Shakespeare, the poet of freedom

The importance of the individual and the tradition of the preface are here open to discussionLaurie Maguire The Shakespeare “Preface” is a genre in its own right practised by major critics such as Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Harley Granville-Barker. Tony Tanner’s posthumous book reprints the prefaces he wrote for the Everyman Shakespeare in the 1990s. One of the questions this book inadvertently raises is whether this prefatory genre changes when thirty-six “prefaces” are gathered in one volume.

I say “gathered” not “edited”. Errors from the original Everyman volumes are reproduced here. Thus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we are told, Shakespeare drew on “Pluto’s” Life of Theseus. Many critics are named without full references; some are household names and therefore not hard to identify but others, like “Marcia Poulsen”, are less familiar; and shorthand references to “Puritan Richardson”, “Puritan Stubbes” and an unqualified “Meres” may perplex the general reader at whom this book is partly aimed. That this is carelessness and not casual chattiness is evident when Tanner tells us, “I have listed helpful items in the bibliography”; no bibliography exists.

Initially, one is drawn in by Tanner’s Kermode-like attention to language. There is something exhilarating about watching a mind – an open and attentive one – engage with vocabulary, etymology, repetition, syntax. The “it” of the statue in The Winter's Tale becomes “her” within a few lines; Hamlet’s simile “as swift as meditation” is queried as is the comparative within a superlative of “Murder most foul, as in the best it is, / But this most foul”. The description of tears as “guests” in Cordelia’s eyes contrasts with the lack of hospitality throughout the play. The daffodils which “peer” in Autolycus’s song are linked with Perdita's “peering in April’s front” and Hermione’s “peerless” life.

Tanner repeatedly gives us figures to anchor his verbal details. We learn that Ovid is mentioned directly only four times in Shakespeare; that “fortune” is used less often in Romeo and Juliet than in any other play (a surprising statistic this) and “haste” more often than in any other play except Hamlet; “glimmering” and “undistinguishable” occur in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and nowhere else. Numbers abound: “conscience” occurs seven times in Hamlet, “soul” thirty times in Othello, “issue” fourteen times in The Winter’s Tale, “spirit” twenty-nine times in The Tempest. However, Tanner’s word-counting technique, which works so well in single essays, becomes repetitively formulaic over the course of a book.

Tanner’s precise attention to language is surprisingly countered by general impressions. “I assume that if we feel something, he [Shakespeare] felt it too.” Examining the associations of shrews, he writes, “Women, notoriously, have a dread of mice and mice-like creatures, though whether that horror was shared by the dames of sixteenth-century rural Warwickshire, I have no idea”. He is not oblivious to recent critical developments (he cites Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Greenblatt, Graham Holderness) but prefers to sideline them – postcolonial views of Prospero make him “yearn for the old sanities”. These old sanities are seen in statements such as “Admittedly she [Sycorax] was there first; but he [Prospero] seems to have made a better fist of things”. This is the argument of colonialist conquerors everywhere.

At his best, Tanner thinks and writes like an Elizabethan. He loves copia. He relishes vocabulary. Having commented on Shakespeare’s unusual use of “whir” he incorporates it in his own lexicon: Pericles is a “whirring, scattering play”. He turns nouns into verbs: Lear “strangers” Cordelia. This love of words is at its most engaging when he admits interpretative defeat. The chapter on All’s Well that Ends Well is a tour de force in this respect: time and again, Tanner’s acute ear and eye lead him to point out phrases and sentences that simply don’t make sense.

Tanner’s dominant critical influences are early- and mid-twentieth century: H. B. Charlton, G. Wilson Knight, Allardyce Nicoll, Nigel Alexander, Kenneth Muir. His phrases come from the same era: Stephano and Trinculo are “pickled silly”; Egeus is “a bit of a stick”; Arthur Quiller-Couch “knows a cad when he sees one”. These endearing retro-colloquialisms are part of the conversational style. The book is full of verbless sentences. It frequently defers (“I’ll come back to that”; “more of that later”), a luxury of speech not usually accommodated so easily in print. Critical works are recommended in the same conversational manner (John Holloway’s “interesting book on Shakespearian tragedy . . . should not be neglected”). But what works in the lecture room does not always translate into print. Thus, a footnote tells us, gratuitously, that “too much Derrida is the sort of thing that makes the British think twice about taking their holidays in France”. On Berowne’s use of affected language to forswear taffeta phrases Tanner writes, “Nothing like a few taffeta phrases, . . . eh Berowne?”. Stylistically this recalls Northrop Frye’s On Shakespeare where, commenting on the Montague/Capulet decisions to build gold monuments at the end of Romeo and Juliet, Frye remarks, “Nothing like a couple of gold statues to bring two dead lovers back to life”. But Frye’s book, edited by Robert Sandler, was specifically marketed as transcripts of his undergraduate lectures. Tanner is addressing a print readership and the matey tone does not always work.

