Shakespeare's Humanism

by Robin Headlam Wells

Overview

Arguing that belief in a universal human nature was as important to Shakespeare as to every other Renaissance writer, this book questions the central principle of postmodern Shakespeare criticism. Postmodernists insist that the notion of a defining human essence was alien to Shakespeare and his contemporaries and as radical anti-essentialists, the Elizabethans were, in effect, postmodernists before their time. Challenging this claim, this book demonstrates that for Shakespeare, as for every other humanist writer in this period, the key to all wise action was 'the knowledge of our selves and our human condition.'

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521824385
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/08/2005
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Robin Headlam Wells is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Research in Renaissance Studies at Roehampton University, London. His books include Elizabethan Mythologies (Cambridge, 1994) and Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge, 2000).

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Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-82438-5 - Shakespeare's Humanism - by Robin Headlam Wells
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Introduction

A vision of a future social order [must] be based on a concept of human nature. If, in fact, man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the ‘shaping of behavior’ by the State authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope that this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community . . . We must break away, sharply and radically, from much of modern social and behavioral science if we are to move towards a deeper understanding of these matters.

Noam Chomsky, ‘Language and Freedom’ (1972)¹

Postmodernists do not share Noam Chomsky's views on human nature. Cultural Materialists and New Historicists believe that talk of innate structures of mind or intrinsic human needs is no more than ideological mystification; in reality there are as many forms of human nature as there are human societies. ‘Constructionism’, writes one leading American Shakespeare scholar, ‘is one of the basic propositions by which newhistoricism as a way of reading has distinguished itself from humanism. Where humanism assumes a core essence that unites people otherwise separated in time and social circumstances new historicism insists on cultural differences.’²

The belief that our minds are shaped largely by sensory experience is not a new one. John Locke famously declared that at birth the mind was ‘a white sheet, void of all characters, without any ideas’.³ But in denying the existence of innate ideas Locke did not reject the principle of a universal human nature. He argued that, although we may not come into the world with ready-made notions of, let's say, truth or justice, we are nevertheless equipped with faculties that enable us to learn what we need to know as human beings, and it's those inborn faculties that define our humanity.⁴ What concerned Chomsky was not the notion of the mind as a tabula rasa passively absorbing experience – though psychologists now dispute that idea – but the claim that we inherit no species-specific mental characteristics of any description. It was in the early decades of the last century that it became fashionable to argue that human nature was inherently unstable. ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1924.⁵ ‘There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough’, declared Bernard Shaw ten years later.⁶ Woolf and Shaw were being deliberately provocative. But the new denial of human nature wasn't just a matter of novelists and playwrights rhetorically asserting a modernist sense of cultural crisis. Anthropologists from Margaret Mead to Clifford Geertz agreed that human nature was infinitely malleable; even the central nervous system was thought to be a cultural artefact.⁷ Sometimes referred to as the Standard Social Science Model, this constructionist view of humanity was the orthodox theory of mind in university social science departments for much of the twentieth century.⁸

For Chomsky there was something profoundly disturbing in the prospect of an Orwellian world in which human nature is fabricated by the state and truth merely an effect of power. It was also bad science. But since the 1970s there has been a revolution in the psychological and biological sciences. Where ‘humanity’ was once seen as a purely cultural construct, a consensus is now emerging among psychologists and neuroscientists that our minds are the product of a complex interaction between genetically determined predispositions and an environment that has itself been shaped by generations of human culture. The zoologist and polymath Edward O. Wilson has a phrase that sums it up well: we are, he says, the products of ‘gene-culture coevolution’.⁹ I will discuss the modern debate on human nature in more detail in chapter 9.

But literary postmodernists are suspicious of the truth claims of science and remain ideologically committed to the principle that the mind, and even gender, is shaped exclusively by social forces and owes nothing to our biological nature. It's true that some of anti-humanism's most passionate former champions have now modified their constructionist theories. But in doing so they have effectively abandoned the core principle of postmodern literary theory.¹⁰ As the neo-Marxist critic Jean Howard explains, central to the New Historicist project is ‘the attack on the notion that man possesses a transhistorical core of being. Rather, everything from “maternal instinct” to conceptions of the self are now seen to be the products of specific discourses and social processes’.¹¹ Postmodernists insist that we bring into the world no inherited predispositions that are typical of our species. It's not just a question of the infant mind being a blank sheet devoid of innate mental content; for the postmodernist there are none of the built-in rules that Locke thought were essential for processing experience. If there is nothing in our mental constitution that can be said to be intrinsically human, any Lockean notions of universal human rights¹² evaporate and we are left with a cipher waiting to be given shape and form by society. As Howard puts it, ‘nothing exists before the human subject is created by history’.¹³ Stephen Greenblatt spells out this key principle of New Historicist criticism in one of his most influential essays: ‘The very idea of a “defining human essence” is precisely what new historicists find vacuous and untenable.’¹⁴

Anti-essentialism is as fundamental to Cultural Materialism as it is to New Historicism. Alan Sinfield speaks for a whole generation of poststructuralist Marxist critics when he writes: ‘as a cultural materialist I don't believe in common humanity’.¹⁵ Reviewing the critical developments of the past twenty years, Jonathan Dollimore has recently reminded us that Cultural Materialism has always been ‘resolute’ in its rejection of ‘universal humanism’ and ‘essentialist individualism’.¹⁶

