Conscience as a Phenomenon in Shakespeare’s Richard III and Macbeth Olav Rian A Thesis Presented to the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, the University of Oslo in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Master’s Degree Autumn Term 2005 Advisor: Juan Christian Pellicer Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Juan Christian Pellicer who, with his enthusiasm and interest in Shakespeare, has encouraged me and put me back on track many times during this process. Thank you for your patience. I would also like to thank Domhnall Mitchell, Jeremy Hawthorne and the other staff members at the English department at NTNU, who first got me interested in literature studies and Shakespeare studies. Many thanks go to Charles Moseley, Eugene Giddens and all lecturers and staff members at the Shakespeare Summer School programme at Cambridge University. Thank you for an inspiring course, and for sharing your wisdom and experience. I would also like to thank Erik Karlsaune, lecturer in comparative religion and sociology at NTNU, who was under no obligation to help me and comment on my theories, but did so anyway. Muchas gracias to Dag Flem Mæland, Dagfinn Karlsen and Sølve Sjeg, my good friends. Without your wonderful example of actually finishing your theses I doubt I would have been able to finish this one. Thank you, Dagfinn, for valuable close reading. I would also like to thank Richard, Duke of Gloucester and Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, who have been a great inspiration in my work, haunting my sleep and prolonging my days. May they rest in peace, and may God have mercy on their dark souls. A very special thank you goes to my dear wife Carene, who has supported me throughout this process. I am very grateful and fortunate to have such a caring and loving best friend. Olav Rian Fredrikstad, October 2005 1 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations.................................................................................................................. 3 List of Illustrations ..................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ................................................................................................................................4 Chapter One: Variants of Conscience in Shakespeare............................................................. 14 1.1. Conscience as Inward Knowledge, Deliberation or Opinion........................................ 15 1.2 Transferred Applications of the Word............................................................................ 19 1.3. Puns on Guilt and Gilt................................................................................................... 26 1.4 Other Metaphors and Images ......................................................................................... 29 1.5 The Functions of Conscience ......................................................................................... 31 1.6 The Location of Conscience........................................................................................... 33 1.7 Challenging the Relevance of Conscience: The Tempest............................................... 35 Chapter Two: The Theatrical Tradition ................................................................................... 39 2.1 The Character of the Vice .............................................................................................. 40 2.2 Richard’s Demonic Ancestry: His Father’s Son ............................................................ 43 2.3 The Development of the Composite Villain .................................................................. 45 2.4 Conscience as a Character.............................................................................................. 48 2.5 Developments in Characterization ................................................................................. 50 Chapter Three: Conscience as a Phenomenon in Richard III and Macbeth............................. 56 3.1.1 The Autonomy of Conscience in Richard III: Conscience as an External Agent... 57 3.1.2 Internalization of Conscience in Macbeth: Conscience as Feeling......................... 64 3.2 Ethical Psychology: William Perkins on Conscience and Melancholy ......................... 65 3.3 Conscience as Witness or Shared Knowledge ............................................................... 83 3.4.1 Free Will, Determination, and Conscience ............................................................. 88 2 3.4.2 The Conflict between Conscience and Will............................................................ 93 3.5 The Role of the Equivocator ........................................................................................ 101 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 106 Bibliography........................................................................................................................... 109 List of Abbreviations OED: Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Geneva Bible: The Geneva Bible : a Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, introd. by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Tilley: Tilley, Morris Palmer, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: a Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Anne Arbor: 1950). All quotations from the works of William Shakespeare are, with the exception of specific references to other editions, taken from: The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edition, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). List of Illustrations Ill. A, p. 60: ‘Råd og Uråd’, Donald Duck & Co, 32 (Hjemmet – Bladforlaget: 1980), 7. Ill. B, p. 60: ‘Sirkusdilla’, Donald Duck & Co, 14 (Hjemmet – Bladforlaget: 1984), 7. Ill. C, p. 78: The N-Town Plays: A Facsimile of British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII, introduction by Peter Meredith and Stanley J. Kahrl (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1977), p. 178, I. Ill D, p. 78: The N-Town Plays, p. 176, I. 3 Introduction In the early stages of working with this thesis, I set out with a desire to investigate John S. Wilks’s claim that ‘a gradual metamorphosis is discernable in the treatment of the idea of conscience from the substantially scholastic form that it takes in the works of Shakespeare, to a predominantly reformist conception in the works of his later contemporaries and Jacobean successors’.1 The initial project was to disprove Wilks’s claim, by showing that while conscience in Richard III conformed to a medieval, scholastic notion of conscience, conscience in Macbeth seemed to be much more influenced by reformist theology and ideology. In retrospect, I do not believe either claim is true, or that it is possible to make a sufficiently convincing argument for any of them. I think Wilks and I posed the wrong question, one which is impossible to answer: Why is conscience represented differently in Richard III and Macbeth? The evidence of cultural, political, religious, and censorial influences on Shakespeare is scarce. There is no evidence of autobiographical references to conscience in Shakespeare’s work, and we cannot know how the context of the plays affected the treatment of themes: Richard III is set in England in the late fourteenth century and it is difficult to establish how its treatment of conscience is bound by the historical treatment in More, Hall, and Holinshed. Does Shakespeare present us with a fourteenth-century or a late sixteenth-century notion of conscience? Macbeth, set in Scotland in the eleventh century, may have left Shakespeare freer to develop his own ideas about conscience, as he relied less than in Richard III on his sources in shaping the characters and plot of the play. This apparent creative freedom may suggest that Shakespeare presents us with a more contemporary notion of conscience and the workings of the mind, but it remains difficult to ascertain the impact of 1 John S. Wilks, The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 6. 4 the stricter censorship of the Jacobean period.2 The different contexts of Richard III and Macbeth make a comparison very difficult, at least as long as the question is why conscience is presented as it is. The appropriate question must be how conscience is presented differently, which has led me to a phenomenological treatment of conscience. The purpose is to investigate how conscience is presented, what the properties of conscience are, and how it affects the actions and the state of mind of the characters. There is little recent critical work on conscience in Shakespeare’s plays; the most recent thorough analysis is John S. Wilks’s The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Tragedy. Wilks draws an ideological distinction between Shakespeare’s ‘scholastic’ notion of conscience and his later contemporaries’ ‘reformist’ conception of the same. According to Wilks, Shakespeare is informed by the scholastic concept of Natural Law as the universal moral order, and sees conscience as a faculty of the mind which witnesses the trespassing of Natural Law: This conception [of transcendental order] released [Shakespeare] to a consideration of justice organically conceived, by which man is punished by his sins, rather than for his sins, and by which the Old Testament theology of the Chroniclers