Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization, by R.V. Young, (Catholic University of America Press: June 2022), 280 pages.

“What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god!” So muses Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Man, proclaims the Danish prince, possesses an essential dignity and an impenetrable complexity which are understood only with great effort, if it does not elude us entirely. Or, as Qoheleth declared, “The purpose in a man’s mind is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out” (Proverbs 14:10). 

Sadly, today many of Shakespeare’s interpreters are not interested in drawing out what he has to say about the human condition in all of its mystery but only in how the Bard can be blamed for contrived, anachronistic evils like white supremacy or heteronormativity. Alternatively, his corpus is theatrically reimagined according to critics’ pet ideologies: deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, new historicism, cultural materialism, and, of course, the academic obsession with race, sex, and gender.

This is a preeminently political interpretive project, one that elides or minimizes Shakespeare’s literary brilliance and universal appeal. It’s a travesty, since Shakespeare’s corpus offers a perhaps unparalleled consideration on what it means to be human and how men and women navigate complicated moral challenges.

Welcome, then, is R.V. Young’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization, which argues that Shakespearean drama “achieves not a break with the Western literary and cultural tradition that has preceded him, but instead its consummate expression.” The Bard is “the exemplary poet of Western civilization because he represents this understanding of human experience with unique and compelling vividness and power.” Or, as John Dryden described the playwright from Stratford-Upon-Avon: “He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.” 

That comprehensive soul enabled Shakespeare to borrow from various histories, chronicles, novellas, narrative poems, and plays to craft original literature. “Shakespeare transforms everything he touches, often turning the most leaden materials to pure gold,” writes Young. In that sense, the Bard is a paragon of the West itself, “a paradoxical tradition of incessant transformation in which institutions and ideals are conserved by means of modification and adaptation to the currents of history and alteration of circumstances.”

Young’s project is both a repudiation of several painful generations of postmodern scholarship as well as an attempt to rehabilitate a more traditional method of Shakespearean interpretation. The North Carolina State University emeritus professor of English accomplishes this via reflections on a number of overarching themes found across Shakesepeare’s corpus.

One of these is the dichotomy between love and lust. The former serves as a transcendent force communicating both happiness and a coherent social order, while the latter delivers destruction. Shakespeare’s most well-known comedies, notes Young, end with conventional happy marriages that “furnish enduring pleasure, prosperity, and contentment,” while “never altogether unambiguous.” This is because there is always an acknowledgement of the attendant realities of disharmony and anxiety that come with imperfect human love even in the best of marriages. Yet faithful love within marriage is what ennobles the soul. As a casket’s inscription in the Merchant of Venice reads: “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.”

Lust, alternatively, is marked by a self-absorbed individualism that erodes the social order, as we see in such comedies as Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. It’s evident even in Romeo and Juliet, when the latter asks her lover to “deny thy father and refuse thy name.” In effect, Juliet requests Romeo abandon his very identity as a man and citizen by repudiating his parents and community for the sake of youthful, impetuous passion. More broadly, while Shakesepare often describes sex in terms that are romantic and even lustful, the act is treated as properly the province of marriage and procreation. Pure lust, alternatively, is described in Sonnet 129 as “th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”

Another ubiquitous theme is the tension between freedom and tyranny, on which Shakespeare’s histories (Richard II to Richard III) offer an extended, incisive commentary. While the weak-willed Henry VI is all piety and peace, he lacks any conception of realpolitik, which leads to his inevitable downfall. Richard III is his antithesis: unadulterated cynical and manipulative Machiavellian ambition. The malevolent hunchback declares in the third act of 3 Henry VI: 

Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile; And cry ‘Content’ to that which grieves my heart; And weat my cheeks with artificial tears; And frame my ace to all occassions…; I can add colors to the chameleone; Change shapes with Proteus for advantages; And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

The noble Henry V, in turn, represents an Aristotelian ethical golden mean that ascends to heroic virtue. Upon his ascension, the once ne’er-do-well Prince Hal matures from his youthful indiscretions while avoiding the extremes of Henry VI’s naivete and Richard III’s cynicism.

One integral component to that realization of civic virtue is friendship. “Friendship,” writes Aristotle, “seems to hold states together, and lawgivers care more for it than for justice.” Several of Shakespeare’s tragedies draw the connection between the collapse of friendships and the collapse of the state. We see it in Julius Caesar, whose titular character becomes incapable of friendship as he assumes the role of tyrant, as well as in his nemesis Brutus, who rationalizes murder based on ideological abstractions. We see it too in Macbeth, the Scottish nobleman whose murderous route to kingship is a “descent into an abyss of evil” by which he kills not only his predecessor Duncan but his former friend Banquo.

Perhaps here is where Shakespeare’s genius is most evident. For as harrowing are his portrayals of depravity, even his tyrants remain authentically human, with consciences that scream at hearts hardened by sin. Only someone who retains some connection to his inner humanity, no matter how tenuous, can see the ghosts of those he murdered or imagine blood stains on her hands. It is only a man trying to silence his conscience who can declare, as Macbeth does, “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning is as tedious as go o’er.” Sadly, postmodern interpreters who impose upon these masterpieces their own absolute skepticism and nihilism cannot perceive these complexities. They share, writes Young, “the moral and political views of his [Shakespeare’s] villains.” 

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That observation is perhaps more perceptive than Young realizes. Insofar as we are incapable of identifying what Shakespeare is doing, the more we take on the qualities of his antagonists. We become Hamlet, so overcome by his passions that he forfeits his prudence; King Lear, who misidentifies the true enemy; Macbeth, pointlessly fighting against fate. C.S. Lewis observed that a sympathetic study of the past frees us not only from “the present, from the idols of our own market-place,” but also from “a fairly recent past.” As much as we fail to sympathetically study Shakespeare, the more likely we are to reenact the errors of history, as woke bureaucrats and capitalists’ coercive tactics — so reminiscent of those employed by Soviet apparatchiks and Maoist struggle sessions — have made abundantly clear.

In contrast to caricatures and character assassinations, the Bard offers an invaluable template for how to understand the other, even if that other is our enemy. “Shakespeare will not allow his characters to be reduced to symbols or literary devices.” From Hotspur to Falstaff, Richard III to Shylock, all are extended dignity and respect, rather than simplistic bit roles. The tragedies, says Young, are driven by a careful study of the “spiritual destiny of individual human beings.” 

Reading Shakespeare rightly is then emblematic of a civilization still capable of empathy, humility and self-reflection. What too much of contemporary scholarship and many of our theatrical reinterpretations evince is sadly the alternative: laziness, arrogance, and narcissism. It reflects an elite interested not in preservation but deconstruction — in other words, cultural suicide. Rather than bravely labor for the survival and revival of the polis, these ideologues descend into an apathetic acquiescence to its own destruction. “Man delights not me,” despairs Hamlet. Yet as long as there are scholars as canny and courageous as R.V. Young, there is still hope that we might find delight in all of Shakespeare’s diverse and beautiful literary progeny.