Meaning by Shakespeare

Terence Hawkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134904990
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

We traditionally assume that the `meaning' of each of Shakespeares plays is bequeathed to it by the Bard. It is as if, to the information which used to be given in theatrical programmes, `Cigarettes by Abdullah, Costumes by Motley, Music by Mendelssohn', we should add `Meaning by Shakespeare'.
These essays rest on a different, almost opposite, principle. Developing the arguments of the same author's That Shakespearean Rag (1986), they put the case that Shakespeare's plays have no essential meanings, but function as resources which we use to generate meaning. A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure, Coriolanus and King Lear, amongst other plays, are examined as concrete instances of the covert process whereby, in the twentieth century, Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare.
Meaning by Shakespeare concludes with `Bardbiz', a review of recent critical approaches to Shakespeare, which initiated a long-running debate (1990-1991) when it first appeared in The London Review of Books.

1

By

Ophelia:	What means this my lord?
Hamlet:	Marry, this is miching malicho. It means mischief.

(III, ii, 134–5)

Into the Mousetrap

The Prince's reply has more than a touch of mischief about it. Ophelia's question is about the dumb-show that precedes the performance of The Murder of Gonzago. She wants to know what such an ‘inexplicable’ (1. 12) pantomime signifies, the extent to which ‘this show imports the argument of the play’ (1. 136). As the spectacle ends and the actor playing the Prologue strides forth, she nervously raises the issue of signification again: ‘Will’ a tell us what this show meant?’ (1. 139). The oddity of Hamlet's response to Ophelia's question comes about because he chooses to answer it from a slightly different ground. In the process, he introduces a dimension of the word ‘means’ that she had not thought to reach.

Ophelia's focus is on what might be termed the argument of the play ‘itself’, on the essential, unchanging message she presumes that it carries, one which actors or critics like Hamlet can be looked to to expound. Hamlet's own view of that sense of meaning is derisive. The mild initial expletive of his reply is suddenly shocking in this context: ‘Marry’. Is he really going to answer Ophelia's query about signification head-on? Is ‘Marry’ the daring opening of a carefully aimed tirade? Is it a verb, the one the play seems to turn on? Will Hamlet use it to point out that the dumb-show mimes the tragic history of one marriage and his mother's subsequent decision to marry a second time? No: that nerve is merely touched, not probed, and the rest of the sentence quickly shifts into an opposite mode. There will be no direct engagement with ‘meaning’ on the level Ophelia intends. Far from it. A tricky phrase in a different language quickly mocks and deflects her query.

What does Hamlet's reply itself mean? On one level, michingmalicho means something like ‘sneaking mischief’, and to some extent, particularly if ‘this’ refers to the dumb-show, it could be said to supply what has been asked for.¹ But the phrase's alien nature also muffles that purpose. As a result, with its signifying function barely operative, an unexpended energy propels it willy-nilly into a new and potentially even more disturbing realm of ‘meaning’: that of a non-discursive alliterative pattern—initiated by ‘Marry’—whose accumulating urgency ultimately puts an extra sardonic spin on the word ‘means’. As a result, the final statement ‘It means mischief’ triumphantly bursts the boundaries—the irony is incisive—of the sort of precision Ophelia is looking for.

What does ‘It means mischief’ mean? Does it offer an assessment of the content of the dumb-show? Or does it glance forward to sum up ‘the argument of the play’? Do the words ‘it means’ introduce a translation of miching malicho, pulled back along that path by the alliteration? Or does the same alliteration push the phrase in an opposite direction, so that it blossoms as the final, unsettling flourish of a deliberately disconcerting figure? Overall, the effect is certainly to undermine any innocent gesture ‘it means’ may make towards straightforward explication—and for good reason. That sort of ‘meaning’ has after all proved cheap enough at Elsinore. The Prologue, Hamlet promises Ophelia, will turn out to be profligate in exactly those terms. He will not only tell us what the show means, he will, like Claudius, like Polonius, explain the ‘meaning’ of anything and everything:

Ay, or any show that you will show him. Be not you asham'd to show, he'll not shame to tell you what it means.

(III, ii, 140–1)

But Hamlet's answer also contains the possibility of a different notion of ‘meaning’. If there was any ‘essential’ meaning embodied in The Murder of Gonzago, it has quite dissolved by the time the play confronts its audience at Elsinore. In that context, and triggered by Hamlet's addition of some lines to the text, it has turned into something very different. In consequence, the Prince's comment that ‘It means mischief’ can readily refer to what the play intends now, as a result of Hamlet's intervention; to what it is up to, here in Elsinore; to what, on this occasion, at this time and in this place, it means to do. The source of ‘meaning’ in this light appears almost to have migrated from the play ‘itself’ to the material context in which it is performed. Here and now, Hamlet seems to say to Ophelia, this is where ‘meaning’ will be generated: at the point where The Murder of Gonzago turns into The Mousetrap.

