“I’ll have grounds more relative than this—
the play’s the thing …”
Hamlet II.ii.583–84
I propose a beginning in the effort to investigate Shakespeare’s understanding of honor as a motive subject to moral scrutiny and as a phenomenon within politics subject to regulation with a view to the common good. To make a start I must raise several questions the determination of which strikes me as a condition for understanding Shakespeare’s principles in the way his poetry instructs us to make inferences from poetic particulars to general conclusions. The questions I pose bear upon a concern to grasp how Shakespeare guides us in considering honor-seeking, first, morally and by reference to an ideal order within the individual human soul. The “absolute” of my title refers to this dimension of the subject. The relativistic dimension will occupy me thereafter. By “relative” I mean a Shakespearean understanding of the part played by honor-seeking relative to particular political regimes. Aristotle said that, speaking generally, political life is chiefly concerned with honor. A regime distinguishes itself from others by what it honors, and a political society distributes offices and power in accord with its estimate of what should be esteemed. Shakespeare distinguishes such communities as Britain, Rome, Scotland, and Venice by reference to this principle. Yet because I contend Shakespeare thinks of honor not as absolutely but only provisionally a worthy object of choice, this relative understanding embraces also what the dramas depict regarding various institutions regimes have relied upon for regulating and channeling ambition toward the common good. This chapter can aspire to no more than making a start because to the questions it raises my answers must be provisional—though I trust suggestive—since my examination of the regimes Shakespeare has depicted in his plays must confine itself to Rome and England. These political orders Shakespeare has presented with more particularity than one finds in his portrayal of other polities. Both the Roman setting and the British we find have drawn the dramatist’s attention at beginning, middle, and end of his career. Yet to make more than a beginning one would need to take account of the constitutions and institutions peculiar to other civil societies encountered in the plays and poems.
To infer reliably regarding how the plays dispose us toward honor requires attending to related issues equally fundamental. First, what I should think most important to decide is whether one can discover in Shakespeare’s works a conception of the divine in terms of which cultivating honor could find its proper place among endeavors either enjoined or proscribed by religious faith. Does such a conception of what a divine authority may require regarding honor lie within Shakespeare’s own convictions as distinct from notions evident in characters he depicts? It is not obvious that the sonnets, the narratives, or the dramas display a Shakespearean belief in divinities, or in the one God held by Jews, Christians, and Islamists to be supremely divine to the exclusion of every other pretender. “Nothing” I mean forthrightly asserted in such manner as Milton, say, by declarations in his own person makes evident his subscribing to belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. One finds Shakespeare making no confession of belief of that sort. In a few instances the plays may stage classical pagan divinities (Hymen, Diana, Jupiter, Hecate maybe), yet these odd intrusions seem fanciful extrusions, not solemn theophanies suggestive of intent to convey and to inspire reverence. Even so, the absence of professions of faith seems not to settle the issue in the negative. Why not? For one thing regarding belief we expect some basis upon which to draw inference one way or the other because Shakespeare causes his characters to make so much of their belief or, in some instances, of their disbelief. Hamlet consults his faith in a God who creates, oversees individual conduct, and punishes or rewards in an afterlife; Richard of Gloucester apparently moves from disbelief to a despairing conviction of his own damnation. Edmund of King Lear dismisses belief in boasting his allegiance to a Nature conceived as first moving efficient cause as well as final cause, since he equates both efficient and final causes with power. Lear himself first appears to believe in classical gods, subsequently comes to speak of a single Deity (“God’s spies”) and at the end seems in doubt of any supervening divinity. At times Lear also speaks of Nature as though that principle is—or ought to be—supremely authoritative. For that matter so does Shakespeare in the sonnets, although even in the same sonnet he may refer to an ordaining “Heaven” operating in tandem (Sonnet 94).1 In the pre-Christian setting of King Lear an Edgar disguised as a madman speaks in the manner of a Christian fearing tormenting devils, whereas in his proper mind, he fabricates a miracle in order to deceive his father into belief that gods have prevented his suicide, an act of desperation which, so Edgar swears, a demon had provoked. Pros-pero also contrives to make others believe in supernatural judges who are punishing sins and requiring amendment. Does Prospero himself believe in “providence divine,” a phrase he once employs in conversation with Miranda (though he also attributes a widely disposing power to “fortune”), or does he merely think it proper to induce such trust in his young daughter? Pious Gonzalo attributes to divine plan (“the gods have chalked our way”) the play’s propitious outcome which, however, has actually been arranged by Prospero’s contrivances. Except to the audience in his Epilogue, Prospero himself does not pray. Has Shakespeare, then, created Edgar and Prospero in order to remind us of a perennially available philosophic alternative to piety of any sort? Does he thereby endorse the position that no religious faith is true altogether and none simply false, but all useful to the wise skeptic? One desires to know whether the question must be pursued beyond merely noting Shakespeare’s grasping the importance to poets and rulers of understanding the uses and abuses afforded by religion, the importance of taking beliefs regarding the supernatural into account. I suspect but cannot establish that Shakespeare identifies the Supreme Being with the God of whom one speaks rightly only when one attributes to him actions consistent with the sovereignty implied in the phrase “Nature’s God.” That is to say nature faintly personified but solely for the purpose of connoting an agency best imagined as producing the operations of a rational being unaffected by passion. Human beings are images of God in the sense of their being imperfect similitudes, that is to say sufficiently reasonable to surmise what form complete rational self-governance would take but themselves capable of no more than a scant approximation of such completion.
