Shakespeare’s Everyday Relationships
Also: How C.S. Lewis became America’s professor, Silvio Berlusconi’s art, Bernard Williams’s relativism, and more.
I teach for a living—four, sometimes five, classes a semester—and right now I am teaching Julius Caesar in my Western lit. survey, which is full of politely interested and politely uninterested students with a few silently passionate ones (they only talk after class) and one or two vocally passionate ones.
I like Julius Caesar, though it is not my favorite Shakespeare play. I love King Lear, and I love it despite the interlude of Lear on the heath, which, quite frankly, drags on for too long. I feel sorry for Lear, however much he is to blame for shirking his kingly duties, for how he is overcome by weakness in his old age and for how he slowly loses his mind yet keeps enough of it to realize he has lost the only daughter who loved him—a daughter he banished in a foolish rage. I love Cordelia for her faithfulness to her father, despite everything, and her unflinching fortitude to the bitter end.
I have taught Hamlet too frequently to enjoy it like I used to enjoy it (maybe other teachers can relate?), though I suspect if I set it aside for a couple of years, it would seem fresh again. Despite the political and religious subtexts of the play, it is about family in the same way that King Lear and Romeo and Juliet are about family and in the way that Julius Caesar is about friendships gone wrong. (Cassius and Caesar were boyhood friends, and Brutus and Caesar were once as close as brothers.) All of Shakespeare’s plays are ultimately about these everyday relationships, whatever they might also say about politics or religion.
Anthony Daniels makes a similar point in the latest issue of The New Criterion in a review of two books about Shakespeare and race. This is what he says about Farah Karim-Cooper’s handling of Othello in her book The Great White Bard:
Though she has race on the brain, she is not so extreme as the authors in the previous book. She loves Shakespeare and acknowledges his marvelous fecundity and the beauty of his language . . . Nevertheless, some of her readings seem to me forced, precisely because she is determined to see so much through the lens of race. Her reading of Othello is almost monomaniacal. At one point she says that: “The scene [of Desdemona’s murder] is distressing not just because a woman gets murdered by her husband, but also because of the way color is itself hyper-objectified in a blatant act of racial formation—color being positioned as the crucial factor in the murder.”
But it is not the crucial factor. It is a factor, in a way that I shall try to elucidate, which speaks to Shakespeare’s great psychological acuity.
People who are surrounded by strangers are more inclined to become paranoid, because they may feel themselves disliked or because they do not understand the social cues around them. People who are uncertain of themselves who walk into a room full of people and hear laughter may think that the laughter refers to themselves; this is especially so if the people in the room speak another language from their own. The deaf are more than averagely prey to paranoid ideas. And, of course, Othello, the Moor, though he has succeeded mightily in the Venetian state, is still ineradicably an alien and prey to the anxieties of an alien, however honored he may be.
That there were prejudices against such as he can hardly be denied, and so, when he wins the hand of Desdemona, he remains somewhat unsure of himself. Jealousy of the extreme form being a kind of paranoia, he is therefore more susceptible to it than another might be. But not all jealous murders are interracial, nor do all interracial marriages end in murder. Moreover, murder motivated by jealousy is common, at least in the sense that it is common among murders.
When Desdemona tells her maid, Emilia, that she never gave Othello cause to be jealous, Emilia answers:
But jealous souls will not be answered so.
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they’re jealous . . .
She does not say “But Africans, or Moors, will not be answered so”: she is making a claim about all human beings.
And so is Shakespeare, of course. Earlier in the review, Daniels remarks that Romeo and Juliet’s wide appeal “does not mean that Shakespeare is or was universal . . . But it surely does point to Shakespeare’s wonderful capacity to imagine himself into the shoes of others, a capacity greater than in any other author known to me.”
In other news, David J. Davis explains how C.S. Lewis became America’s professor in the latest issue of Spectator World:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Prufrock to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.