How to Read Shakespeare, Part 6: Defy Intimidation
Read Shakespeare with a Light Heart
No author who in the English language has been written about more than William Shakespeare. Go to the aisles that hold books about early modern literature at any university library. You’ll find rows upon rows of books written about Shakespeare’s biography, style, historical context, medieval influences, reception, print history, religion, social ideas, commercial undertakings, understanding of human emotions, materialism, poetics, and more.
Is so much ink spilled about one author justified? As somebody who has contributed a few books to these stacks, the irony of the question is not lost on me. There are two ways to answer the question.
One is a rather cynical answer that has more to do with the “profession” of being an English professor. For decades, almost every university English Department has had at least one Shakespeare specialist, and until recently, most English Departments required students to take at least one course devoted to Shakespeare. Academia is a game. And to succeed in that game (to get hired, get promoted, to experience achievement in that world) one has to publish papers and books. And so, one of the causes of such a proliferation of writing on Shakespeare has little to do with the drama itself and more to do with the artificial need to find some artificial angle on Shakespeare.
Side Note. Once, a Milton scholar (Milton scholars are notoriously devoted to the historical contexts of Milton’s writings) caricatured scholarship on Shakespeare to me this way:
You choose a topic you’re interested in, and then you add “in Shakespeare” to it.
“Pirate Origami in Shakespeare”
“Open Head Wounds in Shakespeare”
“Paper Mache Donald Trump Masks in Shakespeare”
The other answer is less cynical. It recognizes that Shakespeare’s writings truly do have an incredible capacity for exploring the human experience. For one, Shakespeare has held such a prominent position in cultural reception for so long, that you can study almost any western (and many eastern) cultural movements through its adaptations and assimilations of Shakespeare’s works.
That’s because Shakespeare gathers from so many cultural sources himself. Some moments seem densely political. Others profoundly religious. Others entrenched in the commercial reality of Elizabethan England. Others reflective of the emersion of new science in the period. And still others drawing on Ovid, Seneca, and other classical sources.
A single scene allows for deep dives in any of these areas. But sometimes this could be intimidating. What if I don’t know much about the political climate of Shakespeare’s London — its patrons, courtiers, spies, factions, laws, and local vocabulary? Maybe I’m missing out on the meaning of the text.
What historical context do I need to know?
Very little, at least in my opinion.
In fact, I’m convinced that Shakespeare drew on cultural contexts even when he didn’t fully understand them himself.
Take the example of Historicism. That’s a label given to a type of literary criticism that became popular in the eighties (the 1980s) and whose principles continue to set standards for published Shakespeare scholarship. Its central tenant is that the meanings of historical literary texts are only fully understood when viewed through the hyper-specific historical ins-and-outs of its time and place.
Here’s an illustration. Renowned historian, Peter Lake, talks about King John in his book, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage. Did he put politics on the stage? Certainly. But Lake says that Shakespeare was communicating something much more subtle and also more involved than almost any current reader would know.
In this paragraph (p. 95) Lake says that Shakespeare used the symbolism of gender as a way of critiquing aspects of the royal succession, specifically in opposition to a series of pamphlets that were published (“Cecil’s Commonwealth”) that argued the opposite.
So when I read King John without knowing that historical context, am I getting it wrong? In my view, Shakespeare probably had only a cursory familiarity with micro-contexts like these. Just consider that analogous micro-historical interpretations have been made of hundreds (maybe thousands) of scenes, and not just about politics but virtually every other possible cultural influence.
It’s just not possible for Shakespeare to have been familiar with every one of these contexts and to have a personal intellectual interest in each of them to such an extent that he coded them into each of his plays, characters, and scenes. Shakespeare was relentlessly resourceful and inventive. When he found a word, concept, or reference in culture that interested him, he used it, and we don’t need to assume that he always intended it to be the key to unlocking the passage’s meaning.
So we ought to meet Shakespeare’s resourcefulness and flexibility with our own as readers. If you get the feeling that a line is tapping into some context you aren’t familiar with, don’t worry about it. Keep on truckin.
The Grab Bag
Shakespeare had a grab bag approach to culture. That’s not to diminish his cultural intelligence or his aptitude at representing aspects of his society in his plays. Shakespeare actually experienced cultural influences and meaning differently than we do today.
The difference is grounded in his education. Shakespeare’s grammar school education focused on rhetoric, largely in Latin. And in order to study grammar, logic, and rhetoric, Shakespeare memorized and recited aphorisms, famous quotations, and commonplace statements. This is quite literally what his education mostly consisted of — memorize and reproduce what other people said.
One of the popular textbooks at the time was by the Humanist, Desiderius Erasmus, and was called, De Copia (“on the copiousness or abundance of words and style”).
The books was full (and I mean full!) of quotation after quotation from Cicero, Ovid, Agricola, Virgil, and other classical authors, mostly in Latin. These were sentences that expressed a word of prudence or a legal maxim or a theological truism or a cultural sentiment.