A complete understanding of what constitutes wisdom with respect to pursuit of honor depends upon resolving this theological question. For if there exists such a Supreme Being as the patriarchs and prophets claim to have heard or that which the Christian evangelists claim to have witnessed, pursuit of honor would seem to be at best a distraction from the one thing needful. Alternatively, how would things stand if divinity should be conceived, not as a Supreme Person but as a principle best discerned in thinking what reason would be if perfectly devoid of passion? On that reckoning honor-seeking would still be a distraction from perfecting reason. Any ambition other than an all-consuming desire to understand would impede that fulfillment of reason via contemplative activity which the old philosophers conceived to be human finality. Seeking honors would, however, deserve a higher estimate than the Hebrew or Christian scriptures encourage. Attaining honor would amount to a good subjoined to a more authoritative purpose. That is, it would be a good provided it should be employed to enlarge the rule of reason. Presently this last thought will deserve further attention.
If my first query lies some distance beyond, a second I will pose comes nearer my pay grade. Can one deduce Shakespeare’s concept of the nature of the human soul? Would a rehabilitated version of an ancient view suffice? A promising working thesis one might devise by considering a commonplace that could be gleaned from any one of several Platonic dialogues or from remarks by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations.2 This classical moral psychology produces the familiar schema of a tripartite psychic hierarchy. Soul is the principle of self-motion. The soul’s motion at any particular moment of choice will be determined by the interplay of three influences. Taking these in ascending order, the passions give a certain impetus varying in kind and intensity according to the chooser’s bodily constitution and habitual character. A second influence one finds exerted by the special emotions attributed to spiritedness, an array of associated emotions by which a person feels indignation, ambition, and will to dominate. A third influence upon both making a decision and determining means of executing choice is the non-emotional cause identified with reason in one of reason’s two modes of activity. A soul operating in accord with its best constitution succeeds in governing its passions and spirited emotions by its reason. This is the ideal human condition productive of self-motion proceeding from self-knowledge. Self-knowledge, in turn, amounts to knowing what one is in the light of what one ought to be.3 But Shakespearean drama either depicts characters that make their choices while in a condition well short of ideal, or depicts souls closer to the ideal yet so situated as having to contend with others more distant than themselves from rational self-government. A Shakespearean drama provides us with rational treatment of human beings conducting themselves more or less irrationally, or rationally merely in the sense of calculating effectively upon means to ends, ends themselves dictated by passion or spirited emotions. We learn the right order of souls by coming to perceive many derangements of that order together with rare positive exemplars, the latter chiefly if not exclusively confined to comedies: Prospero, Duke Vincentio, perhaps Theseus and Belmonte’s Portia.
The two Henry IV plays and Henry V testify to this psychic dynamic in the manner Virgil had adopted for presenting Aeneas, Dido, and Turnus when he had dramatized in all three characters a psychomachia setting a rational principle contending with both spirited and fleshly impulses while assigning to Aeneas the preeminent degree of reason, to Dido erotic passion in ascendant degree, in Turnus spiritedness dominant over reason. In the three plays just mentioned Shakespeare distributes these three contending faculties among separate characters. In each case one of the three dispositions predominates; in Falstaff intemperate bodily passions, in Hotspur spiritedness heedless of calculation; in Henry Monmouth spiritedness submissive to cool reckoning. Henry IV shares with his son a superior capacity for calculation, but in the father cunning presides over a flagging ambition whereas the son puts forethought in service to an honor-seeking spiritedness that proves sovereign over filial devotion, friendship, patriotism, and justice. Once the drunkard, whoring and avaricious Falstaff suffers Hal’s rebuke at the end of the second play, his fraction of a soul must be reprised in the several scoundrels who were his friends and who tag along with Henry V to France. Hotspur slain in combat by Henry Monmouth bequeaths his share of the tripartite soul to the braggart French. In all three plays the plot advances to a climax predestined by the young prince proceeding through scenes setting Henry’s plan to “attract more eyes” in counterpoint with unworthy alternatives represented by tavern-friends (epithumia), warrior-antagonist (thumos) and father (cold calculation). This design adapts the format of medieval morality plays to a secular version thereof, substituting as its aim personal self-conquest in place of sanctity: replacing Everyman with monarch-in-potentia overcoming propensities toward un-princely conduct soliciting him in three “Tempters,” personifying so many exemplars of false teachers. In place of discovering God’s grace the young prince should acquire a soul well-tempered by the classical standard of moderation (sophrosyne). Henry IV, Part 1 concludes with Hal triumphant over Hotspur and over bad companion Falstaff as the prince-in-making exploits that in himself which resembles Hotspur to overcome Falstaff while employing the calculating opportunism of his father to conquer the part of himself which resembles the vainglorious rebel leader. Add Hal’s making use of Falstaff’s satire against the usurper Bolingbroke (e.g., Harry cannot claim blood kinship with his father if he hasn’t a stomach for thievery; the usurping king’s scepter is a dagger) and one might suppose Shakespeare has devised a manual for the preparation of princes in an era of skepticism. Hal realizes his father’s usurpation has discredited respect for the claim that royal authority enjoys divine protection, seeks indeed to publicize the lesson while assured that his personal strength and wit will suffice to restore the authority which had once rested upon widely voiced but untrustworthy and now exploded conventions. His father’s liability will serve as the dull foil against the background of which his own merit will shine all the more stunningly.4
