Will Morrisey

Gentlemen and Gentlemanliness According to Shakespeare

July 19, 2019 by Will Morrisey

William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Performed at the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, July 13, 2019.

What is a gentleman? Are these two Veronese gentlemen true gentlemen? Why Veronese gentlemen, and not gentlemen from some other city? Why bring them to Milan?

And while we’re at it, Shakespeare concludes his comedy with a reconciliation scene that we now find utterly implausible, even for a comedy. What was he thinking? Is the fault in the stars, in the brilliant Shakespearean constellation, or in ourselves?

In the 1590s, when Shakespeare wrote, Verona was ruled by commercial-republican Venice. It may have been known as a city of romance; Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet there, and it has surely been known as such ever since. So, gentlemen of Verona may be expected to be looking for love, for girls happily to wed. For gentlemen, marriage matters politically; aristocratic households not only possess wealth, they rule. Good marriages perpetuate aristocratic regimes, bad marriages ruin them. All regimes concern themselves with the problem of continuity, with the transfer of authority from one generation to the next. Monarchies see dynastic struggles and fear imbecile heirs to the throne, and in the American republic young Lincoln lectured schoolboys on “the perpetuation of our political institutions, as the founding generation passed from the scene.

Milan has another regime, under another imperial ruler. Conquered by the Romans in the third century BC, Milan served as capital of the Western Roman Empire, beginning in third century AD. There the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313, granting religious toleration throughout the empire and thereby enabling Christianity to spread unimpeded. The Roman aristocracy would need to adjust to the new religion, now, just as the modern European aristocracy would need to adjust to commerce and democracy, centuries later.

In modern times, the Christian ruler of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, committed a notorious mistake. Needing an ally against rival, ever-squabbling Italian city-states in the 1490s, when other enterprising Italians were sailing the ocean blue for the New World, he called the king of France Charles into Italy. In 1500, Charles VII returned, this time to stay and to rule—an example of misguided policy by a Christian Italian prince Machiavelli would later deplore. In 1525, Hapsburg Spain took over, and in Shakespeare’s time Milan was part of the Holy Roman Empire.

For centuries, Roman gentlemen knew exactly who they were, and what a gentleman was. But if the Empire becomes holy, at least in name, possibly in aspiration and even a bit in fact, what is a gentleman then, and who is one? ‘We democrats’ of later modernity miss the point of the play if we do not see that it’s about those questions, about aristocracy, the regime that claims to be the rule of the few who are best, men and women who claim the right to rule on the basis of their excellence—whether of virtue (as in Aristotle), ‘birth’ (social rank), wealth, or some combination thereof. In modernity, aristocracy often founds its claim on knowledge or expertise, calling itself ‘meritocracy’; traditionally, another sort of learning, learning in the liberal arts, enhanced a young man’s eligibility for positions of authority. Christians are numbered among ‘the elect’—a new sort of aristocracy, chosen not on the basis of virtues natural or conventional but by God, gratuitously.

Given these cross-cutting, sometimes contradictory claims to rule by self-styled aristocrats, what is a young gentleman of Verona to do, and to think? Proteus, named for the classical world’s legendary changeling, who wrestled with Odysseus, intends to stay in his native city, close to his honorable beloved. Valentine, whose name means “as one containing valor,” has no beloved. He prepares instead for an odyssey, intending to leave Verona, “To see the wonders of the world abroad” (I.i.6). Valentine criticizes love as a dubious investment of sentiment (“If haply won, perhaps a hapless gain”) and intellect (“a folly bought with wit, / Or else a wit by folly vanquished”) (I.i.32-35). If Valentine is an Odysseus and Proteus a Proteus, they will square off, someday (and Homer’s readers won’t put their money on Proteus). Now, however, they part as friends, agreeing to correspond. Proteus thinks Valentine seeks not so much the wonders of the world as honor, traditionally the aristocrat’s passion par excellence, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, as Publius would call it, nearly two centuries later. For the moment, Proteus’ mind is closed to wonder, his love for Julia having “metamorphis’d” him (he soliloquizes, recalling his Ovid), causing him to “neglect my studies, lose my time, / War with good counsel, set the world at nought,” making his “wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought” (I.i.63-69). His immediate worry is Julia’s failure to answer his most recent missive.

Julia asks her lady-in-waiting, Lucetta (“light”), if she would “counsel me to fall in love” and, if so, with which of her suitors. Lucetta recommends Proteus but has “no reasons” for her recommendation “but a woman’s reason; I think him so because I think him so” (I.ii.23-24). This unilluminating counsel fails to impress Julia; Proteus “has never moved me” because in “little speaking [he] shows his love but small” (I.ii.29). Lucetta then produces the letter, which Julia pretends to scorn but delights in, tears up, then attempts to reassemble. Lucetta isn’t fooled, knowing that her mistress has made up her mind. But Julia’s initial concern will prove just.

Proteus’s father, Antonio, also receives advice from a servant, or rather from his brother, a priest, who conveys it through his servant. Why does his lordship allow Proteus to stay at home, “While other men, of slender reputation, / Put forth their sons to seek preferment out,” whether to war, to voyages of discovery, or to “the studious universities” (I.iii.5-10). Antonio confesses to having thought the same thing: His son “cannot be a perfect man,” a man with a just claim to rule, without “being tried and tutor’d in the world: / Experience is by industry achiev’d, / And perfected by the swift course of time,” which his son is now wasting in Verona, Venice’s subordinate, while his friend Valentine is off (as servant Panthino reminds him) to the Holy Roman Emperor’s court in Milan (I.ii.20-23). When Proteus enters, reading Julia’s return letter, he lies to his father about its sender, telling him it’s from Valentine. This only confirms Antonio’s intention to send Proteus to the imperial city; after all, he will be reuniting the young man with his friend. In lying, Proteus tells himself, “I shunn’d the fire for fear of burning,” only to drench himself “in the sea, where I am drown’d” (I.iii.78-79). This hard lesson will not prevent him from lying many more times, however, with Protean abandon.

At the Duke’s palace in Milan, Valentine’s servant, Speed, baits his master, who has reversed his opinion of love, having fallen for the Duke’s daughter, Silvia. Valentine has been so profoundly “metamorphosis’d” by love that “I can hardly think you my master” (II.i.26-27). For his own sport, Speed takes up Valentine’s former critique: “If you love her, you cannot see her” because “Love is blind” (II.i.61-63). With both Lucetta and Speed, the servant attempts to moderate a young boss. Valentine differs from Julia, however, because he makes no attempt to deceive him respecting his correspondence with Silvia; he chaffs Speed right back. Having no need of maidenly modesty, he has no need of maidenly secrecy. The crucial question will be whether an ‘Ovidian’ metamorphosis effected by love is merely ‘Protean,’ or does it instead bring out the nature of the lover, a nature that can remain faithful, unchanging?

Being a maid, Silvia does have need of a ruse. Valentine has been gazing at her at table, and no woman in the world who isn’t blind as Love wouldn’t notice such behavior. She has charged him with writing a letter to her (supposed) beloved, and she has come to tell him that “I would have had them writ more movingly” (II.i.117). She will permit him to revise and resubmit. “O excellent device!” Speed exclaims (II.i.128); the lady flirts well, having “taught her love himself to write unto her lover,” whom he now sees to be Valentine (II.i.156)—as he explains to his uncomprehending, disbelieving, love-tortured master. Is his servant in earnest but wrong, in earnest and right, or deliberately wrong and still baiting him, as his wont? Love is a chameleon, as Speed now and Valentine soon will remark, living on air (as chameleons were said to do)—that is to say, on hope—and changing colors in its blushes, its excitation, its jealous rages.

Changeling Proteus implausibly pledges his constancy to Julia and then heads to Milan, where Valentine lauds his character to the Duke when told of his impending arrival. Proteus, Valentine avers, is a man of ripe judgment and “all good grace to grace a gentleman” (II.iv.70). So trusting, he does not hesitate to tell Proteus of his beloved, to extol her beauty and saintliness, and to introduce her to him. Between now and the flirtation over the letter, Speed has been proven correct; the couple are betrothed, and plan their elopement. Proteus now has other plans, having instantly conceived a passion for Silvia. His love, “like a waxen image ‘gainst a fire / Bears no impression of the thing it was. / Methinks my zeal to Valentine is cold, / And that I love him not as I was wont. / O! but I love his lady too much…” (II.iv.197-201). As for Julia, he has “quite forgotten her” (II.iv.191)—a Proteus of love, indeed. “If I can check my erring love, I will; / If not, to compass her I’ll use my skill” (II.iv.209-210). It doesn’t take him long to logic-chop his way to the latter course. He even concludes his ‘reasoning’ with a prayer, a prayer to Love: “Love, lend me wings to make my purpose swift, / As thou has lent me with to plot this drift” (IV.vi.42-43). Back in Verona, meanwhile, Julia tells Lucetta that Proteus’s “words are bonds, his oaths are oracles, / His love sincere, his thoughts immaculate,” and so on (II.vii.75-76). She plans to disguise herself as a man and run off to Milan to be with him. Sensible Lucetta doubts her mistress’s faith to be well-placed but, loyal herself, will not betray her plan.

