Shakespeare Minus 'Theory'

Tom McAlindon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351900737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

Demonstrating and defending a method of close reading and historical contextualisation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this collection of essays by Tom McAlindon combines a number of previously published pieces with original studies. The volume includes six interpretative studies, all but one of which involve challenges to radical readings of the plays involved, including Henry V, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and Doctor Faustus. The other three essays are critiques of the claims and methods of radical, postmodernist criticism (new historicism and cultural materialism especially); they illustrate the author's conviction that some leading scholars in the field of Renaissance literature and drama, who deserve credit for shifting attention to new areas of interest, must also be charged with responsibility for a marked decline in standards of analysis, interpretation, and argument. Likely to provoke considerable debate, this stimulating collection is an important contribution to Shakespeare studies.

Chapter 1
Taking Stock: Radical Criticism of Shakespeare

It is now time to take stock of these advances … these major steps forward … [beyond] traditional modes of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship.¹

1

Fundamental to the essays in this book are the following intentions: to concentrate on what I judge to be the play’s intended meanings; to take due account of the entire text in the process of interpretation; to attend where profitable to aspects of historical context other than the political; to enhance appreciation of the dramatist’s conscious art; and to encourage readers to empathise with his perspectives on character, action, and life. Clearly, then, these essays will not have contributed to the great march forward celebrated by John Drakakis as he surveys the years between Alternative Shakespeares (1985) and Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 2 (1997), landmark collections of critical essays which typify the radical or postmodernist criticism (deconstructionist, Marxist, new historicist, cultural materialist) that has dominated Shakespeare studies since about 1980.²

As my stated intentions indicate, I have a number of objections to radical criticism of Shakespeare. First of these is the fact that it disallows in the student the sense of wonder, excitement, and admiration which his plays inspired in me from my own undergraduate days to ‘the pupil age of this present twelve o’clock’. The radical attitude to Shakespeare (characteristically and slightingly dubbed ‘the Bard’) varies from suspicion to condescension and even outright hostility, reflecting a determination not to be daunted by his great reputation or seduced by ‘the aesthetic dimension’. It sees him primarily as a social thinker submerged in his own historical moment and not as a great artist whose imagination and craft gave enduring life to his characters and their experiences. His art, both tragic and comic, is effectively ignored, and if passing reference is made to it, it is usually to characterise it as a dangerous distraction. Thus one of the beliefs to which radical criticism is opposed, says Terence Hawkes, is that Shakespeare ‘is entertaining. He makes us laugh and cry like billy-oh, and can command our rapt attention like no other writer.’ In fact, adds Hawkes, his plays should not be thought of in terms of ‘anything as forbidding as Art’; we should reflect rather on the ‘collective role’ of the audience responding to the plays ‘as in a modern football stadium’, viewing them not as art but ‘as part of an ensemble of spectacular entertainment … one which included bear-baiting, brothels, the stocks, the pillory, the exhibition of the mentally disturbed, public beheading and evisceration, and royal processions. These competed — on equal terms — with the theatre for an audience.’³ The origins of this line of argument are political and go back to the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, when Louis Kampf, President of the Modern Language Association of America, endorsed the newly fashionable view that art is elitist, claiming that ‘the very category of art has become one more instrument for making class distinctions’.⁴ ‘The fountains [at the Lincoln Center]’, he said, ‘should be dried with calcium chloride, the statuary pissed on, the walls smeared with shit.’⁵

Critics who write about Shakespeare in the Hawkesian manner reveal an impressively iconoclastic self-confidence; and indeed there is an obvious correlation between the current demotion of Shakespeare and the promotion and self-promotion of the critic, the latter apparently competing at times on equal terms with the former. In the new dispensation, the critic does not listen to the dead author but seeks to ‘engage in a dialogue’ or a quarrel with him; the critic is no longer an interpreter of the text but a ‘producer’ of its meanings or, as Terry Eagleton puts it, a ‘co-partner’. ‘Shakespeare was not great literature lying conveniently to hand’, explains Eagleton, ‘he is great literature because the [literary] institution constitutes him as such.’⁶ As a prominent member of the institution and one of Shakespeare’s most restive partners, he announces on the first page of his bestselling William Shakespeare that ‘[t]o any unprejudiced reader — which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all literary critics — it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact.’⁷