Such a reading of the Henry plays has its proponents yet it must confront a difficulty that appears when one asks whether Prince Harry’s prefabricated reformation indicates his devotion to justice or merely discloses a self-command he has possessed all along, yet a self-mastery as serviceable to unjust rule as to justice. None of Shakespeare’s sources had attributed to the young scofflaw this scheme of premeditated reform. The one soliloquy in which Harry explains himself to himself confides his intent to simulate lawlessness in order to “arouse more wonder” by the pretense of his having suddenly acquired responsible sobriety. Since Henry Monmouth refers on two subsequent occasions to his plan of simulation we must take it seriously. Moreover, we may sense Hal takes no satisfaction in his celebrated dissipations. He enjoys Falstaff’s company only when it affords him opportunity for a combat of wits. The competition answers to his delight in victory whatever the field of exercise. Thus Hal can find even in Eastcheap enjoyments, which, while simulating dissipation, actually satisfy his taste for spirited exertion. Shakespeare’s refinement upon the classical conception of psychic dynamics lies in his recognition of the utility for advancing spirited ambition afforded by pretending low vice. As a dramatist he knows, as does Hal, that “nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.” This is in keeping with his sensitivity to theatricalism as a component of public life. That all the world’s a stage no one knows better than Henry Monmouth.
Yet Shakespeare further resembles the classical moralists in discerning the political costs incidental to a reputation for viciousness even if the vices be counterfeit. Hal’s pretense of lawlessness and dissipation encourages lawlessness in earnest from common thieves as well as rebellion on the part of subjects who fear such a prince’s succeeding to the throne. Then, since the pretense largely constitutes the heir-apparent’s preparation for rule, one has to wonder whether Hal has set himself to crave ever more spectacular coups de theatre as that which he has first contrived. Where does the king go from here? Eliot’s first tempter failing to revive in Thomas Becket a taste for diversions he had indulged in youth says in parting he will leave the Archbishop to his “higher vices.” Shakespeare similarly directs attention to the problem of enlisting spiritedness in the service of justice and confining it to that function. In the First Alcibiades and again in The Republic Plato’s Socrates takes on the task of educating high-spirited young noblemen because he grasps that although anger of the sort occasioned by indignation over injustice belongs to spirited souls, their love of honors and victory at times promotes, but with equal probability at other times opposes, justice.
The concluding scene of Henry IV, Part 2 displays Hal’s submitting himself to the Lord Chief Justice after having boxed the ears of this highest officer of the law after the king. Yet a cloud of uncertainty still occludes the “reformed” Prince, now King, because this turnabout Harry has seized as yet another wonder-arousing spectacle securing his accession and attendant glory without cost to himself. Part 2 ends without having established the new king’s capacity for promoting justice in circumstances wherein he cannot expect spectacular glory. To my mind the final play of the tetralogy answers the question of Henry’s devotion to justice in the negative. Henry V depicts a brilliant self-mastering leader conducting a war unjust in its aims and big with predictable troubles for victorious England, troubles Shakespeare had already depicted in the first tetralogy and to which he has the Chorus make allusion in an Epilogue appended to this final play of his Henriad.
I should mention another feature common to Shakespearean characterization and classical moral psychology, this too accompanied by a Shakespearean refinement. The better known version of the classical teaching I have been expounding maintains that reason governs passion not directly but in partnership with spiritedness. The spirited emotions aiming at honor or at avoiding shame join with reason to subdue appetites that look no farther than immediate sensual pleasures or avoidance of pain. Diverging from this predominant view, Shakespeare appears to consider spiritedness more disruptive of reason than the bodily passions.5 More thorough-going in disruption than mere sensualists, spirited souls precipitate the large commotions, the wars, assassinations, usurpations, revenges, and sexual intrigues dramatized in Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories. Their harm begins within individual souls and extends to societies. Ambition, anger or indignation, and will to prevail over others inflict disorder within the individual intellect together with ruin upsetting civic order, upheavals more terrific than the nuisances sensuality precipitates. For one Falstaff whose drinking, lusting, and thieving disturb the peace we see a dozen instances of murders, tortures, foreign and civil wars, mass proscriptions, corruption of law, and depredations upon property caused by ambition, will to power, or even patriotic anger (Brutus’s) directed against ambition (Caesar’s). Mark Antony afflicts himself with in-constancy and inflicts harm upon others not from simple lust but from desire to arouse admiration for the singularity of his and Cleopatra’s glamorized public display of their love. Falstaff’s incontinence, in itself merely harm on the small scale, does not take on real consequence until Prince Hal exploits his company and low amusements to advance a scheme for cornering a market in fame. Macbeth desires not power simply but the honor that attaches to exercising power. He more regrets loss of honor than the loss of wife and heaven. By thus calling into doubt the idea that spiritedness inclines to ally with reason does Shakespeare part company with a classical teaching he otherwise supports? Or, alternatively, does my impression owe simply to a dramatist’s having chosen to populate his stage with characters whose choices are of the sort to generate momentous political consequences?
