Forgiving the Gift: The Philosophy of Generosity in Shakespeare and Marlowe

Introduction

3 Introduction Marlowe’s Faustus makes a reciprocal exchange the basis of its plot but also presents exchange as the diabolical opposite of saving grace. In our own time, by contrast, few things attract suspicion as reliably as generosity, which we dismiss almost reflexively as some sort of ruse. Adriaan Peperzak observes that “some postmodern authors, very much impressed by critical analyses of abnormal and normal behavior, social structures , economic mechanisms, linguistic and ideological patterns, have dogmatically affirmed that all human actions, even those that seem most generous, are selfish, egotistic, narcissistic.”1 Those authors, in other words, seem to filter the world through the mind of Faustus, incredulous toward generosity, credulous toward exchange, and damned. Such a dogmatic belief in the ubiquity of exchange blinds us to the belief in the gift that was central to early modern drama and to the culture in which it arose. The belief in ubiquitous exchange nevertheless commands importance in criticism of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, though as Peperzak observes, it arises from the social sciences. Specifically, the notion that every gift anticipates recompense achieves theoretical expression in the ethnology of Marcel Mauss. Within criticism of early modern drama, this assumption finds its strongest expression in the work of Stephen Greenblatt and the school he founds, New Historicism. 4 Forgiving the Gift Rather than tracing how Greenblatt comes to be influenced by Mauss, by way of Clifford Geertz and Greenblatt’s interest in cultural anthropology,2 I am content to show that Mauss and Greenblatt share similar ideas. Where Greenblatt finds “a network of trades and trade-offs”3 in the early modern world and its drama, Mauss finds networks of exchange in every society he considers . The 1924 publication of Mauss’s The Gift as an extended essay in l’Année Sociologique marks a watershed in theoretical consideration of gift-giving practices. Mary Douglas credits this text with providing ethnology “a new criterion of sound analysis ”4 and it certainly influenced many disciplines in the humanities as well as in the social sciences. Mauss’s essay, moreover, gives overt form to the assumptions that inform much criticism of early modern drama and therefore opens these assumptions to criticism. When we assume that self-interest motivates characters in works of drama, we employ a set of ideas enunciated by ethnography to describe societies. Our critical understanding of fictive worlds therefore betrays the influence of ideas about the world itself. Conversely, however, the readings we make of fictive worlds and characters influence our understanding of our own beingin -the-world. If we come to view Faustus as a self-interested agent or the product of a society that gives itself to be exhaustively described as a series of exchanges, we endorse a particular worldview. While the social sciences clearly contribute to the study of literature, literary criticism also influences our understanding of the world. In this sense, literary criticism is always philosophical. Emmanuel Levinas suggests in Time and the Other that “the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare.”5 Richard A. Cohen suggests that the phrasing calls to mind the title of René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy and, as a result, “carries enormous philosophical weight, even more than might be imagined at first glance.” In the original French, “de Shakespeare” has the force of a possessive, causing Cohen Introduction 5 to comment: “What this means is not that all of philosophy is a meditation about Shakespeare, which by itself would already be a remarkable and thoughtworthy possibility, but rather that the whole of philosophy is a meditation by Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s meditation.”6 Levinas refers to Shakespeare frequently throughout Time and the Other; moreover, he places references to Shakespeare in parallel with references to philosophers . After listing “Pascalian, Kierkegaardian, Nietzschean, and Heideggerian anxieties,” he argues that the “the fool of the Shakespearean tragedy” offers an alternate response to the terror of solitude. Earlier in the same book, sandwiched between Albert Camus’s and Martin Heidegger’s definitions of absurdity, he discusses the attitudes of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Juliet toward suicide. Particularly in this early work but also throughout his career, Levinas does not treat Shakespeare’s plays as mere illustrations but as philosophical meditations, on par with those of Heidegger. This is not to say that Levinas defers to Shakespeare’s authority any more than he...