Transcript: 425. Patrick Gray on Shakespeare

We're joined by Patrick Gray to discuss Shakespeare's knowledge of philosophy, his ethics, and his influence on such thinkers as Hegel.

Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.

PA: I'm very excited about this topic and I bet you are too because you're a big fan of Shakespeare. You were just telling me before we started that you used to be a Shakespeare actor before you were a Shakespeare academic.

PG: Yes, yes, that's right. When I was a student, I guess, like Polonius, is something that I really enjoyed and I think it led my interest in Shakespeare and ethics because, as an actor, you're always up on stage. You feel like you're making a choice between options and that's part of the pleasure of Shakespeare and that's what you're trying to convey to the audience. And so to make sense of those choices is a big part of what drove my interest and continues to drive my interest in Shakespeare and ethics.

PA: Okay, nice. Well, we are going to get on to ethics, but I wanted to start with a more kind of practical question, I guess, which is just what did Shakespeare know about philosophy? I guess what I mean by that is which philosophical sources was he able to draw on? And I guess we have to infer this from things he says in his plays, right? Because it's not like we have access to the list of the books he owned or anything like that.

PG: The short answer is more than people tend to think. I think one of the more persistent and charming, but also misleading assumptions about Shakespeare is that he was relatively uneducated or uninterested in abstract thought. I think this goes back to a tenacious, memorable jab by his contemporary, Ben Johnson, who said that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek.' And then you get a repeat of that about 50 years later from Milton. Milton depicts Shakespeare in contrast to Johnson, whom he rightly calls 'learned' - he says, 'Shakespeare, fancy's child, Warbling his native

wood notes wild.' And I think this picture of Shakespeare as a naïve folk artist gets misunderstood. It's a bit like the Jansenists accusing Montaigne of being a libertine. It's like, well, I mean, compared to them, OK, but compared to them, everybody. It's like when it comes to knowledge of the Classics, compared to Milton or Johnson, like, we're all ignoramuses. I mean, Milton was writing epic, good epic poetry in Latin as a teenager. So I think his assessment of Shakespeare's supposed lack of learning needs to be taken with a significant grain of salt. By virtue of his education, Shakespeare could read Latin easily and he could access all manner of philosophy in that form.

He's living in a time when works like Plutarch's Morals and Cicero's Tusculan Disputations are being translated into English; I think he could also read French. In terms of the plays, as you noted, in his Troilus and Cressida, he paraphrases a passage from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. And then taking up - you draw attention to the funeral orations in Julius Caesar -, here we see a kind of subtle engagement with different claims within classical philosophy. Unlike Marc Antony, Brutus makes no appeal to pathos, no appeal to the heartstrings of his audience. Instead, his speech is like a series of syllogism, like 'if..., then..., if..., then..., that...,' and the audience struggles and doesn't

understand it. And that's to say, Shakespeare gives Brutus the same kind of staccato, highly abstract manner of speaking that Cicero associates with the Stoics and denounces as rhetorically ineffective. So those are a few examples. I think more generally speaking, the big question is the timing and the extent of Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne. An English translation of Montaigne's essays was published in 1603, which is about two thirds of the way through Shakespeare's career. And for my own part (and here some scholars would disagree) I think that Shakespeare almost certainly read Montaigne's essays earlier. He shows some facility with French in Henry V in a couple of jokes between Henry and Kate. He lived for many years in London with a family of French Huguenots: the Mountjoys. So I suspect that Shakespeare read Montaigne's essays in the original French,

and that the influence of Montaigne can be seen in earlier plays such as Hamlet, and that's why Shakespeare plays take this more philosophical turn about halfway through his career. In fact, I've argued that the character Hamlet is partly based on Montaigne's persona as an author. That would be a longer story, I guess. But anyway, briefly put, Montaigne, as your audience will know, is fabulously learned. His essays are a distillation and a compendium on their own of the central questions and the preoccupations of Hellenistic ethics. So I don't think it's an accident that Shakespeare is fascinated by the same kinds of problems that preoccupy Montaigne, as well as Montaigne's own sources: Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch... I think Shakespeare, like Montaigne, is fascinated by the ethical implications of Skepticism, Stoicism and Epicureanism.

PA: Yeah, that sounds right to me. I'm actually going to talk a little bit more about Montaigne and Shakespeare in the next couple of episodes that I'm working on now. So thanks for setting that up for me. That's great. One source you didn't mention there is, except for the thing about him citing the ethics, is Aristotle. And in particular, I'm wondering about Aristotle's Poetics. If you read anything about Shakespeare and Philosophy, you come pretty quickly across people pointing out that Aristotle has these recommendations for how to write a good play. So, for example, the play is supposed to unfold all in one continuous time, it's supposed to be in the same place, the action is supposed to be somehow unified... So people call these the unities of Aristotle. And Shakespeare famously doesn't do this in his plays, right? So is that something that people are overestimating? Is it significant? What do you think about that?

