Foreword

In a ‘drawing room’ discussion about cultural tendencies in Australia and Serbia the author
encountered a story about an Australian MP who committed suicide at the end of his term in
Parliament. The story made the author draw a parallel between an MP in Australia and in Serbia. The
conclusion that was reached was that a Serbian MP would probably not commit suicide though he/she
would try to stick to the roles and the life he/she had while in the position of power even on the
account of switching political sides. However, the whole story raises the question of the state of mind
of such people and the mechanisms of the modern culture which ‘produce’ them. If the author deeply
feels and is convinced that no such thing could happen to her, not excluding the fact that she could be
faced with the same situation, the question is how people betray themselves in critical situations and
what after all saves them.

Within the modern culture there exists the prevailing orientation towards material wealth and social
success revealing the inability of the human mind to transcend its sense of moral disorientation and
find worthier goals in life. In the search for meaning and truth, man has lost his direction and the
sense for the reality and the real ‘man’s self’. Thus, the state of the modern man can be described in
terms of ‘double consciousness’ that is the existence and the relatedness between man’s private and
public nature. In order to establish or reestablish the real self and the relationship to the real, man has
to have the will and courage to do so – to look into his soul, to know himself, to create a balance
through the synthesis of contraries and polarities and to find in this world what he could affirm and
what could suffice.

So, the story of the MP who committed suicide and who obviously could not establish his identity once
his public self changed, the change he could not accept and transcend, and who did not have the
courage to accept the reality and find what would suffice in his life, immediately brought into author’s
mind Shakespeare. It was at this point that the author became aware of the fact that if you have the
will to think, criticize, ask questions and find nature and love worthier than dollars and pounds you will
resist and oppose the prevailing practices. Presented with alternatives, you make a choice which in
Nietzschean terms classifies you either as a charcoal or a diamond. As a diamond you remain true to
yourself and your set of values, you remain a creative loving and feeling human; on the other hand, as
a charcoal it may happen that one day you look at yourself, enter your soul and say, “The horror! The
horror!”

Art, love, the love of life could cure modern man. In this sense, Shakespeare’s plays are the lessons
in the art of loving and test situations presented so that it can become clear to us that in spite of the
enormous pressures in the society to ‘kill’ the beauty of life and love what we should quest for in life is
not rank and wealth but the completion through love and creation, not destruction. This also
presupposes that we should revise our identities, redirect our quests, reformulate goals and
reexamine our loyalties: to the presidents, state, kings or life.

1
If Claudius, Macbeth and Richard III may smile and be villains in Shakespeare’s tragedies, then too in
real life, as Woody Harrelson reports1, the former American president Bill Clinton can be concerned
about the lives of innocent people in Iraq, and at the same time block humanitarian aid, allowing the
deaths of thousands of innocent people in the bombing that he ordered.

Introduction

This paper is concerned with the investigation of the ongoing processes in our civilization traced in
the ‘for-you-own-good’ practices and instructions of the structures of power presented in
Shakespeare’s plays by his villains: Macbeth, Claudius and King Richard III. These villains
themselves have undergone the process of the destruction of their inner selves and conscience under
the influence of the prevailing poisonous pedagogy that teaches and instructs young people to give up
their selves to be commanded only for the system to be perpetuated. The paper concentrates on
three Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth, Hamlet and Richard III as well as on two contemporary plays,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, by Tom Stoppard, and On the Open Road, by Steve Tesich.
All the plays deal with the question of the moral and emotional disintegration in the modern world that
appear as the result of the abovementioned poisonous pedagogy, which is both learnt and taught in
order to leave man without meaning in life, without a moral compass and without a belief in the milk of
human kindness that can possibly be replaced by the worship of money and gold, causing human
beings to turn into villains. Also, the plays offer a possible exit out of the practices and the poisonous
pedagogy of our culture in order to resist them and revise them and find some meaningful context in
life.

2
 Nay, pray thee. Stay a little. I hope this passionate humour of mine will change.
It was wont to hold me but while one tells twenty. (He counts to twenty).
How dost thou feel thyself now?
Some certain drags of conscience are yet within me.
Remember our reward, when the deed’s done.
‘Swounds, he dies. I had forgot the reward.
Where’s thy conscience now?
O, in the Duke of Gloucester’s purse.

William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I,4.

The difference between human beings may be formulated in Nietzschean terms as the difference
between diamonds, developmental, complex, related to the world, and charcoals, weak, in discontent
with the world to which they do not see any meaningful relatedness. In the sense of this distinction,
the western culture represents a structure organized around practices and procedures which have
capitalized on the existence of ‘charcoals’, perpetuating itself by exploiting their weaknesses instead
of finding possible exits from the human situation of the uncreative despair. The mentioned difference
can also be equated with the different choice of loyalty, that is, the choice one makes in deciding
which direction, from the range of directions, he/she will take in life. One can choose either to be loyal
to life, self, mother and father, husband and children, or to be loyal to the church, the state, the king
which tend to usurp and control the primary loyalty to one’s self and life.

In Hamlet Ophelia observes,2

Ophelia: Lord, we know what we are,

but know not what we may be. God be at your
table!

Protected by rank or by a social group (class, party, clan, sect) which ensures the fulfillment of one’s
needs within the system, people think that they know what they are but if they lose their expected
place within the system or a group they discover that they know not what they may be. We are
teachable and are all subjects to various influences, but the knowledge of the state we are in and the
fact that we know who we are and what our system of values is can provide us with the stance of
critical thought, resistance and revision.

Driven to madness by grief Ophelia is able to pass a judgment upon the society of Denmark which is
best described in Hamlet’s remark that Denmark is a prison house. Furthermore, Hamlet is able to
see in Denmark3

The imminent death of twenty thousand men,

That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds; fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
2
Ibid, p.700, IV. v.27-74
3
Ibid, p.700, IV. iv.47-v. 26

3
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?

Obviously, Denmark is the land of death where people get killed for the sake of King Claudius who
commits fratricide in order to get the crown. Hamlet observes that they fight for the wrong man as well
as for the wrong reasons primarily of fame, which is ascribed to the king, and the bloody plot of land.
This shows the general readiness of people to obey the king without questioning his practices to the
extent of the betrayal of their inner selves, feelings and thoughts and finally to the extent of death.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern choose to be loyal to the king and queen, Gertrude remains loyal to
her husband and the social role, Polonius chooses to serve the king and Ophelia her father, brother,
remaining loyal to the role of the daughter. How much his countrymen are teachable Hamlet best
shows in the play with Polonius4

Polonius: By th’mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backt like a weasel.

