← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
749 Willing and Will-Making in the English Renaissance (with Douglas Clark) | #7 Greatest Book of All Time
01:06:00
Loading summary
Transcript84 lines
- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
- [00:10]
White Claw Surge Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by White Claw Surge. Nice choice hitting up this podcast. No surprises. You're all about diving into tastes everyone in the room can enjoy. Just like White Claw Surge, it's for celebrating those moments when connections have been made and the night's just begun. With bold flavors and 8% alcohol by volume, unleash the night. Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors 8% alcohol by volume. White Claw Seltzer Works, Chicago, Illinois A.
- [00:39]
McAfee Sponsor
Message from McAfee wondering why the post office is texting you or why you owe thousands of dollars in toll fees because someone's trying to scam you. The good news? McAfee can help. With McAfee's award winning scam detection, it's easy to tell what's real and what's fake over text, in your inbox and online. If they're fa, you want a free gift. Seriously, if they're faking it, they're not making it past us. Get award winning scam detection today. Mcafee.com keepitreal hello, today on the podcast.
- [01:11]
Jack Wilson
We talk to an expert in English Renaissance drama to understand why those playwrights were so obsessed with the will in the sense of desire or determination and in the sense of a legal document that directs what should happen to property after one's death. How do these concepts overlap and why were they of such interest to such prominent writers? Plus, we look at number seven on our list of the greatest books of all time. And no, we're not idiots telling tales. Thank you very much. Hint, hint. All that coming up today on the History of Literature.
- [01:55]
Foreign.
- [02:00]
Here we go. Welcome to the podcast, everyone. I'm Jack Wilson. I hope you are all having a good November, wherever you may be. Wills and will making. They're both kind of fascinating. So common to our understanding of ourselves and our relationships with others that they almost disappear from view until they don't. Wills as a concept what do we mean by saying that someone willed it to happen? Or when we describe someone as strong willed, or we say they have a will to power, or a will to survive, or a will to win? Of course, there's the entire debate around free will. Is that how we can best understand our central theological dilemma in a monotheistic world? If God is good, why do bad things happen? What explains Hitler? Could it be that it's because God's great gift to humanity was free will? Isn't free will what makes good things good and bad things bad? We must have a choice for people to be good or bad. But what about original sin? Whose will was that? We're all sinners. Did you decide that? How can we have free will if we're subject to Eve biting an apple in some ancient garden? Dilemmas. Dilemmas around the concept of will. And it's kind of odd that it's the same word as will, as in a last will and testament. Or maybe that's not so odd. That is a person saying, this is what will happen to my things after I die. It's my wish, it's my desire, it's my determination. It's imposing one's will on other people. You will get a house, you will get nothing. For you, riches. But for you, poverty. And I decide, is that fair? Is that like what God has done for you? Sure, you have free will, but I've set the rules. I'm requiring what I want to require. I'm obliging you to worship me. You have a choice, but there will be consequences if you don't do what I want. Is that really free will? As it turns out, Renaissance dramatists, Shakespeare and company were considering a lot of these issues. They addressed the concept of the individual will and they used wills as plot devices. We will talk to an expert about this, Douglas Clark, in a little bit. But first, it's time an announcement to make Number seven. Mighty.
- [04:42]
Number seven.
- [04:53]
Yes, yes, yes. Here we are. Number seven on our list of the greatest books of all time, the Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. And in keeping with our approach of climbing the top 10 with one extra fact or item or factotum, if you will. Will and will and will. I give you free will to accept the word I'm proposing. We will have four nuggets for you today. Here's what I think of when I think of Faulkner in general and this book in particular. First, Faulkner as a modernist. This is probably his most experimental novel.
- [05:29]
Maybe.
- [05:30]
Second, As I Lay Dying. But it's up there. Second, there's Faulkner as a novelist and conventional storyteller. The kind of guy who writes about love and hate and war and peace and families, happy and unhappy and dreams and death, minor moments and minor tragedies. The stuff of life. That's going to be number two. We'll talk about that setting, side form. How about the content? That's number two. Third, we'll talk about the South. Faulkner is a great regional writer who was also universal. But let's not lose Sight of the regional. How much of the greatness of this book is about its ability to capture and present the American South. And fourth, Faulkner, as a character himself, he was such an interesting guy. So flawed in some pretty deep ways, but also heroic, a liar and a great purveyor of truth, and generally a pretty fascinating figure. We'll share an anecdote from his life as our number four. Number one. Okay. Modernism. The Sound and the Fury is a modernist novel published in 1929. It tells a story through four narrators, and it employs the stream of consciousness style which other writers had used earlier, notably Virginia Woolf and probably most famously, James Joyce. In Ulysses. Critics noted the similarities between the Sound and the Fury and Ulysses, and Faulkner replied that he had never read the book when he wrote his own stream of consciousness narrative. Asked to explain how it was that his style borrows or at least resembles the innovative style of Joyce and others if he hadn't read them before, he said, sometimes I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air which fertilizes similar minds here and there which have not had direct contact. But he also acknowledged that he had heard about Joyce's Ulysses when he wrote his book, and maybe that had informed his own style. There's also a shifting in time in the book. Each of the four narrations takes place on a single day as the narrators recall what happened earlier. So the time moves both forward and backward, much as time itself does for us humans. We can only move forward. That's time's arrow. But as we progress through time, we can only look back. We cannot see the future. So to the extent we're not in the present, we're only looking back at a past that's getting farther and farther away. Because we're moving, the past isn't. Sartre took a different angle on this. He said, no, this isn't about moving forward at all. These characters are locked in the past. They're so obsessed with it that they can't look to the future or even see the present. The past, he said, has a super reality that negates the future. Sartre loved Faulkner by the way. He saw this device or this approach as demonstrating the problem with our era, as he called it, that boredom has set in stasis. We are all characters who can't move forward. If you believe this might be connected to Faulkner's famous statement that the past is never dead, it's not even past, or his view of Southern society being locked in a world before the Civil War. I'D say they are thematically harmonious. It was clearly something that marked Faulkner deeply, this tie to the south that no longer existed. But we can maybe see this more clearly in his other works. The Sound and the Fury is more about a family. The title comes from Shakespeare. That was the hint I dropped earlier. It was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. And one of the narrators is mentally disabled, or as Faulkner put it, an idiot. He based the characters on his own childhood. And some of the characters movements are consistent with movements he himself made. It's like an occluded Romanoclef, as Faulkner said, relating the layers of narrators. I had a quarter of the book written, but it still wasn't all. It still wasn't enough. So then Quentyn told the story as he saw it and it still wasn't enough. Then Jason told the story and it still wasn't enough. Then I tried to tell the story and it still was not enough.
