The New York Review of Books

If one wants to find genuine skills at governance in Shakespeare, they are most attractively displayed by Claudius, the usurper in Hamlet who kills his brother, Hamlet’s father, to become king:

Thus much the business is: we have here writ

To Norway, uncle of young Fortinbras—

Who, impotent and bed-rid, scarcely hears

Of this his nephew’s purpose—to suppress

His further gait herein, in that the levies,

The lists, and full proportions are all made

Out of his subject; and we here dispatch

You, good Cornelius, and you, Valtemand,

For bearers of this greeting to old Norway,

Giving to you no further personal power

To business with the King more than the scope

Of these dilated articles allow.

Farewell, and let your haste commend your duty.

(1.2.27–39)

Shakespeare risked this uncharacteristically dull speech in order to convey the voice of authority: businesslike, confident, decisive, careful, and politically astute. And it is, of course, the voice of a murderer, the festering source of all that is rotten in the state of Denmark.

It is those who attempt to pull back from power who fascinated Shakespeare at least as much as those who strive to exercise it: the spoiled dreamer Richard II, who seems to embrace his fall from the throne; the love-crazed Antony, who prefers embracing Cleopatra to ruling the world; Coriolanus, who cannot abide the ordinary rituals of political life; and old Lear, who hopes

To shake all cares and business from our age,

Conferring them on younger strengths, while we

Unburdened crawl toward death.³

What all of these very different characters have in common—and we could add Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure and Prospero in The Tempest—is the desire to escape from the burdens of governance. And in each and every case, the desire leads to disaster.

For if Shakespeare was deeply drawn to those who want to walk away from positions of authority, he was at the same time convinced that this attempt is doomed. Power exists to be exercised in the world; it will not go away if you close your eyes and dream of escaping into your study or your lover’s arms or your daughter’s house. It will simply be seized by someone else, someone probably more coldly efficient than you are and still further away from an ethically adequate object: Bolingbroke, Octavius Caesar, Edmond, Angelo, Prospero’s usurping brother Antonio.

“Rapt in secret studies,” Prospero loses his dukedom, but even in exile he does not escape the authority to which he was culpably indifferent. Instead he finds himself, together with his daughter, on an island that serves as a kind of experimental space for testing the ethics of authority. Prospero possesses many of the princely virtues that the Renaissance prized, but the results of the experiment are at best deeply ambiguous: one of the island’s native inhabitants is liberated only to be forced into compulsory servitude; the other is educated only to be enslaved.

Prospero does seem to make one crucial ethical breakthrough: though he has his hated brother and his other enemies under his absolute control, he chooses not to exact vengeance upon them. But this choice is made at the urging of the nonhuman spirit Ariel, who declares what he would do “were I human.” Perhaps the more striking ethical choice that Prospero makes—and makes on his own, without Ariel’s urging—is to give up his magical powers (the romance equivalent of martial law), take back the dukedom he had lost twelve years earlier, and return to the city from which he had been exiled. By doing so he deliberately plunges back into the contingency, risk, and moral uncertainty that he had temporarily escaped. And, tellingly, he leaves Ariel behind.

The conclusion toward which these stories tend is not the cynical abandonment of all hope for decency in public life, but rather a deep skepticism about any attempt to formulate and obey an abstract moral law, independent of actual social, political, and psychological circumstances. This skepticism set Shakespeare at odds with the dominant currents of ethical reflection in his period. It is not that he set out, like Marlowe, to swim against these currents or to stage violent protests against them; rather he seems simply to have found them incompatible with his art.

Renaissance moral thought, like the Christian theology on which it drew, was deeply influenced by what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls the “ethicized psychology” invented by Plato. The idea, against which Williams’s powerful book Shame and Necessity struggles, is that “the functions of the mind, above all with regard to action, are defined in terms of categories that get their significance from ethics.” Thus psychic conflict, especially that between reason and desire, is mistakenly understood as inevitably an ethical conflict. In this influential but misguided tradition, “reason operates as a distinctive part of the soul,” Williams observes, “only to the extent that it controls, dominates, or rises above the desires.”⁴

There is a glimpse of this ethicized psychology in The Tempest, precisely in Prospero’s response to the spirit Ariel’s moral advice. “Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,” Prospero says of his enemies,

Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury

Do I take part.

(5.1.25–27)

But the play as a whole—and the great body of work of which it is part—resists the idea of a moralized basic structure of the mind and, with it, the search for an intrinsically just conception of responsibility. Prospero’s character is too complex, his relations with Ariel, Caliban, and the others too fraught, to be mapped comfortably onto a stable distinction between moral and nonmoral motivations.

