Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination

11. Universal Wit—The Absolute Theater of Identity

Chapter 11 Universal Wit— The Absolute Theater of Identity Part I. Being at Sea Let us pretend for a moment that we are sticking to the historical, political attitude of Objective Spirit and of Shakespeare’s History plays, and that we are encountering Shakespeare’s Romance genre with that attitude in mind. Let us look at Shakespeare’s Romance play Pericles. From our assumed standpoint, Pericles appears to have few phenomenological merits.3 The character of King Pericles is not credible, nor is the plot.4 If we compare imprisoned Richard II5 with the unshaven, out-of-luck king of Tyre Pericles,6 the latter figure does not draw us in. Pericles’ fate always seems to come to him entirely from without. Unlike for Richard II, events for Pericles never lead to development in his self-consciousness. For example, if we compare the role of music in Richard II’s prison speech with the role of the divine music heard by Pericles after he has realized that Marina is his daughter, we note the following. The interiority of time, meter and meaning and the relation of those to the social order are profound in Richard II’s account; the music changes him. In Pericles, the music is ridiculous; it wafts in. Pericles merely hears it.7 Furthermore (from our assumed historical standpoint of Objective Spirit), it is implausible that Pericles would find his armor cast up on shore just when he needs it; and Marina’s pious staving off of lecherous male pirates and brothel owners requires us to stretch our imaginations to the extreme. This sort of ridiculousness, it would be argued, is par for the course in Shakespeare’s Romances. The plays are teleological in the sense that in them all tragedies are resolved. But in each play, the course and means of resolution are strange and unpredictable. Redemption usually comes in the form of intervention by Greek or Roman gods.8 249 250 Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination These plays therefore leave an objective, historical observer at a loss. Given this, and given the predominance of images of the sea, we might conclude that Shakespeare’s Romance genre is a kind of “Being at Sea.” I mean this both in the sense of the experience and in the sense that, any standpoint that the plays might portray, seems to be a “Being” that has lost its footing. Commentators over the ages have questioned Shakespeare’s artistic ability when writing these late plays.9 At this point, let me step out of our assumed, objective, historical standpoint, and take the different approach to Shakespeare’s Romances that we introduced at the end of last chapter. First, I agree with Northrop Frye’s defense of the Romances: In our day most critics are reconciled to the superiority of Shakespeare, but the Jonsonian point of view still survives in those critics who find the height of Shakespeare’s achievement in the great tragedies, and feel that the romances of the final period represent an exhaustion of vitality or a subsiding into more facile and commercial formulas. My own view is that the turn to romance in Shakespeare’s last phase represents a genuine culmination. I naturally do not mean that the romances are better or greater plays than the tragedies; I mean that there is a logical evolution toward romance in Shakespeare’s work, and consequently no anticlimax, whether technical or spiritual, in passing from King Lear through Pericles to The Tempest.10 I express this culmination in Shakespeare’s dramatic efforts as follows: In the Romances, unlike in his previous works, Shakespeare uses a language of Universal Wit. In what follows, I show that this new imaginative framework is proto-phenomenological and analogous to the culminating moments of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This is not to say that the culmination of Hegel’s phenomenology is not thoroughly committed to the necessity of the moments leading up to it (in a way that is not so or indeed possible for Shakespeare).11 Nor do I mean to make shallow in any way the depth and breadth of Hegel’s Concept as it grasps itself as/at the end of time.12 I am pronouncing on the need—found in Hegel’s account of Absolute Knowing as well as in the Romances—for a different kind of language once one approaches the world from a point of view of Universal Wit. In other words, while remaining clear about differences...