Coda

In this book, I have tried to show that it is only with the rise of dramatic realism that the figure of the Cynic truth-teller begins to provoke sustained interpretive crisis, a crisis that takes shape in the sixteenth century and that goes on to drive key developments in our literary, philosophical and political history. Through my readings of Shakespeare’s plays, I have also tried to show that literature – along with its academic offspring, literary criticism – is uniquely positioned to diagnose the interpretive errors that consequently underwrite philosophical and political ideas about the means of achieving extreme critical agency. What these two overarching aims have in common is the critical methodology I develop in order to advance them, and I conclude this book by briefly commenting on the value this method holds for early modern studies in particular and for the discipline of literary studies in general....

Cash is King: Timon, Diogenes and the Search for Sovereign Freedom

Shakespeare undermines Hamlet’s identification with Cynic melancholy by disclosing his unthinking reliance on princely privilege, a reliance that recasts him as being more akin to Alexander than to Diogenes. Chapter 5 argues that Shakespeare and Middleton align Timon first with the figure of Alexander, then with the figure of Diogenes, in order to formulate a diagnostic response to two related fantasies of sovereign freedom, both of which imagine the possibility of operating entirely outside of money’s influence. In both his philanthropic and misanthropic modes, Timon attempts to set himself above (or outside) the requirements of an otherwise moneyed world, and while it is true that both attempts meet with failure, these failures serve to diagnose two distinct fantasies of sovereign freedom that emerge in symptomatic response to a world in which cash is king. Ultimately, Shakespeare and Middleton reveal the irony of Timon’s two fantasies of sovereign freedom: at the end of the day, no one can single-handedly reshape a world in which cash is king and money talks.

The Realist Turn: Parrhêsia, Character and the Limits of Didacticism

Chapter 2 offers a new account of literary realism and its origins in early modern drama in order to explain why a crisis of character—both literary and ethical—begins to cohere around the figure of the Cynic truth-teller only in the sixteenth century. It argues that the proliferation of non-allegorical characters in early modern drama is the result of a new development in the protocols of literary didacticism, one in which literature can increasingly instruct audiences in the ethics of self-care by offering up to judgment the actions and outcomes of characters fashioned to be verisimilar to people. Moving into the seventeenth century and beyond, literary realism becomes fictionality’s dominant representational mode precisely because it serves as a virtual arena in which to exercise one’s practical wisdom (phronesis) about the ethical means and political ends of action.

Introduction

Early on in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques, having just made the acquaintance of Touchstone, declares himself ‘ambitious for a motley coat’, explaining his interest in foolery in terms of the freedom its practitioner can exercise in criticising others I must have liberty,...

Cynicism, Melancholy and Hamlet’s Memento Moriae

Chapter 4 follows Shakespeare as he explores the lines of affiliation between the Cynic-inspired fantasy of unstoppable critical agency and his period’s romanticized portrait of intellectual melancholy. Drawing support from a range of early modern sources, including Robert Burton’s similar appropriation of Diogenes in his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, it shows that Shakespeare has Hamlet lay claim to a specifically Cynic form of thoughtful sadness, one that posits contemplative self-enclosure as public activism’s final frontier. After linking both Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophies of history to the legacy of Hamlet’s Cynic melancholy, the chapter shows how Shakespeare’s ultimate interest in problematizing this stance allows us to turn the tables on Hamlet’s modern philosophical reception: instead of using modern philosophy as a lens for better understanding an early modern Hamlet, we can use an early modern Hamlet as a lens for better understanding the conditions and limits of modern philosophy.

Shakespeare’s Bitter Fool: The Politics and Aesthetics of Free Speech

Chapter 3 argues that Shakespeare exposes the formal underpinnings of the fantasy of unstoppable individual critical agency through his depiction of wise fools. In Twelfth Night, Timon of Athens, and King Lear, Shakespeare’s citation of diogeneana gives form to a series of wise fools designed to provoke a collision between his period’s antithetical assessments of Cynic critical activity: one that reckons Diogenes’ freedom of speech to be singularly effective, and one that lambasts Diogenes for being inconsequential, a mere parasite-jester who has renounced all claims to seriousness. This double gesture is most evident in a passage unique to the Quarto Lear in which the Fool defines, and simultaneously performs, the critical activity of a “bitter fool.” Here, especially, Shakespeare’s composite characterization of the Cynic stance challenges viewers to comprehend that the “bitter fool” offers only the appearance of a robust critical practice—that its stridently critique-oriented posture exists in form but not in substance.

Cynicism and the Courage of Truth

This chapter takes a closer look at Foucault’s unfinished genealogy of philosophical parrhêsia, or fearless speech, arguing that Foucault sees diogenical Cynicism as the logical culmination of an impulse common to post-Socratic Greek philosophy and hence to the critical attitude in the West—the impulse to derive one’s authority as a speaker of truths from living in a manner that is true to one’s words. Foucault helps us to see that a logic of maximization is immanent to this ethical turn, for it follows that the more closely one can match word to deed, the more powerfully one can convey the truth behind both. However, while Foucault is right to view Diogenes as the first philosopher to fully instantiate the Hellenistic ideal of “the true life,” he is wrong to conclude that “the true life” actually imbues its practitioner with the power to change the world.