Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery

Robert H. West

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813183596
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare has been viewed by critics both as a secular writer who affirmed the dual nature of man and as a Christian allegorist whose work has a submerged but positive and elaborate pattern of Christian meaning. In Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery, Robert H. West explores the philosophical and supernatural elements of five Shakespearean dramas— Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest.

Through his analysis, West discovers Shakespeare's respect for the mysteries of existence but no clear definition of the philosophical and moral context of his play worlds. An artistic motivation leads Shakespeare to use these elements ambiguously to create a dramatic effect rather than to teach a moral or ideological lesson.

CHAPTER ONE

The Questions

At the end of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Meursault, fearfully awaiting the guillotine, repulsed the prison priest and, staring into the cold heavens, suddenly understood that “nothing, nothing had the least importance.” A “persistent breeze” had all his life been blowing toward him from “the dark horizon” of his future, and the nothingness beyond that horizon justified, he thought, his habitual unconcern with life’s choices and enabled him to lay his “heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.” The indifference Meursault had always felt in himself and the matching inconsequence he now feels in all being impress him as so “brotherly” that he realizes that he is happy in the expectation of death.¹ Thus he experiences modern man’s celebrated predicament: nothing outside him justifies anything more inside him than the reasonless anguish of his apathy, and abandonment to dying is his real joy.

Man’s efforts to find justification in the “outside” for his emotional responses to environment have usually meant seeking evidence for God in society, nature, or even in self taken objectively. We have not, ordinarily, known much about any of these but have often assumed or accepted enough to keep us in heart. Man’s efforts to found worship in experience of society, nature, and self have been sufficiently successful to serve many astute persons, especially those who reconciled experience of these things with experience of God or with divine revelation and so could accept more pious beliefs about the cosmos than we have ever been able either to observe or to deduce complete backing for.

But now man is disenchanted not only with the cosmos, but also with society, nature, and even with self. Though the relieved abandonment to dying that overwhelmed Meursault does not have universal support in the literature of our disillusionment, that literature tends nevertheless to found on the inevitability and finality of death a denunciation of ordinary human values and a conviction very like Meursault’s of nothingness outside our little life. So strong a fancy have we for these ideas that we begin to seek them in all their modernity in older masterpieces. And of course the substance of them is not new in philosophical-minded literature. It appears in various ways in the verse of Greece and Rome, for instance, and in that of Neoclassicals and of Romantics. Man’s moral disillusionments are all kin. Probably, though, no older poetry, with whatever flourish it may declare both life and the universe to be blank, is an exact model of the modern attitude, for the older writers usually had interest in the hedonistic self or the romantic self, which are in theory at least unlike the free and transcendable self of atheistic existentialism.

Nowhere in literature before our time does the cosmic doubt or denial seem more graspable in twentieth-century terms than in tragedy. Almost any tragic pessimism may seem nihilistic because tragedy looks severely on both men and the world and makes very much of death. It may expose many human values as ill-founded, and it may show the universe as a punishing one. Thus those who want to think that tragedy is pessimistic in our contemporary vein find it possible if they push a little, especially with the tragedy of Shakespeare. Its language and psychology may seem much more modern than historical facts encourage us to expect, and it reels off the human pageant with what may be taken in the modern fashion as ironical contrast of intense feeling and activity with the inevitable silent end. Shakespeare has had the reputation, too, of being a secular writer, of never affirming the faith of his fathers, and some moderns extend this view of him to a denial that he never affirms any junction of the human with the divine.

Contradicting the contemporizers of Shakespeare are his Christianizers, those who find in his work, so often called secular, a submerged but positive and elaborate pattern of Christian meaning. Far from admitting that he gives nothingness as what is within and beyond man’s life, some Christianity-centered critics find that Shakespeare gives the beatific vision and heaven, purgatory, and hell. He has Christ figures, Christian lessons and exempla, “segments” of Christian story, and numerous Biblical allusions and analogues consistently used to display a special Christian “dimension.” Shakespeare’s tragedies, they say, sustain, not vitiate, Christian moral values and give death as gateway to a personal beyond.

