Shakespeare and Personhood

Shakespeare... The Immortal Bard... Billy Shaken-Not-Stirred-Speare.

The man goes by many names, but he's left an indelible mark on the English language. From the 1700ish words that he either invented or codified (like elbows, long-haired, swagger, and shagadelic*) to the phrases that are so common that it's easy to forget someone had to come up with them first: the green-eyed monster, the be-all and end-all, and cruel to be kind.

The more I read Shakespeare (and I've taught between one and three Shakespeare plays per semester the past five years,) the more I see patterns forming in his work: parallels and tangents forming their own kind of geometrical harmony. Today I'm thinking about how Shakespeare kept coming back to the idea of personhood. Here are three examples:

-In King Lear, Edmund, bastard of the Duke of Gloucester says: "Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?"

​In other words, "Why should I allow society to call me lesser for being born out of wedlock when I know I am as talented and worthy as anyone else?" This speech is spoken by one of the biggest villains of the piece, who justifies his treachery by the fact that he's been wronged for being born out of wedlock, but whose point more or less stands: Edmund is as much a person as anyone else. Society refusing to recognize that leads to heartache for much of the main cast.

And that idea is echoed in The Merchant of Venice when Shylock airs his grievances about being mistreated because of his race and religion: "He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?"

​Again we have a villainous character (and one who, spoiler alert, is forcibly converted from his religion in the "happy ending" to this play) demanding to be recognized as a person. Shylock lays out all the humiliations he has suffered and mocks in repeated, rhetorical questions, the idea that his race should make him any different than anyone else. He's using his mistreatment to justify cruelty, yes. There's a reason the "pound of flesh" he wanted from a rival has come to be synonymous with revenge. But here again Shakespeare recognizes a group that had been maligned without cause and shows not only how that treatment harms them, but also how it feeds resentment between the two groups.

Shakespeare retreads this same idea in gender relations in Othello with a monologue from Emilia defending women who stray from their husbands: "But I do think it is their husbands' faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is't frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so."

​Shakespeare changes the script here by giving us an unambiguously heroic figure repeat the ideas that we just saw from two antagonists, and with the exact same literary device: the repeated rhetorical question. She even repeats Shylock's idea that those who are "instructed" in cruelty will learn and repeat it, though there's no evidence that Emilia personally does anything of the sort. Emilia asks, "Aren't women just as human as men?" Shylock asks, "Isn't the Jewish community just as human as the Christian community?" Edmund asks, "Aren't I just as human as you?"

Shakespeare was not an expert on being an outsider: he was a middle-class white man who ended his career as an upper-middle class white man. But time and again he seems drawn back to this idea that those who society unjustly scorns have a point and a right to exist. And while these plays on their own aren't a substitute for real diverse authors telling their own stories of triumph and defeat and being on the outside, these passages represent to me the best quality of Shakespeare's writing: complex characters tapping into timeless human issues. People want to be seen. They want to be known. And when a person's inherent personhood isn't recognized, Billy tells us that conflict is sure to follow.

*I lied about Shagadelic.