[In the following essay, Heilman examines the contrast in Shakespeare's plays between the implicit acknowledgment that a larger social and political order imposes obligations and restrictions on the individual and the sympathetic presentation of assertive individuals disregarding or defying that larger order.]

Political subject matter is everywhere in Shakespeare's tragedies and histories. One can detect political implications even in some comedies. I could imagine dealing with Love's Labor's Lost under the rubric "The Politics of Young Love," and with The Taming of the Shrew as "The Politics of Matrimony." Both touch on the problems of a polity that comes into being syncretically and makes its constituents face diversities that could beget disruptive turmoil. Lest this seem, however, an over-handsome formulation of issues in a community too restricted to be a political entity, I will treat the two plays not as exemplars but as mild analogies of the political. Love's Labor's Lost and The Taming go comfortably together because they are complementary treatments of the matrimonial relationship. While participation in it rests on passion, some passions need, if not to be reduced to passivity, at least to be curbed or realigned. In Katherine the energy that has gone into an anti-social self-assertiveness—in our day Kate would go for any public disruptive tactics that would draw a television camera to tickle her ego—undergoes a redirection that makes it more adjusted to cooperation. Here, a male figure sees what is needed. In Love's Labor's Lost, a female figure, seconded by three others, sees what is needed. The four young scholars have suddenly fallen out of love with their learning and in love with four French charmers, and they want to marry them on the spot. But the charmers impose a year's delay, and what is more, a year of tasks that in spirit resemble the monastic triennium from which the lovers have apostatized (or defected, to use the political metaphor). Now what Berowne and his fellow-lovers have in common with Kate the shrew is the desire to impose emotion on others, to have feeling force action, to have hysteria make history. All learn the same lesson: a limiting of the will, a curbing of the ego—necessities for a bearable and durable life for all the members of the community. What the characters have experienced is not unlike a lesson in politics.

So Shakespeare has a strong sense of the claim of the larger order upon the individual. But he has no less strong a sense—and we may not notice this as readily—of the individual's tendency to assert himself in forgetfulness, disturbance, or even defiance of the order. More than that, Shakespeare's imagination tends to make the best case that can be made for the individual who wants to do it his own way. Such case-making leads readers at some times to come up with greater sympathy for the self-indulgent or self-asserting than the text as a whole warrants. Surely readers of Love's Labor's Lost tend to do two things: one, to applaud the quarter of scholars when they flee study hall for love, and two, not to notice that the girls really send the hasty lads back to a kind of study hall. And how fashionable it has become to suppose that Kate is not a shrew at all but a superior person who is victimized by a surly papa and a naughty little sister, who is driven to tantrums as tactics of the undervalued, and whose gestures of submission to Petruchio are a brighter woman's ironic triumph over a lout. Since the text can give a small push or two to such readings, these comedies can lead us in to the ways in which Shakespeare, in the politics of his art, can habitually give sympathetic understanding to individuals whose political direction is not entirely exemplary.

I want to widen out the context a little, first by a brief allusion to the spiritual journeys of Father John Dunne of the University of Notre Dame. Father Dunne's quest for understanding, if I do not misunderstand him, involves an imaginative entry into the writings—myths, autobiographies, confessions—about and by figures outside Christianity, such as Buddha and Mohammed, and his full experiencing of "the way, the truth, and the light" as it is presented in those documents. Though the journey implies a return, the spirit that returns may not be the same, for the journey also implies an openness to the illuminations that may be encountered in these alternative visions of spiritual reality. Father Dunne accepts these disparate accounts as having a true role to play for the seeker grounded in another faith. My next allusion is anti-climactic, for I drop from the spiritual to the professorial. My own essay on comedy, The Ways of the World, is a report on the wide applicability of Anthony Burgess's definition of comedy: "acceptance of the world, of the fundamental disparateness of all the elements of the world." Acceptance is best defined negatively: it avoids the rejective styles of abuse, satire, and radical reform. Unless I am mistaken, there is an analogy between the theological journey which accepts the value of experience in alien domains, and the comic method which accepts the diversity of human conduct—i.e., that disparateness which we see as such because of our sense of the norms essential to order.

