Necessary Victims: William Shakespeare's Tragic Ethics of Identity

A drop of blood drawn from thy country's bosom Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore.

—Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry the Sixth

A system of ethics produced by prohibitions is a community's condition of possibility. What maintains this system is the community's identity, the way members of the group mythically describe and convince themselves through mutual mimesis of their mutual belonging, that is, of their mutual ethics of nonviolence. This maintained space of ethical mutuality is defined against a larger external space of mutual violence.

First removed from mutual mimetic violence through prohibitions, community and its self-description as identity are then separated from outsiders through the limitation of these prohibitions to insiders. Given that prohibitions are the main protection against mutual violence, applying them exclusively within the group implies that only members benefit from full ethical protection against violence. Girard explains this inherently violent and exclusionary nature of identity formation:

Although positive and essential, most relationships of belonging—even the most humble—involve some form of exclusion, rejection, and, consequently, violence. To exist, they have to exclude some people, and even if this exclusion is not achieved through physical violence, it employs means that are inevitably perceived as violent by those who are its victims.¹

If exclusion implies lesser or completely absent ethical prohibitions protecting outsiders, behavior that would not be internally applicable without a slide into a war of all against all can be applied to the outsiders. Thus, prohibitions not only separate from the war of all against all, but in that they only apply to those within the group, they separate from outsiders, potentially relegating the interactions with them to a state of nature.

The scapegoat mechanism as described by Girard and its eventual cultural evolution into ritual are based on this discriminatory ethics: an acceptance of the use of victims from outside the group with intent to avoid internal violence. That discriminatory ethic is based on two propositions: first, that the space of nonviolence is limited and separated from an area external to identity where violence is permitted, that is, from an area from which victims of rituals can be chosen and against which collective violence can be exercised; and second, that the mutual nonviolence and protection extended to those within the group does not extend to those without: Fundamentally, outsiders are people against whom collective violence is always potential and periodically actual.

Upon this original sacrificial and discriminatory ethic, other forms of violence can be grafted and justified, including wars and genocides. Rephrasing Hobbes, outside identity lies the state of nature.

This discriminatory ethics of identity is one of the most problematic aspects of William Shakespeare's work and the central subject of this essay. René Girard was the first to show the fundamental role mimesis plays in determining the behaviors of characters and in organizing the overall structures of Shakespeare's plays. In A Theater of Envy, he describes Shakespeare as "not merely a dramatic illustrator of mimetic desire but its theoretician."²

Interpreting interpretations

When René Girard's A Theater of Envy was published, the book sustained criticism on many fronts, including its meager reference to previous scholarship³ and historical context. Girard viewed Shakespeare as a source of universal truths transcending his Elizabethan framework. This universalist view was discordant with New Historicism's relativism and its opposition to the idea of invariable truths. Girard's large disregard of Shakespeare's historical context was also in opposition to historicism's emphasis on contextualization. Thus, the effort to understand Shakespeare's work as containing universal truths about human cultures appears in a period where such an enterprise was under attack. In opposition to Girard's views are those of others such as Orgel, who claims, "What we have of the Shakespeare text, all we have ever had, is a set of versions with no original."⁴ This absence of originals is related to the New Historicism's antifoundationalism and to the idea of a uniquely correct interpretation. Problematizing the very notion of authenticity, Orgel highlights the diverse...