Shakespeare and the Ocular Proof
[In the following essay, Aronson surveys Shakespeare's plays and concludes that "the choice between the eye and the mind, between the ocular proof and spiritual awareness which Shakespeare's characters are compelled to make, is of the very essence of his tragic vision."]
I
If there is any psychological validity in Blake's dictum—"As a man is, so he sees"—and if it is true not only of the ordinary man, for instance the reader of Shakespeare's plays and the spectator in the theater, but also of the characters he created, then it suggests a criterion by which to judge the thoughts, speeches, and actions of men and women on the stage. For "as a man sees, so he is" seems the natural corollary to Blake's dictum. A man's sense-perceptions, his responsive contact with the outside world through his eyes, will determine his "outlook" on the world and its inhabitants, which in turn, will give rise to forms of behavior open to moral judgment. This dependence of being on seeing will color man's knowledge, not only of others, but of himself as well. Man "is" not merely how he sees, but what he sees, as well as when he sees, and, not least of all, because he sees what he thinks he sees.
The spectator in the theater (and even more so the reader of plays) may, as a rule, be supposed to possess a greater degree of "insight" than the actor on the stage, involved as the latter is in intensely emotive situations. The onlooker, in his twofold function as passive recipient, on the one hand, yet carried along by the intensities of the action on the stage, on the other, and quite ready to identify himself with those characters who "see" rather than "are seen"—this sympathetic witness of so frequently distorted vision and short-sighted violence need not necessarily be aware of the archetypal nature of the conflict between "sight" and "insight" arising from it. He may refer what he sees on the stage merely to the personal tortuosities of the characters concerned. Though the metaphor may seem to him psychologically significant, it may not convey that generalized truth which an archetypal pattern of experience is meant to imply.
The purpose of this paper, however, is to show how, with the growing maturity of his art, Shakespeare lifted the conflict and the tension out of the realm of the merely personal and idiosyncratic. He, as it were, universalized it by emphasizing the ever-repeated, legendary, indeed mythical nature of man's distorted vision that leads from spiritual to actual blindness. The archetype of evil is not necessarily expressed in terms of this or that "character", the outcast, the alien, the envious, the greedy, the ambitious, the voluptuous, not in Iago, in Lady Macbeth, in Edmund, not even in Caliban—all of them being undoubtedly projections of what the artist apprehended as evil in human nature. The archetypal essence of evil is so often conveyed through the metaphor of blindness itself that the many varieties of evil that men are capable of may be said to be not "as you are", but "as you see"—or rather as you believe you see. Spiritual blindness—being the result of distorted vision—induced either voluntarily or by compulsion, is one of Shakespeare's most recurrent themes. In the drama of the human soul, it leads from the conventional "lover's eye" of his early comedies, the magic of Helena's "triple eye" in All's Well, to Miranda's regained innocence of vision in The Tempest. It includes a large diversity of blindnesses each one the result of the same archetypal inability to come to terms with visual reality—Othello's pitiable lack of awareness in the face of the "ocular proof, Macbeth's self-blinding ambition, Lear's and Gloucester's initial hubris when confronted by the spectacle of life—nasty, brutish, and short as well as largely incomprehensible.
The evil that Shakespeare expresses through this metaphor lies in men's belief that what they see is a "true" image of life, even when what they see is manifestly impossible. Accepting the most absurd ocular proof at its face-value, they choose the illusory reality of a fool's paradise where "nothing is but what is not". This is why Othello calls Iago "honest", Gloucester trusts Edmund rather than Edgar, Lear banishes Cordelia, and Macbeth relies on the Witches' ambiguous prophecies. By applying a distorted vision to others they also misjudge themselves. Theirs is a surrender to the destructive elements residing in man's unconscious, a return to some primordial darkness of which blindness, in Shakespeare's plays, is the most adequate symbol. Redemption, in the form of insight, if and when it comes, as a rule arrives too late. The price to be paid for re-established vision which enables you to come to terms with reality as it is rather than as it "looks" is always death. The main difference between the actor on the stage and the spectator in the theater seems to be that the former is aware of the evil and therefore "suffers" his blindness, while the latter is content with the knowledge that what he sees on the stage is merely a form of make-believe and therefore requires no commitment on his part. The spectator's prerogative, one may assume, is to be blind without having to suffer the agonies of redemption.
The universe of Shakespeare's early plays takes for granted the visual existence of beauty aesthetically perceivable to the lover only. This alone gives shape and meaning to life. Following the conventional pattern of Renaissance love poetry, Shakespeare makes his youthful heroes and heroines love "through the eye". Whatever obstacles there may be are the result of mistaken identities, external circumstances, or the whims and moods of uncomprehending and frequently unsympathetic male adults (on more than one occasion afflicted with myopic vision), fathers, uncles, brothers, and such like. This is true of Orlando no less than of Romeo, of Hero no less than of Juliet. The rule of the eye over the mind in these plays is constantly stressed as a prerequisite to the achievement of human happiness. To see beauty where and when it exists and to be seen by beauty provides man with a gratifying stimulus to living which no book-learning can supply. The contrast established between the two kinds of truth resulting either from studying books (through the mind) or from looking at beauty (through the eyes) is significant: for it introduces the archetype, the evil of blindness, into a universe where man's proudest attribute is his eyesight, a universe of eternal daylight where happiness is granted to those alone who "keep their eyes open":
Why! al! delights are vain, ut that most vain,
Which with pain purchas'd doth inherit pain:
As, painfully to pore upon a book
To seek the light of truth: while truth the
while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look:
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile:
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Study me how to please the eye indeed,
By fixing it upon a fairer eye,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed,
And giving him light that it was blinded by.
