Monday, May 30, 2005
The signature on Shakespeare’s will
Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is one of those touch-point books of literary history & criticism, a volume so successful, both in terms of sales & critical recognition, that it becomes known just for being known. In fact, it’s a brilliant performance, a remarkable reconstruction of a life that about which there is surprising little direct evidence, a page-turner as narrative, always thoughtful, often provocative. Much has been made of Greenblatt’s use of new historical critical methods, the idea that, if Macbeth truly was written with an audience of one in mind, King James, then it is to the history of James’ fascination with witchcraft one should turn in order to understand the dramatic function of the “weird sisters” who set the plot into action.
Greenblatt’s methodology is open to both critique & parody. Not too long ago, a bookseller I know did a great routine on the premise that some line somewhere in Shakespeare might mention a blemish, which, he hypothesized, Greenblatt would take to imply that Shakespeare himself once may have had a zit on his nose, which would then lead to a detailed & learned discussion of skin care strategies in the 1590s. And it is true that some of Greenblatt’s assumptions are so over-the-top (Shakespeare writes King Lear because he’s thinking about retirement) that even if they’re entirely accurate, they’re also beside the point.
But if new historical critical methodology brought the devices & tactics of close reading to non-literary texts, Greenblatt in fact displays its advantages here in both directions, using Shakespeare as a lens to conjure up late 16th & early 17th century England into a remarkably credible diorama, while using the documentary legacy of that period to flesh out the little that is concretely known about the son of the bankrupt glove maker from Stratford. (And, happily, dismissing the “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” crowd for the grassy-knoll conspiracy whack jobs that they are.)
But Greenblatt’s most powerful contribution here is his consideration of Shakespeare as a writer, positioning him against not only is closest competitors in the theater of that period, but in the larger context of Elizabethan letters, the bumpkin from the ‘burbs who dared compete with the gentile educations of the so-called university wits. It’s a characterization that reveals the open structures of Shakespeare’s drama in the sharpest contrast with the closed forms of the sonnets that I have ever read. And it’s a strategy that leads Greenblatt to view the evolution of Shakespeare’s works as a series of problem-solving decisions – exactly how the chronology of any writer is best viewed.
Thus, Greenblatt argues, halfway through his career, Shakespeare makes his most important single discovery, that which separates him out from the best of his peers of the Elizabethan period, the construction of character. From Hamlet onward, Greenblatt demonstrates repeatedly, Shakespeare consciously proposes that the most important aspect of a major character in any dramatic work is opacity. Again & again, what distinguishes Shakespeare’s plays from the various sources where he derived his tales is that the earlier sources tie up loose ends neatly, characters have clear motivation, works are balanced & contained. All the elements, I dare say, of the well-wrought urn (not to mention Billy Collins’ sense of accessibility). Shakespeare’s constant revision is to break the mold, to excise motivation, to confound expectation, rendering character (and often plot) mysterious. Thus in the previous versions of Lear, the test of the three daughters’ love for the old king is always predicated upon his having to decide who gets which lands, and how much, whereas, in Shakespeare, the test occurs after those decisions have been made, rendering it capricious & likewise forcing the King to revise his original allotments when he banishes Cordelia. The irrationality of the act becoming a defining aspect of Lear’s character as well as setting the plot into motion.
Similarly, Hamlet’s ambiguous, ambivalent nature is a Shakespearean addition. Here, having already argued that Hamlet’s name & the then-recent death of Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet (which in the improvisatory spelling mode of the 1590s would on occasion have been spelled Hamlet) is far more than coincidence, Greenblatt discusses the impact of this writing strategy:
With Hamlet, Shakespeare found that if he refused to provide himself or his audience with a familiar, comfortable rationale that seems to make it all make sense, he could get to something immeasurably deeper. The key is not simply the creation of opacity, for by itself that would only create a baffling or incoherent play. Rather, Shakespeare came increasingly to rely on the inward logic, the poetic coherence that his genius and his immensely hard work had long enabled him to confer on his plays. Tearing away the structure of superficial meanings, he fashioned an inner structure through the resonant echoing of key terms, the subtle development of images, the brilliant orchestration of scenes, the complex unfolding of ideas, the intertwining of parallel plots, the uncovering of psychological obsessions.
