Notes

Preface

1. Rose-Lynn Fisher, The Topography of Tears (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2017).

Introduction

1. Interview with Cameron Crowe, “Joni Mitchell: ‘I’m a fool for love: I make the same mistake over and over,’” The Guardian, October 27, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/oct/27/joni-mitchell-interview-archives-early-years-cameron-crowe.

2. The idea of what counts as love is to be distinguished from a Kantian determinative judgment in which what counts as an instance of a concept falls under a self-standing idea or rule. (I pursue this idea further in chapter 6 on Antony and Cleopatra.) In that case, I would already know what love is and simply need to determine whether this is an instance of it. Instead, our concepts derive from the very fabric of our lives and are fundamentally exposed to experience.

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 16E.

4. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 125, henceforth CR. In philosophizing, says Cavell, “I have to bring my own language and life into imagination. What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may imagine them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me.”

5. Cora Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” Ethics 98, no. 2 (1988): 255–77. Diamond gives examples of conceptual loss as it is differently articulated in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Berger, and Karl Marx, for example, exploring the different conceptual loss resulting from the loss of traditions, or from the inarticulacy of cultural deprivation, or from a present use of words that are inadequate to a human nature from which we are alienated. Her main focus is a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary as it is explored in Iris Murdoch's important essays, and the consequent inarticulacy and impoverishment of the language of our conceptual life. Thus, her essay attends to the connection with the way certain philosophical views of language blind us to our conceptual life. She explores the reasons why “the human good of articulateness, of having the words one needs, is overlooked by philosophers in the analytic tradition” (270). An exploration of living with concepts can be found in Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta, eds., Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021).

6. See Cora Diamond, “Murdoch the Explorer,” Philosophical Topics 38, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 74n13. Diamond sees one of Iris Murdoch's most important contributions in the reevaluation of midcentury moral philosophy to be the claim that “differences of moral vision and differences of concept are closely tied.” In chapter 6 on Antony and Cleopatra, I explore different ways of thinking about concepts in relation to Kant's understanding of determinant and reflective judgment.

7. Shakespeare's chronology of plays is notoriously difficult, and my book does not depend on any particular chronological order. Given that both All's Well That Ends Well and Pericles were composed during the period from 1605 to 1608, no argument can be made for an unbroken focus on tragedy during this time. The priority of Timon or Lear is still in dispute, and so is the question of whether Shakespeare's last tragedy is Coriolanus or Antony and Cleopatra. (I bracket the folio attribution of Cymbeline for now.) My argument examines the plays under focus as a group not because of a set of shared set of formal features or marks, but rather because they constitute a study of their shared conditions of inheritance, here, an idea of the catastrophic loss of a fundamental set of binding concepts. For this idea of genre, see Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 28. For a study of tragedy as a set of responses to the idea of social bonds as “fully dissolvable,” see Paul Kottman's Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 4; and his later essay, Paul Kottman, “What Is Shakespearean Tragedy?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David. Schalkwyck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3–18. The idea from J. L. Austin that “our word is our bond” leads us to a sense of the depth as well as the fragility of bonds and I return to this question explicitly in the chapter on Timon of Athens. For a discussion of “our word is our bond,” see J. L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in Philosophical Papers (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1961), 236. Wittgenstein's work deepens our concepts of convention: he reveals that dominant pictures of language tend to miss (while also depending on) the bonds and necessities involved in acts of speech, in the normative reach of words.

8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: German Text with an English Translation, 4th ed., ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), henceforth PI with the relevant number.

Wittgenstein very often uses ideas of weaving and tapestry to get at the dense interconnections of forms of life and the concepts associated with them. “This complicated form of life” is from fragment i.1; “tapestry” can be found, for example, at fragment i.2. “Criss-cross” and “weave” is a characteristic idiom (e.g., preface, 3, and elsewhere). Also “A main cause of philosophical diseases—a one-sided diet; one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example” (PI, ¶593).

9. Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 4.3.225–226. All citations from Shakespeare are from the Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, cited in the first note reference where the edition is first used, by act, scene and line number.

10. King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 2.2.438.

11. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), especially the final essay, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts.” I return to Murdoch's work in chapter 2 on King Lear.

12. Raimond Gaita's analysis of remorse can be found in his brilliant chapter, Raimond Gaita, “Remorse and Its Lessons,” in Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 43–63.

13. I derive the phrase “excluded and excluding self” from Richard Fleming, First Word Philosophy: Wittgenstein-Austin-Cavell, Writings on Ordinary Language Philosophy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004). Fleming is highly alert to the ethical implications of ordinary language philosophy. See Richard Fleming, “Afterword: Demonstrations in Ordinary Ethics,” in First Word Philosophy, 130–38: “Ordinary ethics . . . is a demonstration of where we answerably stand in the constitutive order of word and world” (130).

14. Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 5.2.287.

15. Begriffsgeschichte is alive and well in the works of Falko Schmeider; Quentin Skinner's work in intellectual history has been influential in exploring the history of concepts; Thomas Pfau's magisterial book Minding the Modern Human Agency: Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) explores “conceptual amnesia” and excavates the language of responsible agency and its attrition; Jonathan Lear movingly explores the cultural collapse of the Crow Nation in his work Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) and Cora Diamond's insights are visible in the latter two works.

16. G. K. Hunter, “Shakespeare's Last Tragic Heroes,” in Dramatic Identities and Cultural Traditions: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries—Critical Essays (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), 251.

17. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of exile is “banishment to a foreign country” or the person who is so exiled: https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=exile. This might define exiles such as Bolingbroke, exiled from England under Richard's orders in Richard II, or Kent and Cordelia banished in King Lear.

18. Cavell, CR, 45.

19. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 40.

20. Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 118.

21. Raimond Gaita and other philosophers working in the reconceptualization of ethics after Wittgenstein see the seriousness of moral thinking and the attempt at lucidity to be a matter of not losing touch with reality. See Raimond Gaita, introduction to Ethical Inquiries After Wittgenstein, Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, ed. Salla Aldrin Salskov, Ondrej Beran, and Nora Hamalainen (Cham: Springer, 2022), 16–17. The ethical possibilities opened up by Wittgenstein are pursued in many collections; see in addition, Cora Diamond on Ethics, ed. Maria Balaska (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Wittgenstein's Moral Thought, ed. Reshef Agam-Segal and Edmund Dain (London: Routledge, 2019); Morality in a Realistic Spirit: Essays for Cora Diamond, ed. Andrew Gleeson and Craig Taylor (London: Routledge, 2021); and Ethics After Wittgenstein: Contemplation and Critique, ed. Richard Amesbury and Hartmut Von Sass (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

22. Anthony Cascardi says that Shakespeare “explores the full range of the commitments that language entails” and that Shakespeare's power “rests on his ability to envision characters who live out the fate of their words relentlessly, without compromise or escape, or who suffer disastrously from their failure to do so.” Anthony Cascardi, “Disowning Knowledge: Cavell and Shakespeare,” in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 190.

23. Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 322: “I can no more take back the word I have given you and you have acted on that I can take back my touch. Each has entered our history.” On the boundlessness, unpredictability, and irreversible nature of human action, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 190–92, 233–36.

24. King Lear, 2.2.73; “intrince” is a Shakespeare coinage.

25. Cavell extends his work in CR in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch, 1989), 36, to suggest that bringing words home is not at all a question of locating their context or conventions, or of finding out what words mean independent of our usage of them. Cavell would thus find the context-hunting of contemporary scholarship necessary but not sufficient to get at what individual speakers are actually saying. It is a question of recalling our criteria—what we count as something on any particular occasion. Recalling what we call and what I call something is a quest of the “ordinary,” an attempt to find my voice in relation to my culture's criteria. “Exile,” says Cavell, “is under investigation in ‘A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’”, citing Wittgenstein, PI ¶ 123, 36. A grammatical investigation and its eliciting of our criteria is “precisely the philosophical path to this end or disappearance of a philosophical problem” (36).

26. King Lear, 1.4.221.

27. For an admirably clear exposition of the ordinary see Fleming, First Word Philosophy.

28. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 86E Wittgenstein's remarks on Shakespeare are scrupulously contextualized by Joachim Schulte, “Did Wittgenstein Write on Shakespeare?,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review 2 (2013): 7–32. Culture and Value collects together remarks from Wittgenstein's notebooks posthumously selected by Georg Henrik von Wright. The seven remarks about Shakespeare, dating from 1939 to 1950 were not intended for publication. William Day points out that one can read everything Wittgenstein said about Shakespeare in about five minutes. Day's article speculates interestingly about Wittgenstein's difficulty in hearing “the sound of the raw motives to skepticism” in Shakespeare's work. See William Day, “To Not Understand, But Not Misunderstand Wittgenstein on Shakespeare,” in Wittgenstein Reading, ed. Sascha Brue, Wolfgang Huemer, and Daniel Steuer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 39–49.

29. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol 1., ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).

30. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 84E.

31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, ed. Ermelinda Di Lascio, D. K. Levy, and Edoardo Zamuner (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014).

32. This vision of language is sometimes called the vision of “ordinary language philosophy.” I sometimes use this terminology. The terminology, however, is unsatisfactory and some of my intellectual interlocutors would not recognize themselves under that name. For useful discussion see Sandra Laugier, Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy, trans. Daniela Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Avner Baz, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); and Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Moi says she understands ordinary language philosophy as “the philosophical tradition after Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, as continued and extended by Stanley Cavell, specifically through his reading of Philosophical Investigations” (1). I will follow her understanding here.

33. Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love, and Truth and Justice (New York: Routledge, 1998), xv. See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) for an examination of the influential Humean idea that an “ought” cannot be derived from an “is.”

34. See Cora Diamond, “We Are Perpetually Moralists: Iris Murdoch, Fact, and Value,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 79–109.

35. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxix, In his preface to the Italian edition of The Claim of Reason, Cavell calls Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome a continuation of the neglected part 3 of the CR (omitted from the Italian edition); see Here and There: Sites of Philosophy ed. Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary, and Sandra Laugier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 215.

36. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, xxx.

37. The term is Ingeborg Lofgren's coinage in her dissertation “Interpretative Skepticism: Stanley Cavell, New Criticism, and Literary Interpretation” (PhD diss., Uppsala University, 2015). Rita Felski has also and influentially described the limits of a certain attitude taken up in “critique,” still the dominant interpretative mode in literary studies in Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

38. This is the burden of chapter 1 of CR, “Criteria and Judgment”: “In no case in which (Wittgenstein) appeals to the application of criteria is there a separate stage at which one might, explicitly or implicitly, appeal to the application of standards” (13).

39. Lofgren, “Interpretative Skepticism,” 318, and taking her cue from Wittgenstein's “rough ground” (PI, ¶107): In a theoretical idiom we can overlook what our language use actually yields and so we get onto slippery ice “where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. Back to the rough ground!”

40. Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2002): “Criticism is always an affront, and its only justification lies in usefulness, in making its object available to just response,” 46.

41. See especially Toril Moi, “‘They Practice Their Trade in Different Worlds’: Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy,” New Literary History 40, no. 4 (2009): 801–24.

42. Joint Stock began in 1974 and disbanded in 1989. The group is associated with the playwrights David Hare and Caryll Churchill. The groups archives are held in the Special Collections at the University of California at Davis. The influence of this idea is found in publications such as Marina Caldarone and Maggie Lloyd-Williams, Actions: The Actor's Thesaurus (London: Drama, 2004).

43. Part 3 of CR is almost a book within a book; it is a brilliant analysis of the rationality of morality and a piercing criticism of the available schools of moral philosophy at the time of writing. The fruits of this work are developed in Cavell's later conception of “moral perfectionism.”

44. Hamlet, ed. Anne Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Thomson, 2006).

45. Patchen Markell says that the politics of recognition as it has been elucidated by Charles Taylor's influential work is too dependent on a sovereign understanding of agency. See Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

1. Coming to Grief in Hamlet

1. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first two uses (obsolete) as transitive: (1a) to press heavily upon, as a weight; to burden, and (2) Of persons to harass, gall with hostile action, to hurt, to harm, and so on. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/grieve_v?tab=meaning_and_use#2469167

2. The Winter's Tale, ed. John Pitcher, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd. ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 2.1.98–100.

3. I Henry IV, ed. David Scott Kastan Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 4.3.41-42.

4. For a humanistic philosophy of grief, see James Carter, “The Passionate Life: On Grief and Human Experience,” in Moral Powers, Fragile Beliefs: Essays in Moral and Religious Philosophy, ed. Joseph Carlisle, James C. Carter, and Daniel Whistler (New York: Continuum, 2011). Grief is revelatory: “It reveals to the fullest extent the value of those whom we have lost,” 114.

5. Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 4.3.231–32. “Let grief / Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it.” See chapter 4 for further details on this scene.

6. “I cannot but remember such things were / That were most precious to me” (4.3.224–25).

7. Love's Labour's Lost, ed. H.R. Woudhuysen, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 5.2.739.

8. Hermione's “honourable” grief is from The Winter's Tale (1.2.111). Constance in King John eds. Jesse M. Lander and J. M. Tobin, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) laments that “grief fills the room up of my absent child” (3.4.93). “Patch grief with proverbs” is from Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing ed. Claire McEachern, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), (5.1.17). “Grief would have tears and sorrow bids me speak” is the Countess's line in All's Well That Ends Well ed. Suzanne Gossett and Helen Wilcox, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), (3.4.42). Cesario's imaginary sister who is herself “sat like Patience on a monument / Smiling at grief” in Twelfth Night ed. Keir Elam, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: 2008), (2.4.114-115). Rosalind says to Celia, “And do not seek to take your change upon you, / To bear your griefs yourself and leave me out” in As You Like It ed. Juliet Dusinberre, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser, (London: Bloomsbury, 2009, (1.3.98–99). Toward the conclusion to confusion in The Comedy of Errors ed. Kent Cartwright, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), the abbess sublimely proclaims a festive end: “Go to a gossips’ feast, and go with me; / After so long grief, such nativity!” (5.1.408).

9. My citations from Hamlet derive from the Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser., of the second quarto of the play, with references, where appropriate and relevant to the folio text also in Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. See Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006) and Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006). The first folio text (F) lacks about 230 of the second quarto's lines; the second quarto (Q2) lacks about 70 of F's lines. The differences are discussed in the Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser., second quarto, 82, and by Philip Edwards in his thoughtful edition of Hamlet for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 8–32; and Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 396–402. Wells and Taylor argue that both Q2and F derive from Shakespeare's foul papers and that Hamlet comes closest to King Lear in “the scale and complexity of the textual variation apparently resulting from authorial revision” (401).

10. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. W. Speed Hill, Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 409. Hooker goes on to add “last of all to testifie the care which the church hath to comfort the living, and the hope which wee all have concerning the resurrection of the dead.”

11. See Raimond Gaita, “Gypsy Is Old Now,” in The Philosopher's Dog (New York: Routledge, 2002), 82–83: “The necessity to acknowledge both our commonness and also our radical individuality, and the fact that we cannot acknowledge one without the other, creates an irresolvable tension between inconsolable aloneness and the consolation to be found in community.”

12. I analyze this passage in Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 16–20. See also David Schalkwyck, “‘Unpacking the Heart’: Why It Is Impossible to Say ‘I Love You’ in Hamlet's Elsinore,” in Shakespeare's “Hamlet”: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

13. The literature charting the transformed language of the post-Reformation death ritual is by now extensive. See, for example, Clive Burgess, “‘A Fond Thing Vainly Invented’: An Essay on Purgatory and Pious Motive in Later Medieval England,” in Parish, Church and People: Studies in Lay Religion, ed. S. J. Wright (London: Hutchinson, 1988); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 1997); Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

For penetrating comments about the corpse being the object rather than the subject of address in the second prayerbook of Edward VI, see Eamon Duffy's monumental The Stripping of the Altars, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

14. “The Ordre for the Buriall of the Dead,” in The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 83.

