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5 - Ethics: Macbeth
from Part II - How to Live
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
Part I examined different forms of scepticism about human nature as a foundational principle and the extent to which these scepticisms simultaneously imply the need for foundations. Part II will explore more concertedly the nature of Shakespeare's affirmations of the human and the ethics of how to live which arises from them. Another way of describing Part II is to say that it will try to deepen the descriptions of the human already given, in accordance with the way Shakespeare himself deepens them. Such descriptions have to some extent already been provided: characterisations of the likes of Hal as ‘heartless’ or Iago as ‘inhuman’ have presupposed concepts of the human/humane which have been examined in some detail. Part II, however, will further advance the deep or thick description of a ‘common humanity’ that Shakespeare gives. However, it will also be mindful of what might be called Shakespeare's practical optimism: human nature, as represented in particular by the emotions, is not so ‘deep’ as to become unfathomable. Human beings are complicated, but not so complicated as to make imponderable the issue of how to live. Concurring with some of the ‘Victorian’ (as he refers to them) principles of A. C. Bradley, Adrian Poole in ‘A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy’ (2005) writes: ‘People are not that strange. He [Bradley] would have been perplexed by our absorption with “otherness”, let alone “the Other” … The idea that we are all strangers to each other is no more a fiction than the idea that we can reach fair understandings’.
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- Re-Humanising ShakespeareLiterary Humanism Wisdom and Modernity, pp. 97 - 113Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007