I. The long quarrel between poetry and philosophy is hard to judge, in part because the two quarrelers speak in different modes and if either adopts the other’s mode he concedes half the quarrel. For the poet who writes a philosophic defense of poetry would seem to concede that poetry cannot defend itself and the philosopher who resorts to poetry to defend philosophy (or perhaps to show its superiority) would seem to concede that philosophy needs poetry. Moreover, when itcomes to quarrels and defenses, there is an inequality in the capacities of the two. It is easier for philosophy to carry on a defense, for reasoning and giving arguments is its usual mode; poetry need not be against reason but it is not fond of the mode that pure reason or pure argument favors, namely, the treatise. Poetry is chary of arguments, even ones in its own defense, for it is the way of poetry to present or show things by imitating them.
Because of this difference in mode the interpreter and lover of poetry finds himself in an ambiguous position. What he usually writes resembles philosophy and its usual modes, the treatise, the essay, the inquiry, the article, etc., much more than it resembles poetry itself. Just by writing as he usually does he seems to concede that poetry cannot really speak for itself and that it needs to be completed by a philosophic kind of discourse. Of course, philosophers sometimes write interpretations of the works of previous philosophers but whatever their reasons (to help students, to enter into philosophic conversation with the author, to help themselves better possess the thought of the author, to correct error at its source), the mode remains philosophic. In other words, seldom do we see either poetic defenses of philosophy or poetic completions of philosophy. The implication of such a practice would be that philosophy requires the completion of poetry; only when philosophy becomes poetry will it be wise. The interpreter of poetry who believed this would be compelled to present his interpretations of poetry in a poetic mode. The fact that most interpreters of poetry do not do so would seem to indicate that they concede the insufficiency of poetry; poetry seems to require interpretation and thereby declare its insufficiency. However, it is not clear that the poets themselves agree; seldom or never do they seem compelled to interpret their own works. They seem to believe that their works speak perfectly well by themselves. Perhaps they even think that they speak better than philosophy. Perhaps Dante, for example, thought that the teachings of Thomas Aquinas could only become wisdom by becoming poetry, by becoming or changing into The Divine Comedy. There might then be a significant difference between the defense of poetry offered by the interpreters of poetry and the defense of poetry offered by poets themselves. It seems to me that Shakespeare, for example, does offer a poetic defense of poetry. In what follows I shall endeavor to uncover one part of that defense or account of poetry. While uncovering it I shall try to preserve some of the unobtrusiveness of his presentation. Not to do so would be to confess that he needs to be made obtrusive and argumentative in the manner of philosophy.[1]
II The part of Shakespeare’s account of poetry which I shall deal with is genre. The idea that poetry comes in classes or species is one we often find in the works of those who interpret poetry. In Aristotle and his Poetics we find a philosopher treating poetry this way, but before I say something about Aristotle’s generic approach to poetry I will try to discover what Shakespeare says about those who approach his work genericly. The first way Shakespeare would seem to speak to this matter is in the titles of his plays and in the arrangement by genre — comedy, history, and tragedy — offered by the First Folio.[2] However, we cannot be sure that this arrangement is his at all. He did not live to complete this edition. To be sure, the editors were his friends (one is mentioned in his will) and are likely to have known his views. If so, it is not insignificant that some plays change title and genre from Quarto to the Folio. For example, Richard III is The Tragedy of King Richard the Third in the Quarto of 1597; while in the First Folio of 1623 it falls under “Histories” and is retitled The Life and Death of Richard the Third.
Shakespeare and his friends seem to have regarded generic classification rather casually. Evidence from the plays themselves suggests the same. Shakespeare seldom uses generic words in his plays. “Comic” and its cognates appear only fourteen times; “history” and its cognates appear only twenty-three times. The word “romance,” the darling of many interpreters, never appears in his works (nor in the titles).[3] “Pastoral” appears only three times and “satire” five times. “Tragedy” appears most often, twenty-nine times,[4] but as A. P. Rossiter has noted,[5] less often as Shakespeare matured. These generic words are not very significant to Shakespeare. Shakespeare eschews talk about “tragedy,” let alone “the tragic view,” and this certainly separates him considerably from the vast majority of interpreters and philosophers.
Of course it might be that a rarely occurring word turned out to be decisive for the interpretation of a work or all his work. We must ask ourselves whether Shakespeare indicates that we are to study him for the sake of these genre terms or whether, if he does not so indicate, he nonetheless regards these terms as providing indispensable guidance in the study of his works.
In all of Shakespeare’s work there is one moment where genre terms are thematic and one place in which the highest concentration of genre terms occurs.
Hamlet: My Lord, I have news to tell you.
When Roscius was an actor in Rome
Polonius: The actors are come hither, my lord.
Hamlet: —Buzz, buzz.
Polonius: Upon my honor —
Hamlet: Then came each actor on his ass —
Polonius: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light.
For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men.
(Hamlet, 2.2.381-92)
Genre terms only become thematic when a garrulous university man who loves neoclassic things (“I did enact Julius Caesar.” 2.2.99), who fancies himself a literary critic (“ ‘Mobled queen’ is good” 2.2.492), and who adheres to neoclassic rules makes his appearance as a character. Such a man is a butt of laughter and disdain. Fancying himself critic of plots by genre, he is in reality a willing tool in the ungeneric and bloody plots of villains like Claudius.
But to understand the full significance of the fun Shakespeare pokes at Polonius, the man who thinks he knows things by genre and by sententiae, we must recall the words of another critic and university man, Francis Meres, who in Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (1598), only a few years before the writing of Hamlet, offered his praise of a young poet and dramatist:
As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to hue in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid hues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his….
