Shakespeare in French Theory

King of Shadows

Richard Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317724001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

At a time when the relevance of literary theory itself is frequently being questioned, Richard Wilson makes a compelling case for French Theory in Shakespeare Studies. Written in two parts, the first half looks at how French theorists such as Bourdieu, Cixous, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault were themselves shaped by reading Shakespeare; while the second part applies their theories to the plays, highlighting the importance of both for current debates about borders, terrorism, toleration and a multi-cultural Europe.

Contrasting French and Anglo-Saxon attitudes, Wilson shows how in France, Shakespeare has been seen not as a man for the monarchy, but a man of the mob. French Theory thus helps us understand why Shakepeare's plays swing between violence and hope. Highlighting the recent religious turn in theory, Wilson encourages a reading of plays like Hamlet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelth Night as models for a future peace.

Examining both the violent history and promising future of the plays, Shakespeare in French Theory is a timely reminder of the relevance of Shakespeare and the lasting value of French thinking for the democracy to come.

Part I

Monsters

1 Gothic Shakespeare

A Monster In The Latin Quarter

Allow me to return once again to Shakespeare, in whom
I may have overindulged … But it sometimes seems to me that
the whole of philosophy is only a meditation on Shakespeare.

[Emmanuel Levinas]¹

The Man Of The Crowd

‘La monstre a plus valeur que le sujet’: the show was worth more than the subject. By separating the spirit from the letter, the first words recorded by a Frenchman about a work of Shakespeare's set the terms for four centuries of cross-Channel reaction to the monstrosity of a drama Voltaire deplored as being by a ‘drunken savage’.² Jacques Petit was a young French musician employed as a tutor to the English nobility (but in fact a secret agent spying for both the Earl of Essex and Henri IV of France), when he reported to the Earl's secretary, Anthony Bacon, on a performance of Titus Andronicus staged for New Year in 1596 at the mansion of Sir John Harington, a hundred miles north-east of London, at Burley-on-the-Hill in Rutland. Because the host was a fixer for King James of Scotland who would be governor of the king's daughter, we know a lot about the Harington household as an advance-post of the Stuarts. But since the teenage Jacques was the protégé of Secretary Bacon, we also know something about Shakespeare's first French critic and attitudes he brought to Titus Andronicus. We know, for instance, that he preferred a juggler he saw en route, whose ‘clever tricks’ included threading ‘three threads in a needle, turning and twisting them quickly between two candles to the sound of violins’. We also learn from Bacon's mother (who liked ‘the French boy’ no more than any she called her son's ‘French cattle’) that Petit's own trick was to ‘twang’ his master to sleep with his lute, when he was not stripping lead off her roof to make bullets. And we can infer that it was his Huguenot upbringing that made Petit wince at the ‘muddle and confusion’ in Harington's housekeeping, and the knight's ‘useless expenditures on tragedies and games’. For it was against his better judgement, he swore, that he ‘kept a good face’ when forced to take part, among ‘too great a number of rustics’, in ‘the dances and amusing games intended to make us laugh’ laid on at Burley for revelling hordes. ‘Nothing spoils enjoyment more than crowds’, Jacques moralised after watching Titus Andronicus; and by Twelfth Night he was pleading with Bacon to ‘play Apollo’ and rescue him from ‘fornicators and ribald domestics’, whose ‘villainous ideas were those of the devil’, protesting he could ‘not endure any more the unseemliness’ of such immoral companions.³ Soon Bacon's squeamish intelligencer was on his way to the Apollonian order of the Dutch Republic, where ‘he would find life more to his liking than in Rutland’.⁴ Thus, by chance, the earliest French account of Shakespearean drama comes from the circle which was the nucleus of the scientific revolution, and the very mindset of Reform that the dramatist would himself satirise in Love's Labour's Lost, with the zealous ‘little academe’ of utopian Navarre [1,1,12]:

There is not an inn in London which covers so many tables as is done here … The orders were to receive and entertain 8 or 9 hundred neighbours who came every day to celebrate … Monsieur Jean dined in hall to receive his neighbours and principal farmers, entertaining these with an excessive choice of all kinds of dishes and all kinds of wines. His maitre d'hotel took care to see that nothing was lacking, and laid out 4 or 5 long tables for 80 or 100 people at a time, who having finished made way for as many others. After it was over, bread and wine in barrels were carried to the poor who were all satisfied, so that there were many left-overs … On New Year's Day the comedians from London were come here to have their share. They were made to play the day after their arrival, and the next morning they were sent on their way. We had a masquerade here written by Sir Edward Wingfield, and they also played The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, but the presentation was worth more than the subject.⁵

