Empson, Wilson Knight, Barber, Kott: Great Shakespeareans Volume VIII 9781472554918, 9780826446459

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For Terence Hawkes Friend and Mentor

Series Editors’ Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a never- ending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is therefore not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson) but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopedic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be seen as negotiating



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and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness. Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopedia would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

Notes on Contributors

Lars Engle is James G. Watson Professor and Department Chair in English at The University of Tulsa, where he has taught since 1988. He’s the author of Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago, 1993), and essays on medieval and Renaissance literature in PMLA, SEL, Modern Philology, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespearean International Yearbook, Exemplaria and numerous essay collections, including the Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and The Oxford Middleton Handbook. He has also published widely on contemporary South African fiction. A co-editor of English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, he is completing Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries for Blackwell in collaboration with Eric Rasmussen. Peter Erickson, currently in his fifth year as Visiting Professor of Humanities at Williams College, MA, is the author of Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (California, 1985), Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (California, 1991) and Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art (Palgrave, 2007). He has co-edited Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber (Delaware, 1985), Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Pennsylvania, 2000) and Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello (MLA, 2005). Hugh Grady is Professor of English at Arcadia University, PA. His books include The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford University Press, 1991), Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Essays in Early Modern Reification (Oxford University Press, 1996), Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from ‘Richard II’ to ‘Hamlet’ (Oxford University Press, 2002) and most recently Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is the editor of the critical anthology Shakespeare and Modernity: From Early Modern to Millennium (Routledge, 2000) and co-editor with Terence Hawkes of Presentist Shakespeares (Routledge, 2007).



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He has contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, and the Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia and has published in numerous journals, including Modern Language Quarterly, Essays in Criticism, Comparative Literature, In-between, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare and Shakespeare Studies. Zoltán Márkus is assistant professor of English at Vassar College, NY. His main fields of research are early modern English literature, especially drama, Shakespeare studies, European drama and theatre, and cultural, literary and performance theory. His current project, Shakespeares at War: Cultural Appropriations of Shakespeare in London and Berlin during World War II, is a comparative study of Shakespeare’s cultural reception in these two cities during the Second World War. Madalina Nicolaescu is Professor of English at the English Department of the University of Bucharest. She has published widely on Renaissance Drama and Women’s Writing. Her books on Early Modern Theatre include Meanings of Violence in Shakespeare (2004), Ec-centric Mappings of the Renaissance (1999) and Protest and Propaganda in 16th Century English and German Theatre (1996). She has recently contributed essays to Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia (2011), Visions of Shakespeare (Ashgate, 2011), Shakespeare and War (Palgrave, 2008), Shakespeare in Europe: History and Memory (Jagellonian University Press, 2008) and Shifting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture (University of Delaware Press, 2004). Michael Taylor is a retired professor from the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters in books on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; Shakespeare; and on the novel and the romance. His book, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century, appeared in 2001. He was the editor of Four City Comedies by Thomas Middleton for Oxford University Press and of Henry VI, Part 1 in the Oxford Shakespeare series. From 2006–8, he reviewed critical works on Shakespeare for Shakespeare Survey. He is currently working on a book entitled Shakespeare’s Innocence.

Introduction

The Dynamics of Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century Hugh Grady

The present volume represents a crucial segment of the centuries-long, multivalent and international set of reactions to the extraordinary works of William Shakespeare. It delineates, in the opening chapters on William Empson and on G. Wilson Knight, two revolutionary developments in the history of Shakespearean criticism that began early in the twentieth century and have continued to influence Shakespeare studies ever since: the Modernist revolution in the arts and the rise of English literature as a newly instituted subject for professionalism in the re-constituted universities in the Western world of the Progressive era. In the chapters on two seminal critics of the second half of the twentieth century, C. L. Barber and Jan Kott, it charts the further progression of criticism from these seminal beginnings into the post-war period that further entrenched Shakespeare criticism in its new academic home and both continued and broke with the earlier Modernism of the first half of the century, taking the field into new, more social- and political-minded directions. Other volumes of this series represent some other facets of this development: Vol. IX chooses three pivotal figures (A. C. Bradley, W. W. Greg, and Henry Clay Folger) in the developing professionalization of literary studies in the early twentieth century. Vol. X, with its extended attention to the impact of Freud and Marx on how the twentieth century thought about Shakespeare, tells another crucial piece of the story. Vol. XII focuses on four extraordinary Modernist artists (James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Samuel Beckett) whose works and writings about Shakespeare show us the impact of Modernism in the construction of a twentieth-century Modernist Shakespeare who replaced the older Romantic one of the nineteenth century. Other volumes will explore the dramatic practitioners, actors and directors, who gave life to the new visions of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world and beyond. But the four Shakespeareans discussed in this volume

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arguably represent the most crucial influences on the understanding of Shakespeare and his works that the twenty-first century inherits because they all wrote vastly influential criticism in detailed studies of Shakespeare’s works that taught generations how to read the plays anew. I should say from the start that the four figures chosen here are outstanding examples from a much bigger and complexly interconnected field of cultural producers; that while there are strong arguments to be made in favour of the selection of each over other possible candidates, certainly others might have been chosen in their stead or in addition to them. Putting aside the contemporary critics like Stephen Greenblatt, Marjorie Garber or Terence Hawkes, who have been excluded a priori from consideration, strong cases might be made, for example, for including either of two leading American New Critics, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman; for the unique American Kenneth Burke, with his synthesis of New Criticism, Marxism and rhetorical theory; for the greatly influential (if much excoriated in recent decades) Cambridge historicist critic E. M. W. Tillyard; for Scrutiny critic L. C. Knights; for the British textual and interpretive critics J. Dover Wilson and M. C. Bradbrook; or for the Canadian critic and theorist who dominated much of Shakespeare studies in the 1960s and 1970s, Northrop Frye – and many readers will undoubtedly think of other possibilities. However, the figures studied here do in fact connect in different ways to the works and methods of these and other central twentieth-century Shakespeareans, and several will receive some attention in what follows. All of the selected four (William Empson, G. Wilson Knight, C. L. Barber and Jan Kott) were, for significant portions of their careers, professors of English who took part in a much larger community of academic scholars and critics and were chosen in part as representatives of larger critical movements with which they were associated. Jan Kott, while having a large academic following, perhaps made his strongest impact directly on the theatrical world by supplying interpretations of the plays in ways that reflected twentieth-century history, above all its politics, its existentialism and its Modernist aesthetics. In addition, all four of these figures anticipate in different ways critical developments which they didn’t live to see, and all of them are still relevant in their interpretations of Shakespeare to us in the early twenty-first century. The figures chosen, then, are each unique in their methods and in the life experiences they bring to bear in their readings of Shakespeare, and the detailed chapters that follow are designed to illuminate those unique contributions – and something of the life-experiences that underlie them. In this Introduction, on the

