Big-Time Shakespeare

Michael D. Bristol

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134928583
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare has made the big time. No less than the Beatles or Liberace, Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger, Shakespeare is big-time in the idiomatic sense of cultural success and widespread notoriety. Not only has he achieved canonical status, Shakespeare is a contemporary celebrity. His artistic distinction and aptitude for controversy constantly keeps his name in the public eye.
Bristol debates Shakespeare's cultural authority, and clarifies the semantics of his name in our culture. Big-Time Shakespeare suggests his plays represent the pathos of our civilisation with extraordinary force and clarity. Shakespeare's contradictory understanding of the social and cultural past is also examined with close analysis of The Winter's Tale, Othello, and Hamlet.

Part I: The supply side of culture

Chapter 1: Introduction

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night….

(Hamlet: 1.5.10)

The good time is the small time, the big time is the hard time.

(Red Buttons, 1956)

Shakespeare has made the big time. No less than the Beatles or Liberace, Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger, Shakespeare is big-time in the idiomatic sense of cultural success, high visibility, and notoriety. Other literary figures may achieve canonical status within the academic community based on claims to artistic distinction, but Shakespeare is unusual in that he has also achieved contemporary celebrity. Such an achievement entails an aptitude for controversy that keeps Shakespeare’s name above a certain threshold of public attention. Notwithstanding a long history of challenges to his cultural authority, Shakespeare has been a celebrity for just about as long as the social state of being a celebrity has existed. Other stars of the culture industry—David Garrick, let’s say, or, to choose a more properly literary example, Lord Byron—have had nothing like Shakespeare’s durability. Such extraordinary cultural stamina will be the primary focus of this book.

When he was still alive, Shakespeare was not much of a public figure. He seems to have avoided publicity, and as far as anyone knows, preferred a relatively modest and retiring existence. On the other hand, the evidence of the Sonnets suggests that Shakespeare had hoped for and expected considerable public renown for his poetry, though there is a perhaps naïve insistence here on the genuine worthiness of his performance as the main reason for his fame. In Sonnet 65 Shakespeare writes of the ‘miracle’ of ‘black ink’ as the solution to the problem of ‘sad mortality’ and suggests that his ‘powerful rhyme’ can outlive ‘marble and the gilded monuments of Princes’. As a private aspiration, fame is simply a wish to be remembered after one is dead. But in the traditional understanding of fame it clearly matters exactly what one hopes to be famous for. Fame, in the sense intended in Shakespeare’s sonnets, is the consequence of virtuous acts and exemplary achievements. From the perspective of the community, the moral dignity achieved by famous people through their famous deeds enhances the cohesion of society over time.

Shakespeare’s own desire for fame has been gradually transmuted into something radically different in the form of contemporary celebrity. Unlike fame, celebrity is a form of social being that does not rest on any particular claim for distinction. Indeed, it is quite possible to achieve celebrity without excelling at any particular craft. The class of celebrities can include not only show business performers and creative artists, but also politicians, sports figures and journalists, certain popular religious leaders, as well as mobsters and serial killers. Public visibility, regardless of how it has been achieved, is the only necessary requirement for claiming the status of celebrity. A celebrity is simply ‘a person who is known for his well-knownness’ (Boorstin 1962:57). The achievement of celebrity status is perhaps more complex than Boorstin’s picture of mass deception and mass credulity seems to imply (Gamson 1994). Nevertheless, celebrity requires neither extraordinary competence nor exceptional virtue. It demands only energetic self-assertion and adroit public relations directed towards a public socialized to the habits of mass consumption.

THE BIG TIME AND THE SMALL TIME

Shakespeare’s name, together with his image, has extraordinary currency in contemporary culture at a time when the practice of reading and careful study of his works appears to be in decline. In the nineteenth century Shakespeare societies were organized in communities all over the English-speaking world for the purpose of reading and discussion of the plays. To judge by their newsletters and other ephemera, these reading clubs seem quaint and even eccentric by contemporary standards. They were often more preoccupied with the social etiquette of club meetings or with the menus planned for club dinners than with serious critical scrutiny of the plays. Nevertheless, the Shakespeare clubs were important in providing a public forum where citizens could practice the art of critical deliberation using Shakespeare to moot a range of social or political topics. The use of Shakespeare for enhancing socialization in these contexts is linked primarily to the idea of his fame, since it is motivated by respect for his virtues. Shakespeare’s celebrity, on the other hand, is primarily the result of his circulation as a masscultural icon (Charnes 1993:155).

