The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “In the act two storm in Pericles [the act the current consensus asserts was written not by Shakespeare but by George Wilkins] both Pericles and Gower comment on the chaos of the elements in a flat, moralizing way,” Leggatt observes. “In the act three storm [Shakespeare at the helm] we suddenly hear the roar of the water, feel the rocking of the boat, and sense the dreadful otherness of the natural world.”

  And then he compares this heightening of the tempestuousness of the storm to the heightened representation of sex in Shakespeare: “Sex in the early scenes of Romeo and Juliet, in the jokes of the servants and Mercutio, is a matter of standing and thrusting, putting things into other things: weaponry and plumbing. But when Juliet anticipates her wedding—and though she has never had sex, she knows what she wants—she evokes the feeling of a shared orgasm that wipes out consciousness and identity. The pleasure created in these moments of surprise is the pleasure of discovering there is more in this character, more in language, more in our own experience than we thought possible five minutes ago.”

  Needless to say, I sought to recall that “shared orgasm that wipes out consciousness” moment in Romeo and Juliet, wondering if it had wiped out my consciousness of it. But fortunately Leggatt supplies the citation, takes note of a debate over it and goes on to make a surprisingly more persuasive case for his conjecture than I had imagined.

  He cites the line in the third act when Juliet cries out, “Give me my Romeo, and, when I shall die/Take him and cut him out in little stars” (3.2.21–22). And, Leggatt tells us, “the collapsing of Romeo’s death into hers (editors used to find this illogical and emended accordingly) is the wiping out of consciousness and individual identity in a moment of love-making after which the lovers could ask, ‘Which of us came just now?’ ”

  What was that last bit again? Let’s proceed slowly through this, beginning with Leggatt’s passing but crucial remark about editors’ emendations of “when I shall die.”

  He did not spell out the “emendation” debate, assuming, I’d guess, that the scholars around the table were all familiar with it, although this auditor on the periphery was not. But it becomes apparent that the emendation he says editors employed was to follow the Fourth Quarto and have Juliet say, “Give me my Romeo, and, when he shall die … cut him out in little stars,” rather than “when I shall die,” which appears in the earlier printed texts.

  The emended version “when he shall die” makes more obvious sense, why cut him up into stars when he’s still alive?

  But Leggatt seems to suggest something more sexual than astronomical is being referred to here. Leggatt’s interpretation depends on construing Juliet’s “to die” as a synonym for “to have an orgasm,” a common sexual connotation at the time. This is plausible; Shakespeare and Donne are tireless in making recurrent plays upon this duality.

  So, if I’m reading Leggatt right, he’s saying that when Juliet talks about dying and cutting Romeo out in stars to make the night shine, she’s imagining an orgasm (without having had sex, he concedes, but “knowing what she wants”). And not just any orgasm, but one where she’ll, in effect, “see stars,” Romeo making “the face of heaven so fine” for her. A kind of orgasmic light show, accompanied by loss of consciousness, of identity of the sort that has the lovers wondering, as Leggatt puts it, “Which of us came just now?”

  Not “How was it for you, dear?”, but “Who was it for you, dear?”

  I admired the daring of Leggatt’s conjecture, so unashamedly confessional as well as exegetical. Almost like Greenblatt declaring his love. A thought crossed my mind: On this tempest-tossed weekend in Bermuda, was some Tempest-like spell causing ordinarily reserved scholars to declare themselves in ways rarely heard before?

  Greenblatt coming out frankly praising Shakespeare’s “indelible beauties,” Leggatt locating in Juliet’s lines a peak of sexual pleasure in Shakespeare, a moment of orgasmic identity loss, one that Leggatt seemed willing to declare he shared with his Juliet.

  I suppose I’ve tended to wishful thinking about signs such as these, but there were, I suspect, more than these two signs. It felt a bit like the fabled “Prague Spring” in academia here in Bermuda, with the old orthodoxies of Theory open to question, and a return to (a revised, contextualized, historicized, heavily theorized) version of close reading once again.

