Shakespeare

Third Edition

Kiernan Ryan

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780333781982
• eBook ISBN: 9781350318373
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published to critical acclaim in 1989, this book is now recognised as one of the most original and influential critical studies of Shakespeare to have appeared in recent times.
For this brand-new edition, Kiernan Ryan has not only revised and updated the text throughout, but he has also added a great deal of new material, expanding the book to twice the size of the first edition. The section on Shakespearean comedy now includes an essay on Shakespeare's first scintillating experiment in the genre, The Comedy of Errors, and a study of his most perplexing problem play, Measure for Measure.
A provocative new last chapter, '"Dreaming on things to come": Shakespeare and the Future of Criticism', reveals how much modern criticism can learn from the appropriation of Shakespeare by Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce.
Students, teachers, and anyone with a passionate interest in what the plays have to say to us today, will find this modern classic of Shakespeare criticism indispensable.

1

Reinterpreting Shakespeare Today

New Critical Perspectives

The aim of this study is to further the development of fresh readings of Shakespeare’s drama, readings designed to activate the revolutionary imaginative vision that invites discovery in his plays today. It is intended as a contribution to what remains a fundamental objective of radical criticism at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to contest and displace the established interpretations of canonical works, and thereby transform both the present function of past texts and the practice of criticism itself.

The closing decades of the twentieth century witnessed the terminal disillusionment of most students and teachers with traditional assumptions about the nature and point of literary criticism. English Literature is still, in both conventional and more modish versions, one of the most widely studied subjects in the school and university curriculum. But it is a subject which has long been recognized, even in conservative quarters, to be in dire disarray and in urgent need of reconstruction.¹ Alternative perspectives opened up by feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalytic theory, new historicism and cultural materialism have thrown the rationale, and hence the interpretive authority, of once impregnable modes of criticism into serious question. It is now hard to resist the conclusion that the main function of orthodox criticism has been to bolster the beliefs upon which our patriarchal, class-divided culture depends.²

Nowhere has this argument been more convincingly advanced than in the case of Shakespeare, whose recruitment has played a crucial role in securing the objectives of the critical establishment since the eighteenth century. A history and a critique of this process of appropriation have been undertaken in a series of seminal studies, which provide the obligatory point of departure for any attempt to transform the prevailing perception of Shakespeare’s significance.³ I want to start, therefore, by summarizing the main points of the case that has been mounted by this groundbreaking body of work.

The reason why our perception of Shakespeare matters is that over the centuries his drama has come to constitute, as Alan Sinfield observes, ‘an influential medium through which certain ways of thinking about the world may be promoted and others impeded’. Shakespeare has become, in other words, ‘one of the places where ideology is made’ and thus, inevitably, ‘a site of cultural struggle and change’.⁴ The problem is that so far most battles for the Bard have been won by forces intent on fabricating from his art a powerful apology for leaving the world the way it is.

Shakespeare’s image has been endlessly refashioned and his works tirelessly redefined to ensure that they reflect the illusions underpinning the status quo. The Swan of Avon has been summoned as a star witness to the notion that the characters and fates of individuals are formed independently of their social milieu and historical conditions, whose seeming mutability masks an unchanging order of things. Generations of labourers in the vineyard of high culture have bent themselves to the task of constructing Shakespeare ‘as the National Poet and as the example of the individual literary genius who transcends his period and produces texts of timeless value which reveal fundamental truths about a “universal human condition”' ’.⁵ To reconsider in this light the most influential authorities on the plays, from the eighteenth century to the present, is to discern beneath the surface diversity of opinion a common, continuous ‘effort of ideological containment, an attempt to harness the unruly energies of the text to a stable order of significance’. It is the effort, more specifically, ‘to recuperate Shakespeare’s text in the name of autonomous subjectivity and universal human experience. From Johnson to Leavis, a tradition grows up in which the plays are subjected to a powerful normative bias, an imposition of meanings and values as conceived by the dominant ideology.’⁶

Certainly, one of the chief kinds of criticism that have prevailed in Shakespeare studies is the sort in which ‘history, if acknowledged at all, is seen as inessential or a constraint transcended in the affirmation of a transhistorical condition’.⁷ There exists alongside this, to be sure, a venerable tradition of scholarship and commentary, which insists on returning and confining Shakespeare to his original historical habitat. But time and again such a move serves ‘only to highlight in the foregrounded text preoccupations which turn out to be not historical at all, but eternal. History is thus recognized and abolished at one and the same time’.⁸ These two apparently opposed styles of Shakespeare criticism reveal themselves, on sharper inspection, to be secretly complicit in the same enterprise. The formidable resilience of that enterprise owes much to the fact that ‘the continuities of Shakespeare criticism and textual and historical scholarship all exert a powerful institutional brake upon any attempt to diverge from the order of concepts and methods they have sought to establish for themselves’.⁹

