Shakespeare

The three lines people quote most as Shakespeare's wisdom are spoken by a spy, a poser and a murderer. To thine own self be true is the last of a dozen tips a father gives his son about clothes and lending money.¹ The father dies behind a curtain, listening at a door.² All the world's a stage is spoken by a man who does nothing all play but stand aside and sneer.³ The moment he finishes, a starving old servant is carried in to be fed.⁴ A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, is spoken by a king who murdered his way to an empty room.⁵ He has just been told his wife is dead.⁶ Shakespeare never speaks in his own voice. There is no page anywhere where he tells you what he thinks. Every idea belongs to a person on a stage, and the play then does something to that person.

So it is easy to conclude he had no philosophy, and most people who love him say exactly that. He gave every side its best voice and never chose. That conclusion is wrong, and the evidence against it is the plots. The same thing goes wrong the same way across twenty years of plays. A man demands proof of something that cannot be proved. A wife's love, a daughter's love, his own real self, the right to the crown on his head. The demand destroys the thing he wanted proved. And in play after play, the one act that ever turns a man the other way is the same act. He stops demanding, and accepts what he already knew. It does not always save him. It is the only thing that ever does.

That is the philosophy, and it can be said in one sentence. People are not ruined by what they do not know. They are ruined by refusing to accept what they already know, about other people, about themselves, about power, and about death. The cure the plays show is acceptance without proof. In the tragedies the plays call it readiness. In the late plays they call it grace, and they give it to human beings to perform, and thank the gods afterwards.

What follows proves that sentence the only way it can be proved, by watching what the plays do to the ideas spoken in them. First the method, which is a kind of experiment. Then the experiment run on the self, on love, on what things are worth, on kings, on nature, and on death. And finally on the hardest case, forgiving a man who never says sorry.

Shakespeare holds no doctrine, and every line people quote as his wisdom belongs to a character the play is busy judging. That is where this begins, and there is a second half that matters more. The plays do not mark those lines false. They mark what each one costs, and who pays.

Start with the most quoted advice in the language. A father is seeing his son off on a ship. The boy is late for his ship, and the father holds him back to give him rules for living. Dress as well as you can afford but not showily, because clothes announce the man.⁷ Do not borrow and do not lend, because a loan loses the money and the friend.⁸ And then the line that sits on mugs and in wedding speeches. This above all, to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.⁹ The speaker is Polonius. He is the king's counsellor in Hamlet, and the rest of his life in the play is spent hiding and listening.¹⁰ He sends a servant to spy on that same son abroad.¹¹ He hides behind a curtain to overhear the prince talking to the prince's mother. Hamlet hears a noise, stabs through the cloth, and Polonius dies with the words, O, I am slain.¹² Hamlet, seeing who it is, says over the body, thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell.¹³ The man who said be true to yourself and you cannot be false to anyone died being false to the people around him. The play arranged that.

The same man owns a second famous line. Brevity is the soul of wit. He says it to the king and queen while announcing that he has found the cause of the prince's madness. He takes seven lines to say he will not waste their time. Then he says that brevity is the soul of wit and he will be brief, and the queen cuts in. More matter with less art.¹⁴¹⁵ This is the one case where nobody has to interpret anything. A character inside the scene tells him the speech is too long. The play has a woman say its opinion of the line out loud.

Now the second line, from a comedy. A duke has been driven into a forest by his brother and is living there with his followers. A young man bursts in with a sword drawn, demanding food, and leaves to fetch an old servant who is too weak to walk. The duke remarks that they are not the only unhappy people in the world, that the whole world is a theatre of sad scenes.¹⁶ A courtier named Jaques picks up the idea and makes a speech of it. All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. He runs a life through seven ages, the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the judge, the shrunken old man. Then the last age. Second childishness and mere oblivion, without teeth, without eyes, without taste, without everything.¹⁷ And then, immediately, the stage direction. Enter Orlando, carrying Adam. The next spoken line is the duke's. Welcome, set down your venerable burden, and let him feed.¹⁸ This can be checked by anyone with a copy. There is no speech in between. Jaques describes an old man's end as nothing. The play answers by carrying an old man onto the stage in the arms of someone who loves him, and feeding him. Jaques himself is a man who does nothing in the play but watch other people and comment. At the end, when everyone else pairs off and goes home, he walks away from the wedding to go and live in a cave.¹⁹

The third line is the hardest, and it is the one people quote when they want to sound unflinching. Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The speaker is Macbeth.²⁰ He is besieged in his castle at the end of the play. He has murdered a king who trusted him, a friend, and a household of children. A cry of women is heard. A servant goes to find out and returns. The queen, my lord, is dead. Macbeth's first response is that she has died at an inconvenient time. She should have died hereafter. Then the speech about tomorrow and tomorrow, the brief candle, the poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and the idiot's tale. Here a distinction is needed. Nobody on stage answers Macbeth. The play does not follow this speech with a starving servant being fed. It does not say life means something. What it does is show, over five acts, how this man emptied his life of meaning with his own hands. So when he says life is empty, the audience knows whose life he is describing, and why. The line is located rather than refuted. It is true of a life lived like his, and the play has shown what that life was.

Two of these three lines are the same image. Jaques says all the world is a stage and the people on it are players. Macbeth says life is a poor player strutting his hour on the stage.²¹ Other characters use the picture too, but these are the two versions everyone quotes, and they were given to a poser and a murderer. That is a choice about who gets to say it.

There is a fourth line, less solemn, and it shows the same machinery from another angle. The better part of valour is discretion. It comes from a battlefield. A fat old knight named Falstaff is attacked, drops to the ground, and plays dead until the fighting moves on.²² The prince he serves finds the body, speaks a few sad words over it, and leaves.²³ Falstaff gets up. He then argues, to nobody, that a man who fakes death in order to live is no counterfeit at all. He is the true and perfect image of life indeed. The better part of valour is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.²⁴ The proverb everyone repeats is the punchline of an excuse. It is delivered by a man standing on the spot where he had just been pretending to be a corpse.

So far the pattern looks simple. A character says something quotable, and the play shows him up. If that were the whole method, it would be a cheap trick. It would also be a philosophy of a kind, the sneering kind, where every belief is a fool's belief. It is not the whole method, and the same fat knight is the proof.

Before that battle, alone, Falstaff talks himself out of honour. Can honour set to a leg?. No. Or an arm?. No. Or take away the grief of a wound?. No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then?. No. What is honour?. A word. He asks who has it, and answers, he that died on Wednesday, and asks whether that man feels it, and answers, no. Therefore, I'll none of it.²⁵ The play then does something particular with this speech. The other great figure of that play is a young nobleman who lives for honour and talks about almost nothing else. In the battle that follows, he dies on the field. It is the prince who kills him, in single combat, and says a few generous words over the body.²⁶ Then Falstaff, who faked his own death a few yards away, gets up, stabs the corpse, and carries it off to claim the credit.²⁷ The play does not refute the speech against honour. It stages the very world the speech describes. The man who scorned honour is alive and the man who loved it is dead. The one is carrying the other's body off for a reward, and the prince who actually did the killing lets him. The prince holds honour without ever making a speech about it. That is a third answer to the question of honour, and the quietest one in the play.

Here is the truer version of the rule, and it is better than the simple one. The plays do not mark a maxim false. They mark what it costs and who pays the bill. Falstaff is right that honour cannot set a leg. The price of being right about that is the man he is. At the end of the next play the prince he loves becomes king and, in front of everyone, refuses to know him. Polonius is not wrong that clothes announce the man or that loans lose friends. The price of a life run on tips is that there is nobody home to be true to. Jaques is not wrong that people age and lose their teeth. The price of standing outside life to describe it is that you stand outside it. Every one of these lines is a bill, and the play shows you who pays it.

This is where the strongest objection arrives, and it deserves its full weight. If every view in the plays is spoken by someone, and every someone is shown paying for it, then Shakespeare is a relativist. He gives the villain great lines and the saint great lines. He writes both from the inside with equal care. A man who can do that has no position. His greatness is that he refused to choose, and the phrase Shakespeare's philosophy is a contradiction in terms, like the weather's opinion. Many of the people who love him most believe this, and it has a distinguished history. It is also the most comfortable belief a reader can hold, because it makes every line free for the taking. Whichever quotation fits your mood today is Shakespeare's wisdom today.

The answer begins with a fact about how plays work that the objection ignores. A play has two ways to pass a verdict. A character can say something, and the author can arrange what happens next. Shakespeare almost never uses the first in his own voice. When someone on stage passes judgement, it is a character with a stake in the scene. A queen who is bored, a servant who is frightened, someone inside the story with something to lose. The verdicts that count are the second kind. The verdict on Polonius is a sword through a curtain. The verdict on Jaques is an old man carried in to be fed. The verdict on Falstaff's speech about honour is the young nobleman's corpse and Falstaff standing over it, alive and lying. None of those verdicts are spoken. All of them are chosen. Someone decided that Orlando enters at that line and not ten lines later. Someone decided that Polonius dies spying and not in bed. A writer with no views does not need to decide those things one way rather than another. The choices are the opinions.

That is only the beginning of the answer, because it opens a harder question. If the verdicts are in the plots, then reading the philosophy means reading what the plots do, not what the characters say. And plots can be read in more than one way too. A method is needed, and it has to be one that anyone can check. Otherwise the whole enterprise is just another person's mood dressed as Shakespeare's.

So far, then. The famous lines are views given to people, and each person is then shown paying for the view they hold. The plays do not refute a line by having a narrator contradict it. They refute, or price, a line by what they make happen. So there is a method here, and it is not an absence of opinion. What that method is, whether it can be checked, and what it finds when it is run on the largest questions, comes next.

Shakespeare's philosophy is a method before it is a set of results. The method is this. Take a view and state it in its strongest form, in the mouth of the person best placed to believe it. Give that person a life. Then run the whole world of the play against the view and watch what it costs. Philosophers have a name for this kind of thing. They call it a thought experiment, and they use it whenever a principle cannot be tested in a laboratory. You build a case, you put the principle inside it, and you see what breaks. The plays were doing this before the name existed, and they were doing it with a rigour that a viewer can check.

Here is the method at full stretch. An army has been camped outside a walled city for seven years and has nothing to show for it. Their generals meet to ask why. A commander called Ulysses stands and gives the most complete speech about political order anywhere in the plays. The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre observe degree, priority and place. This centre is the earth, and degree is rank.³⁰ Everything in the universe has a rank and keeps it, he says, and that is why the universe holds together. Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows. Remove rank, and the rude son strikes his father dead, appetite becomes a universal wolf, and the world eats itself.³¹³² The army is failing, he says, because its greatest fighter will not obey and the chain of command has gone slack.³³ Heard on its own, this is a philosophy. It has the grandeur of one, and heard out of the play it sounds like a view a man might hold.

Now watch what the play does with it. In the same scene, minutes later, a challenge arrives from the enemy's champion, Hector, to fight any of them in single combat. Everyone knows the fighter who should answer is Achilles, the one who will not obey. Ulysses takes an older general aside and proposes a plan. No, make a lottery, and by device, let blockish Ajax draw the sort to fight with Hector.³⁴ Rig the draw. Let a stupid man win it and praise him as the better fighter. Achilles will be so stung that he comes back to the fight out of jealousy. The man who said that rank is written into the planets is now fixing a raffle. In the next act the generals surround Ajax and pour flattery into him like water into a jug. One of them says, as an aside, pour in, pour in, his ambition is dry.³⁵

Here is what the play has done, and it is precise. Ulysses said two things in his speech and they sounded like one. The first was that without rank, things fall apart. The plot confirms that. The camp is a shambles because nobody obeys. The second was that rank is a fact of nature, observed by the planets and written into the sky. The plot destroys that within the hour. The plan to restore order is a fraud. And the fraud does not even work. Achilles comes back to the fight only when his dearest friend is killed, which no lottery arranged. Degree turns out to be something men try to fabricate on a Tuesday afternoon with a rigged raffle, and cannot. The play has separated the two halves of the speech and passed a different verdict on each. It has done it without a single character saying so.

