Thirty spokes join at a hub: their use for the cart is where they are not.
Tao Te Ching by Laozi, chapter 11, Thomas Cleary trans.
When the potter’s wheel makes a pot, the use of the pot is precisely where there is nothing.
When you open the doors and windows for a room, it is where there is nothing that they are useful to the room.
Therefore being is for benefit, nonbeing is for usefulness.
When we consider emptiness, much of what we have historically found ‘useful’ in the world derives from what we have emptied from it. While it is true that empty space often proves more useful than solid matter, whether in vessels, in dwellings, in our theatres, or even in our writing, there can be a dark side to emptiness as well. We cut down the forests for pasture and for land upon which we can build. We drain swamps and marshland for the same reasons. We drain the ocean of whales and we drain the whales of oil. We drain ourselves in that “getting and spending” that Wordsworth mentioned so presciently.*
For the emptiness that may truly be useful to us, emptying ourselves of greed and striving, seems to have eluded us increasingly in our recent centuries. Part of this stems from basing the larger footprint and emphasis of our social and political structures solely on economic gain. And part of it stems from our own human nature as a natural engagement with the necessity of making a living, of providing for ourselves and our families, and of seeking to maximise our potential for comfortable older years. The danger lies in the fine line between emptying a small tract of wood, to provide pasture, build structures, mill lumber, make paper goods, and all the necessaries of modern life, and the cutting of entire swathes of rain forest so that our bathroom tissue can be softer and whiter. For somewhere, on those fine lines between need and want, the devil steps into our existence.
In literature and folklore, the devil may take any number of guises, most often tempting us, appearing as something that may seem good and virtuous, but ultimately steers us away from our own best interests. A hypothetical head of state may willfully disassemble an apparatus designed for dealing with a crisis, perhaps a pandemic, for example, claiming an economic savings for doing so. Subsequently, this ‘leader’ may dismiss or downplay the potential impact of such a crisis once it actually arises, even pressing that denial to the point where it exacerbates the damage of the future curve. Then, of course, once the hypothetical pandemic becomes a major threat to millions of lives, this head of state, who had previously denied the seriousness of the situation, may attempt to claim credit for dealing with it decisively or properly. Because the larger population of the country in our example has had little training in critical thinking, but have instead been well trained to believe whatever they see on television, or whatever they hear on social media platforms, many of them may rally around this leader, pushing his or her support numbers higher in the polls.
But a ghost, as Dickens notes, has lost the power to interfere in human affairs. We merely watch. We observe. Sometimes some of us comment. A focus on literary and theatrical disciplines may only lend one limited scope and basis for understanding the affairs of the larger world, after all. Perhaps these are better left to the devil himself. Certainly in the mythological structure that is so interwoven with our present human experience, the devil is to worldly concerns as God is to the celestial. The opposition of God and devil often represents (among other things) the ongoing war between the flesh and the spirit, or the body and the mind. As the Book of Revelations says:
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Authorised King James Version Revelations, 12:7
Note that the devil is cast “into the earth” (alternate translations follow this to a great extent, with the New International Version saying Satan was “hurled to the earth”), and there is a sense that Satan’s terrestrial trajectory includes an element of significant force, enough so that the character of the devil is ever after somehow marked as part and parcel of the earthly. In being ejected from heaven, Satan becomes not just a denizen of earth, but is actually propelled into it in a bodily sense so that the devil’s substance is linked or even fused with the earth itself.
Yet, the devil still reveals himself to us, or not, in curious ways. The whispering voice in the wee hours, not in our ear, but in our mind, is part of the clay from which we have supposedly been formed. Suspicion. Jealousy. Even loneliness and silent, patient rage. Dramatic stuff, to be certain, and so resonant with the everyday struggles of human existence that the story seems intertwined with our being. Temptation. Having ice cream now might taste so good, but what will I do to lose the extra pounds I gain from that tomorrow?
Indeed, Ghost. Almost all of us can recognise the struggle with temptation in our lives in some form or another. This devil we do know, and we know it well, but what of Shakespeare? Isn’t this a Shakespeare blog? Where’s the Shakespeare?