15. In the prayerbooks of 1552 and 1559 of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, the body/soul of the departed has become a third person, talked about, rather than directly addressed, Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, 172.

16. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theater (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Anthony B. Dawson, “The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare's Theater and the National Past,” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 54–67; Steven Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotion in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

17. This argument is developed in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), sect. 452.

18. The phrase “exemplary form of social action” is found and developed in J. M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 297. “To not give to the body in question the increment of cultural form would make it anomalous: appearing human, but nonetheless not human-just stuff and hence disgusting” (298).

19. The distinction between rites and rights is central in Cora Diamond's important elucidation of Simone Weil's work. See for example, Cora Diamond, “Injustice and Animals,” in Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics, ed. Carl Elliott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 118–48; Cora Diamond, “The Importance of Being Human,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 29 (1991): 35–62.

20. Diamond, “Importance of Being Human,” 51. Here, says Diamond, “we can see the depth of the hatred expressing itself in the denial of what the soldiers knew human beings extend to other human beings in the face of what death is in our lives.”

21. From Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 75.

22. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 75.

23. Roberto Calasso, The Unnameable Present (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019).

24. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2024), 4.5.69 (1126b).

25. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's “Nicomachean Ethics,” trans. C. I. Litzinger O.P. (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox, 1964), 257, sect. 804.

26. Aquinas, Commentary, 257, sect. 804.

27. Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 17, 47.

28. “Anger is conceptually linked to helplessness.” Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness, 45.

29. Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 93.

30. Vergil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), lines 459, 462.

31. Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008).

32. In The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's “Iliad” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Seth L. Schein points out that the violation of Hector's corpse, which offends even the gods, is an offense against the family and community who wish to mourn him: “He is violating the social need on the part of the living to bury the dead with formal, ritual propriety in order to humanize the fact of death.” These themes are sounded too in Charles Segal, The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpse in the “Iliad,” Mnemosyne Supplements, no. 17 (Leiden: Brill, 1971); and James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).

33. “Ter circum Iliacos raptaverat Hectora muros / enanimumque auro corpus vendebat Achilles” (Aeneid, 1.483–84). Fairclough translates: “Thrice had Achilles dragged Hector round the walls of Troy and was selling the lifeless body for gold.” Vergil now depicts Aeneas responding with a deep groan and the corpse of Hector in the frieze appears to meet his gaze as Priam stretches out his weaponless hands. Leah Whittington comments on Vergil's recollection of Homer: “The ransoming of Hector's body, as Homer presents it, is exceptional and fragile.” See Leah Whittington, Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 71.

34. Aeneid, 6.487.

35. Aeneid, 1.11. Fairclough frequently translates ira as resentment and renders this (rather disappointingly) as “Can heavenly spirits cherish resentment so dire?” Fagles translates the Iliad's mênis as “rage.”

36. Whittington remarks on the excising of Achilles's response to Priam's supplication from Aeneas emotional response to Priam's outstretched and weaponless hands in the frieze.

37. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” has been reprinted in Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the “Iliad,” trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: NYRB Classics, 2005). Weil's essay was originally published as “L’Iliade, ou, le poème de la force,” trans. Mary McCarthy, in Politics (1945). I return to this fine essay in chapter 5.

38. Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin Books, 1990), 24.570–71, 24.591, 24.594–95.

39. Weil and Bespaloff, War and the “Iliad,” 79.

40. “Iacet ingens litore truncus, / avulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus” (Aeneid, 2.558).

41. Aeneid, 2.540–558.

42. Aeneid, 12.932–36.

43. Tony Tanner, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 491.

44. Iliad, 22.309–10.

45. Redfield, Nature and Culture in The Iliad, 211.

46. Of course, Marlovian echoes from Dido, Queen of Carthage are present in the player's speech. This play works very closely with Vergil's Aeneid.

47. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Clara Calvo and Jesus Tronch (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 4.4.113–14.

48. W. H. Auden, “The Shield of Achilles,” in W. H. Auden: Selected Poems (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 198–201. The relevant stanza ends: “That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third / Were axioms to him who’d never heard / Of any world where promises were kept / Or one could weep because another wept.” Auden writes this poem in 1952, brilliantly reprising Homer's Iliad in which Hephaestus forges a mighty shield for Achilles at the behest of his mother, Thetis.

49. Tanya Pollard, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 117. Hecuba appeared, of course, in George Chapman's English translation of Homer's Iliad, the first seven books of which were published in 1598. Pollard points out that, in 1599, the Admiral's Men staged a series of Trojan-themed plays (Orestes Furies, Agamemnon, and Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker's Troilus and Cressida). Pollard's chapter “What's Hecuba to Him?” is an indispensable engagement with Hamlet in relation to the tradition of Greek tragedy. See also Louise Schleiner, “Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare's Writing of Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1991): 29–48.

50. Judith Mossman, Wild Justice: A Study of Euripides Hecuba (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 225, 221–23.

51. Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 66–67. Hecuba is well constructed and comes “to the principal point of that one action which they will represent.”

52. Helene Foley, Euripides: Hecuba (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

53. The Rape of Lucrece, l.1448, 1.1458, The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

54. “Ferrite palmis pectora et planctus date / et justa Troiae facite.” Seneca: Hercules, Trojan Women, Phoenician Women, Medea, Phaedra, ed. and trans. John Fitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), l, 64–65. Ode 1 is a formal antiphonal lament for Troy, Priam, and Hector.

55. Thompson and Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser., 306.

56. Hecuba bites at the stones thrown by the Thracians and tries to speak but howls through her metamorphosed canine jaws (XIII.565–571). Ovid: Metamorphosis Books IX-XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

57. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 410.

58. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 410. Hecuba wants to make the child killer suffer the same harm of child-killing that she herself has undergone. Her project is both mimetic and revelatory: Xenia is a façade: the old nomos cannot protect you.

59. Nussbaum, Fragility and Goodness, 413.

60. “Revenge attracts because it offers structure and plan without vulnerability.” Nussbaum, Fragility and Goodness, 410. For an exploration of the dramaturgy of neoclassicism, see Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

61. Hamlet's fantasy is a perfectly conventional reading. On tragedy's virtues, for example, see Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, 45: “Excellent Tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue, that maketh kings to fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours.”

62. Hamlet, 2.1.13. For an in-depth study of the Elizabethan surveillance state, see Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York: St. Martin's, 1996).

63. Rhodri Lewis indefatigably pursues metaphors of predation in Hamlet in Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

64. Try out a thought experiment imagining a form of life in which no one believed anything anyone else said, in which as a matter of course, people routinely or invariably fooled or deceived others.

65. External world skepticism, knowing a table or a tomato is seen as the model for other mind skepticism, knowing people (who talk, converse, and in general have a say in the matter of being known).

66. The philosophical name for this is skepticism. For an indispensable redefinition of skepticism, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

67. Richard Moran, The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony, and Intersubjectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 70. He suggests that refusing to acknowledge any epistemic stance toward the speaker's words other than as evidence means that the speaker and audience must always be in disharmony with each other, for in the contexts of telling, promising, and apologizing the speaker is not presenting her utterance as evidence,” 69.

68. Moran, Exchange of Words, 74.

69. J. M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 229. I return to the question of trust in chapter 3.

70. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston (London: W. W. Norton, 1997), chap. 14, 76.

71. Peter Winch, “How Is Political Authority Possible?,” Philosophical Investigations 25, no. 1 (2002): 29.

72. Olli Lagerspetz, Trust, Ethics, and Human Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 119.

73. That is to say they cannot trust that others are in their expressions, that their bodies and words express them, but they must search for a more certain method that sees through, under, or around human expression.

74. Steven G. Affeldt, “Captivating Pictures and Liberating Language: Freedom as the Achievement of Speech in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations,” Philosophical Topics 27, no. 2 (1999): 273.

75. In its profound exploration of the loss of the ability to voice loss in mourning, Hamlet might be read as an investigation of the loss of loss. The play inaugurates a dramaturgy enacted in the late tragedies that are the subject of this book.

76. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ¶363.

77. Telling, suggests Affeldt, involves telling as tallying, counting something as one thing rather than another—bringing objects and experience under concepts and also as recounting or accounting. Thus, telling is telling of “the necessities involved in a wider range of language games.” Affeldt, “Captivating Pictures,” 273.

78. Affeldt, “Captivating Pictures,” 274.

79. I have addressed this issue at greater length in my essay “Hamlet's Ethics,” in Shakespeare's Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Tzachi Zamir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 222–46.

80. See Peter Mercer's interesting comments about the kinship of revenge tragedy and satire, in Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 91. The satirist and the revenger are isolated and alone, and they inhabit a world dispossessed by vice; they are both truth seekers wishing to tear the mask of the hypocrisy that hides the moral corruption with which they are obsessed. Mercer points out that the satirist looks for the reform and repentance of his audience; the revenger seeks the victim's suffering and death. Is Hamlet shocked out of his mood as satirist by the intimate connection of Yorick with his own history?

81. Tzachi Zamir has noted that “tragedy is the process whereby values and their meanings are crystallized through loss.” Tzachi Zamir, “Ethics and Shakespearean Tragedy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill and David Schalkwyck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 78. I would add that such losses—to work in a tragic idiom—can never be general; it is only through the most particular realizations of loss that mourning can bring into play forms of tragic recognition. That Hamlet is a play about mourning has been noted by many, whether registered through the loss of a concept of purgatory or through individual practices of mourning.

82. David Farr's RSC production at Stratford on Avon in 2013 with Jonathan Slinger as Hamlet and Pippa Nixon as Ophelia.

83. Charles Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5.

84. F omits the entire soliloquy: “How all occasions . . .”

85. See Lionel Abel, “Metatheatre,” in Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatic Form, ed. Martin Puchner (1963; repr., New York: Holmes and Meier, 2003).

86. Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” 20.

87. Nigel Alexander, Poison, Play, and Duel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 73.

88. Alexander, Poison, Play, and Duel, 171.

2. King Lear and the Avoidance of Charity

1. Cited in Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge, 1998), 26.

2. I have explored the learning of love in an exegetical analysis on a relevant passage of Stanley Cavell's book. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 177, henceforth CR. See Sarah Beckwith, “Enter the Child: A Scene from The Claim of Reason,” Philosophy and Literature 41, no. 2 (October 2022): 251–62.

3. Cavell, CR, 125.

4. This is Wittgenstein's method of investigation of a concept. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: German Text with an English Translation, 4th ed., ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), henceforth PI. We look at what we say about it, because “for a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (PI, ¶45). For an ordinary language philosopher words bring us a world only in application. See Peter Winch: “We make contact with the world only through the application of language.” Peter Winch, “Particularity and Morals,” in Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 170.

5. Eli Friedlander, “Faces of the Ordinary,” in Cavell's “Must We Mean What We Say?” at 50, ed. Greg Chase, Juliet Floyd, and Sandra Laugier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 81.

6. See Cavell's extraordinary essay and its companion piece, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” show the centrality of Shakespearean tragedy to his path breaking reformulation of skepticism. Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), henceforth MWM. The essay is also an exemplary piece of philosophical literary criticism; indeed, as Toril Moi has argued, it is a kind of “phenomenology of criticism.” See Toril Moi, “A Phenomenology of Literary Criticism,” in Wittgenstein and Literary Studies, ed. Robert Chodat and John Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

7. My references are from King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997). Alexander Pope conflated the quarto and folio texts in 1723, and this practice was followed in most editions until the major editorial revisions of the 1980s. Scholarly consensus now treats the quarto and folio texts as separate versions of the play. The plays have different titles, hundreds of variants. The Quarto has three hundred lines not found in Folio; Folio has more than a hundred not found in Quarto. The Norton Shakespeare, for example, presents both texts. The complex editorial history of the play and the new orthodoxy is established in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). In this chapter, I note important differences when relevant.

8. Cavell notes that asides are conventionally both overheard and underheard: overheard by the audience and underheard by all on stage. See Stanley Cavell, “The Interminable Shakespeare Text,” in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 57.

9. The grammatical point is prior to any psychological application. I do not confine love to an emotion or a feeling. See also David Schalkwyck, who examines love in a Wittgensteinian idiom. David Schalkwyck, Shakespeare, Love, and Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and David Schalkwyck Shakespeare, Love and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

10. First published in MWM, 267–353.

11. De Trinitate, Book 9, Chapter 2, Augustine: On the Trinity ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 26.

12. For analyses of charitable relations, see Evan A. Gurney, Love's Quarrels: Reading Charity in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018); for charity under the pressure of religious difference, see Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).

13. John Bossy tracks what he argues is the transformation of a social order based on solidarity to one based on civility. See John Bossy, Christianity in the West: 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See especially his section on “Charity,” 140–52. See also John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700,” Past and Present 100 (August 1983): 29–61. Bossy brilliantly notes (57) that the Lutheran liturgy interprets the PAX (spoken by the priest after fraction) as a peace between God and sinner.

14. For the relation of love to service, see the pioneering article by Jonas A. Barish and Marshall Waingrow, “‘Service’ in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 9, no. 3 (Summer, 1958): 347–55; Schalkwyck, Shakespeare, Love and Service, Michael Neill, “Servant Obedience and Master Sins: Shakespeare and the Bonds of Service,” in Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 13–48.

15. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), book 15, chap. 23, 637.

16. At the same time, as I will show, the question of the corruption of virtue is bound up with what characters can see, with recognition, and the virtue tradition is thus tested and probed for adequacy in new climates.

17. For an excellent phenomenology of love, see Joel Backström, The Fear of Openness: An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality (Vasa, Finland: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2007). His way of putting the point about psychology and the grammar of love is this: “Instead of reducing love to psychology, I try to see psychology in the light of love” (118).

18. A point made in Paul Kottman, Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 81.

19. For the formulation of the “impropriety” of human action, see Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 63–64. Impropriety, says Markell, refers not to a contingent moral failing but to a constitutive feature of human action: “The very conditions that make us potent agents—our materiality, which ties us to the causal order of the world, and our plurality, which makes it possible for our acts to be meaningful—also make us potent beyond our own control, exposing us to consequences and implications that we cannot predict and which are not up to us” (63). Markell is working closely with the chapter by Hannah Arendt, “Action,” in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 175–247. The question of what we do in virtue of speaking runs throughout this book but see especially chapters 4 and 5 on Macbeth and Coriolanus.

20. The idea of sovereign agency as a fatal misrecognition (but one to which the Western tradition of Hobbes and Locke is blind) derives from Hannah Arendt and is developed with great clarity by Linda Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

21. See the excellent essay by Kenneth Graham, “‘Without the Form of Justice’: Plainness and the Performance of Love in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 442.

22. In the title essay of MWM, Cavell explores the “must” in his title “Must We Mean What We Say?” In part, we must because our words necessarily carry implications. Cavell's example is that I must imply something is wrong with the way you dress if I say: “Do you dress like that voluntarily?” But there is also the sense in which we must not always mean what we say because we say things we do not and cannot mean. In this sense, the problem is us: In our self-deception, we refuse to mean what we are actually saying.

23. See Robin Fitzpatrick's comments on the effects of Cordelia's “awesome and wondrous” word nothing, “initiating a tempest of uncontainable action.” See Robin Fitzpatrick, “Tragedy and Theology in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens,” in Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory, ed. Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 97.

24. “And in our faults by lies we flattered be,” sonnet 138, Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan Jones, Arden 3 ser. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1997), 391.