- [09:59]
Douglas Clark
End quote.
- [10:01]
Jack Wilson
Which brings me to number two, the.
- [10:03]
Richness of the story. What is this story that he's trying to tell four times? Is it worth our paying attention to it? What happens if you can cut through the modernist prose? The time jumps, the interior monologue. One of the problems of being in someone else's mind is that it's not our mind. That sounds basic, but it's true. How much time do you spend explaining your world to yourself when you're thinking something? Do you think my older sister Wilma, who was 15 years older than me.
- [10:32]
And who I rarely got to see.
- [10:33]
And had red hair, and she came home from college and bought me an ice cream cone and I had never had chocolate before and it tasted wonderful to my 3 year old taste buds. I lit up like a firecracker. I couldn't believe how happy I felt. And then our dog Homer jumped on top of me and bit me. And mother took my ice cream away and I locked myself in my bedroom because I was crying. And I knew that father would beat me if he heard the noise. And I was crying over such a simple thing that always made him very angry. Do you say all that in your mind or do you say Wilma bought me? I was so happy. Then ice, then Homer afraid.
- [11:11]
Douglas Clark
Ice cream.
- [11:12]
Jack Wilson
That might make perfect sense to you. All that emotion might be there in those snatches of recollections, references. You know Homer is a dog. You know Wilma is your older sister. You know what and then Homer means. And then Homer did it. So where's the. And then in the sound and the fury. What events are we trying to unpack as we make our way through this thicket of prose? It's not enough for a book just to be told in the stream of consciousness style that gets old in about five pages. An experimental book for me is interesting as an experiment only for a little while and only for a limited purpose. There has to be some flesh and blood on the skeleton, even if the skeleton is shaped in some unusual way. We have four narrators who are in their minds and the book jumps around. So what? So what? Who cares? What else? What else have you got for me? Well, what we have here is this retelling of some events from Faulkner's childhood. When he was 10, he and his two brothers lived with a female cousin, Sally. Those four became roughly, sometimes only very roughly, the four characters in the book. Quentin, Benjamin and Jason Compson, who are the three sons of a once prosperous white family in Jefferson, Mississippi, and their sister Caddy. When the children are little, their grandmother dies and Caddy climbs a tree to look inside the house at her funeral. The boys are down below looking up at Caddy's mud stained underwear. Benjamin, or Benji, is the first narrator. He was diagnosed as mentally disabled when he was 5. He's incapable of speech. Story moves on. Years later, Caddy has sex with a boy named Dalton Ames. Her brother Quentin is alarmed by this and tries to defend her honor. He proposes a joint suicide pact. Then he tries to fight Dalton and he tells his father that he, Quentin, is the one who had sex with Caddy. Then he goes off to Harvard. Caddy, who is now pregnant with Dalton's child, goes to Indiana, where she marries a banker named Herbert Head. But they get divorced when Head learns from Caddy's father that Head is not the father of Caddy's baby. Quentin, meanwhile, is planning to drown himself. He runs into some trouble with a guy who thinks Quentin has tried to kidnap his sister. And Quentyn gets in a fight with a guy who reminds him of Dalton Ames. I haven't really talked yet about Jason, but he has a story too. He was supposed to work for Herbert Head, the man who was briefly married to Caddy at Herbert Head's bank. But that fell through because of the divorce. And so on and so on. There are fights, there are threats, there's church, there's Easter, there's a carnival and a woman who flees with a man from the carnival. There's a lot of decay, Southern decay, the great Faulknerian theme and incident upon incident. I've just scratched the surface. But a lot of things happen. That's the other Faulknerian gift, which is that the stories just roll out one after another. There's always a lot going on, and it's all in this rich, elliptical language and full of ambiguities, which, depending on your taste, may or may not be to your particular taste, but there's a lot in there. How meaningful is this exactly? Is it a metaphor? Is it philosophical? It feels deep, as if the more time we spend with it, the more we believe we'll take from it. But here we almost missed a good transition to number three. Let's circle back, because Southern decay takes us right into number three, Southernness. One of the reasons why Faulkner is so rich is that he's not just telling stories about a family. He's telling stories about a family in the generations that come immediately after the Civil War, which means they've inherited a past where their own illustrious ancestors were the men who fought for the Confederacy, or who owned plantations that were destroyed by the war, or that they lived and breathed a lifestyle that was shattered by the fight to save the Union and end the atrocity of slavery and the slave trade. Faulkner's great grandfather, Colonel William Clark Faulkner, was a prominent officer in the Confederate army. That's very close in time to when Faulkner was writing. Although Faulkner never met his great grandfather, he died eight years before Faulkner was born. We should note that Faulkner was born just 32 years after the Civil War ended. The stories of his great grandfather leading the regiment at the Battle of Bull Run were part of Faulkner's childhood. Faulkner has an uneasy relationship with what I'm going to call the true and accurate reading and understanding of the Civil War in the south in general. He was unfortunately a victim of his era and his whiteness, in the sense of having some unfortunate opinions and deeply rooted prejudices. We covered a lot of that in our debate, or three episodes. I think we did, on the debate he had with James Baldwin and the unfortunate remarks that Faulkner made to a reporter after he'd had a few too many Bourbons, which we can probably take as Faulkner's unvarnished views to some extent. But for all of his failings as a man, it's Faulkner the artist that interests us more. Without