These different manifestations of openness to diversity, of the acceptance of disparateness, provide the largest possible context for Shakespeare's habit—and habit I take it to be—of seeing what can be said for virtually all characters, even those of whom it might be said that nothing could be said for them. Likewise he imagines what they can say for themselves, and how they can put their best foot forward, even a better foot than they might seem to have by their foot-locker. He can imagine the steadfastness with which they look at that better foot as if they stood solely upon it, and, as they thus give themselves the best possible standing, become plausible enough to stir some fellow-feeling in us. He almost makes cases for them. For instance, when I first gazed in awe at the exploding universe of Shakespeare interpretation, one standard view of Iago was that he was a career army man who had been deprived of preferment expected and due. His lines on this in I.i are credible enough to be convincing, even with professors whom we might expect to admire Cassio's theoretical training and hence to reject Iago's contempt for what he calls "prattle without practice." Such interpreters of Iago would presumably find Coleridge's "motiveless malignity" a rather fanciful imposition upon the positive facts alleged by Iago. To the positivist mind Iago has to have a police-department motive, and unjust failure of promotion seems quite impressive. Well, the point is only that, in imagining character, Shakespeare almost automatically includes the self-image by which men and women put the best possible light on the actions that they take.

One might say, "But of course, self-justification," and thus see only a commonplace phenomenon of personality. Shakespeare tends, however, not so much to let the self-justification become purely that as to allow the possibility that it may contain some justice. Shakespeare is not very much on the lookout for Tartufferie. For him, the case-maker may have something of a case. What is more, the case-maker may manage a very subtle style. He may not so much use words that glamorize a role as enact a role that has in it something honorable or admirable and thus deflect attention, perhaps even his own, from all that he is up to. To adopt or even seek a comforting or reassuring role may in itself reflect a moral or quasi-moral subtlety in the personality. Edmund, for instance, is less gross than Goneril or Regan; he craves a philosophic buttress for his scheme to get on, whereas their aggressive self-interest is more blunt. It hardly seeks a doctrinal base.

Since a tragic hero is more complex than a melodramatic protagonist, whether virtuous or villainous, it is to be expected that tragic heroes go beyond the single role, carrying at least a two-suiter of motives. Oedipus, for instance, is both the crudely passionate aggressor and the principled and responsible detector of evil aggressions. The Shakespearean tragic hero almost always instinctively seeks another role than that of tragic hero. Tragic heroism imposes an ultimate burden or strain that humanity, it seems clear, prefers to evade. The final phase of tragic experience is the recognition of what one has been up to—the anagnorisis, in the traditional term adopted for this more specialized meaning, or self-knowledge (that very familiar phrase at which one hesitates a little because for all of us it is more easily said than done and is therefore in danger of sounding glib). We do not shrink from the hubristic aggression—the violence which is the actional symbol of inner arrogance—nearly as much as we resist the acknowledgment of what we have done. The acknowledgment is the final surrender of, or at least a major blow to, the amour propre that wants to escape judgment by self and others. Pride may go on after a fall. We resist, postpone, or translate into waffle-language the statement hardest for us to make: "I did wrong"—the statement that rounds out the tragic role (or tragic rhythm, as Francis Fergusson called it, defining its phases as purpose—passion—perception).

I have said that the Shakespearean tragic hero instinctively seeks another role than that of tragic hero. As my friend Leonard Dean put it some years ago, the tragic hero has to live in a tragedy, but he tries as long as he can to live in a melodrama. The role he craves is that of melodramatic hero. Tragedy is the realm of good-and-bad; melodrama the realm of good-or-bad. As melodramatic hero one can push out of sight one's misdoing by claiming either as much good for oneself as one can or as much bad for one's adversaries as one can. Thus he can be a unified person, not a disconcerting mixture of well-intentioned man and hubristic wrongdoer.

The Shakespearean imagination, I have said, has a strong grasp of humanity's case-making instinct—either in the rhetorical form in which words give the best possible coloring to deeds, or in the dramatic form in which a man's assumption of a creditable role defines him as favorably as possible. Shakespeare's awareness of the human passion to pare down or modulate self-confrontation has a strong influence on the major tragedies, that is, on the characterization in them. It is not that Shakespeare doubts the emergence of moral enlightenment or recovery, but that he has a keen eye for the human resistance to paying the moral price. I have only lately come to see that this perception of his is a regular element in his tragic imagination, and hence to believe that it affords a way of approaching some of the problems that the tragedies appear to offer. The major heroes exhibit different combinations of the capacity for self-seeing and of that resistance to it which I am designating by the somewhat short-hand term of "case-making."