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other hand, I want to try to situate these stories in a larger cultural context because their meaning for us derives in important part from their contributions to it. All of these cultural interpreters helped shape twentieth-century views of Shakespeare in reaction to a widely disseminated Romantic Shakespeare constructed internationally in the nineteenth century – a development delineated in Vols. III and IV of this series in discussions of Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge, Hazlitt and others. The Romantic Shakespeare was a god-like figure of unrivaled poetic and dramatic creativity famed above all for his creation of complex, lifelike characters. Shakespeare was so closely in touch with the natural world that he was, as Coleridge extravagantly put it, ‘himself Nature personified’.1 He exemplified the Romantic Genius, a creator able to imagine any and all human possibilities with deep insights into human nature and the human condition. Hamlet was his masterpiece, and the tragedies in general constituted his most penetrating works – though, of course, nineteenthcentury criticism was divided over a number of other issues, such as, for example, whether he was a morally serious writer whose works were rooted in Christian insights or was a free-thinker and unorthodox secular humanist. In addition, the nineteenth-century Shakespeare was a figure discussed and constructed in a broad, participatory, and non-professional public sphere that penetrated into the middle and working classes of both the UK and the US. Politically, he was claimed by both Left and Right as a central figure of English-speaking culture, and the productions of his plays were considered popular fare on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than seen as an elite cultural phenomenon. But this was to change in the next century, and we can speak, as I did in an earlier work, of a twentieth-century Modernist Shakespeare emerging both in academia and in revitalized, Modernist-influenced theatrical productions.2 The twentieth-century Shakespeare constructed by new generations of literary and theatrical workers changed the ways we understand Shakespeare’s works in response to the tremendous social and economic changes that marked the twentieth century. This volume exemplifies that development in its delineation of the life and works of four exemplary Modernist and/or Postmodernist figures.

The New Professionalism The late nineteenth century saw the construction of the ideologies and institutions of professionalism still dominant in the early twenty-first century.3

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Of course, medicine, the legal profession and the clergy all had their roots in the ancient and medieval worlds, but these became reorganized and redefined, while new fields like engineering, architecture, dentistry and a host of others constituted themselves in waves from 1825–80 in the UK and 1840–1887 in the US.4 The case perhaps most directly relevant to the present discussion was the foundation in the United States in 1883 of the Modern Languages Association, the professional organization of university professors of foreign languages and of the newly constituted university discipline of English studies. This association was a direct expression of a widespread modernizing of higher education in the United States with the formation of new research universities, first at Johns Hopkins in 1876 and followed by the University of Chicago in 1890; the modernization of existing elite universities like Harvard and Yale; and the development of a system of land grant state universities, begun federally in 1862 and rapidly expanding in the last half of the nineteenth century throughout the nation. In the UK, a similar process occurred at first outside of Oxford and Cambridge, but had entered both of those hallowed academic groves by the end of the First World War. New English departments were a crucial part of the modernization process in education, as older notions that a liberal education had to be grounded in the study of Latin and Greek gave way to a new emphasis on the modern. Change came unevenly, however, and in Shakespeare studies the criticism of the new professional professors co-existed for some time with that of proto-professional amateurs and literary figures like T. S. Eliot – himself something of a liminal case since he did have a PhD and lectured at Harvard, though his essays reached beyond academia. Eventually, however, by sheer mass if nothing else, academic Shakespeare criticism became the dominant force in the interpretation of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. This predominance is reflected in the academic careers of all of the critics represented here.

Modernism and Literary Criticism At the same time, however, all the critics in this volume also engaged in the huge, multi-levelled cultural work that was undertaken in the immediate wake of the Modernist revolution in the arts that dominated twentieth-century culture. I tried to define how this impacted on the cultural construction of Shakespeare in the period of Modernism’s most dominating influence, the period roughly from 1930–70 – and these dates

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could be extended in both directions – in my 1991 study of the aesthetic paradigm shift in Shakespeare studies, The Modernist Shakespeare. Modernism in the arts was, of course, a dramatic and revolutionary affair. As Ricardo Quinones argued some years back, one way to understand it is through focusing on its impact on the form of artworks, particularly its reorganization of time and space in art.5 Adorno had argued that it was above all in its form that the work of art most profoundly reflected the era in which it was created, and we can understand critical interpretation of classical works like Shakespeare’s as involving the same dynamic, creating new frameworks for experiencing the plays and new horizons for interpreting them. Joseph Frank famously spoke of the Modernist twentieth-century novel as having become a ‘spatial’ form.6 And so did the Shakespeare play in the most innovative of the critical interpretations of Modernism that arose in both the US and the UK beginning in the 1920s and 1930s. To ‘spatialize’ a text means, first of all, to bracket or subordinate its temporal dimensions – its plot above all, but also the reader or viewer’s experience over time in ‘taking in’ the play. To spatialize is to spread out the elements of the work for purposes of analysis, as if they occurred in a single instant of time. This was the great innovation of all forms of New Criticism, though it was explicitly defined by the British performer, critic, and Professor George Wilson Knight (better known as G. Wilson Knight), as is discussed in great detail in the chapter by Michael Taylor. However, Knight himself benefited, directly or indirectly, from the seminal innovations in reading literary texts being developed right after World War I at Cambridge University, the starting point for bringing a Modernist, spatializing approach to the reading of Shakespeare and other texts. That is to say then, that what Knight performed self-consciously, earlier New Critics had already begun in practice as they worked to develop a method for focusing on literary texts for their own sake in the newly professionalized English departments in the early twentieth century through methods – whether they were aware of this or not – informed by the new aesthetic Modernism of the age. The majority of professors in the US had at first developed forms of (largely positivist) historicist criticism, trying to unearth and define lost cultural knowledge (the theory of ‘humors’, for example, got a lot of early attention), and had thus situated Shakespeare’s plays in cultural history. But there were those who were dissatisfied with this approach, finding it too arid in its relation to the text and too far from their experience as readers. However, they wanted a critical method that would meet academic demands of rigour and objectivity – something that

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students could be examined on at the end of the term, as it was put very pragmatically, something different from the biographical anecdotes that some popular professors made use of in their lectures.7 It was to fulfill these needs and desires that what came to be called the New Criticism was developed. The primary innovations took place in the UK, in the newly constituted English programme at Cambridge University, which did not adopt a course of study in English until the World War I era. Like many other delayed revolutions, this one was more radical than earlier ones in the UK and the US.

The Cambridge New Critics and Empson The first important figure in the complex process of development was undoubtedly I. A. Richards, who developed the first form of ‘close reading’ of texts through the procedures of what he called ‘practical criticism’.8 Richard’s pedagogical technique was to hand out to his students mimeographed texts of poems without any kind of contextual apparatus around them, so that students were literarily faced with ‘the words on the page’ and nothing else – no author and no date to help them. Students were to comment on the poetry, and slowly come to realize how much they had relied on ‘external’ knowledge in their reactions to the poems, and come to develop the habit of focusing on the language and tropes of the poem itself. But it was arguably Richards’ talented student William Empson who best developed ‘practical criticism’ into a method that garnered international admiration and imitation with the publication in 1929 of his milestone Seven Types of Ambiguity. From this initial example, a whole philosophy of literary interpretation developed, one that was, as Stanley Fish once put it, simultaneously ‘positivist, holistic, and spatial’.9 This thumbnail characterization retrospectively highlights three assumptions of New Criticism that came to be challenged by the innovations of reader-response and Poststructuralist criticism late in the twentieth century, but were largely taken for granted in its heyday. By ‘positivist’, Fish meant that for all its recognition of textual complexity, New Criticism assumed an objective text which could be accurately interpreted through the correct analytic methods. ‘Holistic’ referred to the central New Critical assumption of a unified text, with unified meanings – notwithstanding its identification of ‘tensions’ and ‘ambiguities.’ Finally, ‘spatial’, as we have seen, denoted the central assumption that literary analysis approaches a text as ‘laid out’, as

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if in a single moment of time rather than as experienced serially. All three terms deserve commentary and qualification, but they get at important qualities of the method. However, it should also be noted that of all the first generation New Critics (to use the American term for adherents on both sides of the Atlantic), it is Empson who most resists the characterization of New Criticism by Fish quoted above because, in his painstaking individual analyses, he most often undermined the positivist and holistic tenor of the method—even, at times, its preference for the spatial. And, as Lars Engle explains in telling detail in his chapter, Empson advocated from the beginning a kind of biographical-historical contextualization of literature that was far from the party line New Criticism practiced elsewhere. Nevertheless, in his unwavering focus on ‘the words themselves’ and his close examination of the logic and structure of metaphoric language, he is both an important source and unmatched practitioner of New Criticism at its best.

