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Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama.

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Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama

By Tzachi Zamir

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007

Once upon a time, let's say just after the middle of the eighteenth century, someone discovered that Shakespeare is a great moral philosopher. In my view this should count as a genuine discovery in the human sciences. Like all important discoveries, Shakespeare's value in moral philosophy can only be articulated in relation to developments in certain auxiliary sciences, in this case ethics, social theory, and the science of human motivation. Shakespeare's critics in the eighteenth century could draw on classical sources (Aristotle, Seneca, and the Stoics), on Christian tradition (St. Augustine), and also on new ideas about individual moral agency (the Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, Frances Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, David Hume, and others). This way of engaging with Shakespeare's plays developed into a robust tradition of interpretation that lasted for roughly 150 years, reaching a climax at the beginning of the last century in the work of A. C. Bradley and Richard Moulton.

The central category for this tradition of philosophical criticism is character, a term that basically meant something like a person's ethical or moral personality. Character criticism was eclipsed at the beginning of the last century, first by a shift of attention to the formal characteristics of Shakespeare's language and second by the development of historical inquiry. In both these interpretive traditions character criticism is frequently derided as naive, silly, and sometimes also as downright sinister in its aims. But when something is in eclipse, it hasn't really ceased to exist, it's just that something else is getting in the way of seeing it. So the work of interpreting Shakespeare in relation to moral philosophy has continued in the criticism of A. P. Rossiter, Stanley Cavell, Colin McGinn, A. D. Nuttall and Harry Berger, to name only a few examples. And of course, A. C. Bradley's Shakespeurean Tragedy is still in print one hundred years after its first publication.

Tzachi...

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