E 15 Wk 3 Richard III Characters of William Shakespeare Essay

Description

Assignment:

This is an exercise in magical thinking, in

which you read the play

first one way, then

another: that is,

according to its evid

ent or

historical

sense, and second, symbolically or

allegorically.

Accordingly, y

ou

ar

e giving

two

different

readings of Richard

’

s

figure and

t

he dramatic action of the play:

the f

irst

psychological

; the second

allegorical

.

In order to

do this persuasively,

you have to select evidence from the play that supports eithe

r reading;

and that evidence consists of

the

words

/ speech / language / imagery of the text

—

that

is,

what the character

s

say to

and about

themselves and each other

1.

For each readi

ng, you will start

with Richard

’

s opening speech, interpre

ting his

words to support first one and then the other

account

of his role

(

historical or

magical

,

political figure

or devil incarnate)

.

2.

You will then ch

oose two scenes

to argue

the nature of

Richar

d

’

s

identity

(political

figure or devil incar

nate)

and the play

’

s dramatic action

: the first in

which

a principal

character

in the play is seduced by Richard

’

s wiles

, and th

e second in which s/he

acknowledges

her

or his

error of understanding

or

sin

.

Those principal characters include

Clarence,

Anne, H

astings, Buckingham and

Queen

Elizabeth

.

3.

Repeat.

In addition to Richard

’

s

and others

’

asides,

here are so

m

e suggested passages / scenes. Do

take into

account what transpires by the beginning of Act Fo

ur, when

Richard ceases to

speak and ingratiate himself with the audience.

You need also to consider the fact

and

manner

of Richard

’