The Case of G. Wilson Knight As noted above, Knight introduced the term ‘spatial analysis’ to describe his method of analysis of Shakespeare’s plays. He defined it specifically in a key passage from his seminal collection of interpretive essays, The Wheel of Fire: A Shakespearian tragedy is set spatially as well as temporally in the mind. By this I mean that there are throughout the play a set of correspondences which relate to each other independently of the time-sequence which is the story: such are the intuition-intelligence opposition active within and across Troilus and Cressida, the death-theme in Hamlet, the nightmare evil of Macbeth. This I have sometimes called the play’s ‘atmosphere’... . Now if we are prepared to see the whole play laid out, so to speak, an area, being simultaneously aware of these thickly-scattered correspondences in a single view of the whole, we possess the unique quality of the play in a new sense. ‘Faults’ begin to vanish into thin air.10 Knight’s method was clearly a part of the complex transformation of critical interpretation – Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery (1935) is an allied effort in the same direction discussed briefly in Taylor’s chapter11 – that was being undertaken in the new English departments of research universities in the UK and US – and by a few outstanding figures from the

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public sphere as well. However, Knight, with his many eccentricities, was something of a loner, not socially connected to either the Cambridge or the Vanderbilt New Critics – indeed, as Michael Taylor suggests, it seems sometimes as if he were being studiously ignored by them, and he was certainly under-acknowledged. It was not Richards, Empson, Ransom or Brooks who helped bring Knight to the public’s and academia’s attention; rather T. S. Eliot, in his capacity as an editor for Faber and Faber, was Knight’s most important champion, as noted by Taylor. And, indeed, in many ways, Knight’s methods were quite distinct from those of other New Critics. Most particularly, he perfected early on a method for bringing ‘close reading’ to bear on Shakespeare’s plays as wholes, rather than the practice of early attempts at New Critical interpretations of Shakespeare by Cleanth Brooks and William Empson, which tended to isolate specific passages from the plays and read them much as if they were short lyrics. Indeed, as Lars Engle notes, much of William Empson’s attention to Shakespeare is devoted to his Sonnets rather than to his plays. Knight relied on a kind of ‘cataloguing’ approach to critical reading. He made lists – of words, figures of speech, motifs, stage props and other elements heuristically defined on the fly. He classified the elements of the lists into larger categories, and he grouped these into over-arching large symbols. The method was open to abuse, and as Taylor shows, Knight is not always happy in his deployment of it. Vladimir Nabokov made gentle fun of Knight once by ironically suggesting that a critic might try to get at the essence of Moby Dick through a list of its ‘aquatic mammal’ imagery.12 At his best, however, the method allowed for a kind of precision in discussing the poetic imagery and symbolism of the plays never achieved before and rarely since. In short, Knight was the most ‘holistic’ of all Shakespeare critics, ‘positivist’ only in a very loose application of this term to his very spiritualist slant, and the very epitome of – the seminal definer of – spatiality. And, for all Knight’s spiritualism and love of the ineffable, there was a strong debt to something like the technology of textual underlining and index card notation and manipulation (I have no direct information on his actual methods, but I remember a senior professor, a devotee of Knight, who had worked out a colour-coded set of highlightings to mark image patterns), and the elaborate detail of Knight’s analyses surely demanded something along these lines. He was a professional, and his work was an important part of the professionialization of English studies that occurred in his era. His was a unique synthesis that made a huge impression at the peak of its influence in the 1950s and 1960s and then began to wane as newer approaches came to the fore. But something of his approach lives on, as

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Taylor says, in structuralist and phenomenological approaches to textual analysis – and even in a revived interest in spirituality in Shakespeare.

The Transition to Postmodernism in the Second Half of the Century By the mid-1950s, the New Critical revolution had become triumphant in both American and British academia. Its main opponent, ‘historical criticism’, never disappeared; indeed, in the aftermath of the publication of E. M. W. Tillyard’s related books of the 1940s, The Elizabethan World Picture and Shakespeare’s History Plays, it experienced something of a revival. But, in terms of numbers of publications, New Criticism won the battle and seemed to dominate pedagogy. It was taken up by the new post-war young professors in an age of rapid expansion of higher education, but in a form which one of its American founders, John Crowe Ransom, saw as a triumph of method over spirit. It became what the later Shakespearean Howard Felperin called ‘an empty technology’ of the text, a method which could be deployed to analyse literary language with no larger social purposes.13 Concurrent with this, Modernist aesthetics in the larger culture began to give way, unevenly and confusingly, to a panoply of new aesthetic practices we now call Postmodernism. Just as in the 1920s, the stage was set in the 1950s and 1960s for new critical innovations even as New Criticism enjoyed an unprecedented hegemony in Anglo–American Departments of English. This was the context for Northrop Frye’s groundbreaking An Anatomy of Criticism, first published in 1957. While best known for its advocacy of a unique ‘myth’ criticism which attempted to map all of literary production into one of four basic, season-based myths (spring/comedy, summer/ romance, autumn/ tragedy and winter/irony), the book began with a polemical essay calling for professional rigour, systematizing, and a division of labour among academic literary professionals that found a place for almost all existing scholars.14 By the early 1960s, Frye’s work found wide professional acceptance, especially in the US, to the point where it was said that no article would be accepted by the prestigious critical journal of the Modern Language Association, PMLA, if it lacked reference to Frye’s theories. Its impact on Shakespeare studies was strong, in part because the attention Frye directed to comedy and romance – and the critical terminology he developed to analyse these somewhat neglected genres – opened up veins of critical analysis for the comedies and late plays of Shakespeare that were original and fruitful.

