Ambition, Then and Now

It’s hard for me to separate modern notions of ambition from what people would have described as ambition in the 17th century. The way I perceive this trait is from the context of a western capitalist society. But even that is hard to define. A person is not deemed ambitious by their status in society. For example, a person might build a company from the ground up and become incredibly successful, and we would call this person ambitious. But when he dies, he passes the business on to his son (who may or may not be qualified to run a company), and we would likely attribute the son’s success not to ambition, but instead to nepotism. In another instance, a young woman from a low-income household might get an entry level job in the mail-room of some company, and by hard work she eventually gets promoted to department manager. Ambition is not distinctly defined in our society, but tends to be correlated with upward mobility. But it varies in degree and kind, and the desired reward is not always financial.

According to Oxford folk ambition is “the ardent (in early usage, inordinate) desire to rise to high position, or to attain rank, influence, distinction or other preferment.” And to me this is interesting, since the trait is defined by the desire for rank or prestige, etc. Whereas I would prefer to define the word by those who attempt to raise their status, whether they fail or succeed. Still, etymologically, the earliest uses (starting in 1340) group ambition with pride, vein glory and other negative traits. Even Shakespeare writes in King Henry VIII, “Cromwel, I charge thee, fling away Ambition, By that sinne fell the Angels.” Ambition, like hubris, is the downfall of heroes and the death of kings. Of course, we can see this in Macbeth and Hamlet, but is it always negative? 

In the United States we laud ambitious young people and encourage them to attain the heights of whatever it is they are reaching for. Was there not some equivalent in the Elizabethan era? Isn’t that what makes gallant knights go off to war? Was Shakespeare infected with unholy ambition? Perhaps ambition is only a valiant trait in a capitalist republic/democracy. 

Ambition can also be the object of desire, like a lover or a crown. I suspect that in Shakespeare’s works we will discover the troubling nature of ambition. We will see it destabilize society, and we will see characters compromise their beliefs (or society’s beliefs) over the objects of their ambitions. But I think that looking at these plays and poems through this prism will also reveal that Shakespeare’s era is a more fluid time than it at first seems. Shakespeare himself represents at least some degree of upward mobility.