Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy

The Ritual Foundations of Genre

Naomi Conn Liebler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134788729
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy is a unique look at the social and religious foundations of the tragic genre. Naomi Liebler asks whether it is possible to regard tragic heroes such as Coriolanus and King Lear as `sacrifical victims of the prevailing social order'.
A fascinating examination of Shakespearean tragedy, this extraordinary book will provoke excitment and controversy alike.

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Festive Tragedy

How to Prevent the Fiend and to Kill Vermin

“Festive tragedy” is not an oxymoron. The conjunction of “festive” and “tragedy” as parameters for a discussion of genre expresses complexity rather than contradiction. Apart from obvious genredriven differences in plotting, Shakespeare’s tragedies perform social and communal concerns similar to those C.L.Barber examined more than thirty-five years ago in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959).¹ Barber’s initiative in referring the study of Shakespearean comedy to the ordinary and recurrent social life of its original audiences has been widely and deservedly acknowledged. By situating the study of Shakespearean drama in a social and anthropological context, he and others of his generation, notably Northrop Frye (1957; 1965; 1967),² made a permanent difference in the ways subsequent generations have read and seen Shakespeare’s plays, especially the comedies. They contributed much more than just another critical perspective; they literally launched a new awareness, a new field of inquiry for Shakespeareans whose work had been, until the late 1950s and early 1960s, restricted to printed and authorized “literature,” to the “literary.”

Since then, influenced by the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin (1968; 1981), René Girard (1977), Robert Weimann (1978), and others, the study of Shakespearean drama has ventured excursions into social and cultural anthropology. These excursions have found support in the work of anthropologists such as Victor Turner (1969; 1974; 1982), Mary Douglas (1966), Jack Goody and Ian Watt (1968), and Clifford Geertz (1973; 1983), who have provided information about the study of cultural dynamics as well as models for relating those dynamics to literary production. Constructs that were once thought simple and univocal—like each of the three words of my title— disclose upon examination a complexity that summons new definitions, and sometimes seems to defy definition altogether. The first word, “Shakespeare’s,” belongs to this latter group, and its meanings have been energetically and competently investigated, notably by Michael D.Bristol (1990) and Margreta de Grazia (1991). The two remaining terms, “festive” and “tragedy,” modified and contextualized by the first, are the subject of this book.

In appropriating two-thirds of Barber’s famous title, I mean to acknowledge his work and move on, to explore the ways in which Shakespearean tragedy is “festive” in a sense broader, deeper, and more complex than the one Barber intended for comedy. Since the 1960s, Shakespearean critics have increasingly recognized that plays are sites of contestation where a multiplicity of constituencies (patrons, audiences, readers, actors, playhouse managers, printers) collaborate and compete in constructing a variety of meanings (Bristol 1985; Kastan and Stallybrass 1991). In print and in performance, the plays themselves confirm this; as William Gifford observed more than a century ago, Renaissance dramatists were “the most clear-sighted politicians of those troubled times” (quoted in Knights 1937:175).

Barber’s study was undertaken in and reflected the motifhunting and pattern-seeking interests (the “lit-crit” equivalent of what anthropologists call “butterfly-collecting”) that characterized much of literary criticism in the late 1950s, emerging from what was then known as “New Criticism.” As such, it offered a valuable springboard to subsequent studies that in one sense or another have acknowledged their indebtedness. In marking communal festivity as inherent in the comic genre, Barber applied the pattern he found in popular English seasonal rites—May Day, Twelfth Night, Midsummer Eve, Harvest Home—whose dynamic is expressed as a movement “through release to clarification” (1959:4). What is released is a saturnalian energy of celebration and mirth, clarifying “a heightened awareness of the relation between man and ‘nature’— the nature celebrated on holiday” (1959:8). Order restored after mishap, disaster averted, marriages appropriately settled, disruptive behavior chastized: these and similar plot arrangements mark the occasions for comic festivity, for celebrating individual and communal survival over those mishaps, disasters, mismatches, and disruptions. In the last thirty-five years, however, the large field in which Shakespearean scholars labor has increasingly resisted these and other definitive kinds of enclosure; itsboundaries have expanded to encompass the crops of many other fields: social and political anthropology, history, and the reflexive revelations of critical theory itself.³