Well, as we’ve said, the very idea of the devil has become so intimately intertwined with our concepts of human experience that it is virtually inseparable. Because Shakespeare says so much about human experience, he mentions the devil frequently in various contexts. According to the Shakespeare Concordance, the world “devil” appears in Shakespeare 225 times, and “Satan” a further 8 times. Notably, each mention of Satan appears in a comedy with the exception of one time when it is used in Henry IV part 1 (which play also mentions the devil more than any other in the canon), in Hal’s description of Falstaff during the playacting scene (where Hal poses as his father, King Henry IV, who is upbraiding his son, Hal–played by Falstaff–about his questionable companions):
PRINCE Swearest thou? Ungracious boy,
henceforth ne’er look on me. Thou art violently
carried away from grace. There is a devil haunts
thee in the likeness of an old fat man. A tun of man
is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that
trunk of humors, that bolting-hutch of beastliness,
that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard
of sack, that stuffed cloakbag of guts, that roasted
Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that
reverend Vice, that gray iniquity, that father ruffian,
that vanity in years? Wherein is he good, but to taste
sack and drink it? Wherein neat and cleanly but to
carve a capon and eat it? Wherein cunning but in
craft? Wherein crafty but in villainy? Wherein villainous
but in all things? Wherein worthy but in
nothing?
FALSTAFF I would your Grace would take
me with you. Whom means your Grace?
PRINCE That villainous abominable misleader
of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan.
FALSTAFF My lord, the man I know.
PRINCE I know thou dost.
FALSTAFF But to say I know more harm in
him than in myself were to say more than I know.
That he is old, the more the pity; his white hairs do
witness it. But that he is, saving your reverence, a
whoremaster, that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar
be a fault, God help the wicked. If to be old and
merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is
damned. If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s
lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord,
banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for
sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack
Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more
valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish not
him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy
Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack, and banish
all the world.Henry IV part 1 2.4.461-499
PRINCE I do, I will.
There is much to say about this famous scene, but in our discussion of the devil, it is interesting how devilish Falstaff is. Like the nemesis with which he is compared, as soon as he has been pointedly identified with Satan, Falstaff launches into a protestation, defending himself as one who, though imperfect, is certainly not evil. Like the devil in an argument, Falstaff props up his own character with rhetoric that smacks of virtue: “sweet”, “kind”, “true”, “valiant”, and, in a final dual appeal to seem both sympathetic and perhaps authoritative, “old”. Yet, like so many of our heads of state these days, Falstaff does not substantiate his descriptions. He offers no evidence that he embodies these virtues, he simply says that he does. He links himself to words that ‘sound’ good, however empty of meaning those terms may be in the present context.
Characterized by vice, and perennially driven by appetites of the flesh, Falstaff is often depicted either as the devil himself, or as one who does commerce with the devil. Yet, to “give the devil his due” (another phrase that Hal uses earlier in the play), Falstaff himself not only sounds reasonably good to those not paying particular attention, but he can also be witty and funny. However, he is a devil, and Hal knows it well. Hal’s promise that once he is king, he will banish Falstaff demonstrates Hal’s underlying noble character even at this relatively early point in the Henriad cycle.**
Yet, there is another subtle caution in this exchange. Some critics have made much of Falstaff’s final line, “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.” This naturally suggests that the assumption of the crown will require a seriousness and dedication that must dispense with the frivolities of Eastcheap alehouses and the ongoing parties within them, but it also reminds us of Satan being thrown from heaven, hurled to earth, into it, his essence fusing with it. As an ongoing point of contention in Shakespeare’s own day, and a point much remarked upon within his plays, is the idea that an annointed king represents celestial/heavenly power on earth. That such a ruler may be appointed by God to represents God’s interests in the world promotes some tension with the idea that heaven’s greatest rebel, Satan ‘the adversary’ inhabits that same earth.
However, Hal pointedly tells the audience that his associations in the alehouse only serve to disguise the truth of who he really is:
PRINCE
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.If all the year were playing holidays,
Henry IV part 1 1.2.202-24
To sport would be as tedious as to work,
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promisèd,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
Which brings us, round about, to the blog title. The saying, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” (or sometimes “better the devil you know than the angel you don’t”) has come to describe a situation where one chooses a familiar option, even if unpalatable, over a person, item, or course of action that may be a complete unknown. Familiarity feels safer to us somehow. It breeds a sense that we might pilot the craft of our lives better in familiar waters than in those we do not know. That the devil might delibarately present us with a familiar course in order to mislead us may never appear on our radar. Many of us, for example, grow up in a family where our parents adhere to a particular faith. Once we reach adulthood, many of us still profess to follow the beliefs and practices of our ancestors.