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage: for Comedy, witnes his….
As Epuis Stoic said, that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin: so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if they would speak English….[6]
Neoclassic minds are alike; Shakespeare gives the same comparisons to Plautus and Seneca to his Polonius. What Shakespeare thought of Meres’s mind and the mind of genre critics is sufficiently, and briefly, and wittily indicated by his transfer of Meres’s conceptions to Polonius.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare adds a wrinkle in his account of those who see things in genres. Polonius hyphenates the genre terms and by such inflation makes them into an unintended joke. Once he begins thinking about genres he cannot keep them apart; they begin to mingle and to produce young. His opening sentence builds from small units to large and complicated structures. He ends with a great four-masted genre: “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.” Such wanton mixing of pure kinds would, I suggest, offend a purist. In the figure of Polonius Shakespeare shows the absurdity of genre critics.
He views them with a critical, if genial superiority. His drama outstrips the canons of antiquity with its insistence upon separation of styles and purity of genres.[7] If you try like Polonius to understand his drama with genre terminology you will either become a French neoclassicist (and declare him no correct poet for he allows mice to be mentioned in the first scene of Hamlet), orsurrender your allegiance to genre, or become something in between, a Polonial fool. I venture to guess that when Shakespeare had done the thought about human, divine, and natural things which Hamlet manifests, talk of “tragic,” “comic,”’ ‘pastoral,” and “historic,” seemed weary, ancient, and unprofitable. Shakespeare’s portrait of Polonius advances the indirect question: “Is it not paltry to follow Polonius when you can follow Shakespeare?”
Yet how are we to follow Shakespeare? After Polonius how can we talk of genre at all? Doesn’t Shakespeare’s portrait of him forbid us to pay attention to genre? Pay attention to Hamlet and his problems, not to tragedy. Hamlet doesn’t pay attention to tragedy, why do you? Pay attention to Rosalind and her graces, not comedy. Does she pay attention to comedy? Then why do you? This is good advice: we learn from poetry only by learning from particular poems and no knowledge of the essence of a genre helps us. No such knowledge of comedy would long satisfy us for the loss of our favorite comedy. No knowledge of the essence of tragedy is more precious to us than the knowledge of a particular tragedy. Give us Lear, not “tragic vision.” If God had Lear in one hand and the essence of tragedy in the other, it is clear which we should have him choose.[8]
Shakespeare shows us that Polonius with his genre talk is really immune to poetry. “‘Mobled queen’ is good” (2.2.492), he opines. Polonius is ever judging and never facing poetry; he is never delighted, startled, thrilled, perplexed, provoked, abashed, or taught by poetry and never will be. He will never “mind true things by what their mockeries be.” He sees poetry in the manner he does, from behind an arras, an arras of genre. Even the flustered Gertrude manages to face the player Queen and utter something perceptive (“The lady doth protest too much” [3.2.2221). Even the seedy Claudius is genuinely arrested and caught by the representation of his crimes. Not so Polonius.
Now behind Polonius and his concern with genre is the infinitely greater mind of Aristotle whose treatment of tragedy in his Poetics is surely generic. Much can be learned from what he has to say about poetry and tragedy, but one cannot really say that he ever reads any tragedies. There is no remark in the Poetics which comes close to the perceptiveness of Gertrude’s remark about the Player Queen. Aristotle never speaks in the face of some tragedy. He never seems to read them or one of them as if it might tell him something he does not already know. Hence he is always writing about, viewing them like an army in profile rather than like friends in face to face conversation. Thought provoking as his comments about tragedy may be, they do not suggest that he ever read poetry to learn something or that he encourages us to. Instead he endeavors to instruct us on how to judge poetry. Of course, it may be that his implied view that a philosopher has nothing to learn from poetry is quite justified. It is surely a long question, only to be resolved by long interpretations of poetry that succeed in showing Aristotle wrong or, by failing to, show him right. On this point the opposition between Aristotle and Shakespeare is too absolute to permit a short inquiry to bear fruit.[9]
III Considering the absurdity of Polonius and the deficiency of Aristotle, should we ask about genre in Shakespeare? It seems to me that we should. For when one has appreciated the criticism that Shakespeare offers us in his ridicule of Polonius, when one has avowed that single works are what we learn from, not classes of works, there still remains the stubborn sense that Shakespeare’s works do fall into classes, or rather families. A few plays may bear the title tragedy in one place and history in the other, but, we notice, no comedy is ever titled a tragedy and no tragedy is ever titled a comedy. There may not be the strict separation of styles, which was one of the principle distinguishing features of ancient drama, but there is a feeling of a dominate tone. If we were to open our Shakespeare at random and read for a while, without looking at titles, we would soon be able to say whether we were reading a comedy, tragedy, or history. To be sure, there would be some border line scenes. We might even say that, for example, the first half of the Winter’s Tale is a tragedy, but in general as we read we soon come to feel the generic differences in Shakespeare’s work and if we do not seek a greater precision than the things will allow perhaps we can talk sensibly about these “families” in Shakespeare. Indeed, is not Shakespeare himself very precise when he allows Polonius the absurdity of “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”: does this not describe the generically imprecise Hamlet precisely?