the art, he's one of a hundred million, but thanks to his art, he's more like 1 in 100 million. And in the art, the novels, he presents something that feels very true. Here's how Casey Sepp, writing in the New Yorker, put it. What if the north had won The Civil War. That technically factual counterfactual animated almost all of William Faulkner's writing. The Mississippi novelist was born 32 years after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and Appomattox, but he came of age believing in the superiority of the Confederacy. The south might have lost, but the north did not deserve to win this lost cause. Revisionism appeared everywhere, from the textbooks that Faulkner was assigned growing up to editorials in local newspapers praising the paternalism and the prosperity of the slavery economy, jury rigging an alternative justification for secession, canonizing as saints and martyrs those who fought for the Confederate States of America and proclaiming the virtues of antebellum society. In contrast with those delusions, Faulkner's fiction revealed the truth. The Confederacy was both a military and a moral failure. End quote, an author wrote, wrestling with that, the demons he had of realizing that truth and coming to grips with what it meant for the view of his homeland, his ancestors and himself, and what it meant for all of the people around him who were being told something else, something that was not true, who believed it because they wanted to believe it. That's why Faulkner's Southernness still pops off the page, because he was wrestling with that, that realization, reckoning with that truth. Famously, he imitated Balzac with a series of novels that covered a lot of the same time periods and featured the same recurring characters. He called this region of his Yuknupatapha county his, quote, little postage stamp of native soil. End quote. Well, Faulkner's demons and the demons of this era are what make this postage stamp a rich and fertile territory for a novelist. Number four anecdote. Finally, we look at the man who inspired one of the characters in the Coen Brothers, Barton Fink. Faulkner lived hard. He wrote these crazy stories, and he drank like a fiend, sometimes disappearing on benders that lasted days. He went to Hollywood to make money writing screenplays, including one for to have and have not with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, a movie that is probably better than the Hemingway novel on which it's based. It contains the indelible line spoken by Bacall in her husky seductress voice. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow. When Humphrey Bogart was buried years later, his real life and on the screen, lover nodded to this famous moment in cinema, which was named number 34 on AFI's list of the greatest movie quotes of all time. McCall nodded to this moment by having a gold whistle inscribed with the words, if you want anything, Just whistle. And having that whistle placed in Bogart's coffin, Boy, would that have been a detail that Faulkner would have appreciated and used in one of his novels. But that's not our anecdote. Let's try to find one for the Sound and the Fury. How about this one? When Faulkner was writing the book, he got some feedback that it had no story. Instead of changing the book to insert more story, he doubled down. Or quadrupled down, you might say, adding additional narrators and making the book richer with multiple storylines and layers of incidents and recollections and thoughts. Storylike elements, in other words, if not the kind of story that his editor was looking for, emphasizing the slippery nature of our perceiving consciousness, that was his project. Ben Watson, his literary agent at the time, described the outcome this Faulkner didn't greet me with his softly spoken Good morning, but merely tossed a large, obviously filled envelope on the bed. Read this one, bud, he said. It's a real son of a bitch. I removed the manuscript and read the title on the first page. The Sound and the Fury. This one's the greatest I'll ever write. Just read it, he said, and abruptly left. And then he insisted on keeping things as he wrote them. His agent and his editor tried to make changes to the manuscript to make things clearer for the reader. Stop, Faulkner told his agent. I know you mean well, but so do I. To his editor, he wrote in the margins after noting one change. No, goddammit, no. The end result the Sound and the Fury has met with some different critical opinions. The work of genius, said Sartre. For young people in France, Faulkner is a God, unique and distinguished, said one contemporary review. Deliberately obscure and considerably incoherent, said another. The most splendid failure, said Faulkner himself, and 96 years later, number seven on our list of the greatest books of all time. Douglas Clark takes us into the world of wills and willmaking in English Renaissance drama after this hey folks, the countdown is on. Holiday shopping season is officially here. Uncommon Goods takes the stress out of gifting with thousands of unique, high quality finds you won't see anywhere else. When you shop at Uncommon Goods, you're supporting artists and small independent businesses. But that means they can sell out. So shop now. I bought my dad a very cool throwback radio with Bluetooth so he can listen to his old time radio shows in style. The Uncommon Gifts website has something for everyone from moms and dads to kids and teens. Die hard football fans, history buffs, foodies, avid gardeners, mixologists, and of course, book lovers. So don't wait. Cross those names off your list before the rush. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com literature that's uncommongoods.com literature for 15% off. Uncommon Goods were all out of the ordinary. Hey everyone.
- [24:19]
The days are getting shorter, the holidays.
- [24:21]
Are around the corner. It's time for an energy boost. Here's something I've been using AG1, a whole body health program in one easy scoop after my morning workout, I combine AG1 with water, shake it up, and enjoy a brisk little drink that's packed with antioxidants, prebiotics, probiotics, enzymes and micronutrients. That little scoop also has multivitamins, greens, immune support, cognitive support, functional mushrooms, and stress adaptogens all in one scoop. And it tastes good too, which was a nice surprise.