25. Simone Weil, “Love,” in Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 1952), 65. See also Joel Backström's succinct and probing formulation: “Love and truth go together, but they only go together in love.” Backström, Fear of Openness, 108. Backström, glossing Weil's comments in, The Need for Roots, trans. A. F. Wills (London: Routledge, 1978), 242: “Truth is the radiant manifestation of reality. Truth is not the object of love but reality. To desire truth is to desire contact with a piece of reality. We desire truth only in order to love in truth. We desire to know the truth about what we love. Instead of talking about love of truth, it would be better to talk about the spirit of truth in love.”

26. Anthony Cascardi, “‘Disowning Knowledge’: Cavell on Shakespeare,” in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 190.

27. For the necessity of sense and the accompanying pathos of that necessity, see Stanley Cavell, “Counter-Philosophy and the Pawn of Voice,” in A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 73.

28. Iris Murdoch's essay, “The Idea of Perfection,” suggests that “the central concept of morality is the individual knowable by love,” and she suggests that this is an “endless task.” See Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (1964; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 323, 321.

29. For further exploration, see Jean-Philippe Narboux, “Actions and Their Elaborations,” in Cavell's “Must We Mean What We Say?” at Fifty.

30. Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 322: “I can no more take back the word I have given you and you have acted on that I can take back my touch. Each has entered our history.”

31. The previous paragraph is taken from my essay: Sarah Beckwith, “Tragic Implication,” in Cavell's “Must We Mean What We Say?” at Fifty. The “intrince” holy cords are Kent's explanation for the extravagance of his abuse of Oswald to the Duke of Cornwall. “Such smiling rogues as these / Like rats oft bite the holy cords atwain / Which are too intrince t’unloose” (2.2.71-73).The folio text adds “holy.” “Intrince,” suggests Foakes, abbreviates “inrinsicate”—an obsolete use which means entangled or involved, King Lear ed. R.A. Foakes, Arden 3, footnote 73, p. 229. But the word also includes “intrinsic,” “belonging to the thing itself, or by its nature inherent, essential, proper, of its own” (Oxford English Dictionary) and this indicates the depth of Oswald's offence against the bonds that bind us, https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=intrinsic.

32. “Criticism is always an affront, and its only justification lies in its usefulness, in making its object available to just response” (MWM, 46).

33. J. L. Austin, “Three Ways of Spilling Ink,” in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 273.

34. Austin discusses “linguistic phenomenology” and “what we should say when” as an examination not only of our use of words but the realities we use words to talk about, J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, 182. Cavell explains why this method will tell us about ourselves as well as the world in “Austin at Criticism” and the title essay of MWM.

35. Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?,” 14.

36. Cavell, CR, 179.

37. Cavell explores both the necessity of action and the necessity of sense entailed in our speech acts. Stanley Cavell, “Counter-Philosophy and the Pawn of Voice,” in A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Our speech acts, being acts, will do things in the world. And they carry necessary implications of use.

38. Niklas Forsberg, Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary: Language and Morality in J. L. Austin's Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2022), 179.

39. Romans 13.8: “Owe nothing to any man, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hathe fulfilled the Law.” Romans 13:10: “Love doth not evil to his neighbor: therefore is love the fulfilment of the law.” The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

40. The Lutheran “messenger” in the dialogue is a stand in for English Lutheran infiltration.

41. “Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor.” See William Blake, “The Human Abstract,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Penguin Vintage, 1988).

42. For a fascinating examination of the conviviality and mutuality in charitable relations, see Judith M. Bennett, “Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 134 (February 1992): 19–41.

43. Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 77.

44. The priest's prayer to the congregants to come to receive Holy Communion says, for example, “You that truly and earnestly repent you of your sinnes, and be in love and in charite with your neighbours, and entende to lede a newe lyfe. . . . Draw nere and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort.” See the 1559 version in The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1548, 1559, 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 133.

45. “And yf ye shal perceive your offences to be such, as be not only against God, but also against your neighbours: then ye shal reconcyle youre selves unto them, ready to make restitution and satisfaction according to the uttermost of your powers for all injuries and wronges done by you to any other.” Book of Common Prayer (1559), 132.

46. On peace and charity, see The Lay Folks Mass Book (Early English Text Society), ed. T. F. Simmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1879), 48–54. See John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution,” Past and Present 100 (1983): 29–61. For an analysis of charity as a bond of community, see Andy Wood, Faith, Hope, and Charity: English Neighbourhoods, 1500–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), and especially his depiction of sixteenth-century melancholy about the decline of neighborhood and charitable relations and the pressures of neighborhood in response to the cash nexus. See also Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 9: “Caritas provided an overarching framework for ethical and emotional neighbourly relations.”

47. A Dialogue Concerning Heresies III.8,” 3–6, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 6. part 1, ed. Thomas C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard C. Marius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 288. See Germain Marc’hadour and Thomas M. C. Lawler, “Scripture in the Dialogue,” in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 6, part 2, 494–526. More's focus is less on the semantic history of agape and caritas as “what the English words convey” (513).

48. See my essay: Sarah Beckwith, “The Theological Virtues,” in Shakespeare and the Virtues: A Handbook, ed. Julia Lupton and Donovan Sherman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 125–36.

49. “Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, II,” in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 8, part 2, ed. Jame P. Lusardi, Louis A. Schuster, Richard C. Marius, and Richard Schoek, 199. For a helpful discussion on Thomas More's quarrel about love with Tyndale, see Evan Gurney, “Thomas More and the Problem of Charity,” Renaissance Studies 26, no. 2 (2011): 197–217; and Evan Gurney, “Charitable Translation: Thomas More, William Tyndale and the Vagrant Text,” in Love's Quarrels: Reading Charity in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), chap. 1.

50. Thomas Lupset, A Treatise of Charity (London: Berthelet, 1533), 31. Lupset is making a distinction between agape and eros (“A Dialogue Concerning Heresies,” III.8, 287).

51. A Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, in the Complete Works of Thomas More, vol 8, part 1, ed. Jame P. Lusardi, Louis, A. Schuster, Richard C. Marius, and Richard Schoek (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 199.

52. Gurney, “Thomas More,” 204; More, Complete Works, vol. 8, part 1, 199–200.

53. The point is made in Murdoch's famous M and D example. M comes to see D as she is, not simply differently than before, and her task of seeing reality is an “endless one.” See Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in Existentialists and Mystics, 321. “The realism,” she declares, “of a great artist is not a photographic realism, it is essentially both pity and justice.” See Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts” in Existentialists and Mystics, 371.

54. William Carroll points out that the word charity is only used in the subplot “where it refracts the failure of love so evident in the main plot” (202): William Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

55. Cavell, CR, 437.

56. Kelly S. Johnson, The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 3.

57. Thomas Harman, A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566), in The Elizabethan Underworld, ed. A. V. Judges (repr., London: Routledge, 1930), 91.

58. Harman, Caveat for Common Cursitors, 62.

59. Thomas Dekker, “O per se O” (1612), in The Elizabethan Underworld, 372, 373.

60. Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness and English Renaissance Literature (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 205.

61. On charity as a “form of love demanding recognition among different sectors of people,” see Kate Crassons, The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 22. For difficulties of recognition, see Crassons, Claims of Poverty, 28; and for the classificatory legal apparatus of the Cambridge Statute, see Crassons, Claims of Poverty, 82.

62. Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), 25.

63. Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor After Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 40.

64. Simone Weil, “Human Personality,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Sian Miles (New York: Grove Press,1986), 51.

65. Cora Diamond, “Injustice and Animals,” in Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics, ed. Carl Elliott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 131.

66. Jacobean tragedy is certainly gory, but its violence seems campily grotesque, even complacent when put beside the scene in Lear. Only what is precious can be violated and the scene elicits this sense in us. For a brilliant evocation of what is at stake in the concept of violation, see Christopher Cordner, Ethical Encounter: The Depth of Moral Meaning, Swansea Studies in Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), esp. chap. 1.

67. Diamond, “Injustice and Animals,” 131.

68. I borrow from J. M. Bernstein's examination of the phenomenology of torture as a paradigm of moral injury., J. M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 104, based on Améry, At the Mind's Limits.

69. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity, 178.

70. Note change from the quarto: “Mine injurer's meanest dog.”

71. The quarto reads: “No, sir, you must not kneel.”

72. Echoing, of course, Lear's question: “Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?” (3.5.74–5). See the beautiful analysis of this scene, in Tony Tanner, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 549; he supplies Emilia's answer.

73. Othello, ed. E.A.J. Honigman (with a new introduction by Ayanna Thompson, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser, (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 3.4.160-1. : “They are not ever jealous for the cause, / But jealous for they’re jealous.”

74. The folio reads: “Pray you now.”

75. For an excellent essay on the language of bearing, taking up, and so on in King Lear, see Jason Crawford, “Shakespeare's Liturgy of Assumption,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49, no. 1 (2019): 57–84.

76. The latter is James Wetzel's beautiful phrase. See James Wetzel, “A Meditation on Hell” in Parting Knowledge: Essays After Augustine (Eugene: Cascade, 2013), 173.

77. Shakespeare never tried to justify the ways of God to men or, therefore, to disabuse us of such justifications.

78. For an excellent examination of the pervasive theme of weight in Augustine's conception of love, see Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 246, 248.

79. Foakes makes this point in his footnotes to the stage direction in 5.3.

80. Wittgenstein, PI, ¶ 66.

81. Paul Fiddes, More Things in Heaven and Earth: Shakespeare, Theology, and the Interplay of Texts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022), 142. Lear's entry with Cordelia dead in his arms is the pose of faithful love, the “something” that comes out of nothing, reversing, “nothing will come of nothing.” For a response to this scene, see Charles Altieri, “How Can Act 5 Forget Lear and Cordelia?” in Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts, ed. Russ McDonald, Nicholas D. Nace, and Travis D. Williams (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 309–16. He explores the world of value not accessible to either sentimentalizing or ironizing readings. “Lear's repeated imperatives,” he argues, “suggest that there is something significant just in the spectacle Cordelia becomes in the end, framed by her love and fidelity and honored by his capacity to enter into the space that his love and fidelity have the strength to compose” (315).

82. Cited in Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 252.

83. Williams, Lost Icons, 56; John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (1938; repr., Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2007).

84. For an exceptional essay, see Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, Ian Hacking, John McDowell, and Cary Wolfe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 43–90.

85. I have found Camilla Kronqvist's work on these issues very illuminating. See, especially, Camilla Kronqvist, “Our Struggles with Reality,” in Emotions and Understanding: Wittgensteinian Perspectives, ed. Ylva Gustafsson, Camilla Kronqvist, and Michael McEachrane (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 202–20. I am grateful to Salla Peltonen for drawing Kronqvist's work to my attention. For concepts and literature especially in the work of Iris Murdoch and Cora Diamond, also see Niklas Forsberg Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

86. This is usefully explored in Patrick Rogers Horn, Gadamer and Wittgenstein on the Unity of Language: Reality and Discourse Without Metaphysics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 124–5, 127. Also see the very important chapter by Rush Rhees, “Understanding What Is Said,” in Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 160, 163.

87. Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” in Rationality: Key Concepts in the Social Sciences, ed. B. R. Wilson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974. For comments on this citation from Winch, see Kronqvist, “Our Struggles with Reality,” 205.

88. Niklas Forsberg, Language Lost and Found, 85.

3. Benefits and Bonds

1. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). The Vulgate has: “quid enim boni habes quod non accepisti?” (What aspect of the good do you have that you have not received?) See Biblia Sacra Vulgata, 5th ed., ed. B. Fischer, I. Gribomont, H. F. D. Sparks, and W. Thiele (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007). I like this translation for bringing out the recognition of the good, importantly highlighted when it comes to the translation of benefit/beneficium. In his book, John Barclay comments that “Augustine finds nothing that falls outside of the reach of this Pauline question” (91). See John Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015).

2. I use the Arden 3rd ser. edition for all citations in this chapter and throughout. Timon of Athens, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). The play is variously dated, so it is hard to determine precisely where it works with my grouping chronologically. Does it come before or after Lear? A plausible date of early 1606 puts it very near Macbeth and Coriolanus and possibly Antony and Cleopatra. However we determine this, Timon makes a cluster with this extraordinary group of late tragedies, and its investigation of the depth of bonds is revelatory of all the plays in my group and book.

3. J. L. Austin says, “Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying: our word is our bond” (10). See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). If we have given our word, our “inner state” of reservation cannot cancel out the pledge. Austin is precisely not hiving off a special class of commissives here—although he will investigate that class later on in his lectures. He locates ties of claim and obligation in us and in the giving and taking of words.

4. On Timon's extremes, Apemantus comment is apt: “The middle of humanity thou never knewst, but the extremity of both ends” (4.3.300–301).

5. These expectations are tacit—importantly so—but they are revealed retrospectively. Timon says to Flavius that his impoverishment is a test for his friends, and he is confident that he is “wealthy in his friends” (2.2.184).

6. Karl Marx quotes Timon in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Collected Works 3 (New York: International Press, 1976), 323–25. Money is “the bond of all bonds. Can it not dissolve and bind all ties?” See also Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (London: J. M. Dent, 1974): “Modern society which, when still in its infancy, pulled Pluto by the hair of his head out of the bowels of the earth, acclaims gold, its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its inmost vital principle” (3). Jowett, who cites these passages in his edition of the play, also points out that “gold” is used thirty-six times in this play, and of these, only three can be ascribed to Middleton. See Timon of Athens, ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 55. The gold Timon finds in the earth after his exile is ambiguously a product of culture and nature; mined gold or coins are variously used in production.

7. The expression is Kent's, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 2.2.68.

8. Una Ellis Fermor makes the case for incompletion. See Una Ellis Fermor, “Timon of Athens: An Unfinished Play,” The Review of English Studies 18, no. 71 (July 1942): 270–83. The Alcibiades subplot is murky and full of gaps; we do not hear about the death of the friend for whom Alcibiades pleads in act 3, and Alcibiades military role is not well motivated or anticipated; the characters of the friends are sometimes named, sometimes not; the play offers us multiple epitaphs, and so on. Dawson and Minton discuss these questions (8–9) and argue that the play was “at some point abandoned by its authors, perhaps set aside for revision, and later neglected” (10). Jowett finds this only a “mythical truth” in his edition (1).

9. For questions of joint authorship see the discussion of the play in John Jowett, “Canon and Chronology,” in Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 356–358. Middleton, the younger playwright, was responsible for about a third of the play, and there is some scholarly discussion about determining the exact parameters of this exercise in joint authorship. Jowett includes a chart assessing attribution to Middleton in his edition of Timon, giving to Middleton some role in scenes 1, 4, 11, and 12, and 17, and the entirety of scenes 2.6–10. Jowett leaves the division into scenes intact, but in the act divisions used by most editors after the eighteenth century, this corresponds to the first three scenes in act 3 and much of act 4. For further discussion, see Dawson and Minton, Arden 3rd ser. edition, which includes a vital treatment about the process of sharing in joint authorship, which was a key feature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage (6).

10. See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 25.

11. Genre is not a list of characteristics by which a work is entered under a description such that it counts if it has these particular features. It is best seen as a response to a set of conditions which it works through. As Cavell says in Pursuits of Happiness, it has no history, only a birth and a logic. Members of the genre share the inheritance of these conditions and “each member of the genre shares the responsibility of its inheritance” (28). Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Paul Kottman has brilliantly pursued a similar idea of genre. See Paul Kottman, Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare: Disinheriting the Globe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 1–22; and, in a more Hegelian direction, see Paul Kottman “What Is Tragedy?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. David Schalkwyk and Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3–18.

