Shakespeare William - Shakespeares Tragic Skepticism

Millicent Bell

Shakespeares Tragic Skepticism

Shakespeare is no more ready than Iago to wear his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at, and maybe, like Iago, he really has no heart. What he is trying to say in his plays is hardly distinguishable in the chorus of ideas that his poetry and dramatic structures make us hear. The Romantics thought he was myriad-mindedColeridges term. His entertainment of contraries, his apparent self-contradiction, showed the negative capability Keats said was the mark of literary genius. In modern times, T. S. Eliot felt that Shakespeare had no general ideas worth talking about. Nevertheless, Eliot offered his own egregious simplification, a Senecan Shakespeare, while warning against accepting it too seriously: About anyone as great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.

In offering a skeptical Shakespeare, a doubter of many received views about humanity and the universe, I feel the diffidence Eliot urged one to have. I believe that the plays I am examining in this book exhibit the effects of a potent philosophic skepticism verging upon nihilism. Yet criticism always simplifies. It is always an expression of the critics own bias. Any correspondence I feel between my own doubting mood at the start of a new century and Shakespeares own fin-de-sicle condition may be an illusion, just as the biases of earlier readers made them discover in Shakespeare their own confidence in a universe in which everything had its place and all meanings were secure and accessible. I know that my extract leaves something behind. Like others today, I may be too sure that an earlier school of critics was too sure that Shakespeare believed in the rule of divine intention and stable order in the cosmos and in human society. Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows was, for a whilebut no longer isa favorite quotation from Troilus and Cressida. We are more likely, now, to think that it may not express the writers personal view about the knowable design of the world and mans proper place in it. Do Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth give us confidence even about who one is? Ones very soul, that immortal essence once thought to be God-implanted and unalterable, might, these plays sometimes suggest, be so elusive and variable as to bring its very existence into question. Though Shakespeare makes character so vivid that it survives all inconsistency and seems almost to require no proof of itself, I shall argue that the plays flout traditional ideas about human selfhood as a known and consistent quality by which a man or woman is identified. As for the plot of time by which events are linked togethera sequence and relation that makes rational sense of human experiencethis, too, may not have seemed self-evident to Shakespeare either. His greatest plays seem to rely upon the commonsense logic that connects what happens with causes in circumstances and character; after all, it is only by believing in that logic that we are able to carry on in life. Yet significant gaps and paradoxes disrupt the sequences of action in these plays and bring such coherence and meaning into doubt. They even, finally, provoke us to wonder what one might really know about these matters or anything else. One might doubt that human perception was a reliable instrument. Shakespearean confidence in that instrument seems hardly secure. Troiluss question in Troilus and Cressida, Whats aught but as tis valued? persists in his major tragedies despite Hectors answer to relativism,

Value dwells not in particular will,
It holds his estimate and dignity
As well, wherein tis precious of itself.

Shakespeare allows us to put some trust in the prospect of getting at the final truth and worth of things, but he also invites us to question the absoluteness of our ideas and the validity of our impressions in the most radical way.

A working title for this book was Honest Shakespearemeant to give our author a characterization ambiguously awarded to Iago. Although honest is also applied to someone like Desdemonato mean female chastity as well as truthfulnessWilliam Empson, who counted fifty-two occurrences of the word or its cognates in Othello, also pointed out years ago that it had an emergent sense as description of a type of person coming into view in the new century, one who was uninhibited by abstract principles. Iago is mistakenly called honest by those, like Othello, who trust him to tell the truth, and the term grows more and more ironic as it is applied to a man who lies continually and whose true feelings, if he has any, are disguised rather than evident. But a further irony may be suggested by the words meaning as descriptive of a nononsense speaker who dispenses with exalted beliefs and declines to differentiate between seeming and being. In a word, a skeptic. Shakespeare, of course, the creator of Hamlet, who seems to see either man or woman not only as a quintessence of dust but also as the paragon of animalsnoble in reason, infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a godis hardly himself to be identified with the most cynical and hateful of all his characters. But the Iago who is so cruelly contemptuous of those, like Othello, who think life is more than a shadow-play of illusions, expresses a part of Shakespeares mind as much as Othello does. And this can be seen in the four great tragedies in which the will to belief in universal coherence and meaning struggles, often unsuccessfully, against skepticism. The title I finally settled on, Shakespeares Tragic Skepticism, stresses more accurately the way tragedy results from skeptic disillusion; Hamlet feels at one and the same time the wonder of the human creature and the beauty of the world which has become a sterile promontory to him. His mood is one of tragic loss from which he sees no recovery. This is a mood very different from that of Iago, who, unlike Othello, has never believed or loved, and whose character belongs to the genre of comedy.

That ideas contend with one another in Shakespeares writing is a quality he shares with the skeptic near-contemporary with whom I find him comparable, Michel de Montaigne. Montaignes curiously moving, often evasive, often self-revelatory confessions of alternating belief and unbelief are not merely a feature of his response to the dogmas of his religion. They are duplicated in his attitudes toward numerous other generally accepted assumptions about mankind and the world. Taken as a whole, Montaignes essays dramatize the unreadiness of his belief to come down on any conclusion without allowing for the possibility of its opposite. It is that representative skeptic method of balancing opposing views which was to be inherited from Montaigne by Pierre Bayle, who, at the end of the seventeenth century, made his famous encyclopedic dictionary a dramatization of the method of doubt, in which one opinion was posed against another. I am suggesting that Shakespeares thought, if we can assert anything about it, is, like Montaignes or Bayles, dialectic or dialogic. It pits an idea against its opposite. It looks to me as though Shakespearewriting as he did at a time of cultural crisis when old convictions and new doubts were contending in mens mindsput contrary views into combat to test their strength. His plays are never allegoricalthey never dramatize directly the contest of ideasyet in them ideas contend from line to line in the richest language the stage has ever known. Through the action and language of the plays he invites his audiences to question, from moment to moment, the inherited, standard truths of his time. He also allows his audiences to view fearfully the results of abandoning the prop of such beliefs. This is the hidden structure of argument in Shakespeares plays. Within these plays there are particular poetic occasions, like the soliloquies, which miniature such a structure. The most famous soliloquy of them all, Hamlets To be or not to be is just such a balancing of alternativesabout the nobler course, about the right expectation concerning deaths aftermath, about the process of choice itself. The presence of contraries in the one man is, of course, notable in the case of Hamleta matter not merely of ideas but of a personality in which so many irreconcilabilities cohabit that he seems, if we watch too closely, to be not one but a dozen separate personsand only Shakespeares incomparable way of giving all his heros speech a certain tone keeps us from noticing. One of the secrets of his high poetry is the way its complex verbal effects both enrich and contradict one another.