- [24:57]
It's an easy part of my daily routine and I feel great.
- [25:02]
Head to drinkag1.comliterative to get a free welcome kit with an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3K2 when you first subscribe, that's drinkag1.comliterature.
- [25:20]
Netflix Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Netflix from the creator of Homeland. Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys star in the new Netflix series the Beast in Me as ruthless rivals whose shared darkness will set them on a collision course with fatal consequences. The Beast in Me is a riveting psychological cat and mouse story about guilt, justice and doubt. You will not want to miss this. The Beast in Me launches November 13th only on Netflix.
- [26:02]
Jack Wilson
Okay, Joining me now is Douglas Clark, who is a tutor in English Literature at the University of Oxford and who has published widely on English Renaissance drama and poetry. He's here today to discuss his book, the Will in English Renaissance Drama, which reveals how moments of willing and will making pervade English drama and play a crucial role in the depiction of selfhood, sin, sociality and succession. Douglas Clark, welcome to the history of literature.
- [26:30]
Douglas Clark
Thanks very much, Jack. It's wonderful to be here.
- [26:34]
Jack Wilson
So why don't we just jump in with Hamlet and his dread of something after death, the Undiscovered country which puzzles the will from his famous soliloquy. What does he mean when he says puzzles the will?
- [26:52]
Douglas Clark
A wonderful place to start, Jack. I think within this moment in this incredibly popular and well known play, that Hamlet zeroes in on a decision making faculty within the human soul that is at the core of all that we do, all that we think, and is responsible in large part for how we determine the quality of one's moral character. So if we Think we're zooming in on the crux of the matter, what he is as a person and what he will do going forward within the play.
- [27:34]
Jack Wilson
Mm.
- [27:35]
You note that some of the earlier editions of the play had this as hope of something after death that puzzles the brain. So what would be the significance of that change from brain to will?
- [27:50]
Douglas Clark
It's interesting here that within the 1603 version and the first quarto version that we have brain, we have this material thing that is the center of our rational faculties, our intelligence, our wit, that should in some way direct the world, that shouldn't inform how the will should act, should inform everything that we do. But we go from this material thing to again, a more focused and a more precise immaterial aspect of the soul, this faculty that is the will, that is the key motive and elective faculty within the being, within the self. Now what was important within moral psychology and theology at the time is that the human will, conceived of as this immaterial part of the soul, could refuse or ignore what the reason dictates, what the judgment would suggest. That is a rational course of action. And that's the primary weak point for a lot of moral theologians, writers across so many different genres, that the will could act in a self defeating way that we can act against our better judgments. So from this difference between Q1 and 1603 to Q to 1604, we have the shift between brain, which is more sort of a fleshy material thing that could house the number of different intellective faculties or you know, operations within the soul to then the specific aspect of the will that could be seen as the primary fault or the site of our moral failing as a post lapsarian human, somebody that exists after the fall, that our will and our faculties in general are corrupted by the primal sin of Adam and Eve.
- [29:50]
Jack Wilson
So if we say puzzles the brain, that almost seems like it's a mental failing, like it's something we can't figure out, or we're just, we're confused or. But it's not an action, it's not a choice, it's not a. That we are, we. We don't know what is the right thing to do morally.
- [30:13]
Douglas Clark
I think, yes, I think we're on the right lines of reasoning here. Also the brain puzzles the brain, it could be. Puzzles the memory, it could be anything that exists inside capacities. Whereas will is very, very specific. It puzzles the will. The will as the source of deliberative action, it's something far more precise.
- [30:32]
Jack Wilson
And he kind of, he kind of puts a point on this when he says, conscience does make cowards of us all.
- [30:40]
Douglas Clark
Indeed, if we deem or determine conscience to be the capacity for us to deliberate on our thoughts, to think about thinking itself, to think about us ourselves as moral beings, what we should and should not do, I think these two concepts are very much intertwined. And if you'd maybe give me license upon free liberty, free will, to maybe elaborate on the differences between the first and second versions of Hamlet that are printed in the very early years of the 17th century, I think it could help distinguish for your listeners some of the further differences in these two versions of this very famous scene from Hamlet.
- [31:22]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, sure.
- [31:23]
Douglas Clark
Wonderful. So on the title page of the 1603 version of Hamlet, the Hamlet that is almost half the length of the Hamlet that we see primarily on the stage. Now, on the very title page of this work, it says, it's been diverse times acted by his Highness's servants in the city of London, as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere. So by 1603, this is a very well versed, very well practiced play. But it's a play that is almost as half the length of the Hamlet that we're more familiar with now, a year later. The 1604 version of Hamlet that is printed describes itself as being newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was as in two times the length, according to the true and perfect copy. So within this revision, you know, a year's time, within this period of revision, those changes are being made, as you noted, from puzzles the brain to puzzles the will. And it's not just on these individual words. We have whole scenes being shifted and adapted like a concertina effect. Some are expanded, some are contracted. But this very important Scene from Act 3, Scene 1, it's. To hear it for your listeners might be beneficial because I think it comes across as quite odd. But I think it's also really helpful to know what's happening within this first version to see the difference within the second version. Again, if you'd give me license to just try to pretend to be a Q1 Hamlet, it might help. Okay, this is Q1 Hamlet, where we have puzzles the brain. To be or not to be. Ay, there's the point. To die, to sleep. Is that all? Ay, all. No. To sleep, to dream. Aye, marry, there it goes. For in that dream of death when we awaken, borne before an everlasting judge, from whence no passenger ever returned the undiscovered country at whose sight the happy smile and the Accursed, damned, But for this, the joyful hope of this, who would bear the scorns and flattery of the world, scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor, the widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged, the taste of hunger, or a tyrant's reign, and thousand more calamities besides, to grunt and sweat under this weary life, when that he may his full, quietest make with a bare bodkin? Who would this endure but for a hope of something after death which puzzles the brain and doth confound the sense, which makes us rather bear those evils we have than fly to others that we know not of?
