Introduction
Roger Peters Copyright © 2001
The possibility of a philosophy in Shakespeare's poems and plays
The claim William Shakespeare wrote all his poems and plays with a brilliant
philosophy in mind should not surprise. Yet in 400 years of commentary
and scholarship no one, not even Samuel Taylor Coleridge, has derived a
philosophy from the poems and plays in keeping with their greatness.
Some commentators suggest Shakespeare had little or no philosophy or,
despite evidence to the contrary, they decide his philosophy was Platonic
or Christian, albeit in a covert form. Others, who sense the possibility of a
profound philosophy, readily admit their inability to derive it from his works.
Just as odd is the traditional treatment of Shakespeare�s complete works.
Until recently only a select number of plays were performed, and frequently
they were heavily edited or even rewritten. Coupled with these preemptive
practices was the denigration of the 1609 edition of the Sonnets as little more
than autobiography. While there is now an interest in expanding the traditional
repertoire to include all the plays, the Sonnets are still treated as an
autobiographical resource, or at best a set of mismatched poetic conceits.
The commentaries on the poems and plays in this volume are based on
the evidence presented in Volumes 1 and 2 that Shakespeare did articulate
the philosophy behind all his plays and poems and that he gave the
philosophy definitive expression in Shake-speares Sonnets of 1609. The
inability of orthodox commentators to appreciate the philosophy behind
Shakespeare�s works over the last 400 years has been a consequence of the
application of an inadequate level of philosophical understanding. The traditional
Judeo/Christian paradigm, particularly, has been found wanting in the
face of Shakespeare�s profound natural logic.
When the prejudice toward the complete works is redressed, and the
Sonnets are recognised as Shakespeare�s definitive statement of intent for all
the plays and poems, a sense of perspective and even justice is restored.
Instead of dismissing the Sonnets as an unauthorised miscellany harbouring
some of the greatest love poems in English literature and lamenting their
lack of organisation, their consistent and comprehensive philosophy can be
appreciated as the foundation for all his works.
This means it is now possible, after an interval of 400 years, to articulate
a consistent and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare�s poems and
plays. In this volume nine plays and poems are considered individually. Each
commentary explores the relation of the underlying logic of each play and
poem to the philosophy of the Sonnets.
The uniqueness of the Sonnet philosophy
In Volumes 1 and 2, the uniqueness, consistency and comprehensiveness of
the philosophy structured into the whole set was revealed. The logical
consistency and the mythic depth of the philosophy were explored at length.
The body of evidence presented demonstrates that the edition of 1609 could
only have been assembled by Shakespeare and then published under his
supervision. The organisation and the logical structuring of the whole set
is definitive and authorial.
The Sonnets are unique in Shakespeare�s oeuvre. No other work
published while he was alive shows such attention to structural detail. As
they were published under his direct control, and because the 1609 edition
is still available in the form in which it was published, Shake-speares Sonnets
is the definitive text for understanding his plays and poems.
Contrary to conventional scholarship, there are only twenty or so
typographical mistakes in the complete text of the Sonnets, and the majority
of these are elementary spelling errors. When the text is viewed from the
basis of its inherent philosophy it has more or less the same number of
typesetting errors as a book produced today. The anecdotes about a text rife
with error have gained currency because, since Malone in 1780, the Sonnets
have been subject to an inadequate level of philosophical expectation based
primarily on the Judeo/Christian paradigm. Consequently, an academic
industry has developed to emend, reorder, and generally disparage the credibility
and authenticity of the original.
Besides the Sonnets, only the first editions of the two early poems, Venus
and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594), were most likely published in accordance
with Shakespeare�s intentions. Like the Sonnets, they present relatively
clean texts, but they lack the precision and subtlety evident in the Sonnet
organisation and numbering.
The status of the plays
It was not until seven years after Shakespeare�s death that his colleagues
published 36 plays in the 1623 Folio. (Two Noble Kinsmen was published
separately in 1633, and Pericles was published in the 1663 edition of the
Folio.) Of the 36 plays in the Folio, eighteen appeared in print for the first
time. Of the others, anywhere from one to five quarto editions were
published during Shakespeare�s lifetime. The quarto texts all vary in some
way from the Folio texts. Adding to the issue of authenticity are the traditional
suppositions that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights on
five or so plays. The authorial status of the plays, therefore, is not as certain
as that of the Sonnets.
The differences between the quarto and Folio texts of the plays are due
to a number of factors. Changes made by the author to stage scripts to
improve or adapt them for different circumstances would have created a
number of variant scripts. Then, as there was no copyright for published
material, a number of quarto editions were most likely pirated from stage
scripts or compiled by actors from memory. To counter the inaccuracies of
the pirated versions Shakespeare�s company may then have published an
authoritative edition of the plays. The state of the quartos is consistent with
one or other of these possibilities. Given the publishing conditions of the
day, Shakespeare�s lack of interest in publishing all his plays is understandable.