II

Lear is the best rounded of the tragic heroes—best rounded in the sense that his powerful drive for selfexculpation is most fully balanced by his eventual coming to understand what he has done. On the one hand he seeks a self-protective melodramatic role: the role of innocent victim of Goneril and Regan, and also of righteous judge of them—really a double self-saving. As early as Act I, on the other hand, he is able to say of Cordelia, briefly and fleetingly, "I did her wrong." It then takes him hundreds of lines of violent censure of Goneril and Regan—in this he enacts a role of implicit self-exoneration—before he comes slowly around to the series of lines in Act V in which he can acknowledge that he must beg forgiveness of Cordelia. Begging forgiveness is the ultimate confessional and humbling act.

Othello does not come around nearly so fully. This may reflect a time-situation almost at the polar opposite of that in Lear. Lear's great error is a sudden action that opens the play, and hence Lear has maximum time to come to understanding. Othello spends more than half a play working up to his great error; he does not kill Desdemona until halfway through Act V, so that a minimum of time is left for his understanding what he has done. Shakespeare may be thinking that in so short a time no man can really come around adequately from the self-justification which is his instinctive first stage after the discovery of disaster. This hypothesis is consistent with the distribution, among speakers and things spoken, of the barely 250 lines from Desdemona's "second death" to final curtain. It takes 110 lines for Othello simply to realize the truth; Emilia dominates these with her attacks on Iago and Othello, and most of what Othello says is dull reiteration of Desdemona's alleged misconduct. When Othello at last sees that he has killed an innocent woman, there are just under 140 lines left in the final scene. Othello speaks not quite half of these—a meager space in which to articulate complex alterations in attitude or movements of personality. A few of his lines have to do with the facts, a few directly express grief for Desdemona, a few more attack Iago. In still more lines Othello calls himself names, refers sardonically to himself, seeks a weapon, accuses himself of a drop from past heroism to present pusillanimity, sees Desdemona as sending him to hell at the Day of Doom, and calls for theatrical punishments upon himself. These points, which occupy about two-thirds of Othello's lines, have rather the air of self-censure by one who has been tricked into a bad mistake. In one short speech he insists that he did "all in honor," and finally there is the famous death speech which mostly calls attention to his political and personal merits. He serves as his own character witness. It is true, of course, that he sentences himself to death, yet it is almost as if it were a penalty for a tactical or strategic mistake. At the same time he continues to think well of his honor. What he never gets said is that what his honor amounted to was arrogant and ruthless egotism, and that he committed a terrible wrong. In him, that is, we see the vigorous action of Shakespeare's sense of the ego's persistent reaching out for the formula that will put the individual in the best possible light.

While Lear and Othello both act, one in literal haste and the other in moral haste, Hamlet is the most famous resister of haste in all literature. While Lear and Othello both come to know, as their natures make possible, what they have done, Hamlet wants to know what he is doing before he does it. These differences go along with one interesting ground of resemblance. Othello does not claim outright to be an innocent man, but he does present himself as free of the wrong emotions that would make him guilty of first-degree murder. Lear inferentially claims to be innocent as long as he can, that is, to be an innocent victim of ungrateful daughters. Hamlet passionately desires to remain innocent. Perhaps he is nagged by doubts of his innocence; such doubts would help account for the denunciatory and self-righteous elements in his style (these elements are also strong in the rhetoric of Hamlet senior, and in Lear's language as long as he clings to his role of wronged parent). Be that as it may, Hamlet's longing to feel innocent is his form of the pursuit of self-esteem which Shakespeare regularly detects in his tragic characters. Other heroes act wrongly and then clutch at innocence; Hamlet so clings to innocence that he hardly acts, even to effect a retribution that he makes seem virtually judicial. He does not bring himself to it; rather he brings it about, and in a way, I suggest, that might be devised by wily innocence plotting unawares. He carries out a series of antics—outcroppings, in part, of inner pressures—that generate enormous tensions; tensions generate Claudius' plotting of a "final solution"; the final solution generates chaotic brawling; in this, deaths are generated less by ordered intention than by scrambled contention and hot unscheduled lunges. Retributory homicide is accomplished without the guilt of planned murder, retaliation without loss of innocence. Besides, the plotting of a final solution makes larger and more solid the guilt of Claudius. The more substantial the guilt of the wrong-doer, the more substantial the innocence of the agent of right.