PG: Part of this question... The right person to ask would be my friend, Michael Lazarus, who in the past couple of years has put together some really groundbreaking research really that Aristotle's Poetics was better known and more influential in 16th century England than people had heretofore thought. But even if we knew for sure that Shakespeare read the poetics, there's still a lot of questions that would remain because it's possible to read something and to misunderstand it. And it's possible to read something and to disagree, you know? So, for example, critics of Shakespeare like Voltaire, they think the only conceivable reason why Shakespeare didn't adhere to the unities - and not just the unities, but these other prohibitions like classical prohibition against depicting violence on stage, classical prohibition against mingling comedy and tragedy. Voltaire just sort of assumes, 'Well, if he's not doing that, it's because he's ignorant.' 'If he knew what he was supposed to do, then of course he would do it.' But I think in reality, Shakespeare was well aware of the conventions of classical theater, in particular from the plays of Seneca, which he knew very well. So the reason he doesn't abide by these neoclassical conventions is because he's adhering instead to a rival different set of conventions, those of vernacular English dramas, such as cycle plays, passion plays, morality plays... We tend to think of this body of material as Medieval, but it actually lasted a long time: Shakespeare was able to watch these plays as a child and as a teenager up until the reformers put the kibosh on this kind of direct representation of Christian history. So again, like Voltaire, critics in the 18th and 19th centuries were very learned themselves. They failed to recognize that Shakespeare is deliberately siding with Christian aesthetics as opposed to classical. And they also started to think Shakespeare is naïve. And then he becomes for them, for the romantics, this paradigmatic example of the untutored genius. You know, Shakespeare reveals the superiority of innate talent and authenticity to convention and erudition and engagement with tradition. And I think this mythology is very difficult to shake off because we have this affinity for the Romantics. But anyway, from the perspective of this podcast, from the perspective of the history of philosophy, I think it's very important to recognize that this romantic legend of Shakespeare as a naïve or an outsider artist is a misunderstanding: he's deeply engaged with his intellectual context. So with regards to the Poetics more specifically, there are some interesting differences to flag up deeper, I think, than the unities. As your audience will know, the texts that we have from Aristotle, which may be lecture notes, they're very condensed and cryptic and enigmatic. So in his poetics, Aristotle uses these terms like hamartia or anagnorisis or catharsis, whose meaning is still subject to a very lively debate. You know, so my former supervisor at Oxford, Tony Nuttall, would say that the catharsis tragedy produces is a purging of excessive emotions analogous to what is produced in the body by a laxative or an emetic. And I tend to side, by contrast, with Martha Nussbaum, who interprets catharsis as a kind of cognitive cleansing or an improved understanding of the events that the tragedy depicts and by extension our human nature. And I think a further variable is that interpretation of Aristotle's poetics has been very strongly influenced over time. I would say led astray by the influence of Christianity and by the model of tragedy that emerges from Shakespeare's plays. So critics want to see Shakespeare as early, modern and secular, but Shakespeare is also Late Medieval and Christian. And tragedy for Shakespeare is, I would say, essentially the same thing it is for 15th century, 16th century English vernacular drama: tragedy is the failure of a sinner to repent. Whereas for Aristotle, tragedy is something very alien to a Christian sensibility. Aristotle doesn't really care about moral character. What Aristotle means by hamartia is not sin, but something more like a mistake. And what he means by anagnorisis is not repentance, but something more like a discovery, like a correction of an error as regards to matters of fact. So for Aristotle, tragedy is amoral: it's like the process of legal discovery that occurs in a court of law. Nonetheless, I think many critics continue to use Aristotle's terms to describe Shakespeare's plays, which is very confusing. Partly, I think they misunderstand these terms due to this long legacy of misunderstanding. And partly, I'd say more culpably, because it allows critics who are uncomfortable with Shakespeare and Christianity to avoid using more accurate, but more obviously Christian terms such as ‘sin’ and ‘repentance’.

PA: Right. So a huge difference between using the phrase tragic flaw and using the word sin, right? So the first presupposes that he's trying to be Aristotle. The second presupposes that he's trying to talk about something like the Christian ethics of the Reformation. Right?

PG: When we talk about tragic flaw, I think that's dating back to a theological concept that was extant at the time of people having a besetting sin: that each person has some sin to which they are particularly prone. And I think this actually is part of what drives Shakespeare's interest in characterization, as opposed to the more allegorical representations of the Middle Ages. It's like, why is this person susceptible to this particular sin? You know, like Hamlet is not prone to drunkenness, but he's prone to other things. What is different about Hamlet that makes him... You know, Shakespeare likes to take people and put them in that one situation that will crack them like

Othello. You know, Othello could be a prisoner of war, no problem. But if he thinks his wife might be cheating on him, he totally falls apart. Right? So this theological interest in particular besetting personal temptation, I think, helps explain Shakespeare's interest in fine-grained distinctive characters.

PA: Actually, now that you mentioned that, that's very un-Greek. So the idea that you might have one sin to which you're prone.Sometimes in ancient ethics, you even get the idea that the virtues all come together. Right? So it wouldn't even be possible for a character like Othello to exist and to be like genuinely courageous, for example, but also either jealous or maybe just insecure, or whatever it is that's making him so susceptible to Iago's insinuations.

PG: Yes, you're right about that. The Classical philosopher, they tend to think of it in a more

holistic way. The vicious man is just sort of generally out of order with himself, prone to all manner of different passions. This idea that different people have different weaknesses is a later development.

PA: Actually, another good example here would be Stoicism. And that's actually something I wanted to ask you about anyway, because as I referred to in the last episode, you have thought a lot about the role of Stoicism in Shakespeare's works. And there's a range of Shakespearean characters who you might think are supposed to be sort of set up as some kind of Stoic, and are maybe being criticized because of the limits of the Stoic approach to ethics. So can you say something more about that?

PG: The most obvious place where Shakespeare tangles with Stoicism, as you might expect, is in the Roman plays. And whatever Rome may have been in fact - I think Rome was actually probably

a messier, more emotional place than the Stoics make it out to be. Whatever it may have been in fact, in Shakespeare, Rome is like the historical embodiment of a particular mindset that produces, on the one hand, in victory, a kind of imperial aggression - this is Augustine's libido dominandi. And on the other hand, in defeat, produces Stoicism, which is like imperium of the self, like a desire to control yourself. To me, they're kind of two sides at the same coin. And that's another way of saying this, is that for Shakespeare, Rome is the Rome of Seneca. If we include Seneca's very deeply pessimistic tragedies, as well as his more optimistic philosophical prose. And I think for Shakespeare, the historical degeneration of Rome - from Republic to Empire - is evidence of the fundamental limitations and inaccuracy of Seneca's point of view, if it were enacted on a kind of society-wide scale. But I think, as you note, in talking about Much Ado About Nothing in the previous episode, the engagement with Stoicism is broader. For example, another more subtle example that I think people tend to overlook is the depiction of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. There's a very important opening scene where Graziano mocks Antonio - at some length, actually - for putting on a willful stillness as if cut in alabaster in order to be reputed 'wise'. And that's to say, a bit like Cassius with Brutus, Graziano is accusing Antonio of putting on the appearance of a Stoic out of a kind of philosophical pride. And so people see the play, The Merchant of Venice, as this dialectic between Christianity and Judaism. But I think it's actually more like a trialogue (pardon the neologism there) between Christianity, Judaism and Stoicism. And so there's all these similarities between Antonio and Shylock - they're the two eponymous merchants of Venice. I think when Portia comes in and says, 'who is the merchant and who is the Jew?' I like productions where it's not immediately obvious. And I think just as Shylock shows what Shakespeare sees as the shortcomings of Jewish ethics, like a certain pride or heart hardness or legalism or something like that. I think Antonio is meant to personify the analogous shortcomings of Stoic ethics, like pride and the hard-heartedness even towards himself. So he's ostensibly, he's sort of ethnically Christian, but his moral allegiance is to Stoicism. And I think we see a similar dynamic in another actually Venetian character who is ostensibly Christian who is Othello, right? Othello, we today are so preoccupied with race that it can easily overwhelm our attention to everything else that's going on in that play. So I was really glad that you drew attention to Othello as a case study in the ethical implications of Skepticism. I think Othello is also a case study in the dangers of a certain naïve Stoicism. Again, at the beginning of the play, there's this very important speech where the senators are asking Othello to take command of Cyprus. And they're saying, 'Hey, are you really sure you want to bring your new wife with you? Don't you think you'll be distracted?' And he says -he scoffs- he says, 'The young effects' - it's like the emotions characteristic of a young man - 'in me are defunct.' He says, 'If love gets the better of me, if Cupid gets me with his arrows and blinds me to my duties, then let housewives make a skillet of my helm, and let my reputation be ruined.' And it's very ironic, right? Because like, that's exactly what happened. I mean, they don't make his skillet, his helm into a frying pan, but the gist of it is what happens.

