‘Old custom’. Shakespeare’s ambivalent anthropology

Abstract

In this paper I argue that, up to a certain extent, Shakespeare’s dramatic works partake of an anthropological interpretation of society. In As You Like It the old rustic way of life is presented by Duke Senior as quite preferable to the artificial pomp of the court, while in King Lear Edmund inveighs against “the plague of custom” which prevents him from accomplishing himself and from satisfying his ambition as well as his desires. If, in Romeo and Juliet, the Nurse still refers to the old calendar, Hamlet, as for himself, criticizes the Danish customs and mores that seem to sanctify drunkenness. As to Falstaff, he still embodies the spirit of old, merry England partly ruined by Henry IV’s realpolitik. This anthropological interest of the playwright for a world that had partly been lost, but whose vestigia still haunted his imagination, takes on a new significance in the wake of the work of social historians since they are very much interested in the study of magical remains in the exercise of royal power as much as in the rites of carnival, charivari or religious sacrifice.