Marking the play

The essays which follow share a point of view developed in a previous collection, That Shakespeherian Rag (1986). Drawing on a series of engagements with the work of influential critics, the earlier book questioned whether we could have any genuine access to final, authoritative or essential meanings in respect of Shakespeare's plays. Implicitly and explicitly, it put the case that, like it or not, all we can ever do is use Shakespeare as a powerful element in specific ideological strategies.

The essays in Meaning by Shakespeare aim to probe some further implications of that position. The book's title attempts a slight sharpening of focus. Traditionally, critics, producers, actors and audiences of Shakespeare have assumed, with Ophelia, that the ‘meaning’ of each play is bequeathed to it ab initio and lies—artfully concealed perhaps—within its text. Each account, or production of the play, then offers to discover and lay hold of this meaning, hoisting it triumphantly, like buried treasure, into view. It is as if, to the information which used to be given in theatrical programmes, ‘Cigarettes by Abdullah, Costumes by Motley, Music by Mendelssohn’, we should add ‘Meaning by Shakespeare’.

However, these essays rest on a different, almost opposite principle which, undertaken in the spirit of Hamlet's corrosive play on ‘meaning’, also involves a reconsideration of the word ‘by’. The issues at stake can be simply put. Suppose we have no access to any ‘essential’ meaning nestling within Shakespeare's texts and awaiting our discovery (any more, let it be said, than Shakespeare did). Then what can their purpose be? If they do not transmit the meaning intended and embodied within them by their author, what on earth do Shakespeare's plays do? How do they work? And what are they for?

The answers proposed here suggest that, for us, the plays have the same function as, and work like, the words of which they are made. We use them in order to generate meaning. In the twentieth century, Shakespeare's plays have become one of the central agencies through which our culture performs this operation. That is what they do, that is how they work, and that is what they are for. Shakespeare doesn't mean: we mean by Shakespeare.

Hamlet offers a good example. At one time, this must obviously have been an interesting play written by a promising Elizabethan playwright. However, equally obviously, that is no longer the case. Over the years, Hamlet has taken on a huge and complex symbolizing function and, as a part of the institution called ‘English literature’, it has become far more than a mere play by a mere playwright. Issuing from one of the key components of that institution, not Shakespeare, but the creature ‘Shakespeare’, it has been transformed into the utterance of an oracle, the lucubration of a sage, the masterpiece of a poet-philosopher replete with transcendent wisdom about the way things are, always have been, and presumably always will be.

It is a condition which intensifies when ‘English literature’ is itself located within a system of mass education linking Britain, North America and the so-called Commonwealth countries. Then, together with a number of other texts, Hamlet acquires a central role in a complex programme of educational classification and social advancement. The more competence candidates show in discussing the Prince's lack of that quality, the greater their reward. No wonder that, at the end of their interchange about The Mousetrap, Ophelia begins to sound to us like an examiner. ‘You are naught, you are naught’, she admonishes Hamlet, ‘I'll mark the play’.²

Hamlet scores high marks, inevitably. It comes to function as a universal cultural reference point, a piece of social shorthand. Bits of its language embed themselves in everyday speech until it starts to seem like a web of quotations. In the end, it enters our way of life as one of the resources through which that way of life generates meaning. As an aspect of the works of ‘Shakespeare’, the play helps to shape large categories of thought, particularly those which inform political and moral stances, modes and types of relationship, our ideas of how men and women, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, uncles and nephews, sons and daughters ought respectively to behave and interact. It becomes part of a means of first formulating and then validating important power relationships, say between politicians and intellectuals, soldiers and students, the world of action and that of contemplation. Perhaps its probing of the relation between art and social life, role-playing on stage and role-playing in society, appears so powerfully to offer an adequate account of important aspects of our own experience that it ends by constructing them. In other words, Hamlet crucially helps to determine how we perceive and respond to the world in which we live. You can even name a cigar after it.

A pragmatism

This is to see art as one of the major activities through which a society ‘means’: that is, makes the world a significant and habitable space by defining for itself and distinguishing between crucial categories whose status is otherwise indeterminate. What, for instance, do we mean by ‘man’, by ‘woman’, by ‘duty’, by ‘justice’, by ‘nation’, by ‘honour’, by ‘marriage’, by ‘love’? These are far from simple issues, yet our whole way of life depends on our answers to such questions: they give our culture its distinctive identity at a particular historical juncture. To study Hamlet is to be invited to consider and to reinforce or perhaps to contest and undermine inherited meanings of that order of importance.

Of course, the institution of literature is not the only agency through which those meanings are generated, reinforced or contested. Other activities—they involve music, song, social dancing, sport, domestic architecture, modes of cooking, political pamphlets, parliamentary debates, legal wrangles, the whole range of what people actually get up to in the material world in which they live—might also claim to offer ‘texts’ matching in fruitfulness those of novels, plays and poems. They might even propose the validity of a quite differently contoured world, through their record of a pattern of strategically mounted resistance to the established one. Certainly, they indicate that a society's dominant presentation of itself will often mask what it derives from: tensions between opposing factions, systematic projects of exclusion, the discouraging, even the suppression, of dissent. The most obvious result of such a challenge from the so-called ‘periphery’ has been the questioning in recent years of literature's claims to centrality and to transcendence. In the case of Shakespeare, the suggestion that a play may speak ‘for an age’ begins to seem overweening. That it could speak ‘for all time’ appears suddenly absurd.