That is the method, and it has two features that matter for everything that follows. First, it does not refute a view by having someone contradict it. It refutes, or confirms, or prices a view by what it makes happen. Second, the verdict is often split. Part of what the character said survives the test and part does not, and the interesting philosophy is the line between them. In this case, that things fall apart without rank survives, and that rank comes from the stars does not.

A second experiment, run on the largest word in the plays. In King Lear, everyone appeals to nature. A young man named Edmund, the illegitimate son of a nobleman, opens his part alone on stage. Thou, Nature, art my goddess, to thy law my services are bound.³⁶ By nature he means appetite and force. He was made in a livelier bed than his legitimate brother, he says, and he means to have his brother's land by whatever works.³⁷ His nature is the nature of the strong animal. Two acts later the old king, having been bargained down by his daughters from a hundred attendants to none, calls on the same goddess. If you do love old men, if your sweet sway allow obedience, if you yourselves are old, make it your cause.³⁸ He is calling on the heavens as a moral order that owes something to fathers. Same word, two opposite meanings. One man means the law of the strong. The other means the law that protects the weak. The play now runs both against the world, and neither survives in the form its speaker gave it. What that costs each man, and what the play puts in the place of both, comes later, because it is a whole part on its own. For now the point is the shape. Two people hold the same word, the world is run against both, and the ruling is read off from what happens to them.

Now the objection that a serious reader will already have made. The reader supplies the philosophy. Hand the same play to a priest, a revolutionary and a psychoanalyst, and each will walk out with a different Shakespeare who agrees with them. That has been happening for four hundred years, and it never stops. So when someone claims to have read the philosophy off the plot, they have read their own mind off a mirror. The mirror happens to have a famous name on the frame. There is nothing in the text to stop them, because the text says nothing in its own voice. This objection is right about something, and the something needs to be named before the answer. Lines can be read almost any way. A speech about degree can be admired or sneered at, and the speech itself will not stop you.

The answer is the constraint the objection forgets. A reader can reinterpret what a character says. A reader cannot reinterpret who dies. The old counsellor is stabbed behind the curtain in every reading of Hamlet that has ever existed. Ulysses rigs the lottery in every reading of his play. Adam is carried in after the speech about the seventh age and not before it.³⁹ These are events, fixed by the writer, the same in every theatre in the world, and no interpretation can move them. When the method reads the philosophy off the plot, it reads it off the part of the play that a reader cannot bend. That does not make the reading automatic. People have drawn different lessons from the death of Lear's youngest daughter for four hundred years. What the plot does is rule readings out. No reading of King Lear in which the good are protected survives its last scene. That is the kind of verdict a plot delivers, a fence around what can be said. The priest and the revolutionary can fight about what the degree speech means. Neither of them can make Ulysses stop fixing the raffle.

There is a stronger version of the objection, and it is worth meeting, because it is the one a clever sceptic would actually make. Fine, the events are fixed, but you chose which events to look at. You picked the maxims spoken by fools and villains, so of course the plot went against them. A method that only tests the words of Polonius has already decided its result. The reply is a case where the method runs the other way. Near the end of King Lear, a good man stands over his dying brother, the same Edmund who prayed to nature. The good brother says the gods are just, and out of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us. Their father's adultery, he says, cost their father his eyes.⁴⁰ This is the pious view of the universe, spoken by the best man left alive. And the villain agrees with him. Thou hast spoken right, it is true, the wheel is come full circle, I am here. Two brothers from opposite sides of the moral world, both saying that justice is built into things. Then the old king walks on carrying his youngest daughter's body. She was innocent, and she has been hanged. That scene will be run in full later, because a whole part turns on it. The method did not pick a fool's line here. It picked the noblest line in the play, spoken by the noblest man, seconded by his enemy, and the plot ruled against it anyway. So the pattern is not that villains speak maxims and plots refute them. The pattern is that the plot rules on every maxim, whoever speaks it, and the ruling is never quite the one the speaker expected. The cherries were picked by the plays.

One rule governs every sentence that follows, and it is said here once. Nothing here is attributed to Shakespeare the man. Nobody knows what he believed, and he took care that nobody would. Everything is attributed to what the plays do, which is public, fixed, and checkable by anyone with a copy. When the word philosophy is used, it means the pattern of verdicts the plots deliver when the same demand is made. The argument runs on a handful of plays, the ones where that demand is made, and the plays where it is not are set against it at the end. If that pattern is consistent, it is fair to call it a philosophy. If it is not, the claim fails, and it will fail in plain view.

One fact places these experiments in time, and it matters because the plays are often treated as decoration on ideas that philosophers later worked out properly. A prince on a stage in London sees a ghost that tells him his father was murdered. Before he acts on what he saw, he stops. The spirit that I have seen may be a devil, and the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.⁴¹ The thought that a devil can wear a pleasing shape was an old one, and the play did not invent it. What the play does is refuse to let him act until he has tested it, and his test is an experiment. He stages a play that re-enacts the murder and watches the suspect's face.⁴² That play was in print by 1604.⁴³ In 1641 the French philosopher Descartes published a book that begins by doubting everything he had ever believed.⁴⁴ A deceiving demon, he supposed, might stand behind every appearance.⁴⁵ That book is usually where modern philosophy is said to begin. It will be opened properly later, when the plays' answer to it is on the table. For now, one thing. The deceiver who plants your perceptions was on a public stage, doubted and tested, nearly four decades before he became a philosopher's tool.

The method, then, is a thought experiment. State a view in a person, run the world against them, read the verdict off what happens. The verdict lives in events, which no reader can bend, and it falls on saints and villains alike. It fences what can be said rather than printing a ruling. Nothing is attributed to the author, everything to the plots. Now the experiments themselves, starting with the view everyone assumes is his because it hangs on his most quoted line. Be true to yourself. Whether the plays believe there is a self in there to be true to is where the next part begins.

The plays deny that there is a findable true self to be true to. Most people will resist that, so it needs saying carefully. The plays are full of inner life, grief that cannot be spoken, love that will not fit in a mouth. What they deny is something more specific. An essence, separate from what a person does and how they are seen, that could be found and shown and held up as the real one. Every character who goes looking for that finds nothing, and says so. The search is staged again and again, in kings, in soldiers, in a prince, and the result is the same each time.

Begin with the man who had the most to find. Richard the Second is a king who believes that his kingship is part of his body. His cousin raises an army and takes the country, and Richard is brought to a hall to give up the crown in public. He asks for a mirror. He looks into it, and the speech he makes is a search. Was this the face that every day under his household roof did keep ten thousand men?⁴⁶. Was this the face that like the sun did make beholders wink?. He is looking for the king in the face, and he cannot find him. A brittle glory shineth in this face. He smashes the glass on the floor.⁴⁷ Then he says his grief lies all within, that the substance is inside and the face was only its shadow.⁴⁸ That is the claim of an inner self, made by the man who has just failed to find one in the glass. The substance he names is grief, and grief is a feeling, not a self. Grief is something a man has. A self would be the thing that has it, and that is what he cannot find or name. He says it is there. And in the same scene he says the strangest thing a king can say. I have no name, no title, and know not now what name to call myself.⁴⁹ Take the crown off, and he does not know what to call the thing that is left. He has not forgotten his name. The name was the crown, and he had believed there was something under it.

Alone in prison at the end, he tries the last move available. He plays every role in turn. Thus play I in one person many people, and none contented. Sometimes he is a king, and then treason makes him wish he were a beggar. So he is a beggar, and then poverty makes him wish he were a king again.⁵⁰ He runs through the roles looking for the one that is really him, and each one is just another role. The play does not give him a self at the bottom of the pile. It gives him a murderer walking in.

Two more people say the same sentence, and it is worth hearing both. In Othello, the villain ends his first long speech with the words, I am not what I am. It is spoken as a boast.⁵¹ He is a surface with nothing behind it, and he knows it, and he uses it. Later he tells Othello that men should be what they seem, and the audience, who know he is not, are meant to feel the floor tilt.⁵² In a comedy, a shipwrecked young woman named Viola dresses as a boy to serve a duke. She falls in love with him, and a countess falls in love with her disguise. When the countess presses her, Viola says, in the villain's own words, I am not what I am.⁵³ Earlier she had put it more gently. I am not that I play.⁵⁴ The same sentence, in a tragedy and in a comedy, in the mouth of the worst man Shakespeare wrote and one of the best women. In these plays it is a description of the human condition, not a confession of evil. What you do with it decides which kind of play you are in.

The hard case is Hamlet, and the whole part turns on it. Hamlet is the one character in the plays who claims, out loud, to have an inner self that appearances cannot show. At his first appearance, his mother asks why his grief seems so particular. He answers that his black clothes and his sighs and his tears are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passes show.⁵⁵ There is something inside, he says, that no performance can reach. One thing should be settled here and then left alone. That line can be read as saying that the self exists and is simply private. This account reads it as a claim the play then spends five acts testing, because that is what the play does with it. And it is fair to concede at once that the line itself says less than it seems. It says the outward signs of grief can be performed. It does not say what the inner thing is. Hamlet never does.

Watch him try. He has been told by a ghost to avenge his father, and he does not do it. Alone, after watching an actor weep real tears for an imaginary queen, he turns on himself. Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal, can say nothing. Am I a coward?⁵⁶. He cannot explain his own delay, so he reaches for a reason. The spirit he saw may be a devil, the doubt heard in the last part. He needs proof before he acts, and he will stage a play to get it.⁵⁷ A second reason, before the play is even staged. Thinking itself is the problem. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.⁵⁸ Then the play is staged, and the king's face gives him away, and Hamlet says he would take the ghost's word for a thousand pounds. So the first reason is gone, and he still does not act. A third. He finds the king alone, kneeling, praying, and stands behind him with a drawn sword. He does not strike, because a man killed at prayer goes to heaven, and that would be a reward, not a revenge.⁵⁹ So he waits for a worse moment. A fourth. Watching an army march off to fight over a scrap of land, he says he has been thinking too precisely on the event. And then, one line later, the sentence that gives the game away. I do not know why yet I live to say, this thing's to do.⁶⁰

Four reasons, each contradicting the last, and then a plain admission that he does not know the reason. This is the man who said he had that within which passes show. When he looks within, he finds four excuses and a blank. The most famous soliloquies in the language are a man searching for a self and reporting, each time, that he has not found it.

There is one moment where Hamlet names himself, and it settles the question. At a graveside, watching another young man perform his grief loudly, Hamlet steps forward and announces himself. This is I, Hamlet the Dane.⁶¹ That is a name and a nation, a public role, the title his father held. When he finally says who he is, he says it in the only currency the plays accept. That currency is the role a person occupies in front of others. And at the very end, apologising to the man whose father and sister he has destroyed, he goes further. Was it Hamlet wronged Laertes?. Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be taken away, and when he is not himself does wrong Laertes, then Hamlet does it not.⁶² Hamlet denies it. It is an excuse, and a poor one, and the play knows it. But listen to the shape. The one character who claimed an inner self ends by disowning it, saying the thing he did was done by someone who was not him. The self he promised in his first scene has, by his last, been declared missing.

The famous objection comes next. A critic argued at book length that Shakespeare invented the human. Personality, in our sense, he wrote, is a Shakespearean invention. His characters change, on this view, because they listen to themselves talk and think again.⁶³ Hamlet's inwardness, on this view, is not a failure to find a self. It is the birth of the modern self, the first person in literature to overhear himself thinking and change because of it. If that is right, the plays do not deny the inner self. They discovered it. Half of that is correct, because Hamlet does overhear himself and does change by listening. But what he hears is a man giving reasons and not believing them. What the plays invented was not the inner self but the search for it, staged at full length, with the result shown. The result is roles, memories, appetites, and underneath them the fear of being nothing. Richard found that in his mirror and Hamlet found it in his four reasons. Inventing the search is not the same as finding the thing, and the plays are clear about which one they did.

