Scholar Gail Kern Paster explores the multiple meanings of the word happiness in use when Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence. Those different definitions also appear in Shakespeare, a writer whom Jefferson admired.
It is well known that, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson borrowed and tweaked language from 17th-century English philosopher John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689). For Locke’s phrase identifying the natural rights of the individual as “life, liberty, and property,” Jefferson famously substitutes “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Instead of Locke’s right to have something, Jefferson proposes the right to do and be something. That is, Jefferson brilliantly adds a culminating phrase about an individual’s right to journey toward an affective state—the overall state of pleasurable well-being and contentment of mind that we call happiness.
Instead of Locke’s right to have something, Jefferson proposes the right to do and be something.
To me (as a Shakespeare scholar and student of the history of English), it seems probable that Jefferson writing in the late 18th century also uses the word in a meaning that the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “now rare.” Happiness in this older sense means “good fortune or good luck in life generally or in a particular affair; success; prosperity” (OED, q.v. 1a). And if it can mean prosperity, then happiness includes the right to property that is central to Locke’s original phrasing and is thus implicit in Jefferson’s reformulation.
I think that Shakespeare uses happiness in both earlier and contemporary senses of the word. For happiness as good fortune, I would cite the example of Cleopatra, missing Antony and wondering where he is. In a funny and well-known double entendre, she compares herself to her lover’s horse: “O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!” (1.5.25). Clearly Cleopatra does not think the horse is feeling pleasure to have Antony on his back, but she thinks that he is luckier to be doing so than she is at this moment of intense sexual longing.
For happiness meaning good fortune, the OED cites The Two Gentlemen of Verona. At the opening of that play, Proteus bids farewell to his friend Valentine, wishes him good fortune in his travels, and asks to be remembered: “Wish me partaker in thy happiness / When thou dost meet good hap” [1.1.14-15). Here “good hap” means good fortune (as opposed to mishap, oppositions built upon the idea of “hap” as an occurrence). But, unlike the OED, I think that these lines show us the word in both senses. For Proteus, Valentine’s happiness would refer to his friend’s pleasure at finding good fortune—good hap—and Proteus’s desire to share in that good fortune and pleasure even at a distance.
The real overlap, the significant commonality, between Shakespeare and Jefferson’s emphasis on the pursuit of happiness is to be found in the trajectory of every one of Shakespeare’s characters—to whom he grants a vivid imaginary life on stage or page, hope for the freedom of action we call liberty, and the agency to pursue it.
Shakespeare is deeply interested in the content of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We know this from the body of work he presents to the public on stage—where we see characters enacting all three. Thus the real overlap, the significant commonality, between Shakespeare and Jefferson’s emphasis on the pursuit of happiness is to be found in the trajectory of every one of Shakespeare’s characters—to whom he grants a vivid imaginary life on stage or page, hope for the freedom of action we call liberty, and the agency to pursue it. I think of Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, determined to find life, liberty, and happiness in the flight from an Athens that would prevent her from marrying her lover Lysander and punish her disobedience with life in a convent or execution. Or Rosalind in As You Like It, in similarly direful circumstances, finding liberty and pursuing happiness (of both kinds) in the Forest of Arden.
For tragic characters, of course, the natural rights proposed by Jefferson are only fleeting, constrained as they are by the opposite of liberty—the literary term for which is necessity. That necessity may come, as it does for Hamlet, in the form of a murdered father and a deprived inheritance; or for Lear, in the form of a badly misconceived succession and tragically misplaced trust in two daughters; or for Othello, in the form of a fatal susceptibility to the lies of “honest” Iago about his wife Desdemona whom he loved (he says) “not wisely, but too well” (5.2.337); or for Coriolanus, in the form of a imperative to be not the warrior that he is but the politician he clearly is unable to be. Whether it means good fortune or pleasurable well-being, happiness—for them and for us watching them—is only the fragile image of what might have been pursued had necessity not intervened.
As a student at William and Mary, Jefferson copied quotations from Shakespeare’s plays in his commonplace book. He owned a copy of Bell’s Shakespeare. And with John Adams in the 1760s he traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit Shakespeare’s birthplace. We know that Shakespeare cannot have thought of Jefferson in granting his characters the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it is possible for me to hope that Jefferson, while writing these famous words, might have thought not only of John Locke but maybe of Shakespeare, too.
Shakespeare cannot have thought of Jefferson in granting his characters the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it is possible to hope that Jefferson, while writing these famous words, might have thought not only of John Locke but maybe of Shakespeare, too.
It is my belief, too, that in 250 years Americans will continue to think about the Declaration of Independence and the works of William Shakespeare as founding documents of civilization. My confidence right now is built upon the lively conversations in the summer of 2026 among people around the globe about a 3000-year-old poem composed, we think, by a blind bard named Homer. The great storytellers like Homer and Shakespeare (helped along by master filmmakers, great directors and actors) are rediscovered by every generation for great stories live in the present tense.
About the author
Gail Kern Paster is Director Emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Editor Emerita of Shakespeare Quarterly. She was named to the Queen’s Honours List in 2011.
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