Words, words, words...

[Ando]

Shakespeare Scholars: 1. Stephen Greenblatt

[Sevorin]

Smart people annoy the shit outa me!

[Ando]

I thought you liked Shakespeare.

[Sevorin]

This has nothing to do with Shakespeare. In fact, I agree with what he says -- even his asides about Othello and Much Ado About Nothing.

 

That's why I call him "smart".

 

It's just the irritating way smart people have of being right.

 

(I'm not so sure I take Ulysses' speech in Troilus only as irony, however.)

[Ando]

This has nothing to do with Shakespeare. 

I anticipated that response. I see Shakespeare's ideas and Greenblatt's reception and collation of them as inextricably linked. If you're using "smart" as a pejorative I see no reason why it wouldn't extend it to Greenblatt's endeavor as a whole. That what I meant by "Shakespeare". When people refer to Shakespeare they're referring to their engagement (via the written word or live performance) with his body of work, aren't they? If they're simply praising (or dismissing) his work can we really call that engagement? Can we even call it Shakespeare?

[Sevorin]

If they're simply praising (or dismissing) his work can we really call that engagement? 

 

No.

 

Another sort of "critical" faculty is called for.

[Ando]

Surely. Since you use that faculty when engaging with Shakespeare how can you say it has nothing to do with him?

It's amazing when you consider the extent to which Shakespeare is our own invention. Of course, we have his body of work, but much of what he is is what we've inherited, invented and continue to promulgate. Treating his work, for instance, as the standard bearer of high English culture often puts off people unfamiliar with Elizabethan drama right away. This approach certainly isn't smart. At least, Greenblatt doesn't do that.

[Sevorin]

But Greenblatt -- much as like him -- can't help attributing to Shakespeare qualities I don't believe were part of the original man.

 

I don't blame him terribly for this. Others do it far more aggressively. Greenblatt himself acknowledges that something like the Shakespeare we have has come down to us through late 18th- and early 19th-century German scholars. And they used Hamlet as the Rosetta Stone of their analyses, just as later generations seized upon King Lear. One of the glories of Shakespeare is his susceptibility to re-invention and re-discovery by each succeeding age. (God help the generation that takes Macbeth as the touchstone for understanding the Bard.)

 

What I'm driving at is Greenblatt's assumption that Shakespeare was somehow a Man of Thought. He surely was the exemplar of "what oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd," but I tend to agree with Shaw's denunciation of him -- that one searches in vain through his plays for a single original idea. (I understand, of course, the sarcasm behind Shaw's remark.)

 

Greenblatt's "lecture" -- at least what I saw in the 47 minutes above -- gives the impression that when Shakespeare chose to work over certain ideas, he gave himself wholly to thinking about them. He is not alone in this point of view. But I do not -- and never shall -- believe it is true. His mind was a compendium for all sorts of homely, biblical, and worldly wisdom. And this wisdom -- as well as simple descriptions -- could captivate us by the magnificence of his diction, what a French critic -- I think it was Guizot -- referred to as the language of frenzy, a cornucopic gush of similies and comparisons, which he keeps pouring over us, leaving us awash so that, once we've gained our footing and are ready to proceed, we discover Shakespeare is already fifty meters ahead, leaving a trail of fresh metaphors in his wake. But these are all patterns and analogues and various linguistic devices used to describe things other than authentic thoughts.

 

I agree that he often diverged from his sources -- diverged, as in Lear, in ways that are incomprehensible unless you start with the premise that there's something more on his mind, something deeper, than the plot at hand. But even in the case of Lear it's possible to understand that divergence as the result of the playwright getting carried away with his own craft and composing a type of tragedy with which he had a special, more personal, connection.

 

I'm not saying Shakespeare was a shithead or a dolt without a single thought worth considering. He was immensely part of his time, and his time was overrich with wisdom. I believe he saw that wisdom prodigiously dispensed by all the variegated characters he met on the street, in the ale houses, in the waiting rooms at court, at the barge piers, in the law courts, wherever he traveled and in whatever he read.

 

And here I agree utterly with Greenblatt's comment about Shakespeare's enormous "absorptive" powers. Any of us might have absorbed quite as much, but few have the knack for organizing it so quickly and re-packaging it in verse. It's possible to locate specific passages lifted bodily from Holinshed and inserted into even his great plays, like Henry IV, Part I -- modified, of course, by fitting it into iambic pentameter.

 

Thus far, original thought makes up no greater part of Shakespeare than craft. But it's the craft, finally, that I believe enabled him to fuse his disparate qualities and drive his native genius to Valhalla.

 

Like Duke Ellington, he knew the musicians he was composing for. He knew that Kempe or Armin or Burbage or Alleyn and the rest would be singing his verse, just as Ellington knew that Blanton or Webster or Hodges and the rest would be playing his compositions. So he gave them all a voice -- whether the character on stage is Hamlet or Marcellus, Richard or Tyrell, Beatrice or Ursula, they all got their lines to say. They all got their moment in the sun.

 

And because his cast was so skilled in painting characters so deftly, because Shakespeare appears to have been a quick study of the personalities he came across, he made each of them live for his Elizabethan audience as an "independent" individual. But it's all done with mirrors by a master playwright.

