Paul Cantor on Shakespeare and Politics (Part I)

I'm bill kristol welcome to the next in our series of conversations we have with us today Paul Kanter who I've known for many years and I'm thrilled to have him as a guest he's a professor of literature at the University of Virginia I took his course I think I'm in the English department is when I was an undergraduate and he was a young assistant professor at Harvard many decades ago at the time he had already done important work on Shakespeare ''tis continued that work for the next three four decades so we're going to talk about Shakespeare Paul welcome thanks for having me here good to get to have you so how did you get interested in Shakespeare I got up what sort of interested in Shakespeare if you're in I'm gonna fight but you know I distinctively I was destined to study Shakespeare because my mother was born on April 23rd and that Shakespeare's birthday too and I really said really Jake's birthday or is that one of those well you know it's based on the factors I think was baptized on April 26 so they usually waited three days to see if the kid would live and since he did die on April 23rd in 1616 they kind of April 23rd is is his accepted birthday and I really come from a literary family my mother had an MA in English from Cornell she used to take me to Shakespeare plays my grandfather had a PhD and English my brother was very interested in literature so I grew up my father collected books I grew up in a house with all sorts of Shakespeare books around and then I was taken particularly to Stratford Connecticut which in those days had a wonderful Shakespeare a theatre I remember particularly seeing Morris karnovski playing King Lear was so good we went to it twice I would go to Shakespeare in the Park I grew up Brooklyn so as long as I can remember I remember loving Shakespeare but you decided to actually study Shakespeare and to study of it a distinctive way so yeah that happened I want to start in the ninth grade and it was then called junior high school our ninth grade project was doing the season it's kind of funny because the Roman plays and plays such a great role in my life and it all began with our I was just amazed at Julius Caesar I mean that was the first time I sat down and read the Shakespeare play carefully and then that led me to the other roman plays and by my senior year in high school I wrote a long paper on King Lear but it really was my experience at Harvard that changed things for me and it's odd because it wasn't so much through the English department as through the political science department through a man whom we both know named Harvey Mansfield I met in my junior year and I had joined a reading group he was doing but I took a course he gave the spring semester of 1965 was called government 112 C was a course on comparative government it compared the Greek poleis in the Roman Republic 18th century British monarchy and the American Revolutionary Government and that's when I first learned about Polybius Machiavelli Livy all these things about ancient Rome and one of the supplementary readings with Shakespeare's Coriolanus so I was already interested in play and I wrote a paper for Harvey on that topic and that was really the start of things that's when I understood that it was important to take into account the political dimensions of the play the key thing in the course was the classical idea of the regime that different forms of government shaped different kinds of people and I understood that that was fundamental to Shakespeare that his Romans were different from his Englishmen and in fact his Republican Romans are different from his Imperial Romans so politics is central to Shakespeare though he's not of course thought of primarily as a political author in any in any narrow sense and you saw that early on yes junior year in college that's pretty early and then you wrote your senior thesis I think on a King Lear but then in grad school wrote about the Roman place yes my dissertation which became my first book Shakespeare's Rome was on Coriolanus Judis sea well yeah it was on Coriolanus and and incompatible with some stuff on Julius Caesar so when you think about Shakespeare in the way you do let me give us sort of slight overview then we'll talk about the Roman plays and other kind of categories of plays and obviously these plays all deserved detailed interpretation in their own right and then read every leiden that can be interpreted but stepping back I don't think most studies of Shakespeare really approach it this way thinking about Shakespeare is kind of universe as different his reflections on different regimes I think that's really been key to your work yeah and I was very inspired in it by the work of Allan bloom and Harry Jaffa particularly the book they did Shakespeare's politics which coincidentally came out in 1965 when I first started working on this with Harvey Mansfield I put it this way everybody talks about the wide diversity of human types in Shakespeare that's something he's generally credited with and I like to connect that diversity with the diversity of regimes he looks at I think Shakespeare understood that not all human types are available at all times so there for example he's very aware of how living in a pagan republic as in his characters doing Coriolanus it's very different from living in a Christian monarchy and say his characters do in his history plays a simple issue is suicide I think as suicides not so simple issue you're thinking about but it's a simple way of making this contrast that when Shakespeare sets a play in a Christian land suicide is forbidden it's after all the foeman's the first thing Hamlet says had not the everlasting fixed his Canon gainst self-slaughter suicides very very difficult issue for Hamlet because his religion forbids it on the other hand at the end of the play with Horatio wants to join Hamlet suicide the way he says it is I'm more an antique Roman than a Dane by which he's saying you know I believe in the Roman view where suicide is the honorable thing to do in certain circumstances and in play like Julius Caesar the characters are kind of more aligning up at the end of the play to commit suicide who can do it first that shows you that here's a very serious human issue and yet people approach it very differently depending upon the regime they live under and that's what I've tried to explore in Shakespeare's plays and again suggesting that he's able to portray a different kind of human being in say Coriolanus because he's portraying a different regime which means a different set of fundamental beliefs different attitudes different options in life so there are the I mean just to step back for a second and outline for people so they were the Roman plays which themselves have a progression through regimes right yes Coriolanus which is said in old Rome I guess the Republic II yeah in fact for the Roman plays what I study is the change in regime Coriolanus is the beginnings of the Republic and the Cleopatra portrays the