Shakespeare Studies Today: Romanticism Lost

Praise for Shakespeare Studies Today: Romanticism Lost “Shakespeare Studies Today is a rigorous critique of the ‘Shakespeare Industry’s’ stillcurrent sociological focus and a call for an aesthetics-based alternative. Considering the quantity of debunking necessarily involved in his project, Pechter is consistently and remarkably gracious. More remarkable still is Pechter’s reader-friendly, jargonfree prose. I am surprised at how much I enjoyed reading his book.” —Stephen Booth, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley “Shakespeare criticism isn’t much fun anymore. It isn’t a lot of fun to read, and it doesn’t seem like it’s all that much fun to write. Shakespeare Studies Today is Pechter’s explanation for how this has come to pass. Pechter is not afraid to mix it up with people he disagrees with, but he is also a writer with admirable forbearance, a great sense of humour and a deep enthusiasm for Shakespeare. He wants to put Shakespeare back into the center of Shakespeare criticism and to restore a sense of appreciation for Shakespeare’s greatness as a writer.” —Michael Bristol, Greenshields Professor Emeritus, McGill University “Pechter’s bold critique of current Shakespeare studies argues for a reappraisal of nineteenth-century readings of the plays. Pechter pulls no punches about current interpretive practice, and his controversial arguments uncover dazzling insights that no one interested in Shakespeare can afford to ignore.” —Dympna C. Callaghan, William Safire Professor of Modern Letters, Syracuse University

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Also by Edward Pechter Dryden’s Classical Theory of Literature. What Was Shakespeare? Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice. Editor, Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence. “Othello” and Interpretive Traditions. Editor, “Othello”: A Norton Critical Edition.

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Shakespeare Studies Today Romanticism Lost Edward Pechter

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SHAKESPEARE STUDIES TODAY

Copyright © Edward Pechter, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11419–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pechter, Edward, 1941– Shakespeare studies today : romanticism lost / Edward Pechter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11419–7 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation— History—20th century. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation—History—19th century. I. Title. PR2970.P42 2011 822.3⬘3—dc22

2010043217

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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For E. A. J. Honigmann; and for Ben and Beth and Dave and Ceilidh

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CON T E N T S

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

Part One Discipline and Desire Introduction: Discipline and Desire

15

1 Return of the Aesthetic?

21

2 Negative Desire: Materialism and Its Discontents

53

Part Two

What’s Wrong with Literature?

Introduction: What's Wrong with Literature?

87

3 New Theatricalism and the Repudiation of Literary Interest

91

4 New Textualism and the Crisis in Editing

Part Three

117

Romanticism Lost

Introduction: Romanticism Lost

143

5 Romantic Antitheatricalism and Formalist Values

151

6 Romantic Authorship and Professional Values

177

Conclusion

201

Notes

207

Works Cited

215

Index

231

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PR E FAC E

This book is about how Shakespeareans go about their business at the present time. It argues that we can perform more effectively and with more conviction by relaxing some of the materialist principles guiding current work, and by reconnecting with the traditions of Romantic commentary, beginning with Hazlitt and Coleridge and continuing up to A. C. Bradley, from which our own critical practice has developed. Since the Introduction spells out this argument in detail, I limit myself here to thanking at least some of the many people and institutions who have facilitated my work. A grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada helped with much of the research and writing. During the spring and fall of 2008, I was given the opportunity to try out some of my ideas in a number of academic settings, where the response made me realize that I was writing a very different book from the one I thought I was writing. For setting up these presentations and for filling up the seats with people poised to ask smart and usefully embarrassing questions, I am grateful to Tom Cain, Patrick J. Finn, Marcie Frank, Elizabeth Hanson, Lynne Magnusson, Kathleen McLuskie, Gordon McMullan, and Paul Yachnin. Parts of this book are based on prior publication. For editorial generosity and advice, my thanks go to Graham Bradshaw (Shakespearean International Yearbook 3, Ashgate); Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, Palgrave); Peter Holland (Shakespeare Survey 59, Cambridge University Press); Alan Sinfield and Peter Nicholls (Textual Practice, 11 and 17, Taylor and Francis); and Paul Yachnin and Patsy Badir (Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, Ashgate). I benefited from the encouragement and advice of friends and colleagues at the University of Victoria, including Gordon Fulton, Gary Kuchar, Richard van Oort, and Terry Sherwood of the English Department, and Sara Beam and Matthew Koch of the History

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x

Preface

Department. I got more help than I could have expected from Jo Roberts, Brigitte Shull, and Ciara Vincent at Palgrave Macmillan, and from Rohini Krishnan at Newgen. Special thanks to Michael D. Bristol, for characteristically smart and helpful suggestions, to Marjorie Garson, who made every page of this book better, and to Lesley Wynne Pechter, who conceived and executed the cover illustration, and who made writing the book feel worthwhile.

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Introduction

This book takes off from three claims: (1) in Shakespeare studies at the present time, the level of conviction required to sustain a healthy critical practice is problematically if not dangerously low; (2) the qualities which the Romantics valued in an engagement with Shakespeare are either ignored these days or fundamentally misunderstood; and (3) there is a causal relation between the first two points. The Romantics invented Shakespeare studies (a bald assertion to which I shall return in a moment), and current Shakespeareans, having grown increasingly remote from their origins, have not been able to develop an adequate alternative foundation on which to build their work. The first claim is the least controversial. That Shakespeare studies finds itself at an “impasse”—stuck in a “morass” or stranded in “the critical doldrums”—is regularly asserted in its current work. For the critics using these terms and for many others (they will be identified in chapter 1), we are experiencing a malaise, or even worse. According to Josephine Guy and Ian Small, “English Studies” altogether is “a discipline in crisis,” and many Shakespeareans (the editorial theorists we shall meet in chapters 2 and 4 are striking examples) would probably agree. For even the most phlegmatic, Shakespeare studies looks substantially less robust than might be expected, let alone wished. These accounts may exaggerate the problem. According to Marcie Frank, “literary criticism finds itself ‘in crisis’ with a regularity that could almost be called soothing” (p. 4). Bad news is good news; it makes for a better story; good news is not newsworthy. (This is a version of Tolstoy’s “all happy families are the same.”) There is a wide gap between most people’s daily lives, and the representation of those lives in the accounts of fires, murders, and car accidents that fill up the nightly news. Then too, the particular nature of our enterprise may tend to reinforce exaggeration. Criticism is essentially a problem-solving activity; without a problem to solve, we’d be like the disembodied soul in

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Donne’s “Air and Angels” who “else could nothing do.” We cringe at the clichéd opening claim that “people have noticed X, but no one has noticed Y, and there is a need” (sometimes a “very real need”) “to notice Y.” Kingsley Amis ridicules the maneuver in Lucky Jim. Ref lecting on “this strangely neglected topic,” the phrase he has put at the beginning of his try-not-to-get-fired essay on “The Economic Inf luence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485,” Jim asks, “This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what?” (p. 16). Embarrassing as we know it to be, a version of this strategy nonetheless launches all critical work, including this one. Even those convention-f louting anecdotal beginnings in early Stephen Greenblatt are, as he himself acknowledges, back formations, produced by the convention they purport to f lout (“Writing,” 45). All this notwithstanding, the worried accounts of our current circumstances still deserve to be taken seriously. For one thing, the crisis claims may not be baseless: as Frank adds to her witty comment about soothing regularity, “the rhetoric of crisis masks the fact that the question of legitimacy has haunted literary criticism from its late seventeenth-century beginnings.” Besides, the view that Shakespeare and literary studies are in a precarious condition is shared, as we shall see, among some of the most respected and inf luential scholars writing today, and this consensus extends to a conviction about the originating place (if not the cause) of the problem—namely, the redirection of critical interest, effectively negotiated sometime during the 1980s, away from literary objects and effects to the cultural contexts within which these are produced and experienced. We cannot be dealing just with a predisposition to dramatically bad news or with a make-work project designed to prevent idleness. Something is really wrong. In Shakespeare Studies Today, I am trying to determine what is wrong, how we got into this situation, and what we should be doing about it. The usual way to explain what is wrong is to suggest that Shakespeareans have failed to achieve a coherent agreement about the subject and how to treat it. The absence of an effective cognitive and methodological consensus is a striking aspect of the current critical environment, and it may not be helping our situation; but the claim guiding this book is that our problems derive not so much from having too many different interests pulling us in too many different directions as having too precarious a commitment to the value of any of these interests to sustain a healthy practice. If the energy driving current practice feels intermittent and uncertain, this may have something to do with conceptual incoherence but more to do with unsustainable affect. It is the attenuation of

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Introduction

3

desire that best explains why our critical performances seem unable to furnish a thoroughgoing satisfaction to ourselves or those for whom and with whom we perform them. We need to relocate the problem, so I am arguing here, from the reason to the will. From this perspective, focusing chief ly on desire and will, how should we account for the redirection of critical interest from which our present state of affairs seems to emerge? The trajectory of this still ongoing process may be suggested by means of the following standon-one-foot-and-talk-really-fast synopsis of shifting norms in literary studies during the last thirty years or so. One: In 1981, two junior faculty in the Rhetoric Department at Penn State, Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor, undertook a study of the “institutionalized norms” for and “field-dependent constraints on the published interpretation of literature” as a way of “understanding the available means of persuasion” (p. 77). By analyzing a sample of essays published between 1978 and 1981 in the most prestigious scholarly journals, they determined that this work exhibited the standard marks of Aristotle’s third rhetorical motive—the epideictic: a “ceremonial” and “subtly ritualized form of communication” that has “much in common with religious discourse” in that it “affirms the shared values of a community and harmonizes new insights with what is already believed” (p. 94). They wrote up their work as “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism” and submitted it to the PMLA, where it was decisively rejected. Fahnestock tells me she doesn’t recall why, but I’d guess that the editorial board mistook the piece to be saying that the emperor had no clothes. As an imperial organ, the PMLA could not be expected to countenance let alone disseminate a view of its own nakedness. Two: According to Stephen Greenblatt in Learning to Curse, “one of the more irritating qualities of my own literary training” was “its relentlessly celebratory character” as “a kind of secular theodicy. Every decision made by a great artist could be shown to be a brilliant one; works that had seemed f lawed and uneven . . . were now revealed to be organic masterpieces[,] the triumphant expression of a healthy, integrated community” (p. 168). As Greenblatt remembers it, graduate school at Yale in the late 1960s “was epitomized” by the “Elizabethan Club—all-male, a black servant in a starched white jacket, cucumber sandwiches and tea,” over which “the imposing figure of William K. Wimsatt” held forth “on poetry and aesthetics” as if presiding at “the hierophantic service” of a “mystery cult” Greenblatt himself “wished to resist” (p. 1). By 1990, when these passages were published, it was no longer taboo to identify academic literary study with epideictic rhetoric,

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as in Fahnestock and Secor, because the identification was no longer taken seriously. The “institutionalized norms” and “field-dependent constraints” had changed radically from those in place sustaining the “secular theodicy” of Greenblatt’s professional formation. Three: In 2001, Greenblatt published a book on Hamlet in Purgatory, in which he predicates his whole endeavor on a passionate engagement with textual energy: My only goal was to immerse myself in the tragedy’s magical intensity. It seems a bit absurd to bear witness to the intensity of Hamlet; but my profession has become so oddly diffident and even phobic about literary power, so suspicious and tense, that it risks losing sight of—or at least failing to articulate—the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the first place. The ghost in Hamlet is . . . amazingly disturbing and vivid. I wanted to let the feeling of this vividness wash over me, and I wanted to understand how it was achieved. (p. 4) In effect, Greenblatt does an about face from the resistance described eleven years earlier in Learning to Curse, and the resulting position seems to exhibit a surprising sympathy now for the “secular theodicy” he found so “irritating” then. This neat account falls considerably short of adding up to a serious historical interpretation. At once overdramatized and underanalyzed, it allows us to chart a sequence of abrupt changes of mind, or of heart, but not the motivating factors that might connect them within the structure of a coherent understanding. (The effect is like the title Artie Shaw gave to the story of his much-married and divorced life, I love you, I hate you, drop dead!, with a further twist, I love you again.) In order for it to add up as historical explanation, we would need to pull it down from the Key Dates and Great Men mode and fill in the gaps with general trends. The intensity—aversion would not be putting it too strongly— with which Greenblatt repudiated his literary training was not a single doom; a whole generation of critics felt a similar disenchantment. This broad-based realignment of literary studies, which has been the subject of countless analyses, can be summed up with Edward Said’s term, “worldliness.” The attempt to make criticism a more “worldly” enterprise—bringing with it history and power and the body, among many other highly charged terms and ideas, including, of course, race, class, and gender—endowed an exhausted practice with a newly energized sense of purpose.

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Introduction

5

By 1999, however, when Said addressed the members of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) in his capacity as president, he acknowledged that the achieved worldliness in literary studies had turned out to be a mixed blessing. He warns against “the dangers of transforming the classroom into an arena for the solution, or at least the battleground, of social and political problems.” He worries about the effects on “literary and humanistic education” if it comes “under the inf luence of daily issues like citizens’ rights, new legislation, the restructuring of power, the problems of minorities, and so on”; for “our brief time in the classroom” not to be “squandered,” he argues, we need “a patient, scrupulous reading of texts; a detailed respect for the painstaking effort for clarity of utterance; a careful attempt, in R. P. Blackmur’s memorable phrase, to bring literature to performance” (“An Unresolved Paradox”). Said is not backing away from his belief that “all the great literary works are themselves saturated with worldly concerns.” His account, however, recognizes that this belief has by now become more or less routine; the exhilarated expectation with which a worldly practice first coalesced into a critical program (“putting the text back into history” was the phrase of choice in the early 1980s) has largely disappeared. On the other side, meanwhile, an increased anxiety about the negative consequences of the program has emerged into prominence, and Said describes these consequences in the strongest terms. “Squandering our brief time in the classroom” is as much as to suggest that our occupation’s gone. Said’s qualms help to explain the second of Greenblatt’s reversals in the scheme outlined above. In his discomfort—aversion would, in this case, be putting it too strongly—with the “phobic” tone of current work, Greenblatt seems now to be pulling back from his earlier disparagement of “the relentlessly celebratory character” of his literary training. And here too, his position is exemplary rather than eccentric, not so much leading as reading the Zeitgeist: a critical mass of Shakespeareans (and of non-Shakespearean inhabitants of literature departments) share his discomfort and are beginning to look back with a similarly tentative longing to something like the traditional literary values they repudiated a generation earlier. The question, though, is whether this longing is substantial enough to put us on a path out from the malaise in which we are situated, and the answer, I think, is probably not. Greenblatt’s references to the “magical intensity” of “literary power” produce a powerful but only temporary impact. The terms are quickly evoked and then abruptly

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dropped, as if in embarrassment (they sound, he admits, “a bit absurd”). They have little immediate bearing on the discussion in Hamlet in Purgatory, and except for the perfunctory assertions stuck on to the end of chapter 1, that “modern thinkers” have “been dismayingly insensitive to the imaginative dimension that most fascinated” Renaissance audiences, and that “What we call ideology” is what “Renaissance England called poetry” (pp. 45–6), they disappear. Moreover, it is hard to get a handle on “the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the first place.” After all, Greenblatt’s own engagement with the enterprise “in the first place,” as described in Learning to Curse, included a very substantial element of distaste for the celebratory tone he now uses to describe “literary power,” “aesthetics,” and the “imaginative dimension.” It is as though he is recoiling from the recoil of his previous position, but this disaffection from an earlier aversion—a kind of double negative, “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”—does not inspire confidence as an adequate motivation to propel us out from the “doldrums” in which we feel ourselves to be stranded. The first two parts of this book proceed from the claims I have just set forth. In the Introduction to Part One, “Discipline and Desire,” I develop the idea that the vigor and stability of a critical practice depend more on conviction and desire than on intellectual coherence. Chapter 1, “Return of the Aesthetic?”, reviews some of the many expressions in Shakespearean and literary study of a renewed interest in literary power and tries to account for their failure to add up to much more than the sum of their scattered parts, mainly, as I take it, because of the inadequate desire by which they are motivated. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to materialism, which is what worldly criticism is generally called these days, specifically to the mounting evidence that materialist criticism cannot deliver the political consequence it originally promised. What’s left of materialist criticism, I argue, is little more than its discontent with the purported “idealism” of traditional literary study—hence the title of the chapter, “Negative Desire: Materialism and its Discontents.” Negative desire is the subject of Part Two as well. “What’s Wrong with Literature?” describes the explicit repudiation of literary interest among some Shakespearean performance critics and editorial theorists, the New Theatricalists and the New Textualists, who include the most distinguished and inf luential practitioners in the field. I have so far said nothing about Romanticism, which appears in the title of the book and of Part Three and is central to the second and third of the claims from which this Introduction began. As a way

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Introduction

7

into Romanticism, come back to the phrase I puzzled over just earlier, “in the first place.” I took the phrase in a personal and psychological sense, this is what motivates someone to go into literary study and concentrate on Shakespeare, but it can be taken in a historical and ontological sense as well, this is where Shakespeare and literary study originates and this is what it is, both of which senses lead to Romanticism. The great Romantic critics were, of course, unequivocally invested in the value of “myriad-minded Shakespeare,” as Coleridge called him. “People would not trouble their heads about Shakespear,” according to Hazlitt, “if he had given them no pleasure, or cry him up to the skies, if he had not first raised them there. The world are not grateful for nothing.” Such claims do not originate with the Romantics. As R. W. Babcock demonstrated years ago in The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, the Romantics inherited Bardolatry from their immediate predecessors, who centered their appreciation in the power of Shakespearean drama to generate an intense affective interest in its dramatic characters. But Babcock’s conclusion, that Shakespeare criticism in “the early nineteenth century merely echoed the late eighteenth” (p. 226), overstates the matter. Keats’s admiration for the “camelion” Shakespeare, taking “as much delight in conceiving an Iago or an Imogen” (Scott, p. 195), transports an engagement with Shakespearean character into a territory that William Richardson and Elizabeth Montagu and Dr. Johnson, even if they could imagine what it looked like, had no desire to visit. How Keats (and Coleridge and Hazlitt) found their way to such a place is, like many examples of radical innovation, hard to explain. Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777) seems irresistible as a source. Dr. Johnson, like the shocked “virtuous philosopher” in Keats’s letter, dismissed Morgann in terms immediately relevant to the discussion here: “as he has proved Falstaff to be no coward, he may prove Iago to be a very good character” (Boswell, p. 1213). At the end of the Romantic line, A. C. Bradley, reviewing an anthology of eighteenth-century Shakespearean commentary, ref lected on “the gradual dawn of the romantic movement” and declared that if Morgann’s Essay “could be taken as a fair example of that generation, we should have to say that the century, some time before it closed, had reached in principle the whole position in which criticism has rested from the days of Schlegel and Coleridge” (“Eighteenth Century,” 294). But Morgann had “disappeared almost completely” by the time the Romantics were writing (Fineman, p. 23), and there is no evidence they knew of him let alone actually read his work. We are dealing with

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a Zeitgeistliche affinity. In the same way, Romantic Shakespeareans, with Coleridge as something of an exception, seem to have had no direct contact with the ideas about aesthetic interest newly systematized by Kant among others in the German Enlightenment. They took advantage of these ideas nonetheless, as part of a concerted effort to expand the range of critical response to Shakespeare qualitatively beyond the established norms. In this respect, to return to my sweeping claim at the beginning, the Romantics invented Shakespeare studies, developing the assumptions, methods, and goals that formed the foundation of our critical practice—from which, I am arguing in this book, we have become problematically far removed. It’s a problem not just for Shakespeareans. It complicates professional life all across academic literary study, and for Romanticists perhaps most of all. The Introduction to Part Three describes a situation among Romanticists similar to (and even more intensely fraught than) the one I have been sketching out here: an uncertainty whether Romanticism exists as a meaningful subject and, at least since Jerome McGann’s hugely inf luential Romantic Ideology appeared in 1983, an agenda defined by the aversion from and repudiation of its own critical traditions. The two chapters in Part Three look in some detail at what Romantic critics said about literary form and about literary authorship. My main contention is that their ref lections on these subjects are very different from what we understand them to be saying. Romantic critics were not, as they are regularly said to be, essentially “looking for the organic unity of the work”; they were interested in the quality and intensity of an interpretive engagement largely independent of the textual object with which it engages. Nor were the Romantics essentially “looking for the author behind the text” (like “impasse” et al. at the beginning, these and many similar phrases will be attributed in due course). Romantic authorship is rather a heuristic than an empirical category: working not forward from textual origins but backward from aesthetic effects, the Romantics attempted to identify the kind of creative agency that might be imagined to account for the interest and delight readers and audiences take in Shakespeare’s plays. Formalism and genius authors may deserve the opprobrium lavished on them at present, but these are not the values on which Hazlitt and Coleridge and the others founded an engagement with Shakespeare. If this underlying misrepresentation of our origins is contributing to the malaise reported in current accounts, then setting the record straight seems likely to help, and this likelihood is at the motivational center of Romanticism Lost. But any attempt to express the book’s

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Introduction

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potentially beneficial consequences comes out sounding faintly—or blatantly—self-serving: I will reveal the Romantic dispensation as in itself it really is, the scales will fall from Shakespearean eyes, and the truth will make us free. This is the lone voice crying in the wilderness, and it won’t do. Quite apart from self-aggrandizement (do I really think my rhetorical or critical powers are sufficient to lead the children of Shakespeare into the promised land?), this agenda stands in direct contradiction to my earlier claim about the subordination of reason to will. It assumes that the truth makes us free, that freedom follows truth as the night the day. This is what Hamlet supposes in his exhortation to the ghost— “Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge” (1.5.29–31)—but events prove otherwise. Distracted with contrary desires, meditation, and love on the one hand, revenge on the other, Hamlet’s conviction that knowledge leads directly to the liberating release of expressive action turns out to be wildly optimistic. From this perspective (comparing small things to great), the therapeutic project I announced for this book needs to be treated with more than a grain of salt. If it is will that is driving the apparatus, then the reason Shakespeareans have abandoned Romantic values is not that they do not understand them; rather, the misunderstanding derives from a loss of conviction. The misrecognition of Romantic Shakespeare would then be not the cause of our malaise, but the effect; and if this is the case, the consequences of historical and critical analysis are bound to be substantially limited. A close look at the values underwriting Romantics engagements with Shakespeare should be of some interest in itself. So too should be a close look at the current situation for an inkling of how it feels to be operating with a less-than-adequately secure belief in the purpose of the operation. Putting the two together, moreover, is likely to make some things happen, but exactly what those things are is hard to determine, and there does not seem to be much basis to expect that the juxtaposition will produce immediately beneficial effects on the large scale I proclaimed a moment ago. That “large discourse, / Looking before and after” (4.4.36–7), is not likely to transform malaise into a situation characterized by energetic desire. The skeptical position outlined here is f leshed out in chapter 1. Focused on arguments designed to recuperate aesthetics for the center of critical practice, it offers an object lesson in the inability of the analytical intellect to produce its hoped-for effects. But if this were the whole story, I cannot imagine how I could have sustained the effort to write this book and, more to the point, how I can be asking anyone to

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sustain the effort to read it. It isn’t the whole story, however; for one thing, the situation is less stark than what I have described. Despite sometimes sounding like the voice crying in the wilderness, I have plenty of company on the present scene, whose work stands in one way or another behind many of the arguments of this book. The so-farunnamed “critical mass” of “discomfited” Shakespeareans referred to earlier are part of this picture. If less than wholly successful in effecting a return to aesthetics, they offer testimony of at least a desire to do so. Part of the picture, too, are the various critical eminences (including, in addition to Greenblatt, John Guillory, Lukas Erne, and Harold Bloom) from whom I have shamelessly looted ideas in the following pages; and although none of these might wish to be associated with Shakespeare Studies Today or, for that matter, with any of the others on the list, they all represent versions of a remediating argument from which I have been able to derive encouragement. And finally, some otherwise unacknowledged presences deserve mention in the many Shakespeareans who have contributed to what looks like a resurgence of interest in character as a legitimate focus of critical attention. As I argued earlier, character is central to the Romantic invention of Shakespeare studies, and its reemergence in current work suggests a new willingness (conscious or not) to embrace the Romantic values described in this book.1 In short, despite all the hedging about with ironic skepticism, I still stand behind the agenda italicized on the top of the preceding page: the time is out of joint for Shakespeareans, and a fresh look at the critics who established the foundation for our practice might at least help to set it right. To be sure, the ironic skepticism stands too, if less tall, and in this context, especially with all the Hamlet echoes resonating around us, I should confess that the working title I used while putting this book together was “Shakespeare Studies and the Distractions of Contrary Desire.” The phrase, which I deployed earlier to describe the ghost’s effect on Hamlet, is lifted from Dr. Johnson, who said of “To be or not to be” that it comes “bursting from a man distracted with contrariety of desires” (Sherbo, 8, p. 981). Dr. Johnson was picking up on Hamlet’s tremendous pun in “this distracted Globe.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) takes “distracted” in Hamlet’s speech to mean “much confused or troubled in mind; having, or showing, great mental disturbance or perplexity” (OED 4); but for the audience of a play obsessed with ideas of lunacy, real or imagined, the meaning of “deranged in mind; out of one’s wits; crazed, mad, insane,” must be present as well (OED 5). It is chief ly the high anxiety suggested by

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these implications that led me finally to drop Dr. Johnson’s phrase. The enfeebled will described in this book may be frustrating, but it is not maddening. It might drive us to thoughts of switching fields (though where would we go in literary studies that is not characterized by a similar torpor?), or even of early retirement, but not suicide. Our situation is closer to comedy than to tragedy (“distraction” as “diversion” or “relaxation”; see OED 2a) and closer still to history, in the sense that it offers no definitive sense of an ending, happy or otherwise. If we find ourselves at an impasse, we are not paralyzed like Beckett’s Hamm and Clov; we have what might be called sustainable nongrowth. There may be no way to escape from the general situation, but there are lots of particular things to do inside it. It would be convenient to have a more secure conviction about the value of our practice, but there are still lots of ways to get on with it; and even lacking the sure and certain knowledge that any of these ways is moving the enterprise forward, we continue to have our preferences and an abundant repertoire of arguments to advance in their support. My reliance on Edward Said in this Introduction should suggest as much, and the Conclusion, returning to the claims of practical criticism, aims to reinforce the idea that we have at least as much reason to celebrate the critical possibilities we have than to console ourselves for those we don’t.

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PA RT

ON E

Discipline and Desire

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Introduction: Discipline and Desire

My title may evoke the wrong kind of images. “Discipline” refers to the critical practices and assumptions associated with academic specialization, in particular the kind undertaken by the members of English departments and, more particularly still, by the Shakespeareans inhabiting these (and sometimes theater) departments. The word has no direct connection with inf licting or receiving pain, and any indirect connection, while perhaps interesting to think about, does not concern me here. I am concerned, rather, with the interactions between discipline and desire as Michel Foucault described them in a number of seminal works published thirty years or so ago. By describing power as productive rather than repressive, Foucault reconfigured the relation between discipline and desire from the antithetical forces they were normally taken to be into reinforcing and even mutually constitutive phenomena. From this angle, desire is inevitably involved with the kinds and forms of knowledge by which disciplinary formations not only regulate and define (and therefore limit) but generate and proliferate our affective interests. As Clifford Siskin puts it, “desire is inherently disciplinary” (Historicity, p. 152). The claim is reversible: “academic and scientific discourse,” as George Dillon argues, “is woven out of human actions and is as rooted in human desire as a love letter or a legal complaint” (p. 2). Nonetheless, the standard accounts of academic work continue to emphasize its analytical foundations. When Guy and Small try to explain why “English studies” is “a discipline in crisis,” they locate the problem in a cognitive rather than an affective domain. Any “discipline of knowledge,” they argue in Politics and Value in English Studies, requires agreement on “three constituent elements”—a subject (“the object of study”), a method (the “practices used”), and “a theory” to explain the discipline’s underlying principles and provide an “explicit elaboration” of “the appropriateness and utility of the explanation.” It’s the first that matters most, they claim, the subject, for “if there is no agreement . . . about

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what to study, questions of how to study must be an irrelevance” (p. 38). Without a shared knowledge of what we are talking about, we cannot possibly produce the kind of work required to sustain a disciplinary practice. Fundamental disagreement about the nature of the subject, they conclude, is the main reason why we are “a discipline in crisis.” This plausible claim seems to get immediate confirmation from the fact that a shared knowledge of what we are talking about is something we clearly do not have. The staggering diversity of work produced under the rubric of “Shakespeare criticism” makes it doubtful “whether ‘Shakespeare’ has much more than a nominal significance.” I wrote this in 2000, reviewing “The Year’s Contributions to Shakespeare Studies” (p. 312); but however good it may have felt to get these words off my chest, I wasn’t saying anything readers didn’t already know. Shakespeareans have long recognized that their subject is made up out of—or filled up with—critical practices, the irresolvable differences of which preclude any strict intellectual coherence and prevent any effective consensus. The question is, for how long have we known this? Has there ever been a time when Shakespeare and literary studies have not been required to accommodate an unmanageable variety of practices? “You can never draw the line between aesthetic criticism and moral and social criticism; you cannot draw a line between criticism and metaphysics; you start with literary criticism, and however rigorous an aesthete you may be, you are over the frontier into something else sooner or later.” This is how the situation looked for T. S. Eliot in 1928 (Dryden, p. xxiii), and it looked pretty much the same, a spacious territory with porous borders, as early as its conventionally designated point of origin among the Romantics. For Hazlitt, the imagination was not a specialized poetic faculty but the motor of all human desire and behavior, with the result that literary studies was bound to be more of an eclectic bricolage than a strictly constructed method. The Romantics did not speak with one voice, and Coleridge was more strongly inclined than Hazlitt to define literary study as a critical practice distinct from all others. But the convergences among the Romantics outweigh the divergences (I’ll be developing this claim in Part Three), and the point remains that the practitioners of literary study were from the beginning too inclusive in their interests to allow for any substantial agreement about “the object of study.” The absence of cognitive consensus, then, is not a recent aberration but the variable constant from which Shakespeareans have always worked—the default framework, the humanities equivalent to “normal

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science.” (Thomas Kuhn, in fact, distinguishes between the productive conditions for science, which when it “hesitates to forget its founders is lost” [p. 138], and for humanities disciplines, which proceed not by jettisoning outmoded paradigms but accumulating them in contentious proliferation.) But then if fundamental disagreement has always been with us, it cannot be responsible for a problem that has become generally evident only in conjunction with the “historical turn” of thirty or so years ago. A radical dissensus might even be taken for a sign of disciplinary health. According to G. Thomas Tanselle, reviewing the claims of “some recent editors” that “the field is at present in a state of crisis,” the fact “that different people hold different opinions about basic issues is not a sign of crisis; it points to the perennial situation in any challenging and lively field” (“Historicism,” p. 153). A foolish consistency, you can say, is the hobgoblin of little disciplines, and when the discipline is Shakespeare studies, a smart inconsistency might seem not only good for business but appropriate to the subject. If Shakespearean drama is a gallimaufry or mingle-mangle—text and performance, comedy and tragedy, main and subplot, canting and inkhorn terms, religious ritual and commercial entertainment, high and low culture, etc.—a Shakespeare studies in agreement about its object of study might seem to have abandoned any claim to interpretive authority. But the fact that we hold different opinions about basic issues is no more a cause for celebration than it is for grief. It is just the field on which we are playing, not the game being played, still less evidence that the game is being played badly or well. If we seem to be especially sensitive at present to the disadvantages of disagreement, this is more the symptom of a problem than its cause. In order to identify whatever it is that inhibits Shakespeare studies these days, we need to get beyond the idea of cognitive consensus as the be-all and end-all of disciplinary vitality, and here A. C. Bradley can help. At the beginning of “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,” Bradley declares his intention “to consider poetry in its essence,” and thus not to dismiss “metrical form” as “mere accident.” Essence-vs.-accident is a standard topos in Platonic and Scholastic traditions, and given Bradley’s philosophical training, we seem to be on track for a more or less analytically rigorous discourse. But then the argument abruptly abjures precise language and veers in a totally different direction: without here aiming at accuracy, we may say that an actual poem is the succession of experiences—sounds, images, thoughts, emotions—through which we pass when we are reading as poetically

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as we can. Of course this imaginative experience—if I may use the phrase for brevity—differs with every reader and every time of reading: a poem exists in innumerable degrees. But that insurmountable fact lies in the nature of things and does not concern us now. (p. 4) All the ontological-sounding claims now hang on to nothing. Poems are described not as objects but as subjective experiences, and the description goes round in a circle: poems are what happens to us when we read poetically, and reading poetically is what we do when we read poems. Moreover, these tail-chasing experiences turn out to be almost infinitely variable, corresponding to the “innumerable” readers and times of reading by whom and during which a given poem is engaged. In this context, what I have called “a given poem” may sound like a meaningless phrase, but Bradley would concede the point. His intention, he declares, is not “to give a definition of poetry. To define poetry as something that goes on in us when we read poetically would be absurd indeed.” His “object,” rather, is to recall for his readers the distinction between “poetical reading” on the one hand and “such experience as is evoked in us when we read[,] let us say, a newspaper article” on the other (p. 28). A long history of philosophical ref lection—not to say roiling contention—is concealed under the placid tone of “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake.” In diverting our attention from a particular kind of text (poetry, literature) to a particular way of engaging with texts (reading poetically), Bradley works out of what John Guillory describes as “the central problem of Kantian aesthetics,” the “attempt to give the grounds or conditions for judgments of taste in the constitution of a perceiving subject . . . rather than in the properties of an aesthetic object” (Cultural Capital, pp. 274–5). As Jonathan Loesberg puts it, Kant’s “third critique analyzes and justifies a form of judgment not a set of objects classed as art” (A Return, p. 74). Furthermore, when Bradley adds that “aesthetic apprehension” is not limited to “a work of art” but available equally whether “the object” of its regard “belongs to ‘Nature’ or to ‘Man’ ” (p. 29), he is again working (consciously or not) out of Kant, for whom aesthetic response was more likely to be produced from engaging with natural phenomena (a sunset is a text that can be read poetically, birdsong can be heard on a register of purely disinterested delight) than with manmade objects, where a consciousness of purpose is bound to compromise the preferred kind of experience. The relevant distinction here is with Hegel, whose Lectures on Art, “in overturning the priorities

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of Kant” and emphasizing “the artistic beautiful against the natural beautiful” (Uhlig, p. 36), sought to transfer the main focus of aesthetic analysis from an interpretive engagement to the properties of a human artifact. Bradley cannot be unaware of the complex philosophical traditions out of which he is making his particular—and, for a self-declared Hegelian, peculiar—choices; but they do not seem to matter. Most of his audience would have been unfamiliar with the details of Kant’s Kritik of Judgment or Hegel’s Lectures on Art; but for Bradley, the “truths thus suggested” by the distinctions between reading poetically and reading journalistically (“say, a newspaper article”) are ones he can “suppose my readers to know” already—“so obvious” that “a bare reminder of them would be enough” (p. 28). Bradley’s program assumes consensus as fully as does Guy and Small’s “discipline of knowledge,” but it is consensus of a different kind. Definitive precision about the ontological status of poetic language, detailed understanding of the phenomenological processes involved in reading poetically—all this (to recall the end of the paragraph I quoted earlier) “does not concern us here.” The consensus for reading poetically is rather, Bradley declares, based on “these things. First this experience is an end in itself, is worth having on its own account, has an intrinsic value. Next, its poetic value is this intrinsic worth alone” (p. 4). Intrinsic value; reading poetically is a good thing. The “truths” that we may be “supposed . . . to know” turn out to be values that we can be expected to share; they are centered not in the conclusions of the reason but in the convictions of the will. Reading poetically is something we want to do—a discipline, first and foremost, of desire. The distinction I am making here, between reason and will or knowledge and desire, has a venerable pedigree. It was already traditional in 1644, when Milton’s Of Education argued, unlike Bradley, for the primacy of knowledge: “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him” (pp. 366–7). It was a contentious issue among thirteenth-century theologians: they divided their subject between the Franciscans, represented by Bonaventure, whose “affective voluntarism” emphasized “the role of will and love, more than of intellect and knowledge,” and the Dominicans, represented by Aquinas, whose “trust in reason” dictated that “the intellect leads in theology, not the will or the heart” (New Catholic Encyclopedia, pp. 906–7). In the Sphere of the Sun, Paradiso XI and XII, St. Francis and St. Dominic are represented in relation to the angelic orders associated with their specific beliefs:

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“The one was all seraphic in ardor; the other, for wisdom, was on earth a splendor of cherubic light.” The distinction is firmly established, then decisively erased. “I will speak of one,” Aquinas tells Dante, “because in praising one, whichever be taken, both are spoken of, for their labors were to one same end” (Singleton, p. 121). In what follows, St. Francis’s life story is put in Aquinas’s mouth, St. Dominic’s in Bonaventure’s, the reversal of affiliation playing out the inconsequentiality of the difference, the whole episode culminating in a dance. That’s the way it is in Paradise, but for those of us who have not yet been assumed into the celestial harmony, the “jealousies and disputes which often estranged the orders” remain (Sinclair, p. 172). In aligning myself with Bradley and maybe Dante (though where he comes down on this issue is not clear), I do not mean to minimize the importance of intellectual coherence. Guy and Small are right. A clear sense of subject and method along with the ability to theorize critical practice, to explain its underlying principles and provide an “explicit elaboration” of “the appropriateness and utility of the explanation”—all this is indispensable for academic discourse, and much of chapter 1 will be arguing the case for disciplinary norms as the custodians of clarity and interpretive authority. But disciplinary norms have been developed over time, and the interpretive authority they produce is similarly subject to change. Coherence is what counts as coherence in a particular context, and this context is determined in large part by the felt needs of the historical subjects inhabiting it. From this angle, the ability to theorize a critical practice, while necessary, is not sufficient to sustain that practice; theoretical explanation cannot ground critical activity without itself being grounded in a conviction of the value of the activity explained. The conviction of value is crucial. Despite the cheery aphorism that even a job not worth doing is worth doing well, it is hard keep up a performance without believing in it. If we take care of will, reason will take care of itself. Whatever the malaise, maybe even crisis in Shakespeare studies, it originates in the realm of desire.

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CH A P T E R

ON E

Return of the Aesthetic?

When Stephen Greenblatt expresses “dismay” at the “insensitivity to the imaginative dimension” among members of “my profession,” his tone takes on a bit of the voice crying in the wilderness, but this wilderness is well populated with other voices; a significant number of critics have, in recent years, been similarly lamenting our apostasy from (or at least “losing sight of ”) the core values of our discipline—the experience of “literary power,” which is “the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the first place” (Hamlet, p. 4). Books appear called Revenge of the Aesthetic (Clark) and A Return to Aesthetics (Loesberg); others appear called Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (Rasmussen) and Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Cohen); MLA sessions are devoted to a “new formalism,” and a critical mass of interest develops around this idea to the point where the PMLA commissions a full-scale ref lection on the question “What Is New Formalism?” for its regularly scheduled section on The Changing Profession (Levinson). If a new formalism is emerging in Shakespeare studies, what happened to the old one? If the aesthetic is returning, when and why did it go away? This chapter begins with a review of recent developments, more analytically ref lective than the breathless Cook’s Tour in the Introduction, which can account for the concerted efforts to restore an aesthetic dimension to critical work. These efforts have not been generally successful, and the rest of the chapter offers two explanations why that may be. The first, under the rubric “Disciplinary Development, Disciplinary Identity,” argues that the attempt to reconcile aesthetics with the sociological interests dominating current work violates the requirement for distinct identity established by the long history of disciplinary development. The second, “Desire,” claims that we lack the

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conviction necessary to bring about a more-than-nominal restoration of aesthetic interest to the center of critical practice. Desire is, I take it, the fundamentally decisive factor, so let me introduce the idea here, beginning with the title of this chapter. As an off-key conf lation of Jonathan Loesberg’s and Michael P. Clark’s titles cited just above, “Return of the Aesthetic?” is designed to highlight the equivocations in these phrases. Loesberg’s chief claim in A Return to Aesthetics is that the critique of aesthetic discourse in Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu depends on the principles and assumptions of the very discourse it purports to critique. As Loesberg describes it, the process by which Foucault and Derrida return to aesthetics occurs in a way largely independent of their own critical purposes. From this angle, it appears that Foucault and Derrida are not so much returning to aesthetics as that aesthetics is returning to them. In the case of Bourdieu, this reversal of trajectory is even more striking. Since Bourdieu wants to claim “scienticity” for “what he does” (p. 201), he is eager to occlude the fact that a subjectivity of judgment, like that of aesthetic experience, “permeates” his own “key anthropological concepts and ideas” (p. 202). As a result, when the aesthetic returns to haunt Bourdieu’s critique, it does so in a way that is not only independent of but f latly contradictory to his intentions. Loesberg’s way of putting this, that Bourdieu “represses the aesthetic basis of his analysis of culture and finally of aesthetics” (p. 201), makes explicit what I have been trying to suggest: a return to aesthetics might be characterized as the return of the repressed. Clark’s title points in the same direction. Revenge of the Aesthetic comes from Murray Krieger’s claim that the “aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate that is also a power to undermine.” The reactive tenor of this assertion is striking, and Clark, who takes Krieger’s words as the head-quotation for his Introduction, absorbs their aggressive defensiveness into his own originating claim: “the importance of aesthetic values,” he declares, “has taken on a contrarian quality today as aesthetic issues have often been displaced from a field that only twenty years ago could still be called ‘literary’ theory” (p. 1). A similar tone is sustained through to the end of Clark’s Introduction, where we find another quotation from Krieger, this one claiming that poetry “ ‘warns us to distrust the decisions we must make’ ” and “ ‘to tread with a light foot and a heavy heart.’ ” As Clark acknowledges, this is “a rather somber burden for a defense of poetry” (p. 22). What is common to these discussions is equivocation—frequently reluctance and sometimes even resistance. No one welcomes the

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aesthetic with open arms. There is little here of the pleasure of the text, as Roland Barthes describes it, or of the joyous surprise Wordsworth finds in an imaginative engagement with the natural world, or of the unalloyed delight in such an engagement that Kant, hearing the spontaneous song of a bird, describes as a “pure aesthetical judgment” (Kritik, §42, p. 181). All this suggests why, despite all the protestations about a desire to do so, we have been unable to bring aesthetic interest back into the center of literary study. The desire is not adequate to the undertaking. We haven’t returned to the aesthetic because we do not really want to. * *

*

During the past thirty years or so, Shakespeareans have transferred critical energy away from literary analysis. We tend to focus less on aesthetic than on historical topics. Instead of asking how Shakespeare’s texts work to engage interpretive interest, we ask from what situations the plays were generated, by what audiences engaged, and for what purposes. It was not new for Shakespeareans thirty years ago to ask historical questions. Historical understanding had become obligatory during the nineteenth century, when literary studies took on the responsibilities of disciplinary professionalism. But the more recent “historical turn” was to a different area of subjectivity, situated nearer the bottom of the social order. As this new subject emerged from below the radar of previous work, we focused more on the way different beliefs and assumptions produced different versions of what really happened, so that history, at least as practiced in literature departments, turned into an increasingly historiographic—that is, epistemologically self-conscious—enterprise. From these new perspectives, the often unifying and idealizing conclusions of earlier analysis began to look like strategies for containment, and the formal properties—verbal, structural, generic, conventional— with which Shakespearean artifacts seemed formerly to be put together exerted a less compelling claim on our attention than the competing sociopolitical interests that tended to tear Shakespearean texts—and our understandings of these texts—apart. One corollary of the new historical context for Shakespeare studies has been a relocation of the subject from literary to theatrical experience—from the page to the stage, as the familiar binary puts it. Writing and reading are never wholly private or transcendent activities, motivated exclusively by a disinterested “purposiveness without purpose” (Kant’s phrase, to which I shall return). Rather, to recall Edward Said’s

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point from the Introduction, texts “are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society—in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly” (“The World,” p. 35). But theatrical production and playgoing are more immediately implicated in the commercial realities of a public market and more closely attuned to the appropriative and often contending interests of its spectators. From this angle, the redistribution of critical energy I mentioned at the beginning can be characterized as a turn from the literary to the performance text. Performance was not a new term for Shakespeareans thirty years ago, not even when Dr. Johnson’s Prologue at the opening of Drury Lane (1747) acknowledged the theater’s economic dependence on popular taste: “The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live” (McAdam, p. 89). But like the new history, the new performance criticism has taken a different object of interest. “What,” W. B. Worthen asks, “are dramatic performances performances of?” (“Drama,” 1100). The question is part of an attempt to liberate performance from what Worthen construes as its debilitating attachment to an author and a text. Instead of looking behind them for a static and closed origin, performance critics now look around them to other current performances as the field within which to locate theatrical meaning. Moreover, they extend this field far beyond the normative confines of earlier work. “Since the 1960s,” as Elin Diamond sees it, “performance has f loated free of theatre precincts to describe an enormous range of cultural activity” (p. 2). Books appear called The Performance of Power (Case and Reinelt) and Performing Nostalgia (Bennett). Judith Butler describes gender as “a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed” (p. 1). Our “ideas of national identity and imagined history” are now, according to Thomas Postlewait and Tracy C. Davis, regularly “constructed” in terms of “performed identity,” part of a process by which “the idea of performance” has been “expanded to embrace” a variety of concepts, institutions, and practices, including (all their terms) myth, play, role-playing, ceremony, carnival, everyday life, conventional behavior, and religious and social rituals (pp. 28–9). Surveying the “energetically expanding field” of performance studies, Worthen catalogs a similarly wide “range of aims, methods, and objects of inquiry,” made up of (all his terms) ethnographies of performance, psychoanalytic and postcolonial models of representation, institutional studies, studies of street performance, performance art, performance in everyday life, and identity performance (1094). For Diamond, the “terminological expansion” of “performance discourse, and its new theoretical partner, ‘performativity,’ ” has reached “almost to the point

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of stupefaction” (p. 2). As Richard Schechner puts it, “Performativity or, commonly, ‘performance’ is everywhere in life” (quoted in Postlewait and Davis, p. 33). There is another term whose explanatory reach competes with and probably even exceeds the grasp of “performance” in recent criticism, and Diamond identifies it with her reference to “cultural activity.” “Culture” has been an accommodating concept pretty much from the beginning. According to Raymond Williams in Keywords (a book that in fact originated with ref lection on the complicated history of “culture”), the term was “decisively introduced into English” by Edward Burnett Tylor in 1871 (p. 91). In Tylor’s definition, “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (p. 1). When Clifford Geertz acknowledges the “originative power” of “Tylor’s famous ‘most complex whole’ ” (“Thick Description,” p. 4), he is misquoting; but the added word, “most,” faithfully represents the expansive spirit of the original. Tylor’s definition is notable for its comprehensive range of reference. He enumerates an extensive list of the “capabilities and habits” by which people articulate and enact their identities in relation to one another and then, with “any other,” he invites us to extend the list as far as we can, toward an ever-increasing array of practices, the limits of which, like the Topsy-like performancestudies catalogs of a moment ago, are indefinite. (This suggests a way to solve Worthen’s problem of the limiting referent: “dramatic performances,” we can say, are “performances of culture.”) If, as Walter Benn Michaels suggests, “your culture is nothing more than what you do” (p. 138), it is also nothing less, and nothing seems to be left—or left out. Culture in this “wide ethnographic sense,” is all-inclusive. Culture is everything in life. The shifts I have been describing, from literary study to historical, performance and cultural studies, can be generalized as a turn away from textualism toward the contextualism that Said characterizes as “worldliness.” (The terminology is more convenient than precise: “textualism,” strictly speaking, is just a particular kind of contextualism, one in which interpretation is regulated by aesthetic interest.) The contextualist turn has often been celebrated for opening up a depleted critical practice to new vistas of experience and newly energized forms of an interpretive will to explore them. Writing in 1989, Stanley Fish affirmed his conviction that “the imperialistic success of literary studies” was “heartening” and “the emergence of cultural studies as a field

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of its own exhilarating” (“Being Interdisciplinary,” p. 242). In 2008, however, Fish’s attitude toward this expansion of critical horizons has become notably ambivalent, more inclined to acknowledge “its casualties” as well as its benefits (“French Theory”). In this respect, he expresses qualms similar to Said’s and Greenblatt’s described in the Introduction, and to many other commentators as well, who have been with increasing regularity asking skeptical questions whether the contextualist turn is giving us more freedom than we can manage. Postlewait and Davis, for instance, suggest that the “global reach” of performativity has made the idea too powerfully inclusive for its—or our—own good: “it is pleasing to subsume the various scholarly disciplines in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences under the rubric of performance, but . . . all human thought and behavior cannot be usefully explained by the single idea of performativity” (p. 33). Comparable doubts have been expressed about the infinitely expandable range of material now subsumed under the idea of culture. W. J. T. Mitchell is concerned about the extent to which “culture,” with its claim to constitute “a homogeneous field or grid of relationships governed by a single principle,” is “taking on renewed force as the master-concept for the humanities and social sciences.” For Geertz, the “Tylorean kind of pot-au-feu theorizing about culture,” though it was “a seminal idea,” has lost “the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had” and now leads to a “conceptual morass.” The “whole discipline of anthropology,” he adds, “has been increasingly concerned to limit, specify, focus, and contain” the term (“Thick Description,” p. 4). According to Stephen Greenblatt, whose piece on “Culture” takes Tylor’s definition in full as its starting point, “the term as Tylor uses it is almost impossibly vague and encompassing” and thus inadequate to serve as “the backbone of an innovative critical practice” (p. 225). As William B. Warner and Clifford Siskin put it, “The strategic vagueness of the term and concept ‘culture,’ which was so important to the inclusiveness, emancipatory promise, and growth of cultural studies, can no longer take literary studies where it needs to go” (p. 95). This apprehension, that the expanded subject matter of cultural studies actually diminishes its explanatory power, is given a presciently systematic expression by Fredric Jameson in a 1984 piece on “Periodizing the 60s.” For Jameson, the ubiquity of “culture” may be traced back to an earlier master-concept—“theory.” From the pan-textualist position of theory, with all knowledge immersed in a sea of signs, the claim of any “particular traditional discipline” to “express something

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other than itself, namely truth or meaning,” is “contemptuously characterized as the illusion of reference,” the “mere addition of another text to what is now conceived as an infinite chain of texts . . . drawn from the most wildly distant disciplines.” Jameson’s primary exhibit for the collapse of disciplinary prestige is philosophy, though he adds in a laconic parenthesis that the “analogy with the evolution of literary and cultural studies”—that is, the evolution of a specifically literary into an all-inclusive cultural studies—is “obvious” (pp. 193–4). When culture replaces language as the substance within which all being is constituted, it experiences a “prodigious expansion” and “becomes coterminous with social life in general; now all the levels become ‘acculturated,’ and in the society of the spectacle, the image, or the simulacrum, everything has at length become cultural, from the superstructures down into the mechanisms of the infrastructure itself.” In this situation, “artifacts have become the random experiences of daily life itself,” and “further discussion of what used to be called ‘culture’ proper” (or, it would seem, of anything else in its distinct specificity) has become “problematic”—if not, indeed, impossible (p. 201). As these ref lections trickled down into the professional conversation, we have been led back toward those “particular traditional disciplines” whose truth- or meaning-claims now seem less worthy of “contemptuous” dismissal. In the case of literary study, this has entailed a renewed interest in an aesthetic engagement with texts. In 1993 it seemed to John Guillory that “the thorough dismissal of the aesthetic as an ‘ideology’ has . . . become a ubiquitous gesture on the contemporary critical scene” (Cultural Capital, p. 271), but this situation was beginning to change even as Guillory described it. In the following year, George Levine, concerned with the tendency in recent work to the “assimilation of literature to ideology” (p. 1) and of “critical practice to exercises in political positioning” (p. 2), introduced a collection on Aesthetics and Ideology with a piece designed to “reclaim the aesthetic”—that is, to “imagine the aesthetic” as “a mode that operates differently from others and contributes in distinctive ways to the possibilities of human fulfillment and connection” (p. 3). By December 1998, Levine had his wish, at least to judge from the headline on the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Beauty is Back,” it declared, hooking readers to a piece with the lead, “Wearying of Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty” (Heller, A15). Another Chronicle piece the next July began with an inversion of Guillory. “Bashing cultural studies has become a popular academic pastime,” Rita Felski declares, a result of the “upsurge of interest in aesthetics” that portrays cultural

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studies as hostile (B6). Unfairly so, she claims, because cultural studies “has always been concerned with language and form . . . as much about the aesthetic dimension of the social world as it is about the social dimension of a work of art” (B7). That same year, the idea of a return to aesthetics was represented as a “hopeful sign” in Andrew Delbanco’s otherwise gloomy New York Review piece on “The Decline and Fall of Literature”: “One hears of ‘defending the literary,’ and of the return of beauty as a legitimate subject for analysis and appreciation” (38). Felski’s accommodating tone resonates with the bridge-building program that prompted the editors of PMLA, two years earlier, to invite “comments on the actual or potential relations between cultural studies and the literary”—an invitation so compelling that thirty-two readers took the trouble to respond (Forum 257). According to the journal’s program issues, MLA conferences around this time include membergenerated sessions representing the same set of concerns: “Formalism,” “Toward a New Formalism in Renaissance Studies,” “Does Cultural Studies Have Bad Taste?”; and a three-part program arranged by the Division on Middle English Language and Literature devoted to “Historicism and Literary Values.”1 Michael Clark’s reference to the “contrarian quality” of aesthetic interest sounds like a toned-down version of Guillory’s “thorough dismissal of the aesthetic,” but by the time Clark made it, seven years after Guillory’s pronouncement, a felt need to find room for the old aesthetics within the newly dominant mode of cultural studies is a vitally motivating factor, if not “a ubiquitous gesture on the contemporary critical scene.” Within Shakespeare studies, one of the earliest acknowledgments of this felt need may be found in Patricia Parker’s Literary Fat Ladies (1987). Parker worries about an overcompensating “reaction” among Shakespeareans to the “decades of formalism” dominating previous work: “to focus exclusively on questions of social and political context,” she cautions, to foreground the “political Shakespeare” without also taking seriously the linguistic one, is, for all its recontextualizing value, not just to work to the detriment of the kind of formal analysis that still so much needs to be done but unnecessarily to shortcircuit or foreclose the process of moving from literary text to social text. (p. 94) Parker concludes her argument with the suggestion “that the impasse of a now apparently outworn formalism and a new competing emphasis

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on politics and history might be breached by questions which fall in between and hence remain unasked by both” (p. 96). Parker features prominently in Russ’s McDonald’s Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, which develops more systematically both the idea of an impasse in current work and of a remedial negotiation between an earlier and a more recent critical practice. McDonald builds his analysis from the situation in the 1980s when a “ ‘New Historicism’ or a ‘cultural poetics’ established the terms . . . in which context supplanted text and history dominated poetry.” Conceived as an alternative to the “mechanical readings of an exhausted New Criticism,” this “new phase” itself quickly became a routinized “formula” and “fostered its own excesses”: the “capacious angle of vision” required by the “practice of reading culture” has “perforce diminished the details of the textual object,” resulting in “a virtual disappearance of the particular and a devaluation of the ‘artistic.’ ” In McDonald’s conclusion, “We are in need of some means of reconciling the distant and recent pasts,” an “attempt at a rapprochement” (pp. 2–3). The scrupulously evenhanded balance of McDonald’s argument struck a responsive chord. In Shakespeare and Social Dialogue (1999), Lynne Magnusson starts with the claim that “as the new historicism or cultural poetics took hold in the 1980s,” it “drained much of the energy and interest out of language-oriented studies” and so produced an “impasse” (again) in “Renaissance and Shakespeare studies with regards to close verbal analysis.” She urges Shakespeareans “to negotiate some common ground between close reading and cultural poetics” (pp. 5, 7). In the same year, Catherine Belsey builds her argument in Shakespeare and The Loss of Eden on a similar foundation: while she “unreservedly welcome[s]” the new cultural studies and does “not want to return to . . . New Criticism,” she is “uneasy about the predominantly thematic character” and “decline of close reading” in current work. It is “imperative,” she concludes, “if we are to make good cultural history, to take account of the modes of address of the texts we analyse” (p. 14). Three years later, Mark Rasmussen begins “New Formalisms?”, the Introduction to his collection on Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, with the claim that the “movement toward cultural studies” in “virtually every area of literary study today” has tended “to interpret Renaissance works as bundles of historical or cultural content, without much attention to the ways that their meanings are shaped and enabled by the possibilities of form.” Although he would “encourage a shift” toward “a fuller and more selfconscious engagement with questions of form” (p. 1), he has no desire, he assures us, “to replace other critical approaches” (p. 9).

