy
that stems from a present-day discontent with modern moral-philosophical
inquiry. David Norton, a celebrated Hume scholar, has recently outlined a series
of arguments in “Moral Minimalism and the Development of Character,” which
contrasts modern with ancient, and describes some of the ways in which Classi-
cal philosophy out-performs modern moral approaches.15 He is deeply critical
of the tendency within modern moral philosophy to exclude entire domains of
human experience from its discussion of the moral life. Modern morality’s
characteristic “minimalism” exists in distinct and unflattering counterpoint to
ancient ethical theory, which Norton believes offers a much fuller sense of what
190 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
in the way that characters reason about their own moral ends, and attempt to
fulfill them.
IV
father’s murder, according to the codes of honor by which his father lived. The
“I am” associated with an ontological view of character is dependent, for
Aristotle, on a “what I do” as well as a “what I ought to be doing.” The “I ought”
expresses the way in which an individual moves from the ontological into the
phenomenological, and literally completes and enacts character, or ethos,
teleologically. The continuum between thought and action so central to
Aristotle’s conception of the ethical life ensures that any essentialized notion of
character becomes inseparable from a conception of what a character of that
sort ought to be doing. The “ought to” is another way of describing moral
responsibility, and the kind of moral responsibility hard-wired to Aristotle’s
conception of moral character means that, within Classical ethics, notions of
character are also inextricably linked to moral obligations.
It is not only typical for modern philosophers like Norton to view moral
character as a concept with strong ties to moral accountability. The assumption
that moral living is comprised of a kind of responsibility or self-awareness in the
face of choice, is also a function of the way in which moral-philosophical writers
in the Renaissance conceived of the moral life. Levinus Lemnius’ The Touchstone
of Complexions explains that making wise choices begins with an awareness of
our own disposition, which for him amounts to an acquaintance with our
humoral constitution. In a section whose marginal note reads “every man must
search out his own inclination and nature,” Lemnius suggests the following
prescription designed to improve and mitigate temperamental excesses:
Thus if a man throughe abundance of humours, and stoate of bloude and spir-
ites, feel hymselfe prone to carnalitye and fleshiye luste, let him by altering his
order and diet, enjoyne to himselfe a most strict ordinary and frame his dealings
to a more stayed moderation. But if hee feele himself to bee of a nature somewhat
sulleyne and sterne, and given somewhat to a wayward, whining testye, churlish,
and intractable then reason sylleth, such a one to be reclaimed to an order and
trade of life, gentler and pleasaunter, insomuch it shall not be ill for such a one
to frequent dancing, singing, womens flatteryes, allurements, and embracings,
provided always, that all the same be not otherwise done nor meant, but in hon-
estye and comeliness, within a reasonable measure.26
The kinds of decisions that arise in daily life about whether “it shall not be ill
for such a one to frequent dancing, singing, womens flatteryes, allurements,
and embracings” are here explicitly connected to the issue of constitution.
Lemnius deploys the language of humoral physiology which, in his day, was the
most readily understood description for individuals’ underlying dispositions,
and one that also carried strong moral connotations. The fungibility associated
with humoral character brings to the fore Fahmi’s idea of social imbrication in
a distinctly material language in which the body was literally imagined as the
What’s Virtue Ethics Got to Do With It? 195
No man ought to be employed to any office, act, or exercise contrary to his natu-
ral passions and inclination. This rule concerneth all sort of superiors in the
employments of their subjects, all parents for the education of their children,
schoolmasters for the training up of their scholars. The ground of this rule depen-
deth of long experience, and reason. For by experience we learn that men be
oftentimes employed to one trade and never can profit therein: contrariwise,
when either they of themselves or others do change that course to another where-
unto they were inclined they become very excellent men. I knew one in Flanders
employed of his friends to be a merchant, against his inclination; but he never
scarce could abide to deal in merchandise, and so at last therewith awearied left
them and turned his course to study, wherein he excelled, and became one of the
rarest preachers there. I myself heard him preach after, very godly and learnedly;
a hundred such examples I could bring you.27
it also carries the implication that social phenomena such as economic failure
and religious apathy are indeed functions of human agency and human
choice.
