Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century

Peter Sabor, Paul Yachnin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754662952
• eBook ISBN: 9781351900768
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In 1700, Shakespeare was viewed as one of the leading Renaissance playwrights, but not as supreme. By 1800, he was not only widely performed and read but celebrated as a universal genius and a national literary hero. What happened during the intervening years is the subject of this fascinating volume, which brings together Renaissance and eighteenth-century scholars who examine how Shakespeare gradually penetrated, and came to dominate, the culture and intellectual life of people in the English-speaking world. The contributors approach Shakespeare from a wide range of perspectives, to illuminate the way contemporary philosophy, science and medicine, textual practice, theatre studies, and literature both informed and were influenced by eighteenth-century interpretations of his works. Among the topics are Falstaff and eighteenth-century ideas of the sublime, David Garrick's 1756 adaptation of The Winter's Tale and its relationship to medical theories of femininity, the textual practices of George Steevens, Shakespeare's importance in furthering the careers of actors on the eighteenth-century stage, and the influence of Shakespeare on writers as diverse as Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, and Ann Radcliff. Together, the essays paint a vivid picture of the relationship between eighteenth-century Shakespeare and ideas about shared nationhood, knowledge, morality, history, and the self.

PART 1
Theorizing Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond

Chapter 1
“A System of Oeconomical Prudence”

Shakespearean Character and the Practice of Moral Inquiry

Michael Bristol

Character is the great discovery of eighteenth-century interpretation and criticism of Shakespeare’s plays. Or—maybe it’s just a dreadful mistake. When Shakespeare’s plays were first written, performed, read, and seen by audiences the make-believe people who populated his stories were not called “characters.” Most often they were referred to in published texts as “persons of the drama.” At the same time the word character was used mainly to signify visible distinguishing marks of some kind, specifically handwriting (Goldberg 7ff.). These facts have suggested to some observers that analysis of characters in Shakespeare is somehow erroneous, although Jonathan Goldberg has shown that the relationship between textual marks and fictional personalities is actually very complex and entirely salient. Even so, focus on character simply reflects “the consensual orthodoxy of the west,” in its concern for the fate of the bourgeois subject (Belsey ix). On this account the focus on character to the exclusion of other considerations is not just an innocent mistake, but rather a deliberate and fraudulent misappropriation of Shakespeare’s plays for the ideological purposes of bourgeois society. In its developed form the argument is certainly an important one, but even so it fails to do any kind of justice to the aims and the achievements of eighteenth-century character-based criticism.

Usage of the word character to mean “fictional agent in a literary work” is standard in English, but its cognates in other languages do not often include this range of meanings. In French a fictional “character” is normally referred to as personnage; in Spanish it would be personaje. “Personage” is derived from persona or mask, and thus its primary associations are with performance, theater, and the social self (Bourassa 2003). In Greek, χαρακτήρ is a sharp instrument used for engraving, with the further implication of distinctiveness. Our English word character comes from this notion of engraving tool and thus its semantic links are with ideas of marking, writing, scarring, and so forth. Its use in modern European languages is a metonymy where it is used not to refer to an instrument but rather to the mark it makes. As Joseph Porter has argued, the word character is necessarily a kind of rhetorical condensation, expressing both the idea of something stamped or impressed from without and the idea of something intrinsic or congenital, “with ‘distinctive mark’ sliding either way” (134). Porter then makes the additional point that not too much can really be made of the philological evidence that Shakespeare didn’t use the word character to mean a personality either in the sense of an actual person’s traits or in the sense of a role performed by an actor, arguing that the concept would have been available under other signifiers such as nature or even virtue (134).

The big “discovery” that eighteenth-century criticism made was that lespersonnages, los personajes, i personaggi, could be usefully referred to as “characters” even though this term is complex and even equivocal given the history of its usage in English. This equivocation is the discovery I’m talking about, although it’s more usual to describe it as a mistake, or even as a dumb mistake. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, John Dryden is the first writer to use the word character to refer to fictional agents, using the term in a number of his prefaces and other writings. “The chief character or Hero in a Tragedy ... ought in prudence to be such a man, who has so much more in him of Virtue than of Vice” (Troilus & Cressida 1679, Pref. sig. a 4, as cited in OED). As a working dramatist Dryden wanted an economical term to refer both to the “persons” of a dramatic work and at the same time to something that might be in them, their “natures” or “humors.” His “insight” was just that character would be an apt word to express the complexity of this situation. The discovery of character in English criticism is just a further elaboration of Dryden’s sense of the conceptual richness of the word character as the signifier for a fictional person.

