Roger Peters Copyright © 2005
JAQUES
INQUEST
QUIETUS
Inquiry into the Quaternary Evolution in Shakespearean Thought
In his Sonnets, Shakespeare articulates a consistent and comprehensive
philosophy based in nature. By recognising nature as logically female (the
‘sovereign mistress’), and by accepting the priority of the female (the
‘Mistress’) over the male (the ‘Master Mistress’) he re-establishes the logical
priority of female over male.
By intentionally restoring the priority of nature over the male God of
religions, Shakespeare challenges millennia of male-based prejudice. In the
Sonnets and in the poems and plays he demonstrates that the literal interpretation
of the traditional mythological priority of male over female perpetuates
an inconsistency in human understanding, and perpetrates an injustice
on woman.
Shakespeare’s plays not only demonstrate the inconsistencies that arise
when the male is given priority over the female, they also show how to
recover the natural logic of female priority within the dynamic of female/
male relationships. Each play, whether comedy or tragedy, dramatises the
process of gender reconciliation. Typically, a play begins with an imbalance
toward male-based prerogatives from which Shakespeare constructs a
resolution where the natural priority of the female contextualises the conceit
of male independence.
In his Sonnets Shakespeare recovers the natural logic that connects the
biology of the female/male relationship and the mythic as the highest form of
human expression. In the plays and poems he shows how to write at a mythic
level without falling into the contradictions of traditional male-based beliefs.
The elevation of the male over the female in societies where there is a
belief in the priority of a male God results from two basic misunderstandings.
The first misinterprets the non-biological elements in the logic of myth and
the second inverts the male’s evolutionary function.
In the first case, myth openly exhibits its logical status as an imaginative
account of origins by representing relations between female and male entities
as erotic rather than sexual. The erotic logic of a mythology employs all forms
of secondary sexual desire but precludes the direct biology of procreation.
Hence a myth can represent human origins by having a male God who
appears ex nihilo to create man from clay and then himself be born again of
a virgin. But the erotic dynamic, which serves to indicate the conceptual or
mind-based role of mythology, becomes a source of contradiction if it is read
literally. Logically, the male God cannot be prior to the female in nature.
The second confusion arises because the male, as a consequence of the
differentiation of the male sperm from the primacy of the female cell, is in
effect at the leading edge of the evolutionary possibility. While the role of
the male, or the masculine dimension in human understanding (in male or
female), enables humankind to develop in ways not available to single sex
species, Shakespeare makes the point in the Sonnets that it all comes to
naught if, like the idealistic Master Mistress or youth, all males refuse to
increase. Then, as he argues in sonnet 126, nature would prevail without
humankind.
Even though male-based idealism is symptomatic of a highly competitive
societal model, the belief in the supremacy of the male can create the expectation
that the male will become self-sufficient or independent of the female
and ultimately nature. But the idealistic scenario ignores the logical consequences
of denying increase and the priority of nature and the female in
nature.
In the Sonnets Shakespeare makes the logical point that increase is the
fundamental condition for human persistence. The point is logical because
he does not insist that humankind should persist, only what it should do if
it wishes to persist. The logical connection between persistence and existence
is descriptive not prescriptive.
The illogical representation of the human relation to nature in beliefs
based on traditional mythologies affects both sex and gender. The Sonnets
examine the tendency of the male to become isolated in his male dynamic
but they also consider the consequences for the female who over-exercises
her masculine persona.
Some feminists, for instance, in their drive to gain equality with men,
forget the significance of the logic of human persistence. While there may
be short-term benefits from such a stance, ironically the denial of the logic
of increase allies them to traditional beliefs in male-based mythologies that
give men priority over women.
Shakespeare also recognises (as did Darwin) that the logic of increase is
prior to the possibility of human understanding or the dynamic of ‘truth
and beauty’. Shakespeare argues that only by acknowledging the logic of
increase can human understanding achieve consistency and hence justice.
The Sonnet philosophy clarifies millennia of confusion. Human nature
is based in nature and any male-based system of Gods or ideals is secondary
and at best visionary. So the question arises as to how such misunderstandings
have developed and persisted. It could be that the transmission of ideas in
the medium of writing led to the reification of beliefs in a way not previously
known in oral culture. Certainly, great schisms and sectarian wars have
occurred and are still occurring over the too literal interpretation of words
committed to paper, as in the Bible, the Koran, etc.
The consolidation of male-based religions, particularly in the Middle
East, and specifically the monotheistic male-God religion of the Hebrews,
coincided with the development of writing. When such religions
encourage a fundamentalist belief in the mythological word, intolerance and
persecution result. Thomas Jefferson, objecting to religious intolerance in
Europe, acted against the iniquities of faith by separating Church and State
in the fledgling United States. It might be appropriate now to enact a constitutional
article to assert the priority of the female over the male.