Between the contemporizers and the Christianizers lie various demesnes of an old, rational view held by Bradley, Chambers, Kittredge, Dowden, and many another noble Shakespearean that the tragedies are severe but not despairing or irreverent, though they show, in Bradley’s phrase, “a painful mystery” that remains too much a mystery for the plays to yield a Christian solution to the problem of their evil. We admire Bradley’s balance, but many moderns do not want to face a mystery without taming it or anything painful without denouncing it; others want to find that mystery is black or savage and that pain is the only sentient reality, unless our disdain, anger, and rebelliousness—our freedom—can acquire standing. The predicament of a Shakespeare critic now recapitulates that of western man in general: he must treat the tragedies as Christian or he can establish for the tragic worlds nothing outside the characters to justify more in them than he can build on their reasonless anguish and self-assertion. Yet, the plays do not seem to say that anguish is the chief reality or that the characters’ best wisdom would be to rebel finally against it. The outer mystery in the great tragedies may not sound entirely like dogmatic Christianity’s, but it does not sound like cosmic hatefulness either, or like that nothingness from which the absurdity of all given moral systems seems an inescapable derivation.

The outer mystery—as distinguished from the inner mystery, the mystery of the human heart—is obviously important in life and in drama alike, though it is not most forward in our consciousness of either. It is the cosmic mystery, the mystery of transcendence, of ultimate origin, organization, and ends; the beyond and above; outer as outside and enclosing ordinary experience; outer as existing before and after this natural life; outer as a superior and controlling reality in which man’s creation and destiny lie. And it is mystery in being inconclusively explored and at last unaccountable. To it joins the inner mystery, that intimate and more canvassable mystery of human personality to which our natural needs and responses supply clues every moment but which is at last, like the outer, unfathomed. The inner mystery is the principal substance of all tragedy, and the outer is its indispensable background.

In the suggestion it gives of its cosmos a tragedy rests usually on two opposed impressions: beyond the phenomenal a reality exists, but it is at last unknown. It is mysterious, then, as that whose existence is somehow experienced or understood to be necessary but which is beyond description or explanation that exhausts it. Most that we encounter of either life or death, of human personality or of the world, is mysterious. We are not utterly ignorant of these things, for they touch us powerfully. But we can give of neither man nor cosmos a whole account. The vast obscure lurks in us and around us.

In natural life our impressive explanations and descriptions—those of astronomers, say, or of Sigmund Freud—are as likely to deepen as to dissipate our sense of mystery. In life we stand no chance of exhausting mystery with knowledge; when we affirm what we know, we do not seriously abridge the unknown behind it (unless by a tone like the crackling of thorns beneath a pot), no matter how circumstantial our statement. To renew the sense of mystery we have only to look again with a consciousness of our limitations. But in a play mysteries are not necessarily so derived.

A playwright may be far more knowledgeable about the world and persons of his play than philosophers and theologians or even scientists can be about the real world. His authority runs there as its creator, or at least its contriver, and no view of the play world remains mere speculation or piety unless he allows it to or, in fact, builds it so. The balance of certitude and perplexity, of faith and doubt, of confidence and bewilderment is in the playwright’s charge for his characters and—if he manages skillfully and it responds well—for his audience. He can, after the fashion of the satirist—say Bernard Shaw in Don Juan in Hell and, very differently, Bertholt Brecht in The Good Woman of Setzuan—expunge outer mystery from his rationalized play world; or like Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot, he can intensify mystery into convulsive absurdity. Shaw illuminates the world and the afterworld of his play to reveal its life and afterlife as intricate, certainly, with not every question answered, but still as graspable, rather slight, less than Shaw himself, and less than his witty characters. Nothing remains unknown but that upon which Shaw and his characters happen not to have turned their paradoxical spotlight. On the other hand, Beckett in Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days drives our sense of the unknown toward lunacy, so that, being almost wholly without clue to value, we lose mystery in a terrible meaninglessness that is no dramatic equivalent for mystery.