s death

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Duck-Rabbit Exercise
The exercise is due on Canvas by 12N, Saturday, 13 February. It should be a
MINIMUM of five (5) pages in length, double-spaced, standard margins and font.
Problem:
If we may take the opinion of E.B. Tylor at its face value, [magic] can be most tersely
expressed in his words: “mistaking an ideal connection for a real one” . . . . (Freud, Totem
and Taboo)
Magical thinking, the belief that one’s ideas, thoughts, actions, words,
or use of symbols can influence the course of events in the material
world. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between one’s inner,
personal experience and the external physical world. Examples include
beliefs that the movement of the Sun, Moon, and wind or the occurrence of
rain can be influenced by one’s thoughts or by the manipulation of some
type of symbolic representation of these physical phenomena.
(Encyclopedia Britannica)
********
I do repent; but heaven hath pleas’d it so
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
–Hamlet
In seminar, we have entertained two ways of interpreting Richard III: one historical and
psychological, the other magical and symbolical (or allegorical). Both are moral
interpretations, that is, they pertain to how the characters in the play conduct themselves.
In engaging with Richard, a character may uphold the good and true by her or his speech
and actions. OR a character may be seduced by Richard’s deceptions, committing a tragic
error of understanding (historical and psychological account) or a sin against God that
endangers their salvation (magical and symbolical / allegorical).
Consider allegory as the narrative or extended / continuous version of symbolism, in
which a material thing, the symbol, stands for a meaning distinct from its evident sense,
usually immaterial or abstract, by virtue of some conventional or subjective resemblance
or association. (See attached handout on symbolic thinking. Consider the images we
discussed—the Anatomical Man, Sea-Dog Table and Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I.)
The historical and psychological interpretation sees Richard as the political figure
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the last Plantagenet king who rules England at the end of the
civil war between the factions of York and Lancaster, the Wars of the Roses which have
ruined the nation. He claims to believe that his physical deformity, thrust upon him by
‘dissembling nature,’ has left him unlovable, excluded him from the rewards of his heroism
on the field of battle, and condemned him to live the life of an outcast in an aristocratic
society where the good are beautiful. He therefore determines to prove a villain, becoming
the scourge of England’s corrupt nobility, using his exceptional powers—rhetorical,
psychological, theatrical, deceptive, tactical—ruthlessly to exploit the venality and egotism
of his victims, whom he tricks into a tragic error of understanding (hubris). Richard wins
himself the crown of England, but he does not keep it long, betrayed by his own arrogance
(hubris) into tragic error.
The magical and symbolical / allegorical interpretation sees Richard, Duke of Gloucester,
as the devil incarnate, born congenitally evil, deformed and prodigious into the house of
York during the civil wars of the Roses; turbulent, cunning and vicious in youth; a ruthless
warrior who kills without compunction the former king of England, Henry 6, and his son,
the Prince of Wales, his brother, his wife and nephews, while planning an incestuous
marriage with his niece. He deploys his diabolical powers of illusion to seduce into
committing a sin against God whomever he finds of use, betraying and destroying his own
family as well as his allies in his iniquitous pursuit of the crown of England, which he then
rules tyrannically until the good and virtuous Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, aided by the
ghostly intercession of Richard’s victims, kills him at the battle of Bosworth. (See the
handout on morality plays for details.)
Assignment:
This is an exercise in magical thinking, in which you read the play first one way, then
another: that is, according to its evident or historical sense, and second, symbolically or
allegorically. Accordingly, you are giving two different readings of Richard’s figure and
the dramatic action of the play: the first psychological; the second allegorical. In order to
do this persuasively, you have to select evidence from the play that supports either reading;
and that evidence consists of the words / speech / language / imagery of the text—that is,
what the characters say to and about themselves and each other.
1.
For each reading, you will start with Richard’s opening speech, interpreting his
words to support first one and then the other account of his role (historical or magical,
political figure or devil incarnate).
2.
You will then choose two scenes to argue the nature of Richard’s identity (political
figure or devil incarnate) and the play’s dramatic action: the first in which a principal
character in the play is seduced by Richard’s wiles, and the second in which s/he
acknowledges her or his error of understanding or sin.
Those principal characters include Clarence, Anne, Hastings, Buckingham and Queen
Elizabeth.
3.
Repeat.
In addition to Richard’s and others’ asides, here are some suggested passages / scenes. Do
take into account what transpires by the beginning of Act Four, when Richard ceases to
speak and ingratiate himself with the audience. You need also to consider the fact and
manner of Richard’s death.
Richard’s opening address to the audience (1.1.1-41)
Richard’s exchange with Clarence (1.1.43-121)
Richard’s exchange with Anne (1.2)
Queen Margaret’s curses and warning to Buckingham (1.3.187-300)
Richard’s statement of politic strategy (1.3.323-37)
Clarence’s dream and exchange with the murderers (1.4.1-83ff)
Buckingham’s oath of fealty to Elizabeth and her kin (2.1.32-40; cf. 5.1)
Queen Elizabeth’s and the Duchess of York’s lament (2.2.34-95)
Richard’s pretense with Buckingham (2.2.151-54)
Citizens’ colloquy (2.3)
Richard’s exchange with the young princes, especially, “Thus, like the formal Vice,
Iniquity,/I moralize two meanings in one word” (3.1)
Stanley’s dream and Hastings’ exchange with Catesby (3.2)
Scrivener’s speech (3.6)
Richard’s and Buckingham’s pious play for the crown performed before the mayor and
Buckingham’s claque (3.7)
Anne’s recognition and confession (4.1.65-86)
Richard’s scene of coronation and break with Buckingham (his decision to kill the princes
and marry his niece) (4.2)
the lament of Margaret, Queen Elizabeth and Duchess of York (4.4.1-121)
Richard’s exchange with his mother on their relationship (4.4.132-96)
Richard’s exchange with Queen Elizabeth (4.4.197-431)
Buckingham’s confession of his guilt (5.1)
the juxtaposition of Richmond and Richard staking out their ground at Bosworth field, their
dreams, and exhortations to their soldiers (5.2 and 3)
Richard’s dream (the ghosts’ prophecy) and his dissociated soliloquy with his conscience
(5.3.177-206)
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Symbolic (Magical) Thinking
From Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages:
Viewed from the standpoint of causal thinking, symbolism represents an
intellectual shortcut. Thought attempts to find the connection between
things, not by tracing the hidden turns of their causal ties, but rather by
suddenly jumping over these causal connections. The connection is not a
link between cause and effect, but one of meaning and purpose. The
conviction that such a link exists may come into existence whenever two
things share an essential quality that relates to something of general value.
Or, in other words, any association on the basis of any identity may be
directly transformed into an awareness of an essential and mystic
connection. From an ethnological viewpoint we can see that it is very
primitive. Primitiveness of thought reveals itself in its weak ability to
perceive the boundaries between things; it attempts to incorporate into the
idea of a particular thing all that which constitutes by its very presence any
kind of connection based on similarity or membership in a particular
category. The symbolizing function is most intimately related to this.
(Huizinga 236)
This symbolizing function, as Huizinga goes on to explain, comes down to a question of
belief, expressed or fomented by ostensible likeness or resemblance, the vehicle of
imagination as well as reason; for any “symbolic postulation of identity on the basis of
shared characteristics is only meaningful if the qualities shared by the symbol and the
thing symbolized are regarded as truly essential”—where the overt properties of things
“are regarded not as mere labels for physical differences on a quantitative basis, but as
real entities, as realities themselves” (Huizinga 236-37, emphasis mine).
But symbolism loses any semblance of arbitrariness and immaturity as
soon as we realize that it is inseparably linked to that worldview that was
known as realism during medieval times and that we, somewhat less
fittingly, call Platonic idealism.
The symbolic postulation of identity on the basis of shared characteristics
is only meaningful if the qualities shared by the symbol and the thing
symbolized are regarded as being truly essential. White and red roses
bloom among thorns. The medieval mind sees in this fact symbolic
significance: virgins and martyrs shine in glory among those who
persecute them. How is the postulate of identity achieved? By virtue of
the identity of the qualities, beauty, tenderness, purity. The blood red tint
of the roses is also that of the virgin and the martyr. But this
connectedness is only truly meaningful and full of mystic significance if
the linkage, the symbolism are shared by each of them. In other words,
where red and white are not regarded as mere labels for physical
differences on a quantitative basis, but as real entities, as realities
themselves. Our intellect is still capable of seeing things in this way at
any time if we can momentarily capture the wisdom of primitive man, the
child, the poet, or the mystic. For all these, the natural essence of things is
locked up in their general quality. This characteristic is their being, their
essence. Beauty, tenderness, whiteness by being essences are identities:
everything white is beautiful, tender, and everything that is white has to be
connected, has to have the same basis to its existence, has to have the
same importance before God. –That is why, in medieval thought, an
inseparable link exists between symbolism and realism (in the medieval
sense of the word). (236-37)
. . . The value for life of a symbolic interpretation of all of existence was
incalculable. Symbolism created an image of the world more strictly
unified by stronger connections than causal-scientific thought is capable
of. It embraces in its strong arms all of nature and all of history. In both,
it creates an indissoluble order of rank, an architectural structure, a
hierarchical subordination.
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Backgrounds to Shakespeare and Magic
Sympathy and Aversion
Revenge Tragedy operates according to the following concepts, values, and principles or
functions:
contrariety: opposition, antithesis, polarity, antipathy, adversion, aversion, repugnance,
conversion, antagonism, contradiction
complementarity: difference, distinction, double, complement, dialectic, correlative,
correspondent, interdependent, interconnected, comutual
inversion: change (movement), reversal, contraposition, derangement, revulsion, metathesis,
metabasis, transposition, retroversion, subversion, overturn, overthrow, upturn, turn topsy-turvy,
unbalance, overbalance
anomaly: unconformity, inconsistency, deviation, divergence, aberrance, abnormality,
idiosyncrasy, eccentricity, singularity, oddity, exceptionality, peculiarity, monstrosity, prodigy,
extraordinary
identity: sameness, equivalence, unity, synonymy, similarity, resemblance, likeness, analogy,
coincidence
Simply because it is a human trait, the early modern world conceived order primarily in terms of
sight or visible appearance, the faculty of perception that Aristotle associates peculiarly with
knowledge, and to which the other senses were in a manner synaesthetically (from synaesthesia
or the confusion of sensory faculties) subordinated (if only because they were under constant
assault from early modern living conditions). This visualism positively organized its categories
of experience according to the principle of visible similarity, likeness, resemblance, analogy,
even as those categories were defined and contained by the principle of visible contrariety,
difference, opposition, distinction. Both natural and human change were thought to be driven
by the cosmic forces of sympathy and aversion or antipathy, philos and aphilos, love and hate.
It has been argued that the art of magic–and this was a world that believed in magic to differing
degrees and in different kinds–functioned along the same lines. In The Golden Bough, Frazer
