The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  “Mathematical quantities”? “x and y”? “A problem in mechanics”? If these aren’t the hallmarks of a scientific thinker, I don’t know what is; all that is missing is the white lab coat and black-rimmed glasses.*

  Stephen Greenblatt, when we spoke in his Harvard office, focused on Edmond’s relationship to nature—and the fact that Edmond sees no reason to look beyond nature: “I think of Edmond … as articulating what we could call a ‘naturalistic’ position: that the world is what it is by its nature; that people are what they are by their nature, not by astrological signs, not by divine impulsion, but because of how they are put together. Edmond has a very strong version of this naturalism. He thinks it is ‘biological’—that’s not the term that he uses, but that’s effectively what he’s saying.”

  Modern biology, of course, was not even in its infancy; modern science—what the “new philosophy” would evolve into—was only just being imagined by the likes of Bacon and Galileo. (Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning, as we’ve noted, dates from the same year—give or take a few months—as King Lear.) Even so, as Jonathan Bate writes, “Edmond is the embodiment of the ‘new man’ who emerged in tandem with the ‘new philosophy.’” A new way of thinking was just coming into being, but Edmond was already there as its first ambassador.

  And Edmond is not alone in displaying this urge to scrutinize, dissect, and quantify. We have already seen how Hotspur, like Edmond, dismisses astrology as superstition (Chapter 10); but the two men also share a no-nonsense, analytical approach to their problems. In Henry IV, Part 1—in the same scene as the astrological dispute, in fact—we find Hotspur discussing with Glendower and Mortimer how their newly won lands ought to be divided. Glendower produces a map, and shows the proposed threefold division: “The Archdeacon hath divided it / Into three limits very equally” (3.1.69–70). The Welsh lord describes who gets which parcel of land, and is about to turn to other matters—when Hotspur jumps in. “Methinks my moiety [share], north from Burton here, / In quantity equals not one of yours. / See how this river comes me cranking in, / And cuts me off from the best of all my land.…” But, without skipping a beat, he proposes a solution: “I’ll have the current in this place dammed up, / And here the smug and silver Trent shall run / In a new channel, fair and evenly” (lines 93–100). If Shakespeare’s skeptical villains could be scientists, they could perhaps also be engineers.

  * * *

  I’m not sure why it is Shakespeare’s villains, rather than his heroes, that display such a “scientific” orientation. Of course, we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that Shakespeare would put only statements that he agreed with into the mouths of his heroes, and only those that he disagreed with into the mouths of his villains. On the other hand, Edmond and Hotspur are not entirely unlikable: We may despise their actions, yet admire the sharpness of their minds. As Harold Bloom notes, we may be forgiven for finding Edmond “dangerously attractive.”

  Lear himself toys with philosophical questions. In act 3 we find the king and his companions enduring the ravages of a storm on the open heath. Gloucester and Kent implore the king to seek shelter from the wind and rain. But Lear has more pressing concerns: “First let me talk with this philosopher,” Lear says, turning to “Poor Tom” (actually Edgar in disguise). He asks, “What is the cause of thunder?” (3.4.138–39). Of course, Lear may be quite mad by this point—but he made similar inquiries even when he was in full possession of his wits. In act 1 he engages with his Fool in a similar vein:

  FOOL

  The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.

  LEAR

  Because they are not eight.

  FOOL

  Yes, indeed, thou wouldst make a good fool.

  (1.5.28–29)

  The Fool, it seems, has a knack for such riddles; a few lines earlier he asks, “Canst tell how an oyster make his shell?” (1.5.21). Lear doesn’t know the answer—but the key here seems to be in the questions themselves. The stars, thunder, and oysters are all supposed to be God’s handiwork; to seek physical explanations is to challenge not only the established faith, but faith itself. As William Elton writes in King Lear and the Gods (1968), “Lear’s resort to natural, rather than divine, causation is a measure of his developing scepticism.… This appeal to second causes rather than to first, to nature rather than to God, was a mark of the new materialist doubt.” He even seeks a materialist explanation for his daughter’s behavior: Knowing that his once-beloved middle child has turned against him, he ponders a reductionist explanation: “Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart,” he demands. “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (3.6.33–34).