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In other ways, however, Frye remained within the assumptions of the New Criticism. Like them, he abstracted the texts out of their formative social and historical contexts, reassembling them within a system that amounted to an eternal, even Platonic space of unchanging Forms. His central idea of the Myth derived some of its powers from earlier claims by T. S. Eliot linking literature with the primitive, and defining the social role of contemporary literature as one of myth-making for a scientific age.15 Frye’s impact proved dominant for about 15 years, but then receded rapidly with the turn to new kinds of socially conscious, more political criticism that developed in the 1980s, and which is still largely in force today, though showing signs of change and transition to something not yet fully defined. It is the work of two of Frye’s contemporaries, C. L. Barber and Jan Kott, that has proven to have greater staying power and more continued relevance to our critical universe, and we have chosen them to represent the Shakespeare criticism of the second half of the twentieth century. One of the subterranean issues in this development has to do with the complex evolution of both the content and the status of ‘Marxist’ criticism in the mid-twentieth century. It is easy to notice in their essays of the 1930s and 1940s, that the American New Critics saw themselves in a kind of competitive dialogue with various of forms of Marxist interpretation. Allen Tate, for example, alluded to the false sirens of ‘a bourgeois paradise of gadgets and of consumption’ in his denunciation of the superficiality and spiritual degradation brought on by industrialization and commercialization in his America.16 Ransom somehow met and found much to agree about with Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno, and published an article by him in 1945 in the Kenyon Review.17 From their days as reactionary Agrarians championing the traditional culture of the South, the main American New Critics assumed a highly critical view of the developing popular culture of mass media, and starting in the late 1930s, and led by Ransom, they abandoned the pipedream of an agrarian, de-industrialized America and championed ‘literature’ as the most effective antidote to the draining of modern life of value and meaning.18 It was precisely this dimension of New Criticism that disappeared as it became the leading form of literary criticism in the postwar United States. The story in Britain was a bit different, and produced a more political, more socially conscious, and more left-wing criticism than was the case in the US. In the UK, the most important successor to Richards and rival to Empson was their Cambridge connection F. R. Leavis, editor of the influential journal Scrutiny. Leavis led British New Criticism into a more explicit socially critical role with his endorsement of D. H. Lawrence’s

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indictment of capitalist industrialism and his championing ‘the organic society’. At the same time, he fought many rearguard actions distinguishing his brand of criticism from that of the Marxists who were both drawn to his work and highly critical of its political quietism. As in the case of the original American New Critics, however, it is now evident that there was more commonality there than appeared at first, and this commonality is behind the singular synthesis created by the great mid-century British critic Raymond Williams. Williams was a student of Leavis who adopted much from his values and sensibilities – adding a much greater sensitivity to the role of class oppression in British society – but also distanced himself from the various official Marxisms of the 1940s and 1950s. But, after the advent of a New Left in the late 1960s, Williams proclaimed himself a Marxist, in effect closing the circle. Paradoxically, then, on both sides of the Atlantic, the New Criticism, which has become known for its formalism and disdain for ‘extrinsic’ approaches to literary criticism like Marxism and psychoanalysis, actually engaged in social criticism of a kind, albeit somewhat covertly. I argue, then, that although the New Critical cultural criticism was far from endorsing the political goals of the various Socialist and Communist organizations of the 1930s and 1940s – obviously the leftists advocated socializing the economy, while the New Critics firmly opposed this – early New Criticism was not necessarily all that distinct from Marxist-oriented cultural critics in its hostility to commodified mass culture and its support of socially-critical art. Kenneth Burke is one prominent case of a critic who actually embodied such a convergence, as were the pro-Modernist Marxist fellow-travellers around a journal like The Partisan Review, and among the so-called New York intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s. The connection is obscure in part because the biggest, best organized leftist organization in the US of this era, the pro-Soviet Communist Party, adhered to a Stalinist opposition to Modernism as decadent and elitist – and because Marxism became a dangerous connection in the Cold War hysteria of the McCarthy period and beyond – one best left unarticulated and unexplored. Nevertheless, its existence as a kind of subtext within mid-century academic critical discourses helped pave the way for the political turn in literary studies that began about 1980. For example, in his chapter on C. L. Barber, Peter Erickson shows how, in Harvard University in the 1930s, Marxism was on the intellectual agenda among prominent professors of literature like F. O. Mathiessen, and shows how Barber himself became interested in its ideas. Although Erickson doesn’t make this argument – in fact, he underlines Barber’s aristocratic sympathies in the book – it is not hard to see how this

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interest helped shape some of the ideas behind Barber’s groundbreaking book in Shakespeare criticism, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959). Without itself taking on a politically critical stance, and more or less bracketing the issue of the role played by Renaissance literature in the twentieth century, it nevertheless moved decisively out of the predominately ‘timeless’ space of New Criticism into a historicized and social text – in sharp contrast to Northrop Frye’s attempts to rethink comedy as timeless myth. And in that way, Barber is a direct ancestor of new historicism and cultural materialism. Indeed, Stephen Greenblatt’s much discussed essay ‘Invisible Bullets’ is, in many ways, a series of footnotes to Barber’s chapter on the Prince Hal plays that, as Peter Erickson argues, ‘out-Barbers Barber’ in its downplaying of the power of the subversive.19 But, more broadly, if we look for critics on whose shoulders our generation stands, and whose work therefore takes on an additional dimension in our present because it was prescient of it, I think of Barber and Jan Kott especially. Indeed, it is that connection to the critical present that argues most strongly for including these two in this volume. A convergence of Marxism and aesthetic Modernism was also behind much of the ferment in the Soviet-dominated East European Communist countries of the 1950s and 1960s, and the sub-chapter by Madalina Nicolaescu on Polish Shakespeare critic Jan Kott is an attention-grabbing look at some of the dynamics involved. And, because a similar convergence was taking place underground in the US and the UK of the period, Kott found a ready audience for his work, first in France (from whose existentialist movement he had directly drawn), then, as Zoltán Márkus shows, in the theatrical communities of the UK and the US. Kott wrote in the highly political milieu of Communist Poland, so that there was no question of ignoring the political dimensions of Shakespeare performance for contemporary society. He made a virtue of this in his paradigm-shifting Shakespeare our Contemporary (Polish 1961; English 1964), arguing that Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies presented an implicitly historical theory of power (the Grand Mechanism) that every Pole recognized was an allegory for the situation of a Poland that had emerged from Nazi occupation only to fall victim to a new form of domination by the Soviet Union. Peter Brook made this connection explicit in his introduction to Shakespeare our Contemporary (1964), and then pointed out its relevance to Shakespeare’s age – and implicitly, it seems clear today, also for an apparently stagnated Cold War world as seen from the West.20 If Barber is the father of new historicism, then Kott is the father of contemporary Presentist criticism in Shakespeare studies as well as in the contemporary

Introduction

13

theatre’s enhanced attention to the political implications of performing Shakespeare in the present. For Kott, above all critics, the milieu in which he is read is crucial for understanding and interpreting his work. For that reason, this book divides his entry into two portions. The first, by Madalina Nicolaescu, concentrates on his experiences within his native Poland and the reaction to his work there and elsewhere in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. The second, by Zoltán Márkus, takes up the story of the reception of his work in the West and his subsequent emigration to the United States. After a period of huge influence – especially his influence on the theatrical world in the heyday of the Royal Shakespeare Company under Peter Brook – something of a reaction against Kott set in, epitomized by the 1989 set of essays edited by John Elsom, Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? – as is discussed by both Nicolaescu and Márkus.21 But the chapter on Kott here make a strong case for re-reading Kott now. Even though not every aspect of his argument survives unscathed, his political energy and determination, his acute intelligence, his interpretive creativity, and – as Márkus emphasizes –the power of his prose, make him a figure with continuing relevance as we proceed into the second decade of the twenty-first century. The same can be said, with a few changes in the list of qualities, for all four of the figures represented here. All the chapters make conscientious attempts to hold the writers up to contemporary standards of intellectual rigour and humane values, even while noting their participation in the thinking and values of earlier days. All of them find continuing relevance and influence, even in cases where a reaction against their methods has set in. It is our hope that readers will find this work to be not only a memorial to great Shakespearean critics of the twentieth century, but an incentive for further development of aspects of their thought in the twenty-first.

