Shakespeare as a Way of Life

Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness

James Kuzner

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780823269952
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Shakespeare as a Way of Lifeshows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In a series of close readings, Kuzner shows how Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, andTimon of Athens, impel us to grapple with basic uncertainties: how we can be free, whether the world is abundant, whether we have met the demands of love and social life.To Kuzner, Shakespeare's skepticism doesn't have the enabling potential of Keats's heroic "negativity capability, " but neither is that skepticism the corrosive disease that necessarily issues in tragedy. While sensitive to both possibilities, Kuzner offers a way to keep negative capability negative while making skepticism livable. Rather than light the way to empowered, liberal subjectivity, Shakespeare's works demand lasting disorientation, demand that we practice the impractical so as to reshape the frames by which we view and negotiate the world.The act of reading Shakespeare cannot yield the practical value that cognitive scientists and literary critics attribute to it. His work neither clarifies our sense of ourselves, of others, or of the world; nor heartens us about the human capacity for insight and invention; nor sharpens our ability to appreciate and adjudicate complex problems of ethics and politics. Shakespeare's plays, rather, yield cognitive discomforts, and it is just these discomforts that make them worthwhile.

CHAPTER 1

Ciceronian Skepticism and the Mind-Body Problem in Lucrece

Though this book dwells mostly on drama, this chapter focuses on the early narrative poem Lucrece. Considering the poem alongside Ciceronian thought, I show how Lucrece evinces skepticism about a problem important to other issues explored in this book: the problem of the relationship between body and mind. As we will see in later chapters, Shakespeare’s approach to the mind-body problem colors his portrayals of love, ethics, and freedom.

Shakespeare responds to this problem—overlapping in the poem with the soul-body problem—with a pragmatic skeptical practice that has consequences for Shakespeare’s thinking about gender and republicanism.1 In a powerful and emblematic reading, Catherine Belsey reads Lucrece as a poem whose instructiveness resides partly in Shakespeare’s awareness of the very inseparability of body and mind that much masculinist—as well as some republican—thought would deny, keeping the two apart in order to map masculinity onto a mind sovereign over bodies, and femininity onto a body in need of a sovereign. Rape, for Belsey, demonstrates that mind-body dualism depends upon a basic error about human ontology, an error that Lucrece herself avoids in deciding to end her life.2 Belsey’s essay is part of a much larger tendency in early modern studies aimed at displacing dualism as central to early modern thought. Here, I have in mind wide-ranging, influential collections such as The Body in Parts, Politics and the Passions, and Reading the Early Modern Passions, as well as important monographs by Michael Schoenfeldt and Gail Kern Paster.3 Whether to show that reason cannot be separated from passion (or passion from reason), that thought is inherently embodied (and even distributed about the body),4 or that selves are inseparable from the physical world, these works all attend to how productive early modern texts can be, often with reference to issues of gender, in refusing to separate body and mind. As I show in the chapter’s final section, such work shares with, and occasionally also invokes, recent developments in cognitive theory, which assumes a thoroughly embodied mind and considers the implications.

This chapter challenges the sweeping nature of readings such as Belsey’s and in doing so also challenges the idea that early modern conceptions of selfhood, not to mention models of cognition, are useful only—or even primarily—when they conceive of selfhood as fundamentally unified, embodied, and monistic. When Lucrece is read in the context of a specific, rarely discussed feature of Cicero’s republicanism—his skeptical treatment of Stoic thinking about whether the self is unified or split, monistic or dualistic, in structure—we arrive at new answers about the poem’s interest to us. Both Cicero and Lucrece present a difficult vision, infused with incertitude about selfhood’s structure; both also suggest that the self can seem both monistic and dualistic, can seem to shade from one into the other and back again. Whereas we, as moderns, supposedly “know” that body and mind are inseparable, Shakespeare’s poem suggests that viewing the two as somehow both separable and inseparable better conforms with experience, quite apart from questions of ontology, and also presents possibilities for the care of the self: in this case, for being republican before a republic has come into being, and for being so without falling into masculinist traps.

