Shakespeare’s Mad Men: A Crisis of Authority. By Richard van Oort.

Abstract

“Shakespeare’s Mad Men is a sequel to Shakespeare’s Big Men” (1). Both works together present a handful of Shakespeare’s plays as anthropological “thought experiments” (102) that explore the human problem of resentment—not in the Nietzschean sense of ressentiment (the revolt and subsequent victory of peripheral “slave” morality against a master) but in the Gansian sense of deferral, or attempted deferral by those at the center. Drawing on the anthropological insights of Eric Gans, van Oort situates Shakespeare’s protagonists on an “originary scene” (6) where they must individually deal with the human propensity for violence not as some external factor threatening the communal order from without, but as something that emanates from within that order. Human violence is bred of the resentments toward anyone occupying central status in human society: the “big man” (3). Marshall Sahlins thus supplements van Oort’s discussions on resentment, as the “big man” is the one who defers violence by “throwing parties”—that is, initiating the distribution of surplus wealth (3). Yet, the surplus in question is not material per se, but ethical. The “universal moral law” (38) guarantees the equality of all (as all language users create the originary scene to begin with) and thus cannot underwrite the central occupant’s sacred legitimacy. Thus legitimacy must be performed by the central occupant in the messy “ethical” world of profane politics, thereby validating society’s tenuous hierarchies. The big man both enjoys and resents this performance of centrality, as do his peripheral voyeurs, including us as readers.