Chapter 1

William Empson Lars Engle

This essay begins by posing three questions: what characterizes great critics? Who was William Empson? What makes Empson special, both as a critic and more specifically as a Shakespeare critic? Having attempted to answer these questions, it moves on to argue that William Empson is a great Shakespearean and a model critic generally. His famous eccentricities should not distract readers from central consistent features of his criticism that continue to have both exemplary and corrective force. But he is, in many ways, an odd kind of great critic, and that oddness comes into focus if one asks what in general we mean by the honorific ‘great’ when applied to the oeuvre of a literary critic.

Great Critics What characterizes the greatness of great critics? I propose two answers to this question: one that sees great critics as extreme instances of success in the endeavour to impress and influence their peers (a task that all critics and scholars engage in all the time); and a second, and in my view better, answer, that looks at what we in our own struggles for the attention of others want great critics to do for us. The first answer looks at the short term, and works from a contemporary academic critic’s awareness of what critics do. According to this answer, great critics open up new ground, pioneer new vocabularies of description or evaluation, inspire imitators and found a new normal science in the Kuhnian sense. The greatness of such critics can be measured quickly, during their working lifetimes, by the consequences their work generates. In a modern academic setting, where generations of aspirant scholars hunger for tools for self-establishment, such critics provide new tools. The short-term sociological understanding of critical greatness so defined would resemble Max Weber’s and Clifford Geertz’s accounts of charisma as



William Empson

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well as Thomas Kuhn’s and Richard Rorty’s descriptions of intellectual originality: great critics, like charismatic individuals in any social network, establish themselves at the centres of exchange and evaluation where their impact on affairs will be both immediate and visible to others, even while (as Weber stresses) they possess a special individual attractiveness, derived from access to something beyond ordinary experience, that distinguishes them from others so placed and increases their impact.1 This special attractiveness may involve learning, or confidence, or style, and it often derives partly from literary activity that is not confined to criticism. But on this view, greatness as a critic involves cultural centrality – a kind of power – and is likely to be achieved by critics who seek such centrality. Thus T. S. Eliot and Dr Johnson, paradigmatically great non-academic critics, gravitate toward the metropolitan literary scene and come to dominate it. Their greatness can be mapped as a journey toward the centre of intellectual power: London calling. This paradigm more or less fits many great academic critics. In a way similar to Eliot or Johnson, though less consequential in terms of the larger institution of literature, the most influential academic critics are often central figures in major academic programs that train new academic generations, and these critics often help their institutions establish a kind of magnetic institutional celebrity for critical innovation (‘Cambridge English,’ ‘The Chicago School’). Paul de Man’s move from Cornell to Johns Hopkins to Yale, for instance, to join Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman and be joined by J. Hillis Miller, helped establish him in the last decade of his life as a great living critic by this description. This sociological view of what makes a great critic also explains why, particularly in the academy, critics so often pay a large middle-term price for being consequential or charismatic in their prime. Academic literary critics engage in a ceaseless struggle for rhetorical advantage that often moves toward new ground by salting the fields it leaves behind. Their need to innovate, and to distinguish themselves from their immediate predecessors (who have often been their teachers), accelerates a process of change that is both vital for intellectual progress, and in danger of seeming like change for change’s sake. While this observation is prompted by my experience of life in the current academy, it can find support in many past reflections on the permutations of literary taste. As Samuel Johnson remarks in his ‘Preface to Shakespeare’: The chief desire of him that comments an authour, is to shew how much other commentators have corrupted and obscured him. The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the reach of controversy, are

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confuted and rejected in another, and rise again to reception in remoter times. Thus the human mind is kept in motion without progress. Thus sometimes truth and errour, and sometimes contrarieties of errour, take each other’s place by reciprocal invasion.2 In our own critical scene, these invasions are to some degree generational. Critical generations are hard on their immediate precursors, and the critics who model innovation for one generation tend to provide an equally cogent model of error, emptiness or, at best, old-fashionedness for the next. The curve of Paul de Man’s posthumous reputation, though clearly a complex special case, may partly have to do with the reaction that sets in when something that seemed very new starts seeming old. The widespread familiarity among contemporary critics, as a practical feature of academic behaviour if not a necessary stage of human psychological development, of a Bloomian/Freudian model of parricidal intellectual relations, dovetailing with a widespread interest among younger critics in making sure that they are in the vanguard of the latest paradigm shift rather than eating its dust, speeds up these shifts in our own academic scene by naturalizing them. To put it luridly for effect, ignoring many humane exceptions, and setting aside the ways academic tenure promotes a countervailing institutional gerontocracy, younger critical generations think it only proper to tread down the old. Often the old, rather than kicking back in the name of established tradition, are likely to keep on adopting new intellectual positions in an effort to avoid superannuation and all-oblivious enmity. Sketching dire middle-term consequences of intellectual prominence and career success in this way, we might wish to offer a second answer to the question, ‘what is a great critic?’ A great critic, whatever his or her relation to generational strife, survives it to be found useful afterwards. Furthering this line of definition, we might say that great critics, when time has separated them from the immediate context in which they worked, retain both exemplary and corrective force. That is, they continue to provide us with charismatic or contagious examples of good reading. Or, better, of good writing about literature, since some great critics like Samuel Johnson or Mikhail Bakhtin provide more in the way of enduringly dazzling generalizations than of enduringly dazzling local commentary. But we not only find them helpful in showing us how to read, we also find them helpful in our quarrels with other readers. They have corrective force in helping us see, and say, what is wrong with various kinds of bad reading or bad criticism. I shall claim both exemplary and corrective force for William Empson below, while also pointing out that he never was an institutionally central



William Empson

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critic in his own lifetime: that is, I’ll suggest that he is a great critic according to my second definition but did not behave in the ways sketched in my first. F. R. Leavis, a slightly older contemporary of Empson’s, provides an instructive contrasting case. Leavis was, in his lifetime, a hugely consequential critic who provided both an evaluative vocabulary and a sense of urgent mission to literary critics in British and Commonwealth universities for a long generation that came of age from the late 1920s through the 1950s, but who, as a partial result of this institutional success, became a systematically neglected critic for a generation following. Will Leavis return? Is he returning? Or will his intensities forever seem somewhat parochial when separated by time from their local provocations? Perhaps his ‘greatness’ as a critic depends on the answers to these questions. A taste for Empson in a contemporary student of criticism might also be thought of as a distinctive sign of interest in the not-directly-appropriable. John Ashbery describes Elizabeth Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’ – meaning that she was and is hugely admired by poets (like Lowell and Moore, or Ashbery himself) on whom other poets modelled themselves (with the tacit corollary that Bishop is not a poet whom many other poets find they can imitate directly).3 Empson seems to me a critic’s critic’s critic: not an easily appropriable model, and certainly not someone who moved consistently toward centres of charismatic influence, but someone who is read and admired by many others who have served as widely-imitated models (including Paul de Man, T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, as it happens, but also many others of quite various approaches, e.g. C. S. Lewis, Frank Kermode, Jonathan Goldberg, Christopher Ricks, Christopher Norris, Margreta de Grazia and Jonathan Bate). Empson’s appeal, indeed, may partly lie in his eccentricity. If T. S. Eliot is a twentieth-century model for the poet-critic who centralizes himself, and whose wonderful criticism stands in a fascinating strategic relation to his art, one might think of Empson, like D. H. Lawrence, as another kind of career model for an artist-critic: one with a substantially less consistent professional relation to immediate networks of influence, but one whose work has added appeal perhaps because, however much it is taken up by one generation and set aside by another, it will always seem to speak from an extra-institutional, and perhaps an anti-strategic, perspective. Philip Rahv’s division of American writers into palefaces and redskins may have analogous bearing here.4 Redskins like Lawrence and Empson, who took an extra-institutional position for their criticism in their own lifetimes, may more easily retain corrective force as a result. And like Lawrence’s, Empson’s personal history bears witness to a sustained need to explore

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alternatives to institutional conventions in living as well as in reading and writing.

