Spirits Finely Touched: The Testing of Value and Integrity in Four Shakespearean Plays by Harold Skulsky

Abstract

REVIEWS Harold Skulsky. Spirits Finely Touched: The Testing of Value and Integ­ rity in Four Shakespearean Plays. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1976. Pp. 288. $12.50. An associate professor at Smith College here brings together six essays of a moral and philosophical cast (four of them previously published) on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Measure for Measure. The bookjacket describes these plays as drama of “doubt in search of an exit,” and explains they are “insidiously telling exercises in the undermining of our working faith in the rationality of moral choice.” I must confess to some difficulty with this thesis. I have never felt my own “working faith” under­ mined by the moral choices Duke Vincentio makes in Measure for Measure; they come across to me as being remedial and wise. And on the other hand, the choices made by a Hamlet or an Othello do not undermine my working faith either, because I expect to see in tragic heroes errors of judgment and a moral blindspot. I do of course feel a pity and fear for their plight, since it is of a kind I too might fall into through some similar tragic mistake; yet I scarcely feel what Skulsky calls a “speculative suspense” based on “unpleasant doubts about morals.” I am used to taking genre into account when I read a comedy or a tragedy, whereas Skulsky brings no discussion of genre to his reading. He has chosen the four plays, he tells us (p. 2), because in each of them “our complacency is shaken by moral suspense and destroyed by speculative.” If he said simply that the plays test the moral and specula­ tive capacities of auditors, I could agree. He argues, however, as follows: We may begin by wishing a character well by his own lights—Hamlet in his quest for vengeance, Duke Vincentio in his deputation and bed trick, . . . but soon we are troublingly aware how deeply that character is in danger of being corrupted or made monstrous by his own specious ideal. Such a statement seems to me to blur matters that need a more careful analysis. Duke Vincentio’s “lights,” which Skulsky never really examines, I find in his initial sermon to Angelo on the use of self and of virtue, his declaration to Friar Thomas that he loves his people, and his charitable concern for a multisided “remedy” when justifying the bedmate substitu­ tion. Do not such lights differ greatly from the personal melancholy and idolization of a midnight ghost which launch Hamlet on his quest? Audi­ tors, I think, are given good reason for wishing Vincentio well and no later grounds for judging as “specious” his friarly commitment to the rule of charity. On the other hand, much evidence of the questionable quality of Hamlet’s lights seems to me provided from the very beginning, so that although auditors feel a sympathy for his plight they have a concurrent 266 Reviews 267 fear of the dangers of revenge. Can it be said flatly that we wish Hamlet well in his quest? That our engaged imagination “may” do so I grant, since it seems to me the playwright’s task in a tragedy is to allure us with a temptation typical of the kind fallible human beings are prone to, so that we may experience vicariously its appeal, while at the same time our growing awareness of its disastrous effects on the hero gradually works on our emotions a catharsis of the inclination we are being prompted to indulge. But Skulsky does not mention catharsis, and he supposes that what the play gives us reason to fear is “the intellectual death of our own deepest convictions” (p. 14). Yet he does argue well that Hamlet’s faculty of reason declines into a mindless activism which degrades and trivializes conscience. Hamlet debauches his human talent in the service of intellectual vanity. And Skulsky notes in the Ghost’s injunction a curiously double standard—“an anti-christian punishment for Claudius and the better part of a Christian one for Gertrude.” (Here I would question, however, whether either side of this standard is Christian; Skulsky too easily dismisses the obser­ vations of L...