This conceptual breakthrough in Hamlet was technical; that is, it affected the practical choices Shakespeare made when he put plays together, starting with enigma of the prince’s suicidal melancholy and assumed madness. But it was not only a new aesthetic strategy. The excitement of motive must have arisen from something more than technical experimentation; coming in the wake of Hamnet’s death, it expressed Shakespeare’s root perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled. The opacity was shaped by his experience of the world and of his own inner life: his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal of easy consolations. (324)
It is exactly – exactly! – this “untidy, damaged, and unresolved” aspect of Shakespeare’s late plays that Charles Olson recognizes in Melville’s use of King Lear as the template behind Moby Dick. Olson quotes Melville’s own words from the margins of his copy of Lear:
Tormented into desperation, Lear, the frantic king, tears off the mask and speaks the same madness of vital truth.
Later, Olson notes that
When Edmund is dying he fails to revoke his order for the death of Lear and Cordelia, only looks upon the bodies of Goneril and Regan and consoles himself:” Yet Edmund was belov’d!” This Melville heavily checks. It is a twisting ambiguity like one of his own – Evil beloved.
Melville is dumb with horror at the close, blood-stop double meaning of Shakespeare’s language in the scene of the blinding of
Here’s a touch Shakespearean – Regan talks of ingratitude!
First causes were Melville’s peculiar preoccupation. He concentrates on an Edmund, a Regan – and the world of Lear, which is almost generated by such creatures, lies directly behind the creation of an Ahab, a Fedallah and the White, lovely, monstrous Whale.
Two pages later, Olson will conclude this fateful chapter, noting again (even as he lacks the vocabulary) the importance of opacity both to Shakespeare & Melville:
Shakespeare drew Lear out of what Melville called “the infinite obscure of his background.” It was most kin to Melville. He uses it as an immediate obscure around his own world of Moby-Dick.
Opacity, the infinite obscure, Greenblatt demonstrates, is the line that connects Hamlet, Lear, Othello & Macbeth, the first three primarily through the eradication of motive, the last through devices of plot. It is the same line that Olson draws directly from Shakespeare to Melville – and by implication, to a Maximus not then yet conceived.
Not everybody is comfortable with the “untidy, damaged, and unresolved” as Billy Collins reminded us just awhile back. Indeed, Nahum Tate’s rewrite of King Lear, supplying a happy ending in which Cordelia lives to marry Edgar, was the version habitually performed from the 1680s until the 1830s. This same will to neatness & clarity, and aversion to indeterminacy, opacity & difficulty is at play today in the
The interesting thing about Sahkespeare's late plays isn't that we have a human psyche laid out before us (as some people have claimed about Hamlet or Lear), but that we don't understand these character's motivations.
The aversion to ideterminacy one of the needs met by just this text so that as Greenblatt gestures to opacity his entire work is dedicated to removing just that.
Think one step ahead, recognize contradiction even as you recognize that this and that want is being satisfied.
In fact, look to the ending of Lear and the assurance that the like will never be seen again as a guide to just the irony that undermines Greenblatt, fans of Greenblatt who gesture to indeterminacy even as Greenblatt provides determinate satisfactions,and more.
Greenblatt's bizarre case for opacity -- I haven't read but saw him on TV making a similar case for an hour with perhaps Billy Moyers.
But what's so opaque about Lear's motivations? It seems clear as a bell. Lear offers to give his three daughters something and in exchange he wants their love. Kind of dumb, but a lot of people think that love can be gained so easily or that it indeed has something to do with the material world at all.
Then he's baffled that his daughters Gonorrhea and Raygun don't reciprocate. Cordelia teaches him slowly that love isn't about giving and getting. It's a given.
This is a lesson that he has to learn. He says in the beginning "How much sharper than a serpent's tooth is it to have a thankless child!" But the paradox is that he does have one thankful child, and she is the very child that he is accusing of being an ungrateful wretch. That's the theme. Of course the play isn't set in a social realist manner. It's supposed to be timeless -- illustrating principles of human behavior, rather than a specific moment in history. Poetry isn't history.
Fourth commandment is to honor thy parents. It's a sin not to do this. The play quite simply illustrates this family dynamic but does so using a guy with a personality that is probably incomprehensible to Charles Olson. There are people who give things in order to get things. There are zillions of such people in the corporate world. They don't exist in the poetry world or in academia very much, but try an office of giving or a philanthropical agency. People are giving to get power. Olson was stingy so didn't understand this.