  The betrayal by Regan was already fait accompli by this point. In act 2, Lear had implored her to be the sort of daughter who would care for him in his old age—“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old … on my knees I beg / That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment [clothing], bed, and food.” But to no avail; Regan calls his pathetic request “unsightly” (2.4.146–48). In the New Cambridge edition, Jay Halio remarks, “Lear aptly summarizes Gonerill’s and Regan’s Darwinian outlook, in which survival of the fittest rules and the elderly are superfluous.” We glimpse something of this attitude in Edgar, too. Edgar is just as skeptical as his brother, though, unlike Edmond, he tends toward compassion rather than manipulative self-advancement. Even so, as David Bevington notes, Edgar “is like his brother Edmond in his matter-of-fact understanding of nature. He recognizes that competition for survival is a fact of existence.” Atomism, atheism, reductionism, Darwinism: King Lear is a believer’s worst nightmare. It is Shakespeare’s darkest play. It may also be his greatest.

  14. “As flies to wanton boys…”

  THE DISAPPEARING GODS

  Hamlet versus King Lear: The question of which is the greater achievement is an age-old debate, and as with any vexing contest—Mac vs. PC, Coke vs. Pepsi, Betty vs. Veronica—passions run high. Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, however, the tide seems to have turned in Lear’s favor. A. C. Bradley, writing in 1909, describes Shakespeare’s Lear as “the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully his multitudinous powers”; if we were to lose all of the plays except for one, he argues, Lear would be the one to salvage. In fact, there is an entire book on the question of which is the greater of the two plays—R. A. Foakes’s aptly titled Hamlet versus Lear (1993). The author suspects “that for the immediate future King Lear will continue to be regarded as the central achievement of Shakespeare, if only because it speaks to us more largely than the other tragedies to the anxieties and problems of the modern world.”

  Anxieties indeed. It is King Lear, not Hamlet, that somehow reflects the malaise that has loomed over the planet since the horrors of the World Wars. Trench warfare, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, environmental destruction, terrorism—all have left their mark on the psyche of the twenty-first century, and all contribute to a kind of helplessness of the sort that hangs over Lear. The play was likely written in 1605, and was probably staged for the first time that year, although the first documented performance is from Christmas 1606, when it was performed at court in front of King James.

  King Lear is surely the bleakest of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s not just that everybody dies—Hamlet had already been there and done that; and Titus Andronicus tops Lear for sheer blood and guts—but in Lear, the collateral damage is incalculably higher. It seems as though justice and morality and meaning are poised to perish along with the main characters. By the time Lear comes on stage with Cordelia’s lifeless body, the audience must believe they’ve hit rock-bottom. Samuel Johnson couldn’t bear the play’s ending, saying it violated our “natural ideas of justice.” John Dover Wilson writes that in Lear “horror is piled upon horror and pity on pity,” making it “the greatest monument of human misery and despair in the literature of the world.” Throughout the play, observes Thomas McAlindon, Shakespeare “has been asking how much misery life c
an inflict on human beings, and how much they can endure. Now he is wondering how far tragedy can go, and how much an audience can take.” Where other dramatists paused or turned back, the author of King Lear pushed on. Shakespeare, notes McAlindon, “resolutely brings us to the edge of the abyss and beyond.” Perhaps the playwright pushed too far: In 1681, Nahum Tate came up with an alternate version of the play—a softened rewrite in which Cordelia survives. This was the preferred version for the next 150 years, until the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Shakespeare’s version again seemed palatable.*

  BELIEF IN A JUST WORLD

  Human beings either need or crave a handful of essentials—air, food, water, sex. But we yearn for justice, too. Seeing a person wrongly made to suffer fills us with anger; hearing that someone is getting away with wrongdoing fills us with outrage. Miscarriages of justice leave us steaming mad. Experiments have shown that even very young children have a sense of justice: They get cranky when a misbehaving puppet is rewarded rather than punished, and, if the child is put in charge of handing out rewards, she’ll reward a “good” puppet rather than a “bad” puppet. Roughly put: We’re hard-wired to want good deeds to be rewarded, and to see bad deeds punished. By the time we reach adulthood, the desire for justice is an integral part of who we are.