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These arguments are not identical to one another, but their extraordinary convergence seems to add up to a shared project for remediating the malaise felt to exist in Shakespeare studies. In 2007 this project—call it the reconciliation agenda—acquires a kind of general status in “What Is New Formalism?”, Marjorie Levinson’s PMLA piece mentioned earlier,2 reinforced by two specifically Shakespearean events: the Shakespeare Association of America conference devoted its unique plenary to “Historical Formalism in Shakespeare Studies”; and Stephen Cohen’s Shakespeare and Historical Formalism offered the most systematic version so far of the argument for “reconciling distant and recent pasts.” As Cohen sees it, where the “ahistorical formalism” of New Criticism led in “the 1960s to its own repudiation by a cultural studies movement wary of any sort of literary exceptionalism,” New Historicism, rising “to prominence in the early 1980s” and determined to retain formalist interests within its own culturalist focus, seemed “poised to break this cycle” (p. 1). But New Historicism never “engaged the complex question of form,” so the “promise of a historical formalism has gone largely unfulfilled.” For a way out of “the resultant critical doldrums” (p. 2), Cohen urges us to explore the “mutual implication” of “literature’s formal individuation and its historical situation” (p. 3), thereby to realize the values of “a true historical formalism” (p. 21, note 7). These signs of intensified interest, however, are ambiguous as evidence for interpretive power. Conference Program Committee decisions are overdetermined by unknown contingencies, and it would be foolhardy to make much of a plenary title. Levinson’s piece uncovers a vast body of material in “post-2000 scholarship that lays claim to a resurgent formalism” (558) and, in an expanded version available online, an even more vast body over a longer period of time; but she acknowledges that the critics she cites are frequently at odds with one another and reluctant to view their work as part of any general trend. Although her piece appeared under the rubric of “New Theories and Methodologies,” she concludes that the “new formalism” is “better described as a movement than a theory or method” (558). Cohen’s Introduction testifies to the sustained appeal of the reconciliation program but also, in its felt need to go over the ground Parker and the others had already marked out, to the sustained failure of the program to have taken us anywhere. Remarkable as it is in itself, this consensus around the desirability of harmonizing textualist and contextual interests is even more remarkable for having apparently produced no decisive consequences.

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The inertia is highlighted in Cohen’s claim that by “ ‘crossing’ form and history,” historical formalism “refines and reforms [Louis Adrian] Montrose’s ‘historicity of texts and textuality of histories’: the historicity of forms, and the forms of history” (p. 14). In troping Montrose’s chiasmus with one of his own, Cohen knows he is traveling a road paved with rhetorically similar intentions (p. 4; p. 22, note 11; p. 26, note 48). In 1982, prior to Montrose’s earliest use of the figure (he would go on to massage it into two distinct versions distributed among three separate publications), Stephen Greenblatt produced The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance. Since this publication effectively established “New Historicism” as the phrase used to identify the endeavor, chiasmus may be said to inhere in the very origin of the line Cohen wishes to extend. Parker carries on this line in her final words about Shakespeare in Literary Fat Ladies, referring to “the order of discourse and the discourse of order” in the plays (p. 96). Chiasmus, moreover, is not limited to Shakespeare studies. In an expansive echo of Felski’s “as much about the aesthetic dimension of the social world as it is about the social dimension of a work of art,” Michael Clark tells us that Roland Barthes’s concept of Text does not situate the word in the world, as historicists would attempt to do, nor the world in the word, as formalists might argue: it confounds those terms entirely by treating the word as world, by recognizing in the word the weighty materiality of its worldly existence as part of our lived experience. (p. 7) The presence of chiasmus in so much current work is probably explained by the aura of authority derived from ideas dating back to antiquity, Concors discordia and the Aristotelian mean, which seek not to split the difference between opposing values but to include them within a comprehensively balanced response (Pechter, Dryden, pp. 62–87). The classical origins are mediated by neoclassicism, as evident in the last of the two “Thames couplets” in Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill (1668), “Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, / Strong without rage, without ore-f lowing full,” which were, according to Brendan O Hehir, “imitated, parodied, contemplated and admired to infinity during the following century” (p. 36). Charged with the powerful ideas and feelings of this rich tradition, chiasmus may be said to be the defining trope of the reconciliation agenda. Even those critics who do not actually use the figure implicitly appropriate its values as the structure by which their own claims to harmonize divergent interests are sustained.

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Or, rather, left unsustained; for as Cohen’s finely detailed analysis demonstrates, even as the language works to convey the impression of reconciliation, the actuality of reconciliation continues to elude our grasp. Despite the strong arguments with which it has been represented by so many critics over so long a period of time, the endorsements it has received from the most inf luential of scholars (over-the-top blurb puffs on the back cover of Rasmussen’s book from Stanley Fish, David Bevington, and Arthur Kinney), and its immediate appeal to common sense and goodwill—despite all this, the desire for a “rapprochement” between “close reading and cultural poetics” is as fully unsatisfied now as when it was first expressed. Given this long history of frustration, the project begins to look like a rhetorical construction in the strictly pejorative sense—stylistic effects substituting for a critical coherence. If this is so, there is some basis to fear that “the historicity of forms and the forms of history” will turn out to be just one more dead chiasmus f loating around us as we stagnate in the critical doldrums. I: Disciplinary Coherence, Disciplinary Difference What makes the reconciliation agenda so much easier to put into words than into action? What obstacles limit its fulfillment? One answer is suggested by “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism,” the piece synopsized in the Introduction, which describes the “institutionalized norms” and “field-dependent constraints on the published interpretation of literature” (p. 77). Fahnestock and Secor assume (1) that uncommunicated knowledge is inert (as the Duke puts it in Measure for Measure, “if our virtues / Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike / As if we had them not” [1.1.33–5]); and (2) that effective communication, in the case of a complex discourse like Shakespeare studies, depends on a myriad of rhetorical protocols and conceptual guidelines. Shakespeareans play an elaborate and highly conventionalized language game, and to play it well requires playing by the rules. The same might be said about the participants in other language games—campaign orators, car salesmen, pastoral poets, et al.; but as practitioners of academic discourse, Shakespeareans have a particular responsibility to the norms of intellectual coherence specific to our game, and these norms are defined by the boundaries that differentiate the territories of specialized knowledge. It is first of all here, in our obligations to the discipline-specific value of intellectual coherence, that the reconciliation agenda runs into problems.

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Stephen Orgel, addressing the World Shakespeare Congress convened in 1981 under the rubric “Shakespeare, Man of the Theater” (both the date and the rubric are worth noting), argues that the playscript behind every Shakespearean text, as “the property of the performers, not of playwrights, audiences, or readers,” is “essentially unstable and changes as the performers decide to change it.” From this perspective, Orgel concludes “that the real play is the performance, not the text; that to fix the text, transform it into a book, is to defeat it” (“Shakespeare,” p. 43, Orgel’s emphases). Five years later, Orgel teases out the implications of this argument for a critical practice aspiring to historicist claims. In the Renaissance, he claims, Even authorial texts would have been far more f luid, far more unstable, than most of us, with our yearnings toward final and authoritative versions, will wish to allow. We believe that texts develop and evolve toward publication, and that publishing texts fixes them; we expend great efforts on “establishing” texts that we can then call “authentic.” The claim is historically inaccurate, and blinds us to the true nature of the phenomena we are dealing with. (“Authentic Shakespeare,” 10) With “true nature,” “historically accurate,” and “essentially . . . real,” Orgel deploys highly charged concepts to promote a far-reaching claim. His argument is directed in the first instance against the practices of Shakespearean critical editing; but since editing, by establishing the object of study, is interpretive through and through—“not a prerequisite to scholarly literary criticism,” as G. Thomas Tanselle puts it, but “a part of that criticism” (“Textual Study,” p. 337)—Orgel’s claim has consequences for interpretive activity in general, especially for the kind of practical criticism by which New Critics sought to represent the unified design of literary texts. As Orgel sees it, such a method, at least when applied to Renaissance plays, is “historically inaccurate” and “blind to the true nature of the phenomena.” To exemplify his preferred practice, Orgel focuses on five Fuseli and Zoffani illustrations of Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard in a scene “deriving initially” from a 1744 production of Macbeth (“Authentic Shakespeare,” 14). “Each in its way makes claims to authenticity,” he says, “but means something quite different by the concept. . . . What we want is not the authentic play, with its unstable, infinitely revisable script, but an authentic Shakespeare, to whom every generation’s version of classic drama may be ascribed” (“Authentic Shakespeare,” 24). Orgel describes

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these illustrations as “performances of the same Shakespearean scene,” but his claim is rather their dissociation from anything we might imagine as an originating Shakespearean authority: the “substitution of the elegant attire of high society for the costumes of the stage makes a clear . . . assertion that has nothing to do with Macbeth: that actors and actresses are gentlemen and ladies” (“Authentic Shakespeare,” 20). “Nothing to do with Macbeth”: in disconnecting the “authentic play” as infinitely revisable performance so sharply from the “authentic Shakespeare,” the cultural icon (the Bard, the commodity with the right stuff ), the entire apparatus of “The Authentic Shakespeare” might be transferred to the authorship controversy. Instead of eighteenthcentury illustrations, we could study the texts of J. Thomas Looney and Charlton Ogburn, say, as cultural artifacts in a struggle for the legitimating power of Shakespeare. The authorship question has regularly centered on questions of social legitimation (how could an ignorant glover’s son from a provincial market town know so much about the ways of the Court? how produce such monumental achievements?), and it still centers on legitimation, though now that the concept of an inherited aristocracy has lost its cachet, the issue has been re-framed in terms of an elite professionalism. Hence Ogburn’s analogy between the professors and the bureaucrats, one group resisting his parents’ Oxfordian claims, the other his pleas to disengage from Vietnam: “I fought the Indo-China battle while I was helping my parents fight the Shakespeare battle, and, by God, they had a lot in common! What I was saying was not the thing to say. The State Department had the authority. Who was I?” (Lardner, 89). Through all these modifications, one feature remains constant, precisely the feature Orgel emphasizes—dissociation. The authority of the name “Shakespeare” has nothing to do with the plays Shakespeare (or somebody else) wrote. You might argue that both the illustrations and the authorship controversy have something to do with Macbeth, since Macbeth itself has something to do with rank and social legitimacy, equivocally right and wrong ways to become Thane of Cawdor or King of Scotland, for instance, or with those violated gender norms—doing more than “all that may become a man”; “unsex me here”—that prevent us from attaining the status of “gentlemen and ladies.” Presumably, though, this argument would rely on a notion of textual stability, “Macbeth itself,” that is blind to the true nature of the phenomena. How in any case should we understand the assumptions motivating such a strong dissociative claim? To synopsize the current story: the transformation from a religious and aristocratic to a secular and

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mercantile realm democratizes but also commodifies culture, generating the need for a re-auratized measure of authority within an emergent public sphere. This need produces literature as a back formation, which entails the establishment of a literary canon, which in turn requires the determination of a center. Since any center will do, the accession of “Shakespeare” to the privileged position Michael Dobson describes as the “national poet” is essentially independent of any intrinsic qualities attributed to the plays. (I take the skeptical quotation marks around Shakespeare from W. B. Worthen, whose brilliant Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance shares Orgel’s strong advocacy of performative rather than literary values.) “Shakespeare” is a structural necessity without positive content; its full power derives from malleable emptiness. “Shakespeare” is that it is. Not everyone understands the study of Shakespeare in these terms. Michael Bristol, for instance, claims that there is more to Shakespeare’s staying power than the repetitive chronicle of appropriation and return on investment. Shakespeare’s plays are not just ephemeral products of the culture industry. [I] would suggest that the supply side hypothesis is at best incomplete, and that the story of Shakespeare’s cultural endurance can be “nothing so crude” as an account of commercial practices all by itself, no matter how detailed or how revelatory. A full explanation of Shakespeare’s cultural authority also has to consider the specific shape of “the great stories.” (Big-time Shakespeare, p. 117, 123) From Bristol’s perspective, the staying power of “Shakespeare” is not totally disconnected from Shakespeare: the “specific shape” of the plays themselves contributes to their enduring interest. In subsequent editorial work, Orgel has apparently come around to something like Bristol’s position. Merely by undertaking editorial work, as in his Oxford Winter’s Tale, Orgel seems to ignore the claim, advanced eight years earlier in “The Authentic Shakespeare,” that “to fix the text [in] a book is to defeat it”; and in the specific procedures implemented in his edition, as John Jowett remarks, “Orgel edits undef lected by” the “theoretical complications” of his previous work (“Year’s Work,” p. 267). Nora Johnson notes the same inconsistency. In contrast to earlier claims on behalf of an authorless and infinitely revisable play script, the “essential drifting” with which Derrida characterizes “orphaned writing” (Margins, p. 316), Orgel now declares that “James represented the royal mind as

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programmatically occluded, a politic obscurantism that may certainly be ref lected in the linguistic obscurity of Leontes’s (or Macbeth’s, or Cymbeline’s) court” (“Introduction,” p. 13). The comment restabilizes and reunifies the text (three texts, in fact, separated by several years and distinct generic signals) by simply transferring its ownership—coherent authorial-cum-parental control—from the Bard to the King. “The risk here,” as Johnson shrewdly remarks, “lies in substituting a broadly historical referent—‘authority’—for the kinds of verbal indeterminacy that Orgel himself values as a textual editor” (433). Orgel himself had remarked on the inconsistency earlier than either Jowett or Johnson: “I am the first to admit that my own practice in my Oxford Tempest and Winter’s Tale hasn’t done much to take into account my own arguments in ‘What is a Text?’ and ‘The Authentic Shakespeare’ ” (“What is an Editor?”, p. 25). As Orgel’s insouciant tone suggests, there is no scandal here. People change their minds from one project to the next. We should distinguish between the people producing criticism, whose beliefs are changeable and even contradictory, and the arguments of the criticism they produce, which are internally consistent, at least if the critics are any good. Orgel, who is as good as it gets, argues as though the intrinsic qualities of a Shakespeare play are hallucinations, disconnected from the “real play,” “historically inaccurate,” and “blind to the true nature of the phenomena.” This repudiation of aesthetic interest may not correspond to Stephen Kitay Orgel’s personal belief, but it provides a foundation for the materialist cultural studies on which the author of “Shakespeare Imagines a Theater” and “The Authentic Shakespeare” can build an effective argument. Elizabeth Hanson makes the point explicitly, claiming that Lady Mary Wroth is “entitled to serious and detailed consideration” not despite but precisely because the “aesthetic limitation” of her work “activates important questions about the relation between social experience and literary production in this period.” If you’re interested in “a strategy of socio-political reading,” according to Hanson, “the recognition of aesthetic limitation, as opposed to the denial or bracketing of it,” serves as the “point of departure” (167). It works the other way round as well. If you’re interested in aesthetic engagement, then the exclusion of the sociopolitical serves as your starting point. Consider Coleridge who, in his Table Talk for March 15, 1834, declared: I believe Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local

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allusions of no consequence. As I said, he is of no age—nor of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind. (Woodring, p. 468) This is someone truly indifferent to historical context. Sometimes Coleridge even willfully suppresses historical knowledge, as when he dismisses the “black African” Othello he understands to be the intention of “Shakespeare himself ” in favor of the “tawny Moor” he deems appropriate to the “poet for all ages” (Raysor, Shakespearean Criticism, 1. p. 42). How could Coleridge so f lagrantly disregard the material conditions for the production and reception of Shakespeare’s plays? The answer is, he didn’t. According to R. A. Foakes, Coleridge “attempted from the first” to set Shakespeare in the context of the development not only of English drama, using the recent work of Warton and Malone, but of ancient drama too, and citing Hooker, Ralegh, Chapman, Bacon, Spenser, Davies, and Sidney in his lectures, he demonstrated that the sixteenth century provided a context “favourable to the existence & full development of Shakespeare.” (Foakes, Editor’s Introduction, p. lxviii) If Coleridge really believed that social conditions did not matter, he would not have written the agonized lines in “Fears in Solitude” about British participation in the enslavement and transportation of black Africans (“We have offended, Oh! my countrymen! . . . the sons of God, / Our brethren!”); and he would not have produced the often fiercely engaged political arguments that fill up Volumes 2, 3, 6, and 10 of the Princeton edition. Coleridge too seems to have changed his mind from one project to the next. But whatever Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed, the author of the Shakespearean commentary published (posthumously) under his name writes as though the sociopolitical does not matter. Its absence occupies the same foundational position in Coleridgean aesthetics as the erasure of the aesthetic does in a materialist cultural studies. *

*

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By now, one reason why the reconciliation agenda has been so difficult to implement should be evident. You cannot reconcile a worldly

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cultural studies and aesthetic interest—the sociology of literature and literary study, historicism and formalism, contextualism and textualism—because they are mutually exclusive modes of understanding. The result is bound to be incoherence, which is not only an undesirable effect in academic discourse, but a potentially destructive one as well. After all, these differences not only exclude but constitute each other. Academic disciplines require exclusion (you can do something only by delimiting the area of action—not doing something else); without differences, academic disciplines would cease to exist (like Iago, they are “nothing if not critical”). From this angle, the reconciliation agenda is likely to undermine the precarious stability it was designed to shore up. Instead of remedying a malaise, it will (if it doesn’t first disintegrate into its own contradictions) terminate the patient. It is not just epistemological constraints, the rules of the disciplinary language game, that work against the reconciliation program; there are historical pressures as well. The rules have been developed over a long period of time, during which the institutional sites of the disciplines were being established; and these sites—the academic field on which the game is played—rely on the same processes of mutual exclusion described here. According to Stephen Schryer, literature and sociology departments achieved identity during the middle of the twentieth century “in a dialectical interplay with their own disciplinary other” (668). John Guillory pushes the origin back a little “to the scene of discipline formation in the earlier twentieth century,” when “both literary criticism and the social sciences achieved the status of university disciplines, often in competition with each other” (“Sokal,” 482). We can go back further still. Academic disciplines developed out of a prior tendency toward fragmentation and specialization, the origins of which considerably antedate the twentieth century. Milton is a good place to begin this story, since Milton’s own story begins at the very beginning of things. When Of Education argues the need “to repair the ruins of our first parents,” it locates the disintegration of truth at the advent of history. Any attempt to “regain” prelapsarian unity, Milton goes on to argue, needs to build from the bottom up, proceeding from “sensible things” in order “to arrive” at “the knowledge of God and things invisible”; the “same method,” he adds, “is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching” (pp. 368–9). In according value to particularist knowledge, Milton participates in a process of educational reorganization undertaken broadly throughout Protestant Europe. Along with the other reformers contributing to this project, Milton’s particularism does not undermine his commitment to

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the larger goal of an inclusive totality of knowledge and to the religious framework within which it resonates (Sirluck, pp. 184–216). But this commitment diminishes during the subsequent (and now more historically than theologically situated) fragmentation of the Enlightenment; the natural realm dissociates itself more decisively from the sacred, and particularist knowledge moves toward autonomy and a fully developed specialization. At the cusp of this process, Hegel suggests that totality may be grasped through the dialectic of history, but with the staggering expansion of knowledge during the nineteenth century and the institutionalization of distinct academic disciplines, the Hegelian synthesis comes to seem increasingly tenuous. It was still available to a late Hegelian like Bradley, who attributed the impulse “to translate the one [art or discipline] into the other” to the intuition of “something boundless . . . which, we feel, would satisfy not only the imagination but the whole of us” (“Poetry,” p. 26). Bradley was disinclined to dismiss this intuition as does Freud, for whom the “oceanic feeling,” as it is designated in Civilization and its Discontents, is attributed to infantile regression (pp. 11–20). Nonetheless, Bradley understood that this sense of something far more deeply interfused was unsustainable without realizing the (in historical terms) unrealizable Miltonic endeavor of “regaining to know God aright.” The quest for meta-disciplinary Truth is after all vain, and pending the final revelation of all in all, Bradley focuses on the intrinsic values of distinct discourses. Poetry, he tells us, embodies in its own irreplaceable way something which embodies itself also in other irreplaceable ways, such as philosophy or religion. And just as each of these gives a satisfaction which the other cannot possibly give, so we find in poetry, which cannot satisfy the needs they meet, that which by their natures they cannot afford us. But we shall not find it fully if we look for something else. (p. 25) Poetry for poetry’s sake; philosophy, religion, politics, ethics, etc.—all for their own sakes. Disciplinary distinctness, as Bradley sees it, allows us to achieve whatever partial (in both senses) knowledge we can in the cognitive domain available to us—strength in what remains behind. Placed in this context, the reconciliation program faces obstacles not just in the differential nature of language but in the accumulated experience of history. “Form and history” are not just ideas to be “crossed” at will. A “rapprochement” between literary and sociological interest

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entails more than finding “some common ground” among some divergent methods. It requires reconfiguring the processes—conceptual, institutional, social, and political—which separated these methods (and the values which underwrote them) in the first place, and which subsequently reinforced their separation as distinct practices over a long period of time. In the case of literary interest, the process goes back at least as far as to the aesthetic discourse systematized by Kant and the Romantics. Kant’s claim for “the pure disinterested satisfaction” entailed in “judgments of taste” (§2, p. 48) underlies the idea of “purposiveness without purpose” (§10, p. 68) I quoted earlier on. The same kind of idea underlies Coleridge’s claim for “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Engell, p. 6). For Wordsworth, a fit reader meets poetry shorn of the special interests derived from professional competence, theoretical understanding, and working knowledge: “possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man” (Owen, p. 123). As Bradley puts it, writing near the end of the Romantic line, poetry “makes no direct appeal to those feelings, desires, and purposes” that touch “us as beings occupying a given position in space and time” (“Poetry,” p. 6). Bradley does not identify these excluded positions, but they seem to coincide with Wordsworth’s catalog of special interests, and presumably approximate the normative (“correct”) sociopolitical categories (race, class, gender, et al.) underlying recent work. “Citizenship,” might be a neutral umbrella term here—as in Said’s warning against an excessive emphasis on “daily issues like citizens’ rights” (“An Unresolved Paradox”). Bradley, ref lecting later on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s decision to suppress “one of his best sonnets” because “it was called f leshly,” concludes that Rossetti “judged in his capacity of citizen, not in his capacity of artist” (“Poetry,” p.11). This is where the current desire to harmonize textualist and contextualist interest confronts an apparently insurmountable obstacle in the aesthetic tradition. Contextualism takes various forms these days (historicism, performativity, and cultural studies at the beginning of this chapter are only three of many), but they all tend to be centered on a sociological foundation. They proceed from the belief that aesthetic engagement has real (that is, sociopolitical) consequences in the world, helping to construct the motivations that assign us, “as beings occupying a given position in space and time,” to positions on the grid of power relations, imparting (or imputing) legitimacy, as when

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theatrical performance is said to raise actors to the rank of “gentlemen and ladies.” According to Douglas Bruster, “New Formalism” proceeds by “scrutinizing the cultural work that forms do”—that is, “examining the social, cultural and historical aspects of literary form, and the function of form for those who produce and consume literary texts” (pp. 44–5). The instrumentality of form here is echoed by Cohen, for whom the critic’s job is to distinguish “the historically specific origins and functions” of the literary (p. 4) and to identify the “role” played by form “in the cultural function of literature” (p. 13). With form thus subordinated to function, aesthetic experience is relocated from what Bradley calls “the contemplative imagination” to a purposeful will; instead of “reading poetically,” we read “as beings occupying a given position in space and time”—with the result, presumably, of acquiring “such experience as is evoked in us when we read[,] let us say, a newspaper article” (“Poetry,” p. 7, 28). As a consequence, any claim to “engage systematically with formal complexity” has become compromised—at least as such engagement was valued in the line of thought following from Kant. Cohen argues that Robert Weimann is more responsive to formal complexity than is Louis Adrian Montrose, because Weimann detects not a “single ‘purpose of playing’ ” (like Montrose) “but a variety of sociopolitical functions and effects” (p. 24, note 31). Nonetheless, a variety of functions still adds up to functionalism, and the multiplicity of purposes contradicts the Kantian “without purpose” as fully as a single one. Finally, the effort of “historical formalism” to “take seriously the theoretical commitments and complexities of both halves of its name” (p. 14) collapses into contradiction, as do all the harmonizing projects reviewed here. Reconciling literary study with the sociology of literature, negotiating a rapprochement between language-oriented and cultural studies, finding common ground for New Criticism and New Historicism, etc.—these programs issue not in a coherent synthesis but in something like Geertz’s jumbled-up “pot-au-feu theorizing,” thereby reproducing the problem it was meant to solve: an overabundance of interests, “drawn from the most wildly different” domains, generates an “impossibly vague and encompassing” range of reference inadequate to serve as “the backbone of an innovative critical practice.” Or of any practice at all. If new formalism is (as Levinson says) “better described as a movement than a theory or method,” so historical formalism, Cohen admits, is not “a particular method but a critical commitment” (p. 3), which is, in turn, “not defined by a single critical practice” (p. 14). In the absence of a method or a practice, however, all

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the reconciliation agenda can do is say that the reconciliation agenda would be a good thing to do, in reiterated affirmations of hope that, if we persevere, we’ll eventually reach the point where an unimplementable and even self-defeating idea will have been transformed into a program for action. II: Desire In accounting for the failure of the reconciliation agenda, I have pointed to the obstacle of intellectual incoherence: the path to rapprochement is blocked as a result of the extended process during which the disciplines have differentiated themselves into specific identities. But historical precedent is never absolutely determinative, no matter how long it has been sustained, and intellectual coherence is not a transcendental signified; intellectual coherence takes different forms in different contexts, shaped by the desire to accommodate particular needs. Desire is, I take it, the key word here. If the desire for a return to the aesthetics were strong enough, the requirements of intellectual coherence and disciplinary difference would not by themselves prevent its realization. The underlying problem is in the adequacy—or inadequacy—of the desire itself. In order to develop this claim, we need to be more specific about what the aesthetic has come to mean in current work, and this entails going back to the place where the earlier account of aesthetic discourse left off, Bradley’s “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake.” I identified Bradley’s “poetical reading” with an interpretive rather than a formalist aesthetics—the Kantian line focused on a “perceiving subject” rather than an “aesthetic object,” as John Guillory puts it (Cultural Capital, p. 275), on “a form of judgment” rather than “a set of objects classed as art,” in Jonathan Loesberg’s words (A Return, p. 74). In returning to these distinctions, I ask a historical question, when does one or the other of these two emphases come to dominate the discourse? and a theoretical one, how crucially decisive is the distinction between them to begin with? Loesberg takes on both of these, setting up his argument in A Return to Aesthetics. His first chapter, he tells us, begins, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with Coleridge’s development of the idea of organic form. The Coleridgean criterion of organicism does indeed mean to describe the special feature of an art object, and it describes that feature in terms of an

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immanental design particular to it and to nature, and thus especially valuable. But Coleridge and his followers arrived at this concept through a pointed misinterpretation of Kant and other German sources, who did not think of the design of nature as, in itself, numinous and whose concept of aesthetic design entailed a certain way in which the mind perceives the world, in the first instance, and not a mysterious quality of art objects. (p. 4) As Loesberg sees it, (1) the break from a subjective Kantian aesthetics comes with the formalism of “Coleridge and his followers”; and (2) this break is crucial, “a pointed misinterpretation.” Both these claims could use some fine tuning. In the first place, Coleridge’s formalism is subject to exaggeration. Coleridge certainly has formalist interests, and the standard identification of Coleridge with the concept of organic form is a way of recognizing these interests. But Coleridge’s formalism, as I’ll try to show in chapters 5 and 6, is subordinate to his interest in interpretive activity. A willing suspension of disbelief, the other tag regularly quoted to identify Coleridge’s position, better represents the hierarchy of his critical values; he is concerned more profoundly with the processes of engaging texts than with the properties of the texts we engage. From this perspective, Coleridge looks to be continuing in the Kantian line rather than departing from it. If there is a decisive shift from subjective to objective aesthetics, from Kant to formalism, this occurs not with “Coleridge and his followers,” but only with those (highly selective) followers of Coleridge who come after Bradley, whose position may be exemplified by Archibald MacLeish’s claim (if that’s the right word) in “Ars Poetica” that “A poem should not mean / But be.” As for the second question, the relation between an interpretationcentered Kantian aesthetics and an artifact-centered formalism, this is not necessarily the stark contrast Loesberg’s “pointed misinterpretation” suggests. There is a more or less natural fit between the two. If you engage a text with a disinterested judgment, independently of its immediate consequences for your behavior “as a being occupying a given position in space and time,” you might well find yourself contemplating its formal arrangement, wondering how it was put together. “A poem should not mean / But be” is something Bradley would not have been inclined to say; he was more interested in the interpretive activity of perceiving subjects than in the ontological status of aesthetic objects. But he would have been sympathetic to MacLeish’s sentiments; and although not given to inventing formulas and legislating rules, “Poetry

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for Poetry’s Sake” affirms in considerable detail the values underwriting the arguments against “The Intentional Fallacy” (Wimsatt, pp. 3–18) and “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (Brooks, pp. 192–214) and the other touchstones of New Critical method. These elements of conceptual continuity, moreover, allow us to revisit the historical question in a way to reinforce my claim earlier for the absence of any decisive break. A tradition of formalist aesthetics, associated with Hegel’s Lectures on Art and, in Shakespearean commentary, with A. W. Schlegel, coexisted peacefully with the interpretive or Kantian line. Coleridge’s primary allegiance to the Kantian line did not prevent him from shifting around between the two modes, and this eclecticism may help to explain the persistence of Coleridgean inf luence almost to our own day. It is probably a factor, too, in the insouciance we have seen with which Bradley treats the differences of detail he inherited from philosophical traditions. My point in all this is not to dissolve difference into an amorphous continuum. On the contrary, I think that a very significant break does indeed occur after Bradley, but not so much in theoretical or cognitive as in affective terms. The decisive issue is conviction rather than coherence. Bradley is unambiguously convinced of the value of “reading poetically”: the practice, he declares, has “intrinsic worth” as “an end in itself.” Like virtue, reading poetically is its own reward. Bradley’s indifference to any subsequent or subsidiary benefits accruing to poetical reading is of a piece with Kant’s “purposivity without purpose.” In fact, aesthetic experience is not without a kind of worldly purpose in Kant’s scheme of things (as Guillory remarks, “Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck is not the same thing as purposelessness” [Cultural Capital, p. 291]), and Bradley, thanks to his philosophical training, would have had no trouble developing this idea if he had felt the need to do so. But in “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake,” he evidently does not feel the need to do so. He may “suppose my readers” to understand and sympathize with his claims—they are “so obvious” that “a bare reminder of them would be enough.” Bradley is confident not only in his own convictions but in the shared convictions of his audience. The question is whether these shared convictions survive the transition from a late Romantic interpretive aesthetics to a New Critical—or, in Paul Alpers’s more inclusive term (p. 136), a Modernist—formalism. There are some reasons to believe that it does. If “reading poetically” is “an end in itself,” so the poems read and the readings of them undertaken by Brooks and Ransom and Empson et al. are presumably deemed to have “intrinsic worth” as well. Indeed, since Modernists do not

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simply presume intrinsic worth but spell out the values of their practice, including not just its methods (as in the touchstones mentioned earlier), but its history (Wimsatt and Brooks) and its theory (Wellek and Warren, Krieger), this last designed not only to explain what they are doing but to provide (in Guy and Small’s terms) an “explicit elaboration” of “the appropriateness and utility of the explanation”—given all this, it might seem that Modernist convictions of the worth of their enterprise actually exceed Bradley’s. But the systematic theorizing of Modernist aesthetics can be read the other way round as well. “When philosophy paints its grey in grey,” Hegel says in The Philosophy of Right, “a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its f light only with the onset of dusk” (p. 31). From this angle, Modernist self-ref lection suggests not the intensification or energizing of the critical practice initiated with Kant and the Romantics, but its exhaustion. Developments subsequent to Modernism suggest that Hegel’s perspective is the right one here, for even as Modernism enriched the theoretical sophistication by which it described the value of its own practice, the conviction of that value diminished into an impoverished replica of itself. The term of choice for this replica is “close reading.” Close reading grew out of but then away from the values of “poetical reading.” Increasingly remote from its generative origins in Romanticism, its strategies for lavishing attention onto the nuances of poetic texts dwindled into empty routines, the detailed instructions for performing a critical practice passed along by teachers to students many if not most of whom (the teachers, probably, as well as the students) no longer had any clear idea why they might want to perform it. Close reading is like “degree” in Troilus and Cressida; the “ladder of all high designs,” Ulysses calls it (1.3.162), but it points up at nullity. Close reading is the means to a nonexistent end, the triumph of technique over purpose. The vitiation of purpose, of conviction and desire, is central to the sense of impasse from which we began, and to the program of “Reclaiming the Aesthetic” proposed for its remediation. This is the title of George Levine’s Introduction to Aesthetics and Ideology, one of the earliest and most thoughtful ref lections on the “radical” potential in the contextualist turn (as I have called it) to “challenge the very existence of departments of literature in universities.” As Levine sees it, this challenge raises a fundamental question. “Can, in fact, a category, literature, be meaningfully constituted? If so, once constituted, is it worth much attention?” And if not, then why engage with it?—or, in

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Levine’s later synecdochic version of the question, “Why, for example, read Dickens?” (pp. 1, 9). In a 1999 piece on “Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, and Formalism,” Loesberg takes up this question. Ref lecting on the possible advantages of renouncing cultural for literary studies, Loesberg invites us to “abandon [the] intellectual imperialism,” which allows us to interpret “the subject matter of other disciplines” in favor of a “formalism” that proceeds on the basis of “declaring its own enclosure on the face of its disciplinary concerns.” This is an invitation most of us will refuse, and Loesberg, who extends it only half-heartedly, knows as much. After all, a “formalism held with an awareness that its position is an artificial boundary” can hardly address the problem of inadequate purpose. “Such a voluntary askesis,” he acknowledges, would obviously not give us the benefits normally attached to attempts to recuperate notions of aesthetic value. It would not by itself return us to an attention to the literariness of literature, answering the question Levine asks of why we read Dickens. And while a turn to the aesthetics motivated by the desire to answer that question might produce the desired end, the wilfullness of the turn I am espousing here would tend to work against the kind of consequential claim necessary to produce such an answer. In other words, if we turn to formalist analysis as an act of will rather than as a consequence of knowing why we read Dickens, then we obviously won’t know any better why we read him as any direct effect of making the formalist turn. (540–1) The manufactured will to renounce desire (“askesis” comes from the same root as “ascetic”) merely reiterates the problem of inadequate desire. In retrospect, Loesberg’s f lirtation with formalism seems like an early attempt to work out a problem subsequently treated more fully in A Return to Aesthetics, though I am not sure it is solved there or that it can be solved anywhere. It is certainly not solved among those Shakespeareans who claim that reconciliation offers a way out of our impasse. When, for example, Russ McDonald expresses regret about the “devaluation of the ‘artistic,’ ” the inverted commas around the object of desire represent equivocation (like Worthen’s “ ‘Shakespeare’ ”), and this attenuated interest seems inadequate to the task of “reconciling the distant and recent pasts.” (If “a shape of life has grown old,” it will not be “rejuvenated” by a love that dare not speak its name.) Shakespeare Reread partakes of

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the general diminution that comes after Modernist criticism. The close reading it endorses has been disconnected from any specific object (what kind of text should we read closely?) or purpose (why should we read it closely?). It has become method tout court, and although method is necessary for all critical practices (historians and philosophers and lawyers and certified public accountants all read closely), by itself it is insufficient to sustain any of them. Some alternative is required to replace the conviction we have lost. Shakespeare Reread identifies this substitute value with the “new and potentially illuminating ways of reading closely” (p. 3) designated as New Contexts in the book’s subtitle, “all these shifts in the critical atmosphere” that have brought about “the increased importance of politics” and added “topics such as race and gender” to “virtually all discussion of literature” (p. 10); in short, precisely those sociopolitical interests, the “feelings, desires, and purposes” that touch “us as beings occupying a given position in space and time,” to which Bradley’s poetical reading “makes no direct appeal.” The “purpose” that aesthetic engagement sought temporarily (“for the moment,” as Coleridge put it) to displace is now securely installed at the foundation of the new practice. All this suggests a gap between conception and action—what Shakespeare Reread means to do and what it actually does. The declared intention is reconciliation, to negotiate a common ground between the implicitly equal claims of past and present critical modes, but the effect is appropriation, to render the diluted remnants of aesthetic tradition available for the urgent needs of a new, sociologically inf lected practice. With this gap in mind, we might return to the effective origins of “the reconciliation agenda”—a phrase that sounds increasingly in need of inverted commas of its own—in Patricia Parker’s hope “that the impasse of a now apparently outworn formalism and a new competing emphasis on politics and history might be breached” (Transfigurations, p. 96). Breaching an impasse is almost as hard to translate into a specific action as taking arms against a sea of troubles. But if rapprochement disintegrates into immobilized gestures pointing in different directions, appropriation—the use of textual features to analyze contextual effects, the “process of moving from literary to social text”—predicates a definite trajectory with both traction and impetus. Close reading may seem temporarily to retard the rate of progress, but even its deferrals and dilations, by guaranteeing that we do not “unnecessarily shortcircuit or foreclose the process,” turn out only to intensify the climactic revelations of the sociopolitical determinants when we come upon them at the last.

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Parker’s finesse in teasing out the links and slippages in Shakespearean wordplay has been characterized as “madly creative” (Bly), “rich and fascinating in its linguistic detail” (Cartwright, p. 305), “dazzling” (Howard), and “wonderful” (Maurer, 1045). But this generous engagement with textuality is never permitted to threaten the authority of contextualist values at the center of the enterprise. Linguistic interest is focused on a semantic polyvalence registered in thematic terms; it rarely extends to rhythm, rhyme, and other aural effects that might be hard to fix in a conceptual framework; and to this framework itself, defined as “the power relations implied by gender[,] class, race and sexual identification” (Shakespeare, p. 2), the details are systematically referred. In the words of one otherwise sympathetic reader, Parker’s “privileging of individual words over the wildly different theatrical contexts of their utterance tends to f latten the Shakespeare canon into . . . an immense verbal system in which nothing can be allowed not to mean something important” (Dobson, “Cold Front,” 25). Thus even as one breathtakingly nuanced textual analysis follows another, we are reminded “that words . . . function in relation to a larger field of discourse,” and these reiterated reminders keep us focused on the “larger questions” about “the larger contemporary discursive networks”—the “institutions, practices, and laws” that constitute the big sociopolitical picture (Shakespeare, p. 3; “Transformations,” p. 93; “Othello,” p. 106; my emphases). If the reconciliation agenda is, from the beginning. really an appropriation agenda, it remains so up to its most recent version. Like Parker, who subordinates textual properties to the interests of their sociopolitical masters and then describes the relationship as a chiastic symmetry, “the order of discourse and the discourse of order,” so Stephen Cohen subsumes literary within sociological interests and calls it “mutual implication.” The language of harmonious reciprocity shared among all these critics cannot be disingenuous, but the desire it represents is not adequate to displace contextual interest from its position of dominance. The vision of concord suggested by this language is just a stop on the way to a terminal destination, where the wolf ’s love is not to dwell with the lamb but, as in Menenius’s troping of Isaiah, “to devour him” (Geneva Bible, 11.6; Coriolanus, 2.1.9). I’ll make the point one last time with a look at the presidential address Marjorie Perloff delivered to the MLA Convention in 2006. Reporting on her survey of the forty-nine literature department dissertations completed at Stanford during the preceding six years, Perloff remarks that “only a handful have any specifically literary

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component.” She quotes three “typical titles”—“The Garden and the Crop: Revising Rural Labor in the United States Urban Imagination, 1870–1915”; “Offending Lives: Subjectivity and Australian Convict Autobiographies, 1788–1899”; “The Sway of Chance in Eighteenth Century England”—and comments: These dissertations may well use literary texts as examples, but if so, the fiction, dramas, or poems in question are taken to be means to an end—they are windows through which we see the world beyond the text, symptoms of cultural desires, drives, anxieties, or prejudices. . . . the literary, if it matters at all, is always secondary; it has at best an instrumental value. (654–5) Perloff ’s own title, “It Must Change,” suggests that this situation is both undesirable and unsustainable; and while her judgment in the first instance is debatable, in the second, since all situations are unsustainable (change is the only constant), she must be right. Perloff, however, anticipates a very specific kind of change. “It is time to trust the literary instinct that brought us to this field in the first place,” she argues; “instead of lusting after those other disciplines that seem so exotic primarily because we don’t really practice them, what we need is more theoretical, historical, and critical training in our own discipline” (662). What we need, in other words, is a return to aesthetics; but for the reasons I have been developing here, this prospect is unlikely to materialize in the near future—if it happens at all. When Perloff declares that a “literary instinct brought us to this field in the first place,” she uses the same phrase as Greenblatt in his bid to restore “literary power,” and it raises the same problem. While literary instinct may have been the decisive factor for Perloff ’s generation, most of Perloff ’s MLA audience were in different situations when they entered the field, and their motives are hard to read. About the training they encountered once in graduate school, however, we are on firmer ground. It must have been the kind that led them to take on the nonliterary dissertation topics Perloff catalogs, and if they were smart and perseverant and lucky enough to finish their degrees and get jobs, they have probably been busy writing essays with sociological—that is, nonliterary—orientations (Stephen Schryer’s piece on “The New Criticism and Harvard Sociology,” from which I borrowed earlier, immediately follows Perloff ’s address in the pages of PMLA), and they are now probably training still newer people to write dissertations with orientations similar to their own.

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In short, Perloff ’s proposal runs into an elaborate apparatus working to promote precisely those critical interests she wishes to transform. Inertia inheres in all institutions, but the resistance to change in academia seems peculiarly intense. As Richard Posner puts it, trying to explain why the Chicago economists persist in advocating free-market theories in the face of the crisis that seems to have discredited their position, correctives work very slowly in dealing with academic markets. Professors have tenure. They have lots of graduate students in the pipeline who need to get their Ph.D.s. They have techniques that they know and are comfortable with. It takes a great deal to drive them out of their accustomed way of doing business. (Cassidy, 29) If it takes such a great deal to get professors to change—more, apparently, than it does doctors and attorneys, say—this may be because we are better insulated against any immediately tangible consequences that might be claimed for our work. When surgeons and trial lawyers stick to their accustomed ways of doing business instead of adopting better ones, Craig’s List will make it clear that their mortality or conviction rates are higher than those of more innovative competitors. In the same way, CEOs whose corporations do not produce short-term profits will find their shareholders inclined to replace them, or at least not to line their pockets with such hefty bonuses. The accountability of the nonacademic professional marketplace is no doubt subject to exaggeration, as is the impunity of tenured professors. But the difference remains significant. Academics are discernibly freer from external pressures to change, humanists especially so. (We are rarely asked to confront evidence of apparent error—in the interpretation of Hamlet, say, or the causes of the Thirty Years War, or Heidegger’s relation to Nietzsche—the way economists are to answer for deregulation, not that, as Posner remarks, they have had any problem doing so.) In the absence of external pressures, we are dependent on generating pressures from within, but these are not likely to add up to much. As Louis Menand puts it at the end of a book devoted to “Reform in the American University,” the “conclusion to be drawn from this exercise” is “that the academic system is a deeply internalized one” (Marketplace of Ideas, p. 157). An equally deep internalization extends to the disciplinary systems that comprise the academic institution. But then, having internalized the disciplinary and institutional

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values, how can we be expected to change these values, or even find a position from which to say that these values must change? Changes do occur, of course, but if the obstacle is in the internalization of institutional values, the prospect for a return of the aesthetic looks remote indeed. As a psychological process, internalization has an affective as well as a cognitive dimension, and if my argument for the priority of desire makes sense, affect is what chief ly counts. When Hamlet tells Gertrude that “use almost can change the stamp of nature” (3.4.168), he is talking not about ideas but about fundamental appetites; and in the thirty years or so during which we have gotten used to the contextualism represented by the titles of those Stanford dissertations, we have come not only to appreciate the truth and knowledge claims available to us by performing this kind of work but, more important, to take pleasure in the performance. Perloff acknowledges the element of pleasure, but the acknowledgments tend to work against her case. She tells us to stop “lusting after those other disciplines that seem exotic,” but if at one time cultural studies looked like a perverse pursuit of the outré, it has by now become naturalized, the default—one might say, the missionary—position. “Instinct is a great matter,” as Falstaff says (1 Henry IV, 2.4.268), but “the literary instinct” Perloff asks us to trust has been displaced, and we are now sociologists “on instinct.” It will take more than reasoned arguments to talk ourselves out of these instincts. If, despite all these arguments, we have not returned to aesthetics, or even managed to reconcile aesthetics to contextualism, this is because we do not really want to.

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CH A P T E R

T WO

Negative Desire: Materialism and Its Discontents

In chapter 1, I asked why we have been unable to return to aesthetics, but it might be better now to ask why, in the face of so many disappointments, we keep trying. Disciplinary inertia must be an issue again, pulling now in the opposite direction from where it was pushing earlier on: instead of preventing us from a return to aesthetics, it prevents us from dropping the project. (As Kuhn says, humanists tend to throw nothing out.) But inertia cannot be the whole story. The effort persists because the problem that initiated the effort—the overextension of critical interest and a consequential loss of analytical focus—persists as well. Perloff ’s remark about lusting after exotic disciplines resonates with a skepticism expressed elsewhere about the legitimacy with which we claim territory not really our own. Ref lecting on the “intellectual imperialism” that allows us to “interpret the subject matter of other disciplines,” Jonathan Loesberg questions the “not very deeply buried confidence” that we “may unaided, by doing a literary reading of a Parliamentary blue book or accounts of a sensational criminal trial in a newspaper, do the work of a number of disciplines at once” (“Cultural Studies,” 538). As Jane Gallup puts it, “We have become amateur, or rather wannabe, cultural historians”; without “professional training in historical methods,” we cannot be expected to perform historical analysis “nearly as well as our colleagues in history departments” (p. 183). These concerns take us back to where we started, arguments about the inability of all-inclusive terms like culture and theory to provide disciplinary stability or coherence—“the backbone,” as Greenblatt put it, “of an innovative critical practice.” But where Greenblatt and Geertz and Jameson et al. warned against the overinvestment of hope in an ascendant practice, these more recent claims reflect discouragement in the face of

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evidence that those earlier warnings were in fact justified. According to Toril Moi, for example, invited in 2006 to contribute to the PMLA’s “Theories and Methodologies” section, the fact “that so much feminist work today produces only tediously predictable lines of argument” is “not a problem for feminist theory alone. The feeling of exhaustion, of domination by a theoretical doxa that no longer has anything new to say, is just as prevalent in nonfeminist theory” (1735). The next year, moderating a PMLA roundtable on “The End of Postcolonial Theory,” Patricia Yaeger declares that we are experiencing “now a sense of exhaustion in postcolonial studies” (633). This tone of elegiac disenchantment is widely dispersed throughout current work, a feature of the oscillating trajectory of critical interest since the contextualist turn, the breathtaking rapidity with which enthusiastic expansion has contracted into chastened retrenchment and then led to new investments of temporarily excited desire. The process seems to have begun sometime in the early 1980s when, coinciding with the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious, a declared interest in historicism emerged into prominence. It became obligatory to identify ourselves (or others) as historicists, new or otherwise, and to associate with “Always historicize!”, the slogan Jameson unfurled as “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought” (p. 9). Table-thumping rhetoric like this appeared in uncharacteristic places (Orgel’s “true nature,” “historically accurate,” and “essentially . . . real” date from this period), and although almost no one had the muscle to historicize in a way that respected the massive and nuanced complexity of Jameson’s apparatus, and despite the absence of anything like a consensus about the meaning or value of historicism, new or otherwise, the question Carolyn Porter asked near the end of the 1980s, “Are We Being Historical Yet?”, was the one anyone looking to establish critical authority had to ask. And then it wasn’t; charisma, like the god Hercules whom Antony loved, deserted history; the enchanted aura by which the historical could identify a shared conviction—in hoc signo vinces—vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Or rather it migrated, as by metempsychosis, into a different site, and the political emerged as the new gold standard for interpretive work. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, politics became a word to conjure with. Louis Althusser and Laura Mulvey proliferated in our notes; we puzzled over interpellation and authentic agency; and declarations of political conviction (“Always politicize!”) or accusations of its absence filled up publications with “the politics of ” displayed provocatively in their titles.

