Shakespeare and Reception Theory

Nigel Wood, Evelyn Gajowski

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350200906
• eBook ISBN: 9781350112117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Arden Shakespeare and Theory provides a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical developments that have dominated Shakespeare studies in recent years, as well as those that are emerging at the present moment. Each volume provides: · a clear definition of a particular theory;
· a survey of its major theorists and critics;
· an analysis of its significance in Shakespeare studies;
· a summary of relevant political, social and economic contexts;
· a wealth of suggested resources for further investigation. Reception Theory provides readers with a unique overview and understanding of the ways in which both audiences and readers have reacted to Shakespeare's works historically and in the present. This study demonstrates how recent emphases on a reader's and a spectator's role in the creation of meaning might allow us to contemplate Shakespeare's work in fresh and often provocative ways. Among the plays included as case studies are A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, The Tempest, King Lear and Henry V. Shakespeare and Reception Theory pays close attention to early modern modes of interaction in the playhouse alongside more recent assumptions that underlie spectating and performing.

1

First Principles

Before we consider more recent reception theories, it would be as well to glance at some formative ideas that have shaped both hermeneutic and aesthetic thought. Hermeneutic studies are concerned with how we might interpret external data, both textual and non-textual, clearly and accurately, and aesthetics with how we might register the experiences derived principally from art. In several respects, there is considerable overlap. There are at least four main issues that have engaged reception theorists:

1Are the distinctive artistic elements that encourage certain types of viewing and reading identifiable as, ultimately, residing in the literary/dramatic work; or

2Is the crucial factor a psychological one, manifest only through isolating an awareness of one’s impulses and subjectivity, thereby leading to conclusions as to how we read or spectate?

3To what extent is it valuable to study past reactions to literary artefacts, wherein we focus on some sense of the implications shared with past audiences and which may now elude us? And finally,

4Is it possible to regard some works in manufactured and willed ways that are perhaps more politically or relevant aside from any first, instinctive, reaction? How might we alter or reject earlier (and less valuable) pleasures or judgements in the service of what we might take, on reflection, as a higher good?

Overall, the aim of these critical emphases, where Shakespeare’s plays are concerned, is to apply relevant criteria to their interpretation and evaluation, and that entails an exploration of how they might have been constructed with a likely audience in mind – with a focus on the conventions of spectating and creating that obtained at the time of first performance – but also how these words and gestures reached out to spectator reaction and experience. This is only part of the agenda, however, as the theoretical considerations of how meaning is achieved in the theatre conditions an awareness of how Shakespeare might now be understood in the deepest and most radical of senses.

The move to estimate what happens when we make sense of art – its phenomenology – is often credited to Edmund Husserl, whose major works analyse how we express feelings and therefore ideas caused by external events. Instead of reaching out to such experiential data and attempting to identify a common cause of root experiences therefrom, Husserl wanted to get at the authenticity of how we personally and truly experience. In his two-volume Logical Investigations (1900/1) and then refined in his Ideas (1913; Husserl 1982), he inaugurates studies into how much we are often prey to what he calls a ‘natural attitude’ wherein we experience what we are supposed to and what would be comfortable so to do: a stance ‘in which we all live and from which we start when we bring about the philosophical transformation of our viewpoint’. The world of ‘pre-given things’ (Vorfindlichkeiten) is understood as obvious (Husserl 2006: 2). Back in 1891, and in his Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl had shown an early interest in the precognitive bases that underlay computation – its function as fact and how it satisfies certain emotional as well as practical requirements; indeed, the practical follows from aims that satisfy in some way. The most accessible illustration could be the motivation behind ‘To prove’ in any basic scientific experiment – which is apt to hide – while indicating – the need to experiment in this area in the first place.

The self, anchored by a notion of oneself as ‘I’, is not quite the sum of the varied experiences and intuitions that result from life – through our body and as a result of how we are situated temporally and often spatially. Art allows us to reach beyond this individual subjectivity because we are called upon to experience another ‘I’ and, assuming that we have the ‘empathy’ to travel with that other self, it is as if we intuit a wider arena of knowledge and emotion than that we started with. Traversing along a road in sight of a mountain, say, what we see at one point might lead us to predict what would be visible, but is at this moment out of our sight. If we took the trouble to take a full circuit of the mountain, then our knowledge of what is named on a map as the eminence would be fuller and it might well instal itself in our memory as an experience. Normality is promoted by cartography (or in the linguistic world, a dictionary or formal word-system), a ‘lifeworld’, yet such knowledge is not what Husserl most concerns himself with (Husserl 2006: 5–8).