Proteus easily frustrates the elopement by disclosing Valentine’s plot to the Duke, who banishes the plotter. The Duke would marry his daughter to the wealthy Thurio, a Thor in name only—vain, cowardly, and blustering, a Thor of big thunder and small hammer, despised by prudent Silvia. For his part, Proteus offers ‘friend’ Valentine mock-moderate advice: “Cease to lament for that thou canst not keep” (III.i.241); trust to time. Write to Silvia and send your letters through me, as I shall deliver them faithfully. As it happens, Proteus’s servant, Launce, has formed a better estimate of Proteus than Valentine has done; “I am but a fool, look you, and yet I have the wit to think my master is a kind of a knave” (III.i.261-262). He suspects his master of being willing to launce, a lot.

In this comedy, then, it is usually the case that the servants are smarter than their masters and mistresses. Even Launce’s dog, subordinate of a subordinate, routinely outwits his master, puts him to shame, induces his master to serve him. [1] This is Christianity ill-conceived, a Christianity in comical abdication of political responsibility, mock-Christian misrule. Who, then, are the true aristocrats? How will the aristocrats-by-convention improve themselves, become worthy of the authority they claim?

The Duke isn’t doing so well, in that regard. His purpose as an aristocratic father with an eligible daughter is to choose a worthy suitor and so to continue his line, assuring that his family will continue to rule in the next generation. He too trusts Proteus, asking him his counsel on how to make Silvia forget Valentine and love Thurio. Proteus is more than happy to oblige, and to use what there is of the Duke’s prudence for his own advantage and against the Duke’s intention. Slander Valentine, the would-be Machiavel thoughtfully advises, “with falsehood, cowardice, and poor descent— / Three things that women highly hold in hate” (III.ii.32-33). Yes, but I cannot deliver such a message, the Duke calculates; it must come from the one “she esteemeth as his friend” (III.ii.37). Needless to say, Proteus promises to undertake the task, adding that he shall praise Thurio in the bargain, as Thurio himself is the first to suggest. The Duke and Thurio can trust Proteus, the Duke explains, because Proteus is “already Love’s firm votary / And cannot soon revolt and change [his] mind” concerning his lovely Julia (III.ii.58-59). That Proteus has already revolted and changed his mind, that his quick betrayal of Valentine proves him capable of doing just that, does not occur to the Duke or to Thurio. Milan’s rulers are misfits, aristocrats in name only. As for Proteus, he puts his faith in the power of poetry to persuade Silvia, and again the Duke concurs: “Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy” (III.ii.72). Proteus knows that not all poesy need be heaven-bred, but he does trust in its power; he trusts in what he knows to be human artifice, not in nature and not in God. Shakespeare also knows that not all poesy is heaven-sent, and wants his hearers to know it. He also knows the power of some poetry, but prefers to use it to illuminate and not to deceive. Hilariously, he has dolt Thurio choose to write the sonnet.

A natural aristocrat will find his way to rule in nature itself. So we see when Valentine, self-exiled from Verona and banished from Milan, meets a gang of outlaws in a forest on the frontiers of Mantua. To win their esteem, along with his own and his servant’s safety, he tells them a prudent if not noble lie—that he was banished for killing a man, although “without false vantage or base treachery,” there being honor among killers as well as thieves (IV.i.29). Suitably impressed, upon learning that Valentine also possesses a useful knowledge (foreign languages) as well as the requisite virtù, they will have him for their king. “Some of us are gentleman,” one of their number explains, outlaws only because they committed murder and “such-like petty crimes” in “the fury of ungovern’d youth” (IV.i.44-45). It should be remarked that aristocratic regimes that fail to govern their youth, whether in love or in anger, cannot last long. Valentine agrees “to make a virtue of necessity” (as one outlaw puts it); in return, they will “do thee homage, and be rul’d by thee, / Love thee as our commander and our king,” albeit upon pain of death if he demurs (IV.i.62, 66-67). Judging that these new outlaw-allies may be more honest than some of those he has known in civil society, Valentine consents, “Provided that you do no outrages / On silly women or poor passengers” (IV.i.71-72). Of course not. Being gentlemen manqué, “We detest such vile base practices” (IV.i.73).

As Proteus’s servant serves, doglike, a dog, so (Proteus admits), “spaniel-like,” the more Silvia “spurns my love / The more it grows and fawneth on her still” (IV.ii.14-15). Thurio arrives beneath Silvia’s room, where the Duke has confined her, with sonnet in hand and musicians in his train. Julia is there, too, disguised as a boy, listening to the preposterous serenade. Proteus’s betrayal stands exposed after Thurio gives up and Proteus makes another try at winning Silvia. More lies follow: Julia is dead, so he’s free to court another; Valentine is, too, so Silvia is equally free. After her scornful rejection, he begs for her picture as a consolation, which she promises to send in the morning, “loath” though she is “to be your idol” (IV.ii.124).

Rid of him, she spins a counterplot with her friend Eglamour, whose name Shakespeare has borrowed from a hero of a medieval romance. Sir Eglamour of Artois is a Christian Hercules, performing heroic deeds in a story of courtly love that, counter to convention, leads to marriage and family. A good name, indeed, and Silvia knows him as “a gentleman”—”valiant, wise, remorseful [i.e., compassionate], well accomplished” (IV.iii.11-13). Like Julia, she would escape her father’s injustice and seek her beloved. She will need no protective disguise, as Julia did, because Eglamour consents to accompany her, although this will put him at odds with the Duke. His compassion or pity, consonant with both nature and Christianity, brings him to agree to guard her. Apart from Valentine, he is the only real gentleman in the play, although, being human and no demi-god, he will defend her in a less-than-Herculean way.

Disguised Julia calls herself “Sebastian,” recalling the saint martyred after attempting to persuade the Roman Emperor Diocletian from persecuting Christians. “Sebastian” means “be ashamed,” and Proteus, who doesn’t recognize her in disguise, shows no more shame at his betrayals than the Emperor did at killing saints. Having judged his own dog-serving servant unreliable, he asks her to deliver a ring to Silvia, which of course is the same ring Julia had given to him at the time they pledged mutual fidelity. Unlike Proteus, who uses deception to betray his friend, Julia will faithfully offer the ring to Silvia. “I am my master’s true confirmed love, / But cannot be true servant to my master / Unless I prove false traitor to myself. / Yet will I woo for him but yet so coldly / As, heaven it knows, I would not have him speed” (IV.iv. 98-102). Silvia unwitting proves more faithful to Julia than Proteus, plotting, saying, “Tell him from me, / One Julia, that his changing,” Protean, “thoughts forget, / Would better fit his chamber than this shadow,” the picture of herself that he wants her to exchange for the ring, which Silvia rejects because her finger “would not do his Julia so much wrong” (IV.iv.133). “Sebastian” reveals herself not as Julia but as Julia’s servant, whom Silvia accordingly rewards with a token of respect for her loyalty. Having proved herself good and faithful, Julia also proves vulnerable to a touch of jealousy; left with the picture of Silvia, she supposes herself no less lovely than her rival, concluding that Love is indeed “a blinded god” (IV.iv.193). In judging, justice is blind to persons; in pursuing, Love is blind to judgment. To found a just regime, men and women will need to learn to love prudently and to judge justly, forming families aristocratic in the natural sense of the word, the rule of those best by nature, as guided by God. Before leaving in search of Valentine, Silvia goes to confession.

Before Thurio left Silvia, Proteus told him to meet him the next morning at St. Gregory’s well. It is an unwittingly ironical choice, as St. Gregory was the man who sent Christian missionaries to England, where they led the Anglo-Saxons to conversion. Proteus intends no such holy purpose, but his mission will soon come to an end. By the next day, the Duke has discovered Silvia’s escape, correctly guessing that she’s left in search of Valentine. All parties will soon converge in the forest, in nature, outside the city and its conventions, where a re-founding of the Milanese regime may occur rightly, by the light of natural justice.

An outlaw intercepts Silvia; Eglamour’s disappearance will remain unexplained, and he will not return. However things may have gone, the outlaw faithfully brings the lady to his captain, even assuring her: “Fear not, he bears an honorable mind, / And will not use a woman lawlessly” (V.iii.12-14). His fidelity to his promise not to harm women will serve him well, in the end. Valentine already knows that his men “love me well; yet I have much to do / To keep them from uncivil outrages” (V.iv.16-17). But he hides, seeing intruders in the forest.

They are not strangers. Proteus, Julia/Sebastian are with Silvia, whom Proteus has seized from the outlaws; hoping to put her in his debt, he insists that they “would have forc’d your honor and your love” (V.iv.21). “How like a dream is this I see and hear!” Valentine thinks; like Proteus, he prays to Love, not for swiftness in the execution of a plot, as Proteus had done, but for exactly the opposite, for the “patience to forbear awhile” (V.iv.26-27). Valentine’s love is Christian, agapic not erotic: “Agape suffereth long and is kind; agape envieth not, agape vaunteth not itself” (I Corinthians 13:4). Christian love is patient, not protean,. Christian love enables not only the innocence of doves but the prudence of serpents. In terms of the names in the play, “Speed” is a servant for Valentine, a person under his rule; Proteus imagines speed a virtue, and his servant is a clown.

