Lecture: “Shakespeare’s ‘little Academe/ Still and contemplative in living art’”

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“Shakespeare’s ‘little Academe/ Still and contemplative in living art’”

by Dr. David Whalen
Associate Vice President for Curriculum, Professor of English
Hillsdale College
St. Vincent de Paul Lecture & Concert Series
October 28, 2022

Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch contrasts art with experience, saying “Great art is beautiful. . . . Whereas the evils and miseries of human life are not beautiful or attractive, or formally complete. How can such a terrible planet dare to have art at all?”[i] Quoting Theodor Adorno, she says “’Who can write poetry after Auschwitz?’”[ii] These remarks illuminate her astonished reverence for Shakespeare’s great tragedy, King Lear as “bearing the arcane message that redemptive suffering does not overcome death.”[iii] In Murdoch’s view, the King’s hope expressed toward the end of the play to “take upon’s the mystery of things/ As if we were God’s spies” is an illusion precisely because “it is not so easy to take upon oneself the mystery of things. Perhaps there is no mystery and no God, only pain and utter loss and helpless senseless death.”[iv] This is certainly a dark view of Shakespeare’s arguably darkest — if not unrelievedly bleak and apocalyptic — play, a play in which beloved family are hated and cursed, friends are reviled and spurned, and the wicked prosper at least long enough to scar the heart of every surviving character and as well as of the “gored state” itself.[v] While perhaps more articulate and philosophically freighted than most treatments of Shakespeare, Murdoch’s reading could stand as representative of much in the way that the contemporary imagination tends to apprehend not just the play King Lear, but Shakespeare’s tragedies more generally. For minds shaped by the bleaker aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, and informed by the carnage of the 20^th century’s total wars and the 21^st century’s frenzied social pathologies, Shakespeare’s tragedies are unrelievedly dark. They present a human world as relentlessly meaningless as might be found in the most emphatic theatre of the absurd.

So, Shakespeare the tragedian. But what of the comedies or the romances? How do these plays tend to strike imaginations so shaped and minds so informed? One would think these plays afford greater opportunity for light and hope as here at least one finds occasions for robust laughter at the abundant follies of humanity. Indeed, there is a long history of reading these plays precisely as benevolent and redemptive commentaries on human life. Again, however, contemporary readings tend to focus on troubling undercurrents and implicit pessimism in the plays. It is a commonplace that comedy is tragedy with a happy ending substituted for the catastrophe, and there is more than a little sense today that this substitution falsifies real, and more likely tragic, human experience. Shakespeare’s Tempest, for example, “No longer is . . . a play of social reconciliation and moral renewal, of benevolent artistry and providential design “ according to one contemporary writer.[vi] Instead, says another, the play’s “dominant discursive ‘con-texts’”[vii] include “the Virginia pamphlets, Shakespeare’s personal association with contemporary colonial projects, Montaigne on cannibals, twentieth century racism and political oppression and their relation to Caliban.”[viii] The writer goes on to lament that such contexts have “demonized Prospero, sentimentalized Caliban, and tyrannized conferences and journals.”[ix] Even while lamenting this, however, the same author cannot entirely escape the gravitational pull of contemporary readings. He finds that the famous play withholds illumination or resolution in a kind of intellectual twilight. Quoting another scholar, he says The Tempest dwells in “an atmosphere of ontological suspension.”[x] I mention these authors’ remarks not so much for their own sake but because they are, again, emblematic of the impression Shakespeare’s comedies and romances so often make in our own day.[xi] While they can be uproariously funny or amusingly arch, when it comes to thought, they strike us as dwelling in a kind of darkness.

Certainly, the weight and gloom characteristic of our day’s imagination leaves largely unspoken anything suggestive of Shakespeare’s luminosity, affirmations, or laudation. It provides little reason to read him, to wonder at his works, or to love what we have read. We have entered, in this vision of Shakespeare, an affective dessert. There, his highest title might be that of “Accuser-in-Chief,” whose task is to tell us of our evils and the horrors of being or existence itself. Traditionally, of course, Shakespeare has been quite otherwise assessed. To be sure, attentive readers over the centuries have acknowledged his vision of man’s own hell — the horror of our moral failures and the larger mystery of evil itself. But this has not been the whole, or the chief achievement of the author. Shakespeare has been variously praised as a poet of poets, a craftsman of unsurpassed artistry; as one having the most capacious imagination, deepening our appreciation of the world through his ability to create worlds upon worlds of his own; as possessing a keen moral vision and fathomless insight into character; as a poet of compassionate tragic vision, of comic execution, and even of comic escatology. Readers have extolled his romanticism, his lightening-strike intelligence and — pace Ben Jonson — his classical learning. Books have been written about his almost unique sensitivity to the intellectual currents and meaning of his own, early-modern era. One recently deceased writer, in an ecstasy of self-confessed ‘Bardolatry,’ went so far as to credit Shakespeare with inventing modern consciousness itself, or as he put it, “inventing the human.”[xii] With the possible exception of this last, none of these traditional categories of achievement are wide of the mark or without some genuine bearing on Shakespeare’s accomplishment. His greatness, however, seems to defy adequate capture. He escapes our exhaustive comprehension or a satisfactory measure of his excellence. Anyone who tells you he can get to the bottom of Shakespeare’s genius is — either immediately suspect, or referring punningly to a character from Midsummer Night’s Dream.