  But I don’t want to scant Leggatt’s close reading of that “cut him out in little stars” passage, I don’t want to do a disservice if I characterize his conjecture as merely confessional. It was exegetical as well and I’d like to look more closely at his exegesis of the “cut him out in little stars” passage. It had always struck me as one of those moments of wild Shakespearean beauty, exquisitely excessive, and, yes, once heard, indelible. A uniquely Shakespearean moment of pleasure.

  And I thought it interesting that Leggatt spoke of it in terms of identity exchange. I’d been struck in recent cycles of rereading by the recurrent moments of identity exchange (not just gender change) in Shakespeare—there’s one in virtually every single play. The theme of exchange of eyes, the exchange of “I’s,” the exchange of selves in Shakespeare.

  I’ve spoken of the experience of dissociation of identity that a single sonnet had on me (granted, in a nonsexual context, the Yale classroom). I got the feeling that Leggatt had had that experience in some other context, let’s say, one that he nonetheless related to what he believes to be an otherwise cryptic passage in Shakespeare.

  Let me put the moment in more context since it could be said to be the very fulcrum of the play, the very threshold of the tragedy, the moment when the tragic end has already been triggered, but the news has not yet reached Juliet, who is ardently awaiting Romeo’s visit so they can consummate their surreptitious marriage. It is the moment just before she learns that Romeo has killed her cousin Tybalt, initiating a concatenation of events that will lead to their deaths in the Capulets’ tomb.

  But for the moment she is expressing impatience with the night for not hurrying and bringing Romeo and consummation with him. Here it is again. Read it through Leggatt’s lens and see if you feel there’s an orgasm in there, see if Leggatt’s reading makes sense to you.

  Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,

  Give me my Romeo, and, when I shall die,

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night,

  And pay no worship to the garish sun.

  Where is the orgasmic identity exchange? Leggatt locates it vaguely and obscurely in “the collapsing of Romeo’s death into hers.” Something he points to as happening in the conspicuously unusual original version that has Juliet saying “when I shall die” rather than “when he shall die.” Making it about her sexuality, rather than his death … And the collapsing? Perhaps in the traces of the death—Romeo’s—we expected her to speak of? The result of Juliet somehow collapsing her death into the expected death of Romeo? Or conjuring up another kind of death, a sexual “death,” a petite mort for herself? I think that’s what he’s saying.

  But what about “the wiping out of consciousness and individual identity in a moment of love-making”? Is this Leggatt getting into a fond reverie, or is he persuasive in reading into the text a moment of imagined (very special) orgasm?

  In Leggatt’s defense I could cite a markedly similar moment of identity change later in the same speech of Juliet.

  When she speaks of having been married, but not having consummated the marriage, Juliet says:

  O, I have bought the mansion of a love,

  But not possess’d it, and though I am sold,

  Not yet enjoy’d.

  There is that same identity switch—confusion, dissociation, doubleness, whatever you want to call it—in these lines. She is both buyer and object bought: she bought the mansion, then she is the mansion bought. So, metaphorically, she’s possessor of Romeo’s body but also the body to be
possessed, arguably both at the same time. Both, simultaneously, the same mansion. A collapsing of identity, or rather perhaps a cohabiting of identity.

  Russ McDonald perceptively pointed out, in a 1994 introduction to an essay on the revival of close reading, that the term “undecidability” had replaced “ambiguity” in Shakespeare studies, in literary studies in general. I’m not sure I’m happy with the replacement.

  “Undecidable” carries more than a trace of the failed imperative to decide, as if deciding should be the goal, as if decidability were preferable to undecidability. As opposed to “both/and” ambiguity, entertaining both possibilities without deciding. Entertaining in the sense of both giving and taking pleasure in the possibilities. Allowing both to exist simultaneously, changing each other’s identity in a pulsating fashion if you follow Stephen Booth’s recurrent metaphor.

