176 Ideals in the Modern World
Shakespeare clearly detests chivalry and condemns it almost out-
right. For the Platonic ideal, the quest for Truth, he has some use,
though not much. He never dramatizes the quest for ultimate Truth
and never investigates it, even negatively, as Marlowe does in Doctor
Faustus. Shakespeare, who creates models for almost every type
of literary endeavor after him, creates no prototype for the Faust
of Goethe, who admired him greatly, or for the Doctor Faustus of
Thomas Mann. At the beginning of The Tempest we expect that
Shakespeare will anatomize the character of the wise man—or the
quester after wisdom—in Prospero, but Prospero is not wise, only
sour and angry and old.
About religion and the life of the saint, Shakespeare seems to care
almost not at all. The person in his work whose life is most clearly
defi ned by religion is Isabella the pseudo- saint in Mea sure for Mea-
sure, a prig who will not trade her virtue for her brother’s life. Isa-
bella’s rather unusual psychosexual constitution is manifest in a
short speech wherein she declares that she would greatly prefer
death to sexual dishonor:
Were I under the terms of death,
Th’ impression of keen whips I’ld wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I’ld yield
My body up to shame.
(II.iv.100–104)To Isabella, probably the most overtly religious of Shakespeare’s
characters, death is the only lover that she can imagine stirring her.
She can readily conceive having erotic relations with death—as
Emily Dickinson does more decorously in “Because I could not stop
for death.” And those relations are of a rather fl amboyantly sado-
masochistic sort.