Fortified with this loving patience, Valentine listens as Silvia laments her misery in having been rescued by “false Proteus,” exactly the sort of man to whom she would never want to be obliged (V.iv.35). He listens as she adds, “O, heaven be judge how I love Valentine, / Whose life’s as tender to me as my soul!” (V.iv.36-37). And he hears his beloved reveal not only her faithful heart but her clear mind, as when Proteus complains of “the curse in love” (Love’s final answer to his evil, impatient prayer), that “women cannot love where they’re beloved,” she rejoins with crushing logic that “Proteus cannot love where he’s beloved!”—in Verona, by Julia (V.iv.43-45). The Protean soul contradicts itself by rending its faith “into a thousand oaths,” by committing perjury, by saying two opposite things at once (V.iv.48). “Thou has no faith left now, unless thou’st two, / And that’s far worse than one,” making him a “counterfeit,” a false double, “to thy true friend!” (V.iv.50-53). This reduces Proteus first to appealing to convention masquerading as nature (“In love, / Who respects friend?”); when Silvia refutes this (“All men but Proteus”) he threatens to “love [her] ‘gainst the nature of love—force ye”—the very act he had begun by praising himself for saving her from (V.iv.50-54). Unblessed or even cursed by nature, or by the goddess Love, he would treat her as Machiavelli urges the prince to treat the protean, faithless lady Fortuna, to master her by force. “I’ll force thee to yield to my desire” (V.iv.59). The source of Proteus’s proteanism is the disorder of his soul, which he has turned in precise contradiction to its natural order. His reason serves his desires, and when reasoning fails to get him what his desires want, he resorts to spiritedness, to angry threats of force. Since (as Socrates observes in the Republic) the desires or appetites are foolish and inconstant counselors, he constantly bends himself out of shape.

Valentine, whose soul is so ordered that his reason contains his valor, now puts that virtue to use, commanding Proteus to “let go that rude uncivil touch” (V.iv.60). In the wild, natural forest, outside civil society, his mind and heart command civility, speech over touch. Machiavelli teaches that one learns best not through hearing or faith, not through seeing or reason, but through the sense of touch—touch, which caresses or annihilates, mastering Fortuna. Valentine doesn’t need force to defeat the astonished Proteus; he need only address him as “Thou common friend, that’s without faith or love” (V.iv.63). Common: That is to say, he reveals Proteus as a commoner, not an aristocrat at all, unworthy of ruling anyone because incapable of ruling himself as a human being should do, if fully human. “Proteus, / I am sorry I must never trust thee more, / But count the world a stranger for thy sake. / The private wound is deepest” (V.iv.68-71). Valentine’s own status as a ruler crumbles if civil and even personal friendship disintegrates. Aristocracy requires the virtues of courage, moderation, justice, prudence, fidelity in friendship and in love. For an aristocrat to be a counterfeit, aristocratic in convention, in title or appearance only, ruins aristocracy, makes the world itself a stranger, which is to say a foreigner, not merely an illegal but a natural alien. Machiavellianism alienates nature, and in so doing destroys not only conventional aristocracy, the political balance-wheel between ‘the one,’ the prince, and ‘the many,’ the commoners, but destroys the real, natural aristocracy upon which every conventional aristocracy must finally rely.

Here is where ‘we democrats’ misunderstand the ending of the play. Proteus, for all his faults, retains an element of aristocracy in his soul. He has attempted to play the leonine and vulpine prince, but he still has a core of virtue that his would-be virtù cannot quite smother. He can still feel shame, the reverse side of the honor that is the ruling passion of the true aristocrat’s mind. Confronted by the outraged friend he has betrayed, he admits that “My shame and guilt confounds me” (V.iv.74). Instead of offering battle he asks for forgiveness. Only in a soul formed and informed by natural right and Christian or agapic love can this response make sense. The same is true of Valentine’s response:

Then I am paid;

And once again I do receive thee honest.

Who by repentance is not satisfied

Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleas’d;

By penitence th’ Eternal’s wrath’s appeas’d.

And, that my love may appear plain and free,

All that was mine in Silvia I give thee. (V.iv.78-83)

If God forgives penitent sinners, and if nature does, too, why should humans not forgive? Is Proteus’s sudden show of shame and guilt, along with his repentance and humble request for forgiveness, only another shape-shifting, soon to be forgotten by him? Is Valentine’s immediate reversal of his distrust, his natural (that is, rational) and Christian forgiveness implausible, or even a ruse, a deeper Machiavellianism? Unlikely: This is a comedy, and Shakespeare does not intend to appeal to the supposed realism of Machiavellians or democrats, but to the realities of natural right and Christian grace, which Tocqueville identified as the democratizing gift of an aristocratic society. The resulting democratic society yet stands in need of aristocratic guidance, Tocqueville added.

But what of Julia, still disguised as Sebastian? Overwhelmed by all of this, she covers and reveals herself by stepping out of the shadow of her disguise, as Valentine had stepped out of the shadows of the forest. She too rebukes Proteus, invoking his shame at his own commonness, baseness, vulgarity. Behold the woman:

Behold her that gave aim to all thy oaths,

And entertain’d ’em deeply in her heart.

How oft has thou with perjury cleft the root!

O Proteus, let this habit make thee blush!

Be thou asham’d that I have took upon me

Such an immodest raiment—if shame live

In a disguise of love.

It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,

Women to change their shapes than men their minds. (V.iv.101-110)

The root of nature, the heart, will be cleft by the many-minded, self-contradictory man. The relation of heart to mind, of morality to reason, deranged, ought to shame not only an aristocrat but a man as such.

And so it does. Proteus admits “’tis true” (V.iv.110). Inconstancy is the original sin, the “one error that fills [man] with faults,” making him “run through all th’ sins” (V.iv.111-112). To run: to be impatient, to hasten, to change senselessly, to be ruled by the desires. “What is in Silvia’s face but I may spy / More fresh in Julia’s with a constant eye?” (V.iv.114-115). That is, constancy of heart is the indispensable condition of clarity of mind, of the reasoning mind whose exercise shows men human, and makes aristocrats just. At this, Valentine again intervenes. With right relations restored, he proposes reconciliation of both the friends and the lovers. Proteus and, crucially, Julia agree to the covenant. What Christian aristocrats of the Tudors’ English regime once understood and accepted as plausible, at least in an instructive stage comedy, we modern democrats, we petty Machiavels, do not. Were they the deluded ones, or are we?

As for Valentine and Silvia, there remains the matter of her father, the Duke, who now blunders in, accompanied by thundering arch-blunderer Thurio. Upon seeing Silvia, Thurio claims her as his own, but Valentine proves the more valorous of the two (no hard thing), threatening to thrash him if he touches her, and the false Thor instantly decides that only a fool “will endanger / His body for a girl that loves him not” (V.iv.133-134). The Duke has prudence enough to recognize the obvious: “The more degenerate and base art thou / To make such means for her as thou hast done / And leave her on such slight conditions.” (V.iv.136-138) No true aristocrat, Thurio. Therefore “by the honour of my ancestry”—in the name of his aristocratic lineage—”I do applaud thy spirit, Valentine, / And think thee worthy of an empress’ love” (V.iv.139-141). Valor is the spirit of the true aristocrat, and the Duke now sees that he needs to re-found his regime by ending Valentine’s banishment but much more, to “Plead a new state in thy unrivall’d merit” (V.iv.144). This new state, this new regime, will find support in the man he now addresses as Sir Valentine. “Thou art a gentleman, and well-deriv’d; / Take thou thy Silvia, for thou has deserv’d her.” (V.iv.146-147). The Duke of Milan has clearly stated what a gentleman really is, and it is on this true perception, made possible by a reformed because dis-illusioned heart, that the renewed and more truly aristocratic regime will rest.

Valentine’s first act as a co-ruler of that regime is to reincorporate its remaining repentant scapegraces, the outlaws who preceded him in banishment. They are, he tells the Duke, “men endu’d with worthy qualities,” deserving now of forgiveness, having become “reformed, civil, full of good, / And fit for great employment, worthy lord” (V.iv.154-157). The Duke immediately pardons both them and Valentine, telling his future son-in-law to “Dispose of them as thou know’st their deserts” (V.iv.158-159). Clear-sighted, because virtuous, Valentine knows them because he is clear-sighted, and will then be able to exercise the virtue of justice wisely—justice and wisdom being the virtues of the ruler par excellence, the virtues needed in politics. The Duke then proposes an extraordinary ‘royal progress’ back to Milan—extraordinary because they shall proceed “with triumphs, mirth, and rare solemnity” (V.iv.161). The circumstance makes celebration of victory understandable enough, but how can mirth and solemnity combine? Only in comedy: the high seriousness of tragedy has no mirth, but comedy treats of “high” or noble things with a happy ending, an ending whereby all the elements that might make for tragedy are harmonized as a graceful spirit and the rule of reason over hearts corrected by grace take hold among the rulers of the political community. Comedy is aristocracy gone right, tragedy aristocracy gone wrong. Too much democracy will form souls that blink uncomprehendingly at both.