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During this period, Shakespeareans were given to claiming that their work had an immediate impact on the psychosexual and sociopolitical order. Valerie Traub imagined that, since “prohibitions on incest or homosexuality” are “arbitrary political constructs, and thus open to transformation,” we can, “by deconstructing and refiguring the anxieties that regulate and discipline erotic life,” hope “to contribute modestly to the project of carving out space within the social structure for greater erotic variety” (p. 8). Margreta de Grazia imagined that by “bring[ing] into full view the scheme in which [Shakespeare] has been so effectively reproduced from the late Enlightenment to the present,” the “needs it has satisfied can be acknowledged and the possibilities it has elided can begin to be taken into account” (Shakespeare Verbatim, p. 13). Traub acknowledged that a deconstructive feminist analysis of Shakespeare was not about to eradicate heteronormativity, only “contribute modestly” to loosening its grip on our instincts, and de Grazia understood that interrogating Edmond Malone’s editorial assumptions could do no more than divert a rivulet from the tidal wave of Enlightenment that had swept us into modernity. But even hedged about with qualifications, such claims for direct worldly consequence abruptly disappeared into the background of a more ambitious past, as have Althusser and Mulvey from our notes. Historical and political criticism have not themselves disappeared; they continue to stand behind some of the most compelling examples of current critical practice. What has been lost, however, is the excited conviction they used to generate. Much the same pattern is evident with the various replacement modes that have, during the past thirty years or so, succeeded each other into an intensely, but only temporarily exhilarating prominence. Cultural and postcolonial studies, interdisciplinarity, feminism and queer theory, the new ethical and ecological criticism, etc.—they all remain with us, undiminished in explanatory reach; but as those reiterated laments that we are living “after theory” and “post-feminism” and at “The End of Postcolonial Theory” suggest, they have lost their power to engage hope and desire. Their interpretive power is no less than what it was, but the ravishing aura of unlimited possibility with which they first came onto the critical stage has been exhausted. Ravishing is meant to bring Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus into view. The abrupt shifts of interest during the last thirty years or so bear an uncanny resemblance to the wildly f luctuating desires acted out in the opening soliloquy of the play: Faustus unreservedly devotes himself to a succession of intellectual pursuits, dramatized in his eager

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brandishing of one book after another, each taken to encapsulate the object of his newly “ravished” interest; but when he finds his exhilarated expectations abruptly disappointed, he repudiates the professions in which he had invested such apparently unrealistic hopes by throwing away his books, one after another, in gestures of unmitigated disgust. The stakes are higher for Faustus than for us, and his situation is evidently more desperate; but if there is a useful analogy here, it resides in the idea of bad faith. Bad faith in a theological sense is, arguably, the factor that determines Faustus’s wavering commitments, and bad faith in a looser sense, neither theological nor existential, denoting merely the absence of any firm critical conviction, can account for the instability of current critical commitments as well. From this angle, the “not very deeply buried confidence” Loesberg sees in our readiness to take on a multidisciplinary work looks rather like its opposite, a manic bravado, driven by the intuition of illegitimacy, upon which disappointment is the inevitable—or at least “tediously predictable”—consequence. The problem is not necessarily an overreaching will; it can be located as readily on the other side of the situation, in the world’s failure to provide interests commensurate with a capacity for intellectual wonder. In either case, the result is disaffection, a restless instability that generates ever new objects of always unsatisfiable desire. In the following pages, the name I propose for this cycle of exhilaration and disappointment is materialist discontent. *

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In 1996, the International Shakespeare Association (ISA) invited Stanley Cavell to address a plenary session of its World Congress, meeting in Los Angeles. Cavell is a philosopher, and his Shakespearean interests, though substantial, derive from a prior investment in the traditions of philosophical inquiry. As he puts it at the outset of his talk, “I found in Shakespeare a diffusion of the modern philosophical problematic of skepticism, as portrayed in Descartes, and Hume, and Kant, and . . . the later Wittgenstein” (“Skepticism,” p. 231)—a different set of portraits from Marlowe and Burbage and King James, and whoever else might be supposed to occupy space in the minds of the dues-paying members of the ISA to whom Cavell was speaking. As an acknowledged “outsider” (p. 232), Cavell prepared for his talk by consulting the insiders: “I asked several real Shakespearean scholars what they were thinking about these days.” Cavell’s “real Shakespearean scholars” may be disingenuous. He claims “surprise on learning the

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extent to which philosophy, strikingly in its skeptical mode, has come in recent years to inhabit the Shakespearean field” (p. 232); but he must have had some idea how smoothly his kind of philosophy-talk had been translated into our kind of Shakespeare-talk. Maybe it didn’t even need translation at all. In his comment about Kenneth Burke a little later in the talk, “I do not think I know more food for thought in so few clear pages about the literary conditions of political praise and the political implications of literary praise” (p. 239), Cavell does just what so many of the real Shakespeareans encountered in the previous chapter are doing— use chiasmus to convey the impression of an achieved harmony between literary and political interests. He was speaking our language. Although Cavell probably didn’t need it, the expert testimony he elicited is worth considering for what it tells us about the state of the art as insiders saw it. They told Cavell he needed to catch up with two recent developments as a result of which some of his own earlier claims “had been repudiated.” One was the “continuing importance” of the Lear-text hypothesis—that the Quarto and Folio represent not two versions of the same play but distinct and independent entities, one of them Shakespeare’s own revision; the other that “the word ‘character’ in Shakespeare refers always and solely to traces of inscription and not to traits of persons.” For the far-reaching consequences of these developments, both based on new understanding rather than new knowledge, Cavell was referred to “the paper ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’ by Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass,” which was said to put forward “the further, more radical claims of what is called the New Textualism”—namely, “that the Shakespearean text does not exist; and not because of some fancy theory concerning the inevitability of incommensurable interpretations, but rather literally and simply as a material thing, does not exist” (p. 252). Whether or not this synopsis fairly represented the argument in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Cavell’s consultants were certainly right in describing the “radical” nature of as its claims. Here is the opening paragraph in full: For over two-hundred years, King Lear was one text; in 1986, with the Oxford Shakespeare, it became two; in 1989, with The Complete “King Lear” 1608–1623, it became four (at least). As a result of this multiplication, Shakespeare studies will never be the same. This is not simply because we may now have more Shakespeare than before—many Lears instead of one; a mere enlargement of the canon requires no rethinking of how the works are to be

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prepared and interpreted. Shakespeare studies will never be the same because something long taken for granted has been cast into doubt: the self-identity of the work. We are no longer agreed on the fundamental status of the textual object before us. Is it one or more? The significance of this uncertainty cannot be overestimated. Identity and difference are, after all, the basis of perception itself, the way we tell one thing from another. The possibility of multiple texts, then, constitutes a radical change indeed: not just an enlargement of Shakespeare’s works but a need to reconceptualize the fundamental category of a work by Shakespeare. (255) According to de Grazia and Stallybrass, the disintegration of King Lear into distinct versions serves to confirm the new set of assumptions— about authorial and textual stability, historical recovery, the status, and value of literary study—driving critical practice at the cutting edge of the discipline. The stakes are high: not just editing procedures for multiple text plays, and not just what to say about King Lear’s variant components (how we understand the Fool, say, or the relative authority of Albany and Edgar), but whether we should engage in the interpretation of King Lear at all, at least in Northrop Frye’s terms, as a process that “begins in a complete surrender of the mind and senses to the impact of the work as a whole, and proceeds through the effort to unite the symbols toward a simultaneous perception of the unity of the structure” (Anatomy, p. 77). As the lead article in in Shakespeare Quarterly, the premier journal of North American Shakespeare studies, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” was bound to get noticed, and given its farreaching claims, heralding the termination of Shakespeare studies as we know it, the piece was likely to generate substantial controversy; but even Cavell’s informants, recommending it as a leading indicator of what real Shakespeareans were thinking about, must have been surprised by the amount and intensity of the engagement it received. Two years after the piece appeared in 1993, Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey, and Andrew Murphy devoted four closely argued pages to the claim that “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” collapses disappointingly into the idealist traditions it sets out to dismantle (100–3). In 1996, Michael Bristol concludes an essay on “How Good Does Evidence Have to Be?” with three closely argued pages maintaining that de Grazia and Stallybrass’s conclusions are not justified by their evidence. (If for Holderness et al. the piece does not go far enough, for Bristol it goes too far.) When in 1999, Richard Levin characterized

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“The Materiality” as a “well-known article,” he was thinking of these pieces among others, including one of mine that underlies some of the discussion below. Perhaps the most striking evidence of resonance with what “real Shakespeare scholars” are “thinking about these days” occurred in the same year as Levin’s piece, with the publication of Orgel and Keilin’s Shakespeare and the Editorial Tradition. The editors of this collection reprint their contributors’ essays without regard to the chronological order of original publication, and by making “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” their lead piece, they reinforce the impression of its exemplary importance. By 2009, this impression, to judge from Jeffrey Knight’s casual reference to the piece as the “most prominent summary discussion of materiality in relation to early modern literature and to Shakespeare” (306), has evidently achieved the status of common knowledge. “Materiality” itself must have a lot to do with this impression; the word and its cognates, “materialism” and “materialist,” have, as Levin remarks, “been very prominent in Shakespeare criticism for almost fifteen years,” appearing “in the titles of four anthologies” and “in the names chosen by two major critical schools” (p. 87). The prominence has only increased since the time Levin’s piece appeared. According to Gabriel Egan writing in 2010, if “idealism asserts that reality is just an effect of ideas,” then “its opposite, which has become virtually the default setting for all literary scholars these days, is materialism, which insists that the basic stuff of the universe is matter and that we know about it through it material form” (“Intention,” p. 378; my emphasis). As Levin sees it, the extraordinarily large “number of different meanings” given to “materialism” betrays a fundamental failure to achieve anything beyond a nominally stable intelligibility. He devotes seven pages to demonstrating the “slippage in the materialism avowed” by “The Materiality”; and since de Grazia and Stallybrass’s piece “collects the doctrines as a kind of manifesto of the movement,” Levin concludes that the materialist program as a whole fails to provide a foundation for coherent critical practice (pp. 92, 93). Egan is more sympathetic to materialism, but he too is concerned with slippage in current uses of the term. If the “distinctions between [metaphysical and epistemological] kinds of idealism are frequently elided in theoretico-historical work,” so too are the distinctions between the kinds of materialism that oppose them. His example is the “New Textualism” to which Cavell’s consultants had referred. In New Textualism as Egan describes it, a “pragmatic concern for surviving physical artefacts in preference to the ideas that are supposed to have created them” metamorphoses into a claim that not

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only these ideas but “the lost predecessor artefacts” themselves may be dismissed as immaterial in the literal sense—as, in effect, hallucinations. “To minds captured by such a decidedly unMarxist caricature of materialism,” Egan wryly remarks, “the hypothetical status of authorial papers can even come to mean a healthy scepticism that they ever existed outside of the imaginations of New Bibliographers” (“Intention,” p. 379). As Levin and Egan see it, “materialism” as it currently functions designates (or gestures at) an encompassing area of interest so broad as to lack a definite shape. The critics inhabiting this area are bound together by nothing more than the working assumption that texts are generated out of and interpreted within particular social and political situations. From this angle, “materialism” is just another word for what I have been calling contextualism or worldliness; but if historicism and political criticism and interdisciplinarity and poco and ecocrit et al. may all be lumped together as “materialist” modes, then “materialism,” like “culture” in Greenblatt’s description, may be too amorphous to serve as “the backbone of an innovative critical practice.” Coherent stability, however, is not always the be-all and end-all of critical work. There are occasions when imprecision serves the general critical interest, and given the malaise we are so often said to be experiencing at present, now may be such a time. With the dilution and dispersion of conviction among a variety of much-less-than-fullypersuasive points of view, anything that might reinforce the impression of a common ground, no matter how vulnerable that impression to the sort of analytical rigor usually expected of philosophical inquiry, might be welcome. “Materialism” would then serve the function John Guillory attributes (disapprovingly, to be sure) to “the spontaneous philosophy of the critics”—“circulating what is given for this discourse community” and thereby helping to “produce solidarity in the marginalized humanist sector of the professoriate” (“Sokal,” 477, 499). Despite the fact that “materialism” stands for too many different things, or rather because it does, it reinforces the conviction that we are not alone, doing whatever we are doing in conjunction with a ratifying community of fellow believers. It may be true that “in current critical discourse ‘materialism’ does all the testing and is not itself tested” (Levin, p. 87); but if our true need at present is for an “essentially uncontested concept” (pace W. B. Gallie), then the claim stands, as France says in King Lear, “aloof from th’entire point” (1.1.240). In the following pages, I will be following up on some of the suggestions in Levin and Egan, pointing out “slippages” in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” not just in the meaning of “materialism”

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but in the disconnection between the essay’s conclusions and the evidence claimed for their support. Incoherence, however, seems to me less of a problem than what I described earlier as bad faith, the tenuousness of the convictions by which the materialist project is driven. This tenuousness seems to derive from the essentially adversative sentiment on which the enterprise is predicated—its being “opposite,” as Gabriel Egan shrewdly points out, to the “idealism” of literary study. The ideas in materialist work may not add up, but it is the negative and reactive nature of the desire motivating these ideas—disaffection—that is the fundamental problem. I: Materialism Lost De Grazia and Stallybrass organize their discussion into five topics, the first four of which—“work,” “word,” “character,” and “author”— are said to describe the main categories of understanding that generate Shakespeare studies; all these categories, they claim, need to be rethought. Hence the stability we may assume to exist in a “work,” since it derives from a later tradition of copyright law where ownership had to be fixed with relation to a determinate and stable object, is a quality imposed anachronistically on Shakespeare’s text. The rules governing (or, better, the practices characterizing) print in the Renaissance were more f luid and volatile, and they were dispersed more widely among a variety of contributory agents than what we currently assume. De Grazia and Stallybrass make a similar argument about “word,” using an example from early texts of Macbeth: “the boundaries that separate weyward / weyard / weird / wayward into four discrete and mutually exclusive lexical units had not yet been drawn and systematically reproduced. Until dictionaries fixed these boundaries, cognates blurred, phonetically and orthographically, without regard to the post-lexical determinations that subsequently divided them” (266). And again for “character”: the word meant handwriting in the Renaissance, as Cavell’s consultants informed him; the idea of a fixed inner nature as a self-evident category of existence came only later into general currency. The normal absence of dramatis personae lists and the diversity of speech prefixes in texts prior to Nicholas Rowe’s edition in 1709 suggest that characters should be understood not as producing but rather as produced by the various and variable textual signs described under “work” and “word.” Finally (in both senses), “the author”: here, too, de Grazia and Stallybrass’s strategy is to assimilate the concept into the instability that

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it has come in our minds to govern. Not only did Shakespeare take no apparent interest in the printing of his plays; he could not establish authorial control over even presumably more manageable and intimate interests. For example, “the standard spelling of the author’s name is not that of the author’s hand but that of the printer’s press and ref lects not a personal investment in the question of identity but rather an economic one in the preservation of typeface” (274). It is not clear that Shakespeare could have even imagined such authorial control as we are now said routinely to attribute to him, since the concept, once again, does not establish itself till much later: “Our post-Enlightenment critical tradition has imagined the author standing above or beyond[,] generating words, constructing characters, and creating texts that form his collected works. But all the above illustrations lend support to the simple but profound insight that ‘whatever they may do, authors do not write books’ ” (273, quoting Roger E. Stoddard). What should we be studying, then, if not the books author write? De Grazia and Stallybrass answer this question in the fifth and final section of their essay, where we are urged to abandon “the sense that the value of Shakespeare lies elsewhere, in the inner regions of the text rather than in the practices recorded on its surfaces . . . in the materials of the physical book itself: in paper” (280). What follows is a fascinating description of the Renaissance production of paper (“the rags which quite literally composed the works of the National Bard were themselves the heterogeneous products of an international capitalist industry” [281]); and of ink, made up not only of ingredients like juniper gum, linseed oil, and lampblack but also the residual traces of the urine of the printshop workers, who each night used urine to soak the leather casing of the balls that inked the press. It is these material practices that, even when noted, are ignored in favor of a transcendent “text” imagined as the product of the author’s mind. (281–2) As promised, this is a “radical change indeed”; de Grazia and Stallybrass are proposing a thoroughgoing disciplinary shift whereby we renounce the study of literature and move into the history of the book. Any decision whether or not to follow this counsel will be determined by many things but not, I believe, by the claims de Grazia and Stallybrass make for their own evidence. The many illustrations gathered in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” do not, as they are asserted to do, support “the simple but profound insight that ‘whatever

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they may do, authors do not write books’ ”; far from justifying the conclusion, these illustrations, rather, derive from it. They demonstrate merely that Shakespeare’s texts may be studied as an aspect of the history of the book (Printing History is the name of the journal from which Stoddard’s words are quoted), and that if they are examined from within the assumptions of this discipline, Shakespeare will be produced not as an author, as he might be from within the assumptions of literary study, but as a product of the early modern printing industry—that is, as a phenomenon of its own disciplinary practices. To be sure, this circularity characterizes the argument on the other side as well. R. A. Foakes, for example, examines in detail the differences between Q and F Lear (“Hamlet” versus “Lear”, pp. 99–111) and claims that they do not justify the disintegrationist conclusion: Works of art have frequently been revised or reworked by the artist, and may exist in several versions, but if the basic structure remains roughly the same, these versions are rightly considered as variants of one work. Hamlet and King Lear are works on a huge scale [and] though the changes between Q and F modify the presentation of some characters and events, their impact on the shaping of the play can be seen as one of emphasis or balance. . . . a concept of artistry begins from the whole as structure or pattern, in which the details may vary considerably, as in variants in a large narrative painting or a long novel, so that it is nuanced differently, but not essentially changed. (p. 135) Working within the tradition of literary study described by Frye (“the unity of the structure,” “the whole as structure”), Foakes offers manifold evidence and powerful arguments to suggest that a “basic” or “rough” similarity is equivalent to an “essential” identity (“nuanced differently, but not essentially changed”), and he is therefore relatively indifferent to substantial variations among “characters and events.” But Foakes’s evidence is strong and his arguments persuasive only within the framework of literary study in the service of which they have been produced. Operating out of an entirely different set of assumptions, de Grazia and Stallybrass think more along the lines Jonathan Culler sets out in The Pursuit of Signs: “the interpretation of individual works is only tangentially related to the understanding of literature. To engage in the study of literature is not to produce yet another interpretation of King Lear but to advance one’s understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse.”

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Instead of looking for coherent literary texts that, as Culler goes on to say, is “one thing we do not need” (pp. 5–6), we should, like de Grazia and Stallybrass, be looking at the differentiated products of the early modern book trade. From this perspective, the slippages among “weyward,” “weyard,” “weird,” and “wayward,” though in themselves “small verbal points” trivial by comparison to the variations Foakes can absorb, are judged to be significant nonetheless, because “a text is literally composed of just such small points” (266). According to Hayden White, it is fruitless to try to arbitrate among contending conceptions of the nature of historical process on cognitive grounds which purport to be value-neutral in essence, as both Marxist and nonMarxist social theorists attempt to do. . . . The Marxist view of history is neither confirmable nor disconfirmable by appeal to “historical evidence,” for what is at issue between a Marxist and a non-Marxist view of history is the question of precisely what counts as evidence and what does not, how data are to be constituted as evidence, and what implications for the comprehension of the present social reality are to be drawn from the evidence thus constituted. (p. 284) If for Marxist and non-Marxist views of history we substitute a materialist and a literary study of the Shakespearean text, White’s point is directly transferable to the argument I am making here. Of course we can produce evidence to study Shakespeare as a commodity of the printing house rather than as a literary text; the question is whether we should. In de Grazia and Stallybrass’s essay the strongly implicit claim that we should is based on logical and historical priority. Shakespeare would not be available for literary study but for the development of print technology. In this sense, the potential status of Shakespeare as a literary text depends on book history, to which it stands in the relation of effect to cause, or superstructure to base. The trouble with this argument is that it is too powerful to be controlled. If the history of the book is preferable to literary study as a more authentically materialist discipline, it remains less authentically materialist than, say, cultural anthropology (as literary study depends on book history, so the invention of printing is an event in the evolution of culture). Nor is there any clear rationale for stopping here. Since cultural anthropology itself derives from and depends on a material basis in evolutionary biology, it follows that we should, having abandoned Shakespeare for Geertz,

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now abandon Geertz for Darwin. Perhaps this regression terminates logically in neutrinos and the fundamental interactions of matter in trying to account for the origin of the universe. The point is that once authentic materialism is established as the primary factor regulating the pursuit of knowledge, any kind of work in “the human sciences” is bound to seem more human than scientific, belated in the face of the “simple but profound insight” that all the monuments we build to our own unaging intellects are made up out of atoms and subatomic particles of interchangeable energy and matter. *

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For an astute analysis (and reproduction) of this problem in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” consider Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy’s argument in the piece I mentioned earlier. “ ‘What’s the Matter?’ Shakespeare and Textual Theory” is structured by a narrative in which the promise of an authentic materialism is repeatedly betrayed by a shrinking but nonetheless persistent idealism. The narrative begins with the New Bibliography, whose advocates “found no difficulty in reconciling a confidence in the reality of matter with an assurance of its eventual transcendence” in the ability to determine authorial intention (97). It then moves to a de Grazia essay predating her joint Shakespeare Quarterly venture with Stallybrass (“The Essential Shakespeare”), which, though intended as a critique of New Bibliography, ultimately depends (according to Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy) on a “ ‘Materialism” [that] means much the same as it meant for Bowers . . . an essentially positivist [approach] vulnerable to continual unconscious collapses back into . . . idealism” (98). In the same way, “the imputed ‘materialism’ of [the Oxford edition’s] editorial policy is precisely the same as that of New Bibliography: a materialist methodology devoted towards an idealist end, that of stripping the Platonic ‘veil of print’ from a text to reveal the eternal form of the underlying manuscript” (99–100).1 This narrative reaches its climax in a sustained consideration of “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text.” By attributing to this essay an “importance” that “cannot be overestimated” (100), Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy reiterate the very terms by which de Grazia and Stallybrass announce their own radical breakthrough (the “uncertainty” produced by the multiplying Lear texts “cannot be overestimated”)2; but then, as it turns out, no such matter, for as with the earlier episodes in this depressing history, revisionary claims are seen to be recuperated back into the object of critique: “That ‘specific history’ of an early

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modern text” in which de Grazia and Stallybrass claim to be interested “is subsumed into an extremely general history of early modern cultural process,” with the result that “the textual surface which first ‘obstinately block[ed]’ and limited the parameters of interpretation suddenly becomes an open window on to the industrial and commercial processes of the early modern printing trade,” pointing “outwards towards context and relationship, towards the ‘diversity of labors’ that constituted the productive process” (102). As a consequence, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” remains mired in the same anti-materialist desire for transcendence as was the New Bibliography from which Holderness, Loughrey and Murphy began: there appears to be an underlying complicity between New Bibliography and the poststructuralist wing of “New Textualism” . . . both regard any individual text . . . as a signpost pointing towards something greater and more complete than itself. . . . New Bibliographical materialists, interested in textual surface but committed to spiritual depth, and poststructuralist bibliographical materialism, unable to focus on textual surface as anything other than a transparent window on to the underlying depths of history, encounter one another as strange but compatible bedfellows. (107–8) But then what is to be done? From Holderness, Loughrey and Murphy’s perspective, still attempting to achieve the authentic materialism denied us even in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” the “need for some recuperative action” (116) takes the form of a perspective which would necessarily facilitate a thorough decomposition of those strange compilations of separate texts, the modern editions, that pass under such generic titles as “King Lear” or “Hamlet” into the various discrete and to some degree incommensurable textualizations produced by historical contingency, and indiscriminately merged in most modern editorial practices. We need, in short, a general recovery of such textualizations, as they existed before their colonization by the modern edition; and once recovered we need . . . to look at rather than through them, if we are to distinguish and discriminate each text’s particular capability for the production of meaning. (117) These final sentences of “ ‘What’s the Matter?’ ” push nearly all the buttons currently available to us—perspectivism, deconstruction,

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textuality, historical contingency, pre- and postcoloniality; but the buttons are not connected to anything. The “decomposition” of current editorial constructs sounds like an interesting program, but what exactly does it entail? Earlier, Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy had warmed to the prospect of “a theoretical move that could potentially return texts to history and free them from the ideological constructions of a canonical reproduction” (110–1); but since history is inevitably shaped by ideological constructions, the idea of a return to history that simultaneously escapes these constructions is a contradiction. It is impossible to imagine (or maybe possible only to imagine) just what kind of editorial practice this theoretical move would authorize. The odd word “textualizations” performs energetically, but only in the empty space of a bare and indeed invisible stage. The word presumably denotes some kind of product (if meant to describe a process, the singular “textualization” would make better sense), but since any book or text that might actually be produced will perforce have entered into the process of canonical reproduction, these neologistic “textualizations” seem designed to create a magically new (and, contradictorily, transcendent) category of existence. From the other side of this problem: whatever they are, these “textualizations,” how will we succeed in “looking at” rather than “through” them? This distinction reproduces an earlier claim that the proper purpose of “materialist bibliography” is to “read” the visual surface of an early text, “rather than read through it” (102); but like “textualizations,” the distinction serves to summon up a theoretical or nominal category that cannot correspond to any practice. The problem is that “reading” and “reading through” are the same thing. Texts are meaningful only as they “point outwards towards context and relationship”; a sign is legible only “as a signpost pointing towards something greater and more complete than itself.” Reading that does not contextualize is simply not reading in any recognizable sense of the term. For this reason, the latter distinction between “looking at” and “looking through” might seem to make more sense, but what would these purely decontextualized objects look like? Darkness visible? the gleams of a light that never shone on sea or land? Such textualizations would not mean but be. Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy have succeeded in raising materialism to the level of transcendence itself. In their own “underlying complicity” with traditional aesthetics, the authors of “ ‘What’s the Matter?’ ” turn out not to be (like David Copperfield) the heroes of their own story, just the latest victims in an ongoing saga that might be called Materialism Lost. Inevitably so. By making a big deal of the fact that de Grazia and Stallybrass’s method

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shares with New Bibliography the assumption that “the meaning and value of a text always lie outside it” (107), Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy ignore the more consequential fact that every interpretive method—literary study, the sociology of literature, or any other imaginable form of cultural studies—proceeds from the same assumption. To say that de Grazia and Stallybrass’s book history compromises its own materialism is simply to say that it is an interpretive method. Judged by the deserts of a fully achieved materialism, none of us shall escape whipping. II: Making Love to Our Employment Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy conclude that we ought to be working harder to attain authentic materialism; but everything I have been arguing here suggests rather that we ought to cease pursuing this ignis fatuus in favor of a more practical goal. If we return to “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” from this angle, de Grazia and Stallybrass’s advocacy of book history can make a different kind of sense. By abandoning literary study, they tell us in their final words, we might take our minds off the solitary genius immanent in the text and removed from the means of mechanical and theatrical reproduction. This genius is, after all, an impoverished, ghostly thing compared to the complex social practices that shaped, and still shape, the absorbent surface of the Shakespearean text. Perhaps it is these practices that should be the objects not only of our labors but also of our desires. (283) In its contempt for immanence and ghostly genius, this peroration affirms the values of materialist ontology and methodology, but its deeper motivations are signaled in the shift at the very end—from methodology to hope, from the objects we can legitimately expect to know to others that we should “desire” to attain. This transfer of interest from knowledge to desire is what I have been recommending since the beginning of this book, and it should help to give a clearer sense of the values motivating “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” and, more generally, of the materialist critical practices currently dominating Shakespeare studies. “The Materiality” is centered on a distinction between the elite and the popular, the values conferred on the achievements of gifted

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individuals and those conferred on communal productions. De Grazia and Stallybrass take their stand unambiguously with the demotic and the collective. They deplore the “ ‘hypnotic fascination with the isolated author’ ” that has “led us to ignore the degree to which the production of a literary work ‘is a social and institutional event’ rather than an individual creation” (274, quoting Jerome McGann). Versions of this claim are brought forward throughout “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” frequently with the aid of current critical authorities—Michael Bristol, Scott McMillin, and Paul Werstine, for example, summoned (all on a single page) as witnesses to support the idea that an author-based literary study upholds a series of other hierarchies—genius/scribe, mind/hand, master slave. This politics [is] perceptible in the bias that “gives the privilege of genius to authors and holds those responsible for the material conditions of literature—actors, for example, but also scribes, stationers, and paper manufacturers . . . —as more or less contemptible.” (277, quoting McMillin) These hierarchical binaries originate, de Grazia and Stallybrass imply, in the development of Renaissance drama itself. Five years earlier, Stallybrass published a book with Allon White in which the historical implications are made explicit: “The symbolic domain of ‘authorship’ as it emerged in the late sixteenth century was produced over against the popular, as embodied in the festive scene of the fair and the carnival and as embodied in the popular drama” (p. 61). In his chapter on “Staging Exclusion,” Richard Helgerson relies on and considerably amplifies Stallybrass and White’s claim: an earlier “players’ theater,” characterized by “a union of high and low,” was, in Helgerson’s view, reshaped into a “newly emerging authors’ theater” that “asserted difference” (p. 244). In effecting this transformation, Shakespeare is said to play a central part: having “helped to establish the new genre of the national history play,” Shakespeare “then gave that genre a singularity of focus that contributed at once to . . . the cultural division of class from class, and to the emergence of the playwright—Shakespeare himself—as both gentleman and poet” (p. 245). Along with many others, Stallybrass and Helgerson have shaped “the currently dominant historical narrative of authors supplanting collaborators,” in which Shakespeare is represented “as a high-handed misappropriator of communal funds who strove to detach himself from his audience as well as his coworkers.” I am quoting from Jeffrey Knapp,

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who accumulates a mass of evidence to suggest that this standard view is fundamentally mistaken: coauthorship in fact increases after the 1590s (Knapp suggests that current critics have been misled by “their own utopian vision of collaborative labor”), and Shakespeare, far from identifying himself with an exclusive elite, played to a diverse room, “a multiform author, who makes himself ‘all things to all men’ ” in accordance with an already established tradition. “Before it became a staple of Romantic criticism,” Knapp comments, “the notion of a ‘myriadminded’ playwright was a Renaissance ideal.”3 In “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” the historical focus shifts from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, in which a story about the origin and establishment of Renaissance drama is reinforced with a story about the origin and establishment of literary study. The values are the same: literary study is associated with elitism and privileged individuals, and the withdrawal of interest from literary study—taking “our minds off the solitary genius immanent in the text” and focusing rather on the “social practices that shaped and still shape the absorbent surface of the Shakespearean text”—is a way to affirm plebeian and communal values. Such stories have achieved a common currency among materialist critics. They are not restricted to Shakespeareans, and the history of the book is just one among a variety of critical modes—the historicism, politics, cultural studies, et al. catalogued earlier on—represented as preferable to literary study in supplying “the objects not only of our labors but also of our desires.” Catherine Belsey, for instance, in Desire, published a year after “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” narrates a sequence by which “popular fiction,” at first the “least privileged mode of writing” and “in a sense feminine,” is “commandeered” by Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne (“in a patriarchal culture men rapidly appropriate whatever women invent”), until “at the end of the eighteenth century Romanticism began to idealize fiction as ‘art’. ‘Literature’, as a repository of moral truth, rapidly came into being, along with Grand Opera and Family Values.” Belsey acknowledges “the suspicion which now quite rightly attaches to the literary canon, its narrowness, its exclusions,” but her argument does not conclude (as do some versions of this story) with a call for jettisoning the artifacts of this idealized tradition but rather for abandoning the interpretive protocols associated with the Romantic production of “Literature”: we should read . . . everything. [But what] matters, I increasingly believe, is that we read . . . otherwise: not, that is to say, looking for

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the organic unity of the work; not looking for the author behind the text; and not, above all, in order to evaluate, to assess merit on a scale from one to ten, to allocate a judgment that issues in little more than self-congratulation at our own discernment. (pp. 10–13) This account of the origin of literary study has become a “dominant historical narrative” equivalent to the one Knapp described for Renaissance drama, and it deserves a similarly skeptical scrutiny. That a systematic literary study “came into being” with the Romantics is beyond dispute, but not so the particular values attributed to the Romantics in this enterprise. I think that Belsey is fundamentally mistaken in her representation of Romantic interests, and that similar misrepresentations have become a widespread and decisive feature of current critical work; and although a detailed development of this claim will have to wait for the last two chapters, a synoptic preview is in order here. With “the organic unity of the work,” Belsey alludes to the idea of “organic form” and thus installs Coleridge in his familiar position as fons et origo of Shakespearean criticism. But is it right then to suggest, as Belsey does immediately thereafter, that Coleridge was “looking for the author behind the text”? He was certainly committed to an idealized concept of authorship, in which Shakespeare’s “intentions as a poet for all ages” trump any historically verifiable intentions of “Shakespeare himself ” (Raysor, Shakespearean Criticism, 1. p. 42). But this idealized author is not the object of Coleridge’s quest, not the phenomenon to be “looked for behind the text.” Authorship so conceived is rather a heuristic device, the kind of creative force that might be imagined to produce something with which a powerful interpretive interest might be engaged. In this sense, as serving to describe and confer value on the text itself, authorship may seem simply to transfer attention back onto formal coherence or “organic unity” as the achievement of (rather than window upon) authorial genius. But as I argued earlier in connection with Loesberg’s representation of Coleridge as a formalist, Coleridge was concerned primarily not with textual properties as such, but with “inward illusion” (that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic faith): “while he followed Schlegel in attributing ‘organic form’ to Shakespeare’s plays . . . he internalized the sense of unity as a mental experience in the viewer or the reader” (Foakes, “Hamlet” versus “Lear”, p. 136 and see pp. 125–37). It is on this “mental experience” which Coleridgean literary study is founded, the intense interest and strenuous imaginative activity with which readers engage with textual energy—in short, on the beholder’s share.

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We may explain the misrepresentation of Coleridge in materialist accounts of literary study by introducing a new character into the story: Edmond Malone. In part as a consequence of de Grazia’s hugely inf luential Shakespeare Verbatim, which appeared two years before “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” an increased attention has been paid to Malone as a figure who, by turning commentary away from “improvement” and installing “the reproduction of authenticity” as the aim, established the author, or the authority of an original discourse, as the objective control for commentary. Almost single handedly in de Grazia’s view, Malone’s work systematized the goals and recovery methods we have come to accept (and more recently to question) as the norms for bibliographical and historical scholarship: he professionalized the study of Shakespeare. But much more is involved in de Grazia’s analysis of Malone than this description might suggest. As Stallybrass puts it, Shakespeare Verbatim is the place where the “implications of Malone’s edition for later criticism are fully worked out” (“Love,” 79), and its way of working them out entails locating Shakespeare, prior to Malone’s entry on the scene, in an organic realm of anecdotal folklore and legend. “Rather than individuating Shakespeare by amassing particulars corroborated by facts residing in documents, the anecdotes,” de Grazia claims, “set him in relation to the community.” From this “traditional context,” “before it was idealized by Romanticism,” Malone then “abstracted” Shakespeare, “enclosing him” “in his own experience, consciousness, and creativity” and in the “facts and documents” of “an historically remote past.” With this “decisive shift from individuation predicated on corporate political solidarity to individuation predicated on personal artistic complexity and growth,” Malone produces Shakespeare as “an exemplary instance of the autonomous self.”4 De Grazia’s characterization of the values underwriting Malone’s editorial work has not received universal acceptance (Postlewait, “Criteria for Evidence,” p. 63). But whether her analysis is reliable or not, the larger problem is in the tendency of materialist criticism to make this construction of Malone into the template for the supposed idealization of authorship in the Romantic invention of literary study. “Malone has constructed the text that Coleridge reads,” as Peter Stallybrass puts it. “Coleridge’s responses are responses to Malone’s Shakespeare,” he adds (“Love,” 73–4); but the quite substantial evidence available to us suggests that Coleridge never laid a hand or an eye on the physical objects we identify as Malone’s editions and that, to the extent that these editions and the procedures associated with them attracted Coleridge’s

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attention at all, he accorded them little regard if not, indeed, derisive contempt.5 The attempt to collapse Coleridge into Malone ignores the fundamental differences in their overall goals. Coleridge’s work is centered not in the technical skills of retrieving historical and authorial determinants but in the imaginative realization of textual energy; it does not lead (necessarily) to professionalism but, as Howard Felperin argues, potentially away from it: “the ‘idealist’ or ‘essentialist’ appropriation of Shakespeare” in the nineteenth century is “more than singly motivated,” not just a “conservative recuperation” but the “liberation” of Shakespeare “from the proprietorship of an aristocratic and literary elite and the first realization of the democratic potential of his work” (“Bardolatry,” p. 129; and see Felperin’s Uses of the Canon, pp. 1–15). Hence for a late Coleridgean like Bradley, “the habit of reading with an eager mind” makes “many an unscholarly lover of Shakespeare a far better critic than many a Shakespearean scholar,” because “the prime requisite” for good criticism is to have “a vivid and intent imagination” (Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. xiii–xiv). From this angle, de Grazia and Stallybrass might look as though they have things backward. Once we understand its origins in the beholder’s share, literary study may be viewed as an inherently democratic discipline, and it is rather de Grazia and Stallybrass who serve the interests of the elite. Although they identify themselves as inclusive and egalitarian, conferring value on the honest labor of printshop workers, the consequence of pursuing their project is to restrict Shakespeare to a privileged group, exclusively academic and exclusionary even within the precincts of the academy, empowered by the specialized and technical knowledge required for the study of book history. But reversing the polarities of the materialist story in this way merely reproduces its oversimplifications. Bradley’s “vivid and intent imagination” is not an inherited but an acquired faculty, a “habit,” and the skills and knowledge required to sustain this habit are themselves highly technical and specialized. Hence the complaints about the late Coleridgean eff lorescence called the New Criticism, that its ironies and ambiguities and fallacies constitute the mystifying jargon of a clerisy. (The people making these complaints usually ignore the way in which New Critical practices served to “liberate” texts “from the proprietorship of an aristocratic and literary elite” of old historicists, but that’s the other side of the story.) Bradley himself recognized (or ref lected) the problem. “But this will hardly suffice,” he says, after conferring primary status upon the imagination, as though twigging to the fact that he has just

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sawed off the branch on which, as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, he is perched. “It is necessary also,” he immediately adds, “to compare, to analyse, to dissect,” as long as the dissection is not a murderous displacement of the imagination by “ ‘cold reason’ ” (p. xiv). We might now conclude that the decision whether or not to persevere in literary studies needs to account more fully for the overdetermined history through which the discipline has developed and for the contradictory ways by which its political consequences may be identified and assessed. This conclusion is one I heartily endorse, but the claim I wish to make here is based not on the complexity of the narratives with which we justify disciplinary practice, but on their irrelevance—or at least their irrelevance as justification. This is Stanley Fish’s point at the end of Professional Correctness: It is usually said that justification, in order to be valid, must not borrow its terms from the activity being justified. Only a justification that did not presuppose the value of the activity under scrutiny would be legitimate; otherwise one would be trading on a value while pretending to establish it. This picture of justification will work, however, only if there is a normative structure in relation to which any and all practices can be assessed; but if . . . there is no such structure and each practice is answerable to the norms implicit in its own history and conventions, then justification can only proceed within that history and in relation to those conventions. (p. 112) Fish’s argument is the same one I took earlier from Hayden White about evidence. Since there is no “value-neutral” realm, what Fish here calls a “normative structure” or what White elsewhere refers to as “apodictically certain theoretical grounds on which one can legitimately claim an authority . . . as being more ‘realistic’ ” (p. xii), the explanatory narratives by means of which we purport to establish the foundation for a critical practice are rather, like evidence, derived from or produced by the practice they purport to found. Distinguishing between “the Kantians and the dialecticians”—in other words, between the literary and materialist approaches I have been discussing here—Richard Rorty tells us that “the issue between” them “is, I think, about as serious as the issue between normal and deviant sexual practices.” It “is not unserious in the sense of unimportant,” he adds, but “it is not a serious issue in the sense of a debatable one, on which there is much to be said on both sides. It is not an issue which we all ought to pitch in and try to resolve” (“Philosophy,” pp. 106–7). Rorty gets at once to the heart of my claim and to the reason why the claim generates so

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much resistance. For if it’s all de gustibus, Shylock had it right: Some men there are love not a gaping pig; Some that are mad if they behold a cat; And others, when the bagpipe sings i’ th’ nose, Cannot contain their urine; for affection, [Mistress] of passion, sways it to the mood Of what it likes or loathes. (4.1.47–52) And if Shylock had it right, we might seem bound to inhabit a world of exploitative brutality. But there is no necessary link between Shylock’s antihumanism and his acquisitive selfishness. If there were, materialist critics would all be aggressively exploitative and humanists generously charitable creatures—assertions for which there is no good evidence. According to Louis Menand, describing the circumstances in which people choose between contradictory practices and their consequences, we can’t say where the instinct to prefer one outcome to another arises from; but we can say that, as associated beings, we feel a strong incentive to justify our choices in moral language. If there did not always exist a “higher” principle to trump the one we have just found it expedient to abandon, it is hard to know how societies would function. (“Jane Austen,” 15) Like Rorty, Menand recognizes that we cannot account for our instinctive preferences beyond what we find to be “expedient.” It is clearly expedient—necessary, in fact—to have rules by which to “justify our choices”; without rules to confer differential status on its members or value distinctions on the repertoire of practices available to them, societies would not function. But it is not so easy to explain why academic discourse seems to require that these rules transcend expedience. What underlies Belsey’s claim, for instance, that her preferred critical practice is based on something “more than self-congratulation at our own discernment”? Such assertions fail to deliver on their promise to situate us in a “higher” or “more realistic” perspective, closer to apodictic certainty. Reading against the grain (Belsey’s “reading otherwise”) can be justified as superior to “the Romantic idealization of fiction as art”; but since the justification is bound to derive from the practice it purports to justify (as in the tendentious version of literary history by which Belsey tries to claim a status for “reading otherwise” that is not merely tendentious), it will be no less self-congratulatory than the practice it seeks to displace. As Fish puts it, “when the request

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for justification comes, you respond from the middle, respond with the phrases and platitudes of disciplinary self-congratulation” (Professional Correctness, p. 113). Self-congratulation is where we all stand, the untranscendable ground from which self-justification cannot be elevated. “To love oneself,” as Oscar Wilde says, “is the beginning of a life-long romance” (p. 298). But if the appeal to a higher authority does not amount to anything on its own terms, it does not have to, because these are not the terms that matter. This, I take it, is Menand’s point in locating the basis for such an appeal in our identities as “associated beings.” As “real Shakespeareans”— dues-paying members of groups like the International Shakespeare Association or the Shakespeare Association of America; beings, that is, associated in International or American Shakespeare—we have an interest in justifying our critical preferences because of the discursive conventions that govern our behavior. Such justifications may not transcend self-interest, even though transcendence is just what they claim, but they have something better—namely, cash value. They are what we have been trained to do, are supposed to be doing and rewarded for having done; they are such stuff as careers are made on. The felt need to play by the rules of the ISA and the SAA should not be taken lightly. Membership in these organizations does not define the whole of our identity, but it is the sign of a larger affiliation, citizenship in the liberal democracies that have, over the centuries, nourished the growth of these associations within the academic community and the society of which it is part. Given the historical depth and entrenched complexity of the institutions that underwrite and sustain our felt need for justification, there is no reason to believe that it will disappear overnight. We will continue to feel obliged to proliferate arguments proving that materialism is methodologically and politically superior to literary study, like the ones in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” and other arguments, like the one I sketched out earlier and subsequently abandoned, to demonstrate that traditional literary study is methodologically and politically superior to materialism. But in Rorty’s sense of the term, we do not need to take such arguments seriously. They have no practical consequences, because they are themselves the consequences of our practice. They do not shape belief, belief shapes them. They do not determine but are rather determined by our desires. All of which puts us in the same boat with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as Hamlet describes them to Horatio, explaining why he has sent them to it with neither compunction nor shriving time allowed: “Why, man, they did make love to this employment” (5.2.27).

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III: Negative Desire When a version of the preceding discussion was accepted for publication, the journal’s editor invited de Grazia and Stallybrass to respond. The exchange that followed is on the record, and I just want to glance at two pieces of it here, both of them centrally concerned with the question of desire. De Grazia and Stallybrass took exception to my argument for the priority of desire to knowledge. As de Grazia puts it, referring to the idea that we make love to our employment: “materially minded critics” like her and Stallybrass “see the lover-critic, but where is the beloved text?” The “problem with literary study,” she adds, is that “it assumes the identity of the literary object” (“Love,” 70). Stallybrass reiterates the objection. “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” represents “an attempt to understand just what it is that we are loving.” “Kissing in the dark,” he cautions, “is all very well, but sometimes you really do want to know whether you’re kissing your pillow or your lover” (“Love,” 72). In this dispute, which goes back beyond Bradley vs. Milton to the Franciscans vs. the Dominicans, no one is trying to describe interpretive activity in phenomenological terms; the question is not what we are really doing but how we conceptualize what we are doing. (“This is a logical sequence,” as Frye puts it, just after his description of literary interpretation quoted earlier on. “I have no idea what the psychological sequence is, or whether there is a sequence.”) But if we agree on the question, we disagree on the answers. De Grazia and Stallybrass deny the foundational assumption of my argument, reversing the priority I had given to desire over knowledge. It’s knowledge first, they say, not desire. My response to their denial was to reaffirm my major premise: “it is desire rather than knowledge of objects as in themselves they really are—not what we ‘really want to know’ but what we ‘really want to know’—that is the crucial factor in motivating and sustaining a practice” (“All,” 333). If the exchange had gone on, de Grazia and Stallybrass would no doubt wish to deny my denial of their denial, and like the ritualized exchanges between performers and spectators at productions of pantomime—“Oh yes it is!” “Oh no it isn’t!”—the process would continue until one side or the other ran out of steam. A lot of critical debate proceeds this way. This might seem scandalous, but panto has been around for a long time, during which it has satisfied the desires of countless performers and spectators, so we might hesitate before dismissing it out of hand. The point, in any case, remains that debate at the level of first

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principles does not seem to get us anywhere (as Rorty says, it is not the kind of issue “we all ought to pitch in and try to resolve”), so we might as well move on. (In declining to continue the debate, I am reaffirming my conviction that rational argument is not the decisive factor, which is, of course, a way of continuing the debate; but as Mrs. Simon Eyre says in The Shoemakers’ Holiday, “let that pass.”) De Grazia and Stallybrass not only dispute my argument for the general priority of desire but disclaim the particular desire I attributed to them. Any suggestion that they are “urging the renunciation of literary study,” according to de Grazia, “is wrong” (“Love,” 71). “Let us reiterate,” Stallybrass maintains: “we are not concerned to ‘renounce the study of literature’ ” (“Love,” 78). These disclaimers, though, sort oddly with what they explicitly say: that locating “the value of Shakespeare” in “the inner regions of the text” is the most important “single obstacle” to “rethink[ing] Shakespeare” as “collaborative writing” (279–80); and that, in the rhetorically privileged final words of the piece, we should “take our minds off the solitary genius immanent in the text” and focus rather on its “absorbent surface” as “the object” of “our desire” (283). In the face of exhortations like these, de Grazia and Stallybrass’s assurances that they have no designs against literary studies are not immediately reassuring, but they should not be dismissed out of hand. Their point, I take it, is not to oppose literary study as such, but rather the privilege accorded by literary study to “solitary genius” over “complex social practices” (283). If “This politics” (277) is what we are asked to renounce, however, it is a commodity whose materiality is hard to grasp. As Levin sees it, in fact, there is no politics in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” and its absence is central to the distinction on which “The Old and the New Materialising of Shakespeare” is predicated: where the old materialism “often serves as a synonym for Marxism,” from which it derives overtly “progressive or revolutionary” goals, the “new materialists have no discernible political purpose” to direct their work (pp. 87, 101). As an alternative to Levin’s view, it might be argued that politics in “The Materiality” functions “at the level of the episteme.” This is John Guillory’s phrase, describing the widespread conviction in materialist work “that epistemological positions have a necessary relation to political positions” (“Sokal,” 475), specifically “that an antirealist epistemology (alternatively expressed as antifoundationalism or relativism) is a requisite for any progressive politics and, conversely, that realism, foundationalism, or universalism underlie—at the level of the episteme, as it were—all that is regressive in our society” (476). Guillory attributes this

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belief to disaffected humanists, who compensate for their diminished power within the university by making wildly exaggerated claims for their impact on the outside world. Construing this as “a losing strategy in the conf lict of the faculties,” serving only “to marginalize literary and cultural studies even more extremely,” Guillory concludes that we ought to “dissolve once and for all the supposedly necessary link between epistemology and politics” (501, 506, 501). If this conclusion is persuasive (and it is shared by some of the strongest critics on the current scene, including Richard Rorty, Jonathan Dollimore, and Stanley Fish6), then de Grazia and Stallybrass have no basis for identifying the methods of literary study with an elitist individualism, or for identifying the methods of material bibliography with a demotic collective, still less for claiming that the transfer of interest from one set of methods to the other will have predictably desirable or undesirable effects—or any effects at all—for the disposition of power in the world. Such claims, like those for deconstruction as dismantling phallogocentrism or dethroning Enlightenment individualism, are grand but empty gestures. Politics “at the level of the episteme” is not an alternative to the absence of “discernible political purpose,” it’s the same thing. If abandoning literary study has no consequence beyond the realization of its own negative agenda, this does not mean it’s necessarily the wrong thing to do. According to William B. Warner and Clifford Siskin, the cessation of a practice—“Stopping Cultural Studies” is their example—can be “a crucial intervention on its own.” In answer to the question “what should we start doing?” they propose two answers. The first is just to stop. Why put the burden of prophecy on everyone who advocates change? Many important changes might never have happened—and many more opportunities have certainly been lost in just this fashion—if arguments for stopping had to be matched by arguments for what to do next. Knowing what needs to be stopped and when can be a hard enough task. (p. 104) This argument would be even stronger if Warner and Siskin could identify at least one of the many important changes that came about as the unanticipated consequence of stopping an established practice. The example they provide, Wordsworth’s “timely injunction to stop poetic diction,” in fact works against their argument because, as they acknowledge, Wordsworth was not content just to stop poetic diction.

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“Feeling the burden of prophecy, he did try to follow up with ‘a more exact notion of the style in which it was my wish and intention to write’ ” (pp. 104–5). Warner and Siskin salvage their argument by claiming that, beyond stopping poetic diction, Wordsworth didn’t really know what he wanted to do. His positive agenda “was anything but ‘exact’ in detail or even in its connection to ‘style’: ‘I have at all times endeavored,’ he wrote mysteriously, ‘to look steadily at my subject’ ” (p. 105). Whether Wordsworth is really so uncertain about his future program or not, the general point, the idea of a mismatch between strong arguments for stopping and weak ones for what to do next, remains interesting nonetheless. It coincides with Raymond Williams’s analysis of a “Structure of Feeling,” in which an emergent ideology has not yet achieved the kind of clarity that allows for conceptual or descriptive precision. “It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange” (p. 131). John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, as Frank Whigham describes it, “the shaping of the social self in the abrasive zone between emergent and residual social formations” (181), looks to be a good example of what Williams had in mind. In representing the residues of patriarchal and aristocratic power, the play is relentlessly lucid, “strip[ping] to the skin the soothing discourse of reciprocity” that disguises “Ferdinand’s savage gestures” (182); but no emergent alternative is visible except as inchoate implication. Marital domesticity, we might call it now, a private space where gendered hierarchy has become so confused as to be virtually inoperative; but such explicit terms would be available only to audiences looking back on the play from a position far in the future. Whigham describes The Duchess “as a disruptive symbolic act, the reverse of Burkean Prayer—as an Imprecation” (182); but while the intensity of Webster’s enraged critique is extraordinary, its negative energy is nonetheless directed toward the objects of positive desire. Stopping the Elizabethan World Picture (if that’s a way of describing Webster’s play) is, no less than stopping poetic diction or cultural studies, a way of starting something else. There are other instances, however, where constructive possibilities are neither available nor even imaginable. In Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire describes “this life” as “a hospital where each patient is possessed with the desire to change beds”—to get closer to the stove, or the window, or to escape the room altogether, for Lisbon or Rotterdam or even “further yet, to the extreme edge of the Baltic; still further from life, if possible; let’s install ourselves

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at the pole,” until, “finally, my soul explodes and wisely cries to me: ‘No matter where! no matter where! as long as it’s out of this world!’ ” (pp. 217–18, my translation). Desire here is uncontaminated by any hope beyond escaping from its own self-deluding restlessness—from life itself. This is the “spirit of denial” embodied in Goethe’s Mephistopheles: What use these cycles of creation! Or snatching off the creatures to negation! ‘It is gone by!’—and we can draw the inference: If it had not been, it would make no difference: The wheel revolves the same, no more, no less, I should prefer eternal emptiness. (p. 288) The same pure negativity animates (or de-animates) Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, reducing even the triumphant prospect of snatching souls off to perdition to a savorless banality. In this feeling of weary futility, moreover, there does not seem to be much difference between Marlowe’s Mephistopheles and his blood brother Doctor Faustus (Goethe’s Faust is another matter). All Marlowe’s heroes and villains, as Stephen Greenblatt describes them, seem finally unable to “desire anything for itself ”; despite their “noisy demonstrations of single-minded appetite,” they are beset with “the suspicion that all objects of desire are fictions, theatrical illusions shaped by human subjects” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 218). We come back, then, to the suggestion I made at the beginning—a similarity between Faustus’s restless volatility and the f luctuating excitement and disappointment cycling through current work. I want to insist again on the looseness of the analogy. Materialism is not inherently or necessarily motivated by the spirit of denial. Materialists propose a “radical change” in which “Shakespeare studies will never be the same,” but their exhilaration at the prospect of stopping a practice to which they are averse is, at least potentially, based on the desire to start something else, however vaguely or overambitiously described. In its most recent incarnation, moreover, the history of the book (as we now designate the project announced by de Grazia and Stallybrass’s prescient essay), textual materialism stands behind some of the most compelling critical performances on the current scene.7 These projects have been unable to capture the long-term interest of any but a small minority of Shakespeareans (and for the reasons I suggested earlier, the general approach of materialist book history is bound to remain sequestered

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within a specialized subculture of the disciplinary whole); but the prospect of a continually refreshed search engine, like the Rortian idea of keeping the conversation going, is by no means dispiriting. The risk, though, is that stopping may become, instead of the prologue to an omen coming on, the be-all-and-end-all expression of a purely negative desire. There is a precedent for such a development in the history of biblical interpretation out of which Shakespeare studies (and all literary study) may be said to emerge. In his magisterial Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Hans Frei describes the Enlightenment origins of modern biblical interpretation in the confrontation between the tradition of “figural reading,” whose “chief use” was “for unifying the canon” across “differing cultural levels and conditions,” and a newly materialist historicism focused on the “specific historical circumstances” determining original inscription (p. 7). “On the one hand, there has been the question of the origin and, in some respects, the reliability of biblical writings. On the other there has been inquiry into the proper ways of learning what abiding meanings or values these writings might have” (p. 17). In The Great Code, Northrop Frye represents the field as fractured in the same way. There have always been two directions in Biblical scholarship, the critical and the traditional . . . The critical approach establishes the text and studies the historical and cultural background; the traditional interprets it in according with what a consensus of theological and ecclesiastical authorities have declared the meaning to be. (p. 11) But where the normative response to this situation in Frei is an evenhanded mediation, “plotting a chart for the narrows between these two shoals” (p. 17), from Frye’s perspective, the “analytical and historical approach” has “dominated Biblical criticism for over a century” (p. 11)—and with unambiguously impoverishing results. By restricting interpretive activity to speculation about “some hypothetical embryonic stage of textual development,” and by treating the Bible’s “mythological and metaphorical aspects” as “elements that could be, and therefore should be removed,” the historical approach has preempted efforts to understand “why the books of the Bible exist as they now do in their present form,” and how scripture has managed to engage the passionate interest of so many readers over the centuries (“History,” pp. 17–18). “Textual scholarship,” Frye argues, “has never really developed the ‘higher’ criticism that made such a noise in the nineteenth century.

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Instead of emerging from lower criticism, or textual study, most of it dug itself into a still lower, or sub-basement, criticism in which disintegrating the text became an end in itself ” (p. 11). For my purposes, the most interesting aspect of Frye’s analysis is his suggestion for a way out of the problem. Building on his conviction that “literary criticism is the ‘higher’ criticism, the criticism that is supposed to start after a certain amount of work has been done on establishing the text,” Frye claims that the way to propel the enterprise of biblical criticism forward is to correct “the deficiencies of Biblical scholars as literary critics”—that is, “accept the whole Bible as an imaginative unity of myth and metaphor, and see what comes out of that hypothesis” (“History,” p. 17, 18). The prospect Frye holds out for us, that literary criticism might liberate biblical criticism from its doldrums, looks like a version of Matthew Arnold’s prediction that poetry would replace religion. “The future of poetry is immense,” Arnold declared in the first words of “The Study of Poetry”; in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry. (p. 161) Arnold’s expectation that poetry would fill the vacuum left by an exhausted religion was pretty clearly unjustified. The redemptive possibilities Frye imagined for literary criticism in 1983 are not, to judge from the kind of materialist critique discussed in this chapter, likely to fare any better. Bill Brown reinforces the unlikelihood. Invited by the editors of the PMLA to introduce a “cluster” of essays in a 2010 issue of the journal devoted to “Textual Materialism,” Brown represents a materialist “book history” as focused on the same “specific historical circumstances” and “embryonic stages of textual development” described by Frei and Frye: it “draws attention to those determinants (from questions of layout to questions of law) that worked to stabilize the semantic experience for a specific readership in a specific time and place.”

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Brown, to be sure, acknowledges that “the literary work” can “be said to ‘transcend’ the object (Genette)”—that, for example, although the “experience of Great Expectations is a different experience” in its different material forms, “we’re still generally willing to say that each experience is the experience of Great Expectations. Across those very different mediations, the novel in some sense remains the same.” The consequence of this situation, Brown concludes, “is simply to suppose that the experience of texts . . . amounts to a dialectical drama of opacity and transparency, physical support and cognitive transport, representation as object and as act” (24–6). But unlike most dialectical dramas, such as the mediating course Frei describes in response to a bifurcated interpretive tradition, Brown’s representation is notably lopsided. Opacity and physical support clearly dominate transparency and cognitive transport, just as the “lower” criticism does in Frye. Textual Materialism is interested chief ly in the “specific readership” and “specific time and place,” for and out of which this or that book has been produced—the peculiar contingencies from we are bound to feel estranged. Textual Materialism is interested less in those elements of continuity that have allowed “the literary work” to engage audiences over time and to continue to engage us here and now. The inverted commas in “ ‘transcend’ the object” work to contain literary power within the space of what “might be said” with conviction only by other people (l’enfer, c’est le discours des autres). The idea of transcendence has long been in general circulation, regrettably or not, so attributing it to Gérard Genette seems gratuitous; but the citation has a pointed effect: identified with the formalist excesses of an outworn buried narratology, the literary is further stripped of any residual legitimacy and cachet (who wants yesterday’s papers?). By now a considerable irony should be evident. Instead of elevating biblical criticism into a purposeful activity, literary criticism during the last thirty years or so has descended into the “futile procedure” Frye supposed it might redeem (“History,” p. 18). As “disintegrating the text became an end in itself,” moreover, the hypothetical risk identified earlier seems to be realized: materialism as pure negativity, propelled by nothing beyond the desire to reiterate its own disaffection from literary power, n’importe où hors du littéraire. This extraordinary motivation, so I want to argue in the following two chapters, has managed to install itself in some of the most inf luential centers of Shakespearean critical practice at the present time.

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PA RT

T WO

What’s Wrong with Literature?

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Introduction: What’s Wrong with Literature?

“What’s going on? How’d it get so wrong?” Blue Rodeo. “What Is This Love That I Leave Behind?” In its October 22, 2007 issue, The New Yorker ran a piece by Adam Gopnik, commenting on a series of “compact editions” of celebrated nineteenth-century novels (Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick, Vanity Fair, et al.), produced by the British publisher Orion. Orion’s publicity touts the “passionate romance, thrilling adventure, arresting characters and unforgettable scenes and situations” available in “the great classics,” but acknowledges that “finding time to read them can be a problem” (66). Gopnik does not treat the project with scorn. Moby-Dick, he tells us, is “not defaced”; it is, by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment, improved. The compact edition adheres to . . . the contemporary aesthetic of the realist psychological novel[:] cut out the self-indulgent stuff and present a clean story, inhabited by plausible characters—the “taut, spare, driving” narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers. (66, 68) All in all, “The Orionites should be proud of their work; their abridgments are skillfully done” (66). But Gopnik has his qualms, and they derive precisely from the categorical distinctions between “contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment” and the values associated with what he unabashedly refers to as “masterpieces,” “classics,” and “art.” These latter depend for their power on the eccentric digressions and idiosyncratic excesses that invite us into a ref lective response—precisely what the Orion abridgments eliminate. “Thackeray without his little jokes and warm asides becomes another, duller writer—too constantly on message.”