There is a soldier who runs the experiment from the other side. Coriolanus is a Roman general who has been banished by the city he saved. He comes back at the head of an enemy army to burn it. His mother comes out to plead. He decides in advance that he will not be moved, and he describes what he is attempting. He will stand as if a man were author of himself and knew no other kin. Note the as if.⁶⁴ Even he knows it is a posture. He is trying to be a self with no roles, no son, no citizen, no husband, a man made only of his own will. His mother kneels. He holds her hand in silence. Then he says, O mother, mother, what have you done?.⁶⁵ He knows at once that yielding will kill him, and it does.⁶⁶ The man who tried to be his own author was unmade by being somebody's son. There was no self underneath the roles strong enough to refuse the oldest role of all.

The comedies raise a different objection. Viola plays a boy and ends up marrying the duke. Rosalind plays a boy and ends up marrying the man she wants. If roles are the disease, why do the people who wear them thrive?. The answer is that roles were never the disease. The demand for something under them is. Viola never demands that the real Viola be honoured beneath the disguise. She plays her part, tells the truth inside it when she can, and waits. When the time comes to say who she is, she proves it with facts, a father's mole, the day he died.⁶⁷ A name is a fact, and facts can be proved. What she never asks is that anyone see through to an essence. At the end of the play she is still dressed as a boy and still called by her boy's name. Her woman's clothes are with a sea captain who has been arrested.⁶⁸ The duke proposes to her while she is still Cesario. Cesario, come, for so you shall be while you are a man.⁶⁹ The comedy marries the role and promises the dress later. No true self is restored first. Rosalind goes further. In the last speech of her play she steps out of the story and points at the boy actor who has been playing her all along. If I were a woman, she says, to an audience that can see she is not one.⁷⁰ The comedies are the people who accepted the rule and were happy. The tragedies are the people who demanded an essence and fell.

The argument, as steps. One, in the plays, what a person is, is what they do and how they are seen. Two, several characters go looking for a self beneath that. Three, each one reports that they found roles and a blank. Four, the characters who demand an essence end badly, every one. Accepting the roles guarantees nothing, and the comedies have their own casualties, a steward shut up in the dark, a moneylender stripped in court. But the ruin in the tragedies always begins with the demand. Coriolanus dies the moment he yields to his mother. What put him at the gates with an army was years of refusing to be anyone's son. So the plays rule that demanding the inner self is the disease, and not only that the search comes up empty.

This changes the famous advice. To thine own self be true assumes there is a self in there, separate from what you do. Your actions can be true or false to it. The plays say the actions are the self. Be true to yourself, in their world, can only mean, do the things a person you would respect does, and let that be what you are. That is smaller advice, and much harder.

So there is no findable self beneath the roles, and the search for one ends in a mirror smashed on the floor. A person is what they do and how they are seen. Which raises the next question immediately, and it is the one the tragedies are built on. If I am what I do and how I am seen, then what is it to know another person?. What can I know of a wife, or a daughter, beyond what she does and how she seems?. The tragedies are about the man who demands more, and the next part is his.

The tragedies of jealousy and love are not caused by ignorance. Othello, and the jealous king of The Winter's Tale, and old Lear with his daughters, are not men who knew too little. They are men who demanded certainty about another person's heart, which is a demand for a kind of thing that does not exist. And the demand produces the very thing it fears. The proof of that claim is three men, and one of them had no villain whispering in his ear at all.

Start with the one who did. Othello is a general who has married a senator's daughter against her father's wishes, and she loves him. The play gives him everything he could need to know it. She defied her family for him and followed him to a war, and none of that is in dispute when his officer Iago begins to hint. Othello does what a reasonable man does with a hint, and asks for evidence. Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore. Be sure of it. Give me the ocular proof.⁷¹ He wants to see it with his eyes, and that sounds like the opposite of jealousy, like a man refusing to be jealous without grounds. Then, a few lines later, the sentence the whole tragedy sits on. I think my wife be honest, and think she is not. I think that thou art just, and think thou art not. I'll have some proof.⁷² Two beliefs at once, and he cannot bear to live between them, so he needs the space closed. And notice the form of the demand. He asks for proof that she is false, not proof that she is true. He has already decided which certainty would settle him.

What he gets is a handkerchief. He gave it to her, she dropped it, Iago's wife picked it up, Iago planted it. Othello tells his wife that there is magic in the web of it, that an Egyptian gave it to his mother, that losing it means ruin.⁷³ A piece of cloth with a story attached has become the evidence on which a life turns. Later, when Iago mentions it again, Othello says he would most gladly have forgotten it. It comes over his memory, he says, like a raven over an infected house.⁷⁴ He cannot even bear to think about the object he has made everything rest on. And then he says the sentence that shows what has actually happened inside him. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. That is, I would not feel this strongly if there were nothing to it.⁷⁵ The feeling has become the evidence. The demand for proof has ended in a man treating his own suspicion as proof, because it is so loud.

Before going further, a guess. Most people, hearing this story, take the lesson to be that Othello should have trusted his evidence and not a liar. Look at the facts, check the source, do not be manipulated. That is the reasonable lesson, and it is the wrong one. Othello's evidence was fine. He had all the play gives anyone. His error was to ask evidence to do a job that evidence cannot do, to make another person's love certain. When it could not, he accepted a handkerchief and a story about an Egyptian. So the lesson is that evidence is the wrong kind of thing for this question, and trusting it better would have changed nothing.

The proof of that is the second man, because he has no Iago. In The Winter's Tale, a king called Leontes has a childhood friend staying at his court. He asks his pregnant wife to persuade the friend to stay longer. She does. She is courteous, and takes the friend's hand, and Leontes watches, and in the space of one speech he is certain she is unfaithful. Nobody has said a word to him. There is no plot, no handkerchief, no villain.⁷⁶ The jealousy is made entirely out of his own need, and the play makes him say so in the form of an argument. Is whispering nothing?. Is leaning cheek to cheek?. Is meeting noses?. Kissing with inside lip?. Stopping the career of laughter with a sigh?. He piles up ordinary courtesies and asks whether each is nothing. And then he draws the conclusion that gives away the disease. If these are nothing, he says, then the world and all that is in it is nothing.⁷⁷ Either his suspicion is real or nothing is real. He would rather lose his wife than admit that a thing he felt so strongly could be nothing. A loyal servant hears this and names it on the spot. Good my lord, be cured of this diseased opinion, and betimes, for it is most dangerous.⁷⁸ The play calls it a disease in its first act, in the mouth of a loyal man, and then shows what the disease does.

Here is what makes Leontes the decisive case. His wife is put on trial, and an oracle is consulted, the god's own verdict, sealed and carried back and read aloud in court. Hermione is chaste, his friend blameless, his servant a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten. That is as close to certain evidence as any story can offer. A god has spoken, and named every name. Leontes hears it and says, there is no truth at all in the oracle.⁷⁹ One sentence, and he rejects a god.⁸⁰ No evidence could have cured him, because evidence was never the problem. He had all the evidence the world can supply and refused it. What breaks him, a moment later, is not proof. A servant runs in to say that his young son, sick with fear for his mother, has died. Loss does what proof could not do, and the play makes sure the two arrive a minute apart so nobody can miss the order.⁸¹

There is a line earlier in that play that shows the disease from inside, and it deserves to be heard. After he has sent his wife to prison, Leontes congratulates himself. How blest am I in my just censure, in my true opinion. Then, in the same breath, he curses the knowledge. A man may drink from a cup with a spider in it and take no harm, if he does not know. Show him the spider, and he cracks his gorge, his sides, with violent hefts.⁸² He wishes he did not know, and he is proud of knowing, and what he knows is false. That is the whole disease in one image. The certainty is what is poisoning him, and the certainty is about nothing.

The third man is not jealous of a wife. He is a father, and he wants to be sure of his daughters. Lear is dividing his kingdom among three of them before he dies, and he attaches a condition. He will give the largest share to whichever daughter says she loves him most. Which of you shall we say doth love us most, that we our largest bounty may extend where nature doth with merit challenge.⁸³ Love, measured in a speech, paid for in land. The eldest answers first. Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter.⁸⁴ The second says that her sister has described her own love exactly, and then outbids her.⁸⁵ Both have understood the game and are playing it. The youngest, his favourite, is asked what she can say to draw a richer third than her sisters. Nothing, my lord. He tells her nothing will come of nothing, and asks again.⁸⁶ I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more nor less. She gives him a measurement after all, an exact one, and he throws her out for it.⁸⁷

Look closely at that. He asked for love as a quantity, and she gave him a quantity, and it was the truth, and it was not enough. He did not want a measurement. He wanted an unlimited one. He wanted a proof that his daughter's love had no bottom. No such proof exists, because a love with no bottom cannot be stated in a speech. Her sisters could supply it, because they were lying, and lies have no bottom either. The only daughter who loved him gave the only honest answer to a badly built question, and the question destroyed the family.

One word runs through all three men, and it is the plainest word in the language. Leontes asks, is whispering nothing, and cannot bear the answer to be yes. Cordelia answers, nothing, and means it as the truth. Lear says nothing will come of nothing, and is wrong, because everything comes of it. The catastrophe in each case is a man who will not let anything be nothing. Every gesture must mean something, every silence must be filled, every love must be proved to the bottom. And the one honest use of the word, a daughter's nothing, is the one that gets punished.

There are two good objections. The first is that Othello was deceived by a genius, so the blame belongs to Iago. That is fair as far as it goes, and here is how far it goes. Iago never produces evidence. He produces grounds for doubt, a hint, a hesitation, a handkerchief, and Othello's own demand for certainty does the rest. Every step is Othello asking to be shown, and being shown nothing, and taking nothing as proof. And Leontes proves that the villain was never necessary. Take Iago out of the story, and the story happens anyway, in a different play, to a different king, by the same route.

The second objection is stronger. People do betray. In these same plays, Hamlet's mother did marry his father's murderer. Lear's two elder daughters did turn on him. In a later part, a young man will watch the woman he loves go to another man. Sometimes the suspicious man is right, and doubt is not a disease, it is intelligence. If the plays say never doubt, they are saying something foolish. They do not say never doubt, and the proof is Hamlet, who is the real counter-example to everything in this part. The last part called his demand for proof an excuse for delay, and it was, and the test he built was sound anyway. A pretext can be a good procedure, and the play keeps the two apart. Hamlet demands proof. He says the ghost may be a devil and he needs grounds. But watch what he does with the demand. He designs a test that could have cleared the king. He stages the murder as a play and watches the king's face. He posts an independent witness, his friend, to watch too, and afterwards asks him, didst perceive?.⁸⁸ He gets his answer and he accepts it. The test could have gone either way, and he set it up so that it could. Othello demands a proof that can only confirm. Leontes rejects a proof that disconfirms. Hamlet builds a proof that could do either, and abides by the result. The difference between them is procedural, and it has nothing to do with which doubts turn out right. A deed can be tested. Did this man kill my father is a question with an answer in the world. Here the objector has a sharp reply, and it deserves to be heard. Adultery is a deed too. Othello and Leontes are asking whether a thing happened, and things that happen can be checked. So the distinction seems to cut against the very cases it was built for. Look at what each man does when a deed-test is offered. Leontes is handed the result of one, from a god, and throws it out. Othello asks for one, is given a handkerchief, and treats the question as closed. Neither man was ever asking about a deed. The deed was the excuse. What each wanted settled was the heart, and when the deed-question was answered or dodged, the demand went on regardless. The disease is the demand that a heart be settled by proof, wearing the clothes of a question about a deed.

One more case, the smallest. In a comedy, a young nobleman is tricked into believing his bride is unfaithful, and denounces her at the altar. He is proved wrong when a drunk confesses to the trick.⁸⁹ Evidence works there, and the slander is refuted. So the plays admit that a factual accusation can be settled by testimony. But the play makes the bridegroom do penance anyway, a night of mourning at the tomb of a woman who is not dead.⁹⁰ He is not punished for getting the facts wrong. He is punished for demanding to see before he would trust.

