The Shakespearean International Yearbook

Volume 4: Shakespeare Studies Today

Mark Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351145305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

Preface

When the late, much-missed Professor W.R. Elton founded the Shakespearean International Yearbook, one of his bolder decisions was that there should be no editorial preface. Instead, each preface was to be independently commissioned, providing a commentary by a senior scholar on the ways in which the volume had addressed the question, 'Where are we now in Shakespeare studies?' The present editors kept to this policy in inviting Professor Frank Kermode to contribute his admirable introduction to Volume 3, and we plan to return to it in future volumes. In this respect the present editorial preface is a temporary usurpation; its chief purpose, or excuse, is to explain some changes and innovations in the present and future volumes.

Where are we now in Shakespeare studies?: Professor Elton's subtitle was both vigilant and cleverly elastic. Avoiding any obvious parti pris, it welcomed the survey articles and overviews which have been one of the SIY's great strengths; it also nudged those writing on particular plays or poems to provide a context (or 'situation') for their readings, and allowed the more militant to consider wherever we are but ought not to be. The present editors — less formally, Tom Bishop and I — are no less eager to encourage these regular exercises in critical and scholarly stocktaking, although we have abbreviated the subtitle to Shakespeare studies today; one reason for that change was our perhaps unnecessary worry that the word 'we' can seem more coercive than collegial, and might be out of place in what aims to be an 'international' Yearbook. Just as were pleased that Volume 3 was more 'international' than its predecessors, we are pleased that the range of subjects addressed has extended to include performance, translations and adaptations, and we are especially grateful to John Bell for allowing us to print the diary he kept when working on his recent, acclaimed production of Hamlet. Some of these changes are perhaps no more than natural developments in a still youthful series, but there is one significant new departure.

Beginning with the present volume, each Yearbook will now include a Special Section, edited by an annually appointed Guest Editor. So, next year's volume will include a section on 'Shakespeare and the Bonds of Service', edited by Michael Neill. The present volume begins with a group of essays on 'Shakespeare in the Age of Cognitive Science', edited by Mark Turner. If this choice of a Special Subject seems more startling, that may be because Shakespeare studies have taken some time to catch up with the cognitive revolution. So far as I know, Mary Thomas Crane's admirable Shakespeare's Brain (2000) was the first full-length 'cognitive' study of Shakespeare. Professor Kermode's Shakespeare's Language was published in the same year, but made no use of recent cognitive approaches to language and metaphor; a similar silence in the large 1997 Shakespeare Survey volume on 'Shakespeare and Language' was broken only by the late Kenneth Muir's reference to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's justly celebrated but now somewhat dated Metaphors We Live By (1980). Both of these books contained riches in plenty, and I am not complaining; rather, I am suggesting that a valuable resource is still little used. Cognitive science has many mansions and quite a few battlefields which are not visible in this volume; in the rest of this preface, I want to suggest or recall some reasons why Shakespeareans should be interested by cognitive accounts of metaphor.

The first and probably the best reason is that whatever advances our understanding of metaphor is likely to assist our understanding of Shakespeare. In classical Greek metaphora means 'carrying over', and in the Poetics Aristotle defined metaphor as 'giving the thing a name that belongs to something else'. Unlike Plato, Aristotle attached positive importance to the metaphorical and figurative uses of language; nonetheless, he regarded metaphor as a literary or oratorical ornament, and treated metaphors as one-by-one compressed comparisons based on the principles of analogy. In the twentieth century this account was vigorously challenged from various disciplines. For example, philosophers like Wittgenstein and J.T. Austin exposed the inadequacy of the underlying idea of a shared property, and the great linguist Roman Jakobson argued, in his celebrated 1956 paper on aphasia, that metaphor and metonymy were central in everyday language. By the mid-1970s, cognitive psychologists were concerned with the significant differences — which Aristotle's approach to metaphor had obscured — between metaphor, analogy and similarity: as Andrew Ortony observes in his wonderfully compressed and challenging entry for 'Metaphor' in Richard L. Gregory's The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987), analogy is a particular kind of similarity statement, whereas metaphors are built on comparisons which are themselves metaphorical but not always analogical. After 1977, when Michael Reddy's seminal essay on the Conduit Metaphor appeared (see chapter 5, below), the second generation of cognitive linguists was able to demonstrate that metaphor is not ornamental but inferential, and is a matter of conceptual structure before it becomes a matter of language. Far from being confined to literature or oratory, metaphor plays a crucial role in our everyday language because it plays such a crucial role in our everyday thinking.

This, of course, was the main thesis of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By, which appeared in the same year as Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning. In retrospect, that coincidence might seem more laden with implications and consequences than most dramatic plots. At this time — as J. Hillis Miller recalled in his disconsolate 1986 Presidential Address to the Modern Languages Association — the hitherto dominant 'deconstructive' approach was yielding to the hitherto emergent 'New Historicism'. From a very narrowly partisan 'Shakespearean' view this had one professionally 'happy' consequence: Shakespeare, and what came to be called the 'Early Modern' period — as the older term 'Renaissance' came to seem awkwardly laden, or dismayingly literary — moved into the 'central' position previously occupied by Romantic poetry. Yet another consequence, which Kermode both addresses and mourns in Shakespeare's Language, was that politicized questions involving the Self, race, class and gender came to seem more urgently fascinating and fruitful than considerations of Shakespeare's language or poetry. By this time, when Caroline Spurgeon's and even Wolfgang Clemen's earlier accounts of Shakespeare's 'Imagery' seemed to be played out — 'Been there, done that' — cognitive linguists were proposing a radically different approach to metaphor, but not many professional 'Shakespeareans' were interested.

Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive account of metaphor showed how the cognitive activity in question always involves moving across different conceptual domains, not moving between Aristotle's more atomistic 'things'. They also showed how some basic conceptual (or structural, or generative) metaphors are part of our cognitive apparatus; these basic conceptual metaphors are conventionally represented by small capitals, to distinguish them from individual linguistic or verbal instances of metaphor. So, life is a journey is the mnemonic for the basic conceptual metaphor that allows us to understand variants like LOVE IS A JOURNEY, and allows us to understand or invent innumerable linguistic instances like 'My career is going nowhere' or 'Our relationship is at a crossroads' or 'We'd better change gear!' Another basic conceptual metaphor, KNOWING IS SEEING, is important within the present volume — as we shall see. Usually, when we exclaim 'I see!' and mean, 'Now I understand!' we aren't looking at anything. What we are doing, which is hardly ever the immediate and conscious point of our exclamation, is comprehending and giving structure to the concept of 'knowing' or 'understanding' in terms of another, related but different conceptual domain, that of 'seeing'. The first part of Eve Sweetser's remarkable study, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphysical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (1990), traces the knowing is seeing metaphor through various Indo-European languages and shows how this basic conceptual metaphor provided the 'route' for various independent changes of word meaning, in which roots that originally meant 'see' came to mean 'know'. Cognitive psychology has shown how this long process has a somewhat Freudian recapitulation in children's process of metaphor acquisition. For every excited infant who is opening a birthday parcel, the all-important business of seeing what's in it involves literal seeing as well as literal knowing; later, this stage of conflation is followed by a stage of differentiation when the child learns to move between these two related but separate domains, and can understand extended or attenuated examples of the basic knowing is seeing metaphor like 'That's illuminating!'

Some of the essays that follow in this volume show how this two-domain model, involving a source-domain and a target-domain, was refined and complicated in the mid-1990s by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's accounts of conceptual 'blending'; but the two-domain model remains admirably parsimonious. For example, it is sufficient to show how our thinking about abstractions like Time, Death, the Self and Love or Causality is ineluctably metaphorical. It helps us to understand Shakespeare's local metaphors, not least because it can expose and account for what might not previously have been detected as metaphorical activity. So, if we wonder why the future is approaching from behind when Macbeth says, 'Glamys, and Thane of Cawdor: / The greatest is behinde', or when Andrew Marvell writes, 'But at my back I alwaies hear / Times winged Charriot hurrying near', the fascinating answer has been provided by cognitive linguists but is still not represented in scholarly editions of Macbeth or Marvell. In modern English it usually seems, and therefore is, more 'natural' to think of the future as lying ahead of us. What then seems bizarre in Marvell's lines is not the conventional trope of Time's winged chariot but the chariot's position, and what seems scary is that fore is even worse than aft: what lies ahead is Death, and the ultimate disappearance of Time itself into yonder 'Desarts of vast Eternity'. Yet something comparable happens in our everyday language whenever we speak of looking ahead or forwards to the coming weeks, or talk about facing the Future. We are giving the Future a metaphorical face, or front. It then makes sense to suppose that the coming weeks or carriages follow or trail behind the front of the approaching Time-train; it makes similarly metaphorical sense to think of ourselves as approaching Death, or think of Death chasing us. When we read Emily Dickinson's magnificently chilling poem 'Because I could not stop for Death', where Death drives the carriage, we simply — yet not so simply — assume that Death draws up from behind, when he 'kindly' stops to collect his passenger. Emily Dickinson's speaker or protagonist goes gently, whereas in Dylan Thomas's villanelle 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' the poet manages to have it both ways, urging his father (who is not identified until line 13) not to go gently into what is nonetheless described as a good night.

Conceptual metaphors are generative and constitutive. When the English refer to the 'mother country' and when Germans refer to the fatherland, or Vaterland, both of these metaphorical expressions represent one's country or homeland as a parent. But when they select alternative parents, these elaborated metaphors highlight or mask different aspects of one's relationship to one's country or state: the English expression emphasizes maternal nurturing, while the German expression emphasizes paternal authority. In the opening pages of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's account of the Social Contract the metaphorical idea of the state as a parent slides all too easily into the metaphorical idea of evolutionary substitution; this metaphor's entailments work against any contrary suspicion that to need a substitute parent might not be a stage of growing up. The first generation of cognitive linguists were not much concerned with so-called 'dead metaphors', in which the metaphorical content had become conventionalized and even lexicalized: we teachers can usually refer to the 'Head' of our academic department without wondering which bits of the implied body 'we' might represent. But for the second, post-Reddy generation of cognitive linguists, so-called 'dead metaphors' became important: precisely because they are so deeply entrenched, they may work all the more efficiently. George Lakoff's essay, 'Metaphor and War: the Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf' — reprinted in Harry Kreisler's Confrontation in the Gulf (1992) — might now be supplemented by an essay that considers how so-called 'rogue states' might or might not resemble 'rogue' elephants. Such vigilance about 'metaphor systems' — the metaphors and their relevant entailments — can pay off richly when we are considering how Shakespeare customarily thinks through his metaphors, and often sets one against another in a strikingly exploratory or interrogative way.

When Menenius considers the state as a body in the first scene of Coriolanus he is exploiting the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Index