Still, this is a benign example. Far serious one is the case of Gertrude who first, after the death of her

husband, for the reasons of retaining the social order and her role of the queen, marries her deceased

husband’s brother without seeing any harm in the act. Moreover, she expects of her son to

understand it and rationalize it. When Hamlet genuinely mourns his father’s death, the queen

understands this as exaggeration that can be prevented by casting away the black colour of his

clothes. Hamlet replies5

Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

He is aware that people, deliberately or not, forget the things in the past like Gertrude forgets her
husband and marries again in two months’ time. What he wants to do with his mother is to confront
her with her inner self, her conscience in order to make her see the sickness of her act.6

Hamlet: Such an act

That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love
And sets a blister there, makes marriage-vows

4
Ibid, p.694, III. ii 93-iii 15
5
Ibid, p.673, I. ii.60-113
6
Ibid, pp.695-696, III. iv.14-51, 52-102

4
As false as dicers' oaths: O, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words: heaven's face doth glow:
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.

Queen: O Hamlet, speak no more:

Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.

Hamlet: Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty,--

Queen: O, speak to me no more;

These words, like daggers, enter in mine ears;
No more, sweet Hamlet!

Hamlet’s method lies in the readiness to be cruel but not unnatural, which means that he uses indirect
methods to show the world and his step-father and mother their nature, avoiding the method of killing
which would make him use the same practice that Claudius uses. Still, he kills Polonius but is ready to
repent for his act which he considers to be the punishment from heaven. This is what qualitatively
distinguishes him from Claudius who not once in the play repents for the action of killing his brother to
get the throne, the queen and to fulfill his political ambition. At one point in the play Claudius prays to
heaven but his prayer and repentance is formal because he was taught to pray for the salvation of his
soul. His prayer is a quick way out of the situation-if he really looked into his soul and faced the
consequences of his acts his political ambitions would seem irrelevant to him. However, Claudius is
hardly expected to change. Hamlet already sees his step-father as a villain ready to smile at him and
mean him harm, ready to rationalize the necessity to murder, and ready to stifle the conscience. Once
Hamlet has faced Claudius with his conscience through the play performed at the court, Claudius
sees the threat of his step-son and protects himself by sending Hamlet to England to be killed there,
thus washing off the guilt for Hamlet’s death. In this he seeks the help of more than servile Hamlet’s
friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom Hamlet characterizes as sponges ‘that soak up the
king’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities.’ Hamlet observes that kings keep such officers
because they are easily manipulated into doing all kinds of services for them.

In the view of the relationship between Ophelia and Polonius and Hamlet and Gertrude, Edward
Bond’s contemplation about the origin of killers within the culture has to be taken into account.
Namely, he maintains that people are not natural born killers - they become ones through
indoctrination and training by state, church, school and family: through the ideas they are forced to
accept, through orders and blackmail. Bond observes that even a mother who sends her child to do a
task expecting it to obey unquestioningly is turning the child into a potential killer, someone who is
ready to do things without asking why, and who is capable to receive and obey orders willingly.

5
Gertrude is the final product in the process of indoctrination and the betrayal of self and the
conscience. The monstrosity of this process is revealed in the example of Ophelia who is ‘well’
instructed and taught by her brother and father7

Laertes: Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,

And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes:
The canker galls the infants of the spring,
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear:
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.

Polonius: Marry, I'll teach you: think yourself a baby;

That you have ta'en these tenders for true pay,
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly;
Or--not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,
Running it thus--you'll tender me a fool.

She is further instructed to believe that Hamlet’s feelings are false and that she should give up love for
him and betray her own feelings8

Polonius: For Lord Hamlet,

Believe so much in him, that he is young
And with a larger tether may he walk
Than may be given you: in few, Ophelia,
Do not believe his vows; for they are brokers,
Not of that dye which their investments show,
But mere implorators of unholy suits,
Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds,
The better to beguile. This is for all:
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth,
Have you so slander any moment leisure,
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.
Look to't, I charge you: come your ways.

Ophelia: I shall obey, my lord.

Ophelia is not courageous enough to resist the process of indoctrination which leads to the betrayal of
one’s self and one’s system of values that has to be given up and replaced by the prevailing system
which works to stifle conscience, destroy personality and any form of critical thought. She is too weak
to oppose and finds the exit from the net of such practices in her own death.

Those on whom the system, represented by Claudius, thrives and who never question it and its
practices, but dumbly and blindly obey, are abovementioned
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,
Guildenstern best describes his friend and himself. He says to Claudius9
7
Ibid, p.675, I. iii.20-77
8
Ibid, p.676, I. iii.78-122
9
Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,p.26, Act I

6
But we both obey,
And here give up ourselves in the full bent
To lay our service freely at your feet,
To be commanded.

Hamlet observes that the two of them are the best king’s supporters on whom the king can always
count. The history and the progress of our civilization, which is also the civilization of Shakespeare’s
plays, is about political leaders who through the coordinated effort of family, church and school
educate and bring up young people ready to obey authority and to be prepared not to resist but to
embrace the moral order out of which the empires are built, and ready to suppress their emotional and
moral intelligence in order to be commanded. These manipulative processes lead to the failure to find
any satisfaction and meaning in being alive, and to the victimization of human beings through the
roles they are assigned to play. In this sense, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the victims of the
‘poisonous pedagogy’ of Claudius who are emotionally and mentally crippled by his ideology. Thus, in
reply to the statement that Denmark is not a prison, Hamlet concludes that his friends do not possess
the quality of thought that would make them capable of recognizing the ‘invisible moral and ideological
prisons,’10

Hamlet: Denmark's a prison.

Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.

Hamlet: A goodly one; in which there are many confines,

wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o' the worst.

Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.

Hamlet: Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing

either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.

Later on Hamlet says11

Hamlet: You were sent

for; and there is a kind of confession in your looks
which your modesties have not craft enough to colour:
I know the good king and queen have sent for you.

Rosencrantz: To what end, my lord?

Hamlet: That you must teach me. But let me conjure you, by
the rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of
our youth, by the obligation of our ever-preserved
love, and by what more dear a better proposer could
charge you withal, be even and direct with me,
whether you were sent for, or no?