In addition, powerful arguments have invited a reassessment of what might be termed literature's raw material, the individual text produced by a particular author. One of the major effects of latterday post-structuralist thinking has been the subversion of a central ideological commitment to the idea of the individual, sovereign self, the human ‘subject’, as the fundamental unit of existence and the main negotiable instrument of meaning. In consequence, the notion of the text as the direct expression of that subject's innermost thoughts and feelings has also been undermined. And amongst the first casualties of that development is the supposed ‘authenticity’ of the text as a document whose final ‘meaning’ includes unmediated access to its author's intimate being.

With the text's ‘authority’ and ‘authenticity’ so fundamentally questioned in this way, it has become more and more difficult to claim that Hamlet offers once-for-all revelations about what Shakespeare ‘thought’ and ‘felt’ with regard to the events and characters the play seems to deploy, or to assume that the ‘meaning’ of the play should be limited to or by whatever Shakespeare intended to say ‘through’ it. This is not to say that the text known as Hamlet no longer materially exists. But it is to say that our way of describing, of accounting for, of establishing a productive purchase on that text must change. And the change will effectively serve to push the play's material existence into the foreground. For if Hamlet, like The Murderof Gonzago, offers no determinable set of essential meanings, it demands nevertheless to be seen as the occasion of a number of meanings which have been attributed to it at various moments in the past as well as the present. The Prince's mobilization of The Murder ofGonzago as The Mousetrap could hardly be bettered as an instance of that process and a measure of its potential impact. There are no essential, transcendental meanings here. The Mousetrap's mode is determinedly occasional. An intention to ‘mean mischief is precisely the earnest of a commitment to material political intervention in a way of life, to the premeditated appropriation of specific cultural instruments, for specific purposes, in a particular social context. On this basis, miching malicho means taking part.

The idea that a play can and inevitably does take part in the affairs of a society requires an abandonment of the notion of the primacy or, in practical terms, of the existence of any transcendental ‘meaning’ located within it, able finally to subsume, surpass or determine all others. It calls instead for a recognition of the degree to which all texts are contextualized by history. And that leads in the direction of what might be called a literary pragmatism: the notion that all texts have something in common with The Mousetrap. That is, they always ‘take part’ in historical milieux, whenever and however they are realized, either initially or subsequently. As a result, no final contextfree meaning or ‘truth’ can, should, or need be assigned to them.

This ‘historicist’, or ‘anti-essentialist’, or ‘holistic’ position evidently owes a good deal to the ideas of some American philosophers, from William James and John Dewey to Richard Rorty, as well as to those of some German-speaking philosophers from Nietzsche and Heidegger to the later Wittgenstein. The notion of ‘meaning by’ has obvious roots in that work, most of it a direct challenge to the presuppositions of the broad sweep of current literary criticism written in English.³ There are no surprises here. Amongst the essays which follow, ‘Take me to your Leda’ will make the point that, with a phenomenon as internal to a culture as Shakespeare is to that of Britain, the outsider's view—European or American—has often proved a helpful one. Pragmatism's transatlantic provenance even hints at the continuation of a wider and mutually instructive Anglo-American relationship of long standing. T.S.Eliot's curious role in it forms the subject of another essay.

Such a position does not of course imply that a text's meaning is finally determined by the historical context in which it initially appears. That limited notion of historicism must always yield to the view that human beings are permanently involved in a continuing process of meaning-making, one to which all texts, as aspects of human culture, are always subject, and beyond which they may be conceivable but will remain ungraspable. To attempt to grasp them at all, as the essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream tries to show, is inevitably to become involved in the making of meaning in a particular context.

The idea that meaning is made rather than found has roots in European thought which reach back at least to the time of Vico, and it should be allowed to add its full social and moral weight to the sense of what ‘taking part’ implies. Its essentialist opposite, what Dewey called the ‘spectator theory of knowledge’, will always be undercut both by the instability of the pseudo-polarity which offers to separate spectator from participant and, in my own view, by the undesirability of the politics which seek to sustain it. We should know by now that a ‘spectator theory of society’ is a recipe for, as well as a consequence of, totalitarianism. A contrary theory whereby spectators merge into participants—a theme discernible in A Midsummer Night's Dream and many other plays of the period to a degree which invites a ‘pragmatic’ account of them—invokes a political commitment concerning the involvement of members of a culture in the shaping of its way of life, to which literary criticism ought not to be blind. For Richard Rorty at least, to take part in the broad reactive social process registered and reinforced by such a motif is to engage with the large-scale and continuing cultural dialogue or ‘conversation’ which constitutes the very precondition of democracy.⁴

What passes amongst some literary critics for a text's ‘real’ meaning can only be a temporary pause in ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Meaning by Shakespeare
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 By
• 2 Or
• 3 Shakespeare and the General Strike
• 4 Take me to your Leda
• 5 Slow, slow, quick quick, slow
• 6 Lear’s maps
• 7 Bardbiz
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index