Category: philosophy

Shakespeare’s Greatness: Art and Business

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Shakespeare’s success story is part of what makes him the GOAT. We have a canon of great art produced by tragic figures who killed themselves or drank themselves into oblivion and ridicule. Shakespeare not only produced an incredible body of work, but he was also a popular success and was able to maintain social rank despite doing something for an occupation that was deemed unworthy of a gentleman. What was it about Shakespeare that gave him the energy and stability to have such a perfect career in less than stable conditions and times?

I’ve started listening to the audiobook version of Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, which is a biography of Shakespeare. Using the public records of Shakespeare’s birth, his father’s career, his education, his marriage, and his entrance into the London theater scene, Greenblatt pieces together a portrait of the bard that is compelling and insightful. 

The plays themselves are fully capable of capturing our interest on their own. I’m not suggesting that Shakespeare’s biography holds some secret keys to understanding his plays. That’s not what is interesting to me. I’m interested in how Shakespeare ran his career like a business. It is the story of a great artist/ entrepreneur. This isn’t an interpretive key as much as another way of reading the work altogether. Literature that is produced for the critics, for the academy is much different than work that is produced for the public. Shakespeare produced work for the public that also is canonical to the ultimate degree. 

Thinking about Shakespeare as an entrepreneur also shifts the way we consider greatness in art and its popular appeal. Another thing I find interesting about Greenblatt’s biography is it helps to create this image of a world contained within London where there was excitement about the theater. It’s kind of funny to think of people that long ago wanting to be actors. It goes back much further to the roots of Ancient Greece at least. Dudes want to make up stories and act them out.

The competition to be the greatest writer or the best performer is almost central to our human condition. How essential is art to human society? It almost seems to go hand in hand. As soon as we have a group of people, we have clowns trying to entertain them. We also have people trying to lead them. A group of people is a potential audience. It’s an opportunity for an artist to give them something to think about.

What we can see by looking at Shakespeare’s career is more important than looking for clues to understand his psychological drives. When we see how Shakespeare hustled, and how he kept his productivity so high, it shows us how the greats perform. It’s motivational to artists who strive to have a great career. Making great art is just the first part. You must find a way to make it last. That’s why figures like Henry Miller are so important, too. Certain artists figure it out and live great lives worthy of being studied. 

It’s strange to have a figure who set the high mark for achievement over four hundred years ago. In every other human pursuit, we have made tremendous advancements, but in writing nobody is even coming close. Thinking about Shakespeare’s career, putting his literary achievements in the context of a world of supply and demand, we have an opportunity to challenge our times. If we demand a Shakespeare, she will come.

As You Neg It: Shakespeare and the Psychology of Attraction

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In Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It, we see a pattern of interaction that illustrates something common in our culture, today. The practice of disingenuously criticizing someone to achieve a psychological effect, or negging, is shown through Rosalind’s interactions with Orlando and with Phoebe. She uses false criticism to create a power dynamic with both characters.

With Orlando, she is costumed as a man, and she guides the conversation and uses it to test him. She questions him, negating his declarations of love as nonsense. Orlando, in turn, asks her if she is from the forest, and she says yes. When he suggests that her pattern of speech is too educated to belong to these parts, she explains that she was educated by an uncle who also happened to be an expert in courtly love. Her lies become part of the game. She positions herself as an expert, even though she is pretending to be foreign to the court and questions his authenticity, turning the conversation back to interrogating him. 

Through her questioning his integrity, she manipulates him into working to prove himself. He responds by giving her more of what she wants: evidence of his feelings for Rosalind. A master of manipulation, Rosalind leads Orlando around like a lion on a leash lashing him with her tongue. It is an erotic exchange, as well. Rosalind’s negging includes assuring him that she would likely sleep with 20 or so men like him if they were married. She tortures him with the idea of her infidelity to test his true feelings.

The layers of deception and identity in Rosalind demonstrate how gender in Shakespeare is a performance of power. He uses cultural norms and customs to present an image of gender that the public reads and believes to be true within the context of the play. Many characters in Shakespeare’s comedies use costume to change genders and, in this case, Rosalind is disguised as a rural dude named Ganymede who is then pretending to be Rosalind to Orlando for him to practice expressing his love. She is pretending to be a man who is pretending to be her, a kind of double negative.

Ironically, this gives her the opportunity to be herself without any exposure. She is a spy watching her future husband react to her ideas. By negging him, by questioning his character and his devotion to love, she also eggs him on. She puts fuel on the fire. She gets to see what he is made of and how he feels about her.