There is another consideration which urges the same conclusion. Our protection. The fact that Shakespeare could take the same plot and make of it either a tragedy (Romeo and Juliet) or a comedy (Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the plot of Romeo and Juliet repeated in the “Pyramus and Thisbe” play) ought to make us pause. The fact that he can take the same plot and make either our eyes weep or our hearts leap should make us wonder whether he is a magician. He makes us weep, he makes us laugh; ought we to trust him? Or ought we to say, “You, a teacher? Why do you stylize human life so? Life is neither a comedy, tragedy, nor history. These are abstractions. They are lenses of perception. Yes, you grind those lenses finer than any before you, but what does that show, that truth shows herself naked in your words? Hardly. You are a virtuoso. You love play too much. Your very loveliness tempts us, wantonly, to forget that you artists deform life with your forms. If your plays are so true, so faithful, so instructive, how come they can be grouped in families? Do human things arrange themselves this way? And if your plays are a precious expression of the truth of human things, if they faithfully represent our lives, then how come they always resemble you? They always have your mark? We read you for just a moment and we say ‘that’s Shakespeare.’ How then can your works be true?”
Both because observation tells us that Shakespeare’s works arrange themselves in families and because this fact might warn us that he falsifies what his lovers claim he represents, we should turn to the question of genre in his work. Here we will do well not only to observe it in his work but also to ask his works what he understands by tragedy and by comedy and also their relation. The last is especially important and to bring out its significance I shall turn for a moment to what Plato tells us about comedy, tragedy, and their relation in the Drinking Party (or Symposium).
At the end of the dialogue only Socrates is awake; to his drowsy companions, the nearly asleep Aristophanes and the sleepy Agathon, he asserts that the same man can have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy, “that the fully skilled tragedian could be the comedian as well.” This remarkable assertion fails to stir either the comedian Aristophanes or the tragedian Agathon to reply. “While they were being driven to this (conclusion), they began to nod; first Aristophanes dropped into a slumber, and then as day began to dawn Agathon also. When Socrates had seen them comfortable, he rose and went away.”[10] Socrates’ assertion is to be understood in the light of the action that accompanies it: the comic poet falls asleep before the tragic poet. This sequence accords with something precise in what Socrates says about comedy and tragedy. He says that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian; he does not assert the converse. The tragedian seems to include the comedian and not vice versa. To understand this we must recall what has transpired in the dialogue. The comic poet makes us laugh at almost all things; in his speech Aristophanes made fun of men and also of the gods. Not so the tragic poet; Agathon speaks of eros, the assigned topic, as a beautiful god. What he deifies and Aristophanes had laughed at, as all too human, Socrates proves to be human, and not ignobly so. The superiority of the tragic poet according to Socrates and to Plato seems to rest upon the superiority of enchantment over disenchantment; the tragedian enchants his audience with the beautiful gods; the comic poet only disenchants. However, since he who enchants must himself be disenchanted the tragic poet includes the comic.[11] In this sense life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. Or putting it another way, we have tragedy so that we will not perish of comedy. At least this seems to be the implication of what Socrates says when viewed in the light of the comparative sleepiness of his two companions.[12]
For proof that what Socrates said in the dawn was true, the world had to wait nearly two thousand years. It had to wait for Shakespeare. Yet today the fact that Shakespeare wrote both tragedy and comedy is as unremarked as it is undoubted. That it was and is remarkable I shall try to show in what follows. What itsignifies I shall also try to understand.
The fact that there could be a Shakespeare, a man who wrote both comedy and tragedy, was known to Socrates. Nevertheless, the way in which Shakespeare confirms Socrates would cause Socrates to wonder. Not only does Shakespeare’s tragedy differ from ancient tragedy, and his comedy from ancient comedy, but the relation between them differs as well. To put the difference between ancient drama, both comedy and tragedy, and Shakespeare most briefly, I would say: in place of the divine you find woman. Let me elaborate.
IV Shakespeare the tragedian can be described as one who takes the best human beings and breaks them; he fashions good, strong, noble men and then he watches them suffer and die. So did the ancient tragedians. A decisive difference remains. As these men of Shakespeare fall toward dusty death, there is no assurance of a “world elsewhere” to comfort them or us. No gods or God promises them a felicity they could not find in this world. No trapeze net of supernatural reward or supernatural interpretation interrupts their fall. No Olympic gods are there to beautify the ugliness of corpses. The chief difference between ancient tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy is the presence of the gods in the former and their absence in the latter.[13] This difference is not unconnected with woman and Shakespeare’s representation of woman. To understand this, let us turn to comedy.
Shakespeare the comedian can be described as one who arranges marriages. He fashions lovely, poised and gentle women and then he marries them. Arranging such marriages is the great theme and final happy chord of his mature comedies. By the power invested in him alone do his lovers find their soul’s joy in another. Or their soul’s perdition. Arranging marriages is a tricky thing. Shakespeare could be like a pander or like a tyrannical father or like a good friend who wins the lasting gratitude of both parties.[14] Doing it rightly requires that the lovers themselves think it was all their own idea. As a tragedian Shakespeare (or some part of him) must be willful and cruel, like fate. As a comedian Shakespeare (or some part of him) must be teacherly and gentle, something like freedom. Here too Shakespeare differs from antiquity, both its drama and its philosophy. In ancient comedy there is nothing enchanting; what is enchanting, the gods, appears in tragedy. Shakespeare’s women are not gods, yet they are the most enchanting beings in all his drama; they tempt us to believe what no ancient would, that human things can be worthy of awe. It is in comedy that they primarily do so.
