Abstract
I have titled this work Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist because I think whatever it has to say about him arises ultimately out of the forces of Renaissance Christian humanism as i describe it later in this chapter. i might have also titled the book Shakespeare and Moral Philosophy because it talks more about moral philosophy as such than about the humanism in question by its name, and “moral philosophy” in fact appears in the subtitle. However, for the main title, this would have been putting the cart before the horse. Moral philosophy, as I will argue, was the practical everyday expression of humanism at work in every field of endeavor.1 In its own way, it fused the elements that came to constitute humanism and its numerous shifting phases and changes out of medievalism into what we call modernism, and by doing so it made it a way of life capable of discussion in its own day. Moral philosophy was the practical expression of humanism in the streets of Renaissance Europe and it is in light of this “street humanism” that the present work considers those of Shakespeare’s plays to which it refers to explain what they say. One works one’s way through humanism more or less part by part according to the identifiable major trends of which it was made and of which it came to constitute, and the path I have chosen in the following pages in relation to Shakespeare is that of moral philosophy as the creative force of an abstract metaphysics in daily life.
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Notes
Virgil Heltzel, for example, in his “Introduction,” to Haly Heron’s The Kayes of Counsaile, A Newe Discourse of Morall Philosophie of 1579 (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1954), p. xv, describes the work as “bringing grave and sober moral philosophy home to men’s business and bosoms.”
William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie … enlarged by Thomas Palfreyman, 20th ed. (London: Thomas Snodham, [?]1620), in Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints (Gainesville, Florida, 1967), with an introduction by Robert Hood Bowers. For the editions, see STC 1475–1640, Vol. I, 2nd ed., 1986, Nos. 1253 to 1269; and STC, 1641–1700, 2nd ed., Vol. I, 1972, Nos. 548, 1620. Also see Bowers, “Introduction,” pp. v–vi. For the purposes of the present work, I will refer to the treatise as Baldwin’s rather than Baldwin-Palfreyman’s. The volume appears as “augmented” or “enlarged” by Palfreyman only with the fifth edition of 1555 (STC 1255.5) and the 1620 edition (first of the two in that year) says it is “the sixth time inlarged” by him but there has been no comparative study of what was originally Baldwin’s and what was Palfreyman’s and what the successive “enlargements” entailed. Baldwin’s treatise, along with Thomas Crewe’s The Nosegay of Morall Philosophie, for example, are purported sayings and quotations from a great number of scattered Ancient and more recent writers, but they are organized into running dialogues or commentaries designed to express the compiler’s point of view rather than to transmit faithfully the thought of the original writer.
Philippe de Mornay, A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion…Begunne to be translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney Knight, and at his request finished by Arthur Golding, London: Thomas Cadman, 1587, in Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints (New York: Delmar, 1976), with an introduction by F. J. Sypher. The original French edition, De la vérité de la religion chréstienne, was published in Antwerp in 1581. The later English editions were published in 1592, 1604, and 1617: Sypher, “Introduction,” p. xv.
Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. xii. Among others: Alan Hobson, Full Circle, Shakespeare and Moral Development (Barnes and Noble: London, 1972); Roy Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969); with much pertinence, in spite of its concentration on Italy, Daniel A. Lines, Aristotle’s Ethics in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650), The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002); and Stephen Darwell, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Roy W. Battenhouse, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great: A Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy (Nashville: Vanderbilt, 1966), p. 12.
Peter Charron, Of Wisdome (London: Edward Blount and Will Ashley, n.d. [before 1612]), No. 315 in The English Experience facsimile reproduction series (Amsterdam and New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., De Capo Press, 1971). The original, De La Sagesse, by Pierre Charron, was published in Bordeaux in 1601.
George Hakewill, The Vanitie of the Eye (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 3rd ed. 1615 [1st ed. 1608]), p. 52.
Anne Barton, “Introduction,” Love’s Labour Lost, The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., general and textual editor G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. J. Tobin (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), p. 209. Subsequent references to commentators in the introductions to this volume will be to this edition.
Pierre de La Primaudaye, The French Academie, translated with dedication by T. Bowes (London: Edmond Bollifant, 1586), in the Anglistica and Americana facsimile reprints No. 112, Hildesham: George Verlag, 1972. The original edition L’Académie francoise was published in 1577.
Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books, A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sources (London and New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 2001), p. 277 and Arthur F. Kinney, Lies Like Truth, Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2001), pp. 191–192, passim.
Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 4, 28, 83; William M. Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 73–75, passim.
Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, “Introduction,” Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (Notre Dame, ID: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), p. 1.
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943), p. 6; G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London: Methuen and Co., 1948), pp. 90–91; J. Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare, A Biographical Adventure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952 [1st ed. 1932]), pp. 15–17.
Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations, Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 3–4.
William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, general ed. Alfred Harbage (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books Inc., 1956), 12th printing 1969, pp. 1018, 1369; Stephen Orgell and A. R. Braummuller, eds., The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Middlesex: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2002), pp. 730, 1392.
For Bradshaw’s plaint on the subject, Misrepresentations, pp. 1–2. Of the differences among cultural materialists and on the future of cultural materialism, two books bearing the same title, After Theory, the first by Thomas Doherty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996) and the second by Terry Eagleton (New York: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, 2003).
A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 9–10; Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (updated edition) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. i–3, 4i, passim; Headlam Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism, pp. 6–7, 30, passim.
Bowers, “Introduction,” Baldwin, Treatise of Morall Philosophie, p. vii. Bowers writes also that Plato and Aristotle could “readily be considered Fathers of the Church because of the absorption of many of their tenets.” For Seneca’s influence, Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 2, 182, passim.
Bradshaw, Misrepresentations, pp.22–23, on the contention between “essentialist humanism” and “culturalist materialism.” Also H. R. Coursen, Macbeth, A Guide to the Play (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 52.
Michael Wood, Shakespeare (New York: Basic Books, Perseus Book Group, 2003), p. 76.
Frank Kermode, The Age of Shakespeare (New York: Modern Library, 2004), p. 39.
John Speed, The History of Great Britaine Underthe Conquest of the Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans (London, 1611), X. 15, the passage reproduced by E. K. Chambers in William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems [1930], 2 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), Vol. II, pp. 217–218; also Richard Davies’s manuscript memoranda in the Corpus Christie College Library, Oxford, reproduced in Vol. II, pp. 256–257.
David N. Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 21, 24. For a discussion of Shakespeare’s Catholicism: Carol Curt Enos, Shakespeare and the Catholic Religion (Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance Publishing, 2000), pp. 75, 102–103.
David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 33–35, passim.
Anthony Holden, William Shakespeare: The Man behind the Genius (London and Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1999), p. 328.
Joseph Pearce, The Quest for Shakespeare (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2008), p. 170.
Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare (Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 24, passim; Claire Asquith, Shadowplay (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), pp. 20, 30–31, 201, passim; Peter Milward, The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays (Southampton: Saint Austin Press, 2000), p. 124.
Millicent Bell, “Preface,” Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), p. xi, writes: “Criticism has tended to overlook the apparent inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions in Shakespeare’s tragedies which I see not only as faults of craft but as Shakespeare’s poetic-dramatic version of reality and expressions of a skeptic viewpoint.” But Lionel Basney in “Is a Christian Perspective on Shakespeare Productive and/or Necessary,” Shakespeare and the Christian Tradition, ed. E. Beatrice Batson (Lewiston, ME and Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994), p. 21, argues that there is a “Christian scepticism” as well as “sceptical criticism”.
Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. xi Benjamin Bertram, The Time is Out of Joint: Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 14–18.
Jonathan Dollimore, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. vii. Also pp. 4 and 10 for the transcendence of a text and the transcendence of human nature in “idealist” criticism.
On the fusion of Christian Tradition and Greek classical thought, Hans von Campenhausen: “Indéniablement les Pères ont su, les premiers, unir à jamais l’héritage antique à la tradition chrétienne et créer ainsi les bases de la civilisation spirituelle de l’Occident,” Les Pères grecs, trans. O. Marbach (Paris: Éditions de l’Orante, 1969), p. 11, from Griechische Kirchenväter, Stuttgart: W. Kohlammer Verlag, 1955; also, Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare and Congnition: Aristotle’s Legacy and Shakespearean Drama (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 3.
Charles Trinkhaus has written: “Man’s dignity lay in his creation in the image and likeness of God, which could be interpreted as meaning either that it was man’s destiny to transcend the limitations of his image-likeness and to ascend to eventual deification by a progress toward perfect assimilation of image and model, or that man thought, felt, and acted in a godlike manner in his domination, utilization, guidance, and reconstruction of the world of sub-human nature,” The Scope of Renaissance Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 357.
Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 15.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 7, and Book VII, 1, intro. Sarah Brodie, trans. Christopher Rowe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 100–101, 189–190.
Simon Yee, “Aristotle’s Push for Happiness,” Recollecting Philosophy: Essays on Shakespeare and Philosophy (Vancouver: Emerald Knight Publishing, 2007), p. 43.