PA: It's hard to do on stage. So that's the only way.

PG: Yeah, it takes a long time. You got to call in a blacksmith and stuff. Yeah, but I think this

opening scene, there's a framing closing scene where there's an emissary from Venice there called Ludovico, and he sees Othello strike Desdemona in public and is totally shocked. And he says, 'Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate calls all in all sufficient? Is this the man who passion could not shake?' And it goes on a bit and it's clear he's saying, 'Is this the guy we all thought was a Stoic?' It's kind of like when Cassius says, 'Oh, Brutus, you know, you give way to accidental evils. Well, what's going on? I thought your philosophy was something else.' And I think in this sense, like Brutus and like Benedict, for instance, in Much Ado About Nothing, Othello is an example of the overconfident stoic: the man who thinks he has more control over his own nature than in fact he really does.

PA: So I think those are examples that to me are very convincing where Shakespeare is reflecting on the history of ethics. And we might also think about the history of political philosophy, right? Like, you know, republicanism and so on. But what's the relationship between that and actually thinking about him as writing plays that are in some sense themselves ethical works or works of political philosophy? Do you think it's a good idea to approach the plays as if they were ethical texts or is it more like ethics is just part of the cultural baggage that he kind of hauls on stage for us to think about?

PG: This question is a tricky one to answer. I think partly because we are an age which is very uncomfortable with ethics and political philosophy - we're very polarized. And intrinsically, ethics and politics are contentious topics that people tend to feel very strongly about. We don't have a cultural consensus at the moment - we're very divided. I think Shakespeare is a very beloved author and he possesses a unique international cultural authority. And I think the combination of those two things is that when we try to discern and articulate Shakespeare's position about ethics and politics, the overwhelming temptation is to try to find in Shakespeare a mirror of ourselves rather than acknowledging points of departure. Like Shakespeare, just prima facie, Shakespeare was writing 400 years ago. If he is like most of the Englishmen of his day, then he is a conservative (by our standards) patriotic Christian. Whereas most higher education professionals today, and maybe even more so theater professionals, are progressive and cosmopolitan and secular. Within the arts and within higher education, I think you could even say many people are actively hostile to this more conservative moral and political vision. So in my opinion, people who like Shakespeare, who are professionally committed to teaching or performing Shakespeare, try to find all sorts of workarounds. For example, on stage, and I get it, I worry about it, but I get it. Like on stage, I think directors tend to cut or change or undermine with irony any passages that might pose a challenge to a modern sensibility. A paradigmatic example here is the closing speech of The Taming of the Shrew. I think that's supposed to be delivered dead on earnestly. I think Kate reforms and means what she says. It's in keeping with what St. Paul says about hierarchy within marriage. It makes many people today very uncomfortable.

PA: Because maybe we should just remind people that in the last speech, she basically promises to be a good, obedient wife, right?

PG: Yeah, exactly. There's a great temptation for theater producers or directors or so on to make it

sarcastic or weak or undo the discomfort. But I think that's a disservice to Shakespeare, and I think it's a disservice to ourselves. I don't think theater should just be a kind of liturgy for progressive atheists. I think it should be a chance to experience moral and political and religious points of view that are possibly very different from our own. That's the theater side. Among critics - and this is coming around to your question of the place of ethics within Shakespeare's thought - I think it's central, but a lot of critics would disagree. The most pervasive workaround among critics who are uncomfortable with what (I would say) Shakespeare really says and who he is, is to cite Keats on Shakespeare's negative capability and to maintain as an axiom, as a starting point, that Shakespeare has no fixed opinions about ethics or politics. That Shakespeare always presents both sides of every question in equal weight. To me, this claim is impossible. Shakespeare was a human being. Everybody has opinions, even Shakespeare. So why is this claim so attractive and so tenacious? I think it has the hold that it does because it makes Shakespeare a precedent and an authority for the, well, the delusion, really, that the philosopher Carl Schmitt discerns at the heart of liberalism which is the belief that it's possible for human beings and even institutions to be neutral and to sort of escape tough decisions about ethics and politics. I think for a lot of people, it's easier to tell themselves that Shakespeare believes nothing than to admit that he might disagree with what they themselves believe. Now, having said that, I should add a clarification, which is I DO think Shakespeare does present both sides of important questions. But the way he does that is important. I think Shakespeare presents what I would call a 'dialectic of faith and doubt'. So he has beliefs and he asks himself, 'What if the opposite of what I believe were true?' And he doesn't just ask that, but he builds it up. He steel mans it. Like, 'What's the strongest argument I can make against myself?' That's why Falstaff or Cleopatra is so compelling. He's asking himself, what if the moral vision, the opposite of my own that Falstaff represents or Cleopatra or Coriolanus, what if they're right? What if that is in fact the case? And then he follows that thought experiment through to its conclusion. And he's like, 'Okay, based on what I know of human people, history, life, yeah, it's fun to be Falstaff for a while, but it has a human cost.' 'It's fun to be Cleopatra, but it's unsustainable.' So I think Shakespeare is, or Richard III, 'You can go a long way being Richard III, but in the end, it doesn't work out.' So Shakespeare is entertaining misgivings about Christianity, about war, about nationalism… all these things. He's giving a force and a weight to nihilism and antinomianism to the kind of challenge that he finds in Machiavelli and Seneca, not to praise this sort of rival proto-modern Hobbesian point of view, but in order to more effectively exorcise. Like what he's aiming at, our doubts have this hold on our consciousness, and he wants a kind of catharsis of doubt where he can say, 'Yes, I thought through that. I really thought through the opposite of what I think, and I now understand it better.' Even if he comes around in the end to a sort of consistent baseline position.