If Shakespeare evidently found this distinction untenable, his problem with it lay in what Williams identifies as its underlying basis: “a distinctive and false picture of the moral life, according to which the truly moral self is characterless.” For Shakespeare there was no such thing as a characterless self. His doubts were rooted in his practice; that is, they were inseparable from his power as a playwright. A conception of the moral self as characterless was not for Shakespeare a philosophical blunder so much as it was an undoing or denial of his life’s work.

Shakespeare’s characters have a rich moral life, but that moral life is not autonomous. Instead it is in each case intimately bound up with the particular and distinct community in which the character participates. In Julius Caesar Brutus thinks that he is acting on ethical principles entirely uncompromised by peer pressure, but the audience knows otherwise. “Well, Brutus, thou art noble,” remarks Cassius to himself;

   yet I see

Thy honourable mettle may be wrought

From that it is disposed.

(1.2.302–304)

It is his failure to understand the extent to which he is “wrought”—his refusal to register the social influences upon him and his fantasy of absolute ethical autonomy—that dooms Brutus.

It would be possible, I believe, to argue that Shakespeare’s tragic vision was the consequence of the political defects of his age. The absence of any conception of democratic institutions and the rule of a hereditary monarch with absolutist pretensions left little or no room to formulate an ethical object for secular ambition. Yet Shakespeare’s own skepticism seemed to extend to the popular voice, so ironically treated in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. That is, when he tried to imagine electioneering, voting, and representation, he conjured up situations in which the people, manipulated by wealthy and fathomlessly cynical politicians, were repeatedly induced to act against their own interests.

Rule in Shakespeare is the fate of those who have been born to it. It is the fate of those as well who have been driven to exercise it out of desperation, forced, like Richmond in Richard III, Edgar in Lear, or Malcolm in Macbeth, to confront an evil so appalling that they have no choice but to act. A relatively small number of other characters, generally born in the proximity of power but not its direct heirs, actively seek to seize the reins of government, and a few of these are ruthless or lucky enough to be successful, but Shakespeare inevitably depicts them as eventually broken by the burden they have shouldered. Perhaps this was for him a peculiar form of consolation or hope.

Governance, as Shakespeare imagines it, is an immense weight whose great emblem is the insomnia that afflicts the competent, tough-minded usurper Bolingbroke after he has become Henry IV. There are books now that profess to derive principles of governance from Shakespeare’s works, but sleeplessness, tormenting, constant sleeplessness, is one of the only principles that he consistently depicts.

There is one other key principle, which will take us back to Bill Clinton’s remark about Macbeth. Macbeth dreams of killing his guest, King Duncan, and seizing power. He wants the assassination to be swift, decisive, once-and-for-all: mission accomplished. The lure is strong enough, he says, to make him ignore the threat of divine judgment in the afterlife, but still for a fateful moment he holds back:

We still have judgement here, that we but teach

Bloody instructions which, being taught, return

To plague th’inventor.

This is, I think, Shakespeare’s central perception of governance, and it stands in the place of any more high-minded ethical object. The actions of those in power have consequences, long-term, inescapable, and impossible to control. “We still have judgement here”—it is not in some imagined other world that your actions will be judged; it is here and now. Judgment in effect means punishment: whatever violent or dishonest things you do will inevitably serve as a lesson for others to do to you. Shakespeare did not think that one’s good actions are necessarily or even usually rewarded, but he seems to have been convinced that one’s wicked actions always return, with interest.

Even in a play haunted, as Macbeth is, by witches and the ghost of a murdered man, this causal order does not signal the existence of any supernatural necessity. There is no position outside the world or outside history from which Shakespeare’s characters can authenticate their actions or secure an abstract, ethically adequate object for their ambitions. Indeed even the survival of the state itself does not constitute such an object. One final, startling example will serve to make the point. In the wake of Lear’s abdication, the Duke of Cornwall is the legitimate, formally sanctioned ruler of half the kingdom, and yet the play stages and clearly justifies his assassination. The attack comes suddenly and without warning when he is going about the business of statecraft: specifically, he is attempting, by any means necessary, to extract from the Earl of Gloucester certain information vital for national security, information about a French army set upon invasion of the realm.

The audience has already learned what Cornwall does not yet fully know: that the invasion is well under way. A few scenes earlier, the banished Earl of Kent, in disguise, has taken a gentleman into his confidence. “From France,” he whispers,