Who is William Empson? Empson is regularly cited when the twentieth century is described as a great age of literary criticism in English. I wonder, however, how many people are in fact reading him. When I told a generally-speaking very-well-informed younger colleague of mine a couple of years ago that I was writing an essay on William Empson and Shakespeare’s sonnets, the response was ‘who is William Empson?’ I do not think Empson is commonly taught or mentioned in the brief introductions to literary criticism and theory that make up parts of the ‘professionalizing’ seminars that tend to inaugurate graduate study in US PhD programs. When described in more detailed courses on criticism, I think he appears in somewhat misleading company, on lists of important early twentieth-century critics one no longer often reads (lists that for Shakespeareans would include, say, Theodore Spencer, E. E. Stoll, John Dover Wilson and M. C. Bradbrook). Or, even more misleadingly, on general lists of New Critics or ‘Formalists’ whom time has left on the shelf – Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Maynard Mack, for instance. A shorter and, for the reasons suggested at the end of the previous section, better list would set Empson alongside Kenneth Burke and W. H. Auden as mid-twentieth-century mavericks whom it is a mistake to ignore. I’ll be arguing in what follows that Empson models, in a heartfelt and often astonishing way, a fairly simple understanding of literary reading that is widely useful both as a goal for other critics, and as a way of diagnosing where more complicated modes of critical reading go astray. But, before describing Empson’s criticism, let me provide a biographical sketch, so that the question ‘who is William Empson’ first receives an answer of the most straightforward kind. Empson believed strongly that one needed to think about authors’ lives in order to understand their work, and his own life certainly illuminates his. For a literary critic, particularly one who worked mostly as a university teacher, Sir William Empson had an unusually interesting life. Twenty-first century admirers of Empson know all about it, thanks to the splendid recent two-volume biography by John Haffenden, who has also edited a richly-annotated edition of Empson’s poems and a remarkable selection of his letters, as well as being one of the moving spirits in a substantial project



William Empson

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to collect, edit and publish criticism Empson left behind after his death.5 All recent books and articles on Empson that I know of have begun with a tribute to Haffenden’s industry and discernment, and I suspect that most future ones will as well. Empson was born to long-established Yorkshire gentry, rumoured to be descended from the Richard Empson who features peripherally in G. R. Elton’s The Tudor Revolution in Government, a minister who collected taxes and made policy for Henry VII and whose unpopularity led him to be hanged, drawn and quartered in the first months of the reign of Henry VIII.6 But the connection is uncertain. At any rate, the family was settled in Yorkshire by the seventeenth century, fighting on both sides of the Civil War. Our Empson was a younger son – his elder brother Arthur inherited Yokefleet Hall, near Goole, where Empson was born in 1906. William Empson showed early academic promise: as a twelve-year-old he won a scholarship to Winchester College, the most intellectual of the great English public schools, where he excelled in mathematics and began to write poetry. He proceeded to a scholarship at Magdalene College, Cambridge, to study mathematics, took a first in Part I of the mathematical tripos, and began writing reviews and publishing poems. A slightly disappointing result (an upper 2nd) in Part II of the mathematical tripos led him to follow his literary interests and register for the English tripos, in which he was tutored by I.A. Richards, a lifelong influence. His long essay for Part II of the English tripos was a study of ambiguity; he took a first with special distinction in English, and in 1929 was elected to a bye-fellowship at Magdalene. Thus far Empson’s was a life of intellectual as well as social entitlement. At this point, he might have been expected to remain in Cambridge for an influential life in the English faculty, which (thanks in part to the Leavises, despite their embattled relation to the institution) would be perhaps the most influential centre of English study for most of Empson’s career, and which of course remains one of the great English departments. But his career took a fateful swerve. Empson’s sexual life, both gay and straight, had blossomed at university. Just after his graduation, as his personal effects were being moved from a hostel into the college rooms his bye-fellowship entitled him to, college porters, perhaps encouraged in their search by rumours about Empson circulating among the college staff, discovered condoms in a drawer. At a special meeting of the Magdalene governing board, called in the summer of 1929 to deal with this matter, Empson admitted forthrightly that they were his, and that he had indeed

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used others like them, though he refused to say with whom, and denied using them in his college rooms. The board heard reports that he had, however, been seen by the bed maker in charge of his hostel in a compromising situation with a woman. I. A. Richards, who would surely have attempted both to resolve this matter in advance and to defend Empson vigorously if it came to a tribunal, was on his way to China, and thus unable to help. In the event, Empson’s bye-fellowship was withdrawn, he was sent down from Magdalene, and, since his potentially contagious immorality contravened university as well as college rules, he was declared not welcome in the city of Cambridge. A few weeks after his expulsion, at home in Yorkshire, Empson wrote a poem about it: My friends who have not yet gone down From that strange cackling little town, Attend, before you burn your boats, To these few simple College Notes. Lock up whatever it appears Might give a celibate ideas. You’d best import your own stout box; They keep the keys of College locks (Not that they wish, especially, to; It is their duty, and they do). Remember what a porter’s for; He hears ad portam, at the door; He carries (portat) as he ought (Dons love a Latin pun, with port) All tales and all exciting letters Straight to the councils of his betters (Not that he wishes so to thrill; But it’s his duty, and he will). Remember that a bedder’s dreams Are very active on such themes. Don’t let her fancies loose one minute (Take most care when there’s nothing in it). Empson then dispenses advice for how to deal more successfully than he himself did with the ‘row’ that may result from porters’ tale-bearing,



William Empson

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bedders’ evidence-gathering, and the reactions of ‘chaste good dons’ who ‘have heard more tattle than one knows,’ a ‘row’ Which, when it comes, I hope you’ll try To counter with a working lie. Without deceiving, this endears. They have been practising for years. But oh, whatever game you play (Here is the moral of my lay) Never believe the words they say To make you give yourself away. The emphasis in this quatrain suggests that Empson’s frankness before the Magdalene Governing Board was encouraged by the very Fellows who then expelled him for it. He closes by urging his former fellow-students to heed his dire example, and either go out of Cambridge to find prostitutes or confine themselves to the traditional male-institutional sexual paths: O do be warned by what will happen there, And go to Bedford or to Leicester Square. Or would you please those who control your ends Follow where their high patronage commends, And stick to what you learned at school, my friends.7 Though there is doubtless some anger here, the poem shows remarkable resilience – Haffenden sees it as an instance of ‘Empson’s buoyant generosity of spirit’.8 Empson’s letters of the time also treat his expulsion with sangfroid, but it was clearly a bitter blow, and it doubtless reinforced a resistance to punitive narrow-minded institutions that had been a theme in his life since his schooldays, and remained one throughout. The poem urges tact, bears witness to the disastrous consequences of tactlessness, and celebrates a kind of honesty that survives the disaster. It thus prefigures Empson’s lifelong fascination with the relation between tact and honesty, a relation explored in an excellent recent essay by Matthew Creasy I will discuss below.9 Exiled from a conventional academic career in Britain, Empson moved to London, published Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930 – a book that almost immediately made him famous as a literary critic – and in 1931 took a