(Love's Labour's Lost I. i. 72)
The ability to see beauty and to recognise it for what it is is love's only test of truth. One who knows "love's truth", then, has learned to see. Berowne, the most articulate spokesman for this simplified doctrine of "ocular proof, goes as far as this kind of argument will lead him. Love, he says,
Adds a precious seeing to the eye;
A lover's eye will gaze an eagle blind—
(IV. iii. 334)
and, consistent to the very end, calls his eye "the window of my heart", thereby implying, as so many legends, beliefs, and myths did before him, that the organ of the soul is indeed the eye and that the lover looking into the eye of his beloved will perceive the innermost recesses of her being.
As long as love exists in the largely illusory daylight world of Shakespeare's comedies, "seeing" is liable to lead to partial if not distorted "truth". The risk that the lovers take when gazing into each other's eyes is that of neglecting the presence of moral evil among them. Whenever such evil makes its appearance, the spectator is as a rule taken into confidence. The characters on the stage remain oblivious of its threatening existence. Whether, for instance, Don John's intentions, in Much Ado, are due to motiveless or motivated malignity, the possible consequence of scorned ambition or of a general hatred of mankind, he certainly distracts the vision of one of these thoughtless lovers. We are not told how often and how deep Claudio gazed into Hero's eyes. We may have our doubts as to whether he discovered—or was even capable of discovering—her soul within them. In effect Don John wins an easy victory over Claudio's eyes. Calumny is unquestioningly taken for truth, on the basis of what other people have overheard or "seen" and, at that, indistinctly, at night, and from quite some distance. Hero must first die an artificial, an "untrue" death to be resurrected again so that Claudio may learn to see beyond appearances. For the first time, and in a context of potential tragedy, Shakespeare makes us face the conflict and the resulting tension: sight must be replaced by insight, and imaginative awareness must serve as a necessary substitute for the ocular proof if truth is to be established. For this is what Shakespeare tells us through the mouth of Friar Francis: the only truth worth knowing is that which is reached through the creative effort of the conscious mind. The Friar, like most holy men in Shakespeare, is merely a deus ex machina. Yet he, at the very last moment, teaches Claudio how not to stumble with his eyes wide open. In a way, he teaches him to look into the mirror of his own eyes, and to discover there what we in the theater knew all along, Hero's innocence:
When he shall hear she died upon his words,
Th' idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every organ of her life,
Shall come apparelled in more precious habit,
More moving delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul,
Than when she lived indeed.
(IV. i.225)
II
In Shakespeare's tragic universe of formless ambiguities and indistinct shapes, man inevitably and consistently is made to face the most questionable reality of all, his own soul. This is no longer the daylight universe of lovers looking for the soul in their "lady's eyes". Man's increasing isolation in an unfriendly universe makes him search for self-knowledge and the meaning of his identity beyond his emotional involvements. That this identity appears to him as if seen in a distorting mirror, in the form of a shadow, his alter ego or his double, is quite in the nature of things. For human isolation and the suffering it entails prevent clear vision. Shakespeare, as early as in Richard II, defines that kind of blindness which concerns man most of all because it refers to his loss of identity in a moment of anguish:
Each substance of a grief hath twenty
shadows,
Which shows like grief itself, but is not so.
For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
Like perspectives, which, rightly, gaz'd upon,
Show nothing but confusion.…
'Tis with false sorrow's eye,
Which, for things true, weeps things
imaginary.
(II. ii. 14)
Richard himself is a victim of this confusion between substance and shadow. He realizes the fundamental distinction between what is and what is seen in a way that no lover in Shakespeare's early comedies would have been capable of. Thus Richard breaks the looking glass in which he discovered his own shadow, the unsubstantial reflection of his own eyes gazing back at him, and knowing at last that the "substance" is else-where:
The shadow of my sorrow? ha! let's see:—
'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of lament
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul:
There lies the substance.
(IV. i. 294)
Lear's looking glass is the Fool. Searching for his own identity, as Richard II had done before him, he asks him:
Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, or his discernings
Are lethargied—Ha! Waking? 'tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
To which the Fool replies,
"Lear's shadow."
(I. iv. 249)
Macbeth is his own Fool. His looking glass is his own soul. Looking into it he discovers the unsubstantial nature of his vaulting ambition. His realization that the "walking shadow" and the "poor player" are projections of his own inner hollowness is the only kind of self-knowledge that is available to him. Does he dare face that knowledge? It signifies as little to him as did the looking glass to Richard or the Fool's caustic remark to Lear. It is broken, fragmentary knowledge "signifying nothing". None of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes exhibit that kind of spiritual courage which is required when you stand face to face with your own shadow, your eyes open without flinching.
Yet self-knowledge is what they are after. And if the eye is indeed the "window of the heart", your own reflection in the eye of someone else may reveal your own meaning to you. Perhaps Blake's dictum should not have been "As a man is, so he sees", but "As a man is, so he sees himself in or through the eyes of others. The argument is, of course, fallacious. For if a man's eyesight is deficient and therefore indistinct, there is little likelihood that the image of himself reflected in the eyes of others will help him towards self-knowledge. It is no accident, therefore, that Shakespeare puts this kind of argument into the mouths of two characters whose purity of motive is open to question. The first, Achilles, in Troilus and Cressida, is shown to be a self-centered and pompous fool, who adds his own interpretation to the meaning of a book (generally assumed to be Plato) that Ulysses is reading. According to Ulysses, Plato meant to say that man, whether rich or poor in material wealth or wisdom,
Cannot make boast to have that which he has;
Nor feels not what he owns, but by reflection;
As when his virtues shining upon others,
Heat them, and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.