My purpose here then is not to uncover some secret key to understanding the essence of the bard nor even to provide an illuminating overview of his greatness or importance. Rather, I wish to consider for a moment Shakespeare’s insight regarding a certain facet of human understanding, one that largely escapes notice in our day. This mode of understanding, and its corollaries, run through Shakespeare like golden threads, yet in the “cloud and uproar”[xiii] of modern life, we tend to miss them. No, here is no “magic formula” for grasping Shakespeare, but the poet presents to us, at key moments, characters caught up in the contemplative recognition of truths or realities unavailable to them in their ordinary or discursive manner of thinking. What might be called “poetic contemplation,” for all its obscurity now, seems simply indispensable to Shakespeare. In fact, once this contemplation and its attendant social and literary manifestations are recognized, it is found to be a startlingly prominent feature of the drama and one that significantly illumines — and (with apologies to Murdoch) thematically brightens — many of the plays. Why? It brightens Shakespeare’s plays in part because this kind of contemplation is understood to be an ascent to almost divine or heavenly apprehensions. It is associated with a kind of knowing that participates in what it knows and is naturally drawn to sublime and redemptive realities. Speaking specifically of contemplative prayer, St. Augustine describes it as a “beholding of the everlasting light of wisdom in a certain holy drunkenness of the spirit which has set itself free from the things that are perishable and transient.”[xiv] This “everlasting light” for Augustine is the very brightest of lights, of course, but even contemplative thought other than prayer beholds realities, as we will see, suffused with the light of their transcendent origins. First, then, taking a moment to discuss this rather neglected way of knowing, we will delineate its character and note particularly its important social and literary manifestations. Then we will return for more extended discussions of both Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Tempest — tragedy and comedy, or romance — in order to see both the presence and the consequences of contemplation in these plays. Finally, we will turn to several other plays to note a few moments where again contemplation or its manifestations invest the drama with a sublimity and significance that elevate, and illuminate, the plays with a — yes — benevolent transcendence even in the midst of sorrow or frustrated desire.

Perhaps the most lucid introduction to this contemplative mode of thought is found in a passage I often cite (in print and in person) by German philosopher Josef Pieper. In the short treatise Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Pieper describes human understanding as having, as it were, two wings:

The Middle Ages drew a distinction between the understanding as ratio and the understanding as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought, of searching and examination, of abstraction, of definition and drawing conclusions. Intellectus, on the other hand, is the name for the understanding in so far as it is the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye. The faculty of mind, man’s knowledge, is both these things in one, according to antiquity and the Middle Ages, simultaneously ratio and intellectus; and the process of knowing is the action of the two together. The mode of discursive thought is accompanied and impregnated by an effortless awareness, the contemplative vision of the intellectus, which is not active but passive, or rather receptive, the activity of the soul in which it conceives that which it sees.[xv]

Important here is the idea that our knowledge is made possible by a kind of harmony between two different functions of the mind.[xvi] One function is active, discursive or busy. The word ‘discursive’ literally means ‘running around.’ It probes and pushes, masters data, exercises itself vigorously in examinations and writes treatises. Ratio dissects and analyses, as well as builds and synthesizes. In the mode of “ratio,” knowledge and thought is active, laboring, moving; certainly it is not at leisure. Similarly, this activity of mind normally labors to pursue something, some good or end, other than the mere working of the mind itself. That is, we do not “ratio” for its own sake. It is a means to an end, whether that end be a deeper understanding or a more efficient way to accomplish some task or overcome some obstacle. It is safe to say that this active mode of thought is most familiar to us and tends to be what people mean when they talk about thinking. In literary terms we see this manner of thought best embodied by a particular genre, one dedicated, as it were, to action, to movement, to depictions of people pursuing ends and overcoming (or attempting to overcome) obstacles. This genre of course is narrative. Whether in prose or poetry, narrative takes action. If Aristotle is right and action is the soul of drama, then it would seem that the mode of thought parallel to that soul is ratio.

 But what of its twin intellectus, or ‘non-discursive vision’?[xvii] This is harder to describe in that we are less familiar with this operation of mind despite its ready analogy to the senses. Intellectus is receptive and still, rather than active and busy. It is implicated in the famous verse from the Psalms, “Be still and see that I am God.”[xviii] It is figured forth in words like contemplation, reflection, and understanding. We nod in the direction of intellectus through words like “see” as applied to knowledge: ‘I see, I understand.’ In an era of pseudo-spirituality, phrases like ‘effortless awareness’ can evoke images of mystical dilettantism or self-help psychology, but this is not at all what Pieper means to suggest. As he notes, intellectus is always present in and around ratio. They operate together. In the receptivity of intellectus is the means of rendering ratio fruitful, for no process alone possesses intelligible content. That is why Pieper says we examine through ratio, but in a strong image, we conceive through intellectus.

