Is there a philosophy in Shakespeare?
In As You Like It Touchstone asks the shepherd Corin whether he has any philosophy in him, and we may put the same question to Shakespeare. A rival of his, the book says, answers no, and we may accept that verdict in the sense Bernard Shaw gave it: the plays hold no metaphysics and no theory about God or the final nature of truth. Shakespeare was a sensible man who did not believe that a creature could take its creator apart, or that a mind in this brief moment of life could grasp everything. There are more things in heaven and earth, he has Hamlet tell Horatio, than are dreamt of in philosophy. If he guessed at an answer, he kept it to himself.
He seldom speaks of the famous philosophers with respect, and he doubts that any of them ever bore even a toothache patiently. He laughs at logic and prefers the light of imagination. He does not try to solve the riddles of life and of the self; he looks at them keenly and feels that they give our theories more depth or shame us for our short sight. He stands aside and waits for the holders of firm opinions to destroy one another, or for time to do it. He hides behind his characters and is hard to find, so we should ascribe an opinion to him only when at least two of his creatures voice it.
At first he seems more a psychologist than a philosopher, though not a theorist: rather a photographer of the mind, who catches hidden thoughts and the acts that reveal human nature. Yet he is no shallow realist. People in life do not talk as his characters do, but through these improbable events and unreasonable speeches we come closer to human instinct and thought. Like Schopenhauer, he knows that reason supplies the tools of the will's mischief. In giving love songs to the distracted Ophelia he anticipates Freud and goes beyond him, and in studying Macbeth and his worse half he comes near to Dostoevsky.
Morals and politics
If we take philosophy not as metaphysics but as a general view of human affairs, a broad opinion about morals, politics, history and faith as well as about the world and thought, then Shakespeare is a deeper philosopher than Bacon, just as Montaigne is deeper than Descartes, for it is not the outward form that makes philosophy. Shakespeare accepts that morality is relative: nothing is good or bad, he writes, but thinking makes it so, and our virtues depend on the interpretation each age puts on them. He grasps the riddle of determinism and holds that some men are made bad by inheritance, yet in that case, he says, they are not guilty, since a man's nature cannot choose its own origin.
He also knows the theory of Thrasymachus. Richard III says that conscience is a word cowards use, invented at first to keep the strong in awe, and urges that his arms be his conscience and his sword his law; Richard II holds that those deserve to have who know the strongest and surest way to get. Both, being disciples of Nietzsche before their time, come to a tragic end. Shakespeare also knows honor, the principle of aristocratic morals in the feudal age, and speaks of it with respect, but he criticizes its tendency toward pride and bullying, which marks a lack of manners and of self-government. In the end his ethics are moderation in the manner of Aristotle and endurance in the manner of the Stoics.
Moderation and reason are the theme of Ulysses as he reproaches Ajax and Achilles. But reason is not enough; something of the Stoics must be added: as a man endured his coming into this world, he must endure his going out, and ripeness is all. Death is forgivable only when we have fully paid our debt to life. Shakespeare also praises Epicurus and sees no essential conflict between pleasure and reason. He sometimes attacks the Puritans, as when Maria answers the pompous Malvolio in Twelfth Night with an insulting retort, and, like Pope, he is tolerant of the frailties of human flesh.
His political philosophy is conservative. Yet he knew the miseries of the poor and made Lear speak of them with force. In Pericles a fisherman says that men live on land as fish do in the sea, the great eating the small; he compares the rich misers of his own town to whales that play and tumble, drive the little fish before them and swallow them at last, and he has heard of land-whales with mouths forever open to swallow parish, steeple, bells and all. In The Tempest Gonzalo dreams of an anarchist commonwealth in which nature brings forth everything in common and there is no law, no judge, no labor and no strife. Shakespeare smiles and shows that such a world cannot exist, given human nature: under any constitution the whales swallow the fish.
What was his religion?
Here it is especially hard to track down his philosophy. Through his characters he mentions almost every faith, and with such tolerance that it may have led the Puritans to think him an unbeliever. He quotes Scripture often and with respect, and Hamlet, an apparent skeptic, says devout things about God, prayer, heaven and hell.
Shakespeare and his children were baptized by the rites of the Church of England, and some of his lines point strongly to Protestant belief. In King John the king calls the pardons and indulgences of the pope juggling witchcraft, and speaks very much like Henry VIII: no Italian priest shall levy tithe or toll in his dominions, for under heaven he is supreme head and will uphold his authority without the pope's help; let the pope be told that he and his usurped power are no longer honored. The difference is that John at last repents. In his later Henry VIII, part of which he wrote, Shakespeare admires Cranmer and the king and ends with praise of Elizabeth, all of them agents of the English Reformation. At times he also gives sympathetic words to Catherine of Aragon and to Friar Laurence, but the friar is a figure drawn as in the Italian tales he borrowed.
In all the tragedies there is some faith in God. Lear, in utter despair, thinks that we are to the gods as flies to wanton boys, killed for their sport. But the good-natured Edgar answers that the gods are just and make instruments of our pleasant vices to plague us, and Hamlet expresses faith in a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. Yet with so little faith in a god who deals justly with us, the greatest plays show deep distrust of life itself. Jaques in As You Like It sees in the seven ages of man only a gradual ripening and a swift rotting. The same note sounds in King John, where life is a tedious tale told twice over, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man. Hamlet curses the world as an unweeded garden gone to seed, where things rank and gross possess it. And Macbeth cries out: out, out, brief candle; life is a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Pessimism and its easing
Does belief in immortality ease this gloom? Lorenzo, after explaining the music of the spheres to Jessica, says that such harmony is in immortal souls. Claudio in Measure for Measure (the book gives only a garbled proverb here, and the title is reconstructed from the quotation) contemplates the world after death, but in the measured words of Dante he speaks of its terrors: to die and go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction and rot, the warm and sensible motion becoming a kneaded clod, or to be imprisoned in the viewless winds or lie in regions of thick-ribbed ice. It is dreadful. Hamlet incidentally holds the soul immortal, but his talk to himself is no proof of faith, and according to the book his last words in the first texts, my soul goes to heaven, were changed by Shakespeare to the rest is silence.
We cannot say with certainty how much of this pessimism belongs to the needs of tragedy and how much to Shakespeare's own state of mind, but its repetition and stress suggest the darkest hours of his life. It eases only in his last plays, where he doubtfully admits that the world's evils bring blessings and pleasures too, and that among many bad men there are some heroes and a few saints: against Iago stands a Desdemona, against Goneril a Cordelia, against Edmund an Edgar or a Kent; even in Hamlet there is Horatio's loyalty and Ophelia's eager love. When this weary actor and dramatist leaves the noisy, crowded city of London for the green fields and his father's town of Stratford, to find comfort there, he begins once more, like a strong man, to love life.