Newly acquired knowledges, however, are costly. These expanded arenas have obliged us to debate, negotiate, and sometimes reluctantly choose between, the comfortable satisfactions of reading hermeneutically, that is, of reading reiterative “patterns,” and the often combative rigors of reading locally, of historicizing as much as possible within the limits of present knowledge the specific significations of any artifact’s various representations (Marcus 1988; Pecora 1989). Two very recent, meticulously empirical works (Duffy 1992; Hutton 1994) chart the shifting character of ritual practices in Reformation and post-Reformation England; in so doing, they also demonstrate how overemphasis on exceptional or idiosyncratic instances can undermine the project of historicizing ritual practice in the early modern period, especially when the project is made to depend entirely on the survival of specific documentation.⁴ As E.C.Cawte sagely observed, “the absence of a record does not mean the absence of a custom” (1978:10). The importance of mapping the contestational and variant nature of early modern ritual is unquestioned, but at the same time there is a danger in rendering popular ritual practice almost completely indeterminate. It is also important to notice what is retained, and under what circumstances, and also to notice the anxiety that results when long-held practices are jettisoned by interdiction or by gradual slippage, as in Hamlet’s threnody for the forgotten hobby-horse. Performance, like memory, is itself a kind of record, although not necessarily the kind that can be preserved. It is a Foucaultian “subjugated knowledge,” “le savoir des gens” or “popular knowledge” (1980:82). Moreover, discourses about ritual in plays performed on London stages are distinct from specific local ritual performance across rural England. As such, performances of both early modern plays and ritual practices can never be completely historicized. In the discussions of Shakespearean tragedies that follow, I have therefore tried to balance applications of “local knowledge” with theorized connections between discrete and disparate but nonetheless relatable texts. Implicit in the very concept of “genre” is the possibility of such connections.

The traps inherent in attempts to define, to pin down in some unarguable formulation, such terms as “tragedy,” “ceremony,”“ritual,” and “festive” are to be recognized and respected. Because it sets boundaries for interpretation, definition is a kind of enclosure, but the material practices and significations implicit in these terms, like the theater itself, are hermeneutically unstable, and thus vigorously resist such enclosure. Festive tragedy is, I repeat, not an oxymoron. It is, in the Derridean sense, a dialectic, a “mutual questioning and self-examination…through the detour of the language of the other” (1981:121). In tragedy, “self” and “other” take various forms. They occupy the horns of a situational or characterological dilemma, represented by protagonist and context or community, fictively constructed to embody simultaneously identical and opposing aspects of each other. The drama does not enclose social operations, which are not fixed or finite but dynamic, fluid, shifting, alternating, at once dialectical and dialogical. Instead it discloses them, with attention to the warrants of tradition, precedent, and similar identifiable coordinates. These operations occur in gesture or utterance, as Bourdieu explains, and “reproduce in a transformed form, inserting them into the structure of a system of symbolic relations, the oppositions and hierarchies which actually organize social groups, and which they help to legitimate by presenting them in a misrecognizable form” (1977:97). That “misrecognizable form” is nonetheless recoverable, re-memberable, as ritual, and as tragedy. It can be excavated carefully from beneath the overt significations of dramatic plot and social action. In so doing, we can recover what Derrida calls the “economy, the investment and deferred benefit behind the sign of pure renunciation or the bidding of disinterested sacrifice” (1981:120).