- [34:25]
Jack Wilson
So he's saying life is hard and full of things we don't like. And we know in the context of what he himself is deal with, with his mother and his uncle and so on. But he's saying there's the possibility of hell out there, which is why we don't just end it and, you know, get rid of our troubles by ending things for ourselves. Because we worry. What if things get worse?
- [34:54]
Douglas Clark
Absolutely. And I think this key change between hope and dread of something after death also may make the second version, this revised, longer version of Hamlet that we are now more familiar with, a little more pessimistic. And within that enlarged section, within 3, 1, there are far more quotable, I'm sure your listeners will be quoting for themselves, quotable passages that do not make it into this first version, the first version that is being revised and being played out by Shakespeare and his acting troupe. So I think it's really important to go back to these, the source text, and do a little bit of compare and contrast to see where individual words change, individual sentences or phrases are adapted, expanded, contracted. And for something like the will to make such an important appearance within Hamlet, especially within the version that has been canonized now, I think it is an indicator of the wider acceptance or integration of willful thinking and thinking about the will that you see in other drama. Now, also at the beginning of. I think it's 1, 2 in Hamlet, when Claudius is talking about Hamlet's unmanly grief being indecorous, or is it incorrect to heaven? I'm paraphrasing here, but it's Hamlet's will that's constantly referred to throughout. And when Hamlet is talking with the players, thinking about the death of King Priam, recounting the words of Pyrrhus, stood like a neuter to his will, holding the sword above Priam, waiting for the right moment to strike, we see the Parallels between that play within the play and Hamlet's own history, his own fate, if you will.
- [36:43]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Okay, so let's stick to the will as we've been discussing it for now, and we'll save will making for later in our discussion. But how prominent were references to the will in English Renaissance plays, not just Hamlet? I mean, is this something that you see kind of across the board, that this was part of the Zeitgeist was.
- [37:04]
Wrestling with these questions of the will?
- [37:07]
Douglas Clark
Absolutely. It's something that I try to draw it within the study itself to give a broader appreciation of how important and how embedded notions about will, action and moral character are to English playwrights, from the canonical to the non canonical, to those who perhaps criticism and contemporary stagecraft have perhaps ignored. So I range from plays largely on the commercial stage from around 1570s onwards, but I do also try to take into account plays that pop up from the 1550s onwards, thinking about playmaking and stagecraft and dramatic entertainment from 1558 to around 1625.
- [37:56]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [37:56]
And what was behind this? Were there developments in thinking? Is this the natural outcome of a Christian nation wrestling with what theology means and concepts of heaven and hell? Or were there philosophical or psychological developments that made this issue so prominent?
- [38:17]
Douglas Clark
I think all of the above. It's so ubiquitous, it's so widespread. We can see in the early 16th century the prominence that is given to debates over the freedom of the will within Erasmus, defense of the freedom of the will in 1524, and then Luther's rebuttal in 1525 about the servitude of the bondage of the will. It's percolating all throughout intellectual culture and practical life for people living in Christian nations. The fact that we need to reflect on our will as a maybe a day to day occurrence. Have we been justified by God's grace or not? Do we have a will that is able to work in correspondence with God's grace to do good works? Or is our will completely corrupt, that we need intervening grace and that we cannot do anything good, our wills cannot do anything that is acceptable without God's grace intervening. These are questions that are deeply important for how one lives one's life and deeply important for what will happen in the afterlife as well? I think it's all encompassing.
- [39:32]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. So it's.
- [39:33]
It's basically the question of what are we. What is our role here in terms of making moral decisions and making choices and following ethical guidelines and so on? Are we free to do that? Or is something predetermined? Or are we all just condemned as sinners no matter what we do.
- [39:56]
Douglas Clark
I think zooming down into what the will is allows people to reflect on who they are to themselves, who they are to each other, our sense of commonality, our sense of social ability, our sense of civility. Are we responsible for our actions? Do I take a fatalist approach to my life, that whatever will occur, will occur? Thinking about what the will is, what it does, what it can do, what it can't do, allows us to reflect on what makes us human. And also our relationship to the sovereign will which the God and the will that will dominate and dictate what our wills do and what they are.
- [40:41]
Jack Wilson
Now sometimes we talk about the will as in terms of exemplifying courage or determination that someone could be weak willed. And that means that they've, you know, they're too passive or they don't really stand up for themselves or that kind of thing. And certainly, I mean, that connotation could apply to what Hamlet is wrestling with. But is that a meaning that was relevant back then as well? We've been talking about kind of a different aspect of will. Did they worry about a lack of will as meaning someone was kind of.
- [41:17]
Had a weak moral core?
- [41:20]
Douglas Clark
I think we're really are hitting the mark here in contemporary dialogue. I hear conversations or maybe idiomatic phrases about the will as a form of determination or self directed endurance in sports a lot. I don't know if you've had this experience.
- [41:39]
Jack Wilson
The will to win.
