The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Kermode argued, on the contrary, that not only is it true that Shakespeare could write badly, but that in places, especially in the later plays such as Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale, he did seem to write in a fashion that was sloppily or hastily opaque. Opaque in a way that could not be made transparent by the most gifted exegete.

  It is also true and important, Kermode said, to acknowledge Shakespeare’s responsibility, his occasional limitations, if, in effect, we want to credit him with the kind of greatness some find “indelible.”

  The distinctiveness of Kermode’s approach, in fact the genesis of his new book, he told me in a phone call from his office at Cambridge University, was his willingness to argue that some of Shakespeare, particularly some of the later, deeply knotted, compacted verse, simply failed to make sense. “There’s lots of what has to be called bad writing,” Kermode said.

  Around 1600, in works like Hamlet and Measure for Measure, Kermode believes Shakespeare found a new way of representing the mind in the process of thinking. (This is not the same as Bloom’s great claim that Shakespeare “invented the human” or created self-consciousness—Kermode told me he regards such claims by Bloom as “incense burning.”) But Kermode also believes that by 1608, beginning with Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s language often becomes too fraught, too overwrought to bear the weight of the meaning he wants to load into it: “He doesn’t take the time to make it work.”

  Of course the problem is that readers, exegetes, often do give up too soon, and there are times one can render what seems opaque, if not transparent, at least translucent (trans-lucid? trance lucid?). So we always have to ask ourselves: Is it him or is it we who are not making sense? Is it we because we have not reread the plays in their entirety enough times to be able to make a lucid conjecture about the apparent opacity?

  And it takes a kind of critical daring, if not hubris, to say with any finality that it’s Shakespeare who failed or failed to try (as Kermode has it) to make himself clear. And then of course we have to question how high a value we place on clarity when obscurity can give off a dark glow that can transcend transparency. Shakespearean translucence.

  Kermode believes Coriolanus is a kind of test of this question. It was perhaps the last tragedy Shakespeare wrote and represents an endpoint of Shakespeare’s testing the limits of language, “probably the most difficult play in the canon.… It has passages that continue to defeat modern editors.” One such passage he cites is this from the first act:

  When steel grows soft as the parasite’s silk,

  Let him be made an overture for th’ wars.

  No more, I say! For that I have not wash’d

  My nose that bled, or foil’d some debile wretch—

  Which, without note, here’s many else have done—

  You [shout] me forth

  In acclamations hyperbolical,

  As if I lov’d my little should be dieted

  In praises sauc’d with lies.

  For Kermode such passages in Coriolanus are not without virtues despite their confusion. He believes that Coriolanus represents the endpoint of an evolution of Shakespearean language that began with his earliest (1594) tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and culminated nearly fifteen years later in Coriolanus, a play in which we “register the pace of the speech, its sudden turns, its backtrackings, its metaphors flashing before us and disappearing before we can consider them. This is new: the representation of excited anxious thought; the weighing of confused possibilities and dubious motives; the proposing of a theory or explanation followed at once by its abandonment or qualification as in the meditation of a person under stress.…”

  At times, he implies, under too much stress to maintain coherency. To return to that passage above, about the “parasite’s silk.” The general sense of it isn’t that hard to get, is it? Corrupt and luxurious times breed weakness. In the absence of steel-minded men the parasite thrives, a situation which is overture, prelude to a war invited by weakness.

  But when you try to make the sentence make some kind of literal sense, there’s a problem. Beginning with who’s “him” in the first two lines? The parasite or the softened men of steel?

  And look at the three-word judgment that appears in the footnote on “overture” in the respected Riverside Shakespeare: “Hard to explain.”

  That’s it? “Hard to explain”? Well, there are a few stabs at it cited by the Riverside: “Sisson takes [overture] to mean ‘herald’—let the parasite summon men to war. Many editors adopt Tyrwhitt’s emendation coverture—let silk supersede armor as martial garb. Moore Smith conjectures [that ‘overture’ is actually] officer—let the parasite become a soldier.”

