Presentist Shakespeares

Hugh Grady, Terence Hawkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134172795
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Presentist Shakespeares is the first extended study of the principles and practice of 'presentism', a critical movement that takes account of the never-ending dialogue between past and present.

In this bold and consistently thought-provoking collection of presentist readings, the contributors:

• argue that the ironies generated by our involvement in time are a fruitful, necessary and an unavoidable aspect of any text's being, and that presentism allows us to engage with them more fully and productively
• demonstrate how these ironies can function as agents of change, flowing unstoppably back into the events of the past, colouring how we perceive them and modifying our sense of what they signify
• show that a critic's inability to step beyond time and specifically the present does not, as has been argued elsewhere, 'contaminate' readings of Shakespeare's plays, but rather points to shades of implication suddenly available here and now within the wide range of plays examined
• suggest that presentism might not merely challenge or expand our sense of what Shakespeare's plays are able to tell us, but may in fact offer the only effective purchase on these texts that is available to us.

Presentist criticism is an open-ended and on-going project, located at a particularly interesting and demanding juncture in modern Shakespeare studies. At this crucial point, then, Presentist Shakespeares is a compelling collection of readings by a distinguished team of authors, but it is also much more: it is a landmark, which reflects, develops and even rejoices in the intedeterminacy of the field.

Contributors include: Catherine Belsey, Michael Bristol, Linda Charnes, John Drakakis, Ewan Fernie, Evelyn Gajowski, Hugh Grady, Terence Hawkes and Kiernan Ryan.

1
Band of Brothers

Terence Hawkes

Water

His name was George W. Childs.¹ He was an American: from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was rich: a self-made millionaire, a newspaper proprietor and (if that’s not an oxymoron) a philanthropist. And on 17 October 1887, in the Jubilee year of the reign of Queen Victoria, he was responsible for a curious ceremony which took place in England, in Stratford-upon-Avon. It marked the formal opening of a facility which Mr Childs had recently donated to the town: a large, ornate drinking fountain. He had allowed himself to be persuaded that the provision of pure water for the people of Stratford, their horses, their sheep and their cattle would serve, not only as a ‘useful gift to both man and beast’, but also as a fitting monument to the genius of their fellow-citizen, William Shakespeare (Davis 1890: 5).

The fountain’s still there, at the junction of Wood St. and the Rother Market Place. An impressive piece of Victorian Gothic, nearly 18 feet high, its slight oddity is reinforced by the two quotations from the Bard’s works which it prominently displays. First, from Timon of Athens, Apemantus’s tribute to ‘Honest water, which ne’er left man i’ the mire.’ Second, from Henry VIII, Archbishop Cranmer’s pious forecast of the blissful way of life awaiting Shakespeare’s countrymen in the coming reign of Queen Elizabeth:

In her days every man shall eat in safety Under his own vine what he plants, and sing The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours. God shall be truly known, and those about her From her shall read the perfect ways of honour, And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.

(5. 4. 33-38)

In context, of course, the lines from Timon function less as a tribute to water’s healthful properties than as part of Apemantus’s scornful dismissal of Timon’s lavish banquet for his friends. Worse, to some embarrassment, modern scholarship has overtaken them. They were almost certainly written, not by Shakespeare, but by Middleton.² And the lines from Henry VIII make no mention of water at all.

Blood

In fact, they refer to another liquid altogether. But there’s no real mystery here. It must have quickly become clear that the fountain’s cascades were always destined to engage with issues richer and more complex than water. Presented to the people of Stratford by a transatlantic benefactor, there’s an obvious sense in which they also involved blood.

The speeches marking the opening ceremony make no bones about that. Time and again they stress a central, arresting notion: that the two cultures of the United States and the United Kingdom exemplify a genuine blood brotherhood: that in their collective veins flow the same corpuscles, and that these guarantee and reinforce a unity of race, way of life and general outlook that amounts to a common inheritance. ³ In a letter read out at the ceremony, the American writer James Russell Lowell spoke of the fountain as a symbol of ‘the kindred blood of two great nations, joint heirs of the same noble language’, and as a different chronicler announced, the gift added ‘another link - however slight - to that chain of brotherhood between Englishmen and Americans’ (Davis 1890: iv and 36). Mr Childs was, after all, a prominent citizen of the city of brotherly love, and such a clear proposal of a blood bond - in a context featuring water - contained the obvious implication that the former substance was thicker than the latter.

Fittingly, the opening ceremony was performed by the famous Shakespearean actor Sir Henry Irving. Ringing with impassioned declarations of ‘kinship’ and ‘common heritage’, his speech stressed that the fountain symbolised the fundamental racial unity of the United States and the United Kingdom, and that he rejoiced ‘ . . . in the happy inspiration which prompted a gift that so worthily represents the common homage of two great peoples to the most famous man of their common race’. The fact of genetic identity, of ‘common race’, meant, he added, that, in Stratford above all other places, American citizens ‘cease to be aliens’ (Davis 1890: 44-48 passim).