  In fact, we desire justice so much that it shapes our view of the world. Sometimes we end up perceiving justice even when it isn’t there. We read it into nature, imagining that the universe itself has some kind of moral aspect. Psychologists believe there’s a cognitive process at work in our brains that often causes us to imagine that the world itself is inherently just—that people “get what they deserve.” Our language is filled with everyday expressions that reflect this desire to imagine that such “cosmic justice” has indeed been meted out: “He got his just deserts”; “What goes around comes around”; even “karma.” Psychologists have a name for this way of seeing things: It’s called the “just-world theory,” or sometimes “belief in a just world” (BJW). Social psychology has produced a vast literature on the subject of just-world beliefs over the last few decades, beginning with the seminal work of Melvin Lerner in the 1960s. The idea, as one psychologist puts it, is that “good things tend to happen to good people and bad things to bad people despite the fact that this is patently not the case.” Exactly why we evolved this way of thinking remains a subject of investigation, but psychologists suspect that, like many other “cognitive biases” that have been identified over the years, it confers a survival advantage. Our best guess is that it reinforces the idea that we’re in control of our lives; that our actions, and those of others, have predictable consequences. As a recent review article puts it, “the BJW seems to provide psychological buffers against the harsh realities of the world as well as personal control over one’s own destiny.”

  Unfortunately, bad things very often do happen to good people. The “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that Prince Hamlet spoke of rarely discriminate in their choice of targets. Lerner cautioned that belief in a just world is an “invention”; his book on the subject was titled The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion (1980). But its effects are very real, and often quite repugnant, including a tendency to blame those who are suffering, or who have been victimized, for their fate. This can apply to individuals (e.g., blaming a rape victim because of the way she dressed); to groups (e.g., the poor must be lazy); and even to natural phenomena (e.g., arguing, as Pat Robertson did, that Hurricane Katrina was divine punishment for America’s tolerance for abortion). Note that the first two cases require a human instigator, while the third is “an act of God.” In every case, however, innocent people suffer; and of course innocent people shouldn’t suffer in a just world. And therefore some of us will bend over backward to find a reason, any reason, why the victims of misfortune deserve their fate—and why those who have prospered deserve their good fortune. Belief in a just world has another negative consequence: It can make us doubt scientific evidence. A study by psychologists at the University of California–Berkeley, for example, has shown that some people resist the idea of anthropogenic climate change, even in the face of substantial and growing evidence, because it conflicts with their notion of a just world. As Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer put it, acknowledging global warming “threatens deeply held beliefs that the world is just, orderly, and stable.”

  * * *

  Shakespeare never got around to teaching psychology at Berkeley—but it would seem that he had some sense of these ideas four centuries ago. At the very least, he recognized that the idea of an inherently just world stretches credulity. He either knew, or suspected, that the universe does not have a moral aspect; that things just happen. Sometimes, as disturbing as it may be to witness, good things happen to bad people, and, even worse, bad things happen to good people.

  Nowhere is the idea of cosmic justice explored more thoroughly than in King Lear. The word “nature” is used more often in Lear than in any of the other dramas, and the play itself can be seen, as David Bevington asserts, as “a battleground over which rival concepts of nature are being fought.” As Thomas McAlindon puts it, the play is an investigation of “the nature of nature.” It asks what sort of universe we inhabit. The choice is between one that is “essentially moral, dictating altruism, community, limit, and reason” versus a newer view in which “nature is an amoral system which encourages egoism and the unscrupulous use of force and cunning to achieve one’s desires.” And the answer is not comforting. Samuel Johnson asked if Lear was “a play in which the wicked prosper,” and it certainly looks that way. The wicked often go unpunished, and the good reap few rewards. No one who has seen the play will forget the blinding of Gloucester, surely one of the most cruel (even sickening) scenes in Renaissance drama. But note what one of the servants says upon witnessing the horror inflicted by Cornwall on his victim: “I’ll never care what wickedness I do / If this man come to good” (3.7.98–99).* The servants, as Bevington notes, “pose disturbing questions about the threat of universal disorder that must surely result if crimes are unpunished by the gods.” The gods similarly fail to punish Iago, in Othello, so the Venetian authorities have to make up for the gap in cosmic justice: “If there be any cunning cruelty / That can torment him much and hold him long, / It shall be his” (5.2.332–4). This sounds more like vengeance than justice, but it is needed, Stephen Greenblatt writes, as “a gesture, however inadequate, toward repairing the damaged moral order.” The gods seem similarly uninterested in the protagonist in Macbeth, but at least in that play the title character meets his match, and we have the satisfaction of seeing Macduff come on stage carrying Macbeth’s decapitated head. But in Lear, the gods, if they exist at all, seem to be looking the other way. In Shakespeare’s time, churchmen often condemned the theater as immoral, but Lear presents something far worse than immorality. It suggests a universe that is neither just nor unjust, but rather one in which justice, unless we take steps to establish it ourselves, is simply absent. We are confronted with a universe that is terrifyingly amoral.