beginnings of the Empire and Julius Caesar portrays the transition when the Republic turns into an empire and then there are the English plays which are what ten history plays mostly plays yes and that is Shakespeare's I'm just speaking very broadly we'll get back to this but Shakespeare's attempt to do what to do more than just well Englishman a nice account of their history right now yeah I mean they are a study of kingship I think it's an attempt to on Chase's part to portray what a what a bad King is and what a good King is unfortunately bad Kings are more available in good Kings and again he studies the progression there I think he actually is showing the emergence of the modern British monarchy out of medieval conditions and then some of the other famous plays I mean the path Lear well they're set in different places now most the times I'm like me ghost one of these plays you don't really think that well just an accident it's a Scotland or it's a riot but I take it you would argue that's a pretty yeah honest choice by sure it doesn't help today that you knows Macbeth will be said in New Jersey obvious they want to show a gangster movie but I think the settings are important I tentatively make another grouping which would be Hamlet Macbeth in Othello which I'll very tentatively called the Christian plays because I think in contrast to the Roman plays they they study tragedy a new kind of tragedy that Shakespeare scenes occurring in a Christian context King Lear is a plan to itself as I see it personally think of Shakespeare's may display it's roughly said in a pre-christian Britain and I think Shakespeare abstracts more than he usually does from history in that play because it's a play about nature and he wants to studying nature in a more dare I say natural setting there that's why that play does not have the specificity of locale that many of the other tragedies do and then they're a very famous place set in Italy or galleries yeah that would be another grouping it cuts across the tragedies and comedies I think the fellow is usefully studied with Merchant of Venice they are two plays about Venice gets a little complicated when we start talking about specific cities like Padua her own or whether Shakespeare had any particular conception about them he does understand Italy as important that it's surprising in a way how many of his plays are set on Italy in Italy because Italy I think embodies the tension between religious religion and politics that's so important to Shakespeare's plays so if you step back you could say I guess that Shakespeare is trying to give sort of to portray the different human possibilities the different political regimes and the different human types in these regimes you've got ancients you've got in there Austria additional other plot some other plays that also randomly Troilus and Cressida they're set in different places or confusingly set we didn't we have you know more than one place it seems but there are ancient plays there are Christian plays there are English plays there yes it really is remarkable what an effort he made I'll even call it an archaeological effort to survey as much as he could of Europe the European lived it but also to go back to antiquity now that's what the Renaissance was Shakespeare lived a period we call the Renaissance Renaissance means rebirth and it was a rebirth of classical antiquity this is the time when people dug up those wonderful statues from ancient the ancient Greek and Roman worlds it's when the study of homer was revived Virgil studied all over Europe and Shakespeare was part of that Renaissance movement and to me the most remarkable thing he did among many remarkable things but maybe the most was bringing ancient Rome back to life on the stage I the continuing focus on Rome because after all it's right there in our culture we had HBO series on Rome we got other and I think Shakespeare didn't do this uniquely but he helped to revive Rome in a way that has made it a permanent reference point in our culture ever since that's interesting well let's go back to the Roman plays in a minute but just to complete the kind of general survey then there were the comedies which we haven't really mentioned which seem to be set all over the place and sometimes and hard to tell where they're said and what is the I mean very few if I maybe I'm wrong about this but is it the case that very few playwrights have written great tragedies and great comedies it says Congress seems to have been able to evoke these least arguable that Shakespeare is the only one to have done it on that level it's interesting that in Plato's symposium at the end of a very drunken party Socrates proposes that the greatest playwright would be able to write both comedies and tragedies because you know we have Sophocles Euripides and Aeschylus wrote tragedies with Aristophanes and Menander who wrote comedies they seem very different does and in this dialogue the symposium Aristophanes the comedian and a Agathon trojan none of his plays survived but we know we wrote tragedies and and Plato portrays a very different life and it's in a weird way Shakespeare is the fulfillment of Socrates prophecy there and I think Shakespeare is a deeply philosophical poet and it shows in the fact that he wasn't bound by the limits of either tragedy or comedy you know to this day if Woody Allen makes a serious film we say huh what's going on it or if Ingmar Bergman tried to make a comedy what's going on here generally speaking playwrights filmmakers you know they either we want to say have a tragic or comic vision now you know Ben Jonson wrote a couplet he's mainly a comic writer wrote a couple of tragedies Roman tragedies Cataline and suggests are actually pretty bad a guy named Thomas Middleton who is sort of in the second of Shakespeare's contemporaries and may in fact have co-written a couple plays with Shakespeare he seemed to move easily between comedy and tragedy he wrote some very good tragedies and some very good comedies but they're not on the level of Shakespeare so the level of Shakespeare is operating on there there's no one who can combine tragedy and comedy the way he does and just to complete this sort of 30,000 feet look at the look at Shakespeare's works there's their plays that are sort of people don't know quite what to categorize them that isn't the right problem plays yeah a young guy named Ernest Schanzer came up with this category problem plays most of them I would say are in fact comedies and then there are these last plays sometimes called the romances Pericles Cymbeline Winter's Tale The Tempest Henry the eighth in some ways belongs with that group because it's write the Animus career and then there's this play two noble kinsmen both Henry the eighth and two noble kinsmen were probably written along with a guy named John Fletcher but they definitely fit in this sort of late phase of Shakespeare's career let me go back to the comedies though and say one thing in regard to what you were saying about their setting the comedies are