  Don’t you love centuries-long disputes like this? Well, I do. And here is the great dilemma of close reading. Must we join Moore Smith and conjecture that this is just an error—that Shakespeare wouldn’t have written or meant “overture”? That it was “coverture”? Or should we join Sisson and Tyrwhitt in tying ourselves into knots to make “overture” work? Or Kermode in saying there’s no knot but an impossible tangle? Are the possibilities of making this passage “work” bottomless, or is there a point at which we should give up, having exhausted even the conspicuously irrelevant possibilities, and find we’re digging a grave rather than “gliding over an abyss”?

  Kermode believes that late Shakespeare sometimes didn’t quite hone the inking of what he was thinking to the point of making mere semantic sense, because he was capturing the way a disordered mind races ahead of its words—or because a hurried playwright raced over something too trying, or too time-consuming, to stop, return and regularize.

  Nobody has a very persuasive answer really, although I tend to side with those, like Booth, whose instinct is to feel it’s us, in most cases—that we’ve just so far failed to see the coherence in the apparent incoherence. Because I’ve had the repeated experience on rereading something for the tenth or twelfth time and suddenly seeing it in a new light entirely, seeing it as an echo of some other passage that struck me three rereadings ago, seeing something beneath the surface that was invisible before.

  Would we want the “parasite’s silk” passage to read differently? “Parasite’s silk”: it hisses in a sinister way as it rustles past us surreptitiously, conjuring up the worm in the cocoon, the serpentine origin of beautiful lines, casting enough of a malign spell to convince us we’ve grasped its meaning. Shakespeare, one imagines, came up with the phrase and there were so many things he could do with it, he left it in a somewhat flawed setting, perhaps bewildered himself about the richness, pleasure and potential of the phrase. Not wishing to pin down the pupa within that silk cocoon before it can become a butterfly.

  There are moments in Shakespeare’s late language when one could say with Kermode that Shakespeare’s mind is racing too fast for his “scriptiveness” to completely catch up. And then there are moments like this when we might rather have it that way—have the hint of something so intense or complex even Shakespeare can’t completely capture it in words. And so he leaves us with a less than perfectly articulate record of something having happened, leaves us a gesture of surprise, with the writer as well as the reader on the threshold of comprehension. A clue to the landscape where words fail even Shakespeare. Eliot called poetry “a raid on the inarticulate.” We should be grateful when even Shakespeare’s raids bring back barely articulable fragments.

  It’s as if Shakespeare was reaching a limit to how much accidence could be loaded into a line or passage without it collapsing on itself.

  THE ULTIMATE FLOATING SIGNIFIER

  I had been thinking about the question, and by happy accidence had come upon, in the booksellers’ room at the Bermuda convention, a Cambridge University Press volume, Shakespeare and Language, edited by Catherine Alexander.

  It contained a number of essays by scholars I’d found illuminating in the past. There was Stephen Booth’s essay “Shakespeare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time” that begins with a memorable
one-liner, an inimitable Boothian witticism at the beginning, droll yet profound: “Shakespeare,” his essay opens, “is our most underrated poet.”

  It’s joking, but it’s a serious argument in its own way. Contained within that opening sentence is really the polar opposite position to that of Kermode. Kermode says Shakespeare occasionally has not slowed down sufficiently to make complete sense. And that we tend to overrate his words at times. Booth is saying we are not (yet) worthy, we have not given Shakespeare enough credit. That when we feel he’s failed, it may be our failure because we continue to vastly underestimate the beauties of his accidence.

  Nor may we ever be able to plumb the depths. Shakespeare may not be bottomless “objectively,” but he may be bottomless in practice, bottomless to us, given the limited time on the planet we have to reread and reread Shakespeare. The works will exhaust us, outlive us before we reach bottom. Not only are there too many ways we can read a line but too many ways we can speak it and too many ways we can act it, and too many combinations and permutations of commentaries in each of these categories we can apprehend. That may be the problem with Shakespearean obscurity: it’s not necessarily “undecidable,” there’s just not enough time to decide. Not “evidentiary despair” but exegetical despair. Life is too short to really plumb the depths.