The work of Shakespeare offers the most consistent, comprehensive and
sustained challenge to the illogicality of male-based determination. Only
by recognising the logical conditions for sexual persistence out of nature
can the feminine and masculine gender relationship be understood and
addressed. (See also essay 10 on Riane Eisler.)
Germaine Greer
This essay compares the attitude of a leading feminist to the natural logic
of Shakespeare’s Sonnet philosophy. Germaine Greer lends herself to the
discussion of the relation of women’s rights to Shakespeare’s philosophy
because in her professional life she combines a persistent advocacy of feminist
issues with her status as an internationally recognised Shakespeare scholar.
It should be possible to align her statements on women’s issues from over
the last 35 years with her statements about Shakespeare’s works to see if her
understanding corresponds to Shakespeare’s philosophy.
It is not the intention in this essay to outline or even summarily critique
Greer’s writings on feminism or to examine feminism generally. Rather, the
idea is to listen to her hopes for feminism and her concerns about the fate
of feminism in the period between The Female Eunuch of 1970 and its sequel,
The Whole Woman of 1999. Because she makes mention of Shakespeare in
these volumes it should be possible to show how her understanding of
Shakespeare misses his logical recovery of the female over the male, with its
relevance for challenging the continued adherence to mythological beliefs
inherently contrary to female rights.
In her ‘Recantation’ that serves as a preface to The Whole Woman, Greer
expresses her concern that feminists of her generation were beginning ‘to
assert with apparent seriousness that feminism had gone too far’. (1) Yet it is
she who goes nowhere near far enough in The Female Eunuch, Sex and
Destiny of 1984, and The Whole Woman in challenging the illogicalities of
the beliefs and values of a Bible-based society in which women have been
denied their natural priority.
The impression gained from reading Greer’s feminist writings is reinforced
by her attitude toward Shakespeare in the 130-page monograph
Shakespeare that she produced for Oxford University Press in 1986. While
there is some attempt to acknowledge the significance Shakespeare gives to
his female characters, Greer meekly conforms to the orthodox prejudice of
passing him off as an idealist and even a Christian. Because she is ignorant
of the Sonnet philosophy, with its logical critique of Platonic and biblical
idealism, she attributes to Shakespeare an attitude and values contrary to
woman’s logical status and rights.
The Sonnet philosophy in The Phoenix and the Turtle
To begin to understand how Greer can be a tireless advocate for women’s
rights yet attribute to Shakespeare a ‘Christian scepticism’ (2) or suggest that
Hamlet exhibits a ‘Christian spirit of resignation’, (3) or that The Phoenix and
the Turtle ‘is the most perfect statement of the Platonic ideal in English
poetry’, (4) an appropriate starting point is The Phoenix and the Turtle.
As Shakespeare based his philosophy in nature, he was trenchant in his
criticism of the Platonic inspired claims for a prior ideal world. For Plato
an ideal world must exist to account for the imperfections of life. But for
Shakespeare all ideal worlds are phantasms of the human mind, which is
logically dependent on nature. Instead, the evidence of his works suggests
he was sympathetic to Aristotle’s regard for the natural world.
So Greer’s statement, while in keeping with other attempts to convert
Shakespeare to Christianity or Neo-Platonism, is diametrically opposed to
the Sonnet philosophy and hence contrary to the meaning of The Phoenix
and the Turtle.
Traditional attempts to patronisingly convert The Phoenix and the Turtle
to Platonic/Christian values have not gone unnoticed. William Matchett’s
line-by-line examination of The Phoenix and the Turtle reveals not a perfect
expression of Platonism, but Shakespeare’s devastating critique of idealism.
Matchett’s reading rejects the traditional idealistic gloss on the fate of the
two birds, and shows that the poem, with its original punctuation, is a satire
on the birds’ futile expectations. (5)
Unfortunately, while Matchett makes a number of comparisons between
The Phoenix and the Turtle and the Sonnets, he is unable to show how the
philosophy of the Sonnets informs every aspect of the poem. Instead, as with
many who are at a loss to understand the Sonnet philosophy, he speculates
that the poem comments on the intrigues of the Elizabethan court.
If The Phoenix and the Turtle is examined from the vantage of the Sonnet
philosophy, then Matchett’s anti-Platonic reading is readily vindicated.
Consistent with the natural logic of the Sonnets, the poem mentions ‘Nature’,
sexual ‘Division’, a sexual ‘lay’, ‘posterity… and …married chastity’, and
‘Truth and Beauty’.
Greer, however, does not bother to itemise her evidence for thinking
the poem is a ‘perfect statement of the Platonic ideal’. Instead she turns to
a 1601 account from a law student’s diary, which reports that Shakespeare
upstaged Burbage for the favours of a woman who frequented the Globe.
