The Passion of Reason

What this Book is About

The book presented here reads William Shakespeare as a poetic philosopher in the tradition of Dante Alighieri, for whom reason is naturally passionate. Ludovico Ariosto’s text confirms the thesis that Shakespeare should be read as a Platonist at heart, or as showing that, in virtue of its mysterious roots, the philosophical life cannot be contextualized.

What this Book is Not

This book is not one of the many attempts to apply a theory to old texts in the attempt to conform them to the moral and intellectual, if not altogether ideological sensitivity of our times. This book is about reading old texts carefully enough to discern authorial messages. If a “proof” to introductory arguments is to be found, it is the close readings that supply it. On the other hand, the readings do not seek to prove a thesis or model, but to rise or descend to irreducible understanding. The book’s introductory claims are thus to be read as mere pointers to the wealth of understanding that the close readings lead to.

Modern “theories” that discredit the pursuit of an original authorial message or intent should be bracketed as being based on a questionable anthropology and an equally questionable epistemology, or more precisely on a peculiarly Machiavellian or “Neo-nominalist” conception of language as cut off from substantive intelligibility, or what, Platonically speaking, is the inner or essential life of things. For the modern nominalist, speech serves as effective mask of the meaninglessness of life, a powerful distraction from an abyss of non-sense over which we ordinarily stand “uncritically.” Whence the importance modern scholarship attributes to a “critical” attitude, whence a critical discourse, which is supposed to help us cope with what the nineteenth century announced as “the death of God,” in the act of contributing to the consolidation of a regime that is supposed to convert that “death”—and so our alienation from “sub-empirical” meaning (meaning underlying all experience, or meaning “in nature”)—into a virtue.

This book is not, in sum, an attempt to impose a view, prejudice, or matrix, on old texts, but to dive into their fabric as a mirror of life itself, a “surface” open to a meaning or horizon of understanding underlying all human experience.

The Question of Shakespearean Scholarship

In the interests of direct involvement with Renaissance texts, references to modern scholarship have been kept to a minimum, not under any assumption that modern scholars would have nothing to teach us about our sources, but given a desire to explore horizons of the understanding that, given its modernist or “scientific” (Machiavellian, Cartesian, etc.) proclivities, our scholarship has tended to eclipse.¹

To be sure, the present work is not unprecedented in calling for direct engagement with Shakespeare beyond the scope of modern criticism. Already in 1960 Berbard Grebanier complained that “the one factor they [i.e., Shakespearean scholars] deem totally irrelevant to their conceptions is what Shakespeare might have meant.”² Yet, modern attempts to confront our author(s) in a more intellectually and morally fruitful manner than usual have tended to fall back onto Cartesian prejudices. Grebanier is no exception.

Shunning modernist attempts to make Shakespeare say what he did not mean, Grebanier approaches Hamlet as a genuine Cartesian, who must forget all that he has learned, or purge his mind methodically prior to studying his target subject matter (ibid., 5–6, 19). This manner of approaching a poet such as Shakespeare carries the grievous consequence of obscuring the proper function of classical, especially Renaissance poetry, namely that of purgation of the soul or mind. To assume that we, as readers, should empty our minds of prejudices before studying Hamlet is to miss from the outset the full import of Hamlet as a dangerous journey of purgation.

One characteristic of Cartesian hermeneutics is to consider deeds/actions as something distinct from words. Accordingly, while appealing to the authority of Aristotle, in opposing “building on quotations” Grebanier considers things that are done aside from and informing “things said” (133–134, 187). A sensible alternative would be for us to consider deeds as illuminated in and by speech, until deeds emerge as the agency of the poetic mind itself. The proper function of poetic speech would then be to expose the reader to the true nature of “what is really going on.” None of this is possible to achieve as long as we proceed as Grebanier does, by reconstructing deeds or “circumstances” prior to examining what people (characters on a stage, including that of ordinary life) say (142).