ABSTRACT
Ben Jonson, and beyond. Here I shall discuss such continuations of Stoicism in early modern English literature, first emphasizing Shakespeare and Shakespearean scholarship, then turning to “baroque” prose style, and finally considering in depth the example of Sir William Cornwallis, a representative but little studied essayist from the period who makes his entrance, so to speak, as a kind of Jaques of the late-Elizabethan fringe and exits happily between the pages of his books. It will be good to keep the melancholy Jaques in mind, for I shall assume throughout that continuing the Stoic tradition meant, at its best, not only expressing established Stoic tenets but doing Stoicism and so developing that philosophy in the process. The main themes of scholarship on the topic of this chapter may be traced to the influence
of two Americans born in the 1870s and 1880s: Morris W. Croll, who was hired by Woodrow Wilson in 1905 to be one of Princeton University’s original “preceptor guys” and seems to have left the borough only rarely thereafter (Croll 1966: ix-xii), and T. S. Eliot, who once claimed in a letter to “hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere” (Eliot 1988: 74). In Stoicism the academic saw the ardor and arduousness of individual expression. The cosmopolitan saw pride. Eliot’s address to the Shakespeare Association in 1927 on “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of
Seneca” was informed by John W. Cunliffe’s Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (Cunliffe 1893), but its claims were unmistakably his and characteristically contrarian. Proposing a “Shakespeare under the influence of the stoicism of Seneca” and wishing “merely to disinfect the Senecan Shakespeare before he appears,” Eliot drives quickly to what for him is the quintessential literary expression of Stoicism, both in ancient and modern times: “the attitude of self-dramatization assumed … at the moment of tragic intensity” (Eliot 1950: 109-10). His main example of this “attitude” in Shakespeare is Othello’s final speech in Othello 5.2.338-56, where Othello ends a sentence and his life with, “And smote him – thus” (“Oh bloody period!” exclaims the observant Lodovico; 5.2.557). Othello, says Eliot, “in making this speech is cheering himself up” (Eliot 1950: 111). Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Mark Antony, and even Hamlet, who “dies fairly well pleased with himself” (Eliot 1950: 113), are also mentioned in due course, and Eliot associates all of them with the sentiment, quoted from George Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (1613), that a man should “join himself with th’ Universe / In his main sway, and make (in all things fit) / One with that All, and go on round as it” (4.1.139-41, in Chapman 1910: 122). Thus Clermont d’Ambois eloquently expresses the Stoic injunction to live in accordance with nature, well before his own rather quiet suicide. Eliot, however, insists that living in accordance with nature is always a selfish compensation for not being able to live in some “better” way: “A man does not join himself with the Universe so long as he has anything else to join himself with; men who could take part in the life of a thriving Greek city-state had something better to join themselves to; and Christians have had something better. Stoicism is the refuge for the individual in an indifferent or hostile world too big for him; it is the permanent substratum of a number of versions of cheering oneself up” (Eliot 1950: 112). In Eliot’s judgment one cheers oneself up out of pride, and pride is what really interests
him about Stoicism. “The Senecan attitude of Pride,” “this individualism, this vice of Pride,” “the self-consciousness and self-dramatization of the Shakespearean hero” that “seems to mark a stage, even if not a very agreeable one, in human history, or progress, or deterioration, or change”: for Eliot these things are bigger than Seneca and bigger even than Shakespeare (Eliot 1950: 112, 119). Of course a Christian bias can be heard in his insistence that the “human weakness” shown by Othello is a “universal human weakness,” in the claim that “Christians have had something better,” and in his long paragraph on Dante, who is said to
have been fortunate to live at a time when “thought was orderly and strong and beautiful” (Eliot 1950: 110, 116). It is interesting that Eliot refers to Nietzsche’s “late variant” of Stoicism – “there is not much difference between identifying oneself with the Universe and identifying the Universe with oneself” (Eliot 1950: 119-20) – for his critique is itself a late variant of the long tradition of anti-Stoicism that reaches back to the fourteenth book of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. There the Stoics are linked with the flesh, the Devil, and the special impiety that comes from living in the earthly city but pretending not to be touched by the dreadful emotions with which that city is, by divine command, continually convulsed. Stoics “seem to control … those emotions” and “are so proud and elated in their impiety that … their haughtiness increases even as their pain diminishes.” They exhibit, says Augustine, “a vanity as monstrous as it is rare”; and while failing to gain “true tranquility” they “suffer an entire loss of their humanity” (De civ. D. 14.9, in Augustine 1998: 602). Christopher Brooke’s recent book, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (2012), makes it clear that when Stoicism re-emerged in the early modern period it did so by defining itself, one way or another, in relation to persistent Augustinian attacks. And one cannot study Stoicism in Shakespeare without encountering the same Augustinian tradition carried on by Eliot and others.3