In Renaissance discussions like Wright’s, practical choices and their far-
reaching social effects have important ties to character. It would, however, be a
mistake to reduce the Renaissance concept of character outlined by these
writers to a merely passive receptacle through which environmental or social
forces circulate. Rather, the two dimensions—corporeal and environmental,
inward and outward—are imagined in a relationship that draws extensively on
Aristotelian teleology. For Aristotle, inward states represent potentials capable
of being actualized in accordance with their natural, logical ends. Prudential
reasoning of the kind outlined by Sandys and discussed extensively by Aristotle
in Book VI of the Ethics becomes centrally important because that form of
thinking excels at formulating practical plans that can help actualize inten-
tional dispositions in effective, concrete ways. Choice for both Aristotle and ver-
nacular Renaissance philosophers like Lemnius is envisioned as a crucial
opportunity to align inward states, both emotional and intentional (providing
they are rationally-conceived) with their logical and teleological outcomes.
Successful self-regulation, however, requires awareness and self-presence in
the face of choice. In Lemnius’ terms, this amounts to an honest appraisal of
the kind of person I am—a lusty bon-vivant whose vices are exacerbated by
gaming, dancing, and beautiful women, or a moody introvert for whom those
pursuits represent harmless, even beneficial distractions. Aristotle is even more
explicit on this point, and makes the concept of choice itself contingent upon
character, as we have seen with his discussion of prohairesis.
The divide between pre-modern and modern visions of the ethical life
centers not only on the intensive focus accorded to character under a Classical
model, but more significantly, in the basic sense of what the concept of charac-
ter itself actually entails. The Classical conception involves a comprehensive,
lifelong focus on moral development that contains an idealistic dimension—
one that helps provide a strong motivational push towards actualizing objec-
tively worthy goals. The Classical concept of character, in other words, does not
consist of abstract, or inert qualities, that is; the ideal of a good and loyal son,
much as those qualities and concepts do form an important part of the overall
picture. Character is neither inert nor static according to Aristotle. As we have
seen from both Renaissance discussions and in the recent dialogically-focused
model of character advanced by Mustapha Fahmi, individuals’ basic disposi-
tions are extremely responsive to external phenomena, and remain importantly
tied to the realm of contingent circumstance in Shakespeare. Classical ethics
understands character as fundamentally responsive, and a person’s ethical
character depends not only on inward, dispositional states, but envisions and
calls for the completion and actualization of those states in physically manifest,
socio-political terms. Moral character therefore entails a sense not only of who
What’s Virtue Ethics Got to Do With It? 197
I am, but also calls for activities that correspond with and actualize those
contents.
The basic self-presence required for moral responsibility in Classical ethics
posits that I cannot simply forget who I am, viz. my strengths and weaknesses,
my constituent dispositions and tendencies, when faced with a moment of
choice. To do so is to behave akratically, or step outside of myself characteologi-
cally, effectively becoming morally incomprehensible to myself and devoid of
identity. One way of thinking about this is to imagine that shrinking from
moral responsibility drains the very lifeblood of ethical identity. When Hamlet
says to Laertes, “Was’t Hamlet wronged 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,” he disclaims identity at precisely
the moment when what seems most required is an honest avowal of moral
responsibility in the deaths of Laertes’ father and sister.28 These disavowals of
identity and moral accountability call for a more concerted exploration of Clas-
sical concepts like akrasia, and topics like emotion—topics which consistently
preoccupy Classical and Renaissance moral philosophers.
Philosophizing Shakespeare, however, can also address a different kind of
problem—a historical one. Hamlet’s frustrated exclamation that he is a “pigeon-
livered and lack[s] gall to make oppression bitter,” that is, that he lacks the req-
uisite humoral constitution, in this case, bile, for courageous action, suggests
that his inability to act decisively is fundamentally a reflection of his weak char-
acter.29 If, as I have been arguing, Shakespearean character is importantly tied
to the Aristotelian notion of ethos or moral character, Hamlet’s proclamation
does more than describe a humoral imbalance; it also declares that he is aware
of his own inability to meet those moral obligations he envisions for himself,
and which he himself acknowledges to be ethically and characterologically
definitive. He is quite literally unable to be himself in the full sense implied by
the term ‘character,’ though he remains saddled with the knowledge of both
who he is inwardly and how he is supposed to behave. This is a problem sugges-
tive of more than just a failure to take moral responsibility—it suggests that on
some level, the failure is bound up with the virtue ethical sense of character
itself, despite its importance to Hamlet’s own sense of himself as a moral agent.