- [41:40]
Douglas Clark
Yeah, indeed, yes. You know, can they go on? Can they resist the biological necessities of their body? All of those neurons firing in their brain to tell them stop. Oftentimes it's just as simple as that. You're running too quickly for your, for your body. We do not have the energy or you are being punched in the head too much in a boxing match. Please don't go on. The brain is sending these signals to the body, to the consciousness, if you will. If we really do have a form of self, we seem to be able to logically think that we can resist those urges or those compulsions to a certain extent. And we can see it in forms of endurance or you know, the resistance of pain or maybe the blocking of pain signals. But we maybe also see it in, in a more day to day manner where we have the signal sent by our brain and our gut that you are hungry, you need to have lunch. Like, well, we think we can resist that temptation or that urge. We can resist biology, we can resist our neurology to a certain extent. Do we have the will to go on without lunch for another half an hour? Well, eventually you're going to need to eat or we'll all perish. So we see it in this, you know, idiomatic range of language or maybe a commonplace of thought. Now that that might seem intelligible to your listeners, like, okay, I can resist biological necessity to a certain point. And that might carry over to say how I blame or praise myself and other people for their moral choices. Are they weak willed or not? Can they make the right decision in the right time? Have you had long enough to think about the consequences of that decision? And this is something that AR Aristotle takes up in his Nicki Macian ethics, thinking about, he uses the word, the Greek word akrasia, thinking about one's moral continence or incontinence. Can you act against or with your better judgment? So it's something that is deeply set in classical learning that extends through to common parlance. But I think also to come back to the question, you asked whether this takes a prominent form within English Renaissance drama, the short answer is yes. People tussle with this consistently whether or not they directly refer to the will as being the core center of this. If your listeners wish to read a play that directly relates to this, that may not be on the radar, I would direct them to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Again, familiar name, but maybe unfamiliar play. Thinking about moral continence and the strength of one's will to resist, say, the temptations of the flesh. We can find that in abundance. And Troilus and Creston, it's kind of a. It's a problematic play and it's also a heartbreaking play in many respects. But it's not just Shakespeare who's exploring these kinds of moral dilemma.
- [44:42]
Jack Wilson
Okay, well, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Douglas Clark because I want to put will making onto the table when we return.
- [45:04]
Disney Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Disney. This Thanksgiving, Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are back on the big screen. So grab your family and friends as Disney invites you to return to Zootopia for the fer nominal movie event of the holiday season. See all your favorite Zootopia characters, plus new favorites in the most pawsome movie of the year. Don't miss Disney Zootopia 2 when it hits theaters everywhere November 26th. Get your tickets now.
- [45:34]
Rakuten Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Rakuten. The holidays are here, and that means it's the most wonderful time of the year to Save with Rakuten Use Rakuten to stack cash back at your favorite stores on top of holiday sales. That's savings on sale. With Rakuten, you can get cash back on gifts for everyone on your list, from toys for the kids to kitchen gear for the person who loves to cook to electronics for everyone. You can even save on something for yourself. Cash back is automatically added to your account as you shop, and you can get paid with gift cards, PayPal or check. Or eligible American Express card members can choose to earn Membership Rewards points, join for free today and get a new member bonus after minimum qualifying purchases. Just go to rakuten.com, download the app or install the browser extension. Terms and conditions apply.
- [46:34]
Jack Wilson
Okay, we're back. So, Douglas, we've talked about the will, and one of the things that came to mind when you were discussing the definition of will and the different connotations of it is, you know, we might say today I was on my diet, but then I had a second helping of dessert because I don't have any willpower. I just don't have the willpower. But that it feels to me like even though that's an important thing for us, and we still use that term will for things like that, it's almost like a side issue. You don't see that as dominating the way we think about ourselves, and at least not in those terms. It doesn't feel like our whole existence depends on it, or it's a question we have to resolve. We just sort of use it as in order to say, you know, I wanted to resist temptation a little more than I did. Or we see that someone is very good at sticking to their diet and that kind of thing. But it feels like what we're talking about in English, Renaissance drama, is a lot more of a fundamental question that they had as human beings about how.
- [47:46]
They fit into the universe.
- [47:48]
Douglas Clark
Yes, it's an interesting problem and maybe dilemma for us to reconcile ourselves with now. And it may seem quite foreign that maybe perhaps in a more secularized society that we we live in nowadays, I know that the we can be extensive, depending on where you are listening to this podcast, that we may not believe in an immaterial soul, a form of self that inhabits the meaty vessel of your body, you may think that it is purely determined, and you may think that your decisions are purely determined by electrochemical impulses and signals and the physics of the natural world, that we are embedded in a universe of causes, and that it would be preposterous to think that Something is uncaused. So to go back to the incarnations is a leap of imagination, to place yourself within a historical moment that for the large part does believe in the ghost in the machine, for want of a better phrase, that does believe in the immaterial soul that can make these decisions that may inform all that we do, rather than being led by biological impulse and deterministic causes. So there's that aspect of our thinking that may maybe slightly out of line. Also the analogy that you made between the ability to resist temptation of, say, the snack, one of the prominent problems within this discourse of philosophy as to what the will is, if it does even exist as a concept. Well, to what extent do we have free action and free choice, unrestrained or unconstrained? And to what extent can we change the very nature of our beings that would direct us towards particular snacks, for example? So you may have a range of snacks in front of you, and you have, apparently, if you are in particular circumstances, a free choice between five snacks. Now, you could choose any of those snacks. But the fundamental problem is, is the decision making apparatus within your body, within your mind, whatever you want to think about, is that decision making apparatus? Can you change it fundamentally? Or is that inevitably structured in a way that you will always choose what you are going to choose, and that willing against the nature your will, or the nature of whatever propulses you through life, is that an illusion?
