Shakespeare's Individualism (review)

One reading of literary history could be reductively summarized as assuming that celebrations of liberty and dissidence started in 1789 with the French Revolution and were subsequently confirmed in Romanticism. Writers who quoted Shakespeare on behalf of such values were merely appropriating some of his more eccentric and uncharacteristic expressions taken out of context, since his own works were viewed as generally conformist. Peter Holbrook, in his weighty but succinct and eloquent book, challenges both aspects of this conservative narrative. He trawls through Shakespeare's works to find emphatically that assertions of selfhood, freedom and individualism are not exceptions in the plays and Sonnets, but so frequently expressed as to be the norm, and that in this sense it was Shakespeare who inaugurated and sanctioned libertarianism in Western philosophy and culture. He does so, Holbrook argues, by repeatedly asserting that self-realization is a positive good: 'I am that I am' in sonnet 121 is a sentiment repeated by many of his most memorable characters.

Polonius' 'to thine own self be true' thus becomes in this book a signature of Shakespeare's writing and, although Holbrook acknowledges the untrustworthy wiliness of the speaker in context, he presents a reading that suggests the phrase could be one that the protagonist Hamlet pre-eminently lives by, and not only Hamlet but all the tragic heroes in their different ways. Similarly in the comedies young lovers must of necessity follow their inner desires even to the point of breaking laws, offending greybeards and disrupting society. Any 'impediment in the current' (Measure for Measure) must be removed when it hinders 'violent and unruly' impulsiveness stemming from 'prompture of the blood' and a desire for freedom.

Of course the moral status of evil characters becomes problematical under this view, in exactly the way Nietzsche's ideas are seen as dangerous, Max Stirner's 'ego-anarchism' even more so. If 'being oneself' and following one's 'master plan' involves actions that are positively harmful to others, where does the dramatist stand? John Keats gave part of an answer in a letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818) writing of the 'poetical Character' that:

It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation ...

The artist delights in energy and vitality and he cannot be held morally accountable for the actions of his imaginative creations, themselves pure 'speculation' about the nature of good and evil themselves. Keats has in mind Shakespeare, his paragon of 'negative capability', and Holbrook's Shakespeare is no less than Keats' a writer who unflinchingly holds that the act of self-creation (Richard III's 'I am myself alone') carries the likelihood of outcomes that not only a conventional world would condemn as evil. As a corollary, the unlikely character of the Friar in Romeo and Juliet enunciates the principle that what is vice in one situation can be virtue in another:

For nought so vile that on the earth doth liveBut to the earth some special good doth give.

However, the memorable inscriptions of evil in Shakespeare's plays, such as Tarquin's rape of Lucrece, continue to worry Holbrook and draw his attention to the end of the book, since a possibility exists of a kind of 'false consciousness' of one's destiny. Evil characters may not be choosing freedom in good faith but instead are enslaved to a dogma and the 'mind-forg'd manacles' explored by Blake.

Not surprisingly, most references are, at the earlier end of the historical spectrum, to Montaigne with his unnervingly frank interrogations of his own 'self', and at the other end to an amoral...