12. I am in dialogue with two very different books on social and verbal bonds. Kottman's Tragic Conditions reads Shakespearean tragedy as a response to the realization that the social and authoritative bonds by which we had understood ourselves—bonds of kinship, civic, economic or political relations, are “fully dissolvable” (4). How we inherit the world, and pass it on become bewilderingly opaque and unsettled and Shakespeare's tragedies work through this realization. John Kerrigan takes a comprehensive look at a range of speech acts, such as oaths and vows, to analyze what he calls Shakespeare's binding language. See John Kerrigan, Shakespeare's Binding Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

I have learned much from these stimulating books. Succinctly, I find Kottman's “fully dissolvable” to be too absolute and that Shakespeare's sense of bonds goes deeper. And I find that Kerrigan's understanding of binding language is too restricted to oaths, vows, and promises as the main route to commitment. I will examine the bonds we are (already) in, and the ways we commit ourselves in language.

13. The citation from Twelfth Night is from Twelfth Night Arden 3, ed. Keir Elam (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). A written bond was the default mode of contractual agreements by this time. Such documents could be known as a “recognizance,” “a promissory note,” a “seal” and sometimes a “bill” as used with great dramatic effectiveness in act 3, scene 4, where the pun weaponizes the bonds. (Bills are also a kind of long-handled weapon.) See Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 5. The bond, she says is both the legal instrument of binding and proof that the debtor was so bound.

14. A. D. Nuttall, Timon of Athens, Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 126.

15. Nuttall, Timon of Athens, 125, seeing Timon as taking up crucial, unfinished investigations of The Merchant of Venice (see the famous trial scene of act 4.scene 1, The Merchant of Venice ed. John Drakakis, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: A & C. Black Publishers, 2010). ). See also Elizabeth Fowler, “Toward a History of Performativity: Sacrament, Social Contract, and The Merchant of Venice,” in Medieval Shakespeare, ed. Curtis Perry and John Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 68–77.

16. Cymbeline, Arden 3rd ser., ed. Valerie Wayne (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

17. An important starting point for thinking through disagreement about the language of promise and contract is Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England 1640–1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. introduction, 1–28. There is a large literature on the importance of covenantal theology in Calvinist thought and the movement from the unilateral understanding of the covenant of grace (God's one-sided gift in which only one-sidedness preserved the very notion of gratuity) and to a more contractarian understanding of the obligations of the chosen. The market-driven operations of credit and the theology of grace provide a richly ambiguous context for questions of what we owe and what we own. For an increasingly contractarian world, see David Zaret, The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

18. On usury, see R. H. Tawney's introduction to Thomas Wilson's A Discourse on Usury (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925). For John Shakespeare's debt and involvement in usurious practices, see Park Honan, “John Shakespeare's Fortunes,” in Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 36–42.

19. Jowett, Timon of Athens, 8.

20. Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985): “The second person, the pronoun of mutual address, introduces us to the first and third . . . We are second persons before we are first or third persons” (90).

21. Patchen Markell, “Conclusion: Towards a Politics of Acknowledgment,” in Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 177–89.

22. Ventidius's messenger says, “Your lordship ever binds him” (1.1.107). Lucilius says that everything that falls into his keeping will be owed to Timon, hyperbolically expressing it as an optative, introduced with two negatives (1.1.154–55): “Never may / That state or fortune fall into my keeping / Which is not owed to you.”

23. The Geneva Bible gives a fascinating gloss that shows a financial metaphor underlying the notion of Christ's redemption (etymologically, buying back): “Not hoping for profite, but to lose the stocke and principal forasmuch as Christ bindeth himself to repay the whole with a more liberal interest.”

24. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, ed. and trans. Jane I. Guyer (Chicago: HAU Books, 2016), 73.

25. Of Benefits, 1.3.2–5. I use Seneca: On Benefits, trans. Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), checked against the Loeb edition of the Latin text, Seneca: Moral Essays, vol. 3, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1953). John Wallace first made the most extensive claims for Seneca's importance in Timon. See John Wallace, “Timon of Athens and the Three Graces: Shakespeare's Senecan Study,” Modern Philology 83, no. 4 (May 1986): 349–63. It will become apparent that I do not agree with Wallace's Hobbesian conclusions.

26. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 175. Sovereign agency belongs to the self-determining, self-sufficient, and masterful subject, a concept under such profound, excoriating scrutiny in the late tragedies. This idea of human agency is so deeply rooted in our culture and in liberal political theory that it is often simply assumed; yet it is a version of self that radically underestimates and misconstrues the depth of our agreements with each other, therefore the human condition of plurality.

27. Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), vii.

28. It is arguable, of course, that such a claim rests precisely on an understanding of possession that the gift contests, but it is part of the play's gloss on bonds to show that Timon has been oblivious to the written bonds that will soon fall fast and thick upon him.

29. Flavius lets us the audience know in his aside (1.2.160) that Timon cannot fund his generosity—it is empty. He speaks in further asides at 1.2.194-208 and 2.2.1-9. He tries to speak to Timon (1.2.178) and finally in act 2. scene 2. It becomes clear that he has managed to communicate the parlous state of Timon's finances. Timon reproaches him but he crucially says: “You would not hear me” (2.2.127). He has denied all requests from Flavius to address his situation, so his denial of Flavius and his denial of his true status are interwoven because he has stopped the only honest path of words.

30. The language of “breeding” smacks of usury.

31. Usury presented a problem for as long as it was regarded as a religio-ethical issue and before it could be justified on economic grounds. The arguments in parliament over usury (1571,1604, 1606, 1614, 1621, 1624) while initially dominated by scholastic language ignored God almost entirely by 1624. See Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

32. Regina Schwartz, Loving Charity, Living Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 69.

33. For the textual transmission see L. D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 363–65.

34. Erasmus's edition dates from 1529; Marc-Antoine Muret's partial edition is 1585; and Lipsius's version is 1605. Arthur Golding's The Woorke of the Excellent Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca concerning Benefyts was published in 1577–1578. Thomas Lodge's translation (1614, therefore postdating Shakespeare and Middleton's play) is based on Justus Lipsius's edition. For the wider context, see Jill Kraye, “Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckerd Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 303–86; and Roland Mayer, “Seneca Redivivus: Seneca in the Medieval and Renaissance World,” in The Cambridge Companion to Seneca, ed. Shadi Bartsch and Alessandro Schiesaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 277–88. Seneca was essentially a “moral authority for the medieval reader” (Mayer, “Seneca Redivivus,” 279).

35. Geoffrey Bullough does not cite Seneca's treatise. See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 6 (London: Routledge, 1966), 225–345. John M. Wallace's “Timon of Athens and the Three Graces” is the first study that argues that Shakespeare's ideas about benefits are indebted to Seneca's study. See also Richard Finkelstein, “Amicitia and Beneficia in Timon of Athens,” Studies in Philology 117, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 801–25.

36. Also sometimes translated as charity or an act of kindness.

37. For the significance of these kinds of differences, see J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175–204. See “Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations” (182). For an elaboration of these possibilities, see also Sarah Beckwith, “A Vision of Language for Literary Historians: Forms of Life, Context, Use,” in Wittgenstein and Literary Studies, ed. Robert Chodat and John Gibson (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 82–103.

38. Felicity Heal beautifully charted the language of bribe and gift in Jacobean vocabulary and institutions. Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See especially “Bribes and Benefits,” 188–206.

39. “A benefit cannot be touched with one's hand; the business is carried out with the mind” (1.5.1) translating “Non potest beneficium manu tangi: res animo geritur.”

40. Seneca is concerned with ingratitude and investigates it at length, see 1.10.3, 2.25.1, and in much of book 4. Seneca understands ingratitude to be one of the most common vices (1.1.1), and also a monstrous and devastating vice, breaking the very ligatures of society.

41. On gifts to self (5.7–11), on slaves as donors (3.18.1), on son and father (3.35.4).

42. There is no induction into an office of giving or donation. Giving, receiving, and reciprocating are in the fabric of our interwoven lives and language. On the office of promising, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), part 3, chap. 11, “Rules and Reasons,” 297, henceforth CR, for Cavell's criticism of Rawls who calls promising an “office.” “Virtue is satisfied with the bare person” (3.18.2) translating “nudo homine contenta est.” In Timon, Lucullus to whom Timon has given in abundance, says to one of Timon's servants in response to a request for a loan: “thou know’st well enough, although thou com’st to me, that this is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship without security” (3.1.40–43).

43. I am indebted to Jean-Joseph Goux's essay, “Seneca Against Derrida: Gift and Alterity,” which first made me understand Seneca's importance. Goux's concern is to explore gift and alterity against Derrida's influential understandings of the gift as aporetic, impossible. Goux uses Seneca's idea that there cannot be a gift without others to suggest that the gift gives the other because “to give and open yourself to the existence of others is the same thing.” Seneca thus demonstrates that “the possibility of the gift refutes solipsism” (160). See Jean-Joseph Goux, “Seneca Against Derrida: Gift and Alterity,” in The Enigma of the Gift and Sacrifice, ed. Jean-Joseph Goux, Edith Wyschogrod, and Eric Boynton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 148–60.

44. A benefit is intrinsically social (5.10.1), requiring the involvement of others.

45. On Benefits, 1.4.3: “People must be taught to give benefits freely, receive them freely, and return them freely” (22).

46. See Jonathan Lear's wonderful meditation, “Gratitude and Meaning” that ends his book. Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 126: “Gratitude protects the realm of generosity by recognizing it as such and not treating the benefaction as part of the normal economy of gift and (expected) reciprocation.”

47. For an excellent treatment of the gift, and the problems with the “pure” gift, see Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 23, 51, and the helpful “The Lexicon of Gift” at the end of his book. The “pure” gift is “free” from obligation, unreciprocated, given without a return (52). For Derrida's exploration of the “pure” gift, see Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): and Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), which has been hugely influential in literary studies, anthropology, and theology. Derrida's idea of the gift as one that must involve “no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt” (Given Time, 12) is taken up with trenchant clarity by Ken Jackson. See Ken Jackson, “‘One Wish’ or the Possibility of the Impossible: Derrida, the Gift, and God in Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no.1 (Spring 2001): 34–66.

48. How it got to be a scandal is the story told in Coles, Rethinking Generosity, and Barclay, Paul and the Gift.

49. Derrida, Given Time, 12. On Derrida's account, the gift is vitiated by the mere recognition that it is gifted by either the giver or the receiver. Derrida's insists “for there to be a gift, it is necessary that the donee does not give back, amortize, reimburse, acquite himself, enter into a contract, and that he never have contracted a debt” (13).

50. See Adriaan Peperzak, “Giving,” in The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice, ed. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 161–75. Peperzak helpfully points out that for a phenomenology of giving, it is not necessary to establish the purest form of it as an empirical fact, and that the rareness of generosity is not a revelation, but that its corruptions are also identifiable and must be (163). For example, the fact that we can compare more and less generous givers shows that we already have an idea of a genuine act of generosity. There is no room for gratitude in Derrida's understanding of the gift, because giving is actually destroyed by gratitude.

51. Of course, this language was made familiar in the central practices (and controversies) around the Eucharist, drawing on the Greek word for thanksgiving, see Barclay, “Lexicon of the Gift,” in Paul and the Gift, 575. In Latin, gratia can also serve as grace given and thanks in response to it. Barclay points out that in English “gift” captures only one side of the favor or benefit, whereas “grace” covers all three moments in the circle of the gift: “the graciousness of the giver, the grace conveyed, and the gratitude returned,” 582. For an exploration of the play's “anti-graces,” see A. D. Nuttall, “Timon Says Grace: The Parodic Eucharist,” in Timon of Athens, 113–35. The play's antigraces can be found in 1.2.63-72 and 3.7.69-83.

52. Peter Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 11.

53. Aristotle's magnanimous, great-souled, or proud man (megalopsuchia) “is the sort of man to confer benefits but is ashamed of receiving them; for one is the mark of the superior, the other of an inferior.” Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), book 4:1124b.

54. Annette Baier, “Trust and Antitrust,” Ethics 96, no. 2. (January 1986), 149. Also cited in J. M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Bernstein makes these distinctions relevant to Timon's sense of betrayal: “One of the reasons why destructions of trust tend to be so disturbing is that, unlike contracts that are explicit, linear, and specific, trust relations tend to be implicit, that is, there is no specific thing we had trusted the other to do or forgo from doing” (227).

55. “The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Wright (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), ¶160, 23e.

56. Knud Ejler Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, trans. Theodro I. Jensen, Gary Puckering, and Eric Watkins (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 18. As Alasdair MacIntyre and Hans Fink say in their introduction, Løgstrup understands life as a gift, and it is “a precondition of any cultural ordering that the basic expression of life is to give and receive” (xxi). For a further investigation of giving and receiving (uncalculated, unpredicted), see Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 100, 116, 144.

57. In addition to Løgstrup, a variety of philosophers have explored trust and shown why it has been invisible—and sometimes frankly unthinkable—in the dominant traditions of philosophy. See C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1992); Benjamin McMyler, Testimony, Trust, and Authority (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2011); Olli Lagerspetz, Trust, Ethics, and Human Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Richard Moran, The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony, and Intersubjectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Lars Hertzberg, “On the Attitude of Trust,” Inquiry 31 (1994), 307–22. The difficulties of recognizing trust come about because it is what we tacitly take for granted but also because the modern philosophical tradition privileges “epistemic autonomy.” See McMyler, Testimony, Trust, and Authority, 196.

58. Hortensius certainly compares his lord's ingratitude to “stealth” at 3.4.27. And the exchange between the three strangers in 3.2 is a vital part of the play's ethical landscape.

59. For some fine distinctions, see Regina Schwartz, Living Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 69–70. She offers a textbook definition of a contract as a “promise that the law will enforce.” J. M. Bernstein in his chapter on “Trust as Mutual Recognition” in Torture and Dignity has suggested that social contract theory is “a way of both affirming and denying the necessity of recognition for everyday life.” It considers the parties to the contract to be fully formed, and understands them as self-sufficient apart from the contract (224).

60. Avishai Margalit, On Betrayal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 90–11, 154.

61. The word “truster” in the sense of believer, as the Arden note reminds us, does occur in Hamlet (1.2.172) but this is the only use in the sense of creditor in the canon of plays. “Truster” surely carries the sense of credit not alone in the financial sense but as in Pericles's use of it to Marina that he will “credit her relation” (Pericles, 5.1.114). Suzanne Gossett (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 2004).

62. Lucilius, Flaminius, and Servilius serve Timon. Philotous, Lucius, Hortensius, Titus, and Caphis are named and there are two servants of Varro, one of Isodore. These serve the play's creditors, but their loyalties do not always lie with them. For example, when the servants of Isodore and Varro meet to collect dues from Timon, Caphis's pun, “Would we were all discharged,” can be taken to express a hope that their dues be paid, but it can just as easily indicate a reluctance to perform the duty (2.2.14).

63. For the ethical fellowship of the servants, see Ellorashree Maitra, “Toward an Ethical Polity: Service and the Tragic Community in Timon of Athens,” Renaissance Drama 41, no. 12 (Fall 2013): 173–98; Michael Noschka, “Thinking Hospitably with Timon of Athens: Towards an Ethics of Stewardship,” in Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange, ed. David Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton (London: Routledge, 2019), 242–64; and David Schalkwyck, Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

64. Summa Theologica 2-2, 106, resp. obj. 3. All quotations are from St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, the Complete English Edition, 5 vols. trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1981), henceforth ST. Citations from the Summa use the following abbreviations following the architecture of the work. 2.2 specifies the second part of the second part, 106 specifies the question addressed, followed by a number for the article, s.c. for sed contra (on the contrary)and resp.obj. specifies response to the objection.

65. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 106, 3, resp. obj. 5.

66. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 106, 5, s.c.

67. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 106, s.c.

68. Andrew Galloway, “The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to ‘Kyndenesse,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 4. (July 1994): 365–83. The most probing exploration of “kyndeness” before Shakespeare is Langland's Piers Plowman B and C-Texts. See William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, eds. George Kane and E.Talbot Donaldson, rev. ed. (London: Athlone, 1988, and Piers Plowman, by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall, 2nd (York Medieval Texts, 2nd ser. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994).

69. Galloway points out that “exploring the double-entendre of both the ‘natural’ and the ‘moral’ meanings of ‘kyndenesse’ must rank among the favorite verbal games of Middle English religious writers.” See Galloway, “The Making of a Social Ethic,” 373.

70. A decidedly Christian language is here invoked as it is in the play's eucharistic references.

71. 2 Henry IV, ed. James C. Bulman, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser, (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 5.5.46.

72. For the tears, see James Kuzner, Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Kuzner gives us a marvelous account of his experience of reading Timon. And see Maurice Hunt, “Qualifying the Good Steward of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens,” English Studies 82, no. 6 (2001): 507–20, 511. The tears are Virgil's lacrimae rerum, “sad, wise tears for the human condition of ingratitude.” I would add that they are tears for his failure to see his honest servant, for the kind of failure that is.

73. Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser, (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 2.3.111. King Lear Q, 3.7.79.

74. “Here, take,” says Timon (4.3.519). The Arden editors assume Flavius does take the gold because the Painter thinks (5.1) that the rumours that the steward has gold are true. Karl Klein notes John Woodvine's moving and quiet return of the poisoned gift to Michael Pennington's Timon in Greg Doran's 1999 Royal Shakespeare Theatre production. See Timon of Athens, ed. Karl Klein (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50.

75. On the work of differences see Austin, “A Plea for Excuses.” The epigraph Wittgenstein once thought of using for the Philosophical Investigations was from King Lear. “I’ll teach you differences.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text with an English Translation, 4th ed., ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), henceforth PI. The hope was that distinctions in ordinary usage and reminders about how we came to learn such distinctions might help us find our way home when we are exiled from our own words, when we are lost and wandering. His aim was to restore us to our responsibilities in talking, our (internally related) responsiveness to each other, and our responsibility to the ways our words bind us, thus all at once to the significance of our words to each other and to the worth of speech. Without these differences and distinctions there would be nothing to say.

76. Stanley Cavell, “Performative and Passionate Utterance,” in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 187.

77. Cavell, CR, 268. Part 3 constitutes a brilliant, sustained critical analysis of the major schools of moral philosophy in its contemporary forms. Cavell comments on part 3 in the introduction to the Italian edition of CR, which omitted this section. He felt that he had not yet brought out the full moral implication of Wittgenstein's PI, a project continued years later in part 4, and continued in Cavell's conception of perfectionism in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome and subsequent works.

78. Austin outlines the conditions of illocutionary speech initially in Austin, How to Do Things with Words. Cavell ponders Austin's neglect of the perlocutionary (what we do by rather than in virtue of speaking), and accounts for the disanalogies with Austin's procedure. He begins this analysis in Stanley Cavell, “Counter Philosophy and the Pawn of Voice,” in A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 53–128, and develops it in “Performative and Passionate Utterance.”

79. Cavell, “Performative and Passionate Utterance,” 185.

80. Cavell says something he wants from moral theory is “a systematic recognition of speech as confrontation, as demanding, as owed”—and not alone in the form of moral reasons. Cavell, “Performative and Passionate Utterance,” 187.

4. Losing the Name of Action

1. For vital reflections on the question of the human as a question of recognition to which I return later in the chapter, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), henceforth CR; Cora Diamond, “The Importance of Being Human,” in Human Beings, ed. David Cockburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Niklas Forsberg, Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

2. John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967; repr., Vintage, 1997), 166.

3. “Being human is aspiring to be human . . . since it is not aspiring to being the only human, it is an aspiration on behalf of others as well.” Stanley Cavell, CR, 399.

4. Merriam-Webster defines scare quotes as “quotation marks used to express esp. skepticism or decision concerning the use of the enclosed word or phrase.”https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scare%20quotes?src=search-dict-box, accessed Febrary 21^st, 2025.

5. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/scare-quotes_n?tab=meaning_and_use#24148539, accessed February 21st, 2025.

6. Missouri's republican senate candidate in 2012 said that women who suffer “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant. A public outcry led to his withdrawal from the Senate race. See New York Times, “Rep. Todd Akin: The Statement and the Reaction,” August 10, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/us/politics/rep-todd-akin-legitimate-rape-statement-and-reaction.html.

7. For some reflections on the question of the human, see “Introduction: Cavell, Literary Studies, and the Human Subject: Consequences of Skepticism,” in Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism, ed. Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 5. See also Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

8. In her introduction to Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, Margaret Canovan has said: “Human animals unconscious of their capacities and responsibilities are not well-fitted to take charge of earth-threatening powers” (xi). Margaret Canovan, introduction to The Human Condition, 2nd ed., by Hannah Arendt, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

9. For the idea of Shakespeare and the “invention” of the human, See Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Trade, 1999).

10. Cora Diamond, “The Importance of Being Human,” in Human Beings, ed. David Cockburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35–62.

11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text with an English Translation, 4th ed., ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), henceforth PI, ¶287: “How am I filled with pity for this human being? How does it come about what the object of my pity is? (Pity, one might say, is one form of being convinced that someone else is in pain.”

12. I am indebted throughout to Raimond Gaita for his compelling understanding of lucid remorse as “an encounter with the reality of the ethical.” See Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Routledge, 2004), xiv.

13. For the desiccation of the concept of human action at the hands of moral theory, see Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). For a brilliant exploration of human agency taking up some of Murdoch's perceptions, see Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). R. F. Holland also explored the poverty of moral theory (particularly utilitarianism) when it comes to envisaging evil. See R. F. Holland, “Good and Evil in Action,” in Against Empiricism: On Education, Epistemology, and Value (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1980), 110–25. “Utilitarianism,” Holland claims, “gives us a myopic, misleading picture of the way that good and evil enter into action” (110–11). Raimond Gaita acknowledges Holland's profound influence on his own work; see Gaita, Good and Evil, xi. The book began life as a dissertation supervised by Holland.

14. This reference to his murder of Duncan or to his other murders as an unspecified “it” is a characteristic locution for Macbeth (e.g., see 1.4.50, 2.1.62). All citations are from Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

15. The Oxford English Dictionary records this as the first citation for the meaning of “the taking of a life by treacherous violence,” as recorded in the notes of the Arden, 3rd ser. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/assassination_n?tab=meaning_and_use#37063784, accessed February 21, 2025.

16. Arendt, Human Condition, part 5, 192.

17. My phrase recalls the Captain's fearsome description of Macbeth the warrior, “Valour's minion” who “carved out his passage” with “his brandished steel” (1.2.16, 1.2.19). This passage through enemy bodies is glorified by the King and his witnesses, the not-so-latent violence disciplined to the king's cause. The adjacent play, Coriolanus, explores this world of uncontainable and deathly force, as I show in chapter 5.

18. “Be-all and end-all” is another remarkable coinage, luminously revealing his own wishful logic.

19. Cavell, CR, 110. Cavell is importantly getting at the depth of convention in human life. To Cavell's succinct formulation, we might add the vital idea that acts come under descriptions, and “do not come named for assessment, nor, like apples, ripe for grading.” See Cavell, CR, 265. For a helpful elaboration of this dimension of Cavell's work, see Jean-Philippe Narboux, “Actions and Their Elaboration,” in Cavell's “Must We Mean What We Say?” at 50, ed. Greg Chase, Juliet Floyd, and Sandra Laugier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 56–76.

20. Tony Tanner, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010): “Most tragic heroes, from Oedipus on, have, for a variety of reasons, ever but slenderly known themselves, and when self-knowledge does finally break in, or through, it is invariably at ruinous cost” (563).

21. James Calderwood, If It Were Done: Macbeth and Tragic Action (Cambridge, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). I have found this excellent study very helpful.

22. For a beautifully understated but trenchant analysis, see what is perhaps one of the best essays ever written on the philosophy of action: J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961); see 202, for our language helping us to mistake causes for reasons. For the transition from action to behaviour and its disastrous ethical consequences, see Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); and Charles Taylor, introduction to Philosophical Papers: Human Agency and Language, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2. See also Pfau, Minding the Modern; and the still highly relevant, Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relevance to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).

23. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). When an occurrence is described as an action, it brings in the question of accountability and responsibility. “When an occurrence is apparently the intended action of a human agent, but nonetheless we cannot so identify it, we are both intellectually and practically baffled” (209). For a good essay on this aspect of MacIntyre's thought, see Stanley Hauerwas, “The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre,” First Things, October 2007, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/the-virtues-of-alasdair-macintyre.

24. My citations are from St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, Complete English Edition, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1948). The Treatise on Human Acts within the Summa takes up the first twenty-one quaestiones of the Prima Secundae of the Summa. Aquinas precisely differentiates human acts as those emerging from the deliberation of reason. Human acting is purposive in this tradition and should not be confused with mere motion or happening. Acting is precisely then not reacting to external stimuli in the manner of behaviorism. Although behaviorism is technically a branch of psychology, outmoded in its most notorious forms (e.g., B. F. Skinner), it stands here for a much broader intellectual phenomenon. I invoke it for a kind of scientism that takes out the role of intention and purpose from human agency and thus evacuates questions of meaning and value central to the self-interpreting creatures we are. See Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?,” in Philosophical Papers, 15–44. See Taylor's introduction for a devastating critique of behaviorism. G. E. M. Anscombe was Taylor's adviser in Oxford during the 1950s. For a perceptive examination of the attempt to understand reading and criticism from the perspectives of the natural and social sciences, see Robert Chodat, “Appreciating Material: Criticism, Science, and the Very Idea of Method,” in Wittgenstein and Literary Studies, ed. Robert Chodat and John Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 62–81.

25. Charles R. Pinches brings this out very clearly in his book. See Charles R. Pinches, Theology and Moral Action: After Theory in Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), see esp. 90, 101, 106: “The realms of morality and human acts are exactly co-extensive.” Pinches contrasts this with a strand of moral philosophy that extrinsically brings to bear something called “morality” onto human action. Once again, we can see why the naming of actions and their elaboration is so vital (91).

26. “Intentional actions” are ones to which a certain sense of the question “why?” has application. See G. E. M. Anscombe, Intentions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 11. Anscombe shows herself to be a deeply Thomistic thinker. Human acting is directed toward an end (an end we think is good) and so it is dependent on understanding as well as will.

27. Of course, we can be deceived about our own intentions: Our self-knowledge is far from perfect. For us, things come under certain descriptions, and naming actions is a “most sensitive occupation.” Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35.

28. Ilham Dilman, Raskolnikov's Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Evil (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 112.

29. The “sweet oblivious antidote” is what he hopes the Doctor can minister to his wife, tormented by an endlessly recurring nightmare, an exacting and horrifying nightly reprise of the murders.

30. We might see this as part of the willful thoughtlessness the play explores. Thinking, as Hannah Arendt established, is intrinsically dialogical: It is always thinking with. Macbeth's desire is for solitude. He seeks out only the three weird sisters and the secret knowledge he imagines can make him invulnerable. Arendt explores thinking and thoughtlessness; see, most famously, Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1964); and Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978). For reflections on this topic, see Maria Balaska, “When a Mind Goes Up in Smoke: Thinking of Evil and Thinking,” in Cora Diamond on Ethics, ed. Maria Balaska (Chan: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 247–67.

31. The denaturing of human action is once again apparent. In suggesting that “returning” were as “tedious” as proceeding, the point of acting is lost. It is a horrifying image of numbness, as if Macbeth is anesthetized to his own actions: The way forward and the way back are alike steeped in blood.

32. The Portrait of Macbeth is not moralistic, for we might recognize our chronic proneness to self-deception, the ease with which, as the creatures we are, we slide into it with such alarming ease—and sincerity!

33. Herbert Fingarette has given us a wonderfully clear picture of self-deception. He also shows why certain philosophical pictures of the self will remain puzzled in the face of the paradox of self-deception. See Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (1969; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 38–39. For a far-reaching use of Fingarette's ideas on self-deception, see David Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas, “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Theological and Ethical Reflections on Speer's Inside the Third Reich,” Journal of Religious Ethics 2, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 99–117.

34. On losing concepts, see Forsberg, Language Lost and Found; and for her seminal essay, see Cora Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” Ethics 98, no. 2 (1988). One of Forsberg's key points is that it may be hard to see when we might be losing our grip of a concept and speaking only under the illusion of sense because “words are worn and torn and so turned (differently).” They are “changed but not necessarily exchanged since words may look the same when their concepts change”—and because this is so “it is oftentimes hard to come to see that one may fail in the command of one's own language” (1).

35. I borrow this term from Holland, “Good and Evil in Action,” 118. The sense of the priority of good over evil is Augustinian: Goodness is creative, and evil can only be a privation of the good, being in itself nothing.

36. Macbeth's claim that his “violent love . . . Outran the pauser reason” (2.3.111–12) is his cover-up for his murder of the grooms when the murder of Duncan is discovered.

37. Of course, at this point Lady Macbeth seems to have a limited imagination of “illness.” She seems to see it here as that “necessary” evil that courage and will can supply to get what you want. It hardly needs saying that this is a radical miscontrual of courage, of evil, and the nature of the murder she contemplates. Macbeth's paltry “bring forth man-children only” (1.7.74) shows him as feebly complicit in this fatal misunderstanding of masculine courage. (Compare this: “What the self-deceiver lacks is not integrity or sincerity but the courage and skill to confront the reality of his or her situation”; Burrell and Hauerwas, “Self-Deception and Autobiography,” 105.) Duncan is, like the Prince of Cumberland a “step” they must o’erleap because it stands in their way. Whatever boldness they have is hectic, feverish, intoxicated with drink, driven and riven not with cruelty or calculation but with a terrible mutual incitement. I think it is obvious that neither would have committed murder without the other: Their act, as the play abundantly dramatizes, leaves them both with blood on their hands that they can never clear. Macbeth cannot outsource his responsibility to his wife, or to the Weird Sisters: The play presents this as a temptation and a confusion but an evasion of a responsibility that can only coherently be assumed singly.

38. James Wetzel points out that Dante cannot locate himself in the “selva oscura” by “recalling the moment and motive of his entry.” James Wetzel, “A Meditation on Hell,” Parting Knowledge: Essays After Augustine (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013), 162. Macbeth, as I have been arguing, shows that self-forgetfulness and its consequences in action. Augustine's famous meditation on the stolen pears he did not even really want or need is also a meditation on evil's perversity.

39. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Collier, 1993), 29.

40. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), 68. I thank David Burrell for this reference. See David Burrell, Aquinas, God, and Action (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008), 136.

41. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Classics, 1984), book 12.7, 480.

42. City of God, 12.7, 480. It is certainly an intelligible statement for Macbeth. It is notorious that Macbeth's language uncannily echoes the language of the weird sisters from the beginning of the play. The incantatory “fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.9) with its alliterative chiasmus attempts to reverse good's priority by negating distinction. If fair is foul, and foul is fair, moral discernment is impossible. This is not quite like Milton's later Satanic, “Evil be thou my good,” which immediately succeeds “all good to me is lost,” for there the distinction is still clear. John Milton Paradise Lost, book 4, 109-110, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton eds. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 388. Macbeth's “This supernatural soliciting/Cannot be ill; cannot be good” (1.3.132–33) shows the preliminary moves toward the negation of distinction.