The ruling, then. Another person's love is not a fact that evidence can settle. It is something you accept or refuse, on grounds that will never be proof. The men who demanded proof got a handkerchief, a spider in a cup, and a daughter's honest nothing. Each destroyed the thing he was trying to be sure of. Refusing to accept was not safer than accepting. In every play where the demand was made of a heart, it was fatal.

So the tragedies of love are caused by a demand for certainty about a heart. The demand is the disease, not a defence against one. Philosophy has a version of this problem, and it is the one modern philosophy started from. How can I be certain of anything outside my own head, another person's mind included. The plays diagnosed that demand, and treated it, before the philosopher who made it famous had written a word of it. What the plays' treatment is, and whether it is any good, comes next.

The plays diagnosed the modern demand for certainty before the philosophers did, and they gave a different answer. The philosophers said the problem is that we know too little, and set out to find something that could not be doubted. The plays say the problem is that we refuse to accept what we already know. They show what that refusal does to the people around us. The two answers are not versions of each other. They point in opposite directions, and one of them has bodies at the end of it.

The philosopher's problem has to be felt before the plays can answer it. In 1641 Descartes, the French philosopher named earlier, published a small book of meditations. He begins by deciding, once in his life, to rid himself of every opinion he has ever held and start again from the foundations. His rule is severe. Anything not entirely certain and indubitable is to be treated exactly as if it were false.⁹¹ To make sure nothing slips through, he supposes that some malignant demon, exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive him. The sky, the earth, colours, sounds, his own hands, may all be the demon's illusions.⁹² He is looking for one thing the demon cannot touch. He compares himself to Archimedes, who said that with one fixed and immovable point he could move the whole earth. One certain thing, and everything else can be rebuilt on it.⁹³ He finds it in the fact that he is thinking, and so must exist, at least while he thinks. Everything else, including other people, has to be argued back from there.

That shape matters. A man who will not accept anything that could possibly be false. A deceiver who might be behind every appearance. A search for one immovable point. Now put a wife in it.

Othello is that method with a marriage. He wants one thing certain, and he says so, give me the ocular proof. Iago's whole technique is the philosopher's rule turned into a weapon, because he never proves anything. He supplies grounds for doubt, a pause, a look, a handkerchief, and lets the rule do the rest. Anything not entirely certain is to be treated as false. Desdemona's love cannot be made entirely certain, because no one's can, so by the rule it is false. Othello does not reason badly. He reasons like the philosopher, and the philosopher's method, applied to a person, is murder.

The play is precise about how he does it. He stands over her while she sleeps, with a light in his hand. It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Yet I'll not shed her blood, nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, and smooth as monumental alabaster.⁹⁴ He will not cut her. He wants her whole, white, still, unmarked, like a statue on a tomb. That is what certainty about a living person would look like if you could have it.⁹⁵ A living woman changes, and can be doubted. A monument does not. He is going to make her into the one thing that cannot betray him, which is a dead thing. The demand for the immovable point ends in a body that cannot move. He knows what he is doing, and the play makes him say that too. Put out the light, and then put out the light. A lamp can be relit if he changes his mind. When I have plucked the rose, I cannot give it vital growth again.⁹⁶ He knows it is irreversible, and he does it, because certainty matters to him more than she does.

Now the image again, in a different play, so it is clear the play knows what it is doing. In the play about the Trojan war, the city's greatest soldier has just been killed. His brother has to carry the news in to their father, the old king Priam. There is a word, he says, will Priam turn to stone, and the city's young men will become cold statues.⁹⁷ In The Winter's Tale, the king who destroyed his wife on no evidence is shown, sixteen years later, a statue of her.⁹⁸ A tragedy, a war play, and a romance, one picture. A person who is not acknowledged turns to stone. The refusal to accept someone as a living, changing, unprovable person is shown, every time, as turning them into a monument. The stone is a word the plays use themselves, long before any critic borrowed it.

The plays' alternative is easiest to see in a man who has nothing left to be certain about. Lear has been thrown out by both daughters and is standing in a storm at night with a fool and a servant. He stops at the door of a hovel and says something he has never said in his life. Poor naked wretches, wheresoever you are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm. How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides defend you from seasons such as these?. O, I have taken too little care of this.⁹⁹ Something particular has happened here. Lear has not learned a fact. He was king of this country for decades. He knew there were poor people in it, and that they were cold, and that he had taken little care of them. That knowledge was always available. What changes on the heath is not that he knows it but that he lets it count, because now he is one of them. The failure was never a failure of knowledge. It was a refusal to respond to what he knew. That is the plays' diagnosis, and it is different from the philosopher's. We are not short of information about other people. We are short of the willingness to let what we know about them make a claim on us.

The same play says it in one exchange, and the exchange is a joke, which is how the plays say their most serious things. Lear, mad, meets the old nobleman Gloucester, whose eyes have been put out. Lear says, your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes. Gloucester answers, I see it feelingly.¹⁰⁰ He knows the world now by touch and pain, and he knows it better than he did with eyes. In these plays the organ that knows another person is whatever it is that feels, and the eye that demands ocular proof is the wrong instrument.

The plays also show a cure, in full. In The Winter's Tale the jealous king, Leontes, refused a god's verdict and lost his wife and son within an hour. Sixteen years pass.¹⁰¹ He has spent them in grief. A woman of his court takes him to see a statue of his dead wife, and before she draws the curtain she gives him a condition. It is required you do awake your faith. Then all stand still, or those that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart.¹⁰² The statue moves. It steps down and takes his hand. He says, O, she's warm. If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.¹⁰³ What he does not say is the point. He does not ask how it works before he takes her hand. The accounts come afterwards, at leisure, each one telling their part, when nothing depends on it. He does not demand to know whether she was alive all along, or whether this is a trick. He does not ask what the woman of the court has been doing for sixteen years. The man who once rejected an oracle because it did not match his certainty now accepts a miracle without asking for its papers. Whatever it is, let it be allowed. That is the cure, and it is the disease reversed. No new evidence is given to him. He was told to wake his faith before he could see anything, and he did, and then there was something to see.

The alternative can now be said plainly, since it has been shown three times. The philosopher's method treats another person as a fact to be established, and cannot establish it. So it ends by treating them as false, or as stone. The plays' method treats another person as a claim on you, to be accepted or refused, and shows that refusing is what makes the monster. The word for the plays' method is acknowledgment.¹⁰⁴ It means letting what you already know about someone count, without asking for it to be proved first. The word, and the reading of Othello as a problem about knowledge, come from a modern American philosopher. The reading here follows his. The word will come back, because it is the right one, and each time it comes back it means this.

The strongest objection is one the plays have already answered, though not comfortably. Acknowledgment sounds like a fine word for credulity. Desdemona acknowledged Othello. She trusted him completely, right to the end. When she is dying and her maid asks who has done this, she says, nobody, I myself. She refuses to accuse him with her last breath.¹⁰⁵ And she is dead, and trust did not save her, so the plays cannot be recommending it. The plays never say acknowledgment is safe, and that is what is bracing about them. Desdemona dies. Cordelia, who gave the honest answer to the love test, dies. What the plays say is narrower and harder. In the plays this account draws on, the demand for certainty destroys every time it is made. Trust destroys sometimes. That is a bet, not a comfort. The plays state the odds and let the audience count the bodies on each side, so count them all. On the side of proof, a strangled wife, a hanged daughter, a queen in prison and a small boy dead of fear. On the side of trust, the same strangled wife. A king in Macbeth who slept under his host's roof in what the host himself called double trust, and was murdered there. A young man in Verona who took a sleeping girl for dead without waiting to be sure, and killed himself beside her.¹⁰⁶ A Roman general who trusted a queen and lost the world.¹⁰⁷ Old Lear himself, who trusted two daughters' speeches. He stands on both sides of this ledger, because he tested the honest daughter and believed the liars. The plays are not on the side of trust as a policy. Trusting people kills people in them, often. The claim is narrower. In every case where a man demands that a heart be proved, the demand kills, and in no case does the proof arrive. Trust is a bet with bad odds. The demand is a bet with none.

A second objection is that this is a modern reading, forced onto plays written for other reasons. The answer is that every step above was taken on the plays' own words. The alabaster is Othello's word. The statue is the play's. I see it feelingly is Gloucester's. Awake your faith is the condition set on stage before the cure. One modern word has been borrowed for what the plays already show, and the plays' own words carry every step.

The steps. One, the modern philosopher asks for one thing that cannot be doubted and treats everything else as false. Two, applied to a person, that rule turns them into stone, and the plays show it with the word stone. Three, the men who fall in the plays do not lack knowledge, they refuse to let what they know count. Four, the cure shown is faith before sight, acceptance before proof. Five, the plays do not promise this is safe, only that the alternative is certain ruin.

The plays' answer to the problem of other minds is that it is a problem of acceptance rather than knowledge. The demand for proof is the disease. Which raises a question the plays cannot avoid. Othello wanted his wife's worth to him made certain, fixed, a monument, and the plays say worth cannot be held still like that. But then where does worth live at all. Is anything worth something in itself, or is a thing worth only what someone happens to value it at?. One play puts that question into a soldier's mouth, and the answer he gets is the next part.

The plays run the oldest argument about worth. Is a thing valuable in itself, or only because someone values it?. They rule against the purest form of the second view. Value is kept up by valuing, the plays agree. But not by any valuing. One man says a thing is worth exactly what he prices it at. The same play shows him unable to keep his own price up when the thing changes. And the man who says the opposite is shown abandoning his own argument, for the sake of honour, and dying of it. The ruling is harder than either speaker wanted, which is how the method works.

The argument is staged as a council of war. Troy has been besieged for seven years over one woman, Helen. The Greeks have offered terms. Give her back and the war ends. Hector, the city's best soldier, argues for giving her back, and his reason is a calculation. Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost the holding. Every tenth soul lost in this war was worth as much as Helen, he says, and they have lost thousands of tenths.¹⁰⁸ His younger brother Troilus answers with a question that has been argued about ever since. What is aught, but as 'tis valued?. What is anything worth, except what someone values it at?. Helen is worth a war because they have made her worth a war.¹⁰⁹ Nothing is precious in itself. Things are precious because a person prizes them, and the prizing is the whole of the worth. Give that view its due, because it is the view most modern people hold without knowing it. Value is subjective, and a thing is worth what someone will pay.

Hector's reply is the most careful piece of philosophy in the plays. His point, before his words. The worth of a thing lives in two places at once, in the thing and in the one who prizes it. But value dwells not in particular will. It holds his estimate and dignity as well wherein it is precious of itself as in the prizer. It is mad idolatry to make the service greater than the god.¹¹⁰ A valuing that answers to nothing in the thing is worship of your own wanting, and he calls it what it is, idolatry. A man who values a stone above his children has not made the stone valuable. He has made himself mad.

Two positions, both strong, both given to men with reasons. The play now runs the world against each.

First Troilus. He is in love with a woman called Cressida, and she is sent to the Greek camp in an exchange of prisoners. One night he creeps into the camp and watches, hidden, as she gives a Greek soldier the sleeve he gave her as a token. His theory is about to be tested on him. This she?. No, this is Diomed's Cressida. If beauty have a soul, this is not she. If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies, this is not she. And then the line the whole play has been building to. This is, and is not, Cressid.¹¹¹ He said a thing is worth whatever it is valued at. He valued her at everything. Now she has changed, and his valuing cannot survive the change, and he does not conclude that she was worth nothing all along. The woman in front of him is Cressida and is not, because the one he priced and the one who exists have come apart. If his theory were true, they could not come apart, because there would be nothing but his price. His own experience tells him otherwise. The price was attached to something, the something has moved, and the price is left hanging in the air. He calls it madness of discourse, the mind arguing against itself. It is his own philosophy, lived, and it has broken him.