It might seem strange to us today to think of this comprising so much of kids’ education at the time, but memorizing and reciting these commonplaces served the purposes of teaching students Latin, logic, grammar, and rhetoric. These were like building blocks of reasoning that could be plugged into different occasions.
An education like this gave Shakespeare a cultural grab bag of material, and it conditioned authors like Shakespeare to see aspects of culture as raw material that they were free to use in their own works. I’m not claiming that he was just dropping other people’s ideas into his works willy nilly. He was artful about it. And he elevated these ideas. But what it does suggest is that not every little allusion, reference, idiosyncrasy, or nuance of vocabulary was a clue into a secret interpretation that we need to understand comprehensively. Instead, Shakespeare recognized that words had meanings that stretched far beyond his own usage — and rather than constrain them, he let these meanings flow.
I love the way that William Scott, an Elizabethan poetry critic (a rare breed!) describes the Renaissance poet’s use of language and cultural material:
such are those pretty turnings of your sentences from the apparent bent of your Phrase that are, as it were, Models of the Peripetiæ, they are called facetiæ, sales, and lepôres, merry, gracefull, and savory Jests; which arise of the pleasantness and urbanity of our Nature, and of the occasion administered in the matter.
You’ll recognize that word, “Peripetiae,” from Part 4 of this series on Tragedy. It means “reversal” in plot and in fortune. And here, Scott describes every word and poetic phrase as a little reversal or little turning of the imagination. Poetry was understood to bend and represent ideas and historical matters with an attitude of jest and grace and merriment. And every little turn of creativity was recognized to have a kind of life of its own.
My encouragement, when you come across something that seems like it might be historically loaded or have some historical cultural explanation, is that you approach it with a light mind. Don’t worry about not understanding it. Know that Shakespeare probably took a light touch with it himself. He sensed something powerful and admired the world of meanings that it represents, but he probably wasn’t married to any one of them specifically.
Take the example of Prospero’s speech at the end of The Tempest. It’s here that he foreswears magic and drowns his books in preparation to return to a life at court once he leaves his island. He refers to elves and stars and “mushrumps” (love that word) and corpses emerging from graves.
You elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,
And you that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrumps, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though you be, I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; . . . . graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
⌜Prospero gestures with his staff.⌝
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
Most people enjoy reading this speech without detecting the several topical and literary references in it. Not everyone is familiar with the lore of English fairies leaving ringlets, stealing the cream off the top of delivered milk, and pinching deceitful people. Even fewer of us will recognize the allusion to Ovid’s rendition of the story of Medea, a literary precedent for using magic and raising the dead. If we were to follow this historical connection, we’d probably discover something interesting. Maybe there were political associations with Medea. Maybe Shakespeare is comparing himself to Ovid, who was banished from Rome.
But the fact is that we’re fine without knowing about these historical contexts. And probably — at least this is my contention — Shakespeare himself didn’t nearly as deeply as most contemporary scholars would about such references.
Debunking False Oppositions
One theme of this series on Reading Shakespeare is that today we assume that certain things were opposed to one another that were not opposed to one another in Shakespeare’s society. Comedy could be both raucous and serious. A character could be both a general type and an individual. Genre could be both the exception and the rule.
Where I’m not going with this is to say that all interpretations are valid. I don’t think that. In fact, I think that we do best when we interpret literary texts as we think they were intended to be interpreted. But that’s different from saying that our interpretations of texts are only valid if they actually match exactly what an author intended to say.
Rather, my point is that the way Shakespeare approached his more mysterious and evocative scenes seems to encourage a speculative approach to the scene, a sort of free play within reason. I think that he wants us, firstly, to feel the scene emotionally, and second, to test out an interpretation — and then maybe, third, to investigate that interpretation further, even in our own experience of life.
Take the famous “resurrection” scene at the end of The Winter’s Tale. Hermione, the queen, was thought to be dead (dying from despair at the betrayal of her husband, Leontes, and the loss of her two children). But in fact, she was hidden away by a woman named Paulina. Leontes is told that a statue of Hermione has been created by an artist so skilled that it could easily be mistaken for the real woman.
And in an incredibly dramatic moment, Paulina prepares to unveil the statue, asking that the people around her “awake” their “faith.”
Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach.
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I’ll fill your grave up. Stir, nay, come away.
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you.—You perceive she stirs.
The statue comes to life, slowly, to music, in a chapel, and through the poetic conjurings of Paulina who acts like a priest or maybe a witch.
People have debated what’s happening here. I see four options. Is it a real resurrection from the dead, made possible by the company’s faith? Is it rather art becoming life, where the art is just so good that it just merges with reality? Is it magic, as in a work of sorcery as opposed to religious awakening? Or is it just a trick, and there was never a statue in the first place?
I’ve heard people make emphatic and inflexible arguments for one interpretation over the others. Once, a person argued that what we’re witnessing is a dramatization of the Roman Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, and anyone who doesn’t embrace this interpretation exclusively is out to lunch. I’ve also heard someone argue that in this scene art is becoming life in the fashion of Pygmalion as represented in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and that anyone who departs from this interpretation doesn’t really understand the scene. The irony is that both of these interpretations have merit. Both are supported by details from the scene. But so are several other interpretations.
It one way it’s obvious that it is a trick, that Paulina really has been hiding Hermione for fifteen years. But the other interpretations are still there — and Shakespeare makes a point of calling them to attention. He wants there to be possibilities, even though one of them seems true no matter what.
The wrong way to read a scene like this is to approach it like a detective and foreclose the other interpretations in favor of the “true” one. Really, it doesn’t actually take much of a detective to realize that Hermione was never actually dead. The better way to read this scene is to recognize that Shakespeare purposely made these alternative interpretations possible … and then to ask, why did he make them possible?
A writer named Piero Boitani summarizes the scene this way: “Shakespeare's text is able to keep all four [interpretations] in place because to each one it responds to the other three. In other words, the four positions are inextricable one from the other. And that is because the mysteries of life, magic, art, and resurrection are equal.” On the plane of poetry, all four interpretations are equal, because this isn’t history, and interpretation isn’t detective work. A drama like this is an opportunity to entertain possibilities that aren’t available in normal life.
All the World’s a Stage
A word to close out this series on reading Shakespeare.
The melancholic character, Jaques, sighs in As You Like It, and says,
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
It’s a beautiful and famous monologue that describes the human life in stages (in both senses of the word), from infancy to adolescence, adulthood, and late life. In my view, Shakespeare took this maxim to heart. All the world is a stage. We’re all players, or actors. This doesn’t mean that life is meaningless, as Jacques sort of suggests.
Shakespeare had a high view of the stage. He viewed art as reflecting the grandest and most meaningful aspects of life back to us because we often don’t notice them in everyday living.
We study Shakespeare as students. Professional Shakespeare scholars debate the meaning of Shakespeare’s works. Dramaturges and directors adapt and shape Shakespeare. Teachers grade exams on Shakespeare. We memorize Shakespeare for class assignments and theater auditions.
These activities have their uses, but they oughtn’t to get in the way of enjoying Shakespeare. And such enjoyment is most accessible to us when we read his plays. This begins with an appreciation of the words. Say them aloud. Smile. Move your body when you read. If you come to a difficult moment, take it in stride. When you come to a point of interpretive confusion, just assign a meaning to it. Who cares? Shakespeare was invested in human feeling more than he was poetics, theology, politics, philosophy, or history. And I think we do best by him when we lose ourselves in his drama. Imagination, not study, should be our guide.
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If you haven’t read the previous parts of this series on reading Shakespeare, you can find them here:
Part 1 on Enjoying Shakespeare
We’re coming to the final stretch of the term at Hildegard College. Students in the Incubation Lab are preparing for Pitch Night on December 12th.
And in Foundations of Thought, where we’ve been exploring the question “What is the Human Condition?,” we’ve made our way to the modern age. This week we discussed William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
Both of these books are challenging. But one of the most rewarding parts of teaching in a Great Books curriculum, where we read original sources exclusively in historical order, is that our students have the tools they need to understand it.
For example, in Blake, we read:
It indeed appeared to Reason as if desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is, that the Messiah fell, and formed a heaven of what he stole from the abyss.
This is shown in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the Comforter or desire that Reason may have ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire. Know that after Christ’s death he became Jehovah.
But in Milton, the Father is Destiny, the Son a ratio of the five senses, and the Holy Ghost vacuum!
Note.—The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.
What in the world is going on here? Is Blake switching the Devil and the Messiah? What is he saying about Milton and Paradise Lost? Why is the Holy Spirit a “vacuum?” It’s useful that we’ve just finished four weeks of discussion on Paradise Lost, and so we have the tools we need to take Blake to task.
Or, even more challenging, take this key passage from Kant’s treatise on judgment and beauty:
The consciousness of the mere formal purposiveness in the play of the subject’s cognitive powers, in a representation through which an object is given, is the pleasure itself; because it contains a determining ground of the activity of the subject in respect of the excitement of its cognitive powers, and therefore an inner causality (which is purposive) in respect of cognition in general without however being limited to any definite cognition; and consequently contains a mere form of the subjective purposiveness of a representation in an aesthetical judgement.
Where to even begin? To be fair, reading Kant is never easy. But I was impressed with our students ability to draw on what they’ve read before. A “mere form” of purposiveness: they drew on their understanding of Aristotle’s formal cause and on Thomas Aquinas’s description of beauty as the formal cause of the good. For “aesthetical judgment,” they remembered how Schiller and Burke introduced a notion of the aesthetic apart from but complimented by the rational. Recent discussions of Augustine and Plato made their way into the discussion as well.
There’s really no substitution for this kind of education. And once you’ve experienced reading great books chronologically and thematically, seeing how they speak to one another and create a conversation across history, it’s hard to imagine doing it any other way.