154 Ideals in the Modern World
invest again. Still, the court formed the center of public life, and the
crown sometimes favored the old established nobility, though gen-
erally only when it could do so without harming the material inter-
ests of the new acquisitive classes. A social leveling was taking place,
in part as the children of the middle class married their ways into
the aristocracy, in part as the younger sons of the nobility entered
bourgeois professions. “In England,” Hauser continues, “what takes
place is essentially the leveling down of the nobility to the middle
class” (2.138). The old nobility still exists, and it still has a mea sure
of power and prestige, but the new classes are in contention with it,
much as they are in contention with the poor and the working orders.
On the one side, threatening the acquisitive classes, is the en-
trenched nobility; on the other side the urban and rural poor, who
always represent to Shakespeare (as they must have to many of his
contemporaries) a threat of rebellion, perhaps chaos. The fear of an-
archy threads through the plays, much as the fear of nobles in their
traditional ideal (and perhaps idealized) form does.
But the culture’s collective feeling about nobility and honor will
inevitably be ambivalent. Merchants have their own mea sure of spir-
itedness. They too have felt—or imagined feeling— a jolt of courage
pass through them. They cannot help but be fascinated by a char-
acter who embodies the heroic ideal to self- destructive perfection.
They love what they loathe, and wish to see destroyed that which
they might also worship. This is the ambivalence of Shakespeare’s
tragedy, its richness and its soul. Aristotle says that tragedy must
be about the undoing of someone who is greater than we are. For
us to live in good conscience, Othello and his ilk must be brought
to what appears to be self- made ruin.
The Soul can create a sense of bad conscience in the Self. It is
not enough for the Self to dominate the material world. Victory is
never complete. Somewhere, someone always feels the lure of ideals.
One may even feel it oneself.