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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521820684 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/10/2006 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d) |
About the Author
Russ McDonald is Bank of America Excellence Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
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Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-82068-4 - Shakespeare's Late Style - by Russ McDonald
Excerpt
Introduction
“In all of Shakespeare's development,” write C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler, “there is no change in dramatic style so striking as that between the final tragedies and the late romances.”1 Barber and Wheeler use the term “dramatic style” loosely, referring chiefly to the theatrical sub-genre and the point of view that selects and informs it. But the sentence is true in a strict sense as well, when “style” is taken to mean syntax, meter, diction, repetition, figurative language, and other such verbal and poetic properties. Around 1607, Shakespeare was drawn to a new kind of story and, at the same time, gave his characters a new kind of poetry to speak. At the beginning of this phase, having completed Macbeth and begun and perhaps finished Coriolanus or Antony and Cleopatra (or perhaps both), he contributed to the completion of Pericles, collaborating with George Wilkins or possibly finishing a play that Wilkins had begun; at the end of this phase, from about 1611 to 1613, he collaborated with John Fletcher on three plays, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio; between 1608 and 1611 he wrote three unaided plays, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Modern scholarship cannot decide what to call these seven plays, indeed can scarcely agree on what to call any one of them: comedy?romance? pastoral? tragicomedy? Whatever the designation, Shakespeare's shift from tragedy to the new form coincided with and is related – both as cause and effect – to his development of a poetic style like nothing he (or anybody else) had composed before: it is audacious, irregular, ostentatious, playful, and difficult. This book undertakes a detailed examination of that late style.
The plays of this period have resisted most critical efforts to account for their attraction and theatrical power. This is not merely the conventional claim of one who seeks to justify a critical project by decrying the inadequacy of previous efforts. From G. Wilson Knight in the 1930s to Philip Edwards in the 1950s to Howard Felperin in the 1970s, it was generally agreed that criticism had failed to take the measure of these extraordinary works, and even the abundant attention of the past quarter century has not altered that perception. Kiernan Ryan, summarizing twentieth-century scholarship in 1999, acknowledges the perceived inadequacy of most recent efforts. He also identifies a potentially helpful way of proceeding:
None of the other major phases of Shakespeare's career nor any of the other dramatic kinds – comedy, history, tragedy – has seemed so needy.It is to the deliberate detail of their language and form that we must look, if the last plays are to be released from both the retrospection of old and new historicism and the abstractions of the allegorists. For it is by dislocating the dramatic narrative and contorting conventional poetic discourse that Shakespearean romance articulates its alienation from its own age and its commerce with futurity. What makes these plays still strike us as enigmatic and elusive is neither their engrossment in recondite topical allusions nor their veiled subscription to the perennial mysteries of myth and religion. It is the fact that we have not yet mastered their formal grammar and poetic idiom, and so have not yet learned how to read them.2
One possible explanation for this perceived critical failure is that most commentators begin broadly, exploring indisputably central themes such as forgiveness and redemption or attempting to define and contextualize the plays' distinctive dramatic form. My study takes the opposite point of departure, beginning with microscopic units such as syllables and lines and moving outward. It is a response to Ryan's challenge that we take seriously the “formal grammar and poetic idiom” of these plays. But my aim is not merely to redress the neglect of the late style. The chapters that follow not only define its principal properties but also explore the relation of that style to the dramatic forms it was devised to serve. The remarkable stylistic and formal developments both signify and derive from Shakespeare's revised understanding of the world, his refreshed sense of the positive capacities of language, and his reconceived faith in the power of the theatre and the role of the artist. These affirmations seem not to be sustained wholeheartedly through the entire group of plays, however. Much attention has been paid to Shakespeare's last thoughts, chiefly by the allegory hunters of the nineteenth century and their twentieth-century descendants and detractors; considerable notice has been given to the generic problems posed by the late plays; but relatively little has been written about the late verse. Ideas, genre, poetry – these three areas of critical thought have not been successfully triangulated. By beginning with particulars and furnishing a genuine poetics of the late works, I hope to offer a more specific and thus a more persuasive account of Shakespeare's final period.
