Some of the People, Some of the Time

The new issue of Bookforum features James Shapiro's excellent review of Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars and Kenneth Gross's Shylock Is Shakespeare.   As I noted last month, I've come to Shakespeare through the criticism.   Instead of having my love of The Bard desanguinated by years of graduate study, I've acquired a taste for the man whose works inspired Dead Poets Society to inspire generations to hazard a thwack at the GRE Subject Exam in Literature in English.^[1]   Not only that, I've been inspired by the very works which earn Rosenbaum's ire:

Had Rosenbaum finished up at Yale and landed an academic job (at a time when it was still possible to find one), he would probably have been one of those colleagues soured by the success of New Historicism, cultural materialism, and deconstruction. By the 1980s, Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries had replaced Cleanth Brooks's reading of Macbeth on syllabi, feminists had shown how much earlier Shakespeare scholarship had ignored, and Irving Ribner's providential approach to the history plays had given way to Stephen Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V" and other brilliant readings.

Initially, I thought "other brilliant readings" Shapiro's attempt to distance his position on the Dollimore/Greenblatt junta from Rosenbaum's.   Two paragraphs later, I had to reconsider:

Rosenbaum blames "Theory" for this turn of events, and his book is in part an attempt to persuade us that, in the end, Theory lost and Shakespeareans are beginning to cast off its shackles and once again celebrate beauty, pleasure, and ambiguity. This is wishful thinking. Theory didn't lose; its victory was so complete that we no longer need Theory with a big T anymore because we all do theory, though most of us do it without giving it much thought.

I don't exactly disagree with Shapiro so much as question how complete that victory actually is; that is to say, I wonder whether the distinction drawn here between the New Critics and proponents of theory ever existed outside overheated rhetoric.   But I digress.   I want to focus on that "though most of us do it without giving it much thought," which strikes a similar note to the earlier "other brilliant readings."   Are Dollimore and Greenblatt like "most of us" or do they actually produce "brilliant readings"? Do they do so because of or despite their theoretical sophistication?^[2] 

That Shapiro continues by praising Rosenbaum's account of Shakespeare's recent editorial history doesn't help much; after all, sussing out the authentic Shakespeare is more paleographical than bleeding edge.  He wants to find the middleground between materialism (cultural and paleographical) and close-reading, like the work destined to follow Linne Mooney's "Chaucer's Scribe"—discussed informally here, formally here—in which historicism wins a "victory" as complete as theory's.   Still, he insists there's a place for idiosyncratic works like Gross' Shylock Is Shakespeare:

Argument and speculation can only get you so far in pursuit of a character's mystery. So he turns to imagining, and imagines himself at various points in the book walking with Shylock through Venice after the trial scene, imagines "what it would be like to hear the sad, self-wounding merchant Antonio recite sonnet 87 to Bassanio," imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald studying the play for "certain atmospheric effects," even imagines "Shylock's laughter after the trial"—assuming, of course, that laughter was his response.

I don't necessarily disagree; however, I wonder what it suggests about his idea of what a professional literary scholar does.   Produce flawed but useful work?   "Chafe at the deadening constraints of traditional criticism" while advancing its cause?

 

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¹ You have to love ETS's question-begging description of the test:

The committee that develops the test is aware of the limitations of the multiple-choice format, particularly for testing competence in literary study. An examination of this kind provides no opportunity for the student to formulate a critical response or support a generalization, and, inevitably, it sacrifices depth to range of coverage. However, in a national testing program designed for a wide variety of students with differing preparations, the use of a large number of short, multiple-choice questions has proved to be the most effective and reliable way of providing a fair and valid examination.

That may look like a period after "examination," but it's actually what linguists call the "understood exasperative."   Like the "understood you," the other two periods and the interrobanged "..OF WHAT!?!" are grammatically implicit.   As Eugene Nida observed in his classic Morphology: The Descriptive Analysis of Words (1949):

The need for the "understood exasperative" emerged as more corporations sought to create a "culture" via "employee handbooks."  Lacking the dubitative mood, English speakers could only express their reservations with certain statements directly.  For example, the sentence "Requiring employees to remain seated at their desks for five uninterrupted hours prior to and six following lunch will improve the workplace environment" initially provoked statements listed elsewhere in the handbook under "fireable offenses."  The "understood exasperative" "..FOR WHOM!?!" allows for the sentence to be read aloud without fearing the immediate termination of employment.

Of course, if English possessed the optative mood, these sentences could be written without recourse to the "understood exasperative."

² Or am I expecting too fine a distinction from Bookforum?

Comments

[forgottenboy]

Could you elaborate on the end of your post (which, by the way, is a nice pointer to a couple of new things to read)? Gross seems to be doing something that more closely resembles the sci-fi phenomenon of "fan fiction" than literary criticism. Laughing with Shylock? Reading over Fitzgerald's imaginary shoulder? Who has the patience to work their way backwards from such a thing to the implied argument about the text? It seems like this runs very counter to your notions of scholarly responsibility; perhaps that's what you're saying.

I looked at Dollimore when writing on Lear. It would be hard to think of a better example of a critic so perceptive, and so careless, according to his initial biases. Dollimore's post-structuralist training enables him to make a brilliant reading of the Fool's "O without a figure," and his leftism makes him keenly aware of the play's compassion for the underclasses. On the other hand, his fashionable distrust of literature makes him sneer that, even in fiction, the wheel of fortune rarely brings princes as low as the poor. It is hard to imagine what else he would want Lear to suffer.

Dollimore's related distrust of philosophy, including the Stoicism Shakespeare inherited from Montaigne, makes him a bad reader of Edward's Tom. Tom's speech, in Dollimore's opinion, "adds up to nothing more than the incoherent ramblings of one half-crazed by just that suffering which philosophy, according to the Stoic, guards against." Language in Shakespeare tends not to add up to incoherent ramblings, and Poor Tom is no exception. For example, Edward's line "St. Withold thrice-footed the old" is about himself; he is walking with his old father, and he is withholding his identity. The reference to the "third foot" is a reference to the Sphinx's riddle (solved by Oedipus), which is why Lear calls Tom a "learned Theban."

Apologies for the close reading; but the idea is to illustrate how the theoretical approach can lead to both Blindness and Insight. And this is something that I think you, as someone who tries to maintain a certain critical distance from theory, see feelingly.