Giving is often quite sneaky. And all the givers want is gratitude: a smile and thanks. But also to have you in their pocket. It's dumb, but that's what's going on in the play.
Hamlet, too, is clear as a bell. I suspect that Greenblatt's opacity just means that he doesn't understand much outside of his little confines. When Hamlet realizes that he loved Ophelia after her death in the last scene he also realizes he loved God all along, and hence the whole world becomes clear to him and he can act, and he says to Laertes who has killed him, "Heaven make thee free of it!" And so he quite explicitly makes his faith clear. It's the story of a guy who can't decide if it's worth acting in the world or not. He realizes at the end that it is because God and love exist, so too does honorable action.
Of course Billy Collins is no Shakespeare. Neither is John Ashbery, or Kenneth Koch, or Jonathan Williams, or Susan Howe, etc. Maybe the only contemporary poet who can do so much as one of Shakespeare's characters is Corso. He can do Mercutio at a level which comes pretty close to the original, and may even occasionally surpass it.
You might read the book. He gives a pretty detailed argument for why these characters' motivations aren't clear-- it's related to how Shakespeare leaves out plot elements of the original storylines. His most convincing argument, from my point of view, was in his Lear section. I don't have my book with me or I'd quote something. Anyways, it seems a little odd to argue against a book you haven't read.
Just a conceptual note... Having not read Greenblatt's book I can't comment on its merits or motivations. But there seems to be some flirting in the background in this comment with an unnecessary conflation of transparency/opacity with visibility/invisibility. What Greenblatt and Olson-via-Melville (and Ron by proxy apparently) are noting are the moments when the opacity of Shakespeare's late characters is flares up and exhibits itself. There ain't no contradiction in making the presence of opacity visible. Part of the point here seems to be that this Shakespearean opacity is meaningful precisely because it is encountered. Inscrutibility makes its effect by being experienced as a block. The opaque is not the unnoticeable. It is opaque because it is seen to be opaque. Greenblatt's, Olson's, and Melville's interest in this issue are all a bit different, yet I don't sense that they are keying their analysis on revealing a hidden or esoteric layer, but emphasizing consistent patterns. Whether one calls it a technical shift in Shakespeare (Greenblatt) or a product of his later philosophical orientation (Melville/Olson), pointing to opacity doesn't transform opacity into transparency. Rather, it makes the opacity more noticeable, and therefore more opaque.
How well opacity equates with indeterminacy or untidiness is another question entirely, and probably not a yes-or-no one, but rather a matter figuring out in which instances and to what degree there might be some conceptual payoff in their cross-over. One would hope they would not be used interchangeably.
None.
I can understand somebody not understanding the motivations, or even in not understanding Ahab -- but to me their motivations are as clear as motivations can be. Ahab is obsessed with revenge. It doesn't matter what set him off, what little problem started the chase whether the whale took off his leg or whether Ahab thinks he did. I have a few friends like this. They live for revenge. Do the slightest thing to them and it's a six-year jihad on your hands. How much clearer does the motivation have to get? I suspect that because none of these characters' motivations fit into the simplistic model of dialectical materialism Greenblatt and co. are lost.
Charles Olson's motivations in the Maximus Poems are also completely clear to me. He's contrasting the Unitarian church with the Catholic church.
There seems to be almost no ambiguity in any of these three authors.
I saw Greenblatt on TV and decided he was feeble-minded. I've read very little of his writing (forewords to the Tempest, and some other stuff), but it always struck me as feeble-minded leftism of the most infantile order. He tries to put everything into the same rubric. The fact that almost nothing fits that rubric doesn't deter him. It must fit, it must!
Next to him, Billy Collins is a colossus of intellect. At least Collins is striking out on his own. Greenblatt sounds just like anybody and everybody else in academia.
It's true though that I should read his book. I should also read Edward Said. The thing is that I just don't think I would have any teeth left at the end of such an experience.
Thanks for the idea.
I think the original plot structures are unnecessary in terms of understanding what happens in the plays. You have to think in terms of their motivations, and how they get obsessed with their motivations.
Are the plots actually unclear to other people? Are the motivations really unclear? To me they are almost bizarrely clear for such a difficult and complex story. Even Measure for Measure a so-called Problem Play is completely clear to me. How much easier can things be made?