Yet, it is difficult to argue with idea that a known enemy might be more easily defeated. The classical Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu (traditionally thought to have lived between 544 and 496 b.c.e) quoted an idea that may have been old in his own day:
故曰：知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆。 People say: Know the enemy, know yourself, fear not even a hundred battles. Know yourself but not the enemy, then one defeat for each victory. Don’t know the enemy and don’t know yourself, lose every battle.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Chapter 3. Author translation.
It seems that Hal’s time in Eastcheap isn’t merely a study of some of those over whom he may rule someday, but also involves a deep study of tactics and strategy on the level of human nature and experience.
Does this suggest that we may learn from our own vices? Does profitable instruction lie in our own wickedness, in the devil who sleeps within the dust of ourselves? Perhaps the devil is not simply an embodiment of our baser natures, but is also the agent of change in the human world. Restless nights, perspiring in the sheets over what we might have said. Might have done. With that forceful fall from grace, and from heaven to earth, was the devil made so much a part of us that he has become our inner unsettled grains of sand in the wind? The great agent of change sweeping across the world?
Mick Jagger’s strutting and primping aside, how much sympathy do we feel for the light that leads us on in the darkness. Is it Hamlet’s father’s ghost, or “goblin damned” as Hamlet himself wonders at the apparition. In the end, if he would know more, he must go:
HAMLET
Hamlet 1.4.43-62
Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from
hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. I’ll call thee “Hamlet,”
“King,” “Father,” “Royal Dane.” O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsèd in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher,
Wherein we saw thee quietly interred,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again. What may this mean
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel,
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous, and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?
[Ghost beckons].
In Hamlet’s case, the apparition, which may well be a devil, is still a devil that the prince ‘seems’ to know. Yet, there is a pointed irony in this after Hamlet has only recently made a distinction between what seems and what ‘is’, and the play remains full of such contradictions. Hamlet is very much a ‘devil in the details’ kind of play, as many have noted. One great example is that in spite of Hamlet’s conviction that death is an “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns”, the central action of the play takes place because Hamlet’s father does return from the grave, in order to command his son to avenge his murder.
In productions of Hamlet, the audience often trusts that the ghost is the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Yet, even if innocent, even if the ghost is as it represents itself, it is also an agent of change that ultimately brings about a surplus of death. This may be the bursting of a contagious bubble of corruption that has been allowed to fester for too long, and it may also be a portrait of the spread of corrosive influence across a Denmark that has become the devil’s playground.
We’ve drawn the title of this blogpost from an old saying, of course. The saying was most likely relatively old when Richard Taverner recorded it as an Irish saying in his collection of proverbs in 1539. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Devil, angel, ghost, tempter. How well one knows it may have little to do with how much of the devil lies within any given choice. What seems like the devil we know may still bring the devil down upon us. It has long been pointed out that choosing ‘the lesser of two evils’ is still choosing evil. Living our lives in a business as usual kind of way while ignoring the social plight of the multitudes living hand to mouth in an economy where we incessantly tout economic figures about low unemployment, or minimizing the ongoing environmental devastation promoted by our everyday choices, may evantually bring about our end.
Here’s an article from Business Insider about the links between climate change and Covid 19:
https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-boost-frequency-zootonic-diseases-coronavirus-2020-4
And here’s an article from Technology Review about the link between the world’s growing tendency towards nationalism and climate change, and the problems that arise as a result:
The devil we know may still be the very devil. To this ghost, it seems evident that, in terms of leadership, policy, and in terms of our next course as human beings on this earth, we need another choice. Not the devil we know. Indeed, not a devil at all. We need to choose better for all of us and for every one of us.
*(This poem has been quoted previously in this blog):
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
“The World is Too Much With Us Late and Soon” by William Wordsworth
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
**Usually the ‘Henriad’, as described by Alvin Kernan, includes Richard II, Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2, and Henry V, but this dramatic tetralogy may be expanded to include the cycle of the Wars of the Roses plays (apparently written earlier than the four plays mentioned above, although they deal with events that took place after the life of King Henry V. Those plays are Henry VI part 1, Henry VI part 2, Henry VI part 3, and Richard III. Falstaff appears in the Henry IV plays, and his death is discussed in Henry V, but he also appears in the comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor.