On Shakespeare: morality, metaphysics, and Modernity
Shakespeare's late plays rupture the cynicism and nihilism of Modernity
Shakespeare lived through a time of great political and intellectual strife. Most of his works were written between 1589 and 1613, in the midst of the earth-shattering religious movements and wars that swelled from the Reformation. It was the era of nascent nationalism, repression of Catholicism in England, and constant grappling for power within a fractured culture. Layered through this age was the new Machiavellian relativism — the cynical doctrine of the “will to power”, which preached realism and cunning over objective morality. It had poisoned European political thought in the sixteenth century, compounding the brutality of the Reformation. Indeed, this new cynicism formed a principal building-block in the new zeitgeist of Modernity itself.
Shakespeare, through his greatest plays, explores and punctures the rubric of relativism and nihilism that permeated his age. His 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 the throne. Hamlet fanatically schemes revenge upon his uncle, Claudius, for murdering his father and seizing the throne.
“Shakespeare ruptures the morality and metaphysics of the Modern zeitgeist. We find in his work the vindication of order, the Good, and life itself.”
Following Machiavellian precepts, both men become enslaved by their own rationality, locked in the fevered, self-destructive machinations of power and false honour. Each man commits himself to indulging not only his basest instincts, but the vilest influences of the world. Hamlet, before confronting his mother for marrying his father’s murderer, declares:
“‘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 darkness, seeking by his own volition to absorb, rather than resist, evil. This is not something which happens to him: he wills to become a blood-drinking animal, and to be infected by hell itself. His final destruction lies not far beyond this act of poisonous rebellion. Indeed, Shakespeare subtly mirrors the meaning of Hamlet’s downfall in the nature of his death: he is killed by a mere graze from the poison-tipped sword of Laertes. One drop of hell, once embedded, is enough to destroy a man.
Macbeth, too, once committed to his deeds is not merely resigned to evil — he actively embraces it. Before killing Duncan at the behest of his wife’s venomous schemes, Macbeth declares: “I am settled, and bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.” (Macbeth, Act I.) Both Hamlet and Macbeth fold — by their own choice — to the corrupted Machiavellian rubric, before themselves becoming 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, in the end, the abyss of death itself. The true greatness of these plays lies in their implacable arc towards final justice — the same arc that is evident throughout all of Shakespeare’s work. The Shakespearean finale, although frequently tragic, is settled ultimately in favour of a moral resolution that forms part of the broader restoration of the natural order.
Importantly, the fallen kings and princes of Shakespeare’s tragedies are captured also by existential nihilism, which is the metaphysical malady that undergirds the moral relativism on which their deeds are based. Indeed, several of Shakespeare’s most penetrating passages express the supposed emptiness and pity of human existence. Macbeth, stupefied and defeated by his own moral annihilation, delivers a frightening, cynical attack on the very meaning 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, this expression of Macbeth’s despair is not meant as some profound intellectual insight: it is a declaration only of what he has done to himself. He chose evil over good, and is now living through the misery of his just desserts. In his squalor, he mistakes his own moral self-debasement for the hollowness of life tout court.
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 regard morality as a fiction. Hence, if our deeds are not anchored in anything real or final, why should selfish expedience not become the default rubric of a new individualistic “ethics”?
So, too, in Hamlet, 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.) By casting temporal life as something dreamlike, death is envisaged as the awakening to the final and resolute reality. For Shakespeare, death, although innately mysterious, is not the abyss conceived by the atheist. It is the distant, unknowable realm towards which only wonder, awe and fear can gesture.
Shakespeare ruptures the morality and metaphysics of the Modern zeitgeist. Indeed, we find in his work the vindication of order, the Good, and life itself. Through the self-annihilation of the libertines and the cynics, his works examine — and ultimately reject — Machiavellian pseudo-morality and the metaphysics of nihilism. What we find instead, in the anguished tragedies of his princes and kings, is the exaltation of human liberty, and the inexorable arc towards final justice.