different from the tragedies and by and large they tend to abstract from politics that's why it is somewhat difficult to fit them in to a political scheme Shakespeare is interested in romantic love in those plays and in some ways he has to abstract from the political problem to examine the love problem so I think now Merchant of Venice metaphor measure those plays the setting is highly political and relevant but in a lot of Shakespeare's comedies it's as if he's saying let's bracket out the political problem and see what trouble people can get into when they fall in love which maybe has less to do with the political order although ultimately it does so it still does yeah yeah because even in the comedies have a certain rising amount of politics going on yes they're princes and their dukes and their issues if we marry whom based on exactly nasta considerations yes man but still they in terms of this you know like a midsummer nice dream is nominally set in athens but it's not like any athens i've ever read about especially since they have nunneries available and shakes grocer wrote poems the sonnets yes and you spent much time on those actually i have not they fitted with what i have to say about the analysis of romantic love in shakespeare there are such textural problems with the sonnets it's hard to know how to deal with them and shakespeare did not publish them they seem to have been published over his objection therefore we can't know the order the order in which they were written which would be key to any interpretation does not have authority 'men to it so I've hesitated to get involved the silence though I have been known to bring them up in talking about romantic love in the comedies they're also too narrative poems venus and adonis and the rape of Makris and some other things too it is interesting that in those days to become famous respectfully we had to write poetry and Shakespeare seems to have wanted you know the play writing was his day job like waiting tables in Hollywood waiting for your big break and he was trying to write poems that would make him famous and fortunately he discovered I think that the plays writing plays was better than writing poetry and he became very famous for writing plays and I think fortunately for us gave up his hope of being a poet instead of being a playwright it's rather strange but but a playwriting then had the status let's say of TV writing now it was not a respectable thing so it had been I guess at ancient times of course yes I suppose maybe is it falling out of yeah this interesting serious as early as 1598 guy named Francis Mears went into print comparing Shakespeare to the ancient playwrights mostly the Roman playwrights sent plotters and Terrence and I was in a way his big arrival moment when someone's saying you know this guy Shakespeare's as good as these Roman playwrights and maybe went to Shakespeare's head and he said okay I'll have to do this poetry stuff anymore Shakespeare you say brings Rome to life for 16th century 17th century Britons and I guess for us - what is this put how do you put together the Roman plays he brings to life he also brings to life the change within Rome right yes I think the most remarkable thing is Shakespeare's interest in Republican Rome that is he was living under a monarchy there was great fascination with the Roman Emperor Empire in his day after all you had a Holy Roman Emperor in Europe and Henry the eighth and actually tried to become a Holy Roman Emperor and several English monarchs were interested in it and a lot of the other Roman play is being written in his time deal dealt with the Imperial period Ben Jonson's sagine is for example the most remarkable thing is that he goes back to the beginnings of the Republic in Coriolanus and wanted to understand the Rome at its most different from modern politics and therein chose a subject that is not all that popular in writing about Julius Caesar other people have done it and the compiler few other people have written about Coriolanus but he's not one of the major figures in world literature so in some ways I see that choice is telling us a lot about Shakespeare and again I happen to be studying seriously for the first time when I was taking this course with Harvey Mansfield where we were learning the details of the Rhone Republic and Shakespeare got them right that's what most struck me that he understood that the Roman Republic had two consoles he understood the function of the tribunes now it is reading Plutarch very carefully Pluto's life of Coriolanus and all these details were there he may have been reading living as well Livy's history of the Roman Republic he probably was reading Machiavelli's discourses on Livy so we sources for understanding it but what I saw was that he understood how this Roman Republic function and why it became such a world conqueror because again one of the strange facts is the Roman Republic put together what we call the Roman Empire that vast amount of land was conquered by the armies of the Republic largely and the Empire was largely a holding action of that so Shakespeare shows in Coriolanus what it is to live in a deeply political regime that is a regime where human life is focused on politics part of it is acharya lattices very early right in the middle history it's roughly 500 BC so it's almost beginning but in a certain sense it is the beginning of the Republic because it's the beginning of the Tribune 8 that is Rome had just expelled the Tarquin Kings these Etruscans had been ruling the city and they'd in effect declared a republic the name of King was hated in Rome for five centuries because they looked at pawn Kings as foreigners er pers these Tarquins who raped Roman women that's the story the rape of Lucrece and the instigation for expelling the Tarquins and so Rome was being ruled by a Senate and these two consuls and Coriolanus deals with that very important moment when the people rebel and they are mollified by giving a role in the regime this Tribune ating to these their five Tribune's and the play only two of them are characters in the play and they're given among other things a right of veto over anything that the Senate rules so Machiavelli understood this and I think Shakespeare understood it that the Tribune aide introduced the popular element into the Roman Republican regime and created what was known in antiquity is a mixed regime not monarchy not democracy not ours factory but elements of all three the consuls were the kingly element the executive element we would say the Senate was the the aristocratic element and the tribunes representing the people were the popular or democratic element Machiavelli talks all about this actually goes back to antiquity Polybius in this history of Rome and the famous book six has a description of the Roman regime and Shakespeare understood how that worked and in particular how it worked to elicit political life among the whole community room had these two consuls they were chosen every year that meant a lot of people in the Roman