Though ratio and intellectus operate together, one or the other can predominate in a given operation of mind. Clearly, when one is analyzing options or circumstances, ratio is the primary mode of thought; on the other hand, when (as we say) one realizes a connection, sees the significance of something, or gazes with wonder or admiration upon something with the mind’s eye, then intellectus is primary. While ratio is the active, discursive movement of mind, action is suspended in intellectus and replaced by a kind of receptive apprehension of the real. Its character is less like work or labor than a kind of rest or leisure. This apprehension is nearer to the end or telos of intelligence, complete or in itself satisfactory, rather than being preliminary to some other end. Despite the ratio it may take to get there, it is intellectus that we see predominant in Aristotle’s description of contemplation in Book X of the Ethics, where contemplation “seems . . . to aim at no end beyond itself, and to have its pleasure proper to itself. . . . “ It appears to have “the self-sufficiency, leisureliness, unweariedness . . . and all the other attributes ascribed to the blessed man. . . . “[xix]

When we turn to literary genre, we again find a genre that, typically (certainly not universally) is the genre of stillness rather than action, of steady beholding more than discursive movement and analysis, of festive admiration simply for the sake of the thing known rather than (primarily) some other good or end. That genre is lyric. While lyrical poetry can be programmatically discursive, it possesses the considerable capacity to allay ratio for intellectus, to present an object or idea for contemplation more than for analysis, for celebration more than for use. “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,” begins Wordsworth’s famous lyric in a near-perfect illustration of the “light-suffused” transcendence of even a natural object. But even the ancient roots of lyric — hymns or hymnody — testify to the association of this genre with the divine, with admiration, and with the suspension of temporal activity, often in a turn toward religious festivals. And indeed, festivals, traditionally, are the social manifestation of intellectual contemplation, just as lyric is the literary form of the same. Josef Pieper, quoting Karl Kerenyi, underscores this link between festivity and contemplation: “(T)o celebrate a festival,” he says, “is equivalent to ‘becoming contemplative and, in this state, directly confronting the higher realities on which the whole of existence rests.’”[xx] Perhaps the idea of “festivity” in our day is too frenetic, too dissipated, and too loud to suggest any serious link with contemplation, but Pieper and Kerenyi are not being fanciful. At heart, a festival is the celebration of something received more than achieved. It is the exultant recognition of a gift or blessing we receive with wonder and celebrate with joy. This is clearest of course in religious festivals, where, not coincidentally, lyric or song provides the primary expression of wondering and contemplative celebration.

In the main, then, it might be fruitful to think of these literary genres as manifestations of human knowing. Lyric tends to operate through contemplative apprehension, while narrative tends to build discursively and cumulatively, revealing things — as the etymology suggests — “on the run.” Lyric can sustain attention at rest, while narrative tends to prod it along a course or path. Similarly, festivity and its converse, work (as in the “work-a-day”world) are manifestations of human participation in our end or telos — festivity is immediate or an image of the end, while work is proximate or a necessary means to that end. The dirty little secret known to poets everywhere is that even narrative, even work, rises at moments to lyrical or festive sublimity — but that is a topic for another day. For now, contemplative receptivity, lyrical beholding, and festive celebration share a common horizon in the landscape of Shakespeare’s understanding and imagination.

By any account King Lear and The Tempest are intriguingly parallel: Both plays present old men who are bereft of their former power and station in the world, both men have daughters who are faithful and other relatives (in one case also daughters) who betray them; both men made critical errors that lead to their loss of station; both plays represent storms as agents of change and symbols of man’s subordination to and being an image of a nature or cosmos larger than he is; and thematically there is the complex interweaving of justice and mercy, with one play inclining toward justice and the other toward mercy.

Side by side The Tempest and King Lear present contrasts of leisure and action, lyrical festivity and narrative toil, contemplation and hastening discursive thought. Poet Mark Van Doren, in a brilliant essay on The Tempest, tips our hand. In this play, he says, Shakespeare could “afford to let action come in it to a kind of rest.”[xxi] The romance presents a location of comparative rest, while Lear is a tempest of activity. The Tempest is a play of cessation, of hiatus from the busy world of doings, getting and spending, and governance of Milan. It is a place for the bookish pursuits of Prospero and the lyrical pursuits of Ariel and his sprites. While Prospero cultivates his “liberal arts,” King Lear’s mind casts about with feverish, mad outrage, as much “on the run” as is his body. There is little to celebrate or sing about in Lear, as its agents move in a world of servile — or in the words of Kent, “superserviceable” — ambitions. These contrasts are not absolute, of course. But the context of contemplation described here draws our attention to significant, obverse movements in the plays. The narrative tragedy moves toward a kind of lyric contemplation or rest — ultimately, of course, the rest of death itself amid evocations of the next world. The romance moves instead from a leisured condition of rest, with its associated contemplation, learning, and festivity, toward something more narrative, more politically active, in the service of this world here and now.