Sir Henry then duly turned the water on, sampled it and pronounced it ‘clear, palatable and good’, at which the Snitterfield Brass Band struck up with ‘God Save The Queen’ followed by ‘Hail Columbia’. The US Ambassador next proposed a toast which, in the process of referring to ‘kinsmen who have so much in common’, stressed how appropriate it was that both the ‘straightforward Saxon race’ and Stratford itself, should be recipients of a gift from an American (Davis 1890: 54-57). He was followed by the proprietor of The Times who spoke of Stratford’s appeal to the hearts of ‘most educated Americans’ and confirmed its capacity to ‘make them feel that they were of one kindred and one race with ourselves’ (Davis 1890: 63).⁴ The national and international press concurred. The next day, an editorial in the London Standard referred directly to England as the United States’ ‘parent country’, and the editorial page of the Daily Telegraph carried an article stating that ‘We might, indeed, almost call Stratford-upon-Avon the joint capital of the British England and of the American England’. It was left to The New York Herald to signal the final triumph of hope over expectation, with its prediction that, from now on, ‘The names of William Shakespeare and George William Childs will be indissolubly united’ (Davis 1890: 82, 101-2, 125).

In short, the essence of the fountain lies in its proclamation and reinforcement of the notion that the United States and Great Britain are historically, genetically, culturally and racially forever bonded. In a sublime paradox, its waters declare that we are blood brothers. And as if to underline the sanguinary dimension of the ceremony, prominent amongst the luminaries present was Sir Henry Irving’s long-serving secretary: Bram Stoker.⁵

Money

There’s little doubt that the author of Dracula (1897) would have concurred with most of the sentiments expressed on that day. As Irving’s general factotum, Bram Stoker may even have had a hand in writing his master’s speech (Murray 2004: 93, 148). Just two years before, in 1885, he had offered a large audience at the London Institute what he termed ‘A Glimpse of America’ which projected a future alliance between that country and Britain ‘based on ties of culture and blood’. The old country would be rejuvenated, he claimed, by new compatible transfusions from the United States. For America was ‘a nation, not merely like ourselves, but ourselves - the same in blood, religion, and social ideas, with an almost identical common law’ (Stoker 1886: 11) and as a result ‘We are bound to each other by the instinct of a common race, which makes brotherhood and the love of brothers a natural law’ (Stoker 1886: 30).⁶

It’s well known that Dracula readily lends itself to a number of schematic interpretations.⁷ The Count himself is a crudely-drawn symbol, easily potent enough to fuel an allegory of its author’s relationship with the ever-demanding Irving. Certainly, Stoker seems to have been almost in thrall to, if not dependent on the actor, to have sacrificed his civil service career to him, to have gained energy and vitality from the connection, and to have seriously declined when Irving died.⁸ Nonetheless, Stoker’s broad interest in Shakespeare was also clear. Allusions to the plays occur throughout his early work, and Dracula itself makes mention of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and King Lear. It also seems likely that the novel is set in 1887, the year in which the Stratford fountain was opened (Murray 2004: 179-80).⁹

Dracula also generates an extraordinary range of metaphors of almost Shakespearean scope which seem pointedly to equate blood with money (Ellman 1996: xx-xxi).¹⁰ The Count’s castle contains heaps of buried gold, and these become readily interchangeable with the blood for which the vampire lusts. Lunged at with a knife, the Count doesn’t bleed. Instead, his coat tears open ‘making a wide gap whence a bundle of banknotes and a stream of gold fell out’.

Marx

None of this would have surprised money’s most formidable analyst and, together with Bram Stoker, perhaps the nineteenth century’s twin genius as a spinner of tales of Gothic horror, Karl Marx (1818-83). Dracula, who can assume virtually any shape he pleases, wolf, bat, cloud of dust, shares exactly the capacity for transgressive shape-shifting and reincarnation in the form of any commodity that Marx noticed in money: ‘Just as every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished in money, so money, on its side, like the radical leveller that it is, does away with all distinctions’ (Marx 1967: 132-33). It ‘exchanges . . . any quality for any other, even for its opposite’. Indeed his indictment of capitalism persistently makes the replacement of ties of blood by those of money a central theme. Capital, Marx writes, ‘is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’.¹¹

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Marx’s favourite was Timon of Athens. The play’s stark focus on money had an obvious appeal. Ludicrously generous to his friends, Timon is wholly rejected by them once his own finances collapse. In turn, he exiles himself from Athens and subjects its citizens and their way of life to some scorching invective. Marx was always impressed with Timon’s famous diatribes on the nature and enormous power of money. In his 1844 Political Economy and Philosophy (Marx 1964) he cites key passages from the play, such as Timon’s denunciation of ‘Yellow, glittering, precious gold’:

. . . Thus much of this will make
Black, white; foul, fair; wrong, right;
Base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.