In my introduction I mentioned Shakespeare’s partiality to republicanism but not necessarily to clear republican institutions, and I would like to add a brief word about this with regard to Lucrece. Until recently, debates about Lucrece and its potentially republican cast have tended to revolve around whether the poem celebrates or belittles Brutus’s call for the overthrow of tyranny at the poem’s end. If Brutus emerges as a hero—as in Annabel Patterson’s account—the poem urges a republican polity; if not—as in the work of Heather Dubrow and Ian Donaldson—then Lucrece urges nothing of the sort.5 More recently, Andrew Hadfield has redirected the terms of this debate, locating the poem’s republicanism elsewhere than in the seven concluding stanzas, focusing instead on Tarquin’s failure to embody or respect republican ideals.6 Yet Hadfield, in keeping with earlier criticism, emphasizes ideals of negative freedom and positive liberty that fit within the frame of political structure. This chapter, by contrast, contends that the poem’s republican elements extend beyond political structure to include a pair of practices of the self, distinctly Ciceronian as well as distinctly skeptical, which might allow for the preservation of republican forms of life in the absence of actual republics. I focus not on Shakespeare’s interest in republican constitutions but on his engagement with how republicans are constituted: with the metaphors that inform their ethical outlooks. In the next three sections I consider the poem mostly alongside classical thought, with an eye to how the poem’s skepticism urges a practice, leaving the poem’s political implications for the final section. There, I show that whereas republicanism, masculinism, and mind-body dualism are often aligned, in Lucrece Shakespeare reconfigures all three, offering a skeptical way out of such unhappy alignment.

Battering Down the Consecrated Wall: Body and Soul in Lucrece

After Tarquin rapes Lucrece, Shakespeare portrays the rapist’s spiritual state:

… his soul’s fair temple is defaced,

To whose weak ruins muster troops of cares

To ask the spotted princess how she fares.

She says her subjects with foul insurrection

Have battered down her consecrated wall,

And by their mortal fault brought in subjection

Her immortality, and made her thrall

To living death and pain perpetual;

Which in her prescience she controlled still,

But her foresight could not forestall their will. (719–28)7

Tarquin’s soul, the text implies, could have been immortal, had her “subjects” (here figured as will and desire) not been in revolt. Yet there is no sense that the reasoning mind or soul has the capacity to quell revolt once it occurs. The soul is inert, if resistant, a consecrated wall unable to withstand fleshly desire: “My will,” Tarquin remarks earlier, “is strong past reason’s weak removing” (243). Tarquin assumes that selfhood is split into competing faculties, with reason struggling against the bodily desire that has overtaken will. What foresees cannot forestall what moves.

This split structure seems to present a philosophical problem commonly associated with dualism: that if the self really is split along the lines that oppose the reasoning soul and bodily desire, reason has no way of communicating with, let alone of controlling, desire. And yet desire can destroy the soul. Though a boundary separates Tarquin’s soul and body, selfhood for him is only provisionally split; desire can violate the boundary irrespective of what the reasoning soul might wish, thus undermining the Stoic claim—a claim, we will see, which Cicero himself makes only inconsistently—that the self always can retreat into an inner citadel.8 In Tarquin these confines collapse, making him monistic in structure. One part of the body / soul binary not only controls the other, as is possible in many dualistic frameworks, but overwhelms, suffuses, and pollutes the other.

The portrayal of Tarquin, then, implies a wish for dualistic or split selfhood, with either only enough connection between mind and bodily desire to allow the former to control the latter, or enough solidity in the boundary separating the two to bar the latter from ensnaring the former. Either Shakespeare wishes that Tarquin’s reasoning soul were possessed of agency that could constrain and dominate desire,9 or Shakespeare wishes for the boundary protecting the rational soul to be incapable of erosion. The structure of Tarquin’s self disallows both possibilities, but we should bear in mind that that structure is, nonetheless, conditional. His body and soul could have remained separable; in the poem’s presentation, no stable ontology forbids separation. A provisional soul-body split yields to a sinister unity.