Hamlet's pursuit of a self-image is unique among these heroes. Lear's and Othello's ways of claiming a sympathetic esteem embody more familiar patterns—Lear's "I don't deserve such unfair treatment," and Othello's "I am better than I look." In Macbeth we find a different situation and, in the erring hero, a different style of salvaging an honorableness that can be a bulwark against denigration by self and others. … Since it does not contain a peccavi, this section loses the advantage of a self-correction, which makes the voyeur in everyman feel like a moralist.) Macbeth's way of thinking well of himself, and of encouraging others to think well of himself, differs from the methods of the other tragic heroes: theirs are rhetorical, his is dramatic. They verbalize their cases; Macbeth enacts a role that can elicit fellow-feeling, applause, or admiration. It is not that Macbeth plays tricks to mislead moral pursuers; rather he instinctively follows a course that in its way is creditable enough to deflect attention from what is less creditable. The role that Macbeth creates and enacts is that of a strenuous, come-what-may, fear-quelling fighter against hostile no-mercy forces who hem him in and must kill him. (There is also something of this in Richard III.) He is so completely in the role of hemmed-in hero that his mind is wholly empty of any awareness of why he is hemmed in. Shakespeare focusses all attention on Macbeth agonistes, the heroic warrior against odds. Macbeth shows no fear when he calls on the witches and sees their apparitions; when they give him apparently bad news, he does not fold but takes fierce, indeed savage, action. He must go on, despite his wife's illness and death; despite thought of how wretched life is now when he receives only "deep" curses and what he sardonically calls "mouth-honour"; despite a desperate feeling of emptiness; and despite news of thanes fleeing him and hostile armies approaching. "I'll fight till from my bones my flesh be hack'd" (V.iii.32). Birnam Wood moves toward him—the miracle which has to seal his fate, but still he can cry, "Blow, wind! come, wrack! / At least we'll die with harness on our back" (V.v.52). In one small sense he can even see himself as a victim, yet a victim who will fight rather than merely suffer: "They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, / But, bearlike, I must fight the course" (V.vii.1-2). It's what "they" have done, without any glimpse of what he has done. He will not "play the Roman fool, and die / On mine own sword" (V.viii.1-2). When he meets Macduff and finds that he was born by Caesarean section—a pretty tricky fulfillment of the prophecy of death by one not "of woman born"—he backs off only a moment from the fight that the witches' Apparition has predicted will be fatal for him. Then he comes back: "I will not yield, … / Yet I will try the last … / … Lay on, Macduff, / And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'" (V.viii.27-34).

We may say that Shakespeare knows that a man who does evil may be brave, assumes the palpableness of the evil, and concentrates on the more interesting problem of dramatizing the bravery. Or since Macbeth's way of meeting his troubles is an enactment of a hero's role, and since the hero in him has stolen the stage from the villain in him, we might say that Shakespeare lets Macbeth get away with it. However this may be, it is clear that in Macbeth Shakespeare is more than usually fascinated by the devices that men use—men of punitive, revengeful, or ambitious violence—use to think well of themselves or present themselves as worthy of respect or sympathy from observers. The devices are not conscious tricks; rather they represent an instinctive working of emotions. Shakespeare seems to fall into so thorough an imaginative participation in these self-extolling or self-creating devices that his characterizations can take on some ambiguity. Some commentators write as if, in the beleaguered latter part of his life, Macbeth had transcended his past and were now only a figure of heroic valor. Richard II so manipulates the divine right that is his theoretical strength, exploits the pathos of his practical situation, and converts himself into a poetical contemplator, as to elicit from some readers a fond sympathy and almost an ignoring of the royal incapacity, the combination of weakness and willfulness that invites a takeover by any aspirant stronger on talent than scruple. Again, is Timon a truly generous soul who is a victim of ingratitude and whose only mistake is an excess of a virtue, or does he err much more seriously by unconsciously believing that friendship can be bought and by mistaking his rash payments for pure generosity? If it is the latter, Timon is practicing what we may call timony—that is, a secular simony, the purchase of good offices. Yet to some observers he seems truly generous, a pathetic victim of panhandlers. As is his wont, Shakespeare has imagined the best that can be said for him, and thus made him ambiguous.

