Human Conflict in Shakespeare

S. C. Boorman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000350128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Conflict is at the heart of much of Shakespeare's drama. Frequently there is an overt setting of violence, as in Macbeth, but, more significantly there is often 'interior' conflict. Many of Shakespeare's most striking and important characters – Hamlet and Othello are good examples – are at war with themselves.

Originally published in 1987, S. C. Boorman makes this 'warfare of our nature' the central theme of his stimulating approach to Shakespeare. He points to the moral context within which Shakespeare wrote, in part comprising earlier notions of human nature, in part the new tentative perceptions of his own age. Boorman shows Shakespeare's great skill in developing the traditional ideas of proper conduct to show the tensions these ideas produce in real life. In consequence, Shakespeare's characters are not the clear-cut figures of earlier drama, rehearsing the set speeches of their moral types – they are so often complex and doubting, deeply disturbed by their discordant natures. The great merit of this fine book is that it displays the ways in which Shakespeare conjured up living beings of flesh and blood, making his plays as full of dramatic power and appeal for modern audiences as for those of his own day. In short, this book presents a human approach to Shakespeare, one which stresses that truth of mankind's inner conflict which links virtually all his plays.

PART ONE

Forms of human conflict

(a) Soul-body

Our analysis of the forms of human conflict as they existed in the consciousness of Elizabethans must begin with the religious tradition into which they were born. Although even non-religious man has his inevitable sense of his personal inner struggles, the Christian religion is primarily concerned with this as the essence of the human condition, and it was religion that lay at the root of the Elizabethans’ awareness of it. The basic teaching of the Church was that Man¹ was an uneasy combination of soul and body; the body was not to be considered as a mere regrettable clog fastened upon the spiritual part of Man (although the Puritans came very near to this view); it could be seen as a necessary accompaniment to the soul, presenting in its incongruity a challenge to Man in his daily life. All the traditional teaching of the Church on this matter stressed the difference between the soul and the body. The new and growing humanism which the age also inherited accepted this difference, the Church’s view that in the soul was goodness and the hope of salvation, and in the body the impermanent yet possibly fatal source of weakness and evil. A forceful description of this form of Man’s dichotomy is a passage from Erasmus’s Enchiridion written at the beginning of the sixteenth century (but here as translated into English in 1534):

A Man is than[then] a certayn monstrous

beest compact togyder of partes, two or thre

of great dyuersite. Of a soule, as of a certeyne

goodly thynge: and of a body, as it were a brute

or dombe beest. For certeynly, we so greatly

excell not al other kyndes of brute beestes

in perfytnes of body but that we in al his

natural gyftes, are founde to them inferyours:

as concernyng ye soule veryly, we be so

receyuable of ye diuyne nature: that we may

surmount aboue the nature of angels and be

vnyt[united], knyt, and made one with god. Yf

thy body had not ben added to the[thee] thou

haddest ben a celestial or godly thyng. Yf this

mynde had not ben graffed in the[thee] playnly

thou haddest ben a brute beest. These two natures

bytwene them self so diuerse: that excellent

werkman had coupled togyder with blessed

concorde. But the serpent the enemy of peace,

put them asonder agayn with vnhappy discorde:

so yt now they neyther can be seperate, without

very great turment and payn neyther lyue ioyned

togyder, without continual warre.²

At the end of the Elizabethan period a very popular preacher is making the same point:

So man is created by God, tanquam medius

inter angelum & brutu, a middling betweene an

Angell, and a brute; being a good deale better

then a beast, and a little^q lower then an Angell.

Hauing in respect of his body, something of a

bruit, being sensuall and mortall; and in respect

of his soule, something of an Angell, as being

intellectuall and immortall³

q Psalm 8.5.

(b) Immortal-mortal

Thus Elizabethan man saw himself, to begin with, as a mixture of soul and body, and so capable of being at once far more than mere Man, and far less. With the awareness of this basic disparity was joined the more immediate, everyday knowledge (reinforced by religion) that the body would one day die. Indeed, considering Elizabethan living conditions, the prevalence of the plague, the scarcity of food in the 1590s and 1600s, and the still medieval state of Elizabethan medicine, every Elizabethan must have been acutely conscious of death as a close companion in his daily life. Yet, like Man in every age, he held death at bay in the recesses of his mind, and usually lived as if he were immortal. So Thomas Nashe wrote in 1593:

