[In the following essay, Black examines the influence of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes on Tate as he was writing his King Lear, maintaining that Hobbesian ideas are seen most clearly in the character of Edmund.]

Nahum Tate's famous adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear has recently been the object of renewed critical attention.¹ Up to now, however, no one has commented upon the decided influence which the writings of Thomas Hobbes appear to have had upon Tate at the time² when he undertook to reduce Shakespeare's great tragedy into his own History of King Lear. This influence shows up most clearly in the modifications made by Tate in the character of Edmund, who is the one figure of real literary interest in the adaptation.

There are indications that Tate had studied at least Hobbes's aesthetic ideas, perhaps following in the intellectual path of his friend and mentor Dryden, who was a friend and keen student of Hobbes. For example, Tate's use of Hobbesian aesthetic ideas has been observed by Clarence Thorpe: “Writing [in 1689] in praise of Cowley's Six Books of Plants, Nahum Tate uses the terms ‘wit,’ ‘fancy,’ and ‘judgment’ in a quite Hobbian manner.”³ Thorpe's analysis of Tate's description of Cowley as a creative writer leads him to the conclusion that Tate's critical approach “readily bring[s] to mind Hobbes's notion [s of wit, fancy and imagination].”⁴ But Tate had been using this approach long before his essay on Cowley: in the “Epistle Dedicatory” to The History of King Lear he writes of the play as he had found it:

Lear's real, and Edgar's pretended Madness have so much of extravagant Nature (I know not how else to express it) as cou'd never have started but from our Shakespear's Creating Fancy. The Images and Language are so odd and surprizing, and yet so agreeable and proper, that whilst we grant that none but Shakespear cou'd have form'd such Conceptions, Yet we are satisfied that they were the only Things in the World that ought to be said on those Occasions.

His use of the terms “extravagant Nature” (referring in this case to language which is outlandish yet appropriate to the circumstances in which it is spoken) and “creating Fancy” indicates a knowledge of Hobbes's discussions, in Leviathan and the Answer to D'Avenant's Preface to “Gondibert,” of the roles of fancy and judgment in poetical creation. In Leviathan, Hobbes had said that “In a good Poem, whether it be Epique, or Dramatique; as also in Sonnets, Epigrams, and other Pieces, both Judgement and Fancy are required; but the Fancy must be more eminent; because they please for the Extravagancy” (I,viii). Hobbes defines fancy as the inventive faculty: “He that hath [fancy] will be easily outfitted with similtudes that will please … by the variety of their invention” (I,viii). Thus Tate, in attributing to Shakespeare a fancy which is “creating” and owes nothing to memory, is following Hobbes, and he also followed Hobbes in praising Shakespeare's judgment. “If the defect of Discretion be apparent, how extravagant soever the Fancy be, the whole discourse will be taken for a signe of want of Wit,” Hobbes had said (I,viii), and Tate accordingly adds that Shakespeare's extravagance is “extravagant Nature” and his images “agreeable”—that is, with the madman's vision—and “proper” in the mouth of a madman. Certain parts of Shakespeare's King Lear thus qualify as art from a Restoration point of view, and Tate makes few alterations in the mad speeches.

If Hobbes's aesthetic ideas provided a standard by which Tate could judge certain passages of King Lear, the political ideas of the Malmesbury philosopher gave the adaptor a design for a modified characterization of the villain. Practically all of Shakespeare's characters have been simplified in The History of King Lear, to make them conform to recognizable stage patterns. Lear is a stage representation of the typical bewildered parent;⁵ Cordelia is the standard virtuous heroine of the Restoration theater, Edgar is her male counterpart; Gloster has become another edition of Lear—the grievously misled and abused father who is more sinned against than sinning; Kent epitomizes loyalty and rough virtue. While these “good” characters invariably act impulsively, Tate's villainous people, Gonerill, Regan, and Edmund, are contemplative: they scheme, write and forge letters, devise “projects,” plan rapes and murders, and resolve the most appropriate times for administering poison. They carouse at a masque while the good people are suffering in the storm. The impulse to categorize the characters and to place them in niches for easy identification by the audience is strongest of all in the portrayal of Edmund, who as the most villainous character in the play has been made to correspond in many details to the popular contemporary idea of the “Hobbist.”

As Louis Teeter and Samuel I. Mintz have shown, Hobbes's materialistic and deterministic ideas, as expressed chiefly in Leviathan, were widely read and widely misunderstood.⁶ Most misconstrued of all were his propositions concerning the “state of nature” and “liberty.”