Subsequent thinkers have gained most from what Husserl terms a ‘transcendental phenomenology’: although we have to start with the subjective in order to gain the greatest and most direct access to lived experience, such instances are often momentary and sometimes just pass us by. The ‘philosophical’ attitude, however, involves us in transcending (or thinking beyond) that moment with the knowledge that the apparent purity of such impulses is in fact also a result of memory and situation. Gradually accumulating, the associations that have gathered around, for example, Macbeth, need to be ‘bracketed off’ from the particular performance of the play we are now witnessing. Certain recurrent traits that we acknowledge as the play so named form a kind of ‘horizon-consciousness’ that both aid comprehensibility – but might also retard it if we pigeonhole new experiences too rigidly. It is thus the case that the witches that commence the play may or may not be the principal source of Macbeth’s tragic flaw; the same issue could be derived from how Lady Macbeth is allowed to be the fall-girl to account for and so excuse her husband’s evil. Is it the case that we reject a particular reading of the action because it seems to us not to ‘fit’ – and then we leave it at that? To emerge from our inherited ‘horizon-consciousness’ we have to undergo a form of ‘phenomenological reduction’ whereby we bring to our consciousness this necessary division of the residual baggage from the past or tradition (also perhaps advertising or how we have been educated) from the here and now.¹

The emphasis Husserl introduces into the work of interpretation is that it is worth exploring a distinction between meaning and object. In art, especially, the artwork exists as it is perceived, and as it is understood as an ‘intentional object’, the product of another consciousness.² Thus, we cannot know for sure what Shakespeare may have consciously intended; even if authors left behind plentiful evidence of their ideas through introductions, letters or journals, the work is apt to exceed a prosaic account. By an ‘intentional object’, Husserl has a notion of the interpreter obliged to work towards a model of eventual coherence. We might pause here to reflect upon this assumption: do writers have a developed consciousness of how deeply felt metaphors or other figures add up? Should they? This may be an insistent question where theatre is concerned in that nailing down a ‘message’ is not often regarded as the highest aesthetic and dramatic value. We do, though, have before us the complex task of accounting for how artefacts communicate and this entails an avoidance of the simplification in paraphrase. In the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Roman Ingarden, this mode of enquiry involves a negotiation between the work and interpreter. For Gadamer, in studies such as Truth and Method (1960; English editions: 1st: 1975, 2nd: 1989), ‘method’ is really self-fulfilling, a means to standardize according to prior assumptions in order to achieve a neatness directed by such priorities: this is to be distinguished from ‘truth’, our ‘being-in-the world’, which, crucially, is neither equivalent to scientific accuracy or consistency nor possesses a pragmatic function. The attractiveness of such a practical focus is that it allows for variable approaches given different contexts. It also situates understanding as the result of dialogue and a modification of any initial perspectives by which we might develop others’ perceptions (that ideally become shared). In this, our improved approach to literature becomes a form of moral knowledge. Unlike a scientific language, literary expression is best instanced as a form of self-expression and a reaction to this is not an assessment of its practicality but rather an evaluation of how it bears upon everyday life and thus sensation. It is an activity, not an achievement of stasis and finite knowledge. Inevitably, in this social (and sociable) arena, the goal is to embrace a ‘performative interpretation’ wherein the self and one’s starting preferences are not to be unreflectively set aside but, alternatively, put to work, challenged – and rendered more complex – in a form of conversation or dialectic with congenial others. Drama is no pure form in that it is left to performance conventions to attempt to interpret for spectators. Yet, however much there may be ‘normative’ assumptions in play (theatrical space, director’s decisions in line with regular expectations), there is still an opening for what Gadamer calls ‘cognitive’ perception where we break through traditional filters and reach a more individualistic focus (see Gadamer 2014: 320–2). This means ultimately that the elements of staging are merely various means to a more reflective end. Persistently, Gadamer is drawn to the theatre to provide test cases: ‘The performance of a play, like that of a ritual, cannot be simply detached from the play itself, as if it were something that is not part of its essential being, but is as subjective and fluid as the aesthetic experiences in which it is experienced’ (Gadamer 2014: 120). Unexpectedly perhaps, Gadamer goes out of his way to collapse the world of representation (for example, actors or stage designers) into the world of its reception: we judge how well the performance succeeds by having an initial grasp of the text itself. Nothing can come of nothing. We then are well placed to judge its practical value upon our life choices and perceptions. There has to be some dislocation between the possible fandom of witnessing the playing out of a star system on stage or a ritual whereby our more traditional selves are confirmed, on the one hand, and, on the other, a more considered and holistic view (through aesthetic reflection) that permits a sense of challenge, even discomfort, that emerges from our contemplation of critical ‘play’. The pun on ‘play’ ushers in a profound concentration of allied yet eventually divergent senses: of a staged representation, recreation, the actor’s activity and latitude (in a technical sense of ‘give’, indicating the certain looseness of operation of a mechanism). In a game, while there may be agreed rules (without which the game would indeed cease to exist), charting quite how one exploits these in a specific realization is far from formulaic. Far from an extreme example of literature, a staged play is used by Gadamer to resemble the condition of all art (see Gadamer 2014: 121–30).