For the ancient poets, especially the tragedians, the enchanting thing was the gods (and when the ancient philosophers deposed Zeus and put in his place nous they only went further in the same direction, away from earth). Between Shakespeare and these ancients lies Christianity and for the Christians the truly enchanting thing is the Holy Creator God, like Zeus and nous divine, but also creative, and also “Holy,” mysterious, unfathomable (as YHWH-Elohim tells Job). In never presenting either the gods or this God Shakespeare seems to depart from both antiquity and Christianity; however, in doing so, Shakespeare seems to benefit from Christianity whose God comes down from the heavens, walks the earth, talks with men, seems a man, suffers death, and yet remains enchanting. It is only that in Shakespeare what was god to the Greeks and God to the Christians becomes woman. It is likely that the intermediary step between the worship of God become man and the love of woman is the worship of the Virgin. The Shakespearean result is Rosalind, Beatrice, Kate, Portia, Miranda, Perdita, and Cordelia.
As a whole, Shakespeare’s women are certainly more intelligent than his men; they are also more lovely. It is an unconfessed secret of Shakespeare’s sway over each generation that he makes the men and boys in his audience fall in love with his women. He does this without, however, inspiring envy among the women in his audience. For when they gaze at his women they fancy they know that Shakespeare loved women. Here is the testimony of Mrs. Mary Chesnut, writing in Richmond in the last days of our Civil War:
There is love-making and love-making in this world. What a time the sweethearts of that wretch, young Shakespeare, must have had. What experiences of life’s delights he must have had before he summoned up the Romeo and Juliet business from his own internal consciousness. Also, that delicious Beatrice, and Rosalind. The poor creature to whom he left his second-best bedstead came in second best all the time, no doubt, and she hardly deserved more. Fancy people wondering that Shakespeare and his kind leave no progeny like themselves. Shakespeare’s children were half his, only; the other half was only the second-best bedstead’s. What could you expect from that commingling ofmaterials?
I cannot resist quoting a little more:
Shakespeare knew all the forms and phases of true love. Straight to one’s heart he goes, whether in tragedy or comedy. He never misses fire. He had been there (as the slang goes). No doubt the man’s bare presence gave pleasure to the female world, and he saw them at their best. But he effaced himself; he told no tales of his own life.[15]
No doubt Shakespeare would have appreciated Mary Chesnut. Her unashamed reasoning from work to worker, which might offend a literary theorist, is rewarded with an insight that seldom comes to those who think without affection. Shakespeare should reward her with those lovely greeting words of Othello, “my soul’s joy!”
Shyly we seize Othello’s words to express our own affection. They seem to say, better than we could, what we have wanted to say or hear said. They and the sentiment they express come naturally, if shyly, to us. What could be more natural than to greet one’s beloved this way? Yet we must acknowledge that no ancient and no Christian would do so.[16] An ancient might greet a friend in this manner; we might hear such words escape the lips of Socrates after one of his long trances; a Christian might greet Christ this way or someone from whom he had received Christ’s teaching, but none of these would greet a woman this way. The passionate affection of Romeo and Juliet speaks immediately to us, without the prop of footnotes or the help of interpretation, yet we know that it would not speak to Odysseus or to Caesar or to Abraham. Nor would it speak immediately and unambiguously to Paul or Augustine. We are forced to admit that this affection, which seems so immediate and self-evident to us, is the daughter of time. It was born in Provence early in the Renaissance; the sonnet attended its nativity; the city states of the Italian peninsula adopted it; their poets escorted it North of the Alps, and today it is welcome everywhere.
As a consequence of honoring love we barely regulate it. As modern lovers, modern parents, and modern citizens we have as our creed “that government is best which governs love least.” Ancient peoples were more sober and so was their drama. So too is Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet he portrays this beautiful and immoderate affection in its first home, the city state of Renaissance Italy, and decks it out with the rhymes of its birthplace, Provence; for the lovers meet in a sonnet as well as a kiss. As Shakespeare fills us with the beauty of love, so much so that we forget to censure the suicides at the end (as we should according to Christian teaching), he does not fail to note the problems which this affection poses for the city. When he loves, Romeo feels that he and his beloved lose their family names; love leaps over all walls; itgentles everyone it touches. Romeo in love is tempted to imitate the loving Christ by telling all warriors to put up their bright swords, with disastrous results, as Shakespeare notes; for it is Romeo’s pacific meddling that leads directly, if unintentionally, to his cousin’s death. How dangerous to families and cities and friends are those who behave as if there need not be such distinctions as nation, region, family, friend!
At about the same time Shakespeare became a mature tragedian by writing Romeo and Juliet, he also, by writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, became the man Socrates in the dawn spoke of. In this comedy Shakespeare shows what the phenomena of love looks like in an ancient setting. It is far less dangerous. Lysander is no Romeo. Love is a tragedy in modern Verona and a comedy in ancient Athens; the Pyramus and Thisbe play presented at the climax of the drama is the Romeo and Juliet story told by a lovable idiot, cause of mirth not woe. It is selected by the prince who, Plutarch tells us, first united Athens into a city and it is selected for his marriage to Hippolyta. Perhaps his task of sorting out the lovers and through marriage knitting up his city in civil peace is made easier by the nature of love in ancient Athens; would Lysander ever say “my soul’s joy?” Love is not so spiritualized in Athens. The divine does not reside in a woman. On the other hand, we must notice that in Athens princely and priestly powers are united in Duke Theseus, while in Verona the foot stamping prince can never quite get together with the slow-footed Friar. Perhaps what Athens had and Verona lacks is the unification of civil and ecclesiastical power.