10
Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, p. 684, II. ii.240-286
11
Ibid, p.684, II. ii.240-286, 287-338

7
Guildenstern: My lord, we were sent for.

Tom Stoppard develops his play around Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are already given up their
conscience and who are already trained out of their minds and memories. The greatest emphasis in
the play is in this ‘we were sent for’ and ‘to be commanded’ since it reflects their dumb acceptance of
the authority of the king. They are presented as identity- and conscience –free characters whose
identities are regularly mistaken throughout the play, the ‘phenomenon’ they are not at least ashamed
of. This shows the general cultural trend to make ‘leveled’ people of the same frame of mind and
destroyed moral integrity that could be easily manipulated. This culture is in the play represented by
the plays of tragedians who inform that they only play tragedies, which from the time of ancient
Greece have been about deaths, intrigues, heroes, villains, tormented lovers, rapes, faithless wives
and ravished virgins. Thus, it is the culture of destruction and killing. Guildenstern’s wish is to see a
Greek tragedy12

Guil: Well then – one of the Greeks, perhaps? You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you?
The great homicidal classics? Matri, patri. fratri, sorrori, uxori and it goes without saying -
Ros: Saucy –
Guil:- Suicidal-hm? Maidens aspiring to god heads _
Guil: You kind of thing, is it?
Player: Well, no, I can’t say it is, really. We’re more of the blood, love and rhetoric school.
Guil: Well, I‘ll leave the choice to you, if there is anything to choose between them.
Player: They’re hardly divisible, sir-well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do
you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent and consecutive, but I
can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory – they’re all blood, you see.
Guil: Is that what people want?
Player: It’s what we do.

In Shakespeare’s version, Hamlet uses the play as the mirror held up to nature ‘to show virtue her
own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,’ as
well as the means to catch the conscience of the king. The play in Stoppard’s version has the same
function. It reflects our time and our civilization. When being asked what exactly they do, the player
replies,13

Player: We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are
supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance
somewhere else.

The play, as well as other forms of art, makes us start asking questions about the practices of our
time and the past. If ‘tragedy’ is about the error of man and humankind which brings to the tragic
downfall, then the play can offer a corrective view in the sense that it can be concluded or seen where
the tragic error lies. In this sense, it provides an exit out of the culture. Unfortunately, in the case of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the mental, emotional and moral destruction has gone so far for them
that their memories are washed and they do not remember their past which they could bring into
question. The worse thing is that they do not know how to ask the right questions because they have
12
Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, p.23, Act I
13
Ibid, p.20, Act I

8
always been given ready-made answers in order to forget the practice of asking questions. They do
ask questions but only because they are bored and compete with each other by asking questions and
giving answers alternately like in a tennis match. Their ‘question and answer’ game is formal because
they never ask the right questions, and later it takes the form of a syllogism in logics by means of
which they rationalize the fact that they are taking Hamlet to England to be killed. Rosencrantz says14

Ros: All right! We don’t question, we don’t doubt. We perform, But a line must be drawn somewhere,
and I would like to put it on record that I have no confidence in England. Thank you.
Guil: I don’t see why.
Ros: He won’t know what we are talking about – What are we going to say?

Besides the implied fact that they are going to be utterly servile to the English king too, the next lines
witness to what extent they go to rationalize the death of their friend whom they are taking to be killed.
First, they reason that he is a man, that he is mortal and that he would die anyway one day; also,
Hamlet is one man among many so the loss of him would be within reason. They consider themselves
to be little men that do not interfere with the designs of fate or even of kings so Guildenstern thinks
that it would be best for them to only tie up the letter and forget about the fact that they know what
they are supposed to do. The scene at this point in the play reminds one of the scene with the two
killers sent by the Duke of Gloster to kill his brother Clarence in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Although
Rosencrantz notices that the whole thing is awful and that Hamlet has done nothing to them, he
rationalizes it and draws the conclusion that they are doing it for Hamlet’s own good,15

Ros: We, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from our young days brought up with him, awakened by a
man standing on his saddle, are summoned and arrive, and are instructed to glean what afflicts him
and draw him onto pleasures, such as a play, which unfortunately, as it turns out, is abandoned in
some confusion owing to certain nuances outside our appreciation – which, among, other causes,
result in, among other effects, a high, not to say, homicidal, excitement in Hamlet, whom we, in
consequence, are escorting, for his own good, to England. Good. We’re on top of it now.

Several conclusions have to be drawn from these lines - the two of them have through a long process
been trained out of memory and learnt to receive and obey instructions. They were not accidentally
chosen for the task because they have been trained not to think and ask questions. They do not
understand the meaning and the purpose of the performed play which they consider to be a mere
form of pleasure. Also, they do not understand the source of Hamlet’s, politely expressed, ‘excitement’
due to which they are taking him to be killed for his own good, which makes them far away from the
truth about the system and ’for-you-own-good’ pedagogy that king Claudius is the representative of.
This truth in their case becomes and remains ‘a permanent blur in the corner of their eyes.’

Shakespeare’s Macbeth raises the question of the object of one’s loyalty and asks whether there is
something in life that one should never betray. In the play Shakespeare shows the failure of the power
of love and family ties between Macbeth and his lady and the perversion and betrayal of one’s true
self. The unsexed woman, Lady Macbeth, accepts the value system of her culture, rejects her power

14
Ibid, p.78, Act III
15
Ibid, p. 80, Act III

9
to create life only in order to become powerful enough to control and destroy this creativity. Macbeth
is a play 16

‘that dramatizes the moment when killing, internalized through various traditional practices, becomes
so normal and easy that it becomes second nature to men and women who are unable to resist the
political lies that sanction and promote it. It is a play about the inner defense against this perversion,
about the struggle between man’s first and second nature, about the choice that needs to be made
between the derided milk of human kindness and the glorified but barren crown.’

Unfortunately, Lady Macbeth tries to play political games by encouraging her husband to kill. Instead
of creatively fulfilling herself as a mother she rather chooses to become implicated in dirty political
games which include killing as well. Her wish is expressed as17

Come you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall

She wants to ‘unsex’ herself by becoming cruel, which would enable her to kill without any remorse.
This is basically of what her husband is fit to do - he has already become a killer when he meets the
witches who only confront him with his nature and the future on which he has already embarked. Lady
Macbeth likes the idea of becoming the queen and is ready to support her husband even to the extent
of killing the king. She warns Macbeth that the lack of political ambition, fear and innate human
kindness that he possesses can stop him from fulfilling the predicted future. On the other hand,
Macbeth consciously rationalizes the murder of the king making it a normal thing. Still, having
murdered the king, his suppressed inner voice is heard through fear and guilty conscience. Lady
Macbeth is there to reproach him and bring him back on the way of his destruction 18

My hands are of your colour; but I shame

To wear a heart so white.

A little water clears us of this deed.