A related issue arises from noting two distinct meanings of reason or the rational. To exercise reason in relation to the other sources of the soul’s activity is to conduct one’s self rationally, to achieve self-government, as commonly said. But we also designate with the same word the faculty employed in science, in theoretical speculation, by which we understand grasping the nature of things. To what degree does the latter, speculative science, depend upon the former, moral excellence? Is the desire to know itself subject to regulation on behalf of some super-ordinate moral obligation, or is an all-consuming intellectual desire the one unregulated regulator? Does discerning the natures of things require first subduing passion and spiritedness? Or, to reverse the question, can one act in accord with justice if one does not seek to know natures and that order of the whole referred to as Nature? One derives from the plays a sense of the dramatist’s conviction that doing justice requires intelligence in addition to benevolence. Does good government require a discernment wider or beyond prudence, require an understanding more theoretical than what consists with wise management? Equally crucial with regard to Shakespeare’s portrayal of public figures who impress us with their practical intelligence, to what extent is self-knowledge enabling self-direction dependent upon knowing the nature of things? Is moral excellence dependent upon excellence in the realm of theory? The example afforded by Prospero’s studies would seem to deny Shakespeare’s having considered the two functions of reason to be identical. Prospero says his preoccupation with cultivating science—even though the science had been the “liberal arts”—so undermined his governance that it provoked evil ambition in his brother and caused his dukedom to lose its liberty. Then, does Shakespeare give precedence to practical intelligence over theoretical? Or is it rather that the practical does depend upon the theoretical but only if the theoretical can keep mindful of politics while attending to studies apparently remote from politics? Something more than Prospero’s personal safety seems at stake, since, if the security of the contemplative were the only concern, Prospero could remain on his isle with or without his daughter, continue to have his needs provided by Caliban and rough magic, and live solely for those joys of unimpaired contemplation extolled by philosophers as otherwise disparate as Plato from Machiavelli? Then have I inverted the hierarchy Shakespeare actually has suggested? Is it that reason as governing has priority over reason as knowing essences or universals? Or, is it that Shakespeare has Prospero return to Milan and rule because Shakespeare thinks theory itself defective—precisely as theory—until completed by actual political rule, in Prospero’s case completing a virtue not yet attained?
Connected to this question one perceives another. Cicero says he diverges from Plato by his maintaining that some men can govern passion without invoking spirited emotions to assist reason. Cicero says he never knew Scipio Africanus to exhibit anger even in the midst of combat. Does Shakespeare conceive such self-sufficing reason in Prospero? At the crisis of the play Pros-pero says he is disturbed and his daughter says she has never seen him more so. Yet we have earlier witnessed him pretending to feel anger. Does he do so now for the benefit of Ferdinand, his chosen son-in-law and presumably his chosen successor? Does Shakespeare’s Caesar experience either fear or anger as observers believe he does, or does he coolly fabricate and dissimulate? In the instances just cited does the psychic chain of command proceed, not immediately from reason governing spiritedness which, in turn, regulates passion, but directly from the reason—a platonic charioteer revised, holding the reins of just one pinto horse representing spirited and passionate impulsions together?
Of that I am not certain, nor can I help much with a more vexing question: namely, when reason governs, never mind whether directly or indirectly calling on spiritedness for assistance, to what does reason look? No Shakespearean evidence occurs to suggest reason takes its bearings by reference to hyper-uranian ideas, as Plato’s Socrates speculates on one occasion. Hobbes would say calculation looks to the satisfaction of the last appetite felt prior to choice. Of this alternative likewise we lack dispositive evidence though Shakespeare depicts an abundance of unreflective characters to which the Hobbesian account would seem to apply. With some of the more thoughtful characters we are uncertain as to what the last passion preceding choice may be, whereas in the few most thoughtful, passion may seem never to exercise imperious command over reason.