Although he is probably not as bankable as, say, Clint Eastwood, there is nevertheless a considerable market for a range of cultural goods that carry the Shakespeare trademark. Film versions of the plays such as Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing or Zeffirelli’s Hamlet and his earlier Romeo and Juliet have shown that Shakespeare can be profitable in the context of commercial film production. Even more remarkable perhaps is the success of such avant-gardiste productions as William Reilly’s Men of Respect, Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, all of which rely on their audience’s prior knowledge of a Shakespeare text. In general the overall level of economic activity in publishing, movies, video production, and commercial theater that exploits the general public’s knowledge of Shakespeare remains very high. In this sense to speak of Shakespeare’s currency is an apt usage, since his image actually appears on VISA cards issued by certain banks in the UK, and a scene from Romeo and Juliet is depicted on the back of £20 notes.

In an age where everyone can expect to be famous for at least fifteen minutes in the sense of sheer visibility and vulgar recognition, neither publicity nor sheer dollar volume nor any combination of these two factors provides a complete account of large-scale cultural success and recognition. There is a temporal dimension to this success as well. Contemporary celebrity is ephemeral; nothing seems more dated or more lame than the popular music enjoyed by one’s parents. The typical career of a media star is likely to be characterized by extraordinary peaks of notoriety and public attention, followed in many instances by complete oblivion. One of the rather more difficult tasks I have had to face in composing this chapter has been to think of examples of celebrities whose currency will not already have depreciated by the time the book is actually published.

Celebrities come and go, but only a few achieve promotion to the big time. The experience of such big-time status, moreover, is complex and evokes deeply ambivalent attitudes. In the course of a long career as a comedian in vaudeville, television, and film, Red Buttons experienced many ups and downs. In 1956, when his career was on the skids, he summarized his experience in a vaguely poetic aphorism: ‘the good time is the small time, the big time is the hard time’. For those who aspire to it, the big time is distant, alien, and cold. The regime of the big time diminishes and forbids small-time felicity. The seductive glamor of celebrity status is offset by exorbitant costs in personal sacrifice, self-discipline, compromise, and aggression. In the end celebrity status may prove extremely evanescent and transitory, offering no immunity against ‘sad mortality’.

Despite the risks and the rigorous exactions, however, it’s clear that small-time satisfactions offer no serious challenge to the rewards of the big time. Red Buttons’ season of big-time celebrity, such as it was, could not have been accomplished without a willingness to sacrifice enjoyment of the small time. Shakespeare’s own apparent preference for the small time did not, however, prevent his eventual succession to the big time. Paradoxically, there is an important sense in which big-time Shakespeare is a collectively produced phenomenon generated out of the innumerable small-time accomplishments of actors and directors, advertising copy-writers, public relations specialists, as well as scholars, editors, and educators. In another sense, however, big-time Shakespeare is a scandal and a reproach to these efforts, an index of the transience and marginality of small-time incapacity to serve the hard time of serious cultural ambition and achievement.

Celebrity demands hard time. Its value to individual aspirants may be quite high, though there is no doubt that it is also very costly. But what about the value of big-time celebrity for the community at large and for the vast majority of people who have no serious big-time aspirations? Since it is not based on any pattern of exemplary conduct, big-time celebrity has no binding force for a community over time. The more homely and familiar world of the small time, for example, an extended family, or a religious congregation, or even a professional organization of like-minded people with a common history, provides for satisfaction of basic needs such as material comfort, emotional reassurance, and a sense of moral as well as social orientation. Big-time achievements are in many ways inimical to the needs of ordinary people and the values of everyday life.

The idea that big-time achievements are in some important ways irrelevant and even antagonistic to the concerns of everyday life is given powerful articulation in the ruminations on Shakespeare of Mr Ramsay, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

he slipped, seeing all this, smoothly into speculation suggested by an article in The Times about the number of Americans who visit Shakespeare’s house every year. If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is to-day? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now than in the time of the Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization? Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity. The thought was distasteful to him. He tossed his head. To avoid it, he would find some way of snubbing the predominance of the arts. He would argue that the world exists for the average human being; that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express it. Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it.

(Woolf 1932:70–71)

It is not clear whether Mr Ramsay actually believes his own conclusions, since his desire ‘to disparage Shakespeare’ seems motivated largely by the tiresome demands of preparing for a guest lecture. Whatever readers may make of this character in the context of Woolf’s novel, however, he does raise a troubling question, viz. Is Shakespeare really important in the longue durée of culture, and if so why?