Postmodernists believe that the notion of a transhistorical essence of human nature is an invention of the modern world. Citing Foucault – ‘before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist’¹⁷ – Cultural Materialists and New Historicists argue that to attribute essentialist ideas of human nature to Shakespeare and his contemporaries is an historical anachronism (though as I shall explain in my final chapter, Foucault meant something very different from what his followers took him to mean). In one of the truly seminal critical books of the late twentieth century – Radical Tragedy (1984) – Jonathan Dollimore declared that it wasn't until the Enlightenment that ‘essentialist humanism’ first made its appearance.¹⁸ So influential was Radical Tragedy, and so great the continuing demand for it on university English courses, that a third edition has recently been published. In a foreword to the new edition Terry Eagleton tells us that the book is essential reading for the modern student: it's one of the ‘necessary’ critical works of our time.¹⁹ By the end of the twentieth century the consensus view in what had by then become mainstream Shakespeare criticism²⁰ was that to read this period through ‘the grid of an essentialist humanism’, as Dollimore put it, is to give a false picture of the age.²¹ Shakespeare was in effect a postmodernist ‘avant la lettre’.²² Students were warned against the folly of supposing that Shakespeare's plays might have anything to do with human nature.²³ They were taught that in this period the human ‘subject’ was thought to be inherently unstable and fragmented;²⁴ that it wouldn't have occurred to people that they might have an inner self;²⁵ that the idea of creative originality was an entirely alien concept;²⁶ and that ‘in the Renaissance our modern concept of the genius simply did not exist’.²⁷ As for gender, that was so indeterminate and had so little connection with biological nature that Elizabethans thought the mere act of putting on an actor's costume could literally turn a man into a woman.²⁸ Homosexuality hadn't yet been invented.²⁹

The belief that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were radical anti-essentialists is not supported by historical evidence. On the contrary, wherever you look in Elizabethan England you find the same insistence on the importance of understanding human nature. As the political historian Janet Coleman reminds us, ‘for all medieval and Renaissance thinkers, man's nature does not change over time . . . In all societies throughout history men can be observed to have demonstrated through their actions the same kind of nature, a nature that is specific to humans’.³⁰ For Elizabethan humanists – the word ‘humanist’ comes via Italian from the Latin ‘humanitas’, whose primary meaning was ‘human nature’ – the proper study of mankind was man.³¹ Humanist historiographers believed that the study of history was useful because, human nature being much the same in all ages, it could give the politician a valuable key to human action. Literary theorists defended poetry on the grounds that it gives you a much better insight into the way human beings behave than any scholastic treatise could do: one of the main justifications for reading literature was the belief that dramatic poetry could, as Hamlet puts it, hold the mirror up to nature and show us our characteristic human vices and virtues. People naturally argued about what human nature was like, but no one doubted that it existed. That it was important to understand human nature is something that seems to have been accepted by even the most unconventional thinkers. Montaigne's friend Pierre Charron summed up a commonplace of this period when he said that ‘The first lesson and instruction unto wisdom . . . is the knowledge of our selves and our human condition.’³²

Humanist philosophers from Cicero to A. C. Grayling have argued that any attempt to realise the ideal of a just society must begin with the facts of human nature.³³ Renaissance thinkers shared that belief. However, their intellectual world probably had more in common with Chaucer's than it does with our own. To emphasise the paramount importance that Renaissance thinkers accorded the study of human nature is not to suggest that their educational principles are relevant to the problems of the modern world (Elizabethan humanists showed no interest in the inductive approach to knowledge that was so soon to transform science). Nor is it to endorse Renaissance theories of civilisation (though there was a strong republican element in Elizabethan humanism, much humanist thought was unashamedly elitist). Rather it's an attempt to reconstruct unfamiliar ways of looking at things in the hope that this may correct certain misconceptions about Shakespeare's intellectual world that have become commonplaces in modern criticism. Dr Johnson said that the task of criticism was to improve opinion into knowledge.³⁴ As playgoers and readers we all have opinions about Shakespeare. But it's not until you have established the mental framework within which intellectual debate was conducted and meanings generated in the past that you can begin to judge a writer's response to ‘the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (Hamlet, iii.ii.23–4), or evaluate critically the worth of that response from a modern perspective.

Shakespeare's Humanism is about the centrality of human nature in Shakespeare's mental universe. Although in reasserting the importance of humanitas in the plays, it runs counter to the general tenor of mainstream, establishment Shakespeare criticism, it's not an argument for returning to the critical past. In my final chapter I'll suggest that, by listening to what other disciplines have to say about human nature, criticism can move on from an outdated anti-humanism that has its intellectual roots in the early decades of the last century to a more informed modern understanding of the human universals that literature has, in Ian McEwan's words, ‘always, knowingly and helplessly, given voice to’.³⁵

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Preface; Introduction; 1. Shakespeare and English humanism; 2. Gender; 3. Value pluralism; 4. Social justice; 5. Men, women and civilisation; 6. Love and death; 7. History; 8. Genius; 9. Anti-humanism; Notes; Select bibliography; Index.