âgoats and monkeys!â: shakespeare, hobbes, and the state of nature

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MOORE: “GOATS AND MONKEYS!”: SHAKESPEARE, HOBBES, AND THE STATE OF NATURE rather literally to mark the difference “between master and servant, or between bond and free”. 58 Slavery was understood as a fate that could befall almost anyone; it was not considered the natural condition of any particular race or ethnic group. There are relatively few actual slaves in Shakespeare. Caliban, Ariel, and the Dromio brothers are exceptions. Sokol notes that the term slave most commonly appears in Shakespeare, as it does in Othello, as an insult, synonymous with “churl, lout, wretch, rogue, reprobate, or knave.” The word typically denotes “a person degraded in behaviour or sensibility.” 59 That said, Shakespeare uses the term very deliberately in Othello, and it is especially significant that Iago is the character most commonly referred to as a slave. The consistency of the insult reflects an attempt by the various characters in the play to explain Iago’s motivations, which are notoriously hard to pin down. 60 It would be comforting to imagine that Iago is a slave to nature, like an animal, that he does what he does because his will is overcome by fear or desire, but this does not seem to be the case. The problem is that Iago is not characteristically slavish. For instance when we first meet him, he significantly says of Othello, “I follow him to serve my turn upon him” (1.1.42), and “In following him, I follow but myself” (1.1.58). Such lines are indicative of Iago’s sense of his own liberty, and Iago is not mistaken. The term “slave” actually proves an inadequate label for Iago, because his villainy is premised on his terrifying autonomy, his freedom from all social and moral constraints. The monstrous thing about Iago is not that he is slavish, but that he is free. Consider his response during the seduction scene, when Othello demands to know Iago’s thoughts: “Good my lord, pardon me: / Though I am 58 Michael Neill, “‘His master’s ass’,” 217. 59 B. J. Sokol, Shakespeare and Tolerance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 146. 60 See Zender, “The Humiliation of Iago,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 34, no. 2 1994): 323-4, and Sokol, Shakespeare and Tolerance, 147-9. 114
MOORE: “GOATS AND MONKEYS!”: SHAKESPEARE, HOBBES, AND THE STATE OF NATURE bound to every act of duty, / I am not bound to that all slaves are free to” (3.3.137-9). These lines are crucial because the impenetrability of Iago’s interiority (along with the impenetrability of all human interiority) is one of the play’s central thematic crises. 61 What Iago reveals in these lines though has great relevance to our examination of the Shakespearean account of human nature because what Iago effectively argues here is that all humans, even slaves, are fundamentally free. The frightening thing about Iago, then, is not how bestial or slavish he is, but how human he is. There is a related moment in King Lear as the old king shouts at the storm and applies the “slave” label to himself: “Here I stand your slave, / A poor infirm, weak and despised old man” (3.2.18-20). Lear makes this claim after Goneril and Regan have cast him out and only shortly before his encounter with Poor Tom when he asserts that “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare forked animal” (3.4.95-6). At this point in the play Lear is convinced that humans are nothing but necessity machines, slavishly obedient to their instinctual nature. Thus he proclaims himself a slave to the storm, the play’s most prominent figuration of nature. Lear’s assessment of human nature is clearly mistaken in this moment for his model for natural man, Edgar, is, in fact, faking it. Edgar is not what he is, or, as he says just before assuming the guise of Poor Tom, “Edgar I nothing am” (2.2.178). Lear’s assessment of our slavish, animalistic nature is thus ironic. Just as Goneril, Regan, and Edmond are free to overturn the received order of the universe, so Cordelia, Kent and Edgar are able to transcend the imperatives of the Shakespearean state of nature. 61 See Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of “Othello” (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9-18. 115
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âgoats and monkeys!â: shakespeare, hobbes, and the state of nature