If the play texts were all that were available to determine Shakespeare�s
philosophy, then the possibility of arriving at a definitive account of the
philosophy would always be overshadowed by questions about the authenticity
of the quarto texts. In 400 years it has not been possible to determine
Shakespeare�s philosophy from a study of the plays. Instead, the conclusion
generally adhered to is that expressed by T. S. Eliot in his introduction to
Wilson Knight�s The Wheel of Fire (1965) to the effect Shakespeare had no
philosophy of his own, or at best a �ragbag� philosophy accumulated from
his various sources.
The Sonnets for their part have been trivialised and dissected with gay
abandon. Even Ted Hughes, who at least appreciates that Shakespeare bases
his logic in the priority of the female, reduces the Sonnets to an expression
of arcane mythology and derives a mythological theory based on Venus and
Adonis that he is able to apply to only a third of the plays.
Under these circumstances it is interesting to consider Love�s Labour�s Lost.
Besides being a play of Shakespeare�s invention, it was also the first to be
published under his name. If, in the 1590s, he did trial the presentation of
his philosophy in this play (Coleridge comments on its didactic tone in his
Shakespeare Lectures and Notes, 1907), it seems he gave away the possibility
of similar experiments when the prospect of creating a dedicated set of
sonnets offered a more appropriate medium for a systematic expression of
the philosophy. The authenticity and definitiveness of the Sonnet text
provides the measure to assess the way in which the various plays and poems
explore aspects of the overall philosophy.
The analysis of the plays presented here will demonstrate that every play is
based on the logic of Shakespeare�s philosophy as presented in the Sonnets.
Because the Sonnets present the definitive philosophy, the need to establish a
definitive text for each play, or revisit the traditional issues of dating and
ordering, is eliminated. Because of the difficulty publishing the definitive text
of a play in Shakespeare�s day, he would have been aware of the impossibility
of depending on the plays as vehicles for his philosophy. So the philosophy of
the Sonnets is the ultimate recourse when there are difficulties in interpretation
in the plays. In King Lear, for instance, Cordelia�s response to Lear, and
Edmund�s first speech, which have been consistently misunderstood, find
their true meaning when examined in the light of the Sonnet philosophy.
Throughout his playwriting career Shakespeare wrote without regard for
the conventional modes of drama. The traditional categorisation of his plays
as comedies, histories, tragedies or romances provides no guide to the underlying
philosophy. The categories are secondary to Shakespeare�s consistent
exploration of the Sonnet philosophy over his lifetime. The categories remain
secondary to the way any particular play explores various aspects of his
thought. Plays like Troilus and Cressida and Pericles challenge the need to
categorise, and a history play like Henry VIII, coming as it does late in his
career, upsets the tidy trajectory from history to comedy to tragedy to
romance. And any particular play in the course of its five acts has elements
of the various categories, much to the chagrin of commentators such as
Samuel Johnson who are constrained by orthodox prejudices.
While Shakespeare�s vision matured with age his basic philosophic
outlook remained the same. He could mix dramatic modes because his
philosophy transcended such categorisation. This is consistent with the
philosophy of the Sonnets being a natural philosophy without apology or
prejudice. What shifts from play to play is the point of focus within the
comprehensive dynamic of the philosophy, and it is the shift of focus that
creates the difference in dramatic, or poetic, intensity.
The plays, as do the Sonnets, make the same fundamental points again and
again. Shakespeare was conscious of the repetitious nature of the argument in
the Sonnets due to the simplicity of his logic and the need to include sufficient
sonnets to give the logic an appropriate numerological structure. Sonnet 76
and others acknowledge the repetitive nature of the basic argument. Poets
such as Wordsworth, who have had no idea of the content of the Sonnets,
note the �tediousness� in the sequences (see The Sonnets and the Narrative
Poems, 1988). All commentators record their inability to appreciate the role of
the more philosophic sonnets. They gravitate toward the mainly lyrical
sonnets such as 18, 116 and 129.
By their nature the plays are unsystematic compared with the Sonnets.
For instance, Shakespeare uses humour in the plays much more immediately
than he does in the sonnets. In the plays he uses passages of high
humour as a deliberate strategy to enliven the performance by counterpointing
the underlying seriousness. By interspersing comedic passages he
creates a dramatic form at once logically exacting and at the same time
readily appreciated by an audience wishing to be entertained. Shakespeare�s
common-sense Nature based philosophy enabled him to achieve this
without patronisation.
The philosophy in the early work
...continued in Volume 3, William Shakespeare's Sonnet Philosophy
Back to Top
Roger Peters Copyright © 2001
Introduction
Venus and Adonis
Lucrece
Love's Labour's Lost
The Phoenix and the Turtle
Measure for Measure
Macbeth
A Lover's Complaint
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