Republic could aspire to the chief executive position the consuls led the armies they convened the Senate they were essentially what we would call chief executives but there were two of them so you had the beginnings of what we call checks and balances in the regime the Senators basically role rule Rome they were the wealthy landowners but because of the role of the plebeians had the people could feel they had a say in things thing what Shakespeare shows about the Roman Republic is not that it was a democracy in the modern sense and not that there was full and equal participation in politics but there was widespread participation in politics so these senators are the patricians they could legitimately aspire to become consul some boring lives the plebeians were not going to become consul but they could become Tribune's shakespeare is very good at that showing that the ambitious people among the plebeians have a role of the regime that's why politics becomes the focus of life in Coriolanus so this play that's said at the beginning of this fantastically successful Roman Republic isn't a happy play though and Coriolanus who's a great man I think isn't he's supposed to be in a way a great man is exiled or leaves and then dies and fighting against Rome as I recall so what's that about well our jury in the great individual yes certainly the play is tragic because it deals with the great tension between the most prominent figure in the community and the community itself but here's the deal Coriolanus threatens the Roman Republic precisely because of his overwhelming superiority this is a man who seems to win battle single-handedly and the thread in the play actually to the republic is that everyone is fawning all over him the Patricia's and the plebeians and we see there a formula that was eventually going to produce julius caesar what eventually was going to destroy the Republic is the moment when one of the patricians become so prominent that he rules the city single-handedly so actually the quarry latest episode teaches the Romans I believe a lot of valuable lessons it teaches the patricians that no they shouldn't be too haughty too proud in the face of the permeance it teaches them they shouldn't let one of their number become too prominent it the probiems learn that they have the power to expel a great patrician but it backfires because in that play comes back leading their enemies the Volks keys and nearly destroys Rome and so it's actually a tragic story which has a sobering effect I would say on the city it's a lesson in moderation the patricians learn they have to be more accommodating the plebeians the plebeians have to learn not to press their power too much and actually what emerges from that play is the balance in this mixed regime that sustained itself for five centuries and check for skips those five centuries which maybe it's less exciting to write plays without you know stable successful well you couldn't really discover great plays you could have two pretty skips but I guess just get back to the car lanes what was the most evident thing about it is also just this amazing you know expulsion and of him the greatest Rome at the time and and so the tension between I guess individual greatness and any regime is that part of the point it's not well in that respect it's not Rome is specific right it's really the the central theme of Shakespearean tragedy is the tension between a single great individual and the community he both serves and defies and you see that Macbeth you see in the fellow a weird way you see in Hamlet you can see in King Lear and certainly in all the Roman play that's one of the most fundamental tragic facts for Shakespeare that political excellence and human excellence are not the same thing and that a a great man can be very dangerous for the community he seems to serve but may in fact want to go beyond and even take over some sub cases thus these admirable to skip ahead it from the Roman place for a minute it is striking how impressive these pretty awful tyrants are I mean in Shakespeare write you you can't let you can't like or admire a Macbeth there's only on the other hand he's I mean he's a great man in a way right Shakespeare is very interested in the phenomenon of tyranny the plebeians accuses Coriolanus of being a tyrant certainly it's the major charge against Judah Caesar and I show in my book Shakespeare's room that Antony behaves like a tyrant Shakespeare takes us back to the original Greek meaning of the word terror nose which basically meant a self-made man a Greek tea rose at the start of the use of the term was not necessarily a bad guy it was some guy who came to the throne by his own power and the sixth century BC is known at the age of tyrants and the Athenian tyrant Fortis was a pretty great guy he may have created Athenian tragedy he may have been the first guy who had Homer's poems set down in writing and only gradually did the Greeks learn that if you came to the throne on your own efforts you might be a nasty ruler because you were very worried about someone doing the same thing to you and that's the logic that Shakespeare shows with tyranny and Richard the third Macbeth as well so in some ways he was very fascinated by this phenomenon because he had his doubts about people who simply inherit a throat they often are not good rulers then and I think he was in tune with the Machiavelli and theme about the tension between legitimate princes and illegitimate princes and how illegitimate Prince's have more energy and that's certainly what you see and someone like Richard the third so yes they are not amoral terms admirable but their sheer energy can be pretty impressive it's so Caesar speaking of energy so we have correlated us and then we fast-forward so to speak to this amazing well which was of course an extremely famous moment in world history before Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar as opposed of Caesar and his assassination now is it of course as far as we know Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar first and then maybe seven eight nine years later he wrote Coriolanus but it's seamless how it integrates the two plays and you can see the relation in the opening scenes in the opening scene of Coriolanus the people are hungry they are complaining about the grain that the patricians are hoarding and they're in rebellion they're accusing Coriolanus of being an enemy of the people fast forward to Judah Caesar and the plebeians in the open scene are out on holiday they're wearing the best clothing which is a big development because they have best clothing now in Coriolanus day they just had rags and they're celebrating Caesar triumphs over Pompey and their tributes are berating them for doing that in Coriolanus Shakespeare shows the plebeians were still deeply suspicious suspicious of the patricians and that Czech patrician power in the city but what we see in Judah Caesar is the guy that played Roman politics perfectly Julius Caesar and what he has learned to do is get the