Jill Kraye Ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. xv.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1,1,2, and 6, pp. 95–96, 98–100; Augustine of Hippo, Faith, Hope, and Charity: Enchiridion De Fide Spe et Caritate, Ancient Christian Writers, Vol. III, trans. Louis A. Arand (New York and Ramsey, NJ: Newman Press, [?1947]), Nos. 12–13, pp. 19–21; and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 3 vols., trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province (London: Burns and Oates, 1947), First Part, Q. 48, Art. 1, Replies to Objections 1 to 4, Vol. I, pp. 248–249.
William Shakespeare, King Lear, V.iii. 244–245, The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., general and textual editor G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. J. Tobin (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), p. 1343. Subsequent references to Shakespeare’s works will be entirely to this edition.
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 123–125.
For the influence of classical thinking on European drama in the sixteenth century and of Aristotle’s Poetics on Shakespeare, among others, see Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 183–185, 192–193; T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Five-Act Structure (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), pp. 264–283, and Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare and Cognition: Aristotle’s Legacy and Shakespearean Drama (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 29, 32, 79, 130–131.
D. F. Bratchell, Shakespearean Tragedy (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. i. Also, Heather Dubrow, “Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism,” The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., general and textual editor G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. J. Tobin (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), pp. 36–37, 52; and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Introduction: Issues and Approaches,” Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation, Harvard English Studies 14 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 1–3.
Jackson and Marotti, “Those who use modern philosophy and postmodern theology to interpret Shakespeare attempt to use Shakespearean texts to think through issues that have contemporary urgency, thus, in a sense, assuming that it is possible to see Shakespeare addressing perennial theological and philosophical problems that unite his time with ours,” Shakespeare and Religion, p. 2. Also inferred of King Lear by G. R. Hibbard, “King Lear: A Retrospect 1939–1979,” Shakespeare Survey, 33 (1980), p. 10.
Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. vii.
Bell, “Preface,” Shakespeare’s Tragic Scepticism, p. x, writes that Shakespeare “seems to have shared with Montaigne, his near-contemporary, not only general doubts of what had long been assumed about the universe and mankind but also doubt concerning our own ability of our power to conceive and conclude anything.” For the “fascination with the flux of subjectivity that Montaigne and Shakespeare display,” see Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 124–125. For Montaigne on faith and reason, see Don Cameron Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea, Scepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), pp. 84–85.
Jeffrey Johnson, “The Essay,” Chapter 19 in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 265.
Discussed by Charles Trinkaus in Scope of Renaissance Humanism, p. 352; Paul Oscar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 22–26; and Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, pp. 3–8, 83–85.
Charles Trinkaus, Renaissance Transformations of Late Medieval Thought (Aldershot, Brookfield: Ashgate Variorum, 1999), IX, p. 453, and also in his Scope of Renaissance Humanism, p. 359; Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, p. 172.
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1601), the facsimile reprint of the fifth edition of 1630, with an introduction by Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 300. Subsequent references and quotations are to this edition. Sloan writes, “Five editions of Wright’s work are extant: 1601, 1604, 1620, 1621 and 1630. Although the present edition reproduces the text from the 1630 edition, it is … modelled on the 1604 edition. The differences between the last four editions are insignificant compared to the differences between any one of them and the 1601 edition”, p. xlvi.
Cicero, De Natura Deorum Academica, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann Ltd. and Harvard University Press, 1956), I. i, pp. 3 and 5; I. xxii–xxiii, p. 61; II. i–ii, pp. 125 and 127.
Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 218.
Amos Edelheit, Ficino, Pico and Savonarola: The Evolution of Humanist Theology 1461/2–1498 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008)
The literature is vast. One approach: Daniel R. Gross, “Myths are typically narrative about supernatural beings or events in some unspecified period of time (sometimes called mythic time), involving such themes as the creation of the world or of human beings (creation myths), death and the afterlife, and renewal of the earth. Myths can be distinguished from folktales and legends in terms of formal differences or content but most of these comments about myth apply equally to all three forms,” in Discovering Anthropology (Mountain View, CA, London, and Toronto: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1992), pp. 67–68; also, Martin S. Day, The Many Meanings of Myth (Lanham, MD, New York, and London: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 2–3, 95; Charles F. Kielkopf, “Logic, Liberation, Myth and Metaphysics,” Myth and Philosophy, Vol. XLV: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1971), pp. 43–45.
Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2005), p. 16.
William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1986), p. 9.
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, “Liber Secundus, De Angelis,” Chapter 5, “How Angells be compared to materiall things,” Batman Uppon Bartholome, His Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum [thirteenth century] translated into English by John of Trevisa [fourteenth century], ed. Stephen Batman (London, 1582), facsimile reproduction (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976), p. 5[a].
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© 2016 Anthony Raspa
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Raspa, A. (2016). Shakespeare, the Critics, and Humanism. In: Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137580160_1
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