Shakespeare William - Philosophical Pearls of the Shakespearean Deep

Rembrandt van Rijn, Aristotle with Bust of Homer, 1653.

Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Published 2013 by Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books

Philosophical Pearls of the Shakespearean Deep. Copyright 2013 by Farhang Zabeeh All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zabeeh, Farhang.

Philosophical pearls of the Shakespearean deep / by Farhang Zabeeh.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61614-652-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-61614-653-5 (ebook)

1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616Philosophy. 2. Philosophy in literature. I. Title.

PR3001.Z326 2013

822.3'3dc23

2012027545

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Irma B. Jaffe

Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument.
Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone,
Which three till now, never kept seat in one.

Shakespeare (SON 105)

Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singular.

Aristotle, Poetics

Chapter Seven: The Pragmatic Dimension:
Shakespeares Presentation of
Political and Moral Values

My introduction to Shakespeare was through Macbeth, which I read in a Persian translation in 1934 when I was a sixteen-year-old student in Tehran, my native city. Excited, I found in our school library other plays by this author in English, which I read nonstop over and over again. However, at the University of California at Berkeley, where I arrived fourteen years later, studied philosophy, and eventually received a PhD, my studies and my academic career left little time to read outside of my field (the most frequent of academic complaints!) until as a professor of philosophy at Roosevelt University in Chicago I was able to offer a course in the philosophy of literature. Thus, Shakespeare came back into my life and I have been absorbed in the plays and poems ever since.

I wish to thank my dear friend Professor Irma B. Jaffe for her tireless efforts in editing my book, and Steven L. Mitchell, editor in chief of Prometheus Books, for his constructive criticism.

The presence of philosophical thought in Shakespeare has been acknowledged by many literary critics from William Richardson, A Philosophical Analysis of Shakespeare (1774); W. J. Birch, An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religions of Shakespeare (1848); and K. J. Spalding, The Philosophy of Shakespeare (1963); to Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox. The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1930). However, this aspect of Shakespeares plays and poems has been denied by a number of writers including Bernard Shaw, Epistle Didactory to Man and Superman (1903); Andr Gide, Letters-Preface (the translation of Hamlet); George Santayana, Interpretation of Poetry and Religion (1900); and T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1964). In recent times the issue has been revived largely due to the linguistic turn in philosophy by literary critics such as A. D. Nuttall in his Shakespeare the Thinker and by Colin McGinn, a philosopher by profession who discusses six plays in his Shakespeares Philosophy in the context of his perception that doubt and uncertainty are evident in the characters throughout the plays. Those critics have contributed valuable insights in their investigations of philosophy in Shakespeares works.

Like McGinn, I am also a philosopher by profession. My aim in this book is to reveal Shakespeares use of the heritage of rich thoughts he acquired and expanded upon, not in a few quotations, as others have done, but to string the many philosophical pearls, the conceptual inventions, from the Shakespearean deep on strands of the philosophical issues that have preoccupied Western philosophy since ancient times so as to present to the reader a necklace of rare beauty.