Tarquin’s structure, like Lucrece’s, seems a function not of fixed ontology but of shifting context. After the rape, she also reflects upon the relationship between body and soul, in a way that implies a temporary unity:

My body or my soul, which was the dearer,

When the one pure the other made divine?

Whose love of either to myself was nearer,

When both were kept for heaven and Collatine?

Ay me, the bark pilled from the lofty pine,

His leaves will wither and his sap decay;

So must my soul, her bark being pilled away. (1163–69)

In this stanza, Lucrece’s eschewal of dualism parallels Tarquin’s insofar as the body influences the soul but not vice versa, revealing the soul’s dependence on the body. As the purity of Lucrece’s body made her soul immortal, so its impurity makes her soul decay. Comparing her body to a protective covering for a soul that cannot survive when exposed, she verges on denying the soul any separate existence. Here her position resembles that of strong monism—in which body and mind are inseparable, and of one substance—but the end of the stanza indicates a change. Lucrece says of her soul that

Her house is sacked, her quiet interrupted,

Her mansion battered by the enemy,

Her sacred temple spotted, spoiled, corrupted,

Grossly engirt with daring infamy.

Then let it not be called impiety

If in this blemished fort I make some hole

Through which I may convey this troubled soul. (1170–1176)

Lucrece now lays claim to a saving divisibility of body and soul, such that she might extract the soul from the blemished fleshly fort. So doing, Lucrece seems to have shifted from espousing strong monism to entertaining the possibility of either property dualism (in which body and mind are of one substance, but of differing properties) or substance dualism (in which the two are distinct substances).10 Taken together, however, the stanzas suggest that Lucrece proceeds with a flexible self-conception, one that accommodates both monism and dualism; in her view, the body-soul relation is a matter of context and practice. She wishes for division yet does so on the basis that body and soul verge on being damnably indivisible.

I will focus on resemblances between classical philosophy and the flexibility that marks Shakespeare’s portrayal of Tarquin and Lucrece, but Shakespeare’s position also resembles ones inherited from Christian tradition. From Philo to Augustine to Aquinas, the body threatens to institute indistinction between itself and the soul, making the self monistic in making the soul as perishable as the body.11 Yet unified selfhood, for Lucrece, if not always for early Christian figures, was unproblematic prior to Tarquin’s crime. Lucrece believes in a world where selves, depending on situation, can be either monistic or dualistic without moral taint. To clarify Shakespeare’s position, we thus do well to turn to classical ethics—and especially to Cicero. First, though, I want to examine how Lucrece’s position both resembles and differs from that put forth by Epictetus, whose outlook on this point resembles that of early Christian traditions. Of the relationship between body and soul, Epictetus posits:

If a tyrant threatens me at court, I say, ‘What is he threatening?’ If he says, ‘I will put you in chains,’ I say, ‘He is threatening my hands and feet.’ If he says, ‘I will behead you,’ I say, ‘He is threatening my neck.’ If he says, ‘I will throw you into prison,’ I say, ‘He is threatening my entire body’; if he threatens exile, I say the same. ‘Well, then, aren’t you threatened a little?’ If I feel that these things are nothing to me, then no. But ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Half Title
• Introduction: Shakespeare’s Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness
• 1. Ciceronian Skepticism and the Mind-Body Problem in Lucrece
• 2. “It stops me here”: Love and Self-Control in Othello
• 3. The Winter’s Tale: Faith in Law and the Law of Faith
• 4. Doubtful Freedom in The Tempest
• 5. Looking Two Ways at Once in Timon of Athens
• Epilogue: Shakespeare as a Way of Life
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index