SHAKESPEARE AND PHILOSOPHICALNESS

Once upon a time, it was customary to study the intellectual content of Shakespeare's plays in direct relation to a particular thinker or an entire system of thought. But investiga-tions of the type “Shakespeare and Montaigne” are out of the question nowadays. Even the older ‘history-of-ideas’ method knew that philosophical systems had to be disinte-grated into their constituent parts, i.e., their so-called “unit-ideas”, in order to trace the im-pact of the former on works of literature whose “philosophical patterns” could then be shown to be operative in diluted, albeit still effective, ways. This process of fragmentation in the study of philosophy with reference to literature has continued up to the present mo-ment which is characterized by a Derridean ‘dissemination’ of ideas, texts and contexts, so that in tracing the philosophical quality of a literary work one would be well advised to heed Peter Jones's injunction in his Philosophy and the Novel (1975): “a novel may be de-scribed … as philosophical … if it displays philosophicalness without philosophy”.

Before applying this mediating notion to Shakespearean drama, however, we must en-ter into the ways and means of Tudor discourse formation, dependent as they are on the period's reading and writing habits. For the Tudors, reading is both utilitarian and prepa-ratory in nature, following an analytical method which broke a work down into smaller segments to be gathered in their commonplace books whose general heads – as advocated by Erasmus, for example – were often arranged by opposites. That writing thus became mainly a recombination of material already available from previous texts can easily be seen in, say, the period's Euphuistic prose with its incessant alliterative antitheses and ar-gumentative discursive strategies. To be sure, the same method of reading and writing is also evident in the mental topography of Shakespeare's plays.

Cases in point are As You Like It and King Lear, two plays partaking in the pastoral tra-dition which from its classical origins had been aligned with Epicureanism and later, in the Renaissance, became fused with the vast body of moralistic Continental anti-court lit-erature, known in England through translations, adaptations, or imitations. Revolving around the ubiquitous opposition “court-country”, this signifying universe composed of multiple texts had as one of its major themes the “uses of adversity” (AYL, II. i. 1–17), conducive as they were to self-knowledge (Lear, I. iv. 246–250) in the sense of Montaigne (Florio) and Charron. Another instance of textual intersection of this kind might be Macbeth, a tragedy whose protagonists are differentiated from each other by an ethics of time, the basis of which was provided by Sidney's Arcadia (1590), i.e., the central debate between Cecropia's Epicureanism plus skepticism and Pamela's Stoicism plus Christian