A good show on a bad text: Jacques Petit's preference for the spirit over the letter of Titus Andronicus is so similar to other grudging remarks made about Elizabethan works of Catholic bias that we might suspect the informer of insinuating what critics now recognise, that this Roman tragedy dramatises the audience's own experience of the Wars of Religion, and that when the Goths ‘earnestly fix’ their eyes on some ‘ruinous monastery’ [5,1,21–3] their attitude evokes that of the German iconoclasts.⁶ Thus, the inference that what was de trop to this killjoy was its depiction of the Reformers as Goths (with Elizabeth caricatured as the lustful, tyrannical Gothic Queen, Tamora) is supported by Petit's own background in the Languedoc, and his nausea at Shakespearean extravagance can be related to the ethos of his home-town, the Huguenot bastion of Montauban. Here a Geneva-type regime was installed in the 1560s, ‘and this revolutionary organisation ran its police, schools, and hospitals’, within a federation of assemblies historians describe as ‘a sort of United Provinces of the Midi’.⁷ No doubt it was the Calvinist laws of Montauban, which ‘put stringent limits on festivities’, and sentenced servants who took sweeteners to have their hands cut off, that made Jacques such a dull boy when his host's daughter bestowed New Year presents on all nine hundred guests, ‘from the greatest down to the smallest’.⁸ Lucy Countess of Bedford would be the patroness of Jonson and Donne, who praised her ‘thin face with a long nose’ as ‘God's master-piece’.⁹ But her largesse was met by this interloper with the churlish remark that ‘since the custom is for so much bad play’, he had accepted her gift in the spirit of the actors who came to the feast so as not to miss a slice of the cake.¹⁰ Gift practices were litmus-tests of confessional identity in Reformation Europe, we are told, and Calvin banned backhanders because they muddied his welfare state with unaccountable ties.¹¹ So Petit (who had left the godly city of Montauban in the grip of a purge against wigs and ruffs) was not the ideal recipient of Lucy Harington's Christmas liberality; nor the best spectator of a play which repays the gratuitous savagery of the Goths, and greets their Queen on her progress, with a parody donation by an old Roman nobleman of a cannibal feast:

TITUS:

Welcome, my gracious lord; welcome, dread Queen; Welcome, ye warlike Goths; welcome, Lucius; And welcome, all. Although the cheer be poor, 'Twill fill your stomachs. Please you, eat of it.

[Titus, 5,3,26–9]

In an unflinching commentary on this cannibal meal, François Laroque notes that what would have made it even more horrific is the joke when Titus laughs at how Tamora ‘daintily’ eats her sons [60], as ‘dainty’ then referred to testicles.¹² But Jacques Petit had grown up in a region where Catholic fanatics (such as Titus is perhaps meant to portray), did indeed cut their victims' genitals off, ‘which were hawked through the streets in a ghoulish commerce’.¹³ And he also came from a town terrorised by Protestant thugs who paraded Papists on asses before lynching them.¹⁴ So, it may be that his objection to Shakespeare was to a writer whose primal scene – of Roman hospitality perverted into human sacrifice by Gothic Reformation – was too close to the bone. To a zealot from the sectarian front-line the moral of Titus Andronicus must have looked like the hand-wringing of Montaigne, when he lamented that no belief could ever justify atrocities like those committed by his own neighbours in the name of duty and reli-gion, by roasting and feeding their enemies to dogs.¹⁵ For as its latest Anglo-French critic, Jacques Berthoud concludes in his edition of the play, Shakespeare's universalism is such that, having ‘stared into the terrifying reality’ of sectarian war by revealing not conflict between outsiders and insiders, ‘but a disconnection within Rome itself’, the author of Titus Andronicus ended with politique inclusiveness, ‘To heal Rome's harms and wipe away her woe’ [5,3,147].¹⁶ The earlier Arden editor had therefore to manufacture a stage direction (raising the Goths onto an upper level) to substantiate his tendentious hunch that the invaders ‘are there to secure the Protestant succession’,¹⁷ as what must have scandalised a Huguenot was how Shakespeare's drama in fact restores these ‘Romans’ to power with all their ‘popish tricks and ceremonies’ [5,1,76; 5,3,146]. Thus, Petit was in a position to perceive that the play put on in Rutland was an exposé of just his own brand of fundamentalism; and that its creator spoke for a potlatch of teeming ‘muddle and confusion’, of play, farce, feasts, and crowds, which was the hospitable contradiction of the rational utopia projected by his own ‘Apollo’, and by Anthony's brother Francis, the author of The New Atlantis. So, though we do not know if the masque devised by ‘that great warrior’ Sir Edward Wingfield complemented Shakespeare in its nostalgia for the old gift-giving ways, we can guess that anything devised by this other ‘prodigal son of a mere wastrel’¹⁸ would no more amuse the French informer, who was right when he sneered that his spendthrift host ‘must soon lease out his land to his followers’, and that ‘these noble lords and ladies’ would shortly all go the same way.¹⁹

