The Bard on the Demands of the Common Good

“On his choice depends, The safety and Health of this whole state”

In a recent and fascinating post for Ius et Iustitium, the learned Pater Edmund Waldstein queried how we might best categorize Shakespeare’s political ethos. In this post, Pater Waldstein concurs with Professor Patrick Gray’s assessment that the:

“closest analogue of Shakespeare’s thought about politics in our time is what has come to be known as “post-liberalism” or “common-good conservatism”.

Shakespeare, says Professor Gray, would agree with the sentiment that a society where “each individual is trying to maximize his or her autonomy at the expense of everyone else is a society that is doomed to oscillate between brittle autocracy and merciless civil war”.

Pater Waldstein concludes by exhorting us to heed the lessons Shakespeare’s work contains for perennial political questions, as we try to recover “what is best in our ethical and political tradition”.

Reading Pater Waldstein’s post reminded me of an exchange that takes place in the first Act of Hamlet, in the scene where Laertes urges Ophelia to abandon any hope of marriage to the Prince, notwithstanding their mutual affections. Laertes urges his sister to remember the unique burdens and expectations placed on Hamlet’s shoulders since his birth:

He may not, as unvalued persons do,

Carve for himself, for on his choice depends,

The safety and health of this whole state.

And therefore must his choice be circumscribed,

Unto the voice and yielding of that body Whereof he is the head.

This short exchange is, I think, positively brimming with classical political and philosophical insight. In these lines, one sees recognition of the intelligibility and reasonableness of the idea that individual goods (one’s personal desires and goals) should be ordered to higher and more perfect goods (the common good of one’s community), and that one’s will and passions should be be “circumscribed” by the “voice” of right reason, which includes fulfilling one’s duties to one’s neighbors and countrymen.

Notice, too, how these lines remind us of the truly, and properly, profound charge laid upon those with political authority. Because those with such authority bear the awesome and onerous responsibility of directing all of their choices and deliberations toward the “safety and health” of the whole community, and away from the kind of individual, familial, or factional self-interest that appeal to our more selfish and unreasonable appetites.

If Shakespeare had any sympathy for the ideas expressed in these lines, then I think they certainly lend weight to Pater Waldstein’s and Professor Gray’s insightful commentary, and to Pater’s admonition to “heed” the Bard on matters concerning the health of the body politic.