As a critic, however, Tanner is both brilliant and familiar. He is brilliant at rounding up and condensing the received wisdom on plays and subjects, and anchoring it in his own lexical observations. As a result there are few new ideas but plenty of new verbal details to support them. The “Preface” to Shakespeare is rightly not the place for riding hobby horses. More questionably, it seems not to be the place for addressing textual issues. Tanner sometimes signals his avoidance of thorny textual problems (“need not concern us”; “I will not address the unresolvable question of . . .”) but at other times he makes bold statements (for example, about capitalization) from which a knowledge of compositors, or of Ralph Crane, would have protected him. Given recent and accessible textual work (for example, Oxford’s Textual Companion) it seems perverse to follow E. K. Chambers’s chronology. Repeated comments about Shakespeare’s ownership of Florio’s/ Montaigne’s Essays (1603) move towards uncritical acceptance of one of the British Library’s copies as being his: Shakespeare’s Montaigne is “almost certainly even now in the British Library”. It is (alas) almost certainly not, and a brief look at the wording in the British Library catalogue will encourage any close reader to note the difference between copy C.28 m.8 “with the autograph of Ben Jonson” and copy C.21 e.17, whose “flyleaf bears the signature William Shakespeare”. Tanner reads plays; he does not read rare books. Consequently, an important aspect of Shakespeare, even Prefatory Shakespeare, is missing.

If Tanner offers close readings in the service of New Critical interpretative conclusions, in Shakespeare’s Individualism Peter Holbrook takes outlawed critical terms – like “character” and “the human” – and approaches them both philosophically and politically. The book’s bravery in questioning the gains and contradictions of contemporary literary theory is bracing.

Holbrook begins with a series of questions: why do we admire Hamlet when he is a failure? Why have we fetishized reason as the mark of “the human”? Why has the liberal Left outlawed the individual in literary criticism? The groundwork is established in an analysis of the tension between finding oneself and flouting society. Hamlet is about “someone who does not do what tradition, justice, morality, ‘heaven and hell’, powerful cultural authorities (the classic poets) and even his own father say he should do”. The play is about authenticity (“the most obvious, but also most important thing, to say about Hamlet is that he is not his father”), about trying out parts, about discovering one’s task in life. And unlike Fortinbras, who is happy to become his father rather than himself, Hamlet “‘fails’ in his task because it is not his”.

These deceptively simple observations take us to some sharp close readings – the recurrence of the word “singularity” in Shakespeare, the variants of “I am (not) who I am”, and to a modified Aristotelian theory: tragic heroes inspire envy not pity (envy because they have defied society to become the people they want to be). We are reminded of how “breathtaking” is Coriolanus’s desire to be “author of himself” in a world where hierarchy predetermines the self.

Holbrook argues that freedom is the one item we could not subtract from Shakespeare’s plays “without their, in effect, ceasing to be his”. Freedom is both a personal and a political concept and Holbrook explores them jointly: Shakespeare is aware that personal freedom can often conflict with ethics and morality and social norms. Cordelia’s insistence on speaking in her own voice rather than another’s is both ethically principled and ethically disastrous; the autonomy of villains such as Aaron conflicts with society but so too does that of public rulers like Antony and Cleopatra. Such tensions between self and society lead to larger questions: if it is right for Hermia to disobey her father in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is it also right for a people to rebel against a king?

Holbrook extends these themes to an analysis of Victorian and Modernist Shakespeare criticism. F. J. Furnivall’s approach to Shakespeare “reflects the liberal’s wish to break with a coercive morality”; Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and others see Shakespeare “as standing for life and against a life-crushing morality”. T. S. Eliot objected to Shakespeare because he was morally problematic but Holbrook argues that fidelity to self-realization can be ethical; for Shakespeare (as for Montaigne, who gets much attention here), cultivating the self is more important than capitulating to expectation. When Shakespeare presents vice as a choice it becomes a positive marker of self-determination. Richard of Gloucester determines to be a villain, Aaron embraces his blackness, Antony and Cleopatra choose passion rather than just giving in to it.

Holbrook argues that the triumphs of new historicism (what he calls the “new pessimism”) have severed critical contact with the individual. Partly because the modern West sees the self as a group identity and is more concerned with the rights of groups than those of individuals and partly because this prevents recognition of Shakespeare as “a poet of freedom”, Holbrook envisages a bleakly authoritarian future for criticism. He is not unaware of the irony of his narrative: “the Left, the traditional opponent of tyranny and defender of liberty since Milton, has (at least in its theoretical wing), relinquished the language of individuality as so much sentimental and ideological claptrap”. This is not just a book about Shakespeare’s individualism: it is a critical gauntlet.

Tony Tanner
PREFACES TO SHAKESPEARE
842pp. Belknap Press. £29.95 (US $39.95).
978 0 674 05137 9
Peter Holbrook
SHAKESPEARE’S INDIVIDUALISM
246pp. Cambridge University Press. £55 ($95).
978 0 521 76067 6

Laurie Maguire is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow of Magdalen College. She is the author, most recently, of Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood, which appeared in 2009.