famously divides this art into two modes: “imitative” or “homoeopathic” magic, which works
therapeutically on the principle of similarity or likeness (sight), while its complement,
“contagious” magic, works infectiously on the principle of contact (touch) or proximity. As
Frazer himself observes, they both can be reduced to the imagi-native principle of association
(see the Royalty, Tyranny, Magic and Shakespeare handout for Frazer’s own exposition of
magic). Medicine also observed the concept of sympathy and aversion, likeness and opposition,
in its treatments of illness; logic too operated in terms of analogy and polarity.
One should try to see the forces of sympathy and aversion as an axis, with similarity the vertical
and opposition the horizontal relation. Now consider how Michel Foucault describes these
inextricable forces in The Order of Things, especially sympathy which has “the dangerous power
of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another, of mingling them, of causing their
individuality to disappear, and thus of rendering them foreign to what they were before”:
Sympathy transforms. It alters but in the direction of identity, so that if its power
were not counterbalanced it would reduce the world to a point, to a homogeneous
mass, to the featureless form of the Same: all its parts would hold together and
communicate with one another without a break, with no distance between them. . .
This is why sympathy is compensated for by its twin, antipathy. Antipathy
maintains the isolation of things and prevents their assimilation; it encloses every
species within its impenetrable difference and its propensity to continue being
what it is. . . . The identity of things, the fact that they can resemble others and be
drawn to them, though without being swallowed up or losing their singularity-this is what is assured by the constant counterbalancing of sympathy and
antipathy. It explains how things grow, develop, intermingle, disappear, die, yet
endlessly find themselves again; in short, how there can be space (which is
nevertheless not without landmarks or repetitions, not without havens of
similitude) and time (which nevertheless allows the same forms, the same species,
the same elements to reappear indefinitely). (23-25)
Thus the necessity of opposition or contrariety, which keeps things distinct and distin-guishable,
preserving everything in its own kind, averting the contagion of similarity or “sameness” which
would make everything resemble everything else. Then no sense could be made of experience;
no one identity could be differentiated from another. Without opposition or contrariety, there
would be no difference, no distinction, no particularity or individuality, just the morass of
resemblance Foucault evokes, from which no singularity could escape. The sixteenth-century
French philosopher Michel de Montaigne observes in his Stoical and skeptical Essais:
Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to resort to: experience has
no fewer. The induction which we wish to draw from the likeness between events
is unsure since they all show unlikenesses. When collating objects no quality is
so universal as diversity and variety. . . . Of itself, unlikeness obtrudes into
anything we make. No art can achieve likeness. . . . Likeness does not make
things ‘one’ as much as unlikeness makes them ‘other’: Nature has bound herself
to make nothing ‘other’ which is not unlike. (364)
Just as no event and no form completely resembles another, neither does any
completely differ. What an ingenious medley is Nature’s: if our faces were not
alike we could not tell man from beast; if they were not unalike we could not tell
man from man. All things are connected by some similarity; yet every example
limps and any correspondence we draw from experience is always feeble and
imperfect; we can nevertheless find some corner or other by which to link our
comparisons. (370)
So even as similarity brings things together in a sympathetic bond, the expression of the vital
force of eros or “desire,” so contrariety pushes and pulls them apart, distinguishes and separates
them by the force of aversion or antipathy, eris or “strife.” Both these forces or principles are an
early modern inheritance from the Greeks and Romans, whose works they unearthed from the
monastaries beginning in the fourteenth century. But they also form the fundamental cognitive
schemata by which we induce clarity and certainty in our ideas. It is the poet John Donne whose
speaker says that “likeness glues love,” even as he argues that not “in nothing, nor in things /
Extreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere,” and moreover, that “What ever dies was not
mixed equally.” These are the truisms of the age, expressing the relations of identity and
opposition which governed human thought (see the Gender Ideology handout).
As Foucault notes, sympathy can bring about a catastrophic assimilation of everything to
everything else, in which different kinds of things previously distinct undergo a metamorphosis
into what they were not, ‘rendering them foreign to what they were before.’ In effect, sympathy
overwhelms distinction or opposition, so that the unlike becomes the like. This movement is
typical of the grotesque, a decorative vogue that started sometime in fifteenth-century Italy, with
the discovery of an earlier Roman mode from the reign of Augustus that the architectural theorist
Vitruvius called “monstrous.” The painter Raphael was one of the grotesque’s foremost, if not its
most extreme exponents: “curled and involuted shoots, from whose foliage animals emerge and
cause the difference between animal and vegetable forms to be eliminated; slender vertical lines
on the lateral walls, which are made to support either masks or candelabra or temples, thereby
negating the law of statics . . . . in this world the natural order of things has been subverted” (2021). In the more extreme versions, “human and non-human elements are fused,” familiar
proportions are distorted and enlarged, fantastically colored and arranged: the human emerges
from roots and tendrils. Wolfgang Kayser thus defines the style:
By the word grotessco the Renaissance, which used it to designate a specific
ornamental style suggested by antiquity, understood not only something playfully
gay and carelessly fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister in the face
of a world totally different from the familiar one–a world in which the realm of
inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human
beings, and where the laws of statics, symmetry and proportion are no longer
valid. This meaning ensues from a synonym for grotesque which came into usage
during the sixteenth century: the dream of painters (sogni dei pittori). This term
also names the sphere in which the dissolution or reality and the participation in a
different kind of existence . . . form an experience about the nature and
significance of which man has never ceased to ponder. (21-22)
The Inversion of World Order
Related to this sympathetic apocalypse is inversion, which arises from the conceptual situation
expressed by the Pythagorean oppositions (Gender Ideology handout): as the principle of
complementarity argues, “man . . . cannot judge single, but by coupling contrarieties” (Clark
69). Quoting the seventeenth-century Spanish critic Gratian, who declares that “The things of
this world can be truly perceived only by looking at them backwards,” Stuart Clark observes that
“if the world was composed of contraries it was also a reversible world; indeed, this was the only
change to which it could conceivably be subject”(69). Such a change worked on the principle of
antipathy, often in a sudden, violent motion consequent upon some confusion or crisis of
received understanding, perhaps a traumatic event. Evil, malignity and disorder are expressed not
by opposition as such but by cosmic inversion, “with reference not merely to human behaviour
but relentlessly and exhaustively to every sublunary phenomenon, to the celestial spheres, and to
angels and demons” (70). As Clark proceeds to describe:
Since [humanity’s fall from divine grace in the garden of Eden] . . . everything in
the world has had to be maintained in counterweight to its contrary. All things
now have negative as well as positive qualities (‘marvelous antitheses’)–whereas
before there was only unalloyed goodness. Humankind, for instance, has become
as base as it is noble, as puny as it is might, a shadow as much as a likeness of
God. At the same time, contrariety has produced oppositions in social statuses
and lifestyles, in beliefs and opinions, and within and between nations–as well as
in the behavior of animals and natural bodies. There is a total confusion of
religions, ceremonies, clothes, personalities, languages, arts and manners. . . .
Inversion too, therefore, was a feature of the world of sin, a world in which the
negative qualities threatened to dominate their positive counterweights, and all
things echoed the primal disobedience by reversing their normal roles and
relationships. In men and women as individuals and in society as a whole, all the
hierarchies were overturned and all the inferior values supplanted their superior
opposites. (70-71)
Social and political inversion is thus the standard symbol of human misrule, with Clark
remarking that “in the life of actual societies and states it was resonant with special meaning”:
These were institutions modelled on the divine paradigm, harmonizing
contrarieties of status, interest, and fortune by patriarchal and princely power that
were either historical derivations from or closely analogous to God’s own rule.
Here the image of the world upside-down was peculiarly persuasive. By analogy
it endowed acts of social disorder with a significance far beyond their immediate
character, attributing to them repercussions in every other plane of government.
And by antithesis it offered the opportunity of defending order a contrariis in
relation to a situation in which all the normal patterns of authority were simply
inverted. . . . One obvious instance is that of comparisons between the prince and
the tyrant. . . . The qualities and duties of the prince . . . were portrayed in terms of
the perfectly virtuous man governing in an ideal situation. This exemplary ruler
was contrasted with his opposite, whose government was in every respect
contrary to the good. . . . (73)
The inversion functions as follows:
the king conforms himself to the laws of nature, while the tyrant treads them
underfoot; the one maintains religion, just, and faith, the other has neither God,
faith, nor law; the one does all that he thinks were serve the public good and
safety of his subject, the other does nothing except for his particular profit,
revenge, or pleasure; the one strives to enrich his subjects by all the means he can
think of, the other improves his own fortune only at their expense; the one
avenges the public injuries and pardons those against himself; the other cruelly
avenges his own and pardons those against others; the one spares the honour of
chaste women, the other triumphs in their shame. (73)
Or as James I puts it in his Basilicon Doron:
The one acknowledgeth himselfe ordained for his people, hauing receiued from
God a burthen of gouernment, whereof he must be countable; the other thinketh
his people ordeined for him, a prey to his passions and inordinate appetites, as the
fruites of his magnanimitie. . . . (20)
When God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, contrariety or opposition is the
principle that divides and distinguishes the ideal from the abject, the superior from the inferior,
good from evil, masculine from feminine, virtue from vice, honor from dishonor, justice from
injustice, right rule from misrule, monarchy from tyranny, and so on. These oppositions are
ontological: that is, they assert the fundamental order of created being in which how something
appears is understood to be a direct, infallible index of what it is: character is self-identical, and
the evident is the real.
Moreover, the drawing of such absolute and exclusive distinctions allows the two opposed orders
to stand in a complementary relationship to one another, in which each may be said to complete
the other, supplying as it were each other’s lack. Put another way, one cannot know what is
masculine without the feminine, good without evil, virtue without vice: each constitutes the other
in a dialectical relationship. Thus, in Milton’s phrase, it is the condition of humanity to know
good dialectically:
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost
inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the
knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned,
that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to
cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of
one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving
together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is the doom which Adam
fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil.
(Areopagitica).
Milton points here to the fundamental problem raised by revenge tragedy, which has its source in