The reader will have already grasped the connection between the queries I have thus far proposed, on the one hand, and, on the other, the problem of determining a Shakespearean understanding of honor. “Honor” designates with a single word two quite different, sometimes even opposed, dispositions. Honor in the sense of repute, credit, fame, glory, human respect one must consider a thing relative, that is, relative to what attracts praise from whatever body of opinion the seeker of fame has chosen to pass judgment on his plea. Honor in the sense of the deservedly honorable carries the meaning of an absolute standard of worth, what intrinsically warrants esteem whether or not it attracts opinion favorable to its possessor. A person who is honorable in this sense may be indifferent to honor in the sense of favorable opinion. If his demonstrated merit should confirm him in this self-estimate, we recognize him for the self-respecting, great-souled, or magnanimous man. Sonnet 94 appears to present such a figure in its first eight lines. Caesar’s North Star speech just prior to his slaying envisions a great-souled ruler as immoveable as the mind depicted in the sonnet. Yet cannot self-respect be groundless? As for Shakespeare’s conception of what might qualify for the intrinsically honorable, would it not be the case that to determine in what it consists we should need to answer some of the questions previously posed? Must we not determine especially what constitutes for Shakespeare that good, truth, or standard by looking to which reason governs the other elements of the soul? Reason as self-control seems to function negatively, by imposing restraints. But is there no positive impulsion, nothing to stir reason so as to set it moving, and moving toward some desirable good itself beyond restraint? Moreover, if we find that Shakespeare invites allegiance to a Supreme Being, would it not be necessary in order to arrive at a self-respect grounded in right judgment that the self-examining soul know the nature of that Being? If that Supreme Being equates with the Biblical Jehovah or with Jesus, self-respect, must be regarded as, so to speak, beside the point. For Jew, Christian, or Moslem the point lies in keeping oneself constantly mindful of the necessity of deferring every honor, redirecting every credit to God. Such is the meaning of the first of the two commandments which on the authority of both Deuteronomy and Jesus contain the entire law of God. Great deeds and virtues attributed to such figures as Abraham, Jacob, Moses, or David in truth belong to the God of Israel. Nothing of Deuteronomy’s injunction alters for followers of Jesus who himself yields all glory to the Father. St. Paul says of properly disposed Christians “Our glory is the testimony of our conscience” (II Corinthians 1:12). But even conscience must not credit itself but rather yield all praise to the divine grace which implants and sustains conscience. Among Shakespeare’s characters the one and only spokesman for such a view will be found in Henry Monmouth who decrees death for those of his soldiers who should presume to claim any part of the honor of the victory at Agincourt. This from the leader who prior to that conflict had inspired his men to a combat miracle by promising them lifelong fame and membership in a select brotherhood sharing his royal blood.
Harry displays the practical wisdom of speaking as if all depends on God, but only after exertions conducted in the belief that all depends on oneself. Neither will one discover the speaker of the sonnets anywhere disposed to practice the self-abnegation counseled in the gospels and by Paul. Shakespeare as sonneteer goes the length of assuring his beloved of deathless fame on the strength of his confidence of the fame in prospect for these sonnets. But of course since the beloved will never be named he must find what satisfaction he can in imagining that nothing other than these monuments of ink to Shakespeare’s own excellence will outlive him. Anxiety for honorable standing in the eyes of others appears to figure in the same degree that love figures as a concern among all men and women, pagan, Christian, or Jew, of ancient eras or modern, Roman, British, French, or Italian. Honor-seeking can show as conspicuously in women as in men: Volumnia, Lucrece and Cleopatra match almost any male aspirant in their desire for renown. Scholarly learning attracts the interest of noblemen only in a single play, wherein certain leisured aristocrats renounce love of women to set up a college of scholar wannabes. Yet they found their think tank not for the sake of knowledge itself but to acquire the celebrity they suppose attends the learned. Only in a single play does Shakespeare focus his plot on middle-class characters, but in that play the wives of Windsor are merry because they secure their wifely honor by contriving a series of humiliating deceptions they inflict upon the titled Sir John Falstaff. Descending to the groundlings, neither Roman nor British commoners are self-starters in pursuit of recognition, but they can be roused to spasms of ambition by their betters and do dependably respond to shame. Love and honor impel human beings with about equal force equally universal in extent as well as comparably diverse in application.
Shakespeare’s plays depict the effects of honor-seeking upon the individual soul and, at the same time, upon the common life of civil societies. Taking first the operation of the impulse upon the individual soul, I propose an accounting of effects by a cost-benefit assessment. What comes to sight from considering what ambition seeks and placing in the balance what it must pay to enjoy the benefit ambition has projected for itself?
I think we see the ledger emerging in this way: The person who sets his bearings by honor’s star expects, and may achieve, the virtues men agree should earn honor while he raises his sights above petty concerns. Such a soul may enjoy thereby the liberty one identifies with self-sufficiency, yet still win the friendship of others engaged in similar efforts, and taste in prospect a sort of personal immortality in the minds of future ages. Credit in other men’s eyes gives assurance of worth, bestows power, with power greater security for those one loves as well as some means of assisting those more distant who deserve support. Credit enables action and enlarges the scope of effectual action. In a Lucrece we see love for honor produce courage, a wider sense of responsibility, and a keener practical intelligence; in a Coriolanus ambition produces patriotism and contempt for ease and trifling pleasures; in a Brutus love of honor sustains attachment to the common good and the friendship of superior men; in an Antony nothing but honor’s residue keeps alive valor, hardiness, and generosity. Honor sustained or sought for supports in a Hotspur valor, contempt for dishonesty and resistance to usurped authority; in a Falconbridge, manly independence; in a Katherine of Aragon, feminine independence; in a Henry V, military and political genius; in a Hamlet, restored respect, however transient, for the obligations of a prince; in a Duke Vincentio, a resolve to reform his city; in the Windsor wives, a spirited defense of domestic integrity.