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professorship in Tokyo for three years.10 After spending 1934–7 in London, publishing Some Versions of Pastoral in 1935, he accepted a professorship at the National Peking University in 1937.11 His arrival coincided with the Japanese invasion of China, and Empson travelled under conditions of considerable hardship with Chinese faculty members and students to teach at the Temporary University (an amalgamation of the universities in exile from Beijing) in South China near the Vietnam border. Without access to libraries, he remembered and typed out a great deal of English lyric poetry for his students (though Haffenden does not support the story I was told as an undergraduate, that he had reconstructed The Oxford Book of English Verse in its entirety from memory). In 1939, when war broke out in Europe, he returned to Britain by way of the US, and worked through the war for the BBC Chinese Service, producing allied propaganda alongside George Orwell among others. In 1941, he married Hetta Crouse, a South African who also worked at the BBC. Hetta and Empson moved back to Beijing after the war’s end and remained through the victory of Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Liberation Army in 1949 – a result they in general welcomed, having lived under the Kuomintang. Hetta, a Communist, applied to the British Communist Party in 1949 for a transfer of membership to the Chinese Communist Party, though this was never accomplished. Partly because of Empson’s history in China during the war with Japan in the late 1930s, and partly perhaps because of Hetta’s political affiliations, the Empsons were able to remain at Peking University until 1952, unharassed amid increasing pressure on its Chinese faculty to conform to Maoist programmes. But in 1952, the British Council ceased supporting Empson’s teaching position, and he returned to England. His Collected Poems were published in New York in 1948, and The Structure of Complex Words in London in 1951.12 He was elected to the Chair in English Literature at Sheffield University in 1953 and remained there until his retirement in 1971, publishing Milton’s God in 1961 and holding a variety of visiting positions in the US, Ghana, and Canada before and after retirement. In 1979, he was knighted for ‘services to English literature’ and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, 50 years after his expulsion. He died in 1984, and a number of posthumous collections, including many essays and imaginative pieces unpublished in his lifetime, have appeared since: Using Biography in 1984 (the last book he himself brought to press), The Royal Beast and Other Works and Empson on Shakespeare in 1986, Argufying and Faustus and the Censor in 1987, Essays on Renaissance Literature, vol. I: Donne and the New Astronomy in 1993, Essays on Renaissance Literature, vol. II: The Drama in 1994, The Strength of Shakespeare’s Shrew in 1996, The Complete Poems in 2000 and Selected Letters in 2006.13



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Haffenden’s portrait of Empson as a person stresses Empson’s exceptional but somewhat abstracted generosity to friends and students, his commitment to truth-telling, and a lifelong social unconventionality that may bespeak not only Empson’s robust intellectual and moral self-confidence, but also a less robust capacity for immediate emotional reading of the intentions of those he was face to face with. Kathleen Raine comments that as a hugely-admired Cambridge undergraduate Empson ‘never had … any wish to excel, lead, dominate, involve, or otherwise exert power; he was at all times, on the contrary, mild, impersonal, indifferent to the impression he made to the point of absent-mindedness … his eyes … nervously evading a direct look’ (WE1, 161). Muriel Bradbrook comments that, when he began seeking relations with women, ‘Those who knew said his relations with women went wrong all the time’, and Haffenden speculates that at this point Empson ‘did not yet appreciate what most moved women … he liked the act without attachment’ (WE1, 239). Haffenden deprecates, as unconfirmed ‘vulgarity aspiring to facetiousness’, Hugh Sykes Davies’s memory in a 1983 interview that one of Empson’s girlfriends said, ‘He used a girl like a lavatory’ (WE1, 239–240). Though Haffenden does not comment on this, it seems probable that Sykes Davies’s remark is a misdirected remembrance of Empson’s comment on Iago’s sexuality in Complex Words: ‘Iago has always despised his pleasures, always treated sex without fuss, like the lavatory’ (SCW, 226), though I suppose it is remotely possible that Empson here coolly recycles a comment once made about his younger self. While it is not at all clear what, at this point in his Cambridge life, led Empson to pursue heterosexual relations, Haffenden suggests that several of Empson’s homosexual attachments were unfulfilled, notably the love for Desmond Lee that in Haffenden’s view lies behind several of Empson’s love-poems (see WE1, 232–9, 254–5). Haffenden also recounts various occasions when the young Empson acted with a surprising spontaneous violence out of apparent jealousy or rivalry, pushing a preening young man into the Cam in order to supersede him in the eyes of Desmond Lee, nearly strangling Sylvia Meredith at a book party for Seven Types of Ambiguity (if her account is to be believed), probably out of jealousy of her relation to her husband Carew Meredith, and, in an odd repetition of the Cambridge punt-party incident, pushing off a diving-board an attractive young Japanese man who had outdone Empson in swimming during his first weeks as a teacher in Japan (WE1, 237–238, 268, 292–293).14 Accounts of Empson both in youth and age suggest a man who has some difficulty negotiating directly with others about his or their feelings, prone to alternations between extreme abstraction and awkward suddenness, but who (perhaps as a result) is deeply and intelligently interested in the complexities

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of social interaction and social isolation. We might want to place Empson on the impercipient end of a scale of facility in reading the emotional states of others from their faces, while knowing that he excelled deeply in reading ponderable verbal statements having to do with emotional relations. Haffenden (who does not make this diagnosis, and might deplore it) quotes a Winchester journal kept by the teenaged Empson in which he expresses delight at a new kind of social life: ‘I could talk to people in College … I bounced about saying more than I meant, and repeating myself, till told to go away’ (WE1, 91). This suggests both Empson’s overflowing mental life, and his need for explicit emotional directives, rather than subtle emotional signals, from others. As an adult, Empson had a perhaps consequent need for personal partners of exceptionally robust and clearly-articulated desires and intentions (Hetta above all fits this description, but so do Elizabeth Wiskenden, the woman with whom Empson was involved when he was expelled from Cambridge, and Alice Naish Stewart, Empson’s lover for the last thirty years of his life). Haffenden does not make a wound-and-bow argument about Empson’s subtlety as an interpreter here, but it seems plausible that Empson’s lifelong commitment to making sense of subtle intentions in writing emerged not only from non-conformist radicalism about the possibility of unexpected intentions, but also from his difficulty in picking up subtle social signals, his awareness of their enormous importance and complexity in allowing human beings to escape isolation, and a resultant need to subject complex communications to rational analysis. As Matthew Creasy remarks, ‘Empson wishes to separate the meanings of … words with the kind of sensitivity more usually associated with the exercise of tact in dealings with people’.15 I am suggesting that Empson found it fascinating and imperative to use this tact about verbal meaning precisely because being tactful in the presence of other people was difficult for him. Were this speculation correct, Empson’s criticism would be all the more exceptional, since it is unsurpassed in exploring ‘delicacies of social tone’ (STA 23) while championing reading, writing, and behaviour entirely free from subservience to social conventions. His marriage to Hetta testifies to his own freedom from conventional sources of shame. As he recounts in a poem written in Beijing and first published in Haffenden’s biography, he proposed marriage to her by announcing both his willingness for her to entertain other male lovers and his hope that they will help in the fulfilment of his own sexual needs. Much astonished to find you were handy I proposed when we first got to bed;



