Bard's Brain
VALIUNAS, ALGIS
Bard's Brain What did Shakespeare think, and why did he think it? by Algis Valiunas Shakespeare is a force unlike any other in literature, and penetrating critics have recognized not only his...
...McGinn tends to seize upon some abstraction familiar from his readings in philosophy that he identifies as the theme of the play, then rounds up every line he can find to illustrate the theme...
...In one sense, Shakespeare was no moralist at all: in another, he was the greatest of all moralists...
...Teaching that what one commonly knows of another man is what one sees of him, and that one must touch him to apprehend his true nature, Machiavelli swiftly gets to the point that McGinn labors long-windedly to make about Othello...
...by Algis Valiunas Shakespeare is a force unlike any other in literature, and penetrating critics have recognized not only his preternatural creative vitality but also the questions it raises about his moral judiciousness...
...Prospero contrives the shipwreck of a party that includes Antonio and other bitter enemies, and instructs his spirit minion to appear in fearsome majesty to those men who, disbelieving the existence of any force superior to their own appetites, have offended against all creation...
...Working out his line of patter about "the asymmetry in epistemological power," McGinn offers no sense, as Bloom so eloquently does, of how Othello and Desdemona fell in love—their love is platonic, which, contrary to popular belief, is the most passionate of loves— and how the nature of that love—he is almost wholly dependent on her, and unaware of his dependence—makes Othello peculiarly vulnerable to Iago's seductive murderousness...
...Wittgenstein's exemplary man and artist is Beethoven...
...McGinn's perfunctory and unoriginal reading does not take in the least bit of this wondrous Shakespearean philosophizing...
...His writings are not hortatory, not preachy, and not didactic...
...He showed the greatest knowledge of humanity with the greatest fellow-feeling for it...
...For these critics, implicit in the world that Shakespeare presents is his profound judgment on the action, his teaching about particular sorts of men as their souls are shaped by the regimes under which they live...
...Only in the light of this 'history' can Shakespeare's deepest intention—to be the poet-philosopher of the English-speaking peoples, the teacher of its citizens, statesmen, and legislators—be comprehended...
...Macbeth attempts to live as though the Machiavellian world of savage reasonableness were the real one...
...and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations...
...sadly, it is more interesting in summary than it is in detail...
...One might take McGinn to mean here that reading or watching Shakespeare can be as encompassing an experience as beholding God's Creation...
...Macbeth subverts the conventional understanding of a man's character as the determinant of his actions, and shows instead a series of actions that utterly change a man's character: "It isn't that choice results from character...
...McGinn describes a Shakespeare who was a moral philosopher without being a moralizer: "Shakespeare was not in the business of issuing condemnations, or instituting social reforms, or chastising evildoers...
...This is the saddest play of them all...
...In his Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), Samuel Johnson writes, "Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature...
...Although Shakespeare does not create characters as mouthpieces for his own opinions, neither is he "merely a disinterested recorder" of moral reality—which, after all, includes a monstrous portion of unjustified suffering...
...If Shakespeare could have merged with nature (while retaining his artistic powers), he would have...
...McGinn scraped some Shakespeare together and came up with a book...
...To prove Hazlitt right is McGinn's overriding intention, and he sets out to show how several perennial themes of philosophy inform some of Shakespeare's greatest plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest...
...Here in an excess of love she reels...
...The third Plebeian is not clever...
...for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies...
...for it is always a writer's duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independant on time or place...
...This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate...
...In Hazlitt's eyes, universal compassion, which grants Shakespeare entry to an unprecedented variety of interior lives, supplants conventional moral judgment as the literary virtue par excellence...
...Montaigne, Hume, Sartre, and the rather less celebrated but not unworthy Erving Goff-man form the matrix for McGinn's inquiry into Hamlet, which he calls "fundamentally a play about the constitution of the self," and incidentally a profession of Shakespeare's own belief "in the reality of things we cannot comprehend...
...One begins by being transfixed and ends needing to understand...
...The comprehensive reader has yet to appear who will set down the true understanding of Shakespeare, philosopher, poet, spectacular natural phenomenon, and great human being...
...We seek knowledge of each other—to know and be known—but we easily fail in that quest...
...When one compares McGinn's critical rendering of Othello with that of another philosopher writing about Shakespeare, Allan Bloom in Shakespeare's Politics (1964), the thinness of McGinn's understanding becomes only too apparent...