To forestall challenges to her prejudicial reading of the poem she prefers to
cite unverifiable student gossip, and allude to the ‘bawdy strain’ (6) in
Shakespeare’s plays.
By asserting that such behaviour is ‘not in the least incompatible with
Platonic idealism’ (7), and by dismissing in simplistic terms as ‘bawdy’the erotic
logic of the plays and poems, Greer blindly promotes the orthodox view
that Shakespeare conforms to the Platonic ideal.
And if, as Greer claims, the poem glorifies the eternal happiness of two
birds in a ‘perfect statement of the Platonic ideal’, Shakespeare rebuts such
a reading at every turn. The sole Arabian Bird witnesses a ‘Tragic scene’,
‘Love and Constancy’ are reckoned ‘dead’, ‘love was slain’, the two birds lie
in ‘cinders’, their ‘infirmity…was married Chastity’, ‘Truth and Beauty’ are
‘buried’, and the last line laconically suggests the reader ‘sigh a prayer’ for
the ‘dead Birds’.
Ironically, those like Greer who wish to convert Shakespeare’s devastating
critique of idealism in The Phoenix and the Turtle into a ‘perfect statement of
the Platonic ideal’ frequently characterise the poem as symbolically opaque
and cryptically obscure. Rather, the poem reveals its brilliant natural logic
when viewed as an expression of the Sonnet philosophy. (A full analysis of
The Phoenix and the Turtle is available in Volume 3.)
Christian apologetics
Greer not only brings to her Shakespeare a Platonic expectation for The
Phoenix and the Turtle, she also peremptorily presumes Shakespeare adheres
to Christian beliefs and values throughout his works. Even if she is
ignorant of the nature-based philosophy of the Sonnets, her presumption
of a Christian meaning ignores the evidence of the plays, which most
commentators acknowledge are based in nature rather than the male God
of the Bible.
For instance, Christian sympathisers such as A. C. Bradley and Blair
Leishman have to admit there is no evidence in the complete works for
presuming Shakespeare was a Christian. Yet, despite the lack of evidence,
they still feel compelled to convert him to Christianity by suggesting
he was a closet believer. Greer even quotes Orwell as saying that ‘from
Shakespeare’s writings it would be difficult to know that he had any
religion’, (8) but persists in her Christian interpretation. Having branded
Shakespeare a Platonic idealist, she is far less circumspect than many in her
determination to read Christian intentions into the plays and poems. (9), (10)
The intention of this essay is to redress injustices done to Shakespeare
by a scholar who might be expected to be sympathetic to Shakespeare’s
nature/female philosophy. As examples of Greer’s Christian misinterpretation
of Shakespeare’s works are considered, it must be asked how an inveterate
feminist such as Greer can be so blind to Shakespeare’s prioritising of
the female over the male, which challenges the self-righteousness of the
male-based beliefs of religions such as Christianity.
Greer operates principally as a polemicist who uses hyperbole for immediate
advantage. While her timely but overstated claims and challenges
have forced her to alter her opinions over time, this essay does not discount
the importance of the polemic moment. But because Shakespeare held
to and argued logically for his nature-based philosophy throughout his life,
it might be hoped that even a perennial polemicist such as Greer might
reflect on the evidence and argument for a consistent and comprehensive
philosophy in Shakespeare’s works.
When Greer titles Chapter 5 of her Shakespeare ‘Teleology’, she signals
her intent to interpret the play in terms of an intentional God. Throughout
the chapter, which examines King Lear at some length, she proceeds to
convert Shakespeare to Christianity. Typically she insists on the ‘emergence
and gradual transcendence of Lear’s soul’. (11) But if the Sonnet philosophy is
based in nature, and the natural processes brilliantly represented by Darwin,
the idea of a God directed purpose is logically redundant.
Instead, according to the logic of the Sonnet philosophy, King Lear is
about a conceited, paternalistic male idealist who has lost touch with the
natural logic of life. In the Sonnet logic the goals of life are immanent in
nature. Lear reveals his conceit when he demands the total love of his
daughters. Lear ostracises Cordelia when she responds with the natural logic
of the increase argument (1.1.102-10) (as does Desdemona in Othello,
1.3.527-36). Cordelia identifies love as a boon passed from generation to
generation so it cannot be the sole preserve of a selfish male King who
demands absolute love.
Shakespeare then takes Lear through the process of recovering his natural
logic by literally exposing him to the elements and by subjecting him to the
aggrieved anger of the bastard Edmund, who likewise has been denatured
by his conceited father, Gloucester. Shakespeare removes the Christian
allusions from the original play King Leir, to force his characters to face the
natural world without the compensating psychology of the paternalistic
idealism of Christianity.
Greer, in her revisionary misinterpretation of the play, excuses Lear by
claiming he is ‘senile’. (12) Neither does she appreciate the significance of the
roles of Cordelia and Edmund as differing expressions of the same reaction
to male-driven injustices. But most significantly she misrepresents the role
of the Fool. Whereas Shakespeare removed references to God from his
play, in Greer’s discussion of the Fool’s status she reintroduces them with
a vengeance.
She begins by referring to ‘Erasmus’s fool in God’. Such a fool must be ‘as a
child, for unless we become as little children we cannot enter heaven’. (13) And
she threatens, in the style of the self-serving First Commandment, ‘It ill
behoves man to vaunt before God of his intellectual achievements and the
temporal wealth and power he has managed to secure, for all was done by
grace of God and is as nothing compared to the wisdom and power of God’. (13)
She then refers to the Fool as ‘a ‘natural’, simple as we say, and by extension,
still in a state of nature. We are all born in this condition’ (her emphasis).
With further references to God, and ‘born idiots…touched by God’, (13) Greer
completely inverts the intent of the play as a critique of the adolescent
conceitedness and inconsistency of the Christian belief in biblical mythology.
Instead she says, in complete contradiction of the nature-based Sonnet
philosophy ‘Shakespeare’s wise fools moved, (in) a frame of reference which is
profoundly sceptical and profoundly Christian’. (13)
Not content with that, she also characterises Edmund as a ‘natural’. 14
Even though she has to acknowledge the ubiquitous presence of nature in
the play, she avoids the inference that Shakespeare bases the play in the logic
of nature by claiming there is an ‘intricate play on mutually contradictory
notions of what constitutes nature’. (14) She further dismisses Shakespeare’s
nature-based logic by maintaining ‘every character in King Lear bandies the
word ‘nature’, and in no two cases does it quite mean the same thing’. (14)
And when Edmund refers to nature as a ‘Goddess’, with Shakespeare
alluding to Venus from Venus and Adonis who exacts nature’s justice on the
idealising male Adonis (and also alluding to 'Nature the sovereign mistress'
of the Sonnets), Greer presumes ‘the Elizabethan audiences would have been
shocked at such idolatry’. (14) Shakespeare, in sonnet 105, identifies idolatry
as the literal belief in the primacy of the male God, so it is wonderfully
ironical that Greer, the inveterate feminist, would characterise as ‘idolatry’
Shakespeare’s decision to stage the play within the context of the natural
world, and pervert his advocacy of natural logic as the basis for recovering
of female rights.
Greer’s frequent interpolation of the idea of God and Christian values,
and her claim that they are consistent with Shakespeare’s intent, is patently
contrary to a more judicious reading of King Lear. No doubt it would please
the Christian Church to have a prominent feminist who, under the guise
of polemicising social injustices, is an apologist for Christian illogicalities.
She effectively collaborates with the religious hierarchy of the Church in
the perpetrating the priority of the male God over humankind, and particularly
over womankind.
Throughout her commentary, Greer never misses an opportunity to
advocate for the Christian God. From her recital of such simplistic and
outmoded beliefs as ‘God, when he created and continues to create all that
is’, (15) to the threat against ‘the adequacy of reason to scrutinise the ways
of God’, (16) to her assertion that ‘we witness the emergence and gradual
ascendance of Lear’s soul … (and that) Shakespeare draws out Lear’s soul,
even as his mind decays’, (17) to her delusion that ‘Gloucester dies the joyous
death of the faithful’, (18) she warns that ‘it would be a mistake to interpret
the futility of Lear’s appeals to his Gods as evidence of atheism on
Shakespeare’s part’. (19)
Greer’s complete misreading of King Lear in her Shakespeare is symptomatic
of her unwillingness to hear Shakespeare’s case for the priority of
nature over the male God of religion and the priority of the female over
the male. She claims ‘the goddess nature is an amoral pagan personification,
her laws harsh and ineluctable’. (20) Nature at large is not a goddess, and do
not the divine duo of God and Satan incite a worse immorality through their
self-serving laws.
In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare argues that natural events, while capable
of causing great distress, are unavoidable, whereas the evil consequences of
prioritising an idealised God are completely avoidable. He argues that if
excessive idealism is circumscribed (as Jefferson did to the Churches in the
American Bill of Rights), then the inevitable evil of idealistic beliefs would
be diminished. It is not possible to worship nature as a Goddess in the same
bloody way that overly committed Christians worship their male God,
totally and blindly. Greer’s misrepresentation of Shakespeare’s use of nature
as ‘idolatry’ is typical of the way in which absolute male God worship
perverts even a concerned polemicist for women’s rights.
Shakespeare’s women
Greer’s willingness to associate Shakespeare’s works with the God of
Christianity also affects her appreciation of the role of Shakespeare’s female
protagonists. She pleads that ‘it must be remembered that while Shakespeare’s
concept of virtue tends to be the active rather than the contemplative, his
view of redemptive action is Christian. Christ, the paradigm for both men
and women, redeemed humanity by suffering and dying on the cross’. (21)
Greer’s inability, in her commentary in Shakespeare, to free herself from the
Christian prejudice against nature and the female could not be more
succinctly expressed.
She deepens her association of Christianity and Shakespeare with the
claim that ‘the Christian concept of passive heroism places a high value on
endurance, which in Shakespeare’s ethic is cognate with constancy and hence
truth’. (22) She goes on to suggest that ‘while he may make reference to a
contemporary stereotype of women as fickle as in sonnet 20, and allows both
Isabel and Viola to animadvert on women’s malleability, of all Shakespeare’s
plays only Troilus and Cressida deals with a genuine case of female treachery’. (22)
Not only is Greer determined to blacken Shakespeare’s references to
natural processes as idolatry of a pagan Goddess, she calls the primacy of
the female over the male (as defined in sonnet 20) ‘fickle’. She does not
appreciate that if Isabel and Viola criticise ‘women’s malleability’ they do so
from completely different vantages. In Measure for Measure, Isabel the novice
nun is a blind idealist who regains her natural logic under the tutelage of
the Duke, and Viola, throughout Twelfth Night, applies the Sonnet philosophy
to help Orsino and Olivia recover their natural logic. If the ‘treacherous
female’ in Troilus and Cressida is Cressida and not Helen, then Greer is blind
to the lesson in natural logic that Cressida teaches the overly idealistic Troilus.
When Greer turns to the ‘33 year separation in perfect celibacy’ of the
Abbess in the Comedy of Errors, she claims ‘Shakespeare places a high value
on chastity’. (23) Yet the arguments of the increase sonnets, the pleasures of
the maid in A Lover’s Complaint, the sexual love between the Duke and the
novice nun Isabel, the liberation of Olivia from her ‘dead love’ toward
brother, the marriage of Juliet at 14 in Romeo and Juliet, the destruction of
the male celibacy of the four Lords in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and then the
imposition on them of retributive celibacy by the princesses as punishment,
speak to the contrary. Why, then, does Greer claim Shakespeare places a high
value on chastity unless she projects her own values on to his works.
Shakespeare’s philosophy
Greer seems determined to paste a male-based Christianity over
Shakespeare’s natural logic, just as she seems willing to plaster a false set of
expectations on his women. But not only is Shakespeare made to seem a
servant of the Church, who creates ‘stereotypes’ of women, another of
Greer’s refrains is that he has no philosophy or no systematic method for
producing his works. This last claim is the most serious because it reduces
Shakespeare to putty in the minds of those who wish to undermine his
devastating criticism of religion and sexism evident in the Church, and in
those elements of the State devoted to the Church.
Because Greer cannot, or for the sake of her apologetics will not, see a
philosophy in Shakespeare, it is ironical that she quotes from the philosopher,
Ludwig Wittgenstein. (24) Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and particularly his later
philosophy, is a determined attempt to rid philosophy of apologetics and
return it to an expression of the relation of the world and mind and recover
its role as an investigative tool into the use and misuse of concepts. If Greer
understood Wittgenstein’s intent she would be better able to appreciate that
400 years earlier Shakespeare approached philosophy in a similar spirit but
more consistently and comprehensively.
Greer dismisses the philosophic depth that pervades Shakespeare’s works
through disparagement and innuendo. She bypasses the deeply philosophic
disposition in Shakespeare’s plays alluded to by scholars such as Coleridge,
Benedetto Croce, and Lytton Strachey. Despite calling The Phoenix and the
Turtle an expression of the Platonic ideal, she believes Shakespeare’s philosophy
would at best be ‘philosophical or literary conceits and conventions’.
She resorts to biographical speculation to claim, ‘we do not even know
whether the sonnets are correctly interpreted as revealing Shakespeare’s life
and self primarily or whether they deal principally with philosophical or
literary conceits and conventions’. (25) She allows only that if Sir Walter
Raleigh could write a poem to Queen Elizabeth expressing his ‘loyalty in
terms of love melancholy’, Shakespeare must be at least that ‘sophisticated’. (26)
Little can be expected of Greer’s assessment of Shakespeare’s philosophic
depth if her highest expectation of the Sonnets is that they express ‘conceits
and conventions’, and this of a playwright who penned the greatest dramas
in the language that do not sink into conceits and conventions. She allows
against fellow polemicist George Orwell’s claim that Shakespeare had no
philosophy that she would not argue Shakespeare’s work contains no thought
at all. She says ‘it may not be possible to extract a nugget of thought, which
we usually think of as a series of interrelated propositions’ concluding that
‘Shakespeare knew, as we have forgotten, that feeling is as intellectual as
thinking’. (27)
Unfortunately, she leans on the most apologetic of poets, T. S. Eliot,
to portray Shakespeare as an ‘intact non-dissociative sensibility’. (27) The
Shakespearean idea, she says, ‘is inseparable from the mode of its expression’.