 

We assume that a murderer of two youngsters in the Tower would give voice to the thoughts he gives him, that a gravedigger would taunt an interlocutor with literalness, that a flighty girlfriend would tease her pal with a play on her undisclosed lover's name. The very "universality" of the feelings his characters exhibit gives us the illusion that we're climbing into the head of a Charles Manson, a Nixon, a J-Lo. But it's only an illusion, theatrically worked out.

 

Sometimes we sense -- we know  in our hearts -- that Shakespeare was drawing upon particular experience. I think only a man who'd lost his own young child would know enough to be economic with the grief Lear exhibits over the dead Cordelia, "Thou'lt come no more. Never, never, never, never, never."

 

And so on throughout a lo-o-ong list of examples. Indeed, most pre-20th-century Shakespearean criticism approaches the plays through the characters. Only after Bradley did theatrical-historical and (the not always barren) textual analysis take hold.

 

For this reason -- the glibness and apparent depth of understanding of the many different characters -- Shakespeare was accorded godlike attributes of psychological understanding. And, of course, the built-in snobbery began to get a grip on those without the patience to search deeply into the matter. Since this or that personage on stage was so knowingly delineated, the real Shakespeare could not have been a glover's son from the stix. He had to be a nobleman, a lawyer, a classical scholar, a geographer, a sailor, a murderer -- anything but was he was, a hard-working man of the theater whose greatest sensitivity was to the daily life around him and whose greatest gift was to give voice to that life on stage.

 

Yet if you give the matter any real thought you might notice that Claudius could deliver the "To be or not to be . . ." soliloquy at no loss to Hamlet. That Hamlet himself might have uttered Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . ." without doing injustice to either play. It's dat ol' time "universality" again. It both exalts and explains  a bit of Shakespeare's godlike status. I worship at his altar myself. But the reality is so thrilling, so fulfilling, that it's pointless to praise the man for what he is not, when what he is is worth the ticket.   

 

(I except one character from this observation -- surprising, since of all Shakespeare's characters this is the one he most thoroughly drew from a well-established, even ancient, theatrical tradition. I'm speaking of Falstaff, whom Shakespeare raised from the farcical Roman Miles Gloriosus to fantastic heights. Something about his speeches seems all his own.)

 

(Perhaps Shylock, too, should be mentioned. He is a special case, and his speeches refer to his being a special case. But he was for the Elizabethans really a funny-villain. It was only after Macklin re-thought the role in the 18th century that Shylock became the tragic figure we regard him today.)

 

In his review of Olivier's Henry V  the great film critic James Agee said that even if Shakespeare had been no more gifted with words than, say, Agee was, he'd still be nearly his actual equal as a playwright. It's hard to test the truth of that, though one could, I suppose, argue that experiments were tried by Kurosawa, Verdi, Bernstein and Sondheim, among many others. But notice something about Agee's remark that has bearing on our discussion -- there is no mention of Shakespeare as a thinker.

 

A very long post, I know. But it has helped me formulate thoughts of my own about this matter.

[Sevorin]

I stepped on my dick.

 

The French critic was not Guizot, but Taine.

[Ando]

Indeed, most pre-20th-century Shakespearean criticism approaches the plays through the characters. Only after Bradley did theatrical-historical and (the not always barren) textual analysis take hold.

I don't know about that. Samuel Johnson, certainly, didn't limit his critique of Shakespeare to character study, though (naturally) it was a point of focus.

I don't get this obsession with the actual man, in any event. Of what consequence is "Shakespeare, The Man" if, as Auden rightly put it, "anger or compassion leaves/The bigger bangs to us"?

[Sevorin]

Samuel Johnson, certainly, didn't limit his critique of Shakespeare to character study, though (naturally) it was a point of focus

 

A reason I said "most" such criticism. You can probably add Pope to other big-titted critics -- but they undertook to edit  Shakespeare as well. So they couldn't confine themselves to the characters and forego textual issues.

 

Johnson also had the controversialist's obligation to answer the "classical" objection to Shakespeare -- his failure to observe the so-called dramatic unities.

 

But by and large the titanic figures pre-Granville-Barker -- guys like Schlegel and Johnson and Coleridge and Morgann and Hazlitt and Bradley -- are most interesting (and most memorable) when they consider Shakespeare's characters.

[Ando]

Ha. Might start a What's Yer Favorite Shakespeare Poster?  thread. This one's been kicking around my store a while - been meaning to read it. Have you? I hear it's a fair introduction to Shakespeare crit.

[Ando]

Re: Samuel Johnson

But by and large the titanic figures pre-Granville-Barker -- guys like Schlegel and Johnson and Coleridge and Morgann and Hazlitt and Bradley -- are most interesting (and most memorable) when they consider Shakespeare's characters.

Not to me. I was eternally relieved, for instance, to read that Johnson shared my irritation with Shakespeare's exhaustive use of "the quibble"; especially in the comedies. His plays are littered with pages of dialogue between (usually "common") characters quibbling over nothing - usually deliberate faux pas bandied back and forth for comic effect. But the main characters engage in it as well. I can that kind of wod play it in a sonnet but having to sit through ten to fifteen minutes of this can be irksome, to say the least (I do acknowledge, however, that audiences love it).