The institutional brakes have been applied most effectively in the sphere of education. Here the most cursory analysis makes it plain that Stratford’s principal source of revenue ‘has been made to speak mainly for the right’, not only through the slanted paraphrase of what his works say, but also through his recurrent conscription ‘to underwrite established practices in literary criticism and, consequently, in examinations’.¹⁰ The overtly or implicitly reactionary presentation of Shakespeare is a vital component, in fact often the keystone, of school and degree courses in English Literature, not only in Britain but all over the world.¹¹ Indeed, in British secondary education today, as a result of drastic revisions of the curriculum, ‘the importance of Shakespeare is perhaps greater than ever, for he is becoming the sole vehicle of high-cultural ideology and establishment literary criticism in schools’.¹²

Nor does the process of recuperating Shakespeare restrict itself to the academy and the classroom. An examination of the dominant directorial philosophies of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) since the early 1960s, traced through the productions and pronouncements of Peter Hall, Peter Brook and Trevor Nunn in particular, exposes the pervasive and protracted influence of two critics above all: E. M. W. Tillyard, whose books The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) and Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) cast Shakespeare as a stout traditionalist rooted in his age, and Jan Kott, whose Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1965) depicts him rather as the modernist voice of a bleak, Beckettian vision. Despite their outward incongruity, both these conceptions of Shakespeare ‘are really two sides of the same conservative coin – both predicated on the ideas of an essential human nature and the desirability of “order”' and both hostile to positive political action’.¹³ Film versions and television productions of Shakespeare’s plays have generally fared little better. For, with a few honourable exceptions, where bold, inventive work has been achieved against the odds, the radical potentialities of Shakespeare on big screen and small screen alike ‘are in practice systematically blocked, suppressed or marginalized by the conservatism of the dominant cultural institutions’.¹⁴

Given the sheer weight and global reach of the institutions that dictate how the world’s most celebrated playwright and his works are reproduced in classes, theatres, lecture-halls, cinemas and living-rooms, the chances of reversing the current of interpretation seem slim, to say the least. But if there is one conclusion which the evidence of the radical scholars I have been quoting compels us to draw, it is that the canonized version of Shakespeare is a cultural creation, which has no intrinsic authority and whose validity is wide open to dispute. In short:

Shakespeare does not have to work in a conservative manner. His plays do not have to signify in the ways they have customarily been made to … he does not have to be a crucial stage in the justification of elitism in education and culture. He has been appropriated for certain practices and attitudes, and can be reappropriated for others.¹⁵

Any serious venture to transform literary studies into an educational practice devoted not to maintaining but to changing the existing social order must undertake, as a major priority, the sustained reappropriation of Shakespeare’s plays. The question, however, is what form this reappropriation should take, if it is to make his drama more disturbing in its impact on the institutions through which Shakespeare is reproduced, and more constructively alert to our most pressing problems and needs. The metaphysical premises on which most criticism of Shakespeare has proceeded are being dismantled, and the idealist interpretations that have entombed his plays for too long are crumbling away. But the kinds of reading that have emerged to take their place seem to me, for the most part, more questionable and less helpful developments.

Shakespeare’s oeuvre is currently colonized by most breeds of newhistoricist, cultural-materialist, feminist and poststructuralist criticism. The undoubted diversity of their approaches, however, disguises their engagement in a deeper argument between two basic critical strategies, neither of which proves persuasive. The one grounds the drama’s objectives in the historical milieu from which it sprang; the other cold-shoulders past contexts, preferring to turn Shakespeare’s text into a mirror of the critic’s own method and present priorities.

