Was Shakespeare a Philosopher?

Mr. W. C. Curry’s book, Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns,¹ does not seem to have received yet the study it deserves, but there is plenty of time. It is a bold and impressively able book, and initiates a new kind of study. It will be with us at least till there are further and fuller books to supplement it. It will be appropriate if Mr. Curry will write some of this supplement himself, and become his own critic. In the meantime here are some random ruminations for his attention.

Mr. Curry proposes that Shakespeare was a much sterner intellectual than we have realized. Or anyhow it comes to that; what he proposes, specifically, is that Shakespeare on at least two occasions frames the whole play exclusively within the terms of a definite philosophical system. In Macbeth the system is Mediaeval-Christian; in The Tempest it is Neo-Platonic. Nor does he stop with proposing. The Scholastic orthodoxy of Macbeth becomes astonishing as he cites one detail after another in order to furnish the respective authority who will vouch for it. The correctness of The Tempest, as a play about theurgy, or white magic, is abundantly attested too, although in the nature of the case its detail cannot be so sharply distinctive as the other’s.