The limitations of Greenblatt's method are quite clear. Just as the auteur approach to film doesn't fully work given the sheer number of hands in the stewpot, so too are we led astray if we try to account for everything in the dramas through the lens of a single creative figure. Renaissance drama was inprovisational, and as everyone knows, the copies of the plays are in part based on transcriptions of performances and have been screwed up by editors for centuries. (The famous example is the witches at the start of *MacBeth*, who were added to the play later by, I believe, Middleton.)
More rigorous historicist scholars have pointed out the flaws and huge leaps in Greenblatt's recovery of Shakespeare-as-auteur.
Still, the issue of opacity and motivation isn't as simple as Kirby would make it out to be. Characters like Hamlet, Iago, and Lear *are* the precursors to Bartleby and Ishmael and Ahab and Pierre and the confidence men. Olson isn't tied to this at the level of character, but rather at the level of line and breath -- see Olson's brilliant piece on Shakespeare's late style as based on experiments in English with quantity instead of meter. And Shakespeare's drama really are baggy monsters, as James said of novels -- form is never more than an expression of content there.
(I do question the linear developmental narrative of Greenblatt, though. *The Tempest* is opaque in its poetry but all-too-clear in its motivation, and it's one of Shakespeare's last plays, I believe.)
A character (guess who) can be at once a rough and ready and inarticulate soldier and then, when the time is right, give one of Shakespeare's most gorgeous speeches. "What care I," thought Shakespeare -- somehow not concerned with 20th century notions of character. Rather foolish to treat his characters as almost models of what is real to us (our notions, our sensibility) but then cunningly leaving out this and that to ensure opacity.
Shakespeare was never concerned with out notions of character in the first place. So -- as we notice so often in unscholarly discourse as practiced almost everywhere -- we notice anachronism imposed by theory and we only arrive where we started.
Damn -- doctorates in English Lit of the good old sort are required. No more! No more! And I mean that opaquely.
Kirby: You're right on Act 1 Scene 1, but there IS an indeterminacy in Lear and it's just where we would expect to find it, in other words when the lead character's mentality has broken down.
I should come clean and identify myself on Shakespeare matters as 'married to the Mob', since my wife Ann Thompson is one of the general eds of the Arden 3 edition and is co-editing 'Hamlet' 'as we speak' more or less. So I absorb a lot of stuff in this area osmotically, haven't actually READ Greenblatt lots, and not the biog, but anyway a couple of things....
1. Amusingly (this is NOT meant as a put-down) SG apparently has a moment of believing that the young Shax would have enountered porcupines in Warwickshire--a bit of animal-kingdom fancy fortunately caught by the book's British editors before it appeared over here.
2. The biog means to be scholarly-but-general-reader fare in a perfectly legitimate way, but to see SG in action in more cutting edge historical mode, check out the also-recent 'Hamlet in Purgatory', even if you don't buy into the Shax-the-Catholic (as a grown man that is) stuff which has been a bit of a craze for a year or two. KO might even find it interesting!
3. On Shax's life, another recent book with a more 'down and dirty' approach (despite its author's 'Oxford Born and Bred' credentials) is Katherine Duncan-Jones's 'Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life', which uses existing legal documentation of naturally a rather quarrelsome kind to give a pretty vivid picture of Our Man's associates.
4. I agree with Lon that Shax's characterological 'opacity' is not exactly SG's invention, but I don't think the Shakespeare-not-as-theatre-but-as-poem tradition (classic formulation in Knights' 'How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?'--perfectly legit question I'd say) is anticipating him there, and I don't believe it much needs retrieval (very SoQ actually). For a wonderful treatment of Hamlet's opacity, do treat yourself to a read of William Empson's 'Hamlet' essay collected in 'Essays on Shakespeare', which is not only VERY FUNNY (and unQuiet) but hypothesises a non-auteurial context pretty plausibly. ('We have to consider why Shakespeare rewrote a much-laughed-at old play, and was thus led on into his great Tragic Period, and the obvious answer is that he was told to; somebody in the Company thumbed over the texts in the ice-box and said "This used to be a tremendous draw, and it's coming round again; look at Marston. All you have to do is just go over the words so that it's LIFE-LIKE and they can't laugh at it"'....
5. Sorry to go on so but can't conclude without saying thanks, Ron, for your brisk characterisation of the Shax-was-really-someone-Grand brigade as Grassy Knoll types; the other analogy to the Shakespeare Authorship debate that has always struck me is the structure (to me mysterious) of antisemitism, though the more obvious thing to say is that it's pure snobbery.