Stated as a rule, before moving on. A view that puts the whole worth in the valuer cannot be held by a valuer whose object changes. He can no longer say what he was valuing. The plays do not argue this. They show a man in the position, and he says the sentence that cannot be avoided. This is, and is not.

Now Hector, and here the play is crueller than a fair account might wish. Hector made the better argument. Then, in the same council, having won it, he changes his mind. Despite everything he has argued, he says, he inclines to keep Helen.¹¹² Honour and reputation are at stake, and he has already sent the Greeks a challenge.¹¹³ He abandons his own conclusion for the prize he had just called idolatry. And he dies of it. On the last day of fighting he takes off his armour to rest, and Achilles finds him. I am unarmed, forgo this vantage, Greek. Strike, fellows, strike, this is the man I seek. His body is tied to a horse's tail and dragged across the field.¹¹⁴ Nobody in the play takes up his argument after him. Troilus ends the play vowing revenge and nothing else. The last word goes to a pimp complaining about his diseases.¹¹⁵ The right argument was made, abandoned by the man who made it, and then forgotten by everyone.

The play has already made this case against itself. If the plays rule for Hector, why does Hector lose, and lose ugly, and why does his view die with him?. A verdict that goes against both speakers looks like no verdict at all. The answer is the split verdict the method always finds. The play does not reward views. It prices them. Troilus's view cannot be lived by the man who holds it, and the play shows the moment it fails, in his own words. Hector's view can be lived, and the play shows him living it, right up to the moment he trades it for honour. Honour is the very thing his own argument had called worship of the service over the god. He did not die of his philosophy. He died of abandoning it, and the play lets the difference show. The play's ruling is that the right view is the one you can keep holding while the world changes. Even the man who saw it could not keep holding it. That is a bleak ruling, and it is the ruling.

The same argument is run again in a different key in a comedy, where everything has a price. In The Merchant of Venice a moneylender agrees to lend three thousand ducats to a man who has insulted him for years. He names his terms as a joke. If the money is not repaid on the day, the forfeit will be an equal pound of your fair flesh. It is to be cut off and taken in what part of your body pleaseth me.¹¹⁶ A man's body, written into a contract as a quantity. The whole play lives in the space that sentence opens. Later, on a street, two young Venetians describe how the moneylender behaved when his daughter ran off with a Christian and his money. My daughter, O my ducats, O my daughter. They are mocking him. The line is theirs, not his, and it is a sneer at a Jew by men who have never had to count anything.¹¹⁷ But the sneer names what the play is testing. In this city, everything is on one scale, love, flesh, ducats, and the play asks whether anything can be lifted off it.

Two moments answer. The first is a test of the kind Lear ran on his daughters, except that this one works. A dead father has left his daughter's hand to whichever suitor picks the right box of three, gold, silver or lead. The gold and silver promise. The lead threatens. The man she loves stands before them and thinks aloud. So may the outward shows be least themselves. The world is still deceived with ornament. He chooses the lead, which promises nothing, and it holds her picture.¹¹⁸ The test is passed by the one man who refuses to read the price off the surface. That is Hector's position in a game show costume, and the play lets it win. The second moment is a speech everyone knows, and here the first part's warning about quoted lines applies with full force. In the courtroom, the moneylender demands his pound of flesh, and a young lawyer asks him to be merciful. He asks what compels him. The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. Mercy, she says, cannot be compelled and is owed to nobody.¹¹⁹ It sits outside the contract, the one thing in the play that stays off the scale. That is beautiful, and it is true. Before the scene is over the same speaker uses the letter of the law to take his estate out of his hands. She stands by while he is made to change his religion.¹²⁰ So the speech is a position, given to a person, who then does the opposite, and the play prices her too.

One more voice. The sonnets have a speaker who is not the author, and one of them states Hector's position as a vow. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.¹²¹¹²² That is Troilus in the Greek camp, reversed. Troilus's love altered when it found alteration, and shattered. The sonnet says that was never love. Read beside the play, the vow loses its sweetness and becomes a definition. It is the only account of love that survives what happened to Troilus. It puts the worth in something that does not move when the object does.

Now the ruling. Value is neither in the thing alone nor in the will alone. It is a relation between them that has to be kept up. Troilus put all the worth in his wanting and could not survive her change. Hector put it in both and could have survived, and then sold it for honour. The lead casket is chosen by a man who refuses to let the surface set the price. The same demand that ran through the last two parts is here again in a new form. Othello wanted love proved. Troilus wanted love to be exactly what he priced it at. Both wanted a worth that would sit still, and a worth that sits still is a monument.

The plays hold that worth is made and kept by valuing, but only by a valuing that answers to something in the thing. The man who cannot keep his valuing up has discovered nothing about the thing. He has discovered that he was worshipping his own price. The most valued and most groundless thing in the plays has not yet been tested. Kings believe their crowns are worth something in themselves. The next question is what a crown is actually made of, and what happens to the man who insists on finding out.

Power in the plays is a performance that works only while nobody insists on seeing behind it. There is a second half to that. The plays show that it is a performance, and they show why that truth cannot be used. The man who tears the curtain away does not free anyone. He breaks the thing that was holding the weight, and the weight comes down on everybody, for generations.

Start with a king who believes the opposite. Richard the Second has just landed back in his kingdom. His cousin has raised an army and the country has gone over to him. Richard is not worried, and he explains why. Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king. The breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord. For every soldier his cousin has raised, he says, God has a glorious angel in heavenly pay.¹²³ He believes kingship is a fact about his body, put there by God at his coronation with holy oil, and that no army can touch it. Within the same scene his own army has melted away and he is sitting on the ground. He tells sad stories of the death of kings. For within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king keeps Death his court. Death lets a king strut for a little scene, be feared, kill with looks. Then he comes at the last with a little pin and bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king.¹²⁴ The man who said the oil could not be washed off has, in a few minutes, described the crown as a hollow ring. Death sits inside it. Both speeches are his. He has not learned anything between them. He has swung from one certainty to the other, and the play will now test both.

The test is the deposition, and it is staged with cruel precision. Richard is brought before Parliament and made to hand over the crown. Now mark me how I will undo myself. With mine own tears I wash away my balm. With mine own hands I give away my crown. With mine own tongue deny my sacred state.¹²⁵ The sea could not wash off the oil, he had said. His own tears do it, in public, in a sentence. And then he asks for the mirror, the scene from four parts back. He searches his face for a king as he searched it for a self, with the same result.¹²⁶ It was his cousin who took the crown, and his cousin's soldiers who put him in that hall. But the man who demanded to see what was under it, and said aloud that nothing was, is Richard. The king was the crown, the crown was the ceremony, and once the ceremony is refused there is a face and no king in it.

So far this is the cynic's lesson, and most people expect it to be the whole lesson. Power is a show. The oil is just oil. Strip the robes and there is a frightened man underneath. Before the play is allowed to say more, let that expectation stand, so it can be measured against what actually happens. A bishop stands up in that same Parliament and speaks against the deposition. If you crown him, let me prophesy. The blood of English shall manure the ground, and future ages groan for this foul act. Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny shall here inhabit, and this land be called the field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls. He is arrested on the spot.¹²⁷ And then his prophecy comes true, across three more plays and two generations. The cousin who took the crown cannot hold it without war. His son inherits the war. The country tears itself apart over which ceremony is the real one. That is the answer to the cynic. The ceremony was a fiction, and the fiction was holding real weight. Richard demanded to see what was under the crown and found nothing, and his cousin acted on the finding, and it did not set anyone free. It removed the one thing that had been keeping a whole people from killing each other over who was in charge. A fiction everyone accepts is the floor they all stand on.

The man who took the crown says so himself, in the middle of the night. In the next play he cannot sleep. How many thousand of my poorest subjects are at this hour asleep. The sleep that comes to a ship's boy on the mast in a storm will not come to him in his perfumed chamber. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.¹²⁸ That line is quoted as a complaint about responsibility. In its place it is something sharper. He is the man who proved the crown was a fiction, by taking it, and now he has to wear the fiction knowing what it is. The cynic's knowledge makes the crown heavier, and impossible to sleep under.

Now the fullest statement of the whole problem, and it comes from the cynic's son, who is the most successful king Shakespeare wrote. It is the night before a battle the English expect to lose. Henry the Fifth wraps himself in a borrowed cloak and walks among his soldiers unrecognised. One of them, a plain man, says what a soldier would say to another soldier. If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make. All those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle will join together at the last day. They will cry, we died at such a place. The King, in disguise, argues back.¹²⁹ The King is not bound to answer for how each of his soldiers dies. Every subject's duty is the King's, but every subject's soul is his own. Consider who says it. The doctrine that the office is separate from the man is stated by the man in the office. The King commands the body and not the conscience, he says. He says it in disguise, to a soldier who does not know it is him. Nobody is being fooled here. He is arguing with one of the ruled, as an equal, in the dark, and he wins the point about souls and loses the room anyway. The soldier grants him that much, that a man's soul is his own business. Then they quarrel anyway, about whether the King would let himself be ransomed. They swap gloves as a pledge to fight it out after the battle, like two men in a tavern.¹³⁰

Then, alone, the King says what he has learned from the exchange. And what have kings that privates have not too, save ceremony, save general ceremony?. And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?. What kind of god art thou that sufferest more of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?¹³¹. What are thy rents, what are thy comings in?. O ceremony, show me but thy worth. What is thy soul of adoration?. Art thou aught else but place, degree and form, creating awe and fear in other men?. He calls it an idol. He asks what it is made of and answers, place, degree and form, which is to say, nothing but the performance. This is the sharpest thing anyone in the plays says about power, and it is said by the man who holds the most of it.

And the next morning he uses it. The battle is about to begin, and one of his nobles wishes aloud for ten thousand more men. The King answers with the most famous speech about ceremony ever written, and does not call it that. This day is called the feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day and comes safe home will stand on tiptoe when this day is named.¹³² Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot, but he will remember with advantages what feats he did that day. Then shall our names, familiar in his mouth as household words, be in their flowing cups freshly remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. A name, a date, a brotherhood, a story a man will tell his son. Every element is ceremony, place, degree and form, creating awe in other men. He knows it, because he said so twelve hours earlier in the dark. And it works. The English win. The man who saw through the idol is the man who uses it best. The play treats that as the only way a king can be a king once he knows what a king is, and never as hypocrisy.

The objection should be met by name. This is the prince's handbook, the cynical Italian one that everyone has heard of. Power is theatre, the ruler knows it, the ruled do not, and the wise ruler performs. On this reading the plays are teaching a trick. The trick is played on the audience in the field and the audience in the theatre alike. The plays do not say that, and the night scene is the proof. The cynic's version needs a ruler who knows and a people who do not. Henry argues with a soldier who knows perfectly well that the King is a man with a heavy reckoning coming, and says so to his face. The soldier is inside the ceremony too, and sees it, and fights the next morning anyway. Both of them know. Both of them need it. That is a thing two people hold up together because neither can stand without it, and no trick is being played by one on the other.

Old Lear says the cynic's half of this as plainly as it can be said. Mad, crowned with weeds, he lectures a blind man on how the world goes. There thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog's obeyed in office. Through tattered clothes small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.¹³³ That is all true, and the play means it. But it is said by a man who was obeyed in office for decades and demanded proof that he was loved beneath the office. Now he has neither. He was the dog. He insisted on being loved for himself and not for his robes. There was nothing under the robes that his daughters were obliged to love. The same demand that ran his love test, show me the thing itself, ran Richard to the mirror. It is the same disease, turned on a crown instead of a daughter, and the result is the same.