...Rapture shades almost imperceptibly into philosophizing...
...seems to write without any moral purpose...
...They both know at this time that Romeo is a banished man and must leave Verona...
...This willful false presentiment, the nightingale replacing the lark, has nothing of the spooky quality of the other mis-predictions in the play...
...It is luminously human, wholly understandable...
...This teaching does not take the form of explicit declarations, but emerges from a complex tissue of the characters' thoughts, words, and deeds...
...Subverting classical and Christian morality, Machiavelli preaches the innocence of "the natural and ordinary desire to acquire"—to seize as much power, renown, wealth, or sex as it takes to satisfy your craving...
...McGinn's potentially fruitful approach, his philosophic learning, and his intelligence ought to have made this book richer than it is...
...In King Lear the ethical teleology of a world animated by divine benevolence is irremediably overthrown, and the brute purposelessness of the sort of causality that Hume described—in McGinn's words, "simply one thing following another, without any plan, reason, or even necessary connec-tion"—prevails to harrowing effect...
...but in Macbeth's world, uncanny agents are a part of nature and nature avenges itself on unnatural evildoers: Witches make dire equivocal predictions that eerily come true, Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, and a man not born of woman strikes Macbeth down...
...At his best, Nuttall writes with passionate simplicity, as of Juliet's aubade to Romeo, her poem of parting at dawn: "Wilt thou be gone...
...William Hazlitt, on the other hand, cuts against this grain in Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), finding a higher morality precisely in Shakespeare's taking the amoral plenum of nature as his model...
...His plays are not ethical precepts dressed up in dramatic form...
...This is criticism serious about ideas as they are embodied in the drama...
...On the island where the exiled Prospero has washed up, he rules by magic the spirit Ariel, one of the legion of invisible powers that the prudent, disenchanted mind of Machiavelli had banished from the modern world...
...In The Tempest, Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, has had his rule usurped by his wicked brother, Antonio, who is the consummate Machiavellian political man, strictly an intelligent animal compounded of such characteristics of various other animals as he might require at different times, lacking a conscience, fearing only bodily pains, recognizing no human fellowship, and wanting above all to acknowledge no equals...
...He brings morality into the heart of his dramas because morality is part of nature...
...When it comes to seeing the depths on the surface, neither McGinn nor Nuttall quite compares to the best critics of Shakespeare's thought, the Straussian political philosophers: Allan Bloom, Harry V Jaffa, John Alvis, Christopher Flannery, Leo Paul S. de Alvarez, Michael Platt, and other contributors to the 1981 collection Shakespeare as Political Thinker...
...The spectacle that Shakespeare sets before his audience necessarily prompts a moral response...
...the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life...
...Witlessly, they are cheering for Brutus, the new star...
...McGinn freely confesses, whether with becoming guilelessness or overweening brashness, that his study of Shakespeare was a project picked up when he had some time on his hands during a sabbatical, and in too many respects Shakespeare's Philosophy seems like the left-handed work of a very clever man in a hurry...
...Thus, McGinn writes of Othello: "The epistemological barrier between people cannot be surmounted even by the most intimate of connections...
...People stare at him in wonderment, almost as at a spectacular natural phenomenon...
...Knowledge of other men's souls that runs as broad and deep as Shakespeare's produces a corresponding human warmth, which might even be called a creator's love for his creatures...
...But his words are loaded with meaning, with the burden of a dark futurity...
...The meaning does not lie behind the plays, as the subtitle of McGinn's book declares, but on their surface...
...He bulls his way through a line of argument rather than walk devotedly around the works and peer into their graces and subtleties...
...It was the nightingale, and not the lark, / That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear...
...Rather with a phenomenon...
...The skeptical question posed by Montaigne in the Essays, around 1580, and amplified by Descartes in the Meditations (1641)—whether waking reality might not, in fact, all be a dream—enfolds the fantastic world of Shakespeare's comedy...
...Indeed, he goes so far as to say that Shakespeare desired to join himself to nature and to create as it does, with spontaneous flowing genius...
...In The Tempest Shakespeare examines "the influence of language over human consciousness and conduct," and uncharacteristically composes an allegory of the artist, his creative spirit, and his audience...