the skeptical crisis of the mid-sixteenth century, which Montaigne’s skeptical philosophy
articulates (see Skepticism and Montaigne handout). One could describe that crisis as the
discovery of “mere appearance”–the deceptiveness or duplicity of our perceptions and so their
unreliability: that the world is not as we imagine it; that our ideas describe ourselves, not things
outside the mind; that truth is not truth but what we desire and prefer while falsehood is that to
which offends us, to which we are averse–whatever endangers our identity or self-esteem,
compromises what we perceive to be our interests and power. To quote Montaigne, “every man
calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other
criterion of truth or right-reason than the example of form of the opinions and customs of our
own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed
and perfect way of doing things.” (“On cannibals,” Essais) In sum, what we call truth, justice,
right and knowledge is only an expression of our own narcissism, which we seek to impose on
others in order to secure and advance ourselves.
But when oppositions are not upheld in the human world, the result is not only uncertainty,
ambiguity, confusion, but what is worse, the perversion of the divinely-created order. Unless
those ontological, sexual, moral, political oppositions, which stand in a hierarchical relation to
each other, are duly observed and reinforced, then the world suffers a catastrophic inversion.
One can no longer secure the meaning of things since appearances have become ambiguous,
duplicitous: vice appears like virtue and is overtly indistinguishable from it. Men behave
effeminately: they are deceptive, sinister, obscure, unbalanced, irrational (like Atreus, Nero, the
Duke and his sons in The Revenger’s Tragedy). For their part, women assume the worst traits of
masculine character, losing all modesty and turning into the figure of our general mother, Eve, in
medieval commentary, and so ambitious, cunning, bold, flagrantly sexual, powermongering,
violent (the figure of Agrippina in Octavia and the Duchess in The Revenger’s Tragedy). The
world is suddenly turned upside down, as Ulysses describes in his speech on “degree”
(hierarchical distinction) in Shakespeare’s satire on honor, Troilus and Cressida:
Degree being vizarded,
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order.
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhood in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each things meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right, or rather, right and wrong-Between whose endless jar justice resides-Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. . . .
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking;
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward in a purpose
It hath to climb. The general’s disdained
By him one step below, he by the next,
That next by him beneath: so every step,
Exampled by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation. . . .
(1.3.83-134)
Early modern culture was much taken with the symmetrical and antithetical motif of concordia
discors / discordia concors: “Without a discord can no concord be, / Concord is when contrary
things agree.” This “conceit” or figure represents the world as a harmony–a “tuning of the
string” to bring each sound into concert with others, as Ulysses puts it. Harmony of course is
made up of diverse kinds and proportions, in which difference or discordance is blended into a
natural and politic concord or unity by the strict enforcement of hierarchy or “degree.” This is
the Great Chain of Being, in which all things exist in subordination to their ontological superior-ultimately, God and in monarchy, his lieutenant on earth, the monarch–as the planets do to the
sun or “Sol” (the symbol of kingship) in Ulysses’ image.
Degree is represented by Ulysses, first, as the regular ordering of identity, status and action in the
world: “degree, priority, place, / Insisture [persistence or steady continuance], course, proportion,
season, form, / Office and custom, in all line of order.” Next, it is evoked by its human effect-the creation of sociability by the observance of hierarchy: “communities, / Degrees [ranks] in
schools, and brotherhoods in cities, / Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, / The
primogenitive and due of birth / Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels.” But “vizard”–that
is, conceal, neglect or obscure–this hierarchical order of degree, and nothing appears as what it
is; “the unworthiest shows as fairly” as the best. The evident is no longer the real, and one cannot
trust appearances.
As Ulysses says, “untune that string,” depart from that divine harmony or concord, by neglecting
to maintain hierarchy, then the world turns topsy-turvy. “Mere oppugnancy” or strife results-wars between states, rebellion within the commonwealth and its analogue, the household or
family. This is not only a principle of human but of natural and cosmic rule: when what had
been properly distinguished or differentiated into its proper kind is “mixed,” the result is not just
confusion or disorder but total “chaos” and “evil” on earth and in the heavens. The seas
surmount their limits, the natural elements mutiny, supernatural portents and omens intrude
where they do not belong, and so do human beings. Where human virtue once held harmonious
sway, sheer irrationality in the form of power, appetite and will dominate in its stead, in the
manner of the tyrant consuming everything until the only prey left is itself. There is a general
inversion of erstwhile value: might is now right, and so “the rude son strikes his father dead.”
Humanity as a whole aspires beyond its given place, suffering “an envious fever of pale and
bloodless emulation”–an anarchy of ambition, competition and rivalry.
In effect, Ulyssses evokes in this speech the Iron Age–the world the character Seneca describes
in the Octavia and associates with Nero’s reign (pp. 271-73 in Watling). It is the last the age,
always the present age, following the better worlds now lost of the Golden, Silver and Bronze
ages. The playwright’s original for this topic or myth comes from the Greek Hesiod’s Works and
Days (8th c. BCE)
But when the earth covered this race, too,
Zeus, son of Kronos, made upon the nourishing land
yet another race–the fourth one–better and more just.
They were the divine race of heroes, who are called
demigods; they preceded us on this boundless earth.
Evil war and dreadful battle wiped them all out,
Some fighting over the flocks of Oidipous
at seven-gated Thebes, in the land of Kadmos,
others over the great gulf of the sea in ships
that had sailed to Troy for the sake of lovely-haired Helen;
there death threw his dark mantle over them.
Yet others of them father Zeus, son of Kronos, settled at earth’s ends,
apart from men, and gave them shelter and food.
They lived there with hearts unburdened by cares
in the islands of the blessed, near stormy Okeanos,
these blissful heroes for whom three times a year
the barley-giving land brings forth full grain sweet as honey.
I wish I were not counted among the fifth race of men,
but rather had died before, or been born after it.
This is the race of iron. Neither day nor night
will give them rest as they waste away with toil
and pain. Growing cares will be given them by the gods,
160
165
170
175
and their lot will be a blend of good and bad.
Zeus will destroy this race of mortals
when children are born gray at the temples.
Children will not resemble their fathers,
and there will be no affection between guest and host
and no love between friends or brothers as in the past.
Sons and daughters will be quick to offend their aging parents
and rebuke them and speak to them with rudeness
and cruelty, not knowing about divine retribution;
they will not even repay their parents for their keep-these lawbreakers–and they will sake one another’s cities.
The man who keeps his oath, or is just and good,
will not be favored, but the evil-doers and scoundrels
will be honored, for might will make right and shame will vanish.
Base men will harm their betters with words
that are crooked and then swear they are fair.
And all toiling humanity will be blighted by envy,
grim and strident envy that takes its joy in the ruin of others.
Then Shame [aidos] and Retribution [nemesis] will cover their fair bodies
with white cloaks and, leaving men behind,
will go to Olympos from the broad pathed earth
to be among the race of immortals, while grief and pain
will linger among men, whom harm will find defenseless.
180
185
190
195
200
Moreover, whatever is anomalous, neither like nor opposed to whatever it contacts but simply
out of place, can also function as a contagion until it is properly subsumed into one or other
category. One can think of the anomalous as the contingent or unexpected, what doesn’t fit for
whatever reason in a given world picture. But it can also be imagined as that which pollutes a
given category by its presence, rendering it impure, dangerous, unstable. Hierarchy pictures the
order of things as a ladder or chain divided into ascending or descending ontological ranks or
classes, which is to say, distinct categories of being or existence, on a spectrum from the
supreme (the divine) to the superior (the monarchical and noble) to the more or less inferior (the
gentry, the professional classes, the free or landed peasantry, the artisans and craft-workers,
down to the vagrant poor).
Needless to say, when a member of one class aspires to the class above it (descent is not such a
problem), that person troubles the entire order by making it appear porous, flexible, contingent
when ideologically it is conceived as absolute, permanent and fixed. Similarly, when a person
belongs to one category, say, the masculine, yet assumes the behavior or appearances of its
opposite, the feminine, then there is more than just gender trouble: there is the subversion of the
very differences which determine both class and individual identity. Finally, symbolic orders of
being (like aristocratic ideology creates) tolerate no middle ground or grey area: one is either
ideal or one is abject. Here the anomalous must be assimilated to one or other category in order
to maintain their symbolic relation and especially the integrity of the ideal category or class.
It is no coincidence that the 1580’s saw the beginning of a pamphlet war over the question of
women’s place–her conduct, her fashions, and most especially, her education–which lasted
through the next century (remember Silver’s drawing of modest and immodest female dress). At
the same time, there began a trend to accuse and prosecute unowned or obstreperous women of
witchcraft, frequently elderly widows dependent on the reluctant charity of their neighbors,
which was one way to assimilate them into the symbolic order of the abject, and as Keith
Thomas argues, thus relieve their neighbors of guilt and anxiety. (Indeed, any person whose
behavior was problematic for the community could be subject to such supernatural accusations,
both male and female.) As Stuart Clark argues, the early modern demonologists, both Catholic
and Protestant, who more or less inflamed contemporary superstition and precipitated two
centuries of witchcraft hysteria (from the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries in
Europe, the British Isles and North America), understood and depicted their subject in terms of
contrariety and especially inversion, which were conventionally associated with the satanic and
black magic.
Significantly, the 1580’s and 1590’s saw the height of witchcraft prosecutions in England,
probably as a result of England’s perilous political predicament, which led its elite–crown
magistrates and country justices of the peace—to endorse these ordinary accusations of village
life, even as parliament saw fit to legislate against them, with a sequence of statutes climaxing in
the 1604 law that made consorting with evil spirits a capital offense where death was putatively
involved. Parliament also legislated against Catholic priests—especially the notoriously slippery
Jesuits, the so-called shock troops of the Counter-Reformation—who were seen as subversive of
the Protestant nation whose monarch (Elizabeth) had been excommunicated by the pope, and so
rendered ripe for assassination. Remember the great Armada of 1588, which was but one of a
number of fleets that Catholic Spain sent against England. Remember Mary Queen of Scots, the
chief pretender to the English throne during Elizabeth’s reign, a Catholic daughter of Henry
VIII’s sister whom France married to its short-lived monarch, Francis II, and related to the Guise
family (of the infamous Catholic League, who committed the massacre of French Protestants in
Paris). Remember also that Stuart rule under James I (Mary’s son) and Charles I led to a series
of confrontations with parliament over constitutional and religious questions, whose result was
the English civil war which arguably lasted from 1637 to 1649 (or even in its political form
1688).
As Lawrence Stone describes, the crisis of English aristocracy, in which there was
