Shakespeare and the question of theory PDF
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Shakespeare and the Question of Theory Shakespeare and the Question of Theory Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman Methuen New York and London First published in 1985 by Methuen, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Published in Great Britain by Methuen & Co. Ltd 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE The collection as a whole © 1985 Methuen & Co. Ltd and Methuen, Inc. Chapter 13 © 1984 Stanley Cavell Other chapters © 1985 the respective authors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Shakespeare and the question of theory. I. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation— Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Parker, Patricia, 1945—. II. Hartman, Geoffrey H. PR2976.S3373 I985 822.3′3 85–I3835 ISBN 0 416 369200 0 (Print Edition) 0 416 36930 8 (pbk.) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Shakespeare and the question of theory. I. Shakespeare, William—Criticism and interpretation I. Parker, Patricia II. Hartman, Geoffrey H. 822.3′3 PR2976 ISBN 0-203-41474-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-41477-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 416 369200 0 (Print Edition) 0 416 36930 8 Pbk Contents PATRICIA PARKER Introduction vi I Language, rhetoric, deconstruction 1 1 HOWARD FELPERIN 3 “Tongue-tied our queen?”: the deconstruction of presence in The Winter’s Tale 2 ELIZABETH FREUND 19 “Ariachne’s broken woof ”: the rhetoric of citation in Troilus and Cressida 3 GEOFFREY H.HARTMAN 37 Shakespeare’s poetical character in Twelfth Night 4 PATRICIA PARKER 55 Shakespeare and rhetoric: “dilation” and “delation” in Othello II The woman’s part 75 5 ELAINE SHOWALTER 77 Representing Ophelia: women, madness, and the responsibilities of feminist criticism 6 NANCY VICKERS 95 “The blazon of sweet beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece 7 JONATHAN GOLDBERG 117 Shakespearean inscriptions: the voicing of power 8 JOEL FINEMAN 139 The turn of the shrew III Politics, economy, history 161 9 STEPHEN GREENBLATT 163 Shakespeare and the exorcists 10 RENÉ GIRARD 187 The politics of desire in Troilus and Cressida v 11 HARRY BERGER, JR 209 Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare text: the first three scenes of the Henriad 12 THOMAS M.GREENE 229 Pitiful thrivers: failed husbandry in the Sonnets 13 STANLEY CAVELL 245 “Who does the wolf love?”: Coriolanus and the interpretations of politics IV The question of Hamlet 273 14 ROBERT WEIMANN 275 Mimesis in Hamlet 15 MARGARET W.FERGUSON 291 Hamlet: letters and spirits 16 TERENCE HAWKES 309 Telmah Notes on contributors 331 PATRICIA PARKER Introduction Every major rethinking of literature and theory has a way of returning to particular texts, whatever the theoretical resistance to the very idea of a canon; and often to discover that what was canonical was not so much, or not just, the text in question but the received readings of it, its normalization as a cultural icon or familiar construct. The theoretical ferment which, in Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase here, “has affected (some would say afflicted)” literary studies during the past decade has called into question traditional ways of thinking about, classifying, and interpreting texts. And so, perhaps, it was inevitable that a book such as this—which both begins with “theory” and questions it in turn—should be devoted to Shakespeare, arguably the most canonical and culturally pre- eminent of subjects. Shakespeare himself has been not just the focus of a variety of divergent critical movements within recent years but also, increasingly, the locus of emerging debates within, and with, theory itself, as Greenblatt’s own simultaneous use and critique of deconstruction makes clear. Larger theoretical developments have had their echo in what is now amounting to a wholesale reconsideration of the Shakespearean corpus—from the controversy over what constitutes an authoritative “text” for plays which exist in so many versions, to the perception of a kinship between Derridean wordplay or Bakhtinian heteroglossia and Shakespeare’s own inveterate punning, from the exploration by feminist critics of the differing roles of women in Shakespeare to the reopening of historical and ideological questions in ways other than a simple return to the static conservatism of Tillyard’s long-influential Elizabethan World Picture. This is a book, then, both for those interested in Shakespeare and for those interested more generally in the emerging debates within contemporary criticism and theory, since Derrida, Foucault and others first burst upon the consciousness of English-speaking readers almost a generation ago. It begins with what the label “theory” perhaps still most readily brings to mind—analyses of language and figure, deconstructive strategies of reading, but also a broader engagement with what Joel Fineman here highlights as the “ropetricks” of rhetoric to which modern theory has been so influential in returning critical attention. Howard