On the debit, honor’s attractions exact their costs in undermining self-knowledge, independence, and justice. Self-knowledge—if understood to consist in perceiving what one is against the measure of what a human being ought to be—suffers from courting the unreliable measure of opinion. So suffers also independence. Coriolanus seeks to be self-sufficient yet a selfless servant of his country. But because he mistakes honor for a great-souledness that can subsist without striving for repetitions of public approval he renders himself vulnerable to a populace and tribunes who refuse their approval, and inflexibly attached to contention with fellow citizens. Brutus seeks to resolve a difficult political crisis by consulting what he thinks public opinion expects of him rather than by giving due thought to those conditions that indicate the republic cannot be resurrected, then declines sensible means to an end dubious enough in its aim because he wants to maintain a reputation for purity of motives. Though not a hypocrite he thrusts back opportunities for self-knowledge preoccupied as he is with causing others to think well of him and on that basis thinking well of himself. Antony and Cleopatra are similarly preoccupied with calling a world to witness the singularity of their life of love such that their governance suffers as well as their love which languishes when it cannot draw upon the excitement provided by public display. Hotspur’s mind full of ambitions for military distinction cannot serve him in his other capacity as coordinator of a rebellion and judge of men. Hamlet admires the ambitious Fortinbras with such misguided emulation that he forgets the Norwegian’s unjust march against Hamlet’s country and in dying gives his consent to Denmark’s losing its independence to this bravo. He thereby proves more successful in assisting the foreign prince to avenge his father against Hamlet’s own father than he has been in avenging his own father against his father’s murderer. Henry Monmouth conducts a war unjust to France and not wise for the welfare of his own realm in order to provide an opportunity for his glory to surpass the spectacular exhibitions he has contrived for himself in the several overturning of expectations he has arranged for himself in the three previous plays. Does Shakespeare suggest that pursuit of honor is indispensable yet an unreliable ally of justice and prudence? Indispensable nonetheless because no other motive proves so effective for attaching spirited souls to public life? Does Shakespeare then agree with St. Augustine who thought he disparaged Roman virtues by imputing to Romans the motive of self-glory? Alternatively, does Shakespeare agree with the imputation but not with Augustine’s blanket disparagement? And, if so, is it because he rates the public life more highly than Augustine, or because his faith in higher purposes is less assured than Augustine’s?
The reader might conclude from the foregoing that I am proposing the dramatist conducted in his plays an argument with himself over the worthiness of cultivating reputation. So I am, yet not the sort of self-debating that enjoys running up to a blank wall. Think of it rather as an investigation leading to the issue of the need for identifying by what wisdom the energy derived from this universal human desire may be regulated for the perfection of the soul and the good of souls associated in civil societies. Even without definitive answers to the questions earlier posed we may profit from considering briefly what I have called this relative aspect of Shakespeare’s thoughts upon honor.
If the spirited impulse be thus universally distributed what then can one recognize to be relative and various in Shakespeare’s portrayal of honor? Honor proves to be from play to play relative to the varied character of political regimes depicted therein. The nature, costs, and benefits of the universal disposition Shakespeare shows to be relative to the particular form of political sovereignty that obtains in the regime depicted in any particular play.
Shakespeare has depicted the fortunes of two regimes over a course of time sufficient to reveal interdependencies between political institutions and the pursuit of honor. Rome in both republican and imperial eras, Britain, a monarchy in process of fundamental change, are his chosen settings for plays written in the early, the middle, and as well in the last years of his career. These plays together with one narrative poem Shakespeare has set, moreover, early, middle, and late in the respective histories of the two regimes. The beginning and end of Rome he considers and depicts Britain prior to its Christian era and extending up to the reign of Henry VIII with a forecast of the mode of rule initiated by Elizabeth. Of the two sets of plays, one can say, as Shakespeare has had one of his Romans say: “Honor is [his] story.” The Roman republic he imagines to have been founded upon a noblewoman’s resentment of dishonor suffered from the son of a tyrant. Junius Brutus exploits her indignation to change Rome’s constitution, extending the personal revenge to a political indignation against monarchy. Viewed in process of extemporizing institutions in the time of Coriolanus and then in retrospect from the crisis depicted in Julius Caesar, we see the principle that informs the Roman republic. Republican constitution, law, and education look to realize a conception of justice one may express in the formula: limitation of will maintained by competition for honors. Limitation of will follows upon a premise that all men without institutional restraints incline to partisan mischief and that the arbitrariness of tyrants licenses criminality in the sovereign. Roman republicans reject monarchy because they will not expose themselves to the risk of kings degenerating to tyrants. Their conception of rule of law envisions a condition in which no citizen should suffer subjection to the arbitrary will of others while the citizenry collectively are kept safe from rulers enforcing their arbitrary will. The republic exists for the sake of denying anyone authority to say—as Shakespeare’s Caesar on one occasion asserts: “The cause is in my will.” A plural executive, a legislative authority shared by a Senate acting only in concert with popular ratifying assemblies, popular vote on chief executives nominated