We see great men dye, strong men dye,

wittie[clever] men dye, fooles dye, rich

Merchants, poor Artificers, Plowmen,

Gentlemen, high men, low men, wearish [sickly] men,

grosse men, and the fairest complexioned

[most healthy] men die, yet we perswade

our selues wee shall neuer dye. Or if we

do not so perswade our selues, why prepare

wee not to dye? Why doe wee raigne as Gods

on the earth, that are to bee eaten with

wormes?⁴

(c) Greatness-littleness

So an Elizabethan felt himself to be the meeting-place, the battleground, of the incongruities of soul and body, immortality and mortality. At times he could see himself as a unique miracle of ennobled clay; as a preacher said in a sermon in the early 1600s:

Who can sufficiently expresse or wonder

enough at the excellencie of man, so little a

creature made but of the dust? That he

by contemplation should soare vp to the

skies, and be able to discourse of the

motions, aspects, and effects of the

celestiall orbe; that he should ride vpon the

Seas, and search, and passe ouer the liquid

floods; that he should vendicate[claim] both

earth and sea vnto his profit, and domineere

ouer the beasts, and know the nature of all the

creatures; that he should contriue the Arts

and Sciences to a methode, and being absent

to speak to men farre distant by letters

written, that he should in this mortalitie

seeke after immortalitie, and haue a seate

prepared for him in heauen, after life ended

here on earth ... No tongue is able to express⁵

Here speaks an age that, for a moment, can look with amazement and pride at the new developments in both intellectual and physical exploration of its world, a world growing daily more extended and more various. Yet always behind this remains the thought of the other dimension of Man, the once wholly divine creature brought by the Fall within the reach of impermanence and sin. Sir George More in 1597 expresses the more specifically religious view of this conflict:

double is the nature of man, and a perfect

man is a double man in him selfe, one without,

and another within: without [outside] his body

is man, and within his minde, so as there is

both an outward, and an inward man, and both

in one, if that one have the perfection of a

man.... (Man) being considered in his beginning,

and after his ende truly as he is, by an auntient

Father, is sayed to be, Semen immundum, cibus

vermium, post hominem vermis, post vermen faetor et horror.

Vncleane seed, wormes meate, after a man a worme,

(after a worme) an ill sauor and a horror. Which

two natures in man, as they were found to differ,

so were they by name distinguished even at the

first; the first earthly man being of the

Hebrewes called Adam, as homo tanquam ex humo

(man inasmuch as from earth), and the other

heauenly of the Chaldeans Enoch, which signifieth

true man⁶ Ambros de Isa et anima.

Bernard Meditau

An ordinary Elizabethan may not have fully appreciated the authority of the Church Fathers, St Bernard and St Ambrose, to whom More is appealing, but certainly he felt within him the two natures of which the passage speaks, and with that realisation, the extent of his inner discord as a human being. He would have accepted as a truism that he was a soul and a body, each pulling him in an opposite direction; he would have feared death, and yet hoped that death was not the end; he would have aspired to great and memorable achievements in this life (the Elizabethan age was an age of ambition), and yet have been constantly aware of his littleness and impermanence as a mere sinful creature. Sir John Davies summed up the feeling thus:

I know my bodie’s of so frail a kind,

As force without, feavers within can kill;

I know the heavenly nature of my minde,

But ‘tis corrupted both in wit and will:

I know my Soule hath power to know all things,

Yet she is blind and ignorant in all;

I know I am one of Nature’s little kings,

Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I know my life’s a pain and but a span,

I know my Sense is mockt with every thing:

And to conclude, I know my selfe a MAN,

Which is a proud, and yet a wretched thing.⁷

(d) Freedom-fate

The ‘De Contemptu Mundi’ tradition,⁸ still part of course of Elizabethan religious teaching, probably did not persuade many healthy persons to reject the attractions of being alive, any more than it finally convinced Claudio in Measure for Measure, but it certainly formed part of a much more widely accepted view which recognised the mutability of life (of which Spenser wrote), the variations of success and failure so often impossible to foresee or guard against, and apparently dependent on blind chance. Of course, in religious teaching there was no acceptance of ‘blind chance’, of the Wheel of Fortune by which men rose to fame only to sink to failure; everything existed within the total being of God, and formed his knowledge of the course of Man’s destiny. But within God’s knowledge, in which past, present and future were the eternal ‘now’, Man had for all practical purposes been given free will, and in any case, however much philosophy and theology might debate the meaning of ‘free will’, an Elizabethan, like ourselves today, ‘knew’ that he had a power to choose among the many possible paths presented by his daily life. Here, then, was another form of conflict: he ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 Forms of human conflict
• Part 2
• Part 3 Human conf lia in Shakespeare
• Appendix 1 Marlow’s Doctor Faustus
• Appendix 2 Comedy and tragedy in drama
• Notes
• Indexes
• 2 Shakespeare’s plays: (a) titles (b) characters
• 3 Non-Shakespearean plays: titles
• 4 General