They both have transgressed nature by killing; their hands are in blood which no water can wash. Still,
she believes they can be washed as well as one’s soul.
Macbeth’s ambition grows to the extent that he is easily ready to kill. He has killed his sleep and
dreams through which his inner voice can communicate with him and which, as John Crowe Ransom
maintains in his essay Poetry: A Note on Ontology, reproach us telling us that we have gone off the
course on the direction we have chosen as the right one in life. On the other hand, Lady Macbeth is

16
Bogoeva, Sedlar, Ljiljana, O promeni, Kulturološki eseji, p.183
17
Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, p.862 I. v.12-60
18
Ibid, p.865, II. ii.45-iii.16

10
subconsciously tormented by the fact that she committed murder. She moonwalks, washes her hands
and talks to herself in sleep19

The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?

What, will these hands ne’er be clean? No more
O’that, my lord, no more o’that: you mar all with
This starting.

The doctor’s diagnosis is that20

Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds

Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets:
More needs she the divine than the physician:-God,
God forgive us all!

Macbeth has already gone far on the path of destruction and he has no inner mechanism that will tell
him he has gone astray and that there is no cure for his wife’s illness, at least not by plucking sorrow,
nor through oblivion and cleansing the weighed bosom.

Lady Macbeth experiences an ‘inner recall’, recognizes her acts as the transgressions of nature and
knows in her madness that she deserves to die, unlike her husband. In the case of his tragedies,
Shakespeare’s wish is to show that if one cannot discern where one’s loyalty lies (whom one should
serve) and if one is unable to constitute and maintain a satisfactory personal identity, then one seeks
refuge and reinforcement in various types of collectivism: race, class, sect, clan or any other type
which he/she follows, bribed by social favour, forgetting the milk of human kindness and its
importance.

* * *

Along with Edward Bond’s observation that it takes a lot of ‘culture’ to make us killers, goes the
book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the roots of Violence21 by the Swiss
psychiatrist Alice Miller in which she reveals the ongoing process of our civilization that she calls
poisonous pedagogy. In her book she first gives the historical development of this pedagogy
(including Adolf Hitler) and then elaborates on it. According to Miller, poisonous pedagogy is about
power, of ‘hidden power struggles.’ Those who have power use conditioning and manipulation of
others as weapons even if these weapons are disguised with the terms education and therapeutic
treatment in the same way that technology was used to help carry out mass murder in the Third
Reich. One of Miller’s observations which is the most important in the context of this paper is that:
people who were protected, respected and treated with honesty by their parents and whose integrity
has not been consequently damaged will be intelligent, responsive, emphatic and highly sensitive

19
Ibid, p.880 V. i 28-73
20
Ibid, p.880 V. i 74-ii 31
21
Bogoeva, Sedlar, Ljiljana, Facta Universitatis, Charcoals or Diamonds? On destruction of moral and
emotional intelligence (or soul murder) in Shakespeare’s works.

11
when they grow up. Furthermore, they will use their power to protect themselves but not attack others
and will never have the urge to kill or hurt; what is more, they will enjoy life protecting weaker than
them including their children because once they were protected too and it this lesson they carry in
them throughout their lives. Her conclusion to these observations is that,22

Such people will be incapable of understanding why earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war
industry in order to feel at ease and safe in this world. Since it will not have to be their unconscious
task to ward off intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at
intimidation in their adult life more rationally and more creatively.

This is a good explanation of why Shakespeare had to write about King Richard III and why Hitler
after all happened to the world.

Many parallels can be drawn between King Richard III (Duke of Gloster) and Claudius. They are both
ambitious to get the power, they both instruct and manipulate others and they are both part of the
milleu which after all promotes such people. Still, appears that Richard III is one of Shakespeare’s
villains that have undergone the process of complete moral disintegration as a part of the poisonous
pedagogy Alice Miller explains. Also, it seems that this villain is more close to the type of a modern
‘villain’ in the sense that he introduces the practice of language manipulation, in our modern times,
manipulation through the mass media.

At the beginning of the play Richard III, in an almost sympathetic monologue, the Duke of Gloster
explains the root of his evil nature23

Duke of Gloster: But I,--that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;--
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore,--since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,--
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other.

He implies that his villainy is rooted in his physical deformity, due to which he cannot be emotionally
and sexually involved with women, the circumstance which makes him plot against his family,
22
Ibid
23
Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, p.98, I. i.50-102

12
manipulate other people and order murders. It is hard to believe that he is a natural born killer having
in mind the fact that it takes more than that to become a killer, it takes ’culture’ at least as Edward
Bond observes. Instead of being fed on the milk of human kindness and taught to love life, Richard
maintains the poisonous pedagogy that has replaced human kindness and the love of life with the
sense of being exposed to the permanent competition throughout one’s life, which produces the
insatiable need for power, and the wish to destroy. At this stage he is plotting against his brother
Clarence who is to take on the crown of their brother Edward (King Edward IV). So, he spreads the
rumour that Clarence is plotting against the king and soon Clarence is imprisoned in the Tower. In
order to secure his path to the throne he decides to have his brother Clarence killed. At this point,
Shakespeare introduces into the play the figures of, again, two ‘dumb waiters”, two murderers. In the
scenes in the Tower Clarence realizes that they have been sent to kill him and pleads for his life by
addressing the part of them that has long been suppressed and unpracticed - he addresses their
conscience. The conscience of one of the murderers is awakened24

Second murderer: Faith, some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.

First murderer: Remember our reward, when the deed's done.

Second murderer: Zounds, he dies: I had forgot the reward.

First murderer: Where's thy conscience now?

Second murderer: O, in the Duke of Gloster's purse.

First murderer: So, when he opens his purse to give us our reward,
thy conscience flies out.

Second murderer 'Tis no matter; let it go; there's few or none will entertain it.

First murderer: What if it come to thee again?

Second murderer:
I'll not meddle with it,- it makes a man coward;
a man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; a man
cannot swear, but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his
neighbour's wife, but it detects him: 'tis a blushing shame-
faced spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom; it fills a man
full of obstacles: it made me once restore a purse of gold
that by chance I found; it beggars any man that keeps it:
it is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing;
and every man that means to live well endeavours to trust
to himself and live without it.

This scene reflects the state in our modern world in which one’s soul and conscience can be bought
and in which one can attain security and a sense of self – worth through external sources, such as
money and gold (financial success). It also supports the view that one is considered to be a coward if
one obeys the voices of his/her conscience which will make him/her free to kill if they get rid of it.
Freed from moral insight these murderers are free to kill, as well as the Duke of Gloster is free to do
bloody deeds on the path of fulfilling his ambition to become and remain the king. So, in the number of

24
Ibid, p. 108, I. iv.99-141

13
plots and deceptions the Duke: kills the court noblemen who are loyal to the princes, imprisons the
young princes in the Tower where they are murdered, orders his wife’s, Queen Anne’s, murder, so
that he can marry young Elizabeth, the daughter of the former Queen Elizabeth and the dead King
Edward, the alliance that would secure his claim to the throne. In the scene with Lady Anne, the Duke
is accused of killing her husband. He admits his crime and when she addresses God and heaven to
strike him dead he, in a most hypocritical way, calls for pity and charity25

Gloster: Lady, you know no rules of charity,

Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses.