There is even a hint of philosophy to come. Valentino introduces the Duke to Julia, still in boy-disguise. “I think the boy hath grace in him; he blushes,” the Duke observes, happily noting an aristocratic sense of shame in the supposed lad (V.iv.165). Valentine warrants him “more grace than boy,” and when the Duke asks what that could mean he promises to tell the story in the return, triumphant, trip (V.iv.166), promising in addition that the Duke will “wonder” at the tale (V.iv.169). Before embarking on his odyssey, Valentine had said he intended to see the wonders of the world abroad; Proteus had supposed Valentine’s motive to have been the quest for honor. Valentine has seen the wonders and found honor, as well. As for Proteus, it will be, just Valentine remarks in his final act of justice, Proteus’s act of penance will be to hear “the story of your loves discovered” (V.iv.171).

After that, Valentine promises, the regime will be re-founded on the two marriages, re-founded on “One feast, one house, one mutual happiness!” (V.iv.174). Love and friendship, sundered by the chaotic soul of Proteus, and a sundered aristocratic regime, nearly ruined by the overbearing and imprudent father-Duke, will both achieve reunion on the only stable foundation for private and public good, fidelity. Henceforth the private fidelity of marriage and the public fidelity of justice will reinforce one another, securing the truly human purpose, happiness.

Note

See II.iii.1-29 and IV.1-36.

Taming Our Shrewishness

July 15, 2019 by Will Morrisey

William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew.

Performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Summer 2007.

Performed at the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, July 22, 2017.

In front of an alehouse on a heath—a wild place in a wild place—the indignant hostess confronts Christopher Sly. A tinker or itinerant pot-maker, Christopher Sly lives up to the reputation of his profession, then held to be an occupation for drunks. He doesn’t live up to either part of his name, except in the way he puns off the name of his family: “Let the world slide” (Induction i.5). But as to the rest, he is neither a providential nor a provident man. Not Christlike—innocent as a dove, prudent as a serpent—not Machiavellian—vulpine and lion-like— he could not be less a ruler than he is. Incapable of rule, including self-rule, he seemingly cannot be ruled, at least not by the poor Hostess, whom he refuses to pay for some ale glasses he broke. Unjust, a man who will not pay his debts, like all drunks he harbors too much anger as well as too much appetite in his soul. Aristotle might call him the the least political man imaginable, and therefore not fully a man at all, since man is the political animal.

A better ruler, called only “Lord,” chances by, with his retinue and his hunting dogs. [1] Seeing poor, passed-out Sly, he likens him to a swine but recognizes him as human, a “drunken man,” under the Circean spell of ale (Induction i.34). But as a true ruler, the Lord not only judges men aright, he knows what to do with them. Take him back to my home (out of the wild, back to civil society) and make him “forget himself” (which is indeed a favor, given the character of his ‘self’) (Induction i.38). Like a stage director in a play, the Lord directs his men to hang “his fairest chamber” with “all my wanton pictures”; “balm his foul head with warm distilled waters”; scent the air by burning “sweet wood”; when he awakes, have music ready, “a dulcet and heavenly sound” (Induction i.44-49). Sight, touch, smell, hearing: four of the five senses will ‘argue’ for a new identity; eroticism, especially, brings a man out of himself, redirects his thoughts to the loved one (or ones, as there is more than one wanton picture). The Lord does not appeal to Sly’s taste, inasmuch as it inclines to the taste of ale. Let that sleeping swine lie.

“If he chance speak”—show a telltale sign of humanness—tell him a noble lie (Induction i.50): Address him as His Honor, ask him for a command; will you wash yourself, will you dress yourself, and how? Tell him he is a hunter, a horseman, a husband whose lady “mourns at his disease,” which is lunacy—a dreamlike condition from which he has just now awakened (Induction i.60). “Do it kindly, gentle sirs”; kindly means naturally, as he must be called back to his true, human, nature by natural means (Induction i.64). The Lord induces his men to look at it as an amusement, “pastime passing excellent, / If it be husbanded with modesty” (Induction i.65-66). Husbandry or agriculture works with nature; modesty or moderation works with care. He instructs his page, Bartholomew, to dress as a woman and pretend to be Sly’s wife, and to tell him he’s been deathly ill for seven years. Later, one of the Lord’s servants more than doubles the number to fifteen. With fine comic timing, a troupe of actors arrives, looking for work, which the Lord is happy to give them, inviting them to join in with “some sport in hand / Where you cunning can insist me much” (Induction i.89-90). But above all he needs them to rule themselves throughout the stage business. Don’t act ‘out of character’ in my play, lest my stagecraft fail. “Haply my presence / May well abate the over-merry spleen, / Which otherwise would grow into extremes” (Induction i.34-36). The true ruler’s presence moderates the passions of those he rules, civilizes them. He rules by natural means (water, sweet smoke) and mostly by art (wanton pictures, music, a play); Sly is very far from being ready for a real and civil life. He needs a comprehensive moral education.

The Lord and his men carry out this plot. Awakened but far from ‘woke,’ the patient asserts his identity: “I am Christopher Sly; call not me ‘honor’ nor lordship” (Induction ii.5). Reverting to his favorite appetite, he swears he “never drank sack in my life,” sherry being a gentleman’s drink, unlike his preferred ale, the drink of the people (Induction ii.7). For food he wants salt beef. He even gives his lineage, far from aristocratic, dating back only so far as his father, plain Burton Heath, a name that suggests the wild and inhuman part of nature where Sly was found. Son Christopher has been something of a changeling—peddler by birth, cardmaker by “education,” a keeper of a tame bear “by transmutation,” and “by present profession a tinker” (Induction ii.16-19). “Score me up for the lying’st knave in Christendom,” English Christendom’s finest example of the Cretan liar (Induction ii.23-24). To this, the Lord adjures him to “Call home thy ancient thoughts from banishment, / And banish these abject lowly dreams” (Induction ii.29-30). He commands Apollonian music, the opposite of Dionysian drunkenness. With judgelike authority, the Lord proclaims “Thou art a lord, and nothing but a lord,” with “a lady far more beautiful/ Than any woman in this waning age” (Induction ii.59-61).

That arrests the man’s attention, begins to reform his self-knowledge. “Am I a lord and have I such a lady?” (Induction ii.66). Do I dream now or have I been dreaming? Surely, “I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak;/ I smell sweet savours, and I feel soft things” (Induction ii.68-69); with a boost from wishful thinking, his senses convince him, as planned, even as common sense could not—he having little of that to work with. He calls for ale again, but now only the weakest kind. The Lord’s men ignore that, instead bringing in his ‘wife,’ Bartholomew, who tells him the doctor has left instructions for her not to share his bed with him, lest his illness recur. The actors, whom the Lord encountered out on the heath, will cure his understandable melancholy at having his eros first aroused, then denied. They will stage a play, “The Taming of the Shrew.” This play-within-the-play will have its own play (or plays) within it, as the several levels of noble lies are arranged to lead not only a drunkard but all of Shakespeare’s audience (each of us likely drunk with some impediment to wisdom and the other virtues) to clear-eyed thoughts, through the senses but beyond them.

In the play we meet Lucentio (“Light”) and his servant Tranio. They have journeyed from Lombardy (specifically the city of Pisa, “renowned” for its “grave citizens”) (I.i.2). Lucentio would leave the home of a merchant father, foregoing citizenship for the liberal arts, the way to the philosophic life. “Here let us breathe, and haply institute/ A course of learned and ingenious studies” (I.i.8-9), especially the study of “Virtue and that part of philosophy” which “treats of happiness/ By virtue specially to be achiev’d” (I.i.18-20)—the philosophy found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Ah, but as Tranio may know, the Ethics might lead to the Politics, or, if not to politics, then to Stoicism. “Let’s be no Stoics nor no stocks”—restraints—”I pray,/ Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks”—his moderation—”As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured” (I.i.31-33). Logic, yes; rhetoric, very well; “music and poesy” by all means; even mathematics and metaphysics (I.i.36): But ‘pray’ “Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. / No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en” (I.i.37-38). Epicurean Tranio has a mind rather like an American college student; he likes a curriculum with as many ‘electives’ as possible: “In brief, sir, study what you most affect,” what you want (I.i.40). If you would flee political life, select from Aristotle’s books as you please, but avoid the stern apoliticism of the Stoics and embrace the pleasurable apoliticism of the Epicureans. In Plautus’ play, Mostellaria, from which Shakespeare borrows him, Tranio is a clever slave, as indeed he is here: a man of wit, a fixer, but of ‘slavish’ character—low, pleasure-preferring, given to manipulating the low side of other souls, bending them to his own inclinations. “Gramercies, Tranio, well dost thou advise,” replies Lucentio, as he inclines toward becoming a genteel version of Sly (I.i.41).