people on his side and once he does that he unbalances this mix Roman regime and is on the verge of becoming sole ruler Rome even maybe King though it's clear that people still don't like the name of King and he still was trying to arrange a deal with the Senate he'll be called King outside Italy everywhere else in the Empire but he won't take the title and roll the whole scene of mark-anthony offer him the crown is part of that public relations stunt to keep the people convinced that he's not going to become King we won't impose a king on you and yet we see from Casca's account that Judis Caesars covering that crowd so basically again it's something that Roman historians know and again Shakespeare would have learned from Machiavelli the great problem from the Roman Republic was growth in size once it reached this pan Mediterranean Empire they had to extend the terms of the consuls it took you a year just to get your army to Spain and as Machiavelli argues and other people have argued about Rome once the consuls could serve for more than one year their armies start to become loyal to them and not to roll and that's what we see at the opening of Julius Caesar the army is loyal to Pompey have been defeated by the armies loyal the Caesar and no one's loyal to Rome anymore they're loyal to their leader and so that's what the Empire is personal politics and Shakespeare shows how that transforms everything now and Brutus is he loyal to the old republic or yes well that's you see these figures like Brutus and Cassius and all the conspirators who are trying to restore the Republic and who bitterly complain about the preeminence of one man I mean Cassius has this great speech where he says when did we ever see this before in Rome that one man is ruling the whole city in this whole claim to Brutus is this guy Caesar he's not better than I am I once had to rescue him drowning and he once had a fever in Spain he's just just a human being and you do see the old Republican spirit alive but it's about to be defeated to be the turning point I think Shakespeare is indicating is when Brutus gets up and gives this fairly good speech defending the murder of Caesar and the effort to restore the Republic some guy in the crowd says let him be Caesar and that's when it's over when you realize that this whole thing that was done to restore the Republic at most can produce a change of regime and the very name Caesar has become a title down we don't need Kings we need Caesars that I suppose Antony Cleopatra omits that right afterwards yes those two were kind of a pair yeah yeah I mean it's interesting that really in terms of composition Coriolanus and Antony Cleopatra or the pair that is there written at the same time I believe that having written Julius Caesar at some point perhaps even when he wrote you to Caesar Shakespeare conceived of having to pendant plays one which would go back and show the foundation of the IMP of the Republic that's Coriolanus and one would show effectively the foundation of the Empire namely auntie Cleopatra growing out of what happens into the Caesar and they're roughly quite continuous at ante Cleopatra which is taken to be I don't know what it's take to be exactly way most viewers in fact it's a bizarre a love story I guess I mean what's the political implications of that forward was our love story follows from the transformed regime that is one thing again this is one of the things that Shakespeare so good at he shows how uh neurotic the Rome of Coriolanus is clearly this is a married man he greets his wife as my gracious silence hail and he talks about how since he left Rome my lips have versioned it ever since no sex for Coriolanus it's actually quite Coriolanus is quite striking among Shakespeare's plays for the absence of sex they were almost there are no dirty jokes in it Shakespeare shows that as a consequence of the focus of politics under the Roman Republic the whole erotic side of life is suppressed in Julius Caesar you start to see that change and the relation between Julius Caesar and Calpurnia and between Brutus and Portia is a much deeper richer relationship than any romantic relationship shown in Coriolanus under the Empire eros is released the whole thrust of the Empire is to suppress politics getting people interested in politics will only get them to challenge the Emperor and so it's in effect Imperial policy to encourage love affairs we talk about bread and circuses as the policy of the Roman emperors and that's something Shakespeare shows Caesar Cesar has that speech or only Julius Caesar where he says Antonius let me have men about me that are fat and he talks about Cassius has a lean and hungry look such men are dangerous sees that Julius Caesar doesn't like political men ambitious political men he wants people like Anthony who go to parties who stay up late who like music who will be interested in anything but politics and that's so the whole love affair and adding Cleopatra occurs in the context of Adi politicizing world the emperors precisely want people to divert their energy into love so that they won't challenge the rule of the Emperor an dancing Cleopatra ends with the victory obviously of Augustus and the beginning of the Roman Empire and I suppose I mean so these are all pre-christian but isn't there I seem to argue this I think in the book there's a sort of looking forward you might say to Christianity in anti-glare Petra yes and I developed that very esoterically in my book Shakespeare's Rome I'm hoping to write a new book that will make these arguments more explicit there are a number of references in ante Cleopatra to Herod for example there are five references to Herod that can't help but make you think of what was happening contemporaneous with these events there are some very quotations from the New Testament Anthony refers to the Bulls of Bashan at one point look that up in Psalm 22 the one that begins my God my God why has thou forsaken me which is a line famously associated with Jesus and I do think Shakespeare is correlating the rise of the Roman Empire what will become the rise of Christianity after all under Constantine the Roman Empire became Christian but I'm particularly interested in the way the Roman plays show the emergence of a Christian ethic I actually use Nietzsche a lot and friedrich nietzsche in developing this and I do think that Shakespeare anticipated Nietzsche in some ways through keys that come out of Machiavelli but one of the great transformations in the course of the Roman plays is losing becomes winning in Coriolanus winning is winning it's very much what nature would call a culture or mass morality culture it's one where strength is virtue it is held at valor as the chiefest virtue one of the Roman patrician says and you prove yourself in that play by winning it's very interesting the transformation that starts to count occur in Julius Caesar in a new world where personal loyalty has replaced the old loyalty of the Republic and Brutus dies saying I'm going to have more glory losing today