For many important critics Shakespeare’s chief skill lies in the delineation of feelings. For William Richardson the art of “imitating the passions” has special value for philosophers, “conducting us to the temple of truth, by an easier and more agreeable path than that of mere metaphysics” (20). But feelings cannot be explored in isolation from a proper understanding of ethics:

thus the moralist becomes a critic: and the two sciences of ethics and criticism appear to be intimately and very naturally connected. In truth, no one who is unacquainted with the human mind, or entertains improper notions of human conduct, can discern excellence in the higher species of poetical composition. (398—99)

Richardson’s account links up with Dryden’s earlier and simpler formulation in its focus on the way a person’s passions are expressed or manifested in their ethical dispositions. Richardson understands the disposition to act virtuously as one of the passions, rather than as an inhibition or external constraint on the passions. In the following sections I intend to argue that eighteenth-century character criticism is linked to a number of developments in ethics and moral philosophy. These critics began to engage with Shakespeare’s dramatis personae as moral agents, guided primarily by their own singular traits, resources, and inclinations, rather than as mere tokens of a conventionally pre-determined social role.

Above the Direction of Their Tailors

Dryden’s idea of dramatic character is still closely tied to the idea of an exemplary figure, with “more in him of Virtue than of Vice.” But for many of the eighteenth-century critics this is not what was particularly striking about Shakespeare’s characters, who were precisely not “exemplary” in the sense of demonstrating the appeal of any particular virtue. Shakespeare’s great achievement—or his great failing—was of an entirely different kind. Lewis Theobald had a notably felicitous way of expressing this: Shakespeare’s characters “are the Standards of Fashion for themselves: like Gentlemen that are above the Direction of their Tailors, and can adorn themselves without the Aid of Imitation” (iii). Theobald suggests that Shakespeare does something superbly well that other writers scarcely attempt, and that is to create figures with a very robust sense of fictional agency. In my view, Theobald does not get any respect for what I think is a genuine discovery, namely that it is possible to relate to Shakespeare’s characters in the same way that we relate to actual social agents.

The kind of enthusiasm expressed by Theobald for Shakespeare’s art of characterization is sometimes dismissed as “confusing fictional characters with real people,” but I don’t think there is any ontological confusion in his remarks. According to Dr Johnson:

It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited.... The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. (Preface 76-77)

Thinking about fictional characters as if they were real people is not a crude mistake; instead it demonstrates a cogent understanding of the actual purpose of fictional characters, namely the construction of detailed, interactive models of human agency. In a sense what we do when we use the same vocabulary to talk about fictional people as if they were real is to stipulate that in fiction x it is the case that character p acts or thinks or feels in this particular and idiosyncratic way. The stipulation is, however, necessarily tacit, since it would be both awkward and also unnecessary to include it every time a fictional character is discussed.

Theobald’s discovery that Shakespeare’s characters are above the direction of their tailors can be most fully grasped in relation to the development of “auxiliary sciences,” specifically moral philosophy. His insight is thus linked to a consensus in later eighteenth-century criticism that Shakespeare was a great moral philosopher. But the various people who reiterated this insight were not expressing the view that Shakespeare’s plays conformed to or illustrated some kind of preferred idea of what a moral philosophy ought to be. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. The insight about Shakespeare as a moral philosopher takes shape primarily through the resistance of Shakespeare’s works to a certain kind of aesthetic and ethical “tailoring” on the part of editors, theatrical producers, and critics during the period. Elizabeth Montagu eventually will give us a full articulation of this notion in An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with Some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire, where she says, “he is certainly one of the greatest moral philosophers that ever lived” (59). This is an ambitious claim, but Montagu’s arguments are clear, detailed, and carefully considered. Her book is worth careful study, though it hasn’t been reprinted since 1820. But I think the larger insight is already becoming apparent, in a kind of pre-theoretical way, in Theobald’s remarks about characters who can adorn themselves without the aid of imitation.

