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

MOORE: “GOATS AND MONKEYS!”: SHAKESPEARE, HOBBES, AND THE STATE
OF NATURE
Hobbes identifies liberty as the first right of nature and describes it as “the
absence of external impediments.” 62 Both King Lear and Othello question the degree to
which nature imposes limits on human beings. Both plays suggest that our natural
autonomy, our essential liberty is the thing that makes us human. In early modern
England there was an emergent sense that the “subject no longer locates the self as an
inherent part of a meaningfully ordered cosmos.” Instead “the basic social unit is the
individual, whose membership in community must be created.” 63 Shakespeare’s
argument is essentially that the political order needs to account for this human autonomy.
In this way his plays evidence a transition from an understanding of politics as divinely
ordered to one that understands human community as constructed, a movement in early
modern political thought that would later be advanced dramatically by Hobbes’
Leviathan.
62 Hobbes, Leviathan, 98.
63 Wells Slights, “Slaves and Subjects in Othello,” 377-8.
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