Shakespeare in Hate

Emotions, Passions, Selfhood

Peter Kishore Saval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317531142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di Shakespeare

Hate, malice, rage, and enmity: what would Shakespeare's plays be without these demonic, unruly passions? This book studies how the tirades and unrestrained villainy of Shakespeare's art explode the decorum and safety of our sanitized lives and challenge the limits of our selfhood. Everyone knows Shakespeare to be the exemplary poet of love, but how many celebrate his clarifying expressions of hatred? How many of us do not at some time feel that we have come away from his plays transformed by hate and washed clean by savage indignation? Saval fills the great gap in the interpretation of Shakespeare's unsocial feelings. The book asserts that emotions, as Aristotle claims in the Rhetoric, are connected to judgments. Under such a view, hatred and rage in Shakespeare cease to be a "blinding" of judgment or a loss of reason, but become claims upon the world that can be evaluated and interpreted. The literary criticism of anger and hate provides an alternative vision of the experience of Shakespeare's theater as an intensification of human experience that takes us far beyond criticism's traditional contexts of character, culture, and ethics. The volume, which is alive to the judgmental character of emotions, transforms the way we see the rancorous passions and the disorderly and disobedient demands of anger and hatred. Above all, it reminds us why Shakespeare is the exemplary creator of that rare yet pleasurable thing: a good hater.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315724508-1

Shakespeare is the greatest of all dramatists of anger and hate. Everyone speaks of Shakespeare as the exemplary poet of love, but as a young man, I was transfixed by his hatreds. My life had not prepared me for the new feelings I found in Shakespeare’s rancorous and disobedient tirades: Timon inviting his flatterers to feast on empty bowls of water as he assails them with stones; Coriolanus telling the people of Rome that he hates them as he banishes them: these demonic, unruly passions challenged the antiseptic safety of my world.¹ As I moved on to other plays, the spite, the rage, the enmity again intensified me. The willingness of these characters to expose their most undecorous feelings was addictive and uncomfortable at once, because I knew that I had these feelings in myself, but my white-collar education valued equanimity and coolness, and made passion seem stupid or immoral. “No one is born hating,” said so many sanctimonious teachers. “People have to learn to hate.” But in Shakespeare learning to hate seemed like one of the conditions of a fully lived life. Later, when I discovered the poetry of Dante, the tragedies of Aeschylus, or the characters of Dostoevsky, I realized that to appreciate their greatness was to be implicated in hatred.

I found that discussions of Shakespeare by teachers and critics had little to do with my experience of his dark, unsocial passions. Hate rarely got its due. Anger, of course, had the more respected pedigree: I was taught about the rage of Achilles, and the savage indignation of Juvenal; I read in Blake that the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. Si natura negat, I learned, facit indignatio versum: if nature denies, indignation will make verse. But hate rarely ever occasioned the response of wonder or pleasure. “Anger occasionally gets a better press,” says the classical scholar David Konstan, “but hatred is almost universally condemned.”² Jack Levin has a theory why:

Until recently, the term ‘hate’ referred to any intense dislike or hostility, whatever its object … Beginning in mid-1980s, the term “hate” became used in a much more restricted sense to characterize an individual’s negative beliefs and feelings about members of some other group of people because of their race, religious identity, ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, or disability status.³

The meaning of “hatred” has been transformed in our minds to be synonymous with prejudice.⁴ So much of the study of early modern literature has focused on hate from this perspective. Anyone daring to suggest that hate can be thrilling and clarifying risks being called a reactionary. Yet wasn’t there something to Flaubert’s remark that “hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom”?⁵ Isn’t there more than “prejudice” in Satan’s celebration of “immortal hate / And courage never to submit or yield” (1. 107–8)? Hatred in these cases has the power to lift us out of servility and ennoble us.⁶

Such lines show us that there is an aesthetic pleasure in hating, and that part of the appeal of the greatest works of art is that they revitalize our capacity to hate. In 1939, the critic D.W. Harding insisted, in an essay entitled “Regulated Hatred,” that the pleasure we should take in Jane Austen is inseparable from the pleasure of hating. The readers who would be most likely to appreciate the art and power of her work are “those who would turn to her not for relief and escape but as a formidable ally against things and people which were to her, and still are, hateful.”⁷ He reminds us of a passage in Emma whose actual force so many readers are likely to miss:

Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having so much of the public favor; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself or to compel an outward respect from those who might despise her.⁸

Except, says, Harding, that’s not what Jane Austen says. The passage above ends like this:

… she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement for herself, or to frighten those who might hate her into outward respect.⁹

Frighten; hate: “This eruption of fear and hatred into the relationships of everyday social life is something that the urbane admirer of Jane Austen finds distasteful; it is not the satire of one who writes securely for the entertainment of her civilized acquaintances.”¹⁰ Yet unsocial passions like fear and hatred are everywhere in Austen. According to Harding, Jane Austen’s work does not just represent hatred as a quality that various characters feel: her work is meant to educate us in ways of hating, to teach just which people we are to hate, how to hate them, or how to see characters as pleasurable and detestable simultaneously. The element of hate in the work, says Harding, is not to be misread as satire: it is rather fundamental to her art that hate is taken seriously as a judgment.¹¹

