Myriad-minded Shakespeare: Essays, chiefly on the tragedies and problem comedies

247 Pages·1989·23.106 MB·English

by  E. A. J. Honigmann (auth.)

MYRIAD-MINDED SHAKESPEARE
Myriad-tninded
Shakespeare
Essays, chiefly on the tragedies and
problem comedies
E. A. J. Honigmann
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-19816-0 ISBN 978-1-349-19814-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19814-6
© E. A. J. Honigmann 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1989 978-0-333-41939-7
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United Statesof America in 1989
ISBN 978-0-312-02440-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Honigmann, E.A. J.
Myriad-minded Shakespeare: essays, chiefly on the tragedies
and problem comedies I E. A. J. Honigmann.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-02440-6:$35.00 (est.)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
PR2976.H58 1989
822.3'3---dc19 88-18834
CJP
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Note on texts and references vii
Bibliographical note viii
Introduction: Myriad-minded Shakespeare and the
modern reader 1
1 In search of William Shakespeare: the public and the
private man 4
2 Politics, rhetoric and will-power in Julius Caesar 21
3 The politics in Hamlet and 'the world of the play' 43
4 Trends in the discussion of Shakespeare's characters:
Othello 60
5 The uniqueness of King Lear: genre and production
problems 73
6 Past, present and future in Macbeth and Antony and
Cleopatra 93
7 Shakespeare suppressed: the unfortunate history of
Troilus and Cressida 112
8 All's Well That Ends Well: a 'feminist' play? 130
9 Shakespeare's mingled yarn and Measure for Measure 147
10 On not trusting Shakespeare's stage-directions 169
11 Shakespeare at work: preparing, writing, rewriting 188
m
~~
Index 233
v
Note on texts and references
Quotations from Shakespeare, and line-references, are taken from
Peter Alexander's William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Collins,
1951). A single line-reference after a quotation is to the first line
quoted. Other Elizabethan plays are usually quoted from The Revels
Plays (Manchester University Press). Old-spelling quotations from
Elizabethan texts are modernised, except that I retain old spelling
when there is a special reason for doing so: I hope that this will
not cause confusion.
vii
Bibliographical note
Some of the essays in this volume are revised versions of earlier
publications or lectures, or reprint parts of earlier publications, as
indicated below. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for
permission to reprint. I have not sought to disguise the fact that
the lectures were written as lectures: my occasional exhortations
to attentive listeners will not confuse the attentive reader.
1. 'In search of William Shakespeare: the public and the private
man.' Partly based on a review in The New York Review of Books,
vol. 31 (17 Jan 1985) pp. 2~, and on 'Shakespeare and London's
immigrant community circa 1600', in Elizabethan and Modern Studies
Presented to Willem Schrickx, ed. J. P. Vander Motten (R.U.G.,
1985). See also my Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries (Macmil
lan, 1982) ch. 1.
3. 'The politics in Hamlet and the "world of the play".' From
Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 5, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard
Harris (Edward Arnold, 1963).
4. 'Trends in the discussion of Shakespeare's characters: Othello.'
From Handelingen van het XXIX Vlaams Filologencongres (Antwerp,
privately printed, 1973). Some of the ideas in this chapter were
later developed in my Shakespeare: seven tragedies, the dramatist's
manipulation of response (Macmillan, 1976).
5. 'The uniqueness of King Lear: genre and production problems.'
A lecture delivered on 23 April1983 to the Deutsche Shakespeare
Gesellschaft West. Published in Jahrbuch, 1984.
6. 'Past, present and future in Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.'
Partly based on a lecture delivered in Los Angeles, 1987, at a one
day conference on Macbeth sponsored by the University of California
at Los Angeles.
7. 'Shakespeare suppressed: the unfortunate history of Troilus
and Cressida.' Partly based on a lecture delivered to the Caltech
Weingart Conference at the Henry E. Huntington Library, 1982:
see Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann
(University of Chicago Press, 1985).
9. 'Shakespeare's mingled yarn and Measure for Measure.' A
lecture delivered on 23 April 1981 at the British Academy. From
Proceedings of the British Academy, LXVII (1983).
viii
Bibliographical note ix
10. 'On not trusting Shakespeare's stage-directions.' Partly re
printed from Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976), and partly based on a