PA: That's amazing, because that's, of course, what philosophers do. They think very hard about the position that opposes their own position, and they try to come up with the strongest arguments for it so that they can then show that their position can defeat those arguments. I mean, philosophers never ignore the other side, right?

PG: I totally agree. To me, I think this is the distinction between literature and propaganda. Good

literature is asking these questions of itself; and I suppose you could say the same thing about good

philosophy as opposed to propaganda - you're raising objections to yourself. I think, to me, the tension between poetry and philosophy is a little bit baffling, because, in my opinion, the poet and the philosopher are both asking the same kinds of questions. It's just one is trying to answer them through abstract, general forms and through tests of coherence; and the other is trying to ask them through hypothetical particulars and tests of correspondence. And I see the role of the literary critic as to mediate between these two languages of asking questions about the nature of reality.

PA: It strikes me that what you're saying sounds in some ways like what Philip Sidney says about poetry. So he thinks that you can use poetry because of its concreteness to convey moral lessons. I wonder whether you think that Shakespeare also would have seen his plays as having some kind of morally beneficial effect. Do you think you're supposed to improve the audience morally, or are they just supposed to entertain, or what's going on there?

PG: This is a great question. I think Shakespeare wants to believe that theater, and more generally, kind of fiction, imagination can lead people to repentance, like a sermon or a parable, like the story that the prophet Nathan tells King David about a rich man stealing from a poor man. And by this defamiliarization, he's helping illustrate what's wrong with David having this affair with Bathsheba. And we can see this most clearly in Hamlet, right? Hamlet says, 'I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play, they were so struck by what they saw that they proclaimed what they did.' I'm paraphrasing, but anyway, you get the idea. This idea, if you saw it, you stand up and proclaim it, right? And that sort of happens, but it sort of doesn't. Claudius is visibly shaken by the player's representation of a man murdering his brother.

PA: And he asks for light. 

PG: That's right. The irony of that. It shakes him, you know, and he does make this effort to pray, even if he doesn't get there in the end, right? And here, I think Shakespeare's hopes about the power of theater collide with his more fundamental commitment to the freedom of the human will. There's a sort of general critical consensus, which I think is correct, that Shakespeare is the great playwright of human freedom, of the human free will. And I think we can see that there are two techniques I think Shakespeare uses to bring that to life. One is he uses foils or sort of counterfactual alternatives. So characters like in Hamlet, Horatio or Laertes or Fortinbras, they help us see what other roads Hamlet could have taken, what he could have done instead. And then I think maybe the most obvious technique are soliloquies. You know, Shakespeare goes to great lengths to give us these people who are articulating opposing courses of action and choosing between them. But coming back to the question of theater, I think Shakespeare realizes that people don't always make the right choice. Like typically in a soliloquy, people make the wrong choice. The art of a soliloquy is watching someone reason themselves into doing the wrong thing. And so I think Shakespeare is a keen enough observer of human nature to know that many people, maybe even most people, if you show them their offenses - like The Painting of Dorian Gray - they don't always like choose to acknowledge their sins and change their ways. More often, they get angry, right? They, like, shoot the messenger. They don't want to hear the message of who they really are. So, for example, and I agree, my friend Will Hamlin has this argument that Measure for Measure, this notorious problem play, is like an extended version of the mousetrap in Hamlet, where the Duke is repeatedly setting up these various events and little miniature scenes to try to get his deputy, Angelo, to see who he really is. But Angelo instead just keeps doubling down on his badness and keeps just pursuing sin even harder. And I think other instances like this are Malvolio at the end of Twelfth Night or Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. These scenes are really uncomfortable because they're tragic. You know, they're housed within what is ostensibly a comedy, but it's tragic because this is where I say, like, you know, for Shakespeare, tragedy is the failure of a sinner to repent. That's the tragedy that we feel in the fate of Shylock or Malvolio and why we sometimes think of these plays as 'problem plays'. That's the problem: they don't repent.

PA: As it happens, I was just thinking about the 10th book of Plato's Republic, which is where he has his argument about how you shouldn't let poets show you bad people doing things.

PG: Oh, yeah.

PA: Because it will corrupt you, right? Because it will instill bad ethical habits in you. And it's really interesting that Shakespeare has exactly the opposite intuition. So he thinks that if you see bad people making mistakes, then you might learn from that not to make the same mistakes rather than... So rather than thinking that the audience will instinctively imitate the characters on stage, Shakespeare thinks that you'll see it as a warning and that the less heavy handed he is about it, the more likely you are to get the point.

PG: I think that's exactly right. And actually, I think that is... it's not a coincidence because, you know, in Shakespeare's lifetime, there is this big debate about the morality of theater. Like, should theater even be allowed to happen? And you get these people like the president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, - this guy Joshua Reynolds - writes an overthrow of stage plays, basically saying public performances of plays shouldn't happen. This is a Puritan position. And it's like, 'Why did they think this?' Well, one is like ‘Theater is like just sort of generally disreputable. You know, it's like next to the brothels, and the bare pits and stuff, and men dressed women and so on.’ But there is a philosophical element. I think a lot of this anti-theatrical discourse is in keeping with Protestant iconoclasm. And I think... like iconoclasm, it reflects an increasing knowledge of an affinity for Plato as opposed to Aristotle. Reynolds is really worried about this. People will see vice on stage and it will contaminate that they'll see strong emotions and they'll take on those. It's very much,

you know, right out of Plato, the line of reasoning. I think Shakespeare is trying to articulate a response, which I would suspect is partly inspired by sermons where sermons talk about sin in order to sort of convict you of sin. And you realize, 'Oh, that could be me', and so on.

PA: Okay. So obviously this is Shakespeare, so we could literally talk about this all day. But rather than doing that, I want to ask you one last question, which is just about the reception of Shakespeare among later philosophers. People don't usually think of Shakespeare as a philosopher, but people... they do think of philosophers were interested in Shakespeare. For example, I know you're interested in Hegel and what he does with Shakespeare. So do you want to tell us about that or other examples of later philosophers engaging with him?