(III. iii. 98)
Achilles readily agrees. What the writer of the book here said about virtue, is, he thinks, even more applicable to the beauty of a face and, no doubt, of the spirit as well:
The beauty that is borne here in the face,
The bearer knows not, but commends itself,
To others' eyes, nor doth the eye itself,
That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself
Not going from itself: but eye to eye oppos'd,
Salutes each other with each other's form.
For speculation turns not to itself,
Till it hath travell'd, and is mirrored there
Where it may see itself.
(III. iii. 103)
Is Achilles, who otherwise shows little sense throughout the play, quoting Socrates?1 Possibly he is merely repeating a commonplace in Elizabethan psychology which offered a kind of short-cut to self-knowledge. Accordingly, all you have to do is to look for the "shadow" without rather than within. Cassius who may be said to possess all the political shrewdness that Achilles lacks—though similarly self-centered and unaware of the spiritual implications of his actions—asks Brutus to use him, his friend, as a mirror wherein he may discover his true self:
And it is very much to be lamented, Brutus,
That you have not such mirror as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eyes,
That you might see your shadow.…
And since you know you cannot see yourself
As well as by reflection, I, your glass,
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of.
(Julius Caesar I. ii. 54)
The spiritual analogy implied in both passages, however, is morally questionable. For those that draw the parallel between eye and soul are hardly qualified to do so. To neglect the ironic implications of these two passages is to miss the ambiguity of the situation: for though Shakespeare makes Achilles and Cassius philosophize about the eye as a "mirror of the soul", there is little enough soul in either of them. Ulysses is not fooled by Achilles. But Brutus having looked into Cassius' eyes, discovers his shadow there. And his
state of man,
Like to a little kingdom suffers then,
The nature of an insurrection.
(II. i. 67)
There are other, subtler ways in which Shakespeare's heroes become aware of the existence of their shadow. They may, especially in times of spiritual anguish, project it outside themselves, by turning their defective spiritual eyesight into visual self-deception. Their blindness acquires, as it were, corporal shape: out of the dimness of their vision arise forms of non-being, "false" shadows yet visible to their eye, compelling them to assume the existence of the physically unsubstantial, an assumption liable to annihilate any rationally valid distinction between the real and the unreal, the visible and invisible. The shadow-image of your own soul, in the words of Achilles and Cassius, should reflect your own true self. Yet man can bear a limited vision of truth only: instead of leading to self-knowledge, the "shadow" comes in the terrifying shape that man's unconscious creates. The confrontation of shadow and eye is of little help: the dividing line between the spiritual and the physical disappears, and the hero is left wondering on which side of the line reality lies.
Brutus' realization of defeat at the end of the play is in part due to the "weakness of mine eyes" (IV. iii. 275) which showed him the shadow of his own soul in the form of a "monstrous apparition". Though his eyes may falter at first, they adjust themselves soon enough to his "evil spirit". What he sees is, indeed, a form of non-being, yet he never doubts the "reality" of its existence: "Why, I will see thee at Philippi then" (IV. iii. 285), he says, knowing at last that there is no escape from your own shadow, however unsubstantial the nightmare-image of your self may be.
Hamlet is no less willing, indeed eager, to hold converse with his father's Ghost. Once before, in a conversation with Horatio, he had seen his father in his "mind's eye" (I. ii. 185). Now he stands face to face with the shadow of his own mind. He, as it were, receives an ocular proof of the impossible, because the non-existing, and perceives the invisible. His friend Horatio, who first doubts the reality of the Ghost, as indeed any sensible man would do who knows how defective and indistinct eyesight can be, later on accepts the apparition but only in so far as his senses, and especially his sense of sight, have "approved" it:
I might not this believe
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of mine own eyes.
(I. i. 56)
That Horatio should at all be able to "see" the Ghost reveals his integrity of mind. "Blood and judgement" are so well "commingled" in his nature that he is capable of seeing beyond himself, realizing, in his own limited way, that the time is out of joint and that much insight will be required to set it right. Gertrude lacks that integrity and, therefore, is "blind" to anything that is not corporal:
Alas, how is't with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy,
And with the incorporal air do hold
discourse?
(III. iv. 115)
she asks Hamlet when he meets his father's Ghost for the second time and in her presence.
Banquo is a worthy cousin to Horatio. He questions the Witches, assuming immediately that their essential nature is different from
that indeed
Which outwardly you show.
(I. iii. 54)
In addition, he doubts the reliability of his and Macbeth's eyesight, concluding that they must have been mistaken and what they thought they had seen was the result of their having eaten
Of the insane root
That takes the reason prisoner.
(I. iii. 85)
Macbeth's attitude is necessarily different. He not only "sees" the Witches, the floating dagger, and Banquo's Ghost, but recognizes them as belonging to him, variations on the theme of his own shadow—in a way, the looking glass in which he perceives his own soul. He also realizes, and more clearly and overwhelmingly than any other character in Shakespeare's plays, that the organ with which one perceives one's own shadow is not the eye, but the imagination. The apparition of the dagger evokes from Macbeth some of the most revealing remarks about the phenomenon of "double vision" to which intense suffering exposes man at a moment of spiritual crisis:
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind … ?
Mine eyes are made the fools of th' other
senses
Or else worth all the rest.…
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes.
(II. i. 36)
The world of shadows which Macbeth inhabits is made fairly explicit by constant references to the ambiguity of the very concept of reality. Macbeth's agony consists in his having to face the shadow of his own inner self without being equipped with the emotional reserves that would make such a confrontation in any way meaningful. He therefore dismisses Banquo's Ghost:
Hence, horrible shadow!
Unreal mockery, hence!
(III. iv. 106)
not realizing that this self-created shadow is merely one out of many: for the shadows multiply in his soul in proportion to the ever-thickening darkness around him. When he requests the Witches, on his second visit to them, to reveal his future to him, they even perform a shadow-show for him:
Show his eyes, and grieve his heart:
Come like shadows, so depart.
