VO LUME XII, NUMBER 2, SPRING 2012

A Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship

William James Q.
Voegeli: Wilson:
Take this Job What
& Shove It Tocqueville
Got Wrong
Angelo M.
Codevilla: Tao
George Kennan’s Wang:
America Leo Strauss
in China
Kenneth
Minogue:
John R.
Marxism’s
Bolton:
True Believers
Sovereignty
or
Rita Submission
Koganzon:
Joseph Epstein’s Matthew:
Gossip Continetti:
Game of
Algis Thrones
Valiunas:
A Tale of
Two Dickens Michael
Anton:
The Beach Boys’
Greatest Hit

PRICE: $6.95
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Shakespeare’s Freedom, by Stephen Greenblatt.
University of Chicago Press, 160 pages, $24 (cloth), $14 (paper)
T here is a new movement in shake-
speare studies and the evidence can
be found at your local bookstore:
Shakespeare’s Philosophy, Shakespeare’s Ideas,
Philosophers on Shakespeare, and Shakespeare
the Thinker, to name a few of the recent titles.
The authors of these volumes represent a wide
range of humanities specialties, but they all
share one commonsensical observation: any
mind capable of moving and continuing to
move so many human beings with his poetry
must understand something of fundamental,
enduring importance. Ben Jonson considered
“Shakespeare’s minde” the key to his “well
toned, and true filed lines,” and the reason the
Bard was “not of an age, but for all time,” but
this view has only recently regained credence
with professional academics. In the current
movement to articulate exactly what Shake-
speare knew, and why it still resonates with
us, the most authoritative voice is Stephen
Greenblatt in Shakespeare’s Freedom.
Greenblatt, the John Cogan University
Professor of the Humanities at Harvard,
opens his case with certainty: “Though
[Shakespeare] lived his life as the bound sub-
ject of a monarch in a strictly hierarchical so-
ciety that policed expression in speech and in
print, he possessed what Hamlet calls a free
Book Review by Rafael Major
A Free Soul
soul.” Evidence from the plays indicates that
Shakespeare was the rare type of individual
who could recognize the arbitrary limits of
his historical and cultural circumstances. In
this act of recognizing and reflecting on the
character of Elizabethan conventions, Shake-
speare was able to liberate his mind. Though
most people—then and now—consider
themselves competent judges of issues like
justice, beauty, and noble action, most ulti-
mately settle for some variation of the domi-
nant expectations of their culture. According
to Greenblatt, Shakespeare was different,
“irremediably different.” He had to conduct
himself in a manner that was acceptable to
his immediate society, but in his mind and
cunningly in his plays and poems, he was “ab-
solutely free and unconstrained.”
Greenblatt’s argument is remarkable be-
cause he is the most influential contemporary
literary authority to emphasize the possibly
timeless character of Shakespeare’s thought.
Half a century ago, articles in the American
Political Science Review by Harry Jaffa (1957)
and Allan Bloom (1960) influenced a num-
ber of political theorists and a handful of lit-
erary scholars to approach Shakespeare as a
continuing source of philosophic reflection.
But this approach did not prove influential
Claremont Review of Books Spring 2012
Page 73
in the academy generally. In the intervening
decades, Shakespeare studies focused on his
hypothetical biography, Elizabethan culture
and commerce, or the historical reception of
performances. Until recently, “New Histori-
cism” was the only literary school to pay close
attention to Shakespeare’s texts, but these
studies too were more often attempts to un-
derstand the historical events that surrounded
Shakespeare than to understand what occurs
within the plays. It is on this last point that
Shakespeare’s Freedom might signal a renewed
interest in Shakespeare’s mind and what he
can still teach us, because until now, Stephen
Greenblatt himself has been the most promi-
nent scholar attempting to demonstrate the
impossibility that Shakespeare—or anyone
else—could ever become a free soul.
G reenblatt’s apparent change of
heart seems to center on a fuller rec-
ognition of the necessity imposed
upon playwrights in any historical period
or culture to remain within “ordinary social
rules” when composing their dramas. It taxes
the imagination to ponder what a 21st-cen-
tury American playwright would have to do
to break the law, but in Shakespeare’s day it
was different. As early as 1559, playwrights
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were officially forbidden to touch upon issues
pertaining to either politics or religion, and
by 1581 the officer known as the Master of
Revels became the crown’s de facto censor with
absolute power to punish offenders. It is not
known how systematically infractions were
punished, but what is known is that Shake-
speare stands virtually alone in remaining
free of legal trouble. Christopher Marlowe,
Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson,
Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and
others all spent time in prison “as a direct or
indirect consequence of their writing.” In as-
signing punishments, the Master of Revels
was limited solely by his personal discretion,
and in circumstances where a writer could be
held accountable even for the “indirect conse-
quences” of plays, the need to appear respect-
ful of “societal norms” was paramount. Plays