One more case shows the cost from the other side, the cost of the man who does not know it is a performance. In Measure for Measure a judge named Angelo is famous for his virtue, and he believes his authority is his virtue. A colleague warns him before anything happens. Had time cohered with place, or place with wishing, would you not sometime in your life have erred in this point which now you censure?.¹³⁴ In plain terms, given the chance, would you not have done the same thing you are about to hang a man for. Angelo does not hear it. A young woman comes to plead for her brother's life, and she says to his face what the plays hold about power. But man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he's most assured, his glassy essence.¹³⁵ His glassy essence is what he is made of, which is glass. Like an angry ape he plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as makes the angels weep. Brief authority. Dressed in it. Most ignorant of what he is most assured of. And within the hour Angelo wants her, and knows exactly what he has become. Thieves for their robbery have authority when judges steal themselves.¹³⁶ He diagnoses himself correctly, and then does it anyway. When he propositions her, his defence is his position, and his virtue is never mentioned. Who will believe thee, Isabel?. My unsoiled name, the austereness of my life, my vouch against you, and my place in the state.¹³⁷ The man who thought the office was his goodness discovers, the moment he is tempted, that it was only ever place, degree and form. He reaches for the robes the instant the virtue fails.

So power in the plays is ceremony, place, degree and form, and the plays say so through the mouths of kings. The ceremony is a fiction, and the fiction carries real weight, and when Richard's is broken a country bleeds for two generations. It is not a trick played by rulers on the ruled. Both sides hold it up, and both sides can see it, and it works anyway, as long as neither demands to see the thing itself. The man who demands to see it, Richard with his mirror, Lear with his love test, breaks the thing he wanted proved. And the man who mistakes the fiction for his own virtue, Angelo, finds out what it was the moment he is tested.

What holds a kingdom together is the same act that holds a marriage together, a shared acceptance that nobody can prove and nobody should try to. The demand for proof runs through crowns as it ran through wives and daughters, with the same result. But there is a man in these plays who says all of this is beside the point. Kings, oaths, ceremonies, love, are inventions. Underneath them is nature, and nature is the only law, and nature says the strong take what they can. He is the bastard in King Lear, and whether he is right is the next part.

The plays put the two modern views of nature into combat and rule that neither can be lived. One view says nature is a moral order that punishes the wicked and protects the old. The other says nature is appetite and force, and the strong take what they can. King Lear gives each view to a man, runs them both to the end, and kills the first on stage in its most famous scene. What is left is what human beings add to nature, and the play shows the adding in the one place nobody expects it.

The second view was heard when the method was introduced, in the mouth of the bastard Edmund. Thou, Nature, art my goddess. To thy law my services are bound. By it he takes his brother's inheritance, his father's title, and both of the king's elder daughters.¹³⁸ For four acts it works. The play will come back to him at the moment he least expects.

Now the first view, and its collapse. Lear has given his kingdom to his two elder daughters on the strength of their speeches. They begin to strip him. He had a hundred knights. One daughter says fifty, the other says twenty-five, and then the question, what need one?. His answer is the first great speech about nature in the play. O, reason not the need. Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life is cheap as beast's.¹³⁹ In plain words, if you give a person only what nature requires, food and warmth and nothing more, you have made him an animal. The extra, the hundred knights, the robes, the title, the dignity, is what makes a life human. He is right about that, and he is defending his own furniture with it.

Then he is put out into a storm at night, and the play strips him of everything the speech defended. At the door of a hovel he makes the prayer for the poor naked wretches that was heard three parts ago. One line of it now matters more than the rest. O, I have taken too little care of this. Take physic, pomp. Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, that thou mayest shake the superflux to them, and show the heavens more just.¹⁴⁰ The word has come back, and its owner has changed. In the palace, the superfluous was the thing that made his life more than a beast's, and he was defending his share of it. In the storm, the superflux is the thing that should be shaken out to people who have none. The same man corrects his own speech, in the same play, with the same word, once he is houseless. Nature did not teach him that. Exposure did, and what exposure taught him was not a fact about nature but a duty about surplus, which nature knows nothing about.

The play goes further down. A naked beggar comes out of the hovel, and Lear looks at him and sees the bottom. Is man no more than this?. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool.¹⁴¹ Thou art the thing itself. The beggar is in fact a nobleman's son in disguise, which the audience knows and Lear does not. So the bottom he thinks he has found is itself a performance, and the play has arranged that too. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. And he begins tearing off his own clothes. Off, off, you lendings. This is the state of nature, staged. More than four decades later Hobbes would describe the same condition in a famous sentence.¹⁴² No industry, no culture of the earth, no navigation, no building, no arts, no letters, no society. Continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.¹⁴³ Neither text knows the other, and the likeness is being drawn here. The philosopher's remedy was a contract, everyone giving up their force to one sovereign so that nobody need fear. The play's heath has no contract in it, and its answer, when it comes, is not one. Its answer is a king seeing a beggar and saying, thou art the thing itself, and taking his own clothes off to match. That is acknowledgment rather than politics. What he sees is a costume, and what he lets count is true anyway, that a man can be brought down to this. The letting is the whole of what happens.

Now the cruellest view, and the play gives it to the man with the best reason to hold it. The old nobleman Gloucester has had his eyes put out for helping the king. Led along a road, he says, as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.¹⁴⁴ On this view nature is malicious and bored, and not even indifferent, let alone just. That is the third position, and it is stated by a man who has just paid the price for a kindness. Hold it beside the other two.

Here is where the play makes its ruling. It has to be followed line by line, because the order is the argument. The last scene. Edmund has been beaten in a duel by his brother Edgar, and lies dying. Edgar, the good brother, stands over him and says the pious thing. The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us. Their father's adultery, the dark and vicious place where Edmund was conceived, cost him his eyes. That is the first view, nature as moral order, stated at full strength by the best man in the play. And Edmund, the man who prayed to nature as appetite, agrees. Thou hast spoken right, it is true. The wheel is come full circle, I am here. Grant the objection everything here. The good brother says the gods are just, and the villain says yes. Both sides of the argument endorse cosmic justice. A sceptic who wanted to say the play mocks that view has no footing. Nobody on stage mocks it. It is agreed to, across the moral divide, with the villain's dying breath.

Then the news comes that the two elder daughters are dead, one poisoned by the other, who then killed herself, both over Edmund. And Edmund says the strangest thing in the play. Yet Edmund was beloved. The one the other poisoned for my sake, and after slew herself.¹⁴⁵ The man whose law was appetite discovers, dying, that he was loved, and it turns him. Some good I mean to do, despite of mine own nature. He reveals that he has ordered Cordelia's death and sends a messenger to stop it. Weigh the words. Despite of mine own nature. Nothing in nature turned him. The argument did not turn him. He agreed with the argument and stayed as he was. What turned him was the news that two women had died for him, that he had been loved. Being loved did what his goddess never could, and he says so in the one sentence that names the whole ruling. The good he does is done against his nature, not from it.

And now the line the play has been building towards for five acts. The messenger is too late. Lear walks on with Cordelia dead in his arms. Howl, howl, howl. O, you are men of stones. A man standing nearby asks, is this the promised end?. Another answers, or image of that horror?. The duke says, fall, and cease.¹⁴⁶ He lays her down and searches for breath, a feather, a mist on a glass, and finds none. While he kneels there, the duke who is now in charge turns to the business of the kingdom. He says what a good ruler says at the end of a story. All friends shall taste the wages of their virtue, and all foes the cup of their deservings.¹⁴⁷ That is the first view again, cosmic justice, stated as an administrative fact. He does not finish the line. In the same verse line, mid-breath, he says, O, see, see. And the old man, over the body, says, and my poor fool is hanged. Then he dies.¹⁴⁸ The promise of cosmic justice is interrupted in the middle of the line by the father over the body that refutes it. The play did not argue against the view that the gods are just. It let everyone agree to it, and then put the hanged daughter's father in the middle of the sentence. Nobody on stage has anything to say about justice after that.

Nature as moral order is agreed to by every voice on stage and refuted by the corpse. Nature as appetite is held by Edmund for four acts and abandoned by him in the last minutes, for a reason his goddess cannot supply. Nature as malice is spoken by a blinded man and nobody contradicts him, but the play does not end on it either. What is left is what people add. A king shaking out his surplus to the poor. A dying villain trying to do some good against his own nature because someone loved him. A father carrying his daughter. None of it is natural. None of it is rewarded. It is simply the only thing in the play that is not cheap as beast's.

One sentence about the rest of the plays, before the objection. In the romances, the gods do act. In one of them a god descends on an eagle, in thunder, and every promise he makes is kept.¹⁴⁹ So the plays do not say flatly that heaven never intervenes. The tragedies rule that nature delivers no justice. The romances deliver justice as a miracle, which is the same admission, because a thing that has to arrive by miracle does not arrive by nature.

Everyone feels the same thing here. Edmund's turn is sentimental and changes nothing. Cordelia dies anyway. If the play meant to say that love is what people add to nature, it should have let the love save someone. A ruling that ends with the innocent hanged is not a ruling for anything. The point was never that love saves. The play concedes Cordelia, and the concession is made here in full. She dies, and the messenger was late, and nothing about being loved protects anyone from the rope. The claim is smaller than salvation and harder to dismiss. Nothing else even turns a man. Argument did not turn Edmund, and he agreed with it. Nature did not, and he worshipped it. Only the news that he had been loved moved him one inch, and it moved him toward the good, too late. That is the whole of what the play will grant, and it is the only force on stage that points the right way.

Two more cases confirm the shape, briefly, from the last plays he wrote. In a late comedy, a shepherd's daughter refuses to grow grafted flowers, which she calls nature's bastards, because a man has meddled with their making.¹⁵⁰ A disguised king answers her with the best argument in the scene. The art that mends nature is itself made by nature. We marry a gentler scion to the wildest stock, and the art itself is nature.¹⁵¹ That is exactly right. Then, in the same scene, he forbids his son to marry her because she is low born, and threatens to have her face scratched with briers.¹⁵² The man who argued that grafting noble to base is natural refuses the graft when it is his own son. The right argument, given to the man who will not live by it. The play prices him as it priced Angelo. In The Tempest, a magician exiled on an island has spent years trying to teach the island's one native creature to be human, and gives up. A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick.¹⁵³ Yet the same play shows the creature having learned language from the magician's daughter, and cursing them fluently in it.¹⁵⁴ Nurture stuck, and what it produced was fluency rather than gratitude. And at the end, presenting the creature to the visiting lords, the magician says, this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.¹⁵⁵ He owns him, with the word this account has been leaning on since the storm, and the play makes nothing of it, and moves on.

In the tragedies, then, there is no moral order in nature and no justice from the gods. The play that tests this hardest says so in its most famous scene. It cuts the promise of justice off mid-line with a father over a body. What makes a life more than cheap is added by people, out of surplus and out of being loved, and it is not rewarded. That leaves one thing nature does deliver to everyone without exception, and the question of what the plays say to it. Death.

The plays' answer to death is readiness, and readiness is a harder thing than consolation. It means giving up the demand to own the timing, and refusing to let the ending make the life worthless. It is proved by one man's arc across five acts, and tested against three other answers in a single play. Then it is set beside the classical alternative, which the plays try and reject.

Hamlet's first position on death is fear of the unknown, and he states it in the most famous speech in the language. He is asking why anyone bears a weary life rather than ending it. The answer is the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns. It puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.¹⁵⁷ Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, the line Part 3 counted as his second excuse.¹⁵⁸ This is the demand for certainty, turned on the last question. He will not move until he knows what comes after, and nobody can know that, so he does not move.

Two acts later he is in a graveyard, holding a skull the gravedigger has just identified. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.¹⁵⁹ Then he goes further, deliberately, to the largest names he knows. Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?. Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.¹⁶⁰ Something has changed between the two speeches. In the first, death is an undiscovered country and the fear of it governs everything. In the graveyard, death is a skull in his hand, a fact he can turn over and joke about. He has stopped asking what is on the other side. He is looking at what is on this side, which is bone. The speech is disgusted rather than consoled. But the disgust is at something known, and fear of the unknown has gone out of it.