PG: Yes, I'll do two. I'll come back around to Hegel, but that may make more sense in light of a more general take. I think I said that Rome for Shakespeare is the Rome of Seneca, right? Why should we care? Well, Seneca's influence is deep, right? Seneca really shaped the thought of Shakespeare's contemporary, this Dutch political philosopher Eustace Lipsius (who you talked

about on the series). And Lipsius has a profound effect on Kant. Kant is very indebted to Lipsius. Kant's emphasis on individual autonomy as an effect, the sort of greatest good, is a legacy of the influence of Seneca and is a touchstone for liberal thought today about morality as well as politics. Like to put the question in a different way, when I was working on Shakespeare's Roman plays, I wanted to find a contemporary point of view that most closely resembles his just for purposes of translation. And one was Hegel, but the other is what we would now call post-liberalism, or maybe common good conservatism, in the work of people like Alastair McIntyre or Patrick Deneen. And that similarity makes sense because both Deneen and then Shakespeare are in effect arguing that any society where each individual is trying to maximize his autonomy, if necessary, at the expense of everybody else, that society is doomed to oscillate between brittle autocracy, like one person wins, and a kind of interminable, merciless civil war. And I think Shakespeare sees this dynamic in a pre-Christian society - Rome - and Deneen sees it in a post-Christian society – so that's our world today. And as far as Hegel, sometimes these post-liberal guys are thinking in these terms. As part of this research, I was surprised to discover the extent of Shakespeare's influence on Hegel, which I think is still underestimated. To give you some sense, like the earliest piece of writing that we have from Hegel is him translating Julius Caesar as a schoolboy, from English into German. And Hegel's Rome is very much Shakespeare's Rome. For example, you know, Kojève makes the master-slave dialectic into practically ALL of Hegel. But in fact, the master-slave dialectic is just... it's not an enduring feature of the human tradition. For Hegel, it's a characteristic of a particular stage in our historical development - the stage that coincides with Ancient Rome. And I think he's getting that sense of master-slave dialectic from these Roman plays. Shakespeare's Romans, they also prefigure what Hegel calls 'the unhappy consciousness'. He says the modern individual is torn between Stoicism and Skepticism: between the Roman frame of mind where you live unto yourself and then an awareness that that's not possible. The solipsist, he sees himself as the source of meaning and experience, but then he's also the skeptic where he remains aware that he's subject to these powers outside his own control. And I think Shakespeare dramatizes this in Roman plays like Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, how the Roman drive for dominance turns inward into a kind of narcissistic solipsism that proves unsustainable. Hamlet gets this too. Hamlet says, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, were it not for bad dreams.' Bad dreams are like reality coming in and interfering with his reverie. And ultimately we're constrained by a world outside ourselves, including especially our relations with other people. So I think this aspect of Shakespeare, the way in which our selfhood is bound up in the selfhood of other people, shapes Hegel's thought and informs many of the contributions that we see as distinctively Hegelian.

PA: Okay, that's brilliant. It's also very nice that you sort of finished there by quoting Hamlet,

because that's the next thing I'm going to be talking about. I'm going to do the next episode to Hamlet and this, sort of, idea about Renaissance individualism. We have sort of been circling around a lot and a lot of episodes, but I'm going to try to come to grips with it more next time. Before we go, would you like to hear the joke I made up that's inspired by Hamlet?

PG: Yes, yes, absolutely.

PA: We know from paintings that Shakespeare was losing his hair.

PG: Yeah, yeah.

PA: Not as badly as I have, but he had a sort of receding hairline. So what did Shakespeare say to himself when that started to happen?

PG: Oh, no.

PA: Toupee or not toupee?

PG: [Laughter] Oh, man. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

PA:  This is the sound I always hope the audience at home is making with the terrible jokes with which I end each episode. So on that note, I will thank Patrick Gray very much for coming on the episode or on the podcast.

PG: My pleasure. And I look forward to the next ones. It's great to have Shakespeare on this series. I've been listening to the series for a long time. It's an inspiration and it's an honor to be here and be able to meet you and have a conversation.

PA: Thank you. Likewise. 

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Prof Gray has also supplied the notes that he wrote up to prepare for the interview; thanks to him for making these notes available for putting up on the site!

Which philosophical sources Shakespeare was able to draw on, as far as we can tell from his writings?

The short answer is, more than people tend to think. One of the more charming and persistent but also misleading legends about Shakespeare is that he was relatively uneducated. This assumption is tenacious in part because it dates back to a memorable jab by an envious but illustrious contemporary of Shakespeare, the English playwright Ben Jonson, who poked fun at him for having (supposedly) “small Latin and less Greek.” About a half a century later, the English poet John Milton comes to the same conclusion. In his poem L’Allegro¸ he describes Shakespeare in contrast to Jonson, whom he rightly calls “learned,” as “Fancy’s child,” warbling his “native woodnotes wild.” But this picture of Shakespeare as a naïve folk artist needs to be understood in context. It’s a bit like later seventeenth-century Jansenists accusing Montaigne of being a libertine. Compared to them, OK, yes. But compared to them, who isn’t? When it comes to knowledge of the classics, compared to Milton and Ben Jonson, frankly, we’re all ignoramuses. Milton was writing epic poetry in Latin, good poetry, as a teenager. So, his assessment of Shakespeare’s supposed lack of learning needs to be taken with a significant grain of salt. Shakespeare could read Latin easily and access all manner of classical philosophy in that form. I think he could also read French. He was living in an age when works such as Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Plutarch’s Morals were being translated into English and received with great interest. For example, as you noted in the previous episode, in his play Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare paraphrases a passage from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. A more subtle example of this kind of engagement with classical philosophy might be Brutus’s funeral oration. Unlike Mark Antony, Brutus makes no appeal to pathos, to the heartstrings of his audience; instead, his speech is a series of syllogisms, which the audience struggles and ultimately fails to understand. That is to say, Shakespeare gives Brutus the same distinctive style of speaking, a kind of staccato, highly abstract argumentation, that Cicero sees as characteristic of Stoic philosophers and denounces as rhetorically ineffective. More generally speaking, when it comes to Shakespeare’s knowledge of philosophy, the big question is the nature and timing of his reading of Montaigne. An English translation of Montaigne’s Essays was published in 1603, which is about half-way through Shakespeare’s career. For my own part, and here, some scholars may disagree, I think that Shakespeare almost certainly read Montaigne’s Essays earlier. Shakespeare shows some facility with French in Henry V, and he lived for many years in London with a family of French Huguenots. So, I suspect he read Montaigne’s essays in the original French and that the influence of Montaigne can be seen in earlier plays such as Hamlet. In fact, I think the character, Hamlet, is in part based on Montaigne’s persona as an author. But that would be a longer story! Briefly put, Montaigne, as your audience will know, was fabulously learned. His essays are a distillation and a remarkably comprehensive education, simply on their own, in the central questions and preoccupations of Hellenistic ethics. So, I don’t think it is an accident that Shakespeare is fascinated by the same philosophical problems that preoccupy Montaigne. Like Montaigne’s own chief sources, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, Shakespeare, like Montaigne, is fascinated by the ethical implications of Skepticism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism.