The tragedy King Lear might be typified by two statements of Albany’s: “Run, run, oh, run!” and “Haste thee, for thy life.”[xxii] It is a play of magnitude, sublimity, and rapid action. Significantly, the acts that Albany commands in “Run” are futile, as Cordelia is already dead; action in Lear is fraught with dubious consequences. The turmoil of human passions, tumultuous war and murder, intrigues private and political do, however, bring the play to ephemeral moments of uneasy rest. In these, Lear and Gloucester learn at least partially to see “how the world goes,” and to “see it feelingly.”[xxiii] Notably, Shakespeare renders this seeing possible only after Lear and Gloucester have been “cut off” from the activity of the world, cast out into enforced “contemplation” so to speak. This is neither very consoling nor reassuring, as much of what these characters realize drives them to madness or to attempted suicide, though in neither case, significantly, is this final. Nevertheless, the play is punctuated with pauses of stunning revelatory power. These flashes of lyrical brilliance are seen for instance in speeches — or rather entire scenes — of Lear on the heath and in the hovel. In these moments, Lear takes on the language and even the “madness” of a fool or jester, speaking in paradoxes and uttering observations about man and his condition from outside the world of action, or on its margins at best. Gazing in wonder at poor Tom, the seeming-mad beggar, Lear is struck with a sudden realization: “How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides/ Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you/ From seasons such as these? Oh I have ta’en / Too little care of this.”[xxiv] Though Lear himself is mad or nearly mad, his own isolation and sufferings have prepared him for this moment of intellectus or contemplative insight. Likewise, his meditative, paradoxical condition of man speech, also uttered while in exile and on the heath, borders both wisdom and lunacy in its force and poignant contemplation of man “Thou art the thing itself. Unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”[xxv] These hitherto neglected reflections now come home to Lear, momentary as they are, in his new condition of suspended action.

Yet the great and conscious suspension of the play’s narrative life remains that very speech Iris Murdoch quotes. Whether Lear’s hope is practicable or not, his address to Cordelia embraces forms of lyrical and contemplative life, rejecting the “ebb and flow” of political affairs:

Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.[xxvi]

Spoken just before Cordelia and Lear are escorted to prison near the end of the play, this is often understood as another mistaken desire on Lear’s part to avoid responsibility. At best, it is thought, the passage bespeaks the reconciliation of Cordelia and Lear, but in the main it is an expression of foolish, wishful thinking. The “mystery of things” is glossed as referring merely to political secrets, and being God’s spy means little more than knowing the intrigues of court even from a prison cell. Such understandings fail utterly to do justice to the speech. Its location in the play, its profound advance beyond Lear’s earlier notion of “crawling unburdened toward death,” its none-too-subtle resonance regarding all the political intrigues and their futility that we have been privy to throughout the play, and not least, the prominence of one of Shakespeare’s great, overarching themes — reconciliation and forgiveness — these and more do not permit this speech to be so dismissively explained away. In fact, the speech is a striking and insistent invocation of the contemplative mode of thought and — indeed — of a primarily contemplative life. Lear’s prison begins to look rather like a monastery. Solitude, suspension of the active life, the controlling prominence of song and prayer, the strange presence of joy, the durability of these things as contrasted with the ephemeral world of affairs — all of these spring to high importance when seen as functions of contemplation. They bespeak the ordering and even redemptive apprehension of the sublime that is the special capacity of knowledge in the mode of intellectus. This new “ordering view” of affairs allows Lear to imagine talking with poor rogues about court news with, however, a detachment that “wears out” the tides of the times. Most especially the invocation of mystery and the divine demands a contemplative, rather than purely political, understanding of this passage. Shakespeare here points to what Spinoza would later describe as “sub specie aeternitatis” — that is, the beholding of things from the aspect of eternity. This, of course, is the highest reach of contemplation.