43. Charles T. Matthewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 79. The Augustinian tradition continues in Hannah Arendt's work. One of Arendt's early works was her Heidelberg dissertation, an account of love in Augustine, which she took with her from her exile in France to New York. It is now translated as Love and Saint. Augustine, ed. and trans. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt's picture of Eichmann's evil arguably remains Augustinian. A better understanding of this dimension of her thought might qualify the outrage engendered by her talk of evil's “banality.” Of course, Augustine could not have anticipated the particular horrors of totalitarian thoughtlessness, but her thinking is importantly different from many other post-Auschwitz analysts.

44. Gaita, Good and Evil, xxi. Judi Dench's outstanding performance as Lady Macbeth was in Trevor Nunn’ s Royal Shakespeare production (with Ian McKellen as Macbeth) in 1976. My attendance at this production in London that year transformed my sense of the possibilities of theater utterly and forever.

45. The prior nature of a good to be violated is apparent, though conceived terribly as an obstacle to her “fell purpose.” “Compunctious visitings of nature” are glossed as menstruation in the Arden, 3rd ser., but surely stand as much for the naturalness of compassion for the living, as well as the for the pricking conscience.

46. Thanks to Thomas Pfau for the reference to Emily Dickinson's poem. It can be found in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (San Francisco: Back Bay, 1976), 365. Raimond Gaita, “Ethical Individuality,” in Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch (London: Routledge, 1990), 137.

47. Gaita, Good and Evil, 52. Gaita finds remorse as “an astonishing encounter with the reality of the ethical” (xiv).

48. Wittgenstein, PI, ¶287: “How am I filled with pity for this human being? How does it come about what the object of my pity is? (Pity, one may say, is one form of being convinced that someone else is in pain.)”

49. Gaita, Good and Evil, 177–78.

50. Wittgenstein, PI, ¶286. Wittgenstein is combatting the pervasive idea of the body as a veil or mask that we must get beyond to be certain of say, pain. Cavell's gloss on this remark in is: “to withhold, or hedge our concepts of psychological states to given creatures, on the ground that my criteria cannot reach to the inner life of the creature is specifically to withhold the source of my idea that living creatures are things that feel: it is to withhold myself, to reject my response to anything as a living being” (CR, 83–84).

51. Gaita, “Ethical Individuality,” 127. Rowan Williams calls remorse a lost icon, along with childhood, and charity, by which he means an understanding and way of perceiving a pattern of human behavior that condition the possibility of recognizably human conversations. In cases in which certain things, such as marking deaths in ritual, or respecting the latency of childhood, or the making of promises do not obtain, we might find it hard to stay within a recognizably human conversation. Lost icons are concepts in danger and Williams's task is to show the costs of that loss. See Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T &T Clark, 2000).

52. It reprises in an altogether different register her words to her husband in the third act, her wan attempt at reassurance: “What's done is done” (3.2.13), uttered just at the point at which she may be on the brink of perceiving how useless and ineffective those words are, and how also untrue. What's done can’t be undone, but the action is far from finished in consequence, and in this sense, it is not “done” at all.

53. Lady Macbeth was going to die sooner or later. Lady Macbeth should have died at a more convenient time (to mourn her?). Both readings cauterize natural response.

54. The OED gives these compounds for remorse—remorse-filled, remorse-smitten, remorse-stirred, remorse-stricken, remorse-stung. The biting nature of remorse is closely associated with the medieval discourse of conscience. Remorse is “agenbite” as one medieval treatise has it: It is “again-biting.” It is sharp and stinging: a “pricke” of conscience (https://www.oed.com/dictionary/remorse_n?tab=meaning_and_use#26042706, accessed February 21, 2025.

55. Gaita, Good and Evil, 59.

56. The weird sisters too sometimes think about deeds intransitively: “I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do” (1.3. 10) or without name as when in 4.1. they respond to Macbeth's question, “What is’t you do” with the reply: “A deed without a name” (4.1.63–64).

57. Gaita, Good and Evil, 63.

58. This is, of course, how Lady Macbeth greets Macbeth when they meet for the first time in the play. This is the place to which his letters with the “intelligence” of the weird sisters have “transported” her.

59. Williams, Lost Icons, 109. This picture of the will is intrinsically bound up with the negation of time. An atemporal self does not have to be connected with the lives of others. Macbeth's reading of the weird sister's equivocations as prophecies and predictions is an evasion of his temporal self.

60. See the epigraph by Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture,” from “Metaphysics and Ethics” in the same volume. She has in her sights the concept of a deracinated will. Shakespeare's philosophical understanding of such a picture is that it is potentially murderous, extinguishing others metaphorically, and in the case of Macbeth, literally: “How does one become Thane of Cawdor? By his death. How does one become king? By killing him. How does one become an earl, as at the end of the play? By killing.” Macbeth: Texts and Contexts, ed. William C. Carroll (New York: St. Martin's, 1999), 20.

61. Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 3.1.55.

62. Pfau, Minding the Modern, see esp. 3: “to work with concepts . . . means to enter into an ethical—as opposed to a straightforwardly pragmatic—relation to the reality that these concepts prima facie allow us to apprehend”; Cora Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts.”

63. Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” 290. The differences in conceptual amnesia in the work of MacIntyre (whose chief concern is the radical attenuation of an understanding of virtue) and Murdoch are certainly worth exploring as are implications of their Aristotelian and Platonic lineages, but they cannot be my central concern. Diamond undertakes some distinctions between a MacIntyrean understanding of the loss of concepts and conceptual loss in Murdoch in “Losing Your Concepts.” Nevertheless, immediately preceding the words I have cited, Murdoch asks, “What have we lost here? And what have we perhaps never had?” Murdoch also suggests that we have stripped ourselves of concepts in morals and politics, and (relevant here) that the ones we have cannot imagine evil (294). I cannot do more than allude to the riches on offer in Pfau's extraordinary book, a rich investigation of agency, its attenuation in modernity, and its related concepts.

64. Forsberg, Language Lost and Found, 62. Forsberg points out that for Murdoch (and I add, for Diamond), loss of concepts cannot be understood in a purely historical way—that is, as if some concepts had application in a former period and now do not. See my introduction.

65. Murdoch's understanding of conceptual amnesia is superbly elucidated by Forsberg, Language Lost and Found, see esp. 171.

66. For an excellent elucidation of Murdoch and the idea of choice, see Susan Wolf, “Loving Attention: Lessons in Love from The Philadelphia Story,” in Understanding Love: Philosophy, Film, and Fiction, ed. Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

67. Forsberg, Language Lost and Found, 132; for the idea of comprehension as merely regional, see 133.

68. Gaita, Good and Evil, chap. 4.

69. G. Wilson Night, “Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil,” in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy (1930; repr., London:, 1989).

70. Gaita, Good and Evil, 68.

71. Gaita, Good and Evil, 71.

72. Cavell, CR, part 3, 247, for a brilliant critique of the focus on the constricted question “what ought to be done.”

73. Forsberg, Language Lost and Found, 171: “A loss of concepts is, at bottom, due to a lack, or a distorted form of self-understanding. This lack or these distortions are in turn related, but not reducible to misunderstandings of our language.”

74. See Cavell, CR, 324, Cavell's critique of Rawls, and his elucidation of specifically moral claims: “What you are said to do can have various descriptions; under some you will know that you are doing it, under others you will not, under some your act will seem unjust to you, under others not. What alternatives we can and must take are not fixed, but chosen; and thereby fix us.”

75. Lars Hertzberg, “Gaita on Recognizing the Human,” in Ethics, Philosophy and a Common Humanity, ed. Christopher Cordner (London: Routledge, 2010), 7–20.

76. Mark Doty, The Art of Description: Word into World (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2010), 65: “Description is an art to the degree it gives us not just the world but the inner life of the witness.” In literary criticism, the art of description has been neglected and despised for too long and precisely because of the assumptions Murdoch criticizes. Description is on this account obvious and banal because what is self-evidently there is not related to our vision of it; what we see is irrelevant to the kinds of people we are.

77. Gaita, Good and Evil, xiv; see also 61: “Remorse is a central and inexpungeable determinant of what it is for something to be a moral matter.”

78. For Murdoch understanding the reality of another person is the work of love, justice, and pity, all essential to the vision of Shakespeare's late tragedies. Gaita's vital commentary on this comment is that love, justice, and pity are forms of understanding not consequences of it. See Hertzberg, “On Recognizing the Human” in Ethics, Philosophy and a Common Humanity, ed. Christopher Cordner (London: Routledge, 2011), 7.

79. A point that Gaita makes about Oedipus; Gaita, Good and Evil, 44. The chorus, he says, holds Oedipus responsible for his unintentional deeds, and does so through their pity for what he had become. Pity is part of their “lucid response to the significance of what he did” (44).

80. Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” 293.

81. Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” 293.

82. See Yaniv Iczkovits, Wittgenstein's Ethical Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 145.

83. Michael Boyd's fabulously inventive production doubled the actors playing Macduff's children for the weird sisters, who appeared hanging down on nooses in the second appearance of the weird sisters (the first scene was cut). The production kept “the eye of childhood” resolutely to the fore.

84. “The responsibility of responsiveness” is a key idea in Cavell's interpretation of Wittgenstein and Austin. For the phrase in Cavell's work, see Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 126.

85. Malcolm is obtuse to Shakespeare's astonishing uncoupling of grief and anger, his turning inside out of the revenge tradition and he talks as if revenge can cure grief: “Let's make us medicines of our great revenge / To cure this deadly grief.”

86. Cora Diamond's essay beautifully explores how ethics is utterly interwoven with explorations of how concepts work in our lives. See Cora Diamond, “Suspect Notions and the Concept Police,” in Cora Diamond on Ethics, ed. Maria Balaska (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 17.

87. Tragedy again stands as a corrective to some forms of moral philosophy, an alternative form of it.

88. Cavell, CR, 399.

89. Czeslaw Milosz, “One More Day,” in New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 418–19. Milosz's poem is, of course, deeply Augustinian: “Or should we say plainly that good is on the side of the living / And evil on the side of a doom that lurks to devour us.” It is also deeply Platonic: “And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil / Only beauty will call to them and save them / So that they will still know how to say: this is true and that is false.”

90. The play, as many have noted, is haunted by children—the children the Macbeths notoriously do not have; the children of those who are prophesied to be future kings (Banquo's lineage, childish apparitions); the children murdered at Fife; and young Siward toward the play's end. Some productions portray the weird sisters as children to highlight this strong strand of the play. The imaginary baby at Lady Macbeth's breast from whom she plucks the nipple depends entirely on the idea of “the milk of human kindness” (1.5.17), that we take in human kindness with our milk, as Milosz's poem suggests.

91. Cavell, CR, 397.

92. Wittgenstein, PI, ¶283.

93. See Peter Winch, “Eine Einstellung Zur Seele” in Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

94. For the interdependence of concept and response, see Gaita, Good and Evil, 188.

95. The key discussion is Cavell's discussion of the slaveholder; see Cavell, CR, 372; and Gaita, Good and Evil, 173.

96. On treating people as people, with startlingly lucid and extended examples, see the discussion of “the vanishing of the human”: Cavell, CR, 468.

97. “Criticism is always an affront, and its only justification lies in its usefulness, in making its object available to just response”: Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, 46.

5. Coriolanus

1. It is hard to know what to call Coriolanus, as the question of what he is called—and the relation of naming to identity—is central to the play. The speech headings change to read Coriolanus after he receives his new name at Corioles (1.9.62–64). Before that, he is Caius Martius. It is an option to follow this naming precisely by calling him Caius Martius only before his renaming, but I use the names interchangeably.

2. The Oxford editors in their essay “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays” say that stylistic tests uniformly put the play after Lear, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra. In both plays, one can see the final experimentations in the form of late tragedy, with Antony and Cleopatra introducing the eradication of solid and single Antony, and Coriolanus definitely diagnosing the fantasy of the private linguists that in some ways underwrites them all. See William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 131.

3. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 297, henceforth CR. In part 3 of CR, Cavell takes issue with John Rawls characterization of promising as an office (“Two Concepts of Rules”) in the following terms: “And to call being a promisor an ‘office’ (28n25) can only, I think, mislead. For it is obviously unlike other offices which are established within practices: there is no special procedure for entering it (e.g. no oaths!), no established routes for being selected or training yourself for it, etc. If it is an office, it is one any normal adult is competent to hold and can hold merely by putting himself in it with respect to anyone with whom he is in, or with whom he might create, a certain form of relationship. And it is critical to the concept of moral responsibility that it should be so” (297).

My preliminary investigation of the grammar of asking is influenced here both overall, and here locally by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Steven Affeldt's helpful thoughts about the language game of telling. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text with an English Translation, 4th ed., ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), henceforth PI, ¶363; Cavell, CR, 93; and Steven Affeldt, “Captivating Pictures and Liberating Language: Freedom as the Achievement of Speech in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations,” Philosophical Topics 27, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 255–85, esp. 273–75.

4. All citations from Coriolanus are from Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). For some fine analyses of Coriolanus and the speech act of asking, see Stanley Fish, “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle,” in MLN 91, no. 5 (October 1976): 983–1025, republished in Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 197–245. There are, however, some consequential differences between Fish's version of what he calls “speech act theory” and my understanding of ordinary language philosophy that will emerge more clearly. To put it succinctly, Fish's understanding of convention is very different from the question of convention as it is developed in Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein.

For Wittgenstein, on Cavell's understanding, convention is natural, built into our most basic and instinctual responses to each other, and therefore it is not something we decide, but rather it is something we live in our forms of life. It is something we cannot fail to know but about which we need to be reminded. For a detailed and important elaboration see Cavell, CR, “Natural and Conventional,” chap. 5, 86–125. Wittgenstein, as Cavell says, writes that “if language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments” (PI, ¶242), and Cavell's gloss on this remark underlines that the agreement is in not on judgments. This is part of the burden of the first chapter of CR. It is precisely this difference that Fish does not discern when he assimilates conventions to things we agree and decide on. The upshot of Cavell's reading is not, as Affeldt puts it, “that our shared language is the ground of our intelligibility.” Rather, “our intelligibility to each other depends continuously, from moment to moment and in each act of speech, upon our agreement in judgment. . . . Our language is the vehicle through which, or the medium within which, we continuously undertake to make ourselves intelligible to one another by projecting the ground that we individually, at a given moment, occupy.” Steven Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality: Criteria, Judgment, and Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall and Stanley Cavell,” European Journal of Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1998): 1–31, here 23.

Furthermore, Fish treats Austin as if he were John Searle and treats his vision of language as a theory about a particular class of speech acts called “performatives.” John Searle in attempting to systematize Austin missed the revolution in his thinking. Searle, unlike Austin, assumes that meaning and use can be separated, imagining that sense is one thing and the use we make of words is another. My understanding of Austin sees him as inaugurating a revolution carried on by Wittgenstein and made available in Cavell's extension and understanding of both thinkers. See Niklas Forsberg, Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary: Language and Morality in J. L. Austin's Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 140n98, 171, 190–91. Cavell takes issue with Fish's distinctions between literary language and ordinary language. Stanley Cavell, “The Politics of Interpretation: Politics as Opposed to What?,” in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 34–39. For the “revolution” see Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Sandra Laugier, introduction to Must We Mean What We Say?, trans. Sandra Laugier, Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (Summer 2011): 627–51; and Sandra Laugier, introduction to Cavell's “Must We Mean What We Say?” at 50, ed. Greg Chase, Juliet Floyd, and Sandra Laugier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

5. For an extremely useful essay, see Sandra Laugier, “Wittgenstein and Cavell: Anthropology, Skepticism, and Politics,” in The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy, ed. Andrew Norris (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 19–37, esp. 31, where the parallel between ordinary language and political language is made apparent.

