K.J. Spalding: The Philosophy of Shakespeare. Oxford: George Ronald, 1953.
“Shakespeare’s plays seem, at first sight, to reveal a mind remarkable for its imagination than for its logic.” In Spalding’s time, academic philosophy in the Anglophone world had become dominated by logicians, most of them logical positivists. By that standard, Shakespeare hardly qualifies as a philosopher. “Shakespeare may seem at first sight to have few of the characteristics of the philosopher. Yet poets and artists may be philosophers—philosophers at times more sensitive to the truth of things than those who endeavor to express it by reason and argument.” Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Nietzsche: though rare, such philosophers yield nothing in eminence to their more prosaic counterparts. Looking only at Plato, is dialogue not a sort of play? (Plato found a rival in Aristophanes, who recognized a competitor when he saw one.) And are dialogues not arguments? If so, they lend themselves to philosophy at least as readily as a treatise.
In some respects, Spalding has in mind the idea of the ‘natural philosopher,’ particularly the physician, who seeks not only to diagnose but to cure the patient before him. By his time, what had been called natural philosophy had been in large measure divorced from philosophy, having been reclassified as ‘science’ or knowledge, distinct from ‘philosophy’ or love of wisdom. Logical positivism was in some respects a response to this narrowing of the meaning of philosophy; in that sense, it registered not only a shift in the self-understanding of philosophers but a regime change in the universities in which most philosophers were employed. That is, academic philosophers were practicing politics, some of them without knowing it.
In Spalding’s, and Shakespeare’s, more capacious understanding of philosophy, the natural philosopher or, more precisely, the political philosopher who inquires into nature, may act as a kind of physician, both diagnostician and even, in rare circumstances, caregiver to patients, although more usually this task will be attempted by a ruler. The patient might be a person or a polity: “Presenting in different plays different maladies of men and of the State, [Shakespeare] likewise presents in them some physician with the task of alleviating or healing them.” This suggests that Shakespeare might partake not only of natural but of political philosophy in the Platonic-Socratic line. “Like the scientist confronted by the Chance of Nature, Shakespeare’s…rational spirit” attempts “rather to resolve his perplexities than to remain their victim.” Spalding treats the plays as a sort of philosophic ascent whereby Shakespeare “came to himself” as a philosopher.
As in Plato’s Symposium and elsewhere, the ascent originates in a sort of erotic longing. “Love looks and longs for beauty’s immortality.” For Socrates as for Shakespeare, the ladder of ascent goes beyond the natural philosophy of the early philosophers, through the human element of opinion, subjected to logical scrutiny, toward the ideas, beyond material physis. And if “the beauty of a thing of Nature touched the heart of Shakespeare”—as it does in his early poem, Venus and Adonis—”the beauty of a human mind touched it more deeply,” setting him on the trajectory that culminated in The Tempest, in the figure of Prospero. “Mind knows itself and all things; bodies know neither themselves nor other things.” As recorded in Sonnet 69, Shakespeare became intent on “seeing farther than the eye hath shown.”
In that ascent, however, it is easy to leave the realm of human opinion behind. “Like Nature, man presents a riddle to the mind. Reason looks for the perfection of either, but experience discovers imperfections in both. In this quarrel reason wins the final word,” for “as the scientist looks for a rational order in the seeming disorder of the natural world, so the moral philosopher looks for one in the seemingly disordered and chaotic life of man.” Yet while the some of the interlocutors in Plato’s Republic seek justice and find it ‘in the abstract,’ bringing actual poleis into line with the ‘ideal’ politeia, the ‘city in speech,’ this proves unlikely or impossible. Taking Plato’s point, Aristotle recalls reformers to sobriety, proposing remedies to political problems seen in the light of practical, not theoretical, reasoning. Spalding maintains that his tension between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ gives Shakespearean drama its drama. And for Shakespeare there is an added difficulty. “An Aristotle has the privilege of writing what he thinks. But Shakespeare had need to consider at once his partners, his actors and the pleasure of the public”; he “might find it impracticable to utter truths plain to himself but strange to the multitude, and not less strange, perhaps, to a Kempe or a Burbage.” Spalding has rediscovered the necessity of exoteric writing.
He begins, therefore, with the plays that consider the question of “social man” and the immediate difficulties of his own country, with its clashes of opinion, its factions. In his dramas on Henry VI and Richard III, Shakespeare “seems to be studying the social nature of man as revealed in the political chronicles of Halle and Holinshed,” who show “a people that had been for generations in irrational conflict with itself.” From Margaret in 1 Henry VI to the tyrant Richard, rulers love themselves more than their people and seek to bend the law to their wills. The Taming of the Shrew turns a tyrannical woman into a butt of comedy in a battle of the sexes, that primal natural duality, while The Two Gentlemen of Verona sets two friends, one a model of inconstancy, Proteus, against a model of fidelity, Valentine, subjecting the changeling to firm, comic correction. “For a moment Shakespeare seems to smile at a world restored to its reason, and to the peace and beauty natural to it.”