  And then, in that same volume as the Booth essay, another perspective entirely on the “late language”: Russ McDonald’s essay, which I hadn’t read before: “Late Shakespeare: Style and the Sexes.” Published in 1994, some six years or more before Kermode’s book, it nonetheless suggested a way of looking at the whole “late language” dispute in a new context: the debate between Ciceronian and Senecan rhetorical principles and the gendered connotations of each.

  Wait! Please don’t all rush for the exits! This is a truly important piece of thinking about Shakespearean language—it addresses directly the question Kermode raises about the almost willful difficulty of the late language, and I don’t want to do it a disservice with that summary by making it seem too arcanely academic. In fact, it gave me great pleasure to read, there are so many felicities of thought and feeling. And one very profound conjecture.

  It sets itself apart from conventional academic thinking with its opening announcement of its methodological assumption.

  His method, McDonald says, of comparing complex verse patterns in the late plays “assumes artistic agency, an author in whose dramatic productions we may observe both a distinctive style and distinct mutations in that style. In this respect it resists the claims of much recent discursive criticism which behaves as if a play were author of itself and ‘knew no other kin’ ” (a phrase from Coriolanus).

  Artistic agency! It’s the postmodern way of saying that an artist has some autonomy and personal responsibility, for better or worse, for his or her work. At the time McDonald wrote, the concept was in much disrepute in mainstream lit-crit Theory.

  You can see McDonald treading carefully, with such an explosive notion to convey: he takes pains to say he’s not denying “external [historical, cultural] influences” but he believes in the existence of an author whose choices can in some sense be said to be the result of his own deliberations.

  He speaks of doing so, “the currently low repute of formalist criticism notwithstanding.” And makes a politic plea that he is not seeking to reinstate pre-Theory formalism (looking only at the “internal” rather than “external” contexts and aspects of the poem). Good God, not that! Instead he defers to respected scholar Patricia Parker’s contention that “ ‘to pay attention to the structural force of rhetorical figures’ ” or characteristics of artistic technique is to “ ‘suggest that the impasse of a now apparently outworn formalism and a new competing emphasis on politics and history might be breached [that is, the “impasse” might be bridged] by questions which fall in between and hence remain unasked by both.’ ”

  It’s remarkable that in the decade or so since this was written with its reference to “the currently low repute of formalist criticism,” the “low repute” would morph into what was coming increasingly to be called “neo-formalism,” a resurgence of close reading under the guise of having “incorporated the insights of Theory.”

  It would be a mistake to underestimate the influence of Russ McDonald on this salutary development. In particular the influence of another book on close reading (Shakespeare Re-read), a collection of essays he edited, and the subtle but powerful force of his argument for rereading close reading in the Introduction to that book.

  In it he contended it was time to get past “a phase in which context supplanted text, history dominated poetry.” He called for “a rapprochement between the intrinsic and external” but made clear that what he really hoped for was “reconceiving the possibilities of close reading.”

  If there is a figure in Shakespeare studies whose work gives me the most hope for “the profession,” it’s Russ McDonald and the evident influence his careful brilliant scholarship has had in leading others to a return to the study of the language, a “reconceived” close reading. Indeed next to my iBook as I write are a stack of books and Shakespearean quarterlies which attest to a genuine sea change in “the profession” (one of the better ones: Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, edited by Mark David Rasmussen).

  I have a feeling that McDonald’s own work was the best advertisement for his position. He had found a way to bring something, if not new, then newly reconsidered, to the study of Shakespeare’s language: an attentiveness to the rich literature on figurative speech that saturated the bookstalls of London during Shakespeare’s time. Guides to figures of speech, metaphors, tropes taken from classical and medieval handbooks, manuals of rhetorical devices. George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie and Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence for instance.

  McDonald identified the way the excited debate about language in the Elizabethan age, the ferment over figurative and rhetorical style and technique, shaped—and was reshaped by—Shakespeare, and the thematic implications of the formal effects to be found embedded in the language.

  I met McDonald for lunch in the bar lounge of Bermuda’s Southampton Princess. He’s a soft-spoken Southerner; his father, he tells me, was a mill worker in Houston. As a student he too had a transformative experience of Peter Brook’s Dream. He became one of those scholars of Shakespearean language who are enthusiasts for stage productions as well. In fact, as I’ve had occasion to mention earlier, one of his most recent books is Look to the Lady, a study of three great Shakespearean actresses over the past three centuries: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry and Judi Dench.

  And his essay on the “late language” that I’d found so illuminating might be said to look to the lady as well. Nonetheless I sensed McDonald wince slightly when I brought it up because, he said, it had been misunderstood in some quarters. It was, in part, a careful study of the misogynist Elizabethan caricature of femininity and the way it had crept into the debates over linguistic style at the time. But some, I gathered he feared, might have thought he was advocating the position on the sexual typology of language he was examining.

  He summarizes his argument this way at the opening of the essay (which first appeared in Shakespeare Survey, a respected annual):

  That the difficult “complex verse patterns in the late plays are intimately related to Shakespeare’s imaginative recovery of the feminine, and that the origins of the conflict between masculine and feminine rhetoric emerge in the late classical tragedies and that the romances constitute a kind of conditional resolution of these concerns.”

  He argues that this “recovery of the feminine” can be found even in the way the metrics of the pentameter line shift “from what has been called the end-stopped form of tragedy” to “the more open form of the romance.”

  The essay offers a beautiful example of McDonald’s method, which combines erudite scholarship and close reading. For instance, he agrees with Kermode about the difficulty of the language in Coriolanus: “… there
are almost no conjunctions, Martius’s [Coriolanus’s] speeches lack connectives both within and between sentences and such withholding creates a disjunctivity.…”

  But where Kermode finds this “disjunctivity” a careless, unfinished, not fully thought-out quality, at least in some places, McDonald draws on his extensive knowledge of Elizabethan rhetorical literature—those “gardens of eloquence” and handbooks of classical Latin and Greek figures of speech popular during Shakespeare’s time—and tells us, “The pertinent rhetorical figure here is asyndeton, the omission of conjunctions between words, phrases or clauses.”

  In other words, one may dislike Shakespeare’s rhetorical style in Coriolanus but it is not necessarily the result of carelessness; it has a formal and classical precedent that may have been a matter of choice rather than laziness.

  He argues that there’s a thematic significance to the choice of rhetorical trope, to the use of asyndeton:

  “It is not difficult to see how Shakespeare’s most habitually isolated hero [Coriolanus] should speak a language in which the interdependence of sentences is suppressed, in which clauses do not touch.… His speech constitutes the grammatical equivalent of his famous desire for freedom from familial or other types of relations, his desire to ‘stand/As if a man were author of himself/and knew no other kin.’ ”

  It is only now that McDonald puts his risky rhetorical strategy into play. Puts the difficulty of the late language in the perspective of the debate over language and gender that swirled throughout the amazing burst of eloquence that was the Elizabethan age.

  In particular the debate between the Senecan and the Ciceronian style, between Seneca’s and Cicero’s opposed philosophies of word and world, between “masculine” and “feminine” language.

  The debate between the highly embellished Ciceronian style and the comparatively Spartan Senecan style, McDonald writes, “is grounded in conceptions of sexual difference and is related to the figuration of language as feminine, and action as masculine in early modern language theory. The misogynist tradition inherited from the Middle Ages propagated the notion that language resembles women in being treacherous and unreliable, subject to extravagance, malleability and error.”