In an interview on Living Prudently

Your second choice is King Lear. What can we learn about prudence from Shakespeare?

You see the same dichotomies, and beginnings of discomfort with prudence, in Shakespeare that you see throughout our culture ever since. Edmund is prudent – evil and calculating. That is the danger we think we face. And on the other hand we worship Cordelia, but she is an utter fool. She is absolutely sincere, horrified by the phoniness of her sisters, only tells Lear “I love you according to my bond” and is cast out by him as a result. She could have been true instead of being silly. Tragically, she was both true and silly.

But let’s not forget that the mainspring of the tragedy was Lear’s imprudence in giving away his kingdom without, at a minimum, thinking to whom he was giving it. How could he have been so blind as to who his daughters were? But this is evidently not their first experience of his imprudence. Regan says: “He has ever but slenderly known himself.” That lack of self-knowledge runs through the history of imprudence.

One way of reading King Lear is that through the process of his imprudence and suffering, Lear learns to know himself and emerges, finally, a better man – even if he dies.

Psychologists ask the same question: Do we learn from our mistakes? Or in other words: Do we get wiser as we grow older? Perhaps not on a Learian scale but on a more mundane scale, do we learn from our imprudence? And the answer is no. The answer is people do not get wiser as they grow older, rather they become more entrenched in the attitudes they started out with. Because you can only learn from experience with the mental furniture you have at the moment. And that mental furniture consists too often of those attitudes you began with. So a lot of what people “learn” is just a confirmation of their attitudes. Contemporary psychology is filled with lessons like that, where people at the end of the journey get what they started with. Life, instead of being filled with lessons, is too often a cracked mirror reflecting us back to ourselves.

If Lear learns, he learns because Shakespeare wanted him to. And he learns because he had therapists along with him, in Edgar and the Fool, and later Cordelia. You have three to one therapist-patient ratio, so how could he not have learned?!

Going back to Cordelia, are you saying she should have lied, and spouted sugary words like Goneril and Regan? Because that would be false to herself.

I’m not trying to re-write Shakespeare, but a prudent version of Cordelia could have said: My Lord, you asked me to describe how much I love you. Let’s talk about all the times we’ve had together, all the moments we’ve shared, the conversations we’ve had and the ways I’ve accompanied you. When have I ever been anything other than a devoted and loving daughter?

She was rather blunt in saying “Nothing”.

She stabbed herself in the heart, and she’s not the only Shakespearian heroine to have done that – only she did it with her words.

You also wanted to mention Hamlet in the context of prudence.

Hamlet is conceived of as the poster child for indecision. I think that’s a bad rap. He is faced with the difficult question of what the best thing to do is. It’s easy to make fun of him for thinking about it so carefully because he’s a graduate student in philosophy – so he was always going to be wrapped up in the coils of thought. But his dilemma is really a practical one: Can I trust the ghost of my father? Should I kill my uncle and take vengeance and the consequences of vengeance? If I do kill him, what is the best moment to do it? Do I really want revenge if he confesses, and so I end up sending him straight to heaven? Hamlet struggles with all of that. More than indecision, he really represents someone who is trying to be prudent, as best he can. Like Antigone.

He is certainly contrasted with Ophelia, who deals with overwhelming difficulty by throwing herself in a river – the height of imprudence. Ophelia is Lear without his team of therapists. Hamlet is simply trying to be as thoughtful as possible about what the best thing to do is under incredibly difficult circumstances. And we know, for example from the World War II literature of people in the resistance, that sometimes in difficult circumstances you can be boundlessly prudent but in the end you’re still dragged under.