than Mark Antony and Octavian is going to have from winning why because his followers will be more deeply attached to him in loss and he starts to suggest he calls what happens to Mark Antony and Octavius the man who became Augustus viral conquest what we start to see is what nietzsche referred to as the revaluation of values in the ancient world that suddenly losing becomes winning a defeat becomes victory even death becomes life and that's all over anthing Cleopatra that's a play in which your aim is to lose a battle the beginning of Act three a Roman captain ventidius comes out and he's being urged to pursue the Parthian xand and carry the frontier of Rome for this as now I could do that but then I had a frightened Antony he'd think I was trying to replace him and so he says I'm going to make choice of loss it's an amazing moment in the Roman place these are plays that have been geared towards the Roman ocean choice of victory and suddenly you see in the transform conditions of the empire now when there could be only one ruler if you look at vicious if you win a great victory that ruler that Emperor is going to be suspicious and and ventidius points out a friend of mine just got fired because he wanted victory the made Anthony look bad so this is a really this is a very interesting aspect of the Roman play is that in effect they show the development of what Nietzsche understood is this revaluation of ethics and so by the Nevada Cleopatra you got Cleopatra talking of heaven very interesting for example that she says then is it a sin to seek death for the first time in the Roman place suicide is presented as a sin we are very far on the wind she uses the word sin she uses which it's not yes which is anachronistic is the play has a lot of interesting anachronisms that I think are quite deliberate right and that are pointing to the towards the whole transformation of in antiquity really the end of classical antiquity as we know and the beginnings of the Christian world and then Shakespeare writes all these Christian plays you want to call them that but plays in which let's say the monarchies or political order is very much is in a Christian context in some cases claims the authority I guess of Christianity in other cases just seems to be in Christian times and what and Shakespeare seems of us always seem to me at least to be very interested in the effect of Christianity on politics and yes you know this is the thing the example makes him different from Plato and Aristotle I think one way or another he was familiar with Plato and Aristotle and in many ways I think his attitudes or we would describe ancient I think you really remind government for example the idea of the mixed regime and so he's very interesting spoor in that but the thing he has to deal with that Plato Aristotle did not is Christianity and he I think he's fascinated by the way Christianity transformed the terms of human life and you know Nietzsche is famous for being anti-christian D even wrote a book called the Antichrist but Nietzsche says Christianity made man an interesting being and I think Shakespeare would have understood that claim and indeed I do Shakespeare is a figure of the Renaissance the Renaissance was a rebirth of classical antiquity but within a Christian civilization and that means some of Shakespeare's most fascinating figures and I have in mind particularly Hamlet Othello and Macbeth are people who are caught between the tensions between the classical and the Christian traditions now when it comes to tragedy I'm I'm very much guided by Hegel's theory of tragedy most people know Aristotle I think it's unfortunate that a lot of people don't know that he Hill had a very important theory of tragedy Hegel's theory of tragedy looked at the tragic situation and for Hegel a tragic situation is one in which there's a conflict of two goods if you just have a conflict of good and evil that's just melodrama and it's easy to resolve but his prototypical tragedy was Sophocles Antigone where Antigone stands up for the good of the family and Creon stands up for the good of the city and although they're not equally justified at least both Creon and Antigone could make a public defense what they're doing and I think Shakespeare we had not read Hegel was operating with this notion of tragedy by the way Hegel to some extent developed it from his own reading of Shakespeare so Shakespeare finds the Renaissance a particularly tragic era because by reviving classical antiquity within a Christian civilization you basically were setting up two ethics for people to follow Hamlet's a case in point here Hamlet is faced with this issue of revenge now the classical tradition and the Christian tradition dictates very different responses to a revenge situation and I feel that's the key to understanding Hamlet's inaction is his inability to to make a decision is being torn in two directions so I think Shakespeare's employees like Hamlet is exploring the deep ethical contradictions at a time when people were trying to revive the ancient world old in a modern context as I like to put it you know the Christian principle is the meek shall inherit the earth the classical Persia position is the Greek shall inherit the earth two very different views of the world so Hamel it's not just about an indecisive guy who couldn't make up his mind a knight issues with his mother and all that yeah you know is funny when you read a lot of the literary critics it's so psychological but it shakes or puts in a particular time in place and yes I would say the characters discuss don't they to some degree or yeah a lude to at least yes ancient and classical Han is always thinking of you know I'm off to kill my mother but wait a minute Nero did that and that was our ball I can't do that so as I like to put it I mean Hamlet has some genuine things to think about and Shakespeare presents the situation which really gets to the heart of the ethical contradictions of the Renaissance this issue revenge and so the the plate turns on the moment when Hamlet has the opportunity to kill Claudius and doesn't and gives a long speech about why he doesn't do it and the reason he gives is if I kill him now he's at prayer he may go to heaven I gotta kill him at a moment when he goes to hell now virtually every critic I know simply dismisses that speech as an excuse the whole Freudian theory of Hamlet begins from the idea that Hamlet can't mean this he's got to have some other motive I begin with what Hamlet says and you realize then that one of the things the play is showing is that the task of revenge has become incredibly more complicated in the Christian world when Achilles goes to kill Hector all he has to do is kill up he doesn't sit there and worries he'd go into the Elysian Fields where is he going to Hades but Hamlet does and then he's in a bind because he's dealing with something invisible Claudius has sold out his body all Achilles has to do is kill that body his task is daunting his revenge is done Shakespeare shows how much more incredibly