(IV. i. 110)
That his wife should consistently refuse to grasp the meaning of all these various shadows for Macbeth is in keeping with her obsession with what she believes to be "real" and therefore accessible to sight. All the rest is foolishness or, at best, self-deception:
'Tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil.…
(II. ii. 54)
she exclaims in answer to Macbeth's compulsive fear to look again at dead Duncan. On a later occasion when faced by the shadow of Banquo which his own mind had created, he answers his wife's question, "Are you a man?", with the doubtful affirmation:
Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that
Which might appal the devil.
(III. iv. 59)
Macbeth is quite ready to look at the evil without, perceivable to the eye as part of "objective" reality; yet he wilfully blinds himself to the existence of the evil within, claiming to be "bold" when he should have been human.
Lady Macbeth, fully realizing her power over her husband's mind, provides him with a kind of distorting mirror. At the end of the first Act, Macbeth believes that what her eyes see must be the truth. And since the ocular proof of Duncan's death is all that matters, the "sightless substances" of which she is as aware as Macbeth pertain to the "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts", not to the reality of human life. In her own simplified way, she constantly tries to correct her husband's faulty vision:
When all's done
You look but on a stool.
III. iv. 66)
When the shadow disappears, the mockery gone, the imaginary looking glass broken, Macbeth is "a man again". The "substance" of his manhood, however, we know, will never be regained. The real mockery is still to come.
III
In a patriarchal society—the one that Shakespeare represented on the stage—in which masculine forms of conduct are taken for granted and the emotional and intellectual habitus of both men and women is determined by a predominantly masculine code of behavior, women are objects of choice rather than choosers. When Shakespeare shows some of them as free agents, choosing their mate without any external compulsions, in a love-relationship or in marriage, their eyesight is liable to lead them astray. By committing themselves "through the eye" only, they are "blinded" by inadequate vision leading to faulty judgment. The involvement being colored by violent erotic impulses, they act against reason and common sense. Inhibitions that had formerly been freely accepted as guides towards honorable living and on which such conceptions as chastity, virginity, fidelity in marriage, or respectable widow-hood were founded, are thrown overboard. When "compulsive ardour gives the charge" and "reason panders will", desire becomes a slave to the sense of sight and the blind violence of lust rules supreme.
This does not mean to say that woman's "eye" is incapable of self-analysis and self-knowledge. In Shakespeare's mature comedies, the women—Portia, Rosalind, Viola—are indeed the ones who choose. And though we may be surprised at the object of their choice, we can hardly accuse them of faulty eyesight. Yet, whenever Shakespeare portrays women in the frailty of their flesh, they are usually shown to be aware of their transgression of a code of conduct which made conscious masculine choice the very basis upon which their civilization was built. The eye which in ancient mythology always symbolized the light of consciousness is here the tempter. Olivia, in Twelfth Night, is the first to hint at this peculiarly feminine "frailty":
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth's perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes.…
I do I know not what; and fear to find
Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind.
(I. v. 314)
The plague that Olivia catches is that of blindness. Yet she knows that she is acting against the principles of conduct that she had set herself in accordance with the admittedly rather far-fetched dictates of the social group of which she is a part. Her implied self-mockeiry lacks the intensity of later plays. One is out of sympathy with Olivia because she constantly fools herself, or rather lets herself be deceived by her eyes, willingly and knowingly. Eventually she even achieves happiness—in terms of an imaginary ocular proof. Her choice is founded on the inability of her eyes to distinguish between a girl dressed in boy's clothes and the girl's very real brother. It is happiness experienced through indistinct vision.
One is similarly out of sympathy with Gertrude. The fact that we hardly ever see her through her own eyes but through the eyes of others, her former husband and her son, undoubtedly determines our attitude towards her. Her "frailty", Hamlet implies, is that of visual lust. It is this fascination "through the eye" that leads to the paralysis of judgment. The more uncontrolled the lust, the greater the blindness that follows:
Have you eyes?
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,
And batten on this moor? Ha! have you eyes?
… Sense, sure, you have,
Else could you not have motion: but sure, that
sense
Is apoplex'd: for madness would not err,
Nor sense to ecstasy was ne'er so thrall'd
But it reserv'd some quantity of choice,
To serve in such a difference. What devil
was't
That thus hath cozen'd you at hoodman-blind?
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope.
(III. iv. 65)
Gertrude responds to her son's arguments with surprising eagerness. Hamlet opens his mother's eyes and lets her "see" her soul. What she sees there is a reflection of her disordered appetite:
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.
(HI. iv. 89)
Cressida's story is a variation on the same theme. Her intrinsic shallowness, which she seems to share with Gertrude, is the only excuse for her conduct. She had previously made her choice. Pandaras had helped her by "opening" her eyes to Troilus' presence: "Why, have you any discretions? Have you any eyes? do you know what a man is?" (I. ii. 209). When Cressida shows herself to be "frail" and, incidentally, fully realizes the implications of what she is about to do, she blames her eyes for having misdirected her mind:
Troilus farewell; one eye yet looks on thee;
But with my heart, the other eye, doth see;
Ah, poor our sex: this fault in us I find:
The error of our eye, directs our mind.
What error leads, must err: O then conclude,
Minds sway'd by eyes, are full of turpitude.
(V. ii. 104)
Self-mockery has turned into anguish, deficient eye-sight into moral evil. Both Hamlet and Troilus perceive the same "turpitude" in the eyes of those they love. For Hamlet this discovery is part of a larger recognition, that time is out of joint and visual lust has taken over, destroying the precarious balance between blood and judgment.