This reverse valuation of creative writer and critic is not confined of course to Shakespeare studies (although when Shakespeare is the demoted writer in question it does have a singular audacity); the attitude is typical of postmodern theory and criticism as a whole. Barthes’s alleged Death of the Author, and Derrida’s assurance that every text ‘since Plato’ lies waiting for its unintended contradictions to be unpacked in the academy (‘Derrida has shown us …’), inaugurated what W.J.T. Mitchell has hailed as ‘The Golden Age of Criticism’, a period when ‘the dominant mode of literary expression … is not poetry, fiction, drama, film, but criticism and theory’.⁸ Until the sales of radical theory and criticism begin to challenge those of fiction and poetry, and audiences desert theatres and cinemas for public readings from avant-garde critics, we can dismiss this claim as absurd. But in the academic study of Shakespeare the success of radical criticism is such that its iconoclastic assertions and daring ‘productions’ have to be taken very seriously.

2

A major symptom of radical criticism’s hostility to Shakespeare’s art is its persistent sneering at the attribution to his plays of an essential unity, an attitude whose primary sanction is to be found in the work of Marxist theorists such as Pierre Macherey⁹ and Frederick Jameson.¹⁰ The offending attribute is ‘an imaginary coherence’ allegedly imposed on the plays by liberal humanist (or ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’) critics driven by ‘certain pressing ideological imperatives’.¹¹ ‘In the old days’, explains Alan Sinfield, ‘the thing you were meant to do with a literary text was to point out how whole and complete it was. The trick now is to do the opposite, to look for the gaps and silences and stress and pressure points.’¹² And elsewhere he adds that ‘coherence is a chimera … No story can contain all the possibilities it brings into play; coherence is always selection.’¹³

There is a degree of error and confusion in these observations. In the first place, no critic writing in ‘the old days’ would have denied that coherence always entails selection; in fact since the time of Aristotle, who introduced the metaphorical concept of organic unity to dramatic criticism, it has been taken as axiomatic that artistic unity is entirely dependent on selection, and that the drama, being subject to a strict time limit, is of necessity the most economical and compressed of all literary forms. Moreover, the maxim of Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906) that ‘conflict is the essence of drama’ was generally accepted, and A.C. Bradley subsequently established a long tradition when he analysed Shakespeare’s tragedies in terms of behavioural and emotional conflict and found at their heart an unresolved metaphysical contradiction (the radical critic substitutes ideological and political contradiction). The effect of the New-Critical tradition too was to stress in Shakespeare’s plays a combination of both formal unity and inner contradiction (or ambivalence, or paradox). A clear instance of this combination is Richard II, where structural symmetry and ironic circularity reinforce a profoundly complex if not ambiguous attitude to the rights and wrongs of the Richard–Bolingbroke conflict, leaving us with a final sense of pattern and closure and yet with an awareness that for Bolingbroke and England ‘the really difficult part was only just beginning’ (to quote a Chekhov ending).

As Richard Levin has observed, the radical critic’s denial of artistic unity to Shakespeare’s plays involves a confusion of formal unity and ideological uniformity.¹⁴ A play would not succeed if it did not dramatise a conflict of ideas, attitudes, feelings, values; but when it is conflictual in that sense it is not in consequence artistically disorganised. It would seem that the root cause of this denial of artistic unity is a determination to equate all Shakespeare’s meanings with ideology, and with ideology defined not simply as the prevailing social norms but as the ruling class’s endeavour to smooth over the conflicts and contradictions of the social order.¹⁵

There is abundant evidence in Shakespeare’s plays of an entirely conscious concern with ideas of unity and disunity. As we shall see in Chapters 3 and 6, they are grounded for the most part on a well-established notion of unity — in nature, society, and the self — understood as an intrinsically unstable system of opposites. Thus the raison d’être of Shakespeare’s focus on unity is not, as Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield maintain, to ‘occlude’ conflict and contradiction,¹⁶ since it acknowledges them as always inherent and potentially dominant in every stable structure or state of affairs. And the implication that signs of deep disunity or contradiction in the plays invalidate an intended impression of unity, and have been detected only by vigilant radical critics, is very wide of the mark. Such beliefs, however, serve to legitimise the claim that the critic’s role is to ‘construct meaning out of the contradictory discourses which the text provides’,¹⁷ which in turn promotes the practice of strategically selective quotation, bits and pieces from Shakespeare’s carefully wrought designs being reassembled to fit a prefabricated interpretive paradigm.