Anne: Villain, thou knowest nor law of God nor man:

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

Gloster: But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

Anne: O wonderful, when devils tell the truth!

Gloster: More wonderful when angels are so angry.--

Vouchsafe, divine perfection of a woman,
Of these supposed crimes to give me leave,
By circumstance, but to acquit myself.

He is trying to woe her by declaring his love for her and telling her that she has inspired him to use
sweet words for the first time. In the lines to come, the Duke shows a great manipulative power of
language, which makes Lady Anne, in spite of the fact that she hates him, that she knows he flatters
her and that he would soon have her killed, believe that somehow perhaps he has become penitent.
Once she has left his company, the Duke reasons26

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?

Was ever woman in this humour won?
I'll have her; but I will not keep her long.
What! I that kill'd her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart's extremest hate;
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by;
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit withal,
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her,--all the world to nothing!
Ha!
Hath she forgot already that brave prince,
Edward, her lord, whom I, some three months since,
Stabb'd in my angry mood at Tewksbury?
A sweeter and a lovelier gentleman,--
Fram'd in the prodigality of nature,
Young, valiant, wise, and, no doubt, right royal,--
The spacious world cannot again afford.

He recognizes the power of her conscience and moral integrity supported by her Christian beliefs.
Never in the play is he afraid of the wreath of God and the awakening of his conscience but at the
very end of the play, a night before the great battle with Richmond, after he has been visited upon by
25
Ibid, p.100, I. ii.34-80
26
Ibid, p.102, I. ii.197-240

14
the ghosts of those he ordered to be killed. He admits that in his dream he was struck by more terror
than ten thousand soldiers could struck him with27

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!--

The lights burn blue.--It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What, do I fear myself? there's none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No;--yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why,--
Lest I revenge. What,--myself upon myself!
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain: yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well:--fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the high'st degree;
Murder, stern murder, in the dir'st degree;
All several sins, all us'd in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all "Guilty! guilty!"
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die no soul will pity me:
And wherefore should they,--since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
Methought the souls of all that I had murder'd
Came to my tent; and every one did threat
To-morrow's vengeance on the head of Richard.

He realizes that his conscience is part of him, in fact that it is his very soul which communicates with
him in this scene accusing him for and naming all the crimes he has committed. This is the point of
the recognition of his error. Nevertheless, it does not stop him to make an inspiring speech to motivate
his soldiers and go into the battle where he is betrayed by Lord Stanley, and, again, where he wishes
for the death of his son, George Stanley.

This Shakespeare’s play, as well as s many other plays, witnesses the existence of the strategy of
moral disorientation used to get rid of the milk of human kindness and conscience as an instrument of
meaning. In this sense, his plays are the study of human beings as moral agents and the reflection
upon the nature of moral progress and moral failure.

27
Ibid, p. 136, V. iii.206-249

15
Shakespeare’s villains revisited

Prudentia: This acting. This intervening. This putting stops to things. Who obliges
you Clarissa?
Clarissa: My conscience.
Prudentia: Put it to sleep, then. Strike it with a shovel. Like a senile dog, one swift
and clean blow kills it. I was spun by conscience like a top. And when it died I came
to life.The top ceased spinning. Look how you shiver. Look how manifestly you are
inferior to me.
Do I shiver? You are in the blindfold.

(Barker Howard, Seven Lears)

16
 Barker’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good, is an
attempt to show what the system and its institutions do to children that have no motherly protection
and that are wrongly taught and instructed: instead of loving they are taught to hate, destroy and lie.
His view is that a child should develop itself on the basis of its innate sense of justice ‘the godlike
authority of the private soul’28and free questioning that leads to the recognition and love of the Good.
If a child does not develop in this way it is poisoned and dehumanized by the ideology and education
of the culture. His Lear in the pursuit of the good undergoes changes under the influence of these
instruments of society.
In his Introduction to Seven Lears, Barker reveals the background of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
His observation is that ‘mother is denied existence in the play’ and in the memory of its characters and
that this extinction is the result of the repression of the feminine principle by the whole society,
including Lear and his two daughters Goneril and Regan who hate everything this principle stands for.
Barker thinks that although this hatred is unjust it may have been necessary. This means that the
society out of necessity deliberately destructs those feminine qualities such as truth, love, compassion
in order to create a dehumanized army of leveled ‘money makers.’ In Seven Lears, first Lear, a boy, is
very different from his brothers who are only interested in playing games especially playing adults’
game of building castles and destroying them. Young Lear is at this stage able to question his father’s
rule and ask questions about justice and goodness. He says: ’If people were good, punishment would
be unnecessary, therefore the function of all government must be – the definition of and subsequent
encouragement of goodness.’29 He thinks that people make goodness difficult by their immoral
behavior, making it impossible to achieve and perceiving it as a kind of victory after a long time of acts
of badness. When his brothers die, the king appoints a teacher to him, a bishop, to educate him
because he will be the future king.The bishop’s purpose in his education will be to kill through a long
process of deprivations of truth, books and love his inner sense of justice. Second Lear is not yet
indoctrinated but is presented as a completely soulless person having sex with Prudentia, a lawyer
whose femininity is ‘undiscovered’ and ’habitually absented’: a bad mother. Lear is not able to define
his feelings for Prudentia and they range from love to his readiness to kill her and take her daughter
instead. He receives encouragement for that from the bishop but decides not to do it which the bishop
understands as the failure of education meant to teach indifference, cruelty, injustice and designed to
kill conscience. Lear is presented as an emotional manipulator, a liar and Prudentia loves him only
because he will become the king. He himself does not find that he is fit to rule – he acts like a child,
his emotional responses go into extremes; at one time he is an actor on other occasions he is
tormented by his conscience when he hears the voices from the gaol reminding him of the injustices
done. The one that is supposed to correct him is Clarissa who is the embodiment of love, truth and
femininity. In her relationship with him Clarissa insists on truth, avoiding all flattery, and on love and
feelings defying mere sex as ‘dead iron on a mountain.’ Lear is a child split between his genuine self
and the self that he has to be as a king. This makes him completely incapable of ruling and being
successful in wars, which is expected of a king. His wife Clarissa is there to save him and criticize him
28
Bogoeva, Sedlar, Ljiljana, Facta Universitatis, Charcoals or Diamonds? On destruction of moral and emotional
intelligence( or soul murder) in Shakespeare’s works

