The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Updated and Expanded) by Susan Wise Bauer

Author:Susan Wise Bauer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-11-15T14:00:00+00:00

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world

And measure every wandering planet’s course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres,

Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest.

In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe takes Everyman and turns that flat character into an individual. Faustus, restlessly climbing after “knowledge infinite,” is faced with the same choice that Everyman is given: knowledge and wealth on earth or bliss in heaven. Unlike Everyman, Faustus chooses earth; like any good Renaissance scholar, he is unable to turn his back on the unfolding knowledge of the physical world, even if it means his damnation.

And at the play’s end, Faustus has both knowledge and hell. The Renaissance (and later, the Enlightenment) praised human ability to act: to survey a situation, analyze it, decide on a course of action, and carry it out triumphantly. Yet the two greatest Renaissance playwrights are skeptical of simple Renaissance optimism. Shakespeare writes comedies, tragedies, and histories—but he never writes victories. Even the happy endings of his comedies are bittersweet, spiked through the heart by past misunderstandings and the possibility of future dissolution. Shakespeare’s heroes are thoughtful and able to act, but they are also unhappy, conflicted, divided against themselves.

Greek literature (and architecture) was rediscovered during the Renaissance, and Shakespeare is obviously aware of Aristotle’s laws for dramatic form: He writes his plays in five acts and makes a half-hearted attempt to maintain the unities. But he asks his audiences to empathize with his heroes, not because they are morally upright, but because their motivations are psychologically credible. Lear’s demand that his daughters love him more than their husbands is twisted but pathetically real. We grit our teeth over Hamlet’s indecision, but his unwillingness to throw a match into the bonfire piled up in the middle of his family is perfectly comprehensible. Richard III is a moral monster but an efficient politician, an individualist who looks first to his own end, rather than the larger good, quite different from the Oedipus who tries nobly to do what is best for his people, even in the face of private catastrophe.

And, of course, all of these men come to sad ends. The Renaissance saw man as free to choose his own path, rather than bound into God’s preordered design; Shakespeare’s heroes are free, but they are far from happy. “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare wrote, in the most quoted lines of As You Like It:

And all the men and women merely players;

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