ABSTRACT
In his Poetics, Aristotle defines tragedy as a form of mimesis which produces catharsis through pity and fear. What he means by catharsis, however, is obscure. Interpretations include moral purification, medical purgation, emotional moderation, and intellectual clarification. Of these competing claims, whether or not it is correct as regards Aristotle’s intention, as regards Shakespeare, I argue here that Martha Nussbaum’s is the most useful. The catharsis Shakespeare aims at is cognitive elucidation, accomplished through the exercise of emotions such as, but not limited to, pity and fear. Literature in general, including Shakespeare’s plays, is a written record of authors’ thought-experiments, designed to purge themselves, insofar as possible, of emotional temptation, as well as cognitive error. Despite Keats’s praise for his ‘Negative Capability’, Shakespeare does take sides in ethical debates. But he is not as moralistic as authors such as Milton and Shelley. What distinguishes his plays from propaganda is the depth and sincerity of his willingness to consider the opposite of his own beliefs. In Shakespeare’s case, the moral danger that he seems to find the most tempting is solipsistic self-absorption: the ‘transvaluation of all values’ that we now associate with Romanticism. Shakespeare’s canonization was assured in the eighteenth century, when he became a darling of German precursors of Romanticism such as Lessing and Herder, as well as Schiller and the Sturm und Drang movement. Goethe calls him unser Shakespeare (‘our Shakespeare’). Romantic rhapsodizing about Shakespeare, however, tends to misinterpret the direction of his thought. Like Blake, placing Milton on the side of Satan, Romantic critics are too quick to identify Shakespeare with characters such as Richard II, Falstaff, and Cleopatra whom he himself, by contrast, goes out of his way to undermine. The Shakespeare of the Romantics is not Shakespeare himself, but instead what Jung would call his ‘shadow’.