This preliminary chapter moves eventually to a statement of purpose and method, but it opens by introducing certain critical problems that require elucidation before stylistic analysis can begin. First comes the question of textual authority, the status of the play-texts available to us. The fact of collaboration also demands a brief comment, especially as it affects stylistic analysis. Next is “lateness,” an abiding and enormously influential notion in discussions of the plays from Pericles on. That problem leads conveniently to a brief critical history of the last plays in general, a survey glancing at some of the major approaches and important names. It is followed by a summary of the comparatively little work done on the late style, and then by a consideration of dramatic kind: what nomenclature best suits these works? Since one of my aims is to identify the points of correspondence between poetics and dramatic mode, this last critical question is uncommonly significant, more significant, in fact, than the answer. Finally, after referring to certain critical models I have found helpful, I set forth my argument in moderate detail. Given that the taxonomy I shall construct is (once again) literal, in these pages the phrase “the late style” means, for the most part, dramatic verse. The stylistic changes that become audible around 1607 are most easily discerned in the poetry, although many of the traits that make the verse challenging also complicate the prose, and some prose passages will be cited and discussed. In both its manifestations, prose and verse, Shakespeare's late style is difficult – difficult to listen to, difficult to read, difficult to understand, and difficult to talk about.
THE TOPIC OF TEXTS
Any treatment of stylistic particulars must acknowledge the distinctive textual circumstances of this group of plays. Each one considered here, unlike many of the earlier works, exists in only one version, all later texts deriving from the first printing. Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, and Cymbeline were published initially in the 1623 Folio; Pericles appeared in 1609 in an unsatisfactory quarto, from which the five subsequent quartos were reproduced; The Two Noble Kinsmen, advertised as the work of Shakespeare and Fletcher, finally saw print in a quarto of 1634 and again in the second Beaumont and Fletcher Folio (1679); no text of Cardenio has survived. Scholarship has so far failed to learn why so few of the plays from the second half of Shakespeare's career found their way into print: between 1594 and 1600, thirteen of his plays were published, whereas between 1601 and 1616, only five appeared. This discrepancy suggests a changed attitude towards publication on the part of the author (or authors) or of the owners of those texts, the King's Men, and a number of explanations for this reduction have been proposed, from company prosperity (no need to sell) to a glutted market (too many books being sold) to a decline in Shakespeare's popularity.
Recently two additional possibilities have been advanced: first, that the company's involvement with the aristocracy, especially the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, “might have prompted Shakespeare and his fellows to change their publication strategy from print for a relatively wide readership to manuscript presentation copies for a small group of influential patrons”; and second, that Shakespeare and his fellows withheld the playbooks because even at this early date they had begun to entertain the possibility of a collected edition of his plays.3 After publication of the second quarto of Hamlet in 1604, perhaps a defensive response to the faulty Q1 of 1603, none of Shakespeare's plays appeared in quarto for the first time except King Lear and Pericles, the latter in the unsatisfactory version of 1609. Thorpe's quarto version of the Sonnets also appeared in 1609, of course, but its origins, especially whether it was published with the poet's permission, are debatable. Whatever the cause or causes, the texts of many of the plays we rank among Shakespeare's greatest achievements were not available to the reading public until after his death.