were required to portray official versions of
manners and morals. No coincidence, then,
that many academic readers have tended to
see in Shakespeare’s works a mere reflection
of Elizabethan society. If Greenblatt is cor-
rect, however, a mind that is truly free would
be willing to maintain this outward appear-
ance of conventional propriety as a condition
and even guarantor of his freedom.
I n the first extended textual analysis
in the volume, Greenblatt makes an ad-
mirable attempt to interpret Measure for
Measure with this issue of censorship in mind.
Rather than focus on the more famous as-
pects of this “problem comedy,” he focuses on
a cameo character named Barnardine. In one
of the play’s funniest scenes, the audience is
introduced to a convicted and confessed mur-
derer who has spent nine years in jail avoid-
ing execution by being “Drunk many times a
day, if not many days entirely drunk” (Act IV,
scene 2, line 138). Barnardine drinks so much,
we are told by the prison’s provost, that on the
repeated occasions when the guards have tried
to carry out his execution, he has been simply
incapable of getting himself to the gallows.
According to Greenblatt, in an Elizabethan
theater “ringed with gibbets on which the
bodies of criminals like Barnardine swung,”
discerning audience members must have not
only laughed, but shared a silent appreciation
of his stubborn soul. Emblematic of the art-
ist’s freedom to resist the norms of society, the
convict, argues Greenblatt, embodies a kind
of “irreducible individuality” that is similar to
Shakespeare’s own. Barnardine is in fact con-
fined, but he is simultaneously free to be him-
self. We need not agree with the particulars
of this analysis to appreciate the attempt to
access or uncover Shakespeare’s cunning. The
Barnardine example is a useful one because
it highlights the reasonable possibility that
Shakespeare could embody his more radi-
cal thoughts in characters, or situations, that
would least interest the censors.
In a society where playwrights were limited
in their freedom of speech, we should expect
limited “aesthetic autonomy.” Even attempts
to subvert conventional understandings of
politics or religion, for example, would have to
be contained within legal boundaries. Art and
society, in this view, would have to engage in
murky negotiations—neither one able to free
itself from the other. In Shakespeare’s Freedom,
however, Greenblatt makes a very plausible
case that Shakespeare was able to break free
from his historical circumstances not by ne-
gotiation, but by using or taking advantage
of legal constraints. First, by submitting “to
artistic conventions or to societal norms,”
Shakespeare the artist acquired a powerful
voice. By scrupulously avoiding openly sub-
versive speech, he was able to find the widest
possible audience. Secondly, and more impor-
tantly, the “triumphant cunning” of appearing
to have no practical or political intentions had
the effect of making his plays more influential
than his contemporaries’. Shakespeare’s plays
can have an educative effect on discerning au-
ditors, and he heightened this effect by making
“his spectators forget that they are participat-
ing in a practical activity.” Unlike Christopher
Marlowe, for example, who openly dissented
from accepted “currents of ethical reflection,”
Claremont Review of Books Spring 2012
Page 74
Shakespeare was content to appear “nonfunc-
tional, nonuseful, and hence nonpractical”
and this subtlety made his plays more power-
ful. Greenblatt even implies that the zeal for
skepticism in a poet like Marlowe might not
only have detracted from his plays’ popular-
ity, but also made the man himself less able to
think through the limitations of his circum-
stances. Shakespeare’s patient recognition of
the limits of expression ultimately allowed
him to reflect more deeply.
T his emphasis on shakespeare’s art
of writing runs throughout the book,
but Greenblatt also attempts the diffi-
cult task of specifying the content of the poet’s
thought, and this aspect of Shakespeare’s Free-
dom is not so persuasive. As Greenblatt points
out, the intellectual step of doubting “the laws
of the polis” comes first in the quest for au-
tonomy, but there is also the far more difficult
challenge of recognizing “the innumerable se-
cret ways in which the world shapes any life.”
If this is true for Shakespeare, it is more so for
those of us attempting to interpret him in our
own time. Following Theodor Adorno, Green-
blatt suggests that Shakespeare’s true freedom
consisted in his “deep skepticism about any at-
tempt to formulate and obey an abstract moral
law, independent of actual social, political, and
psychological circumstances.” Such a conclu-
sion seems conveniently close to contemporary
dispositions to be accepted without further
investigation. If Shakespeare was able to free
himself from the dominant expectations of
his culture, we must be willing to attempt the
same. Shakespeare’s Freedom gives us reason to
think that we, too, might become free souls
and, to those who previously thought it either
uninteresting or impossible to understand
Shakespeare’s mind, it offers incentive to re-
turn to his plays with fresh hope.
Rafael Major is director of faculty development
at the Jack Miller Center, teaches at Ursinus Col-
lege, and is currently completing a book-length
study of Shakespeare’s comedies.
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