Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith

6: ETHICS

160 John D. Cox Hamlet, and our knowledge makes all the difference. Claudius is no skeptic; he is a consummately clever and determined sinner, and Hamlet is right to suspect him from the outset: O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain! My tables—meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. (1.5.107–9) We know with absolute certainty that Hamlet is right to suspect Claudius, however, only because we are granted knowledge that is privy to Claudius and to God alone, and this knowledge, revealed to us by the playwright, definitively reveals Claudius’s suspicious duplicity—though to Hamlet that duplicity is impenetrable, however strongly he suspects it. The king’s admission is what makes Hamlet more than a remarkable esthetic achievement: it makes the play a challenging vision of human uncertainty in a distinctively religious setting that is charged with profound moral seriousness. That seriousness, moreover, underpins Shakespeare’s political thinking even in his most secular plays, where it appears to be least evident. Shakespeare was no less insightful than Machiavelli about the infinite resourcefulness of instrumental thinking, and he embodied that resourcefulness in plays about historical process, which for him, as for Machiavelli, meant political process. Where Shakespeare departs most profoundly from Machiavelli is in his affirmation of moral limitation— not in the political process itself, whose exclusive end is the acquiring and maintaining of political power, but in the human situation that encompasses kings and commoners alike, whether the first are willing to admit it or not. Shakespeare’s most successful politicians are the most self-deceived, because self-knowledge comes only with the acknowledgment of human limitations, and politicians, as Machiavelli well knew, need to act as if nothing limits them, least of all moral scruples. Shakespeare knew this too, but his politicians suffer, in ways that Machiavelli’s prince never does, because they attempt to deny limitations that their world nonetheless imposes on them. 6 ETHICS 161 O hateful Error, Melancholy’s child, Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men The things that are not? Julius Caesar 5.3.67–69 Oh, that you could turn your eyes toward the napes of your necks and make but an interior survey of your good selves! Oh, that you could! Coriolanus 2.1.38–41 For Shakespeare’s contemporaries, on both sides of the Catholic/ Protestant divide, questions about ethics were inseparable from religion —not because of a simplified divine-command theory, but because God was perfect goodness. “Godliness,” Hooker asserts, is “the cheifest top and welpsringe of all true virtues, even as God is of all good thinges.”1 Addressing the ethical question in Shakespeare’s plays is therefore, in this sense, impossible to address without addressing the religious question. Shakespeare’s drama does not consist of animated moral abstractions, as in the morality play, but the words and actions of his imagined characters are morally meaningful, especially when taken in conjunction with the shape of their story. In the continuum of Christian destiny between Creation and Last Judgment, characters understand goodness imperfectly, being deceived or self-deceived or both, or if they do understand goodness, they fail or refuse to act on it, as Macbeth does. In the comedies—and sometimes even in the tragedies—understanding and actions improve, so that self-division, mistrust, vengeance, and pride give way to self-understanding, trust, and reconciliation, both for individuals and their communities, in ways that are recognizably Christian—not because the stories are literally 162 John D. Cox biblical or allegorical, as they were in the religious drama that preceded Shakespeare’s, but because characters’ words and actions enact distinctive Christian virtues and usually acknowledge their origin in meaningful allusive patterns. STOIC ETHICS In some plays, however, a different set of ethical expectations is evident, and these plays provide a useful contrast, by default, to those discussed already, especially since virtue in these plays is not as closely tied to religion as Christian virtue is. The medieval distinction between cardinal and theological virtues is helpful here, because Shakespeare consistently identified ancient pre-Christian Rome with stoic ethics, creating an implicit contrast between two sets of ethical assumptions.2 This contrast is complicated by the fact that stoicism was ambivalently favored in the Renaissance, and that neo-stoicism, as it is called, became a court fashion late in the century; stoic...