The Right of Nature … is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of his own life, and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own judgment, and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.

By Liberty, is understood … the absence of external impediments: which impediments, may oft take away part of a man's power to do what he would; but cannot hinder him from using the power left him, according as his judgment, and reason shall dictate to him.⁷

These and other passages, read out of their context, were widely interpreted as announcing a programme for libertinism, irreligion, and free-thinking—a code for the Restoration rakes for whom Hobbes “erigeait le manuel de leur conduite, et redigeait d'avance les axiomes qu'ils allaient traduire en actions.”⁸ “Irreligion 'tis true in its practice hath been still the companion of every Age, but its open and publick defence seems the peculiar of this,” wrote Charles Wolseley in 1672, and went on to blame Hobbes: “'Tis but of late that men come to defend ill living and secure themselves against their own guilt, by an open defyance to all the great Maxims of Piety and Virtue … ; and most of the bad Principles of this Age are of no earlier a date than one very ill Book, are indeed but the spawn of the Leviathan.”⁹ Samuel Mintz, quoting Wolseley, shows that this tirade accurately reflects the general conception of Hobbes's ideas.¹⁰ The general idea of Hobbism was encouraged by the well-publicized career of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who professed to be a Hobbist, and who died in 1670 at the age of thirty-three after acquiring the reputation of the most notorious libertine of his time. Rochester's dying confession was as misleading as his lifetime's example, for he was reported to have said that “that absurd and foolish Philosophy, which the world so much admired, propagated by the late Mr. Hobbs, and others, had undone him.”¹¹

It was inevitable that the ideas—or what were thought to be the ideas—of Hobbes should eventually be given dramatic expression. The Restoration stage was often an extension of the real-life political and philosophical milieu and, as Louis Teeter observes, “the very notoriety of [Hobbes's] ideas made them valuable to the dramatists who wished to have their political villains up to date.”¹² The “modern” villain was Hobbes's “natural” man, as popularly conceived: cynical, treacherous, lustful and cruel, judging the rightness of a cause by its success, and recognizing no power beyond his own strength. Settle's Crimalhaz (The Express of Morocco, 1673), Dryden's Zempoalla (The Indian Queen, 1663), Maximin (Tyrannic Love, 1669) and Morat (Aureng-Zebe, 1675), and Otway's Don John (Don Carlos, 1675) are five of the major characters of Restoration tragedy whose outstanding quality is their disregard of any ethical criterion but success. Tate's Edmund could be modelled upon any or all of these characters, or simply made to conform to the popular idea of the Hobbist. There are, however, indications that Tate was as closely acquainted with the political and moral ideas expressed in Leviathan as with Hobbes's aesthetic theories. His modification of the character of Edmund reveals a desire to do more than simply make the Bastard vaguely Hobbist. Rather, he attempts, through the use of echoes of Hobbes's own words and of important criticisms and interpretations of those words, to create definite points of correspondence between Edmund and the “natural” man.

One of Tate's changes in the structure of King Lear consists of moving the famous soliloquy “Thou, Nature, art my goddess …,” from Act I, Scene ii to the very beginning of his version, a modification which seems to represent an attempt to capture the audience's immediate interest through the initial presentation of a well-known type. Not only does Edmund announce at once that he is a villain; he goes further than his Shakespearean counterpart to point out that he is a successful villain, and later announces that he means to be even more successful:

                                                                                                                        With success
I've practis'd yet upon their easie Natures

(I.i.14-15)

.....                                                                                What Saint so divine
That will successful Villany decline?

(I.i.298-299)

The last-quoted lines, especially, are designed to be immediately recognized as embodying the Hobbist idea that the success of an enterprise made that enterprise just. Hobbes's observation that “Good success is power,”¹³ had been taken so literally that Oxford University, in a Judgement and Decree of the University … passed in the Convocation, July 21, 1683, was to attribute to Hobbes and condemn as a “damnable doctrine” the proposition that “Possession and strength give a right to govern, and success in a cause or enterprise proclaims it to be just.”¹⁴

It was believed that the true Hobbist had no other motive but self-interest for undertaking any course of action. One of the wittiest attacks on Hobbes, John Eachard's Mr. Hobbs's State of Nature Consider'd, In a Dialogue between Philautus and Timothy (1672), is also an excellent source for estimating the extent to which narrow interpretations of Hobbes's ideas were current. A section of the dialogue is devoted to showing the attempts of Philautus (Hobbes) to defend the principle of “self-interest.”

