The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism

Evelyn Gajowski

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350327504
• eBook ISBN: 9781350093232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on critical approaches to Shakespeare by an international team of leading scholars. It contains chapters on 20 specific critical practices, each grounded in analysis of a Shakespeare play. These practices range from foundational approaches including character studies, close reading and genre studies, through those that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that challenged the preconceptions on which traditional liberal humanism is based, including feminism, cultural materialism and new historicism. Perspectives drawn from postcolonial, queer studies and critical race studies, besides more recent critical practices including presentism, ecofeminism and cognitive ethology all receive detailed treatment. In addition to its coverage of distinct critical approaches, the handbook contains various sections that provide non-specialists with practical help: an A–Z glossary of key terms and concepts, a chronology of major publications and events, an introduction to resources for study of the field and a substantial annotated bibliography.

PART ONE

Foundational studies

CHAPTER 1.1

Close reading and New Criticism

KENT CARTWRIGHT

Reading literature closely is a counter-cultural activity. Only intrepid students practise it, guided in shabby classrooms by suspect faculty, hunted by academic administrators who would convert them to engineering majors and harangued by capitalist boosters for ruinously trading their futures as lords of Wall Street for thin-gruel lives as baristas. Yet they persist. They do so, as literature students’ accounts of their own experiences testify, because they find something riveting and transformative in the process of reading and discussing literature. At ground zero of this subversive activity dwells the only world author, Shakespeare, for close reading and his writing seem to have been invented for each other. This is the danger zone, beware: immersing yourself in Shakespeare could ruin your life. Or save it.

Close reading has become a topic for disagreement, with its rootedness as a practice now being acknowledged but its qualities and implications contested. A professional consensus has formed that the criticism and teaching of literature rely fundamentally on the practice of close reading, despite divergences in critical approaches among its adepts. As one Shakespearean puts it about her teaching, ‘I could no more dispense with close reading than I could build without hammers and nails’ (Peterson 2017: 48). Shakespearean studies has seen in recent years a surge of publications on the subject (see, for example, McDonald, Nace and Williams 2012; Collins 2014; Parolin and Rackin 2017b; and Lopez 2018). The time is ripe, Russ McDonald, Nicholas Nace and Travis Williams declare, for close reading to ‘come out of the shadows’ (2012: xx).

But not all close readings proceed in the same way or with the same goals. So, what is close reading? What are its history, branches and assumptions? What are its ideological implications? And how might it be reasonably practised? In the following sections, we will, first, review the origins of close reading and outline its American version, New Criticism; second, consider whether close reading is a theory or a practice; third, pose the question of whether close reading constitutes immersion or disruption; and, fourth, conclude with an illustration, for drama, of close reading augmented by rhetorical analysis, with the example of Much Ado About Nothing’s opening scene.

CLOSE READING AND/VERSUS NEW CRITICISM

Developed in the 1920s by the Cambridge scholar I. A. Richards, close reading approached poetry in terms of its formal, linguistic and poetic features, without reference to author, date, or historical and cultural context (see Richards 1929; the Table of Contents introduced the phrase ‘closeness of reading’). Richards’s interest was in the personally transformative power of poetry, its psychological and emotional effects, and he evoked that power by stripping away his students’ ‘stock responses’ – those derived from preformed judgements – to force his readers to encounter the literary work on its own terms. Richards wanted to ground literary study in a fact-based practice that might give it standing in an academy then swooning at positivism and the emerging sciences. He saw literature as culturally diagnostic and personally transformative. The term ‘psychology’ appears frequently in Practical Criticism; although Richards had studied behaviourism, he was more Pavlovian than Freudian. Indeed, he regarded Freud as an ‘inept’ reader of literature (Richards 1924: 30), and his work lacks any interest in the ego, id, superego or subconscious. Rather, Richards regards poetry as a superbly complex mode for communicating meanings and feelings; the close reading of it also allowed one to work through the intricacies of evaluation. Poetry is ‘our chief means by which subtle ideas and responses may be communicated’ (Richards 1929: 245), and poetry, properly studied, has formative power for the individual (it employs methods useful for other disciplinary fields, too); it was thus a discipline fitted for the cultivation of citizens of a democracy. In present-day terms, one might fairly think of Richards’s approach as affective and rhetorical, with links, commentators observe, to phenomenology and to subsequent reader-response criticism. For the messianic Richards, then, poetry was ‘capable of saving us’ (Richards 1970: 78). Nonetheless, although Richards acknowledges the ‘quasi-magical sway’ that words can have in the hands of a poetic master, he generally takes little interest in the reader’s immersive experience of literature; indeed, he found his students’ attributions of ‘charm’ to various poems to be ‘discouraging’, and he found distasteful the notion of ‘inexplicable’ word-magic (1929: 112, 364). Altogether, Richards launched a movement that displayed, as Terry Eagleton puts it, a ‘courage and radicalism’ that nothing subsequent in literary studies has ‘come near to recapturing’ (1996: 27). Thus Practical Criticism constitutes a foundational document – but one with unforeseen consequences.