Rosalind, while in disguise as Ganymede, also has a strange encounter with a young woman in the forest. Phoebe is actively rejecting the courtship of a suitor named Sylvius. With not much else to do in the woods, Rosalind is there for the sport of it. She is there to be entertained by their unhappy love connection and to play a trickster kind of role in their affairs. She interrupts their conversation and starts to criticize Phoebe suggesting that she should take the offer Sylvius is making because she is not beautiful enough to do better.

Phoebe’s response is to fall in love with Ganymede. Rosalind explains the psychology behind this reversal. Sylvius was being overly complimentary. He was making Phoebe think that she was better than she is. He was falsely flattering her, and it had the effect of making her think too highly of herself and that she was better than him. Because Sylvius has been worshipping her, she sees him as subordinate.  When Rosalind as Ganymede dresses her down, she feels more attracted to “him,” because his judgmental speech suggests that he is better than her. She is attracted to being negged because it makes her think she is with someone superior. 

We see this kind of cynical darkly humorous stance often on Twitter or generally online. We are pretending to laugh so we aren’t seen crying. We perform wokeness so nobody questions our complicity. We neg our crush so they will give us some attention. We know it works, but does it work to our advantage? What is that pattern keeping us from doing or knowing? 

Romantic love is a drug and a form of madness in Shakespeare. We see characters behaving in uncharacteristic fashion, lying, and deceiving people around them to pursue the feeling of being in love. This is much different than the effect of negging. Rosalind loves Orlando both for how she feels around him and for how she feels about him. She judges him to be worthy of her love and negging him is simply testing him and having fun with him until she can reveal herself to him and claim her place as his love.

Poor Phoebe is repelled by Sylvius who is in love with her, but she becomes attracted to Ganymede for negatively criticizing her. Shakespeare gives us a comparative study of different kinds of attraction to think about the differences between love, attraction, negation and power.

Fools and Villains in As You Like It

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Once you make sense of the plot of As You Like It, you can begin understanding some of the stranger and more interesting parts of the play, like the discourse about power and the unconscious. We have a foolish Duke, a brother made murderously stupid with jealousy, another brother struck dumb with love, we have a wise jester, and a philosophical sad boi. The play is a meditation on how power can make people foolish and how self-aware actors can manipulate the situation.

The play is set in two main locations: the court and the countryside. The main characters are banished from the court to the countryside. When the play begins, Duke Ferdinand has already exiled his brother–Rosalind’s father–to the Forest of Arden. There are biblical connotations throughout the play, beginning with fratricidal rage, evoking the story of Cain and Abel. Arden suggests the Garden of Eden.

Oliver, the older brother, is aware of his own motivations. He identifies Orlando as the source of his own feelings of jealousy. He is fully aware that he is driven by an evil desire, but it is a mental condition he feels he can resolve only with the death of his brother. Shakespeare gives us a look into the mind of a murderer. He’s jealous to the point of being ill and he knows it. 

Oliver believes his path to feeling better begins with his brother’s death. It isn’t till much later in the play, when Orlando saves Oliver’s life from a mountain lion, that he transforms how he feels. It isn’t Orlando’s death, but his willingness to sacrifice his life that is successful in changing the bad energy between them. Despite his jealousy, Oliver is transformed into a loving brother through Orlando’s act of service.

For most of the play, Orlando is completely out of control, first with ambition and then with love. He makes bold moves that lead to radical change. He beats the wrestler, but it is a form of entertainment for the Duke. Orlando’s father was an enemy to the Duke, so wrestling as a form of entertainment for his recently deceased father’s enemy is kinda shady. That’s how bad he feels about himself. He has a cockblocking older bro who wants him dead and so he takes on the court wrestler right in front of the Duke. You almost can’t blame the Duke for losing his shit when he finds out who the kid is. 

We don’t know why Duke Ferdinand exiled his brother, but we do know that it is not working to his favor. The older brother is off in the woods living like Robin Hood with a bunch of men and women loyal to him. Ferdinand is surrounded by arrogant enemies who don’t respect his authority. His temper tantrum when he finds out who Orlando’s father is leads him to snap on Rosalind and his own daughter. In this pathetic speech, you see the Duke insecure about his power and taking it out on young women. This portrayal shows how power can amplify insecurities to the point of violence. 

The villains are fools in As You Like It, and the fools are wise. This play gives us some memorable quotes delivered by fools, including “all the world’s a stage.” The portrayal of Jaquis and Touchstone are another moment of meta-comedy in Shakespeare. The play reflects on the value of entertainment and on the possibility that there is more wisdom in those who occupy the privileged position of entertainer and thinker within a group than in those who have power. Touchstone is subservient, but also witty and he has pointed insights and a theory about everything.