PHILAUTUS.
I do not at all question but that thou wilt fully believe what I have taught thee to be true; namely, that the world is wholly dispos'd of, and guided by self-interest.
My main reason that self-interest is to be looked upon as the first Principle of Nature was, because I found that every man was desirous of what was good for him, and shun'd what was hurtful and evil: and this he did by a certain impulsion of Nature, no less than that whereby a stone moves downward.(15)

Tate's Edmund, a “natural” man, clearly proclaims that for him the choice between good and evil depends upon self-interest: “Be Honesty my Int'rest and I can / Be honest too” (I.i.297-298). “Interest” is, in fact, an important word in the adaptation: Burgundy seeks Cordelia's hand in order to consolidate an “alliance” with Lear's kingdom (I.i.), and Cordelia attributes his affection to “interest” (I.i.). On the other hand, Tate holds up Edgar, Kent, and Cordelia for admiration as examples of disinterested service to others.

At one of the high points of the adaptation, during an exchange of defiances before the duel in Act V, Edmund labels himself with a word not used in the original: “I / Was born a Libertine, and so I keep me” (V.i.18-19). To use such a word as “libertine” is to summarize the traits already exhibited to the audience. Tate's Edmund is a libertine not simply in the sense that he recognizes no moral restraint in his relations with women, but also in his character as a free-thinker. The word was strongly associated with the idea of Hobbism, for, as Mintz has shown,¹⁶ both of these meanings—rake and free-thinker—were combined after the Restoration in the attacks upon Hobbes, whose critics tried to show that the libertinism which manifested itself in dissolute living resulted directly from the libertinism of free-thought and denial of religion. This movement from free-thinking—the rejection of any deity but “Nature”—to dissolute living is, of course, the sequence of Edmund's moral career in both Shakespeare and Tate. It remained for Tate to mark Edmund as a topical villain by appending the label of Libertinism. This libertinism of Edmund's extends in Tate's version of King Lear to a love of luxury, which Edmund shares with Gonerill and Regan. His inclinations are clearly stated during an interval of the “masque,” the revels which the villains enjoy during Act III: “The Storm is in our louder Rev'lings drown'd. / Thus wou'd I reign cou'd I but mount a Throne” (III.ii.1-3). He thoroughly enjoys the sensual luxuries of a grotto where he makes love to Regan in Act IV. With leanings such as these, Edmund is associated with Gonerill, Regan, Cornwall, and the Gentleman-Usher (Shakespeare's Oswald metamorphosed for Restoration audiences) in a luxuriousness which, was thought to go hand-in-hand with a belief in Hobbes. In Leviathan, (I.xi), Hobbes explains that after the securing of power “there succeedeth a new desire; in some, of fame from new conquest; in others, of ease and sensual pleasure,” and there were critics who accused him of advocating the pursuit of such pleasure. One of these critics, Robert Sharrock, writing in 1673, outlined some “Principles of Baseness” which are practically a summary of the conduct of the villains in Tate's King Lear:

Fill yourselves with costly Wine and Oyntments and let none of you go without some part of his voluptuousnesse … ; oppress the poor righteous man, spare not the Widow and (which is perfect Hobbisme) Let your strength be the Law of Justice and what is feeble count it little worth. Lay wait for the Righteous man. … Examine him with Despitefulnesse … know his meeknesse … prove his Patience. Do not only make your scoffs at Vertue, but … destroy it and root it out and then fear not to venture upon any acts of Impiety or Insolence.¹⁷

When, in Tate's third act, Edmund plans to rape Cordelia, he proposes to seize her in “some desert place.” Cordelia has departed to search the heath for her father, and Edmund rejoices that her virtue is delivering her into his hands. Away from the palace, in a wild place, there will be no restraints. This is not to force a melodramatic plan for a rape into a philosophical context, nor to overlook the fact that Cordelia's subsequent capture on the heath near the hovel which shelters Edgar is designed to give the latter an opportunity to rescue her: Tate knew that his audience would recognize the appropriateness of the “natural” man's proposing to seize his victim in a “natural” setting, where all inhibitions and barriers set up by decorum, rank, and morality would be nullified. In this setting, Edmund proposes to prosecute “the amorous Fight” while the thunder drowns Cordelia's cries “like Drums in Battle.” The images here are suited to Edmund's aggressive temperament and, taken with what he proposes to do, and where, they are also reminiscent of the Hobbesian law: “The condition of mere nature … is a condition of war.”¹⁸