But her apologetic disingenuousness ignores the persistent presence of
argument throughout the Sonnets, and that each play is constructed as an
argument with the characters as the logical premises, with mock arguments
interspersed. It ignores the arrangement of the Sonnets into discreet argumentative
parts, with the grouping of sonnets such as the 14 increase sonnets,
the 5 poetry and increase sonnets, the 9 rival poet sonnets, and the division of
the Mistress sonnets into parts that explicitly deal with beauty (127 to 137)
and then truth (138 to 152), not to mention the precise numerological relationships
within the set.
Greer’s tendency to characterise Shakespeare as a dramatic divine, conveniently
avoids his devastating criticism of excessive idealism in general and
the Christian Church in particular. She allows that ‘Shakespeare’s perceptions
were more comprehensive than those of more disciplined minds but
they are not the products of intuition and Shakespeare is not merely the
conduit of some kind of divine inspiration’. (28) Rather he ‘was profoundly
aware of and interested in intellectual issues, which he chose not to simplify,
codify, reconcile, or resolve, but rather to dramatise’ so that he could give
his audiences the ‘thrill’ of an ‘imaginative dimension’ (28) to their daily lives.
Greer’s apologetic intent and her patronisation of Shakespeare’s audience
cannot conceal her profound ignorance of a philosophy that more comprehensively
and logically than any other philosophy argues for the priority of
the female over the male and the priority of nature over the male God.
She casts Shakespeare as a latter-day post-modernist post-structuralist (a
tertiary mindset from which her polemical style has benefited) claiming that
the ‘strength of Shakespeare’s position is that he refrains from coming to
conclusions but leaves that to those who complete his utterance’. (24)
Greer persists in denigrating the man by denying Shakespeare the right
to be anything more than a mouthpiece for commonplaces of thought.
‘Shakespeare’s achievement as a thinker, then, is not that he formulated
original notions or erected a new system of philosophy, but that he took
the commonplaces of Elizabethan thought and made them actual’. (29) In her
attempt to straddle the unbridgeable divide between women’s rights and
male-God based Christianity she cannot help but, like the Christianity she
defends, be pre-emptory and patronising.
There is no respite from her assault on Shakespeare’s worth. She says,
‘Shakespeare does not provide us with a map of an ethical system’. (30) What
about the extensive treatment of truth and beauty in sonnets 20 to 126 and
127 to 152, and the unrelenting critique of male-based injustices in the plays
and poems? She says ‘there is nothing innovative in Shakespeare’s idea of
history, no ideology or philosophy which he imposed on the material that
he organised’. (31) The commentaries on the Sonnets and plays in these volumes
demonstrate overwhelmingly that the logical/ethical structure articulated in
the Sonnets is the basis for all his poems and plays.
In Shakespeare’s most deliberately philosophic play, Love’s Labour’s Lost,
in which the four princesses challenge and correct male-based conceits, he
presents the most exacting expression of the rights of women in the face of
the hierarchical patronisation of the type practised by the idealising Church.
But Greer, the arch feminist, does not note and approve of Shakespeare’s
intent to right millennia of male-driven wrong. Instead she slights the role
of Jaquenetta, who carries the logical inevitability of increase through the
play. More significantly, she disparages the logic of the female challenge to
the ‘narcissistic’ lords as being their part in a ‘game’. She says, ‘the young
lords accost the ladies of France with more evolved versions of the same
convention, but the ladies treat the whole business as a game, and a rather
narcissistic and misconceived game at that’. (32)
Marriage
Greer concludes her final chapter in Shakespeare with the subheading ‘The
achievement of marriage’. She claims ‘for Shakespeare marriage was not
simply a cliché for ending the action, although it became so in his lifetime.
He was profoundly interested in the paradox of creating a durable social institution
out of the volatile material of lover’s fantasies’. (33) And a little later she
insists ‘Shakespeare was giving form to the Protestant ideology of marriage’. (34)
But both these claims are contrary to the Sonnet logic.
Shakespeare’s natural philosophy seeks to resolve not simply ‘lover’s
fantasies’ but to naturalise through the increase argument and the logic of
truth and beauty the fantasies and delusions of those who believe literally in
the mythological stories of the Bible and other religious tracts. Only when
an attempt has been made to address religious delusions are the characters in
the plays assigned a state of union appropriate to their psychological maturity.
