Shakespeare, Neo-Platonism and Princess Diana
The litigation about the death of Princess Diana drags on, to the confusion of most of us, the satisfaction of none, and I imagine to the great distress of her two sons. And what is forgotten in this grimy attempt to prove conspiracy theory is the woman herself, a true princess of delight and fantasy. She was a wonderful example of a certain type of gifted woman, the epitome of whom is Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost. She always insisted that she was uneducated (though her handwriting was excellent) and far from intelligent — ‘thick as two planks’ was the expression she used. But I have never met anyone, male or female, who had such strong powers of intuition. And intuition, I have come to realise, is often as important, sometimes more important, than intellect. She could not reason very well but she could intuit, deeply and instantly, and this enabled her often to understand people the moment she met them, and to communicate with them, to their enormous delight. This was the secret of her popularity, which baffled and angered Prince Charles, and irritated other members of the royal family — for intuition is a royal gift, which none of them possess. She intuited, and communicated, through her eyes, which were very fine and sensitive in expression.
The reason I connect Princess Diana with Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost is that I have just been reading an essay on Shakespeare’s philosophy by that delightful scholar of the Renaissance Frances Yates (it is in Volume 2 of her Collected Essays). She, too, was an intuitive woman, capable of snatching from the air historical aperçus no one had thought of before. In the essay she argues that Shakespeare was not so much an Aristotelian, as were most writers and intellectuals in his day, as a Platonist, or perhaps one should say a Neo-Platonist — the Plato as perceived by early Renaissance scholars such as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. The Cardinal, in his book De docta ignorantia (1440), argues that since truth in its precision cannot be attained by the faulty intellects of mere human beings, the wisest man is one who aims no higher than ‘learned ignorance’. This point was taken aboard by Shakespeare. In most practical matters he was run-of-the-mill rational, what Jane Austen would have called ‘a sensible man’. But there was also an anti-rational or even mystical streak about him, the fruit of his magical intuitions which made him a poet and playwright of genius. He took Nicholas of Cusa’s point pat ently, and as Frances Yates puts it, the phrase ‘learned ignorance’ admirably describes the whole state of mind of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most complex character. For Hamlet tries to reason himself to action in his soliloquies, but fails, and in the end falls back on intuition and impulse.
Yates cites Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia as evidence of Hamlet’s (and so Shakespeare’s) Platonic view of the composition of the universe, and also of the difficulty of arriving at truth:
Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.
Marsilio Finico, the 15th-century scholar who translated Plato and the Neo-Platonists into Latin, and so made them available to people like Shakespeare, made a fundamental distinction between intellect and love (and between reason and intuition). The passage in Plato’s Symposium in which he argues that all the arts are taught best by love (and all who practise them successfully know) was used by Ficino to illustrate the superiority of the intuitive power of love over the rational power of the intellect.
A few years before he wrote Hamlet, Shakespeare used this idea or principle of Ficino’s to create Love’s Labours Lost. This is a highly sophisticated drama attacking intellectuals and the intellectual view of life (i.e. that ideas matter more than people). The King of Navarre and his lords, one of them Berowne, decide to renounce women, sex and love, and to live the collective life of a group of bachelor intellectuals, discussing ideas and studying. They are eventually intercepted by the arrival of the Queen of France and her ladies, one of them Rosaline, and the scheme is abandoned, the King marrying the Queen, and Berowne his Rosaline. The piece is famous or notorious as an ‘in’ play, written for a select circle rather than the groundlings, with private jokes and references intelligible only to courtiers privy to state secrets or well-lettered members of the Elizabethan establishment.
There is also the view that the play is personal, and that Shakespeare put a good deal of himself in Berowne, expressing in his lines something of his own private philosophy of life. Equally Rosaline is reputed to be based on the mysterious woman known to us as ‘the Dark Lady of the sonnets’. The late A.L. Rowse used to get excited about this play and its personal implications, as you can see by reading his book Shakespeare the Man (pp 100-104). Of course his views on the Dark Lady are disputable, and one should never make too much of the intriguing business of reading real people from fictional characters. What particularly interests me, however, is Berowne’s great speech in Act IV Scene iii (lines 285-360). In this he takes up Ficino’s theme of love as the great teacher, with a particular reference to women — above all to women’s eyes.
It is, he says, impossible to ‘found the ground of study’s excellence without the beauty of a woman’s face’. Doing without women means you cannot look in a woman’s face and in that have ‘forsworn the use of eyes’, adding ‘For where is any author in the world/ Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye?’
Love, first learned in a lady’s eyes, Lives not alone immured in the brain, But with the motion of all elements Courses as swift as thought in every power. And gives to every power a double power, Above their functions and their offices.
He then goes on to show that the intuitive power of a woman’s eyes inflames and sustains all the arts:
They sparkle still the right Promethian fire They are the books, the arts, the academes That show, contain and nourish all the world.
This is the doctrine of the kind of NeoPlatonism taught by Nicholas of Cusa and Ficino.
Of course it can be illustrated, in practice, only by a remarkable woman. Shakespeare had his Dark Lady, recreated in Rosaline. We in our own time had Princess Diana, with her remarkable intuition and the extraordinary use she made of her beautiful eyes. Propagandists on behalf of Prince Charles & co. did not realise they were dealing with a Neo-Platonic heroine, whose ways were mysterious to them, but whom Shakespeare would have understood very well.
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