What was Theobald actually saying about Shakespeare’s characters when he described them as “gentlemen who are above the direction of their tailors”? The social importance of tailors has, for us, diminished almost to the point of non-existence. When Theobald was writing, tailor-made clothing was a privilege of the better-off fraction of the population. Ordinary people generally had to be satisfied with homemade garments. Tailors did not enjoy a very favorable reputation. Somewhat like lawyers today, tailors were viewed as imperious and unscrupulous scoundrels who took advantage of their clients’ social anxieties. Tailors did this by imposing their own, sometimes outré tastes on both men and women who were concerned with how they looked to other people. To follow the direction of your tailor is to “imitate” an external or an extrinsic standard. Actually, Theobald didn’t think that his insight would be true for any and all fictional beings. His claim was limited to Shakespeare’s characters, who comprise a very separate category of fictional beings that he wanted to distinguish from mere imitations. The social distinction between gentlemen, that is men who know who they really are, and fops who are basically insecure copy-cats is something that Theobald might actually have noticed in some of Shakespeare’s plays. The foppishness of Malvolio in following the bogus fashion suggestions of Maria is one example. Hamlet’s disdain for the phony courtier Osric might be another.¹

For Theobald the notion of character clearly entails some fairly strong ideas of self-determination, distinctiveness, and originality. To be a character, or to possess character, is to be sufficiently confident of who you are and of your position in society to take responsibility for the selection and appearance of your own clothes. Theobald regards this quality of high self-esteem as clearly ethically praiseworthy. But his remarks are ambiguous here, not in their account of Shakespearean character, but in their treatment of the gentlemen who form the standard of comparison. He might mean here that it is a characteristic of a gentleman to be above the direction of his tailor. Or he might equally mean that some gentlemen are above the direction of their tailors, but that some others are not. In that sense being a standard of fashion reflects a particular kind of social being rather than a conventionalized social status. One way to get the drift of Theobald’s comment here is to think of our contemporary distinction between fashion and style. Being fashionable is essentially mimetic—it’s conventional, safe, and it even leaves scope for some degree of individuality. Having style is a stronger form of self-affirmation, though it’s also more risky. I think what Theobald has noticed here is a kind of anomaly or failure of both social and literary decorum, a slippage between the over-coded, stereotypical, basically unsurprising behaviors that would conventionally define a “gentleman” or a “king” or a “gravedigger” and other distinctive markers that appear as much more creative—read surprising. This form of engagement invites readers to use background knowledge about how the world works drawn from their everyday social life to understand what’s happening in a fictional world. Poor Theobald does not get credit for any of this. Usually he gets credit for being king of the dunces, a derisory example of someone too naive to distinguish fictional agents from real people.

When Theobald claims Shakespeare’s characters are “above the direction of their tailors” or when, for example, David Denby compares the behavior of his dying mother to King Lear, they are not making some kind of ontological mistake, though their discussion may entail another kind of problem. Reasoning from premises drawn partly from a fiction and partly from background knowledge of the actual world is, strictly speaking, a logical fallacy, as David Lewis and others have pointed out. But Lewis maintains that in practice the fallacy is not so bad, and that it may even be very productive (269). He adopts the term “mixed reasoning” to cover this kind of situation. The intellectual “breakthrough” achieved by Theobald, and by other thinkers at about the same time, is that there is a significant payoff in using this mixed reasoning as a way of responding to Shakespeare’s characters. One way to describe the breakthrough then is to suggest that eighteenth-century critics feel able to apply their own version of folk psychology to the fictional beings in Shakespeare, but not necessarily to those in, for example, Racine. A folk psychology is based on the assumption that people, including make-believe ones, have reasons for what they do, but that those reasons are generally not explicit. They must be discovered in what people say and in how they are situated, not always an easy task. Charact...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Table
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1 Theorizing Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond
• PART 2 Eighteenth-Century Editors and Interpreters
• PART 3 Eighteenth-Century Adaptation and Reception
• Index