29
Barker, Howard, Seven Lears: The Pursuit of The Good, p. 2

17
because she cares for him and sees goodness and decency that has been obstructed by the
education he received from the bishop. She approves of Bishop’s murder – his death is inevitable and
is for the sake of children whose humanity will not be killed through his teaching. Before he is killed,
the bishop asks Kent whether he is really the only one to be removed. Clarissa is aware of this and
knows that she has to kill her mother Prudentia who represents the justice system. Clarissa has to
punish her mother for not realizing that pity and love can be ‘correction.’ Prudentia is loveless and
cannot understand what urges her daughter to seek for the correction of her husband.
By the end of the play Lear is astray from the path of finding his real self and the good but is still
able to realize that his wife and her love were able to cure him. Having discovered the gaol that
tormented Lear from his earliest childhood, Clarissa vanishes leaving him his three daughters Regan,
Goneril and Cordelia to instruct them and prepare for the world. There is no bishop, but now it is Lear
who teaches them. The gaol is silent and Lear’s children cannot be redeemed for they are like their
uncles wishing to build castles on the beach and fly kites that stand for every child whose humanity
and the right to be what it chooses is killed by the system.

Barker’s Seven Lears tries to answer the question whether it would be different if Goneril, Regan
and Cordelia had a mother and Lear a wife. In Shakespeare’s version Lear is presented as an
autocratic ruler whose life in the play is seen as a kind of ‘purgatorial pilgrimage in which arrogance,
moral blindness and inhumanity are stripped away, and a fundamental humanity is left.’ 30 Lear’s
daughters Goneril and Regan, influenced by the distorted human values, are seen as evil, inhuman
beasts regarding their behavior to the father. They use nice words to satisfy their father’s need to be
flattered (and not showed genuine affection) and take the land that he is willing to divide among the
three daughters. They are his daughters who use his own practices which they were taught to. The
only one that differs is Cordelia who is not prepared to use the language of her sisters. Love for the
father is something she naturally feels and she does not show the need to exaggerate it because it is
understood. Lear does not recognize this due to the fact that he has not developed this faculty of
nature in himself. His error is huge and is against nature which becomes wild and disrupted due to the
disrupted order in the society. He is punished for it by the death of all three daughters after having
realized the power of love, pity and forgiveness. There is no possibility of correction for him in the
sense of having another chance with his daughter Cordelia-he is severely punished and the very
knowledge that love brings a soul’s content and not a territory, gold or conquering is his only reward
for awakening.

Those on whom the system, represented by Claudius, thrives and who never question it and its
practices, but dumbly and blindly obey, are abovementioned
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,
Guildenstern best describes his friend and himself. He says to Claudius31

30
Drama in the Twentieth Century, Comparative and Critical Essays, p.326

31
Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,p.26, Act I

18
But we both obey,
And here give up ourselves in the full bent
To lay our service freely at your feet,
To be commanded.

Hamlet observes that the two of them are the best king’s supporters on whom the king can always
count. The history and the progress of our civilization, which is also the civilization of Shakespeare’s
plays, is about political leaders who through the coordinated effort of family, church and school
educate and bring up young people ready to obey authority and to be prepared not to resist but to
embrace the moral order out of which the empires are built, and ready to suppress their emotional and
moral intelligence in order to be commanded. These manipulative processes lead to the failure to find
any satisfaction and meaning in being alive, and to the victimization of human beings through the
roles they are assigned to play. In this sense, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the victims of the
‘poisonous pedagogy’ of Claudius who are emotionally and mentally crippled by his ideology. Thus, in
reply to the statement that Denmark is not a prison, Hamlet concludes that his friends do not possess
the quality of thought that would make them capable of recognizing the ‘invisible moral and ideological
prisons,’32

Hamlet: Denmark's a prison.

Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.

Hamlet: A goodly one; in which there are many confines,

wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o' the worst.

Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.

Hamlet: Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing

either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.

Later on Hamlet says33

Hamlet: You were sent

for; and there is a kind of confession in your looks
which your modesties have not craft enough to colour:
I know the good king and queen have sent for you.

Rosencrantz: To what end, my lord?

Hamlet: That you must teach me. But let me conjure you, by
the rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of
our youth, by the obligation of our ever-preserved
love, and by what more dear a better proposer could
charge you withal, be even and direct with me,
whether you were sent for, or no?

Guildenstern: My lord, we were sent for.

32
Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, p. 684, II. ii.240-286
33
Ibid, p.684, II. ii.240-286, 287-338

19
Tom Stoppard develops his play around Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are already given up their
conscience and who are already trained out of their minds and memories. The greatest emphasis in
the play is in this ‘we were sent for’ and ‘to be commanded’ since it reflects their dumb acceptance of
the authority of the king. They are presented as identity- and conscience –free characters whose
identities are regularly mistaken throughout the play, the ‘phenomenon’ they are not at least ashamed
of. This shows the general cultural trend to make ‘leveled’ people of the same frame of mind and
destroyed moral integrity that could be easily manipulated. This culture is in the play represented by
the plays of tragedians who inform that they only play tragedies, which from the time of ancient
Greece have been about deaths, intrigues, heroes, villains, tormented lovers, rapes, faithless wives
and ravished virgins. Thus, it is the culture of destruction and killing. Guildenstern’s wish is to see a
Greek tragedy34

Guil: Well then – one of the Greeks, perhaps? You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you?
The great homicidal classics? Matri, patri. fratri, sorrori, uxori and it goes without saying -
Ros: Saucy –
Guil:- Suicidal-hm? Maidens aspiring to god heads _
Guil: You kind of thing, is it?
Player: Well, no, I can’t say it is, really. We’re more of the blood, love and rhetoric school.
Guil: Well, I‘ll leave the choice to you, if there is anything to choose between them.
Player: They’re hardly divisible, sir-well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do
you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent and consecutive, but I
can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory – they’re all blood, you see.
Guil: Is that what people want?
Player: It’s what we do.

In Shakespeare’s version, Hamlet uses the play as the mirror held up to nature ‘to show virtue her
own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,’ as
well as the means to catch the conscience of the king. The play in Stoppard’s version has the same
function. It reflects our time and our civilization. When being asked what exactly they do, the player
replies,35

Player: We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are
supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance
somewhere else.