For a more lasting solution, Shakespeare must turn to politics, particularly to statesmanship. Spalding cites lines from The Taming of the Shrew:
Only, good master, while we do admire
This virtue, and this moral discipline,
Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray;
Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured.” [I.i.25-28] ?????
Spalding remarks, “Ovid united with Aristotle might be a medicine of a kind to keep men close to the world; while Aristotle united with Ovid might possibly keep men virtuous in it.” More, “a man of this temper might presently become a Statesman and, like Aristotle’s ‘Phronimos,’ find in his care for man the natural purpose of his existence.” At a minimum, erotic love is nature’s guarantee of the perpetuation of the human species; in politics, it guarantees the perpetuation of the polity; in the life of the mind, it guarantees the perpetuation of philosophy. Eros is not a noticeable theme among logical positivists; Spalding would recall academic philosophy to self-understanding, or possibly to a new understanding.
The need to mate Ovidian love with Aristotelian virtue forms the theme of the comic drama of Love’s Labour’s Lost. There, “Shakespeare seems to be studying with a good deal of humor the laborings of minds capable of giving birth in their time to the politic being he is looking for,” as the king of Navarre sets himself “at war with his own affections” and those of his courtiers by proposing to turn his Court into “a little Academe”—a Platonic school or ‘republic’—consisting of men who will cloister themselves away from worldly desires for three years in an effort to make themselves, if not Philosopher-Kings, at least Scholar-Kings. The arrival of four ladies from the French Court puts a comic stop to their fantasy, and the ensuing drama issues in a reconception of love, now understood not as a fatal temptation to be countered by an austere life devoted to the liberal arts or by the frivolous eroticism for which the French Court was (in)famous, but for an Aristotelian ‘mean’ or center in the practice of love itself. Called back to the responsibilities of Court life after the death of her father, the King, the princess imposes a lighter sentence on the suitors than the Navarrian king had ordained: one year of mourning followed by marriages if the Navarrians behave themselves in the meantime. “By leaving the world these gallants of Navarre were thus to return to it men sobered, constant, of service” both to Navarre and to France.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not immediately call statesmanship to mind. But Spalding rightly argues that it should. Once again, Shakespeare presents the problem of misplaced loving among rulers—not only among humans by day but among the fairy regime which rules the countryside at night. Fairy King Oberon cures his queen, Titania, of her jealousy with an herbal remedy; among the young aristocrats, the loves of the two young couples are deranged by the same potion, misapplied by Oberon’s mischievous servant, Puck, whose work eventually gets undone by his master. Families being the foundation of polities, in both the human and the fairy regimes right order is restored, showing that it is not only the intensity of eros that can cause disaster but its direction. Moderation, hitting ‘the mean,’ is indispensable, but so the right choice of one’s beloved.
But “to ‘cleanse the foul body of the infected world,’ dreams must give way to sterner Reality, and a Man take the place of the King of the Fairies as the physician of human disorders.” In Richard II, “England, ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’…has become “‘a drooping country’ with a ‘broken wing.'” A less rationalist version of the Navarrian king, Richard wastes his time in a world of imagination, “charming to poets and ladies” but useless in a statesman. “Divine as Heaven’s gift of a crown may be, it cannot weigh with a man’s own [practical] wisdom in the rule of a people; and a wise man without that gift is of more service to a State than a fool with it.” Such a man is Henry Bolingbroke, “an uncrowned physician of more promise than Richard,” a man ready to act “like the good gardener” who will “laboriously lop ‘superfluous’ branches ‘that bearing boughs may live'”—first of all by disposing of Richard. It remained for his son, Henry V, to exemplify “the reason-serving ‘phronimos’ of Aristotle, “Free from gross passion or of mirth or anger, / Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood….” Julius Caesar is Henry’s counterpart in ancient Rome, “a man whose practical wisdom had by its sole might combined and sustained the far-flung fabric of a universal empire,” “possess[ing] the distinctive character of Plato’s ‘Philosopher-King’ and of the rational ‘Monarchos’ of Aristotle.” At the same time, his supposed divinity (he was “worshipped by the many”) was pure fantasy, as the assassins’ knives proved. “Sore for his high flight above them, [the conspirators’] eager envy sought to bring the eagle laughably to the ground,” and as they sought so did they find.
The limitations of human effort, the ungodlike character of men, appears most clearly in Twelfth Night. Here, Shakespeare “seems to be more seriously concerned with a mysterious world ruled neither by man’s wisdom nor Heaven’s Providence, but rather by untutorable Time and Fate and Fortune. The men and women that now appear on his stage are alike inclined to disallow the efficacy of the human will in the affairs of the world.” This time, there is no “resolute ‘physician’ of men,” no wise statesman to save the day, or the regime. “The best Statesmen may be in the sick world of humanity as the best of physicians in an uncontrollable pestilence of nature; and the wise man may look rather to retire from the world, like Jacques, than, like Caesar, to meddle uselessly with it.” Here Hamlet begins, with a prince who cannot decide what to do. Yet Hamlet proves himself “a rare being in the world,” as “men of ‘practical wisdom’ are more often to be found in it than ‘Kings of infinite space'”—self-divinizing, imperial rulers of Rome.