‘My cousin, Lord Harington’, wrote the other Sir John Harington remembered today, had ‘much labour to preserve his sobriety midst all the foolery of the times’. Shakespeare's benefactor was typical of the English who escaped the ‘gunpowder fright’ of terrorism only to ruin themselves, his namesake quipped, by ‘going on as if the devil was contriving every man should blow himself up with wild riot and devastation of time’.²⁰ So, the Midland Maecenas would expire at the Reformation storm-centre of Worms, returning in 1613 after depositing Princess Elizabeth in the Heidelberg castle of her husband, Elector Frederick, and the morass of her father's grandest mistake: his match-making to unite Europe, which led, in reality, to Frederick igniting the Thirty Years War with a Protestant grab for Bohemia, the land of Hus. If James I was ‘one of the few rulers who regarded peace as always better than war’, he was Shakespeare's perfect patron. But ‘in the excitement of the wedding’ for which The Winter's Tale was acted the fiction of Bohemia as a scene of toleration was ignored, and ‘no one took notice of James's own agenda’ for peace.²¹ All the expense James and Harington lavished educating the princess who became the ‘Winter Queen’ in the Kantian lesson of Shakespeare and Montaigne – that Europe's wars were fought ‘to gain a little patch of ground / That hath no profit but the name’ [Hamlet, 4,4,9] – was wasted in the crusade that ended in the Battle of the White Mountain. Such was the backdrop of the games gate-crashed by the young spy who slipped into the Rutland mansion in 1596, so ‘unknown amongst many others’, he imagined, that his cover would not be blown as he reported how much he disliked Shakespeare's play.²² The puritan pageboy played a bit-part in the plot to turn the Stuarts to Reform. Jacques Petit's suspicion of his hosts’ hospitality forms a perfect prologue, then, to the story of Shakespeare's French reception, as French thinkers would long echo his complaints, but then come to praise the plays precisely because of their monstrous elasticity, concluding that if time is ‘too short / To make a world-without-end bargain in’ [Love's, 5,2,770–1], opposing fundamentalisms will have to learn to co-exist:

For young Chairbonne the puritan
and old Poisson the papist, howsome'er their hearts are severed
in religion, their heads are both one: they may jowl
horns together like any deer i'th'herd.

[All's Well, 1,3,45–8]

Watching Titus Andronicus, Petit relayed, he heard a rumour that ‘the Spaniard hopes to come as he did in ‘88’. In its mix of gossip, envy and disgust, penned by a ‘hand trembling for fear of committing some disgrace’, the agent's dossier on theatricals in Rutland reads like ‘The Mousetrap’ as recounted by Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.²³ And, by luck, we suddenly know more about the controllers whose expectations dictated his report. For a Polonius in the Bacon circle was at that instant filing a memorandum which also disparaged the plays for the superfluity of their text. William Scott was a clerk in the Ordnance Office when he compiled a manual of good usage where Shakespeare was chastised for ‘stuffing’ his works with ‘very idle verse’ and a style to smother ‘well conceited’ plots with gigantic excess. Scott's analysis has caught the eyes of editors because the example he cites of Shakespeare's redundancy is Richard II, which may have been staged to trigger the Essex Revolt.²⁴ But his treatise is even more interesting as the earliest ...