One source that people will especially think of here would be Aristotle’s Poetics. It’s commonly observed that Shakespeare did not follow the recommendations we find there, e.g., the so called “unities” of time, place, and action. Why was this, and what did Shakespeare do with other ideas we find in the Poetics?

A great question. In recent years, my friend Micha Lazarus has put together some ground-breaking research showing that Aristotle’s Poetics was much better known and more influential in sixteenth-century England than scholars had heretofore presupposed. Even if we knew for sure, though, that Shakespeare read the Poetics, many questions would still remain. For example, it’s possible to read something and to misunderstand it. Or to disagree. Some critics of Shakespeare such as Voltaire seem to assume that the only conceivable reason why Shakespeare did not adhere to the unities and to other rules of classical theater – the prohibition against depicting violence on stage, the prohibition against mingling comedy and tragedy -- is because he was ignorant. If he had known better, they think, surely he would have stuck to proper form. In reality, Shakespeare was well aware of the conventions of classical theater, not least from the tragedies of Seneca. The reason he does not abide by those conventions is because he is adhering instead to the conventions of vernacular English drama such as cycle plays, Passion plays, and morality plays that we tend to think of as medieval but that in fact Shakespeare was able to watch in person as a child and as a teenager, that is, up until the Puritans outlawed this kind of direct depiction of Christian history on stage. Critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries failed to recognize this decision on Shakespeare’s part to side with Christian aesthetics as opposed to classical and instead misunderstand Shakespeare as naïve. Shakespeare becomes, for them, and for many people, still remains, a paradigmatic example of the supposedly untutored genius. For the Romantics, in particular, Shakespeare reveals the superiority of innate talent and authenticity as opposed to erudition and engagement with tradition. This mythology is difficult to shake off, mostly because most of us today, whether we realize it or not, default to Romanticism and to its inheritor, modernism, in our assumptions about aesthetics. Nonetheless, from the perspective of this podcast, that is, the history of philosophy, it is important to recognize that the Romantic legend of Shakespeare as a naïve or outsider artist is a misunderstanding. Shakespeare is deeply engaged with his intellectual context. With regards to the Poetics more specifically, as your audience will know, the records that we have of Aristotle’s thought, which may be lecture notes, are highly condensed and at times enigmatic. In his Poetics, Aristotle uses several key terms such as hamartia, anagnorisis, and catharsis whose meaning is still subject to lively debate. For example, my former supervisor at Oxford, Tony Nuttall, argues that the catharsis tragedy produces is a purging of excessive emotions analogous to that produced physically in the body by an emetic or a laxative. I tend to side, by contrast, with Martha Nussbaum, who interprets catharsis in the Poetics as a kind of cognitive cleansing, an improved understanding, of the events that tragedy depicts and, by extension, human nature. Further complicating the picture is the fact that interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics has been strongly influenced over time, I would say, led astray, by the influence of Christianity and by the model of tragedy that emerges from Shakespeare’s plays. Many critics want to see Shakespeare as early modern and secular. But Shakespeare is also late medieval and Christian. In particular, tragedy for Shakespeare is the same thing -- essentially -- that it is for other vernacular English drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Tragedy is the failure of a sinner to repent. Tragedy for Aristotle, by contrast, is something alien to a Christian sensibility. Aristotle doesn’t care about moral character. What Aristotle means by hamartia is not “sin” but instead something more like “a mistake.” What he means by anagnorisis is not “repentance” but instead something more like “a discovery,” that is, a correction of a past misperception, a recognition of a previous error -- as regards matters of fact. That is to say, tragedy for Aristotle is amoral. It’s like the process of legal discovery that occurs in a court of law. Nonetheless, many critics continue to use Aristotle’s terms to describe Shakespeare’s plays, partly because they misunderstand those terms, and partly, more culpably, because it allows them to avoid using more accurate but more obviously Christian terms such as sin and repentance.

Another ancient source you’ve talked about is Stoicism. I talked about this in the previous episode, actually drawing on your work; but nonetheless can you say something about how Stoic ideas turn up in his works? 

Thank you for mentioning my work! Yes, as I explain there, the most obvious place where Shakespeare tangles with Stoicism is in his Roman plays. Whatever Rome may have been in fact, for Shakespeare, Rome is the incarnation, the historical embodiment, of a mindset that produces, on the one hand, in victory, imperial aggression, seeking to control others, and on the other, in defeat, Stoicism, seeking to control the self. That is to say, for Shakespeare, Rome is the Rome of Seneca, including Seneca’s deeply pessimistic tragedies, as well as his more optimistic philosophical prose. And the historical failure of Rome, its degeneration from Republic to Empire, is evidence – again, for Shakespeare – of the fundamental limitations and inaccuracy of Seneca’s point of view. As you note in the previous episode, though, Shakespeare’s engagement with Stoicism extends beyond his plays about Rome. You mentioned Leonato in Much Ado about Nothing; another, maybe more subtle example is the depiction of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. In the opening scene, Gratiano mocks Antonio at some length for putting on a “willful stillness,” as if he were a statue “cut in alabaster,” in order to be “reputed wise.” That is to say, a bit like Cassius with Brutus, Gratiano accuses Antonio of putting on the appearance of a Stoic out of a kind of philosophical pride. People see the play, Merchant of Venice, as a dialectic between Christianity and Judaism, but in fact it is a tri- alectic (so to speak) between Christianity, Judaism, and Stoicism. In keeping with other similarities between Antonio and Shylock, the two eponymous “merchants of Venice,” just as Shylock shows what Shakespeare sees as the shortcomings, the pride and hardheartedness, of Jewish ethics, Antonio personifies the analogous shortcomings of Stoic ethics. Antonio is ostensibly, ethnically Christian. But his moral allegiance really is to Stoicism. We see a similar dynamic at play in another Venetian character, Othello. As in the case of The Merchant of Venice, Othello is a play where our modern preoccupation with ethnicity tends to overwhelm our awareness of anything and everything else that is happening in the play. So, I was glad to see you draw attention to Othello’s importance, setting aside his race, as a case study in the ethical implications of Skepticism. I would add that Othello is also a case study in the dangers of naïve Stoicism. At the beginning of the play, when the Senators ask him to take command in Cyprus, Othello scoffs at the idea that bringing his new wife with him to his new post might prove a distraction. “Young affects,” he says, that is, the emotions characteristic of a young person, “in me” are “defunct.” If love gets the better of me, he says, if the arrows of Cupid blind my eyes, “let housewives make a skillet of my helm,” and let me lose my great reputation as a commander. He speaks ironically here because, of course, that seemingly inconceivable possibility is exactly what happens. Once Othello starts to think that Desdemona might be cheating on him with Cassio, he completely loses his inner equilibrium. He even strikes her in public, much to the shock and horror of a visiting emissary from Venice, who marvels at his change in behavior. “Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate / Call all in all sufficient? Is the nature / Whom passion could not shake?” Like Brutus, as well as Benedick in Much Ado, Othello is an example of the overconfident Stoic: the man who thinks he has more control over his own human nature than he really does.