Women too can prove themselves to be wise rulers, as seen in All’s Well That Ends Well. In that comedy, an impoverished physician’s daughter first cures a desperately ill king of his physical affliction, then cures the man the king selects for her husband of his folly in rejecting her. She does this not with a love potion devised by her late father but by means of her own smarts, tricking her wayward husband into bed with her and thereby making him see in her a worthy wife—a realization that confirms the king’s authority by vindicating his command. For Shakespeare, the real aristocracy is what Aristotle said it was: the rule of the best, not the rule of the snobs. “Such a will as Helena’s might be conceived to remedy, not alone the ills of lovers, but the wider-spreading evils of a human society, and in Measure for Measure Shakespeare accords to the Statesman the untrammeled powers of will of a Helena.” The statesman in question, the Duke of Vienna, finds himself about to be overwhelmed with the “envy, folly, and mistaken” of the people. Instead of “the swift decision of a Caesar,” Duke Vincentio practices patience, exiling himself from his corrupt city for fourteen years, allowing the corruption to “boil and bubble till it o’errun the stew.” Only then did he intervene to reform Vienna. That this can in fact be done was demonstrated by Charles de Gaulle, who retired from politics in the late 1940s, watched as the Fourth Republic foundered to the point of capsizing, then reappeared in Paris to found the Fifth Republic.
Patience conspicuously numbers among the Christian virtues, not so much among ‘the ancients,’ although moderation is its foundation. In Christianity itself, the foundation of patience is agape, “man’s forgiving love for man.” If practiced, this would indeed cleanse the foul body of the infected world. The problem is that it isn’t. “In the course of his reflections,” Shakespeare “discovered physicians of differing capacities: some able, who have helped lame men to their feet; others incompetent, who have aggravated rather than allayed their troubles.” Dovelike innocence, love, and patience must be supplemented with serpentine prudence, or all is lost but good intentions, with which the road to Hell is proverbially paved. “Human beings rarely raise themselves by their sole efforts; or become ‘devils to themselves’ without the help of other men.” “Like Socratic ‘midwives,’ such agents may bring to birth in a man beauties as unknown to himself as to his neighbors; or, like evil nurses, deforming passions subversive of the human reason natural and proper to him.” There are Vincentios among us; there are also Iagos. Spalding finds the tragedy of King Lear in his lack of self-knowledge, which issues in rage when his beloved youngest daughter tells him the truth about her love for her, without flattery. In his dying despair before her corpse, “Life showed death’s shining secrets at the last in visions unrevealed to eyes less martyred”—the flicker of life he alone claims to see in her. Insight into a life after death or pitiable illusion? Shakespeare does not tell us, perhaps because he does not know any more than we do.
Spalding chooses to read it as insight, if not exactly as Christian insight. “Men find themselves, it seems, rather in an immortal world than in the world of mankind; and learn to smile at last only as their hearts break.” “The human world, for reason’s rational foresight, must look a natural Paradise”—as Miranda sees, when she sees men other than her father for the first time. “But unreason, displanting it, may seem at times rather to have made a wild of it.” This notwithstanding, and despite the fact that the “the best of earthly Statesmen may fail of his purposes,” the “purposes of Heaven, and of the ‘mortal officers'” cited in Pericles Prince of Tyre as inspired by the “will” of Heaven, “are not finally to be thwarted.” “The fingers of the powers above do tune / The harmony of this peace.” (Cymbeline V.v.466). Shakespeare has “presented a world which, freed from human tragedy, must find, through Heaven’s directing power, the ultimate felicity Heaven destines for it.”
“Yet the reason of the philosopher is not easily satisfied; and the best of answers may provoke at times the worst of questions. Content with his new world, Shakespeare could still continue to question it,” wondering “why its Providence had admitted an evil to cure” in the first place. Here The Tempest‘s Prospero, not Lear or any of the tragic heroes, has the last of Shakespeare’s many words. “It is for man’s ultimate benefit that Heaven has admitted evil into the world. In making ‘uneasy’ man’s attainment of his rational nature evil is destined to reinforce and invigorate it.” Or rather Spalding’s Shakespeare gives himself his last words on the matter in Sonnet 119:
O benefit of ill! Now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruin’d love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuked to my content,
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.
By “Heaven” does Spalding mean “God”? He leaves that, too, open, following Shakespeare.
Since Spalding published his study, numerous writers have followed him in scrutinizing Shakespeare philosophically, although they have never dominated academic Shakespeare studies any more than Spalding did in his day. Allan Bloom, Harry V. Jaffa, Paul Cantor, Michael Platt, have all concurred with Seth Benardete’s conviction that Shakespeare could have written philosophic dialogues along the lines of Plato. And that he did, in his own way.
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