SHAKSPER 2000: Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 02/04/00 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0249  Friday, 4 February 2000.

[1]     From:   Seán Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
        Date:   Thursday, 03 Feb 2000 07:28:52 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0232 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[2]     From:   Tom Reedy <treedy@cooke.net>
        Date:   Thursday, 3 Feb 2000 11:56:17 -0600
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0241 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[3]     From:   Melissa D. Aaron <maaron@csupomona.edu>
        Date:   Thursday, 03 Feb 2000 10:13:24 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0241 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[4]     From:   Mike Jensen <MJENSEN@mayfieldpub.com>
        Date:   Thursday, 03 Feb 2000 10:16:39 -0800
        Subj:   SHK 11.0241 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[5]     From:   David Knauer"<knauerd@hotmail.com>
        Date:   Thursday, 03 Feb 2000 15:37:42 CST
        Subj:   Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Seán Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date:           Thursday, 03 Feb 2000 07:28:52 -0800
Subject: 11.0232 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0232 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

I want to thank Patrick Dolan for his note in the last digest.

By way of a reply, I would wish to make it clear that both sets of
martyrs, the "martyrs" of various secular causes he refers to and those
of the sixteenth century, are certainly "real" and that explaining
either group in terms which exclude their ethical commitment is a lie.
However, I would also have to argue that neither group's martyrdom is
explained in terms of a "belief system" as such, which is more or less
constitutively closed.  We have to look beyond the system (say, the
specifics of contemporary theology or the party dogma) to the source of
its power in an ethical imperative.

In the Old Testament, Moses is first summoned to Mount Sinai before
there are ten commandments.  Marx first cared about other people before
formulating his system of economics and dialectical materialism to
explain their slavery and point the path to liberation.  To put it
another way, laws and systems of thought do not, in themselves, make
people care about one another.  They might, on the contrary, just
provide a suitably self-righteous reason not to care about others.  A
psychotic who lives under the law, according to a psych prof at my
institution, is just someone who avoids being caught.  Our society may
be more heavily peopled with psychotics than we wish to believe, but
their merely tactical subjection to ethics should not, I don't think, be
taken as normative.

What is necessary to really justify any system (theology, party
doctrine, etc.) is a reference outside itself, and outside the agent who
uses it to understand and dominate her or his world.  Hence the concern
with the well-being of others that motivates the conscientious
Viet-Cong, and which is prior to her or his adoption of Maoist doctrine,
which may actually have led her to Maoist doctrine, like the voice of
God leads Moses up Mt. Sinai.  Like the voice that speaks to Moses, it's
fundamentally alterior to the system.  A system that merely manufactures
its motivating imperative collapses into tautology, but in a world where
it's elephants all the way down, recourse outside the system is, as it
were, forbidden.

In a debate with Bertrand Russell, Fr. Copleston pointed out that
Russell could not explain obligation ("the sense of 'ought'"); though he
could explain individual obligations, he could only explain obligation
itself away anthropologically.  This is not to deny that Russell was
strongly ethically motivated, since he clearly was, but that his thought
tended to betray its ethical motivation, not because it led him to
unethical acts, but because it denied the specific claims of ethics,
that provided the ultimate basis for his thought.

Nor am I saying that Christianity has not also, all too often, collapsed
into a mere metaphysics, but that like all religions, it is able to turn
again to what is at once outside of and constitutive of its system, to
be surprised in its comfort.  This is what, I would argue, the
Confessing Church strove for.  Demystification strikes me as an effort
to avoid anything outside the system of thought, and it begins, like out
debate, with Marx's famous dictum.

As Clifford pointed out, it is perfectly feasible to have religion
without providentialism, though this would mean admitting that there is
a surplus outside the uses to which religion is put in a particular
society, outside the social forms and laws in which it is held and often
betrayed.  One other way to put my argument is to say that while one can
have a religion without providentialism, it would be pretty much
impossible to have Marxism without history.

Cheers,
Seán.