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Gopnik invites us to laugh, or grimace, at the imagined response of an Orion-type editor to a draft of Moby-Dick: “myself I find the whaling stuff fascinating, but I fear your reader wants to move along with the story—and frankly the tensile strength of the narrative is being undercut by a lot of stray material that takes us way off line” (68). Whatever the value of a stripped-down, bare-bones, and fast-moving narrative, this is not, as Gopnik sees it, a defining feature of art. For my purposes, the most interesting moment in Gopnik’s discussion comes in the form of a parenthetic reference to the Hamlet text controversy: “(There are those who think that the late long First Folio Hamlet is a messy author’s expansion of the short, stern, early quarto, but they are a minority)” (70). Only Shakespeareans will know in any detail what Gopnik is talking about here. A few of his readers may have vague memories of a piece Ron Rosenbaum wrote for The New Yorker five years earlier, “Shakespeare in Rewrite: The Battle Over How to Read Hamlet,” which is likely the source of Gopnik’s own knowledge (he is a staff writer for the magazine); but the reference is bound to go over the heads of almost all Gopnik’s readers. Presumably, this is why he puts the point between parentheses as a tossed-off aside. He is trying to reassure his readers that their ignorance is not really disabling. All they need to know is the point of the reference—that artistic masterpieces demand a more patient and thoughtful response than do the entertainments of contemporary popular culture. And this is the kind of response, Gopnik’s parenthesis implies, that professional Shakespeareans are prepared to offer to the object of their disciplinary interest. Gopnik concedes that some Shakespeareans take the “short, stern, early quarto” as a first draft rather than as an abridgement of Q2 and F1, but only “a minority”; most, in his representation, are aligned with the values of depth and expansive richness he identifies with artistic masterpieces. Gopnik evidently means his aside as a compliment to Shakespeareans; and at a time when the traditions of anti-intellectualism and prof-bashing seem to have reached new heights, who would not feel grateful for the gesture? But this would be the wrong response, because Gopnik himself is wrong—not, I think, in the values he invests in aesthetic interest, but in his assumption that Shakespeareans largely share the investment. More Shakespeareans than Gopnik thinks have come out on record in support of Q1 Hamlet, and still others in support of other “short, stern, early” quartos. Moreover, it’s not just the numbers: the Shakespeareans writing in support of the early quartos are in many cases the industry leaders, positioned institutionally to define best critical practices, and the values sustaining these

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practices have had a significant impact on Shakespearean commentary far beyond the textual issues narrowly defined. My title, “What’s Wrong with Literature?”, along with the musical questions Blue Rodeo asks in the head note to this Introduction, are meant to highlight a strong general tendency—perhaps a dominating factor—in current Shakespearean commentary not just to abandon but explicitly to repudiate aesthetic interest as a fundamental motivation for the way we go about our business. The abandonment is problematic, but the explicit repudiation, so I will be arguing in the following two chapters, has had and continues to have unambiguously damaging consequences for our work.

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CH A P T E R

T H R E E

New Theatricalism and the Repudiation of Literary Interest

I: What’s Going On? A few years ago, a friend of mine—call him Tom—asked me to read his M.A. thesis, a hypertext version of The Taming of A Shrew. A Shrew is not The Shrew, the play printed in Shakespeare editions. Its plot and themes are similar, and its language is too close to Shakespeare for coincidence; but there are differences as well—in the characters’ names, setting (Greece, not Italy), length (about 40% shorter), order and emphasis of scenes, and in the framing action (Christopher Sly’s story disappears halfway through Shakespeare but is resolved at the end of A Shrew). Nearly all discussion of A Shrew seeks to determine its relation to The Shrew—source? first draft? “bad quarto” (that is, reported or pirated text)? spin-off? touring version? In his thesis, though, Tom refused to consider A Shrew in terms of Shakespeare’s play. He was determined, rather (he declared at the beginning), to look at A Shrew “in its own right.” Tom’s agenda had been anticipated almost verbatim in Kathleen O. Irace’s book on Reforming the “Bad” Quartos (1994). According to Irace, the “intrinsic interest and value” not just of A Shrew but of all the “bad quartos” make them legitimate candidates for “evaluating as theatrical scripts in their own right” (pp. 11, 12). Irace’s own agenda had been anticipated by Steven Urkowitz in 1988, who argued that the “bad” quartos “should be studied for what they are, in and of themselves, rather than solely as pernicious desecrations of Shakespeare’s iconic originals” (p. 204). Stephen Miller, writing four years after Irace,

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argues to the same effect: “the ‘bad quarto theory,’ ” he claims, has diverted “attention away from much of what is most interesting about A Shrew and ultimately from the play itself ” (p. 262). And according to John Jowett, summing up attitudes toward the “bad” quartos as they “were emerging in the 1990s,” each “text was opened up for study and potential or actual performance without prejudice as a version in its own right” (“Editing Shakespeare,” p. 9). I take “the play itself ” in Miller and “in and of themselves” in Urkowitz to be versions of Tom’s and Irace’s (and subsequently Jowett’s) signature phrase, “in its [or their] own right”; and by now it may be clear why such formulas (and we will meet more of them in the following pages) engage my interest. If in language there is difference without positive terms, then texts do not exist “in their own right,” sustained by “intrinsic interest and value,” but are rather perched on top of subtexts, posterior to pretexts, in the midst of contexts. In Sir Thomas Browne’s quaintly Anglican inf lection of the antifoundationalist creed, “God . . . onely is, all others have an existence with dependency and are something but by a distinction” (p. 34). What then does looking at The Taming of A Shrew “in its own right” add up to? For Tom it meant interesting characters, resonantly suggestive language organizable into image patterns that reinforced the play’s themes, lively dramatic structure, and a critical intelligence that served to “interrogate the patriarchy.” In other words, A Shrew engaged Tom’s interest with the same qualities Shakespeareans have found in The Shrew. Miller and Irace, too, negotiate their discussions of A Shrew with the familiar topoi of Shakespearean commentary. Where Tom sees gender relations, Miller keys on class—the interactions among characters “from different social ranks,” as juxtaposed by “parallels” between and within its plots: theme again, and plot structure (p. 256). “Plot Structure” is the first of the three categories by which Irace identifies the bad quartos’ “intrinsic interest.” The other two, “Characterization” and “Staging,” harmonize similarly within the dominant Shakespearean register. (“Staging” may seem like a special case, focusing on performance features, but the discussions there—e g., are the French prisoners killed on stage in Q Henry V?—are also recognizably standard counters in the nonperformance-centered commentary on the play.) In all these respects, Tom, Irace, and Miller had been anticipated by Urkowitz’s catalog of the values exhibited by the “bad” quartos: “patterns of imagery, poetic devices (particularly repetitions), meaningful uses of stage action, dramatic characterization, development of themes, and the rest—the entire repertory of theatrical art” (p. 204). The “bad”

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quartos, it seems, turn out to exhibit just what the Folio and the “good” Shakespearean quarto texts exhibit in such exemplary abundance. How can we explain the fact that Tom, Irace, Miller, and Urkowitz, having banished Shakespeare from their discussion, then proceed to let him sneak in through the back door in the form of the literary interests and aesthetic values for which Shakespeare is the avatar? One way to make sense of this apparently self-contradictory situation is to look ahead to the Romantic claims about Shakespeare we’ll be considering in detail in Part Three of this book. Although no one these days would indulge in such grandly sweeping pronouncements as Coleridge’s, that “very nature” is ‘shakespearianized” (Engell, p. 27), or Emerson’s, that “literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized” (p. 335), these assertions still have explanatory power. Even now, when it comes to literary interest, Shakespeare wrote the book; the 1623 Folio, if it did not corner the market, at least constitutes the default value. Given their residual investment in aesthetic interest, Tom, Irace, and Miller may have had no choice but to hang their discussions on the hook of Shakespeare. Of Shakespeare we may say what Danny DeVito says about money in David Mamet’s Heist: everybody likes Shakespeare; that’s why they call it Shakespeare. Not everybody; these days—so I argue here—liking Shakespeare seems to belong to an increasingly inconsequential constituency among academic Shakespeareans. Consider Scott McMillin’s 2001 edition of Othello for the Cambridge Early Quartos series. McMillin starts with the claim that Q1 Othello proceeds “from the acted version of the play, not by way of a ‘bad’ quarto but by way of a prompt book legitimately prepared once the actors have memorized their roles” (pp. 7–8). On this basis, McMillin takes “this earliest published version of Othello as a book in its own right.” That phrase again, and an alternate version of it appears in the summary statement at the end of McMillin’s Introduction: The question this volume asks readers to consider is not the question usually asked in studies of the Othello texts (how is F related to Q1?), but what might be considered the prior question once it is asked: what is the Q1 text itself, and how is it related to the persons who may have produced it? (p. 46) Like those other phrases in Tom, Irace, Miller, Urkowitz, and Jowett, McMillin’s “Q1 text itself ” does not make sense, or at least not the sense it purports to make. McMillin no sooner invokes the intrinsic

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identity and value of “the Q1 text itself ” but that he defines it extrinsically, in terms of “how it is related to the persons who may have produced it.” He is not really interested in an essentially decontextualized phenomenon (this would entail worshipping Sir Thomas Browne’s deity), but rather in a newly or differently contextualized phenomenon. Disconnecting the first Quarto of Othello from the Folio version allows McMillin to reconnect it to something else, a preferred alternative misleadingly referred to as “the Q1 text itself.” Early on in his Introduction, McMillin goes some way toward explaining the basis for his transfer of interest. Acknowledging that the “160 lines included in F but not in Q1 are rich in metaphor and verbal energy,” and that “no one doubts that they are Shakespearian,” he then reviews the various textual hypotheses “proceeding from this observation.” Q1 might be “a theatrical version abridged for stage,” or it might be “a first draft which Shakespeare then enlarged.” The latter has been the hypothesis of choice because, as “a ref lection of the author’s original manuscript of the play, his ‘foul papers,’ ” it provides “exactly what one would like to have for a back-up text.” McMillin himself, however, wants to go in a different direction from most editors: “the evidence they dealt with in advancing the foul-paper hypothesis is often the same evidence which leads to a different conclusion, that Q1 Othello comes from a theatre-script on which Shakespeare may have never left a mark in his own hand.” (pp. 2–3). In rejecting the “usual question” about Q1’s relation to F, McMillin is clearly disclaiming an interest in authorial intention. His reasons for this disclaimer are not specified, but his opposition to “the bias that ‘gives the privilege of genius to authors’ ” at the expense of “ ‘actors, . . . scribes, stationers, and paper manufacturers’ ” is on record, cited by de Grazia and Stallybrass as we have seen, and he is presumably taking for granted the materially minded analysis discussed in chapter 2. In any case, the question remains what values he associates with his preferred alternative. Once Q1 is emptied of its at least directly authorial marks, whom should we identify as those other “persons who may have produced” it? The print house workers are likely candidates, and in fact McMillin devotes a lot of his Introduction to speculations about the textual traces of scribal and compositorial actions; but his most intense and sustained scrutiny is reserved for the actors, who emerge as the determining agents in the making of the text as McMillin claims it has come down to us. By this point, a fairly clear picture is emerging. At the center of McMillin’s argument is the claim that we should regard Q1 Othello “in

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a fresh light” in order to see it not “as the first thoughts of a playwright who would deliver his second thoughts in time for F, but as a performable and lively playhouse script which can be staged as it stands, and probably was” (p. 14). Performable liveliness, a playhouse production “as it stands” (in its own right), rather than an authorial production: Q1 Othello embodies theatrical rather than literary value. At first glance, McMillin seems to be going round the same circles described earlier— banishing Shakespeare but then recuperating what Shakespeare represents in the form of theatrical power. Not that theatrical power is identical to literary power; reading texts and watching plays are distinct activities. Both of them, however, can be and frequently have been accommodated within the same capacious framework of aesthetic interest. In fact, McMillin’s performable liveliness sounds a lot like enargia, the Longinian sublime—the effect where not only the literary and the theatrical but the aesthetic and the rhetorical traditions seem to coincide. But McMillin does not confuse his argument with inconsistent residues of aesthetic interest. His passing reference to the 160 Shakespearean lines absent from Q1 Othello, “rich in metaphor and verbal energy,” reads like a sop to convention. Notably excluded from this laconic description is the powerful impact of these 160 lines for, precisely, performable liveliness. The omitted passages include Desdemona’s prayer on bended knee, to Iago of all persons, to tell her “what I must do to win my lord again” (4.2.149), a speech during which, as John Jones sees it, “the play’s fierce and . . . unrelenting concentration on Othello” is “brief ly but very powerfully removed” (p. 262). They also include Desdemona’s heartbreaking rendition of the willow song, as she prepares the bed where we know she will be murdered, and Emilia’s thrilling speech about the double standard, which moves us, to quote Jones again, “into a large central area of human ordinariness . . . unknown to Othello” (p. 260)—a turning point in the process through which Emilia emerges as the magnet of audience feeling. These passages are crucial in establishing the women’s parts in Othello, and in Othello women’s parts (I mean the pun) are at the center of the action. When Lodovico at the end instructs us to “look on the tragic loading of this bed” (5.2.363), we see not just Othello (though nineteenth-century productions often doctored the text to isolate him in this final tableau), but Desdemona and Emilia’s bodies as well. These speeches are indeed “rich in metaphor and verbal energy,” but if we dismiss them as just pretty language, without consequences for the play’s theatrical impact, what meaning can be left for the concept of

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performable liveliness? McMillin addresses this issue indirectly, arguing that in regard to the 160 lines present in F but not in Q1, it seems that the shorter text was cut down from the longer. The distribution of these lines has not been noticed before. . . . Act 4 has the largest number of omitted lines, nearly 50 per cent of the total. . . . Forty-five of the omitted lines are from Desdemona’s part, 36 from Emilia’s—again, about 50 per cent of the total. Coghill noticed Emilia’s larger role in F and thought Shakespeare was building up her character, but the implication of his view would have to be that Shakespeare added lines to the later scenes of a play that already ran upwards of 3,000 lines. It seems more likely that the play was cut towards the end because it was running too long. Perhaps the performance sagged because the boy-actors were not at their best here, or perhaps the performance sagged in the later scenes when the boys were at their best. Othello is a long play. (p. 9, McMillin’s emphases) This discussion is remarkable for its lack of interest in Othello’s specificity—the play’s substantial investment in issues of gender, sex, and marriage. That “50 per cent of the total” cuts are from the women’s roles gets absorbed into the fact that that “50 per cent of the total” cuts are from Act 4; all that matters is location (“distribution”). Hence the asymmetry of the argument against Neville Coghill. Where Coghill claimed that Shakespeare “was building up [Emilia’s] character,” McMillin claims that the cuts reduce the length of the play. Character is as inconsequential as theme; what really counts is the duration of the action and an uninterrupted through line (hence the reiterated “performance sagged” at the end). We now seem finally to have a working definition of the conditions necessary for performable liveliness: a short (or at least not-too-long) play with a fast and steadily moving plot. The implications of this definition are not developed into a systematic argument but don’t have to be. Similar claims have proliferated to such an extent these days that they may be taken for granted. Conspicuous in the background here is the Lear revision case—that Shakespeare’s own F cuts helped shore up a sagging action in Q, and that these abridgments constitute differences so significant that Q and F Lear should be considered separate plays. “The language of speed seems to govern all such arguments,” William Carroll remarks about the theatrical advantages claimed for F’s deleting the mock trial in 3.6; “the scene becomes ‘not only shorter but sharper,

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more urgent and rapid’ ”; the “plot is ‘streamline[d]’ and the ‘narrative momentum’ increased,” producing an intensified “ ‘rhythmic and narrative excitement” ’ as compared with Q. Where the mock trial caused “ ‘the pace to slow down,’ ” making it “ ‘very difficult for actors to sustain dramatic momentum,’ ” the F cuts are “ ‘designed to sustain the rapid sequence.’ ” Carroll himself is unconvinced. “What is not effectively shown is why this acceleration and streamlining are really virtues. Indeed, the very metaphors used by these scholars—positives like ‘streamline’ and ‘accelerate’ rather than, for example, ‘abort’ or ‘truncate’—beg the question” (230–1). As Richard Knowles suggests in his 1997 summary of the situation, similar objections have contributed to something of a retreat from the enthusiastic conviction about Lear revisions that prevailed in the 1980s. Even as it recedes, however, the argument leaves its impression on and even changes the shape of our work. Shakespearean criticism continues to welcome arguments for theatrical abridgement, whether authorized by Shakespeare or not. Hence McMillin can support his emphasis on the “distribution” of the Q1 Othello cuts with a 1997 essay on “The Revision of Scripts,” in which Eric Rasmussen demonstrates that the F cuts in Hamlet and Lear are similarly concentrated in Act 4. As perhaps the most striking examples of the current hospitality to stage cuts, consider the companion volumes to McMillin’s Othello in the Cambridge Early Quarto series. Andrew Gurr’s Henry V, published the year before McMillin’s Othello, anticipates the situation described there in every significant respect. As Gurr sees it, “the copy that formed the basis for the quarto text is almost certainly” based on “the play as first staged in Shakespeare’s presence, not the . . . text as Shakespeare delivered it to the players” (pp. 10–11). But this is not to say that Q Henry V is a bad quarto—surreptitiously stolen by rogue actors; rather, it was “recorded by dictation” taken in-house from “[a]t least two, possibly more, of the company’s players” and is thus “undoubtedly an authoritative players’ text” (p. 9). As another legitimating factor, Gurr remarks on the “purposive” competence of this abridgment, designed as a way not only of “shortening the text but of altering its speed.” The “scenes before the battle [of Agincourt] are trimmed” among other “changes that marked the speeding-up of time” (p. 24). This acceleration and streamlining, moreover, are part of a strategy for transforming the play as a whole. “The changes made for the staged version had a radical effect” on the “secret play inside the official play” (p. 10); working “to emphasise the king’s heroism at the cost of the play’s ‘secret’ other”

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(p. 11), they eliminate the ironic skepticism that commentators since Hazlitt have emphasized in the F version. How to explain and evaluate this major revision? The question is thrust on us by Gary Taylor’s Oxford edition, which, some twenty years before Gurr’s, proceeds from much the same description of the two versions—Q “remove[s] almost every difficulty in the way of an unambiguously patriotic interpretation of Henry and his war” (p. 12)—but comes to a very different conclusion. Taylor supports his negative evaluation of Q with Anne Barton’s argument about the “little touch of Harry in the night” episode: the disguised king motif in this scene was a standard topos at the time, but where convention called for “a romantic gesture” in which “king and unsuspecting subject meet time after time and discover unanimity of opinion and mutual respect” (quoted by Taylor, p. 41), F plays against type, dramatizing an action that issues in recrimination and distrust. In Taylor’s view, Q “has clearly been adapted and debased to make it conform to the very expectations about Henry,” which F “goes out of [its] way to disappoint” (p. 43, p. 42). As an attempt to explain why the Q adapters proceeded in this manner, Taylor suggests that, faced with “the apparent modesty of [F’s] early success,” a consequence of “its having disappointed . . . the complacent expectations of its first audience,” they eliminated material that departed “from the kind of play which theatrical convention and the national mood would have led audiences of 1599 to expect” (p. 12). Where Gurr sees “a shorter, brisker, simpler play” (p. ix), Taylor sees a “debased” and “complacent” one, not just cut but dumbed down to satisfy popular taste. The same qualities have been reversed in polarity, turned into the “positives” Carroll described in the revisionist evaluation of F Lear. Gurr obviously knows Taylor’s argument but never engages it directly. Confronted with claims about aesthetic impoverishment, a Q Henry V systematically diminished from F in its power to sustain a complex interpretive interest, Gurr asserts legitimate provenance: the text is produced by authority of the actors’ company itself. Despite “undoubtedly” and “almost certainly,” Gurr’s claim that Q represents a theatrical abridgment of F produced by in-house dictation remains fundamentally conjectural. Richard Dutton amasses textual and contextual evidence to produce a story with a diametrically opposed trajectory, in which F is produced from the earlier Q version, and his speculation seems no less plausible than Gurr’s. (To be sure, Dutton then arrives at a position identical to Gurr’s, that Q is “a robustly playable text,” the conclusion sandwiched between claims

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that—wait for them—Q “was almost certainly performed in its own right,” “deserves more attention in its own right,” and “was originally composed in its own right” [pp. 140, 135, 144]). Taylor’s story about a reaction to initial unpopularity is itself, of course, no less speculative than Gurr’s and Dutton’s. The evidence we have to determine how the text came into being is inferred from the effects we understand the text to produce. But even if it were possible to confirm Gurr’s claim that Q is not a “bad quarto,” it might still be a bad text in Taylor’s terms. To assert theatrical origin is not to identify theatrical value. We are back to McMillin, where a claim for “performable liveliness” is nowhere substantiated with evidence or argument—or where the evidence produced in support of the claim reduces the concept of theatrical value to nothing more than an unimpeded and fast-moving action. In an edition published in the Cambridge Early Quarto Series two years before Gurr’s Henry V, Kathleen Irace claims that Q1 Hamlet’s “revisers and adapters” were “full members of Shakespeare’s company,” and that the copy they produced was “reconstructed from memories of performance” (p. 20). It’s the same story: an “authoritative players’ text” (or so it is speculated) is cut by almost half in order to accelerate the action and keep it on track. An “adapter telescoped details” in order “to quicken the pace late in the play” (p. 9). When “to be or not to be” is relocated earlier in the action from its puzzling position in the middle of Q2 and F, Irace detects “a deliberate theatrical alteration designed to speed the action” (p. 11), producing “a more single-minded hero along with a less complex plot” (p. 15). It’s not just the protagonist whose rough edges are smoothed over. Q’s changes “reinforce the view of the king as a simple, conventional villain”; the Polonius character “may also have been deliberately altered” to appear “more foolish than his counterpart in the longer texts” (p. 13); and the queen’s role, though much reduced, nonetheless “includes several lines . . . not in the longer versions” (p. 14) evidently intended to establish her ignorance of the murder and her unequivocal transfer of allegiance to Hamlet after the closet scene, thereby avoiding those perplexing questions with which Q2 and F audiences have to struggle. No Gary Taylor turns up to evaluate these radical revisions, but we don’t need him. Hamlet is about what happens (or doesn’t happen) when action loses its name, drifting into doubt in the face of will-puzzling situations and uninterpretable (or overdetermined) behavior. To reduce Hamlet to an unobstructed through line, peopled with simple and transparent characters, plucks out the heart of the mysterious complexity that has made it perhaps the supreme example of the power to

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sustain interpretive interest. Muriel St. Clare Byrne, reviewing a Q1 production, argues that Hamlet needs space as well as speed, expansion as well as progression—a movement like the waves of an incoming tide, which fall back after each surge forward and spread more widely the next time. The scenic order upon which the Second Quarto and the Folio agree makes this the characteristic movement of the play as a whole, and the tension thus created is subtler and more dramatic, with its alternations of depression and exaltation, inertia and energy. Having quoted Byrne’s review, Irace acknowledges that Q2 and F were “catering to a more sophisticated audience” (p. 21); “the features that seem to make Q1 easier to understand (the streamlined plot, the simpler villain, the more appealing queen) or more amusing (the added puns and gags) or more convenient to play (the shorter running time)” all “imply that Q1 was designed for the simpler tastes” (p. 19). But then, having in effect identified a “debased” and “complacent” play, Irace proceeds to celebrate its effects along with the “others who have grown to appreciate the unique features of Q1 Hamlet” (p. 20). The “added puns and gags” Irace mentions deserve special attention. Gurr similarly describes “new jokes or phrases” added to the Q versions of Henry V and Merry Wives (p. 27); and in Miller’s speculation, A Shrew was produced by “a ‘play doctor,’ improving The Shrew—while cutting it—by stuffing it with the sort of material currently in demand in popular romantic comedies” to conform with the “taste that Shakespeare was busily building upon and reacting against” (pp. 261, 262). According to Tiffany Stern, commenting on John of Bordeaux and Greene’s Orlando Furioso, “It is . . . a ‘bad’ Quarto quality to have an enlarged humorous or fool section” (Rehearsal, p. 102). F. P. Wilson had made the same points earlier on: the manuscript of John of Bordeaux “gives a text in which all but the clown’s part has been abridged” (p. 80), and the text of Orlando Furioso provides “an abridged version” in which “the original play had been further impoverished by enlargement of the comic scenes at the expense of the serious,” and “by general vulgarization” (p. 82). In conjunction with the Gertrude additions already noted, these expansions all suggest that dumbing down is even more important than trimming per se. Short is good, but simple-minded is better; eliminate complexity, turn up the laugh track, bring on the clowns. According to Brian Vickers, Q1 Hamlet is “Hamlet by Dogberry.” It might equally well be characterized as Hamlet by Polonius, who, when he complains that the

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player’s speech as “too long,” provokes Hamlet’s irritated response that “he’s for a jig or tale of bawdry or he sleeps” (2.2.497, 499). Among the “others who have grown to appreciate the unique features of Q1 Hamlet,” we should include Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey, whose Introduction begins by claiming an “[e]normous dramatic economy and force” for “a brisk, exciting play” (p. 13), and thereafter associates these features with “the text’s own intrinsic theatrical capacities” (p. 19). If “Q1 is addressed” as “a play in its own right,” they inform us in a phrase that follows as the night the day, “we will find” a “tighter dramatic narrative and a faster theatrical denouement” (p. 23). Tighter and faster than what? we might ask. The comparative referent is presumably Q2 or F, but then they cannot really be talking about the “play in its own right” any more than McMillin was talking about the Q1 Othello “text itself ” when he “related it to the persons who produced it.” As Holderness and Loughrey see the situation, “the detailed comparisons” by which previous editors have claimed Q2 or F to be superior to Q1 cannot stand up to “serious examination once the Quarto text is addressed as an appropriate object of investigation in its own right” (p. 21), but since looking at Q1 in its own right means not comparing it to anything at all, this audaciously evacuated claim is too modest: the comparisons would not stand up even to frivolous examination, because they would not exist. (If we had bacon, we’d have bacon and eggs—if we had eggs.) As a more self-ref lective advocate of Q1’s special qualities, G. B. Shand, in “Gertred, Captive Queen of the First Quarto,” argues that Q1 is distinguished for its “accomplished theatricality,” precisely because it replaces the “tantalizing motivational indeterminacies” of Gertrude in Q2 and F with a “uniformly and clearly announced” intention and a “unitarily constructed” role about which an audience can experience “little doubt” (p. 34). But then, having sustained this argument throughout his piece, Shand abruptly reverses direction at the end. “It is conceivable, of course, that all this spare Q1 treatment of the Queen really amounts to nothing more than another instance of mindless patriarchal obliviousness, in which the Queen is mainly given little performable optionality because no one has paid her any heed.” It’s a grandly dramatic moment, like so many in the Q2 and F versions of the play, when the protagonist seems to overhear what he has been saying, turn a critical eye upon it, and lose conviction. Unlike Hamlet, though, Shand quickly puts himself back on track in order to reassert “that the constraining simplicity of the Q1 Queen-role results from a deliberate and accomplished theatrical shaping of the role toward a single prescribed signifier” (p. 45).

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Shand acknowledges that his sense of accomplished theatricality is indebted to “Scott McMillin’s demonstration” of Q1’s “narrative efficiency and technical simplicity” (p. 34). The connection goes deeper than conscious indebtedness; it extends to McMillin’s later work on Othello and represents a similar sensibility for engaging with theatrical experience. Shand’s linkage of “accomplished theatricality” with the containment of female subjectivity coincides closely with McMillin’s association of “performable liveliness” with the silencing of women’s voices. The commitments in both to an unimpeded through line constitute a relentlessly phallic sense of theatrical value: get it on, move it along, get it over with; and God forbid the performance should sag. (As Gopnik puts it, the Orion Moby-Dick “still has its phallic reach and point, but lacks its f laccid, anxious self-consciousness: it is all Dick and no Moby” [p. 68].) There are other ways to possess or be possessed by Shakespearean fourth acts. Prolongation and dilation might be experienced like Marvell’s vegetable love—not as abatement or lack but as a different mode of pleasure. To do so, however, we would need to see the fourth act not just as absence, empty space for the “distribution” of dramatic time, not even as a merely strategic hiatus to allow the star to catch his breath (“the Burbage tea break”), but as an affective environment in, well . . . in its own right; that is, endowed with enough presence to displace our engagements earlier in the play and to claim for itself the center of our interest. I take the point from Kenneth Burke: “Act IV: ‘The Pity of It.’ Indeed, might we not, even as a rule, call this station of a Shakespearean tragedy the ‘pity’ act? There can be f lashes of pity wherever opportunity offers, but might the fourth act be the one that seeks to say pity-pitypity repeatedly?” (Othello, 174). Burke gives many examples—Ophelia’s death, the willow song, Cordelia’s reunion with Lear, Mariana at the grange, etc.—working out of similar material: a quiet lull in the action, women’s affections and vulnerabilities, songs, pathos.1 From Burke’s perspective, Act Four does more than impede the action. By diverting attention from the protagonist, it engages our interest in the women as the primary concern and thus complicates the overall emotional economy of the play. The risks entailed by this diversion are not inconsequential. Ophelia’s suffering is an embarrassment for anyone committed to Hamlet as a “sweet prince.” Desdemona’s suffering goes beyond embarrassment, threatening any claim that Othello is great of heart. A nineteenth-century critical maneuver, originating in Coleridge and carrying on through Swinburne right up to Bradley, ref lected the problem by asking, “whom do we pity more?” The

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officially sanctioned answer was “Othello,” but the apparatus engineering this conclusion looks like a version of the theatrical practice by which the Victorian stage systematically cut the women’s roles. They were cut in the eighteenth century as well, though the justification was articulated not in the sentiment-drenched vocabulary of the Victorians, but in the hardnosed context of generic distinction. Too much female babble interfered with the appropriate response to heroic tragedy. The early quartos suggest that the problem may have gone back to the beginning of things. The revisers, we may speculate, believing the garlic breaths unable to cope with an action that beset them with contrariety of desire, reduced complexity to the “uniformly-unitarily” norm of “mindless patriarchal obliviousness.” It’s Polonius again, l’homme moyen sensuel. Like Irace and Holderness and Loughrey, Shand effectively acknowledges Q1’s “unique features” as complacent and debased and then claims we should appreciate them—in the name of “accomplished theatricality.” II: How’d It Get So Wrong? My objections above are not to the dissemination and discussion of A Shrew, Q1 Hamlet, Q1 Othello, or Q Henry V. These are interesting texts, and anything that makes them available for study is a good thing. It is possible to quarrel with particular formats in which these texts are published (facsimile, modernized spelling or punctuation, etc.), but these decisions are determined (apart from market factors) by the uses editors imagine for their target audiences; and nothing I have said here focuses on these questions. Nor, finally, am I objecting to the consistent evocation of theatrical value as the basis for our interest in these texts. On the contrary, I am questioning the way in which “accomplished theatricality” and “performable liveliness” have been reductively identified with the qualities of “a shorter, brisker, simpler play.” To be sure, theatrical production often requires the abridgment of texts. Some Renaissance plays were almost certainly cut in their own time, and subsequent innovations in mise-en-scène have made cutting even more likely in current productions. Moreover, a clearly defined and uninterrupted dramatic action is often a good thing in a play, and Shakespeare usually provides it in varying degrees as part of a repertoire of dramatic effects. But to claim that brevity and straight-ahead simplicity constitute the essence or totality of theatrical value seems to mistake a particular means for a general end.

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What then does it mean that a critical mass of Shakespeareans, including the most inf luential senior scholars, are making such a claim? How is it that the arguments based on such a claim manage to be sustained? The question invites us in the first instance to focus on rhetorical technique—the means by which arguments establish and develop their persuasive power; and here a passage from Irace’s book about the bad quartos is illuminating. Speculating on the assumptions that led A. W. Pollard to distinguish between good and bad quartos, Irace suggests the following: “if a quarto is ‘bad,’ it must not have been written by Shakespeare; if it’s ‘bad’ enough to deserve this label, it may not even be ‘literature’; and if it isn’t ‘literature’ it must not be worthy of serious study” (p. 13). This is funny and quite probably right about a snobbish antitheatricalism that characterized a substantial number of Shakespeare studies at the beginning and middle of the last century. But given the current environment, it may be more useful to reverse the perspective in order to suggest what Irace’s joke might unwittingly reveal about the beliefs and biases underwriting her own argument. Whether or not Pollard’s claims against bad quartos were based on a mindless veneration of Shakespeare and literature, Irace’s claims for the bad quartos may be predicated on an equally problematic repudiation of the same categories. The theatrical value that makes the bad quartos worthy of serious study is that they are not literature and (another way of saying the same thing) not produced by Shakespeare (but rather by an anonymous collective of actors or printing house workers). “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Some such back-formation seems to be at work in Madeleine Doran’s 1928 study of the texts of 2 and 3 Henry VI, the earliest attempt, as Paul Werstine sees it, to claim theatrical value for the “bad quartos” (“Touring,” p. 53). According to Doran, “It cannot be overemphasized that the Quartos are good acting versions” (p. 76), “as good acting versions as the Folio plays” and even “perhaps better” (p. 51). One of the things that supposedly makes them better is the pratfalls and slapstick routines absent from the Folio versions, the “enlarged humourous or fool sections,” noted as a hallmark of other “bad” Quartos earlier on. The actors “would pick up comic bits put in extemporaneously,” Doran tells us (p. 82), elements of the “horseplay acceptable to the groundling,” the “kind of accretion a play would gather in being given before a rude audience” (p. 65). But it’s not mainly what the Quartos add to the Folio versions but what they subtract from them that defines their theatrical value. Doran catalogs examples of what “an adaptor would cut” (p. 61): “similes . . . long figurative harangues or soliloquies . . . undramatic and

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bunglesome poetic metaphor . . . an extravagant conceit . . . elaborate metaphor . . . non-dramatic material . . . most of the Latin . . . ineffectual Latin lines” (pp. 58, 61, 62, 76, and 82). These formulations represent figurative expression, Latinate diction, and apparently any example of what Wordsworth calls “peculiar language” (Attridge, pp. 1–16) as performably inert. In effect, they produce a working definition of theatrical value as a function of difference: it’s what you have left in a text from which the residual traces of verbal interest have been reduced. Doran’s discussion works largely by suggestion, but the backformation concept of theatrical value she implies has been systematized as a regular feature of the arguments considered earlier on. McMillin, for example, by associating Shakespeare with a trivialized fancy language (“rich in metaphor and verbal energy”), and then detaching both Shakespeare and the literary from the Q text, manufactures a valued presence (performable liveliness) out of nothing but absence. When Miller laments that A Shrew “has always suffered low esteem in comparison to the more verbally brilliant text of The Shrew” (p. 262), he is no more interested in illustrating or analyzing verbal brilliance than is McMillin in “metaphorical richness and verbal energy.” Such phrases are empty and dismissive counters (“you know what I mean: just Google ‘Poesy, viewless wings of ’ ”); but what they lack in cognitive content is amply compensated in persuasive effect. For by identifying Shakespeare with an attenuated literariness, and then eliminating him and such literariness from the process, Miller can evoke the mirage of a contrast, claiming that A Shrew merits and indeed “has always merited high esteem” for its accomplished theatricality. There is no reason to doubt that these critics admire simplicity and directness as much as they say, or that the debased version of the literary driving their rhetorical machinery corresponds to authentic belief. But the question remains whether we should subscribe to a critical practice that reduces the literary to fancy words and the theatrical to the short sharp shock of an uninterrupted through line. As the dissenting voices in the preceding pages suggest—Carroll’s on Lear, Byrne’s on Hamlet, my own on Othello—these views are based on drastically impoverished notions not only of literary but of theatrical value. Other critics have developed these suggestions in a more systematic way. Consider Alexander Leggatt’s ref lections on what he calls “detachable scenes” in Shakespearean tragedy—bits of action that can be eliminated without any evident consequence. “The Folio King Lear does without the mad trial, and if a hypothetical text of Hamlet lacking ‘To be or not to be’ were presented to a hypothetical reader with no

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knowledge of the play or the speech’s reputation, such a reader would not notice anything was missing” (“Standing Back,” p. 113). Leggatt’s point is not to dismiss these scenes; they are, he claims, “paradoxically both important and disposable” (p. 113)—indeed, important because they are disposable. Their detachability produces detachment, the space for ref lection. When the f ly-killing scene (Titus Andronicus, 3.2) “cuts across” the ongoing action “with a scene that lies outside the story proper,” its “opening line ‘So, so. Now sit’ calls for a pause in the play’s forward movement, a chance to sit (literally) and ref lect” (p. 112). In the same way, the mad trial scene in Lear or the Deposition scene in Richard II gives us “a chance to stop the f low of action and contemplate its significance” (p. 114). Though “contributing nothing to” the “forward movement” of the action, they “have a quality (in Hamlet’s words) of ‘looking before and after’ (4.4.38). They provide the sort of overall ref lection one can construct in retrospect when the action is over” (p. 119). For Leggatt, although tragedy “needs an edge of irony, even absurdity, to keep its emotions from being too soft, too easy and selfindulgent,” the place of “that sort of detachment . . . cannot be a central one” (p. 120). Others have been less qualified, as Leggatt acknowledges, quoting Giorgio Melchiori’s claim that Hamlet’s “all occasions” soliloquy represents “the hallmark of true tragedy: catastasis, the retarding moment, when the action is apparently at a standstill and attention is directed instead to the inner meaning, the ideological core of the inextricable knot the characters have been tying” (p. 119). In the most systematically developed version of this strong claim, Francis Berry focuses on what he calls “insets”—the discursive and perspectival shifts between action and narration, past and present, spectacle and language, foreground and background, speech and song, etc. According to Berry, these interruptions “do not so much tone down the extreme pathos or anxiety of a situation but they force one to be ref lective on it” (p. 9). They produce “a disturbance in the dominant surface of the containing work,” through which “the spectator is compelled to adjust his seeing or hearing or both” (p. 36) and “would then see at depth” something “contradictory to that which was physically exposed.” In Berry’s conclusion, “it was in those crises where an audience had either to look beyond the physical scene, or to give it but secondary attention[,] that the real challenge—and opportunity—arose” (p. 168). Like Melchiori’s “true tragedy,” Berry’s “real challenge” claims centrality for these effects, and his argument extends beyond tragedy to include all Shakespearean drama. The different strengths of these claims

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are important, but it’s the common ground that matters. These critics all value Shakespearean drama for its power to engage a ref lective interpretive interest. To the extent that they focus on passages that seem to exhibit a high degree of literary complexity—set speeches characterized by a conspicuous verbal formality or intensity—we can say that they are invested in literary power. But their focus is not always or necessarily on the verbal. Sometimes they emphasize a sense more of conceptual than literary density (as in Hamlet’s “all occasions” soliloquy), or of a histrionic rather than textual artifice (a beautiful singing voice, for example). The quality of “overall ref lection” in Leggatt’s detachable scenes is produced “whether intended for readers, audiences, or both” (p. 119). The “depth” Berry admires, “signifying that the poem or play (or novel) under discussion is not ‘superficial’ but satisfying, enriching and that it offers yet further rewards with each re-reading, re-hearing, re-watching” (p. 166), is available equally (if not identically) to readers of poems and novels and to audiences of plays. Performance history reinforces the point, offering abundant evidence of theatrical practitioners who have themselves sought to provoke such a ref lective engagement. Despite the “theatrical reasons for cutting” the f ly-killing scene, Leggatt remarks that “even heavily cut productions of Titus generally use” it (p. 113); and the fact that theatrical “use” has regularly trumped “theatrical reasons” suggests that stage practitioners recognize a power in the scene—despite or maybe precisely because of its digression into verbal artifice—instrumental to their own effects. Or consider the Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet. Like the f ly-killing scene, its effect is “to compel the stage audience” to “listen as passively as does the seated audience” (Berry, p. 2). Granting that it “would be practical enough” if the speech “were cut in production,” Berry nonetheless claims that “more would be lost than some fine lines of poetry. . . . Remove it, and the play has lost its hinterland; remove it, and the picture consists purely of a foreground” (p. 10). Most of the speech (33 out of 43 lines in my count), however botched, found its way into the “bad quarto” generally assumed to be an acting version. Apparently the actors themselves recognized values in the speech despite—or, rather, because of—its “fine . . . poetry.” Critical history reinforces the point yet again. As Berry remarks, in a long tradition extending “from Longinus to [Edmund] Burke and beyond,” the “commendatory word” for what he calls profundity or depth “used to be ‘sublime’ ” (p. 166). We are back to enargia, the effect I described earlier where performance, textuality, and rhetoric, however distinct their trajectories, intersect in a shared power to generate

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aesthetic interest. We find ourselves, thus, beholding a remarkable spectacle. In the impoverished concepts of theatrical and literary value sustaining the arguments on the current scene, Shakespeareans seem to be repudiating en masse the long and rich tradition of aesthetic interest with which, until recently, literature and theater have been identified. This situation raises the second of Blue Rodeo’s questions, how’d it get so wrong?, to which I propose two quick answers, both taking us back to the analyses in chapter 2 of the values sustaining a “materially minded” criticism: Shakespeareans are being driven along the path I have charted here by (1) historical and (2) political principles. Neither of these, as far as I can see, merits the authority invested in them. Gurr’s Henry V can get us started with the historical. His argument proceeds along the back-formation lines that should be now familiar, producing Q’s direct simplicity by contrast to a trivialized and fancified sense of F’s “poetic riches” (p. 11): its “colourful and unusual adjectives,” “more exotic words,” and “superbly pedantic polysyllables” (pp. 21, 27). But Gurr does not merely repudiate the “dismissive assumption” by which Q is thought “to have contaminated the purity of Shakespeare’s poetry with theatrical mud” (p. 4); he claims to offer historical reasons for doing so. It is likely that the performed text, the only kind of publication that Shakespeare sought for his plays, differed widely from the written versions of the plays that have survived . . . the quarto text of Henry V is probably closer to the version of the play that Shakespeare’s company first put on the stage in 1599 than any form of the play that modern audiences have seen. That it is such an obscure version of Shakespeare’s play is a comment on the priority we have given to Shakespeare on the page since the First Folio appeared in 1623 . . . readers find less value in performing scripts than in texts prepared for reading. The text for performance which a company compose from their author’s manuscript has always been ranked lower than the original composition itself. The fact that Shakespeare himself made no effort to get his play-manuscripts into print, but was only concerned to have them staged, may indicate that he shared the preference of his original audiences. If so, his choice is not the preference of subsequent generations of readers. (pp. 1–2) The claim here, that literary value is a post-Renaissance invention, is given no further development, but once again an argument has

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become so routine that it suffices merely to evoke rather than to develop it: the invention of “ ‘Literature’ ” at the end of the eighteenth century” is made possible by the emergence of a critical mass of interested readers, a print industry geared to supply products at an affordable price, a legal framework beginning to recognize copyright and intellectual property, etc. But the institutional apparatus of literature is not identical to literary value. To say that the apparatus postdates Renaissance cultural production does not mean that literary value is an anachronism in the analysis of any Renaissance cultural product. If literary value is understood as a category of aesthetic interest, the evidence for its relevance goes back beyond the Renaissance and even beyond Longinus as far as to Aristotle’s claim in the Poetics (1460a) that “a likely impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility” in its capacity to generate an affectively rich and complex interpretive engagement. Shakespeare and Renaissance audiences probably knew nothing of Aristotle, and it may be true, as John Guillory claims, that “aesthetics as a discourse does not exist before the eighteenth century” (Cultural Capital, p. 284); but conscious inf luence and discursive systematization are not all that matter. Institutional history is not the totality of history. Dismissing the complex ironies of F Henry V in the name of historical legitimacy reduces the concept of historical interest to coincide with the impoverishment in the literary and the theatrical it purports to validate. Unlike the other Q advocates who credit a “play doctor” (Miller), “adapter” (Irace) or “the actors themselves” (McMillin, p. 1) for their favored texts, Gurr implicates Shakespeare himself in the process of theatrical abridgment: “Shakespeare and his company were in the habit of trimming and redrafting his scripts for use on the stage quite drastically” (p. ix). Not only a willing but evidently an eager participant, Gurr’s Shakespeare may have “shared the preferences of his original audiences” for shortened theatrical versions. The evidence for this claim is the “fact that Shakespeare himself made no effort to get his play-manuscripts into print, but was only concerned to have them staged.” But the absence of evidence that Shakespeare sought publication doesn’t prove he did not do so; and even if a document emerged declaring a Shakespearean intention corresponding to Gurr’s invention, the then-fact would still require an interpretive context. In Gurr’s argument, the context seems to be what Peter W. M. Blayney has called “the Pollard myth” (“The Publication of Playbooks,” p. 415), an interpretive framework based on “the axiom that the demand for printed plays greatly exceeded the

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supply—which happens to be untrue” (p. 384). Hence Gurr’s fact collides with a different and indeed, from Blayney's angle, “inescapable fact about printed plays—namely, that they were not the best-selling moneyspinners that so many commentators have evidently believed they should have been” (p. 416). If we take Blayney’s conclusions into account, we’re left with nothing more than the absence of evidence for Shakespeare’s pursuing possibilities that may well not have existed in any very substantial way to begin with—a tenuous foundation for any conclusion whatsoever.2 As Lukas Erne argues, Blayney’s claim revives E. A. J. Honigmann’s suggestion “that we revise ‘the modern myth of [Shakespeare’s] complete indifference to the printing of his plays,’ ” which in turn leads to “a whole series of other questions,” beginning with “why did Shakespeare write plays that are far too long to be accommodated by ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’?” (pp. 79, 128). According to Greg, for whom it was “foolish to suppose that Shakespeare was indifferent to the fate of his own works,” the length of the plays suggests that Shakespeare must have “had an alternative mode of publication in view” (The Shakespeare First Folio, p. 2)—but where is the evidence for that? Richard Knowles thinks it “likely” that Shakespeare “expected most of these [excess] lines to be performed (or he would not have written them)” (pp. 59–60)— but how could Shakespeare so miscalculate the time constraints of his stage? These questions, about the time of performance in the public theaters and about the relation between performance and the texts that have come down to us, have never been satisfactorily answered, and since there are too many complex factors involved about which we are and are likely to remain uncertain, it’s hard to see how they ever will be.3 There is, however, a simple answer available, and it entails cutting the Gordian knot: Shakespeare wrote the way he did, we can say, because he wanted to. If it entered his mind that he was going on too long for performance, he bracketed that concern. He may, as Erne speculates, have “designed” his plays for readers from “the very beginning,” in order “to raise” their “literary respectability” (p. 138, 220), but in the story I am telling here, Shakespeare gets interested in the writing independently of literary ambition as much as of theatrical practicality, and he follows this interest wherever it takes him—into the excesses of Antony, the gratuitous complexities of Hamlet, or, for that matter, the impacted intensity of Macbeth, where an unimpeded through line— doing “all a man can do” and getting it “done quickly”—is both the satisfaction and the horror.

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Shakespeare the Writer: the idea sounds suspiciously postmodern, but the pleasure of the text is a version of aesthetic interest, and just as aesthetic interest antedates Kant, so textual pleasure antedates Barthes. It goes back at least as far as to Ovid, whose texts were familiar to every Renaissance schoolboy, and known by Shakespeare with such evident intimacy that A. B. Taylor, the editor of a recent collection on the subject, can confidently declare, along with four of his contributors, that Ovid is Shakespeare’s “favourite” poet (pp. 3, 126, 150, 185, 212). If Shakespeare the Writer is not anachronistic or antihistorical, it might be called nonhistorical, in that it does not depend ultimately on historical legitimation. There are historical constraints (we cannot say whatever we want, it’s not just anyone’s guess, some kinds of speculation are more plausible than others), but the model of textual production suggested by Shakespeare the Writer, like any competing model (the actors dictated a performance text, say), exceeds anything we can know about what really happened. Shakespeare the Writer, then, is not so much a historical as a heuristic construction, assembled out of textual qualities and effects, the inferences we draw from them and the values we attribute to them. It serves to acknowledge the interpretive interest produced by the “good” quarto and Folio versions and by the performances based on these versions, as attested to by a long tradition of critical commentary and theatrical production. The very different characters substituted for the lead role in current historical narratives—Shakespeare the Trimmer, happily cutting and simplifying the very texts to whose delights Shakespeare the Writer had unaccountably abandoned himself, the anonymous “play doctor” or “adapter” or “actors themselves”—also serve to acknowledge textual values, in this case claimed for the “bad” quarto texts. These values, however, remain undefined save as brevity and linear simplicity, back-formations whose absence and emptiness are then surrounded by and plumed up with the artificial aura of historical legitimacy. With invisible or displaced values, we encounter the political, which is to say reencounter the materialist claims described in chapter 2. The new theatricalists reviewed here seem to be working out of the same conviction—namely, that to transfer interest from the “isolated author” to the “social and institutional” factors underlying cultural production is to identify critical practice with communal and demotic as opposed to individual and elitist values. Gurr’s preference for the demotic is implicit in his identification with the hearty pragmatism of Renaissance acting companies, who lacked “the respect of later

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generations for Shakespeare’s every word” (p. iv), and who “had not acquired the massive reverence for the master’s text and its great set pieces that we have inherited, and that critical judgements have repeatedly confirmed” (p. 4). The final concession hardly displaces Gurr’s suggestion of a fetishized bardolatrous aestheticism (“massive reverence for the master” reproduces Henry James’s ironies without the Jamesian conviction). Similar values are manifest in Irace’s celebration of Renaissance players and modern filmmakers who, “apparently not as obsessed as we are by precise accuracy” and not “troubled” by “the objections of purists,” are free to cut F versions into “glamorous and entertaining” hits (p. 171). These suggestions, about the theatrically popular and the literarily elite, are made explicit in Paul Werstine’s piece on Shakespeare’s “nameless collaborators”: in “deconstructing authors and dissolving them into the larger theatrical enterprise that they serve,” Werstine affirms “common cause with much that has been written in the last couple of decades, as our reading practice has moved from constructing plays as literary creations to representing them to ourselves as performance texts.” Where an interest in literary creation tends “to reproduce collective activity as the nearly superhuman achievement of particular individual authors,” the attribution of value to performance is taken to affirm the anonymous collective agency previously effaced from the record (“Close Contrivers,” pp. 18–20). Collective and individual enterprise are represented in these arguments as moral absolutes, between which the same straightforward choice is always required; but what Michael Bristol says about the anonymous print house workers is true of the generally anonymous actors as well: the “wish to redeem and vindicate the dignity” of their labor “doesn’t depend on the abolition of the notion of authorship as singular creative agency, which [has] its own kind of dignity” (“How Good Does Evidence Have to Be?”, p. 40). “Mob thought may kill us all before our time,” Empson wrote in the 1930s, when images of brown shirts and black shirts and Soviet cadres must have been marching through his mind. And yet the piece in which he raised this appalling prospect, his tremendous chapter on “Double Plots” in Some Versions of Pastoral, is designed chief ly to affirm the value of a collective theatrical response: “so far as an audience is an inter-connected unit they all work on [the performance] together” and thereby constitute a small “public opinion”; the mutual inf luence of its members’ judgments, even though expressed by the most obscure means or

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only imagined from their presence, is so strong as to produce a sort of sensibility held in common, and from their variety it may be wider, more sensible, than that of any of its members. (pp. 66–7) From Empson’s perspective, “collective” and “individual” do not function as categorical antitheses. He valued the experience of “interconnected unity” potentially available to audiences of Shakespeare’s plays, but his appreciation is specific to particular theatrical circumstances, and it is asserted with a full awareness of our vulnerability in other circumstances to an aggressive group-think. The black and white representation of individual and collective values may simplify political choices, but the larger question is whether the new theatricalism can be identified with any substantial politics at all. We are back to the question Guillory raises, about politics “at the level of the episteme.” It is hard to establish any necessary connection between F complexity and elitist individualism. Leggatt, Berry, Carroll, and Byrne are not obsessed with what Werstine elsewhere calls a “fantasy of boundless authorial fecundity” (“Narratives,” p. 86), In fact, they largely ignore authorship in their arguments for the value of a complex engagement with the text. In the same way, it is hard to establish any real connection between a preference for the simplified quarto abridgements and communal solidarity. If you stand for inclusion and diversity, why champion a version of Hamlet that systematically excludes the diversionary subtexts welcomed with such generous abandon by Q2 and F? and why celebrate versions of Othello and Henry V that mute or ruthlessly excise any material (the women, the soldiers, Eastcheap) with a potential to undermine the hegemonic values of warlike valor, patriarchal authority, and monarchical power? The disconnection amounts to a contradiction, and the contradiction suggests that the political values implicit in the new theatricalism are empty gestures. The political is just the historical writ large. III: So What? To sum up: at the cutting edge (which is also the center) of Shakespeare studies, the new theatricalism celebrates a theatrical value that is nothing more than a back-formation (from fancy language), and it does so in the name of a politics without any evident content or consequences for the world. If this is so, what follows? We come finally to the biggest of the big questions, so what? to which the answer so nothing deserves

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some serious consideration. After all, if everything is a back-formation (difference without positive terms), on what basis do we object to misrepresentation? The concept depends on a distinction between truth and error, between what really happened and the stories we tell about the past; but if with Terence Hawkes we “embrace” a “Presentism” whose “first principle” is that “the questions we ask” of historical texts “will always be shaped by our own concerns” (Shakespeare in the Present, p. 117), then reading-versus-misreading can be negotiated for a distinction between strong and weak readings; and the strength of a reading that identifies literary study with “the nearly superhuman achievement of particular individual authors” is confirmed by the authority it has achieved across the Shakespearean ranks. Presentism deserves the interest it is generating among Shakespeareans (Fernie; Grady and Hawkes), and as a card-carrying antifoundationalist, I am happy to credit Hawkes’s first principle, that “the questions we ask” of historical texts “will always be shaped by our own concerns.” Where I diverge from Hawkes is that I don’t see how this idea can be translated into practical action. Hawkes claims that since “an intrusive, shaping awareness of ourselves, alive and active in our own world, defines us,” it “deserves our closest attention” as “a factor actively to be sought out, grasped and perhaps, as a result, understood” (p. 3). But how exactly do we manage to “grasp” the desires that possess us, how understand the interests that “define” us? Presentism starts as an epistemological theory, in which knowledge is determined by factors over which we have at best a very limited control, and then slips into a practical program characterized rather by discretionary latitude and interpretive volition—“a critical manoeuvre that uses” the “material present” as “a crucial trigger” in order “deliberately” to “set the interrogative agenda” (back cover). Interest and desire, limiting factors shaped by fundamentally unknowable social or instinctive constraints, by ideology or the unconscious, are accordingly transformed into the clearly accessible items by which we shape our intentional agendas. If we support gay marriage, say, or want to overturn Roe v. Wade, we can “use” these goals to “trigger” readings of the appropriate historical texts (The Two Noble Kinsmen, say, or Macbeth). The important thing is that “We choose the texts” in order to produce the meanings that—in an emphasis supplied by Hawkes himself—“We speak, we mean, by them” (p. 3). However convincing this might be as a description of what happens willy nilly in the general process of interpretation, it seems unpromising as a deliberate program for any particular interpretive act. From

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within epistemological theory, it may be plausible to claim that every reading is perforce a misreading, since it is produced within a framework of challengeable perspectives, and to claim further that strong misreading is what we do (at least if we are any good). But nobody does it as an expression of individual will (at least not if we are any good). What Stephen Greenblatt says about literary history, that it “has to commit itself to a vision of truth, however provisional, nuanced, and epistemologically modest” (“Racial Memory,” 57), is equally true about literary interpretation. We report on the text as in itself it really is, quite undeterred by the sure and certain (but in this context extraneous) knowledge that others will have good reasons for seeing it differently; and we are motivated in our reports (or should be) by the altogether immodest conviction that the report is true, independently of its strategic consequences for our political agendas. As with Presentism, the idea that everything is a back-formation seems to me based on a category confusion, The idea may pertain to the way things are, but not to what we do. To be sure, action is always reactive. This was Marx’s point in The Eighteenth Brumaire: our capacity to go forward is defined within and as a response to “circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” The point is particularly relevant to critical practice, which (to recall Marcie Frank’s claim quoted in the Introduction) is by definition in a perpetual state of crisis, at a turning point, obliged by its own traditions to express a self-conscious dissatisfaction with its own traditions. But reaction isn’t the whole story. Marx’s main point was that people are after all free—if not totally so—to “make their own history,” and that the desire to do so expresses a felt need to go toward some more or less tangible dream of better “circumstances” as well as to escape from the nightmare of the past (p. 15). In the same way, if criticism is motivated by one version or another of Pound’s “make it new,” it needs to include a “utopian” or “positive” dimension ( Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 286). Despite its abstract platitudes about communal solidarity, or rather because of their abstractness, the critical practice reviewed here seems to me primarily if not purely negative, the expression of an aversion to its own history unrelieved by any hopeful imagination. What can be built on the foundations of a critical practice disposed primarily to a contempt for its origins? It is not, nor it cannot come to good.

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CH A P T E R

FOU R

New Textualism and the Crisis in Editing

In 1988, when Randall McLeod convened the twenty-fourth annual Conference on Editorial Problems at the University of Toronto, he chose “Crisis in Editing” as the topic for discussion. McLeod’s own piece on “UN Editing Shak-speare” had appeared six years earlier, and a year after that Gary Taylor and Michael Warren had come out with The Division of the Kingdoms, an inf luential collection of essays many of which asked Shakespeareans to take on the idea that the Quarto and Folio versions of King Lear were not two versions of the same play, but two distinct and autonomous plays. “Crisis in Editing,” however, extended its reach beyond any particular quarrel with received opinion or the special problems of the Lear text to suggest that editing itself was in critical condition, and this idea, in one form or another, has been in regular circulation ever since. We have already encountered one version: de Grazia and Stallybrass’s “Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” (1993) claims that the proliferation of Lear versions constitutes “a radical change indeed” not just in textual criticism but in all forms of Shakespearean practice. “As a result of this multiplication, Shakespeare studies will never be the same” (255). The editors of two more recent collections on editorial matters argue that we are in the midst of a transformation analogous to the sweeping institutional and conceptual revolutions—the new maps, the Reformation, print dissemination—of the Renaissance itself (Maguire and Berger, p. 11, 13; Erne and Kidnie, p. 1). Implicit in these momentous reenactments is the notion of a paradigm shift, and in the most recent Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, Barbara Mowat adopts this idea as the organizing principle for her analysis, concluding with a catalog of the recently produced “paradigm-threatening” critiques

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as a result of which “hardly a ‘fact’ supporting New Bibliographical assumptions remains standing” (pp. 23, 24). Before accepting these claims, we ought to consider G. Thomas Tanselle’s cautionary suggestions in a piece called “Historicism and Critical Editing: 1979–85.” Devoting five pages to D. F. McKenzie’s attempt in “some of his recent work” to “make authorship more a social than a private activity” and another eight to Jerome McGann’s advocacy of “social editing” as an antidote to the tendency in the Greg-Bowers tradition (as McGann sees it) “to ‘suffocate textual studies’ by limiting it to a narrow ‘psychological and biographical context,’ ” Tanselle was fully aware of the intensity and magnitude of the attacks on the editorial traditions of New Bibliography; yet he is unpersuaded by the claims of “some recent editors” that “the field is at present in a state of crisis”: “the fact that different people hold different opinions about basic issues is not a sign of crisis; it points to the perennial situation in any challenging and lively field” (pp. 122, 127, 153). We don’t have to agree with this opinion (Tanselle himself may no longer hold it); but how do we decide? how get to a position from which to determine whether the crisis in editing is real or just apparent? In 2004, Leah Marcus begins a piece on the Othello texts with the assertion that there “has in recent years been a seismic shift in the way Shakespearean scholars view the early printed versions of the plays” (p. 21); but unlike geological earthquakes, which produce an immediately evident rubble not just of “supporting ‘facts,’ ” cracks in the conceptual foundation can be determined only in retrospect. For the time being, plausible guessing may be about all we can hope for. My guess is that the crisis is real, and that in the differences between New Bibliographers and their most stringent critics, regularly designated “New Textualists,” more than the editing of Shakespeare is at stake. I take this dispute to be symptomatic of a crisis in “Shakespeare studies” generally, as de Grazia and Stallybrass claim, even in the discipline as a whole, as Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan suggest, introducing yet another recent collection on the topic with the claim that “the recent explosion of work” in “editing and textual criticism” has moved such matters “from the periphery of English studies to the much-debated centre” (pp. xvi–xvii). Finally (though it belongs first), I should declare my belief that New Textualism’s challenges to editorial tradition have outlived their usefulness and deteriorated into an unproductively negative routine. I am writing this chapter in the probably quixotic hope that the critics sustaining these challenges will abandon their project for something better.

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I: The Facts of the Matter To begin with a test case, the differences between W. W. Greg, the protagonist in any story about editing Shakespeare, and Scott McMillin, one of the most compelling antagonists to New Bibliography in current work, concerning the provenance of Q1 Othello, the first quarto of the play printed in 1622. Provenance—that is, the nature of the manuscript used as a basis for printing the earliest editions of Shakespeare’s plays—is the key issue in the dispute as I understand it here. Greg and his colleagues and followers sought to develop procedures to distinguish among the various agents (scribes, compositors, actors, et al.) who contributed to the production of the early printed texts. In this way, they hoped to establish more or less clear lines of affiliation back to the manuscript the author submitted to the acting company (his “foul papers”). New Bibliographers assume that it is both possible and desirable to get a clearer sense of the author’s intention under the signs in the surviving texts. New Textualists question whether any such identification is either possible or desirable. As we have already seen, McMillin’s 2001 edition of Othello for the Cambridge Early Quartos series rejects “the standard editorial position,” established by Greg in The Shakespeare First Folio and adopted by almost all subsequent editors, that Q1 derives from Shakespeare’s foul papers (p. 4). According to McMillin, the indicators New Bibliographers have taken to suggest a foul-papers origin (vague stage directions and speech prefixes, idiosyncratic spelling and usages) are less reliable than they suppose. Even as New Bibliographers exaggerate this kind of evidence, they have tended to ignore “signs of other textual origins in Q1,” including “signs of a prompt copy” (p. 4, McMillin’s emphasis). In arguing for a prompt copy, McMillin emphasizes the approximately 160 lines not in Q but printed in the 1623 First Folio edition of the play. Like E. A. J. Honigmann in his Arden 3 edition and in his book on The Texts of “Othello”, McMillin sees these lines as cuts from rather than additions to an earlier text. But where Honigmann’s conviction of a foul papers origin rests on a series of complicated inferences (authorial revisions, false starts, deletions sometimes missed by the scribe), McMillin thinks that “the search for new signs of foul papers may have created more problems than it solves, for it calls upon fictions of competence and incompetence in the transmission of text to suit the changing needs of a hypothesis for which there is no documentary evidence in the first place” (p. 13). Against this “strained and unconvincing” account (p. 14), McMillin proposes a “plain and obvious explanation of the 160 F lines which

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are missing in Q1,” namely “that Q1 proceeds from a theatre script which has been reduced for performance” (p. 13), specifically as a “scribal copy taken from the dictation of actors who had memorized their parts.” This hypothesis can account for a number of features in the text, but as McMillin acknowledges, in most cases “other interpretations are possible for each of these kinds of textual phenomena” (p. 35). The foul papers hypothesis on the other side can also account for a number of features of the text and, though hardly self-evident, is more plausible than McMillin suggests. As Honigmann himself subsequently argued (“Shakespeare’s Deletions”), the oddities he describes in Q1 Othello may be found across the canon, sometimes in conjunction with duplicate versions of the same material, and they have suggested a foul papers origin to others as well (MacD. P. Jackson, p. 168; Dawson, “The Imaginary Text,” p. 155 ff ). The question then becomes whether the marginal increase in explanatory power—those relatively few variants hard to explain in any other way—justifies adopting the collective-dictation scenario, especially when this hypothesis turns out to include some unlikely elements of its own. McMillin himself acknowledges one: “I do not think scribes would have preferred working this way. They were trained to copy from manuscript, setting their own pace” (p. 43). But what of the actors’ preferences? They were, we know, tremendously busy. With daily performances, each of a different play, actors had to learn or relearn their lines either during the day, or as soon as the day’s performance ended. Naturally that had to be their priority. Situations existed in which plays no longer in repertory had to be revived, the actor being obliged to (re)learn a script for performance the following day. Tiffany Stern, from whom I am quoting, concludes from this hectic schedule that “with so little time to learn or relearn parts for performance, it is unlikely, in these instances, that there was any collective rehearsal at all” (Rehearsal, pp. 56–7). This may be pushing the evidence further than it warrants, but the actors were certainly busy, and whether or not they found time for collective rehearsal, collective dictation in the manner McMillin supposes does not seem likely. There would have been occasions—off season, during plague closures, between tours—when the actors were less rushed, but even then the dictation scenario hardly seems to fit McMillin’s description of “an economical way of putting together a new prompt book” (p. 35, my

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emphasis). For if Q1 Othello is not “a ‘bad’ quarto” or pirated text but “a prompt book legitimately prepared” (pp. 7–8), why didn’t the actors take advantage of their in-house position to use an available old manuscript or scribal version as copy for the new? Lost play books may be hypothesized and even documented in the case of two Beaumont and Fletcher plays, Bonduca and A King and No King. But in both these cases, the company was not driven to the desperate expedient of actors dictating remembered performances: there was an earlier draft to fall back on (Fletcher, v, 9; Turner, p. xxviii). McMillin’s scenario asks us to believe that the company lost all the transcripts ever in its possession—the author’s first draft, the fair copy, the prompt books produced for previous revivals, even the copy licensed by the Master of the Revels, without which the company had no authority to perform the play—of one of the most popular productions of their resident playwright. If this is hard to swallow, McMillin suggests that the players, having turned their copy over to the Master of the Revels for review, might then have become impatient to get on with rehearsals. “The idea that the company would wait for the licensed prompt book to be returned from the Master . . . seems much too sedate a procedure for a busy commercial repertory company” (p. 43). There is no more documentary evidence for this than for the foul-papers hypothesis; but the problem is not so much speculation as such (anything we might say about the manuscripts behind Renaissance play texts requires conjecture) as its unlikelihood in this case. What is known about the Master’s procedures does not suggest that the players had any basis to anticipate a long delay.1 But even if they expected a quick turnaround, would they not have put together a back up copy?—this is Greg’s inference about the transcript of Bonduca, “preserved in the archives of the company, perhaps in view of just such an accident” (Editorial Problem, p. 271). The idea that such hard-nosed and market-driven professionals as McMillin (rightly, I believe) supposes them to be would have been so negligent as to relinquish their unique copy of such a valuable resource seems implausible in the extreme. To this remarkable carelessness, we must now add extraordinary good luck. In a consensus already established when Greg delivered his Clark Lectures in 1939 (Editorial Problem, p. 108) and current still (Evans, p. 1288; Wells and Taylor, p. 477), editors conclude that the scribe who prepared the text for the Folio had access to an independent transcript for his copy: what was incredibly lost is miraculously found. And the results seem too good to be true. In the Introduction to the Oxford edition of Othello, Michael Neill remarks that, even accepting

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the full-cast-dictation hypothesis, “one might expect to find more numerous instances of apparent mishearing in an aurally constructed text” (p. 426). Neill suggests “that the scribe might also have had access to a manuscript with which he could piece out the imperfections of what the actors dictated,” but immediately concedes that “If that were so, it is difficult to see why dictation would have been necessary in the first place” (p. 427). He then hypothesizes that the scribe might have had access to the actors’ written-out parts (p. 428), thereby loading an additional complication on to an interpretive structure already collapsing under the weight of its own too-much. II: The Assumptions beneath the Facts How is it that Scott McMillin, though setting out to find a “plain and obvious” alternative to New Bibliographical tradition, summons up his own “fictions of competence and incompetence in the transmission of text” (lost books, a found book) “to suit the changing needs of a hypothesis for which there is no documentary evidence in the first place” (the dictation scenario) and winds up producing a Rube Goldberg machine even more “strained and unconvincing” than the one he seeks to displace? Part of the answer may lie in the peculiar difficulties of the Othello text, so problematic that editors find themselves skeptical about even their own accounts.2 But in addition to the intransigence of the Othello text, and despite claims about seismic shifts, New Bibliographers and New Textualists occupy a fair amount of common and relatively stable ground. Both acknowledge elements of truth in each others’ claims about authorial and nonauthorial signs in the text. McMillin recognizes that foul papers exist somewhere in the background of Q1; hence his comment on Othello’s “set [F “soft”] phrase of peace” that the Q reading is “appropriate” because it coincides with “other Shakespearian uses” (p. 65). And New Bibliographers don’t usually claim that the foul papers themselves constituted the copy for Q. As McMillin acknowledges, if a foul papers origin became “the standard editorial” explanation for Q, it was not a direct link but “probably at the remove of a scribal transcript” (p. 4). This was Greg’s own position. Along with most of his followers, he would have found nothing to disagree with in McMillin’s claim that the manuscript behind Q1 Othello is one “on which Shakespeare may never have left a mark in his own hand” (p. 3). The issue, then, comes down to how much mediation exists—how many transcriptions intervene—between the author’s draft and the text

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we have, and this difference, though merely of degree, is hugely consequential. An abundance of mediation effectively disrupts the line of transmission; past a certain point, the multiplication of layers adds up to impenetrability, and there would be no getting back to an authorial origin. In McMillin’s view, the goal of recovering authorial intention predisposes New Bibliographers to regard mediation as minimal. In developing this claim, McMillin builds on the work of Paul Werstine who, if it is true that “hardly a ‘fact’ supporting New Bibliographical assumptions remains standing,” is entitled to a major share of the responsibility: Werstine has shown that a characteristic move in the logic of the New Bibliography is to frame textual problems according to the most economical line of transmission, from author (foul papers) to acting company (prompt book) to printing house. This economy creates a binary logic, with foul papers and prompt copy as the active terms. Left out of consideration . . . are other kinds of copy, such as transcripts made for private patrons, or transcripts made for later revivals of the play [which would] break the economical chain of agents. (p. 6) In other words, New Bibliographers assume a relative nonproliferation of manuscripts because it serves their interpretive interests to do so: “optimistic enough to believe that an authentic Shakespearian Othello can be determined” (p. 2), as McMillin puts it, they invent a foulpapers origin that turns Q “into a repository of hope and desire” (p. 3). Hence Honigmann, by “offering the hope of knowing Shakespeare’s first conception of the play,” is said by McMillin to represent the “fullest and most imaginative version” of “the New Bibliography working to catch sight of its desired objects, the imagined Shakespeare manuscripts” (p. 8). But what if New Bibliographical assumptions are basically right? The evidence is ambiguous: the existence of six Game at Chess manuscripts, for example, might be taken to suggest proliferation, but given the exceptional notoriety surrounding Middleton’s play, it might suggest rather that frugality is the norm. Besides, apart from its ambiguity, there is just not enough evidence to decide the question with much confidence. In his Appendix on “Shakespeare and the Circulation of Dramatic Manuscripts,” Lukas Erne comes to the same conclusion as Greg, that it would be “unwise to suppose that the circulation of Shakespeare’s plays in manuscript was a well-established practice that

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existed on a large scale” (p. 261), but he acknowledges that it may have been. Given the material lost from this period (we don’t know how much—that’s the problem), we cannot determine whether the manuscripts in Shakespeare’s milieu circulated in a relatively frugal or abundant economy. But then if abundance is no less a speculative assumption than frugality, everything McMillin says about New Bibliography can apply equally to his own project. Maybe he finds the dictation scenario plausible because he wants to; proliferation caters to his interpretive interest, allowing him to deliver a knockdown blow to Greg and his followers: “If this practice went on often,” as H. R. Woudhuysen says about the dictation scenario, “its effect on theories about the copy-text for printed plays would be devastating” (p. 141). Much virtue in “if ”; although nothing corresponding to this practice “has been identified” in any single instance, McMillin is undeterred from his “impression” that this procedure occurred not just once but “rather often.” This is the New Textualism working to catch sight of its desired objects, manuscripts proliferating in such abundance that any putatively Shakespearean draft is bound to be lost in the shuff le. Here, then, is yet another similarity: New Bibliography and New Textualism are both based on predisposition—assumptions or “impressions,” the reliability of which cannot be decisively verified. Hayden White’s claim that it is “fruitless” to look for “cognitive grounds” that are “value-neutral in essence” (p. 284) pertains to all interpretive projects, ranging from the most complex to the most simple, and even to those apparently preinterpretive perceptions that might seem to serve as the foundation from which to judge among contending interpretive claims.3 Both New Bibliographers and New Textualists work more or less comfortably within this situation; like the rest of us, they make do with what they’ve got—“circumstantial” rather than “veridical evidence,” say, in Michael Bristol’s distinction (“How Good,” pp. 23–9; see also Skura, pp. 171–2; and Dawson, “Correct Impressions,” p. 40). McMillin’s disarmingly candid “impression” implicitly concedes that his conclusions are impressed on inconclusive evidence or, more accurately, derived (to recall Hayden’s White’s argument synopsized in chapter 2) from the assumptions by which he determines “precisely what counts as evidence and what does not, how data are to be constituted as evidence, and what implications are to be drawn . . . from the evidence thus constituted” (Metahistory, p. 284); but he evidently finds this impression adequate as a foundation for his account. Greg often strikes a similar tone: he admits that “plausible guessing is about all

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we can hope for” given “the frequent ambiguity of the evidence,” but adds that “we may yet reach conclusions of some interest” (First Folio, p. 175). Greg’s “all we can hope for” confirms McMillin’s claim about New Bibliographical motivations (“repository of hope and desire”), but is the presence of hope in an interpretive enterprise a bad thing? Its absence, after all, doesn’t lead to better interpretation, or to any interpretation at all. (In Dante, abandoning hope means losing the benefit of the intellect and it locates you in hell.) Hope is a necessary precondition for interpretive work, like its mate, “desire,” for if (to recall George Dillon’s formulation) “academic and scientific discourse is . . . as rooted in human desire as a love letter or a legal complaint” (p. 2), then desire, while it may undermine some of our interpretive performances, must underlie all of them. As must the imagination. Although imagination might seem to be a good thing for a Shakespearean, “imaginative version,” in McMillin’s canny innuendo about solipsism, is code for something like “wishful thinking” (the third of Bristol’s terms from the distinction I cited just earlier). If wishful thinking is a scandal, however, then interpretation itself must be a scandal; based on assumptions and driven by values, interpretation is a kind of wishful thinking. Wishful thinking—motivated by hope, desire, and imagination—is the only kind of thinking we’ve got. III: New Bibliographical Desire The antifoundationalist critics who have brought us to this place suggest where to go now. To recall Hayden White yet again, if “there are no apodictically certain theoretical grounds on which one can legitimately claim an authority for any one of the [interpretive] modes over the others as being more ‘realistic,’ ” the “best grounds for choosing” become “ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological” (p. xii). In Richard Rorty’s terminology, we should transfer interest from correspondence, how well an interpretive mode mirrors objective reality—Kuhn’s “what is really out there” (p. 206)—to coherence and consequence, what it adds up to and where it’s going. The important matter is not that New Bibliography and New Textualism are based on assumptions and values (what mode isn’t?), but that they are based on different assumptions and values, and it is on these differences that we ought to concentrate. We need to ask: “why are New Bibliographers so interested in authorial intention? why are New Textualists so averse to

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this interest and what do they offer as an alternative? and which interests seem better, morally or aesthetically or pragmatically, as the basis for critical practice?” These questions focus on deliberate motivation, as though New Bibliographers and New Textualists understood what they were doing; but since there is no reason to believe that editorial theorists are, any more than the rest of us, fully informed about the values underlying their work, the answers will depend as much on the origins, identity, and consequences of critical practices as on the declared intentions of the practitioners themselves. In “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” probably his best-known piece, and one that ref lects more or less directly on these matters of history, identity and direction, Greg intervenes in an ongoing debate whether New Bibliography is chief ly a scientific method providing (in Dover Wilson’s words) “a foundation of fact” for “literary judgements” otherwise “notoriously shifting as sand” (quoted in F. P. Wilson, p. 112), or whether it is itself chief ly engaged with literary judgments, in which case, as Tanselle puts it, “Editing is not a prerequisite to scholarly literary criticism; it is a part of that criticism” (“Textual Study,” p. 337). The issue is obviously a complex one, and it is no scandal if Fredson Bowers, one of Greg’s most authoritative followers, argued for each position at different times.4 Greg’s “Rationale,” however, comes down unequivocally on the latter side, supporting “the discretion of an editor,” whose “liberty of judgment” he is centrally “concerned to uphold” (30). As Greg sees it, there is “a definite limit to the field over which formal rules are applicable,” and any “editor who declines or is unable to exercise his judgement and falls back on some arbitrary canon, such as the authority of the copy-text, is in fact abdicating his editorial function” (28). He acknowledges that this position may be taken to represent editorial work as a “frankly subjective procedure” (31), but he insists that the results are preferable to those achieved through following any mechanical rule. I am, no doubt, presupposing an editor of reasonable competence; but if an editor is really incompetent, I doubt whether it much matters what procedure he adopts . . . And in any case, I consider that it would be disastrous to curb the liberty of competent editors in the hope of preventing fools from behaving after their kind. (32) Greg is here following A. E. Housman’s “Application of Thought to Textual Criticism.” “Knowledge is good, method is good,” Housman

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concludes, “but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head” (p. 1069). “The Rationale” adopts the spirit (if not altogether the letter) of Housman’s libertarianism, and it appropriates Housman’s tone as well. Fools “behaving after their kind” captures Housman’s “devastating sarcasm” (20)—Greg’s sole appreciative reference to current authority in the piece. This indebtedness is odd. Housman dealt with ancient texts, which descended in such long and independent lines that any glimpse of convergence at a point of origin was impossible. In this respect, Housman’s methods were largely irrelevant to New Bibliographers, who sought primarily to retrieve authorial intention. Fredson Bowers puts his finger on the problem: “for Sir Walter to talk of the responsibility of the editor to back his own judgment” might seem to “thrust us back into the eighteenthcentury confusion” of undisciplined eclecticism. Bowers insists on New Bibliography’s “essential difference” from the procedures inherited from editors of ancient texts, the “increased understanding of the bibliographical method” by which current editors could claim to locate authorial intentions at the start of relatively short lines of transmission. This advance, Bowers declares, has “altered the eclectic approach to editing to such a degree that there is scarcely a parallel between the current position and that of the past” (On Editing, pp. 82–3). Greg would hardly disagree. He had contributed more than anyone to this “increased understanding”; his work took off, he once said, only when he determined that “what really mattered was what sort of manuscripts they were that lay behind the earliest texts” (Review, 101). But when Bowers argues that “critical judgment must expand from a logical basis in bibliographical and linguistic fact” (On Editing, p. 72), he locates method in a determining position ontologically prior to critical judgment, and with this claim Greg would not have been prepared to go along. “The Rationale,” in fact, tends to put it the other way around. Where Bowers celebrates the “essential difference” by which New Bibliographers have advanced beyond tradition, retaining “scarcely a parallel” with “the past,” Greg dissociates himself from the formal methodology of his colleague R. B. McKerrow in order to align himself with a classicist who thunders against the self-congratulatory progressivism by which “the most frivolous pretender has learnt to talk superciliously about ‘the old unscientific days.’ ” “The old unscientific days are everlasting” Housman adds; “they are here and now; they are renewed perennially by the ear which takes formulas in, and the tongue which gives them out again, and the mind which meanwhile

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is empty of ref lexion and stuffed with self-complacency” (“Application of Thought,” p. 1069). Greg has no intention of abandoning the methodological advances that allow him to surmise the provenance for early texts; but in “The Rationale,” as the issue migrates from identity (what New Bibliography is) to origins (where it comes from), Greg stands outside his own methods in order to locate them within the longue durée of an extensive continuing history. And from this perspective, the question of textual provenance begins to look less like “what really mattered” (Bowers’ “essential difference”) than, to recall Freud’s memorable phrase, “the narcissism of minor differences” (“Taboo of Virginity,” p. 199). In an extraordinary achievement of self-detachment, having worked for years to establish the uniquely defining features of his practice, Greg now represents New Bibliography as not essentially new, just the latest installment in an ongoing dialectical interplay between systematic method and critical taste. Going on from when, exactly? Greg doesn’t ask this question, but if we want to continue down the path to which “The Rationale” points us, we come, pretty much everyone agrees, to Edmond Malone. If Malone did not invent professional literary study ex nihilo, his “dedication to discovering the facts of literary history through manuscripts and early editions” (as the blurb on Peter Martin’s biography puts it) “laid the foundations for the scholar’s code and the modern study of literature.” Malone’s Historical Account of the English Stage is almost unwaveringly focused on the primitives of a historicist agenda—names, dates, places, and the authority by which they are established. His rare deviations from the discourse of methodical scholarship sound perfunctory. When he proclaims the right of English rather than Italian theater to the “honour” of being “the most ancient in Europe,” cultural nationalism is secondary to historicism—establishing the factual coordinates of English theatrical origins (Poems and Plays, vol. 1 Part 2, p. 3). When Edmund Burke wrote a congratulatory letter to Malone on the civilizing power of his edition (Boswell, 3, pp. 3–4), Malone’s response was polite but insouciant. As Martin puts it, if Burke “wanted to equate his history of the stage with the history of the state, that was fine with Malone,” but not his main concern. “Facts,” Martin adds, “not politics, drove his research” (p. 136). And yet, as Martin himself recognizes, Malone’s supposedly selfsustained research depended on the support of extrinsic “[c]ultural and political circumstances,” not least “the astonishing worship of Shakespeare as the national poet” which, during “the second half of

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the eighteenth century,” by itself guaranteed that “what he had to offer was especially valued” (p. xvi). Jonathan Bate, ref lecting on the diverse “appropriators of Shakespeare” in Malone’s time, remarks that the “one premiss shared by all” of them “is that his plays matter, that they are to be valued—which is why they are worth appropriating”; and he illustrates the point with the “rousing words” from Hazlitt I quoted in the Introduction: “People would not trouble their heads about Shakespear, if he had given them no pleasure, or cry him up to the skies, if he had not first raised them there. The world are not grateful for nothing” (Shakespearean Constitutions, p. 9). Malone doesn’t cry Shakespeare up to the skies but doesn’t have to. He focuses soberly on “matters of fact,” but his rhetoric is epideictic by default. His “Enlightenment apparatus” for retrieving Shakespeare, as de Grazia calls it, is implicitly secured by the conviction, shared with his contemporaries (even those who, like Coleridge, found Malone’s methods distasteful), that the Shakespeare text merits all the attention he lavished on it. At this point, we may seem to have wandered so far down the path pointed to by Greg’s “Rationale” as to lose contact altogether with the original territory. The Bardolatrous “premiss” that produced lateeighteenth-century Shakespeare “worship” opens a wide gap between New Bibliography and its historical origins. New Bibliographers repudiate the idea of an appreciation independent of a disciplined critical faculty. Even in the libertarian mood of “The Rationale,” Greg worries about a “reliance on personal taste” (28) and endorses editorial discretion with a proviso: “intrinsic merit” can determine readings only “so long as by ‘merit’ we mean the likelihood of their being what the author wrote rather than their appeal to the individual taste of the editor” (29). Tanselle regularly insists on that “most basic distinction between editions in which the aim is historical—the . . . reconstruction of what the author intended—and those in which the editor’s own personal preferences determine” editorial decisions (Textual Criticism, p. 102; and see p. 51, 99). Greg and Tanselle usually acknowledge the subordination of their scientific ambition to the interpretive implications of the project; other New Bibliographers less so. Thrilled by the prospect of an objective truth liberated from subjective opinion, they sometimes reified the focus of their desire, identifying authorial intention with textual properties as though foul papers were themselves the final object of their interest. “Some day,” Bowers envisaged, the “final capstone” will “be placed” on “what may be called a definitive text of Shakespeare” (On Editing Shakespeare, p. 100, 101). Barbara Mowat quotes some equally overconfident claims dating from the late

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1960s and early 1970s in which editorial work is said to be on the verge of possessing the “ultimately authoritative” or “fully definitive” Shakespearian text (p. 21). This kind of talk has not dated well. Authorial intention, as represented in the current critical context, may be “implied” by or “inferred” from textual properties, but is not embedded in them.5 As a “hypothetical” rather than empirical category, the author stands for what “Shakespeare ‘would have’ approved” (Mac D. Jackson, p. 166). Alternatively, the author signifies “an ideal,” and editors pursue not “what the author wrote,” but “what the author would have written had he had all his wits about him—a situation that could never quite be achieved in real life” (Dawson, “Imaginary Text,” p. 141). This is not to declare that authors are unreal or absent, still less dead. Such claims locate the issue in an ontological context, the productive agency that accounts for the existence of the text, but authorship is more usefully located in the context of reception, the nature and intensity of our engagement with it. As Seán Burke puts it, The decision as to whether we read a text with or without an author remains an act of critical choice governed by the protocols of a certain way of reading rather than any “truth of writing”. . . . authorial absence can never be a cognitive statement about literature and discourse in general, but [rather] ref lects on the activity and status of the critic. (p. 176) As an interpretive construction, an imagined point of reference guiding editorial judgment, the author is, like Father Ong’s audience, “always a fiction” (something made, that is; not something unreal); and when the author is Shakespeare, the agency imagined to account for those reading and theatrical experiences that have generated and continue to generate the most intense interpretive engagements, it might be called a Supreme Fiction. But if this is so, in what sense can we engage in an attempt to identify Shakespearean intention that is not based substantially on assumptions and values that ref lect an “editor’s own personal preferences”? The question can be focused on a comment of Boswell the Younger’s, writing to support an emendation attributed to Warburton for a much-debated line in Othello: “a regulation which contains so much beauty,” Boswell declares, must be the invention of “our great author” and not “merely the refinement of a critic” (vol. 9, p. 465). The reverentially Bardolatrous tone of “our great author” is very

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different from Dawson’s casual “author [with] all his wits about him,” but theoretically the two are hard to tell apart. Is New Bibliography no more than this—Bardolatry toned down? “Toned down” is the wrong way to put it. What should be emphasized, rather, is New Bibliography’s enrichment of earlier work. It achieved a vast increase in knowledge, leading to (or perhaps from) some remarkable conceptual breakthroughs and an extraordinarily productive method for dealing with the early texts. All this may not have brought us to a final revelation of Shakespeare’s intention as in itself it really is, but it has produced plausible speculations along that line and, perhaps more important, added immeasurably to the intellectual sophistication of what we do and the complexity of the institutional framework within which we do it. Nonetheless, one thing remains unchanged from Malone’s time, driving the enterprise as much for New Bibliographers as for Shakespeareans around 1800: the “premiss” that Shakespeare’s plays are not “nothing,” and the grateful conviction that taking part in the long history of critical, editorial, and theatrical ref lection about them is a desirable undertaking. IV: New Textualist Desire So much for New Bibliography’s interest in the author, now to the repudiation of that interest on the other side. New Textualists have no shortage of arguments why an author-centered editorial practice is bad. It is unhistorical (Shakespeare didn’t write for publication, authorial status as we know it didn’t exist in the Renaissance), antitheatrical (performance is a collective enterprise, the playwright has only a small part), and politically objectionable (cultural production is identified with an elite notion of the gifted individual). The concepts of history, theater, and politics underwriting these claims may not stand up to scrutiny—or so I have argued in earlier chapters; but their widespread persistence in the context of editorial work suggests they are nourished by deeper convictions. Once again, I am interested in underlying assumptions and values, and Paul Werstine’s critique of Greg and his followers, undertaken in an array of strongly argued essays published during the last twenty or so years, is the place to look. McMillin’s “economy” and “binary logic” fairly characterize Werstine’s main point: New Bibliography is founded on the reduction of complex materials into a single axis of difference, as when, in Shakespeare’s Folios and Quartos (1909), A. W. Pollard “divides all the

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quartos into just two classes, labeling them the ‘good’ and the ‘bad.’ ” Despite its “nearly absurd simplicity” compared with the “large and multiple differences” among the quartos themselves, “the binarism and rigidity of his original distinction” has, Werstine claims, been perpetuated (“Narratives,” 65). Seven years later, he tells the same story with a new protagonist: Greg “reduces a dispersed heterogeneity of manuscripts” (“Plays,” p. 482) into a “binary system,” with the “ ‘promptbook’ ” serving “as the opposite of ‘fowle papers’ ” (p. 489); and again “editors and scholars” who “labor under the inf luence of Greg’s theory . . . continue to evade the complexity exhibited in the range and diversity of the extant manuscripts” (p. 482). To reductionism, Werstine adds the charge of idealism: the categories constituting New Bibliographical binaries “are hypothetical constructs that have yet to be empirically validated”: “no documentary evidence” survives for the category Greg “designated ‘foul papers’ ” (“Narratives,” 81), and his “stipulations of tidiness” as the defining features of promptbooks “are merely ideal and were rarely, if ever, in force for theatrical manuscripts” (“Plays,” p. 485). But Greg himself acknowledged all this. It “would be a great mistake,” he says about promptbooks, not “to suppose” that “a good deal of untidiness” was typically “tolerated”; and if we lack evidence for foul papers, this is not just because of “the uncertainties of transmission” but “because the author may never have produced a definitive text for us to recover.”6 Both concessions are reiterated in The Shakespeare First Folio during Greg’s attempt, moving from general commentary to detailed discussion, to lay out his overall method. Just after his remark that “plausible guessing is about all we can hope for,” he twice cautions that any identification of authorial or theatrical origins can proceed only by “ignoring the possibility” of interference between categories unlikely to be independent of each other. Moreover, the passage emphatically concludes, “it must be remembered that foul papers and prompt-books do not exhaust the possibilities regarding the copy from which the texts were printed” (p. 175). Such acknowledgments identify foul papers and promptbooks as heuristic rather than empirical categories. Their binarism is not meant as a comprehensive description of the more diversely nuanced materials Greg understands to be out there, but as an interpretive strategy, serving to organize the field for the kind of analysis he deems appropriate. I “will show,” Werstine declares as if exposing methodological impropriety, that “Greg’s theory is logically a priori . . . to any survey of the manuscripts” (“Plays,” p. 481); but logical priority is in the nature of theory

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or indeed of any thought—we don’t just look, we look for. “Despite the highly rational integrity of Greg’s narrative,” Werstine observes, “it in fact exceeds the documentary evidence” (“Plays,” p. 488); but without doing so, it would cease to count as explanation. If we are to blame “Greg’s haste to produce a general rational theory” for driving him to devise an interpretive system “chronologically prior to his own limited survey” of the manuscripts, how much more empirical-inductive surveying would be enough? Given the inadequacy of the material, too much irresolvable uncertainty about the too few surviving manuscripts, “an objective survey of the extant dramatic manuscripts” will not by itself—that is, without evidence-exceeding hypotheses from which to proceed deductively—get us any closer to interpretive conclusions (“Plays,” p. 481). As D. F. McKenzie puts it, “no finite number of observations can ever justify a generalization” (3). Even the richest data base and all the time in the world would never let us reach the threshold Werstine evidently requires. We would be going slowly and methodically on a path to nowhere. The critique of New Bibliographical economy and binarism arrives at the same dead end. All interpretation begins with an economizing action—establishing a field of inquiry within a larger, potentially infinite mass of phenomena. Interpretation is inherently reductive in a descriptive sense; to say that Greg “reduces a dispersed heterogeneity” merely identifies Greg’s interpretive practice as an interpretive practice. (From a more sympathetic perspective, it might be called selective or even creative in its capacity to invent hypotheses that bestow meaning.) Binarism is the most stringent form of economy, but its reductio ad absurdum is just what makes it useful and even necessary. Binaries constitute the elemental foundation of existence and consciousness. In the beginning, a series of divisions—between light and darkness, waters under and above the firmament, etc.—formed the intention, content, and consequence of God’s creative word. Given the differential nature of language, what Freud calls “the antithetical meaning of primary words,” all thought continues perforce to be generated within the structure of binary logic. Without binary logic, the operating system crashes. Werstine’s critique of New Bibliographical binaries is itself binarydependent. He objects that Greg’s interest in foul papers “is the product not of reason but of desire” (“Narratives,” 75), and in a version of the same doublet thirteen years later, he directs us to “what we can know, rather than feel” about a foul-papers provenance (Housmania, p. 57). Reason-knowledge vs. desire-feeling: although Werstine wants “to

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open up a space in textual criticism between the “good”/“bad” axis,” he winds up enclosed within a good/bad axis that is no less a “rigidified hierarchy” than the one it displaces (“Narratives,” 83). The issue, then, is not the presence of binaries (they are ubiquitous), but their nature and value, the uses they serve and the judgments we make about them. I don’t share Werstine’s judgment in rejecting desire and feeling any more than I did McMillin’s in dismissing desire and hope, and the reasons need no reiteration here; but in the case of the most important of the binaries sustaining Werstine’s critique, the aesthetic vs. the historical, some more expansive ref lection is in order. Disputing the claim that “Hand D” in the More manuscript is Shakespeare’s, Werstine declares that “authorship is an aesthetic, rather than a historical category” (“Close Contrivers,” p. 17). In a discussion of the Hamlet texts, he dismisses any evaluation of the Q2/F variants as based on “purely aesthetic patterns” that “can have no claim to historicity,” adding that to “claim that such patterns must originate with Shakespeare is to abolish the distinction between history and aesthetics” (“Textual Mystery, 24). In both passages, the aesthetic is linked with the author, defined as a “single agent” (“Narratives,” 86) whose coherent and conscious intention produces a “single ‘meaning’ ” realized immediately in an “aesthetic design” whose “self-evident” and “unassailable integrity” requires us to acknowledge ourselves “in the presence of Shakespeare’s true art” (“Textual Mystery,” 16, 24). As a description of some feeble interpretation, this is amusing and beneficial; but for reasons already suggested (I will develop them more fully in chapters 5 and 6), Werstine’s identification of the aesthetic with textual properties and with a solitary authorial agency fundamentally misrepresents the idea as Romantic writers understood it. It is thus historically dubious even as it serves the rhetorical purpose of locating the historical in a realm beyond doubt. The aesthetic functions within his argument as a risible impossibility against which the historical, on the back side of the binary, can be produced as both accessible and worthy of respect. But what is it, exactly, that emerges? According to Werstine, “history is histories, multiple narratives” to account for the state of early printed texts which were, after all, “open to penetration and alteration not only by Shakespeare himself and by his fellow actors but also by multiple theatrical and extra-theatrical” agents (“Narratives,” 85,86). With Foucault, he rejects the idea that the various contingent materials of history should be made to reveal any “ ‘timeless and essential secret’ ” except for “ ‘the secret that they have no essence or that

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their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms’ ” (“Textual Mystery,” 26). But Foucault does not simply leave it at that; his conviction about the constructedness of history serves to shift the interpretive question from production, “who is speaking” the text, to the more interesting and useful questions of reception, “Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it?” (“What Is an Author?”, p. 160). This shift returns the aesthetic to its origin in the “perceiving subject” and restores it to its historical dimension in another sense as well—as interpretive history (rezeption-esthetik or nochleben). To claim that the interpretive history of Hamlet, inscribed throughout centuries of commentary, performance, and critical editing, “can have no claim to historicity” reduces not just the aesthetic but the historical as well to a futile pursuit of inaccessible and uninteresting kinds of knowledge. Werstine appropriates Nietzsche’s claim “ ‘that the actual causes of a thing’s origin and its eventual uses, the manner of its incorporation into a system of purposes, are worlds apart; that everything that exists, no matter what its origin, is periodically reinterpreted . . . in terms of fresh intentions’ ” (“Touring,” p. 59); but as with Foucault, the results are disappointing. The problem resides in the phrase Werstine elides from his quotation, “by those in power.” Presumably, Werstine wants to avoid raising the specter of Nazism sometimes associated with Nietzsche, but the effect of the omission is to reduce the claim into a merely negative critique. When Nietzsche identifies a gap between origin and use, his aim is not just to describe an epistemological problem, but to offer an opening for philosophical übermenschen, “those in power,” to energize the interpretive will. Werstine seems to have assimilated the deconstructive aspects of antifoundationalism, but its “edifying” consequences, as Rorty calls them (Philosophy, pp. 357–72), their capacity to encourage the construction of new meanings, have gotten lost. Werstine’s system, rather, works to discourage the construction of meanings, old or new. He urges us to replace “Greg’s a priori theory” about theatrical manuscripts with “an a posteriori conclusion that respects their variety and disuniformity” (“Plays,” p. 495); but since there is no way to sort out the textual markings deposited by the many diverse agents who may have “penetrated and altered” them, this respect leaves us with nothing to say. As Werstine puts it, if the theory can “be recognized as only an undemonstrable hypothesis, then we can stop pretending . . . we know what we see” (“A Century,” 330); or again, anyone who “examines the extant manuscripts

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themselves instead of relying on Greg” will be “confronted with the radical indeterminacy of identifying what kind of manuscript may lie behind a printed dramatic text” (“Plays,” p. 492). It is reasonable to urge editors “to be more skeptical about their claims to know the origins” of texts (“The Cause,” p. 116), but skepticism since Plato has served as a means to beget desire, and the repudiation of desire among New Textualists reduces skepticism into a terminal nescience. Hermeneutic abstinence in the face of the “irreducible historical messiness of the actual manuscripts” is claimed as a way “to engage the fierce particularities of the extant manuscripts,” each of which “can then be appreciated in its uniqueness as the matrix of a variety of possible scholarly narratives about the inscription of early English drama” (“Plays,” p. 482, 492, pp. 494–5). But since every text constructed by this method turns out to be yet one more product of an identically unknowable multiplicity of possible agents, the result is not fierce particularity but undifferentiated sameness. This is what Stephen Greenblatt has called the “slime of history” (“Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” p. 101), an amorphously viscous otherness it would be impossible to engage even if we wanted to. V: Consequences It “is one thing,” Robert Weimann tells us, “to question the premises on which the New Bibliography sought to trace the dramatist’s presumed intentions and meanings,” but “to define and clarify” a set of “new premises” with “reference to a more inclusive circulation of authority in the Elizabethan theatre” is “quite another” (p. 41). These things may be not just different but incompatible. Stephen Orgel, acknowledging that his editorial work “hasn’t done much to take into account” his own contributions to the New Textualism, then ref lects on “requirements” that “are not really reconcilable” (“What is an Editor?” p. 16, 17). R. A. Foakes points to the same disconnection: despite “the explosion of writing about textual criticism and about editing” recently, “many of those publishing advice or admonitions to editors have never edited a work themselves”; their counsel seems “to have no bearing” on the “practical work” involved. “However strenuously theorists try to discredit the notion of intention,” Foakes remarks, “editors in practice continue to find the idea of the author necessary” (“Shakespeare Editing,” 425, 434). Or if not the author, at least (so Anthony Dawson argues) some comparably “immaterial idea . . . behind

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the textual manifestations” for without this it “would be impossible to edit at all” (“Correct Impressions,” p. 42). From this angle, the consequence of New Textualism is willy-nilly to terminate editorial practice. Giorgio Melchiori takes the argument one step further, from a possibly inadvertent effect to a deliberate strategy. In his view, New Textualists, by eliminating any functional center to their practice, have “created an all-inclusive and all-purpose negative narrative intended to nullify all narratives by their predecessors,” and to leave editors “in a kind of limbo, not knowing what to present to readers and performers as an authentic text of a play” (p. 19, 24). This conclusion needs some qualification; New Textualism is not seeking to terminate the totality of editorial practice. When Randall McLeod asserts that “photography has killed editing” and asks “what rationale can there be for editing?”, he is not claiming that all editing is purposeless, only “that critical editions suck” (“from Tranceformations,” 72, 76, McLeod’s emphasis). As he sees it, in fact, the same technology that has killed critical editing gives birth to new editorial possibilities in the form of “photofacsimiles” that let us “present the authoritative texts very much as they appeared to Shakespeare’s contemporaries,” thereby eliminating “the pervasive bias of the pre-photographic age of transmission and of the tradition of editorial and compositorial middlemen it fostered” (“UN Editing Shak-speare,” 37, 38). Werstine’s death-of-editing claims are similarly restricted. It is only the “ ‘critical’ editing of Shakespeare” that “has had its day”; and for him too its demise heralds “a new beginning”: once having “rightly abandoned” the “goal of establishing the text of a metaphysical ‘work’ that transcends its evidently imperfect printed states,” editors may now “strive for the humanly possible goal of editing one or more of the early printed texts, without claiming to locate either author or work in relation to these printed versions” (“Housmania,” pp. 58–60). Although Werstine is probably thinking of diplomatic transcriptions rather than “photofacsimiles,” the fundamental consistency of his program with McLeod’s should be clear enough. But to say that New Textualists want to terminate only critical editing drastically underestimates the consequences of the program. If critical editing is a subset of editing itself, so editing itself—as “not a prerequisite to scholarly literary criticism” but “a part of that criticism”—is an element within a larger enterprise. Like Greg in “The Rationale,” Tanselle believes that the interpretive judgment required to produce a critical edition is effectively identical to the interpretive judgment exercised in critical commentary. But if critical editing and critical

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commentary are different aspects of the same project, then the unediting program has un-interpreting consequences as well. Eliminate the “bias” of “middlemen,” “abandon” all mediating efforts to relate texts to an author or work or any other “immaterial idea,” and it won’t be just a form of editing that disappears. “Shakespeare studies” and “literary studies” altogether (to recall the claims from which we started) will disappear as well, for the “premiss” on which they are built—that Shakespeare is not nothing, that the Shakespeare text is worth troubling our heads about, that our continued participation in the long history of interpreting, editing, and performing Shakespeare is a good thing—will have disappeared as well. The “quite remarkable power” of the New Textualism’s program extends (as Meredith Skura recognizes) beyond “the editorial process” to include “us noneditors” as well: it produces a situation in which “there is no way of going about our business at all” (p. 172). But we do, of course, go on. Given the evident persistence—even f lourishing—of our interpretive and editorial enterprises, I must be exaggerating the consequences of the New Textualism, and I want to conclude with some moderating concessions. One concerns lumping. Honigmann argues against the representation of New Bibliography as if it were “a clearly defined programme at a particular moment in time” (“New Bibliography,” p. 77), and Werstine has gone out of his way recently to acknowledge the same point. New Bibliographers were not “locked in perfect agreement”; they “resisted each other’s simplifications and over-generalizations in struggles with the Shakespeare texts” (“Science,” p. 127). A fortiori the New Textualism. It includes critics who do not share the un-editing program I have described here. Michael Warren, for instance, one of the earliest and most inf luential interrogators of New Bibliography, seeks not just to expose its “pervasive bias” but to replace it with an enriched sense of meaning in the original texts. In his scintillating pieces (“The Perception of Error” is a characteristic recent example), Warren may be said to engage not so much in un-editing as in reediting. Besides, even the most unremitting of New Textualists seem reluctant to live with the consequences of their own un-editing program, undertaking editorial work in a way that ignores their theoretical claims. Werstine’s productions are probably the most striking example of this reluctance, since at the same he was arguing against critical editions in the essays reviewed here, he was busily engaged with his coeditor Barbara Mowat in producing the wonderful critical editions of Shakespeare published under the auspices of the Folger Library.

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Werstine tries to gloss over the inconsistency. He claims that the Folger Othello “is an edition, not of the ‘work,’ but of the Folio printing of Othello, and therefore” not “a ‘critical’ one”; and that the Folger Lear breaks with the “intellectual tyranny” of critical editions (Housmania, p. 59). But as Michael Neill points out, Werstine and Mowat “chose to use F as the basis for their New Folger edition on the grounds that it is ‘the more accurate’ of the two” early texts, just as any unregenerate critical editor would; and as Foakes argues, the Folger Lear is basically indistinguishable from his own Arden 3 edition, or even Furness’s 1880 Variorum.7 And finally, I don’t want to overestimate the reach of New Textualism. Thompson and McMullan’s claim quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that “the recent explosion of work” in “editing and textual criticism” has moved such matters “from the periphery of English studies to the much-debated centre,” echoes David Scott Kastan, for whom “Editing has suddenly become . . . arguably the hot topic in Shakespeare studies” (Shakespeare After Theory, p. 59, Kastan’s emphasis), and Erne and Kidnie, for whom “editing and textual studies have become hot topics that attract ever-increasing attention” (Introduction, p. 1). Despite these claims, however, it may be that most Shakespeareans pay no more attention now to the New Textualism than they did to the New Bibliography in the days of its hegemony: just enough to work up a passable response if the topic comes up at a dinner party or a PhD oral. It remains true, nonetheless, that New Textualism resonates strongly with views held among a wide range of Shakespeareans for whom “un-editing” and “New Bibliographical binarism” are not household phrases. As I argued in chapter 3, a significant constituency of Shakespeareans in and out of New Textualism, all across the ranks up to the most inf luential senior scholars, are arguing positions that seem to repudiate the interpretive modes that have sustained us going back at least to the time of Hazlitt and Malone. This noteworthy development seems to invite explanation, but it may be one for which explanation is neither necessary nor, frankly, possible. Perhaps all we can say is that change happens; like living organisms, cultural practices exhaust themselves and die. or metamorphose into different forms. Whether the current situation is characterized by such an “interchange of state”—a bona fide paradigm shift, an authentic crisis in editing—is, as I said earlier, impossible to know for sure. If it is, if we are no longer sustained by the pleasure and value Hazlitt claimed as the self-evident consequence of engaging with Shakespeare’s plays, then I think the situation

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of Shakespeare studies may be irremediably desperate. But to reiterate the point from the Introduction, I wouldn’t have worked up the arguments in this and in earlier chapters if I altogether lacked hope that some readers would find them useful. There is always hope, quixotic though it may be—hope, desire, and imagination.

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PA RT

T H R E E

Romanticism Lost

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Introduction: Romanticism Lost

In the spring of 1967, Paul de Man delivered a series of six lectures to the Gauss seminar at Princeton under the general title “Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism.” In the first of these, de Man takes off from the idea that Romanticism is “a privileged topic for contemporary criticism.” He acknowledges that any such claim is “impossible to prove” by “objective criteria.” A comparable amount of high-quality work is focused on other periods as well—“Baroque, renaissance, or medieval topics,” for example—but de Man insists nonetheless that Romanticism is a special case: whenever romantic attitudes are implicitly or explicitly under discussion, a certain heightening of tone takes place, an increase of polemical tension, as if something of immediate concern to all were at stake. Few of the contemporary writings on romanticism are free of polemical overtones, to the point that it remains exceedingly difficult to consider the topic with the historical detachment that applies to the study not only of earlier but also of some later topics in literary history. (p. 3) The lecture that follows is devoted to developing this point through an analysis of the “hostility toward romanticism” in the work of René Girard. Since Girard’s work reproduces “the very problems we will find” in “ ‘romantic’ writers” even when “it has cut itself off from the source of its own insight,” it constitutes “clear proof of the privileged, originary relationship that exists between him and his romantic precursors” (p. 24). In the surviving fragment of the fifth lecture, de Man generalizes the idea, remarking on “the feeling of crisis that comes over all thought when it comes into close contact with its own source” (p. 97). The state of affairs de Man described in 1967 has been sustained and apparently even intensified in some of the most inf luential studies of

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Romanticism published during the quarter century that followed. In 1983, Jerome McGann published The Romantic Ideology, a book whose “hostility toward romanticism” makes Girard’s work sound celebratory in tone. McGann made two basic claims: first that the value put by Romantic writers on the imaginative transcendence of material history was a self-deluding mystification—in short, an ideology; and second that current work continues to be penetrated and shaped—interpellated—by the same ideology. Five years later, McGann’s conclusions were reinforced by Clifford Siskin, whose Historicity of Romantic Discourse argued that our enthralled attraction to Romanticism was equivalent to an addictive desire. In 1992, Don H. Bialostosky’s Wordsworth, Dialogics, and the Practice of Criticism, taking on McGann and Siskin among others, sought to rehabilitate Romanticism as a still-useful foundation (his word is “constitution”) for critical practice. Six years after this, Siskin, in The Work of Writing, dismissed the “comforting sense of continuity” between Romanticism and the present represented by Bialostosky’s book (p. 237) and takes on, as “the crucial task” of his own work, an attempt to “negotiate a central paradox posed by the last decade of historicist work on Romanticism: how to write about Romanticism without being Romantic” (p. 14). How is it that the problem identified by McGann in the early 1980s persists into the late 1990s with equal force? The “central paradox” Siskin locates in McGann’s analysis is, after all, inherent in all textual and historical interpretation: there is always an admixture of continuity and discontinuity between the reader and the text and between our current position and a historically remote situation. To say that repetition is a problem, then, is to claim that there is too much continuity (it becomes “comforting”—an evidently bad thing) or too little critical detachment, but this is not so much a methodological or epistemological as an ontological and value judgment. It resides in what Romanticism is (or is taken to be), and on whether this is a good thing. Siskin’s position is built on the repudiation of—or, minimally, a skepticism about—the value of Romantic beliefs. In this respect, The Work of Writing reiterates his earlier Historicity of Romantic Discourse, which had sought to find ways out of what he described as a pathological dependence on Romanticism; and since The Historicity in turn reiterates the position of entrapment established by McGann, these multiple recursions seem to illustrate (though they may also self-fulfillingly prophesy) the idea that Romanticists are imprisoned in a compulsive repetition constituted by the repellent attraction of Romanticism itself.