The tragic pitch of mystery is not finally, though, a matter of how far the dramatist informs the audience about things that in the real world only faith or speculation can touch. Rather it is of whether he achieves a striking view of man and his affairs as surrounded, exceeded, dependent upon and joined to some grand economy of being that far surpasses man’s most comprehensive grasp. What expunges tragic mystery is not necessarily revelation but domestication or moralization. Cyril Tourneur, for instance, in The Atheist’s Tragedy makes heaven and hell fall comfortably into line with the wishes of the audience to see the atheist clubbed and the believers safely married. The play is a Christian object lesson, as Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus is not, in spite of what is doctrinally routine in the portrayal of Faustus’ temptation and damnation. The one play establishes the characters in a moral scheme that dominates not only the characters but also their cosmos and seems to exhaust them both. The other names supernatural poles, but imaginatively lies unexhausted far beyond our dialectical grasp of either the given poles or the morality that swings upon them.

The mere linking of man to a given cosmic pattern does not in itself vitally sap either the inner mystery or the outer. Marlowe, Racine, and Milton each puts his authority as a dramatist behind Christian views of eternal judgment in the world of his play without domesticating eternal judgment there. The mystery of human good and evil in the play, they make us feel, does rest in a remoter one of which the play tells this much, that it exists with God and Satan as its unequal poles exerting their contrary attractions. To go so far abridges the cosmic mystery to the extent that it limits imagination with terminal answers. Yet these answers do not destroy mystery, for though they are terminal, they are not all-sufficient; they do not seem to answer every question the play raises, but simply to give rational limits that have in themselves suprarational possibilities—among them, perhaps, the total inversion of cosmic standards. Though we may grant, then, that the tragedy of Marlowe and Milton and Racine “affirms,” as Richard B. Sewall has said, “a cosmos of which man is a meaningful part” and affirms it more categorically than Koestler’s Darkness at Noon does with the phrase “the oceanic sense” or Camus’s Caligula with “l’ordre de ce monde,”² still heaven and hell in Dr. Faustus and Samson Agonistes and Athalie remain mysterious enough in themselves to suit tragedy. These plays do more than banally tie them captive to the audience’s daily moral preferences.

Strictly speaking, no play has a metaphysical reality in it; no noumenon exists within and around a play’s phenomena, its visible showing of men and events. By the same standard no play has an empyrean or afterworld, unless it stages one or otherwise puts it beyond question. But just as a play provokes the sense of a past, which it does not show (and which is dangerous for critics to wander in), so it may provoke a sense of an other-worldly something that surrounds or underlies its visible setting, including, perhaps, a future, staged or unstaged, for characters who die in the audience’s sight. A play has such a beyond or outerness if the lines of dramatic statement fall so as to establish and maintain it in the imaginative awareness of the audience—perhaps by staging an afterworld, or by direct presentation of superhuman personages, or by explicit or forcefully implied linking of the action to revelation or to religious assumptions, or perhaps to antireligious ones, through implications and allusions. However the dramatist may establish this outerness, it reflects always the more mysterious sector of the human condition, whether a traditional haven of the dead or some entirely unschematized transcendence or primacy, whether an ultimate being or an ultimate nothingness.

As a condition of man’s existence this outer mystery in a play usually is a backdrop to the inner mystery of the heart, those ill-understood drives and gratifications which may be so strong in some characters that they seem charged from sources beyond the personal and which are the chief subject matter of serious literature. Dramatized, this inner mystery and the outer one are no more psychology and metaphysics than the play’s putative past is history, and they do not fully invite or always repay the reasoning proper to psychologists or metaphysicians. In plays they are simply the viewer’s sense of some fictive being in the characters and their world that is not the fictive being of the natural staged surface, though conveyed by the appeals that that surface makes to our beliefs, sympathies, fears, and whatever else in us accepts the hints of the imitation. Estimates of the mysteries, inner and outer, must be chiefly in terms of this viewer’s sense. Dramas are not propositions about man and the world, nor do they present propositions in any primary way. But they do present men and worlds and so sometimes numinously intimate to the viewer unseen energies and organization (or modernly a want of them) in and beyond the seen ones, and they do sometimes suggest to him rationales for these mysteries.