More generally, what do you think are the possibilities (and perhaps risks) of approaching Shakespeare within the framework of ethics or political philosophy?

Ethics and politics are contentious topics, which people tend to have very strong feelings about. Shakespeare is a beloved author and possesses a unique international cultural authority. As a result, when we try to discern and articulate Shakespeare’s perspective about ethics and politics, the overwhelming temptation is to try to find in Shakespeare a mirror of ourselves, rather than acknowledging points of departure. Shakespeare was writing more than four hundred years ago. Like most of the Englishmen of his day, he was a conservative patriotic Christian. Most of his critics today, by contrast, and even more so, the theater professionals who produce his plays, are progressive, cosmopolitan, and secular. Within the arts and higher education, the establishment today is actively hostile to Shakespeare’s moral and political vision. So, people who like Shakespeare, who are professionally committed to teaching or performing Shakespeare, try to find all sorts of workarounds. On stage, directors tend to cut, change, or undermine with irony any passages that might pose a challenge to a modern sensibility. I think that this tendency is a disservice both to Shakespeare and to ourselves. Theater should not be a kind of liturgy for progressive atheists but instead, at its best, the experience of encountering moral, political, and religious perspectives very different from our own. Theater, ideally, should compel us to take seriously the opposite of our own beliefs. Among critics, the most pervasive workaround, by contrast, is to cite Keats on Shakespeare’s “negative capability” and to maintain as a kind of axiom that Shakespeare has no fixed opinions about ethics or politics. Shakespeare always presents both sides of every question with equal weight. This claim is implausible. Everybody has opinions -- even Shakespeare. So, why is it attractive? The claim has the hold that it does because it makes Shakespeare a precedent and an authority for the delusion that the philosopher Carl Schmitt very accurately discerns at the heart of liberalism: the belief that it is possible for human beings and even institutions to be neutral, to escape tough decisions about ethics and politics altogether. For most critics, it is easier to tell themselves that Shakespeare believes nothing than to admit that he might disagree with what they themselves believe. Having said that, I would want to add an important clarification. Shakespeare does present both sides of important questions, in the sense that he presents what I call a dialectic of faith and doubt. He asks himself, what if the opposite of what I believe were true? What if the moral vision, for example, that Falstaff represents, or Cleopatra, or Coriolanus, is in fact the case? Then he follows that thought experiment through to its conclusion. Yes, it’s fun to be Falstaff, at least for a time, but it also has a human cost. It ends badly. Yes, it’s fun to be Cleopatra, but it’s also unsustainable. Shakespeare entertains misgivings about the claims of Christianity but not to the point of losing his faith. He gives force and weight to the nihilism and antinomianism that he encountered in the works of Machiavelli and Seneca, not to praise this rival, proto-modern point of view, but instead to more effectively exorcise its nagging hold upon his consciousness: to attain what I have described elsewhere as a kind of catharsis of doubt.

Speaking of ethics, there is also the whole question of the ethical status of theater itself. In 1642 the Long Parliament actually shut down the theaters during the English Civil War; that is about a quarter century after Shakespeare’s death, but there were also concerns about the morality of these entertainments in his lifetime, right?

Yes, theater in Shakespeare’s day was a disreputable endeavor. The Globe Theater, for example, had to be built outside the city limits due to the hostility of London officials. Theater happened in the same part of town as prostitution and bear-baiting. Puritans especially were leery of theater for all kinds of reasons, including not least men and boys dressing up as women. We see pamphlets such as Philip Stubbes’ Anatomie of Abuses and more polished diatribes such as Joshua Rainolds’ treatise On the Overthrow of Stage Plays. Rainolds was a popular lecturer at Oxford and at the time the president of Corpus Christi college. So, an important figure. This suspicion of theater is in keeping with the more general iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation. Like that iconoclasm, though, antitheatrical discourse also reflects an increasing knowledge of, and affinity for, Plato as opposed to Aristotle. We can see the same dynamic at work, for example, in the poetry of Sidney and Spenser. Both poets are Protestant, and, like Plato, both poets are very anxious about the power of images. Images have a propensity to deceive that these poets recognize but that they are not sure how to escape. In the case of Joshua Rainolds, his fear that theatergoers might be contaminated by the passions and sins that they see represented on stage very much resembles Plato’s in his Republic. Given the implications for his profession, Shakespeare was almost certainly aware of the general shape and tenor of this debate. So, it is worth asking how he weighs in, if at all. One way, I think, is through characters who represent the imagination. And here, it may be worth recalling at least briefly what the imagination is. It is a faculty of the mind that Aristotle in effect invents, posits as a necessity, in order to explain what Christians call “sin” and what he calls akrasia, that is, being out of order with oneself. Plato reports that Socrates maintained that vice of this kind is a result of ignorance: inadequate knowledge. Aristotle disagrees: people know all the time what they ought to do and still don’t do it. How can that be? St. Augustine will posit the existence of the will to help explain this phenomenon, that is, the possibility of sin. Aristotle, by contrast, posits a faculty he calls phantasia, hence in English “fantasy” or “fancy,” as well as “imagination,” which mediates between the senses and the mind and which can be easily misled by madness, sleep, drunkenness, or especially, strong emotions. Imagination is the weak link in our capacity for moral reasoning. And as such, it is a cause of anxiety for earnest Christians. In his Faerie Queene, for example, Spenser represents the imagination as a duplicitous wizard, “Archimago,” who deceives the Redcrosse Knight repeatedly with false images. I think Shakespeare is also worried about the moral status of the imagination. He personifies the imagination in characters such as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ariel in The Tempest who are at best flighty and amoral. Shakespeare also represents the imagination, though, in more troubling characters such as the ghost in Hamlet, the witches and ghosts in Macbeth, and especially, Iago in Othello. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Iago’s name resembles the Latin word for imagination, imaginatio, as well as the name of Spenser’s wizard, Archimago. One way to understand Iago is as an external embodiment of Othello’s internal imagination, a bit like Tyler Durden in Fight Club. In Othello, as in Hamlet, Shakespeare is asking the same question that Spenser is asking in Book 1 of the Faerie Queene: how can I be sure that what I think is my conscience is not in fact nothing more than my own imagination, prey to the devil and leading me astray?   