The performance of this critical excavation ideally requires what Geertz, appropriating Gilbert Ryle’s term, calls “thick description” (1973:6): the patient and careful representation of the contextual and circumstantial ground of any human activity. By the meticulous relation of a particular action or practice to both motivation and situation, in so far as these may be known, “thick description” attends to the sedimentations of culture that comprise an integrated organism, and that in turn can be analyzed synchronically. “Relativists” see every cultural activity discretely, producing a check-list of unrelatable data; they reject efforts by “essentialists” to obscure specific contexts in favor of similarities and patterns held in common by disparate groups. “Thick description” attempts a useful compromise by respecting both pattern and displacement. Although Geertz’s anthropological project has been challenged recently (Crapanzano 1992:45–6, 60–9) on the grounds that it fails in its own stated intentions, both those intentions and their arguable failure are nonetheless important caveats for those of us who would try to recover the contextualized resonances of Shakespearean tragedies in their original performative settings. Geertz reminds us that “Looking at the ordinary in places where it takes unaccustomed forms brings out not…the arbitrariness of human behavior…but the degree to which its meaning varies according to the pattern of life by which it is informed” (1973:14). “Thick description” thus tries to recognize and accommodate not only the differences between separate and disparate cultural groups, but also the subtle and overt hierarchies of value systemic within a particular group.

In what has become a classic text in undergraduate courses in both anthropology and literature, Laura Bohannon’s essay, “Miching Malecho: That Means Witchcraft” (sometimes reprinted under the title “Shakespeare in the Bush”) illustrates particularly well the problematics of “thick description.” Bohannon, an American anthropologist studying the Tiv people of West Africa, was given by a friend at Oxford a copy of Hamlet to take with her in the hopes that she would “by prolonged meditation, achieve the grace of correct interpretation” (1956:174). To honor their “guest,” on successive nights the Tiv narrated for her one or another representative legend. After many such nights and narratives, she was asked to share the “paper” that she had been seen reading. She summarized the plot for her auditors, who responded with a mixture of shock and derision. Hamlet, they told her, was quite wrong to disrespect and disobey his father’s brother, even to save his own life. As for killing Claudius, Hamlet must have been mad! They explained that in their country, “also,” a younger brother customarily married his elder brother’s widow and became the “father” of his children. If the uncle is the father’s “full brother,” then he would be a “real father” to his nephews and nieces. Thus it was important to know whether Hamlet’s father and Claudius had the same mother. Since she did not know these crucial genealogical details, Bohannon was urged to “ask the elders” about them when she returned home (1956:178). And who, the chief elder asked, had married the other wives of the “dead chief”?

“He had no other wives,” I told him.

“But a chief must have many wives! How else can he brew beer and prepare food for all his guests?”

I said firmly that in our country even chiefs had only one wife, that they had servants to do their work, and that they paid them from tax money.

It was better, they returned, for a chief to have many wives and sons who would help him hoe his farms and feed his people; then everyone loved the chief who gave much and took nothing—taxes were a bad thing.

(1956:179)

Moreover, he continued, no young man should challenge his elders, and certainly not under the influence of witchcraft, which was the only logical explanation for the “ghost.” For Hamlet to seek revenge against his uncle who had become his father was a terrible and wicked thing. If retribution was required, Hamlet should have appealed to his father’s age-mates, the only ones empowered to avenge an elder’s murder: “No man may use violence against his senior relatives” (1956:185). Furthermore, as the chief elder explained,

it is clear that the elders of your country have never told you what the story really means…. We believe you when you say your marriage customs are different, or your clothes and weapons. But people are the same everywhere; therefore, there are always witches and it is we, the elders, who know how witches work…. [You] must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting idle in the bush, but among those who know things and have taught you wisdom.

(1956:186–9)

Lacking “thick description,” Bohannon and her Tiv interlocutors had no choice but to misrecognize each other’s narratives. Curiously, Bohannon’s essay is sometimes taken as “proof” that Shakespeare can be understood only by a Western audience (perhaps only by a British one, as Bohannon’s Oxford colleague thought her “American” perspective lacked the “grace of correct interpretation”); such a view inaccurately privileges a specific Western reading. Bohannon’s narration of Hamlet’s story in fact spoke loudly to the Tiv, and told a tale that resonated with the values and practices of Tiv culture. Indeed, it told a tragic tale of a protagonist caught in a web of cultural violations. The Tiv heard the story in a context perspectively different from that of Western audiences, but it was for them a story no less powerful, no less morally weighted, and no less tragic.