An object for erotic desire enters immediately. A Paduan gentleman, Baptista Minola, has an apparently unmarriageable daughter, Katherine, “rough” and shrewish elder to studious, beautiful and modest Bianca. Hortensio and Gremio (the latter an unsuitable suitor, a comical old man exemplifying a stock figure in Italian comedy) would court Bianca, but Baptista will not marry his younger daughter until he finds a husband for undesirable Katherine. Upon seeing Bianca, Lucentio falls in love, too. He devises his own ‘play’ or plot to win her, proposing to present himself as a tutor in order to gain access to Bianca. Meanwhile, Tranio will assume Lucentio’s identity in Padua, a plausible imposture because faces alone don’t distinguish master from manservant. Nature makes no such distinction, at least physically; they can change clothes, even as a clothing change was part of the ‘play’ on Sly, and even as actors in plays change into their costumes, into their assumed identities—to sleep, perchance to dream, not of some Hell but of a person and of things outside their ordinary selves. And so, perhaps, to learn. Shakespeare himself served in his company as plotter, ruler, and player. And he learned as he went, from histories and light comedies to tragedies to The Tempest. Lucentio announces that he has another, undisclosed, purpose in his plotting, but does not say what it is.

This is to say that the Lord presents the changeling Sly with a play about changelings played by actors (themselves by definition changelings). The play will invite Sly to change, to reorient his soul, even as his condition has been changed for him by the Lord.

Veronese gentleman Petruchio and his servant Grumio (not to be confused with old man Gremio) have arrived in Padua to visit his “best beloved and approved friend,” Hortensio (I.ii.3). (The root of “Hortensio” means “garden”; there is perhaps a hint of apolitical Epicureanism in this university town.) His father having died, Petruchio seeks in Padua not the liberal arts but a fortune and a wife, preferably in the same person. Hortensio tells him he knows a prospect, unfortunately “shrewd and ill-favoured” (I.ii.58) but assuredly “rich, and very rich” (I.ii.61). As manly and thumotic as Lucentio is ardent and ‘intellectual,’ Petruchio replies that “wealth is the burden of my wooing dance” (I.ii.66). Therefore, “Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love” (an old hag who nonetheless turned into a beautiful woman, by magic), or “old as Sibyl,” or even “as curst and shrewd / As Socrates’ Xanthippe or a worse”—philosophy lingers in the background, even with Petruchio—all’s well that ends well, wellness being defined by him as wealth (I.ii.67-69). [2] He too has a plot: He will disguise himself as a music teacher to gain access to Baptista’s household, then take things from there.

Lucentio (having assumed his new identity as tutor “Cambio”) and Gremio pass by, discussing their own plots to win Bianca, overheard by the two friends. But Hortensio doesn’t know everything, as he assumes that Gremio really is Lucentio, and that he must be a rival to Petruchio for the hand of Katherine. Of course there’s no real conflict, as these suitors aim at different women. This becomes clear as Petruchio discourses on Katherine, “an irksome brawling scold” (I.ii.184) whom he nonetheless intends to woo: “Have I not in my time heard lions roar?” and the winds howl at sea, seen the “angry boar chafed with sweat” and “the great ordinance in the field,” indeed the greater “thunder in the sky” (I.ii.196-201)? Hunter (like the Lord), sailor and soldier, perhaps unfearful of Heaven’s lightning itself, why should Petruchio fear “a woman’s tongue” (I.ii.204)? He will proceed to vindicate his boast.

Lucentio’s servant Tranio enters, playing Lucentio, and proposes that he, Hortensio and old man Gremio, Bianca’s suitors, deal with one another “as adversaries do in law—/ Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends” (I.ii.275-275). It is a fine proposal for a comedy, and also sets up Tranio’s two gulls for the deception needed to give his master the decisive edge in his contest to win the lady.

Baptista’s house is the setting for the beginning of Petruchio’s celebrated taming of Katherine, who’s been acting insufferably toward her father and Bianca. Suspecting her blameless sister of desiring Hortensio, rich old Gremio, or both, she strikes her; when Baptista reprimands her, she turns on him, accusing him of favoring Bianca and vowing revenge. Baptista’s deranged household thus consists of a weak father, a rebellious and unsisterly daughter, and a decent young woman who for now must suffer them both. Padua, a place of liberal learning, features serious deficiencies in at least one of its ruling families. Families being the foundation of cities, of political life, Padua may be a university town with a government problem.

The several suitors arrive, and Petruchio executes his strategy, which is to contradict Katherine at every turn. Goading her by calling her by the diminutive, ‘Kate,’ he taunts her by praising her as pleasant, gamesome, courteous, slow in speech, yet “sweet as springtime flowers” (II.i.239). With broad irony, he lauds “her princely gait” (II.i.252) and her likeness to the virgin goddess, Diana—the way of a princess ambitious for rule but unfit for it, an impediment to the continuation of her own family and therefore in contradiction with her own ambition. He turns to romantic language, the language of courtly love, into a vehicle of infuriating mockery. For once, the lady is at a loss for words, speech being the coin of politics. She can only sputter, as her father offers her hand in marriage. She recovers her speech sufficiently to protest to when her desperate father, objecting to this impending marriage to a man she judges a “half lunatic,” “mad-cap ruffian” and “swearing jack” (II.i.280-281). Her taming has just begun; Petruchio exits, off to Venice to buy wedding-clothes, but not before describing his betrothed as “temperate as the morn,” the virtue associated with wise rulership in the play’s Induction. As Caton observes [3], Petruchio proceeds with Katherine very much as the Lord did with Sly, in principle if not in practice: To tame the immoderate and unruly soul, he subjects it to the opposite of what it wants, contradicting it at every turn. Unlike the Lord, he does not do so gently, as it were behind the back of his ‘student.’ Public shaming, not private illusion, must be the way to amend a soul drunk not on ale but on the will to power.

Gremio and Tranio (as “Lucentio”) end the scene by arguing over which of them deserves Bianca, appealing to Baptista’s love of wealth by describing their riches, real and alleged, respectively. Tranio outbids Gremio, but now he needs to produce the rich father he claimed. The two self-announced suitors appeal to the father. The two secret suitors, the real Lucentio (as tutor “Cambio”) and Hortensio (calling himself “Litio,” playing the role of a music-master), will make their approaches to the daughter. Both men pass love notes to Bianca in the course of ‘teaching’ her. She prefers “Cambio,” who rightly strikes her as the truer man, beneath the disguise. Hortensio proves the accuracy of her judgment by immediately thinking of shifting his love to someone else.

Long before the actress-queen in Hamlet, Katherine shows herself a woman who protesteth too much, chafing at Petruchio’s absence after having tried to order him to go away. It is this hitherto well-submerged sense that she hasn’t been living well in her father’s household, that she somehow wants and needs a husband stronger than her father, that makes her curable, that will enable Petruchio’s strong medicine to work. When he arrives, disheveled, clever but unwise Tranio begs him to “see not your bride in these unreverent robes,” to “go to my chamber, put on clothes of mine” (III.ii.108-109). Petruchio is not a man to be ‘dressed’ by another, advised by a very clever but less prudent (and less manly) man. The lady will be marrying him, not “my clothes” (III.ii.113), he replies. What she sees will be what she gets. Tranio suspects method in this madness, which continues at the wedding, when Petruchio avers to be “master of what is mine own,” a wife who “is my goods, my chattels,” and “my house,” and indeed his household stuff, field, barn, horse, ox, ass—”my any thing” (III.ii.225-228). Because she is his own, however, the man of military valor will defend her as his own, against all comers: “Kate, I’ll buckler thee against a million” (III.ii.235). He rules her by virtue of his nature, not by the dubious virtue of ‘clothes,’ that is, of convention, changeable appearance. Moderate Bianca, who needs no such taming, remarks that her sister, “being mad herself,” has been “madly mated” (III.ii.240). Thumos has yielded to the superior thumos.

Nor is Petruchio done. The shrew has yielded, but perhaps not wholeheartedly—and if not wholeheartedly, then not for long. Reversing the tactic of the Lord, he takes Katherine from the city to the country. Sly is a human being ‘countrified’ by ale, a drunk passed out on the heath—in a ‘state of nature,’ as later writers would put it. He needs to be civilized gently, by means of seductive illusions, removed to civilization to live a noble lie for a time, in order to learn the truth about his real nature. Katherine, an uncivilized denizen of eminently civil, indeed liberal-artsy, Padua, needs not the gentle atmosphere she has learned to exploit but roughness, exposure to harsh truths, crushing defeat by someone who plays her own game better than she does. She needs exposure to a state of war. Petruchio abuses the servants; she pleads for them, thereby getting out of herself, as did Sly under the rule of the Lord. As one of the servants remarks, “He kills her in her own humor,” even as the Lord kills Sly with kindness (IV.i.169). Like Sly, she “sits as one new risen from a dream” (IV.i.170). In both cases, it is a dream induced in order to bring the patient back to reality. “Thus have I politicly begun my reign,” Petruchio replies (IV.i.172). Unlike Lucentio, like the Lord, Petruchio is a political man. But Caton is wrong to think that he is a Machiavellian one. [4] Petruchio rules her not as a tyrant, for his advantage alone, but for her own good. That is, he rules her as a parent rules a child, replacing her hapless father in founding a new household. “Amid this hurly I intend / That all is done in reverend care of her” (IV.i.187-188). Here he reveals his true nature; he had claimed to be interested only in a rich wife, but now we know he wants a good one. Right rule is a kind of practical wisdom: “He that knows better how to tame a shrew, / Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show” (IV.i.194-195). Like his near-namesake Petrarch, Petruchio knows how to address a woman. Courtly Petrarch shows how to address a gentlewoman; Petruchio shows how to address an ungentle and indeed unkind one.

He soon teaches her how to beg, instead of her habitual commanding. He starves her body, taunting her by offering and then taking away both food and clothing. Enforced bodily suffering requires recourse to the mind, and indeed, as Petruchio instructs her, “‘Tis the mind that makes the body rich; / And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,/ So honour peereth in the meanest habit” (IV.iii.68-70). Her thumos, misdirected toward prideful libido dominandi, must be redirected toward the natural honor of a human being, founded in its distinctive nature, the capacity to reason. “O no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse/ For this poor furniture and mean array” (IV.iii.175-76). As with Sly, she must learn her true ‘identity,’ her nature, stripped of convention. When she continues to murmur in rebellion, Petruchio even ‘makes’ time stand still: “It shall be what o’clock I say it is” (IV.iii.191). (Newton supposes time a constant, but Petruchio anticipates Einstein.) He soon makes her call the sun the moon, and then the sun again. Like the Lord, he bends his patient’s perceptions of nature to his will, so as to break her ill-will, and by so doing bring her to see nature aright.

Back in the city, in front of Baptista’s house, Tranio finds in an elderly “Pedant” passing by the perfect type for the needed role of Vincentio, Lucentio’s ‘rich father.’ As a smart casting director, he gives the old fellow motivation, gulling him into believing that his life’s in danger, telling him that he must assume the role of Vincentio for safety’s sake. Pedants and the elderly alike tend to have timid souls. His master and Bianca plot elopement; this is the additional plot Lucentio had hinted at, earlier, as he deployed the decoy ‘Lucentio’ to distract Baptista’s attention from the doings of the real one with Baptista’s daughter. But his, their, plot takes a twist when his real father meets Petruchio along the road and learns from him of the impending marriage. The elopement proceeds, but the young marrieds must now return to Padua, and to their fathers, neither of whom is a happy man for the deceptions. Petruchio and his Kate (herself now openly in love) can now watch the show with amusement, as the quiet, seemingly docile couple have made themselves the center of controversy.

They all gather not at father Baptista’s house but at Lucentio’s; as the Bible and nature both command, the newly-married couple cleave to one another, form a new household. There, Lucentio can offer his guests hospitality, bring “our jarring notes” to “agree” (V.ii.1). “Feast with the best, and welcome to my house” (V.ii.8). (At last, Kate will be fed.) “Pray you, sit down; / For now we sit to chat as well as eat” (V.ii.10-11). This is the first time anyone in the play sits, comes to rest. To eat is to serve the body; to speak is to exercise the mind; the jarring notes of body and soul can now agree in the newly and rightly constituted household, where the newly and rightly constituted household of spirited Petruchio and Kate are welcome guests. When Baptista, Petruchio, Lucentio, and Hortensio (successfully married to a rich widow) make a playful bet on whose wife is the most obedient, Petruchio wins; Kate’s love of victory, redirected, can now contribute to a re-founded, better household than the one she left for marriage.

She makes her victory speech to the ladies, when commanded by Petruchio to “tell these headstrong women / What duty they owe their lords and husbands” (V.ii.135-136). This she proceeds to do, but not in her former way, by her once-characteristic habit of berating. She reasons with them. Her rhetoric depends upon an account of human nature. She teaches them that nature, shared by men and women, has also has differentiated them. She will prove a better Paduan lecturer than many a university prof, then and there, now and here.

“Unknit that threatening unkind brow” (V.ii.136). As always in Shakespeare “kind” means natural, as in grouping natural objects according to their kind, their species. Some parts of nature are also kind in our sense, but not all—as for example the heath from which the Lord rescued Sly. Why is a threatening brow unnatural in a wife? Kate offers four reasons: It wounds your husband, your rightful ruler; it blots your beauty; it ruins your “fame,” your reputation; it is neither “meet” nor “amiable” (V.ii.140-41). Like a dirty fountain, no one will drink from it. That is, if a wife will share a household with her husband, any attempt to inspire fear will fail, if he is a real man, the kind you want for a husband. Your way with him must go through attraction, through your beauty and your amiableness. You will be better off if respected by him, and by others; your honor, even the honor of your family, depends on it.

Properly, your husband is your sovereign, but both a gentle and a kind one, one who “cares for thee” (V.ii.147). He does this by committing his body to “painful labor both by sea and land” (V.ii.147). You stay “warm at home secure and safe” (V.ii.151). In justice, you owe in return for his care “love, fair looks, and true obedience,” the duties a subject owes his prince (V.ii.153). Why so? To disobey “his honest will” makes the wife a “graceless traitor to her loving lord” (V.ii.158-160). But why are these sharply distinct ‘roles’—our own contemporary term suggests playacting—natural? By nature, women’s bodies are “soft and weak and smooth,” ill-fitted for painful labor both by sea and land, at least in comparison to the bodies of men. Undermine your husband and you weaken his ability to defend you and the household you share with him. The bodies of women are fitted for living in soft conditions, not for “toil and trouble in the world (V.ii.166). Our hearts should be correspondingly soft, Kate urges—harmonized with those of caring husbands, as the Apollonian music heard by Sly might do to his shrewish, unruly soul. Therefore, she reasonably concludes, wives should curb their willfulness and do their own natural duty, even as husbands do theirs.

“Why, there’s a wench!” Petruchio rightly exclaims (V.ii.180). He commands a kiss, and receives one. “We’ll to bed” (V.ii.184), as their marriage is now of a kind as may prove a just, natural, secure foundation for a family.

As for his brother-in-law Lucentio, in victory Petruchio can be magnanimous, great-souled: ‘Twas I who won the wager, though you hit the white”—punning on Bianca’s name—and “being a winner, God give you good night!” (V.ii.186). Whereas thumotic Petruchio presents the matter in terms of victory, Lucentio presents it in terms of thought: “‘Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam’d so.” Philosophy begins in wonder. Lucentio came to Padua to study philosophy, the crown of the liberal arts. Tranio has failed to side-track him. Lucentio needs the example of his spirited, shrew-taming friend to spur him to philosophy, away from a slack epicureanism. Fortunately, his own wife will need no taming, so the young Socrates, if that is what he proves, will have no Xanthippe to harass him. In forming an alliance, and by forming it at Lucentio’s house, Petruchio and his new friend will strengthen the city or cities in which they live. They have formed an alliance between philosophic reason, practical reason, and spiritedness that mirrors not only a well-ordered regime but a well-ordered soul.

What can ale-soaked Sly learn from this play? He can learn how to order his soul rightly He can learn to tame his inner shrew, the anger that lies beneath his drunkenness, the anger that must have made his soul drunk before he touched a drop of the brew. He can learn to get out of his own passions and appetites, away from his longtime identity, aspire to self-rule instead of self-indulgence, make a change that puts an end to his changeling ways. Although men and women have very different ways, by nature, as human beings they struggle with the same anger, the same libido dominandi, while remaining capable of the same capacities to reason and to love, justly and wisely. There is the foundation, in families, for good cities. If Sly heeds the lesson, he will no longer let the world slide, but join in the task of ruling it well, if only by ceasing to be unruly.

Notes

See Hiram Caton: “On the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 3, Number 1, Summer 1972, 53.
Florentius appears in the Wyf of Bath’s Tale, a tale about the proper nature of a wife. A young knight and “lusty bachelor” in King Arthur’s court, Florentius rapes a maid and faces death by beheading. Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, calls the king to an act of just mercy: He consents to her ‘plot,’ that Florentius will have a year and a day to discover “what thing is it that women moost desiren.” Florentius goes on the quest, but eventually despairs, as some women tell him they want riches, others honor, or “jolynesse,” or “riche array,” or “lust abedde,” or flattery, or attention, or “bisynesse,” or freedom (meaning to do as they like). And so on. Near the end of his period of reprieve, he comes upon more than two dozen ladies dancing in the forest, ‘in nature,’ who vanish, leaving behind an “old wyf,” foul as she can be—worse than the much-married Wyf of Bath herself. She agrees to tell him the answer to the queen’s question, in exchange for his promise to grant her a wish. The answer, he will tell Guinevere, is “Wommen desire to have sovereynetee / And for to been in maistrie him above.” All women, or at least “worldly women,” harbor this libido dominandi, which Katherine exhibits openly. In exchange for this answer, which Guinevere approves as the correct one (Arthur acceded to it in granting her original request), the old wife demands marriage to Florentius. Understandably, the young knight resists, at which point the old wife offers him another bargain: You can have me “foul and old” but true and humble or young and fair and take your chances. Having now learned what women really want, Florentius leaves the decision up to her: She rewards him by changing into a woman both “fair and good.” They seal their marriage with a kiss, as indeed Petruchio and Kate will do, at the end of the play.
Caton op. cit., 53.
Ibid. 57-58. Both the Lord and Petruchio aim at the good of the one they govern, not simply at their own good, as does Machiavelli’s prince.

The Logic of the United States Constitution

July 11, 2019 by Will Morrisey

Paul R. DeHart: Uncovering the Constitution’s Moral Design. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007.

Note: I am grateful to Robert R. Reilly, Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, for drawing my attention to this book.

