Charcoals or Diamonds? On Destruction of Moral and Emotional Intelligence (or Soul Murder) in Shakespeare’s Plays
Charcoals or Diamonds? On Destruction of Moral and Emotional Intelligence (or Soul Murder) in Shakespeare’s Plays

Summary/Abstract: This paper was presented at the First British Shakespeare Association Conference, held at De Montfort University in Leicester in August of 2003. It was part of the seminar on "Shakespearean Childhoods: Representing and Addressing Children in Shakespeare's Work and Afterlife". It highlights the process of instruction children are subjected to by various figures of authority, in order to point out that the effect such instruction has on them is equivalent to the destruction of their moral and emotional intelligence, or murder of their soul. Shakespeare exposes the deadliness of this traditional 'for-your-own-good' pedagogy by showing in his plays how children, belonging to different historical epochs and geographical locations, have to 'give themselves up to be commanded', and how the triumph of the will of the adults over them comes to be complete. Forced, or seduced into self-betrayal, children are raised not to become who they potentially are, but what they are expected to be, to fulfill prescribed social roles and expectations. Shakespeare does not merely illustrate the fact that 'dumb waiters' such as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Laertes, Osric, Oswald, etc. exist; he shows how they are created out of the same humanity that is Horatio's, Hamlet's, Edgar's, Kent's, Cordelia's. This approach to Shakespeare has been taken up and explored by John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes, Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine, Edward Bond's Lear, Howard Barker's Seven Lears, the Women's Collective's Lear's Daughters. The plays Faust (Faust is Dead) by Mark Ravenhill and Far Away by Caryl Churchill are also seen as 'Shakespearean' because their central preoccupation is the treatment of the child. In the first part of this paper the playwrights' Shakespearean concerns are compared to the findings of Victor Frankl, Bruno Bettelheim, and Alice Miller, psychoanalysts who have worked with children most of their lives. The second part examines Shakespeare's King Lear and Howard Barker's Seven Lears: The Pursuit Of The Good (the reconstruction of the process through which Lear, the child, is turned into the King we meet in Shakespeare's play). The subtitle, The Pursuit Of The Good, places Berker's approach in the tradition of Socrates and Nietzsche (from whose Twilight of the Idols the title of the paper is taken). In different ways Socrates, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Barker built their work on a 'heretical' conception of personal development, founded on the belief in the child's innate sense of justice, the godlike authority of the private soul, and questioning as the method that leads to the unfolding recognition (and love) of the Good. Their works show how care-givers guided by such assumptions have been replaced in our culture by promoters of the 'put-money-in-your-purse' poisonous pedagogy, which cripples and dehumanizes the child.

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