complicated the task of revenge is when you're acting upon someone's soul you have to wonder where the soul is going how will you ever know people have said well look Claudius gets up and says my soul's not going to heaven I know I'm a hypocrite and they're there for Hamlet's not really caring about that but Hamlet doesn't hear that and Hamlet doesn't know where Claudius his soul is going Hamlet lives in an incredibly more complicated universe because he lives in the world of the Christian afterlife the whole to be or not to be speech is about that it's we don't know where we're going the undiscover'd born from whom from which no traveler returns that's what puzzles the will is ham it's not that Hamlet just thinks generically he thinks about these fundamental Christian issues is suicide prohibited is there life after death who goes you know they're genuine questions Hamlet would be pitiful if he was just an irresolute confused person in fact I think he's the great figure he is because he thinks through to the fundamental contradictions and tensions in Renaissance life that's why he's the ultimate Renaissance man because he thinks about both sides of the Renaissance dilemma and Hamlet is set I guess in there I mean yeah hard to tell maybe if it isn't yeah you know fairly recently yeah yeah again it's a little confusing it comes out of a North saga that would be said earlier but the references to France and Tennyson it for example in fencing make it it has a real renaissance feel after all there's a reference to the University of Edinburgh in it I mean right you can you can date things mention in the play to the sixteenth century and I think there's also Shakespeare Watson I think that shows also his art that he yeah you know people said anyway this is his source so it's his own play is just you know somehow set when the sources but it seems like several times he takes the source but then he moves the time and place sometimes precisely to make up for like yes in fact my father for Hamlet is it's a Renaissance man thrust into an Icelandic saga and that's his problem if you were a nice Norse warrior he could handle this easily and in the source story he just burns everybody at the end in the castle but in this play there's a kind of anachronism in the play that takes a modern man for Shakespeare modern man Renaissance man and puts him in a more primitive situation and actually Shakespeare creates a sense there's an enormous time gap within the play where Hamlet's father seems to live in the world of Icelandic saga he lives in a world of hand-to-hand kind of combat with the elder for breast and he's associated with the classical world there's all this effort to create a sense of a actually a Homeric world Rueben Brauer has shown that the addiction of the play echoes the diction of the Elizabethan translations of Homer for example the sledded Poe locks on the eyes for example that's a whole Merrick epithet sledded Pollock so it creates the sense of Hamlet caught between this Homeric world in the past and this modern sophisticated world he has to live in the present and some of the other tragedies you'd say similarly sort of focus on the religious question the theological political question yeah I see a fellow and Macbeth as the inverse of this they are about Homeric heroes who are thrust into a modern Christian world and have the opposite of Hamlet's problem though in the same ways it's the same problem being caught between two ethics in the case of Macbeth you know at the start of the plays his noble warrior he's being praised for cutting people in half everybody is just going bonkers and giving him awards because he hacks people in half and then you know kills Duncan and suddenly everybody's all bent out of shape with him and it is a sense that you know he would like to live in a simple Homeric world he says this when Banquo's ghost comes by says you know face me in any other form a Herc and Tiger I can handle that but I can't handle his ghosts and indeed I think what we see in that plays the Homeric hero thrown off balance when he's in a Christian world Macbeth says to those murderers he hires to kill Banquo are you so gospel so really a quite amazing word we look this up and it's the first use of the word gospel in the English language I he's convinced them that Banquo has been making life difficult for them and he basically then says are you so Christian and you won't kill this guy now it's an amazing moment and then in when Banquo's ghost goes back pigpens says yeah excuse me if I can't quote Shakespeare literally hey buddy now he says you know there was a time when he killed people they stay dead but now they come back and in a way that's what's so disconcerting to Macbeth to put it mildly he's you know he can live in a world where the old heroic world where you face your opponent on the battlefield and you know damn be him who first cries hold enough as Macduff says but now he's living in a world where you kill people and they don't stay dead and he is haunted by that he's actually a man with a deep Christian conscience I think the whole play is said in a moment when you see a Scotland that has been Christianized and it's not yet comfortable with it where's England is presented as being under the rule of Edward the Confessor and being highly Christian now a fellow is similar in this sense that you're in the city of Venice which is a commercial city of Christian City it's got a problem that its opponents are of these Ottoman Turks who are great military figures and threatening Venice and their solution is to hire their own Turk that their Christian merchants they can't fight these I'm just out of interest so they'll hire a fellow and who win battles for them because he's a Barun they don't care that he thinks he's a Christian in fact is a Christian and thinks for himself that way and in fact then the problem develops when he wants to marry a Venetian woman he thinks for himself as a Venetian the city really doesn't think in that way he is their hired Turk their hired killer and so he's caught again between two worlds where in many ways he would like to be a Homeric hero he actually offers the most Homeric simile in all of Shakespeare that famous light to the Pontic sea similarly he speaks and he then is himself unnerved when he enters this Christian City and Iago convinces him he is an outsider that he doesn't understand Venetians especially he doesn't understand Venetian women and why he can't see into their souls it's actually the same problem that Hamlet faces dealing with Claudius but Iago is genius in the play is to convince a fellow you know you're a kind of country bumpkin and you're in the big city now you're in Venice and women do very suspicious things here and you just don't understand that's what's unnerves him it's amazing in a way how easily a fellow succumbs to this deception on the argos part but part of it is he too was a man of battlefields he was used to the open confrontation of soldiers on the battlefield and now he's in this almost