I did read the 9 pages the Amazon.com book Search Inside function allowed me to read last evening and it was a pretty riveting experience.
I do think that Olson's reading of Shakespeare emphasizes a pagan mentality that simply isn't there. Or rather it is there in the smaller characters -- Lucio for instance in Measure for Measure -- but the larger text is always well within the boundaries of Christian thought.
This is most important in the histories. You can read against this interpretation and find your way, but only if you sweep all the details that would work against that interpretation under the rug. To me it seems that all the characters' ends are quite neatly summarized, and the morals of the plays are entirely clear.
I can't even think of anything that would make it more clear that Hamlet managed to attain faith than the last scenes of that play, or to make it clear that Lear learned his lesson about Cordelia, etc. Billy Collins is a nightmare of 100 kinds of ambiguity compared to Shakespeare.
Falstaff is banished, and he is told the requirements for unbanishment. And of course he deserved to be banished. He impersonated a king, he abused women, he put his soldiers' lives in jeopardy in order to get their war pay, etc. I scratch my head and wonder why this is considered obscure by so many others.
Shakespeare's plays are perhaps not as clear as a sermon but it's pretty clear in the end that they are moral plays and that his morals were clear.
Charles Olson's morals were much less clear and so there isn't anything like a character with a motivation in the Max poems. There is a lot of confusion because I don't think Olson ever made up his mind between the Unitarian reason mode and the Catholic mode of belief.
But Shakespeare? Solidly Lutheran.
I am a School Of Quietude man
I am a School Of Quietude man
What the men don’t know.
All the women understand.
So, while I don’t believe that Shax might have encountered a porcupine I am sure he would have encountered Toad and Mole and that it is important to write a poem about this.
And, I too, am a Made Man – having put my pen to the pleasant task of demonstrating how absurd it was to ever think Shax the author of the Funeral Ode which used to intrigue SG and done my little bit consoling fellows editing “Coriolanus.” “Shall we have a drink?”
And I love that Empson essay but I wasn’t referring to the grand and consoling tradition of the plays as poems but to the Anti-Bradley movement of the twenties. Old Historicist sort of thing but also trying to place the plays as plays and asserting that notions of characters adhering to our idea of character are anachronistic and not a concern of the Swan of Avon’s: suggesting he was more concerned with effects. Need a laugh? Well, put a comic schtick in: unconcerned with our notions of plausibility in/of character.
So, all talk of motivation not taking this into account naïve and anachronistic. KO here claims motives of characters transparent. Unlikely unless the idea that the idea of character was very different is taken into account.
See David Haley’s “Shakespeare's Courtly Mirror” for a fairly recent view: an old historicist/Shakespeare as Man of Theatre take conditioned by having lived through French theory and American nonchalance.
But Lon your post is fairly opaque. What critics in the 20s are you talking about? What books specifically? What page? Can you quote it, and put quotations around it?
I'd be grateful. Thanks!
Also, looked over at your blog today for the first time so I get what you mean by 'Lutheran'! Loved what you've recently written about visiting Gloucester Mass., really beautiful stuff.
In reading your post, certain words catch my ear: touch-point, reconstruction, function, metholodogy, hypothesized, strategy, strategies, devices, tactics, positioning, structures, aspect. elements, excise, indeterminacy, generated. All are words I associate with technology and the military. They're also the sorts of words I see on a daily basis in company emails and memos (I work in the billing department of a large corporation.)
Now this is obviously a listing of words picked arbitrarily from the posted article, and so says at least as much about where I'm coming from as it does about what the article is saying. And it's also random and arbitrary that I've picked the words from this particular post; words of the same sort exist in much writing about writing, by many authors.
Having said that --
How much is it possible to talk with real meaning about poetry and other literature, overall or about specific works and writers -- let alone to find ways to talk about it that enlarge or deepen our understanding and appreciation of the writing (or that sharpen our dislike of it, as the case may be) -- when a large part of the talk turns on the vocabulary of the bureaucrats and technicians and generals of modern empire?
An entertaining (if large) bio we were asked to read at Uni was Schoenbaum's "Shakespeare's Lives" - off at a tangent from this discussion as it pursues the engaging line that the biographers of Shakespeare reveal more about themselves in their bios than they do of the Bard. Opaque indeed.
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