6. Sicinius suggests he solicits them “in free contempt” (2.2.198). “Have you” he asks, “Ere now, denied the asker, and now again, / Of him that did not ask but mock, bestow / Your sued-for tongues?” (2.3.203–5).

7. “Plutarch's Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans,” trans. Thomas North, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 5, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge, 1966), 506.

8. For some of the larger issues, see Affeldt, “Ground of Mutuality.”

9. Caius Martius is equally disgusted by the idea of praise and cannot “idly sit” to hear his “nothings monstered” (2.2.73–74). Later, as he joins Aufidius's forces, he is described by Cominius as “a kind of nothing, titleless / Till he had forged himself a name o’the fire / Of burning Rome” (4.7.211–13), where he aspires to the impossible status of namelessness, and the fantasy of naming himself without others.

10. For “grounds of intelligibility,” which we project in every speech act, see Affeldt, “Ground of Mutuality.”

11. Of course, the logic of the first watch, which is initially Coriolanus's, is precisely what will be subverted in the supplication scene. The petitioners are old women and nonwarriors, those who do not fight but who must plead and, by these means, bring about a peace that “convenes” together.

12. Fish, “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle,” 1000.

13. Wittgenstein, PI, ¶243. These remarks are collectively known as the “private language argument” and are often capitalized in the philosophical literature and given the abbreviated designation PLA (PI, ¶243–315). For the designation “argument,” see, for example, Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (London: Allen Lane, 2005), chap. 10; G. P. Baker “The Private Language Argument,” Language and Communication 18 (1998): 325–56; Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 309–15; and G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity, vol. 2 of An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 2:158–68.

Wittgenstein's remarks in PI come after a long section on rules (PI, ¶185–242) and before further remarks on thinking and on states of consciousness. They are part and parcel of an investigation of language and meaning, including almost a linguistic anthropology for human creatures. In his preface, Wittgenstein says that “the same or almost the same points were always being approached from fresh directions, and new sketches made,” sketches of “landscapes “criss-crossing in every direction over a wide field of thought” (PI, 3e).

14. “Immediately after introducing the idea, Wittgenstein goes on to argue that there cannot be such a language. . . . The importance of drawing philosophy's attention to a largely un-heard of notion and then arguing that it is unrealizable lies in the fact that an unformulated reliance on the possibility of a private language is arguably essential to mainstream epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics from Descartes to versions of the representational theory of mind which became common in late twentieth century cognitive science.” Stewart Candlish and George Wrisley, “Private Language,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, July 26, 1996, substantive revision, July 30, 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language.

15. Cavell, CR, 343–54.

16. Cavell, CR, 343: “The dependence of reference upon expression in naming our states of consciousness, is, I believe, the specific moral of Wittgenstein's inventions containing the so-called language argument.”

17. Cavell, CR, 344, 348, 351–52.

18. Cavell, CR, 343.

19. Sandra Laugier, Wittgenstein: Le Mythe de L’Inexpressivité (Paris: Vrin, 2010), 14. The latter phrase belongs to Peter Dula, “Private Languages,” in Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 3. Richard Eldridge finds that the private language fantasy is a fantasy about the “acquisition of authority”; “one sustains—if it is possible—a conceptual life apart from the accommodations to any public practice.” See Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 243, 268. Cavell says that it is his goal “to reinsert the voice in philosophical thinking”; see Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 63. He also finds Wittgenstein as a philosopher more “attuned to the human voice than any other I can think of” (Cavell, CR, 5) and in his foreword, he finds the human voice “is being returned to moral assessments of itself” (Cavell, CR, xvi).

20. Cavell addresses the question of private language; see Stanley Cavell, Coriolanus, “Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics (‘Who does the wolf love?’),” in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 61. Wittgenstein's articulations of the fantasy of a private language are part of his redefinition of skepticism as a kind of narcissism, “a kind of denial of an existence shared with others.”

21. Robert Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1983); Paul Cantor, Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), and Gail Kern Paster, “‘To Starve with Feeding’: The City in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 123–44.

22. Cavell, CR, 25.

23. Both meanings are available in the early 1600s.

24. Note Martius's characteristic reduction of their voices as explosive hot air rather than reasoned speech.

25. Force and political recognition are at issue in Plutarch's account, too. For Plutarch, one large question is whether “valliantnes,” “honoured in Rome above all other vertues” should be accorded that status. For Coriolanus is seen as unyielding, and “churlish, uncivill, and altogether unfit for any man's conversation.” This would make civility, the capacity for talking, for conversation central to political life, for the ability of a group of people to so much as form a polis; see Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 506.

26. See Naomi Scheman, “A Storied World: On Meeting and Being Met,” in Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism, ed. Richard Eldridge and Bernie Rhie (New York: Continuum, 2011), 96.

27. Andrew Norris, Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 115. He cites Cavell, CR, 19: “The only source of confirmation . . . is ourselves. And each of us is fully authoritative in this struggle.”

28. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, second edition, 1998), 175, henceforth HC.

29. Arendt uses the term men where we might now prefer a more inclusive term.

30. Arendt, HC, 176.

31. Cavell, CR, 27.

32. See, for example, Miola, Shakespeare's Rome: “[Shakespeare] seeks in Coriolanus to explore the purpose, nature, and problems of political order” (165).

33. The political nature of the play is noted by many critics. Rossiter calls it “Shakespeare's only great political play.” A. P. Rossiter Angel with Horns and Other Shakespearean Lectures (New York: Theater Arts, 1961), 235–52.

34. “The Romane Historie of T. Livy” was translated by Philemon Holland and published in 1600. The discussion of the management of the plebs begins in book 1.

35. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie Walker, ed. Bernard Crick (London: Penguin, 1983), book 1, 3–5.

36. Discussions of republicanism in a growing body of literature include Andrew Hadfield (who does not discuss Coriolanus), Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); James Kuzner, Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); and Patrick Gray, Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic: Selfhood, Stoicism, and Civil War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). For Tacitus's major influence in the early seventeenth century, see Peter Burke, “Tacitus, Skepticism, and Reason of State,” in Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 477–98.

37. Cavell suggests that talking, claiming, calling, and counting are the major modes in which we word the world, (CR, 94).

38. The Tragedy of Coriolanus, ed. R. B. Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 83n4.

39. Fish's concept of “interpretative communities” thinks of convention as something more like contract. Cavell's idea of agreements “in” and not about judgments sounds a deeper conception of convention as what we cannot possibly all have agreed in advance, but which concerns a shared form of life. For an elucidation of Wittgenstein's understanding of agreement in judgment and forms of life, see Cavell, CR, chap. 5. See also Sandra Laugier, “Voice as Form of Life and Life From,” Nordic Wittgenstein Review (2015): 63–81. I chart my understanding of this difference in detail; see Sarah Beckwith, “A Vision of Language for Literary Historians: Forms of Life, Context, Use,” Wittgenstein and Literary Studies, ed. Robert Chodat and John Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 82–103.

40. Stanley Cavell, “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture,” in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch, 1989), 48. This essay, along with Cavell's chapter “Natural and Conventional” in CR, is one of the most original and profound readings of “forms of life.” Cavell expounds an idea of culture as a “system of modifications of our lives as talkers.” He writes: “Culture as a whole is the work of our life with language, it goes with language, it is languages's manifestation or picture or externalization”(CR, 48).

41. Cavell, CR, 17. Criticism of the play has been fruitfully preoccupied by the speech act of naming. See especially Gordon, D. G. “Name and Fame: Shakespeare's Coriolanus.” In The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D. G. Gordon, ed. Stephen Orgel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. 40–57. I am arguing that an exclusive focus on naming obscures the way the play is involved in a much more fundamental examination of linguistic agency.

42. Cavell, CR, 35, 94.

43. J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses” in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), henceforth PP, 182: “Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, in the lifetimes of many generations.” See also Cavell, CR, 94.

44. Laugier, “Wittgenstein and Cavell, 34.

45. Paul Standish, “Democratic Participation in the Body Politic,” Educational Theory 55, no. 4 (July 2005), 374: “Language is the epitome of community because in talking we are already exposed to others.”

46. Cavell, CR, 14.

47. The first citizen in act 1, scene 1, does not appear to be the same first citizen as in subsequent scenes, so first citizen designates only who speaks first and second.

48. Not all readings of the play see Coriolanus's death as a sacrifice, of course. One powerful version of this reading is Philip Brockbank's in his Arden, 2nd ser. edition of Coriolanus. In this reading, Coriolanus dies for the city that has worshipped glory, yet failed to understand its need of the warrior Coriolanus in Rome. His death is at once the inevitable climax of that failure of recognition, and a punishment for a mode of life which cannot make peace with “the more vulnerable claims of human community.” That community is therefore “purged, chastened, shamed, and renewed.” Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank, Arden Shakespeare, 2nd ser. (London: Methuen & Co, 1976), 66.

49. “It is held / That valour is then chiefest virtue and / Most dignifies the haver” (2.2.81–83). Although the speech goes on to name Martius's deeds of valour, it continues, “If it be.” The “if” invites us to consider the conditions under which valor might be the chiefest virtue and thus challenges the connections between virtue, valor and worth.

50. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1969), 56: “Power and Violence are opposites. . . . Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.” On the confusion of power, violence and authority, see Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 1977), 92.

51. Michael Mann, On Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 10. Mann distinguishes military from other forms of power (ideological, economic, and political) in his previous work. See Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. 3 vols. Second ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

52. Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 3, 7–8, 11, 26, 11.

53. When he returns home from Corioles, Volumnia exclaims: “O, he is wounded, I thank the gods for’t.” Menenius shares the feeling, though modifies it—”the wounds become him” as long as they are “not too much” and as long as he brings home a victory in his pocket (2.1.118–20).

54. Reuben Brower calls Coriolanus “Achilles in the Forum” in his interesting chapter on the play; see Reuben Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 363.

55. The phrase is from Gordon Braden's excellent book; see Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 2.

56. For Hannah Arendt on natality, see HC; for the development of the concept in her thinking, see Patricia Bowen-Moore, Hannah Arendt's Philosophy of Natality (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).

57. Wilfrid Owen, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend,” from “Strange Meeting,” in The Poems of Wilfrid Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).

58. Seneca, Moral and Political Essays, ed. John M. Cooper and J. F. Pocope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 131.

59. In their edition of Shakespeare's complete works published in 1914, Charlotte Porter and Helen Clark see the play as structured around five acts showing Coriolanus as “soldier,” “candidate,” “foe to the public weal,” then “avenger,” and finally Coriolanus as Human.” Cited in Holland, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser., 110.

60. Leah Whittington, Renaissance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 138. This, she says, cannot be said of any other play in the Shakespeare canon. Whittington learnedly shows the genesis of this focus in Plutarch and in the wider literary and visual culture in her chapter, “Constraint and Coercion in Shakespeare.” Most tellings render the scene a “moral tale about anger, estrangement, and reintegration” but Shakespeare creates of it a tragedy (141). Shakespeare's profound originality, I want to add, makes it a tragedy motivated by the relinquishment and adoption of human kindness.

61. Rachel Bespaloff, “On the Iliad,” in Weil and Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, 79. Bespaloff's stunning chapter “Priam and Achilles Break Bread” is part of a meditation on the Iliad, contemporaneous with Weil's essay, which was her way of facing the catastrophe of war.

62. For a reassessment of selfhood and the role of vulnerability, see Kuzner, Open Subjects, and Gray, Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic.

63. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 539.

64. We may want to recall here the homosocial reunion of Aufidius with Coriolanus. Aufidius “more dances his rapt heart” when he first recognizes Coriolanus and becomes allied with him, than when he saw his wedded mistress astride his threshold (4.5.118–120). Aufidius might well feel displaced as he witnesses this particular kiss!

65. Holland, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser., 390. He notes Doran's 2007 production in which the actor Will Houston speaks the line “O, a kiss” not as a response to a kiss, but a longing for one that never happens.

66. Coriolanus, ed. Lee Bliss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 253.

67. Weil and Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, 4.

68. Raphael Lyne, “The Shakespearean Grasp,” Cambridge Quarterly 42, no. 1 (March 2013): 38–61, suggests—against the idea that the stage direction is authorial—that it is the prompter who might most benefit from this stage direction to prevent a vital dramatic moment being ruined or talked over, with the implication that the folio version is quite close to the prompt book, but Lyne also says this argument is both beguiling and circular. For another analysis, see Jarrett Walker, “Voiceless Bodies, Bodiless Voices: The Drama of Human Perception in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 180.

69. In his essay on Coriolanus, Cavell understands this speech as “expressing the silence with which this son holds, and then relinquishes, his mother's hand.” Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 160.

70. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare ed., Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 5, The Roman Plays (NY: Columbia University Press, 1966), 541.

71. The softness is appropriate to the scene's dynamic. Martius has already described himself as “melting” (5.3.27) when he sees them first approach, as if here like Anthony, he cannot maintain and sustain his former shape, his body-armour.

72. See Jan H. Blits, Spirit, Soul, and City: Shakespeare's Coriolanus (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006), 216: “In Coriolanus hands are often synecdoches for the grip of force or necessity, especially in matters of death.” See also Lyne, “Shakespearean Grasp.”

73. Heather James nicely says: “What brings him to man's estate and the threshold of tragedy is his consent to identifying with the members of society who are forced to depend on others.” Heather James, “A Modern Perspective: Coriolanus,” Folger Shakespeare Library, accessed February 9, 2025, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/coriolanus/coriolanus-a-modern-perspective.

74. Christina Luckyj examines four productions in which Volumnia's silence after act 5, scene 3, is interpreted “as devastation.” They are as follows: Old Vic, 1954; Royal Shakespeare Company, 1972; Stratford, Ontario, 1981; and the National Theatre, 1984. In “Volumnia's Silence,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 31, no. 2 (1991): 340.

75. Wittgenstein, PI, ¶287.

76. An important distinction maintained and developed in Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

77. For some useful reflections on Cavell's humanism, see Bernie Rhie and Richard Eldridge, introduction to Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism (New York: Continuum, 2011), 4.

78. John Berger, with photographs by Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967; repr., New York: Vintage International, 1997), 116.

79. The apt terminology of “man-child” is introduced by Volumnia. “I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man” (1.3.15–7). She means, of course, that she rejoices he was born male, but the history of his childhood is notably emphasized in the play, as is the idea that he is so often seen in relation to his mother, therefore as a child, her child. The first citizen observes in the very first scene that he fights the wars “to please his mother, and to be partly proud” more than for his country (1.1.35–36).

80. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 539.

81. I am going against quite a strong critical consensus. Janet Adelman's strong psychoanalytic reading led the way. Her argument is as rich as it has been influential and I am in sympathy with much of it but not with this: “Just as his child entered the scene holding Volumnia's hand, so Coriolanus again becomes a child, holding his mother's hand”: Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 161. Among many other examples, see Michael Long, The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1976), 78. Long finds Aufidius's slur perfectly valid; the man child has never been adult, as the first citizen hints at the play's beginning. Lucy Munro, in a fascinating essay on the discrepancy between actor and role so prevalent in the Children's Companies, yet unavailable to Shakespeare, says his “political childishness” is evident throughout the play; see Lucy Munro, “Coriolanus and the Little Eyases: The Boyhood of Shakespeare's Hero,” in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Suzanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 78. Kenneth Gross discusses Coriolanus's buried impulses as more infantile than heroic; see Kenneth Gross Shakespeare's Noise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 133.