What I hope a more extensive study of the Shakespearean character’s relation-
ship to Aristotelian ethical thought will fill out is the sense in which that failure
resonates not only as an instance of botched revenge and dashed hopes—that
is to say, resonates not only on an individual moral-characterological level, but
also on a cultural and historical one. My view of literary character as impor-
tantly connected to moral character proposes that such failures entail the
collapse of an entire ethical mode—one that we have only begun to investigate
and theorize, but which for a culture preoccupied and deeply invested in recov-
ering modes of ancient thought, would have been experienced as a crisis of
epic proportions. A closer examination of characters like Hamlet in light of a
198 Shakespeare and Moral Agency
virtue ethical conception may well help us better conceive of how such failings
are construed and experienced, just as a more careful examination of Classical
philosophical insights about moral character can lend dimensionality to our
understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare’s characters as moral agents.
Notes
1
Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007); Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Disco-
vering the Meaning Behind the Plays (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). Martha
Nussbaum has recently reviewed both books, along with A. D. Nutall’s Shakespeare
the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) in “Stages of Thought,” The
New Republic 238 (May 7, 2008): pp. 37–41.
2
On treating Shakespeare’s characters like actual people, see Michael Bristol,
“How Many Children Did She Have?” in Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John Joughin
(London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 18–33. See also Mustapha Fahmi, “Shakespeare:
The Orientation of the Human” in Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, eds. Christy Desmet
and Robert Sawyer (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 97–107.
3
David Beauregard, Virtue’s Own Feature: Shakespeare and the Virtue Ethics Tradition.
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995).
4
Beauregard, Virtue, p. 9.
5
Beauregard, Virtue, p. 22.
6
Paul Oskar, Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts
(New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 113–14.
7
Charles Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1983).
8
Margreta de Grazia, “Teleology, Delay, and the ‘Old Mole,’” Shakespeare Quarterly
50 (Fall 1999): pp. 251–67.
9
Michael Bristol, “Vernacular Criticism and the Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote,”
Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): pp. 89–102.
10
L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” in Explorations: Essays in
Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New York: George W.
Stewart, 1947), pp. 15–54.
11
Bristol, Vernacular, p. 98.
12
Miles Sandys, Prudence: The First of the Foure Cardinall Virtues (1634), p. 50.
13
Sandys, Prudence, p. 49.
14
Bristol, Children, p. 33.
15
David Norton, “Moral Minimalism and the Development of Moral Character,” in
Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume XIII: Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue, eds.
Peter French, Theodore Uehling, and Howard Wettstein (Notre Dame: Univer-
sity of Norte Dame Press, 1988), pp. 180–195.
16
Norton, “Minimalism,” p. 180.
17
ibid., “Minimalism,” p. 183.
18
ibid., “Minimalism,” p. 184.
What’s Virtue Ethics Got to Do With It? 199
19
Martha Nussbaum, “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” The Journal of Ethics 3
(1999): pp. 171–73.
20
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Book Six, trans. and ed. L. H. G. Greenwood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 1139a.
21
Gertrude Anscombe, “Thought and Action in Aristotle,” in Articles on Aristotle 2,
ed. Jonathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, and Richard Sorabji (London:
Duckworth, 1975), pp. 61–71.
22
Fahmi, “Orientation,” p. 99.
23
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead,
1998). Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, ed., intro. Donald Bouchard. Trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
24
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
25
Fahmi, “Orientation,” p. 100.
26
Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions (1581), p. 6.
27
Thomas Wright. The Passions of the Minde in Generall. Newbold Critical Edition,
The Renaissance Imagination, vol. 15 (New York: Garland, 1986), p. 163.
28
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Ed.
G. R. Hibbard. 5.2.179–182.
29
Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.565.