  Edmond, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, is one of Shakespeare’s great villains. What is alarming about his role in Lear is that he prospers: He is resolutely evil—he is more than willing to harm others to achieve his own selfish goals—and he gets away with it. Bevington writes:

  What is truly frightening about King Lear is that the battle over “nature” seems to run in Edmond’s favor to such an extraordinary degree and for so long a time. His creed of self-reliance gives him, as he readily perceives, a tactical advantage over those who credulously submit to the moral restrictions of the social order. Holding the view that moral codes are simply part of the mythology by which the power structure enforces its grip on society, Edmond sees no reason not to lie, cheat, or otherwise overwhelm those who stand between him and the goals of his limitless ambition. Confident that there are no gods to reward or punish, and no afterlife in which to suffer eternal pain, Edmond proceeds w
ith relentless energy and tactical brilliance.

  Edmond is, along with Aaron, Iago, and Richard III, one of a set of characters that provide Shakespeare with “the stage panache of the unapologetic villain,” as Jonathan Bate puts it. But Edmond is more than a brilliant, calculating, manipulative villain. He is also a skeptic. We have already seen (in Chapter 10) his refusal to buy into astrology, rejecting the superstitions embraced by his father, but he is also—as Bevington suggests in the above passage—perfectly willing to reject the notion of life after death, and, indeed, to reject the gods themselves.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF ATHEISM

  Just as “science,” in the sense we use the word today, didn’t quite exist in Shakespeare’s day, atheism, too, was absent in its modern, Dawkins-like form. There had been millennia of debate on the extent of the involvement of God (or the gods) in human affairs—but the idea of the complete nonexistence of God is, as Gavin Hyman writes in A Short History of Atheism (2010), “an intrinsically modern disposition”; a way of seeing things whose birth was “roughly contemporaneous with the birth of modernity itself.”

  The word “atheism” begins to crop up in English writing in the sixteenth century, almost always as a put-down; the term was used as derogatory label, bestowed on anyone imagined to hold heretical views of one kind or another. Even so, the seeds of unbelief had been planted, and Hyman points to the years from 1540 to 1630 as a period in which “the notion of a worldview that was entirely outside a theistic framework was … gradually becoming conceivable.” As it happens, Shakespeare’s life falls wholly within this transitional period; and, just as his works hint at the beginnings of science, so, too, do they hint at the possibility of unbelief.

  Once can easily perceive the danger that irreligion presented to the established faith; and, given the very real connections between religion and politics, it is hardly surprising that Parliament eventually passed laws against atheism. The first of these was enacted in 1667, calling for anyone “who denies or derides the essence, persons, or attributes of God the Father, Son or Holy Ghost given in the Scriptures…” to be jailed (at least until the payment of a fifty shilling fine). A similar piece of legislation, from 1678, requires that if any person over the age of sixteen “not being visibly and apparently distracted out of his wits by sickness or natural infirmity, or not a mere natural fool, void of common sense, shall … by word or writing deny that there is a God … [that person] shall be committed to prison.” For the authorities to have sensed so much smoke, there must have been at least the occasional fire. As Benjamin Bertram writes, atheism “must have flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”