Traditionally, death is the ultimate sign or type of contemplative wisdom for it suspends our storied lives in the eternal “now” of God’s presence. The play’s emphasis certainly rests on death as a release from, rather than release to, but in the context of action leading to contemplative pauses, of rising above ebbs and flows as if we were God’s spies, of movements toward song and prayer, there are hints enough to suggest that something other than absurd extinction is the point of the play’s conclusion. The direction is upward. This in no way diminishes the apocalyptic, heart-rending conclusion in which Lear chants “never” in direct contemplation of Cordelia’s mortality. Such things — the death of a beloved daughter — drench the play’s tragic conclusion in grief and pain. The moral horrors of treacherous, now dead daughters, the looming death of friends like Kent and Gloucester, Lear’s own death as well of course as Cordelia’s, these sorrows are a chastising visitation for everyone on stage and in the audience. And such chastisement is also directed upward toward contemplative apprehensions of great moral moment and the ordering transcendence beyond this very real vale of tears. It is at least highly suggestive that Lear’s final, heart-wrenching words, despite their ambiguity, reproduce on even the most literal level the fundamental contemplative and lyrical impulse, ‘Behold!’: “Look there, look there!’ he says in wonder, and then dies.[xxvii] While many argue whether this is a comment on the overall tragedy of Cordelia’s mortality, or perhaps the mistaken impression that there is still breath on her lips, it is certainly an invitation to behold something ultimate and meaningful beyond the power of discursive reasoning to encompass. It is best apprehended contemplatively, through intellectus, with all its attendant overtones of the transcendent. To put it more poetically, Lear’s “Look there!” is more an invitation to see than a desperate imperative to search. It is more a poignant and pained recognition of our spiritual entanglement with mortality, than any kind of resignation to nihilistic despair.

If Lear is brought to a condition of wonder, The Tempest abounds in wonders, the study of which is, traditionally, the principle of the liberal arts. These arts are Prospero’s passion, a passion so great that, in Milan, the contemplative study of these arts trumped his political responsibilities. His punishment, so to speak, is to fully indulge these arts — to become a professor, as it were (or as he says, Miranda’s schoolmaster). More troublingly, the term “art” in the play most often refers to his powers of magic. For Prospero, the liberal arts have proceeded to that perilous stage warned of in James I’s Basilicon Doron, where the study of natural causes may, through the “uncertain scale of curiosity” tempt us to mastery (magic) over being, rather than admiration of it.[xxviii] Nevertheless, one of the first uses of “art” in The Tempest is Prospero’s reference to his reputation. . . “for the liberal arts/ Without parallel; those being all my study. . . .“[xxix] This reference evokes the traditional and widely recognized association of the liberal arts with leisure and contemplation. Though Prospero has strayed, we are reminded of the arts’ proper and original dignity.

Indeed, the liberal arts and contemplation are fittingly symbolized in the island itself. While contemporary studies tend to emphasize the political condition of this little island, there are large, over-arching contextual cues that should play into our understanding of virtually everything about the island and its drama. Perhaps the most imposing reality is the island’s isolation; it is cut off from the busy, active world of Milanese politics and affairs. In fact, this isolation is extremely suggestive of leisure and contemplation as surely Shakespeare was familiar with the etymology of “temple” — meaning a place “cut off or demarcated” in which an augur ”collected and interpreted omens.”[xxx] Just such augury, or “prescience” as Prospero calls it, informs him that his fortunes must be courted now, or “ever after droop.”[xxxi] Contemplation classically requires separation — as we saw occurring in Lear — and just so, the island is a material manifestation of this reflective pause in the life of Prospero. The island becomes a kind of temple, cut off as it is and thus suited to leisurely pursuits. Whether Shakespeare believes ‘tempest’ and ‘temple’ share the same etymology, or he is merely setting up a meaningful verbal echo or pun, the significance is the same: the island is a place cut off from the world of affairs.

This pause reminds us of the other great contextual reality surrounding everything about the play. Prospero’s ordinary, active life is suspended and what is not happening signifies far more than anything that does happen in this play. Without this suspension, we do not even have a play, as Prospero’s opening scheme responds directly to his exiled condition. When we turn to the action of the play itself, it seems to possess a desultory, almost languid character. Other than Prospero’s scheme, most action is futile, thwarted, or an object of ridicule or denunciation. We must be careful not to set up false dichotomies and estimations of value: action is bad, contemplation is good. But this island seems a better place for study, for learning, and for leisurely beholding (think of Miranda’s response to first seeing Ferdinand) than for affairs of state. We see a comical diminution: to corrupt Plato, the state here is the soul writ teeny, not large. Of course, not everything is leisure, not all thought is contemplative. There are important flies in this contemplative ointment, notably the servitude of Caliban and the labors of Ariel, about which more later. Nevertheless, the overwhelming quality of life on the island has the character of leisure and learning, a character not entirely lost even while the work of Prospero’s scheme is underway.

What, however, of lyric? Here again, Mark Van Doren observes the play’s “visionary grace, its tendency toward lyric abstraction.”[xxxii] As we have seen, lyric can function as the festive corollary to the contemplative life. The Tempest is drenched with lyrical festivity. This may appear startling when the context of political and racial oppression dominates so much contemporary commentary; yet again, scale and scope are instructive here. The sheer quantity of music and spritely airs, not to mention the famous lyrics that leaven the play, suggest that to focus so entirely on themes of oppression may be to miss the broad daylight. Oppression must not oppress the underlying festive and lyrical context of so much of the play. Ariel himself, that “fine spirit,” seems to be a festive, lyrical sensibility personified.[xxxiii] Though drafted into temporary service, his nature is that of a celebratory spirit whose distinctive mode of discourse is song: “Merrily, merrily shall I live now/ Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”[xxxiv] Ariel’s unnatural servitude to Prospero produces a good bit of tension in the play, tension arising from the fact that such constraint runs so obviously contrary to this lyrical being whose greatest joy is singing the praises of the natural order. Ariel’s promised liberation is thus not only a point of political liberation but a matter of metaphysical restoration. He is returned to his natural state.

