Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination

Notes

Notes Notes to Preface 1. Henry V 1.1 68 p. 1457, and ibid. note 8. 2. Hegel addresses the issue of anachronisms in art in his Lectures on Aesthetics. On the one hand, he defends the artist’s need to bring the characters and events to life for the audience of the day; the artist need not be trapped by the historical “naturalness” of a time or event. “Such a transgression of so-called naturalness is, for art, a necessary anachronism” (Aesth. p. 278). So for example, “to propose to reproduce with complete accuracy of detail the purely external appearance of the rust of antiquity is only a puerile pedantry undertaken for what is itself only an external end” (Aesth. p. 279). To “bring every ‘pathos’ to light in an appearance which absolutely corresponds with it, . . . he [the artist] has to take into account in each case the culture of his time, its speech, etc.” (Aesth. p. 278). On the other hand, according to Hegel there is another kind of anachronism that is not acceptable. One ought not to transpose insights and ideas of a later development of the religious and moral consciousness . . . into a period or nation whose whole earlier outlook contradicts such newer ideas. Thus the Christian religion brought in its train moral categories which were foreign throughout to the Greeks. For example, the inner reflection of conscience in deciding what is good or bad, remorse, and penitence belong only to the moral development of modern times; the heroic character knows nothing of the illogicality of penitence—what he has done, he has done. [In] Orestes . . . the Eumenides are . . . represented as universal powers and not as the gnawing of his purely subjective conscience (Aesth. p. 278). Unfortunately for us, Shakespeare makes use not only of the first but also the second kind of anachronism. For example, in his Winter’s Tale, the characters 293 both appeal to an oracle and experience the pangs of conscience. The result is that our book must also, contra Hegel, engage in such anachronisms. 3. PoS par. 53, p. 32. 4. I am grateful to my student Neil MacGregor (University of Guelph) for his wonderful assignment for me entitled “A Hegelian Account of Othello,” which he also presented at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature, University of Syracuse, May 2004. 5. PoR p. 10. 6. John J. Joughin, Philosophical Shakespeares (Routledge, 2000). 7. Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2006). 8. A. D. Nuttal, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 9. Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007). See The New Republic (published Wednesday, May 07, 2008) for a review of the books by Nutall, McGinn, and Zamir. 10. Michael Witmore, Shakespearean Metaphysics (New York: Continuum Press, 2008). 11. Paul Kottman, A Politics of the Scene, (Stanford University Press, 2007) and Philosophers on Shakespeare (edited by Kottman, Stanford University Press, 2009). 12. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987). 13. A. C. Bradley, “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy” and “The Rejection of Falstaff ” in Oxford Lectures on Poetry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 69–95 and 247–75, respectively. 14. Otto Pöggeler, “Hegel und die griechische Tragödie” in Heidelberger Hegel-Tage, Hegel-Studien Beiheft 1.1964: 285–305. 15. Henry Paolucci and Anne Paolucci, Hegel on Tragedy (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1962). 16. Anne Paolucci, “Hegel’s Theory of Comedy” in Comedy: New Perspectives , edited by Maurice Charney (New York: New Literary Forum, 1978), 89–108. 17. Henry Paolucci, “The Poetics of Aristotle and Hegel” in Hegel in comparative Literature, ed. Frederick G. Weiss, Review of National Literatures, Vol. 1, No. 4 (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1970), 201–9. 18. Henry Paolucci and Anne Paolucci, Hegelian Literary Perspectives (Smyrna: Griffon House, 2002). 19. Ursula Franke and Karsten Berr, Kulturpolitik und Kunstgeschichte: Perspektiven der Hegelschen Ästhetik (Meiner Felix Verlag GmbH, 2005). 294 Notes to Preface 20. Walter Jaeschke, Hegel-Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung (J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2003). 21. Maria Salditt, Hegels Shakespeare-Interpretation. Philosophische Forshungen (Berlin: Springer, 1927). 22. Emil Wolf, “Hegel und Shakespeare” in Vom Geist der Der Dichtung; Gedächtnisschrift für Robert Pesch (Hrsg Martin, Fritz, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1949). 23. Anne Paolucci, “Bradley...