The play, as well as other forms of art, makes us start asking questions about the practices of our
time and the past. If ‘tragedy’ is about the error of man and humankind which brings to the tragic
downfall, then the play can offer a corrective view in the sense that it can be concluded or seen where
the tragic error lies. In this sense, it provides an exit out of the culture. Unfortunately, in the case of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the mental, emotional and moral destruction has gone so far for them
that their memories are washed and they do not remember their past which they could bring into
question. The worse thing is that they do not know how to ask the right questions because they have
always been given ready-made answers in order to forget the practice of asking questions. They do

34
Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, p.23, Act I
35
Ibid, p.20, Act I

20
ask questions but only because they are bored and compete with each other by asking questions and
giving answers alternately like in a tennis match. Their ‘question and answer’ game is formal because
they never ask the right questions, and later it takes the form of a syllogism in logics by means of
which they rationalize the fact that they are taking Hamlet to England to be killed. Rosencrantz says36

Ros: All right! We don’t question, we don’t doubt. We perform, But a line must be drawn somewhere,
and I would like to put it on record that I have no confidence in England. Thank you.
Guil: I don’t see why.
Ros: He won’t know what we are talking about – What are we going to say?

Besides the implied fact that they are going to be utterly servile to the English king too, the next lines
witness to what extent they go to rationalize the death of their friend whom they are taking to be killed.
First, they reason that he is a man, that he is mortal and that he would die anyway one day; also,
Hamlet is one man among many so the loss of him would be within reason. They consider themselves
to be little men that do not interfere with the designs of fate or even of kings so Guildenstern thinks
that it would be best for them to only tie up the letter and forget about the fact that they know what
they are supposed to do. The scene at this point in the play reminds one of the scene with the two
killers sent by the Duke of Gloster to kill his brother Clarence in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Although
Rosencrantz notices that the whole thing is awful and that Hamlet has done nothing to them, he
rationalizes it and draws the conclusion that they are doing it for Hamlet’s own good,37

Ros: We, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from our young days brought up with him, awakened by a
man standing on his saddle, are summoned and arrive, and are instructed to glean what afflicts him
and draw him onto pleasures, such as a play, which unfortunately, as it turns out, is abandoned in
some confusion owing to certain nuances outside our appreciation – which, among, other causes,
result in, among other effects, a high, not to say, homicidal, excitement in Hamlet, whom we, in
consequence, are escorting, for his own good, to England. Good. We’re on top of it now.

Several conclusions have to be drawn from these lines - the two of them have through a long process
been trained out of memory and learnt to receive and obey instructions. They were not accidentally
chosen for the task because they have been trained not to think and ask questions. They do not
understand the meaning and the purpose of the performed play which they consider to be a mere
form of pleasure. Also, they do not understand the source of Hamlet’s, politely expressed, ‘excitement’
due to which they are taking him to be killed for his own good, which makes them far away from the
truth about the system and ’for-you-own-good’ pedagogy that king Claudius is the representative of.
This truth in their case becomes and remains ‘a permanent blur in the corner of their eyes.’

Moral disorientation and the necessity to find something that would suffice in life and make it
meaningful is also the theme of Steve Tesich’s play On the Open Road. Tesich sets the story of his
play within the modern society which anticipates Christ’s second coming in the place and time of yet
another civil war. What Tesich wants to communicate through the play is that in order for the world to
36
Ibid, p.78, Act III
37
Ibid, p. 80, Act III

21
be free to commit crimes, at the same time rationalize them and consider them to be civilization, it is
necessary to kill Jesus and his religion whenever they appear. The meaning of killing Jesus lies in the
fact that if the God within man is killed, he remains without that part of him through which he
appreciates the totality and the sacredness of life. Thus, morally disoriented, uncreative and from the
god estranged man is unable to find the right direction or path through already meaningless life. On
this path, man so often chooses to betray his self, the wholeness of his being, his creative potential
and the religion of love, replacing them by the religion and the system of values he is taught to believe
in by his mentors.

At some point in the play Angel, one of the characters in Tesich’s play, reasons 38

Angel: Live and fucking learn. I thought it was the culture that was oppressing me. Wrong. It’s culture
that’s gonna liberate me.

Indeed, it is culture that was oppressing him with Al as its representative. Al is on the road to the Land
of Free to which one has the access if one is culturally qualified. In order to culturally qualify himself
and Angel, he is taking pieces of art in a cart to the Land of Free to which he is hurrying when he
meets Angel. Angel is about to be hanged but Al saves him only because he needs someone to pull
his cart. Along the road to the Land he assumes the position of a Mentor who is to teach Angel about
the achievements of the culture which is permanently at war of some kind. Nevertheless, it turns out
that Angel is the one that should teach Al the right religion, which he perceives to be the religion of
love and compassion. By means of this religion Angel is able to appreciate Al as a human being and
to wish in life a kind of emotional connection even if it is in the form of his friendship with Al. On the
other hand, Al denies any kind of sympathy for Angel and on the larger scale for any human being.
What is more, he does not believe in Jesus and the idea that man is a Godlike creature with a
potential to create, because he is the witness of the fact that his culture is only destructive. It is Angel
who is going to teach Al in a Jesus–like manner through his insistence on the close relationship with
him, based on honesty and appreciation of other’s personality and through his compassion for other
human beings seen in the scene where he saves a girl that has been raped.

Al’s standpoint is that the word ‘human’ has undergone a complete erosion of its meaning. Moreover,
he has ceased to believe in the milk of human kindness and for this reason declares that he would
appreciate more Angel’s portrait than Angel himself as a human being. He emphasizes the
importance of art39

Al: Art is freedom. When we’re lost in the night, art defines the darkness we’re in. it elevates us to a
promontory from where we can see the way. Forward and back. So we can discern the continuous or
the severed line of our lives. And if we truly want to be human, it defines what that is and how far we
have to go to reach it or how far off the course we’ve strayed.

It is clear that he puts the importance of art before and above the belief in love and relatedness to
human beings and nature. In the scene with the girl that Angel saves, Al urges Angel to leave the girl
because she cannot be saved by a one shot salvation that Angel offers her. The implication of this is

38
Tesich, Steve, On the Open Road, p. 19, Act I , Scene II
39
Ibid, p. 37, Act I, Scene V

22
that she would need a kind of love religion on which she could live by throughout the rest of her life.
This is a kind of religion Angel believes in and seeks in Christ and his music.

At the beginning of Act Two we find Angel and Al ready to be hanged because they have been late to
cross the border and the government has changed. When Angel asks Al why they are hanging them,
the latter answers that it is the policy of the new government’s judicial system to hang everyone who
feel guilty of something. Since they feel guilty of at least one thing they are qualified for hanging. At
this point, Al raises the question of the progress of civilization, which is the question that mankind has
bee asking itself for eons without ever getting the answer. Angels concludes40

Angel: So mankinds’ been asking itself the same question for eons, to which there is no answer and
progress is getting as many people as possible to ask the question.