  All of which is to say I think Leggatt’s conjecture probably should remain in the new realm of “undecidability,” textual purgatory for a while. I’d like to see other responses to it.

  Despite some reservations I might have about his specific readings, Leggatt is the kind of scholar I admire, one with an instinct for particularly resonant passages. Who causes us to look closer at moments like Lear’s last words, and Juliet’s … whatever happened to her in that passage.

  Another thing I liked about Leggatt’s paper was the emphasis he put on “surprise.” In fact he called his paper “The Pleasure of Surprise,” and the element of surprise figures prominently in his account of Shakespearean pleasure. It’s akin to Kermode’s evocation of the experience of being on the “threshold of comprehension” of something new. The brink of surprise and the brink of surmise. The brink of amazement. The brink of a maze.

  And Leggatt’s conclusion was a frank challenge: “A good deal of Shakespeare criticism makes us feel we have had the meaning but missed the experience; we need to start recovering the experience.” Recovering: John Andrews seeks to recover the original spelling for the deeper experience of the Shakespearean spell, Steven Berkoff the original emotional spell. I thought of Berkoff doing the Garrick gesture, that signature gesture of Shakespearean surprise: Hamlet’s seeing his father’s ghost. What I find over and over in Shakespeare is that, on one level or another, I’m throwing up my hands in surprise, on the brink of comprehension, seeing, if not a ghost, then an unexpected specter emerging from the text. Trying to recover such moments—and recover from them.

  O HAPPY ACCIDENCE

  If there is an element of surprise peculiar to Shakespearean pleasure it is often the surprise of continually exceeded expectations. A passage that seems familiar, one you’ve read a dozen times, suddenly surprises you with an entirely new dimension. Perhaps because until one has reread all of Shakespeare a dozen times and other passages have successively yielded up new dimensions, only then does this one suddenly become available, apparent when it hadn’t been before. Only the cumulative experience, the critical mass of previous rereadings, can propel it over the threshold of comprehension.

  In Bermuda at the Pleasure Seminar, in Joseph Porter’s talk I found a word I liked for the kind of thing one discovers in such circumstances: “accidence.” A word that sounds like but does not exactly mean “accidents” but which does have an element of suddenness, surprise and even shock to it, the shock at the discovery of some unexpected coherence, correlation between a phrase in one play and a phrase in the same or another play, that gives one a deeper sense of the vibrancy of the whole.

  The somewhat obscure title of Porter’s talk, “Pangs of Scriptive Transparency,” referred to what I found to be a thoughtful and earnest attempt by the Duke professor and literary novelist to capture just what is unique to Shakespearean pleasure. Something we feel, but somehow find hard to put into words that do justice to it.

  Porter begins by defending the idea of seeking to elucidate the nature of Shakespearean pleasure against what he calls the “puritanical renunciation of the pleasures of the text in Shakespeare study of recent decades.”

  Then he tries to describe something he calls Shakespeare’s “distinctively, transparently scriptive pleasures,” how Shakespeare provides distinctive pleasure through “his pervasive and transparent writtenness … and it is a pleasure Shakespeare himself seems to take from his work” (my italics).

  “Writtenness”? “Scriptiveness”? Yes, we all know Shakespeare was initially written, scripted with a pen and all that. No, I think he’s referring to certain passages where Shakespeare seems carried away with the power of words, with his own power over words, and conjures them into a localized tour de force, sometimes excessive seeming, sometimes almost about the fructifying excess of language, about reveling in the pleasure of it when under its spell. The hounds-and-echo passage. The double-cherry passage.

  Porter cites an example from an essay by the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom. Ransom singled out a three-line phrase from Macbeth:

  … No; this my hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

  Making the green one red.

  It’s Macbeth speaking of the way he can’t wash the blood off his hands; implicitly if he dips them in the ocean it will turn the ocean itself red with blood.