The Renaissance dramatic form called the “masque,” too, emblematic as it is of celebration and feast, remains notoriously lyrical (notorious, as they resist attempts to describe them in narrative terms — much to students’ dismay). Note the masque in honor of Ferdinand and Miranda — a feast of a feast performed by spirits of celebration, in which Iris (messenger goddess, and daughter of Thaumas — i.e. “wonder” — like Miranda) calls to Ceres, the goddess of harvest to leave off labors and “Here on this grassplot, in this very place/ To come and sport. . . . “[xxxv] Not only does the masque enact a pause (within the larger “pause” of life on the island), but it calls for an end to labor and the beginning of leisurely sport or play. Pieper, interestingly, notes that Thomas Aquinas “speaks of contemplation and play in the same breath.”[xxxvi] No wonder then, that Ferdinand compares this experience to paradise, our image of timeless bliss, saying “Let me live here ever”![xxxvii]

The island world of The Tempest manifestly evokes taking the mystery of things upon ourselves and living as God’s spies. The life there is primarily lyrical, contemplative, liberal. Yet it is given up, renounced. If King Lear inclines in its narrative rush toward lyrical contemplation, The Tempest inclines in its contemplative pause toward a return to the active life, the busy world of affairs, even politics in its Milanese complexity. Why? Why would Prospero leave contemplation behind? Has he not comparatively transcended the ebb and flow of affairs and reached a form of wisdom that Shakespeare often holds aloft as an approach to divinity itself?

Certainly The Tempest’s dramatic and moral impulse toward restoration and reconciliation accounts for much by way of answer. Shakespeare has little inclination to dream utopian dreams, but he regards a sound political order as invaluable in respect to human order more generally. Prospero’s restoration to the Dukedom of Milan means, among other things, shaking off the superflux and showing the heavens more just. Likewise, the dramatic, moral tension cannot be resolved until Antonio’s and Alonso’s usurping wrongs are righted.

Perhaps a deeper need is felt here as well. Pieper makes the point that, for festivity to be genuine, it must be unconstrained and allied with genuinely meaningful work: “both work and celebration spring from the same root, so that when one dries up, the other withers.”[xxxviii] Prospero’s enjoyment of leisure is never quite what it ought to be (of course, neither is Lear’s), for the leisure is enforced, constrained, imposed. His love of liberal learning does much to ennoble this enforced contemplation, but as we have seen, in Prospero, contemplation has been flirting with curiosity, and art has become magic. Moreover, under constraint, festivity assumes an artificiality that Pieper calls “pseudo-festivity.” Such pseudo-festivity, he says, in ways surprisingly suggestive of The Tempest, can temporarily “thrive and even exert a more or less convincing spell — especially if the combined powers of the pseudo arts, entertainment, sensationalism, and manipulated illusion are brought to bear. . . .”[xxxix] Thus while much of the play radiates a contemplative illumination, it contains likewise cautionary notes as to certain distortions to which imperfect contemplation and learning are prone.

Another — and only too obvious — reason Prospero must give up the lyrical life of the island for the narrative life of politics is, of course, Miranda. Contemporary interest tends to focus on Miranda in dynastic terms; however, if we may posit a bit of “benevolent artistry,” perhaps Shakespeare indicates something of the nature of human affections, as well. Romantic love may be experienced in ways evocative of lyric — poets underscore experiences of suspended time, delightful insularity or isolation, and sudden illumination (“O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” [Romeo and Juliet][xl]) — but such love is lived, if at all, narratively. Love moves from leisure to labor, contemplation to action, lyric to narrative in its fruitfulness and toils. As Prospero evidently knows, and Ferdinand learns, endurance of trials and willingness to labor are typical components of the active life — and certainly of married life. Upon such fundamentals may consequent dynastic interests be grounded. Miranda needs a lyrical and a narrative, active life. Prospero must return.

Startled by memory, Prospero interrupts the celebratory masque. This is aptly indicative of leaving leisure to return to the world of affairs and even its murderous plots. Here too, of course, is the famous renunciation speech — “Our revels now are ended” — often thought an image of Shakespeare speaking of his own art.[xli] Yet the character of this renunciation draws our attention beyond Prospero’s giving up of arts and study for politics. Rather than simple contrast to King Lear — one moves from action to contemplation, while the other does the opposite — The Tempest also reminds us here of that great and final suspension of action, in death. Every third thought will be Prospero’s grave, he notes, and the active life he is resuming will soon enough be rounded by a sleep. Even the epilogue draws our attention to final grace, forgiveness, and mercy, where the “prayers” of the audience will by indulgence set Prospero (and the actor) free. This appeal for applause is couched in terms of ultimate beatitude, the direct vision of wisdom. Thus, while contemplation is renounced for action, it is not utterly forsaken or forgotten. As a context, it becomes as ultimate as mortality itself.