III

Now let me try to knit up or together several lines of thought that may seem tangled. The emerging fabric should have constant implications for political life, though for the time I leave them implicit rather than make them explicit. I started by suggesting an analogy among a kind of theological imagination, a theory of comedy as the acceptance of diversity, and the Shakespearean habit of finding the best that can be said for characters whose flaws are quite evident. My Shakespeare examples, it is true, have been mostly in the realm of tragedy, though I did start out with Love's Labor's Lost and The Taming of the Shrew. My dominant use of the tragedies reveals no desire to push a paradox—that one can use the spirit of comedy as a perspective for discussing tragedy; rather it enables us to see a common element in tragedy and comedy. That tragedy and comedy are related is an old truism; but people who utter it may speak with solemn vagueness rather than with useful precision. Let me try a concrete formulation of an attitude shared by tragedy and comedy: neither envisages the eradication of evil but rather acknowledges the inevitable imperfection of things, especially the imperfection of human conduct (and, as we have seen, Shakespeare's acceptance includes his extremely active understanding of what may be said for imperfect beings, or what these erring creatures may say for themselves). Clearly I am attributing to both forms a solid reality sense, which I need hardly note is an essential foundation of political life. Now the risk in such an attribution, indispensable as the reality sense is, is that it may seem to invest both generic forms with an anything-goes or whatever-is-is-right or even a wrong-always-triumphs version of despair. But this conclusion, though we must not ignore it, does not really follow. To have a sense of the un-regenerate as a constant is not to deny the influence of the regenerative; to be aware of the fallen nature of man—I beg the fact or the nature of the fall—is not to declare that man never can be, or is, upright. In tragedy, what survives anti-moral conduct is moral awareness; it may have to struggle to regain its power in the human soul or in the human community, but it is never replaced by a general yielding to the non-moral that for a time seems to call the shots. In comedy, what survives is the social order; the essential processes are the embrace of better values by the more capable, the restoration of good sense in those who have acted foolishly, and the general application of amiable tolerance in place of retaliatory and reformist pressure. But these survivals that are characteristic of the two genres and that are essential to the enduring of a free society make no guarantee that there will not be further out-breaks of destructive arrogance or disruptive folly. Neither form ever says, "This will never do" or "We will change all that"; what each form says is, "This is the way it is," one with an "alas," the other with a smile.

Tragedy, we may say, invokes a sense of honor; comedy, a sense of humor. A sense of honor means the acceptance of imperatives that one may not ignore or violate; a sense of humor means an acceptance of disparates rather than an application of conformitarian or egalitarian imperatives. Both honor and humor involve risks. The code of honor of course runs the risk that honor may mean contentious self-magnification rather than self-subduing obligation. The humorous acceptance of disparates raises the nice problem of the borderline beyond which acceptance may seem to go much too far. Two Shakespeare comedies approach the borderline problem rather adventurously, coming up with different solutions that cause difficulties to many readers. One is the extraordinary grace shown to Angelo in Measure for Measure; the other is the rejection of Falstaff in 2 Henry IV. Each play makes a decision that many readers would not make.

In Measure for Measure Angelo, an acting duke committed to reform, is so eager to purify Vienna that he invokes the death penalty against Claudio because Claudio got his fiancée Juliet pregnant. When Claudio's sister Isabella begs for his life, Angelo feels so strong a sexual desire for her that he promises to free Claudio if she will sleep with him. Isabella is horrified, but later agrees to this as part of another plot: substituted for her on the nocturnal assignation is Mariana, a girl whom Angelo had once jilted for dowry-failure. But after this sexual pay-off for his promised mercy, Angelo orders Claudio killed anyway. Happily the Duke whom Angelo is temporarily replacing is a full-time deux ex machina masterminding defensive actions: Claudio is saved, Angelo's vices are publicly revealed, and he is sentenced to death. But Mariana and Isabella both plead for him, and he and Mariana become one of three couples that constitute a final rich matrimonial harvest. The problem is that Angelo has been guilty of judicial harshness, lust, blackmail, and treachery, but by way of the penalty that seems required he has no more than a brief fright. In effect, the play accepts the actions of Angelo as if they were not vices but follies like pretentiousness or boastfulness. One way of reflecting our difficulty with this situation is calling this play a "dark comedy." As a matter of fact, the way things are handled is very much like that in the modern form which we regularly call "black comedy": its hallmark is the acceptance of the unacceptable. The fact that we have to come to terms with is that comedy always has within it the seed of black comedy; acceptance can easily drift into over-acceptance. There is no wholly objective line that bounds the realm of the acceptable. Measure for Measure is useful in its focusing attention on this problematic indeterminateness.

