Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 179
compelled to send to another planet or some faraway people a literary
work to let them know who and what we are, we would probably
choose Shakespeare. Yet, he says, reading the playwright, “they
would hardly understand that man has a religion” (91). Santayana,
displaying what seems a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of Shake-
speare, points to three moments when he believes that something
close to au then tic religious sentiment penetrates the work: the pas-
sage in Richard II that commemorates the death of the Duke of Nor-
folk; Hal’s hymn of thanks to God after Agincourt; and the beautiful
sonnet that begins “Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth.” But he
fi nds only three, out of all the poet’s vast work. Says Santayana:
“Shakespeare’s world... is only the world of human society. The
cosmos eludes him; he does not seem to feel the need of framing that
idea. He depicts human life in all its richness and variety, but leaves
that life without a setting, and consequently without a meaning” (95).
Shakespeare is cutting himself and his audience loose from
their trammels— compassion, courage, and (for the most part)
contemplation— and setting them free. Setting them free to do what,
exactly? To be themselves, to be sane and circumspect and to pursue
their own advantages: to eat and to fatten and to live a long time. To
enjoy. The injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself— the idea
that there is only one life and we must honor it— such an ideal inter-
feres with the odyssey of Self.
Granted, Shakespeare does not always seem delighted with the
results of his poetry of disenchantment. The youthful characters in
Merchant of Venice are radically post- Christian. But that does not
seem to grant them enviable freedom. Merely it makes them free to
rob Shylock and pursue their dreams of wealth in the manner that
they wish. They are selfi sh, wasteful, insensitive, and cruel. Though
some of them are also glamorous and brilliant. (It is easy to be bril-
liant, Goethe said, when you do not believe in anything.) They are
harbingers of the world from which ideals have departed.