To uncover the Constitution’s moral design, most scholars examine the writings and speeches of its Framers, especially those available in the records of the Constitutional Convention and in the ratification debates. Some also consult the pre-Constitutional documents issued by the United States, foremost among them the Declaration of Independence, but also the Northwest Ordinance and other major state papers classified as ‘organic laws’ of the United States. Some might also look to early Supreme Court decisions for clarification on certain points, and to post-Constitutional presidential papers and debates in Congress.

DeHart takes a different approach. Somewhat along the lines of the post-World-War-II New Critics in literature departments, he observes that any text has an integrity of its own, apart from the intentions of its author or authors; by ‘design’ he means the structure of the document, not ‘design’ as ‘intent.’ If I intend to say, ‘The sky is blue’ but mistakenly type ‘The sky is not blue,’ the meaning of the sentence I have typed is the opposite of my intention. It is nonetheless the meaning of the sentence I have typed, and any lawyer, including a constitutional lawyer, would take due note of that. The New Critics maintained that whatever John Keats’s intention may have been, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” means something that can only be discovered first by looking at the words he put on the page. Other elaborations may follow, but that is the indispensable first step. As DeHart puts it, “The writings of the key framers cannot serve as a proxy for the Constitution.”

Unlike the New Critics, DeHart is also a logician. To uncover the Constitution’s moral design, and indeed tp determine if it has one, he compares what it says to several familiar moral doctrines, including Aristotelianism, Hobbesianism, Kantianism, positivism, and nihilism. When he finds that a given moral doctrine contradicts some important clause or clauses of the Constitution, he rules it out as the source of that design. “General categories as classical, modern, or positivist bundle together logically discrete propositions concerning sovereignty, the common good, natural law, and natural rights”; therefore, such propositions are open to confirmation or refutation as elements of the Constitutional framework, the institutional structure it ordains. “We must turn our attention to uncovering that framework by analyzing the logic of and assumptions underlying the practical, institutional arrangements put into place by the Constitution.” In this he follows the lead of no less a constitutionalist than James Madison, who distinguished what he called the “true meaning” of the Constitution from “whatever might have been the opinions entertained in forming the Constitution.” This, Madison went on to say, included the Constitutional debates, which he recorded, and The Federalist, which he helped to write. Madison did not deny the value of such extraconstitutional writings in clarifying points in the Constitution, only that such writings closed cases.

More, DeHart undertakes not only a scholarly exercise but an exercise in moral philosophy. “The overriding question is this: Is the Constitution’s normative framework philosophically sound?” Is “the Constitution’s assumption about the common good,” once identified, “in fact good”?

There are some merits in this approach. For example, scholars have found antecedents of the Constitution in texts ranging from Genesis to The Spirit of the Laws. God and Montesquieu are not to be confused. Does this make the Constitution incoherent? No: “It remains possible to draw on incompatible thinkers in ways consistent with a particular normative framework.” Indeed, “the framers did not tell us how they drew on various thinkers”; “it is logically possible that the Constitution is partly modern and partly classical.” Research into their writings “will not provide us with a determinative answer concerning the Constitution’s normative framework.” Or, as Hamilton put it, “Nothing is more common than for laws to express and effect more or less than was intended.”

By “the Constitution” DeHart means not only “writing on parchment” but what the Constitution constitutes: the “practical institutional arrangement” of the United States government, what the Greeks called the politeia or form of the American national government. The politeia in turn influences, and is influenced by, “the incentive patterns” of citizens who live under the governmental form, the Bios ti or way of life of the American people, and especially of those who undertake to govern. “On this understanding, the Constitution also includes the normative framework that is presupposed by its particular institutional arrangements,” its telos or purpose. Readers of Aristotle will recognize all these as elements of what he calls the regime of a political community. In considering the moral design of the American regime as seen in the United States Constitution, DeHart considers four main topics: sovereignty, the common good, natural laws, and natural rights.

DeHart gets down to particulars, discussing Madison’s accounts of the controversy over whether presidents had the power to remove officers appointed with the Senate’s advice and consent, a point nowhere explicitly addressed in the Constitution. In addressing he issue, “Madison exhibits the sort of reasoning I have in mind.” He begins by observing what he calls “a principle that pervades the whole system,” namely that there should be “the highest possible degree of responsibility in all the executive officers thereof.” Executive officers therefore should be responsible to the chief executive officer, the president; this in turn will make the president directly responsible to the American people for “the conduct of the person he has nominated and appointed.” DeHart glosses Madison by calling this argument a specimen of “reasoning in terms of the institutional structure of the Constitution.” He finds “beneath the surface of Madison’s reasoning… an application of the law of noncontradiction,” inasmuch as to make the president’s removal power contingent on Senate approval would render executive power, and therefore executive responsibility, “virtually nonexistent.” On the larger point, Madison compares the principle of executive action under the Constitution (responsibility) to a particular action (the removal of an officeholder) and finds that the action in question logically coheres with the principle—more so than it does with the legislative and advise-and-consent powers of the Senate.

Plato illustrates this more generally in his analysis of “proper function”: “the proper function of a thing, Q, is that work which only Q does or that which Q does better than anything else.” Additionally, to perform its proper function Q must be in good condition; “a dull pruning knife will not even succeed in cutting a vine where a sharp dagger will.” “Plato’s rule for discerning the work appropriate to a thing, its purpose, has nothing to do with the intentions of a designer.” The designer of the object we identify as a pruning knife may or may not have designed it for pruning. We infer its function from its design. Returning to the Constitution, DeHart proposes to compare several moral theories with the Constitution, determining how many points in each theory contradict the structure of the Constitution; he will then “try to figure out which moral assumption” in each theory “explains or is consistent with the most constitutional features and which assumption requires the least auxiliary hypotheses in the course of providing an explanation.” Finally, at the “teleological level” of explanation, he will determine not only whether a given moral assumption is “the best fit” with Constitution, but whether it is a sound moral assumption. This final step will answer his “overriding question” as to the moral soundness of the Constitution itself. If a given moral theory both fits the Constitutional structure and proves philosophically sound, then the Constitution is good.

The first of the four topics DeHart addresses is sovereignty, “the right to determine what shall or shall not be law by giving consent to what will or to what has already gone into effect.” In classical ‘regime’ terms, sovereignty belongs to a person or persons, the “ruling body” or politeuma. The Constitution “presumes the sovereign to be both popular and constrained.” Whether or not it is popularly constrained, the sovereign may delegate its powers to others (as, for example, between the national government and the government of provinces) because “the exercise” of sovereign power “is not essential to sovereign power”; “it is enough for the sovereign to be able to weigh in on how these functions are performed,” reserving the “final determining power” to itself, should it “decide to exercise it.” DeHart adds that sovereign power could be given away. Therefore, the fact that “We the People” have ordained the Constitution of the United States doesn’t prove that we have retained sovereignty, now that the Constitution is operating. To assume so would be to commit what logicians call the ‘genetic fallacy’—that the origin of a thing constitutes that thing, simply and entirely.

DeHart finds three main possible explanations of sovereignty under the Constitution. Positivists claim that “the people retain an unconstrained sovereignty,” authorizing “officials and institutions to carry out their will.” Modernists claim that the Constitution “presupposes that the people transfer sovereignty from themselves to the authority they establish,” making the government sovereign, no longer the people. Classicists claim that the Constitution “presupposes a sovereign constrained by the dictates of justice, whether this sovereign be popular, mixed, etc.” The Declaration of Independence clearly states what DeHart calls the classical view, laying down as major premises of its argument that human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, rightly secured by governments. But DeHart must find evidence for this in the Constitution itself. Given the Constitution’s substantial powers to govern the American people, “they are a greatly constrained sovereign,” a collection of citizens who “cannot get what they want, right when they want it.” Although “all governmental authority traces back to the will of the whole people,” either directly or indirectly—thus establishing popular sovereignty—the people must exercise that sovereignty under certain self-imposed constraints. Their “long-term will” may prevail, but to prefer the long-term will of the people to their short-term will strongly suggests that there must be some criterion whereby long-term popular will is preferable to short-term will. This doesn’t tell us (as the Declaration does) what that criterion is. To put it in terms of a major Constitutional controversy, it doesn’t tell us that Lincoln was right about the character of the moral lights Senator Douglas was blowing out when he argued for unlimited popular sovereignty; it does tell us Douglas was wrong.

What, then, does the Constitution tell us about the common good, about justice? Positivists deny the existence of any “objective common good.” Obligation “derives from the command of the sovereign,” period. Modernists (beginning with Hobbes) say that the common good is peace. Classicists say that the Constitution includes peace, self-preservation, but also “includes all the dimensions of human well-being and rightly ordered relationships.” He then adds another possibly relevant moral theory, elaborated by Kant, who distinguishes both the classical and the modern teleological accounts of a real common good from “deontic” accounts. Kant locates morality not in the fulfillment of some end or purpose but in the sincere attempt to enact some a prior principle (for Kant, the categorical imperative)—not so much a good end but a good will.

DeHart rejects Kantianism. “We cannot, by recourse to the will, determine whether any particular exercises of the will are good or bad.” He prefers classical teleology, whose proponents argue that “human well-being” or goodness “is composed first and foremost of a rightly ordered soul—a soul in which reason governs the appetites through the passions (or the spirited part)” of the soul. “This is true because the human function, or work, is to live according to reason,” which is as much the distinctive quality or virtue of the human soul as a cutting edge is the distinctive quality or virtue of a knife. The full exercise of reason requires the exercise of other virtues, including “courage, friendliness, generosity, and prudence,” along with moderation and courage.