...What makes the lines so touching is that they are given to Juliet, the realist...
...He is babbling mindlessly...
...Macbeth and The Tempest, on the other hand, present lessons in the ultimate failure of Machiavellianism...
...and unlike McGinn, who tends to be provocatively blunt, Nuttall is discursive, sometimes dazzling in his leaps of insight and wild rambles through arcane learning, sometimes maundering, convoluted, and tedious...
...Nuttall, a onetime professor of English at Oxford, whose Shakespeare the Thinker is emblazoned with raves from Harold Bloom and other Shakespearean eminences, fares little better with The Tempest, invoking Star Trek to make the case for Shakespeare's final play as "incipient science fiction," seeing incestuous desires for Miranda on Prospero's part, and suspecting that Prospero—the most lavishly gifted and most superbly accomplished of all the men Shakespeare imagined, peerless in wisdom, magniloquence, power, and justice—is bound for hell like Doctor Faustus for his trafficking in magic...
...They do not have the feeling that this brings them into contact with a great human being...
...Nuttall comments: One can almost smell the air at the open window, see the lightening sky...
...He was a moralist in the same sense in which nature is one...
...Johnson, to astonish with unrelenting verbal energy or to beget a world in language is not enough...
...One has to know how to look so as not to miss it...
...But the "third Plebeian," just as enthusiastic as the others, shouts, "Let him be Caesar...
...Bloom steeped himself in Shakespeare until he was ready to write...
...His aim as author is to disappear morally...
...For Wittgenstein as for Dr...
...The people are not cheering for Republicanism...
...He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he Algis Valiunas is a writer in Florida...
...the true poet and great human being must also conceive and transmit a moral order...
...And following the lead of Shakespeare's detractors, like Wittgenstein, as well as that of his most lavish admirers, McGinn identifies nature as Shakespeare's prime inspiration and instructor...
...Writing about Measure for Measure, Hazlitt argues: Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers...
...Ludwig Wittgenstein is similarly unsettled to find no moral core to Shakespeare, and thus no inspiriting teaching in his works...
...This is, in a way, the central tragedy of the play—the tragedy of knowledge...
...Unlike McGinn, who focuses on a handful of plays, Nuttall takes on the dramatic corpus...
...I do not think that Shakespeare would have been able to reflect on the 'lot of the poet.' Nor could he regard himself as a prophet or as a teacher of mankind...
...This is so abstract as to be useless as literary criticism, and so banal as to make philosophy cringe...
...The late A.D...
...A notable shortcoming of McGinn's book from the philosophical end is that he never mentions the greatest of Renaissance philosophers, who was a pervasive influence on Shakespeare: Machiavelli...
...Juliet was always the one whose feet were on the ground, who saw things steadily...
...What makes it great as a moment in drama is the combination of economy with enormous implication...
...character can result from choice...
...McGinn opens his book with two quotations from Hazlitt, who remarked of Othello that Shakespeare "was as good a philosopher as he was a poet," and who found in Coriolanus "the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher...
...Such profusion and exactitude of imagination, however, bring out a certain indifference to moral precept, perhaps not unlike that of nature itself: His first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evil in books or in men...
...In Harry Jaffa's words, "Shakespeare's work, seen as a whole, comprehends what today would be called a history of western civilization...
...Those four words placed in the mouth of the third Plebeian constitute the most telling political moment in the history of drama...
...Nuttall can also be especially astute at describing the dramatic effect of Shakespeare's political thinking, as in the third Plebeian's response to Brutus' speech defending the assassination of Julius Caesar in the name of the Roman Republic...
...The philosopher Colin McGinn, professor at the University of Miami and the author of 16 previous books, trying his hand at Shakespearean criticism in Shakespeare's Philosophy, quotes this passage from Hazlitt approvingly...
...In McGinn's somewhat tortuous explanation, the audience draws moral instruction from the plays although Shakespeare is patently not a moral instructor, or at least takes pains to conceal that he has a moral teaching to convey: "He shows us moral reality, without commentary...
...Othello is a diabolical exercise in epistemological darkness, exploring the evil that can be caused by the fact that the minds of others are opaque to us...
...Shakespeare was a kind of naturalist—an artist whose reportorial power was intended to lie as close to nature as possible," he writes...
...He taught what he had learned from it...
...It is not yet near day...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 3