Contemporaries tend to think that the juxtaposition of rapid action and slower, thoughtful scenes provide emotional contrast or modulation within Shakespeare’s dramas. It is often the case however, that much more than mere emotional relief is underway. The suspension of action in a kind of reflective gaze occurs often, and these moments frequently define or at least color the understanding of the characters or the ensuing action. Contemplation complements action, as intellectus complements ratio, and apprehension of Shakespeare’s insightful use of contemplation can illuminate much in the bard’s drama that seems puzzlingly gratuitous or out of place. Several short examples from other plays reveal Shakespeare placing contemplation at the pivotal or dramatically shaping moment.

In Hamlet, for instance, there is a puzzling alteration in the eponymous character in the final act. The first four acts present the young Dane as thoughtful, yes, but often in an “antic,” agitated, thoroughly discursive way. Hamlet expostulates, rebukes, argues, complains bitterly, kills, and believes that he has an almost messianic mission to set right times that are “out of joint.”[xlii] He is attracted powerfully to death, suicide, as an escape from the slings and arrows of his outrageous fortune. It is an understatement to say he is a man of cares and keen-edged anxiety. Act five, however, finds him for the most part strangely calm, resigned, self-possessed and even sociable. Yes, there is the passionate leaping into Ophelia’s grave, and he even mentions his hunch that all is not right with the proposed duel with Laertes, but many have noticed his strikingly different attitude and behavior in act five. He is altered, somehow. And how does this act begin? In the famous graveyard scene---an utterly gratuitous one that this over-long play could do without if we were thinking only of significant actions that advance the plot. Yet this scene is justly famous, — indeed the “iconic” image of the Dane brooding on a skull arises from this very scene — and we find here Hamlet engaged in the steady contemplation of mortality. Death now is no romantic abstraction or a welcome escape from trouble. It is real, and his gorge rises at it. As he holds the skull of beloved Yorik, gone are all the self-pitying flirtations with suicide. Death is terrible, tragic, and admonitory: let pride beware for all greatness comes to this. Hamlet contemplates this meaning with the ruminative meditation of a monk, displaying later a resignation and peace that we had not seen heretofore. After alluding to the Gospel of Matthew’s “fall of a sparrow,” Hamlet says of his own death “If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now. . . . Let be” (answering his earlier question, “To be or not to be?”).[xliii] No longer is there the great burden of, so to speak, saving the world: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.”[xliv] And, of course, there is the great reconciliation with Laertes. The action — violent and bloody as it is — occurs in a context of a Hamlet altered and resigned, and even looking to heaven to ratify forgivenesses. Significantly, one of his very last acts is the prevention of a suicide — Horatio’s. Whether his contemplation of mortality is the cause of these changes may be doubtful, but contemplation marks the change. It is through this contemplative interlude that Shakespeare alerts us to the ascent in Hamlet from embittered rage and grief to at least some sense of the world sub specie aeternitatis.

Some final illustrations of contemplation in Shakespeare arise out of a few specific lyric poems and their relation to their plays. As suspensions of action, lyric poems can realign the force or direction of a drama, underscoring obscure or even counter-intuitive truths. More than merely comment on the drama, the lyrics raise up for our often startled apprehension qualities of human experience that are approximated with difficulty through narrative, realities of our experience that beggar discursive thought but enrich or ennoble our understanding. Often, these are presented as paradoxes. As You Like It contains one of the most notable examples in the famous song, “Blow, blow, thou winter wind/ Thou art not so unkind/ As man’s ingratitude.”[xlv] The play itself, amusingly, is awash in truly terrible lyrics — doggerel that Touchstone justly calls a “false gallop of verses.”[xlvi] But this lyric stands out. It speaks directly to the winter wind and sky, telling them they are not so piercing as man’s ingratitude or forgetful friends. Given that the play concerns yet another usurpation of power — the benevolent Duke Senior is chased from his ancestral seat by his younger brother, Duke Frederick — the idea of ingratitude or betrayal seems apt enough. But the lyric goes on to sing twice its famous refrain: “Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly,/ Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly./ Then heigh-ho, the holly! This life is most jolly!” False friendship, especially filial friendship, is apparent in the play, and as for “most loving” being “mere folly,” romantic folly abounds. Sincere but rotten love-verses are tacked to trees throughout the Arden forest; a man practices his loving discourse on a surrogate who is actually, unbeknownst to him, his beloved; a cynical town wit lustily woos a socially ambitious country wench; a lovelorn shepherd woos a reluctant shepherdess; and finally, another couple falls in love absolutely at first sight. The loving then is mere folly. But is the love? That is, most romantic action in the play is richly comical. Yet at least some of the loves are not so readily laughed to scorn. Rosalind and Orlando, Oliver and Celia have comical courtships, but their affections seem both genuine and profound. Just this kind of relationship between foolish loving and joyous love is suggested by the refrain’s last line: “This life is most jolly.“ After the litany of follies and cruelties, however, such a line perhaps seems sarcastic or at least so heavily ironic as to be dismissed. But again, could it be true? Though in one regard suffering and folly characterize most human experience, in another regard, sub specie aeternitatis, as it were, joy may well be its greatest endowment. The lyric seems to present to us the paradox implicit, though in far more diffuse a fashion, in the play itself: Sorrows are many, but joy is deeper. This does not simply refer to the play’s happy ending. The quality of the joy is more intense and finally more meaningful than the very real and even quantitatively greater sorrow. “Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly./ Then heigh-ho, the holly! This life is most jolly!” There is more to the lyric than this, of course, and even more to the meaning of that last line. We see, for instance, that it adjusts the preceding seven ages of man speech by Jaques and its famous pessimism: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”[xlvii] Jaques’ quantitative measure of a life would have its end foreclose on happiness; however the lyric, despite its cognizance of sorrow, would not. The paradox of the lyric, especially in its end, is a thought-arresting vision of a profound truth. More than a quaint observation, the lyrics’ appearance early in the play (late in Act Two) conditions the rest of the play and guides us in understanding both its travails and happiness.