unprecedented mobility up and down the social ladder, with ancient noble families dying out and
new nobility being created, neatly coincides with the period in which revenge tragedy had its
dramatic vogue (1580 to 1640). Consequently, there was relatively-speaking a constant class of
what were called “new men” seeking preferment or office at court. The phrase “new man” comes
from the Latin novus homo, used to describe those very few Romans of the plebian class who, by
running the cursus of office from tribune to consul as Cicero did, were admitted to the Senate,
thereby becoming legally if not socially members of the ancient patrician class. Owing to the
humanist embrace of his writings (of which we have more than any other Roman), the example
of Cicero was always before the renaissance gentleman, including Bacon, who would pursue
social and economic advancement by virtue of his political “parts” or talents. “New men” were
always treated as anomalous, as parvenus even when they were of good birth, as Bacon was
(although he did not belong to the titled branch of his family). But with each new creation from
the lower classes (usually gentry, sometimes professional in the form of officers of the court like
Bacon, occasionally nouveau riche merchants), the College of Heralds would supply a device
and motto for the ennobled lineage that would give it the semblance of antiquity, thus preserving
aristocratic appearances. Indeed, once advanced, the otherwise untoward aspiration of “new
men” could be assimilated to the hierarchical picture, which always held a place for those who,
in the romantic tradition of chivalry, were “natural” aristocrats, having proven their worth, their
“quality,” if not in war, then in what Bacon calls “business”–service to the crown by office,
service to England’s prosperity by commerce.
Identity, Aristocracy and Honor
If distinction is the principle behind aristocracy, identity informs the concept of honor. Aristocracy expresses difference in terms of a unique or exceptional class or category of person
whose members can simultaneously be identified as such by their shared appearances, their
exclusive likeness to each other. Honor (in Greek, time) as the code of this elite class expresses
the principle of identity in terms of the self-identical appearances and integral character of the
gentleman, whose word is his bond, and whose reward is glory (in Greek, kleos) or reputation,
manifest in the palpable form of power, wealth and deference by his inferiors. “Disdain,”
contempt or scorn, is the class emotion directed at those who prove unworthy of their birth by
their violation of this class code. In his account of the megalopsychos, Aristotle also makes
disdain the emotion felt by the “great-souled” for any ordinary reward or opportunity for glory
that is therefore beneath his or her notice. Nemesis or “retribution,” understood as the antipathy
and indignation that prompts class disdain towards the violator of honor, also signifies the
inevitable and necessary vengeance exacted for such violations by the offender’s peers, in
keeping with the class code.
By definition, aristocracy is a political system defined as “the strength of the best” (aristoi from
the Greek arete or “excellence,” whose Latin equivalent is virtus, Italian virtu, which all signify
the exceptional capacity and performance of the aristocrat): “Because men that are free, wellborne, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that
prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour”
(Rabelais). Thus Curtis Brown Watson (the author of Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept
of Honor) observes:
It is suggested on the one hand that the desire for virtue is innate, but on the other
it is pointed out that the Renaissance aristocrat is carefully instructed in them oral
disciplines and refrains from intercourse with any who is not of a like virtue.
Virtue is hereditary and in the blood, but it will not, apparently, bear wholesome
freuit if the soil is not as carefully selected as the seed.
The sense of honor, the desire for virtue, is then deeply implanted in the soul of
the Renaissance gentlemen. He is not concerned primarily with the opinon of
others, but with his own conscience, his own inner sense of integrity. Insofar as
Renaissance moral treatises followed the humanist philosophers of antiquity, first
emphasis was placed on the individual’s acquisition of a sense of his own value
and moral worth. Both Aristotle and Cicero placed major stress on the fact that
virtue was not implanted by the gods but resulted largely from a man’s own
inclination and training. Stoic philosophy developed this theory of
individualism and self-reliance to its extreme, but Epictetus is uttering a mere
truism of pagan philosophy when he says, “Fidelity is your own, virtuous shame
is your own.”
According to pagan-humanist theory, however, the sentiment of honor was to be found
only in the aristocratic classes. Aristotle had said that arguments “are powerless to
stimulate the mass of mankind to moral nobility. For it is the nature of the many to be
amenable to fear but not to a sense of honour, and to abstrain from evil not because of its
baseness but because of the penalities it entails.” This remark becomes a Renaissance
commonplace. Repeatedly a distinction is made between those who are motivated “for
vertues sake, for feare of reproch, for love and reverence to honestie” to lead upright and
virtuous lives, and those who are compelled to good and virtue “for feare of punishment
to be inflicted upon them by the magistrates.” [. . . .] For the man of the Renaissance,
[virtue, conscience, and honor] . . . involved his whole being. Honor was related to the
intellectual faculties, but was equally an “ardent heate which enflameth the minde of
man, to glorious enterprise, making him audacious against enemies, and to vices
timerous.” (91-93)
Aristocratic politics assumes that the aristocrat’s natural superiority to others–his or her human
exceptionality to the common run of human beings, which derives genetically from “blood” or
lineage–can be recognized as such. This appearance of superiority, which consists in beauty of
some kind (in face, body, movement, apparel) is especially obvious when the aristocrat’s natural
endowments have been cultivated and enhanced by paideia–“culture,” education, training-which itself entails a self-discipline that Aristotle calls “taking hold of the beautiful.” The Greek
principle of kalokagathia, “the beautiful-with-the-good,” is the result of such discipline,
implying both beauty of feature and grace of movement. One’s degree of beauty is thus the
natural expression of the degree of one’s arete or achieved excellence: kalokagathia implies the
perfect symmetry or proportion between the natural and the cultural or artistic–between the
evident dimension of a person and his or her “real” or “essential” capacities. For the
proportionate or symmetrical is the canon of beauty in Greek culture, both for the body and the
face, even as physical gravity, strength and magnitude (physical height and breadth) are
considered by Aristotle the physical expression of the “great-souled” or “magnanimous” person.
In short, the aristocrat embodies in his or her appearances an identity between the evident and
the real. And this is the functional principle of honor: that gentlemanly thought matches speech,
and speech matches action. The honorable person is thus a person of integrity, which involves
the integration of these dimensions of human character into a single, consistent whole. Hence the
supreme offense of “giving the lie” according to the Italian code of the duello: that is, of
accusing another person of falsehood, however trivial. Here is Watson again on honor as
“honesty” or “integrity”:
The ideal Renaissance gentleman was a man of absolute honesty and integrity.
Hence, one of the traditional privileges of the aristocrat had been his right to
testify in court without bond and without witnesses. The mere word of a
gentleman was, presumably, as trustworthy as the sworn testimony of a man of
the lower classes. . . . Indeed, honor and honesty were practically interchangeable
in the Renaissance, although the shading of meaning which distinguishes the two
words today had begun to differentiate them. The Latin word honestas meant
worth, virtue, honorable character, probity. . . .
The emphasis on honesty was so great that the pagan philosophers seemed to
prefer an honest simpleton to a man who proved to be even slightly deceitful,
however brilliant he might be. The humanist philosophers held nothing in greater
abhorrence than the feigning of emotions not felt; open enmity is infinitely
preferable to pretended love. Cleland is expressing one of the fundamental
Renaissance precepts when he says that a friend is “such in his hart as he
appeareth in action, without al dissumulation or deceit, loving nothing but honest,
faithful, plain, and simple dealing.” Montaigne suggests that nothing shows
greater ignobility than deceit: “of all vices, I finde none that so much witnesseth
deisseness and baseness of heart. It is a coward and servile humour, for a man to
disguise and hide himselfe under a maske, and not dare to shew himselfe as
he is . . . A generous minde ought not to belie his thoughts, but make shew of his
inmost parts: There al is good, or at least all is humane. Aristotle thinkes it is an
office of magnanimitie to hate and love openly, to judge and speak with all
libertie.” In this passage, the close integration of various Renaissance virtues is
indicated; openness and lack of all pretense are considered indispensable
attributes of the magnanimous man. In Renaissance England simplicity may have
possessed the pejorative meaning which the word now has but it meant equally a
quality of the highest nobility. “In vertue may be nothing fucate [painted, dyed;
cosmetic, false show] or counterfayte. But therein is onely the image of veritie,
called simplicitie.” (97-98)
“Simplicity” (as against complexity) of expression and action again evokes the idea of
transparency, which can be natural or achieved. The presumption to integral or transparent
appearance is thus a critical claim of aristocracy: what you see is what you get, and what you get
is the best, those supreme in human excellence of all kinds. One could even say that the principle
of honor is just another version of kalokagathia, insofar as it asserts that the evident is the real,
and consequently that the gentleman is a virtuous person–what Cicero calls a bonus vir, whose
appearances of superiority are honest and trustworthy.
This presumption to honesty explains one great desideratum of aristocracy, which is enkrateia-self-discipline, self-mastery, self-control, often as the result of paideia or training–which is
opposed in Greek morality to akrasia or “incontinence,” self-indulgence, the inability to observe
limits, all of which typifies the tyrant (see the Royalty, Tyranny, Magic and Shakespeare
handout). Self-mastery entails the exercise of sophrosune–restraint, temperance, moderation,
which French chivalry terms mesure–and is the source of justice, which Aristotle makes the
epitome of all human virtue. Thus King James again from the Basilicon Doron:
I meane not by the vulgar interpretation of Temperance, which onely consists in
gustu & tactu, by the moderating of these two senses: but, I meane of that wise
moderation, that first commaunding your selfe, shall as a Queene, command all
the affections and passions of your minde, and as a Phiscian, wisely mixe all your
actions according thereto. Therefore, not onely in all your affections and
passions, but euen in your most vertuous actions, make euver moderation to be
the chief ruler. (43)
For the just person observes proportion, giving to each person their due according to
circumstance and of course rank or degree, with the result that to those that have, more will
usually be given. That is, it will unless equity intervenes and the aristocrat engages in an act of
noblesse oblige [the obligation of nobility], giving a person more than is due him or her, in effect
treating an inferior as an equal.
E15
Silver
Backgrounds to Shakespeare and Magic
Sympathy and Aversion
Revenge Tragedy operates according to the following concepts, values, and principles or
functions:
contrariety: opposition, antithesis, polarity, antipathy, adversion, aversion, repugnance,
conversion, antagonism, contradiction
complementarity: difference, distinction, double, complement, dialectic, correlative,
correspondent, interdependent, interconnected, comutual
inversion: change (movement), reversal, contraposition, derangement, revulsion, metathesis,
metabasis, transposition, retroversion, subversion, overturn, overthrow, upturn, turn topsy-turvy,
unbalance, overbalance
anomaly: unconformity, inconsistency, deviation, divergence, aberrance, abnormality,
idiosyncrasy, eccentricity, singularity, oddity, exceptionality, peculiarity, monstrosity, prodigy,
extraordinary
identity: sameness, equivalence, unity, synonymy, similarity, resemblance, likeness, analogy,
coincidence
Simply because it is a human trait, the early modern world conceived order primarily in terms of
