Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 165
man, then the man who lives the life of Self can rest more content,
for he is healthy. There is good reason for his not venturing into
the bloody wars. He is not a coward. Put no white feather in his
hand. The man of Self is sane; the hero is... the hero is not
mad: there is something glorious in certain sorts of madness.
Rather, the hero is simply ill.
One of the main functions of Shakespeare’s great inheritor, Freud,
is to redescribe the ideals of compassion and courage and the exer-
cise of imagination as pathologies and forms of delusion. (He will
also help redefi ne thought as that which demystifi es, rather than that
which inspires and exalts.) Freud makes the middle- class people
who live by half mea sures feel much better, allowing them to under-
stand that the virtues that intimidated them are forms of sickness
and that normality— clear- eyed and stable—is the true achievement.
What a reversal! What a transvaluation of values. What victory for
those who wish to live as long and securely as possi ble.
Ancient honor, legendary or historical, is not something
Shakespeare abides easily. His major source for classical lore,
Plutarch, has an entirely diff erent vision of this subject than Shake-
speare does.
Plutarch’s Caesar is a hero out and out. The historian (if that is
genuinely what Plutarch is) delights in telling stories about Caesar
that border on legend. In Plutarch’s life of Caesar we learn how pi-
rates captured him when he was young. Caesar spends his time in
captivity with the pirates telling them stories, drinking, and joining
in their games while he waits for his ransom money to arrive. He
also makes threats, laughingly. He tells the pirates that after he’s ran-
somed he is going to raise an army and come back to the region,
defeat them in battle, then capture and crucify the ones who haven’t
been killed. They laugh uproariously at him. But of course that is
precisely what Caesar does.