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And so, it seems, they still are. Robert Miles, for example, in his compelling study of Romantic Misfits (2008), mounts a spirited defense of Habermas’s public sphere by means of a neo-McGannian assault on the privileging of interiority (the “ ‘turning to Nature or the creative Imagination,’ ” “the reaching and overreaching of the autonomous subject”) said to characterize “Romanticism’s institutionalized critical practice” (p. 200 [quoting McGann], 205, 206). Miles’s book is yet one more piece of evidence for the “increased polemical tension” de Man sees “whenever romantic attitudes” are under discussion. But even as this predictable cycle of repudiation and occasional recuperation perpetuated itself, a change seemed to be in the wind. At the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism meeting at McMaster University in 1997, two eminent Romanticists, Susan Wolfson and William Galperin, organized a plenary session, “ ‘Romanticism’ in Crisis: A Panel Discussion on Period and Profession.” “Crisis” keeps us securely ensconced in the situation de Man described, but the quotation marks around “Romanticism” signaled something apparently different—an uncertainty not just about the proper definition or evaluation of Romanticism, but about its very existence as a distinct category. As the panel’s subtitle suggests, this uncertainty was identified in institutional terms. In their opening presentation, Galperin and Wolfson observed that English departments “were not hiring Romanticists as Romanticists” and “wondered if the job category of specialization in romanticism under which so many of our now-tenured professoriate were hired was a diminishing presence” (“The Romantic Century”). Some respondents were skeptical: the evidence was only anecdotal, after all, and the job market was bad for everyone. But Galperin and Wolfson’s gloomy impressions seem to have been justified. A few years after the McMaster conference, Phyllis Franklin, the executive secretary of the MLA, reporting on the “remarkable stability” in “members’ interests between 1984 and 2001,” notes that only four of the association’s twenty most heavily enrolled divisions in 1984 were no longer represented in 2001. Two of these were “The English Romantic Period” and “Comparative Studies in Romantics and the Nineteenth Century.” Having defined the problem in terms of institutional nomenclature, Galperin and Wolfson tailored their solution to the same domain. “Accordingly we propose a reconstitution of the Period Formerly Known as Romanticism into an intellectually and historically coherent century-long category, 1750–1850, which we unabashedly call ‘The

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Romantic Century.’ ” A bold move, but it didn’t work, and Wolfson, revisiting the situation four years later in the pages of the PMLA, explains why. The problem addressed by the McMaster panel was largely confined to professional concerns, but Romanticism was lost not just as a title on the hiring grid or in the period course curriculum; it was lost as a historical and theoretical concept as well. To be sure, something called “Romanticism” still existed, and probably still along the lines confidently outlined by René Wellek in 1962: “The great poets of the English romantic movement constitute a fairly coherent group, with the same view of poetry and the same conception of imagination, the same view of nature and mind. They share also a poetic style, a use of imagery, symbolism, and myth, which is quite distinct” (p. 178). But Romanticism so defined now seemed remarkable for its exclusions—of prose writers, for instance, including Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, not to mention the writers of gothic fiction; and even in poetry it concentrated so heavily on the “major six” that others, including women like Felicia Hemans, whose sales figures alone should have earned them a place in the story, were left out in the cold. In short, Romanticism in its traditional version had come to seem too narrow to serve as the “intellectually coherent” descriptor for the period 1750–1850. But even as Wolfson has to abandon the ambition declared at the McMaster conference, the news turns good. That earlier project now looks “less necessary” than she had thought: the more we’ve added to the Romantic mix, the less certain its boundaries and containments have come to seem and the less necessary the cover term, which emerged from an earlier and now debatable design of determining the spirit of the age, a kind of period “consciousness” for which “literature” was taken to be a key site, as emanation, bearer, or even generator. (“Our Puny Boundaries,” 1433) From this detached perspective, the solution to the problem is to cease regarding it as a problem. Romanticism may be diminished in historical reach and interpretive power, but instead of a futile effort to reclaim its authority in “The Long Romantic Century,” we can accept the fact that the Period Formerly Known as Romanticism has been absorbed into the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although “the recent configurations of the field” leave “an unprocessed historical record,” the radiant variety of phenomena they make available, an “appealing chronicle of national events from court to workplace—populated by

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men and women, poetry, novels, tracts, scholarship and periodicals” (1436)—can be understood as “an opportunity rather than a catastrophe” (1440). Charles Ryzepka, one of the original participants at McMaster, joined Wolfson in reconsidering the problem in the pages of the PMLA, and for him too the intervening years have brought a philosophic mind. At the conference, Ryzepka, expressing “alarm” at the “apparent indifference to close reading” in current work, sought “to reaffirm the importance to our professional survival of maintaining the skills of aesthetic and formal analysis” currently “threatened mostly by neglect, due to the otherwise quite welcome broadening of our research interests to include marginalized writers and literary forms, and ever more historical detail.” By 2001, the imminent threat to survival Ryzepka sensed in 1997 has disappeared: “Romanticism does not seem to be in crisis at present” (1425). Even the earlier sense of crisis has come to seem like a false alarm: Indeed, Romanticism in the mid-1990s, far from being in crisis, its usual mode, had reached a hiatus. There was no longer a theoretical or methodological or ideological banner around which a new revolutionary cohort could rally or toward which the old guard could direct its fire. . . . the sense of crisis by which Romanticism had traditionally defined itself vanished. We didn’t notice it was gone [until, with the collapse of the job market,] the period formerly defined by crisis, having lost any sense of crisis by which to define itself, soon found one in the apparent threat of its own extinction. (1428–9). Like Wolfson, Ryzepka brings glad tidings. With the felt need gone to make unsustainable claims for its centrality, Romanticism, having shed its defining identity of “being in crisis,” is free to become just another mode (or set of modes) of literary expression, a division (or subdivision) of literary history like all the others (de Man’s “Baroque, renaissance, or medieval,” say). The appeal of such normalization is apparent—an abatement in the “polemical tension” de Man described as present “whenever romantic attitudes are implicitly or explicitly under discussion.” Despite regular laments about the death of theory, the curtailed production of far-reaching and difference-making ideas has brought a welcome relief to all of us, Romanticists or not. After so many claims about new paradigms, normal science may be just what we need.

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But whether desirable or not, the question remains whether the normalization of Romanticism is possible. It’s not just that “being in crisis” is the condition to which all critical consciousness is apparently destined (Marcie Frank’s point again, quoted at the beginning of this book), but that, according to de Man, Romanticism embodies this crisis-consciousness with unique intensity. As the effective point of origin for subsequent ideas about literary expression and literary history up to the present, Romanticism occupies an inescapably privileged position in our own work. It cannot be relegated to just another slot in the period-course curriculum—it provides the blueprint and the machinery by which the period-course curriculum has been constructed. It cannot be reduced to just another example of literary expression—it undergirds whatever understanding we might claim to possess about the nature and value of literary production. From this perspective, the Look!-We-Have-Come-Through! rhetoric in Wolfson and Ryzepka is less than fully convincing. In Wolfson’s piece, what we have come through to is a “chronicle” of diverse phenomena—national events, tracts, and poems, everything you can think of all over the social and discursive domains; but once “ ‘Romanticism’ ” and “ ‘literature’ ” and even “ ‘consciousness’ ” have been consigned to the limbo-space within quotation marks, not as a way to invite speculation about compellingly complicated ideas but rather in order to defer the stress of engaging with problems, there isn’t much we can do of any real consequence with all the different items in Wolfson’s catalog. A world of choice is paraded before us; but however “appealing” the variety of its constituent elements, we no longer engage it with the intensity of interest de Man described, “as if something of immediate concern to all were at stake,” so its interpretive prospects seem to have dwindled into the freedom of nothing left to lose. In Ryzepka’s similarly cold comfort, Romanticism is said to have “reached a hiatus.” The verb in this odd phrase offers an upbeat prospect, the purposeful attainment of a goal (“man’s reach must exceed his grasp”), but the noun fails to deliver. “Hiatus” opens up (or closes down) into an indefinite space, somewhere outside the “usual mode” of crisis-consciousness that structured critical activity when we inhabited the Period Still Known as Romanticism, and all we can do there, apparently, apart from staving off attacks of agoraphobia or claustrophobia or both, is wait for the revelation of some new postcritical mode of consciousness (even “consciousness” might help). In the interim, we can try filling up the silence (or distracting ourselves from the noise) with the still sad music of cultural studies, but however much Ryzepka

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claimed to have found this “broadening of our research interests” a “welcome” development, the weary reference to “ever more historical detail” makes it clear that his heart isn’t in it. This is discipline without desire, and it deposits us back in the doldrums along with all those dispirited Shakespeareans encountered at the beginning of this book. In the fragmentary fifth lecture from which I quoted earlier on, de Man remarks on the pattern in which “contemporary critics of romanticism” exhibit “a curious turning back at the very moment when they seemed closest to their conclusive point.” In “all these cases,” he tells us, having added Jean Starobinski, Martin Heidegger, and Geoffrey Hartman to his earlier example of Girard, Romanticists “have shrunk back before the full impact of their findings” (p. 97). I am suggesting that Wolfson and Ryzepka should be included in an updated version of de Man’s list. They painstakingly describe a situation in which interpretive efforts have to be acknowledged as inadequate in the face (or midst) of a vast space at once empty and full to bursting with unmanageably diverse phenomena—then turn away and shrink back. Wolfson assures us that this situation is “an opportunity rather than a catastrophe”; Ryzepka declares it a hiatus rather than the quietus we might take him to be describing. Both say we have gone past crisis. Neither acknowledges the possibility that the patient has died. Romanticists’ problems are not limited to Romanticists. If Romanticism is where we are all coming from, then they are problems for Shakespeareans as well; and even—since Shakespeare is the cornerstone of the house that Romanticism built, the primary exhibit for Coleridge and Hazlitt and Keats and Emerson of the working imagination—problems for Shakespeareans especially. (Phyllis Franklin’s statistics illustrate the point again: only two divisions have dropped out of the top ten between 1984 and 2001—“Shakespeare” and “Poetry.”) In the two chapters following, some of the anxious efforts of Romanticists sketched out here will reappear in a Shakespearean context, including a troubled and seemingly self-canceling effort to dissociate Shakespeare studies from its own origins. These chapters take on key ideas with which Romantic critics associated an engagement with Shakespeare, the effects of form and the concept of authorship, arguing that the representation of these topics in current work is based on a misconstrual of Romantic claims and the values on which they are founded. As a result, instead of a hoped-for escape from the critical past, Shakespeareans wind up, like the self-deluded and addicted subjects in McGann and Siskin’s analysis, trapped in the reproduction of a crisis they purport to get beyond.

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The question brooding over all this discussion is, how should we account for such an apparently self-defeating practice? or why is it (to condense Stephen Greenblatt’s perplexed ref lection quoted in the Introduction) that our “profession has become so phobic about literary power that it risks losing sight of the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in the first place” (Hamlet, p. 4). It’s a question I keep coming up to and then swerving away from in the discussion that follows, and the similarities to the pattern de Man describes are alarmingly evident. Seeing a problem evidently does not by itself get rid of it. (I am still following de Man, who acknowledges that “this recurrent pattern” is one “of which I am certainly myself also a victim” [p. 97]; but the basic predicament goes back to Romans 7:15.) The answer I eventually suggest, at the end of chapter 6, keyed to the innocuous sounding my profession at the start of Greenblatt’s perplexity, is professionalism itself. In this context, however, we cannot expect to reach a single decisive pronouncement about the motivations behind current practice. And while professionalism is going to close down the argument of the book, it will obviously not put an end to the question.

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CH A P T E R

F I V E

Romantic Antitheatricalism and Formalist Values

One rubric by which to characterize nineteenth-century Shakespeare is “The Theater Poet,” in which “Theater” functions as a distinctly subordinating modifier of Shakespearean achievement understood chief ly in literary or textual terms. The history written under this sign would begin with the Romantics who, when they originated a systematic understanding of literary value, produced Shakespeare as their primary witness. The foundational document for “Shakespeare, the Theater Poet” is Charles Lamb’s 1811 essay, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation,” which boldly claims “that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever,” and that we engage Shakespeare better “with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading” than with “the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse” (pp. 98, 99). From Lamb and the other Romantics, notably Coleridge and Hazlitt, we might carry on through to Bradley’s emphatic claim, at the beginning of the next century, that “ignorance” about the theatrical conditions and audience for which Shakespeare wrote “does not exclude us from the soul of Shakespearean drama,” accessible through an imaginative engagement with a poetic text (“Shakespeare’s Theatre and Audience,” p. 361). The Romantics did not invent “Shakespeare the Theater Poet” out of thin air. According to Stephen Greenblatt, antitheatricalism goes back to “a move Ben Jonson rather than Shakespeare seems to have anticipated,” in which the theater itself comes to be emptied out in the interests of reading. In the argument made famous by Charles Lamb and Coleridge,

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and reiterated by Bradley, theatricality must be discarded to achieve absorption, and Shakespeare’s imagination yields forth its sublime power not to a spectator but to one who, like Keats, sits down to reread King Lear. Where institutions like the King’s Men had been thought to generate their texts, now texts like King Lear appear to generate their institutions. The commercial contingency of the theater gives way to the philosophical necessity of literature. (Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 127–8) The negotiation of value Greenblatt describes here coincides with the emergent establishment of print culture, but in Jonas Barish’s magisterial history, the origins of “the antitheatrical prejudice” may be traced back beyond the early church fathers to the recesses of antiquity. Elements of antitheatrical sentiment seem to lurk in the origins of theatrical interest itself, as in Aristotle’s cautionary remarks on the appeal of spectacle in Poetics 14 and 15 (1453b and 1454b). If Greenblatt might go further back than he does, he takes the claim further ahead than he should. The now in his next-to-last sentence suggests that we continue to work within an antitheatrical dispensation, but as part of the contextualist turn described in chapter 1, the reversal of values “made famous” by the Romantics, from theatrical to textual Shakespeare, has itself been reversed. During the past thirty years or so, as signaled early on by “Shakespeare, Man of the Theater,” the theme for the 1981 World Shakespeare Congress, and then developed by arguments that “the real play is the performance, not that text,” Shakespeare studies has transferred its attention decisively away from literary texts and into a performance-centered critical practice. Of the many stage-centered commentaries in current work, W. B. Worthen’s Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance is exceptionally strong, not least because of its insistence that the stage–page binary is something to be engaged with critically, rather than resolved with a preference for one or the other side. “Texts and performances are not really the issue,” he argues, “but how they are construed as vessels of authority” (p. 6). Hence, although Worthen is writing “a book about theatrical performance” (p. 2), he refuses to set up his subject as an unmediated and self-present experience to which textual engagement might serve as a diminished contrast. At the same time, however, Worthen reserves his sharpest critique for the literary model of interpretation as he sees it. Based on the idea “of the unified subject (and its various avatars/epigones/guises, the author, the individual, character)” (p. 91), the literary functions to produce containment and closure and

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thus to impoverish the richer experience available to audiences of plays. Theatrical “directors invoke surprisingly literary valuations of a stable text, and an intending author,” Worthen contends, and this “stabilizing, hegemonic functioning of the Author,” in conjunction with the idea of “meanings authenticated in and by the text,” work, “finally, to tame the unruly ways of the stage” (pp. 2–3). As a result of this emphasis, Worthen’s attempts at even-handedness tend to settle into a lopsided configuration, leaning toward the reductive effects of the literary (defined in these narrow terms) on the theatrical (associated with wildly liberatory possibilities). And it is here that Romanticism comes back into the picture. As Worthen understands it, this restrictive cultural force develops from “the institutionalization of ‘literature’ as a rival means of producing drama, especially Shakespeare, that came to fruition in the nineteenth century” (p. 25)—which is to say, out of Romantic antitheatricalism. As the quasi-Marcusian resonances in Worthen suggest, recent arguments for a theatrical Shakespeare have ventured out from a theoretical or conceptual domain onto a moral or political ground. Rex Gibson, writing in 2000 about Shakespeare’s use for “Active Storytelling in Schools,” provides a striking example of how deeply (and unconsciously) the value of a stage-centered approach has been assimilated into the current consensus. Gibson begins with a catalog of the “strange, and even risible” omissions and transformations in Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. His purpose, though, is not to “censure the Lambs”; this would “mistake their endeavour,” which is, after all, only to introduce Shakespeare to young audiences for whom “further acquaintance will follow.” Gibson’s willingness to allow the Lambs to defer “more subtle discriminations” to a later time includes their decision to “present the Christians in The Merchant of Venice in a wholly favourable light.” But even as he countenances an intensified religious contrast in the Lambs’ version of Merchant, Gibson is not prepared to cut them an unlimited slack. “What more justifiably grates on a modern sensibility,” he adds, are the Lambs’ “gender and social class assumptions” and “their view of the relationship of literature and drama.” Why these factors should grate more than anti-Semitism is never explained, and that should give us pause. The problem is not that Gibson is willing to contextualize anti-Semitism, as distinct from, say, merely throwing up his hands in the face of unspeakable evil. Contextualizing is what we do; it’s a professional responsibility. The problem comes from the other side. Gibson seems to assume that the conception of Shakespeare as “a literary affair, privileging reading over

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the experience of seeing the plays on stage” (p. 151), is self-evidently beyond the pale: the Lambs’ antitheatricalism is represented as a matter (like their “gender and social class assumptions”) to which we should extend zero tolerance and thus zero thought. Gibson evidently assumes that the readers of Shakespeare Survey will share his anti-antitheatricalist sentiments, and he is probably right to do so. As Lukas Erne puts it in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, anyone with “the courage to ‘state the case against the stage-centered approach’ ” is “very much swimming against the current today” (p. 25). Then again, perhaps not; the tide seems to be turning. A number of signs on the current horizon, of which Erne’s own book is the most prominent, suggest that “the stage-centered approach” to Shakespeare no longer enjoys the nearly universal support it once had. According to Gabriel Egan, In the 5 years since Erne announced his theory there has been no serious attempt to refute it and we are currently in a period of uncomfortable vacancy: f laws in the theatre-centered orthodoxy have been revealed but no new overarching paradigm has been proposed. What seems likely to occur next is at least a partial rehabilitation of literary-critical sensibilities within Shakespeare studies.1 Egan’s prediction is plausible, and as my argument about New Theatricalism earlier should suggest, I am not unsympathetic to the idea of a return to literary interest. But the re-reversal (or re-re-reversal) of position on the stage–page binary opens up into a vista of endless oscillation, and while this is a way to keep the conversation going, it might be preferable to keep it going somewhere other than just back and forth. Worthen’s attempt to read the binary, rather than simply inhabit it, is worth trying again, but with greater historical detail, which means going back, if not to the primal sources of antitheatricalism (these, as I suggested, seem to recede indefinitely into the abysm of time), but to its more recent origins, the decisive shift “made famous” by “Lamb, and Coleridge, and reiterated by Bradley”—to the Romantics, whose commentary constructed the framework within which we continue to understand the issue. Before renouncing Romantic ideas about literary Shakespeare altogether, or before rehabilitating these ideas, as Egan thinks is likely to occur next, we should try to make sure we know what it is we are abandoning or recuperating.

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My first claim in this chapter is that we don’t; the consensus about Romantic antitheatricalism is based substantially on misconception. Romantic antitheatricalism is not primarily a formalist discourse— not, that is, focused on the superiority of one kind of object (texts) to another (plays). It is, rather, a rhetorical discourse, interested primarily in the quality and intensity of an audience’s engagement largely independent of the object with which it engages. The same distinction can be made in the terms of the useful taxonomy of “critical orientations” M. H. Abrams sets out in his Introduction to The Mirror and the Lamp, of which two are relevant here: “objective” critics focus on the text “as a self-sufficient entity constituted by its parts in their internal relations” (p. 26); “pragmatic” critics are interested in the text chief ly “as a means to an end, an instrument” (p. 15), designed “to achieve certain effects in an audience (p. 14). Within this terminology, Romantic antitheatricalism is a pragmatic discourse, not the objective discourse it is these days usually taken to be. A mistaken consensus about Romantic antitheatricalism (or anything else) does not have to be an altogether bad thing. Maybe blindness can sometimes produce insights and misreading strong criticism. Nonetheless, the consequences of this particular instance of misprision are, as I see them, undesirable ones. Romantic antitheatricalism is central to the constellation of beliefs and values with which the Romantics established a systematic basis for literary study; and if the critical practice we have at present defines itself dismissively (or, for that matter, appreciatively) in terms of its Romantic roots, the misrecognition of Romantic antitheatricalism, so I will be arguing at the end of this chapter, provides an unstable foundation for ongoing work. I: What Romantic Antitheatricalists Said If it grates on our sensibilities today to hear “that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever,” it could irritate the Victorians as well. In his appreciative review of Augustin Daly’s opulent 1888 Midsummer Night’s Dream, George Edgar Montgomery represents the idea that “an essentially poetic work cannot be put upon the stage” as a “sophistical opinion” that has been “hammered into us year after year” (p. 297). Montgomery’s complaint is directed not against Lamb but against Hazlitt, either the Dream chapter in his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), or perhaps his review of an 1816 production we’ll see later on;

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but the details are not crucial. What irritates Montgomery is that the idea has been everywhere in the air for such a long time. It may be that Lamb’s contention outraged even some of his original audience. He introduces it as “a paradox,” an “opinion” he “cannot help” but hold, as though knowing it would sound counterintuitive and even counterfactual. It could not have registered as the stale routine Montgomery complained of at the end of the century, but neither was it wholly new. Forty years earlier, Johann Gottfried von Herder had warned similarly against any theatrical location for poetic value: “if there is anyone who for one moment feels and looks for the boards of the stage and a series of versified and elegant speeches on it, neither Shakespeare nor Sophocles nor indeed any true poet in the world has written for him” (pp. 46–7). In his appeal to literary experience rather than theatrical performance, Herder’s contempt for the stage is specific. The “versified and elegant speeches” to which he refers are characteristic of “some French dramas,” where “everything is versified and trotted out in scenes merely for theatrical effect” (p. 50). Lamb is similarly specific. He complains about an oratorical acting style that tends to focus on the decontextualized set speech as an isolated moment of high intensity: “spouted [as] by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play” (p. 99, Lamb’s emphasis). By concentrating on “theatrical airs and gestures” (p. 97), the “gesticulating actor” must “play the orator” in an attention-getting way “manifestly aimed at the spectators” (p. 100). The whole enterprise is designed to “get applause” (p. 103). The declamatory style to which Herder and Lamb object is especially suited to (and arguably produced by) the physical size of the theaters at the time. In “the late seventeenth-century,” Alexander Leggatt points out, “Drury Lane held around 800 people; by 1794 it held more than 3,600” (English Stage Comedy, p. 10). In this cavernous space, according to P. G. Patmore, reviewing an 1814 production of Othello, “the mild and quiet tones of conscious rectitude” with which Edmund Kean performed Othello’s speech to the Senate (1.3), “such a contrast to the mock-heroic air with which it was usually given,” got lost. Although “in a moderate sized theatre” such tones “would have been distinctly heard,” Patmore urges Kean to “remember that he is acting in a theatre, ni [sic] point of size, admirably calculated for a Spanish bull-fight, but not at all adapted to the exhibition of those delicate shades of feeling which are depicted by a glance of the eye, a turn of the lip, or an under-tone of the voice” (318). A few weeks later, Thomas Barnes, the

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Examiner’s regular theater critic, develops the same argument about Kean’s Iago. We were never more convinced of the absurdity of large Theatres, than at a late representation of Othello. Owing to the immense crowds who f lock to see Mr. KEAN, we found ourselves unable to approach the stage nearer than at the distance of the back boxes of the second tier. He performed Iago, but from the first act to the last we, in common with those about us, were not able to catch above two or three sentences of his part. He disdains to rant, and “tear a passion to rags:” the consequence is, that not above onethird of the persons collected in that immense structure have the good fortune to hear him. Like Patmore (and Herder and Lamb), Barnes directs his complaint not against acting per se or theatrical performance in general. He clearly admires the capacity to represent nuanced intimacy—one of the main expressive features that made Kean the premier actor of his time. His point, though, is that “those finer tones and inf lections, which mark the genius of a great actor, are inevitably lost in an arena, where even Stentor would have been compelled to use some exertion” (364).2 In addition to sheer volume (“the noisiest actors,” Barnes adds, “are generally the greatest favourites”), such star turns tend naturally toward thrillingly climactic exits. Lamb remarks of the celebrated Sarah Siddons that she “never yet got more fame by any thing than by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in Macbeth.” Focusing on “the gracefulness of the doing” and “judging of acting,” an audience is distracted from the inner meanings more readily accessible to “the imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful Scene” (p. 111). In the same spirit, A. W. von Schlegel, writing in his Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1809–11), complains that Shakespeare’s practice of sometimes rhyming at the end of scenes or speeches was imitated in an injudicious manner by the English tragic poets of a later period; they suddenly elevated the tone in the rhymed lines, as if the person began all at once to speak in another language. The practice was hailed by the actors from its serving as a signal for clapping when they made their exit. (2.155–6) Like the declamatory delivery, these emphatically punctuated exits are made possible—even necessary—by the physical conditions of

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nineteenth-century theaters, notably the curtain in front of the proscenium stage. In his piece on “Shakespeare’s Theatre and Audience,” Bradley contrasts the effects available to Renaissance and nineteenthcentury performance in terms precisely of this difference. “It was clearly in some ways a great disadvantage,” he says of Shakespeare’s curtain-less stage; for every situation at the front of the stage had to be begun and ended before the eyes of the audience. In our dramas the curtain may rise on a position which the actors then had to produce by movements not really belonging to the play; and, what is more important, the scene may advance to a striking climax, the effect of which would be greatly diminished and sometimes destroyed if the actors had to leave the stage instead of being suddenly hidden. In his characteristically evenhanded appreciation of its tendency toward the effect of “striking climax,” Bradley gives nineteenth-century performance its due; and even his dry remark about the tendency in “our dramas” for actors to have to perform “movements not really belonging to the play” is toned down considerably from Lamb’s complaint about deracinated histrionics, “torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play.” But there should be no mistaking Bradley’s preference. When he remarks that the strong curtain effect “appears properly to belong to comedy and to melodrama (if that species of play is to be considered here at all),” the parenthesis casually consigns a very substantial chunk of nineteenth-century theatrical production to a domain beyond the pale of critical interest (p. 386). And he has pretty well abandoned irony for open contempt in his remark that the Elizabethans, “even if they wished to” play for exit-applause as “we too often do,” were “saved from the temptation by the absence of a front curtain” (p. 387). By contrast to the degraded fare on current stages, Elizabethan productions “must have been something much more variegated and changeful” (p. 386), encouraging the ref lective engagement Bradley associates with the double plot in which, “since scene follows scene without a pause,” Shakespeare “could make one tell on another in the way either of intensification or of contrast. We catch the effect in reading, but in our theatres it is usually destroyed by the interval” (p. 385). This last claim echoes Lamb’s appeal to “the imaginations of . . . readers”; but again the point to emphasize is that, like Lamb’s, Bradley’s antitheatricalism targets the practices of “our”

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theaters, not Renaissance performances, where such readerly effects were evidently available. Curtain intervals did more than reinforce the effects of striking climax. They bought the time required to change the increasingly complicated and elaborate design machinery developed by new techniques of mise-en-scène on the nineteenth-century stage: box sets replacing movable scenes in grooves, large property pieces, platforms, stairs, extensive furniture, etc. Spectacular scenery is the defining feature of theatrical pictorialism, which, though regularly associated with High Victorian productions, has roots going to much earlier theater. When in 1880 Squire Bancroft “put a moulded and gilded picture-frame, two feet wide, around the proscenium of the Haymarket, f lush with the front of the stage,” he was just refining an already well-established effect. By Lamb’s time, when “the stage was moving with architectural inevitability toward its final Victorian form” of “the picture-frame stage,” the idea had already “been in the air for many years” as a subject for considered discussion (Michael Booth, pp. 70–1). Hence George Saunders, writing about Covent Garden in his Treatise on Theatres (1790), regrets the absence of a distinct border around the stage: “Were a painted frame to be proposed for a picture, how would a connoisseur exclaim! The scene is the picture, and the frontispiece, or in other words the frame, should construct the picture, and thereby add to the illusion” (p. 84). According to Benjamin Wyatt, describing his design for the 1812 reconstruction of Drury Lane , the proscenium “is to the Scene what the frame of a Picture is to the Picture itself: namely, a boundary line to confine the eye to the Subject within that line, and prevent it from wandering to other objects” (quoted in Leacroft, p. 167). Quite apart from such conscious ref lection, the material transformation of the theater in the direction of pictorialism had begun earlier still—with the foreshortening of the Restoration stage. The process might even be said to begin as early as Shakespeare’s own time.3 Theatrical pictorialism has not only a long history but a broad reach; it dominated nineteenth-century taste in Germany as well as in England. When the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft was established in Weimar in 1864, Franz Dingelstedt, one of its founders, produced the history plays as a cycle designed to “nostrify” unser Shakespeare. According to Werner Habicht, this “milestone” event required the full use of the techniques of modern stagecraft. Pictorial effects were more important than the spoken words, more important even than the actors’ performance. The aim was

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not so much to activate an audience’s imagination, which was why Ludwig Tieck in the era of romanticism had appreciated Shakespearean drama, but to unfold visual display. (p. 249) As the references to Tieck and Romanticism suggest, the German theatrical situation was substantially similar to the English: even as a taste for spectacle developed into the determining factor for theatrical production, so a distaste for spectacle became the driving force behind Romantic antitheatricalism. Hence Adam Müller, in his Fragmente über William Shakespeare (1806), laments the insatiable attraction to dazzling costumes: “matters in Germany have long ago reached the point where most theatre directors are no more than glorified wardrobe masters” (p. 85). Five years later, Lamb issues the same complaint: the voracious appetite of English theatergoers for elaborate scenic effects is reinforced by an addiction to stunning costumes. The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of Dresses, which are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last time I saw Macbeth played, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of garment which he varied,—the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish priest at mass. The luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity of the public eye, require this. (p. 110) For Hazlitt, this importunate dependency meant that theatrical production had to feed the public ear as well as the public eye. “The spirit was evaporated,” he wrote of an 1816 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the genius was f led; but the spectacle was fine: it was that which saved the play. Oh, ye scene-shifters, ye scene painters, ye machinists and dressmakers, ye manufacturers of moon and stars that give no light, ye musical composers, ye men in the orchestra, fiddlers and trumpeters and players on the double drum and loud bassoon, rejoice! (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, p. 81) A century later, Bradley revisits the “luxury” of “stage-improvements” as Lamb described them, and the level of antipathy has not abated. As the most recent editor of Shakespearean Tragedy puts it, Bradley’s “patience as an Edwardian theatregoer would have been sorely tested” by such scene-shifting and curtain-dropping interruptions

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(Shaughnessy, p. xxii). But as usual, Bradley tones down his irritation. “His public,” Bradley says of Shakespeare’s audience, dearly loved to see soldiers, combats, and battles on the stage. They swarm in some of the dramas a little earlier than Shakespeare’s time . . . Our tendency, on the other hand, is to contrive one spectacle with scenic effects, or even to exhibit one magnificent tableau in which nobody says a word. And this plan, though it has the advantage of getting rid of Shakespeare’s poetry, is not exactly dramatic. It is adopted chief ly because the taste of our public is, or is supposed to be, less dramatic than spectacular, and because unlike the Elizabethans, we are able to gratify such a taste. (“Shakespeare’s Theatre,” p. 367, 368) Bradley is noticeably free here from the épater-les-bourgeois provocations of Lamb and Hazlitt (or bereft of these effects, depending on one’s enjoyment of polemic); but this is not to say that he caters to bourgeois tendencies of his own. Rather, he has a different rhetorical situation to negotiate. His piece is based on lectures given to Oxford undergraduates, and since a direct attack on the proto-Woosterian self-satisfaction of his audience would simply provoke confusion or resistance, he begins with a canny gesture that purports to share their ref lexive disdain for the groundlings (the Menenius-like contempt in “swarm” is transferred from the stage action to its audience), and only then turns on both them and himself (or on the self he is disingenuously performing) with a veiled and nuanced derision. His irony may have another target as well. When Bradley refers to what “the taste of our public is, or is supposed to be,” he unobtrusively opens up a space for ref lection: is the pleasure nineteenth-century audiences take in theatrical spectacle an instinctive one, or has it been constructed for them, presumably by the theatrical entrepreneurs whose interests it serves? “The motive was greed,” Iain Mackintosh says of the vastly expanded theatrical venues, “ ‘rising costs’ as the producers always like to say,” and the “architects did what they were told” (p. 34). Hence Wyatt, acknowledging “the very popular notion that our theatres ought to be very small,” slightly reduced the size of Holland’s Drury Lane (see note two) but yielded finally to commercial constraints: “if that very popular notion should be suffered to proceed too far it would [deprive] the proprietors of that revenue which is indispensable to defray the heavy expenses of such a concern” (quoted p. 34). Elsewhere in his Observations, Wyatt dresses up commercial interests in the finery of a

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responsiveness to the popular will: So long as the Public taste for Spectacle shall continue (and it does not appear likely to cease), all the objections to increasing the Stage-opening and, with it, the magnitude and expense of the Scenery, must remain in force; and so long as our Theatres shall be maintained by the money paid at the doors, it will be impossible to reduce the size of those Theatres below the scale of their necessary expenses. (pp. 23–4, Wyatt’s emphasis) This passage conveniently ignores the “very popular notion that our theatres ought to be very small,” and by virtue of its amnesia about the Old Price Riots of only a few years earlier, it preempts potentially embarrassing questions about which of these apparently contradictory desires is chronologically or ontologically prior. We are not far from the schlockmeisters who have Webberized our own stage by catering to tastes they themselves helped to create. Bradley is not Adorno, but (despite the tendency among some current Shakespeareans to construct him as a character out of Eminent Victorians) he understands the problems of the market for what we have come to call middlebrow culture; and between the static tableaus (“magnificent” but dumb once Shakespeare’s poetry is “advantageously” got “rid of ”) and the dramatic movements choreographed by Shakespeare’s poetry, it is clearly not the appetite of “our public,” whoever is responsible for its establishment, that Bradley judges worthy of gratification. *

*

*

Sympathetic attempts to account for Romantic antitheatricalism tend to remark on the abridged and doctored texts performed on the early nineteenth-century stage. It is certainly relevant that the stage productions witnessed by the Romantics were based on texts “improved” by Nahum Tate and Colley Cibber et al in the Restoration and eighteenth century; but the theater always cuts and shapes texts to fit into changing particular circumstances, and it is rather the techniques with which the cut and tailored texts were mounted on the stage that interest me here. In this context, consider Martin Meisel’s comment in Realizations, his tremendous study of narrative, pictorial, and theatrical arts in nineteenth-century England, that “what is striking and characteristic in the nineteenth-century theater is that its dramaturgy was pictorial, not just

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its mise-en-scène” (p. 39). The stunning spectacles do more than produce spatial effects; they work to reinforce a particular mode of organizing theatrical time. Instead of developing as “an articulated succession,” the scenes in this pictorial dramaturgy function as isolated and static tableaus. Like music hall turns, each scene “contains its own reason for being, and is too full of itself to spare a thought for the whole” (p. 38). Meisel quotes from what he takes to be “best contemporary account of the new dramaturgy,” Edward Mayhew’s Stage Effect (1840): To theatrical minds the word “situation” suggests some strong point in a play likely to command applause; where the action is wrought to a climax, where the actors strike attitudes, and form what they call “a picture,” during the exhibition of which a pause takes place; after which the action is renewed, not continued. (quoted p. 39) By “organizing a play in a series of achieved situations,” pictorialism may be said to aspire to the condition of melodrama, “the form that was best able to exploit the new dramaturgy,” since its actions, in Mayhew’s description, are “ ‘brought only to a certain point called a situation, and there interrupted’ ” (p. 41). As Meisel represents it, pictorialism is not just a collection of spatial and temporal effects but an integrated system, all of whose parts—elaborate costumes and scenery, interruptive curtain punctuations, freezeframe tableaus, applause-generating exits, etc—reinforce each other’s tendency toward strikingly melodramatic effects. When Lamb and the others protest these effects, they are objecting to the system they serve. In Charles Lamb and the Theatre, then, Wayne McKenna is surely right to claim that Lamb’s antitheatricalism is carefully articulated and grounded on reasoned arguments. But if Lamb rejects the apparatus of theatrical pictorialism, this does not mean that he rejects the very idea of theatrical performance in all its manifestations, which is the position Roy Park attributes to him in “Lamb, Shakespeare, and the Stage.” Park acknowledges that Lamb’s argument might be “merely descriptive,” targeting only the pictorial dramaturgy currently in fashion; but in his view, it is, rather, “normative” (170), opposed in principle to acting and theatrical performance as such. From this angle, in which Lamb is taken to be staking out an “aesthetic rather than contingent” position (171), “Shakespeare’s Fitness for the Stage” regards all theatrical experience as inherently debased. By implication, the entire tradition of Romantic antitheatricalism stemming from Lamb’s essay may

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be said to constitute a general claim on behalf of literary rather than theatrical experience—which is, of course, the claim I have been arguing against here. The most immediately evident obstacle to accepting this view of Lamb’s antitheatricalism is the anomalous fact that Lamb was powerfully drawn to the theater, went regularly, wrote and talked about it (often appreciatively), and even tried to write for it. What makes this obstacle more daunting is that the anomaly is not limited to Lamb. Hazlitt’s warm interest in theater is a matter of public record, and it has earned him the reputation of the supreme theatrical reviewer of his time. Bradley loved theater too, and went regularly. Barnes and Patmore extend the range of the picture beyond the familiar faces. Expressions of “disgust with contemporary stage productions” are, it seems, widely disseminated in the nineteenth-century among those professionally engaged in theatrical production, at least in a critical or reviewing capacity. It seems unlikely that so many different people would invest so much time and sensibility in a cultural practice they understood on principle to be inherently debased. They must have retained a concept of theatrical value independent of specifically pictorial effects or, to put it the other way around, pictorialism, no matter how systematically pervasive and deeply entrenched, could not have occupied the whole space of theatrical possibility. (Pictorialism, in other words, was not an ideological apparatus in the strong Althusserian sense.) The same anomaly, moreover, extends to theatrical practitioners themselves, individuals devoting their professional lives not just peripherally but centrally to the stage. “How sad it is,” Helena Faucit writes about the Willow Song in Othello (4.3), that the exigencies of our stage require the omission of the exquisite scene. I never saw this scene acted but once, and that was in Dresden. Certainly the Germans prove their high admiration and respect for our great poet. They give his plays in their integrity, never dreaming of cutting out the very scenes that are most necessary for the development of plot and character. Their scenery is good, appropriate, harmonious—and stands, as it always should in subservience to the plot and human interest in the play: it is so unostentatiously good that you never think of it. So of the costumes: you think you see the persons represented. As all is in keeping, so you never criticise what the characters wear. You feel at once, they looked or did not look as they should, and give this subject no further heed. All these matters are deeply studied, but

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not so much talked about as they are here. Being but accessories at the best, they are very properly only treated as such. I feel very grateful for the draped curtain which in Germany drops down from the sides after a scene—a usage which is now adopted in some of our leading theatres. While it is closed, such furniture as has been necessary for the scene is quietly withdrawn (no sofas pushed on and pulled off by very visible ropes)—and the next scene appears, on the withdrawal of the curtain, quite complete. In this way one of the great difficulties in presenting Shakespeare’s plays, arising from the frequent changes of the scene, is got over. (pp. 73–4) Faucit’s appreciative description of German theater sorts oddly with what we have heard from Werner Habicht and Adam Müller; she may have been idealizing her memories, or perhaps she caught an uncharacteristically f luid rather than pictorial production. In any case, only the last bit, about the relatively undistracting curtain practice in Germany, marks a difference between Faucit’s in-house perspective and the commentary of a theatrical outsider like Bradley. Faucit understands that curtain intervals are inevitable, given “the exigencies of our stage,” and she is willing to compromise. But in all other respects, Faucit simply parades out the same objections as in Lamb and the others—to elaborate costumes, obtrusive stage props and all the other aspects of the nineteenth-century apparatus that diverted audiences away from the “plot and human interest of the play” to the interruptive “accessories” of spectacular pictorial effects. Faucit feels “sad” about if not “disgusted with contemporary stage productions,” but the premier leading lady of Victorian theater is not issuing a blanket condemnation of stage performance. It is specifically “the exigencies of our stage” that disappoint her, not theater as such. If Romantic antitheatricalism is not an argument against theater generally, but against the particular apparatus dominating contemporary production, so it is not essentially an argument for literature or texts as such, but rather for a certain way of engaging with texts. Herder, for instance, acknowledges the possibility of reading Shakespeare the wrong way, something he disparages in the same terms applied to the set speeches of a declamatory theater: “if then, my dear reader, you were too timid to give yourself over to the feeling of setting and place in any scene, then woe betide Shakespeare and the withered page in your hand” (p. 42). Lamb, on the other side, acknowledges the possibility of an appropriate theatrical realization of Shakespeare, one in which “the

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form of speaking . . . is only a medium . . . for putting the reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of inner structure and workings of mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at” (p. 99, Lamb’s emphasis). The “reader or spectator”: as Lamb’s slippage suggests, the reading literature / witnessing performance contrast is not the main point. He is distinguishing not between the objects of our interest (books / plays) so much as between the kinds of interpretive interest we bring to these objects, more or less appropriate ways of engaging with Shakespeare. In Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796), Serlo tells Wilhelm that the debate “whether drama or novel should be ranked higher” is “a futile and ill-conceived argument, since each could be excellent in its own way” (p. 185), and the discussion turns to other matters— how texts or performances can both in their own ways “set people’s imagination working” (p. 186) to produce “a vivid comprehension of what the author had in mind”—namely, the “power to create illusion in the spectators, fictitious truth producing solid effects by aiming solely at illusion” (p. 187). Goethe’s discussion migrates from generic or textual to interpretive or affective questions in order to emphasize the imaginative working of a sympathetic response—the shared mental power by which author and reader, play and audience, work together to produce “that willing suspension of disbelief that we call poetic faith.” The familiar words from the Biographia (Engell, p. 6) cue Coleridge, a presence waiting in the wings during much of the discussion here, whose antitheatrical sentiments develop in what should by now be a familiar trajectory. “It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty,” Coleridge says of The Tempest; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous. For the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within, from the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where so much is addressed to the more external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to spring from within. (Foakes, Lectures, 2. pp. 268–9) Like Lamb and the others, Coleridge directs his argument against not the stage but “the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times.” In a lecture some seven years earlier, taking off again from the

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idea that The Tempest is a play in which “Shakespeare has especially appealed to the imagination,” Coleridge goes out of his way to make an exception for the production practices and histrionic technique of the Renaissance stage: It is to be borne in mind, that of old, and as regards mere scenery, his works may be said to have been recited rather than acted— that is to say, description and narration supplied the place of visual exhibition: the audience was told to fancy that they saw what they only heard described; the painting was not in colours, but in words. (Raysor, Shakespearean Criticism, vol 2, p. 130)4 Romantic antitheatricalists, rather than arguing for the advantages of reading poems to watching plays, advocated “reading as poetically as we can”; but as Bradley understood it, “poetical reading” was not necessarily restricted to readers of poetry or readers of anything else. There was no reason why “the succession of experiences” that constituted this process could not be available to certain kinds of theatrical audiences at certain kinds of theatrical productions (“Poetry,” p. 4)—or (to look at the matter from the other side) no reason by itself why it had to be available to all readers, most of whom would probably sit down to read King Lear in much the same spirit and with much the same expectations as the crowds f locking to gape at the waterfalls and thrilling “situations” pictured on the Victorian stage. There’s no accounting for taste—at least not in terms of textual properties. To recall Foakes’s claim, when Coleridge “followed Schlegel in attributing ‘organic form’ to Shakespeare’s plays,” he “internalized the sense of unity as a mental experience in the viewer or the reader” (“Hamlet” versus “Lear”, p. 136). With “the viewer or the reader,” Foakes reproduces the felicitous slippage of Lamb’s “reader or spectator,” and for the same reason. Booksvs.-plays is not what this is about. What the Romantics invented was not so much literature as imagination, the faculty—or transformative energy—that calls literature into existence in the engagement of an actively speculative response. And while it is notoriously hard to define this response, one fundamental quality is clear: an appropriate imaginative engagement, as the Romantics described it, entails a strenuous interpretive exertion. This idea, like so many others among the Romantics, may be traced back to the Critik of Judgment, where Kant never tires of reiterating that aesthetic experience works “subjectively to quicken the cognitive powers” (p. 202). “Spirit, in the aesthetic sense,” as Kant describes it in

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Division 1 § 49, “is the name given to the animating principle of the mind,” that which “puts the mental powers purposively into swing, i. e. into such a play as maintains itself and strengthens the mental powers in their exercise” (p. 197). Kant identifies this apparently self-generating and self-reinforcing power with the imagination. Ref lecting on the response appropriate to “a representation of the Imagination” (he is, as Steven Knapp suggests in Literary Interest [pp. 40–43], evidently thinking of evocative metaphors and figurative language in general), Kant claims that since it “occasions in itself more thought than can ever be comprehended in a definite concept,” its effect is to produce a comparably expansive response, provoking “the Imagination to spread itself over a number of kindred representations, that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words” (p. 199). As Kant represents it, the mind is provoked “to quicken its cognitive powers” as a way to expand the range of its knowledge, and this expansion in turn serves to “enliven the mind” as a preparation for further expansions. The whole process seems to entail a kind of feedback loop, in which aesthetic interest generates speculative efforts that generate further interest that generates additional effort. It is an appetite that grows with feeding. Whether or not Coleridge knew Kant, he was a Kantian in his own emphasis on the ongoing exertion of imaginative engagement. It is often remarked that the imagination in Coleridge functions to reconcile opposites, but when he treats this idea in the seventh of his Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, his emphasis is less on what imagination does or even can do than on what it tries to do—on the effort in the mind when it would describe what it cannot satisfy itself with the description of, to reconcile opposites and to leave a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any other when it is hovering between two images: as soon as it becomes is fixed it becomes understanding and when it is waving between them attaching itself to neither it is imagination.—Such was the fine description of Death in Milton “Of Shadow like but called Substance” &c. These were the grandest effects of where the imagination was called forth, not to produce a distinct form but a strong working of the mind still producing what it still repels & again calling forth what it again negatives and the result is what the Poet wishes to impress, to substitute a grand feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image. (Foakes, Lectures, 1. p. 311)

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Accidents happen in the shorthand transcription of oral presentation (wavering rather than waving was presumably what Coleridge originally said or meant to say); but the reiterations here leave little room for doubt about Coleridge’s point: imaginative activity, he insists, entails an effort that is ongoing; it fails to find—or, rather, succeeds in not finding—a stable closure. The effect is produced by the piling up of gerunds (hovering, waving, attaching), reinforced by still in its already archaic sense of “always” (OED, adverb 3.a), and confirmed by the syntactical echo, in “still repels & again calling forth what it again negatives,” of Satan’s “endless gratitude,” “still paying, still to owe” (Paradise Lost, 4.52–3). The “effort in the mind,” the “strong working of the mind”—these are the values at the center of Romantic antitheatricalism. The “essence of drama,” as Bradley understood it, resided “in actions and words expressive of inward movements of human nature” (“Shakespeare’s Theatre,” p. 388); but the “effort of imagination” required to engage with these inward movements, like “the continuous attention to any imaginative or intellectual matter, however enjoyable, involves considerable strain” (p. 389). The pictorial practices dominating Victorian stage production seem designed to discourage such interpretive exertion. Augustin Daly’s 1888 Dream, the production that provoked Montgomery’s attack on Hazlitt’s antitheatricalism quoted earlier on, equipped its fairies with papier-mâché wings and with the new electric lights, which f lickered in their hair and at the tips of their wands, powered by batteries on their backs. . . . The chief novelty was Daly’s ending for the forest sequence. As the sun rose over the forest, the argonaut Theseus and his hunting party entered, disembarking from a ship. . . . after Daly’s Theseus awakened the lovers, he boarded everyone and made for the “port” of Athens. A complex diorama provided moving scenery behind the ship and a moving shoreline in the foreground; as the party arrives in port, even the caryatids seem to wave handkerchiefs in greeting. (Gary Jay Williams, pp. 127–8) With his characteristically accommodating restraint, Bradley is willing to acknowledge that these kinds of “pictorial attractions” may be “fused with the essential elements of dramatic effect”; but once they “exceed a certain limit,” he argues, audiences “begin to enjoy them for their own sakes, or as parts of a panorama and not of a drama,” with “mischievous” results. “Offered a pretty picture of the changing colours of the

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sky at dawn, or of a forest glade with deer miraculously moving across its sunny grass, most of us cease for the time to be an audience and become mere spectators” (“Shakespeare’s Theatre,” p. 388, 389). If the “picture-frame stage” was “well suited” to “the growing passivity and detachment of the Victorian middle-class audience” (Michael Booth, p. 71), the infantilizing effects of its eye candy could not have been more ill suited to the active involvement the Romantics valued in interpretive response. When Wordsworth describes our “eyes and ears” in terms of “what they half create, / And what perceive” (Tintern Abbey, 106–7), he construes meaning as a made thing, the productive consequence of an interplay between objective effects and subjective efforts. The spectators at pictorial productions, however, are invited to cede their “beholder’s share” (as Gombrich calls it) for the gratifications of submissive consumption. (In effect, they parody the unsustainably self-transcendent contemplation Prospero asks for his spectacle, “No tongue! all eyes!” [Tempest, 4.1.59].) “This is your triumph,” Hazlitt complains after his ironic apostrophe to the technicians displaying their wares in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; “it is not ours.” In a characteristically breathless passage, Lamb ref lects on what it means to read through performance in order engage with the subtextual interiority of Shakespeare’s characters, and the result, a dialectically produced self-realization, can be taken as a gloss on Wordsworth’s lines. We talk of Shakespeare’s admirable observation of life, when we should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s, the very “sphere of humanity,” he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds, which only waited the application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and clear echo of the same. (pp. 102–3) Production and reception, creation and recognition, subject and object—the categories tend to merge with one another here even as their distinctions form whatever foundation we have on which to construct a stable sense. At times, Lamb seems to be leading us on a journey in the direction of Shakespeare’s “own mind,” but before we can take

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possession of this phenomenon, the passage draws us back toward “our own minds.” Like Coleridge on the cover of this book, the self seems to be contemplated—if not constituted—by the object of its own imaginative engagement. Given the impetuous volatility of Lamb’s writing, it is hard to know whether the effect of going around in circles in this passage is accidental or contrived. The opaque textuality can be read as deliberately reinforcing the effect of indeterminacy, but it may be that Lamb is so immersed in his own excitement that he just doesn’t really know what he is talking about.5 On the other hand, there is, apart from the similarity to Wordsworth’s formula, a general correspondence between the account of the process Lamb provides here and the feedback loop I described earlier in Kant and Coleridge’s ref lections on imagination. And it survives, even now, in the late Romanticism of Harold Bloom: “We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist. We need to exert ourselves and read Shakespeare as strenuously as we can, while knowing that his plays will read us more energetically still” (Invention of the Human, p. xx). At least one thing Lamb’s account helps to clarify—his distaste, shared generally among Romantic antitheatricalists, for the bravura arias of a declamatory histrionicism. The effect of such “turns” is to homogenize and f latten out what we now (thanks to Diderot) regularly designate “the paradox of the actor”: “knowing how much of one’s own personality one must efface in order to do justice to the role,” as Goethe’s Serlo puts it, “sensing that one is oneself quite different, and yet having the power to convince the audience that one is what one portrays.” By contrast to this rare talent, “given to few,” as Serlo adds (p. 187), acting on the pictorial stage tends to train attention onto a static and achieved tableau, absorbing the audience in the unitary identity of the performance, so that, as Lamb puts it, we are apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. [ John] K[emble]. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S[iddons]. (p. 98) Lamb acknowledges the pleasure of such histrionicism. Indeed, the pleasure is the problem; it precludes the “pain and perplexity of mind”

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(p. 98) required if we are to do more than witness the play at a selfpresent performative level, the imaginative response exemplified bythough not identified with or limited to—the readerly engagement with texts. II: What We Say They Said According to Thomas Rymer at the beginning of his Short View of Tragedy (1693, pp. 85–6), “Aristotle tells us of Two Senses that must be pleas’d, our Sight, and our Ears: And it is in vain for a Poet . . . to complain of Injustice, and the wrong Judgment in his Audience, unless these Two senses be gratified.” The visual appetite is the stronger of the two. “The Eye is a quick sense, will be in with our Fancy, and prepossess the Head strangely,” so that “many Plays owe all their success to a rare Show.” The problem, as Rymer sees it, is not new. “Even in the days of Horace, enter on the Stage a Person in a Costly strange Habit, Lord! What Clapping, what Noise and Thunder, as Heaven and Earth were coming together! yet not one word spoken.” Given this vulnerability to the blandishments of visual pleasure, “It matters not whether there be any Plot, any Characters, any Sense,” for “the Eye misleads our Judgment,” and “Spectators are always pleas’d to see Action, and are not often so ill-natur’d to pry into, and examine whether it be Proper, Just, Natural, in season, or out of season.” Buckingham’s Rehearsal proves Rymer’s point; audiences are interested more in the dancing than in the political ideas. “This thing of Action,” of “speaking to the Eyes,” finds “the blindside of humane-kind an hundred ways,” making us “very dotterels by example,” so that “all Europe over Plays have been represented with great applause, in a Tongue unknown, and sometimes without any Language at all.” Rymer’s attack on the tyranny of spectacle can be mapped in all respects onto the argument of Romantic antitheatricalism as represented here; even the details—applause-generating costumes, for instance— coincide. What makes this situation remarkable is that, despite some superficial similarities in temperament (Lamb and Hazlitt share Rymer’s delight in provocative rhetoric), their basic sentiments and values diverge in fundamental ways. Rymer’s investment in balance and decorum, however compromised by his own style, seems to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from the core Romantic value of an imaginative engagement, “still producing what it still repels & again calling forth what it again negatives,” sustaining its impetus into an endless excess.

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On the other hand, that “antitheatricalism” can be applied to two such fundamentally different tastes might come as a predictable consequence of the argument I have been making here. If “the literary” and “the theatrical” are not fixed commodities, their meanings are bound to change with context. The stage-vs.-page formula has been deployed in various cultural situations to figure a multitude of only tenuously connected contrasts: readerly and writerly texts; closed-fisted logic and open-handed rhetoric; hard and soft evidence; classical and carnivalesque bodies; science and the humanities, high and popular culture; male and female. Not only are the meanings variable, the values associated with them are unstable and even reversible. As I suggested in chapter 3, current Shakespeareans tend to identify Shakespearean theatricality with a robust heartiness in contrast to the fussy effeminacy they associate with high literary culture—the exact opposite to the standard configuration in Shakespeare’s time, which gendered performance as female and writing male. It’s not just the terms on either side that are unstable; the nature of the relationship itself cannot be fixed. Stage and Page are not always or necessarily adversaries. The literary and the theatrical have been accommodated within the same capacious framework of aesthetic interest. As Julie Stone Peters describes them in her richly detailed Theater of the Book, literary and theatrical institutions in the European Renaissance feed off each other in a manner more symbiotic than parasitic. All this should reinforce the point I took from Worthen at the beginning of this chapter: rather than appropriating stage and page for our own purposes, we should be reading through these terms to determine “how they are construed as vessels of authority.” In this context, it is worth revisiting Park’s claim that Lamb’s antitheatricalism is “normative” and “aesthetic,” rather than merely “contingent” and “descriptive.” Park acknowledges that Lamb’s stylistic volatility, tending toward impulsive enthusiasm rather than systematic argument, works against his conclusions, but he downplays the problem. It is only “[b]ecause we do not expect from Lamb statements of general principle,” he argues, that “we tend to ignore the presence of such principles in specific contexts,” adding that Lamb’s views “show a surprising consistency in one commonly regarded as subject to whim and paradox” (170,171). But the common regard may be justified; whim and paradox are Lamb’s default mode by his own admission (as in “It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that . . .”); and if we do not expect statements of general principles from Lamb, this may be because Lamb’s regular practice is not to provide them.

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Instead of reprosecuting the case against Lamb’s systematic consistency, however, we might focus on the motivations that lead toward this conclusion. Park’s argument is well-intentioned. He evidently assumes that consistency and general principles are better than whim and paradox as a basis for critical and literary practice, and by finding in “Shakespeare’s Fitness for the Stage” a preference for the presumed coherence of literary texts to the presumed incoherence of theatrical performance, Park attributes to Lamb the values of his own critical position. From within this “objective orientation,” as Abrams would call it, tending to appreciate the text “as a self-sufficient entity constituted by its parts in their internal relations,” Park perceives (and half creates) the project of Romantic antitheatricalism as an embodiment of the same tendency. This tendency has not been generally shared among Shakespeareans for some time. Even when Park’s piece appeared, in 1982, the contextual shift I described in chapter 1 was beginning to make objectivism obsolete. In The Death of Literature (1990), Alvin Kernan describes the abandonment of the “traditional romantic claim” that “works of art” possess meanings “inherent in the text or set in place for all time by the writer’s word craft” (p. 1, 2). Such formalism, focused on the coherent properties of autonomous texts, quickly joined the group of outmoded practices George Dillon catalogs in Contending Rhetorics, including “positivism, foundationalism, correspondence theories of truth, and Methodology,” all subjected, as Dillon wryly puts it, to “repeated polemical and by now ritual slaying” (p. 2); and once the formalist basis for Park’s sympathetic view of Lamb and the others was undermined, the new consensus hostile to Romantic antitheatricalism seemed an inevitable result. It was no longer desirable (in fact, it grated on our sensibilities) to entertain the idea that “the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading” might be a more interesting way of engaging Shakespeare than “the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse.” Once it is established that “the real play is the performance, not the text,” and “that to fix the text, transform it into a book, is to defeat it,” the literary becomes virtually synonymous with the idea of a self-contained unity, the formalist genome for all those fossilized dragons in Dillon’s graveyard; and thus emptied out of any value either for identifying the phenomena we study or for articulating the methods by which we study them, the literary turns into “the literary,” the “guise” (to recall Worthen’s terms) by which “character,” “the Author,” and the other instruments in the toolkit of “the stabilizing hegemonic” conspire “to tame the unruly ways of the stage.”