sight or visible appearance, the faculty of perception that Aristotle associates peculiarly with
knowledge, and to which the other senses were in a manner synaesthetically (from synaesthesia
or the confusion of sensory faculties) subordinated (if only because they were under constant
assault from early modern living conditions). This visualism positively organized its categories
of experience according to the principle of visible similarity, likeness, resemblance, analogy,
even as those categories were defined and contained by the principle of visible contrariety,
difference, opposition, distinction. Both natural and human change were thought to be driven
by the cosmic forces of sympathy and aversion or antipathy, philos and aphilos, love and hate.
It has been argued that the art of magic–and this was a world that believed in magic to differing
degrees and in different kinds–functioned along the same lines. In The Golden Bough, Frazer
famously divides this art into two modes: “imitative” or “homoeopathic” magic, which works
therapeutically on the principle of similarity or likeness (sight), while its complement,
“contagious” magic, works infectiously on the principle of contact (touch) or proximity. As
Frazer himself observes, they both can be reduced to the imagi-native principle of association
(see the Royalty, Tyranny, Magic and Shakespeare handout for Frazer’s own exposition of
magic). Medicine also observed the concept of sympathy and aversion, likeness and opposition,
in its treatments of illness; logic too operated in terms of analogy and polarity.
One should try to see the forces of sympathy and aversion as an axis, with similarity the vertical
and opposition the horizontal relation. Now consider how Michel Foucault describes these
inextricable forces in The Order of Things, especially sympathy which has “the dangerous power
of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another, of mingling them, of causing their
individuality to disappear, and thus of rendering them foreign to what they were before”:
Sympathy transforms. It alters but in the direction of identity, so that if its power
were not counterbalanced it would reduce the world to a point, to a homogeneous
mass, to the featureless form of the Same: all its parts would hold together and
communicate with one another without a break, with no distance between them. . .
This is why sympathy is compensated for by its twin, antipathy. Antipathy
maintains the isolation of things and prevents their assimilation; it encloses every
species within its impenetrable difference and its propensity to continue being
what it is. . . . The identity of things, the fact that they can resemble others and be
drawn to them, though without being swallowed up or losing their singularity-this is what is assured by the constant counterbalancing of sympathy and
antipathy. It explains how things grow, develop, intermingle, disappear, die, yet
endlessly find themselves again; in short, how there can be space (which is
nevertheless not without landmarks or repetitions, not without havens of
similitude) and time (which nevertheless allows the same forms, the same species,
the same elements to reappear indefinitely). (23-25)
Thus the necessity of opposition or contrariety, which keeps things distinct and distin-guishable,
preserving everything in its own kind, averting the contagion of similarity or “sameness” which
would make everything resemble everything else. Then no sense could be made of experience;
no one identity could be differentiated from another. Without opposition or contrariety, there
would be no difference, no distinction, no particularity or individuality, just the morass of
resemblance Foucault evokes, from which no singularity could escape. The sixteenth-century
French philosopher Michel de Montaigne observes in his Stoical and skeptical Essais:
Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to resort to: experience has
no fewer. The induction which we wish to draw from the likeness between events
is unsure since they all show unlikenesses. When collating objects no quality is
so universal as diversity and variety. . . . Of itself, unlikeness obtrudes into
anything we make. No art can achieve likeness. . . . Likeness does not make
things ‘one’ as much as unlikeness makes them ‘other’: Nature has bound herself
to make nothing ‘other’ which is not unlike. (364)
Just as no event and no form completely resembles another, neither does any
completely differ. What an ingenious medley is Nature’s: if our faces were not
alike we could not tell man from beast; if they were not unalike we could not tell
man from man. All things are connected by some similarity; yet every example
limps and any correspondence we draw from experience is always feeble and
imperfect; we can nevertheless find some corner or other by which to link our
comparisons. (370)
So even as similarity brings things together in a sympathetic bond, the expression of the vital
force of eros or “desire,” so contrariety pushes and pulls them apart, distinguishes and separates
them by the force of aversion or antipathy, eris or “strife.” Both these forces or principles are an
early modern inheritance from the Greeks and Romans, whose works they unearthed from the
monastaries beginning in the fourteenth century. But they also form the fundamental cognitive
schemata by which we induce clarity and certainty in our ideas. It is the poet John Donne whose
speaker says that “likeness glues love,” even as he argues that not “in nothing, nor in things /
Extreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere,” and moreover, that “What ever dies was not
mixed equally.” These are the truisms of the age, expressing the relations of identity and
opposition which governed human thought (see the Gender Ideology handout).
As Foucault notes, sympathy can bring about a catastrophic assimilation of everything to
everything else, in which different kinds of things previously distinct undergo a metamorphosis
into what they were not, ‘rendering them foreign to what they were before.’ In effect, sympathy
overwhelms distinction or opposition, so that the unlike becomes the like. This movement is
typical of the grotesque, a decorative vogue that started sometime in fifteenth-century Italy, with
the discovery of an earlier Roman mode from the reign of Augustus that the architectural theorist
Vitruvius called “monstrous.” The painter Raphael was one of the grotesque’s foremost, if not its
most extreme exponents: “curled and involuted shoots, from whose foliage animals emerge and
cause the difference between animal and vegetable forms to be eliminated; slender vertical lines
on the lateral walls, which are made to support either masks or candelabra or temples, thereby
negating the law of statics . . . . in this world the natural order of things has been subverted” (2021). In the more extreme versions, “human and non-human elements are fused,” familiar
proportions are distorted and enlarged, fantastically colored and arranged: the human emerges
from roots and tendrils. Wolfgang Kayser thus defines the style:
By the word grotessco the Renaissance, which used it to designate a specific
ornamental style suggested by antiquity, understood not only something playfully
gay and carelessly fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister in the face
of a world totally different from the familiar one–a world in which the realm of
inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human
beings, and where the laws of statics, symmetry and proportion are no longer
valid. This meaning ensues from a synonym for grotesque which came into usage
during the sixteenth century: the dream of painters (sogni dei pittori). This term
also names the sphere in which the dissolution or reality and the participation in a
different kind of existence . . . form an experience about the nature and
significance of which man has never ceased to ponder. (21-22)
The Inversion of World Order
Related to this sympathetic apocalypse is inversion, which arises from the conceptual situation
expressed by the Pythagorean oppositions (Gender Ideology handout): as the principle of
complementarity argues, “man . . . cannot judge single, but by coupling contrarieties” (Clark
69). Quoting the seventeenth-century Spanish critic Gratian, who declares that “The things of
this world can be truly perceived only by looking at them backwards,” Stuart Clark observes that
“if the world was composed of contraries it was also a reversible world; indeed, this was the only
change to which it could conceivably be subject”(69). Such a change worked on the principle of
antipathy, often in a sudden, violent motion consequent upon some confusion or crisis of
received understanding, perhaps a traumatic event. Evil, malignity and disorder are expressed not
by opposition as such but by cosmic inversion, “with reference not merely to human behaviour
but relentlessly and exhaustively to every sublunary phenomenon, to the celestial spheres, and to
angels and demons” (70). As Clark proceeds to describe:
Since [humanity’s fall from divine grace in the garden of Eden] . . . everything in
the world has had to be maintained in counterweight to its contrary. All things
now have negative as well as positive qualities (‘marvelous antitheses’)–whereas
before there was only unalloyed goodness. Humankind, for instance, has become
as base as it is noble, as puny as it is might, a shadow as much as a likeness of
God. At the same time, contrariety has produced oppositions in social statuses
and lifestyles, in beliefs and opinions, and within and between nations–as well as
in the behavior of animals and natural bodies. There is a total confusion of
religions, ceremonies, clothes, personalities, languages, arts and manners. . . .
Inversion too, therefore, was a feature of the world of sin, a world in which the
negative qualities threatened to dominate their positive counterweights, and all
things echoed the primal disobedience by reversing their normal roles and
relationships. In men and women as individuals and in society as a whole, all the
hierarchies were overturned and all the inferior values supplanted their superior
opposites. (70-71)
Social and political inversion is thus the standard symbol of human misrule, with Clark
remarking that “in the life of actual societies and states it was resonant with special meaning”:
These were institutions modelled on the divine paradigm, harmonizing
contrarieties of status, interest, and fortune by patriarchal and princely power that
were either historical derivations from or closely analogous to God’s own rule.
Here the image of the world upside-down was peculiarly persuasive. By analogy
it endowed acts of social disorder with a significance far beyond their immediate
character, attributing to them repercussions in every other plane of government.
And by antithesis it offered the opportunity of defending order a contrariis in
relation to a situation in which all the normal patterns of authority were simply
inverted. . . . One obvious instance is that of comparisons between the prince and
the tyrant. . . . The qualities and duties of the prince . . . were portrayed in terms of
the perfectly virtuous man governing in an ideal situation. This exemplary ruler
was contrasted with his opposite, whose government was in every respect
contrary to the good. . . . (73)
The inversion functions as follows:
the king conforms himself to the laws of nature, while the tyrant treads them
underfoot; the one maintains religion, just, and faith, the other has neither God,
faith, nor law; the one does all that he thinks were serve the public good and
safety of his subject, the other does nothing except for his particular profit,
revenge, or pleasure; the one strives to enrich his subjects by all the means he can
think of, the other improves his own fortune only at their expense; the one
avenges the public injuries and pardons those against himself; the other cruelly
avenges his own and pardons those against others; the one spares the honour of
chaste women, the other triumphs in their shame. (73)
Or as James I puts it in his Basilicon Doron:
The one acknowledgeth himselfe ordained for his people, hauing receiued from
God a burthen of gouernment, whereof he must be countable; the other thinketh
his people ordeined for him, a prey to his passions and inordinate appetites, as the
fruites of his magnanimitie. . . . (20)
When God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, contrariety or opposition is the
principle that divides and distinguishes the ideal from the abject, the superior from the inferior,
good from evil, masculine from feminine, virtue from vice, honor from dishonor, justice from
injustice, right rule from misrule, monarchy from tyranny, and so on. These oppositions are
ontological: that is, they assert the fundamental order of created being in which how something
appears is understood to be a direct, infallible index of what it is: character is self-identical, and
the evident is the real.
Moreover, the drawing of such absolute and exclusive distinctions allows the two opposed orders