The cultural materialist Jonathan Dollimore provides a characteristically grim and dispiriting instance of the former method at work. Dollimore’s brand of historicism seeks to reveal ‘the effectiveness and complexity of the ideological process of containment’¹⁶ in which it presumes Shakespeare’s drama to be embroiled. The progressive critic’s task is to demystify Shakespeare’s plays, by exposing them as elaborate devices employed by the repressive cultural machinery of his time to secure the status quo. Subversive impulses and flashes of resistance find expression throughout the plays, of course, but these are to be explained as ruses of the ruling ideology at its most cunning. Shakespeare only opens authority to question along the way in order to vindicate it more completely in the last analysis. Thus Dollimore’s account of Measure for Measure maintains, despite abundant implications to the contrary, that the play is best fenced off as ‘a reactionary fantasy, neither radical nor liberating … the very disclosure of social realities which make progress seem imperative is recuperated in comedic closure, a redemptive wish-fulfilment of the status quo’.¹⁷

It is ironic that critics of Dollimore’s bent confirm rather than dispute the coarse supposition of traditionalists like Tillyard that Shakespeare’s plays enforce the political, moral and philosophical outlook of those who ruled his world. The (far from negligible) difference is that the Dollimore school offers a more complex diagnosis of the drama’s conformity, and treats it as something to be smoked out and disarmed rather than sidestepped or celebrated. The plays can be studied and taught from a progressive modern viewpoint, but the idea that they themselves prefigure such a viewpoint is inconceivable. The possibility that Shakespeare’s texts, once extricated from their conservative constructions, might be inclined to signify the opposite of what they have been induced to mean, is entertained only to be dismissed as an historically unwarranted delusion. Dollimore is anxious to reassure us that recognizing the power of the dominant ideology to turn even Shakespeare’s imagination to its account ‘by no means implies a fatalistic acceptance that it is somehow inevitable and that all opposition is hopeless’.¹⁸ But, with scant textual evidence adduced to persuade us otherwise, it is hard to see what else it can imply, since it leaves merely negative or cynical reasons for studying such a contaminated Shakespeare at all.

It is consequently a relief, in many ways, to turn from this myopic rhetoric of gloom to Terry Eagleton’s brazenly unhistorical ‘exercise in political semiotics’, William Shakespeare. Eagleton’s book is an opportunistic attempt to read Shakespeare against the grain, to prove that ‘this conservative patriarch’ was actually a seditious postmodernist, whose plays exhibit a proleptic intimacy with the later revelations of ‘Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida’. As such, it constitutes a salutary assault on historicist pieties, wresting Shakespeare’s drama from their fossilizing grasp to send it spinning into the late twentieth-century orbit of critical theory. The drawback is that the texts dwindle into anthologies of excerpts and allusions, whose real point is to validate Eagleton’s poststructuralist thoughts on ‘language, desire, law, money and the body’.¹⁹ Moreover, the ostensibly liberating disregard for historical limits in fact renders the moments of illumination defenceless before the charge of being arbitrary and anachronistic, and thus incapable of arguing their advantage over rival readings.

Eagleton’s eloquence and ironic verve make appealing what often becomes tediously predictable in most efforts to turn Shakespeare into a precocious poststructuralist – by showing, for example, ‘how the Shakespearean self-reflexive forays of wit match, remarkably, the wit of the deconstructionist enterprise’.²⁰ This commonly means reading his plays in such a way as to demonstrate the abject impossibility of a coherent reading. The object is to leave us impaled ‘on the problem of linguistic indeterminacy’, floundering in ‘the condition of interpretive uncertainty’.²¹ As a strategy for breaking the strangle-hold of arthritic interpretations, this certainly has its merits. But after the umpteenth exposition of the scandalous arbitrariness of the signifier and the ceaseless deferral of meaning, one begins to see the force of the complaint that deconstruction, when confronted with a text, ‘can only endlessly rediscover its own first principles’.²² Above all, the method leaves no ground on which cogent, stable accounts, however carefully qualified and provisional, might be built for practical use in education or the theatre. Deconstruction without reconstruction throws the potentially radical baby out with the metaphysical bathwater. For it kills the plays’ urge to undo the credibility of the real world they represent, without pitching themselves or that reality into an abyss of verbal mediation in which nothing can be known or decided.

A fuller and sharper picture of the trends epitomized by Dollimore and Eagleton emerges if we survey the range of recent responses to the flagship of the canon, King Lear.²³ We can begin by looking more closely at the strain of criticism we have just glanced at: the sort that feels entitled to construe the Shakespearean text either as an allegory of its own procedure, or as a blank sheet transformed by the text’s reception into a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Reinterpreting Shakespeare Today
• 2 The Future of History: 1 and 2 Henry TV
• 3 Shakespearean Tragedy: The Subversive Imagination Questioning the Consensus
• 4 Shakespearean Comedy and Romance: The Utopian Imagination
• 5 ‘Dreaming on things to come’: Shakespeare and the Future of Criticism
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index