by the Senate, written laws, and the vetoes and interpositions entrusted to the tribunes, all these provisions evolving in response to several historical crises answer to the purpose of shackling the partisan and arbitrary. The achieved result republican Romans extol as their liberty. This constitution has a soul, a principle of self-movement relying on a renewable source of energy. Competition for honors constitutes the animating principle. Not just any distinctions command esteem in Shakespeare’s Rome. Excellence in science or the fine arts never attracts notice among the republicans Shakespeare presents. Roman religion produces nothing resembling the saintliness for which a few Christians will come by such wide renown as they will acquire, though not by the saints’ desire. The strange notion of there being an excellence in sexual love appears only once the Empire has come to pass and even so Antony and Cleopatra are viewed as exotics. Chastity, fidelity, and patriotism earn distinction for Lucrece, Virgilia, Volumnia, Valeria, and Brutus’s Portia because these attainments support the public good. Service to the republic, whether service be shown in fields military, political, or domestic, continues to provide the only occupation deserving of praise so long as the republic endures. Even partisanship suitably confined can sustain this constitution. Shakespeare’s patricians enjoy expressing contempt for commoners, but so long as the class preens its snobbery the individuals comprising the class keep themselves safe from descending to demagoguery. The republican patrician Casca supposes the demagogue Caesar must faint away from the collected halitosis emitted from an adulating plebeian crowd. Once a preeminently successful patrician general overcomes the snobbishness he takes in with his mother’s milk, the republic must perish. Coriolanus thinks his honor depends upon his despising commoners. Brutus has something of the common touch but would not be a Caesar (though one voice in a crowd he momentarily captivates shouts he should). Pompey seems to have tried but Caesar beat him. Cassius might descend to rise if he had not been beaten in a previous war. Caesar stoops to conquer armed with requisite military prowess and party machinery. Alternatively, one can say once the republic has become an empire in its extent it has created thereby conditions for a single extraordinary man combining military with party leadership to terminate competition for honors by definitively surpassing all competitors. Caesar has contrived so to live, and perhaps has devised so to die, that he institutionalizes his name, thereby arranging perpetuity for his redirecting all public honors to himself.
If one should conclude as I do that the constitution Shakespeare has attributed republican Rome manages for five centuries to regulate ambition in a manner conducive to securing a durable independence together with liberty under law, and unprecedented security for individual rights, one would infer Shakespeare means to commend a republican form of government.
That inference leads to my final questions, these regarding Shakespeare’s portrayal of England’s constitution during an era extending from King John to Henry VIII. Does Shakespeare’s England possess means of channeling ambition comparable to those he has attributed the Roman republic? Evidently not. Shakespeare’s depiction of the British monarchical constitution seems to make it quite distant from that of the Roman republic because the basis of claims to distinction voiced or assumed by Shakespeare’s Englishmen appear almost always personal and remote from serving public good, as distinct from promoting family interests or the personal interests of other noblemen, including monarchs.
Yet my further question must venture somewhat beyond the bounds ordinarily observed by literary criticism: does England seem so distant from Roman consciousness of and devotion to a res publica because it was so, in fact, or because Shakespeare has by omission misrepresented the British constitution of the era he has dramatized? A virtual absence of Parliament as a feature of England’s constitution only just less important than the monarch is the omission or suppression to which I refer. So rarely do the history plays make mention of Parliament and so little is made of the legislative body on the few occasions it receives notice that it is fair to say Parliament has no dramatic presence. Its scant nominal presence just suffices to cause one to notice the institution’s effectual absence. If we had no record on which to rely save the Shakespeare Histories we would not know that Parliament was divided into a House of Lords and a House of Commons. A sharp ear for one remark made by an Archbishop in a single scene of a single play (Henry V) might produce an inference that a certain body of men called Parliament had some role in publicly deliberating upon legislation, yet one could infer nothing regarding the authority of that body relative to the king’s authority. No Shakespearean king appears before a Parliament or is reported to have done so, or proposes he will, or regrets he has or has not. No Shakespearean king—save one (see 2H4 V.ii.134, V.v.103)—ever mentions Parliament. All the more striking the anomaly when one takes account of English jurists writing in the era Shakespeare has depicted. These writers emphasize rule of law and the coordinate role of Parliament with monarch in making laws. For this reason Fortesque concludes his Britain of the fifteenth century realizes Thomas Aquinas’ model of a royal and political regime, “political” here meaning pertaining to a polity, Aristotle’s term for a mixed regime, or subsequent ages would say, a republic.6 Sir Thomas Smith, Elizabeth’s favored legal scholar explicitly categorizes Britain as a “res publica” in the title he gives to his well-known legal commentary and in that work maintains sovereignty to be vested in Parliament.7 Although it should be noted that such declarations were usually attended by the reservation that Parliament to be complete must provide for the presence of the king in its sessions and that of course the members are convened by royal writ and can be dismissed by him, even so the jurists cannot be held to have treated the deliberative body as though it did not share sovereignty with England’s monarchs.