bedroom comedy bedroom farce where women are cuckolding their husbands and he is deeply disconcerted by that and again our nagua says something like her honor is something unseen and that's when he grabs a fellow when he realizes he doesn't understand the depth of soul something Shakespeare men like Macbeth Coriolanus fellow their warriors and a certain superficiality goes along with that and then they're deeply subject to the machinations of witches in the case of Macbeth Iago in the case of talent I guess you could say Oh Phineas in the case of Coriolanus and I guess fellow I mean whatever Venice does seem to be the place for Shakespeare where there's an attempt to be very cosmopolitan and I think bloom argues that and yes immersion about as they're Jews there are Christians they living in the same city and getting along okay I guess yeah but then the limits of sort of cosmopolitan doesn't perhaps Shakespeare yes it is interesting that Shakespeare wrote two plays about Venice he understood it was the most modern community in Europe that it seemed to be pointing to the future and above all that Venice seemed to be doing what other cities or other communities were not doing namely incorporating Christians Jews and really in effect Muslims if you look at the way the Venice views fellow even though he's a Christian in his own eyes and Shakespeare shows that the basis the city does this on his commerce it really is the Lockean principle the principle toleration the Jew who says to the Christians in Venice you know I won't eat with you pray with you down but I will buy and trade with you and that's the Venetian hope that you could establish a community on the base of Commerce in one play Merchant of Venice Shakespeare treats it comically and things in Venice seemed to work out though only by having forced to convert to Judaism at the end in a fellow it works out tragically so I think Shakespeare would have said the verdicts out on Venice I'll even say the verdicts out on liberal modernity whether this is going to work because you can see the logic that's working out in Venice these Venetians are merchants there are certain things they have a trouble doing as Christian merchants Christian merchants they're not warlike enough so they hire a fellow they can't take interest but need a money market so they bring and other Jews into the city and get these functions performed by people who are not of the same ethnicity but that then leads to other tensions and I have to say I I think you know one question Shakespeare raises is the efficacy of Venice will it work but I think he's also raising the question maybe would be a problem if it did work because what he does show is that old ideas nobility religious ideas they have to be gutted in order to make this commercial republic function and so you start to see is Shakespeare's a genius and we has this reflected comically in Merchant of Venice when Shylock's daughter Jessica or runs off for the Rennes own is converting to Christianity Lancelot Gobbo the servant of was transferred to that that says all these Christians all these Jews converting to Christians it's going to raise the price of pork in Venice and he's upset by that and you know Shakespeare shows that that that you may get this agreement but only by lowering your sights it's going to take away a lot of the power of religion one thing Shakespeare shows about Venice is that the the the power of religion is waning I I noticed this scene at the opening the play when they're worried why is that this character Antonia was so sad and one guy says yeah he's a merchant he's worried about his ships maybe they're sinking somewhere he says it always happens to me I'm in church and all I'm thinking about is my ship sinking and that is an incredible clue Shakespeare gives us about Venice have to be in the play where this is a community where even in church they're thinking of commerce and I think Shakespeare sees that as a possible lowering on the tone I think he really it's amazing how well he understood the coming of modernity yeah even when he was right in that's very about this was that was early I mean this is very 300 so that's before house before a lock contemporaneous with bacon yeah and there's my market yeah some people think wrote Shakespeare right yeah there's mocking give us Machiavelli already but but the economic argument is that's extraordinarily early that he should show the connection between Christian conversion and the price of pork that's just an astounding moment it also shows he understood the law of supply and demand right and you something about Jewish dietary laws the liberator of Jews in England that I guess well you know James Shapiro has written a very good book called Shakespeare and the Jews which shows that it's been estimated there may have been as many as 10,000 because they were nominally illegal but it's the saying you know you have trade going on and London was a major trading center traded with these traded you know Elizabeth had a commercial treaty with the Ottoman Sultan and so there were probably a lot of Jews living in England either nominally converted or concealing their Judaism I mean a Portuguese converted Jewish physician Roderigo Lopez was accused of trying to poison Queen Elizabeth I believe he was executed many people have seen that as connected with Marlowe's play the Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice so there were certainly people suspected of being Jewish at the time and I'm convinced that Shakespeare traveling in the circles he did namely theatre would have met a lot of Jews if there were Jews in London they were going to the theatre come on let's face it good point and he was interested in the question of I'm sure the relation of Judaism to Christianity that I guess he doesn't really address that in great detail but obviously he was a well aware of the tensions and yeah and in some ways you know the play 10 that turns on a Jewish literalism and a more symbolic interpretive impulse in Christianity and he you know he understands the function of the law and Judaism the function of family you really do you know that moment when says are these your Christian husbands saying you know no no Jewish wives and husbands would argue this way it's really quite remarkable you and of course it's been shown by the so many Jewish actors have embraced that role I've been very so Marx karnovski played Sherlock I've seen David Sujit play Sherlock and you know it is interesting that many it was a very popular play in the Eaters theatres actually translated to yudish around 1900 and so yeah it's really a Jews have have felt that Shakespeare understood them and I think quite rightly he understood everybody impressive

Channel: Conversations with Bill Kristol

Views: 49,215

Rating: 4.1343284 out of 5

Keywords: Paul Cantor (Author), Shakespeare, William Kristol, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice

Id: aIcRdmQK-WM

Length: 63min 12sec (3792 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 27 2014