3

Intimately related to radical criticism’s negative attitude to Shakespeare’s art is its hostility to his humanity, more often referred to as his universality. Ben Jonson had the latter in mind when he declared that Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time; but it was Samuel Johnson who gave most forceful expression to the idea, and he has in consequence been pilloried by critics such as Terence Hawkes¹⁸ and Christopher Norris.¹⁹ High on Hawkes’s list of beliefs to which radical criticism is opposed is ‘the belief that the Bard’s … work is universally valid and speaks to human beings across the ages as clearly now, had we the wit to see it, as then … that, construed aright … Shakespeare’s plays are able to address all people at all times, and everywhere’.²⁰ On the contrary, Shakespeare’s plays have historically specific significance and no more; his supposed universality is founded on the false and dangerous notion of a permanent human nature (dangerous because it serves to obstruct social change); moreover local, contemporary relevance (which most traditional critics acknowledge in Shakespeare) and universal significance are mutually exclusive, cannot coexist.²¹

The idea that it is impossible to effect social change if one believes (rightly or wrongly) in an essential human nature is disproved by the biographies of countless men and women who have been responsible for major advances in social thought and practice, and by the fact that even radical critics would never abandon the appeal to ‘human rights’ when challenging the activities of brutal regimes. And the suggestion that a play which is manifestly rooted in its own time and place cannot have universal significance is baffling. The case of a play which antedates Shakespeare by two thousand years is sufficient to establish its obtuseness. Sophocles’ Antigone is undoubtedly embedded in the religious, ethical, and political culture of fifth-century Athens (bc); but its dramatisation of a conflict between the state and the individual, between the inhumanity of rigid law and the strength of human love and moral conviction, is such that it found its place as a play-within-the-play — a mirror image of the contemporary context — in Athol Fugard’s The Island, a veiled attack on the injustices of South Africa’s apartheid system and its most notorious prison. Moreover, the actor who first played Haemon, and was arrested on his way to the theatre and sentenced to seven years hard labour on Robben Island, gave one-man performances of Antigone in the prison quarry for the benefit of his fellow prisoners. Could anything better demonstrate the timeless significance of great art?

Shakespeare, wrote Johnson in 1765, is

above all writers … the poet of nature; the poet who holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters … are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion.²²

As Nicholas Rowe pointed out in 1709, ‘the severer Critiques’ of the time complained that Shakespeare broke all the (neoclassic) rules; and he was rebuked and patronised accordingly. And yet ‘the generality of our Audiences’ loved and admired his plays (remarked Rowe), they grew in esteem with the passing of time, and his greatness had to be both acknowledged and explained.²³ Johnson was doubtless wrong (or at least overstating his case) when he said that Shakespeare’s characters are not modified by contemporary and transient peculiarities; but his universalist argument is essentially a response to a question which the severer critics of today invariably ignore, and which every academic should consider an elementary part of the teaching process: wherein lies the special virtue of this particular play or body of plays? Why is is that four hundred years of cultural change have not diminished its appeal to audiences and readers alike? The question has to lead us back to humanity and art.

Against the anti-universalist argument one must also set the perpetual tendency of Shakespeare’s characters themselves to utter generalisations on human nature and experience, or simply to express feelings and ideas that time never antiquates:

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy. I were but little happy if I could now say much.

How bitter a thing it is to look at happiness through another man’s eyes.

Such men as he be never at heart’s ease

Whiles they behold a greater than themselves.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow …

Thou’lt come no more.
Never, never, never, never, never.

There sir stop.
Let us not burden our remembrance with
A heaviness that’s gone.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

And so on. The more distant Shakespeare becomes from us, the more important is the work of historical contextualisation if we are to understand and enjoy all that he has to offer; but the task is worthwhile in the first place because utterances like these, heard or read in context, capture with arresting authority what is not historically contingent and absorb us into the life of the plays.

4

Since the 1970s, individual theorists such as Derrida, Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan have been granted iconic status and submissive intellectual regard by radical critics in the United States and Britain (‘heroic’ is Catherine Belsey’s word for Althusser);²⁴ and although their theories have been subjected to rigorous and extensive demolition work, the reverence in which they have been held west of Calais still persists. In some cases, too, radical critics of Shakespeare indulge in repetitive self-reference and autobiographical excursus, blending for the supposed benefit of the reader their own intellectual and spiritual lives with the concerns of the world’s greatest playwright. Yet the cult of the individual is sternly condemned by such critics in relation to Shakespeare himself (‘bardolatry’), his charac...