- [50:36]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [50:37]
And if we're talking about the will as being an expression of liberty, or it raises questions of liberty and the freedom we have, that seems like a good place to pivot to the idea of will making. Because on the one hand, this is kind of the ultimate freedom, is to be able to say, this is what I want to happen even when I'm not here anymore. And you know what will happen, no pun intended, with the force of the law behind me. And yet, at the same time, it could be viewed as inhibiting freedom because those who inherit those possessions, I mean, I guess you could say it frees them up if they inherit a lot of money and they can quit their job or something, but. But I think for the most part, we think of it as possibly inhibiting the freedom in terms of people who impose conditions on that inheritance. Or we may say, well, you will inherit this house unless you are not married, or that kind of thing. And it seems to you could encumber the property as it gets passed along to the inheritors as well. So how did will making fit into this discussion in terms of the English Renaissance and in particular the dramas. Was this something that they put on the stage as well?
- [52:04]
Douglas Clark
That's a great question. Yes, it is something that you put on stage. It's a feature in a range of different tragedies and comedies and as you were suggesting, the dictates of the dead informing what the living will do is a topic and a concern that is taken up by so many dramatists in the book. I begin with Ulpien Foolwell's 1568 play like Will to Like Quoth the Devil to the Collier. It begins in pre commercial drama through to the commercial stage, and it becomes a really, really important and popular aspect about how particular civic and societal and familial dilemmas are resolved. Or maybe more chaos is created by a dead father leaving a will that forces or compels a person to act in a certain way. One example that I did have that again may be beneficial to your listeners is from the Merchant of Venice from Act 1, Scene 2, when Neurissa and Portia are discussing the state of their liberty and freedom as women. And if you'll again grant me the liberty to read out some of Portia's lines, I think they could help.
- [53:14]
Jack Wilson
I won't get in the way of your will.
- [53:18]
Wonderful.
- [53:18]
Douglas Clark
Thank you for that. So this is Portia, right at the beginning of Act 2, Scene 1, discussing with Nerissa their life to come. Portia says, if to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions. I can easier teach 20 what are good to be done, than to be one of the 20 to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o' er a cold decree. Such a hair is madness. The youth to skip o' er the meshes of good counsel, the cripple. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband. O me the word choose. I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike. So is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father? Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one nor refuse none? So there you have Portia declaiming exasperatedly about how her fate, how her decision making, her future actions, are going to be constrained by the will and testament of her late father, who's made this casket dilemma for her future suitors to choose the right choice. So it's a really neat encapsulation of the kinds of constraints and Maybe awful. And some plays, awful conditions that especially women are placed within. And that's, I think, is reflective of the. The historical moment of the mid to late 16th century, in the early 17th century.
- [55:13]
Jack Wilson
Was there a. Did you feel like the playwrights are complaining about God in some sense when they're crafting these plots and putting these scenes in? Because it also seems like it's a complaint that could fairly be levied against the nature of religion and God to sort of say, well, I know what I'm supposed to do. You want me to be good and to be moral and to follow all the Ten Commandments and so on at the same time. You gave me this body that gets hungry and is lustful and is, you know, is weak and doesn't always know what to do and is, you know, you.
- [55:57]
All the things that I'm supposed to.
- [55:59]
Be careful about not doing are the very things that are the most appealing to me. And so am I free or not? It feels like I'm not free if I'm shackled by this fear of hell and the notion that I must be good all the time and I can never sin.
- [56:18]
Douglas Clark
Yes, it's a particular problem, I think, within the drama of the period. One note I will make is that from the period of. About. David McInnes has done some really excellent work on this. From 1567 to around 1642, only around 540 plays from the commercial theatre survive, whereas we know around about 740 plays are identifiably lost. So when we think about the commercial theatre within the period, we are working with a reduced block of evidence. So making any grand assertion about what English dramatists thought of, we always need to take with a pinch of salt because of the. The lack of evidence. But saying that, I think a number of dramatists, prose writers, theologians, again, think of any genre of writing that you can. A number of people are concerned and possibly irate or dejected or, you know, show this range of emotions through characters, through plot lines. They're concerned and dejected and irate with the fact that we may not have the ability to change our fate, that that may cause existential quandaries and maybe an incalculable level of fear within a conscious self as to what we should do. If we are already damned, then what is the point in living? Can I do any good on this earth while I am on it? If for some reason, for some trick of fate, that I will prove myself to be unworthy of God's presence? It's a really Horrible dilemma. And this was why. One of the reasons we have a religious schism that is not down to this fact on how we interpret what the will is and its indication of our saved position or possibly our damnation.
- [58:23]
Jack Wilson
And the question of, well, what good does it do me here to follow all of these rules when my neighbors are flouting them and are having such a good time and getting ahead?
- [58:37]
Douglas Clark
Yes, why not? Hedonism for all. Why should I be the only one restraining myself, restricting myself from the. The voice, perhaps how this manifests in you or anybody else. The voice inside my head telling me to take all of the candy bars, talking about the analogy from before, and, you know, you've got a choice from one to five, why not all? Yeah, you know, why? Why indeed? Why? Why should we do anything? And again, to reflect on that, to have questions, conscience, to reflect on the manner in which we think, to reflect on how we operate as individuals with supposedly moral cause, may or may not bring a certain amount of pain, but it may or may not justify our position as righteous or possibly not righteous. The fact I'm concerned, the fact I care about the quality of my will may be an indication that perhaps I'm on the right path and perhaps those other people are not on the right path. But then again, maybe at the end of their life, they will repent. They have the will to do so granted to them by God or not, depending on your opinion. And they, for all of their debauchery, may be saved. But unfortunately, a human experience is not an experiment that can be redone. We do not currently have the capacity to turn back time, to go forward in time, to skip and to see ourselves, to see our lives play out. So I don't think we'll ever know. But that's the problem, isn't it? Yeah.