Shakespeare's treatment of the metaphor of distorted vision acquires in his tragedies an archetypal character. Men and women alike are born into an alien universe which neither their mind nor their senses can fully explore. Knowledge through bodily senses is swayed by "affections"—by which the Elizabethans meant appetites, desires, and lusts—which prevent men from perceiving the true nature and meaning of the world they inhabit. What we "see" is always open to a variety of interpretations. Nothing ever is that it seems to be. It is no accident that Shakespeare puts the following lines into the mouth of Antony:
Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapour sometime, like a bear, or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock,
A fork'd mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air.…
That which is now a horse, even with a
thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
(Antony and Cleopatra IV. xii. 2)
What is true of the physical universe applies in an even greater measure to human relationships. If what is corporal in man is at all times subject to uncontrollable emotions, how much greater must the intensity of spiritual surrender be when man finds himself ruled by those same "appetites". The eye as the "window of the heart" is forever liable to reflect a distorted image of people and things. The moral evil resulting from such a lack of insight, Shakespeare implies, does not necessarily reside in "nature". Neither the body nor the mind is a priori evil. It is "man-made" and can be explained as originating in a false sense of security ("I see, therefore I am"), an inflated self-confidence that puts all trust in the physical ability to perceive, to measure, to calculate, to establish an ocular proof of "truth" which in effect is not open to such visual measurements at all. The refusal to face a truth that ought to be confronted in terms of imaginative awareness only is the undoing of the tragic hero. This is what Tiresias meant when he warned Oedipus of a false clear-sightedness:
Have you eyes,
And do not see your own damnation? Eyes,
And cannot see what company you keep?
… Those now clear-seeing eyes
Shall then be darkened.…
He that came seeing, blind shall he go.2
Greek philosophy as well as mythology provides us with an instance of archetypal polarity implied in the eye-metaphor as used by Shakespeare. Being a deficient instrument of sight, the eye may take the shadow for the substance and thereby falsify the meaning of reality. On the other hand, blindness, that is the physical inability to see, may force man to turn the eye inward and reveal there a wisdom which is beyond the reach of sight. This is why Plato warns men not to introduce "in the act of thought sight or any other sense"3 if he wishes to attain knowledge which includes self-knowledge. His Phaedo expresses a subtle contempt for the body, a kind of ironic aloofness which, across the centuries, contrasts in a strange and revealing manner with Shakespeare's frantically violent out-bursts against visual lusts in his darkest plays. The body, explains Socrates,
fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and, as men say, takes away from us the power of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body?4
Plato's imaginary heaven can be found only when man succeeds in breaking through "the exterior limit" of his sense-perceptions, divests himself of his body; thus "he would see a world beyond", which is a place of "the true light and the true earth". Plato, however, expresses his doubts whether "the nature of man could sustain the sight".5 He admits that only too often, instead of this voluntary rejection of the body as an instrument of perception, "the soul too is then dragged … into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused."6
Aristotle supplies the finishing touch to the polarity inherent in the eye-metaphor. The separation of body from soul seems to him an artificial withdrawal from reality. Man's unending desire to explore this alien universe with whatever limited instruments nature may have endowed him is the main challenge. These instruments used by men in search of the meaning of what is most alien, his own soul, are viewed differently by Aristotle:
All by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything we prefer seeing to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.7
One of the many differences that our sense of sight should bring to light is that between appearance and reality, seeming and being, between what we think we see and what is. And though doubts may arise in our mind as to whether anything ever is at all or merely appears to be because we see it in a certain way, Shakespeare's most tragic heroes, Othello, Macbeth, and Lear, are victims of the same visual deception: they take the shadow for the substance. They stumble when they see.
If Aristotle were right, all that would be required to achieve self-knowledge, is some ocular proof providing us with knowledge that gives pleasure and wisdom. Othello demands such a visual experiment. He wants to "see" in order to set his mind at rest. That Iago manipulates the show, prepares the setting for the experiment, and deceives Othello, is relevant only in so far as he exploits Othello's "blindness" to the full. Othello, who was only too eager to believe what his eyes showed him, was ready to let himself be fooled. Did he not see Desdemona's handkerchief in Cassio's hand? "I'll see before I doubt, when I doubt, prove" (III. iii. 190). An absolute Aristotelian proof, however, is hard to come by. Othello, unconsciously following Brabantio's advice "Look to her, Moor, have a quick eye to see" (I. iii. 292), and accepting Iago's warning,
Look to your wife; observe her well with
Cassio;
Wear your eye thus, not jealous but
secure—
(III. iii. 197)
demands the "ocular proof of his wife's infidelity. The Aristotelian "delight" in the sense of sight is here carried to its ultimate absurdity:
Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on,
Behold her topp'd? …
It is impossible you shall see this,
Were they as prime as goats, as hot as
monkeys,
As salt as wolves, in pride; and fools as
gross
As ignorance made drunk.…
(III. iii. 395-405)
This is the proof. Let imagination do the rest. As for Desdemona, Iago has only to remind Othello of her conduct towards her father,
She that so young could give out such a
seeming,
To seal her father's eye up, close as oak,
(III. iii. 213)
to evoke in Othello's mind Brabantio's own words when he called Desdemona's choice a preposterous error of nature. For, "Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense" (I. iii. 63), she surely could have chosen a more suitable husband from among the young noblemen of Venice. Is this not an "ocular proof' of Desdemona's blindness, thinks Othello, "And yet, how nature erring from itself …" (III. iii. 231)—and leaves the sentence unfinished. On the other hand, Desdemona must have "seen" whom she was marrying, whatever Brabantio or Iago may say, "For she had eyes, and chose me" (III. iii. 193). Desdemona's "insight", however, is that of a simple and unschooled soul. Her way of "apprehending" Othello was, one is tempted to say, Platonic rather than Aristotelian. "I saw Othello's visage in his mind" (I. iii. 253), and this, in all the simplicity of her soul, determined her choice. The "error" does not lie in nature, but in Othello's own blindness. What is at stake is not only his love for Desdemona but the integrity of his own self. Othello's disintegration before his own "shadow", so forcefully projected by Iago on the screen of his imagination, turns substance into a mockery and the Aristotelian "delight" in the sense of sight into unbearable anguish. When his eyes are finally "opened", Desdemona is dead, an innocent victim of the ocular proof. Blake's dictum, as applied to Othello, should read, "As a man sees, so he destroys". Othello looked into the distorting mirror held up by Iago for him to see himself. What he saw was the chaos within. Only by breaking the mirror could he free himself of the nightmarevision. The return from the shadow to the substance is a return from life to death. Othello's conscious mind is never really involved. For had it been, he would have "seen through" Iago's machinations and corrected his vision accordingly.