Because Shakespeare bases his philosophy in nature, he does not lead
all his characters into the institution of marriage as a holy union sanctified
by the Christian Church, Catholic or Protestant. The characters in the plays
who achieve a mature appreciation of natural logic do not, as Greer suggests,
enter a bond where ‘no other witness except God was required’. (35)
Shakespeare’s natural philosophy moves beyond the psychological
dependence on an idealised male God.
Shakespeare’s own marriage occurred after he and Anne Hathaway were
pregnant with their first child. Possibly something in his youthful experience
of both the logic of increase and the role of marriage led him to realise
marriage that is conferred without an appreciation of the logic of increase
in nature is no more than a conceit or a convenient contract.
While Greer notes that the Church had for centuries established marriage
as a second rate state compared with ‘virginity, celibacy and widowhood’, (36)
her claim that Shakespeare led his characters toward a ‘durable social institution’
is not consistent with the endings of plays such as Measure for Measure
and Twelfth Night. These plays have been called problem plays in the literature
because their endings are not consistent with Christian expectations
of the type espoused by Greer. They are consistent, though, with the Sonnet
philosophy.
Shakespeare, in his Sonnets and in his plays and poems, argues persistently
for marriage as a possible contract between couples after they have
achieved an awareness of natural logic. The first 14 sonnets, for instance,
have traditionally been dismissed as ‘marriage sonnets’ in which Shakespeare
was doing his duty by encouraging a Lord to marry. Yet the theme of the
14 sonnets is increase and not marriage. At no point do the increase sonnets
encourage the youth to marry. In Shakespeare’s philosophy the sexual
division in nature is followed logically by the requirement to increase if
humankind wants to persist and love without prejudice. Marriage, by
contrast, is a social/religious contract that does not guarantee a loving or
procreative union.
Greer’s misreading of the Sonnets carries over into the misinterpretation
of Shakespeare’s intent in the plays. In some plays in which marriage is a
possibility, one of the female characters is pregnant before the action begins,
at least one of the characters has an attitude inconsistent with the logic of
increase, and at least one of the characters is charged with bringing the others
to an awareness of natural logic. Only then is marriage entertained as a possibility.
And consistently, in those plays, Shakespeare uses marriage either as a
fitting climax for characters who have achieved a philosophic resolution of
the relation to nature away from their previous capture by idealistic or
religious prerogatives (Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing).
Otherwise he either ensures that idealising or selfish partners are married
as a punishment for their previous divorce from natural principles (Angelo
in Measure for Measure) or, if the characters have a psychological disposition
that makes it difficult for them to come to such an understanding, he
acknowledges their psychological problem by allowing them a Christian
marriage (Olivia and Sebastian in Twelfth Night).
The other possibility is reserved only for those characters who control
the action and pair off with a partner who gains complete freedom in their
natural understanding. In those cases the play ends with them agreeing to
cohabit without a mention of marriage (Viola and Orsino in Twelfth Night),
much like the best of de facto relationships existing now. If anything,
Shakespeare should not be complimented by Greer for giving marriage a
new meaning but for creating the philosophic climate in which the modern
mature agreement between consenting couples prevails without the marriage
sanctions and prejudices of the male God driven Church. Shakespeare’s
treatment of the idealising Isabel and Angelo in Measure for Measure typifies
his desire to relieve such characters of the burden of conceit and deceit.
When Greer notes the prevalence of nature in King Lear, and others
note its ubiquitous presence throughout all his works, Shakespeare’s intent
is not to institute another idolatry to replace the idolatry of the male God,
but for the philosophic purpose of bringing reason and sensibility into the
relationships of those characters at odds with nature.
Conclusion
In her Shakespeare Germaine Greer accepts the traditional misreadings of
Shakespeare as a Platonist and Christian. She misrepresents the challenge to
male-based conceit by many of Shakespeare’s women, she misunderstands
Shakespeare’s attitude to marriage, and dismisses the possibility of a coherent
philosophy articulated in Shakespeare’s works. In doing so she remains blind
to a critique of male-based prejudice that would give consistency to her
vacillating polemics as a professional feminist and would eliminate her
unthinking support for attempts to convert Shakespeare to Platonism and
Christianity.
For instance, Greer is unable to develop Bronislaw Malinowski’s Freudian
analysis of the mythic basis of patrilineal Christian/Roman presumption into
a critique of paternalistic morals.
The complex known to the Freudian school, and assumed by them to be
universal, I mean, the Oedipus complex, corresponds essentially to our
patrilineal Aryan family with the developed ‘patria potestas’, buttressed
by Roman law and Christian morals, and accentuated by the modern
economic conditions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie. (37)
Instead, in her desire to accommodate the obvious harshness of some of
Shakespeare’s characterisations of religious hypocrisy in many of the plays,
Greer, at a number of points in her Shakespeare, offers the oxymoronic notion
of ‘Christian scepticism’. But even she demonstrates, through her
unrelenting conversion of Shakespeare to Christianity, that belief in an ideal
God cannot be conditional. And moreover, the history of philosophical
scepticism since the time of Hume runs counter to Christian belief. In
response, Christianity, undermined by its mass of inconsistencies, has
attempted to excuse itself by asserting that all other paradigms of understanding
must also be inconsistent.
