Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination

Section 2. Sovereign Deceit and the Rejection of Wit (Chapters 7, 8, and 9)

Section 2 Sovereign Deceit and the Rejection of Wit (Chapters 7, 8, and 9) Introduction This chapter and the next two chapters make up a single argument about the evil of Shakespeare’s apparently virtuous character, Henry V.1 In Chapter 7, we look at Henry V’s rejection of wit, his apparent honor, and his pretense of virtue. We use Hegel’s theory of virtue to undermine this pretense and to redirect our interpretation of Henry V as evil. In Chapter 8, we look in-depth at Hegel’s account of evil in the Aesthetics and in the Philosophy of Right. Hegel’s account in the latter work shows us how the negative infinite judgments of crime and evil are necessary developments of a developing social will. While they give rise to alienation, they force the dialectic toward higher forms of social justice. In Chapter 9, we look in detail at the “slip” of conscience into evil, and at hypocrisy. We give this scope and depth by looking look at the characters of Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet and their relationships to conscience and to evil. The conclusion is that, on the one hand, Henry V’s behavior is no less consciously chosen than Richard III’s; on the other hand, the evil of Henry V’s motivation is unconscious to him. The reason for this is that, as with Macbeth, his deliberations have within them a dream-like structure; he “slips” into evil. For these reasons, he is the extreme of evil as Hegel defines it, for he is the hypocrite who has fooled himself. Contrary to what Hal as King Henry V thinks, the mirror inversions and temporal disorders inherited from his predecessors have not been solved. He has not “redeemed time”; he has rejected its excess. In our final chapter of Part II (Chapter 10), we discuss whether redemption of time is possible in ethical life or whether a higher standpoint is necessary. 157 Chapter 7 Henry V’s Unchangeableness His Rejection of Wit and His Posture of Virtue Reinterpreted in the Light of Hegel’s Theory of Virtue2 Part I. Henry V’s Background and His Rejection of Wit “Shakespeare does not let us locate Hal/Henry V’s true self; a king is necessarily something of a counterfeit, and Henry is a great king” (Bloom).3 Prince Harry (Hal): “The thieves have bound the true men; now could thou and I rob the thieves, and go merrily to London”4 “. . . a visor for a visor” (Mercutio).5 I have argued elsewhere that Hegel’s dialectic involves a spatial, stable moment (das Bestehende) and a moving, temporal moment (das Vergehende).6 The one turns into the other in a dialectical spiral toward more complete forms of consciousness and society. Whenever one side predominates, there is instability. This is the case, on the one hand, even if (where the side is spatiality) it looks like there is complete stability, or, on the other (where the side is temporality) it looks like a sequence without hindrance. Where one side predominates, the other side is near at hand, hidden within the predominate side as part of its essence. When I speak of Henry V’s unchangeableness, I mean, on the one hand, his apparent stability as king and as a royal will-power. This stability appears 159 160 Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination in the shape of his virtue. But on the other hand, there is within his past and within his own psychology, the thieving, mercurial, and witty character of Falstaff and the characters at Eastcheap, as well as Hal’s memories of participating in their exploits. That is the temporal character that lies within Hal and which he rejects in order to achieve his royal stability. We saw previously that Richard II’s time was changed into Bolingbroke’s “Jack of the clock” and that that had become further destabilized with the new sub-lunar time of Jack Falstaff.7 By rejecting Falstaff and all that changeableness, Henry V thinks he is putting an end to this long history of temporal unrest. He thinks he has “redeemed time when men least thought he would.”8 My argument in what follows is that this suppression of the temporal, changeable, and contingent is evil and ultimately untenable. In the process of exploring Hal’s unchangeableness and its dependence on suppression, I look at how virtue...