That this is so is suggested by what Duke Vincentio does in Measure for Measure; he is never more a Duke than when he puts on a cowl; he is never more a prince than when he is a priest; he is never more a comedian than when he is making tragedies for his people. His problems are the saints and the sinners, those who prefer a cloistered virtue and those who prefer no virtue at all; the two groups, represented by Isabella and by Pompey, abhor each other while gaining a certain justification for their way of life from each other. Both disdain public things, of which marriage is the most pertinent, the one because they are against the flesh, the other because they wallow in it. The crafty, cowled, hidden Prince must first stir them with an incipient tragedy, the death of Claudio, and then reform them with a comedy, some unlikely marriages. By so doing the Prince reforms Vienna, the center of the Holy Roman Empire. While his reformation is certainly Imperial and probably Roman, it cannot be said to be especially Holy. (At play’s end, while the whore houses are closed, so too are the cloisters.) It is a solution which he himself partakes in; he marries. Indeed one may wonder if all his calculated tragedies have not been partly moved by the hope of this comedy.
V In speaking of comedy and tragedy, of woman, and of love we have naturally come to speak of politics. It is now time to observe a certain connection never made entirely explicit by Shakespeare and perhaps not capable of being made precise, between the drama of Shakespeare and the momentous changes wrought by Henry VIII in the English regime. It was under this regime, with its religious adjustment, and under the rule of Henry’s daughter that Shakespeare and his company flourished. Henry VIII did two things which were fundamental to all that followed. He destroyed the monastic life of the Church; with the resulting wealth he endowed a new nobility, loyal to himself, the now supreme head of the no longer Catholic Church. As St. Thomas More suspected, these changes could not but diminish the persuasive force of Christian teaching, one consequence of which is the possibility of a tragedy such as Shakespeare’s in which the dread of something after life is no longer a secure Pole star to guide human life but has become a terrible, bewildering, and harmful intrusion into human life, much like the Ghost against which Hamlet so mightily strives and over which he triumphs, only to find life deprived of all vital savor. Santayana lamented that Shakespeare was a poet utterly without religion; his tragedies certainly do not present the truly enchanting God; nor do they show us men adoring, marveling at, or worshipping this God. As Santayana remarks, there is not one good prayer in Shakespeare.[17]’ It is doubtful that Shakespeare would have been permitted to present human life so free from the Biblical interpretation without Henry VIII’s innovation.
Henry VIII did a second thing and it prepared the way for Shakespeare’s comedy. Whether for reasons of state, as some maintain, or for reasons of ungoverned appetite, as others allege, also with reason, Henry saw to it that he became supreme in the matter of marriage. He was a prince who would decide for himself whom he would marry (and marry and marry and marry and yet again marry). To be the prince he wished to be, he found he had also to be a priest and so he severed England from the mainland of Papal authority and made himself pontifex maximus. What is so unhappily divided in the Verona of Romeo and Juliet, civil and ecclesiastical power, he united. The union never brought the fretful tyrant happiness, but it is among the conditions that contributed to Shakespearean comedy. In them it is Shakespeare who unites these powers. To his characters he is prince and priest. It is he who arranges all marriages. It is through his self-invested power that his amiable young men come together with his witty lasses.
As a tragedian Shakespeare resembles a tyrant for he takes the best men, breaks them on some fatality in themselves or in human things, and sends them to death (“be absolute for death”); as a comedian, he resembles a good, fatherly prince who sees to itthat his beloved daughter falls spontaneously and freely in love with a prince whom he, in his better wisdom, knows will be best for both her and the realm as well. As a tragedian Shakespeare is always preparing his men and women for death; as a comedian he is always preparing them for marriage
VI In order to begin to understand the relation between these two preparations and therefore the relation between tragedy and comedy according to Shakespeare we will now turn to The Tempest. Its first scene is a little tragedy, an epitome of every Shakespearean tragedy, whereas the whole is a comedy, the most complete of all Shakespeare’s plays. Perhaps the relation between his tragedy and his comedy is suggested by the fact that this comedy contains a tragedy. Never do we find the converse pattern. Hamlet has a tragedy within a tragedy. The plot of Romeo and Juliet is contained within A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not vice versa. The tragedy that constitutes the first part of The Winter’s Tale is reversed and redeemed by the comedy of the second part. Never do we find a comedy rounded out with a tragedy, or a comedy within a tragedy. The single candidate is the comedy of Gloucester’s miraculous salvation from his fall over Dover Cliffs; from his point of view it is a tragedy that ends in comedy. Not for us. We see altogether too transparently the falsehood of the gods that his son enchants him with to be ourselves enchanted, even for a minute. It seems that for Shakespeare comedy embraces tragedy.
To understand this we must consider the opening scene of the Tempest. All is tempest and, strive as they do or wish to, none of the seafarers can resist it. In a storm the man with genuine skill rules and so it is here. It is the Boatswain, rather than any mainland prince, who gives the orders. Still, those orders make no difference. Since he cannot command the “roarers,” he must prepare for death. Even as he strives against the tempest, he tells others to give thanks that they have lived so long. His very last words,
What, must our mouths be cold? (1 .1.49)
tell us what we have most to thank life for, for warm bodies and for speech. We are a combination of life and speech. With his warm mouth the Boatswain bids life farewell, blessing it, not clinging to it. There is no better preparation for death in all of Shakespeare. The Boatswain “dies” so as to fill us with wonder at the miracle of this combination of warmth and speech which we are. In this tragedy it is not the gods that we find enchanting. The truly enchanting things are humans. It is a wonder that there should be creatures with warm lips. That these lips will be cold, that human life is also mortal life, ought to inspire us not so much with fear (the Boatswain fears not), but with wonder and affection.
That this scene and this teaching epitomize Shakespearean tragedy is suggested by the fact that Lear too ends looking at cold lips. “Never, never, never, never, never,” he says over the slain Cordelia and dies looking at her lips.