- [60:07]
Jack Wilson
Now, was there also a legal. What was the legal landscape like in terms of the. Like a last will and testament? I mean, today, encumbrances on future holders of property are really disfavored, and it's hard to do. If you are putting together your will, you. You can't say, you know, I will give this property, I will give my house to my son, but I want it to be known that the house shall never be torn down, whether it's by my son or any future owners of this house or, you know, something like that. We say that the law won't enforce that because we don't want houses that are a thousand years old. Because some guy said that before he died. Was this worked? Out by the time of the Elizabethans. Or was this something that, you know, they were dealing with wills where people could put all kinds of restrictions on the things that they were passing along?
- [61:05]
Douglas Clark
That's a great question. Yeah. There's still a certain sense of flexibility and a sense that one's last will and testament could contain restrictions or perhaps liberties that may or may not benefit an individual, somebody that has bequests given to them. And it's something that's drawn out in the drama as well, that we often have dead or soon to be dying patriarchs that hold a great deal of capital or fixed property, restricting access to their last will and testament to a younger generation below them or two younger generations below them them. And this is a cause of consternation for those younger generations who are often depicted as being licentious bawds or knaves or roguish villains. And they need to go through a process of reformation, of personal reformation, to turn their prodigal ways around and whatever is used as a device to help them on that way, be it a virtuous woman or a horrible set of actions or occurrences that happen to them.
- [62:11]
Jack Wilson
That's interesting, isn't it? Because the theology as it is to basically say, no, no, you have to be free to make moral choices, because otherwise those moral choices won't be as significant. That it would be easy for an omnipotent God to just make everyone behave morally, but that would be kind of meaningless. Instead, you have to give people the freedom to choose the bad as well as the good. And that's the only way to make the choice to do good meaningful.
- [62:43]
Douglas Clark
Indeed. And then we have to perhaps reflect on the fact that maybe those free choices were always going to be ordained. So how free were they? But as you said, yeah, this is the problem about morality. It's like, well, do I do good for the sake of doing good, or do I do good for the sake of me entering heaven potentially? Or do you do good at all? Actually, should I just focus on the personal good? Personal pleasure? Isn't that that the best good of all to make sure that I thrive, I survive, but I do not care about anybody else? So, yeah, it's really interesting the ways that particular familial units and individuals are shaped by the wills of others, as in their own choices, their own determinative acts, but also the last will and testaments of primarily powerful patriarchs and men. It's quite uncommon for women's worlds to be crafted, created or established on stage. But as I discuss in the book, there are really important examples of that same. John Webster's the Duchess of Amalfi and a number of other plays that may be familiar to your readers. But it is a really interesting time that many individuals had the opportunity to transfer land and property outside of the boundaries, boundaries of the immediate family through a will and testament. And that causes a lot of both chaos, but also opportunity for real people and people on the stage.
- [64:11]
Jack Wilson
It's such an interesting idea because we often will use that. Like, right. We'll say, I think this is, like we say we inherit some money. I think this is how my grandfather would have wanted us to spend it. Or I think this. I think this would have made him. I think this would have made him happy. Happy to know that we were using it this way or something like that. And a similar thing. We could hear ourselves saying something like, I don't think God wants me to be hiding in my basement and never sinning. I think he wants me to be out in the world. Or I think he doesn't want me to feel guilty all the time. He wants me to enjoy the beauties and the miracles that he's put on this planet and that kind of thing. But in none of that is the idea of, well, what do I want? It's like we're afraid to say, I'm doing this because I want to. We're giving other people the agency and maybe fooling ourselves into saying, well, we're just doing this because this is what so and so would have wanted.
- [65:14]
Douglas Clark
Yes. I love the image of liberating yourselves from the bit, the dark basement of a life, of a life of purity, to go out into the world and sin and to gain that experience and then learn from it so you can go back into the basement to live a pure life. That's the journey of life. Right.
- [65:32]
Jack Wilson
Right. Well, let's leave things there as we, as I, as I wrap things up from my. Literally, from my basement.
- [65:40]
Douglas Clark
Most excellent.
- [65:42]
Jack Wilson
The book is called the Will in English Renaissance Drama. Douglas Clark, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [65:49]
Douglas Clark
Thank you for having me on the wonderful program. Thank you.
- [65:55]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that's going to do it for.
- [65:58]
This episode of the History of Literature. If you're interested in meeting Emma, the show's producer, and me, Jack Wilson, and some of your fellow History of Literature buffs, now's your chance to sign up for our tour. I believe there are still slots and I know for a fact that Emma and I would love to have you join us. We'll be traveling through England together, reading and talking and meeting distinguished guests and seeing some spectacular places and literary spots. That's in May of 2026 and you can sign up at historyofliterature.com or John Shores Travel. That's S H O R S. We'll be back soon with some Thanksgiving treats, a celebration of sorts of this year, and some brand new stories by one of your favorite writers. Newly discovered stories, I guess I should say. We'll talk to the discoverer of those stories and we'll travel to Tehran and we'll hear an argument for why King Lear is the most Chinese of Shakespeare's plays. So do join us for those. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Join TikTok today and get your 20 no minimum.
- [67:31]
Rakuten Sponsor
Spend a voucher. Just download TikTok and search for get TikTok G E T T I k.
- [67:37]
Jack Wilson
Redeem your voucher and start shopping now.
- [67:40]
Rakuten Sponsor
Only for new user.