Indeed, with a little ingenuity, we can argue that our bad behavior, being instigated by something outside ourselves, makes us victims, hence deserving of pity and even, indeed, celebration.Įdmund wasn’t taken in by such subterfuges. The worm of our infirmity is not in us but elsewhere, hence we are not truly, not fully, guilty of our sins. I n Shakespeare’s time an excuse for bad behavior might be astrological: we lie or cheat or pander not because of our own weaknesses but because of an external celestial influence beyond our control.
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune-often the surfeit of our own behavior-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars: as if we were villains by necessity fools by heavenly compulsion knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! In the middle of Act I, he soliloquizes bitterly about Gloucester’s invocation of celestial portents to explain his familial discord: He is also given some of the play’s most brilliant lines. The line is spoken by Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester and one of the play’s chief villains. The main title, as many will doubtless have recognized, comes from King Lear.
B ack in 2015, Theodore Dalrymple-a writer well known to readers of The New Criterion-published Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality.
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