And my poor fool is hanged: no, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her! Look her lips,
Look there, look there — He dies (5.3.306—312)
Here is our obstinate human love. The deepest fear in King Lear is a species of the fear of nothing; it is the fear that once gone, we shall never, never come again. This fear presupposes a sweet, even fierce attachment to here. But here would not be here for Lear without his beloved, wronged, beloved Cordelia. Here is not here without the beloved. Thus it is that while Lear asks why there is no life in his poor fool, he refers to her corpse as “Thou.” Obstinate love indeed. Five times he then repeats the terrible “never.” First indignantly, finally blankly, I think. Turning away from what will never come again, he asks to be unbuttoned for he would spare others the labor of undressing his corpse. So stricken as he is, he yet remains courteous. Suddenly he bids the man look upon Cordelia. Where is Cordelia? Her eyes are closed. Look to her lips. Why lips? Lips don’t close like eyes. Through lips pass words that soothe — “her voice was ever soft, gentle and low — an excellent thing in woman” — and through lips the words that undo, as Cordelia’s words undid all Lear’s cunning yet tender plans. Yet “love and be silent” were Cordelia’s first words. Now she is silent. It would comfort Albany to know that here or elsewhere we are rewarded for our patient suffering; not Lear. Bidding others to look at Cordelia’s lips, he knows that we must love and be silent. Lear dies bidding us look. He loves and is then silent. What are we humans? The Boatswain’s farewell tells us we are a union of warmth and speech. To this Lear’s attending to Cordelia’s lips adds something; warm and speaking as our lips are, they also love, even when they do not speak. Indeed, we are the beings who love and then fall silent.
What is the relation of this tragic teaching to the comedy of the Tempest which follows and embraces it? To understand this better we should turn to the masque Prospero puts on for his daughter and her beloved and ask: what is enchanting? Into this scene Shakespeare has poured his superabundant powers. To see the splendid antique deities treading the earth once more, many a Renaissance humanist would have given his soul (and Faust did). They come to bless this marriage. But they nearly upset it, for the impressionable Ferdinand avers that he would like to stay on the Isle. When he says “Let me live here ever!” (4.1.122), we may wonder if he is not somewhat more impressed with these spirits than a bridegroom nearing his wedding day should be. Fortunately these enchanting spirits disappear abruptly.
Through the masque and its abrupt disappearance Ferdinand will learn to love well his mortal wife and prefer her to these immortal spirits. In this regard he is led by her for she is not enchanted by them. In order to become disenchanted it helps to be next to some one who is unenchanted. What Miranda finds enchanting (“oh brave new world”) are human beings, not immortal spirits. The spirit of Shakespeare’s comedy is the same as his tragedy. In preparing for death and for marriage we are to love well the human things we must leave ere long. The truly enchanting things are not the gods or nous or God but human beings. Ancient tragedy, comedy, and philosophy agreed: it is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. Love what is above the human then. Shakespeare is the comedian he is, the tragedian he is, and hence the dramatist he is, because he replies: it is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. Only among the dying things will you find what is lovable. Look at Miranda. Look at Cordelia. Cherish them.[18]
VII What Shakespeare would say to Socrates about tragedy and comedy is sufficiently clear. What he would say to Aristotle is embedded in it. The Tempest teaches us to wonder. According to Aristotle tragedy should teach us to pity and fear. It is only in the Metaphysics that he speaks of wonder and distinguishes poetic wonder from the wonder in which philosophy originates (982b12—983a23). When the poet wonders, he is satisfied to remain in wonder and does not try to replace his ignorance with knowledge; and of course he is satisfied to let others, his audience, also remain in wonder. Chief among the things that the poets deem wonderful are the gods. Where the poets end, the philosophers begin. When the philosopher wonders he wishes to replace his ignorance with knowledge. (However, when it is knowledge of Being which he desires it is not clear that he ever leaves wonder behind; it seems that Being is only available to man in this wonder.)[19]Since Shakespeare’s Prospero only presents the wonderful gods to withdraw them and fix his son-in-law’s attention upon Miranda, it seems that Shakespeare cannot be easily classed with the poets, for those whom he teaches to wonder, Ferdinand, Miranda, and us, are encouraged to know what they first wonder at. Ferdinand and Miranda will know each other in marriage. Ferdinand must not only wonder at his father’s survival but come to know his crimes. Miranda must not only wonder at the mainlanders but come to distinguish an Antonio from the rest. So it seems that the wonder which Shakespeare’s art encourages is “philosophic” in Aristotle’s sense. With this corollary: that it is by looking at Miranda, looking at Cordelia, looking with wonder at them, gazing breathless, so caught up in looking that upon finishing a play one begins again (“is that Cordelia?” then “once more”), that we come to wonder at Being.[20]
In doing so Shakespeare never encourages us to so wonder at Being that we do not fail to care for beings, beings such as Lear, Edgar, and Cordelia. Beings who do not care for beings do not wonder at Being. And if you care for Cordelia, if you want her “once more,” then you will be ready to cry “hold your hand” to any villain approaching her. And therefore ready to kill any being who has slain her, as Lear does.
VIII Considering the care for human things that Shakespeare’s wonder entails should remind us of something we have overlooked until now: Shakespeare wrote not only comedy and tragedy but history.[21] Indeed his histories are the most obvious instance of his care for human beings, which would not be genuine if it did not include care for his fellow Englishmen. Perhaps the greatest gift ever given to a nation by a poet, Shakespeare’s histories are crowned with a portrait of the best king England ever had. No man in all of Shakespeare pits his intelligence against adversity with more success than Henry V. He is intelligent care in action and the active image of his maker.[22] That Shakespeare, the solitary poet of Sonnet 94, created and esteemed the active Henry V is not as extraordinary as it at first seems.[23] The “natural riches” of Henry V set both the Carlisles and the Machiavels to school.