Felperin starts from a tendency in Shakespeare criticism not unlike the kind parodied in L.C.Knights’s classic “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” and argues in his discussion of representation in The Winter’s Tale for Shakespeare’s vii own sophisticated awareness of the inescapable mediacy of all language, of the instability of meaning and the radical uncertainty of interpretation. Elizabeth Freund illustrates her thesis that it is possible, in the wake of contemporary theoretical discourse, to show that “the Shakespearean self-reflexive forays of wit match, remarkably, the wit of the deconstructionist enterprise” by an examination of the ways in which Troilus and Cressida, like recent rhetorical analysis, questions the assumptions of unified meaning central to certain kinds of criticism and calls attention to its own intertextuality by foregrounding its highly literary materia. Geoffrey Hartman, reviewing the varieties of traditional Shakespeare scholarship, from G.W.Knight to Empson to Leavis, from historical scholarship to editorial gloss to biographical sleuthing, focuses on the ways in which Shakespeare’s notorious punning and wordplay undo the hegemony of any single order of discourse, compelling us, as he puts it, to realize the radically social and mobile nature of the language exchange. My own essay attempts in turn to ground the language of Othello more historically in the crossing of rhetorical and judicial, and the uncertainty of reference which Felperin describes as problematic for both audience and jealous husband in the link between rhetoric, representation, and the classic problem of this tragedy’s supposed double time scheme. Hartman’s essay invokes Dr Johnson’s famous, or infamous, remark on the pun or quibble as Shakespeare’s “fatal Cleopatra” in order to explore the richness of precisely such punning play within Twelfth Night. But Johnson’s very choice of phrase betrays the gender associations of his age—and not just his age —with the slippery and suspect deviance of figurative language itself. What is only implicit, then, in the essays in part I, in Hartman’s pursuit of this “fatal Cleopatra” or the evocation in Othello of the often violent misogynist topos of women’s troublesome speech or verbal copia, is in part II opened up for a debate which both continues recent feminist inquiries into the “woman’s part” in Shakespeare and raises the question of the methodologies and assumptions appropriate to a genuinely historical feminist criticism. For Elaine Showalter, the “part” of the woman extends beyond that of the character within a single play— Ophelia, for instance, in Hamlet—to the representations which elide the boundary between dramatic and social, “art” and “life,” between a role in a play dominated by the male character who gives it its name and the part played by this particular woman in the “living theater” of female pathology which so crucially informed the emerging discourse and practice of psychoanalysis. Nancy Vickers, whose well known essay on the blazon in Writing and Sexual Difference already sets out the ways in which the body of woman becomes, in Cixous’s phrase, the “uncanny stranger on display,” here focuses on both the Sonnets and Lucrece, a poem in which the blazon’s inventory of separate and reified parts is part of the motivated discourse of a rape, of a contest in which a woman’s role, as Mary Jacobus has observed in another context,1 is to figure the rivalry between men. viii Jonathan Goldberg, in a discussion ranging over, among others, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, polemically opposes what he sees as a tendency within certain recent feminist criticism of Shakespeare simply to identify genre and gender, or purely to oppose male and female. He employs a broadly Derridean and Lacanian language to investigate the discourse of power which for him complicates this question, returning to Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that woman is a cultural construct in order to counter what he takes to be ahistorical constructions of the “woman’s part.” Joel Fineman, observing that at the end of The Taming of the Shrew things are as patriarchally inflected as at the beginning, investigates how it is that an apparent discourse of subversion manages to re-secure the very order to which it appears to be opposed, and whether it is finally possible to voice a language that does not speak sooner or later for the order and authority of man. In an argument which links his essay with those in part I as well as with Showalter’s very different questioning of Freud and Lacan, Fineman also asks why the question of rhetoric should evoke from psychoanalysis the patriarchalism for which Lacan appears to be the most explicit mouthpiece, just as the same question provokes the anti-patriarchal gender deconstructions of a Derrida or the French feminism of a Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, or Hélène Cixous. Fineman’s essay suggests an intimate connection between rhetoric and the very placing of “woman,” as indeed might a glance at those numerous Elizabethan rhetorical handbooks