McGinn - Shakespeares Philosophy

Like many another person, I first encountered Shakespeare at school, where I studied Othello and Antony and Cleopatra for A-level English. I was particularly struck by Othello, though I would have found it hard at the time to explain my reaction. It was, in truth, all rather above my head, but something about the emotional articulation appealedand I always liked words. In subsequent years, during which I became an academic philosopher, I would attend a performance of this or that play, finding that my own advance in age and sophistication would deepen my response to the plays. But I never made a proper study of Shakespeare during these years, not supposing that I might have anything to contribute to understanding his work, and having quite enough difficult material on my plate anyway.

Then, while on sabbatical in 20045, I found myself with a block of time and my philosophical projects completedso I decided to make a detailed study of Shakespeare. I had recently seen a production of King Lear at Lincoln Center, and some lines had struck me as having philosophical import; I wondered how much philosophy was embedded in the plays. I began to watch DVDs of the plays, read commentaries, and study the texts carefully. After a while, it seemed to me that a philosophical study of Shakespeare would be worthwhile. The result is the book now in your hands.

I am well aware that there is some presumption in my enterprise, since I am not professionally a Shakespeare scholar or any other kind of literary expert. But I am not attempting to do better what earlier scholars have labored to produce; I am approaching Shakespeare from a specifically philosophical perspective. The book, as its title suggests, is about the philosophical ideas embedded in Shakespeares textthough of course there is no avoiding questions of character, history, and poetry. What I have attempted is a systematic treatment of the underlying philosophical themes of the plays, themes of some abstraction and generality. These themes include skepticism and the possibility of human knowledge; the nature of the self and personal identity; the understanding of causation; the existence and nature of evil; the formative power of language. I claim that these themes are woven deeply into Shakespeares plots and poetry. I write, then, as a professional philosopher with an interest in Shakespeare, not a professional Shakespeare scholar with a passing interest in philosophy.

I am grateful to Jonathan Miller for some conversations on Shakespeare, to my agent, Susan Rabiner, for suggestions about the structure of the book, and to my editor, Hugh van Dusen, for his enthusiasm and good judgment. I am also grateful to my wife, Cathy, who more than let me get on with it.

In Characters of Shakespeares Plays , published in 1817, William Hazlitt remarks (discussing Iago in Othello ) that Shakespeare was as good a philosopher as he was a poet. Critical studies tend to focus on issues of character, plot, and diction, as well as the social and political context of the plays, but the philosophical ideas suffusing them receive only passing mention. This is no doubt because those professionally involved in Shakespeare studies are not in general philosophers by training or inclination; they are literary scholars. Philosophy, perhaps, makes them nervous. It will be my contention in this book that an avowedly philosophical approach to Shakespeare can reveal new dimensions to his work, and that his work can contribute to philosophy itself. It is not my intention to replace poetic or dramatic treatments of Shakespeare, or even historical ones; I mean merely to supplement them with something more abstract. I want to look at Shakespeares plays expressly from the point of view of their underlying philosophical concerns. This will, I believe, reveal the source of their depth.

The plan of the book is as follows. In this chapter I shall outline in a preliminary way what I take to be the main philosophical themes in Shakespeares plays, with minimal attention to the text. I want to give the reader a sense of the issues themselves, before using them to interpret the plays. These issues are by no means antiquated, but have a continuing relevance. Then I shall move on to a close reading of Shakespeares main plays, with these themes in hand, elaborating them as I go. At the end of the book I shall treat a small number of philosophical matters that are ancillary to my main themes. We shall see that Hazlitt was quite correct in his assessment of Shakespeares talents.

Shakespeare is often commended for his timelessness, rightly so, but of course he also wrote at a particular period in historythe end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. For my purposes, the most relevant fact about this period is that it precedes the Scientific Revolution, so that science was in its infancy in Shakespeares day. Very little that we now take for granted was understoodin astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. The achievements of Descartes, Leibniz, Galileo, Newton, Locke, Boyle, and other heroes of the Renaissance were still in the future. The laws of mechanics were unknown; disease was a mystery; genetics was unheard of. Intelligent people believed in witchcraft, ghosts, fairies, astrology, and all the rest. Eclipses were greeted with alarmed superstition. Scientific method was struggling to gain a foothold (Francis Bacon was laying the groundwork). The conception of the world as a set of intelligible law-governed causes was at most a distant dream. The most advanced learning available came from the ancients; intellectually things hadnt changed much in two thousand years. When Shakespeare looked up into the night sky, he had very little idea of what he was seeing, and the earth was still generally considered the center of the universe. Nor was much known about the extent of the earth and of other cultures (though global exploration had already begun). It can be hard to remember this when we are confronted by Shakespeares sophistication in other matters. Nothing much was known about the natural world then, and this was known to be so; uncertainty and ignorance seemed mans natural lot. To give one striking example: so little was understood about the plague that devastated Europe in the late sixteenth century that orders were given in London to exterminate all cats and dogswhich were in fact the best enemies of the true carriers of the germs responsible, rats.

It was also a period of religious upheaval in which the source of divine authority was very much in doubt. The Protestant Reformation had challenged Catholicism, and the question of how we might know God was intensely real (you could die for taking the wrong view). Should believers rely on their own unaided reason to know Gods ways, or must they depend ultimately on church dogma? How to interpret Scripture was a vexed question, with a great deal turning on it. Thus there was a strong interest in knowledge and how it might be acquired, but not very much that seemed to qualify as beyond doubt. It was an age of uncertainty, following a period (the Middle Ages) of dogmatism, and preceding the age in which human reason seemed to achieve undreamed-of understanding of the universe (the Age of Enlightenment in which we still live). It is fair, I think, to characterize Shakespeares time as transitionalas one kind of authority (the church, monarchy) began to give way to another (science and human reason, a new social order). We might say, simplifying somewhat, that Shakespeare was between cultures. Questioning is the spirit of this period, and a sense of shifting foundations. It would not be surprising, then, to find doubt and uncertainty running through Shakespeares plays. And these aporias would run deep: the nature of man, his place in the cosmos, the very possibility of knowledge.