Those consequences emerged particularly in the United States, where the New Critics of the 1930s and 1940s reformulated Richards’s vision of what poetry was and how it might save us. According to Joseph North, the shift from Richards’s practical criticism to American New Criticism constituted a shift from a ‘materialist aesthetic’, which saw the literary work as continuous with everyday experience, to an ‘idealist’ one, which did not (2017: 28–31).¹ New Criticism began as a conservative southern movement that set traditional and communal agrarian values in opposition to rising corporate capitalism and scientific rationalism. The New Critics looked to literature as a fixed star in a rising sea of change and shifting values, reflected in two world wars and an international economic depression. These readers dismissed the importance of the writer’s intention (what they called the ‘intentional fallacy’) and of the poem’s effects on the reader (the ‘affective fallacy’). In that second principle, the extremity of their break from Richards’s form of criticism becomes profoundly evident. For the New Critics, poetry was not a transactional invitation but an object, out there in the empyrean, the embodiment of a structure of meaning with inherent dynamics that endured across history (see, for example, Brooks 1947) – and thus, we might say, it promised stability and hope.

For the New Critics, literature is a domain apart because literary language is special (while it is ordinary for Richards). Poetic language is thickened with imagery and figuration, and it activates layers of ambiguity; it possesses a density that requires attention and removes it from the everyday; thus poetic language calls attention to itself. (Poetry was the main theatre of discussion for the New Critics.) According to René Welleck and Austin Warren in their influential Theory of Literature (1942), literary language ‘abounds in ambiguities’; it is highly ‘connotative’, ‘expressive’, ‘full of tone and attitude’; thus ‘far from merely referential’ (12). Those qualities of the artefact take it ‘out of the world of reality’ and into that of disinterested contemplation (14). Thus New Criticism can be credited with making central the notions of imagery, paradox, irony and ambiguity that have constituted a lasting legacy to literary criticism.² Political critics who read for a work’s fractures and faultlines – those places in a text where its dominant ideology seems unable to contain its energies – are heirs of New Critical practice. Indeed, John Crowe Ransom saw literary works as embodying a ‘collision’ between ‘image and idea’, experience and abstraction, that puts tension at their heart (Jancovich 1993: 40).

New Criticism, then, was a pre-digital form of pattern recognition.³ Informative studies of patterns emerged, such as, for example, Caroline Spurgeon’s still-influential Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935). Spurgeon’s work shows, surprisingly, that an urban comedy such as Much Ado About Nothing is full not only of images of ‘swift movement’ but also, less predictably, of those from ‘English country life’ (2005: 263, 264). Discerning the woven tapestry of figurative and rhetorical colours allows the critic or reader to grasp the work whole, to see how each dimension contributes to its overall character. And thus emerges the holy grail of New Critical interpretation, the revelation, despite a work’s difficulty and complexity, of the poem’s essential unity. Critics sought to find a consonance among a work’s disparate parts that produced a sense of hard-won harmony. Of course, the objective of finding unity now looks as if imposed upon, rather than rising from, the practice of close reading. Of the many examples of American close reading of Shakespeare, one might mention Cleanth Brooks’s classic essay on Macbeth in The Well Wrought Urn, wherein the critic finds a pattern of images ‘organically related, modified by “a predominant passion,” and mutually modifying each other’ so as to serve the goal of ‘imaginative unity’ (1947: 26, 27; emphasis added; see 21–46). New Criticism’s key metaphor is of the ‘organic’ nature of the poem, organic in the sense that its aspects work in concert with each other to shape the work as a whole. The idea of the organic work was emphasized in a comment by T. S. Eliot,⁴ and it became widely shared by the American New Critics (although not invoked by Richards). Perhaps the term gave the literary work a quasi-scientific status (a goal for Richards, too) – although very few qualities associated with the term ‘organic’ really apply to a literary work. Other famous metaphors for the artefact included urn (Brooks 1947) and icon (Wimsatt 1954).⁵ In these evocations, the literary text, even if imbued with nostalgia or mystery, emerges primarily as materialistic, bounded, hard-sided and spatial, an object for admiration and contemplation. There is little room in this view for any sense of, say, a Shakespearean play as something open-ended, temporal, variable or transactional, and the sense of its theatricality largely disappears.