This dearth of textual choices limits the close reader, of course – “limits,” but does not disable. The increased complexity of the style, particularly the syntax, as Chapters 3 and 4 will demonstrate, yields a relatively high quotient of confusing sentences or phrases, but editors lack an alternative text that might help them clarify or emend a difficult or manifestly corrupt passage. Naturally such textual instability affects the work of the stylistic critic, whose conclusions about minute poetic or syntactic effects might seem dubious or unreliable. While it would of course be desirable to have better texts, versions reflecting greater fidelity to the words that Shakespeare wrote or that the King's Men performed – especially in the case of Pericles – the existing copies nevertheless offer thousands of comprehensible and more or less authoritative lines and sentences, plenty of territory for noticing poetic choices and linguistic properties. As Coburn Freer remarks about the problem of textual instability, “if such objections vitiate the study of the poetry in Renaissance drama, they also invalidate every other kind of criticism, except the study of the text and the facts connected with its generation and transmission.”4
An irreducible fact about the poetry treated in this book is its status as dramatic verse. Much will be made of Shakespeare's metrical disposition, his increasingly elliptical approach to expression, the tangled structure of much of the poetic syntax, the insistent repetitions audible in the verse, and other such formal features. These technical properties combine to produce poetry initially delivered from the stage, and this theatrical origin has shaped, and thus needs to be borne in mind throughout, the ensuing analysis. How audience members perceive the distinctive verse of the late plays determines how they respond to the dramatic narrative, how they react intellectually and emotionally, how they comprehend the meaning of the story enacted before them. In other words, what they hear is as important as what they see, and in fact what they hear to some extent determines what they see. Recognizing the theatrical status of the medium is one of the ways in which the analysis performed in this book differs from what some detractors of poetics deride as “New Criticism.” The kind of poetic analysis conducted fifty years ago would not normally have insisted on the relevance of the dramatic context, would have been more likely to address the play as poem and contented itself with certain favored critical topics, notably metaphor, tension, paradox, and irony. As we have learned, a just appraisal of almost any aspect of Shakespeare's style must include an awareness of its theatrical provenance.5
To acknowledge that origin is not, however, to insist that it constitutes the only legitimate context: Lukas Erne has argued convincingly that “Shakespeare did not only expect that at some point in the future people would ‘read – and reread’ his plays. He could not help knowing that his plays were being read and reread, printed and reprinted, excerpted and anthologized as he was writing more plays.”6 Moreover, although Erne himself eschews detailed analysis of verbal properties, he acknowledges that his argument “does go some way toward justifying such an approach, suggesting that a close, ‘readerly,’ attention to the play's text is not a modern aberration.”7 Much of the analysis undertaken herein depends upon the leisure needed to reflect on the verse, to read and re-read, to notice its patterns and other effects. And yet we must remain conscious that these verbal configurations are acting upon the ear of the audience and affecting their perception of the semantic content of the poetry, even though the operation of those effects may be extremely subtle or even subliminal. Hence, the discussion that follows is not predicated exclusively on one or the other conception of textual ontology.
COLLABORATION
The problems of what was written are complicated by some uncertainty about who wrote what. According to MacDonald Jackson, with reference to Pericles, “The very gateway to the final period of Shakespeare's playwrighting career is . . . obstructed by thorny problems of text and authorship.”8 So, it might be added, is the exit ramp. Even if we tidy up the end of the career, placing Pericles after Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus and thus treating the plays from Pericles through Cardenio as a discrete group, we cannot avoid the inconvenient fact that four of the seven were written by Shakespeare and somebody else. As will become clear in the 20The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII helped to stimulate interest in the last plays as a group. Those early concerns, although based on a non-systematic impressionism, have been validated by stylometric and other kinds of tests developed by twentieth-century scholarship, especially the meticulous labors of Cyrus Hoy in the 1950s.9 Recent scholarship has returned attention to the practice of collaboration. Brian Vickers's Shakespeare, Co-Author, focusing on the investigations of such scholars as Jonathan Hope, David Lake, and MacDonald Jackson, offers an exhaustive account of the current state of attribution studies.10
Scholars agree on the following general conclusions: that Shakespeare both began and ended his career writing with other people, and probably did so in the middle of it as well; that Pericles was a collaborative effort with George Wilkins, even though we can't be sure by whom the product was conceived or how the partnership functioned; and that Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio were all joint productions with John Fletcher, although questions remain about the nature of this final collaborative relationship, such as who plotted the plays? Did the two authors work together or separately? Did Fletcher touch up certain scenes first written by Shakespeare? Might a third playwright have contributed? Other questions that used to receive attention, such as the nineteenth-century belief that Shakespeare couldn't have written the scene depicting the descent of Jupiter in Act 5 of Cymbeline, have mostly disappeared from the critical discourse. While specialists still quibble over certain scenes and decline to speculate on some small samples, such as prologues and epilogues, we can say that Shakespeare is probably responsible for the following sections of the collaborative plays. Pericles: Acts 3, 4, and 5, with Wilkins having written Acts 1 and 2 (although there may be some Shakespeare in the first two acts and some Wilkins in the last three); Henry VIII: 1.1, 1.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.2.1–203, and 5.1; The Two Noble Kinsmen: 1.1 through 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, and 5 (but not 5.1.1–33 or 5.2).11
Accepting these conclusions about division of labor, I should acknowledge their significance for the present study. Although I sometimes write of one or another of these collaborative works as if it were entirely Shakespeare's, such reference is largely a critical convenience. The phrase “the style of Henry VIII,” for example, denotes those scenes or parts of scenes that most scholars have assigned to Shakespeare. A similar assumption obtains when Henry VIII is referred to loosely as one of the “romances,” although it should probably be called a history play. The reader should consider such phrases a kind of shorthand, with the assurance that all stylistic illustrations are taken from Shakespearean scenes. For purposes of clarity I have evaded other potential complications. Although Shakespeare is generally assigned the last three acts of Pericles, “it is nevertheless true,” as Frank Kermode points out, “that the first scenes also occasionally have lines that sound like idiosyncratic Shakespeare,” in support of which claim he cites the image of the “blind mole” and the “poor worm” (1.1.100–2).12 While remaining aware that such possibly Shakespearean lines exist here and there, I have mostly resisted the diversion that entering into such controversies would entail.