In Angelo Shakespeare seems to go as far as he can to see what can be said for a character of rather ample questionableness. In effect, we are still to feel the character to be "one of us" if his motives, however unlovely, fail to result in the injuries that he is willing to inflict on others. In Falstaff, on the other hand, Shakespeare seems uniquely to depart from the principle that we have seen him frequently use: here, as it were, he seeks out what can be said against a character who is so widespread a favorite that anything short of adulation seems almost indecent. Yet I doubt that Shakespeare is really doing a turnabout. It depends partly on where we start. Even if we think that Shakespeare thinks of Falstaff as primarily a clown and entertainer, still Falstaff gets a pretty large slice of the military pie, and then adopts a style there, and in his relations with creditors, that makes it difficult to think of him only as an innocuous funny man. But suppose Shakespeare, as I suspect he does, thinks of Falstaff as primarily a sponger, a cheat, and a racketeer whom we would hate to have to rely on in any situation at all. Then we can see Shakespeare as indeed applying his standard method of finding everything that can be said for him: Shakespeare has given him credit for so much amiable jesting, easy wit, parodic skill, and general showmanship that he has charmed most observers out of their usual sense of what is socio-politically admissible. For the new Henry V, whose youth has been rather clouded by his crony-hood, to continue an intimacy with Falstaff would be a ruinous symbolic act; this should be clear to sentimental Americans if they will bother to recall their immense and often savage displeasure at any peccadilloes in any White House attaché or habitué. Shakespeare accepts what the King has to do, even at the cost of the King's looking unfaithful and ungrateful, and he also accepts the fact that Henry V may do what he has to do not very gracefully or winningly. In Falstaff Shakespeare accepts the fact that irresponsibility and rascality need not be repulsive but can be allied with vast seductive charm; he also accepts the fact that there is a point at which charm can no longer bail out irresponsibility and rascality. The situation is analogous to that in tragedy: all that wins our admiration and sympathy for tragic heroes cannot save them from the outcomes implicit in their deeds. Whoever objects to the discarding of Falstaff by Henry V should also object to the fact that Macbeth is done in by a coalition of more conventional political types, and that suicide deprives the world of so glamorous a charmer as Othello. And if we seek a consistency within Shakespeare's comic practice that condemns Falstaff but rescues Angelo, it may be this: that Falstaff is essentially corrupt, but because he is great fun we ignore his corruption as long as it is not politically significant; while Angelo, who of course is no fun at all, undertakes evil acts which represent, instead of an essential corruption, the faulty resistance to temptation which marks all humanity.

IV

Looking at the new Henry V, Shakespeare sees that a king may have to be royal rather than loyal. Not that being royal means per se being disloyal, but that the royal imperative is to be loyal to community rather than crony, or, in another idiom, to polis rather than pals (incidentally the reverse of the moral formula enunciated by E. M. Forster some years ago, presumably for political commoners rather than political leaders). Looking at royalty—that is, political leadership—in numerous plays, Shakespeare can use, with equal ease, either a tragic or a comic perspective. And in both modes he sees reality as a mixed, ambiguous affair: the catastrophes of tragedy do not mean a total loss of sustaining values, nor the Act V satisfactions of comedy an elimination of the dissatisfied and the disruptive. On the one hand, the sufferings of tragedy are counterbalanced by the survival in consciousness of the distinction between good and evil. Things do not get blurred, meaningless, or contemptible; in other words, as someone said long ago, the opposite of tragedy is not comedy but cynicism. In comedy, on the other hand, the comfortable accommodations reached in later scenes do not guarantee or even hint at happiness for all forever. We stop at a moment of gratifications and peace, but its continuance, if not denied, is not predicted. Trouble and troubling characters are still alive and around, and even in the luckier ones, human nature still holds on. Despite a recent tendency to invest the dramatic romances with an aura of the transcendental or the paradisaic, even there, I think, we see more a temporary surfacing of good nature or good sense than the creation of a utopia or even the establishment of a truly better world. What I am getting at, in other words, is that the opposite of comedy is—to employ a term now made widely available by the writings of Eric Voegelin—the gnostic illusion.