To assess the value of Harding’s claims, and their validity for the art of Jane Austen, is, of course, outside the scope of my book. I mention the essay not in order to read Austen’s work, but to point to a possibility in literary criticism that may have escaped us: that part of the pleasure of great works of art is the pleasure of hating, and the delight and instruction of learning to hate well. The greatest Shakespeare critic, William Hazlitt, pointed to similar possibilities in his essay, On the Pleasure of Hating:

Nature seems … made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn into a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interest of the unruly passions of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal. Animals torment one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport … Even when the spirit of the age (that is, the progress of intellectual refinement) no longer allows us to carry our vindictive and headstrong humors into effect, we try to revive them in description, and keep the old bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and our hate, in the imagination.¹²

Though Hazlitt is one of my favorite writers, here he is carried away, even false. The tone is cynical, even a little posturing. But still, there is style, verve. This celebration of hate as a joyful rapture is delicious and breezy. It reminds me of E.R. Dodds on menos, the ancient “anger” that enlivens the soul:

When a man feels menos in his chest, or “thrusting pungently into his nostrils,” he is conscious of a mysterious access of energy; the life in him is strong, and he is filled with a new confidence and eagerness. The connection of menos with the sphere of volition comes out clearly in the related words menoinan, “to be eager,” and dusmenes, “wishing ill” … In man it is the vital energy, the “spunk,” which is not always there at call, but comes and goes mysteriously and (as we should say) capriciously. But to Homer it is not a caprice: it is the act of a god, who “increases or diminishes at will a man’s arete (that is to say, his potency as a fighter).”¹³

The passage provides a window into the vehement passions as a claim about the world and a mysterious access of energy; at its most sublime, anger is not a failure of deliberation but a supernatural power. The unruly and fighting emotions are not just pathologies to be stigmatized, but forms of life to be celebrated.

The greatest art often brings us close to those forms of life. About William Butler Yeats, Joseph Hassett rightly pointed out, “Hate is Yeats’s passion of preference – so much so that when he dreamed of his goals as a poet, he ‘dreamed of enlarging Irish hate.’ … Yeats’s letters and essays bristle with a hatred that is never far beneath the taut surface of his poetry.”¹⁴ In one of his great verses hate is not even beneath the surface:

Why should I seek for love or study it?

It is of God and passes human wit;

I study hatred with great diligence,

For that’s a passion in my own control,

A sort of besom that can clear the soul

Of everything that is not mind or sense.

Yeats felt that hate connected him to a tradition of writers like Jonathan Swift. Hassett identifies this tradition of hate with the very form of Dionysian frenzy: “The use of hate as a wellspring of creative activity did not begin with Yeats. It is at least as old as the process by which the angry frenzy of Dionysac ritual gave birth to the Greek practice of ecstatic prophecy and the related notion of the divine madness of the inspired poet. Yeats forcefully asserted his place in this tradition when, in ‘Blood and the Moon,’ he declared himself an heir of ‘Swift beating on his breast in sybilline frenzy blind.’”¹⁵

Like Yeats, Robert Browning famously identified not only his own verses but the very spirit of poetry with the power of hating, as in his encomium that Dante is the greatest poet-lover because he is the greatest hater:

Dante once prepared to paint an angel:

Whom to please? You whisper ‘Beatrice.’

While he mused and traced it and retraced it,

(Peradventure with a pen corroded

Still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for,

When, his left hand I’the hair o’ the wicked,

Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma,

Bit into the live man’s flesh for parchment,

Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle,

Let the wretch go festering through Florence) –

Dante, who loved well because he hated,

Hated wickedness that hinders loving,

Dante standing, studying his angel, –

In there broke the folk of his Inferno.

Says he – ‘Certain people of importance’

(Such he gave his daily, dreadful line to)

Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet,

Says the poet – “Then I stopped my painting.” (32–49)¹⁶

The poet hearkens back to Dante as the great precursor, not only of the spirit of love, but of poetry, and insists that this poet “loved well because he hated,” in order to identify the poet’s creativity with that spirit. Daniel Karlin says: “Here, at the heart of Browning’s tenderest and personally most expressive lyric, is a figure of astonishing violence and cruelty, a figure of hatred, blistering, savage, demonic. … What … is the figure of hatred doing here? And what larger questions does it raise about Browning’s creativity?”¹⁷ Asking that question, Karlin goes on to identify hatred not only with the impulses to creativity in Browning but to the very pleasure we take in his poetry.

Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!

Water your damned flower-pots, do!

If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,

God’s blood, would not mine kill you! (1–4)¹⁸

Despite the fact that Brother Lawrence’s activities seem comically incongruous with the speaker’s rage, all the thrill and power of this poetry comes from the enlivening power of the speaker’s hate. Yeats and Browning place themselves in a literary tradition that links the pleasure of art with hate, and finds its creative impulses in the capacity for hatred and rage. The feelings of literary power can connect us to fighting emotions.

The fighting emotions; the darker and more demonic drives: did not so great a thinker as Freud teach us that we could not evade them? Yes, but what Freud gives me in his account is powerful and limiting at once. His most comprehensive study is in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes.” There he insists that hate is an instinct older and more fundamental to the establishment of the ego than love:

The relation of hate to objects is older than that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Rage in the World
• 3 The Arrival of Enigma
• 4 Hating without Hope
• 5 Expose Thyself
• Epilogue: Not to Trust
• Bibliography
• Index