lecture delivered to the Renaissance Conference of Southern
California, 1987.
11. 'Shakespeare at work: preparing, writing, rewriting.' Partly
based on The Stability of Shakespeare's Text (1965), passim, and
on 'Shakespeare as a reviser', in Textual Criticism and Literary
Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (University of Chicago Press,
1985).
Introduction: Myriad-minded
Shakespeare and the modern reader
[Shakespeare] first studied patiently, meditated
deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge,
become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to
his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to
that stupendous power, by which he stands
alone, with no equal or second in his own class.
(Coleridge)1
My title, Myriad-minded Shakespeare, has a sting in its tail. We all
agree, I suppose, that Shakespeare's exceptional knowledge
contributed to 'that stupendous power, by which he stands
alone', but what of his reader's knowledge? How myriad-minded
must his reader be? In the theatre the plays are enjoyable
without any special knowledge whatsoever. I have seen twelve
year-olds, unhampered by study of the play at school, entranced
by a performance of Henry V, and of some of the comedies. The
groundlings at the Globe, who are given a finger-wagging in
Hamlet ('groundlings who, for the most part, are capable of
nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise'), enjoyed even
Shakespeare's most sophisticated play, for we hear from a
contemporary witness of 'the vulgar's' delight in Shakespeare's
tragedies, one in particular: 'faith, it should please all, like Prince
Hamlet!'2 Shakespeare himself, however, distinguished between
'the unskilful' in his audience and 'the judicious', adding that
one judicious spectator 'o'erweighs a whole theatre of others.' So
I rephrase my question: how myriad-minded will the judicious
spectator or reader have to be?
Shakespeare certainly expected the judicious of his own day to
'understand minutely', as Coleridge put it, the finer shades of
language, of social difference, and of contemporary intellectual
debate (e.g. concerning ghosts or melancholy in Hamlet). Four
hundred years later we have to labour to acquire this knowledge,
1
2 Myriad-minded Shakespeare
and it will sit less comfortably in our minds. In addition we have
to evaluate the teachers who inflict this knowledge upon us, for
they all offer different explanations and they cannot all be right.
('Are Hamlet's critics mad? or are they only pretending to be?')
Today's judicious reader or theatre-goer, it seems, will have to
be even more myriad-minded than his ancestors.
If that is an excessively daunting challenge, he can at least aim
to be open-minded. Too many of the books published almost
daily on Shakespeare, unfortunately, are the very opposite -
narrowly restricted to a single approach. Either a specialist
wishes to sell his thesis, or a generalist writes essentially the
same essay about several plays, because he wants to sell a book.
In this collection I attempt something different. It introduces the
reader to the great variety of approaches to Shakespeare, dealing
with genre, character, plot, the political and sexist implications
of the plays, their sources, staging-problems, response problems,
textual problems, the dramatist's character and biography, and
so on, usually relating several of these narrower concerns to
each other, to bring out the interconnectedness of all the critical
and scholarly questions that we ask today. The method changes
from chapter to chapter, but presupposes a reader who, if not
myriad-minded, still wishes to be aware of the multiplicity of
critical procedures. In short, this book may serve as an
introduction to several (but not all) important 'specialist'
approaches. As far as possible, however, I avoid surveys of
recent research: instead, I plunge straight into problems, and
show in passing that it is rarely safe to restrict oneself to a single
specialist view. The open-minded reader learns that Shakespeare
criticism is a jeu sans frontieres.
This collection consists of several unpublished essays, and of
others that are already in print (some in out-of-the way books
and journals). I have excluded essays from my own books, and
also work that would be too boringly technical for the general
reader. For the reader's convenience I have concentrated on
plays that are usually grouped together: five essays on tragedies,
three on problem plays. To broaden the book's horizons I have
added one essay on stage directions, illustrating the important
consequences of textual study for producers and actors; another
on Shakespeare as a writer and as a reviser, the latter a topic
that has provoked heated debate in the recent past, and is likely
to continue to do so; and a third one on Shakespeare's