Ignorance of first causes uncovers the human good. The absence of providential intervention in human affairs sets the stage for the appearance of the human virtues, both by calling us to set things aright for ourselves and by permitting us to do so without those helps that would render our virtues calculating and ignoble. “History” is a mess that would melt into anarchy or harden into tyranny if itwere not for human virtue; without courage we could prevail against no fear, without moderation against no excess, and without justice against no corruption; and without practical wisdom our virtues themselves would not be able to secure or preserve the good things of this earth. No final victory is, however, to be hoped for. Things are always about to slide from mess to calamity to chaos itself. Human virtue is always required to thrust itself “once more” into the breach. The character of Shakespeare’s ideal English Prince is summed up by the maxim; in philosophy, ignorance; in life, courage; in public, practical wisdom; in private, solitude. The deep night is “more than we know” but our watchfires cast enough light to know ourselves by.
If female virtue shines brightest in Shakespeare’s Comedies, in a Rosalind or a Perdita, male virtue shines brightest in the Histories, in a Bastard, a Talbot, and in a Henry V. In the marriage of Henry V and Catherine of France manly intelligence and feminine wit seem at last matched. Not accidentally the play in which Henry’s active wisdom shines includes both a tragedy, the night before Agincourt, and a comedy, the marriage after Agincourt. In the night before, we see Henry and his soldiers prepare for death; in the days after, we see Henry and his bride, Catherine of France, prepare for marriage. That this crown of the histories includes a comedy that completes a tragedy suggests that Shakespeare is fundamentally an historian and hence something entirely unprecedented. Not only did no Greek dramatist write both comedy and tragedy, none wrote history. Nor did Socrates in the dawn imagine the possibility.
Shakespeare is not only the English Sophocles and the English Aristophanes but the English Thucydides and more, for he is all of these at once, a Homer. Because he was the tragedian he was, the comedian he was, and the historian he was, Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
IX The long quarrel between poetry and philosophy is hard to judge but perhaps one part of itis now, after this inquiry, somewhat easier. Since Shakespeare ceased to write, two philosophers have written about tragedy, without we think taking sufficient account of his work. Although his work is designed, like Hegel’s, to comprehend all history, his sense of history is very different from Hegel’s. Like his own Henry V, Shakespeare faces the scene of human troubles and pleasures entirely without the comfort of “progress.” So long as there are humans there will be troubles and there will be pleasures; where there are men there will be vices and yet where there are men there must be virtues. History is a “breach” into which we must ever and again “once more” commit our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honors. The virtue that seeks and finds the good in the particular circumstances and that chooses the best possible although it loves the best far more, we may call practical wisdom, after Aristotle. In his Phenomenology of Mind Hegel tries to replace such fronesis with conscience, but conscience is inarticulate, like Billy Budd hitting Clagett. It is true that Shakespeare gives no apology for practical wisdom in the articulate way of Aristotle’s Ethics, yet his way of showing practical wisdom embodied in action and in speech, in a Henry V, is superior in one respect: It is more vividly and widely instructive. To the ruled it shows what kind of ruler to prefer, and to rulers it shows what kind of ruler to be. Great men sometimes need philosophers, to protect their virtues from bad theories; peoples always need poets, to protect them from false images. Although the English-speaking peoples have never had a philosopher worthy of their virtues as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were worthy of the people of Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae, they have had a poet.
The second philosopher to write of tragedy, after Shakespeare but without we think taking sufficient account of him, is Nietzsche. Nietzsche not only wrote of tragedy like Hegel but is the only thinker ever to champion tragedy or call his own thought tragic. Although he maintained that the best want to rule, contrary to the Platonic Socrates, and although he admired Caesar, calling the Übermensch “Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ,” nevertheless Nietzsche’s substitution of solitude for moderation in the Platonic-Socratic quartet of virtues and his characterization of prudence as knowledge of the ways and means of protecting one’s solitude indicate how far the life of a statesman was from his experience or imagination.[24] Nietzsche was suited to understand a Coriolanus, a Brutus, a Cordelia and even a Falstaff, but not a Henry V. He did not appreciate the truth that sometimes when natural right — or what Nietzsche calls “an order of rank” — is diluted and even betrayed by conventional right it is naturally right that it be so. With his “once more” song he tries to suppress the nausea that noble spirits naturally feel for men made by convention alone, men made by a tailor, as Shakespeare has his Kent say. Yet Nietzsche was often nauseous and often cries Pereat humanus et fiat superhumanus.
Nietzsche is on the whole very different from Marx, whose ideal state, in which man loafs from morning to evening, is the same as the worst state for Nietzsche, the state of the Last Man, without aspiration, delight or self-knowledge; yet Nietzsche shares with Marx (and also the author of Revelations) a delight in catastrophe. They await the end of humanity as we have known it with more hope than fear, and Marx awaits it with faith and Schadenfreude. In celebrating such a ruler as Henry V, for whom the good is not an ideal, Shakespeare shows that his sympathies lie elsewhere. In The Tempest he has portrayed a demi-creator willing to make men suffer. However, Prospero fits the suffering to the men and also does so with no intention of creating “brave new men.” He wishes only to regain his kingdom, find a husband for his daughter and live without the mastery of nature. It is significant that he is tempted to drown the brother he cannot reform and refrains. Shakespeare understood the intention to new-create humanity by first destroying it, in a tempest, in a deluge, or in a concentration camp, as wicked, and in Gonzalo’s dream (2.1.143 ff.) he has portrayed the ideal of communism as silly.[25]
In conclusion then, we offer the thesis that modern philosophy has more to learn from Shakespeare than he has to learn from it.[26]
University of Dallas
Published:
“Tragical, Comical, Historical,” in The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition:
Poetic—Epic—Tragic , Analecta Husserliana; Volume XVIII, ed. A-T. Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 379-399. (on Shakespeare)
End Notes
[1] To most of the points in this section there are significant exceptions. The works of both Plato and of Nietzsche employ a poetic mode of presentation in order to seek wisdom. Heidegger is a philosopher who seems to regard poetry as higher than philosophy, for he reads Hölderlin as if he were co-authored by Being. Among poets, we may note that Virgil is known to have been a student of Plato and Goethe appreciated Spinoza exceedingly.