It must remain a matter of conjecture why in rendering several crises of his country’s history spanning more than two centuries Shakespeare should have thought proper to have drawn a veil over an essential feature of the nation’s constitution. It could be that he has intended thereby to assert a view of effectual truth in opposition to professions “officially” sponsored. However much Englishmen take comfort in supposing they live under laws collegially produced, in truth Parliament’s role counts for next to nothing in comparison to less public determinations devised by kings and their court favorites. Or, to conjecture from the opposite quarter, it may be an attentive element of the audience he expects to carry home from the theater a lesson subsequently to be espoused by Whigs. Misrule is the massive impression conveyed by the ten Histories. Hence for champions of a stronger Parliament the plays would admonish with the lesson: observe what Englishmen suffer from arrogant as well as from weak monarchs who have sought to evade their responsibility to act in concert with a representative deliberative body. Whatever may account for Shakespeare’s distortion, his Englishmen are neither good Romans honor-loving yet regulated by sound political institutions, nor good Christians contemptuous of honor-seeking but thereby the more devoted to rectitude before the eyes of a God who sees all and requires righteousness. They desire to be well thought of as much or more than Shakespeare’s Romans do. But for Shakespeare’s English nobility honor takes the form of precedence in the favors bestowed by the monarch. The dispensing of honor is thus all too personal, the grounds upon which honor is claimed or conferred are often far from clear. Absent Parliament the pursuit of honors among Shakespeare’s Englishmen appears to have neither a proper field for its exercise nor a means for such regulation as would channel ambition toward promoting the safety and good of the realm. When we observe Shakespeare’s Romans we do seem to learn something of Rome. Whether we learn something equally reliable about the English constitution by reading Shakespeare’s Histories depends it seems upon resolving the question of his intent in his apparent infidelity to what actually was.
1. Sonnet 146 with its lament over a soul held captive by a “sinful” body and with its concluding adjuration to seek immortal life appears to attest conventional Christian spirituality. Yet its tenor, if orthodox, does not seem to carry over to any of the other 153 poems of the sequence. Moreover, immortality may even here refer to durable fame earned by poetic excellence or to living eternally in contemplating timeless truth. In any event the poem conveys no sense of devotion to a personal deity.
2. I have in mind similar discussions of a tripartite soul to be found in the three Platonic dialogues Republic, Phaedrus, and Timaeus. There are some differences in the three versions, and it is unclear to me whether one of the three accounts is to be preferred, or, indeed, if what is common among the three should be taken as a Platonic doctrine. A tradition of commentary has accorded Platonic “doctrinal” status to the three-part schemata. See, for instance, Plutarch’s reference to the horses of the soul in his Life of Marcus Antonius.
3. Paul Cantor has proposed Shakespeare’s assortment of characters in The Tempest intends to display the classical psychic divisions with Prospero embodying reason speculative and practical, Ariel and Ferdinand spiritedness, and Caliban, Stephano, Trinculo the bodily passions requiring government. See “Prospero’s Republic: Shakespeare’s Politics in The Tempest,” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. John E. Alvis and Thomas G. West (ISI Press, 2000, revised edition) 241–60. I suggest the relevance of this assumption to Shakespearean characterization generally in the dramas, narrative poetry, and the sonnets. The notion seems to me to account for more than either the theory of humors or a modern psychology that professes to treat the dynamics of the mind independently of moral judgments.
4. Once Bolingbroke has become the monarch we see in the two plays named for his reign that the burdens of royal office appear to place him in a new light. The scheming opportunist of Richard II now in private conversations with his son acknowledges himself to have been such, referring to his “bypaths and indirect crook’d ways” for which he prays “O God forgive” (2H4 IV.iii.313, 347). Then, as he approaches death, his grief has combined with genuine fear for the future of his subjects in the lawless reign he anticipates from his successor. Bolingbroke may be unique among Shakespeare’s kings for moral improvement upon acquiring power. As for his wisdom, the legislative plan he bequeaths his son for creating a new order of noblemen from taxes levied on ecclesiastical holdings arguably rests upon a basis more just and farsighted than the war Henry V finances and seeks to legitimate by bribing Archbishops with the promise of preventing his father’s tax legislation, then being deliberated in Parliament.
5. In this respect Shakespearean moral psychology resembles Virgil’s portrayal of spiritedness in the Aeneid (i.e. in his depicting of Dido, Turnus, and Aeneas), as well as Cicero’s account in Tusculan Disputations. I may misunderstand Plato’s Socrates, since I am assuming his assertion that the spirited emotions draw upon reason implies that spiritedness is more docile to reason than the lower passions. Yet my assumption does not follow of necessity from the partially rational character Socrates attributes to the spirited part of the soul. Similarly, from the same assumption I may have misunderstood Aristotle. These are issues requiring a more thorough sifting than can be attempted here.
6. Sir John Fortesque, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge University Press, 1997) 49. A similar claim for Parliament is found in Thomas Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, ed. George Woodbine, tr. Samuel E. Thorne (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1968) 33.
7. Sir Thomas Smith, On the Commonwealth of England II.1. Given the likelihood that in writing his Richard III Shakespeare acquainted himself with Sir Thomas More’s narration of the events Shakespeare incorporates in his play, he would have encountered in either More’s Latin or English version the statement that the authority of Parliament is “complete and absolute.” See The Complete Works of Thomas More, tr. and ed. Daniel Kinney (Yale University Press, 1986) Vol. 15: 320.