Abstract
The long quarrel between poetry and philosophy is hard to judge, in part because the two quarrelers speak in different modes and if either adopts the other’s mode he concedes half the quarrel. For the poet who writes a philosophic defense of poetry would seem to concede that poetry cannot defend itself and the philosopher who resorts to poetry to defend philosophy (or perhaps to show its superiority) would seem to concede that philosophy needs poetry. Moreover, when it comes to quarrels and defenses, there is an inequality in the capacities of the two. It is easier for philosophy to carry on a defense, for reasoning and giving arguments is its usual mode; poetry need not be against reason but it is not fond of the mode that pure reason or pure argument favors, namely, the treatise. Poetry is chary of arguments, even ones in its own defense, for it is the way of poetry to present or show things by imitating them.
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Notes
To most of the points in this section there are significant exceptions. The works of both Plato and of Nietzsche employ a poetic mode of presentation in order to seek wisdom. Heidegger is a philosopher who seems to regard poetry as higher than philosophy, for he reads Hölderlin as if he were coauthored by Being. Among poets, we may note that Virgil is known to have been a student of Plato and Goethe appreciated Spinoza exceedingly.
All references to Shakespeare will be to the Complete Works, ed. by Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1969).
Despite this fact and despite the fact that both print a photo of the First Folio table of contents, both the Pelican Shakespeare and the Riverside Shakespeare ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) arrange some of the plays under the title ‘Romances.’ Only editor Harbage of the Pelican offers his reasons.
have checked these counts with Marvin Spevack A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, 6 vols. (Hildeshein: Georg Olms, 1969).
Angel With Horns, ed. by Graham Story (New York: Theatre Arts Press, 1961), pp. 253 ff.
Four Centuries of Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 31.
See Erich Auerbach’s sensitive comments on Shakespeare in the light of the ancient separation of high and low, tragic and comic styles, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), pp. 274 ff.
I want to thank my colleague Eileen Gregory for her vigorous opposition to my views on genre, which prompted me to gather my thoughts on comedy and tragedy together for the first time.
One way to address it would be to offer an interpretation of Othello, for Iago like Aristotle (Poetics, 60a26 and following) suggests that “incredible possibilities,” e.g., that Venetian Desdemona should love a Moor, cannot be. By saying, as it were, “I know these Venetian women” (3.2.200 ff.) and thereby subsuming the rare incredible Desdemona under a class, a species, a genre, he does persuade Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful. But he does not persuade Shakespeare and he does not persuade us. It may be incredible but Desdemona is true. What Aristotle forbids the poet, Shakespeare presents.
Drinking Party, 223d. There are good comments on this passage in Stanley Rosen’s Plato’s Symposium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 325–27.
By carefully stating that the tragedian can be the comedian, and not vice versa, Socrates implies that tragedy and its gods are mere enchantment. When he reduces Agathon and his speech to nothing with a few questions, Socrates disenchants; when he reports Diotima’s speech, he enchants. Perhaps Socrates knows that the same man could write both comedy and tragedy because Plato knows himself.
While interpreting the Drinking Party we must keep in mind the stylistic difference between ancient comedy and tragedy, the one suited to low, private, daily things, the other suited to high, public, and splendid things.
If I am correct, Lear suggests that if there is a creator God, then no creature of His can have evidence of His existence for such evidence would compromise the uncalculating character of all true virtue. If you know of a world elsewhere, where your Creator rewards your patience virtue, then your virtue is tainted with calculation. Creation means separation. In other words, we cannot conclude from the absence of God in Shakespeare that he is an atheist; he may be an unusual Christian. Everything else about him is rare, so this should not surprise us.
Shakespeare did win such gratitude from a couple whom he brought together while he lived with the Montjoys in London. See S. Schoenbaum William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 211–13.
Both quotations are from Mrs. Chesnut’s diary entry for March 12, 1864; see Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Ben Ames Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 391–92.
Antony in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra just might greet Cleopatra with these words. However, that only proves our point, for Shakespeare differs most from Plutarch in endowing his Cleopatra with an unancient attraction.
‘The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare’ in Kermode (cited above), pp. 158–69. However, see Note 13 above and consider Cymbeline 5.4.9–29.
The comic ending of The Tempest is the work of father Prospero. The tragic Lear wanted to give up his kingdom, marry his best daughter well, and prepare for death. Comedy seems not only to be more inclusive than tragedy but higher; it shows us higher sorts of human beings.
I owe this account to Seth Benardete’s ‘On Wisdom and Philosophy: The First Two Chapters of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha,’ Review of Metaphysics 32 (1978), 205–215.
This special relation between human beings and Being in Shakespeare resembles the relation in Biblical religion between creatures, especially man, and the Creator. Since man is said to be in the image of God, it ought to be possible to study man so as to know God. In wondering at the one comes to wonder at the other. We find the same in the study of Shakespeare; from wondering at the works we come to wonder at their maker. See my ‘Shakespearean Wisdom?’ in Shakespeare as Political Thinker ed. John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Carolina Academic Press, 1981).
Since Shakespeare there seems to be only one poet who has written both comedy and tragedy: Kleist.
For further discussion of the histories see my Shakespeare’s English Prince (Washington: University Press of America, 1984), passim.
That in ‘Sonnet 94’ Shakespeare has described himself is the main idea of my essay ‘Shakespearean Wisdom?’ cited above.
Zarathustra III, ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln,’ 21; Der Wille zur Macht 983; Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 284; Zarathustra II, ‘Von der Menschen-Klugheit.’
For a complementary account of Tempest 1.1 see my essay ‘Shakespeare’s Apology for Poetic Wisdom’ in Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Cecile Williamson Cary and Henry S. Limouze (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 280–293.
I am very grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the leisure to revise this essay.
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Platt, M. (1984). Tragical, Comical, Historical. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic — Epic — Tragic. Analecta Husserliana, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6315-3_28
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