If we can set tragedy off against cynicism, and comedy against gnosticism, we can see these generic modes as having in themselves some significance in the context of political order. It is just possible that in this context there is a symbolic significance in the writing of tragedy and comedy. Perhaps it would be saying too much to propose that the writing of tragedy and comedy is essential to a healthy political order. But the moods out of which these forms come, and which they may nourish, are desirable in, if not actually indispensable to, political order, for ominous threats to that order would lie in cynicism and gnosticism, i.e., on the one hand the sense that anything goes because all is corruption, and the opposite sense that all corruption must be eliminated and intramundane salvation be accomplished, obviously by whatever compulsions are requisite. Tragedy and comedy are different modes of reconciliation to imperfect actuality: tragedy sees wrong-doing instead of corruption, sees the cost, and sees the spiritual survival; comedy sees folly, messiness, and even scheming as incurably persistent, but not finally triumphant over the decency and good sense and even wisdom that humanity is capable of in its better parts and at its better moments. Comedy also sees that not all differences are differences between right and wrong.

Suppose we could imagine a polity in which all members were equally equipped with a tragic sense. That is, they would recognize their wrongdoings as wrong-doings, as their own, as voluntary, as of a moral quality not to be upgraded by causes and conditionings that the doer can allege, and as imposing a responsibility to be borne and exercized. Highly improbable, it need hardly be said. But were it possible, this situation would define a political order in which the institutional arms and organs could be minimized; we might even approach the deinstitutionalized community projected hauntingly on the screen of the ideal by anarchist visions. At least an immense machinery of justice would seem gratuitous. Still to be taken care of, however, would be all matters of policy. Here, perhaps, the comic spirit would be useful. The acceptance of fundamental disparateness is a definition not only of humor and of comedy but of politics, at least of democratic and pluralistic politics as opposed to ideological politics, which is humorless and gnostic and therefore dictatorial. Ideological politics is always a melodrama: our own virtue against others' evil that must be done away with. Carthago delenda est, with Carthago as the symbol of all that is different (there is a version of this in antiSemitism; "Jew," Arthur Miller has said, "is only the name we give to the stranger"). American political activity always starts as a melodrama: campaigns for office are strictly noncomic affairs of good guy vs. bad guys. Election over, the winners soon discover, if they do not already know it, that what they face is not so much bad guys as it is complex and diverse claims that have to be met by various styles of compromise and accommodation. They move from melodrama to the comic spirit: acceptance of the disparate. (This politicization of the literary is also a secularization of Christian charity.) The problem, as we noted earlier, is always the limit of acceptance, the point at which the disparate calls for distinctions rather than undifferentiating embrace, the point at which even those behind glass walls have to risk throwing a stone or two. Comic practice may provide a model: it does not assume a plurality of options to mean an equality among the options. It does not go for compulsory homogenization; one result is that it lets cream rise to the top. In effect, it judges: some courses, some situations, some individuals are more admirable than others. Prospero is the superior person in The Tempest, Hermione in Winter's Tale, Imogen in Cymbeline; and to go outside Shakespeare for a great example, Mirabell and Millamant in Congreve's The Way of the World. In comedy all survive, all get something; but the higher the quality of the individuals, the greater the achievement, be it in measurable things, in way of life, or simply in the esteem which we accord to the exemplary. In dealing with the difficult issue of quality and equality, comedy provides a theatrical symbolization of a basic political problem.

The mark of the achieved quality may be the denial or rejection of apparent advantage or profit. Prospero's abjuring of his magical powers, whatever it may signify in Shakespeare's own spiritual or poetic history, is implicitly a piece of political theory: man may work a political miracle now and then, but he is wise not to count on a regular intervention of the miraculous. In the long run, political life is a gamble with human nature, to be understood and dealt with as best one may by the more limited tools normally at hand. Timon exemplifies the worst way of dealing with human nature, and he brings out its worst side, for he denies it nothing that it wants or thinks it needs. His experience is a cautionary tale of the relationship between politician and public as we often see it now. The politician believes that he can win the love, and votes, of his district only by handouts, the universal yes, and the district comes to believe that the handouts alone symbolize quality. The receivers become corrupt, and the blessed giver bankrupt; his corrupted pupils can interpret this insolvency only as a willful termination of the largesse which has become for them the criterion of merit and truth. The eponymous practitioner of timony took to a rather tedious misanthropy. The disappointed public man of our day (not to mention the market-eyed publicist fighting, he says, for our right to know) also turns moralist and writes a best-seller exposing vice in government men and agencies. Lear, however, did not make a quick quid exposing Goneril and Regan in print. He died too soon to enjoy that ultimate anodyne for, or spinal block against, the harsh pain of the peccavi—that anguish of self-acknowledgment which Shakespeare understood so well that he could not always make his characters fully capable of it.