Seneca's failure

Wallace again on Timon of Athens. Wallace argues that Shakespeare has written a play to explore Seneca's society of benefits and gratitude, and shows that the classical model of social order is impossible: "the cast would appear to have been designed to test the Senecan hypothesis about the nature of a just society and to find the classical model hopelessly wanting. Natural obligations derived from mutual benefits could never be the basis for a healthy society because mankind is ineradicably greedy and hypocritical, and the effort to pretend that he is not must lead to disgust and misanthropy."

Later, Wallace restates this thesis, and says that Shakespeare is brought to an impasse, having no alternative to offer to the Seneca model that he knows will not work:

The ending is unsatisfactory, he argues, because "Shakespeare could not help himself because he had no alternative scheme to offer in place of the Senecan wisdom. If Alcibiades, in justifiable rage, unleashed the dogs of war on Athens, that is the end of it, and universal misanthropy swallows all. If, alternatively, Alcibiades were to consider deeply the lessons to be learned from Timon's tragedy, he would have to conclude that Athenian society is rotten to the core and that another model of political society was needed to control its destructive appetites. Timon springs from this deep need for a better system."

Thus, Shakespeare, in the first decade of the century, saw and felt more vividly than anyone before him that gratitude and good turns were not a glue that could be trusted to keep society stuck together, but if he followed that line of thought he produced images like King Lear howling in the storm about 'filial ingratitude,' or Coriolanus, that 'boy of tears,' breaking down as he is compelled to acknowledge obligations that he had imagined had been overthrown by Rome's immense ingratitude to him."

Timon dramatizes the opinion that "De beneficiis was a primer of old-fashioned, unworkable nonsense," and thus was "a great blow to cherished Elizabethan conceptions." Yet, Shakespeare leaves those conceptions in place, and it was not until Hobbes that England discovered "a model of political society founded on the bedrock of human passions which had wrecked Timon's idealism; and the reception of Leviathan in England was proof enough that the country still nursed its Senecan illusions about a happy world of benefits." For Wallace, "Timon is a martyr to profoundly held beliefs which Shakespeare knew were inadequate but was powerless to change and could only challenge with a vision that shirked nothing."

Several inconclusive, perhaps incoherent, reflections: First, Wallace's article suggests that the struggle of early modern England was between Seneca and Hobbes, between a benefit-gratitude society and a social-contract society that is grounded not on mutual benefit but mutual fear. Second, Wallace describes the impasse that early modern England reached as feudalism's last trappings fell away, for feudalism was a benefit-gratitude society.

Finally, I wonder if Shakespeare is quite as pessimistic about alternatives as Wallace suggests. His classical plays dramatize contradictions within classical Greek and especially Roman society, but these contradictions are not necessarily woven into the fabric of things. Perhaps, as Shakespeare dramatizes the internal tensions of Judaism in Merchant of Venice, he also dramatizes the tensions of classicism. Classical models of society, not Shakespeare, reach an impasse.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 01, 2007 at 04:48 PM

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