[2] All references to Shakespeare will be to the Complete Works, ed. by Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1969).
[3] Despite this fact and despite the fact that both print a photo of the First Folio table of contents, both the Pelican Shakespeare and the Riverside Shakespeare ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) arrange some of the plays under the title ‘Romances.’ Only editor Harbage of the Pelican offers his reasons.
[4] I have checked these counts with Marvin Spevack A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, 6 vols. (Hildeshein: Georg Olms, 1969).
[5] Angel With Horns, ed. by Graham Story (New York: Theatre Arts Press, 1961), pp. 253 ff.
[6] Four Centuries of Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 31.
[7] See Erich Auerbach’s sensitive comments on Shakespeare in the light of the ancient separation of high and low, tragic and comic styles, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), pp. 274 ft.
[8] I want to thank my colleague Eileen Gregory for her vigorous opposition to my views on genre, which prompted me to gather my thoughts on comedy and tragedy together for the first time.
[9] One way to address it would be to offer an interpretation of Othello, for lago like Aristotle (Poetics, 60a26 and following) suggests that “incredible possibilities,” e.g., that Venetian Desdemona should love a Moor, cannot be. By saying, as it were, “I know these Venetian women” (3.2.200 ff.) and thereby subsuming the rare incredible Desdemona under a class, a species, a genre, he does persuade Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful. But he does not persuade Shakespeare and he does not persuade us. It may be incredible but Desdemona is true. What Aristotle forbids the poet, Shakespeare presents.
[10] Drinking Party, 223d. There are good comments on this passage in Stanley Rosen’s Plato s Symposium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 325-27.
[11] By carefully stating that the tragedian can be the comedian, and not vice versa, Socrates implies that tragedy and its gods are mere enchantment. When he reduces Agathon and his speech to nothing with a few questions, Socrates disenchants; when he reports Diotima’s speech, he enchants. Perhaps Socrates knows that the same man could write both comedy and tragedy because Plato knows . . . himself.
[12] While interpreting the Drinking Party we must keep in mind the stylistic difference between ancient comedy and tragedy, the one suited to low, private, daily things, the other suited to high, public, and splendid things.
[13] If I am correct, Lear suggests that if there is a creator God, then no creature of His can have evidence of His existence for such evidence would compromise the uncalculating character of all true virtue. If you know of a world elsewhere, where your Creator rewards your patience virtue, then your virtue is tainted with calculation. Creation means separation. In other words, we cannot conclude from the absence of God in Shakespeare that he is an atheist; he may be an unusual Christian. Everything else about him is rare, so this should not surprise us.
[14] Shakespeare did win such gratitude from a couple whom he brought together while he lived with the Montjoys in London. See S. Schoenbaum William Shakespeare.- A Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 211-13.
[15] Both quotations are from Mrs. Chesnut’s diary entry for March 12, 1864; see Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Ben Ames Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 391-92.
[16] Antony in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra just might greet Cleopatra with these words. However, that only proves our point, for Shakespeare differs most from Plutarch in endowing his Cleopatra with an unancient attraction.
[17] The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare’ in Kermode (cited above), pp. 158-69. However, see Note 13 above and consider Cymbeline 5.4.9-29.
[18] The comic ending of The Tempest is the work of father Prospero. The tragic Lear wanted to give up his kingdom, marry his best daughter well, and prepare for death. Comedy seems not only to be more inclusive than tragedy but higher; it shows us higher sorts of human beings.
[19] I owe this account to Seth Benardete’s ‘On Wisdom and Philosophy: The First Two Chapters of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha ,‘ Review of Metaphysics 32(1978), 205-215.
[20] This special relation between human beings and Being in Shakespeare resembles the relation in Biblical religion between creatures, especially man, and the Creator. Since man is said to be in the image of God, it ought to be possible to study man so as to know God. In wondering at the one comes to wonder at the other. We find the same in the study of Shakespeare; from wondering at the works we come to wonder at their maker. See my ‘Shakespearean Wisdom?’ in Shakespeare as Political Thinker ed. John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Carolina Academic Press, 1981).
[21] Since Shakespeare there seem to be only two poets who has written both comedy and tragedy: Kleist and Synge.
[22] For further discussion of the histories see my Shakespeare’s Christian Prince to be published sometime.
[23] That in ‘Sonnet 94’ Shakespeare has described himself is the main idea of my essay ‘Shakespearean Wisdom?’ cited above.
[24] Zarathustra III, ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln,’ 21; Der Wille zur Macht 983; Jenseits von Gut und B6se, 284; Zarathustra II, ‘Von der Menschen-Klugheit.’
[25] For a complementary account of Tempest 1.1 see my essay ‘Shakespeare’s Apology for Poetic Wisdom’ in Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Cecile Williamson Cary and Henry S. Limouze (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 280-93.
[26] I am very grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung for the leisure to revise this essay.
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