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Although critical values on either side of the contextual turn are sharply opposed, the two positions surprisingly converge in representing Romantic Shakespeare as a formalist discourse. Worthen’s “meanings authenticated in and by” the “literary valuations of a stable text” correspond in all respects to Kernan’s meanings “inherent in the text or set in place for all time by the writer’s word craft.” Kernan and Worthen differ not in what they see, but in whether they like it or not. Kernan writes elegiacally about the “traditional romantic claims” we have abandoned, while Worthen construes the abandonment as progress toward the critical sophistication that has rendered these claims obsolete. I have tried to account for the sympathetic misrepresentation as a form of projection, in which an admired object is endowed with the values brought to it. This may not be a wholly satisfactory explanation (for one thing, it ignores the question why the object is admired to begin with), but the unsympathetic construction is even more difficult to explain. What makes it difficult, I think, is the substantial basis for kinship rather than antipathy between Romantic antitheatricalism and current work. Discussing “the ‘organic’ approach to acting,” with its assumption of “the experiencing body” as “a pre-cultural, pre-ideological ‘nature,’ and as the ground of an organic wholeness, the self, identity, or presence of the performer,” Worthen insists that this is not the way to engage Shakespeare. The point of plays like Othello or Twelfth Night or The Winter’s Tale is not to make the audience want to be Othello, Viola, Malvolio, Leontes, or even Perdita, but to stimulate and render meaningful the desire to watch them, and (in the best theatre) to engage the consequences of this act of involved, disengaged, seeing (Shakespeare, pp. 100–1) The table-thumping italics in this passage produce a sound uncannily like Lamb’s, or an irascibility like Hazlitt’s, and the resonances go beyond temperament or tone. Worthen’s robust insistence on a ref lective response to Shakespeare’s characters, at once engaged and disengaged, is exactly the point (or indeed point) that Lamb hammers home in rejecting the facile absorption of self into the unitary identity of performance. This convergence, moreover, is not an isolated instance. The claims sustaining the argument throughout Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance are basically consistent with the values endorsed by the Romantics: an actively productive rather than passively reproductive

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model for understanding and evaluating cultural practice, the making of significance rather than the acquiescence to its putative preexistence in the self-sufficient properties of a coherently unified object. For Worthen, the literary text, construed in formalist terms, tames the unruly ways of the stage. For the Romantics, theatrical performance, construed in terms of the pictorial conventions producing Sarah Siddons’ bravura exit from the banquet scene in Macbeth, distracts from the excitement available to “the imaginations of the readers of that wild and wonderful Scene.” Books and plays, the “vessels of authority,” have exchanged positions, handy dandy, like the justice and the thief in King Lear, but the nature of authority, the reason for which Shakespearean drama is appreciated, remains fundamentally the same. On the basis of such similarities, at once detailed, extensive and profound, it might seem that current Shakespeareans would find common cause with Romantic Shakespeareans. The fact that we don’t, that Shakespeareans tend these days to view the Romantic criticism of Shakespeare with apathy if not aversion, is perplexing, in the same way that the “phobic” response to “literary power” prevalent in contemporary Shakespeare studies, as Greenblatt describes it, is perplexing. What accounts for the resistance to the “traditional romantic claims” from which Shakespearean critical practice originated? The next chapter offers a tentative answer to this question in professional values, but whatever the explanation, it seems perversely self-defeating to cut ourselves off from a source of ideas and feelings with such a rich potential to animate our own work.

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CH A P T E R

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Romantic Authorship and Professional Values

According to Charles Whitney, writing in Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (2006), “Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) provides a handy philosophical reference point for the full establishment of the aesthetic sense as a distinct and separate area of experience”; this “autonomous aesthetics,” Whitney argues, by encouraging an “author-focused or authorial reading,” serves ultimately to produce “the Romantics’ fully imagined Bard” (p. 10). In identifying Romantic literary values with authorship, and in suggesting that the Romantics are problematic precisely because of this investment, Whitney occupies a densely populated position on the current landscape. Materialists, New Theatricalists and New Textualists all build their commentary on a critique of “authorfocused or authorial reading,” and for this critical practice they hold Romanticism responsible. When “Romanticism began to idealize fiction” as “ ‘Literature,’ ” to recall Belsey, it mandated “looking for the author behind the text”; or as Worthen put it, the “institutionalization of ‘literature’ ” that “came to fruition in the nineteenth century” produced the “stabilizing, hegemonic functioning of the Author.” Such claims proliferate beyond the ones already catalogued in these pages. Terence Hawkes, for instance, refers to the “systematic Romantic prejudice that all literary texts somehow proceed from ‘inside’ the author” as the “outward expression” of “intimate, individual, personal ‘feelings’ ” (“Bloom,” p. 28), and David Scott Kastan assumes the existence of “a romantic concept of writing as individual and originary” in three separate books. Acknowledging the “seductive” appeal of this “romantic notion of artistic genius, solitary and sovereign, untouched by the world,” Kastan argues that we should nonetheless be “resisting the romantic idealization of authorship as the sovereign source of

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literary meaning” (Shakespeare and the Book, p. 48; Introduction, p. 5; Shakespeare After Theory, p. 40). That the Romantics were interested in authors is beyond dispute, but the question remains whether the representation of Romantic authorship circulating at present coincides with what Coleridge and Hazlitt and Keats and Emerson actually said. My chief claim in this chapter is that it doesn’t. Authorship is another example, like formalism in chapter 5, of the misrecognized origins driving—and encumbering— contemporary critical practice. More particularly, authorship should allow us to see not only how we have lost contact with Romantic literary values, but why, and why, desirable or not, the loss may be irrecoverable. The issue, I think, is professionalism. Behind the various agendas that repudiate or abandon or simply misconstrue Romantic ideas about authorship, I see the outlines of a strong, though usually unacknowledged, investment in professional values. I: Authorship: What the Romantics Said If Coleridge is “Shakespeare’s fiercest Bardolator,” as Harold Bloom calls him (Shakespeare, p. 362), the object he worshipped took a peculiar form. Coleridge’s favorite epithet for Shakespeare was “myriadminded,” and subsequent commentators have tirelessly repeated Coleridge’s own tireless repetitions of the same idea.1 Despite its familiarity, however, or perhaps because of it, the nuances in Coleridge’s term and even its main point risk getting lost. Though easily taken for an all-absorptive containing of multitudes, myriad-mindedness stands in Coleridge rather for a productive emptiness. In his Table Talk of May 9, 1830, Coleridge develops this idea about Shakespearean authorship by contrasting it with Milton’s. Shakespeare’s poetry is characterless; that is, it does not ref lect the individual Shakespeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. . . . There is a Subjectivity of the Poet—as of Milton, who is himself before himself in every thing he writes. And a Subjectivity of the Persona or Character as in Shakspeare. (Woodring, p. 125, 130) Fifteen years earlier, in the Biographia, Coleridge had worked the juxtaposition to the same effect. Where Milton “attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own IDEAL,” Shakespeare “darts

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himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the f lood” (Engell, pp. 27–8). Hazlitt is no less fierce a Bardolator than Coleridge, and his Bardolatry focuses on a similarly impersonal object of worship. In the final chapter of his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, a kind of afterthought about the Poems and Sonnets, Hazlitt emphasizes the magnitude of the transition from the plays to (as he judges it) a qualitatively lower order of imaginative experience: Our idolatry of Shakespear (not to say our admiration) ceases with his plays. In his other productions, he was a mere author, though not a common author. It was only by representing others that he became himself. He could go out of himself, and express the soul of Cleopatra; but in his own person he appeared to be always waiting for the prompter’s cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic. (pp. 357–8) When in 1818 Hazlitt devotes a lecture to his version of the ShakespeareMilton contrast, the similarity to Coleridge’s “characterless” Shakespeare is even more striking. Where Milton’s “mind is stamped on every line” (“On Shakespeare and Milton,” p. 58), Shakespeare is “nothing in himself ” (p. 47). He seems rather “to identify himself with the character”; like a “ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the person in whose name it is given” (p. 50). Three years later, in a piece “On Genius and Common Sense,” he goes through it once again: Milton “embodied a great part of his political and personal history” in his work, but Shakespeare wrote “with a perfect sympathy with all things, yet alike indifferent to all,” a “genius” for “transforming himself at will into whatever he chose” that made him “the Proteus of human intellect” (p. 42). The echo of Coleridge’s “Proteus” is striking, but as R. S. White observes, “Shakespeare’s protean qualities” are a “Romantic commonplace,” and there “is no use looking for any particular figure” as a source (p. 52).2 The larger structure, playing off Shakespeare against Milton, is a Romantic commonplace as well. It underlies the contrast between negative capability and the egotistical sublime in Keats’s celebrated letter to Woodhouse of October 27, 1818. Keats assigns the non-Shakespearean part in this contrast to Wordsworth rather than to Milton, but the focus remains on the “characterless” quality of a Shakespeare who is “nothing in himself.” “As to the poetical Character

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itself,” Keats tells Woodhouse , “it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character” (Scott, pp. 194–5). The “camelion Poet” in the continuation of this passage, taking “as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen,” turns out to be yet another Romantic commonplace. When Hazlitt enlarges on Shakespeare as “the Proteus of the intellect,” he likens him to “the camelion” in its ability “to borrow . . . its colour” from “all about it” (“On Genius,” p. 43). David Thatcher cites five references to chameleons in Shelley, dating from between 1819 and 1821, which add to the idea of transformative instability a related belief that (as Hamlet puts it) chameleons “eat the air, promise cramm’d” (3.2.94). For an insubstantial creature that is “nothing in himself,” air and hope are evidently adequate nourishment. In one instance, Shelley tropes this belief to imagine a new feature by which the negatively capable chameleon figures forth “the poetical Character”: “it also feeds on light” (Thatcher, 19). According to Jonathan Bate in The Genius of Shakespeare, the effect of “the great cultural shift that we call the Romantic movement” was to establish the view of “literature as encoded autobiography” (p. 36). This had been M. H. Abrams’s foundational claim in The Mirror and the Lamp as well: by focusing on “the artist himself ” as “the major element generating both the artistic product and the criteria by which it is to be judged,” the Romantics were the first to articulate a fully “expressive” (as distinct from “mimetic” or “pragmatic”) “critical orientation” (p. 3, 21). Bate and Abrams both take their cues from Wordsworth. Bate’s claim appears at the beginning of a section called “Shakespeare Unlocks His Heart? (pp. 36–40), a title adapted from a line in “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” and Abrams inaugurates his discussion of “Expressive Theories” (pp. 21–6) by taking Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, “ ‘the spontaneous overf low of powerful feelings,’ ” as the shared Romantic norm. “Almost all the major critics of the English romantic generation,” he claims, represent poetry as “the overf low, utterance, or projection of the thought and feelings of the poet; or else (in the chief variant formation)” as “the imaginative process which modifies and synthesizes the images, thoughts, and feelings of the poet” (pp. 21–2). Poetry as Wordsworth understands it may well be centered thus on the encodings of the poet’s own thoughts and feelings, but the question is to what extent Wordsworth is a normative figure, representative of “the great cultural shift we call the Romantic movement” and of “[a]lmost all the major critics of the English romantic generation.” Abrams attributes Wordsworth’s autobiographical interests to Coleridge. “So systematically does his discussion of poetry involve its causes in the

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mental processes of the poet,” Abrams declares, that the subject seems to belong to “the romantic psychology of poetic invention” (p. 115). But this claim does not square with Coleridge’s emphasis on the characterless Shakespeare, and it does not square with the chameleon poet in Hazlitt and Keats either. Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Keats had their own differences, to be sure.3 Nonetheless, to a remarkable degree, they shared a resistance to autobiography, encoded or otherwise, and sought to locate the concept of “genius,” with which they identified the interest of poetry, outside the domain of ego and individual psychology. According to Coleridge, “the moment you perceive the slightest spirit of envy in a man be assured he either has no genius or that his genius is dormant at that moment” (Coburn, Philosophical Lectures, p. 179). Hazlitt, who describes Shakespeare as “the least of an egotist that it was possible to be” (“On Shakespeare and Milton,” p. 47), devotes an entire essay to the proposition that Shakespeare was indifferent to posthumous fame and another one to claiming that the defining attribute of genius is the unconsciousness of its own powers (“On Posthumous Fame”; “Whether Genius is Conscious of Its Powers”). In “Shakespeare; or, the Poet” (1850), Emerson continues along the same line; Shakespeare, he declares, “has no peculiarity, no importunate topic [and] no discoverable egotism” (p. 121). The Romantics understood the hyperbolic nature of their claims. As Hazlitt saw it, all human action is (for better and for worse) inherently bound up with (though not wholly determined by) a competitive self-consciousness; and Coleridge and Emerson, while they might have been reluctant to assert this view with Hazlitt’s robust specificity, would not have disagreed. From this perspective, the representation of an envy-less and ego-less self-transcendence cannot be taken to refer to any person who lived and wrote or even might have lived and written, or to any possible way of being in the world. That there was a real Shakespeare in the world the Romantics did not mean to deny, and they—or Hazlitt at least, the most worldly of them—would have been in no way discomfited by the idea that this real Shakespeare’s acquisitive and competitive interests (in love and money, say) served as the efficient causes for the texts attributed to him. Hazlitt’s point, however, is that the richness of experience available to readers and audiences engaging the plays is “absolutely independent” of “the author” in this sense (“On “Shakespeare and Milton,” p. 50). As a psychological and historical subject, the worldly Shakespeare is “a mere author,” the entity Hazlitt identifies with the Poems and the Sonnets; and mere authorship, even when it “not a common” authorship, is, he insists, qualitatively distinct

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from the higher order of action that generates “our idolatry (not to say our admiration)” for the plays. This distinction is central to Hazlitt’s thinking, and in one form or another it runs throughout Romantic commentary. When Emerson declares that Shakspeare is “out of the category of eminent authors,” this is another way of saying that Shakespeare transcends “mere authorship,” however “uncommon”; and when Emerson adds that Shakespeare inhabits “the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self, the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship” (p. 121), he is making Hazlitt’s point that, “almost alone,” Shakespeare “seems to have been a man of genius, raised above the definition of genius” (“On Genius,” p. 42). The distinction underlies Coleridge’s claim that the agent properly held responsible for Othello is “a Poet for all ages,” not to be confused with “Sh himself,” or with whatever beliefs (about “Negros” and “Moors,” for example) might be attributed to this “Sh himself ” (Foakes, Lectures, 2. p. 314). In Bradley, the same distinction serves to make the same point. It’s “the real Shakespeare” we should be interested in, he tells us, the author as imagined through the experience of engaging with Othello “as poetically as we can,” rather than the historical and psychological being whose opinions and prejudices (about Desdemona’s “loving a brown man,” for instance, or “a black one”) must, Bradley freely admits, have gone into the play’s composition (Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 165). Expanding on his understanding of “the great cultural shift that we call the Romantic movement,” Jonathan Bate declares that The Romantic idea of authorship locates the essence of genius in the scene of writing. With Romanticism, the quintessential image of the poet becomes that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge alone in a farmhouse, transcribing his opium-induced dream of “Kubla Khan” onto a blank piece of paper, being interrupted by the knock of a person from Porlock, thus losing for ever that part of the inspired vision which he had not yet written down This conception of what it is to be a genius has the effect of investing talismanic power in the author’s original manuscript. (Genius of Shakespeare, p. 82, Bate’s emphases) Here again, the actual statements of Romantic critics seem to have gotten lost. If anyone in the Romantics’ environment stood for the “talismanic power in the author’s original manuscript,” it was Edmond Malone; but Coleridge treated Malone’s endeavors with contempt (see

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chapter 2, note 5), and Hazlitt, at the beginning of his Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820), derisively dismisses any interest in the attempt “to restore” the original text, “as if the genius of poetry lay hid in errors of the press” (p. 176). Romantic authorship pursues its trajectory not forward from textual origins, but backward from aesthetic effects. The Romantics were not “looking for the author behind the text,” but looking in front of it for audiences capable of engaging—spontaneously, inventively—with their desires for a future in front of them. Romantic authorship is, to repeat my earlier claim, a heuristic rather than an empirical category; it attempts to identify the kind of creative agency that might be taken to account for the interest and delight readers and audiences report having experienced over the centuries, continue to experience even now, and will presumably continue to experience for as far as the eye can see, in an engagement with Shakespeare’s plays. In the most compelling detail of Bate’s “scene of writing,” Coleridge, when we see him “in a farmhouse transcribing his opium-induced dream,” is represented strikingly as “alone.” Solitude and singularity are the “quintessential . . . essence” of the process as Bate represents it, the necessary (if not sufficient) conditions for the realization of “genius” and “inspired vision.” In this respect, the anecdote about the man from Porlock constitutes a scene of writing virtually identical to the one moviegoers witness at the beginning of Shakespeare in Love: Joseph Fiennes, sequestered in his garret, unable, despite all the efforts of his ink-stained fingers, to animate his unresponsive quill. A large part of the delight available to audiences of Shakespeare in Love is the witty and affectionate irony with which it treats its stereotypical images, something for which presumably Tom Stoppard is to be thanked. But stereotypical they are, these images; and since they are legion and come unbidden into the critical imaginary, readers will probably find themselves looking even now at other versions of the same scene in their mind’s eye. My point here, though, is that for this situation the Romantics should not be held responsible; they explicitly repudiate the values of solitude and singularity on which these images depend. According to Coleridge, “all genius exists in a participation of a common spirit—in joy individuality is lost . . . to have a genius is to live in the universal” (Coburn, Philosophical Lectures, pp. 700–1). As Emerson puts it in the essay on Shakespeare included in his Representative Men (the title itself makes the point), “The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any individual great, except through the general”

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(p. 109). And here is Hazlitt, on Shakespearean non-singularity: “the great distinction of Shakespeare’s genius was its virtually including the genius of all the great men of his age, and not differing from them in one accidental particular . . . He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men” (“On Shakespeare and Milton,” p. 47). Terry Eagleton, remarking on the existence of certain kinds of literary production “in which what speaks is less a personal voice than a set of conventions,” captures brilliantly the idea I am trying to get at here. “Romantic literature, with its cult of the poetic personality,” he adds might seem just the opposite of this. Yet the Romantic poet’s richly particularised voice is largely a way of giving tongue to the transcendent. From Wordsworth to D. H. Lawrence, one speaks most persuasively when one articulates what is not oneself, whether one calls this Nature or the creative imagination, the primary processes or the dark gods. The self runs down to unfathomably anonymous roots. Men and women emerge as unique beings through a medium (call it Geist, History, Language, Culture or the Unconscious) that is implacably impersonal. (“Unhoused,” 19). From this angle, the scene of writing is not the habitation where genius ought to be localized. The scene of reading would be preferable, as long as reading is released from its conventional enclosure within private experience (Coleridge’s farmhouse or Fiennes’ garret) and brought out into the expansive surroundings of social and historical space. Ref lecting on “Whether Genius is Conscious of its Powers,” Hazlitt distinguishes between the routinized labor of individual authors and the experience of admiration (not to say idolatry) available in an imaginative engagement with what they produced. What parity can there be between the effect of habitual composition on the mind of the individual, and the surprise occasioned by first reading a fine passage in an admired author; . . . between the reverential awe we have for years encouraged, without seeing reason to alter it, for distinguished genius, and the slow, reluctant, unwelcome conviction that after infinite toil and repeated disappointments, and when it is too late and to little purpose, we have ourselves at length accomplished what we at first proposed; between the insignificance of our petty, personal pretensions, and the vastness and splendour which the atmosphere of imagination lends to an illustrious name? (p. 117)

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Hazlitt is interested in what readers do with texts (or audiences with plays) rather than with what “mere authors” might have done to bring them into material existence; but what I want to emphasize here is a further distinction between mere readers, as they might be called, contained within the petty confines of their ego, and the “vast splendour” of a collective response, going back “for years” into a history deeper than the repertoire of anyone’s own particular stories. “Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare,” Emerson declares, but “even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us, that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour” (p. 119). Like Hazlitt, Emerson wants to reclaim genius as an interpretive category, “the Shakespeare in us,” but Emerson’s qualification at the end, “that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour,” makes it clear that for him, too, a pedestrian personal response—mere interpretation—will not do. Emerson understands reading—poetic engagement, interpretive practice—as sustained by the cumulative authority of interpretive traditions. Our poet’s mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; . . . not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought, are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. (p. 117) Shakspearized: Emerson’s bold neologism sounds stunningly original, but as readers may remember from chapter 3, it is not without precedent. In a general way, it comes out of Shakespeare himself, who delighted in turning nouns into verbs, as in Cleopatra’s “boy my greatness / I’ th’ posture of a whore” (5.2.220–1). Coleridge may have been thinking about this line when he described the abundance of “happy valiancy” he found in Antony and Cleopatra: “Feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparative with his other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets” (Raysor, Shakespearean Criticism, 1.77). Coleridge seems relevant here if only because, in the sentence immediately following the passage above, Emerson defers to him (and to Goethe) as “the only critics

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who have expressed our convictions” about Shakespearean genius “with any adequate fidelity.” But it’s more than this. In a Notebook entry for November 1804, Coleridge anticipates Emerson’s neologism almost exactly, describing “the imitation instead of copy which is illustrated in very nature shakespearianized” (Coburn, Notebooks, 2.1.2274). Emerson could not have known Coleridge’s Notebooks, but he knew what was in them nonetheless; the coincidence is not just coincidental. The Shakspearizing (or shakespeareanizing) of nature—of literature, philosophy, and thought; of the sights that we see and the music that we hear—was a commonplace among the Romantics, like chameleons and “Proteus” (Coleridge’s next words after “very nature shakespeareanized” are “the Proteus essence”), in the sense that it was held in common. Emerson’s beliefs belong uniquely to the individual Emerson no more than Shakespeare’s to the individual Shakespeare. They belong rather to Romantic Shakespeare, the shared enterprise that locates “judgments of taste” not in the material agency of individual authors but in the imaginative activity of audiences, engaging Shakespeare within the collective history of a long and richly various interpretive tradition. II: What We Say They Said How should we explain the striking discrepancy between Romantic claims about authorship and the representation of these claims in the current work? If we limit the question to the material-minded critics from whom we started—Belsey and Worthen, Hawkes and Kastan, et al.—then it might be argued that we are dealing with a strategically (if unconsciously) motivated process. By associating the Romantics with “the idealization of authorship as the sovereign source of meaning,” it becomes possible to discredit the enterprise of Romantic criticism as a whole—its attempt, as Belsey puts it, to bring “ ‘Literature’ rapidly into being.” The misrepresentation of Romantic ideas about authors would then contribute to the “radical disturbances” Alvin Kernan describes, by which the “primary values” of literature have been turned “topsyturvy” from their origins in “traditional romantics” claims, with the effect of bringing literature rapidly into unbeing—the “death of literature” in Kernan’s title. The trouble with this view, however, is that the identification of Romantic authorship with confession and self-expression is not limited to material-minded criticism. It is a regular feature of commentary among critics who have no systematic investment in materialist values.4

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It proliferates, moreover, among bona fide specialists, whose expert testimony should carry a lot of weight.5 And most remarkable of all, it persists even among those critics most actively sympathetic to Romantic values. Alvin Kernan is once more an example of this phenomenon— call it sympathetic misprision. He identifies the idea that the “author[‘s] creative imagination” is “the source of literature” as one of the “traditional romantic” claims by which literature is originated (p. 2). Kernan’s position is identical to Belsey and Kastan’s et al, for whom “authorship as the sovereign source of meaning” is central to the Romantics’ bringing “ ‘Literature’ rapidly into being”—except, of course, that again (as with the attribution of formalism to the Romantics) Kernan likes what he sees and the material-minded critics do not. The most striking example of sympathetic misprision has to be Harold Bloom, who deserves some sustained attention here. At the very beginning of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom acknowledges his indebtedness to “Romantic criticism, from Hazlitt through Pater and A. C. Bradley” (p. 1) and frequently declares his affinities thereafter with Coleridge, Hazlitt, Emerson, and the others who established “High Romantic Bardolatry” as a distinct critical mode (p. 3). As “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator,” he perseveres in the faith of the great Romantics, about whom he is richly knowledgeable and on whose achievements he has founded his own towering career. And yet, while in many ways Bloom’s Shakespeare demonstrates the legitimacy of his claim to Romanticism, in one crucial respect—authorship—it deviates from the principles of the Romantic tradition as significantly as does Kernan and as do the material-minded critics (the “School of Resentment,” as Bloom amusingly calls them) against whose radical disturbances he defines his own work. In his contemptuous dismissal of “all formalists,” reiterated throughout the book (pp. 314, 483, 729, 744), Bloom’s self-identification as a belated Romantic is fully justified. His core claim about character effects—“the phenomenon of a ‘real’ person entrapped in a play, surrounded by speaking shadows” (p. 182)—goes back to the “Preromantic” origins of character criticism, in Maurice Morgann’s Essay on Falstaff. Morgann understood the distinction between dramatic characters and real people, but he insisted that the distinction broke down in Shakespeare, whose exceptional power generated a speculative interest in what might have happened outside the boundary of the represented action. Falstaff is a huge presence for Bloom too, but he devotes even more attention to the character effects Hamlet produces in his audience. “Inwardness as a mode of freedom is the mature Hamlet’s

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finest endowment” (p. 401), he declares, because “the varied and perpetual ways in which Hamlet keeps overhearing himself speak” generate an infinite self-renewal: “he changes with every self-overhearing” (p. 423; Bloom’s emphasis here and elsewhere unless otherwise specified). But above the freedom revealed in Hamlet, Bloom values the freedom shared out with the audience: Shakespeare “returns us to the place where the matured Hamlet always takes us, to the process of selfrevision” (p. 411). If “Hamlet’s freedom can be defined as the freedom to infer,” the crucial matter is that “we learn this intellectual liberty by attending to Hamlet. . . . inference becomes the audience’s way to Hamlet’s consciousness” (p. 419). Hamlet functions as a synecdoche for Shakespearean value in general. As “the outward limit of human achievement,” Shakespeare’s plays “abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach; we cannot catch up to them . . . and our joy is that the process is never ending” (pp. xvii–xviii, p. 271). The Shakespeare text thus “exhausts” and “defeats” any attempt to achieve interpretive closure but amply compensates us, Cleopatra-like, by generating new interests—“open to everyone, and provocative to endless interpretation” (pp. 718, 719, 729). (And to endless demonstration as well: pp. 475, 484, 488, 583, 639, et al.; no one would wish the book any longer.) Despite his francophobic posturing, Bloom frequently sounds like Barthes, emphasizing the textual pleasure of deferred climax. But the pragmatist label works better; as with Hazlitt and Emerson especially, the trump value behind pleasure is “use”: “The ultimate use of Shakespeare is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing” (p. 10). In the Hegelian phrase Bloom adopts as a kind of signature tune, Shakespeareans may, like Hamlet himself, become “ ‘free artists of themselves’ ” (e. g., p. 6, 417), at least within certain limits. Interpretive freedom never wholly transcends past constraints. “We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist” (p. xx). Moreover, Shakespeare’s power is not available to “mere” interpreters, only to those who, in their “most apprehensive and sympathetic hour,” are strong enough to meet the “challenge” of Shakespearean “ellipsis” (p. 494), engaging the irresistible text with irrepressible response: “We need to exert ourselves and read Shakespeare as strenuously as we can, while knowing that his plays will read us more energetically still” (p. xx). My quotations have called attention to Hazlitt and Emerson as precursors of Bloom’s thought, but the most resonant echo here (conscious or not) is of Bradley, one of Bloom’s most admired models (p. 717), to whose understanding of poetry as “imaginative experience” I keep referring: the “succession

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of experiences—sounds, images, thoughts, emotions—through which we pass when we are reading as poetically as we can” (“Poetry,” p. 4; my emphasis). In all of this, Bloom’s continuities with the great Romantic Shakespeareans are both overt and profound. But when we shift the perspective from character and text to authorship, Bloom’s affiliations with Romantic ideas become not only complicated but compromised. The book begins with a “Chronology,” declaring Bloom’s “largest departure” from “scholarly authority,” in “assigning the early Hamlet . . . to Shakespeare himself ” (p. xiii). This is important: not only is it central to Bloom’s argument about Shakespeare’s invention of the human; beyond this, the claim for Shakespearean authorship of the ur-Hamlet takes on the foundational idea of Bloom’s critical identity. Twenty-five years prior to Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom had to acknowledge that the “greatest poet in our language” was also “the largest instance in the language of a phenomenon that stands outside” the theory developed in The Anxiety of Influence. Since Marlowe, “Shakespeare’s prime precursor,” was so “much smaller than his inheritor,” the contest failed to achieve the required intensity and thus produced not anxiety but an unthreatened and “absolute absorption of the precursor” (p. 11). Revisiting this idea now, in a coda entitled “The Shakespearean Difference,” Bloom argues that although Shakespeare “had to begin by absorbing and then struggling against Marlowe,” once “he had fully individuated” as a writer, with “the creation of Falstaff and Hamlet,” he “became so strong” that “it is difficult to think of him as competing with anyone” else. “From Hamlet on,” Bloom concludes, “Shakespeare’s contest primarily was with himself, and the evidence of the plays and their likely compositional sequence indicates that he was driven to outdo himself ” (p. 720). In broad outline, “The Shakespearean Difference” looks consistent with Bloom’s original claim: in reworking not “that mythical play, Kyd’s Hamlet, but rather [his] own earlier Hamlet” (p. 408), Shakespeare rises above the normative struggle with a precursor and becomes an exceptional instance of self-generation. But Bloom equivocates. On the one hand, self-revision constitutes the basis for an apparently ontological claim. “Not self-fashioning but self-revision; for Foucault the self is fashioned, but for Shakespeare it is given” (p. 411). Selfhood here is not merely a “perspectivist” category or a differential effect of discourse, a claim Bloom is at great pains to deny even among critics he admires.6 On the contrary, selfhood, he insists, has real substance. Hence Shakespeare’s achievement realizes the root meaning of “invention,” finding a “human” that was

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already there, though presumably inaccessible to earlier view. But on the other hand, Bloom emphasizes a more radical concept: “Hamlet is the perfected experiment, the demonstration that meaning gets started not by repetition nor by fortunate accident nor error, but by a new transcendentalizing of the secular, an apotheosis that is also an annihilation of all the certainties of the cultural past” (pp. 388–9). Here invention is not discovery but creation ex nihilo, the Wordsworthian light that never gleamed on sea or land, an idea extending back beyond Milton’s selfcreating Satan and Marvell’s green thought in a green shade into the dark prehistory of Bloom’s gnostic faith. As A. D. Nuttall argues, these different meanings for “invention” ref lect a fundamental contradiction in Bloom’s thought (132), and one consequence is a substantial reduction in the Shakespearean exceptionality acknowledged in The Anxiety of Influence. Marlovian precursorship is no longer a feeble matter. The pre-Hamlet Shakespeare has a real struggle on his hands, and in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the Marlovian ghost survives the triumph of Hamlet to haunt Othello (p. 461), Lear (pp. 488, 504), and even The Tempest (p. 558). Sometimes the threat metamorphoses into other identities. Hence Coriolanus “seems to have begun as an attempt to outdo Jonson as moral satirist” (p. 589), “as though Shakespeare had set out to defeat Ben Jonson upon his rival’s own chosen ground” (p. 583); and in his “final effort,” The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare develops “a strange new mode, which he founds upon Chaucer, his truest precursor, and still his only authentic rival in the language” (p. 696). From this perspective, the decisive status of Hamlet seems to disintegrate, an impression reinforced by Bloom’s conviction that “Shakespeare’s first Hamlet must have been Marlovian, and would have been . . . an overreacher” (p. 387), for if the self revised in Hamlet is a back-formation from the precursory Marlowe, then self-revision turns out to be just a continuation of the contest with Marlowe at one remove. Bloom suggests as much when, discussing The Merchant as a trial run for the mode “perfected in Hamlet,” he argues that Shakespeare’s transformation of Barabas into Shylock “is our best clue for tracing the process by which Shakespeare outdid Marlowe, and in doing so invented or reinvented the human” (p. 182). Bloom’s hedging on “invention” and “reinvention” betrays a deeper equivocation: maybe the “perfected experiment” of Hamlet is not a “transcendentalizing” innovation after all but mere “repetition.” If so, “The Shakespearean Difference” is rather a Shakespearean sameness, one more instance of the “incessant and ongoing contest” with the precursor—the norm of literary production to which there is no real exception.

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This equivocation has fundamental consequences for Bloom’s critical motivation. “I am not concerned, in this book, with how this happened,” he says about Bardolatry, “but with why it continues” (p. 3). From this angle, Shakespearean authorship of the early Hamlet is just a story; its attempt to account for the supreme value available in the version we know is ultimately inconsequential, because Hamlet’s value exists independently of any account of its origins. The story is merely heuristic, serving to direct critical attention away from productive causes as such and over to richly engaging effects. This authentically Romantic interest is not just a pretext; Bloom devotes much space to the question of “why,” and “why” governs How to Read and Why, his subsequent book. But Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is first, last and foremost devoted to how, to analyzing the growth of the poet’s mind, “tracing the process” of authorial development. The opening “Chronology” is determining. Whatever his departures from traditional scholarship, Bloom is committed to the explanatory value of a developmental sequence. He divides Shakespeare’s career into periods—“Early” and “High” Comedies,” “First” and “Major” Histories; “Apprentice” and “Great” Tragedies, “Tragic Epilogue” and “Late Romances.” Individual plays are pressed into relentless conformity with the overall structure. The Two Gentlemen “clear[s] the ground for the greatness” to follow (40), Romeo “prepares the way for his five great tragedies” (p. 103). If pre-Hamlet plays build to transcendent triumph, post-Hamlet plays fall away from it: “after Antony’s collapse and Cleopatra’s apotheosis, Shakespeare was wary of further quests into the interior” (p. 547). “From Coriolanus on, Shakespeare retreats from personality. . . . the immense fascination of Coriolanus, for me, is that in it Shakespeare experienced a sea change, and abandoned what had been the center of his dramatic art” (pp. 582–3). This fascination differs significantly from Romantic critical interest. Bloom purports to be Emersonian, quoting the remark that even Shakespeare can say nothing about Shakespeare “except to the Shakespeare in us”; but his afterthought, that “I myself deviate a touch from Emerson, since I think only Shakespeare has placed the Shakespeare in us” (p. 488), is not trivial. Gazing on the author, Bloom wrenches Emerson’s focus away from the interpreting subject. Putting Shakespeare himself at “the center of his dramatic art,” Bloom deviates far more than a touch from Hazlitt, who valued Shakespearean drama for its energetic resistance to any stabilizing or centralizing impulses—in authorship or anything else. By locating Shakespearean value in a struggle against other precursors or his own earlier self, Bloom

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directs us to just those issues of individual ego that Hazlitt insisted were irrelevant. Bloom represents his work as a continuation of Hazlitt’s, but The Characters of Shakespear’s Plays does not begin with a chronology and pays no attention to compositional sequence. Hazlitt knew of the recent historical research undertaken by Edmund Malone and others, but he is so utterly indifferent to the question how the Shakespeare text came into existence that he does not even mention—let alone justify— his apparent choice in The Characters to follow the random order of what he elsewhere calls a “common edition” in the Pope tradition (see Howe’s note, 4. p. 391). He shares none of Bloom’s obsessive—and anti-Romantic—fascination with “looking for the author behind the text.” III: Why We Say It: Professionalism Bloom’s deviation from Romantic values may be understood as strategically motivated. Invested in the explanatory power of the theory developed in The Anxiety of Influence, he cannot live with the fact of Shakespearean exceptionality, so he molds the material to conform to the behavior predicted by his theory. But like the argument about strategic misrepresentation on the other side (if you can trivialize Romantic authorship as self-expression, you have a basis for replacing literary study with an alternative critical practice), this seems too simple. Self-interested ideological agendas are no doubt relevant, but the characterization of Romantic authorship as encoded autobiography proliferates across the whole range of current work, visible in roughly equal measure on the cultural left and the cultural right. Something different—and deeper—is involved. The candidate I offer here as a way to account for this situation is professionalism. In his 1934 British Academy Lecture on “The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare,” C. J. Sisson, commenting on the then-current (and still-current) interest in biographical speculation about Shakespeare, argues that “the overwhelming dead weight of nineteenth-century criticism,” going back to “the origin and development of the romantic myth,” is “responsible.” Sisson begins his explanation with Malone, who “laid the foundations for all subsequent consideration of the possible biographical significances of the plays, when he essayed to establish their chronological order,” then proceeds to Coleridge, who “took the next step, dividing the plays according to periods of their author’s life,” and concludes that the “way is now open to the

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inevitable elaboration of such hints, and to the systematization of such an approach to Shakespeare’s work. It is true that Coleridge insists on Shakespeare’s Protean divinity and on his Olympian detachment [but] the mischief was done” (pp. 11–12). Sisson’s “mischief ” might sound like the anti-Coleridgean and generally anti-Romantic insurgency of our own day; but with his final concession (“It is true that . . . ”), Sisson anticipates David Bromwich’s point that, “Though Coleridge delights in tracing an author’s footsteps through a poem, such investigations are against his principles” (Hazlitt, p. 239). Sisson understands that Coleridge was not committed chief ly to finding the author behind the text. He sometimes treats poems in biographical terms, but these accounts are marginal, promoted to centrality only in a critical agenda developed later on. As Peter Holland puts it, the Shakespeare who “seems mainly to know about life by living it[,] the one who knew about law by having been a lawyer, who knew about the sea by having been a sailor, and who know about Italy by having traveled there,” is actually a “post-Romantic Shakespeare of the kind the Victorians loved” (36). Current critics who object to a “systematic Romantic prejudice” in favor of encoded autobiography should really be directing their complaints against Victorian Shakespeare.7 In accounting for this development from Romantic impersonality to Victorian biography, we need to distinguish between Coleridge and Malone. Although both may be said to have “laid the foundations” for a systematic biographical explanation of Shakespeare’s plays, they have different agendas. To develop more systematically the distinction I suggested in chapter 2: Coleridge seeks to engage interpretively with Shakespeare, Malone to determine the historical framework within which Shakespeare was produced; Coleridge is interested in the imaginative realization of textual energy, using texts, Malone in systematizing the goals and retrieval methods for bibliographical and historical research, establishing texts. Given this difference, the “elaboration” and “systematization” of the biographical approach that occurred later in the nineteenth century is unevenly distributed between its founders. As Aron Stavisky claims, “The Victorians did not develop their ideas about Shakespeare from within the romantic tradition [but] brought to full f lower Malone’s historical perspective” (p. viii). In this context, consider Edward Dowden, whose Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875) has come to epitomize the periodizing of Shakespeare’s career. However tenuously connected to Coleridge, Dowden’s fourfold division (“In the Workshop,” “In the World,” “In the Depths,” “On the Heights”) is immediately

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indebted to F. J. Furnivall, who used it to determine authenticity, the Shakespearean text as in itself it really is, uncontaminated by the forged claims or collaborative contributions of other authors. “The study of Shakespeare’s work must be made natural and scientific,” Furnivall insisted, and “the method I have pursued is that of the man of science.”8 Dowden generally avoided such explicit claims but shared the commitment. As he puts it near the end of his career in an essay called “Is Shakespeare Self-Revealed?”, people do not keep a tame steam-engine to write their books. Even if the tame steam-engine be named “imagination” it will not write the books unless the coals have been supplied and kindled. [Poets’] faculties are not constructed in water-tight compartments; imagination is one mode of energy belonging to a living, complex creature. Out of nothingness it can summon nothing. But it can separate, combine, enlarge, diminish, transmute, create new compositions of feeling, and colour them with variously-mingled hues. (p. 256) Here at last is the fully “expressive” theory Abrams attributed to Coleridge: poetry understood as a phenomenon of “the [post-]romantic psychology of poetic invention,” with psychology functioning (as Freud sometimes argued that it should) like a hard science (biology, physics, hydraulics, and optics are all suggestively present in Dowden’s analysis of the working “ ‘imagination’ ”) according to systematically determined and analytically verifiable laws. In a brilliant piece to which I am much indebted here, Hugh Grady traces the development by which Furnivall’s commitment to scientific method led to the New Shakspere Society’s verse tests and to the “disintegrationist” arguments of F. G. Fleay and others. “For most of the twentieth century,” Grady comments, “these findings seemed laughable and beneath the consideration of serious scholars” (p. 114), but we are no longer so sure. In looking for the author behind the text, Furnivall, Fleay, and Dowden were all in their different ways committed to the same idea, seeking to identify and account for a phenomenon through the systematic study of the processes that led from its origins to its formation and eventual establishment. Most of us probably still share Sisson’s view that the particular applications of Victorian methodizing constituted “mischief ”; but whatever we think about their judgment as practitioners, the practice itself continues to shape current work. Postmodern skepticism about scientific methods and the value of

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metanarratives is only skin deep. If “always historicize!” is our motto, we learned it from the great developmental explanations of Hegel, Darwin, Marx, and Freud. They have taught us how to think, and any capital we have to invest even in undoing their work is, as Margreta de Grazia’s compelling critique of Malone acknowledges (Shakespeare Verbatim, p. 12), borrowed from their work to begin with. As William Kerrigan sees it, the historical methods of the Victorians enrich the affective hermeneutics of the Romantics. “What is needed, now as always,” Kerrigan declares in his astute review of Bloom’s book on Shakespeare, “is the old scholarly ideal that modern selves can be pried loose from their immediate feelings, liberated from narcissistic self-enclosure by disciplined historical learning” (p. 42). This ideal can apparently be realized. When, in 1869, William Carew Hazlitt reprinted his grandfather’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, he performed two changes—revising the quotations to conform to the authoritative Alexander Dyce Shakespeare edition of 1868, and beginning each chapter with a note describing the earliest editions of the play under discussion and the latest scholarship about its date of composition. The indifference to such matters in the first edition was evidently no longer acceptable; but if the republication signaled the ultimate triumph of Malone’s scholarly agenda, it does not represent the collapse of Hazlitt’s original approach, which persists with just minimal updating. Philosophy has clipped no angel’s wings; gusto survives method. As long as “criticism” and “scholarship” respect each other, they work together to produce an enhanced practice. The idea of a fruitful complementarity has for so long underwritten our work that we may be unable to acknowledge the depth of difference between these two modes of thought. Romantic critics themselves were highly sensitive to the problem. Hazlitt’s dismissal of textual scholarship, “as if the genius of poetry lay hid in errors of the press,” is of a piece with the derogation of historical research in Coleridge, for whom “Shakespeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man” (Woodring, p. 468). The same skepticism is still solidly in place as late as 1902, in Bradley’s piece on “Shakespeare’s Theatre and Audience”: “the conditions under which [Shakespeare’s] plays were produced” are perhaps interesting to “Antiquarians,” Bradley remarks, but not “needed for intelligent enjoyment of the plays” (p. 361). These claims do not celebrate ignorance. Coleridge is talking about an “educated” response and Bradley an “intelligent” appreciation. Coleridge kept up with the historicizing of Shakespeare going on around him, and Bradley, in the same essay

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that dismisses antiquarianism, makes detailed use of the new knowledge emerging about the original conditions of Renaissance theatrical production as a way to bolster his case for what he elsewhere calls “the real Shakespeare.” Nonetheless, for both of them (as for Hazlitt), the knowledge available through historical method is construed as a subordinate contribution to an engagement with Shakespeare. What matters first and foremost is imaginative competence, and while historical understanding might contribute to this as means to an end, it would, if it became the central purpose of the endeavor, prove distracting and destructive. As Kerrigan describes it, historical method liberates the self from narcissism, but the Romantics tend to emphasize not the benefit but the risk. As they see it, personality disciplined is likely to become personality diminished, and “the old scholarly ideal” of a “historically informed imagination” begins to look like an oxymoron. If Bloom tried to adjust to this ideal, the result would be radical contradiction. What I have been suggesting is that Bloom’s book is contradictory in just this way: strenuously engaging with the Shakespeare text on the one hand, while on the other “tracing the process” by which the Shakespeare text developed—each hand charitably ignorant of what the other is doing. In his post-coda “Word at the End: Foregrounding,” Bloom inveighs against “Backgrounding,” what he takes to be the f lattening contextualization of historicism, but “Backgrounding,” in the sense of looking for the author behind the text, is what Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human largely does. Thus, tracing the development by which the (hypothetical) early Hamlet goes “beyond Christian belief ” to achieve the “purely secular transcendence” of its later version, Bloom comments that “Nothing is got for nothing, and the nihilism of the Problem Comedies is part of this conversion” (p. 339). Nothing is got for nothing. Bloom likes the phrase (see p. 587), presumably for its echoes going back through Lear to antiquity, but the significant resonance for my purposes is Dowden’s concept of imagination: “Out of nothingness it can summon nothing.” The inexplicably marvelous invention of Shakespearean Heroic Tragedy, which, in a view Bloom shares with Hazlitt, “gives us a high and permanent interest, beyond ourselves, in humanity as such” (Characters, p. 200), is subdued to an age when miracles are past, and when “even . . . the most Bardolatrous of critics,” Bloom himself, must submit to a “simplistic” cost-accounting (p. 547), obliged to understand the historical laws by which all natural phenomena, including the Shakespeare text, have evolved into material existence.

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Bloom’s contradictions emerge most prominently in his antiprofessionalism. His opening salvo against “our self-defiled academies” (p. 3) is reiterated in a barrage of assaults against the perversity of “most scholars” (p. 238), both “old-style scholarly idealists and new-wave cultural materialists” (p. 321), culminating in an inclusive diatribe against “Wittgenstein, and the formalist critics, and the theatricalists, and our current historicizers, all” of whom “join in telling us that life is one thing and Shakespeare another” (p. 730). Bloom’s antiformalism and his antiprofessionalism seem to have a common ancestor in Romanticism. From this angle, the New Critics who drew Coleridge’s peripheral formalism into the center of their system served the interests of a burgeoning academic institution in need of disciplinary technique, a method that could be taught, tested, and reproduced; and for this enterprise Bloom declares his contempt. The book’s format—no index, no references—ref lects the intense distaste for the institutionalization of literary study he shares with Bradley and Romantic traditions going back to Hazlitt.9 Again, however, Bloom’s Romanticism is deeply compromised. In rejecting specialists and professionals, those “University teachers of what once we called ‘literature’ ” who have gone whoring after French theory, Bloom takes his stand with “the world’s public” for whom life and Shakespeare are inseparable—the audience he identifies as “common readers and playgoers” (pp. 288, 420, 730). Some such audience no doubt exists, and they might have bought Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human in numbers to justify its much-publicized advance; but even if they were committed to real characters and live authors as much as Bloom assumes, they are not likely to put down their Dan Brown and Danielle Steel to slog through 800 pages “tracing the process” by which one “ever-living poet” gradually evolved into the transcendent genius who invented the human. As Bloom himself acknowledges in an unsentimental moment, popular audiences watch what “runs on television, or with Madonna” (p. 726). They will laugh at the nutty professoriate (American antiintellectualism runs so deep it infects even American intellectuals), but they are not about to arrest the “decline” of “deep reading” that occurs as Shakespeare, “the Western canon’s center, now vanishes from the schools with the canon” (p. 715). To be consequential, Bloomspeak has to be directed to the schools, including the universities where teachers train other teachers, writing books like this for readers like you. Despite his Byronic posture, among them but not of them, Bloom continues to inhabit “The Shakespearean Scene of Instruction,” as Christy Desmet calls it (“Harold Bloom,” pp. 220–4),

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from within which he produces a discourse as much “self-defiled” as the School of Resentment at which he directs his harshest abuse.10 To sum up: in the absorption of disciplinary method, Romantic values were gradually dislodged from the center of literary study. Already secondary by Furnivall’s time, they have been further attenuated over the years to the point where misrecognition now fills up the whole range of critical sentiment. The left, misconstruing the Romantics’ commitment to cultural innovation, distorts their values into an admixture of formalism and encoded autobiography and thus deprives itself of a rich source of useful strategies and ideas. Bloom perceives Romantic values more clearly and claims them as the luminous center of belief. But even for Bloom their brightness has dimmed into a kind of twilight. No less than “our current historicizers,” Bloom distorts Romantic criticism into an encoded autobiography, and in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, despite himself, he represents the self-sustaining residues of his Romantic belief in a theatricalized clowning, as if almost to guarantee that his voice will not be effectually heard. Self-deprivation and selfspite: at twilight, it’s self-defilement all across the board. *

*

*

How, finally, should we make sense of this strange eventful history? A good place to start is by acknowledging that we are not above it but in it, and that inhabiting the academic institution, if it does not necessarily entail self-defilement, at least besets us with the distraction of contrary desires. I would like to think that Romanticism Lost has moved at least some Shakespeareans to respond more sympathetically to the idea of “reading as poetically as we can”; but we have all been operating for so long under the dispensation of a materialist historicism that any procedure that seems to depart from its established protocols is likely to seem perverse. (I admire Hazlitt this side idolatry, but his cavalier dismissal of textual scholarship as “errors of the press” makes me wince as much as the most confirmed textual materialist.) Moreover, the obstacles are not just theoretical; the complexity of our institutional arrangements is likely to prevent anyone in the academic profession from feeling altogether comfortable with Romantic values. A regime of strenuous exertion would make it hard to determine the criteria required to perform those routine evaluations—the hiring, promotion, publication, and tenuring of the faculty—that keep the institutional machinery running. The assessment of students would appear similarly arbitrary. When they file in to request higher grades based on strenuous

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exertion (“I gave it my best shot”), we cannot refuse, it seems, without impugning their very humanity (“you got a C- because you have a Cmind”), and that way madness lies—or at least ombudspersons, litigation, sensitivity training, and the other signs of insecurity that nourish the sense of malaise in current academic life. One way to make sense of this story from the inside is to do away with its diachronic narrativity—its storyness. We would be dealing, then, not with temporal sequence but existential situation. From this angle, the common reader is a metaphor, not actually present to read Hazlitt or even to chat in Restoration coffee houses. The public sphere is always already lost; professionalism is never not there, even (or, as Stanley Fish, argues, especially) in “Anti-Professionalism.” Twilight had a special resonance for Romanticism from its earliest expressions. Long before Hegel specified the time when Minerva’s owl takes f light, Johann Georg Hamann, the Magus of the North, “notes that he is writing at dusk (‘entre chien et loup’), the liminal state between light and darkness.” According to Garrett Green, the “French phrase was a favorite of Hamann’s,” for whom the “realm between day and night became a symbol of his eschatological existence between the times” (pp. 55–6). As early as 1765 Diderot associated sunset with imaginative creation: “It’s at sunset when the light of the spirit is illuminated, when the solitary bird—wild, untamable, its feathers sad and brown— opens its throat and begins to sing, making the grove resound and breaking the silence and darkness of the night” (p. 71, my translation). As it prolonged itself, however, twilight became belatedness, the darkling plain where ignorant armies clashed in Arnold, one age dying, another striving to be born. And now? Business as usual, plus ça change. Twilight is a condition of sustainable diminution, modernism with the capacity to absorb an apparently indefinite number of hyphenated posts, the tunnel stretching out, beyond what any eye can see, to an intimation of absolute darkness, the nothingness out of which nothing can come. Then again, maybe the sequence matters, and we are on the cusp of real change. Despite Sisson’s claim, the displacement of Romanticism was not “inevitable,” and the “distinct upsurge of interest in Hazlitt” at the present time (Paulin, p. xiii) seems to be part of a “canonising endeavour,” as Uttara Natarajan describes it (Review, 472), an attempt to supplant Coleridge, who became central to the canon, arguably, because he was more assimilable to the subsequent methodizing of literary study. On the other hand (or is it the third?), this rewriting of history into a better future is not guaranteed. It may be too late to

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bring back the radiance from under two centuries of misreading, strong and otherwise. This seems to be Bloom’s sense of things, though registered not as a phenomenon of institutional or cultural history but of individual experience. As usual, he takes things personally. We “read against the clock,” he says, “to prepare ourselves for change,” but the clock always wins, “and the final change alas is universal” (How to Read, p. 21). For Bloom, reading at about seventy, three score and ten, twilight means that the night has almost come when no man can work, and in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human he rages—buffoonishly, brilliantly—against the dying of the light.

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CONC LU SION

Though I had no inkling of it at the time, this book can be traced back to a graduate course I was teaching on “Othello and Romantic Criticism” at Concordia University in Montreal during the winter term of 1997. One evening after the class, a student—call him Sean—came into my office and sat down to talk. I expected him to be looking for clarification about the discussion just ended or about a future assignment, but instead he asked me whether, in defining the specialized interests of his academic career, he should concentrate on genre studies or on new historicism. We discussed this for a while, and then another student from the class, Nadia (not her real name either), came in, took the seat Sean had vacated, and asked me a version of the same question. Did it make more sense, she wondered, for her to go into editorial work or into post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory? Graduate students regularly ask for advice about their professional future, but what surprised me about Sean and Nadia was the abstract nature of the interest which generated their questions. The four options among which they were trying to choose might have been hooked onto Othello or other texts, literary or theatrical or not, from other historical periods. Alternatively, Sean and Nadia might have expressed some kind of detailed interest in the options themselves, all of which had been the subject of much discussion for quite a while, hundreds of years in the cases of editing and genre. But no such interests emerged in our discussions. As Sean and Nadia referred to them, genre, new historicism, editing, and psychoanalysis were like imaginary toads in real gardens, or like market commodities—blue chip stocks, tax-free municipals, credit default swaps—altogether bereft of those intrinsic qualities that might generate intellectual or affective interest. What they had was growth potential, and the advice I was being called upon to proffer was a kind of investment counseling.