Do you think that he saw his plays as having a morally beneficial effect, like Philip Sidney would want? Or is he too impressed by human perversity and freedom to be confident about this?

I do think Shakespeare wants to believe that theater and more generally, fiction, can lead people to repentance, like a sermon or a parable or like the story that the prophet Nathan tells King David. David can see what is morally wrong about a hypothetical rich man stealing from a hypothetical poor man, and this exercise of his imagination, a temporary defamiliarization, allows him to better understand what is morally wrong about his adulterous affair with Bathsheba. We can see this hope on Shakespeare’s part most clearly in Hamlet. “I have heard,” he says, “That guilty creatures sitting at a play” have been “so struck to the soul” by the “cunning” of a scene that “they have proclaimed their malefactions.” And that is to some extent what happens. And that is to some extent what happens. Claudius is visibly shaken by the players’ representation of a man murdering his brother. But he does not ultimately repent. And here, I think, we see Shakespeare’s more fundamental commitment to the freedom of the human will. One of the problems with representing human choice on stage that Seneca reflects on in his tragedies as well as Tom Stoppard in his take on Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, is that plays are scripted; the performance is largely determined, even if the events that it represents are not. To give the appearance of choice, Shakespeare relies on two characteristic structural components. One is to include counterfactual foils. Characters such as Horatio, Laertes, and Fortinbras allow us to see that Hamlet could make different choices than he does. The most famous such technique, however, is his incorporation of soliloquies. We watch characters articulate opposing courses of action and choose between them. And they do not always make the right choice. Coming back to the question of theater, when they are shown their offenses, whether in person or on stage, people do not always choose to acknowledge their sins and change their ways. More often, they get angry. Rather than receiving the message and coming to a better awareness of themselves, they shoot the messenger. For example, and I agree, my friend Will Hamlin argues that Measure for Measure, a notorious problem play, can be understood as an elaborate variation on the so-called “Mousetrap” that Hamlet stages. The Duke repeatedly arranges events so that his deputy, Angelo, will be forced to see more clearly who he really is. Each time, however, Angelo refuses to rise to the occasion and instead doubles down on his pursuit of sin. Other such instances include Malvolio at the end of Twelfth Night and Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. These scenes make us uncomfortable because they are tragic, even though they are housed within what are ostensibly comedies. As I said before, for Shakespeare, the essence of tragedy is the failure of a sinner to repent.

Finally, could you say something about the reception of Shakespeare in later philosophers? For instance I know you are interested in the engagement of Hegel with Shakespeare.

Yes, certainly! You may remember I said earlier that Rome for Shakespeare is the Rome of Seneca. This connection is important not least because Seneca is the model and inspiration for a contemporary of Shakespeare, the Dutch political philosopher Justus Lipsius, who in turn exercises a considerable influence on Kant. Kant’s emphasis on individual autonomy as in effect the greatest good is a legacy of the influence of Seneca. And it is a touchstone for the present-day liberal consensus as regards morality as well as politics. To put the connection a different way, when I was working on Shakespeare’s Roman plays, I wanted to find a contemporary point of view that most closely resembles his. Is he conservative? Progressive? Marxist? Libertarian? What? And what I realized is that the closest analogue of Shakespeare’s thought about politics in our time is what has come to be known as “post-liberalism” or “common-good conservatism,” such as we find in the works of authors such as Alastair MacIntyre and Patrick Deneen. Moreover, that similarity makes sense. Both authors, Deneen and Shakespeare, argue that a society where each individual is trying to maximize his or her autonomy at the expense of everyone else is a society that is doomed to oscillate between brittle autocracy and merciless civil war. Shakespeare sees this dynamic in a pre-Christian society, Rome; Deneen sees it in a post-Christian society, our world today. This research on Shakespeare’s Rome also led me to discover Shakespeare’s importance to Hegel. For example, the earliest written work we have by Hegel is a partial translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Thinking in terms of genealogies of influence, Shakespeare shapes Hegel’s thought much more deeply than I think even scholars of Hegel tend to recognize. Hegel’s Rome, in particular, is very much Shakespeare’s Rome. For example, it is worth remembering that the so-called master-slave dialectic is not for Hegel an enduring feature of the human condition but instead characteristic of a particular stage in our historical development: the stage that coincides with ancient Rome. Shakespeare’s Romans prefigure what Hegel calls the “Unhappy Consciousness” of the modern individual and which he associates with “the Roman empire, the seat of Stoic strength of mind,” in which a man lives unto himself alone.”  The would-be solipsist is unhappy because he finds himself torn between a Stoic sense of himself and himself alone as the source of meaning and experience and a refractory Skeptical countercurrent of awareness that he remains subject, nonetheless, despite himself, to forces and powers beyond his control. In Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare shows how Romans’ characteristic drive for dominance can turn inwards, especially in defeat. Characters such as Brutus, Antony, and Cleopatra take refuge in a kind of narcissistic solipsism. But this involution is ultimately unsustainable. As Hamlet says, “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space, were I not troubled by bad dreams.” Ultimately, we are constrained by a world outside ourselves, including especially our relations with other people.