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 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. 116
MOORE: “GOATS AND MONKEYS!”: SHAKESPEARE, HOBBES, AND THE STATE OF NATURE References Altman, Joel B. The Improbability of “Othello”. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Alvis, John and Thomas G. West, eds. Shakespeare as Political Thinker. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999. Armitage, David, Conal Condren, and Andrew Fitzmaurice, eds. Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Berry, Ralph. “Shakespeare’s Venice.” Contemporary Review 272, no. 1588 (1998): 252- 7. Black, James. “The Influence of Hobbes on Nahum Tate’s King Lear.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 7, no. 3 (1967): 377-85. Bloom, Alan and Harry V. Jaffa, eds. Shakespeare’s Politics. New York: Basic Books, 1964. Boehrer, Bruce. Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 117
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âgoats and monkeys!â: shakespeare, hobbes, and the state of nature