By asking whether ‘civilization’ would be any different if Shakespeare had never existed, Mr Ramsay assigns a radical privilege to the claims of ordinary life and to all those ordinary people whose exclusive daily concern is with repetitive labor and the struggle for subsistence. What Mr Ramsay challenges here is the kind of lofty universalist claim, often unexamined, that Shakespeare in some way expressively defines social being within ‘civilization’. Mr Ramsay’s intuitions here suggest a further shift in the comparative valence assigned to the categories of big time and small time. He certainly acknowledges that Shakespeare is one of the historically great figures of his culture, but he does not interpret this status as in any way fundamental to the values of civilization.

Mr Ramsay proposes instead a strong claim for the moral dignity of ordinary life, against which the claims of art can be dismissed as merely arrogant and frivolous. This powerful affirmation of ordinary life as the sovereign ethical purpose of civilization goes beyond transvaluation of the idea of the big time. The very definition of what is genuinely enduring is tied, not to the grandiose ambitions of big-time celebrity, but rather to the anonymity of the small time. The arts are merely a superficial diversion when considered in light of the more solid permanence of things and places—’familiar lanes and commons’.

The conventional value assigned to Shakespeare is connected with the belief that his works are in some way essential to the ‘progress of civilization’. Appreciation and understanding of Shakespeare would then somehow be constitutive of membership in civilized society. Mr Ramsay’s thought is that any such belief in the achievements of ‘great men’ simply reflects the interests of an elite class. Shakespeare’s importance is illusory; people can get along perfectly well without him. But Virginia Woolf does not present Mr Ramsay’s affirmation of ordinary life without considerable irony.

Not knowing precisely why it was that he wanted to disparage Shakespeare and come to the rescue of the man who stands eternally in the door of the lift, he picked a leaf sharply from the hedge. All this would have to be dished up for the young men at Cardiff next month, he thought.

(Woolf 1932:71)

Mr Ramsay’s defense of ordinary life against the claims of art and high culture is destined for an audience of university students, many of whom doubtless aspire to wealth and distinction. But these ‘young men’ are at Cardiff, not Oxford or Cambridge, and his lecture will be ‘dished up’ as intellectual leftovers to the sons of shopkeepers and tradesmen. His challenge to the importance of ‘great men’ is complicated by an obscure resentment of this audience and by his irritation with his own contradictory institutional situation. The planned lecture will attest to the moral centrality of ordinary life. But at the same time the act of ‘dishing up’ such a lecture to the young men at Cardiff simply instantiates the social relations of privilege, exclusion, and complacency it is intended to challenge.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf presents a very different account of Shakespeare’s authority and its relation to everyday life. Her discussion suggests that literary creativity is sustained in and through broad social participation, that it is an effect of communal life. Shakespeare’s works are built up from comprehensive borrowing of preceding literary works and from an unselfconscious absorption of the speech types of the common people.

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Without… forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.

(Woolf 1929:98)

Woolf’s immediate concern is with the revolutionary and epochal emergence of the institution of women writing, an event she thinks of ‘greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses’. Such an emergence takes place through the initiative of an exceptional singular agent, but the pre-condition of such originality is the existence of a shared expressive life among the socially excluded and unvoiced.

The most powerful figure for the silenced and subordinated community in A Room of One’s Own is Woolf’s description of Judith, Shakespeare’s ‘wonderfully gifted sister’. As Woolf has no doubt correctly insisted, a woman with a Shakespearean capacity of expressivity and a determination to use that capacity publicly would almost certainly have been denounced and punished as a witch or demon. Judith Shakespeare is a casualty of the patriarchal order and its violent policing of language. William Shakespeare himself is not, however, indicted for the generic persecution of Judith or for any of his anonymous sisters. Furthermore, the voice of the doomed sister can in fact be heard resonating through the work of the brother. Shakespeare is, for Woolf, a maternal figure, a fecund and nurturing precursor for her own alter ego, Anon (Schwartz 1991:722).

Woolf’s account of Shakespeare as ‘mother and muse’ to the long-silenced expressive potentiality of women writing suggests a second, contrasting meaning that the term ‘big-time Shakespeare’ has for this project. On one level I certainly intend to stress the sheer vulgar celebrity Shakespeare has enjoyed for a period of several hundred years. But the expression ‘big time’ is also an idiomatic translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase bolshoe vremja, which is usually given the more formal academic rendering in English of ‘great time’ or even ‘macrotemporality’ (Morson and Emerson 1990:287–288). The translation of bolshoe vremja as ‘big time’ evokes a show business idiom of long runs and return engagements that usefully suggests Shakespeare’s success in the entertainment industry. Bakhtin’s intention with this phrase, however, is more closely equivalent to the classical proverb ars longa, vita brevis than it is to contemporary notions of show business celebrity.