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Tom Reedy <treedy@cooke.net>
Date:           Thursday, 3 Feb 2000 11:56:17 -0600
Subject: 11.0241 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0241 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Judith Matthews Craig writes:
<snip>
> It seems to me that I am the one always passionately asked to
> leave the intellectual discourse to others on a subject that I feel
> that I know something about.

No one is "passionately" asking you to leave, but it was you yourself
who professed ignorance of Marx's works, save hearsay.

Tom Reedy

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Melissa D. Aaron <maaron@csupomona.edu>
Date:           Thursday, 03 Feb 2000 10:13:24 -0800
Subject: 11.0241 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0241 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Judith Matthews Craig writes:

>I will certainly check the above references for more evidence that I
>provided in my statement (I should not have submitted that plays were
>pirated-it seems very difficult to pirate Shakespeare), but I still am
>not following the argument Dave Knauer makes that the above evidence
>serves as a disqualification for assertions about Shakespeare's good
>character.  Certainly a poet of bad character can have an "apathy toward
>his printed plays," but the usual presumption is that an author writes
>to make money and enrich himself.
>
>Shakespeare does not seem to have embraced greed as his only motivation
>for writing (and I think we can all agree that he did have an "apathy
>toward his printed plays").  He seems to have cared about what his
>audience thought and felt as human beings and could be critical of their
>attitudes to his own pecuniary impoverishment-see the evidence above.

Um.

Please do recollect that a playwright-or "poet," to use the contemporary
term-generally could not expect to make much money from printed plays,
but from sales to companies or as a sharer (Shakespeare, Armin, etc.) or
as poet-in-ordinary (Brome, and quite probably Fletcher, Massinger and
Shirley).

What's ignoble about money, anyhow?  Are we revealing a certain academic
squeamishness on the topic?  (This is why I write on money rather than
sexuality, by the by-it's much more taboo).

Also I am not certain how writing plays for profit would have been
considered somehow irreligious according to 16th century constructs of
Protestant and Catholic religion.  Loaning money at interest, which I
understand Shakespeare also did, was much more suspect but this attitude
was waning.

We on this list, of course, whatever our religious affiliations or lack
thereof, mostly live in cultures where credit is widely approved and the
stock market-at which Thomas Aquinas would have shuddered in horror-is
booming.  Let us beware of projecting social, ideological and economic
assumptions backwards.

M. Aaron

[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Mike Jensen <MJENSEN@mayfieldpub.com>
Date:           Thursday, 03 Feb 2000 10:16:39 -0800
Subject: Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        SHK 11.0241 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Ms. Craig wrote:

> I just am tired of being accused of not treating "others with
> respect" when I make every effort to do so

This is hilarious, because she has also written:

>   I assume, from your low-life view of the world ...

Or when she told another list member that because she disagreed with him
he should:

>  just go to Hollywood, or study advertising and become
> a major player in the controlled leftist media that we have today?

Or later:

> Why don't you study history, then, or psychology, or political
> science or better yet-advertising, or corporate management?

and went on to imply he was not interested in ideas.  Then there was the
lovely:

> It is you who are not demonstrating a "truly open, humanist mind."

and said this to someone who had apologized, though Ms. Craig later did
write to apologize for her remark, which itself seems an admission of
rudeness.

There are also all those posts I have deleted and so can't quote, and
the (mostly) undeserved rude things said to me off list.  Even worse
were the things she said about another list member.  I wrote off list to
help her understand what he really meat, and how she had not grasped the
complexity of his argument. She accused him, in his sensitive and soul
searching post, of deliberating trying to drag down the level of
discourse on SHAKSPER.  She even justified all her rudeness, saying that
Jesus was sometimes rude to his enemies, which is true enough.

The claim quoted at top is disingenuous at best.

Of course this leaves me in an ethical dilemma.  Ms. Craig's rudeness
has rather brought out my own.  What to do?  Point out her's at the risk
of being rude, or let her word stand unchallenged?  I'm not sure I have
made the right choice, nor am I sure it is wrong.  Ms. Craig's own words
condemn her.  Perhaps mine condemn me as well.  We have let personality
get into this.  Maybe it is time to call a halt?