Unlike positivists, the Constitution does not deny the existence of an objective common good. Nor does it encourage the undiscriminating expression of human desires; indeed, it discourages such expression. Nor is there anything in the Constitution that indicates support for Kantianism, given the Constitution’s obviously purpose-driven structure (to say nothing of its Preamble, wherein the purposes of that structure are clearly spelled out). With respect to modernist or ‘thin’ teleology, which holds that the Constitution aims only at peace or self-preservation, the Constitution’s structure provides for more than civil peace alone. By delaying decisions, by discouraging impulsive acts, the Constitution valorizes reason over passions and appetites. “Passion is a passing thing. Unjust factions animated by passion do not endure for long. If the lawmaking process is a slow one in which laws are repeatedly brought under reexamination, passionately driven factions will likely dissipate before their demands can be met.” Therefore, the Constitution “should be understood as an institutional structure that takes the governance of the political community by reason for its goal.” As DeHart knows, this is exactly what Madison said it was.

If the Constitution encourages the rule of reason, what is reason ruled by? Logically, it is ruled by the principle of noncontradiction. But noncontradiction is a means to an end. What standard does reason discover, when it functions according to its nature, when we think non-contradictorily? DeHart maintains that “the Constitution presupposes a view of natural law in which the requirements of that law are known through noninstrumental, or substantive, reason.” “It is essentially Thomistic or Aristotelian”—presumably more Thomistic than Aristotelian, as Aristotle doesn’t make nearly as much of natural law as Thomas does, centering his ethics on natural right, which gives more play to the importance of circumstances in making moral choices. The emphasis on natural law instead of natural right may derive from the advent of Christianity between Aristotle’s life and Thomas’s. Be this as it may, although the common good provides the content of the natural law, law itself is a type of command. “The natural law adds prescription to the common good, telling us that we are obliged to pursue good and avoid evil.” He quotes the Catholic moral philosopher Knud Haakonssen, himself following Suarez, who writes that “the natural law… reflects the two inseparable sides of God’s nature, namely his rational judgment of good and evil and his will prescribing the appropriate behavior.”

DeHart distinguishes natural law theory from theories grounded on the ‘moral sense,’ closely associated with theories grounded on ‘moral sentiments.’ In such theories, moral premises “are underivable by reason.” Some of these theories are more ‘sentimental’ or emotion-based than others. Those that define principles derived from the moral sense as effectively the first principles of practical reason are hard to distinguish from Thomists, who give a careful account of synderesis or conscience as the faculty of moral perception. Those who derive such principles from emotions tend to involve themselves in circular reasoning: If morality derives from emotions, but not all emotions are moral, how do the emotions know which sentiments are moral and which are not, other than by claiming that some sentiments make us feel as if we are good? By contrast, Thomas’s noninstrumental reason proceeds “via consideration of the objects to which the natural inclinations point”; by “inclinations” Thomas means “not ‘desire’ or ‘preference’ but rather the aim or goal (i.e., the disposition) of the design plan of human nature.” Noninstrumental moral reason looks at the nature of a human being and wants to know what is good for this kind of being. Moral actions will conduce to that good, which is really a constellation of goods.

Turning to the Constitution, DeHart that it “can’t presuppose” that the standard of morality “is known by emotion” because its design favors (at the very least) long-term emotions” over “immediate ones.” The standard for such a preference cannot itself be an emotion, as that would entail circularity. As seen in the Constitution itself, and in Madison’s writings, the Constitution favors the rule of reason, not sentiment.

If so, why does the Constitution countenance the kind of slavery that is based upon race, not at all upon reason? Because “the slavery provisions taken together can be understood as allowing slavery, in order to secure ratification of the Constitution by slave states, while providing constitutional means to work for its eventual elimination.” And of course the Constitution itself has banned slavery since the Civil War amendments were added. “To end slavery, Union was necessary; to form the Union, providing for the protection of slavery for the time being was necessary.” In sum, “a noninstrumentalist account of natural law fits with the Constitution in that the Constitution promotes the rule of reason over desire and sentiment, presumes, at a minimum, widespread moral knowledge, and seems to fit with the classical natural law account of the relationship between natural law and human law.”

Where does this leave the doctrine of natural rights, as enunciated most prominently in the Declaration of Independence? DeHart argues that natural-law theory doesn’t deny the existence of natural rights but asserts the priority of natural law (and thus of duties) over natural rights. He regards the claim that natural rights precede natural law as modern, although of course both precede conventional or humanly-willed law, which should indeed secure natural rights, as the Declaration says. “The Constitution presupposes that natural law precedes natural rights and grants to natural rights what obliging force they have.” As G. E. M. Anscombe maintains, rights can only be justified by positing the existence of certain “necessary tasks.” By this she means that “if one has a right to perform a (morally) necessary task, one also has a right to the means of performing that task.” To prevent me from performing that task is to violate my right. A “necessary task” imposes a “stopping cannot” upon anyone who considers any such prevention. “A natural right is a ‘stopping cannot’ with a logos protecting a ‘can’ that a person possesses in virtue of human nature. That is, if N has a natural right to do Z, then something about N’s nature as a human being morally enables N to do Z and morally restricts others (whether individuals or the government) from preventing N from doing Z.”

If one maintains, with Hobbes, that natural rights precede natural law, then the law of nature is “instrumental or conditional, telling people [in Hobbes’s central claim] that if they want peace, then they must surrender this right (insofar as others are willing to surrender it too).” That is, in the state of nature, which Hobbes calls a war of all against all, I and many others may decide that our natural right to self-preservation would be better served by making the rational choice to transfer our right to defend ourselves to the government we constitute for that purpose. And, Hobbes adds, that government must be sovereign, absolutely so, “unconstrained in any way”—a “‘can’ with no ‘stopping cannots.'” There can also be a variant of this, whereby the rights that dictate natural law shall not be contradicted by any individual or governmental act. “The Declaration [of Independence] says that the Creator endowed man with inalienable rights,” “imparting to his human creations an inviolable value sewn into the fabric of their beings.” Whatever John Locke may have thought of the Creator-God, he also may take governmental actions to be limited by prior natural rights, particularly the right to self-ownership.

On this last point, DeHart prefers to enlist Locke on the natural-law and indeed theistic side of the debate, arguing that to say, as Locke does, that “human persons are God’s property, subject to duties [God] imposes upon them,” but they are also self-owners in the sense that they own themselves as trustees of God so long as they enjoy the gift of life from God. DeHart also cites Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments: the religious right to follow one’s conscience is a right I hold against other men, but with respect to God it is my duty. Be these scholarly interpretations as they may, the Constitution aligns with the priority of natural law, “plac[ing] constraints upon the will of the popular sovereign precluding the people from doing whatever they want in this matter.”

But what about the Declaration’s stance, which at least may be construed to be that rights are prior to natural law? DeHart rejects it. “It is difficult… to see how natural law (or how obligation) can be generated by natural rights.” Taking property rights as his example, he asks, “Why should the fact that N has property in a thing or an act entail anything about what others are obliged to do with respect to N? There is a huge gaping hole left by a messing premise in the move from N’s property to everyone else’s mysteriously generated obligation to respect N’s property. In fact, the obligation of others to respect N’s property doesn’t exist unless there is first a rule or law such that if some thing or act O is the property of N, then others must respect N’s property and not interfere with his use of O or doing of O.” “The ground of the right must be an ontologically prior law imposing an obligation upon individuals to respect the property of others”; “the idea that rights, by themselves, generate obligations seems self-referentially incoherent.”

One must ask DeHart: Why so? If God endows one (or more) of the species He creates with certain unalienable rights, then it isn’t necessarily a law that is ontologically prior to the right. God is ontologically prior, and His will is morally binding. God might of course create the human species by means of natural law, and that would make the law prior to the right, but if the right is endowed by the very act of creation then it is prior to the natural law. It is on this point that DeHart’s attempt to ‘Thomistify’ the United States Constitution and to decouple the Constitution from the principles of the Declaration breaks down. This is not to say that the Constitution need be based on either the priority of natural right or the priority of natural law. The Constitution leaves that ontological issue open.

This notwithstanding, DeHart concludes, in my opinion indisputably, that “the Constitution’s presupposition of obligation antecedent to human willing seems to entail rights in the full sense (both as enabling ‘cans’ for the person with the right and as ‘stopping cannots’ for the person not in the possession of the rights) that are antecedent to and normative for human willing. It also seems to presuppose that these rights are inalienable.” This is “the philosophy latent in the Constitution.” And it is why the Constitution is good, the framework for a good regime.

As a final note, it should be observed that DeHart’s interpretive strategy could be used with extraconstitutional texts, not only with moral theories. So, for example, a reader might compare the Declaration of Independence, or indeed any writing on the American regime, with the Constitution, to determine which texts ‘fit’ the Constitution and which do not. This would reintroduce the study of the Founders’ political thought to Constitutional interpretation, without making those texts authoritative to such interpretation in an arbitrary way.

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