Tate's Edmund has one more trait which is carried over from Shakespeare, is shared with Gonerill and Regan, and which may, when contrasted with a marked feature of Albany's character, be seen as consciously “Hobbist.” As in the original, he has designs upon the lives of Lear and Cordelia, and though in Tate's version the most systematic malice toward the King comes from Gonerill, Edmund still advises Albany to execute Lear. His reasons are, like Gonerill's, political. Lear alive would always be an inducement to rebellion among the commons. However, in the adaptation their vindictiveness is made to contrast sharply with Albany's pronouncement (added by Tate) at the opening of Act V, scene iv: “It is enough to have Conquer'd, Cruelty / Shou'd ne're survive the Fight.” To Albany the battle is over, and with its cessation the passions which it aroused should abate. As in Shakespeare (V.iii.42-46), he appears to have in mind some plan for releasing Lear and Cordelia. In Tate's version, Albany has not appeared since Act I, scene i, where he was a neutral character. He is now to play a large part in the unravelling which leads up to the happy ending, and it would appear that Tate expended some thought upon the problem of instantly stamping Albany at his reappearance as a “good” or at least a hopeful character. Albany's opening lines are more than vaguely humanitarian; they are meant to be taken as a pointed denial of the strongly-deprecated Hobbesian doctrine of a perpetual state of war, a state which “consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is suficiently known.”¹⁹ This “will to contend” is short-lived in Albany, and all the more conspicuously present in Edmund and Gonerill. Indeed, it is a prominent feature of Edmund's character both in Shakespeare and in Tate.

Tate's addition of Hobbesian dress to a Shakespearean character seems, therefore, to go beyond a mere catching at certain popular notions of Hobbes's doctrines. It suggests rather that Tate was familiar with the letter of Hobbes's works as well as with the general spirit of distrust and fear in which Hobbes's ideas were held. Tate saw in Shakespeare's Edmund an adumbration—if not an actual type—of the Hobbesian “natural” man²⁰ and took pains to make the Shakespearean villain more exactly Hobbesian than he found him to be. It is paradoxical—though not untypical of the work of the Restoration dramatists—that while Tate's treatment of Edmund grows out of a close familiarity with Hobbes's works, the result tends towards a perpetuation of the misconceptions about the philosopher's ideas.

Notes

1. Margareta Braun has deplored many of Tate's alterations in “‘This is Not Lear.’ Die Leargestalt in der Tateschen Fassung,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XVIX (1963), pp. 30-50; Christopher Spencer has carefully appraised the adaptation to show that Tate's changes are often “skillful and canny” (“A Word for Tate's Lear,” Studies in English Literature, III (Spring 1963), 241-252.

2. 1680. The History of King Lear was the first of Tate's three Shakespearean adaptations: he went on to new-model Richard II and Coriolanus. The adaptation of Richard II was undertaken just after the version of Lear, as Tate says in the Prefatory Epistle attached to Richard II: “I fell upon the new-modelling of this Tragedy (as I had just before done on the History of King Lear). …” Richard II was first produced on 11 December 1680 (Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama 1660-1700 [Cambridge, 1952], p. 434), and The History of King Lear shortly afterwards. Tate's Lear was entered in the Term Catalogues under May 1681.

3. The Aesthetic Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Ann Arbor, 1940), pp. 280-281. Tate wrote an epistle “To the Reader” which was affixed to the 1689 edition of the Six Books of Plants.

4. Aesthetic Theory, p. 281.

5. Cf. Christopher Spencer, SEL, III (1963), 245.

6. Cf. Louis Teeter, “The Dramatic Use of Hobbes's Political Ideas,” E.L.H., III (1936), 140-169; and Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1962), Ch. VII.

7. Leviathan, I.xiv.

8. Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (Paris, 1899), III, 34.

9. The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief (London, 1672), sigs. A3-4.

10. The Hunting of Leviathan, p. 135.

11. Robert Parsons, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Rt. Honorable John Earl of Rochester (Oxford, 1680), p. 26.

12. Teeter, E.L.H., III (1936), 168.

13. Leviathan, I.x.

14. Quoted by Teeter, E.L.H., III (1936), 148.

15. English Reprints Series, ed. Peter Ure (Liverpool, 1958), pp. 89-90.

16. The Hunting of Leviathan, p. 134.

17. R[obert] S[harrock], De Finibus Virtutes Christianae (Oxford, 1673), pp. 195-196.

18. Leviathan, I.xv.

19. Leviathan, I.xiii.

20. John F. Danby has argued that Hobbes originally “took over Edmund and made him his basic pattern [for the natural man]”: cf. Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London, 1949), pp. 38-43, 47.