. . . This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless th’accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves,
And give them title, knee, and approbation . . .

(4.3.26–45)

His analysis is incisive:

Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money . . . (1) It is the visible divinity – the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and overturning of things; it makes brothers of impossibilities. (2) It is the common whore, the common pimp of people and nations . . .

(Marx 1964: 167–68)¹²

Marx’s telling comment ‘is not money the bond of all bonds?’ reaches to capitalism’s heart as well as to the centre of Timon.¹³

Neverthless, he would no doubt have been amongst the first to observe that the two plays cited on the Stratford fountain make uneasy companions. If Henry VIII famously looks forward to the golden era of Elizabethan settlement, Timon of Athens offers a spectacular and seriously different point of view. The play’s initial account of Athens may suggest a closely integrated society based on mutual obligation, generosity and support. But it sets up this vision only drastically to undermine it through its depiction of the brutal power of money. In Athens, there’s no singing of the merry songs of peace to all one’s neighbours, there’s no eating in safety whatever one plants under one’s own vine. Quite the reverse: in fact, eating gradually takes on a new, disturbing aspect in the play, one which both reinforces and significantly darkens the bloodmoney relationship. It’s the cynic Apemantus who, at the same banquet in Act One where he praises ‘honest water’, also hints that the figure of Judas, the very symbol of blood-money, stalks such feasts;

The fellow that sits next to him, now parts bread with him, pledges the breath of him in a divided draught, is the readiest man to kill him. ’T has been proved . . .

(1. 2. 45–48)¹⁴

– and he goes on to develop this image in horrific terms,

O you gods! What a number of men eats Timon, and he sees ’em not! It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man’s blood.

(1. 2. 38–40)

The nightmare spectacle of human beings eating each other becomes closely woven into the play’s texture. Timon’s light-hearted comment to Alcibiades that he’d rather be ‘at a breakfast of enemies than a dinner of friends’ provokes the almost off-hand response ‘So they were bleeding new, my lord. There’s no meat like ’em.’ Pared to its essential features, the play’s focus on blood and money highlights a savage, reductive relationship between the two, hinted at by Marx, explicit in Stoker’s Dracula. In it, the heart’s blood, the essence of humanity, tragically dwindles to become a mere commodity, negotiable or edible. ‘Five thousand drops’ of it, we’re told, will match Timon’s debt of five thousand crowns. And when a thief observes ‘We cannot live on grass, on berries, water’, Timon advises ‘You must eat men’ (14, 422–25).¹⁵

Brothers

Less than sixty years after the opening of the George W. Childs fountain in Stratford, a rather larger issue came to require the attention of the commingled corpuscles of Britain and the United States: it was called World War II. By then, it was clear that the idea of ‘blood brotherhood’ had lost something of its potency. Indeed, for the British, resuscitation of the concept had become a matter of considerable urgency and efforts to promote it were by no means limited to regular diplomacy.¹⁶ To give just one example: in 1920 a small press bureau, funded by the British government, had been established in New York as an ‘experimental branch of the Foreign Office News department’. Dedicated to the relatively mundane business of enhancing the image of the British Empire in the United States by means of lectures and exhibitions, it was called the British Library of Information.¹⁷ However, the advent of the war against Germany, and the growing isolationism of large sections of American public opinion, forced a huge escalation of the Library’s role. Its major aim became the persuasion of Americans at large that the British armed struggle was worthy of support.

Perhaps surprisingly, this proved to be a considerable task. By 1940, ideas of ‘kindred blood’ had certainly atrophied and notions of ‘common race’ seemed barely tenable. In fact, a distinct anti-British chill could be detected in some quarters of President Roosevelt’s administration. ¹⁸ One senior State Department official even became anxious to have both the British and the German Libraries of Information closed down, describing them as ‘foreign propaganda offices’ whose activities might encourage the United States to become embroiled in a European war. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull was finally persuaded to draft a bill ‘to make unlawful the distribution or publication of matter of a political nature by agents of foreign governments in this country’.¹⁹

No doubt that word ‘foreign’ came as something of a shock. Of course, later events at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, changed everything. ²⁰ Yet, as the war dragged on, the question of ‘blood brotherhood’ continued to prove a complex business. The British found themselves more and more dependent on the Americans, particularly when i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• ACCENTS ON SHAKESPEARE
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• General editor’s preface
• Introduction
• 1: Band of Brothers
• 2: Historicizing new historicism
• 3: . . . And I’m the King of France
• 4: Shakespeare, and belief, in the future
• 5: Present text
• 6: Action! Henry V
• 7: Lavinia as ‘blank page’ and the presence of feminist critical practices
• 8: Hamlet and the present
• 9: Troilus and Cressida
• References