The same kind of structural, binary misrecognition applies to the relation of tragedy and comedy. Certain parallels and conversions of the comic “pattern” can be seen in tragedies where, simply stated, individual and community are threatened by more powerful versions of comedy’s disturbances. Comic ripple intensifies to a tragic rupture whose resolution, unlike comedy’s, moves beyond the bounds of human redress and becomes an irrational and sometimes apocalyptic “promis’d end/Or image of that horror” (King Lear V.iii.264–5). However, despite the invitation of innumerable “definitions” of tragedy, beginning with oversimplified abstractions from Aristotle’s and those in Renaissance dictionaries, it is a mistake to read “tragedy” as the mere inverse or obverse of established comic patterns. The “restoration of order” in tragedy amounts to much more than burying the dead and patching up the wounded (persons and kingdoms alike); it reflects, among other things, the (over) determined and driven choices that people in communities— collectively and individually—make towards survival, and the price, again collective and individual, of those choices.

The syntax or context of these actions involves every political and social institution at work in a given community. Contestation and confrontation result in the serious violation of all agreements implicit in the term “civilization,” itself always a dialectic of control and resistance (Freud 1961), and wreak irreparable losses beyond the mere correction or elimination of bad behavior. The licensed misrule of comedy (Barber 1959:36–57) is intensified in tragedy to eruptions of chaos; comic forms such as masquerade and oathbreaking (Barber 1959:87–92) are magnified in tragedy to the denial or obliteration of significant human connections. What in comedy occurs as happy celebration is replaced in tragedy with appeals to solemn ceremony and other strategies for containment and order that reflect political and social operations. Comedy performs a “breaking out” of the social restraints imposed by necessary labor, prescribed or proscribed behavior, or seasonal obligations, followed by a return to a socially and politically viable stability. Tragedy performs an uncontrollable breakage at great expense, despite human efforts, either inevitably or accidentally inadequate, to contain its repercussions. It, too, “celebrates,” by reconstructing, re-membering, what is lost.

Thus, both comedy and tragedy are festive genres. The former (as Barber demonstrated) recognizes, negotiates, and celebrates the social operations that reaffirm and revitalize social institutions, while the latter discloses the consequence of misrecognizing or debasing those operations by diverting or disjoining them from the structures through which a society normally derives its meaning. The term “festive”, applied to tragedy, signals, as it does when applied to comedy, the celebration of a community’s survival, although that application entails an alternatively focused view of both celebration and survival. Tragedy “celebrates” by anatomizing its community’s claims and constructs, how they work, what threatens them, how to preserve them, and at what cost. In both comedy and tragedy, the constructed cultural values of the fictive community are invariably reaffirmed and reconsecrated, but in tragedy the management, alteration, or manipulation of those values is put to question. That question interrogates not only the capability of representative human communities to act for their own continuing good, but also what constitutes “the good,” the “common weal” in each dramatized case.

At one level, tragedy participates in what Barber described for comedy as the movement “through release to clarification” (1959:4). In tragedy this release is closely related to Aristotle’s claim for catharsis; it is also a release of the powerful and destructive energy unleashed when the bonds that identify and protect a collectivity of individuals as a community are severed. Because their focus is upon human rather than natural creation (and indeed upon what sometimes appears to be most “unnatural” in human creation), we do not find in the tragedies the same close correlations between ritual and seasonal festivity that Barber and Frye asserted for the comedies. What is clarified is not, as Barber thought, the “relation between man and nature” but that between human beings and their own creations, the values that inform and sustain a civilization.

It is the business of ritual to protect and reaffirm those values. This is the function identified when Edgar, disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam, answers Lear’s question, “What is thy study?” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Festive Tragedy: How to Prevent the Fiend and to Kill Vermin
• 2. Seeking Definitions: Aristotle, Brecht, Artaud, and Others
• 3. The Ritual Groundwork
• 4. Communitas, Hierarchy, Liminality, Victimage
• 5. The Hobby-Horse is Forgot: Tradition and Transition
• 6. Conclusion: wRiting/Lost in translation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index