The elusive mind of Shakespeare

Thinking Through Shakespeare, David Womersley, Princeton University Press, £30

In David Lodge’s 1984 novel Small World, the character Persse McGarrigle is writing a Master’s thesis titled ‘The Influence of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare’: it’s a good, Borgesian joke. In Thinking Through Shakespeare David Womersley has undertaken a study of the influence of the Enlightenment on Shakespeare. ‘It does seem’, he writes, ‘as if Shakespeare had made a careful study of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith before writing… Coriolanus and Timon of Athens.’ He is, of course, joking, but the joke brings out very clearly the bizarre nature of his enterprise.

Let’s start with what he is not doing. Many major intellectuals have found Shakespeare stimulating to think with. There are established literatures on Marx’s reading of Shakespeare, and on Freud’s, to take two obvious examples. But Womersley isn’t collecting examples of people actually using Shakespeare to think. Nor does he use the plays of Shakespeare to do his own thinking for him. There is a large literature on Montaigne, for example, which reads him in order to learn how to live; but this isn’t a ‘how-to’ book.

Nor is Womersley trying to excavate Shakespeare’s beliefs. There is a vast literature on Shakespeare’s politics, his religion, his views on what we call gender, and so forth. Womersley, quite correctly, says that it is striking and important that Shakespeare never tells us what he thinks on any subject, if by ‘thinks’ we mean what doctrines he holds. Eliot said of Henry James that he had ‘a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’. It is not that James didn’t think; rather that he didn’t preach, and neither does Shakespeare. It strikes me, but not Womersley, who never talks about Shakespeare’s audience, that there is a good practical reason for this. Shakespeare’s audience included Catholics and Puritans, divine-right monarchists and Machiavellian republicans. The plays are designed so that all and sundry may come away thinking the playwright is sympathetic to their views. Shakespeare has good commercial reasons for rendering his own beliefs invisible.

The claim Womersley wants to make is a traditional one, already made by Ben Jonson in his encomium of Shakespeare in the first folio: Shakespeare is a man of his time, but also of all time. What he presents on stage is not just what E.M.W. Tillyard called ‘The Elizabethan World Picture’; it is also the true picture of the world. Consequently, what Shakespeare portrays must be in close correspondence with what sophisticated thinkers debate when they talk about society, psychology and morality. Read (or watch) Shakespeare, and you will find there Rousseau and Smith – more Rousseau than Smith, since economics is a fundamentally new discipline.

To understand the book’s enterprise it helps to think of clouds. Clouds were not given their Latin names until 1802. Before that they were thought to be unclassifiable. Yet 17th-century Dutch painters represent clouds perfectly. They could see what they could not name. There is absolutely no reason why Shakespeare should not have portrayed phenomena (class struggle, the Oedipus complex, the felicific calculus, unintended consequences) which he could not name.

The outcome of such a reading is a great books course where every book leads back to a Shakespeare play. Womersley picks four topics: Self and Other; Civilisation and Barbarism; Means and Ends; Throne and Altar. The last (in my listing, not his) is the least successful, as the divine right of kings is not a current preoccupation, and it takes some twisting and turning to pretend it is. But then Ben Jonson and Womersley both admire Shakespeare for turning his matter on the anvil, and himself with it. Civilisation and Barbarism draws on Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents, but one can imagine Shakespeare nodding along to Freud as Freud nods along to Shakespeare. Means and Ends involves lengthy discussions of Kant and Rawls, though as the key distinctions are already in Cicero, whom Shakespeare will have read in grammar school, it is not clear that much is gained by declaring that Cordelia is a Kantian and Goneril and Regan are utilitarians. Womersley’s reading of the individual plays is usually fine, although I find it astonishing that he (and others) should discuss Macbeth at length in the context of republicanism and tyrannicide without even noting that it is a play about the killing not of one king but of two.

Matters get trickier when we leave the world of (more or less) perennial ideas and turn to topics that are distinctively post-Shakespearian. ‘Self and Other’ is discussed in the context of Locke’s theory of personal identity, but here you really need to understand that Locke’s problem of personal identity is a new problem and one that arises only because Locke doesn’t believe we have immortal souls, except by divine intervention. He doesn’t even believe that we have souls. Consequently, the question of who or what I am becomes for him genuinely puzzling. It did not puzzle Christians or even Aristotelians – and here Womersley misrepresents Aristotle as discussing personal identity when he was discussing the souls of plants and animals along with those of humans. Trees have identities, but they are not personal.

Personal identity did not puzzle Shakespeare, but it did puzzle Montaigne, who took his Lucretius seriously. Lucretius was the only philosopher before Locke to worry about personal identity. He believed in eternal recurrence: this world, in all its detail, has existed before and will exist again. Is it then the same Lucretius each time? No, he replies (as if he had been studying Locke): it may be an identical Lucretius, but it would only be the same one if he could remember already having been the author of De rerum natura. Womersley, by the way, thinks Shakespeare read Montaigne in French, a bold proposal; in any event, what matters is not the influence of Montaigne on Shakespeare but the difference between them.

What worried Shakespeare was something very different from personal identity. Christians believe in the resurrection of the body, but our bodies are eaten by worms, worms are eaten by fish, and we eat fish. We have no individual bodily identity. As Hamlet says ‘Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away’, and again, later: ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath ate of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.’ Claudio in Measure for Measure imagines:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice,

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world…

And this is inseparable from the problem of Christ’s body, present (except for Calvinists) in bread and wine. This doesn’t worry me and perhaps you, because I don’t expect my body to be resurrected, nor do I imagine Christ’s is with us still. But it does worry Shakespeare. Thus, for Shakespeare, bodily identity is a problem, personal identity isn’t, while for philosophers since Locke the opposite is the case. Some problems simply aren’t perennial.

This would have been a much better book if a discussion of perennial problems had been balanced by a discussion of issues that no longer concern us, but that did concern Shakespeare. I admire and at the same time deprecate Womersley’s ‘undisguised ahistoricism’: admire it, because it is always good to question the received truth that all knowledge is local and particular, and deprecate it, because so much knowledge really is local and particular.

I am left with the sneaking anxiety that Womersley, like David Lodge, might be playing a game with the reader. He quotes with approval Eliot, in his essay on ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’: ‘I propose a Shakespeare under the influence of the stoicism of Seneca. But I do not believe that Shakespeare was under the influence of Seneca… I wish merely to disinfect the Senecan Shakespeare before he appears. My ambitions would be realised if I could prevent him, in so doing, from appearing at all.’ Is this book, too, a ‘stealthy vaccine’, to quote Womersley, against the very doctrines it claims to uphold? I wish it were, but fear it is not. It is a riposte to historicism both old and new: striking that sometimes it works, but in the end reassuring that often it doesn’t.