Angel: Mankind must be demented.

For Hamlet ‘time is out of joint’ and for Angel mankind is demented, which shows that two of them
have the same frame of mind and the moral intelligence enabling them to pass a judgment on the
culture which in the context of the contemporary play considers the murder of Christ to be the
humanitarian and the Christian thing to do. The two of them have been chosen to kill Christ and Angel
asks the logical question: Why them? If we take into account the fact that Al has been the one who
negotiated with the government, then we have the answer to this question. He is the kind of a person
that will make up all possible excuses to justify the practices of the government, as well as rationalize
them. Unwillingly, Angel accepts to go to the monastery where Christ is kept. The next scenes of the
play remind one of the scenes from Richard III in which, after being warned by the Duke that Clarence
will try to address and awaken their conscience, the two murderers are to kill Clarence. For the sake
of arriving to the Land of Free and saving himself from the traps of the system to which he belongs
and because of which he feels not to be free, Angel is ready at least to hear the reasons that lie
behind the necessity to kill Christ. It is interesting to hear and see to which extent Al goes to justify the
government and rationalize Christ’s death explaining that by killing him they would do the moral thing
alleviating his miseries. Angel observes that to do a moral thing they have to commit murder.

In the scene in the monastery in which Monk appears, Angel is chosen by means of tossing a coin to
kill Christ which he does not commit because he is reminded by Christ’s music of the time when he
saw salvation and meaning in Christ’s religion. Monk is furious when he realizes that the two of them
cannot and do not want to kill Christ. Monk’s explanation of the necessity of Christ’s murder lies in the
fact that his religion has been emptied of its original meaning. There is neither brotherhood of man nor
any visionaries left, no lion is lying down with the lamb. The truth is evident – the long and bloody
history of civilization has destroyed the notion of unconditional love the result of which is that no one
believes in it any longer. What is more, people need a motive not free will to love, and the knowledge
of the fact that they cannot accomplish this unconditional love has made people at war with their own
mind, that is their very self. People are enraged and tormented by the failure to follow Christ’s vision,
the consequence of which is that they torment others and communicate the rage to them. The
concluding line is that there cannot be peace on earth so long as man is at war with himself as well as

40
Ibid, p. 51, Act II, Scene I

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that there are only a few chosen ones that can support Christ’s vision and love their neighbours as
they love themselves.

Angel belongs to this group of the few who have developed the love and appreciation of other human
beings through self-respect and the knowledge of who they are and what they may be in any possible
situation in life because they have internalized only one system of values by which they live and which
provides them with meaning.

Al is able to make the distinction between two kinds of freedom - freedom from something, and
freedom for something, and to figure that once freed from chains, a slave soon loses the vision of free
for what. So, he sees that civilization has developed in the direction to free itself from tyrants and
become democratic, but what it has achieved is that it left man incapacitated to create meaningful
visions of life in freedom. The lesson that Angel was to teach Al from the beginning of the trip along
the road of life is that ‘to love without a motive is Art’ it is the free for what of freedom it is something
that defines a human being in the first place. This is the truth Al reaches crucified on the cross with his
friend Angel.41

Al: But at least we know who we’re supposed to be. And by clinging to that very definition which
damns us and excludes us, but which we won’t demean, we retain, if nothing else, the true worth of
our purpose and claim the right to say that although we may be out of reach of salvation, we are not
lost.

Conclusion

Nosce te ipsum

(inscribed at the entrance to the

Temple of Apollo at Delphi)

If the time of wars, of destruction of every kind and of the loss of some meaningful context for man
rests on and perpetuates itself on the existence of ‘charcoals’, we all have to the deal with the
question of how gold- and money- lovers, as well as villains of the Claudius- and Richard The Third-
kind are made and promoted. As it was earlier mentioned, our civilization has developed in the sense
that it has reached the freedom from what but has not reached the freedom for what of man’s
existence. The history of its development is formal and rests on the fact that man fought to reach
freedom but went on fighting, destroying and killing without any obvious reasons except for the reason
that it was not his choice but the choice of those in power who taught him to fight and kill for his own
good. Essentially, man has gone astray on the path of finding a meaningful context which once he

41
Ibid, p. 93, Act II, Scene IV

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could find within the religion of love of the Christ type, which is basically the fundamental need of
every human being to be appreciated, protected and treated with love. This also presupposes the fact
that if one is loved he/she will value and appreciate himself/herself more as well as other people
because they are the object and the subject of love, a thing they have been taught to praise more
than anything in life. This is a natural urge of man who in the situation when he is faced with a
different system of values dominant in the culture reacts by passing moral judgments upon such a
system and culture since he has a preserved moral integrity, preserved through the cultivation of the
connection with the inner self. In the clash with culture, culture tends to impose on man his public or
social self which the society constructs for him and wants him to believe in, at the same time working
to destroy his inner self so that he could be completely commanded by the society. So, confronted
with the existence of the inner self and the public self (we should bring to mind here King Richard The
Third’s recognition of the other suppressed self awakened in the dream) and subjected to the
poisonous pedagogy of the institutions as the forms of culture and the society that works to kill man’s
inner self, man needs to define himself and set the goal of his life-whether he will be loyal to his self or
to something else, a firm, a king, a president, a party. Having in mind the circumstance of man’s
double consciousness, man has to reconcile his public self and the natural, God-like self which is
perceived as the Other Me. Those people whom Nietzsche calls ‘diamonds’ are Hamlet-like people
who manage to heroically conquer the natural self by ‘neutralizing the terror of its immense otherness’
through the process of active thinking and introspection expressed in the phrase ‘know thy self’. In this
way, Hamlet as the man of thought as well as of feelings is able to detect that the time is out of joint,
withdrawing from the society as a sign of his refusal to participate in its state of error. Shakespeare’s
plays provide an insight into this state of error of our modern culture offering different modes of
revision and resistance-through art, through love of all forms of life, active thinking and introspection,
the pursuit of the Good, and through the belief that ‘all deities reside in the human breast.’

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Bogoeva, Sedlar, Ljiljana, O promeni, Kulturološki eseji 1992 - 2002, PROSVETA, Niš, 2003.

Bogoeva, Sedlar, Ljiljana, Facta Universitatis, Charcoals or Diamonds? On destruction of moral and
emotional intelligence (or soul murder) in Shakespeare’s works.

Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Faber and Faber, London, 1967.

Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Shakespeare Head Press,
Oxford, Wordsworth Editions, GB, 1996.

Tesich, Steve, On the Open Road, Applause Theatre Book Publishers, New York, 1992.

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