Greer unwittingly buys into the charade. When she disparages some of
the references to nature in the plays as idolatry, she characterises
Shakespeare’s philosophy, which is based on common sense and logical
acuity, as another religion like Christianity. The circuitousness of her
polemic is a sad reflection on her lack of confidence in nature and
womanhood.
A much more consistent analysis of the history of the usurpation of
women’s rights is available in the writings of Riane Eisler, Merlin Stone,
and Marija Gimbutas. They argue that for 30,000 years the female priority
was recognised and celebrated in Goddess-based religions. Only in the last
3000-4000 years has there been a perversion to a male God based priority.
While neither Eisler, Stone nor Gimbutas have fathomed Shakespeare’s
recovery of the logic of female priority at the mythic level of expression,
their thinking is free of the oxymoronic cul-de-sacs that bedevil Greer’s
polemic.
Ironically, in the current climate of the recovery of women’s rights, it is
to males such as Shakespeare and Duchamp that the kudos goes for
addressing the logical heart of the problem. They, as males, have been
prepared to take responsibility for the history of male-based injustices by
acknowledging the priority of the female over their masculine sensibilities.
Their works exhibit respect for the logic of sexuality in nature and paradoxically
they have been able to achieve a consistent level of mythic expression
denied to male driven prophets and evangelists.
It is unfortunate for women’s rights, then, that Greer’s social criticisms
and political polemic have been supported by inadequate arguments and,
in the case of Shakespeare, such a bewildering blindness to his achievement.
When the template for Shakespeare’s natural logic is placed above a version
reworked to represent the traditional male God based belief, it is apparent
Greer has attempted to understand the world from the inadequacies of the
God template.
Nature Template
God template
The singular God at the head of the God template has no leverage on the
world. God can only reveal his true nature by first casting out the false in the
form of Satan. The dynamic of God’s goodness is logically linked to the characterisation
of the sensuous as evil. As in Greer’s analysis, when nature is
made secondary to the absolute God, it is reduced to an Eden-like state
lacking the natural complexity represented in the Nature template.
Greer’s attack on nature idolaters is ironic, considering the idealisation
of nature in the Garden of Eden. But worse is the traditional prioritisation
of the male over the female, which leads to the denigration of the natural
dynamic of increase. In the illogical God template, the life of a child ends
in a singular non-reproductive death that conveniently requires divine intercession
to gain ‘eternal life’.
Greer’s determination to convert Shakespeare’s natural philosophy to a
male God Christian reading does an injustice both to Shakespeare and to
the women whose causes she has championed. It is a sad reflection on human
understanding that a person dedicated to women’s rights is so willing to
submit Shakespeare’s female-based natural logic to a retro-active inquisition.
References
1 Germaine Greer, The Whole Women, London, Doubleday, 1999, p. 1. Back
2 Germaine Greer, Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 99. Back
3 Ibid., p. 58. Back
4 Ibid., p. 11. Back
5 William. H. Matchett, The Phoenix and the Turtle: Shakespeare's Poem and Chester's 'Love's Martyr', The Hague, Mouton, 1965. Back
6 Germaine Greer, Shakespeare, p. 12. Back
7 Ibid., p. 12. Back
8 Ibid., p. 107. Back
9 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, Cleveland, Meridian Books, 1963, p. 30. Back
10 J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets, London, Hutchison, 1968, p. 177. Back
11 Germaine Greer, Shakespeare, p. 96. Back
12 Ibid., p. 88. Back
13 Ibid., p. 91. Back
14 Ibid., p. 92. Back
15 Ibid., p. 95. Back
16 Ibid., p. 94. Back
17 Ibid., p. 96. Back
18 Ibid., p. 98. Back
19 Ibid., p. 99. Back
20 Ibid., p. 103. Back
21 Ibid., p. 112. Back
22 Ibid., p. 113. Back
23 Ibid., p. 114. Back
24 Ibid., p. 40. Back
25 Ibid., p. 13. Back
26 Ibid., p. 14. Back
27 Ibid., p. 125. Back
28 Ibid., p. 17. Back
29 Ibid., p. 59. Back
30 Ibid., p. 67. Back
31 Ibid., p. 84. Back
32 Ibid., p. 118. Back
33 Ibid., p. 119. Back
34 Ibid., p. 120. Back
35 Ibid., p. 121. Back
36 Ibid., p. 123. Back
37 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, London, Paladin, 1970, p. 224. Back
Roger Peters Copyright © 2005
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