Shakespeare: An Appreciation - Mackubin Owens

Thursday, April 28, 2022

Mackubin Owens, MINDSETTER™

April is both the birth month and death month of William Shakespeare, whom we should celebrate as not only the poet of the English speaking people but also their political teacher, as Homer was the political teacher of the Greeks and Vergil the political teacher of the Romans. Although he wrote long before the Founding of the United States, American politics owes much to Shakespeare as well. During his visit to America in the 1830s, Alexis d ’Tocqueville noted that even in the meanest cabin on the American frontier of the time, one found two books: the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

Of course in these times, Shakespeare is often dismissed as just another dead white male who represents nothing but the Eurocentric “colonization” of literature. W.E.B Du Boise, for one, would disagree. Writing in The Souls of Black Folks, he observed, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not…. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.” The academic “cancelling” of Shakespeare represents the dangerous combination of ignorance and arrogance the result of which is the continued “dumbing down” of academia.

His plays and sonnets teach universal truths, as all great literature does.  Shakespeare explores a number of themes of universal importance: the nature and limits of political life; the meaning and practice of statesmanship; the best polity vs. real polities in the form of England, Italy, and Rome; the link between individual character and the political regime; and the relationship among poetry, politics, religion, and philosophy.

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The division of Shakespeare’s plays into histories, comedies, and tragedies obscures the fact that all of his plays—including the comedies— are political, in the sense that they are treatments of the human condition under different constitutions. The human beings he describes seek completion within a political community, whether it be an ancient city such as Athens, a timocratic regime such as the Roman Republic, a commercial republic such as Venice, or a monarchy such as England in transition from a medieval polity to a modern one. Shakespeare devotes great care to establishing the political setting in almost all his plays, and his greatest heroes are rulers who exercise capacities which can only be exercised within civil society.

Shakespeare’s plays are about public individuals sharing a public world with fellow-citizens or subjects, who make choices that have political consequences. His plays educate his readers and viewers by having them confront a variety of men and women living under various constitutions/regimes. Thus his plays serve the truth: “minding true things by what their mock’ries be.”

From Shakespeare, Americans learned the relationship between the human soul and political constitutions. Shakespeare seems to have internalized the Greek division of the human soul into three parts: nous, the intellective, reasoning part of the soul; thumos, the spirited part of the soul, concerned with honor and justice; and epithumeia, the appetitive part of the soul, concerned with basic human desires and subject to the passions.

Following the Greek philosophers, Shakespeare illustrates the way in which various polities reflected a part of the human soul. In this taxonomy of regimes, the noetic part of the soul was seen in rule by the one; the thumetic part of the soul in rule by the few; and the appetitive part of the soul in rule by the many. Each form of rule had a good and bad version, the former based on rule for the benefit of the entire polity and the latter rule on behalf of the ruler alone. Thus the good form of rule by the one was kingship; the bad form tyranny. The good form of rule by the few was aristocracy; the bad form oligarchy or plutocracy. The good form of rule by the many was politeia or a balanced constitution; the bad form was democracy or ochlocracy: mob rule.

This taxonomy led the Greek historian, Polybius, to suggest that all political regimes were subject to the anakuklosis politeion, or “cycle of constitutions.”  Kingship—rule by the one on behalf of the whole deteriorates into tyranny. The virtuous few—the aristoi–depose the tyrant, but over time aristocracy deteriorates into oligarchy. The oligarchs are overthrown by the virtuous many but a balanced constitution deteriorates into democracy, and the cycle then repeats itself. 

One sees a version of the anakuklosis politeion in Shakespeare’s sonnet, The Rape of Lucrece (Lucretia) and his Roman plays. Lucretia’s rape by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last Roman king, leads to her suicide, which in turn compels the aristocrats to expel the Tarquins and establish the Republic. In Coriolanus, we see the shortcomings of a regime based on thumos and honor alone. Julius Caesar overthrows the republic and his adopted son, Augustus defeats Antony and other leading men to establish a cosmopolitan empire, the decline of which we see in Titus Andronicus.

What the American people in general and the Founders, in particular, learned from Shakespeare’s Rome was the instability of democracy, which served the passions, not the reason of the people; the dangers of demagogues; the importance of the rule of law; and the necessity of institutions—in this case the Constitution—to tame the ambition of great men while tamping down the passions of the people.

Shakespeare taught the English speaking world the deficiencies of most polities, suggesting thereby how deficient constitutions can be improved. The timocratic Roman Republic of Coriolanus is full of men motivated by thumos but deficient in other virtues. The commercial republic of Venice feeds the epithumeia of its citizens but thumetic men are lacking, which means that the Venetians must depend on outsiders such as Othello—who do not share their religion—to defend the city.  The Vienna of Measure for Measure is a city of extremes: it is characterized by bordellos and convents. It is a city that needs to be taught moderation.

Most of all, the American Founders seem to have learned from Shakespeare that a balanced constitution that accommodates the souls of all of its citizens and moderation are necessary for a healthy polity. By working through the entirety of partial, partisan regimes, Shakespeare’s readers and audiences can get a sense of the best practicable regime. That best practicable regime appears to be something like the American Republic created in 1789 with the adoption of the Constitution.

But as Rome proved, a republic is fragile. As the United States becomes less a commonwealth and more an oligarchy with democratic trappings, it doesn’t hurt to recur to the truths that Shakespeare taught. The Bard is truly, as James Fennimore Cooper wrote, “the great author of America.”

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