With little cheer,
Mike Jensen

[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           David Knauer"<knauerd@hotmail.com>
Date:           Thursday, 03 Feb 2000 15:37:42 CST
Subject:        Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Judy Craig writes,

>I will certainly check the above references for more evidence that I
>provided in my statement (I should not have submitted that plays were
> >pirated-it seems very difficult to pirate Shakespeare), but I still >am
>not following the argument Dave Knauer makes that the above >evidence
>serves as a disqualification for assertions about >Shakespeare's good
>character.  Certainly a poet of bad character can >have an "apathy toward
>his printed plays," but the usual presumption >is that an author writes to
>make money and enrich himself.

I suspect this is another version of the materiality/metaphysics
conflict, but here goes:  My objection focuses on what I see as a misuse
of the available evidence.  Firstly, I should clarify that I don't care
to engage the question of Shakespeare's character at all.  I can't know
much at all about any writer's character from his or her writing, but
that's a basic tenet of modern literary criticism, if not reading
generally.  More to the point, I was trying to suggest that
Shakespeare's apathy towards printing his plays is more convincingly
attributable to the fact that he didn't own them, nor did he stand to
profit by their distribution, rather than to speculate that "he was
ethical and shrewd-not . . . greedy for power or money," as your
original post did.  Many of "the usual presumptions" about the greed,
nobility, whatever, of authors simply don't apply to playwrighting in
the early modern period, and any speculation at least ought to take into
consideration the known material conditions of playwrighting then.  I
don't know what you mean about the difficulty of piracy; what I've read
merely suggests that there was little incentive for it.

>Shakespeare does not seem to have embraced greed as his only >motivation
>for writing (and I think we can all agree that he did have >an "apathy
>toward his printed plays").  He seems to have cared about >what his
>audience thought and felt as human beings and could be >critical of their
>attitudes to his own pecuniary impoverishment-see >the evidence above.  To
>have wanted his name emblazoned in print to >"insult" over the "speechless
>tribes" (Sonnet 107, line 12) does not >seem to have motivated him either.
>In fact, Sonnet 107 emphasizes >his "confined doom" (line 4) and "poor
>rhyme" (line 11). In fact, he >seems to have thought of the wallet in one
>context as a place for >"alms for oblivion" Troilus and Cressida
>3.3.145-46. One of his >contemporaries, Ben Jonson, personally supervised
>the collection and >printing of his plays.  Shakespeare's plays were
>collected by his >company seven years after  his death.  The Sonnets, where
>an >aggrandizing attitude toward his "mission" as a poet is evident (see
> >17, 19, 55, 63, 65, 81 to mention but a few) were pirated by Thorpe >and
>evidently published without his consent.  His plays were the >property of
>the company and published without his supervision in >quartos which
>scholars argue endlessly over-which is "good" or "bad" >and if these
>adjectives have any meaning.  To me, this attitude, and >the self-critical
>and often self-deprecating attitude of the speaker >in The Sonnets bespeaks
>a man for whom character, truth, and love >mattered in a shifting and
>duplicitous world.

Here we agree on the facts, but again, I don't see how the evidence
supports your valuation.  The sonnets you cite are a completely
different case from the plays, written as most sonnets were for private
reading and courtly patronage, but moreover, many of the poses
Shakespeare adopts there are not unique to him.  To beg pardon or
poverty or incompetence was conventional.  I don't think we can tell for
certain where Shakespeare drops all fictive personae and speaks.  Ben
Jonson is indeed exceptional in his commitment to seeing his plays into
folio, and you're on firmer ground in talking about his motives because
he proclaimed them so often and so unambiguously;
Shakespeare didn't.

You are of course free to speculate anything you like about Shakespeare
from your reading of his canon, but I'd prefer to notice that his canon
reflects his time and place, not just himself.

Dave Knauer


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