82. See Jessica Wolfe, Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 294.

6. Antony and Cleopatra

1. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, vol. 1, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15:15: “I can’t stand the Queen.”

2. Horace's “Cleopatra Ode,” Ode 1.37.21; http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0024:book=1:poem=37. “Fatale monstrum” is best translated as a “doom-laden portent.” Lawrence Rhu has pointed out to me in a private communication that the stanzas after this include admiration for Cleopatra's regal stoicism.

3. The Aeneid, trans, Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 2006), 8:808, 264, translating Virgil's “sequiturque (nefas) Aegyptia coniunx.” (Coniunx can be translated as wife or woman. I will show why that distinction might be important.)

4. For the difference between the moralizer and the moralist, see Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), henceforth CR, 326: “What is required in confronting another person is not your liking him or her but your being willing, from whatever cause, to take his or her position into account, and bear the consequences. If the moralist is the human being who best grasps the human position, teaches us what our human position is, better than we know, in ways we cannot escape but through distraction and muddle, then our first task, in subjecting ourselves to judgment is to tell the moralist from the moralizer.”

Raimond Gaita has remarked that “the estrangement from morality of morally serious people—is a mark of the times.” Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge, 1998), xv. Gaita significantly stages his reflections as encounters. My reflections in this chapter develop the idea that judgment is not located in particular acts of judgment, moralized or otherwise (although that reduction is indeed closely connected with the moralization of moral theory), but it is pervasive in our using criteria to make the distinctions we habitually make in speaking. It is these encounters and responses rather than any moralized framing to which I pay attention.

5. Philo's “Nay” (1.1.1); Dolabella's “Gentle Madam, No” (5.2.93). All quotations are from the Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Routledge, 1995).

6. For a detailed and compelling analysis of an Augustan attempt to possess time and space in an imperial theater, see William Junker, “The Image of Both Theaters: Empire and Revelation in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 66, no. 2. (Summer 2015): 167–87. Cleopatra's competing model discloses a history of what “might be” over “the history of what merely was” (168; 5.2.91–92). For Augustan innovations in triumphal theater, see Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). After his extravagant triumph of 29 BCE, Augustus restricts triumphal theater to the emperor and his family, and he characteristically refused the triumphs offered to himself and his family. For Cleopatra's “witty appropriations of triumph,” see Anthony Miller, Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 128, 133.

7. Directors often stage a kiss at “to do thus” (1.1.38). There is no such direction in the folio. “Thus” might be a more general sweep of the terrain to encompass their self-styled grandeur or magnitude, or it might indeed be Antony's way of stopping Cleopatra's mouth.

8. I take this latter phrase from Christopher Cordner, “Moral Philosophy in the Midst of Things,” in A Sense for Humanity: The Ethical Thought of Raimond Gaita, ed. Craig Taylor and Melinda Graefe (Clayton, Australia: Monash University, 2014), 128. Cordner is describing a moral philosophy that merges out of moral encounter, one that does not illustrate a given concept (as in Kant's determinate judgment) but is shaped by an example as in reflective judgment. I pursue some of these distinctions, useful as they are for catching the imaginative provocations of this play.

9. For Craig Taylor, it is a feature of moralism to occlude the ways in which responses such as pity and other immediate responses act as forms of moral recognition. This kind of responsiveness is a dimension of moral thought. See Craig Taylor, Moralism: A Study of a Vice (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012), vii, ix.

10. For a careful and comprehensive argument that moral thinking goes “beyond judgment,” see Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). I return to these themes later in the chapter. Vivasvan Soni and Thomas Pfau have brought judgment back into critical focus in their collection, Judgment and Action: Fragments Toward a History (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018). Signs that scholars and critics are beginning to pay attention to this crucial humanistic concept are evident in the publications by Michael W. Clune, A Defense of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); and D. N. Rodowick, An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

11. John Danby, “Antony and Cleopatra: A Shakespearian Adjustment,” first published in Scrutiny (1949). I use the version reprinted in Antony and Cleopatra: New Casebooks, ed. John Drakakis (London: Red Globe, 1994), 33–55.

12. Other critics have brilliantly taken up Danby's cue; see, for example, Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); and Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragi-comedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

13. Danby, “Antony and Cleopatra: A Shakespearean Adjustment,” 36, 35, 45.

14. Danby, “Antony and Cleopatra: A Shakespearean Adjustment,” 35, 36, 40.

15. Adelman, The Common Liar, 20, cited in Wilders, Antony and Cleopatra, 42.

16. Danby, “Antony and Cleopatra: A Shakespearean Adjustment,” 24, 27, 30. In Wilders's Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser., he devotes a sequence of his introduction to “the question of moral judgement.” See Wilders, Antony and Cleopatra, 38–43.

17. Barbara Bono also finds a “crisis of belief” present in almost all of Shakespeare's plays, but “absolutely central to Antony and Cleopatra” (Literary Transvaluation, 12). She charts as carefully and convincingly as Danby and Adelman the way in which the play both “demands that we make judgments even as it frustrates our ability to judge rationally” (Literary Transvaluation, 14).

18. Bono, Literary Transvaluation, 39.

19. The crisis of judgment is identifiable under many descriptions and on the basis of some characteristic oppositions between fact and value, objective and subjective, ought and is, and descriptive and evaluative. It appears in many different guises, dogmatism and skepticism, for example.

20. Vivasvan Soni, “Introduction: The Crisis of Judgement,” Eighteenth Century 51, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 261–88. The question of judgment is now explored in Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013); Linda Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); and Kevin Curran, ed., Shakespeare and Judgment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

21. I differentiate this from a realization that judgment is often tragic, which is precisely what tragedy will sometimes reveal.

22. Conant's idiom is a Wittgensteinian and Austinian one in which the pressures of “philosophy” are taken to remove the context of use which makes concepts intelligible. That is why he wants to put us back in contact with the way we actually use “perspective”—that is, when we invoke it, what it does in our speech. See James Conant, “The Dialectic of Perspectivism, I,” SATS: Nordic Journal of Philosophy 6, no. 2 (2005): 5–50.

23. Conant, “The Dialectic of Perspectivism, I,” 15.

24. Conant, “The Dialectic of Perspectivism, I,” 12.

25. Wilders, Antony and Cleopatra, 41.

26. Soni, “Introduction: The Crisis of Judgment,” 262–63.

27. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

28. Andrew Norris, “Skepticism and Critique in Arendt and Cavell,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 44, no. 1 (2018), 81. Arendt's Kantian work on judgment begins with Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and had she not died, was to be continued in the third part of Life of the Mind. For the Kantian underpinnings of Hannah Arendt's late work, see Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgment. Kant's influence is all pervasive in Cavell's work, implicit in the very title of The Claim of Reason and explicitly addressed in Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetics Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). I am indebted to Keren Gorodeisky and Arata Hamawaki for educating me on the Kantian dimensions of Cavell's work both in person and in print. See especially Arata Hamawaki, “Kant on Beauty and the Normative Force of Feeling,” Philosophical Topics 34, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring and Fall 2006): 107–44; and Arata Hamawaki, “Philosophic and Aesthetic Appeal: Stanley Cavell on the Irreducibility of the First Person in Aesthetics and in Philosophy,” in Cavell's “Must We Mean What We Say?” at 50, ed. Greg Chase, Juliet Floyd, and Sandra Laugier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 103–20.

29. Arendt's project was sponsored by her sense that after the camps and horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism, there was no guarantee in legal frameworks, or in universal human rights, but only in the capacity for judgment, which was so alarmingly atrophied in the likes of Eichmann. Arendt studied the conditions of such atrophy and sought, in her unfinished third volume of The Life of the Mind, to examine and retrieve this essential faculty. Cavell's Kantianism underlines the whole project of CR.

30. Kant, “Analytic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” Critique of the Power, 89. In Kant's lingo he says that the determining ground of an aesthetic judgment “cannot be other than subjective.”

31. Kant, Critique of the Power, 97, for “Subjective universality”; for the demand on everyone, 98.

32. J. M. Bernstein, “Aesthetics, Modernism, Literature: Cavell's Transformations of Philosophy,” in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 107.

33. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text with an English Translation, 4th ed., ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), henceforth PI, ¶68. See Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Cavell, CR, 188.

34. See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). The phrase is the title chapter for Cavell's essay on The Philadelphia Story.

35. Sandra Laugier, “What Matters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Importance,” in Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding, ed. Gary L. Hagberg (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 169. Laugier judges it to be one of Cavell's greatest accomplishments to show “that truth and importance are one and the same, or that importance is just as important as truth, and just as demanding and precise a concept” (171).

36. Richard Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 214–15.

37. For important inquiries on this central concept in the humanities, see Soni, “Introduction: The Crisis of Judgment”; Pfau, Minding the Modern; Zerilli, Democratic Theory of Judgement; and Soni and Pfau, Judgment and Action.

38. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Dover, 1999), 6.43, 106.

39. Madeline Doran, “High Events Such as These: The Language of Hyperbole,” in Shakespeare's Dramatic Language: Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 154–81.

40. Russ McDonald remarks that the surrender of son to mother in Coriolanus (“he holds her by the hand, silent”) is a profound shift from the “masculine verbal purist” to the feminine verbal seducer in Antony and Cleopatra, as “Cleopatra inserts herself into and transforms what might be-as it is in Plutarch and other neoclassical versions, the single tragedy of Antony.” Russ McDonald, Shakespeare's Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 70.

41. Wilders, Antony and Cleopatra, 25.

42. John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. Ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon. (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 866.

43. Milton, Doctrine and Discipline, 866.

44. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 19.

45. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 18.

46. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 53. Cavell also says that in the remarriage comedies a “criterion is being proposed for the success or happiness of a society, namely that it is happy to the extent that it provides conditions that permit conversations of this character, or a moral equivalent of them, between its citizens,” 32.

47. Ludger Viefhues-Bailey, Beyond the Philosopher's Fear: A Cavellian Reading of Gender, Origin and Religion in Modern Skepticism (London: Routledge, 2007), 98.

48. Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 30.

49. Robert Ornstein, “Love and Art in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 95.

50. North's translation of Plutarch's “The Life of Marcus Antonius,” in Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, is reproduced from Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 5 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 289.

51. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 275. My point is the extraordinary, vital, and ambitious claims they make for their love, but Tony Tanner sees in this phrase an invention of language, “using language as a repository of possibilities, trying to transcend the limitations of the available formulations, rehearsing reality by stretching language in new directions and combinations.” Tony Tanner, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 622.

52. For Cinthio, see Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 346; for Garnier, see Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 372.

53. Scenes of conversation: 1.1, 1.3, 3.7, 3.11, 3.13, 4.2, 4.4, 4.8, 4.12, 4.15. Emrys Jones has shown how the play's movement is obscured in the editorial addition of acts to the play's seamless movement. The far-flung and rapidly alternating locales in short, sometimes tiny scenes makes way for a more concentrated focus on Actium, Alexandria, and the monument, culminating in the focus on the play's longest scene, which requires our utmost attention: The scene that “ends all other deeds” (5.1.5). See Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 225–65. Jones suggests that this allows for the alternation of intimacy and detachment in relation to the play's chief pair; see Jones, Scenic Form, 239.

54. See Jones, Scenic Form, 7–8.

55. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 275. He also mentions that her voice was “an instrument of musicke to divers sports and pastimes, the whiche she easely turned to any language that pleased her.” She has learned many languages and converses easily in them, but it is Shakespeare who takes up and explores the mutuality of conversation and how central it is to their love. Plutarch is as disdainful as the Romans in his condemnation of their pastimes as “idle,” wasting as he puts it, “the most pretious thing a man can spende” (275). Time is not spent by Antony and Cleopatra when they are together; it is stretched and distended by their mutual pleasure.

56. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 211. I prefer this to Wilders's “satisfy his appetite,” 161.

57. Antony and Cleopatra is notoriously hard to play, and there have been many unsuccessful stage productions. The raw simplicities of Antony and Cleopatra's talk are saturated with a showy excess that obscures the delicate and exposed points of connection between the lovers. This is not to say that the lovers are not self-regarding, grandiose, or histrionic, nor that their relationship is not thoroughly erotic, suffused with desire and vitality; it is to point to a significant dramatic and philosophical achievement of the play in showing what it means to converse.

58. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 2008), 867.

59. Charles Taylor makes this point and uses this example in “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 189. Taylor's point is that the dominant atomized picture of agency makes some dimensions of conversation obscure. This is a point made too in Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: Clark, 2000), 81.

60. Robert Garnier's play, M. Antoine (1578) was translated by Mary Herbert (Sidney), The Countess of Pembroke as Antonius (1592), and Samuel Daniel's version was The Tragedie of Cleopatra (1594). The declamatory style rules out the very notion of conversation, but Shakespeare finds an idiom for it in his dramatic poetry.

61. I borrow these last phrases from Claire Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023), ix, 266. Her wonderful book is relevant to my reading of Shakespeare's play, because Carlisle claims George Eliot as a philosophical writer and explores her brilliant novelistic investigation of marriage. “There is something dazzling about marriage—that leap into the open-endedness of another human being” is the first sentence of the preface to her book. The last quotation comes from the book's closing pages: “[Eliot] searched for truths not in order to form crisp definitions or moral judgments, but to make peace for souls to grow, to stay curious, to feel alive.” Shakespeare, I think, is profoundly interested here in the “growth of souls” through a loving relationship, and this, as a very principle of life, is what makes life worth living, therefore worth dying for.

62. Of course this is a double-bind. It would not go down too well to mourn her in front of Cleopatra.

63. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 276.

64. On the subject of the kisses in this play, see Bernard Beckerman, “Past the Size of Dreaming,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977), 110.

65. Romeo and Juliet ends with two; Julius Caesar with three; Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet with one a piece. In Antony and Cleopatra, the deaths by suicide include Enobarbus (4.9), Antony (4.14), and Cleopatra, Charmian, and Iras (5.2).

66. Cited in The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 85.

67. Anne Barton, “‘Nature's Piece Against Fancy’: The Divided Catastrophe of Antony and Cleopatra” (inaugural lecture, Bedford College, 1973); reprinted in Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 113–35.

68. On the unusual structure of the divided catastrophe see Barton, “Nature's Piece Against Fancy.”

69. “Imperare sibi maximum imperium est,” Seneca, epistle 113.31, in Seneca: Epistles 93–124 trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 298.

70. Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 31.

71. In Gordon Braden's classic study of Seneca's influence on Renaissance drama, he calls stoicism a philosophy of the will; see Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

72. Seneca, “De Ira,” in Anger, Mercy, Revenge, trans. Robert A. Kaster and Martha Nussbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 76.

73. Tacitus's description is in Annals, vol. 15, trans. A. J. Woodman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 64–67.

74. See James Ker, The Deaths of Seneca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Medieval legendary material had Seneca's name as a kind of prophecy, killing himself (se-necans), Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, ed. Georg Theodor Graesse (Dresden, 1846), Chap. LXXXIX, 3.

75. The play frequently flirts with comedy.

76. Robert Sokolowski, Moral Action (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), appendix A, 198.

77. “Here I am Antony / Yet cannot hold this visible shape” (4.14.13–4). The image here of the clouds and their vaporous shape-shifting leads to indistinction “like water is in water” (4.14.10–11). The stoic suicide cannot possibly prevail amidst this deliquescence.

78. Explorations of the use of revelation in Antony and Cleopatra include Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 214; and Adrian Streete, “The Politics of Ethical Presentism: Appropriation, Spirituality, and the Case of Antony and Cleopatra,” Textual Practice 22 (2008): 405–31.