Jaquis is highly empathetic and poetic kind of thinker. He is one of the Duke’s men living in exile and as he experiences things that happen in the countryside he compares it to his own background. This leads to him creating metaphors that link the violence and ruthlessness of men and women in the court to the dealings of the natural world. Whereas Oliver and Frederick try to get rid of their negative feelings through violence, Jaquis is a connoisseur of sadness. 

Through his embrace of feeling bad, because he enjoys his own sadness, Jaquis becomes empowered. He is entertaining to the men. They love to laugh at him grieving over the death of a deer. His sadness is fun for them to witness. Oliver and Ferdinand reject their negative feelings and try to fix their feelings through violence. Jaquis shows us the opposite. He owns his feelings and therefore attracts brotherhood.

As You Like It is a comedic tapestry full of fun moments, but it is also a philosophical reflection on the interaction between power and understanding. The self-aware fool is ultimately more in control and has more influence than someone who has political clout but is not in control of their own emotions. The fools and villains in As You Like It are a key to the play’s deeper meanings and relevance to today. 

Benedick’s Double: Much Ado as Meta-Comedy

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Hero may be the protagonist of Much Ado, but her cousin Beatrice is the funniest, the most insightful and comical character in Shakespeare’s play. The only other character who even comes close is Benedick. The series of transformations Benedick undergoes through the course of the play makes for a hilarious portrait of a jester. Through the portrait of Benedict as a comical character, Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy about comedy.

Benedick begins as a mega-bro, a boy’s boy. He is a turn of the 17th century fuck boi. If he were alive today, there’s no doubt that he would be down to shotgun beers on the weekend. He’s Claudio’s homeboy, someone who helps to keep the mood light and to joke about the condition of being a man. Together they are bachelors enjoying their military tour.

It is their fateful visit to Aragon that initiates their transformation through love. It is the ways in which they change that make for such a hilarious portrayal of how people are altered by the experience of romance. Benedick is deceived into thinking that Beatrice is interested in him and that is all it takes for him to begin the process of turning into a whole other human.

Beatrice and Benedick have a famous ongoing battle of wits between them, and Beatrice always has the upper hand. It is less a battle and more of a dance, a game of cat and mouse. She toys with him and absolutely shreds his ego. The setting of the play is an island in Italy where a small militia lands to recover from their recent battles. As a part of their recreation, they have a masquerade ball. Beatrice takes advantage of this occasion to dance with Benedick and to pretend she doesn’t know it is him. She then proceeds to tell him about this fool named Benedick and negs him hard.

This begins the opening of Benedick. Truly, he has been a dick and he is finally starting to see it. Through her portrait of him as someone unworthy of respect, he begins to question himself. Because she fools him into thinking that he is receiving this description anonymously, he believes her. It hurts him even more.

The idea of Benedick and Beatrice as a couple is so ridiculous that their friends on both sides conspire to trick them into a romantic misunderstanding. As soon as they begin to believe that the other person loves them, they start to change how they feel altogether. Benedick, the lifelong bachelor, suddenly is catching all kinds of feelings. When they finally come together to confess their feelings to each other, Hero’s crisis has already gone down, and she is supposed to be dead. Beatrice is less transformed by love and in the first moment that Benedick swears he loves her and will do anything for her she asks him to kill Claudio to avenge her friend. He immediately responds that he can’t. She goads him into it, using the act as a way of verifying his love for her.

What a trick! It is another example of how shame is leveraged to manipulate action in the context of the play. She has broken him down, shown him a version of himself that is shameful. Then, when he has disintegrated to the point that he is ready to do anything, she gives him the command to murder. This is a remarkably dark moment in a comedy, but it is the counterpoint to the comic’s role. The comic kills with laughter, his double just kills.

When Benedick challenges Claudio to a duel, he takes on a ridiculously masculine role. He is transformed by his mission. He becomes militant in his devotion to Beatrice. He is ready to kill his best friend. Bros before hoes no more.

Suddenly, he is not himself, and in this process of existential opening he attempts to write a love poem to Beatrice, with hilarious results. Shakespeare’s portrait of a man inspired to write poetry without any skill for crafting lines of verse is an amazing parody. He is having a good laugh at his competition and maybe at himself. There is nothing funnier than bad poetry.

Of all the characters in the play, Benedick changes the most. He is the most dynamic because he falls in love with a woman who dominates him intellectually. His experience of love makes him believe in himself in ways he had never had the courage to before. As an image of transformation, Benedick serves as a mirror giving us the ability to see how funny it is when we fall in love.