That collaboration renders parts of certain plays unavailable for stylistic analysis may be taken less as a hindrance than as a benefit. Having the presence of another poetic hand – Fletcher's much more than Wilkins's, of course – is most instructive in the attempt to establish Shakespeare's stylistic profile after 1607–8. The audible differences between two distinct styles of verse initially set scholars to investigating the details of composition and led them eventually to establish the order of the canon. And the differences between Fletcher's and Shakespeare's verse are marked: respectively, smooth versus choppy, heavily versus subtly patterned, delicate versus rough. According to Charles Lamb, Fletcher “lays line upon line, making up one after the other; adding image to image so deliberately that we see where they join: Shakespeare mingles every thing, he runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; before one idea has burst its shell another is hatched and clamorous for disclosure.”13 This is one of the most insightful stylistic analyses ever written, and without pausing now to illustrate its accuracy, I will have occasion throughout the book to refer to Lamb's distinctions as a way of sharpening the definition of Shakespeare's particular style.
LATENESS
Shakespeare's style, like everything connected with the last plays, is inevitably associated with the idea of “lateness,” Shakespeare's “last” productions, his “final period,” even his “swan song.” An implausibly large number of critics find themselves unable to write about the last phase of Shakespeare's career without invoking the late years of Ibsen, Michelangelo or, invariably, Beethoven. The composer represents “an ideal example of the final achievement of a great artist, when he seems to acquire a new profundity, a new understanding, in making a last attempt to solve the enigma of life” – Kenneth Muir's sentence is typical of this critical position.14 A variation on the theme is found in Adorno's interpretive reversal of the terms, so that “the antiharmonistic postures of Michelangelo, of the mature Rembrandt and Beethoven are all attributable to the inner development of the concept of harmony and in the last analysis to its insufficiency.”15 Such rhetoric is difficult to escape, based as it is on perception of a distinctive voice in a recognizable phase of an artist's career. Still, throughout this book the phrase “Shakespeare's late style” is meant to function chiefly as a chronological pointer: a term designating the dramatic verse Shakespeare composed between 1607 and 1613, a sign divested, insofar as possible, of emotional or teleological connotations. Logically, of course, the use of the adjective “late” implies a way of thinking about the style, acknowledges a category separating it from the expressive forms discernible in earlier plays, but such groupings need not be sentimentalized, nor must the style be considered necessarily superior, the plays regarded as wiser.16
Owing to the overexposure of such comparisons with other major artists, “lateness” is an idea that has recently come under attack, and it is worth scrutinizing the critical history of this concept and noting some of its ramifications for the study of style.17 The santification of the late plays, and indeed our capacity for talking about “late plays” at all, is a function, interestingly enough, of very close reading. In the nineteenth century such scholars as William Spalding, the German G. G. Gervinus, and above all F. J. Furnivall, the prodigiously energetic editor and founder of the New Shakespeare Society – these scholars and others, mostly working independently of one another, set out to determine which parts of certain disputed texts were written by William Shakespeare.18 This goal required that they establish Shakespeare's poetic identity, a task they undertook by means of detailed prosodic investigations. Thus they were able to determine that, broadly speaking, Shakespeare liberalized his blank verse as he matured, writing a progressively less regular line as he moved from histories and comedies to the tragedies and beyond: such relaxation of the line, they discovered, entailed the poet's admission of multiple forms of variation, particularly enjambment and light endings, along with an increasing tolerance for lineal disruption. Knowledge of this progression then allowed scholars to determine with considerable certainty the order in which the plays were composed.19
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