to stand in a complementary relationship to one another, in which each may be said to complete
the other, supplying as it were each other’s lack. Put another way, one cannot know what is
masculine without the feminine, good without evil, virtue without vice: each constitutes the other
in a dialectical relationship. Thus, in Milton’s phrase, it is the condition of humanity to know
good dialectically:
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost
inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the
knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned,
that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to
cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of
one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving
together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is the doom which Adam
fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil.
(Areopagitica).
Milton points here to the fundamental problem raised by revenge tragedy, which has its source in
the skeptical crisis of the mid-sixteenth century, which Montaigne’s skeptical philosophy
articulates (see Skepticism and Montaigne handout). One could describe that crisis as the
discovery of “mere appearance”–the deceptiveness or duplicity of our perceptions and so their
unreliability: that the world is not as we imagine it; that our ideas describe ourselves, not things
outside the mind; that truth is not truth but what we desire and prefer while falsehood is that to
which offends us, to which we are averse–whatever endangers our identity or self-esteem,
compromises what we perceive to be our interests and power. To quote Montaigne, “every man
calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other
criterion of truth or right-reason than the example of form of the opinions and customs of our
own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed
and perfect way of doing things.” (“On cannibals,” Essais) In sum, what we call truth, justice,
right and knowledge is only an expression of our own narcissism, which we seek to impose on
others in order to secure and advance ourselves.
But when oppositions are not upheld in the human world, the result is not only uncertainty,
ambiguity, confusion, but what is worse, the perversion of the divinely-created order. Unless
those ontological, sexual, moral, political oppositions, which stand in a hierarchical relation to
each other, are duly observed and reinforced, then the world suffers a catastrophic inversion.
One can no longer secure the meaning of things since appearances have become ambiguous,
duplicitous: vice appears like virtue and is overtly indistinguishable from it. Men behave
effeminately: they are deceptive, sinister, obscure, unbalanced, irrational (like Atreus, Nero, the
Duke and his sons in The Revenger’s Tragedy). For their part, women assume the worst traits of
masculine character, losing all modesty and turning into the figure of our general mother, Eve, in
medieval commentary, and so ambitious, cunning, bold, flagrantly sexual, powermongering,
violent (the figure of Agrippina in Octavia and the Duchess in The Revenger’s Tragedy). The
world is suddenly turned upside down, as Ulysses describes in his speech on “degree”
(hierarchical distinction) in Shakespeare’s satire on honor, Troilus and Cressida:
Degree being vizarded,
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order.
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhood in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each things meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right, or rather, right and wrong-Between whose endless jar justice resides-Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. . . .
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking;
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward in a purpose
It hath to climb. The general’s disdained
By him one step below, he by the next,
That next by him beneath: so every step,
Exampled by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation. . . .
(1.3.83-134)
Early modern culture was much taken with the symmetrical and antithetical motif of concordia
discors / discordia concors: “Without a discord can no concord be, / Concord is when contrary
things agree.” This “conceit” or figure represents the world as a harmony–a “tuning of the
string” to bring each sound into concert with others, as Ulysses puts it. Harmony of course is
made up of diverse kinds and proportions, in which difference or discordance is blended into a
natural and politic concord or unity by the strict enforcement of hierarchy or “degree.” This is
the Great Chain of Being, in which all things exist in subordination to their ontological superior-ultimately, God and in monarchy, his lieutenant on earth, the monarch–as the planets do to the
sun or “Sol” (the symbol of kingship) in Ulysses’ image.
Degree is represented by Ulysses, first, as the regular ordering of identity, status and action in the
world: “degree, priority, place, / Insisture [persistence or steady continuance], course, proportion,
season, form, / Office and custom, in all line of order.” Next, it is evoked by its human effect-the creation of sociability by the observance of hierarchy: “communities, / Degrees [ranks] in
schools, and brotherhoods in cities, / Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, / The
primogenitive and due of birth / Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels.” But “vizard”–that
is, conceal, neglect or obscure–this hierarchical order of degree, and nothing appears as what it
is; “the unworthiest shows as fairly” as the best. The evident is no longer the real, and one cannot
trust appearances.
As Ulysses says, “untune that string,” depart from that divine harmony or concord, by neglecting
to maintain hierarchy, then the world turns topsy-turvy. “Mere oppugnancy” or strife results-wars between states, rebellion within the commonwealth and its analogue, the household or
family. This is not only a principle of human but of natural and cosmic rule: when what had
been properly distinguished or differentiated into its proper kind is “mixed,” the result is not just
confusion or disorder but total “chaos” and “evil” on earth and in the heavens. The seas
surmount their limits, the natural elements mutiny, supernatural portents and omens intrude
where they do not belong, and so do human beings. Where human virtue once held harmonious
sway, sheer irrationality in the form of power, appetite and will dominate in its stead, in the
manner of the tyrant consuming everything until the only prey left is itself. There is a general
inversion of erstwhile value: might is now right, and so “the rude son strikes his father dead.”
Humanity as a whole aspires beyond its given place, suffering “an envious fever of pale and
bloodless emulation”–an anarchy of ambition, competition and rivalry.
In effect, Ulyssses evokes in this speech the Iron Age–the world the character Seneca describes
in the Octavia and associates with Nero’s reign (pp. 271-73 in Watling). It is the last the age,
always the present age, following the better worlds now lost of the Golden, Silver and Bronze
ages. The playwright’s original for this topic or myth comes from the Greek Hesiod’s Works and
Days (8th c. BCE)
But when the earth covered this race, too,
Zeus, son of Kronos, made upon the nourishing land
yet another race–the fourth one–better and more just.
They were the divine race of heroes, who are called
demigods; they preceded us on this boundless earth.
Evil war and dreadful battle wiped them all out,
Some fighting over the flocks of Oidipous
at seven-gated Thebes, in the land of Kadmos,
others over the great gulf of the sea in ships
that had sailed to Troy for the sake of lovely-haired Helen;
there death threw his dark mantle over them.
Yet others of them father Zeus, son of Kronos, settled at earth’s ends,
apart from men, and gave them shelter and food.
They lived there with hearts unburdened by cares
in the islands of the blessed, near stormy Okeanos,
these blissful heroes for whom three times a year
the barley-giving land brings forth full grain sweet as honey.
I wish I were not counted among the fifth race of men,
but rather had died before, or been born after it.
This is the race of iron. Neither day nor night
will give them rest as they waste away with toil
and pain. Growing cares will be given them by the gods,
160
165
170
175
and their lot will be a blend of good and bad.
Zeus will destroy this race of mortals
when children are born gray at the temples.
Children will not resemble their fathers,
and there will be no affection between guest and host
and no love between friends or brothers as in the past.
Sons and daughters will be quick to offend their aging parents
and rebuke them and speak to them with rudeness
and cruelty, not knowing about divine retribution;
they will not even repay their parents for their keep-these lawbreakers–and they will sake one another’s cities.
The man who keeps his oath, or is just and good,
will not be favored, but the evil-doers and scoundrels
will be honored, for might will make right and shame will vanish.
Base men will harm their betters with words
that are crooked and then swear they are fair.
And all toiling humanity will be blighted by envy,
grim and strident envy that takes its joy in the ruin of others.
Then Shame [aidos] and Retribution [nemesis] will cover their fair bodies
with white cloaks and, leaving men behind,
will go to Olympos from the broad pathed earth
to be among the race of immortals, while grief and pain
will linger among men, whom harm will find defenseless.
180
185
190
195
200
Moreover, whatever is anomalous, neither like nor opposed to whatever it contacts but simply
out of place, can also function as a contagion until it is properly subsumed into one or other
category. One can think of the anomalous as the contingent or unexpected, what doesn’t fit for
whatever reason in a given world picture. But it can also be imagined as that which pollutes a
given category by its presence, rendering it impure, dangerous, unstable. Hierarchy pictures the
order of things as a ladder or chain divided into ascending or descending ontological ranks or
classes, which is to say, distinct categories of being or existence, on a spectrum from the
supreme (the divine) to the superior (the monarchical and noble) to the more or less inferior (the
gentry, the professional classes, the free or landed peasantry, the artisans and craft-workers,
down to the vagrant poor).
Needless to say, when a member of one class aspires to the class above it (descent is not such a
problem), that person troubles the entire order by making it appear porous, flexible, contingent
when ideologically it is conceived as absolute, permanent and fixed. Similarly, when a person
belongs to one category, say, the masculine, yet assumes the behavior or appearances of its
opposite, the feminine, then there is more than just gender trouble: there is the subversion of the
very differences which determine both class and individual identity. Finally, symbolic orders of
being (like aristocratic ideology creates) tolerate no middle ground or grey area: one is either
ideal or one is abject. Here the anomalous must be assimilated to one or other category in order
to maintain their symbolic relation and especially the integrity of the ideal category or class.
It is no coincidence that the 1580’s saw the beginning of a pamphlet war over the question of
women’s place–her conduct, her fashions, and most especially, her education–which lasted
through the next century (remember Silver’s drawing of modest and immodest female dress). At
the same time, there began a trend to accuse and prosecute unowned or obstreperous women of
witchcraft, frequently elderly widows dependent on the reluctant charity of their neighbors,
which was one way to assimilate them into the symbolic order of the abject, and as Keith
Thomas argues, thus relieve their neighbors of guilt and anxiety. (Indeed, any person whose
behavior was problematic for the community could be subject to such supernatural accusations,
both male and female.) As Stuart Clark argues, the early modern demonologists, both Catholic
and Protestant, who more or less inflamed contemporary superstition and precipitated two
centuries of witchcraft hysteria (from the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries in
Europe, the British Isles and North America), understood and depicted their subject in terms of
contrariety and especially inversion, which were conventionally associated with the satanic and
black magic.
Significantly, the 1580’s and 1590’s saw the height of witchcraft prosecutions in England,
probably as a result of England’s perilous political predicament, which led its elite–crown
magistrates and country justices of the peace—to endorse these ordinary accusations of village
life, even as parliament saw fit to legislate against them, with a sequence of statutes climaxing in
the 1604 law that made consorting with evil spirits a capital offense where death was putatively
involved. Parliament also legislated against Catholic priests—especially the notoriously slippery
Jesuits, the so-called shock troops of the Counter-Reformation—who were seen as subversive of