Macbeth, on the other hand, is the most conscious of Shakespeare's "blind" heroes: his eyes tell him the truth, his imagination elaborates it, his mind interprets what eye and imagination so vividly perceive. Macbeth is only momentarily deceived by his wife's vision of ultimate success. Both before and after the murder of Duncan he prays for darkness. He admits to himself (and to his wife) that he is afraid of facing the ocular proof ("Look on't again I dare not"), because he knows that, in the words of Macduff, it might
destroy your sight
With a new Gorgon.
(II. iii. 77)
The darkness which accompanies us throughout the play is indeed an embodiment of evil. Macbeth's mind remains frighteningly lucid, analytical, Aristotelian. His prayer before the murder—
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see—
(I. iv. 52)
remains unfulfilled. One cannot impose blindness if the mind's eye compels one to see. The murder having been commited, Macbeth looks at his hands and exclaims, "This is a sorry sight" (II. ii. 20), while a few lines later he realizes with a shock of recognition that, even away from Duncan's bedroom, the ocular proof will always be with him, constantly reminding him of what his eyes have seen: "What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes" (II. ii. 58). What the eye "fears to see", the murder committed with those hands which are the true instruments of darkness, attracts and hypnotizes Macbeth beyond human endurance. Before the murder he could still visualize the universal effects of shedding Duncan's innocent blood. He knew then that even if his own eye could "wink" at his hand, other eyes would be open and then
Pity, like a naked new-born babe …
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye
That tears shall drown the wind.
(I. vii. 24)
And if the winds are "drowned" by tears, what will the eyes see but a world of shadows where nothing is real any more, and the "tender eye of pitiful day", Helios-Hyperion, the all-knowning and the all-seeing sungod, will be darkened by the "bloody and invisible hand" of man. For truly, "Never shall sun that morrow see" (I. v. 60). All this Macbeth knows, and this knowledge "opens his eyes" in ever-increasing measure, until life itself, which had given him ocular proof of hell, is "but a walking shadow" seen by the light of a "brief candle" which, like a mirror in Macbeth's consciousness, only shows the absurdity of all human effort at "seeing" and at giving meaning to what "the eye fears to see". The archetype of evil Shakespeare is concerned with in his tragedies is, indeed, lack of insight and imaginative apprehension. The greater evil, however, is when you "see" and pray for the "blanket of the dark" to hide your soul behind a protective wall of blindness. Lady Macbeth, who suffers from no hallucinations, sees no ghosts, and contemptuously refers to Macbeth's "sights" as created by "the eye of childhood", symbolizes the ultimate evil:
Doctor: You see, her eyes are open.
Gentlewoman: Ay, but her sense is shut.
(V. i. 24)
She, like Banquo's Ghost, has "no sepculation" in her eyes. Not only the substance, even the shadow eludes her.
IV
To see is to perceive evil. Not to see is to be at the mercy of evil. The one who sees too well but not wisely, and the one who sees not enough are equally doomed to blindness. Innocence and guilt are similarly punishable before the gods. To commit evil in ignorance of it is no less a crime than to know evil and to do it. Gloucester's crime is ignorance of evil: he committed it in the unawareness of lust. He "saw" well enough where he was going, but did not associate visual lust and all that it implies with moral evil. Edgar, undoubtedly with his father in mind, paraphrases his father's fundamental "innocence". For Gloucester's lust was not guilt-ridden. He "served the lust of my mistress" heart, and did the act of darkness with her"; he "slept in the contriving of lust, and wak'd to do it" (III. iv. 87). The moral evil of adultery is passed over in silence. If Gertrude and Cressida are condemned for their "frailty", Gloucester is unrepentant and, if anything, proud of his achievements. Anyway, "There was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged" (I. i. 23). The gods think otherwise. At least that is what Edgar declares when confronting Edmund at the end of the play:
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.
(V. iii. 170)
Gloucester's visual lust, however, is only one aspect of his spiritual blindness. By light-heartedly ignoring the meaning of Lear's choice at the beginning of the play and by being blind to the presence of evil, he fails to see what the spectator in the theater has grasped during the very first conversation between him and Edmund. His distroted vision belongs to the same symbolic pattern as Lear's madness, the eye of the one reflecting the mind of the other, so that Gloucester's actual blindness appears merely as a climax of a process that started before the play began. The ironical implications of Cornwall's exclaiming, when putting out Gloucester's second eye, "Lest it see more, prevent it" (III. vii. 82), are not lost on us. Gloucester's eyes have "seen" little enough before his blindness. What moral mischief, corruption and evil does Cornwall wish to prevent his one remaining eye from seeing? What ocular proof should be kept secret from Gloucester? Yet his false sense of security based on his faulty eyesight will be replaced by a new and more precious "commodity". Othello and Macbeth only began seeing—if indeed they ever did—with their inner eye after they had "stumbled" into disaster. Gloucester's gift of insight comes to him like the agonizing birth-pangs of consciousness itself:
I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw: for oft 'tis seen,
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities.