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Sean and Nadia faced the prospect of the job market in the not too distant future, and it would have been strange for them not to think about ways to increase their marketability; but market value was all they seemed to be thinking about. Some things must have been at work in their personal histories for them to have narrowed down their options to the four they mentioned, or for that matter to have gone into literary study in the first place; but these things played no part in the story they were telling me, and I doubt they were part of the autobiographical story they told themselves. This situation was different from what I remembered of my own graduate experience, but not completely so. “In my day,” says a character in Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man, “reading English was a moral choice.” This is the laudator temporis acti mode, and it merits skepticism. Even in my day, which was longer ago than the one recollected in The History Man, majoring in English, the North American equivalent of reading English, wasn’t just about the disinterested pleasures of engaging with “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and The Golden Bowl. There were pragmatically self-serving motives at work; we were accumulating cultural capital. We hadn’t heard of Bourdieu, and that phrase might have produced something like the protagonist’s shotin-the-back face in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, we knew what we were doing. Those of us going on to graduate school would find our lives fraught with strategic choices like the ones facing Sean and Nadia, and we regularly wondered about the growing distance between what we were learning and the motives, however contradictory and imperfectly accessible to understanding, that had set us on the road to the place where we then found ourselves. For all these continuities with my own past, I was unprepared for what Sean and Nadia were telling me. The thoroughness with which their questions, one after the other, had been purged of nonmarket interests was a new thing—or at least (pace Prospero) new to me. In retrospect, I was just belatedly picking up on impressions that had already been analyzed as the constituents of a distinct situation. In “Preprofessionalism,” as John Guillory designates the syndrome, graduate education in literary study is conf lated “with self-marketing, as though getting a job were somehow the culmination of a successful career.” From this angle, the exclusive focus on jobs ref lects the abysmal conditions that make jobs so hard to come by. If you are a graduate student facing the “arbitrary brutality” of the job market (4), you do not have the luxury of following your heart’s desire. Instinct or intellectual preference might distract you from a clear-headed reading of the market; it might lead

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you into the wrong—that is, less marketable—areas of the discipline. In these circumstances, the heart’s desire needs to be downplayed; or better still, ignored. Or best of all, repressed. As Guillory analyzes it, the appalling perversity of this situation is not limited to graduate students’ experience of the job market. What “the graduate students suffer most,” he argues, are “the symptoms of a pathology that aff licts the profession universally” (6). During the past thirty years or so, we have been brought to realize that literary study and the humanities in general are being systematically stripped of material resources and prestige. No new jobs is clearly an expression of the diminished value of our work, but even those who have jobs internalize the message, and the internalization must be contributing substantially to the sense of “impasse” described at the beginning of this book. When the world keeps telling you that what you’re doing isn’t worth much, you begin to believe it, perhaps with something like the selfdoubting equivocation dramatized in Sonnet 138—“When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies”; and this disabled conviction has the consequence, willy-nilly, of attenuating any desire to perform the work in question. (Alternatively, you can make overcompensating claims about the consequence of your work—Guillory’s reading of “the politics of the episteme”—but this adds up to pretty much the same situation.) The difference between the employed and everyone else—the unemployed and that large and growing cadre of part-timers designated on dues forms as the underemployed—cannot be exaggerated. If we are in the same boat, the discomfort levels between steerage and all the other classes are incommensurable. My purpose in taking up Guillory’s point is to emphasize that those of us who have jobs are in some ways making the situation worse for those who don’t. I am not in this instance thinking about the socioeconomics of the situation, though their detrimental effects are real enough. (We sit on positions at least some of which might be inherited by new recruits, and we admit graduate students for the pleasure and prestige of teaching them even as we know most of them won’t get tenurable jobs.) It is the more strictly academic and pedagogical dimensions I am concerned with here—the way in which, by communicating our own diminished convictions, we may be twisting the students’ preprofessionalized deformity even further out of shape. Consider Nadia: if she had chosen to pursue her interest in editorial work and was still at it two years after the conversation I described above, she might have come across a new book called Shakespeare and

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the Editorial Tradition. The nineteen essays in this collection, which leads with the de Grazia and Stallybrass piece I discussed in chapter 2, are all reprinted from recent originals (two date from the 1970s, nine from the 1980s, and eight from the 1990s), so Nadia might have been perplexed by the claim in the editors’ Introduction, that their contributors “examine the changing signification of the forms Shakespeare’s texts take throughout their editorial history” (Orgel and Keilin, p. viii, my emphasis). In fact, many of the pieces do take examples of pre-1970s editorial practice into account, but almost always to expose their shortcomings and to suggest—sometimes even declare with robust explicitness—that earlier work is an unrelieved hindrance to any understanding we might now achieve. Nadia might well leave this book with the idea that the Shakespearean “editorial tradition” referred to in its title should for all practical purposes now be considered defunct. If so, and if she had soldiered on with her editorial interests for another two years, she might have found confirmation for this idea in the piece on “The Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Texts” collected in the new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (a volume designed to provide a normative perspective to those who feel they need it—especially, though not exclusively, graduate students), which concludes, as I noted in chapter 4 on New Textualism, with a catalog of the recently produced “paradigm-threatening” critiques as a result of which “hardly a ‘fact’ supporting New Bibliographical assumptions remains standing.” From all this, Nadia might have drawn some comfort. In a situation where she was being asked to take on an unmanageably heavy load of work, the most eminent and reliably current authorities in the field seemed to be telling her that she could safely ignore everything from, say, Fredson Bowers on back. That’s not what they were saying, of course, but it’s easy to see how Nadia might mistake these unintended implications for the proper conclusion of their arguments—in fact, hard to see how she wouldn’t. In any case, the comfort would soon turn cold. By seeming to suggest that disciplinary knowledge is subject to the volatility of fashion (who wants yesterday’s papers?), Shakespeare and the Editorial Tradition and the Cambridge Companion effectively identify academic authority with the “arbitrary brutality” of the market, thereby reinforcing a sense of hopelessness in the face of a landscape from which any sense of mappable coherence had been evacuated. Faced with such futility, having consulted “the book of fate” and found only “chance’s mocks / And changes,” Nadia might have wanted to give up, like the “happiest youth” in 2 Henry IV who, according to the King, “Would shut the book and sit him down and die” (3.2.45–56).

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205

I didn’t have any practical advice to give Sean and Nadia on the evening they came to see me. I was taken aback and didn’t have any advice at all. The next week, though, I summoned them to my office after class, sat them down, and treated them to a mini-lecture along the following lines: Don’t try to psych out the market. No one really knows where things are going, and you’ll tie yourself in knots. Some things you can do. Look at the undergraduate curriculum. Even with all the recent changes, a lot of the course titles have stayed the same. Whatever you work at, however you work at it, cultivate an image for yourself that coincides with that structure (or that list of titles—whether it is a structure is debatable). Apart from that, you may as well do what you want. I can’t say whether this f lood of would-be reassurance actually reassured Sean and Nadia. I didn’t get to the heart of their problem, which was the “arbitrary brutality” of the market, which in turn derived from global pressures over which none of us had control (downsizing, quantifiable productivity models, etc.), and it may be that there was little in what I was suggesting they could practically act on even within the academic domain. Don’t try to psych out the market is like saying “don’t think of pink elephants.” Do what you want assumes that what you want is identifiable, and it conveniently fails to acknowledge that desire may be constructed by the socioeconomic factors I was telling them to ignore. This was the best advice I had to offer at the time, and years later I don’t know that I have any better. Graduate students, prospective or actual, who have managed to get through this book might want to take it as basically expanding on my mini-lecture to Sean and Nadia. Most readers will, I assume, have teaching jobs, and given the universality of the situation Guillory describes, the points I am trying to get across to them are bound to look similar in some respects to the synopsis italicized above. Do what you want, then, would be a signal to play down my own preferences. I may be predisposed to the aesthetic mode, but as I argued in chapter 1, the deliberate pursuit of an agenda for “the return of the aesthetic” or “the new formalism” tends to produce evidence mostly to suggest that the aesthetic cannot at this time effectively return, and that formalism (even if the term were not misleading when applied to the Romantics) is no less exhausted now than in the old version decisively repudiated thirty or so years ago. Whatever my reservations about the tendency toward

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pure negativity in materialist criticism, it remains true that some of the most compelling work on Shakespeare these days is being written with a materialist slant; and at a time when Shakespeare studies in its entirety—indeed, all of the humanities—is being written down if not written off, cease and desist orders from within house directed against this or that particular mode of proceeding do not seem helpful. From this angle, then, the message of Romanticism Lost might sound pretty much the same for the battle-scarred veterans as for the raw recruits: do what you want but just do it. But this is only half—or less than half—of the story. When in chapter 3 I thundered against the New Theatricalism in Shakespeare studies, I was arguing as forcefully as I knew how on behalf of my preferences, not playing them down. When in chapter 4 I urged New Textualists to transform their practice into something better, do what you want was the last thing on my mind. There are evident contradictions here. It may be that unresolved contradictions have a place in a book that never fully jettisoned its working title of the distractions of contrary desire. In any case, I should make it unequivocally clear now at the end of things that when the Introduction dismissed as naive the idea that the truth about Romantic Shakespeare would set us free, I was not abandoning the hope, however quixotic, that readers of Romanticism Lost might want to start working more like Hazlitt and less like Bourdieu; and that I was not relinquishing the conviction that if they did so, the world, or that small and sequestered part of the world we call Shakespeare studies, would be a better place.

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NOT E S

Introduction 1.

I am by no means the first to notice a resurgence of interest in character among Shakespeareans. According to reviews of Shakespeare studies published in 2003 and 2004, “Character is certainly back this year” (Morse, p. 304), and “character criticism seems to be coming back in from the cold” (Smith). The reviewers making these claims were thinking about (or anticipating) works like those by Desmet (“Character Criticism,” Reading Shakespeare’s Characters), Falco, Pechter (“Character Endures”), Poole, Rutter, and Sadowski; and if we included non-Shakespearean literary study, a much longer list would emerge. If “Character has made a comeback,” as Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights declare in the first sentence of their Introduction to a 2009 collection of essays on Shakespeare and Character, a large part of the credit belongs to Michael Bristol, who has been arguing for its central importance in a series of half a dozen scintillating essays published during the last dozen or so years. Bristol starts from the recognition that “among contemporary Shakespeare scholars,” professional protocols dictate that “thinking about dramatic characters as if they were real people . . . would not be comme il faut” (Introduction, p. 2), and his strategy for recuperating character is to find alternatives to the disciplinary norms. In the first instance, he tries to relocate the question within the more hospitable terminology of a neighboring discipline, “approaching Shakespeare from the perspective of moral philosophy rather than from the more usual framework” (Shakespeare and Moral Agency, p. x). In the second, he explores a territory outside of academic discourse altogether, urging “professional scholars” and “expert readers” to shift their tonal register “closer” to “ordinary readers” and “vernacular ethical standards” (“Vernacular,” p. 95, 97). Both strategies resonate powerfully with tendencies in current work. Attempts to connect academic discussion with general readers are ubiquitous, and attempts to connect Shakespeare studies with philosophical norms have issued in title phrases like Shakespeare’s Ideas (Bevington), Disowning Knowledge in Shakespeare (Cavell), Shakespeare’s Philosophy (McGinn), Shakespeare the Thinker (Nuttall), and Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Zamir). Both strategies introduce problems. Without a fundamental distinction between academic Shakespeareans and general readers, what would justify the salaries we receive (however pathetically inadequate)? In a similar way, adopting philosophical norms might leave us with nowhere to stand from which to identify literary or theatrical interest (the subtitle of one of the volumes cited above, Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays, suggests the kind of problem to which I am referring). But in the best of this work, philosophical interest is centered in an affective attachment to dramatic characters, as by Bristol himself: “the contract we make with a fiction has to do with beliefs,” and an “aspect of that contract

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is openness to an emotional engagement with fictional characters”; it is “by way of emotion that the philosophical interest of a fiction is initially sensed” (Introduction, p. 3). Hazlitt, discussing Thomas Holcroft’s popular novel Anna St. Ives, gets at the same idea: “the principal characters” come across as “not natural, but ideal beings,” he remarks, and then expands the point to a set of general claims about the nature and value of engaging with fiction: though the author has gained in point of argument by throwing his reasonings into a narrative form, perhaps he has lost in point of the general impression produced upon the mind. It was Mr. Holcroft’s business to make his characters not only consistent, but interesting and amiable; [not just] pure creatures of the understanding, mere abstract essences, which cannot kindle too warm a glow of enthusiasm in the breast. . . . We admire [the protagonist’s] actions, but we do not love the man: his motives we respect, but with his feelings we have little sympathy. Indeed he is a character who does not stand in need of our sympathy; “A reasoning, self-sufficient thing, an intellectual all in all.” He is himself a being without passions; and in order to feel with him, we must ourselves be divested of passion. (Life of Holcroft, pp. 128–30). As Hazlitt sees it, literary interest depends more on the capacity for a generous engagement of sympathy than on the exercise of an ethical judgment. This was Keats’s point about “camelion” Shakespeare, and it can serve as an example of the affinity, often remarked, between Keats and Hazlitt. But an openness to affective engagement with fiction is a matter of emphasis generally among Romantic Shakespeareans, earlier and later, English and beyond—it is, looking ahead to chapter 5, central to Herder’s concept of the Einfühlung: “if then, my dear reader, you were too timid to give yourself over to the feeling of setting and place in any scene, then woe betide Shakespeare and the withered page in your hand” (p. 42).

1

Return of the Aesthetic?

1. 1997, #s 76 and 303; 1999, #125; 2000, #s 564, 670, and 731. 2. “New Formalism” in Levinson’s title derives most immediately from a phrase in Rasmussen’s book, which grew out of the second of the MLA sessions catalogued in the preceding note. The phrase seems to originate in a book Heather Dubrow published in 1990. See Levinson’s online version, 32, and Rasmussen’s Introduction, p. 4.

2 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

Negative Desire: Materialism and Its Discontents

The reference in this discussion is to Fredson Bowers, a follower of the New Bibliography in his attempt to develop procedures to determine the author’s intention—an attempt which he famously or infamously described as “penetrating the veil of print” (Textual and Literary Criticism, p. 18). Chapter 4 returns to this material in greater detail, focusing on the “New Textualists” referred to earlier in a quotation from Egan. I have changed Holderness et al’s “underestimated,” an evident and perhaps interesting mistake, to “overestimated.” Knapp first made this case in “What Is a Co-Author?” and subsequently developed it in Shakespeare Only. The quotations in this paragraph come from “What Is a Co-Author?”, 1–2; Shakespeare Only, p. 29; “What Is a Co-Author?”, 8; and Shakespeare Only, p. 87. These quotations come from Shakespeare Verbatim, p. 10, 75, 76, 78, 133. In her monumental edition of the Marginalia, H. J. Jackson lists the four copies of Shakespeare Coleridge owned and marked up, and Malone is not there (4.684). Many of the editions

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Coleridge used for his lectures on Shakespeare’s plays have been identified, and Malone is not there either. The two editions he used for his lectures on the Sonnets have been identified as well—an anonymous 1797 edition of the Works and Anderson’s British Poets (Coburn, Notebooks, 3.2.3247 and 3289), and for neither of these did Malone have any direct responsibility. Though Coleridge makes use of Malone’s essays on the rise of the drama and the chronology of Shakespeare’s works, he probably found this material in the Isaac Reed edition of Shakespeare’s Plays (the “1803 Variorum”) we know he used for the 1811–12 Lectures (Foakes, Editor’s Introduction, p. lxvii). Stallybrass himself makes no claim for any hands-on contact with Malone. His point is rather that Malone, by restoring the Sonnets to the 1609 order, had turned John Benson’s miscellany of 1640, the previously standard version, into a story that could be interpreted biographically, thereby “exposing the cultural god of the English language as a pervert,” and that it is to this Malone-produced story, “a narrative that had only been constructed in the previous two decades,” to which Coleridge’s commentary is said to be a response (“Love,” 76). Since the editions of the Sonnets Coleridge used did in fact follow the 1609 order, Stallybrass has a basis for his claim; but to say that “It was Malone’s narrativizing of the Sonnets that profoundly troubled Coleridge” and “continued to trouble Coleridge throughout his whole life” (“Love,” 77) is another matter. Stallybrass produces two pieces of evidence to support his claim: some marginal comments Coleridge wrote next to some marginal comments Wordsworth had written in his edition (the Anderson) of the Sonnets (Raysor transcribes this material, in the Miscellaneous Criticism, pp. 454–5); and some remarks he presumably uttered—not “wrote,” as Stallybrass says (“Love,” 77)—apparently referring to Sonnet 20, recorded in his Table Talk for May 13, 1833 (Woodring, pp. 377–8). These passages are more complicated and less “profoundly troubled” than Stallybrass suggests, but this matter aside, the question is whether two passing comments, separated by thirty years, are enough to attribute such intense anxiety—“sexual panic,” Stallybrass calls it (77)—during the course of a “whole life.” It would help if Stallybrass produced other examples in which the Sonnets generated some comparable concern on Coleridge’s part, but he can’t. On the other hand, we have other examples in which Coleridge talks about the Sonnets—his lecture of November 28, 1811, for instance (Foakes, Lectures, 1.243)—in a totally different context, including the explicit dismissal of the relevance of biography to poetic effects which is a regular feature of Coleridgean commentary throughout his career. Overall, in any case, the Sonnets were not very important to Coleridge; the plays, he thought, were the primary evidence for Shakespeare’s achievement. About all that Stallybrass’s evidence allows us to conclude is that Malone’s editorial work contributed indirectly to two passing comments, both inconsistent with Coleridge’s regularly reiterated critical convictions, and both concerned, as is only a very small part of the totality of Coleridge’s Shakespearean commentary, with the Sonnets. To all this, it should be added that Coleridge evidently found Malone’s sedulous historicism distasteful. In public, Coleridge moderated the intensity of his antipathy. John Payne Collier reports his remark “that although Malone had collected a great many external particulars regarding the age of each play, they were all, in Coleridge’s mind, much less satisfactory than the knowledge to be obtained from internal evidence” (Raysor, Shakespearean Criticism, 2.26). In his Notebooks, however, Coleridge pulled no punches. An entry from February 1808 imagines a séance in which “Rival Editors have recourse to Necromancy to know from Shakespeare himself who of them is the fittest to edit and illustrate him,” but before the ceremony can be completed, “Malone leaps up” and cries “No! No! Let me alone,” upon which Coleridge hurls invective against “that eternal Bricker-up of Shakspeare—Registers, Memorandum Books, and Bill, Jack, and Harry, Tom, Walter, & Gregory, Charles, Dick, and Jim &c &c were lived at that time, but that nothing more is

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known of them—but oh the importance when half a dozen Players’ Wills can be made to stretch thro’ half a hundred or more of pages—tho’ not one word in them that by any force can be made to illustrate either the times or life or writings of Shakspere, or indeed of any times” (Coburn, Notebooks, 3.1.3267). That “Malone constructs the text that Coleridge reads” is no doubt true in a trivially literal sense, at least in the case of the Sonnets, but it is hard to believe that the author of these enraged and funny lines might be subject to the continuous and radical inf luence Stallybrass wants to suggest. 6. Rorty acknowledges that there “is no reason why a fascist could not be a pragmatist” (Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 23); Dollimore admits that “there is nothing to stop homophobia . . . from appropriating the constructionist view” (478); for Fish’s “no consequences” argument, see Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 315–467. 7. I am thinking of the Rossetti archive in Virginia, REED in Toronto, pretty much anything by D. F. McKenzie and, more immediately relevant to the subject of this book, William Sherman’s Used Books and John King’s collection on Tudor Books and Readers—the list could be expanded considerably.

3 New Theatricalism and the Repudiation of Literary Interest 1.

The effect, as Burke describes it, is not necessarily gendered. His examples include Flavius in Timon and the servants in Antony (Newstok, p. 105, 126), to which we might want to add (apart from Portia’s death) Lucius’s song in Julius Caesar, put at the center of the play by Richard Linklater in his wonderful movie Me and Orson Welles. 2. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser have challenged Blayney’s conclusions, arguing that the market for playbooks was more substantial than Blayney allows. Blayney’s claim that we have been exaggerating this market may itself be an exaggeration, or at least exceed the available evidence, which remains inconclusive, if only because (as Farmer and Lesser acknowledge) the meaning of popularity and the magnitude of commercial appeal in such a different economic situation is impossible to determine once and for all. There are no “inescapable facts” in this dispute—neither in Blayney nor in the long-standing tradition extended by Gurr which assumes that Shakespeare was not interested in readers. 3. See Erne (pp. 134–91), Gurr (“Maximal and Minimal Texts”), and Hirrel for recent accounts, coming at the question from different positions. Hirrel’s is particularly worth noting for the richness of its bibliographical citation, and for its revisionary conclusion (based on pushing the slender and ambiguous evidence rather hard) that even the long playscripts could have been performed without abridgment on Renaissance stages. There is also useful information and interesting speculation in earlier accounts by Wilson (pp. 90–2) and Empson (“The Length”).

4 1.

New Textualism and the Crisis in Editing

In 1633, Sir Henry Herbert declared that “All old plays ought to bee brought to the Master of the Revells, and have his allowance to them, for which he should have his fee.” But this was a new or more rigorously applied policy under a Master who had grown increasingly authoritarian as his tenure advanced. A few weeks after Herbert assumed the duties of the office in 1623, he authorized revivals for two plays previously reviewed by Sir George Buc on the basis evidently of nothing more than a verbal assurance that there were no profane performance additions or revisions. For one of these, he was even willing to overlook the loss of the originally licensed copy (“the allowed booke”), and in both cases he waived his

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Notes

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

fee. These look like instances of a mere pro forma process with a quick turnaround. The time-consuming process McMillin imagines for Othello would have occurred under an even more permissive regime than that of the early Herbert. See Adams, pp. 20–1; Bentley, pp. 158–61; and Bawcutt, p. 142 and pp. 182–3. See Greg, Shakespeare Folio, p. 370; Honigmann, Texts of “Othello,” pp. 145–6; and Evans, Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1299. McMillin is no exception. “I set this down,” he says of his dictation scenario, “more assertively than is perhaps warranted” (p. 35). “To observe at all,” D. F. McKenzie remarks, “is to bestow meaning of some kind on the thing observed; to gather particular pieces of evidence is to seek those relevant to some preconceived notion of their utility” (3–4). “To perceive,” as Morse Peckham puts it, “is to categorize a configuration by ascribing to it the attributes of a conventionalized category . . . Sign perception is not a passive response to a stimulus but a dynamic interaction involving both sign and interpretation . . . Ultimately, to perceive is to choose, will, intend” (p. 90, Peckham’s emphases). Like turtles, it’s interpretation all the way down. In “Hamlet’s ‘sullied’ or ‘solid’ Flesh,” Bowers dismisses the mere “opinion” of “literary argument,” where “little certainty can obtain,” in favor of the “mechanical evidence of bibliography” by which he “can now expose an error in criticism” and “establish the text for an individual reading” (pp. 44, 47). But in On Editing Shakespeare, he maintains that “the sole function of linguistic analysis and of textual bibliography, with all its mechanical aids, is to guide an editor’s critical intelligence” (p. 178). For a fair and informed review of New Bibliography’s “mixed signals” on this matter, see Maguire’s Shakespearean Suspect Texts, pp. 42–59. For the “implied author,” see Wayne C. Booth. For the inferred author, see Bowers himself who, in a less apocalyptic passage than the one I just quoted, identifies the goal of editorial work as “to approximate as nearly as possible an inferential authorial fair copy” (“Textual Criticism,” p. 26). The passage about prompt books is quoted from Greg’s Dramatic Documents by Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, p. 44. The passage about the unaccommodating author is quoted from Greg’s Editorial Problem by Joseph Loewenstein, p. 36, who remarks that, “When we casually attribute a monological, idealized, and stipulative attitude to textuality to prepostmodern critics, we should not suppose ourselves to be referring to Greg” (p. 39). Stephen Orgel seems to be unique in his insouciant acknowledgment of a contradiction between his editorial theory and practice. Like Werstine, Leah Marcus is closer to the normal New Textualist mode of refusing to recognize inconsistency. In a piece called “Confessions of a Reformed Uneditor (II),” Marcus admits that editing Queen Elizabeth just after writing Unediting the Renaissance leaves her with “a bit of explaining to do,” which she does by claiming that “Contrary to some readers’ interpretation of Unediting the Renaissance, the book was aimed primarily not at editors” (1072). But since Unediting the Renaissance declares itself at the outset to be “designed as a contribution to the newly active field of textual studies,” in which “scholarly editing” is “coming to be understood as a form of cultural practice” that proceeds by “revealing, even f launting, its own plastic energies,” and since the first section of the book concludes by advocating “Unediting” as “an activity that all editors should engage in as part of their own revisionary efforts” (pp. 3–5), it is small wonder if such a sharp-eyed analyst as Jonathan Crewe should take the program as targeted to editors and designed specifically to limit editorial work to an “anti-interventionist or restorative editorial practice” (p. 24).

5 1.

211

Romantic Antitheatricalism and Formalist Values

(“New Contexts,” p. 184). In a book published in 2007, a year before Egan’s piece, A. D. Nuttall commends “Erne’s cogently argued” book for standing up to “the wind of fashion”

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2.

3.

4.

5.

Notes

(p. 402), but two years later, Ros King refers, without mentioning (or having to mention) Erne’s work, “to the currently fashionable view that Shakespeare wrote in order to be read.” (Fashion may be unstable and hard to define, but it is evidently a bad thing.) For some other examples, coming at the question independently and from different directions, see Richard Dutton’s “Shakespeare: the Birth of the Author” (originally published in 1996), Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (2000), Patrick Cheney (2004), and the collection on Shakespeare’s Book, including an Afterword by Erne, edited by Richard Meek et al (2004). Erne himself cites Harry Berger’s Imaginary Audition (1989) from which his quotation about “ ‘the stage-centered approach’ ” is taken, and (as we have seen) he elsewhere nods to E. A. J. Honigmann’s seminal suggestions in The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text, a book that has become an increasingly rich resource to Shakespeare studies over the years. To this list might be added an early precursor in Sigurd Burckhardt’s Shakespearean Meanings (1968), which at the outset dismisses the “odd superstition” that “nothing can be part of Shakespeare’s intention that cannot be communicated directly across footlights,” and proclaims that “to be understood,” Shakespeare “must be read—with attention to somewhat minute detail” (p. vii). John Bluck’s aquatint, reproduced at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s website (http:// www.vam.ac.uk/tco/images/image/45572-popup.html), represents an 1808 performance in the Drury Lane Theater designed by Henry Holland in 1794. The theater burned down in 1809, and the Kean performances described in this chapter took place in the new Drury Lane designed by Benjamin Dean Wyatt in 1812. Wyatt reduced the capacity of Holland’s theater from 3600 to 3060 spectators, but it remained a huge space, and as Barnes and Patmore indicate, the problems with visibility and acoustics continued to encourage elaborate spectacle and histrionic declamation at the expense of more nuanced dramatic effects. Beyond my obligations to Michael Booth for material in this paragraph, I am indebted to Richard Leacroft’s chapter on “Picture Frames and Proscenium Walls.” For claims about Restoration origins, consider Martin Meisel’s claim that pictorialism, “in the sense of [the stage’s] being perspectivally organized and acutely aware of the visual ensemble, including scenery and spectacle,” goes back at least to “Davenant’s Restoration extravaganzas” (p. 39). For possible pre-Restoration origins, consider Joseph Roach’s suggestion that “f lying machines and pyrotechnics” in The Enchanted Island, Shadwell’s operatic adaptation of The Tempest (1674), “expanded the franchise of a privileged spectatorial position—the right to see everything, even mysteries, clearly.” Since this production “quite possibly could have been quoting” an elaborate production staged for Louis XIV at Versailles (p. 61), we might infer an even earlier English origin for the “perspectivally organized” pictorial stage in Jacobean court masques. Foakes points out that the Collier’s 1856 edition, from which this passage ultimately derives, is suspect (Lectures, 1. pp. 162–72); but the version Foakes prints from Collier’s unpublished longhand notes (ibid, p. 357) is, though less fully developed, substantially the same. Attributing “sphere of humanity” to Jonson, for instance: “This quotation still eludes research,” according to Lamb’s editor’s note in 1904 [p. 416], and it apparently continues to do so. Gabriel Egan informs me that “sphaer of humanity” appears about halfway through Act 3 of Shackerly Marmion’s 1641 play The Antiquary. It is unlikely that Lamb read The Antiquary, but Marmion’s locution may occupy some space on the unmapped path leading to Lamb’s usage.

6 Romantic Authorship and Professional Values 1.

For “myriad-minded” in Coleridge, see (with approximate dates of composition) Coburn, Notebooks, 3.3285 (1808); Engell, p. 19 (1815); Foakes, Lectures, 1, pp. 112, 114, 119 (1818); and Rooke, p. 453 (1818).

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2. For some other examples in Coleridge, see Foakes, Lectures, 1. p. 225 and 1.p. 528. White adds that the idea “originates much earlier in the eighteenth century,” probably thinking of “the Proteus of the drama” in Richardson’s Philosophical Analysis (p. 42). Engell and Bate associate the idea with “one of the major interests of eighteenth-century English and Scottish criticism, especially after 1750: the concept of the ‘sympathetic imagination,’ ” adding that the “modern theory of Einfühlung (empathy) is one development of this concept” (p. 27, note 2). Palfrey and Stern cite passages from the early and mid seventeenthcentury in which “ ‘Proteus’—the god of shape shifting” is used to describe the ability of “Shakespeare’s chief actor,” if not of Shakespeare himself, “to ‘become’ whatever character one was playing” (p. 45). 3. Hazlitt would have been surprised (and not altogether happy) to find himself yoked together with Coleridge, with whom he often goes out of his way to disagree. For their disagreements, see Bromwich (Hazlitt, pp. 230–60), but for the fundamental similarities underneath the differences, see Natarajan (Hazlitt, p. 7) and Bromwich’s own second thoughts (“Disinterested Imagining”). For divergences between Hazlitt and Keats, see Natarajan, who argues that Shakespeare occupies “a unique and isolated position” for Hazlitt, whose “theory of ordinary genius” emphasizes “the powerful self ” rather than impersonality or negative capability. This claim brings the norm in Hazlitt closer to “mere authorship” and “prevents the confusion with Keats, whose adaptation of Hazlitt is founded upon that isolated case” (Hazlitt, p. 119). 4. Some examples, in alphabetical order: “individual creator (individualist romanticism) . . . as the ‘source’ of art” (Armstrong, p. 155); “Romanticism . . . writers as chroniclers of their own personal histories or their moods” (Allan Bloom, p. 79); “the romantic philosophy that underlies the critical insistence upon solitary inspiration” (McMullan, Introduction, p. 6); “a Romantic aesthetics of genius,” referring everything to “a mental picture of the master-poet at work” (Patterson, 35–6); “a quasi-bardolatrous belief in Shakespeare as . . . the Romantic genius who needed no adjutants” (Vickers, Shakespeare Co-Author, p. 18); “the Romantic concept of genius . . . the creator [as] isolated individual . . . the Romantic ideology of which Jerome McGann wrote so cogently” (Hutcheon, p. 5); “a characteristic Romantic desire” to come “into direct spiritual contact with the poet himself ” (Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, p. 152). 5. Two of these, Abrams and Bate, we have already seen. When Daniel Fineman says that “romantic critics . . . regard ‘the poet . . . himself as the predominant cause and even the end and test of art,’ ” he is quoting from Abrams as “our best authority on the subject” (p. 103), a judgment more open to challenge now, but still defensible. Bate, whose stunning intelligence has access to a vast reserve of knowledge about both Shakespeare and the Romantics, nonetheless regularly repeats the claim that “the Romantics” established “the conventional wisdom” whereby Shakespeare “forged a glorious solo career” in heroic isolation from “the patchwork and frenzy of Henslowe’s script factory” (“In the Script Factory,” 3). He makes the point throughout The Genius of Shakespeare (pp. 37, 90, 99, 103, 151, 163, 168), and continues to make it in more recent work, referring in “The Romantic Stage” (1996) to “the Romantic reading of Renaissance soliloquy” as “the expression (literally, the pressing out) of a sacrosanct interiority” (p. 97), and (in a 2009 interview) to the idea of Shakespeare and Kyd’s collaboration in Edward III as “a more realistic image of Shakespeare than perhaps the romantic view some have of him as a solitary genius” (Malvern). Clifford Siskin is another expert whose testimony seems problematic. He says of the Romantic period that “writing was naturalized at that time by confounding textual effects with authorial behavior—what writers did instead of what writing could do . . . the mode of attention was systematically psychologized; . . . concern shifted from the potentially disruptive power of the technology of writing to the supposedly disrupted personalities of people who wrote” (Historicity, pp. 14–15). As a final example, consider Jack Stillinger who, at the beginning of Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, refers to “the romantic ‘myth of solitary genius’ in my title”

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

Notes

(p. vi, my emphasis). What motivates Stillinger to add romantic to the title of his book? The book is not limited to the texts of Romantic authors (it devotes chapters to The Waste Land and a variety of American novels and films); and as the author of a dozen or more distinguished books on Romantic writers, Stillinger knows they were not particularly invested in the idea of solo authorship, still less in the value of autobiographical revelation on which the idea of solo authorship depends. Only a few pages after tamping romantic into his title phrase, Stillinger remarks on the “theorizing about dramatic speakers and situations” in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and the Biographia: Wordsworth and Coleridge were, he says, both “well aware of poetic ventriloquism. Keats in his letters describes the chameleonlike adaptability of the poet’s sympathetic imagination” (pp. 5–6). But if the Romantics abjured the confessional mode associated with a uniquely individualized authorship, why describe “the myth of solo authorship” as a “romantic” phenomenon? For examples, Graham Bradshaw, William Empson, W. H. Auden, and Richard Lanham (pp. 250, 392, 401, and pp. 410–11). According to McMullan, “post-Romantic criticism” produces Rembrandt in “the image of the lone painter,” and “a postromantic mindset” assumes “a fundamental connection between the state of mind of the playwright” and “the nature of plays produced” (Shakespeare, p. 228, 254). The post in these formulations, however, seems to mean continuing with rather than (as in Holland’s usage) deviating from—for McMullan, once again, “the critical insistence upon solitary inspiration” constitutes “the romantic philosophy” (see note 4 above). There is one notable example in which Keats is taken in his own time to be committed to “encoded autobiography.” Francis Jeffrey, in his notorious Edinburgh Review piece of 1820, complains that Keats’s “ornaments and images” are “poured out without measure or restraint, and with no apparent design but to unburden the breast of the author, and give vent to the overf lowing vein of his fancy” (Matthews, p. 203). Jeffrey, though, described by Wordsworth as “ ‘a depraved Coxcomb; the greatest Dunce, I believe, in this Island,’ ” was astoundingly unresponsive to Keats’s dramatistical ventriloquism—“somewhat,” as Matthews understatedly characterizes him, “out of touch with contemporary movements of taste” (p. 202). Quoted from the Furnivall entry in Campbell (p. 249). For more on Furnivall, see Benzie and Hawkes, “Hank Cinq” (pp. 118–21). See also the Campbell entries for Dowden, Fleay, Gervinus, Ingleby, the New Shakspere Society, Robertson, Swinburne, and Verse Tests. Marjorie Garber (“Amateur,” pp. 42–7) puts an interestingly different spin on Bloom’s antiprofessionalism, which she understands in terms of a commitment to performativity, sustained throughout Bloom’s career independently of any Romantic context. This is not altogether fair to Bloom, whose work is more capacious than Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. As Desmet describes them (“Harold Bloom”), the inf luential anthologies of criticism he produced for Chelsea House operate on a different register, to conform with academic norms.

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I N DE X

Abrams, M(eyer) H(oward), 155, 174, 180–1, 194, 213n5 Adams, J(ohn) Q(uincy), 211n1 Alpers, Paul, 44 Althusser, Louis, 54, 55, 164 Amis, Kingsley (Lucky Jim), 2, 202 Aquinas, Thomas, 19–20 Aristotle, 3, 109, 152 Armstrong, Isobel, 213n4 Arnold, Matthew, 83, 199 Attridge, Derek, 105 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh), 214n6 authorship, see Romantic criticism, bardolatry and authorship; Shakespearean authorship Babcock, R(obert) W(itbeck), 7 “bad” quartos, 88, 91–3, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 111, 113, 121, 131–2 Bancroft, Squire, 159 Barish, Jonas A., 152 Barnes, Thomas, 156, 157, 164, 212n2 Bate, Jonathan, 129, 180, 182, 183, 213n5 Bate, Walter Jackson, 213n2 Baudelaire, Charles, 80 Bawcutt, N(igel) W(illiam), 211n1 Beckett, Samuel (Endgame), 11 Belsey, Catherine, 29, 70–1, 75, 177, 186, 187 Bennett, Susan, 24 Bentley, Gerald Eades, 211n1

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Benzie, William, 214n8 Berger, Jr., Harry, 212ch5n1 Berger, Thomas, 117 Berry, Francis, 106–7, 113 Bevington, David, 32, 207 Bialostosky, Don H., 144 Blackmur, R(ichard) P(almer), 5 Blayney, Peter W. M., 109–10, 210n2 Bloom, Allan, 213n4 Bloom, Harold, 10, 171, 178, 187–92, 195–8, 200, 212ch5n1, 214n8 Blue Rodeo, 87, 89, 108 Bly, Mary, 48 Bonaventure, St., 19–20 Booth, Michael, 159, 170, 212n3 Booth, Wayne C., 211n5 Boswell, James, 7 Boswell the Younger, James, 128, 130 Bourdieu, Pierre, 22, 202, 206 Bowers, Fredson, 65, 118, 126–7, 128, 129, 204, 208ch2n1, 211nn4, 5 see also New Bibliography Bradbury, Malcolm (The History Man), 202 Bradley, A[ndrew] C[ecil], 7, 19, 39, 45, 77, 102, 155, 158, 160–2, 164–5, 182, 187, 197 see also Romantic criticism Bradshaw, Graham, 214n6 Bristol, Michael D., 35, 58, 69, 112, 124–5, 207 Bromwich, David, 193, 213n3 Brooks, Cleanth, 44, 45

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232

Index

Brown, Bill, 83–4 Browne, Sir Thomas, 92, 94 Bruster, Douglas, 41 Burbage, Richard, 56, 102, 213n2 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 212ch5n1 Burke, Edmund, 107, 128 Burke, Kenneth, 57, 80, 102, 210ch3n1 Burke, Seán, 130 Butler, Judith, 24 Byrne, Muriel St. Clare, 100, 105, 113 “camelion poet,” 7, 180, 214n5 see also Romantic criticism, bardolatry and authorship Campbell, Oscar James, 214n8 Carroll, William, 96–7, 98, 104, 113 Cartwright, Kent, 48 Case, Sue-Ellen, 24 Cassidy, John, 50 Cavell, Stanley, 56–9, 61, 207 Cheney, Patrick, 212ch5n1 Cibber, Colley, 162 Clark, Michael P., 21–2, 28, 31 Coburn, Kathleen, 181, 186, 209, 210n5 Cohen, Stephen A., 21, 30–2, 41, 48 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 102, 149, 187, 194, 208n5, 209, 210n5, 212ch6n1, 213nn2, 3, 214n5 see also Romantic criticism Covent Garden Theatre, 159 Culler, Jonathan D., 63–4 Dante Alighieri, 20, 125 Darwin, Charles, 65, 195 Davis, Tracy C., see Postlewait Dawson, Anthony B., 120, 124, 130, 131, 136 de Grazia, Margreta, 55, 65, 72, 129, 195, 208n4 see also “Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” Delbanco, Andrew, 28 de Man, Paul, 143–5, 147–50

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Denham, Sir John, 31 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 35 Desmet, Christy, 197, 207, 214n10 Diamond, Elin, 24, 25 Diderot, Denis, 171, 199 Dillon, George L., 15, 125, 174 Dobson, Michael, 35, 48 Dollimore, Jonathan, 79, 210n6 Dominic, St., 19–20, 77 Donne, John (“Air and Angels”), 2 Doran, Madeleine, 104–5 Dowden, Edward, 193–4, 196, 214n8 Drury Lane Theatre, 24, 156, 159, 161, 212n2 Dutton, Richard, 98–9, 212ch5n1 Eagleton, Terry, 184 Egan, Gabriel, 59–61, 154, 208ch2n1, 211n1, 212n5 Eliot, T(homas) S(terns), 16 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 149, 178, 187, 188, 192 see also Romantic criticism Empson, William, 44, 112–13, 210n3, 214n6 Engell, James, 40, 93, 166, 179, 212n1, 213n2 Erne, Lukas, 10, 110, 123, 154, 210n3, 212ch5n1 and Margaret Jane Kidnie, 117, 139 Evans, Gwynne Blakemore, 121, 211n2 Fahnestock, Jeanne, and Marie Secor, 3, 4, 32 Farmer, Alan B., and Zachary Lesser, 210ch3n2 Faucit, Helena (Lady Martin), 164–5 Felperin, Howard, 73 Felski, Rita, 27–8, 31 Fiennes, Joseph (Shakespeare in Love), 183 Fineman, Daniel, 213n4 Fish, Stanley, 25–6, 32, 74, 75, 79, 199, 210n6 Fleay, F(rederick) G(ard), 194, 214n8

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Index Fletcher, John, 121 Foakes, R(eginald) A(nthony), 37, 63–4, 71, 136, 139, 166, 167, 182, 209, 212n4 formalism, 8, 28, 38, 42–7, 71, 84, 155, 174–6, 178, 187, 197, 198, 205 see also “Historical Formalism”; Kantian aesthetics; “New Formalism”; Shakespeare studies today, misconstruing Romanticism Foucault, Michel, 15, 22, 134–5 Francis, St., 18, 77 Frank, Marcie, 1, 2, 115, 148 Franklin, Phyllis, 145, 149 Frei, Hans W., 82, 83–4 Freud, Sigmund, 39, 128, 133, 194, 195 Frye, Northrop, 58, 63, 77, 82–4 Furnivall, F(rederick) J(ames), 194, 198, 214n8 Fuseli, Henry, 33 Gallie, W(alter) B(ryce), 58 Gallup, Jane, 53 Galperin, William, 145 Garber, Marjorie, 214n9 Garrick, David, 33 Geertz, Clifford, 25, 26, 41, 53, 64–5 Gibson, Rex, 153–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 81, 166, 171, 185 Gombrich, E(rnst) H(ans), 170 Gopnik, Adam, 87–8, 102 Grady, Hugh, 194 Green, Garrett, 199 Greenblatt, Stephen, 2, 3–6, 10, 21, 26, 31, 40, 53, 54, 60, 81, 115, 136, 150, 151–2, 176 Greg, W(alter) W(ilson), 110, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126–8, 129, 131–3, 135, 136, 137, 211nn2, 6; see also New Bibliography Guillory, John, 10, 18, 27–8, 38, 42, 44, 60, 78–9, 109, 113, 202–3, 205

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233

Gurr, Andrew, 97–9, 100, 108–12, 210nn2, 3 Guy, Josephine, and Ian Small, 1, 15, 19, 20, 45 Habicht, Werner, 159, 165 Hamann, Johann Georg, 199 Hanson, Elizabeth, 36 Hartman, Geoffrey, 149 Hawkes, Terence, 114, 177, 186, 214n8 Hazlitt, William, 8, 98, 149, 178, 187, 188, 192 198, 199, 206 see also Romantic criticism Hazlitt, William Carew, 195 Hegel, G(eorg) W(ilhelm) F(riedrich), 18–19, 39, 44, 45, 188, 195, 199 Heidegger, Martin, 149 Helgerson, Richard, 69 Heller, Scott, 27 Herbert, Sir Henry, 210–11n1 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 156, 157, 165, 208intn1 Hirrel, Michael J., 210n3 “Historical Formalism”, 21, 30–1, 41, 48 see also Shakespeare studies today, reconciling aesthetic and contextual interests Holderness, Graham, and Bryan Loughrey, 101, 103 Holderness, Bryan Loughrey, and Andrew Murphy, 58, 65–8, 208ch2n2 Holland, Henry, 161, 212n2 Holland, Peter, 193, 214n7 Honigmann, E[rnst] A(nselm) J(oaquim), 110, 119–20, 123, 138, 211n2, 212ch5n1 Housman, A(lfred) E(dward), 126–7 Hutcheon, Linda, 213n5 Irace, Kathleen O., 91, 92, 93, 99–100, 103, 104, 109, 112 ISA (International Shakespeare Association), 56, 76

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234

Index

Jackson, H(eather) J., 208n5 Jackson, MacD(onald) P., 120, 130 James, Henry, 112, 202 (The Golden Bowl) James I, 35, 56 Jameson, Fredric, 26–7, 53, 54, 115 Jeffrey, Francis, 214n7 Johnson, Nora, 35–6 Johnson, Samuel, 7, 10–11, 24 Jones, John, 95 Jowett, John, 35, 36, 92, 93 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 171 Kantian aesthetics disinterested satisfaction, 23, 40–5, 106 interpreting subjects vs. formal objects, 18–19, 167–8 see also Romantic criticism, Kantian aesthetics Kastan, David Scott, 139, 177, 186, 187 Keats, John, 149, 178 see also Romantic criticism Keilin, Sean, see Orgel Kernan, Alvin, 174, 175, 186, 187 Kerrigan, William W., 195, 196 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 117, 139 King, John N., 210n7 King, Ros, 212ch5n1 Knapp, Jeffrey, 69–70, 71, 208n3 Knapp, Steven, 168 Knight, Jeffrey Todd, 59 Knowles, Richard, 97, 110 Krieger, Murray, 22, 45 Kuhn, Thomas S., 17, 53, 125 Lamb, Charles, see Romantic criticism Lamb, Charles, and Mary Lamb (Tales from Shakespeare), 153–4 Lanham, Richard A., 214n6 Leacroft, Richard, 159, 212n3 Leggatt, Alexander, 105–6, 107, 113, 156 Lesser, Zachary, see Farmer Levin, Richard, 58–9, 60, 78 Levine, George, 27, 45–6

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Levinson, Marjorie, 21, 30, 41, 208ch1n2 Linklater, Richard (Me and Orson Welles), 210ch3n1 Loesberg, Jonathan, 18, 22, 42–3, 46, 53, 56, 71 Loewenstein, Joseph, 211n6 Looney, J(ohn) Thomas, 34 Loughrey, Bryan, see Holderness Mackintosh, Iain, 161 MacLeish, Archibald, 43 Magnusson, A(ugusta) Lynne, 29 Maguire, Laurie, 117, 211nn4, 6 Malone, Edmund, 37, 55, 72–3, 128–9, 131, 139, 182, 192–3, 195, 208–10ch2n5 Marcus, Leah, 118, 211n7 Marlowe, Christopher, 55, 56, 81, 189–90 Martin, Peter, 128 Marvell, Andrew, 102, 190 Marx, Karl, 115, 195 materialist criticism currently normative, 59–60 intellectual coherence, 59–68, 91–4, 101, 132–3 negative desire, 6, 61, 78–81, 81–4, 115, 132–8 New Textualism, 57, 59, 61–3, 65–8, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 132–9 New Theatricalism, 94–103 political consequence, 6, 54–5, 68–70, 78–9, 111–13, 203 reason/knowledge vs. hope/desire, 77–8, 123, 133–4 repudiating literary/aesthetic interest, 6, 27–8, 36, 70–1, 78, 84, 88–9, 104–5, 108–9, 134, 174 “Materiality of the Shakespeare Text, The” (de Grazia and Stallybrass), 57–9, 61–9, 73, 77–9, 81, 94, 117–18, 204 Matthews, G(eoffrey) M., 214n7 Maurer, Mary, 48 McDonald, Russ, 29, 46

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Index McGann, Jerome, 8, 69, 144–5, 149, 213n4 McGinn, Colin, 207 McKenna, Wayne, 163 McKenzie, D(onald) F(rancis), 118, 133, 210n7, 211n3 McLeod, Randall, 117, 137 McMillin, Scott, 69, 93–7, 99, 101, 102, 105, 109, 119–25, 131, 134, 211ch4nn1, 2 McMullan, Gordon, 118, 139, 213n4, 214n7 Meisel, Martin, 162–3, 212n3 Melchiori, Giorgio, 104, 137 Menand, Louis, 50, 75, 76 Michaels, Walter Benn, 25 Miles, Robert, 145 Miller, Stephen, 91–3, 100, 105, 109 Milton, John, 19, 38–9, 77, 168, 178–9, 190 Mitchell, W(iliam) J(ohn) T(homas), 26 Moi, Toril, 54 Montgomery, George Edgar, 155–6, 169 Morgann, Maurice, 7, 187 Mowat, Barbara A., 117, 129, 138, 139 Müller, Adam, 160, 165 Mulvey, Laura, 54, 55 Murphy, Andrew, see Holderness Natarajan, Uttara, 199, 213n3 Neill, Michael, 121–2, 139 New Bibliography, 65–8, 118–19, 122, 123, 124, 125–31, 136, 137, 139, 208ch2n1, 211n5 New Criticism, 29–30, 33, 41, 42, 43, 44, 73, 197 see also formalism “New Formalism”, 21, 28, 29, 30, 41, 205, 208ch1n2 see also Shakespeare studies today, return of the aesthetic New Textualism, see materialist criticism New Theatricalism, see materialist criticism

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235

Nuttall, A(nthony) D(avid), 190, 207, 211ch5n1 Ogburn, Charlton, 34 Ong, Walter Jackson, 130 Orgel, Stephen, 33–6, 54, 136, 211n7 and Sean Keilin, 59, 204 Palfrey, Simon, 213n2 Park, Roy, 163, 173–4 Parker, Patricia, 28–9, 30, 31, 47–8 Patmore, P(eter) G(eorge), 156, 157, 164, 212n2 Pechter, Edward, 207 Peckham, Morse, 211n3 Perloff, Marjorie, 48–51, 53 Peters, Julie Stone, 173 Poole, Adrian, 207 Porter, Carolyn, 54 Posner, Richard, 50 Postlewait, Thomas, 72 and Tracy C. Davis, 24, 25, 26 “Preprofessionalism”, 202–3 Pritchard, Mrs. [Hannah], 33 professional values, 23, 49–51, 53, 72–3, 128, 192–5 see also Romantic criticism, professional values “Proteus”, 179, 180, 186, 213n2 see also Romantic criticism, bardolatry and authorship Ransom, John Crowe, 44 Rasmussen, Eric, 97 Rasmussen, Mark David, 21, 29, 32, 208ch1n2 Roach, Joseph, 212n3 Romantic criticism affective interpretive exertion, 17–18, 73, 169–70, 188–9 (Bradley); 71, 168–9, 171 (Coleridge); 185, 191 (Emerson); 8, 170, 208Intn1 (Hazlitt); 7, 208Intn1 (Keats); 170–2 (Lamb); 170, 171 (Wordsworth)

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236

Index

Romantic criticism—Continued antitheatricalism, 151–2, 154, 158, 160–1, 164, 167 (Bradley); 151, 154, 166–7 (Coleridge); 151, 155, 160, 164, 169, 174 (Hazlitt); 151, 154, 155, 156–7, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163–4, 165–6, 167, 168 (Lamb) bardolatry and authorship, 182 (Bradley); 7, 8, 71, 93, 178–9, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186 (Coleridge); 7, 129, 139, 161, 179, 180, 181–2, 183, 184–5 (Hazlitt); 93, 181, 182, 183, 185–6 (Emerson); 7, 179, 181, 214nn5, 7 (Keats); 179–80, 214n5 (Wordsworth) differences within, 16, 181, 199 (Coleridge and Hazlitt); 181, 213n3 (Keats and Hazlitt) Kantian aesthetics, 18–19, 40–4, 47 (Bradley); 8, 36–7, 40, 43, 47, 71, 168, 171 (Coleridge); 40 (Wordsworth) origin of literary studies, 1, 6–7, 70–1, 148, 149 professional values, 73, 182, 195–6 (Bradley); 36–7, 72–3, 182, 192–3, 208–10ch2n5 (Coleridge); 183, 191–2, 195–6, 198 (Hazlitt) provocative rhetoric, 158, 161 (Bradley); 161, 172, 175 (Hazlitt); 156, 161, 171, 172, 173, 175 (Lamb) Rorty, Richard, 74–5, 76, 78, 79, 125, 133, 210n6 Rosenbaum, Ron, 88 Rutter, Carol Chillington, 207 Rymer, Thomas, 172 Ryzepka, Charles J., 147–9 SAA (Shakespeare Association of America), 30, 76 Sadowski, Piotr, 207 Said, Edward, 4–5, 11, 23–4, 25, 26, 40

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Saunders, George, 159 Schechner, Richard, 25 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 7, 44, 71, 157, 167 Schryer, Stephen, 38, 49 Secor, Marie, see Fahnestock Shakespeare studies today affective vs. cognitive foundation, 2, 15–20, 32–7, 42, 44–51, 124–5, 131, 139–40 contextualist turn, 2, 4–6, 23–5 “crisis” or “impasse”, 1, 2, 15–17, 19–20, 26, 28–9, 30, 32, 45–7, 54–6, 115, 117–18, 139, 145–50, 203 instability, 54–6 intellectual coherence, 26–7, 33–41 misconstruing Romanticism, 1, 8, 42–4, 71–3, 134, 155, 172–6, 178, 180–1, 182–3, 186–7, 189–92, 208–10ch2n5, 213nn4, 5 reconciling aesthetic and contextual interests, 28–32, 49–51 return of the aesthetic, 4, 6, 21–3, 27, 51 see also materialist criticism Shakespearean authorship controversy, 34 cultural function (“Shakespeare”), 33–6 psychological/historical category, see Romantic criticism, bardolatry and authorship; Shakespeare studies today, misconstruing Romanticism Shakespeare’s works Antony and Cleopatra, 54, 110, 185, 191, 210ch3n1 Coriolanus, 48, 161, 190, 191 Cymbeline, 36 Hamlet, 9–10, 50, 51, 63, 66, 76, 88, 97, 99–101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 110, 113, 134–5, 171, 180, 185, 187–91, 196, 211n4

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Index 1 Henry IV, 51 2 Henry IV, 204 Henry V, 92, 97–100, 108, 109, 113 Julius Caesar, 210ch3n1 King Lear, 57, 58, 60, 63, 65, 96–7, 98, 102, 105, 106, 117, 139, 152, 167, 190, 196 Macbeth, 33–4, 36, 61, 110, 114, 157, 160, 171, 176 The Merchant of Venice, 75, 153 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 100 Othello, 37, 93–7, 101, 102–3, 105, 113, 118, 119–22, 123, 130, 139, 156, 164, 175, 182, 190, 201, 211ch4nn1, 2 Richard II, 106 Romeo and Juliet, 107, 191 Sonnet 138, 203 The Taming of The Shrew, 91, 92, 100, 105 Titus Andronicus, 106, 107 The Two Noble Kinsmen, 114, 190 The Winter’s Tale, 36 Shand, G. B., 101–2, 103 Shaw, Artie, 4 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 180 Sherman, William, 210n7 Siskin, Clifford, 15, 26, 144, 149, 213n5 see also Warner Sisson, C(harles) J(asper), 192–3, 194, 199 Skura, Meredith, 124, 138 Slights, Jessica, 207 Small, Ian, see Guy Stallybrass, Peter, 69, 72, 77, 208–10n5 see also “Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” Starobinski, Jean, 149 Stavisky, Aron Y., 193 Stern, Tiffany, 100, 120, 213n2 Stevens, Wallace (“The Emperor of Ice Cream”), 202 Stillinger, Jack, 213–14n5 Stoppard, Tom (Shakespeare in Love), 183

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Taming of A Shrew, The, 91–2, 100, 105 Tanselle, G(eorge) Thomas, 17, 33, 118, 126, 129, 137 Tate, Nahum, 162 Taylor, Gary, 98–9, 117, 121, 213n4 Thatcher, David, 180 Theatrical pictorialism, 159, 162–5, 169–71, 176, 212n3 see also Romantic criticism, antitheatricalism Thompson, Ann, 118, 139 Tolstoy, Leo (Anna Karenina), 1 Traub, Valerie, 55 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 25, 26 Uhlig, Claus, 19 Urkowitz, Steven, 91, 92, 93 Vickers, Brian, 100, 213n4 Warner, William B., and Clifford Siskin, 79–80 Warren, Austin, 45 Warren, Michael J., 117, 138 Wellek, René, 45, 146 Wells, Stanley, 121 Werstine, Paul, 69, 104, 112, 113, 123, 131–6, 137, 138–9, 211n7 see also materialist criticism, New Textualism Whigham, Frank, 80 White, Allon, 69 White, Hayden, 64, 74, 124, 125 White, Robert S., 179, 213n2 Whitney, Charles, 177 Wilde, Oscar, 76 Williams, Gary Jay, 169 Williams, Raymond, 25, 80 Wilson, F(rank) P(ercy), 100, 126, 210n3 Wilson, John Dover, 126 Wimsatt, Jr., William Kurtz, 3, 44, 45

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Index

Wolfson, Susan J., 145–9 Wordsworth, William, 23, 79–80, 105, 209 see also Romantic criticism Worthen, William B., 24, 25, 35, 46, 152–3, 154, 173, 174, 175–6, 177, 186 Woudhuysen, Henry R., 124

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Wyatt, Benjamin Dean, 159, 161–2, 212n2 Yachnin, Paul J., 207 Yaeger, Patricia, 54 Zamir, Tzachi, 207 Zoffani, Johann, 33

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