The concluding lyric in Love’s Labor’s Lost provides another example of a seemingly light, but contemplative, illuminating paradox. The first half of the poem “Spring,” paints a resplendent, romantic picture of spring and concludes with a warning: “Cuckoo, cuckoo! Oh word of fear,/ Unpleasing to the married ear!”[xlviii] Spring is so lushly romantic a season, that love can tip over into lust, and union can dissolve into jealousy or adultery. The second half, “Winter,” describes the frozen misery and chill of that season, concluding with its odd refrain, “Then nightly sings the staring owl — Tu-whit,/ Tu-who, a merry note,/ While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.”[xlix] If springtime beauty contains a dispiriting reminder of infidelity, winter misery somehow contains the merry note of an owl. Though now famous for representing wisdom, owls in the Renaissance commonly represented chastity. Thus the “merry note” is merry precisely because it signifies the opposite of betrayal and infidelity. However, the paradox here lies deeper than a simple yoking of apparent opposites, that is, yoking something foul with a season of beauty, and something virtuous with a season of hardship. The vice is, perversely, aided and abetted by the seasonal beauty, and the virtue is strangely harmonious with hardship. This bears an obvious connection to the ending of the play where the young men must spend a year in significant hardship before their beloved ladies will marry them. Berowne’s concluding note bespeaks the comically unsatisfactory nature of such an arrangement: “Our wooing doth not end like an old play:/ Jack hath not Jill.”[l] No, indeed. But the bitter “winter” of Berowne’s discontent will paradoxically raise him up in a virtue he sorely needs and render him fit for marriage. The paradoxical relation of hardship and happiness requires presentation and emphasis precisely to redirect the thrust of the play at its end. It must move from a conventional comic ending — marriage — to this highly unusual one of a kind of penitential discipline, all the while maintaining the link to happiness. And move it does, as this poem actually “sings . . . home” the point while it closes the play.[li] The thought-suspending paradox here is joined to the seasonal vignette held up for our lyrical beholding.

Certainly the integrated relations of contemplation and action, festivity and work, lyric and narrative do not exhaust the meaning or possibilities of these plays, nor would they of any play by Shakespeare. But we neglect them to our loss. Like the trunk of a tree that branches into many limbs, contemplation is the base from which many recognizable facets of human experience and art branch out. When we see this trunk and its related branches repeatedly and rather consistently employed, we have encountered an important context, one that cannot help but have a shaping influence on our reading of Shakespeare. In many instances, this context suggests understandings of “providential design” or “moral renewal,” considerably more benign than is customarily thought today. Nevertheless, and as we have seen, concerns with contemplation do not translate simply into naïve optimism about man and the world. As a recent writer points out, Prospero (for instance) “affirms our human reach toward God, not human achievement of heaven on earth.”[lii] It is often in these pauses, these interstices of action that reaching toward God or toward an understanding of the mysterious, paradoxical, yet meaningful world, occurs. Toward the close of The Tempest, again, Alonso moans “Some oracle/ Must rectify our knowledge.”[liii] Though perhaps coincidental, Prospero’s reply bespeaks Shakespeare the contemplative with almost startling precision: “Do not infest your mind with beating on/ The strangeness of this business. At picked Leisure/ Which shall be shortly, single I’ll resolve you. . . .Till when, be cheerful, / And think of each thing well.”[liv]

David M. Whalen
Hillsdale College
Hillsdale MI 49242
October, 2022

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