the Protestant nation whose monarch (Elizabeth) had been excommunicated by the pope, and so
rendered ripe for assassination. Remember the great Armada of 1588, which was but one of a
number of fleets that Catholic Spain sent against England. Remember Mary Queen of Scots, the
chief pretender to the English throne during Elizabeth’s reign, a Catholic daughter of Henry
VIII’s sister whom France married to its short-lived monarch, Francis II, and related to the Guise
family (of the infamous Catholic League, who committed the massacre of French Protestants in
Paris). Remember also that Stuart rule under James I (Mary’s son) and Charles I led to a series
of confrontations with parliament over constitutional and religious questions, whose result was
the English civil war which arguably lasted from 1637 to 1649 (or even in its political form
1688).
As Lawrence Stone describes, the crisis of English aristocracy, in which there was
unprecedented mobility up and down the social ladder, with ancient noble families dying out and
new nobility being created, neatly coincides with the period in which revenge tragedy had its
dramatic vogue (1580 to 1640). Consequently, there was relatively-speaking a constant class of
what were called “new men” seeking preferment or office at court. The phrase “new man” comes
from the Latin novus homo, used to describe those very few Romans of the plebian class who, by
running the cursus of office from tribune to consul as Cicero did, were admitted to the Senate,
thereby becoming legally if not socially members of the ancient patrician class. Owing to the
humanist embrace of his writings (of which we have more than any other Roman), the example
of Cicero was always before the renaissance gentleman, including Bacon, who would pursue
social and economic advancement by virtue of his political “parts” or talents. “New men” were
always treated as anomalous, as parvenus even when they were of good birth, as Bacon was
(although he did not belong to the titled branch of his family). But with each new creation from
the lower classes (usually gentry, sometimes professional in the form of officers of the court like
Bacon, occasionally nouveau riche merchants), the College of Heralds would supply a device
and motto for the ennobled lineage that would give it the semblance of antiquity, thus preserving
aristocratic appearances. Indeed, once advanced, the otherwise untoward aspiration of “new
men” could be assimilated to the hierarchical picture, which always held a place for those who,
in the romantic tradition of chivalry, were “natural” aristocrats, having proven their worth, their
“quality,” if not in war, then in what Bacon calls “business”–service to the crown by office,
service to England’s prosperity by commerce.
Identity, Aristocracy and Honor
If distinction is the principle behind aristocracy, identity informs the concept of honor. Aristocracy expresses difference in terms of a unique or exceptional class or category of person
whose members can simultaneously be identified as such by their shared appearances, their
exclusive likeness to each other. Honor (in Greek, time) as the code of this elite class expresses
the principle of identity in terms of the self-identical appearances and integral character of the
gentleman, whose word is his bond, and whose reward is glory (in Greek, kleos) or reputation,
manifest in the palpable form of power, wealth and deference by his inferiors. “Disdain,”
contempt or scorn, is the class emotion directed at those who prove unworthy of their birth by
their violation of this class code. In his account of the megalopsychos, Aristotle also makes
disdain the emotion felt by the “great-souled” for any ordinary reward or opportunity for glory
that is therefore beneath his or her notice. Nemesis or “retribution,” understood as the antipathy
and indignation that prompts class disdain towards the violator of honor, also signifies the
inevitable and necessary vengeance exacted for such violations by the offender’s peers, in
keeping with the class code.
By definition, aristocracy is a political system defined as “the strength of the best” (aristoi from
the Greek arete or “excellence,” whose Latin equivalent is virtus, Italian virtu, which all signify
the exceptional capacity and performance of the aristocrat): “Because men that are free, wellborne, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that
prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour”
(Rabelais). Thus Curtis Brown Watson (the author of Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept
of Honor) observes:
It is suggested on the one hand that the desire for virtue is innate, but on the other
it is pointed out that the Renaissance aristocrat is carefully instructed in them oral
disciplines and refrains from intercourse with any who is not of a like virtue.
Virtue is hereditary and in the blood, but it will not, apparently, bear wholesome
freuit if the soil is not as carefully selected as the seed.
The sense of honor, the desire for virtue, is then deeply implanted in the soul of
the Renaissance gentlemen. He is not concerned primarily with the opinon of
others, but with his own conscience, his own inner sense of integrity. Insofar as
Renaissance moral treatises followed the humanist philosophers of antiquity, first
emphasis was placed on the individual’s acquisition of a sense of his own value
and moral worth. Both Aristotle and Cicero placed major stress on the fact that
virtue was not implanted by the gods but resulted largely from a man’s own
inclination and training. Stoic philosophy developed this theory of
individualism and self-reliance to its extreme, but Epictetus is uttering a mere
truism of pagan philosophy when he says, “Fidelity is your own, virtuous shame
is your own.”
According to pagan-humanist theory, however, the sentiment of honor was to be found
only in the aristocratic classes. Aristotle had said that arguments “are powerless to
stimulate the mass of mankind to moral nobility. For it is the nature of the many to be
amenable to fear but not to a sense of honour, and to abstrain from evil not because of its
baseness but because of the penalities it entails.” This remark becomes a Renaissance
commonplace. Repeatedly a distinction is made between those who are motivated “for
vertues sake, for feare of reproch, for love and reverence to honestie” to lead upright and
virtuous lives, and those who are compelled to good and virtue “for feare of punishment
to be inflicted upon them by the magistrates.” [. . . .] For the man of the Renaissance,
[virtue, conscience, and honor] . . . involved his whole being. Honor was related to the
intellectual faculties, but was equally an “ardent heate which enflameth the minde of
man, to glorious enterprise, making him audacious against enemies, and to vices
timerous.” (91-93)
Aristocratic politics assumes that the aristocrat’s natural superiority to others–his or her human
exceptionality to the common run of human beings, which derives genetically from “blood” or
lineage–can be recognized as such. This appearance of superiority, which consists in beauty of
some kind (in face, body, movement, apparel) is especially obvious when the aristocrat’s natural
endowments have been cultivated and enhanced by paideia–“culture,” education, training-which itself entails a self-discipline that Aristotle calls “taking hold of the beautiful.” The Greek
principle of kalokagathia, “the beautiful-with-the-good,” is the result of such discipline,
implying both beauty of feature and grace of movement. One’s degree of beauty is thus the
natural expression of the degree of one’s arete or achieved excellence: kalokagathia implies the
perfect symmetry or proportion between the natural and the cultural or artistic–between the
evident dimension of a person and his or her “real” or “essential” capacities. For the
proportionate or symmetrical is the canon of beauty in Greek culture, both for the body and the
face, even as physical gravity, strength and magnitude (physical height and breadth) are
considered by Aristotle the physical expression of the “great-souled” or “magnanimous” person.
In short, the aristocrat embodies in his or her appearances an identity between the evident and
the real. And this is the functional principle of honor: that gentlemanly thought matches speech,
and speech matches action. The honorable person is thus a person of integrity, which involves
the integration of these dimensions of human character into a single, consistent whole. Hence the
supreme offense of “giving the lie” according to the Italian code of the duello: that is, of
accusing another person of falsehood, however trivial. Here is Watson again on honor as
“honesty” or “integrity”:
The ideal Renaissance gentleman was a man of absolute honesty and integrity.
Hence, one of the traditional privileges of the aristocrat had been his right to
testify in court without bond and without witnesses. The mere word of a
gentleman was, presumably, as trustworthy as the sworn testimony of a man of
the lower classes. . . . Indeed, honor and honesty were practically interchangeable
in the Renaissance, although the shading of meaning which distinguishes the two
words today had begun to differentiate them. The Latin word honestas meant
worth, virtue, honorable character, probity. . . .
The emphasis on honesty was so great that the pagan philosophers seemed to
prefer an honest simpleton to a man who proved to be even slightly deceitful,
however brilliant he might be. The humanist philosophers held nothing in greater
abhorrence than the feigning of emotions not felt; open enmity is infinitely
preferable to pretended love. Cleland is expressing one of the fundamental
Renaissance precepts when he says that a friend is “such in his hart as he
appeareth in action, without al dissumulation or deceit, loving nothing but honest,
faithful, plain, and simple dealing.” Montaigne suggests that nothing shows
greater ignobility than deceit: “of all vices, I finde none that so much witnesseth
deisseness and baseness of heart. It is a coward and servile humour, for a man to
disguise and hide himselfe under a maske, and not dare to shew himselfe as
he is . . . A generous minde ought not to belie his thoughts, but make shew of his
inmost parts: There al is good, or at least all is humane. Aristotle thinkes it is an
office of magnanimitie to hate and love openly, to judge and speak with all
libertie.” In this passage, the close integration of various Renaissance virtues is
indicated; openness and lack of all pretense are considered indispensable
attributes of the magnanimous man. In Renaissance England simplicity may have
possessed the pejorative meaning which the word now has but it meant equally a
quality of the highest nobility. “In vertue may be nothing fucate [painted, dyed;
cosmetic, false show] or counterfayte. But therein is onely the image of veritie,
called simplicitie.” (97-98)
“Simplicity” (as against complexity) of expression and action again evokes the idea of
transparency, which can be natural or achieved. The presumption to integral or transparent
appearance is thus a critical claim of aristocracy: what you see is what you get, and what you get
is the best, those supreme in human excellence of all kinds. One could even say that the principle
of honor is just another version of kalokagathia, insofar as it asserts that the evident is the real,
and consequently that the gentleman is a virtuous person–what Cicero calls a bonus vir, whose
appearances of superiority are honest and trustworthy.
This presumption to honesty explains one great desideratum of aristocracy, which is enkrateia-self-discipline, self-mastery, self-control, often as the result of paideia or training–which is
opposed in Greek morality to akrasia or “incontinence,” self-indulgence, the inability to observe
limits, all of which typifies the tyrant (see the Royalty, Tyranny, Magic and Shakespeare
handout). Self-mastery entails the exercise of sophrosune–restraint, temperance, moderation,
which French chivalry terms mesure–and is the source of justice, which Aristotle makes the
epitome of all human virtue. Thus King James again from the Basilicon Doron:
I meane not by the vulgar interpretation of Temperance, which onely consists in
gustu & tactu, by the moderating of these two senses: but, I meane of that wise
moderation, that first commaunding your selfe, shall as a Queene, command all
the affections and passions of your minde, and as a Phiscian, wisely mixe all your
actions according thereto. Therefore, not onely in all your affections and
passions, but euen in your most vertuous actions, make euver moderation to be
the chief ruler. (43)
For the just person observes proportion, giving to each person their due according to
circumstance and of course rank or degree, with the result that to those that have, more will
usually be given. That is, it will unless equity intervenes and the aristocrat engages in an act of
noblesse oblige [the obligation of nobility], giving a person more than is due him or her, in effect
treating an inferior as an equal.

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