“goats and monkeys!”: shakespeare, hobbes, and the state of nature

MOORE: “GOATS AND MONKEYS!”: SHAKESPEARE, HOBBES, AND THE STATE
OF NATURE
In place of this account another emerges, one that incorporates the empirical
reality of human selfishness and cruelty. 25 This emergent account anticipates Hobbes
insofar as it acknowledges that “neither the rational content of the law of nature as a way
to peace nor the belief in it as the command of God suffices to establish its status and
obligatory force as actual law.” 26 In King Lear Edmond is the prime example of a
character who subscribes to the idea that we are no different from animals, that we
prioritize self-preservation and bodily satisfaction over all else, and are essentially
governed by instinctual processes beyond our control. Edmond has made a “goddess” of
this emergent nature (1.2.1). Consequently, he is completely self-interested. Morality and
religion have no hold over him. However, though Shakespeare clearly supplies Edmond
with several intelligent arguments, he remains a villain – a traitor, a usurper, and an
unfaithful lover – and so we cannot align Shakespeare completely with Gloucester’s
bastard son. Shakespeare will not go so far as to argue that we are governed by
“[m]echanical necessity.” 27 He perceives in human beings a capacity to resist their
instinctual natures, just as he recognized the capacity to deviate from the divinely
ordained natural order. Edmond’s deathbed declaration, “Some good I mean to do, /
Despite of mine own nature,” illustrates this awareness (5.3.271-18). Shakespeare
recognizes in our innate desire for security and felicity the simultaneous presence of
communal and anti-social drives, and so anticipates the tension in Hobbes’ Leviathan
25 It is important to reiterate that there is no contest in this account between our rational state and
our passionate state. The dualism that the Greeks and Christians saw in our nature does not exist
in Hobbes because the tripartite soul is collapsed in his account. Humans are as rational in the
state of nature as they are in the state of natural law; it is simply that the wildly different contexts
change the standard of rational behaviour.
26 Zagorin, Perez, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009),
52.
27 Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, 25.
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