(IV. i. 18)
His ultimate moral realization of the evil implied in his former innocence comes shortly after. Blindness shows the way from seeing to feeling, that is, from ignorance to knowledge. The pattern that Shakespeare follows is once more the archetypal process from the ocular proof and the evil associated with it, to the moral good that results from insight. It is his not-seeing that redeems him of unconscious evil. Gloucester seems to echo Oe-dipus' words
What should I do with eyes
Where all is ugliness?
Yet Gloucester goes a step further when he describes "the superfluous and lustdieted man", the innocently evil man, that is himself, as one
That will not see
Because he doth not feel.
(IV. i. 68)
Neither Othello nor Macbeth could arrive at such an ultimate conclusion. For what Gloucester compares in this passage is the meaninglessness of the ocular proof, on the one hand, and the significance of imaginative awareness, which he calls "feeling", on the other. Such an awareness, however, requires more than usual moral integrity: for the truth that your imagination lets you see smells of mortality. It may conceivably be an even deeper evil than the one that the ocular proof revealed to you. When blindness and insanity meet on the heath, their conversation develops this contrast between seeing and feeling still further. Lear's madness is, in a manner of speaking, in advance of Gloucester's blindness. His sarcasm, when speaking of the "scurvy politician", is indeed an "insight" which, ironically enough, only madness could have supplied:
Lear: … Yet you see how this world goes.
Gloucester: I see it feelingly.
Lear: What, art mad? A man may see how
this world goes with no eyes.
Look with thine ears.…
Get thee glass-eyes
And, like a scurvy politician, seem
To see the things thou dost not.
(IV. vi. 151 ff.)
The reference to glass-eyes carries the archetypal metaphor still further. For they will substitute one distortion for another. They are, indeed, the ultimate symbol of the deceptive nature of all knowledge through ocular proof. They stand for the antithetical core hidden in all human experience when based on the senses rather than on spiritual awareness—symbolized in Othello by the contrast between Iago's seeming honesty and actual dishonesty, between Desdemona's apparent guilt and real innocence, and in Macbeth between his "hands" as instruments of action and his "eyes" as a means of becoming aware of the consequences of his action. We also remember Gloucester's mocking reference to spectacles at the beginning of the play:
The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself. Let's see: come: if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.
(I. ii. 32)
Gloucester's eyes do not help him to see beyond the "quality of nothing", to distinguish between seeming and being. Not spectacles but blindness makes him see "feelingly", just as Cordelia's love and humility enable Lear to see her as "a soul in bliss". What indeed Lear "sees" when he rediscovers the true Cordelia cannot be judged by the criteria established by the sense of sight as applied to the ocular proof. Evidently, Lear's recognition of Cordelia in terms of mutual suffering and compassion does not require the help of mirrors or spectacles. Man's sense of sight, Shakespeare constantly implies in King Lear, may, at best, become aware of the forms of beauty only: beauty's spiritual essence can be apprehended by the mind alone. It is the organ of this apprehension that we call insight.
The choice between the eye and the mind, between the ocular proof and spiritual awareness which Shakespeare's characters are compelled to make, is of the very essence of his tragic vision. Choosing wrongly, for the wrong reason, and deliberately, leads to evil, while an unconscious surrender to evil leads to suffering. Yet, within the total context of Shakespeare's work, compassion and love, allied to beauty, have the last word. The ultimate choice is always between Caliban's sense-perceptions (for, "As Caliban is, so he sees"), his visual lust, and Miranda's innocence of mind. In Sonnet 114 Shakespeare speaks of "love's alchemy", an alchemy of seeing. If what we see is found to be "poison", it is merely an additional variation on the theme of knowledge and the way we come by it. Beauty, by "flattering" the eye, "poisons" the understanding. Deformity appears as perfection. Caliban seems an Ariel, evil is no longer recognized as such:
Or whether doth my mind, being crown'd with
you,
Drink up the monarch's plague, this flattery?
Or whether shall I say, mine eye saith true,And that your love taught it this alchemy,
To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble,
Creating every bad a perfect best,
As fast as objects to his beams assemble?
O, 'tis the first: 'tis flattery in my seeing,
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up:
Mine eye well knows what with his gust is
'greeing,
And to his palate doth prepare the cup:
If it be poison'd, 'tis the lesser sin
That mine eye loves it and doth first
begin.
Neither Ferdinand nor Miranda could have spoken these lines: for this sonnet takes for granted a degree of sophistication that neither of them possesses. Yet, "love's alchemy" is with them, and even if—in the ignorance of their seeing—they are not conscious of the poison, Prospero is. It is he, then, who prevents the poison from infecting Miranda's mind. When she "sees" beauty in the shape of Ferdinand for the first time, her eye is "flattered" by the ocular proof of perfection. Prospero chides Miranda for judging by sight only. In a few lines he disposes of what has troubled the minds of many a Shakesperian hero before; the bewildering sameness of beauty perceived through the eye and evil perceived through the mind. Gifted with deeper insight, he demolishes once and for all the false sense of security associated with the ocular proof in Shakespeare's previous plays:
Thou think'st there is no more such shapes as
he,
Having seen but him and Caliban : foolish
wench!
To th' most of men this is a Caliban,
And they to him are angels.
(I. ii. 475)
Prospero knows that innocence supporting evil, though unconsciously, becomes a partner in crime. His daughter's naive acceptance of a world of evil when it comes into her sight must have filled him (as certainly it did Shakespeare) with a sense of frustration. Never having met mankind "in the raw" and, therefore, never having received the ocular proof of good and evil beyond the confines of the island, she exclaims in the face of an incomprehensible reality:
O, Wonder,
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new
world,
That has such people in't!