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Index
action 4, 6–10, 15–16, 19, 23, 26, Cavell, Stanley 73, 168, 175
29–31, 33–41, 55–6, 58, 61, 63, Coghill, Neville 176
71, 76–9, 81–4, 86–8, 90–1, 93–4, Coriolanus 18, 31, 42, 44, 49–52, 121,
96–7, 111–12, 114–15, 129–31, 131, 133, 155
133–4, 137, 139, 148, 151–4, Currie, Gregory 10
159–62, 164, 167–8, 172, 174–5,
177–80, 186, 188, 191, 192, De Grazia, Margreta 187
194–5, 197 deception see also self-deception 6, 9,
akrasia 8, 86–95, 97, 192, 197 21, 39–40
Althusser, Louis 156 delusion 37, 92, 173–4, 180
Anderson, Perry 71, 84 Derrida, Jacques 15, 17
Andrew, Edward 106, 110
Annas, Julia 78 Eagleton, Terry 15
Anscombe, Gertrude 192 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 65, 159, 168
Aristotle 8, 10, 16, 31, 41, 55–63, 67, Ewbank, Inga-Stina 171
86–8, 91, 94, 97–8, 111, 153,
160–2, 169, 178, 184–6, 188–92, Fahmi, Mustapha 187, 192–3, 196
194, 196 Foucault, Michael 15
Arpaly, Nomy 88, 92–3, 96–8 Frye, Northrop 177
Artaud, Antonin 123
Garber, Marjorie 43
Baker, Hershel 135 Ginet, Carl 4
Beauregard, David 185–6 Girard, René 90
Becker, Lawrence C. 14 Goffman, Erving 77–8
Bell, Vikki 99 Goldberg, Jonathan 83
Belsey, Katherine 16 Gordon, G. 150
Berger, Harry 73, 167–8 Grady, Hugh 6, 88
Bloom, Alan 171
Bloom, Harold 73, 192 Haidt, Jonathan 29–33, 40
Bobbio, Norberto 112–13 Hamlet 2, 7, 17–19, 26–8, 31, 42, 44–7,
Braden, Gordon 163–4 56–8, 62, 82, 111–12, 121,
Brecht, Bertold 123, 156 129–30, 134, 139, 150–1, 186,
Bristol, Michael 72–3, 174, 177, 187–8 193, 197–8
Brooks, Cleanth 77–8 Heller, Agnes 17
Burke, Kenneth 6, 15 Heracleitus 160
Butler, Joseph 9 Heschel, Abraham J. 116
Butler, Judith 72, 77, 83 Honigmann, E. A. J. 160
212 Index
imagination 10, 43, 75, 117, 132, 156, motivation, motive 7, 15, 22, 62, 64–6,
172–4 92, 108–9, 130, 134, 171, 173,
intention 20, 24, 37, 41, 61, 151, 161, 185, 177, 186
179
Nietzsche, Friedrich 130
Jaggar, Alison M. 104 Norris, Christopher 15
Johnson, Samuel 1–2 Norton, David 189–91, 193–4
Julius Caesar 6–7, 15–17, 86–7 Nussbaum, Martha 73, 161, 189–90
Kant, Immanuel 16, 88, 90, 162, 186, Olère, David 122
189
King Henry IV, Part 1 31, 140, 148 Palfrey, Simon 42
King Henry IV, Part 2 23, 31–2, 36, Pinker, Steven 29, 31, 35
113–14 Plato 30–1, 94
King Lear 8, 19, 27, 31, 42, 44, 47, poststructuralism,
111–24, 133 poststructuralist 15–17
King Richard II 18, 20, 23, 83, 129, prudence 1, 188–9
135–40
Knights, L. C. 176, 187 rationality 86, 90, 97
Kott, Jan 123–4 responsibility 7, 10, 19, 32, 55–8, 62,
82, 99–103, 109, 121, 148, 153–4,
Leavis, F. R. 160 159–63, 166–7, 169, 174, 177,
Lemnius, Levinus 194, 196 179–81, 194, 197
Levinas, Emmanuel 11, 17, 100, Ricoeur, Paul 162
121
Liebler 8 Sandys, Miles 188–99, 196, 198
Schmitt, Charles 185
Macbeth 4–5, 7, 18, 26–7, 31, 62, 71–83, self-deception 4, 6, 44–9, 61, 63, 115,
150, 166 159
Machiavelli, Niccolò 6, 17, 24, 63 Seneca 163–4
Mahood, M. M. 177 Shepard, Alexandra 113
Margalit, Avishai 8, 99, 105, 107 Sinfield, Alan 16
Marx, Karl 71 Skulsky, Harold 160
Marxism, Marxist 15–16, 18, 71, 116, Spurgeon, Caroline 77
155 Strier, Richard 7
Measure for Measure 5, 8, 31–2, 37–8,
99–109, 132 Taylor, Charles 73, 129–32, 136, 193
Merchant of Venice, The 8–9, 23, 31, Toulmin, Stephen 72
59–62, 99–109, 133, Troilus and Cressida 81
142–56
Miola, Robert 163–4 Weimann, Robert 71, 73, 75
Montagu, Elizabeth 2 Williams, Bernard 162–3, 166
Montaigne, Michel de 17, 117 Wright, Thomas 195–6
moral luck 159, 162, 166–9
moral responsibility see responsibility Zamir, Tzachi 9, 32, 34, 73, 76, 81, 122