  I’m always struck by the use of “incarnadine” as a transitive verb, for “turn red.” Porter calls the passage “a jewel … that serves as a lexical lens or synopsis of the whole body of Shakespeare’s language. Its pleasures are partly metrical—the striking hypermetrical ‘multitudinous’ enacting itself in a surf-like wash, and the metrically striking ‘green one red’ concentrating the tripartite structure of the entire preceding line.”

  What is it about such passages that gives pleasure?

  For Porter the passage “opens vantages into Shakespeare’s pervasive scriptiveness, present even in performance which reveals itself transparently in the features noted and also in the scriptive and readerly movement from ‘hand’ through ‘seas’ (to ‘sees’) to ‘red’ (‘read’). Such pleasures furthermore do not occlude Macbeth’s character and extremity. Rather the lines let us peer into the unprecedented fear of the warrior never before disturbed by blood even as the lines also in their transparent writtenness evince something like an attendant imaginative bloodying of the writer’s hand” (my italics).

  There’s an appealing combination of attentive close reading and winging it (does “red” really evoke “read”?) all balanced on the very threshold of comprehension. He’s circling around something real but hard to define explicitly in his almost ritual incantation of “writerliness” and “scriptiveness.” I think he’s talking about the same thing Stephen Booth was talking about when he hailed the hounds-and-echo passage in the Dream for what, with Boothian faux naïveté, he called “inspired dog talk.” We love the moments of “thick description” as anthropologists call it in Shakespeare’s work, when the hounds of his verbal imagination are loosed from the leash of dramatic economy.

  But Porter’s final attempt at getting at the question was the most illuminating, I thought.

  He concluded by citing Hal in Henry IV: “nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.” And makes another daring but more persuasive leap (than “red”/ “read”) by summoning up the secondary meaning of “accidents” at the time Shakespeare wrote: “accidence,” a secondary meaning which the OED says was current from 1589 to 1612 and which describes what we might call resonances between phenomena, and, here especially, words. In a way “accidence” is the opposite of “accidents.” (It’s coherent instances of things that co-incide, rather than coincidence.) Resonances that once again are apprehended on the “threshold of comprehension.”

  Porter concluded his paper by praising Shakespeare’s “characteristic acumen about the rarity, the enabling and poignant transience of all pleasure.”

  A beautiful, pleasurable sentence about pleasure. “Enabling and poignant transience” is an almost Shakespearean hendiadys,* and I’d suspect an intentional attempt to approximate one. “Enabling
transience”—the vitalizing charge that the inevitability of death and change give to life. Poignant because a consequence of mortality. Again a Bermuda effect? Porter, self-described in his paper as “a literary novelist” as well as scholar, making a daring raid on Shakespearean language.

  But I liked an “accidence” because it seemed another way of expressing what I’ve been groping toward saying when I speak of the dizzying pleasure of bottomlessness, the thrill of unending, ever-deepening and echoing resonances of accidence. Bottom’s Dream and “The Bay of Portugal that hath no bottom” in As You Like It.

  THE PLEASURES AND DISPLEASURES OF THE LATE LANGUAGE

  I had been looking forward to my Bermuda lunch with Russ McDonald before I’d read his essay on the “late language” issue. An essay which I would like somehow to enshrine as a model of scholarly erudition and extraordinarily sensitive engagement with language.

  The “late language.” When it comes to “undecidability” there may be no more seductive yet irresolvable question than the one that has been posed, most recently by Frank Kermode, about the pleasures and displeasures of Shakespeare’s “late language.”

  I want to consider it under the aspect of pleasure because I believe the question of what we find displeasing and how we define our displeasure can tell us something about pleasure.

  For too long, Kermode argues in his continually provocative Shakespeare’s Language, scholars and exegetes have sought to rescue Shakespeare from himself, sought to find—as Stephen Booth does—that passages that appear to give displeasure, passages that seem opaque, needlessly, even carelessly, tangled rather than merely knotted—subsequently turn out to yield a higher pleasure when what appears opaque is rendered transparent (or translucent). When what appears tangled is unknotted by close reading. Holes become wholes.