Moreover, just as any performance of a play is always situated spatially – in a particular theatre for a target audience – it is also inextricable from pre-existent conditions embedded in history. I cannot ‘play’ in my interpretation free of not only what I now sense but also how I came to recognize the ‘truth’ or accuracy in (in short, the value of) any work. We approach art relative to where we have now arrived in history – with our inherited ways of seeing or noticing. What is more, the clearest view of any object under scrutiny is more efficiently grasped once we ‘play’ with opinions to realize factors that are historically determined and perhaps free ourselves from them; we also need to break free from any egoistic adherence to ‘what I believe’, recognizing that, say, what we may take as authentic at age twenty may undergo radical change once we hit fifty, and that this alteration is not just a matter of maturation but temporal change in cultural terms.³ The most memorable, and so valuable, experiences cannot always be captured and described easily, but Gadamer would prefer to see these, even if in a preliminary consideration, as inferred from the work: ‘Thus it is not at all a question of a mere subjective variety of conceptions, but of the work’s own possibilities of being that emerge as the work explicates itself, as it were, in the variety of its aspects’ (Gadamer 2014: 122). In addition, there is as a consequence no sense involved of searching for a correct or definitive interpretation, because we should also sense that there cannot be – by definition – a ‘fixed criterion’ of value that is transhistorical (Gadamer 2014: 123).

We are thereby prey to the available ‘horizon’ through which we perceive and find matters comprehensible. Gadamer defines this term as ‘a range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’. This is not just inescapable but also a condition that is enabling: we escape a perspective that is conditioned only to note what is nearest by looking beyond the immediate or obvious: ‘similarly, working out the hermeneutical situation means acquiring the right horizon of inquiry for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition’ (Gadamer 2014: 313). This is why art is essential, for at its best it addresses the whole human being and, if we strive for a developed aesthetic and self-aware reflection, it promotes possibilities for change and a complex engagement with the processes of enquiry.

One of Husserl’s students, Roman Ingarden worked on the invitation in his mentor’s work to account for specifically aesthetic effects. How do we approach and interpret artefacts as distinct from other forms of communication? In two works, The Literary Work of Art (written 1926; 1st ed. in German, 1931; Ingarden 1973a) and The Cognition of the Work of Art (in German, 1968; Ingarden 1973b), he, however, does not stress an interpreter’s power of transforming any object of her/his analysis in a realm completely independent of its cause. His hope was that, if we could enumerate the literary features of any text, we could literally come to terms with its more successful qualities and its overall value as art. Thus, he arrives at an identification of four separate zones: word sounds or phonetic effects (for example, melodies and rhythmic stress), units of meaning (relating to original semantic possibilities), schematized aspects (how references in the chosen text, such as characters or locations, are situated thematically) and representations. Ultimately, these components will compose an ‘organic unity’, even if the path to such a goal might be rather circuitous (Ingarden 1973a: 30, 33). Indeed, as we view or read, this awareness is usually beyond us. It is only by reflection (for Ingarden, a crucial step) that we can ‘concretize’ the work and come to an appreciation of its unitary existence. It is only by these means that debates of value can progress and points of real difference be isolated (Ingarden 1973a: 332–55). Furthermore, it is only by demonstrating artistic values that the work may be thoroughly understood. Such ‘concretizations’ are not perennial, though, as they may change via ensuing discussion or considering more mature experience in aesthetic cognition. The principle, on the other hand, would remain the same, and the worth of intricate compositions differentiated from merely consumerist fodder. Intuition is not missing from this approach; rather, it confronts a fully illustrated sense of how such a valuable work adds up. Ingarden, though, only allows drama into the literary ranks as a borderline case. The possibility for reflective analysis derives from a myriad of practical and material considerations that cannot always relate to any playtext in conventional ways. If, as he makes clear, this analysis can only fruitfully occur once we grasp a sense of the whole, a ‘qualitative harmony in intuitive apprehension’ that is composed of ‘concepts … saturated with emotional elements’ but which lead to ‘strictly formulated judgements’ (Ingarden 1973b: 210), then we minimize aspects of duration and the plasticity of representation wherein, performance by performance, there may be iconographic codes that are not directly inferred from the original text.

We do not reinvent any play once we review it subsequently. There is some demonstrable value in claiming that any performance is better than others, so there has to be a yardstick by which to substantiate such claims, an identifiable potential that gives rise to any number of serial experiences. Any written drama has a main text and what Ingarden calls a ‘side’ text, composed more or less directly from stage directions (in Shakespeare’s case, these are often deduced from the main text’s verbal content). One has to deter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 First Principles
• 2 The Role of the Spectator and Reader
• 3 Literary Communities and Affective Experience
• 4 The Resistant Reader
• 5 Shakespeare and Public Responses
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright