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Overview
Originally published in 1989.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691601328 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #962 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 9.80(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Shakespeare â" The Theater and the Book
By Robert S. Knapp
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06766-7
CHAPTER 1
The Literariness of Shakespeare
* * *
No one in 1623 would have said that Shakespeare's work marked and embodied some general change in European self-understanding. We often say so now. Portentous and wistful by turns, our talk about Shakespeare habitually sets him between times, last witness for the old, first prophet of the new, a genius of the divided vision and a symbol of our own life on the margins of tradition. Commonplaces can be false, of course, but the proof of this one is repetition, not only iteration of such judgments about Shakespeare's place in history, but our constant recurrence to his texts, which have thereby come to generate a body of commentary and wealth of allusion second only to that stemming from the Bible. If there were any doubt about the change that we imagine Shakespeare helped initiate and now stands for, this should dispel it: only on the near side of modernity could it happen that a group of plays would rival sacred narrative as a focus of interpretive energy.
Though this ultimate and perhaps not altogether happy result could not have been foreseen, it is remarkable that the process leading there — the persistent and even compulsive reading of texts that seem almost to rewrite themselves as we go — was urged and anticipated by the men who first presented Shakespeare to a reading public: "Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe: And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him. And so we leave you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can bee your guides: if you neede them not, you can leade your selues, and others. And such Readers we wish him." We need not make Heminge and Condell into prophets; they know that a sort of revolution really has occurred. In their call for a special kind of reader, they assert implicitly what Ben Jonson puts directly, and not without some envious sense of belatedness, that the playwright "to whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe" has entered the canon of literature, has become a "Starre of Poets," an event unprecedented since Rome. Giving Shakespeare over to hermeneutics and all time, his actors thereby triumphantly announce that they have been unable to use him up.
Being used up, of course, is the normal fate of stage plays, even of those which at first seem to mirror universal concerns with extraordinary depth and brilliance. As Matthew Arnold was perhaps the first to observe, all literary history is discontinuous: some generations are luckier than others when it comes to writing texts that later readers will return to. But the drama is a special case of this phenomenon. It has such an alarming way of reverting to pure and obviously bygone code that it is extremely rare for a playwright to convince more than one or two generations that the actor's hermeneutics — let alone a reader's — are worth the price of admission. For stage plays to become fully literary, participating in an enduring chain of influence, institutionally sustained reading, and recurrent commentary, is rarer still. Moreover, the relation which the history of such drama bears to other shapes of time is quite different from that of the epic from Homer to Milton, or of lyric since Petrarch, or of the novel since Richardson, to cite just three obvious lineages in other genres. Whatever may be said about their distinctive rhythms, about deliberate imitation and transformation, Oedipal struggle, or lonely attempts to begin some Active community, none of these traditions manifests the peculiar clustering which has characterized important drama from the very beginning. Sudden efflorescence at crucial national moments — fifth-century Athens; seventeenth-century France; Russia, Ireland, and the Scandinavian countries in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the less distinctly national but no less sporadic pattern since then — this is the arabesque which dramatic history occasionally performs beside the much more continuous history of theater, from which it is otherwise indistinguishable.
Such a seismic rhythm, general eruption followed by echoes and subsidence, creates an awkward but compelling problem for the literary historian. Some genres seem to lack origins altogether. Lyric must be as old as song, and to get to the roots of song would take us further back in evolution than literary traces can go. So far as these let us see, lyric is also more or less continuous: no times are so sullen that it is impossible to write honest and enduring verse which will compel a reckoning from future poets, even if not from other sorts of readers. Epic comes round less often, though its origins are equally an abyss of difference in repetition, but its identity is distinct enough and its functions sufficiently clear that one feels fairly comfortable about its history: epic is foundation narrative for an epoch and people and at the same time a determinate form, alive in rehearsal and deliberate recollection from the West's beginning until its conscious departure from the ancients. Even its modernized and subjective stand-in, for all the notorious difficulties in defining the novel, nonetheless possesses a characteristic telos which marked it from the beginning as a genre of beginning, of a self-conscious struggle with narrative device that sets it apart from earlier literary kinds. Like lyric, the novel has a certain essence (albeit invented) that talent, once subjectivized, can always find out and adapt to new circumstances, no matter how unpropitious. Only the drama "develops," always suddenly, always in company, and always from an obscure and inadequate theatrical past. And only the drama "declines," falling on worse days than lyric ever encounters, for the decline of drama takes a curiously schizophrenic form, splitting into the momentarily popular theater of an increasingly theatrical civilization, side by side with periodic eruptions of a self-consciously "literary" theater.
In putting the case this starkly, I risk overstatement. Everyone can think of fallow periods where no genre in a given national literature excites much interest; and most professional readers will be able to supply a favorite play or dismal epic with which to threaten any claim for a systematic difference in "life cycle" between drama and the other genres. With due allowance for exceptions, however, the history of drama clearly presents special puzzles and temptations. This is not surprising, since the art is special too, in ways that structurally entail a problematic reception from the readers of a later age. As the most public of all literature, drama depends more obviously than other sorts of poetry upon a people's whole resources for self-articulation; no wonder, then, that most plays live only for their own age, or that yesterday's commonplaces seem an adequate map for the specialist who seeks to understand such plays. When drama does transcend ideology and social ritual, something needs explaining; evolutionary models tempt the historian's imagination. And the great author of genetic explanations, of course, also wrote our first poetics. Structure and genesis have never been inseparable, though it is hard to imagine from what position we could pretend to know their interaction.
If anything, however, Shakespeare occasions more surprise than the phenomenon that Aristotle sought to understand. At least the Athenian drama kept continuity with a ritual past and was in part, we now believe, the consequence of a deliberate reworking of that past for fairly evident political and social goals. For Shakespeare, there is no such excuse. Had he been the only significant playwright of the era, an isolated Homer of the stage, we might evade the question with bardolatry. Had his been merely the greatest in a chain of texts, however many the years between, we could speak with confidence about his appropriation of the ancestors (as we can, for instance, even in the warped lineage connecting Fielding, Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer). But neither avenue will do. With at best an allusively surviving ritual context and with hardly any genuine predecessors, Shakespeare had fellows. None is so great, some are interesting mainly for the relation they bear to the "Soul of the Age," but all bear witness that the Elizabethan drama was new and general, a collective, intense, and short-lived revolution in genre somewhat before it was perceived as one more sign of revolution in the times.
Whatever else they do, great texts cannot explain their own originary force: they embody that resistance to theory, that unique and disruptive quality which for Derrida characterizes a real event. In the effort to find out origins, and thus domesticate this force, there have been many subtle strategies, some suggestive results, and much cudgeling of recalcitrant old plays. But the standard version remains much the same after very many books, and for that reason alone leaves one unsatisfied. The problem is not so much in accurately describing formal change, as in knowing what to make of it and how to understand the implications of any causal story that would cross the formidable gap from Horestes to Hamlet. On the side of play writing, there is an evident process of learning and adaptation, together with some shift in the aims and tactics of representation. On the side of history, there is religious conflict and perhaps some skeptical disillusionment as well as an intensified, more inward piety; there is nationalism focused in the person of a royal actor; there is a general European shift in the ground of epistemology, a shift so basic that knowledge itself becomes constellated as a separate problem of unprecedented dimensions. The puzzle is how to connect one history with the other, how to describe a relation between the peculiar form of these plays and their historical moment without either falsifying our own sense of the drama or forgetting what else we know about cultural and literary history.
Such a task engages us in more than a search for origins. As we try to see how Shakespeare relates to his own age and past, we must simultaneously devise some story about his relation to us, to what we think we have become since so-called traditional society gave way to our modernity. Every dispute about the form and meaning of these plays thus rests upon a disagreement, often quite explicit, over the use to which we put them or which we find them having served, over moral imperatives and the different senses of identity that these entail. In one moment of the debate, universalizing (and often existentialist) humanists have celebrated Shakespeare's transcendence of his era and its metaphysical constraints, while a school of historicists (often "Christian humanists" themselves) emphasize Shakespeare's tie with the old plays and ways, finding in the frankly symbolic methods of that past a way of tying down what Shakespeare meant, of freeing him (and us) from the ethical and semantic relativism that defines and curses every "modern" era. In another and braver mood, so their demystifying rhetoric implies, a more recent controversy of critics sees quite different images in the glass. New historicists, Marxist as well as Foucauldian, examine Shakespeare's relations with power (often to debunk both these and the humanistic celebration of his authority). For an opposing party, both old and new historicists and the older generation of formalists have given way to a deplorable nostalgia: the corrective, sterner view discovers a Shakespeare not of an age but for all time textual, his universality consisting in a registration of hard truths, how provisional and fictive meaning is, how the nature of writing outruns our order, how a strong form can contain Nietzschean energies without controlling their ironic play.
No doubt this puts it crudely and tendentiously. Pure formalists are as mythical as the historicists they always fight; and in recent years, there have been serious attempts to develop a theory of textual production that would transcend both the undialectical opposition between formalism and historicism, and the romantic epistemology underlying this opposition. Nonetheless, nearly all histories of the drama turn on a small set of binary oppositions — the most basic being religious versus secular, and symbolic versus realistic — which only mythical beings could think were purely literary and atemporal in scope or uniquely characteristic of old against new. Yet argument that hinges on such labels makes easy prey for error: in each pair, metaphor insensibly overlaps some ostensibly recent change in our collective self-understanding, so that the more "modern" seems natural, new, and intrinsic to the formal essence of the genre. How commonly we say it, in effect: where Shakespeare's predecessors were medieval, he is modern; mimetic where they were didactic, verging on illusion where they were bound to emblems, riddling and complex where they were morally confident if not naive, insistently ironic where they were allegorical, iconoclastic where they were enthralled to images of truth. In earlier works, the persons of the drama are signs, not characters; they figure forth idea rather than psychology; neither motivation nor consistency matters much, for inwardness is not a value in that theater. Instead of plot as classical and post-Elizabethan writers understood it, this drama gives us schemes, patterns of redemption and damnation rather than sequences of probable cause. But in Shakespeare, everything is transformed: we recognize ourselves in him; at least the selves we thought we were, before modernity began to turn against selves and plots, alerting us to other pressures and designs within Shakespeare's texts as well as in our own.
Just this notorious capacity for changing shape and meaning as his readers change their habits of perception is evidence enough that form cannot by itself account for the plays. But their corollary ability to outrun determinate world pictures proves that certain kinds of history hinder as much as help responsible interpretation. We can say that the texts are literary rather than instrumental; that they are radically ambiguous, refusing to allow sure resolution of the tensions which inform them; more radically, that they forestall any sort of closure, whether organic or dialectical. But all this begs the question: since such literariness, ambiguity, and openness appeal to recent rather than to older tastes, we cannot be sure that modern interpreters do not simply satisfy their own desires; and to say that tensions stay unresolved is no more than to say that for us the plays remain implacably dramatic. There may indeed be deep and perhaps intrinsically irresolvable contradictions in Shakespeare between different ways of apprehension and presentation. But the conundrum set us is that the poise he strikes is simultaneously diachronic and formal, part between eras and part between representational modes with only an imaginary link to temporal fashions or changing world pictures.
Yet just as a way of putting the difference between early plays and late, the simpler oppositions — suitably qualified — ring true to our experience. Compared to fully literary drama, medieval and early Tudor plays really are thin gruel. This is safe to say, despite those modern studies (and interesting shifts in modern sensibility) that have made it possible for us to see that the early plays, especially the mystery cycles, are neither the product of "Carpenters and Coblers," as Rymer thought (thereby maligning the Shakespeare derived from them) nor barely dramatized dogma, feebly enlivened by realistic comedy. Medieval and early Tudor drama has structural integrity; it is theologically alive, iconographically informed, and splendidly theatrical; it has moments both outrageously funny and genuinely moving. But it does not, and as popular, occasional, and largely homiletic theater, cannot, arouse the interpretive instinct in the way that the later drama does. That it has required some explication is no contrary evidence; it is one thing to explain a forgotten semiotic and quite another to find in the text the kind of problematic interplay between code and noncode that characterizes works we continue to use for the purpose of cultural self-definition. Like the more academic debate plays, this drama is too transparent, too close both to oratory and to ritual (of court, college, parish, guild) to bear reading and rereading except for special purposes, whether of history or anthropology.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shakespeare â" The Theater and the Book by Robert S. Knapp. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. ix
- NOTE ON TEXTS AND ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xiii
- ONE. The Literariness of Shakespeare, pg. 3
- TWO. The Body of the Sign, pg. 45
- THREE. The Idea of the Play, pg. 79
- FOUR. The Moving Image, pg. 128
- FIVE. Shakespearean Authority, pg. 182
- Index, pg. 247