in which discussions of ordo and proper sequential “disposition” so frequently invoke the model of “man” first, “woman” second as the conventional example of a proper order both in discourse and in nature. Or as the reinstitution of patriarchy in as controversial a play for feminist analysis as A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests a rule associated with what is called the ordered “chain” of discourse. All four essays in part II invoke questions of power, politics and history, in turn the explicit subjects of part III. Stephen Greenblatt, in a discussion which includes The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and All’s Well That Ends Well, adopts what he terms a “cultural poetics” in order to explore the relation between King Lear and Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregi-ous Popish Impostures —one not analogous to traditional source study or so-called historical “background,” but rather closer to Brech’s “alienation effect” or to the dynamic of “internal distantiation” described by Althusser and Macherey. René Girard, whose theoretical writings figure in other essays in this volume, focuses by contrast not on power and politics in specific historical terms but on the underlying structure of “mimetic desire” which in a play such as Troilus and Cressida inextricably links the erotic and the political, the economy of masculine desire to that vicious circle of rivalry and imitation which is the Trojan war itself. Harry Berger, Jr, in a different way, links the political preoccupations of the Henriad with the psychological, focusing both on the problem of genealogical succession from father to son and on the debate between text- centered and stage-centered critics of Shakespeare, suggesting at once the power ix of theatrical performance and the Lacanian “discourse of the Other” it represses. Thomas M.Greene reads the Sonnets as calling into doubt both the representation of the bourgeois poet’s aristocratic friend as the source of all value and an alternative economic system located in the value of the poetry itself, while Stanley Cavell—writing on the play which, especially after Brecht, has provoked radically divergent political responses—argues that Coriolanus is concerned not so much with a specific politics as with the very formation of the political. The volume comes to an end with three essays on Hamlet, still the most discussed of all of Shakespeare’s plays. East German critic Robert Weimann, whose analysis touches on Lear as well, outlines the critique of mimesis in recent deconstructive and Girardian theory—including that undermining of certain notions of representation and interpretation with which Howard Felperin began—but questions whether the methodologies of poststructuralism can provide a satisfactory framework for the complex question of mimesis in Shakespeare, suggesting instead an approach to this question through Marx’s concept of Aneignung or “appropriation.” Margaret Ferguson, observing that Shakespeare’s tendency to blur generic lines has often been remarked but not related to the way in which Shakespearean tragedy seems often to imply a questioning of the casting of a given story as tragedy, approaches this broader problem by exploring both the techniques of wordplay within Hamlet—including the “fatal Cleopatra” of the pun—and a process of dramatic literalization associated with the impulse to kill. Terence Hawkes’s Telmah—or Hamlet in reverse—raises, finally, larger cultural and political questions about the context of all theory and criticism by focusing on the anxious response of John Dover Wilson both to an unsettling reading of the play and to the contemporary specter of Bolshevism in Russia and of working-class unrest more close at hand. Appropriately for the ending to this volume, it situates the critic—here not just Matthew Arnold, Dover Wilson, E.M.W.Tillyard, F.R.Leavis, or promoters of a particular educational project for the English classics, but by implication any critic or theorist—as always, culturally and politically, interested readers in the full sense of the word. And it reminds us as well that “theory,” that supposed recent development or baleful foreign influence, is in fact always with us, performing both its radicalizing and its normalizing functions, posing questions but itself always open to questioning in turn. * The division of the book into parts—with “the woman’s part” deliberately and sardonically placed as part II—merely suggests one possible grouping or common focus: in reality, the concerns of the essays across these partitions greatly overlap. Berger’s observation that genealogical succession in the Henriad betrays a latent ideal of male parthenogenesis expressed in the fear, scapegoating and repression of the feminine, like Greene’s characterization of the unstable gender of poetry in the Sonnets or Girard’s description of the laws of masculine desire and of rivalry among males, joins Showalter’s and Vickers’s feminist analyses of other texts, and attests, perhaps, to the growing influence of feminist
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