The New Critics have been accused of being ahistorical, but that argument can be exaggerated. Certainly, they lacked a Marxist sense of historical process, but many of them knew history well. More importantly, New Criticism might be understood as a response to its own historical moment. Eagleton sees these critics as affecting a stance of neutral, cool objectivity and balanced-mindedness, reflective of a certain democratic outlook in the years of the Cold War (1996: 43–4). One might also see their awkward pseudo-science and objectivism as a proffered alternative to the culture of capitalism, dehumanized industrialization and materialism of their own times. In particular, the democratic virtues of New Criticism deserve emphasis (see, for example, Trilling 1950). One of the side-effects of the movement’s relative indifference to history is that critical work could be done by AnyReader, not just a member of the clerisy. In the case of Shakespeare, the democratic impulse of close reading and New Criticism led to a vision of the plays as geared to cross-sectional audiences (Harbage 1941) and from there to extraordinary and lasting undertakings such as Joseph Papp’s innovative New York Shakespeare Festival, launched in 1954. And the techniques of that early generation of critics, including Richards, remain fundamental to literary pedagogy, as noted.

A violent reaction against New Criticism’s marmoreal aesthetics took place with the cultural, political and deconstructive critics of the latter part of the twentieth century, who, in the wake of 1960s activism, wanted to put the artwork in close conversation with the social world and who interpreted the enshrining of it as the institutionalizing of various values that should better be uprooted as patriarchal, classist, elitist and even racist rather than be allowed to flourish under the cover of canonicity. As long as close reading was identified with New Criticism, it was retrograde, in ‘the shadows’.

But today close reading has been forgiven – or, perhaps, forgiven in part. In the late decades of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first – with leftist politics embattled, with the neoliberal capitalist state ascendant and with the global economic recession rattling the brains of parents and politicians – the mission of higher education became for many the search not for truth but for job credentials. Reading literature is fine for when one does not feel like watching TV or surfing the web, but studying literature, getting absorbed in it, looks indulgent, maybe even a bit wrong-headed. On the bright side, this miserable situation calls upon advocates of literary reading, huddled in those shabby classrooms, to defend its transformative power – even rethink it. Indeed, our growing recognition of the differences between ‘hyper’ screen reading and ‘deep’ literary reading (Hayles 2010) urges such a project. No better author exists for that than Shakespeare. To those ends, the next sections undertake, first, to describe close reading and to assess it as a practice with theoretical implications. From there, the essay critiques the current emphasis on recognizing discontinuities rather than experiencing enchantment and immersion (values emphasized by present-day theorists of reading). It then proposes combining close reading with dramaturgical reading, thus bringing together enchantment and reflection, and it applies that strategy to the opening of Much Ado About Nothing.

CLOSE READING: A THEORY OR A PRACTICE?

Part of the difficulty of understanding whether close reading is a theory or a practice or something of both is the difficulty of explaining what close reading actually is and how it works. Russ McDonald and his fellow editors admit that they ‘know of no single statement by which any critic in any period has satisfactorily articulated the aims, the range, the benefits and the process of close reading’; consequently, they launch their collection ‘without such an impossible formulation’ (2012: xix). Likewise, the literary theorist Jonathan Culler embraces Peter Middleton’s hands-thrown-up conclusion that close reading is ‘a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions’ (2010: 21). To that heterogeneity, however, McDonald et al. give some form when they describe the close reader’s ‘impulse to return to a passage, to scrutinise its direction or images or sounds, to notice the presence of similar features elsewhere in the work, to linger over the verbal hold that this bit of text exerts upon the mind’ (2012: xx). Here close reading implies a re-reading that focuses on linguistic particularities. More expansively, Annette Federico describes close reading as

a deliberately undertaken activity that asks for attention to the real-time experience of reading a literary work united with an effort to step back from the experience in order to better understand (1) the work’s form, its craftsmanship and artistry, (2) the work’s feeling, or its personal and psychological resonance, and (3) the work’s ethos, its implied commentary on human values. (2016: 9)

As Federico’s keywords suggest, close reading has both subjective and objective dimensions; emotional and affective on the one hand, yet evaluative and judgemental (even ethical or political) on the other. At the subjective end, the close reader might become absorbed in ‘the numinous power of the aesthetic object’ (Felski 2008: 51). The reader’s ‘scrupulous attentiveness to stylistics and narrative detail’ or other elements can evoke a sense of enchantment and intoxication (Felski 2008: 52; see 51–76), of being inside the artefact’s imagined environment. At the objective end, the close reader might step back to reflect on how, say, a play generates its sense of immersion and wonder. She might also explicate the play for its ethical or social commentary – or critique it for perpetuating the values of a ruling elite, or praise it for resisting them. The spectrum’s seemingly opposite poles threaten conflict, for a work might enchant us while propagating wrong-headed values. That question has been well treated elsewhere (e.g. Felski 2015), but one might offer two comments. First, enchantment and immersion are essential dimensions of reading imaginative literature and cannot be ignored or dismissed. Second, Shakespeare’s works are celebrated for presenting ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Twenty-first-century shakespeares
• Part One: Foundational studies
• Part Two: Challenges to traditional liberal humanism
• Part Three: Matters of difference
• Part Four: Millennial directions
• Part Five: Twenty-first-century directions
• Appendices
• Index
• Imprint