From the Archives: How Shakespeare ruptured Modernity

Shakespeare's late plays expose the cynicism and nihilism of Modernity

This is an updated version of an essay first published in March 2023, when I had only a small handful of subscribers. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, and please do share this essay with others. Thank you very much for reading.

Separately, I am writing a short essay on Jordan Peterson that will be published shortly.

The Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare (c. 1611)

Shakespeare lived through a time of great civilisational strife. Most of his plays and poems were written between 1589 and 1613, in the midst of the tectonic religious movements and wars that swelled from the European Reformation. It was the era of nascent nationalism, the brutal repression of Catholicism in England, and the constant grappling for power within a fractured political landscape.

Interwoven with this bitter religious contest was the new Machiavellian paradigm, inspired by the Italian statesman Niccolo Machiavelli’s famous work The Prince. His cynical doctrine of the “will to power” preached cunning and violent treachery as legitimate political means, spurning the Christian moral tradition. It had poisoned European political thought in the sixteenth century, compounding the vehemence of the Reformation. Indeed, this new cynical egotism was innate to the emerging Modern era. For it was in the sixteenth century that the notion of the individual, as distinct from his fellow citizens, took full shape — a concept that was non-existent, or at least radically different, in the Classical and Medieval ages.

Shakespeare lived through this transformation in the heart of Western man. Almost certainly a devout Christian, and quite possibly a secret Catholic during the repressive Elizabethan era, his finest plays cut through the rubric of moral relativism and existential nihilism that had permeated his age. The final works build labyrinthine worlds of profound darkness, anguish, scepticism, and suffering. The central characters are destroyed by their lusting for power and vengeance. Macbeth murders his way to kingship; and Hamlet maniacally schemes revenge upon his uncle, Claudius, for murdering his father and seizing the throne.

Entranced by the Machiavellian ideal, both men become the slaves of their own cunning, locked in the fevered, self-destructive machinations of power and pride. Each man chooses to indulge his most base instincts and the vilest influences of the world. We see Hamlet, prior to confronting his mother for marrying his father’s murderer, declaring:

“‘Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.” — Hamlet, Act III

In his fury, Hamlet embraces the blackest darkness, desperate to absorb, rather than resist, evil. This is not merely the strain of the world acting upon him: he in fact yearns to become a blood-drinking animal — to be infected by Hell itself. His final destruction lies not far beyond this act of bitter rebellion. In Hamlet’s frenzied schemes we do not see the humility and moral striving of the Christian, but rather the pride and egotism of the dissociated individual. He acts out the Machiavellian doctrine to its conclusion. Indeed, Shakespeare subtly intonates the true meaning of Hamlet’s downfall through the mechanism of his death: he is killed by a mere graze from the poison-tipped sword of Laertes. Thus one drop of potent darkness, once embedded, is bound to destroy a man.

Macbeth, too, once committed to his deeds is not merely resigned to evil — he actively embraces it. Before killing King Duncan at the behest of his wife’s venomous plots, Macbeth declares boldly: “I am settled, and bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.” (Macbeth, Act I.) Both Hamlet and Macbeth bend willingly to the corrupted Machiavellian rubric, offering themselves as determined agents of evil and madness. Once the bounds of morality, and hence sanity, are overstepped, all that lies before the libertine is the plummet into disorder and, finally, the abyss of death.

The true greatness of these plays lies in the implacable trajectory by which each anti-hero is drawn towards final justice — the same moral arc that is evident in all of Shakespeare’s work. Whether comic or tragic, each Shakespearean finale is above all a moral resolution that reflects a broader restoration of the natural order in the wake of chaotic breakdown. Shakespeare is in this sense quintessentially Christian; but he also enjoins in the uniquely Western narrative tradition of moral fable that dates back to Homer.

Furthermore, the fallen kings and princes of Shakespeare’s tragedies are entranced by nihilism, the intellectual malady that undergirds their moral decrepitude. Indeed, several of Shakespeare’s most penetrating and memorable passages express the supposed emptiness and pity of human existence. For example, Macbeth, when stupefied and defeated by his own annihilation in the wake of his killing spree, delivers a frightening and desperate attack on the very purpose of life:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.” — Macbeth, Act V

In the depths of his anguish and ruin, life is transformed into a shadow — a hideous, absurd and vapid insignificance. Yet, Macbeth’s despair should not be interpreted as a serious intellectual insight: rather, it is a declaration of what he has done to himself. Having fallen prey to the evil temptations of his wife, Macbeth must live out the misery of his inevitable destruction and endure his just deserts. In his squalor, he mistakes his own moral self-debasement for the hollowness of life itself.

Shakespeare’s true meaning is surely not that this broken, tormented murderer-king has reached some high philosophical vantage-point from which he can see the abiding purposelessness of life: it is that the destruction of human morality is the natural bedfellow of metaphysical nihilism. To regard existence as meaningless is necessarily to view morality as an empty fiction — a set of malleable and insignificant pseudo-rules that the maverick can subvert at will.

So, too, in Hamlet, perhaps the most memorable soliloquy is the disturbing, beautiful meditation on the apparent emptiness of existence and the metaphysics of death:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause” — Hamlet, Act III

Hamlet contemplates suicide as the solution to the tumult and anguish of existence. And yet he is haunted by the terrifying spectre of impending divine justice: “in that sleep of death what dreams may come.” What if more than the abyss lies beyond the veil of death? Indeed, the notion of death as something akin to sleep recurs repeatedly in Shakespeare’s later work. In The Tempest, Prospero tells us: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” (The Tempest, Act IV.)

For Shakespeare, death, although a mystery, is not the abyss imagined by the atheist. It is a strange realm towards which only wonder, awe and fear can gesture — a journey’s end at some final and resolute reality.

“This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life”, observed Dr Johnson in his great and moving Preface to Shakespeare. We find in Shakespeare’s work not only the whole of life, but a vindication of order, nature and the Good. Through the self-annihilation of the libertines and the cynics, his works examine — and ultimately reject — the darkness of nihilism and the evil of the Machiavellian. Indeed, Shakespeare ruptured and exposed the moral and philosophical assumptions of the Modern epoch just as they were being midwifed. What he offered in their place, through the anguished tragedies of his princes and kings, was the exaltation of human life and an affirmation of its implacable end in final justice.

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