The notion of ‘great time’ is obviously related to the concept of longue durée as this has been developed by historians of the Annales movement, and indeed Bakhtin read and admired the early Annales historians, particularly Marc Bloch (Holquist 1986:xxi). But where Bloch and the other Annales historians were primarily concerned with the historical record of material culture left by anonymous peasants and artisans, Bakhtin focuses on the more dynamic and eventful long-term existence of individual artistic works:

It seems paradoxical that…great works continue to live in the distant future. In the process of their posthumous life they are enriched with new meanings, new significance: it is as though these works outgrow what they were in the epoch of their creation.

(Bakhtin 1986:4)

This view of the durable permanence and the gradual ‘coming-into-being’ of the work of art is summed up in one of Bakhtin’s proverb-like formulations —’nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival’. This aphorism seems to offer the possibility of an eventual reconciliation of big time with small time in a sense not suggested by the observations of Red Buttons or Mr Ramsay. The pastoral and domestic resonances suggested by McGee’s translation of Bakhtin’s prazdnik vozrozhdeniya suggest that there is something to come home to, some feeling of solidarity or sense of community that links the present with the past. In the original Russian the idea has a more specifically religious connotation. A more literal translation would be ‘festival of rebirth’. James Nielson interprets Bakhtin’s phrase as the equivalent of Easter and suggests ‘every meaning will celebrate its day of resurrection’ as a translation that more exactly captures the spirit of Bakhtin’s idea in this fragmentary passage, probably the last thing he wrote before his death in 1975.

Bakhtin’s idea of ‘great time’ focuses on the extended life of the community as encompassing and also as linking together the much briefer tenure of individual lives. This is a view of social time primarily in terms of its intersubjective and ethical aspects, in which people are related not only through spoken dialogue, but also through reciprocal economic obligations, and even physical intimacy. Bakhtin arrived at his notions of the big time late in his career as an extension of his central theme of dialogue. The dialogic context has neither linguistic boundaries nor temporal limitations. Even the ‘alien word’ of historically distant contexts remains capable of revealing new meanings to dialogue partners who could never have been envisioned at the moment of the utterance. Shakespeare, in this view, has become both an enduring institution and a source of cultural authority not by virtue of cheap and meretricious celebrity but because the works produced are already richly dialogized and thus answerable to unforeseen social and cultural circumstances.

Shakespeare’s works are not closed discursive formations, nor are they limited to expressing the concerns and interests of a narrowly circumscribed historical period. They have potential for generating new meanings in successive epochs. Bakhtin argues that there is something paradoxical in the way certain works exist in epochs far removed from the time of their composition. In effect, the works outgrow the meanings and purposes for which they may have been intended and acquire new significance during an extended afterlife.

We may say that neither Shakespeare himself nor his contemporaries knew the ‘great Shakespeare’ that we know today…. The treasures of meaning invested by Shakespeare in his works arose and accumulated over centuries and even millennia—they were lurking within language, and not just literary language, but also in those strata of the popular language, which prior to Shakespeare, had not penetrated into literature…. Shakespeare, like every artist, constructed his works not out of dead elements, not out of bricks, but out of forms already heavy with meanings, filled with them.

(Bakhtin 1986:4)

Shakespeare was a writer who was vitally in touch with the richest possible sources from a wide range of past cultural formations. His works constitute a vast archive or library of ‘lost voices’ that retain their potential to be heard with new force and intonation in the perspective of the big time.

It’s possible that Bakhtin was led to the notion that lost meanings may enjoy a ‘homecoming festival’ in consequence of his own return from political exile. For Bakhtin the great works of literary culture provide a rich resource that allows us to connect with other human beings, even in situations of isolation and extreme deprivation. Such works enable much wider social participation in great time:

The mutual understanding of centuries and millennia, of peoples, nations, and cultures, provides a complex unity of all humanity, all human cultures (a complex unity of human culture), and a complex unity of human literature. All this is revealed only on the level of great time.

(Bakhtin 1986:167)

For Bakhtin, the great works of world literature provide the basis for this sort of ecumenical vision on a grand scale. It’s important to distinguish here between abstract notions of universality and Bakhtin’s intuitions about a complex ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Big-time Shakespeare
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: The supply side of culture
• Part II: The pathos of Western modernity
• References