(V. i. 181)
To which Prospero, rather drily, replies, "'Tis new to thee."
Can Prospero help us to reach an adequate response to Miranda's "flattery in her seeing"? His position is not without ambiguities: having discarded his "Art" he will now return to the ordinary life of men from which he had been exiled for so long a time. He will return to a world of evil, where seeming is taken for being, and the ocular proof alone is taken for evidence of truth. The story he told his daughter at the beginning of the play, we remember, is not only characterized by evil done to him by others in the past, but it also tells us of his own lack of insight and his blindness to evil. It is the archetypal story of the fair and the foul brother, the latter judging reality by the ocular proof that his eyes so amply supply, the former cultivating his blindness in all "innocence", unable to grasp the extent of evil which his eyes must have shown him so plainly. Prospero's exile on the island frees him from the ambiguities of the past: it is devoted to the training of consciousness, the disciplining of his mind, and the art of controlling nature. His "magic" is that of consciousness making him "see" and "know" beyond the limitations of the ocular proof. His training in self-discipline is really a training in the art of seeing and of responding to the light of knowledge unaffected by motivations born of "appetite". Prospero, at the end of the play, is a giver of light—Hyperion—who by for-giving others teaches them to see, to discriminate with their eye and their mind, reason no longer "pandering" will, but the one in complete harmony with the other.8
The victory of consciousness over the chaos created by man's appetities and lusts, that is to say, the victory of awareness over ocular proof, seems to be at the very core of The Tempest. Yet the act of seeing without the pitfalls of self-deception may give but little delight to Prospero. The insight he acquired on the island does not lead to the redemption of those whose success in life was achieved by evil means, such as his brother Antonio. All the ambiguities that result from too strong a reliance on the life of the senses remain intact. For Prospero himself may be taken to be a victim of his own Art, a fact which—if it proves anything at all—points at the intrinsic absurdity of the human condition. For what Prospero "sees" when he confronts the world of his evil-thinking and evil-doing brother and his associates is neither brave nor new. It is the archetypal world of beautiful shapes and evil intentions. They neither are "insubstantial" nor "such stuff as dreams are made on". They are of Caliban's family even if externally polished and using the language of civilized life. Prospero's forgiveness means little or nothing to them.
Will he be able to face the "Caliban within" having failed to give light to that "thing of darkness"? The contemporary spectator may well ask himself the question when he reaches the end of The Tempest and looks for the substance beyond the shadow in the looking-glass. He may well ask himself what good Prospero's disciplined consciousness may do to him if all that it reveals to him is a civilization of the worldly-wise, those who look at evil with their eyes open and whose natural habitat is the dark chaos of hell rather than the clear, all-seeing light of the mind. What does Hyperion do in the company of these petty evil-doers who "see" what they want to see—the ocular proof of Prospero's weakness—and are blind to his strength, which lies in his virtue of compassion, "who do not see because they do not feel"?
The contemporary spectator, having experienced an anguish and an exile the frightfulness of which far surpasses anything Shakespeare could have known, may be excused if he attempts to refer Prospero's predicament to his own. For Prospero's tale translated into a contemporary idiom appears to be an attempt at interpreting the human mind in terms of its power to contemplate the senseless. The following may not be Prospero's voice, but it speaks in his spirit:
No one will live his fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it.9
The myth of the absurd is, to a considerable extent, the myth of the ocular proof. Oedipus, blind, anguished, and exiled, is the archetype. His suffering stands for man's struggle out of the false security of the ocular proof towards the life-creating light of consciousness, man stumbling "when he saw" and gaining insight by defeating the urges of the unconscious. It is the absurdity of his suffering, the gradually dawning recognition that "there is no sun without shadow" and that "it is essential to know the night" that relates Oedipus to Prospero no less than to the contemporary spectator. By dispensing with his "Art" when confronting reality in the shape of Miranda's "brave new world", Prospero accepts nature, human nature, and his own awareness of it, as his only guides. Knowing of the absurdity of all effort and aspiration that is merely human and therefore limited by the ocular proof that guides them, Prospero, a "blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end",10 joins those whose evil he had forgiven in an attempt at "nobler reason" on their return-journey to civilization.
Ferdinand and Miranda will accompany him on his voyage. Their innocent presence will keep that precarious balance between the absurd and the beautiful from toppling. It will help Prospero, if not to forget, at least to circumvent his awareness of imminent chaos. The two young lovers, ignorant of the distinction between shadow and substance, will be nature's ocular proof of love's alchemy: a return to the primeval myth of manking before their eyes began to "see"—and knew the meaning of evil.
Notes
1 The reference here may be to the First Alcibiades (132, 133). In Jowett's translation: "If the eye is to see itself, it must look at the eye, and at that part of the eye where sight which is the virtue of the eye resides." For a further discussion of this theme in Troilus and Cressida see L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), p. 70.
2King Oedipus, translated by E. F. Watling (Penguin Books, 1947).
3 Plato, Phaedo, Jowett's translation (Pocket Books, Inc., 1950), p. 79.
4Phaedo, p. 80.
5Phaedo, p. 148.
6Phaedo, p. 102. See also
7Metaphysics, Book A, I, 980a, 21.
8 Modern depth-psychology has a good deal to say about the sun-symbolism with reference to consciousness. Myths make use of this primeval image of the eye giving and receiving light, seeing as well as seen, discriminating as well as being an object of discrimination. See Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (New York: The Bollingen Library, 1954), II, 311 ff.
9 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 40.
10 Camus, p. 90.
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