Then the last position, and it comes in prose, quietly, to a friend, minutes before the end. He has agreed to a fencing match he has reason to distrust. His friend offers to call it off. Not a whit. We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, it is not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is it to leave betimes?. Let be.¹⁶¹

This speech is read two ways, and the difference matters, so the reading used here is stated now. On one reading it is faith in providence. God sees every sparrow, so whatever happens is meant, and the good man submits. On the other reading it is exhaustion, a man who has stopped caring dressing his indifference in religious words. A critic writing a century ago took the second view sharply. He called the speech fatalism rather than faith, because it is not joined to any determination to do what providence wills, only to let things happen.¹⁶² That is the case against, from someone who knew the play as well as anyone. This account reads the speech as neither, and here is why. Listen to what Hamlet actually says he does not know. Since no man of aught he leaves knows. Nobody knows what they are leaving, so there is no such thing as leaving too early. The demand from the first speech was for knowledge of the other side before acting. This speech gives up that demand. It makes no claim to have the knowledge. It says the knowledge is not needed, and never was, and that the readiness to act without it is all there is. That is not faith, because it asserts nothing about what providence intends. And it is not fatalism, because of what he does next.

What he does next is act against the man he came for, for the first time in the play, without an argument. The fencing match is rigged, the point is poisoned, his mother drinks poisoned wine and dies in front of him. The dying man who poisoned the sword tells him who arranged it. The point envenomed too. Then, venom, to thy work. And he kills the king. No soliloquy. No four reasons.¹⁶³ No stopping to ask whether the king's soul is in the right state. The man who could not act while he demanded to know acts the instant he stops demanding. That is the answer to the critic, who said readiness produced no determination to act. He has a reply, so it should be heard too. Hamlet had acted without an argument before, he can say, when he stabbed through the curtain and killed the wrong man. And the king dies only after Hamlet has been told he himself is poisoned and has minutes to live, when there is nothing left to weigh. A man who acts when he has nothing to lose has not been freed, only cornered. The reply to that is the prayer scene. Hamlet stood behind the kneeling king with a sword drawn, with everything to lose and the deed in his hand, and argued himself out of it. By the last scene his odds had not changed, but he had stopped requiring them to be known. The critic read the same scene and saw drift, a man leaving his duty to some other power. This account sees a man who was freed to act by giving up the thing that had stopped him. The disagreement is real, and the play settles it by what happens rather than by saying so. What happens is a dead king.

And then his own death, which needs quoting in full, because it is always misquoted. He is trying to give his friend a message for the man who will rule after him. So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less, which have solicited. Tell him what happened and what led to it, he means, and he is trying to list it. The rest is silence.¹⁶⁴ That last phrase is quoted as a grand line about death. In the play it is the broken tail of an unfinished sentence. He is mid-instruction, and the instruction stops, and he says the rest is silence because he has run out of breath to say the rest. It is a man dying with a task half given, and accepting that the half will have to do, and no summary of mortality at all. That is what readiness looks like from the inside, and it is smaller and truer than the fortune cookie.

Now the same question run three ways in one play, because the plays did not rest on one man's arc. In Measure for Measure a young man called Claudio is in prison, to be executed in the morning. A friar visits him. The friar is the city's duke in disguise, and he knows he can stop the execution and does not say so. He gives Claudio the classical argument for accepting death, complete. Be absolute for death. Either death or life shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life. If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing that none but fools would keep.¹⁶⁵ Life is a breath, servile to every influence of the sky. Thou art death's fool, running from him and toward him at once. Thou hast nor youth nor age, but as it were an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both. It is the philosophers' argument, that life is not worth the fear of losing it, given at full length and with real skill. Claudio thanks him and seems persuaded. Then his sister arrives with the news that the judge will spare him if she sleeps with the judge. And every word of the friar's argument falls off him. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where. To lie in cold obstruction and to rot. This sensible warm motion to become a kneaded clod. The weariest and most loathed worldly life that age, ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death.¹⁶⁶ That is the raw fear, with no counter-argument in it, and the play lets it stand. The friar never comes back to win. The play puts the best argument for accepting death next to the plain terror of it and leaves both on stage. Anyone who thinks the plays side with the argument should notice who made it. A man in disguise, who knew the execution was not going to happen.

The third answer is the one nobody remembers, and it is the funniest thing in the play. There is another prisoner, a murderer called Barnardine, who has been in the jail for nine years, drunk. On the morning of the execution they wake him to behead him. He refuses. I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me, or they shall beat out my brains with billets. I will not consent to die this day, that's certain.¹⁶⁷ The disguised duke tries to give him spiritual counsel. Not a word. If you have anything to say to me, come to my ward, for thence will not I today. And he goes back to his cell. And it works. The duke looks at him and says, a creature unprepared, unmeet for death, and to transport him in the mind he is were damnable. He is spared, and in the last scene he is pardoned outright. He says nothing in reply.¹⁶⁸ The man who was talked into readiness had a worse morning than the man who would not be talked to at all. The play does not endorse Barnardine. But it lets him live, which is more than it does for its philosophers.

So three answers. The argument that life is not worth the fear. The fear that no argument touches. And the refusal that is not an answer at all. The play does not pick one, and that is to its credit. But it does show which one the plays as a whole come back to, and it is none of these. It is a fourth thing, and King Lear says it in one short exchange.

The blind old man Gloucester has been led by his disguised son to a place of shelter. The son returns with news that the battle is lost. Gloucester will not move. No further, sir. A man may rot even here. The son answers. What, in ill thoughts again?. Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all. Come on. And Gloucester says, and that's true too.¹⁶⁹ That is the whole doctrine and the whole acceptance in one exchange, and the acceptance is the more remarkable half. Nobody proves anything. A blind man who has already tried to kill himself is told two things. He did not choose his birth, and he does not get to choose his death. He says yes. No argument was needed and none was asked for, and he gets up and goes on. One scene later the king's daughter is hanged, so the doctrine earns no reward. It is stated and agreed to, in the plainest words in the play, and then the play goes on to the worst thing it contains.

Here is the classical alternative, tested and failed, so it is clear why the plays did not settle for it. The Roman philosophers taught that a wise man is indifferent to death, his own and others', because it is nothing to him. Readiness can sound like that teaching, and the kinship is real, so the difference has to be shown and not asserted. Brutus, in Julius Caesar, holds the Roman view and says so twice, and then contradicts it inside a single speech. He is told his wife has killed herself by swallowing fire. With meditating that she must die once, he says, I have the patience to endure it now, and he calls for a bowl of wine.¹⁷⁰ Before the last battle he is asked what he will do if they lose. He condemns the philosopher who killed himself as cowardly and vile. He will arm himself with patience, he says, to stay the providence of some high powers that govern us below.¹⁷¹ That is Hamlet's sparrow, in a Roman mouth. Four lines later his friend asks whether he is content to be led in triumph through the streets of Rome. No, Cassius, no. He will not go bound to Rome. He has contradicted the doctrine inside a single speech, and it is his friend who catches him, not the audience. And after the defeat he asks his servant to hold his sword and turn away his face, and runs on it.¹⁷² A Roman would call that the philosopher's exit, and it was. But it was the very exit Brutus had called cowardly and vile, by his own philosophy's rule, four scenes earlier. The Stoic held the position and could not live it. The play never mocks him. It shows the position and the man coming apart under pressure, as Troilus came apart from his theory of value. A doctrine of indifference to death did not survive one battle. Hamlet's readiness is a different thing, because Hamlet is anything but indifferent, and that is the whole difference. He tells his friend how ill all is about his heart. He simply stops requiring to know, and acts.

One more voice, because it is the most quoted and the most misplaced. In The Tempest the magician breaks off a masque he has been staging for his daughter. He has remembered a plot against his life, and he is agitated. Our revels now are ended. The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.¹⁷³ That is read as serene. In the play it is spoken by a man shaking with anger, who has just been reminded that someone wants him dead. It is readiness spoken under pressure, not from a hammock. Life rounded with a sleep is what a man says when he has been jolted into remembering that he does not own the timing.

So the first position is fear of the unknown, and it paralyses, because it demands knowledge of the other side before acting. The classical cure, indifference, is tested in Brutus and fails in one battle. The fullest argument for accepting death is given by a man who knows the death will not happen. It falls off the condemned man the moment hope appears. The plays' own answer is readiness, which means giving up the demand to know or to own the timing, and acting in the hour you have. And readiness is not rewarded. Hamlet dies within the hour and Cordelia is hanged one scene after the ripeness speech. It changes what a person does with the hour, and nothing else.

Readiness is acknowledgment turned toward your own death. Othello could not accept that a wife's love cannot be proved, and Hamlet in his first speech could not accept that death cannot be known. The cure was the same in both cases. Stop demanding the proof, and let what you already know count. What Hamlet already knew was that he was a man who would die, and once he let that count he became able to act.

So the plays meet death with readiness, not consolation, and readiness means acting without the certainty the first speech demanded. That leaves the hardest case of acceptance without proof. A death can be accepted because it comes to everyone. A wrong done to you comes from one person, who chose it. Whether that can be accepted too, and what it costs, is the last experiment.

The late plays test forgiveness and find that it is the same act as acknowledgment. To forgive, in these plays, is to give up the demand to be proven right. In the hardest cases it is given up before the other person has repented, without proof that they ever will. That is the demand for ocular proof, reversed. The plays show what it costs, because it costs a great deal, and they count every item.

The fullest case is a magician on an island. Twelve years earlier, Prospero was Duke of Milan. His brother Antonio took the dukedom with the help of a neighbouring king, and put Prospero and his small daughter to sea in a rotten boat. Now the same men have been shipwrecked on his island by his magic, and he holds every one of them in his power. He can do anything he likes. His spirit servant Ariel reports on the state of his enemies, who have been driven half mad and locked in a grove. Your charm so strongly works them that if you now beheld them, your affections would become tender.¹⁷⁴ Prospero asks, dost thou think so, spirit?. Mine would, sir, were I human. And mine shall. Consider who is speaking. The prompt to mercy comes from a creature of air who says outright that he would feel it if he were human. The human is shamed into feeling by the thing that cannot feel. Prospero says it himself. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling of their afflictions?. And shall not myself, one of their kind, be kindlier moved than thou art?. Then the rule. Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, yet with my nobler reason against my fury do I take part. The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.

Then he says one more thing, and the part turns on it. They being penitent, the sole drift of my purpose doth extend not a frown further. He puts a condition on the mercy, that if they repent he will not so much as frown. He is expecting repentance and making the forgiveness answer to it. And he is wrong about the condition. When the court party are released and brought before him, the king who helped steal his dukedom does repent, at length. His brother does not. Antonio says nothing. His companion in the plot mutters, aside, the devil speaks in him. And Prospero turns to his brother and forgives him anyway. For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother would even infect my mouth, I do forgive thy rankest fault, all of them. And require my dukedom of thee.¹⁷⁵ He cannot say the word brother without disgust. He forgives every fault in one breath, and demands his title back in the next. And Antonio does not answer.

Here the easy version is false, and the true one is better. It is often said that Antonio never speaks again. He does, once. Later in the scene, when the island's native creature is dragged in with two drunken sailors, Antonio's friend asks whether money would buy such things. Antonio answers. Very like. One of them is a plain fish, and no doubt marketable.¹⁷⁶ That is his only line after being forgiven. Given the chance to answer forgiveness, he prices a slave. That is worse than silence, and more telling. The man who was forgiven without repenting spends his one remaining line on the resale value of another human being. So it should be said as a reading of what is on the page, and it is a reading. Antonio never acknowledges the forgiveness, never repents, and never speaks to his brother again. The forgiveness lands on a man who gives no sign of wanting it, and it stands.

That is the whole structure. Prospero said his mercy depended on their being penitent. The act outran the reason he gave for it. He forgave a man who was not penitent and would not become so, and the play lets him. Forgiveness offered on condition of repentance is a transaction, like the love test or the ocular proof. Show me you are sorry, and I will release you. What Prospero actually does, when the moment comes, is release a man who shows him nothing. That is Othello reversed. Prospero says he wants to see, is shown nothing, and forgives anyway. One more thing should be said about it, because a hostile reader will. In the same breath as the pardon, Prospero tells the two plotters that he could expose them to the king as traitors and chooses not to.¹⁷⁷ The forgiveness comes with a threat folded inside it. It is not pure, and the play does not pretend it is. It is a forgiveness given by a man who knows exactly what he is forgiving and could still take revenge, and does not. He accepts without proof, at the risk of being wrong. The play makes sure the audience knows he may well be wrong, because Antonio's last line is about selling a fish.