Whatever rationale it may suggest, a great play does not at last resolve mysteries, but rather contemplates them, gives them point for us, and expands our minds to them. Bringing mystery within him, man comes from mystery; it fills and surrounds him here, and it takes him finally back into itself. These are elemental facts, long observed. In tragedy mysterious man’s central concern with the mysterious cosmos has been the frequent and drastic discrepancy between the outer compulsions of the human condition and the inner ones that express human desires and deserts. The fate that a tragic hero gets is not one that he wants or one that he may feel he deserves. As for audiences, they sense the outer mystery in the strain between their moral sympathy and resistless circumstance or divine rule, and more acutely yet in the cathartic relief of this strain. A great tragedy depicts men and the world with a balance of passionate conviction and doubt. The dramatist has more grasp and detachment than the character can have, and the viewer does too. Yet the dramatist has doubt of his own, as well as conviction, and so does the viewer. By their conviction and their doubt, as well as by their special knowledge and their sympathy and awe, they try the play’s morals—the morals of the protagonist and those of his world—and usually come to a mysterious peace about them.

In some plays the cosmic anchor of morality and the balance of justice are plain enough; at least, the play gives them beyond dispute. The character’s desire and the deeds it calls forth correspond intelligibly to the fate the desirer provokes from some outerness. In even the plainest-spoken plays, however, the final reasons for both the desire and its denial or fulfillment must remain obscure, however convincing. The inner mystery lies finally in some fathomless act of appetite or will and the outer in some ultimately unaccountable state of being that the dramatist may or may not conventionalize. Everyman wants Fellowship and Good; their price, evidently just, is Death. Then he wants eternal life, and it is worth its price in contrition, penance, and submission, for God lives and even Death proclaims His order. This much the play shows, and it is scholastic enough for our direct grasp of its morals. But a Christian mystery pervades it just the same: the arbitrary blessing of God’s will. Modernly Archibald MacLeish’s J. B. hungers and thirsts after a righteousness shaped to his bourgeois values and thinks the price of his faith in it to be finally at variance with its worth and to reflect on the outer standard itself, which should have served him better. In this play not God but man shows most prominently a conclusive (if dramatically unconvincing) arbitrariness. The book of Job and other profound works ascribe such ultimacy only to outer being. “No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied,” ends the bereaved mother in Riders to the Sea.

Everyman and J. B. are alike, though, and like the rest of serious drama, in treating the outer mystery chiefly as it relates to the elections of the soul and so confronts us with the problem of evil, of why the world goes far from our heart’s desire and from what we think just or loving. This cosmic problem can have no conclusive solution even from a dramatist who enters into God’s confidence through revelation and is explicit about outer being. But of partial answers plays suggest a great variety. Polyeucte is more secure in his new baptism than a modern audience can easily believe. Sean O’Casey’s Paycock wants only to drink and to show off; his petty though overmastering desires contrast poorly with his responsibilities but seem more disproportionate yet to the remorseless ruin in which incompetence and bad luck involve his worthy wife and daughter. Dryden’s Antony trades all for love, an unseemly bargain by his play’s intimated cosmic standards, though a heroic one. And Ibsen’s Oswald Alving must pay all for nothing whatever by a cosmic exigence that in Ghosts appears not only unseemly and unheroic but bitterly unjust. In Sophocles’ Antigone both Creon and Antigone are at fault before the gods, and the dignity of their relation to divinity touches them both; Anouilh’s version intimates no divinity, and Creon for his failure of human sympathy suffers not only pain but indignity. Racine’s Athalie and Christopher Fry’s The Firstborn both rest on Biblical story, but Racine emphasizes the mystery of God’s choice and Fry the mystery of human suffering.

However the modern dramatist may evoke the outer mystery, he is likely to side against any kind of public virtue grounded in a given world view. Many modern playwrights indicate the world to be surly at best, and they consider the traditional view of it trivial. Strindberg and O’Neill in such plays as The Father and Long Day’s Journey into Night show man ill-served by both h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter One: The Questions
• Chapter Two: The Evidence
• Chapter Three: Outerness & the Supernatural
• Chapter Four: King Hamlet’s Ambiguous Ghost
• Chapter Five: Night’s Black Agents in “Macbeth”
• Chapter Six: Ceremonial Magic in “The Tempest”
• Chapter Seven: Iago & the Mystery of Iniquity
• Chapter Eight: Othello and Damnation
• Chapter Nine: The Christianness of “Othello” & “King Lear”
• Chapter Ten: Sex, Death, & Pessimism in “King Lear”
• Chapter Eleven: In the Great Hand of God
• Notes
• Index