Now the same shape in the other late plays, quickly, because the pattern is the argument. Cymbeline is the case a hostile reader will raise, because it looks like the worst counter-example, so it goes first. A husband bets a stranger that his wife cannot be seduced. The stranger comes back with a bracelet stolen from her arm and a description of a mole under her breast. The husband converts on the spot to certainty, and orders her killed. It is Othello again, with a bracelet for a handkerchief. But then the play does something none of the tragedies do. Alone, holding a bloody cloth he believes is proof that the murder was carried out, still certain she was guilty, he forgives her. You married ones, if each of you should take this course, how many must murder wives much better than themselves for wrying but a little.¹⁷⁸ He gives up the demand while he still believes the worst, before any proof of her innocence arrives. He has nothing to gain and nothing left to save. That is the statue scene performed by the demander himself. Only afterwards does the play restore her, and at the very end the slanderer confesses and kneels. The husband says, kneel not to me. The power that I have on you is to spare you, the malice towards you to forgive you. Live, and deal with others better.¹⁷⁹ The king, watching, says, pardon's the word to all.¹⁸⁰ That second forgiveness comes after repentance and after everything has been given back, so it is the gentler case. The one in the cell, over the bloody cloth, is the one that counts. In Measure for Measure, the judge who propositioned the young woman and, as she believes, executed her brother anyway is exposed and condemned to death. He has confessed to the court and asked for death rather than mercy, and he has said nothing to her.¹⁸¹ His wife begs the young woman to kneel with her and plead for his life. She does not know her brother is alive. The duke has deliberately kept that from her. And she kneels. Most bounteous sir, look, if it please you, on this man condemned as if my brother lived. Let him not die. She kneels for the man she believes killed her brother, and argues for his life like a lawyer, that his intent was never carried out.¹⁸² Nobody made her. Nothing has been restored to her. That is forgiveness with nothing under it but the choice to forgive. So in two of the three plays a person is forgiven who has offered nothing at all, Prospero's brother and the husband's wife. The part rests on those two. The others show the same act with more under it. And in the same scene the drunk murderer from the last part, the one who refused to die, is pardoned outright. He says nothing.¹⁸³ Two pardoned men in two plays, and neither one answers. One silent pardoned man is a reading of an absence. Two, Antonio and the drunk, is a pattern. The pattern says the plays did not need the forgiven man to speak for the forgiveness to count.

Anyone who has read the tragedies will want to say this. This is cheap grace. The romances are fairy tales that take back everything the tragedies taught. Lear's daughter is hanged, and then in a later play a jealous king gets his wife back from a statue. Othello kills his wife, and then a magician forgives everyone and sails home. If the plays believed what they showed in the tragedies, they could not have written the endings of the romances. The answer is that the romances count the cost, on stage, item by item, and the cost is not small. Take the statue that came to life. The wife comes back. The son does not. He died of fear for his mother in the third act, and he is never restored, and in the last scene nobody says his name.¹⁸⁴ But he is not forgotten either, and the way he is remembered is the play counting the cost. In the scene before the statue, the same woman who will unveil it looks at a visiting prince. Had our prince, jewel of children, seen this hour, she says, he had paired well with this lord. And the king answers, he dies to me again when talked of.¹⁸⁵ Sixteen years of grief, and one dead child who does not come back, and a father who cannot hear his name. The woman who arranged the whole reunion, and hid the wife for sixteen years, says what it has cost her. Her own husband was killed carrying out the king's orders. I, an old turtle, will wing me to some withered bough, and there my mate, that's never to be found again, lament till I am lost.¹⁸⁶ A turtle here is a turtledove, the bird that mates once. One line later the king hands her a new husband, and the play means that kindly. It is still a man given to a woman who has just said her mate can never be found again.¹⁸⁷ The remedy is arranged, and the loss it answers was real.

And the magician. He forgives everyone, gets his dukedom back, and marries his daughter to a prince. His last speech in the play proper says what he will do next. He will retire to Milan, where every third thought shall be my grave.¹⁸⁸ That is the sentence of a man who has forgiven at real cost and knows what he has left. His brother is unrepentant, his daughter is leaving, he has given up his magic, and one thought in three is about dying. The romances are tragedies with one different act at one point, and nothing in them undoes the tragedies. Everything the tragedy would have cost is still paid, except the one thing the act saves.

These endings are often read another way, and the other reading has real support in the text. The endings can be read as Christian grace, and the plays use the language. In the epilogue to The Tempest the magician, alone, says that his ending is despair unless he be relieved by prayer. Prayer pierces so that it assaults mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.¹⁸⁹ That is the vocabulary of prayer and pardon, and it would be dishonest to say it is absent. This account does not rest on it, for one reason. In every case above, the act of forgiving is done by a human being. In two of the plays the gods are asked to bless it afterwards and do not appear. In the third a god does descend, and the forgiving is still done by the man. A courtier asks the gods to look down on the young couple, and the king says amen, and nothing looks down.¹⁹⁰ The plays let their people credit heaven. They give the act to people.

Forgiveness in the late plays is acknowledgment, the same act that was named in the storm and at the statue. It means letting what you know about a person count, that he is your brother, that he is one of your kind. It is offered before repentance and without proof of it, and he is never asked to prove he deserves it. Prospero states a condition and then forgives a man who never meets it. The young woman kneels for the man she thinks killed her brother. It is not safe. Antonio may be plotting again tomorrow, and his last line suggests he has not changed. And it is paid for in full, in dead children and lonely women and a duke thinking about his grave. The plays do not pretend otherwise. They show the bill, and then they show the man paying it and forgiving anyway, and they call that the rarer action.

The hardest case of acceptance without proof is forgiving a wrong that one person chose. The late plays run it and pass it, at a cost they count out loud. The forgiven man does not have to speak. The gods do not have to appear. The act is human, and it is the same act that the tragedies showed men refusing to perform. Every experiment has now been run. What they add up to, and what a person who has heard them is supposed to do tomorrow, is all that is left.

There is one philosophy in the plays, and it can now be said whole, because every part of it has been run. People are not ruined by what they do not know. They are ruined by refusing to accept what they already know, and the plays show that refusal taking the same shape whatever it is aimed at. A self, a wife, a daughter, a crown, the gods, death, a brother. In each case a man demands that the thing be proved before he will accept it, and the demand destroys the thing. In each case the cure shown is acceptance without proof. That is the claim the whole argument was built to earn, and here is its skeleton.

One. Shakespeare holds no doctrine, and the famous lines belong to characters the plays are pricing. The verdicts live in the plots, in who dies and what happens next, which no reader can bend. Two. There is no inner self beneath the roles. A person is what they do and how they are seen. The men who search their faces for something more find a mirror and a blank. Three. Another person's love is not a fact that evidence can settle. The men who demanded proof of it got a handkerchief, a spider in a cup, and a daughter's honest nothing, and killed what they wanted proved. Four. The modern demand for certainty, one immovable point and everything else treated as false, turns a person into stone when it is aimed at a person. The plays' alternative is acknowledgment, letting what you already know count. Five. Worth is kept up by valuing, but only by a valuing that answers to something in the thing. The man who prices by his own wanting cannot survive the thing changing. Six. Power is ceremony, place, degree and form, and the fiction carries real weight. The man who tears it down to see behind it breaks the floor. Seven. Nature gives no moral order and no justice. The play that tests this hardest puts the hanged daughter's father in the middle of the line promising justice. What makes a life more than cheap is added by people, and it is not rewarded. Eight. Death is met by readiness, which is giving up the demand to know or to own the timing. Readiness frees a man to act in the hour he has. Nine. Forgiveness is acknowledgment aimed at a wrong, offered before repentance and without proof of it, at a cost the plays count aloud.

Nine steps, and one shape under all of them. The demand for proof. Richard, Othello, Lear, Leontes, Hamlet in his first speech, Prospero with his condition. The same man, in six bodies, making the same demand. In the tragedies where it is made, it wins, and the people it was aimed at die. In the late plays a man gives it up and someone lives. Not every tragedy is built on it. Macbeth, and Romeo, and Antony die of other things, and some of them die of trusting. The claim is about what happens when the demand is made, and about that the plays never once vary.

Here is what those plays say to a person who has heard all this and has to go to work tomorrow. It should be said plainly, because the plays are plain about it. Most people have run Lear's love test. Not with a kingdom, but with a question that has the same shape. Prove that you love me. Show me in a way I cannot doubt. And when the honest answer comes back, which is always a bond, no more nor less, it is never enough.¹⁹¹ What was wanted was an unlimited measurement, and there is no such thing. The plays say the question is broken, not the answer. Most people have demanded ocular proof of someone. Not of a wife's fidelity, perhaps, but of a friend's loyalty, a colleague's honesty, a parent's regard. And having demanded it, they have found that the demand itself changed the thing. A loyalty asked to prove itself is already a different loyalty. The plays say that is the mechanism, and never bad luck. Most people have searched for their true self, the one beneath the job and the family and the face in the mirror. The plays say the search ends at a broken mirror, and that this is not a loss, and Part 3 said why. Nobody is being cheated by that. And most people are waiting for an apology before they forgive. The plays' hardest case is a duke who waited for one, said his mercy depended on it, did not get it, and forgave anyway. His brother's only remaining words were about selling a fish. The plays do not say the brother deserved it. They say the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance. The duke went home to think about his grave one thought in three, and this was still the better ending.

A thoughtful person will raise one last objection at this point. Why go to the plays for any of this?. Philosophers have said it in order. There are books on the self, on other minds, on value, on the state, on death, on forgiveness. They argue their claims step by step instead of hiding them in plots. If the philosophy is real, read the philosophers. If it is only in the plays, it is not philosophy, it is a mood. The answer is that the plays do one thing a treatise cannot, and it is the thing that matters most for these particular claims. A treatise can tell you that the demand for certainty about another person is incoherent. It cannot show you what that costs when a man lives it, in the hour, with the person in front of him. Othello is a demonstration of what happens to a man who requires certainty about love anyway, and no argument that it is impossible. The demonstration includes the sentence where his reasoning turns. It includes the object he accepts instead, and the way he wants her to look when she is dead. No argument delivers that, and the claims in question are claims about what it is like to live a certain way. For claims of that kind, the case is the proof. That is why the method matters and not just the results. The plays do not illustrate a philosophy. They are the form the philosophy has to take. Its subject is what a demand does to a life, and only a life can show that.

Then the limit, conceded in full, because claiming more would be doing the thing the plays warn against. There is no politics of justice in the plays. They show that the fiction of the crown is load-bearing and that tearing it down costs a civil war. They do not say what a just order would look like or how to build one. In the tragedies no god acts, and in the late plays the gods are thanked afterwards for what people did. There is no system. Nothing here tells you what to value, whom to trust, how to rule, or how to die. The plays show the price, and they show one act that avoids paying it. They leave the choice where it was, with the person watching. That is smaller than a philosophy of life. It is also, for the specific claims it makes, harder to argue with than any philosophy of life. The evidence is a body on the floor, and it is there in every reading.

The plays leave three things standing at the end, and they should be left standing here. Cordelia is dead. Nothing about the honesty of her nothing saved her. The play knew it, and put her father over her body in the middle of the sentence that promised justice, so nobody could look away.¹⁹² Antonio is unrepentant.¹⁹³ Forgiven without condition, he spent his last line pricing a slave, and the man who forgave him went home to think about his grave. And the demand is still available. Anyone can run the love test tomorrow. Anyone can ask for the ocular proof. Anyone can go looking in the mirror for the king. The plays cannot stop that. They can only show, four hundred years in advance, what the face in the glass will say when it is asked. And what will be carried in, and by whom, when the asking is done.