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This was viewed as too pushing or randy And not what was usually said; I urged you have lovers beside me O lots, and I’d just as soon know. It took time and angel to guide me To make the thing go. Did I love you as mine for possessing? Absurd as it seems, I forget; For the vision of love that was pressing And time has not falsified yet Was always a love with three corners I loved you in bed with young men, Your arousers and foils and adorners Who would yield to me then. (WE2, 385) It is clear from the rest of the poem that ‘who would yield to me then’ deserves to be recognized as an ambiguity of the fourth type, ‘when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author’ (STA, 133). The young men will yield Hetta’s bed to Empson himself, who, stimulated by their recent presence, will then make love to Hetta; the young men will yield themselves sexually to Empson. While Empson did not publish this poem, he and Hetta were not at all covert about her affairs and the openness of their marriage; moreover, Empson as a critic was quite firm in suggesting that the sexual lives of Andrew Marvell and of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom followed this unusual pattern.

What Does Empson do as a Critic? In the specific context of this collection of books on Great Shakespeareans, it is notable that much of Empson’s best criticism is not about Shakespeare, and that much of his best Shakespeare criticism is about the sonnets. I discuss Empson first as a critic of lyric poetry and of the sonnets, presenting his early work on them as the basis for his understanding of relations between verbal complexity and authorial biography, and then go on to discuss his treatment of Shakespeare as a playwright. In discussing his sonnets criticism, I adapt some arguments and use some examples that I have treated elsewhere, focusing mainly on Seven Types of Ambiguity and

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on Some Versions of Pastoral.16 I then discuss the Shakespeare chapters in The Structure of Complex Words and some of the later writings collected in Essays on Shakespeare. I emphasize the ways Empson, who is famous for far-reaching and imaginative reactions to particular words, lines and passages, cuts between local intense readings and an overall large-scale picture of Shakespeare as someone with a set of imputed preoccupations and habits that allow Empson to identify with him: suspicion of Christianity, bisexuality, anti-authoritarianism and deep commitment to and exasperation with English social forms. Standing on the shoulders of recent commentators on Empson, above all Haffenden, but also Creasy, Matthew Bevis, Christopher Norris, Richard Strier and Paul Fry,17 it is possible to see William Empson’s career as following from the consequences of two broad and relatively simple claims about reading: A. Complex and multiple meanings can be reasonably read out of particular textual moments by close attention to their details; B. These meanings must ultimately take shape in the reader’s mind as part of an author’s struggle to live well, often a struggle to understand, embrace, combat or reconcile himself or herself to particular opportunities and cruelties of the social, moral or natural order. I’ll refer back to A, ‘the local complexity claim’, and B, ‘the authorial struggle claim’, below. Before turning to the articulation and elaboration of these claims or themes in Empson’s work, it may be helpful to reflect on what they demand in a reader who aspires to be Empsonian. To tease out the implications of claim B, ‘authorial struggle’: reading involves the reader in an effort to understand an author’s life, but the struggle to live well must take place on the reader’s side as well for process B to be complete, in part because no one who is not attempting to sort out the opportunities and cruelties of his or her own culture can sympathize effectively and imaginatively with such struggles on an author’s part. As Empson remarked, ‘you can only understand people by having such a life in yourself to be their mirror’.18 In contrast, Process A calls on the reader to develop an elastic, often playful willingness to juggle options and enjoy the complexity of interpretable expression, but also calls on the reader to make sense of things as exactly as possible. Put more concisely, to do A the reader must combine exquisite sensitivity with belligerent rationality. Thus the fully equipped reader (‘geared up,’ as Empson would say, to do both A and B at once) needs



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optimism, moral sympathy and an interest in resistant relations to the social order, as well as a highly developed faculty for logical and unsentimental exegesis. The two premises I have attributed to Empson can be imagined as the two pincers used to take hold of something, or the two eyes needed to see something in three dimensions. A, the complexity premise, and Empson’s extended attempts to provide satisfactory descriptions of the forms verbal complexity takes, and what aspects of linguistic communication verbal complexity illuminates, supply his work with rigour and philosophic interest. B, the authorial struggle premise, and Empson’s extended effort to imagine or project selves struggling within and behind literary works, supply Empson’s criticism with ethical intensity, give it its substantial historical dimension and provide the outlines of a plausible erotics of reading. But as I have suggested throughout, Empson sees these two premises about reading as enmeshed with each other: words do not mean without speakers or writers; moves in a game are not moves in a game without rules; there are no rules without players, and no players without a culture of play; there is no contest without winners and losers, and no winners and losers without power and pain; and so on. Empson’s adeptness at summoning up this sort of expansion from the very local to the very broad is part of his greatness, just as his resistance to attempts to dehumanize the expansion by somehow leaving human suffering and hope out of it is another part. It is evident that A, local complexity, and B, recognition of authorial struggle, pull in somewhat different directions, but it would be a mistake (though not an uncommon one) to imagine that Empson’s career moves alphabetically from A to B. I shall be demonstrating below that both are evident and well developed in Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson’s first book, published in 1930. It makes some sense to suggest that, after The Structure of Complex Words (1951), Empson largely sets aside the analysis of local complexity, which he regarded as having been misappropriated by the New Critics, for a less fine-grained reconstruction of authorial struggles; for instance, Milton’s struggle with the unpleasantness of Christian doctrine in Paradise Lost. More B and less A allows the later Empson to polemicize vigorously, on the one hand, against mere academic explication that ignores the possibility of genuinely meaningful authorial intention, and on the other, against historicist orthodoxies that rule out the possibility of genuinely surprising meaning. Richard Strier has emphasized the latter polemic recently in an argument I’ll return to below. Nonetheless it remains true that all of Empson’s later work – from Milton’s God through

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Using Biography to the posthumous collections – involves passages of remarkably tight analysis, however far the general arguments are from theorizing local meaning. Analysis of local complexity and recognition of authorial struggle intertwine, more or less symbolically, in a famous passage from the opening chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity, perhaps the first passage in which new readers of that book become certain that they are dealing with a writer of genius. Not unlike the use of a comparison which does not say in virtue of what the two things are to be compared is the use of a comparative adjective which does not say what its noun is to be compared with… . I shall give an example from one of Mr. Waley’s Chinese translations, to insist upon the profundity of feeling which such a device may enshrine. Swiftly the years, beyond recall. Solemn the stillness of this spring morning. (STA, 23) Empson’s ‘example’ is in a characteristic way Empson’s own, as it both misquotes its source poem (where the second line reads ‘Solemn the stillness of this fair morning’) and gives the reader who does not know Waley the impression that the two lines themselves constitute a complete poem.19 Certainly, as Empson shows, they open a wide perspective on human consciousness that, while not ambiguous, is complicated and dialectical: The human mind has two main scales on which to measure time. The large one takes the length of a human life as its unit, so that there is nothing to be done about life, it is of an animal dignity and simplicity, and must be regarded from a peaceable and fatalistic point of view. The small one takes as its unit the conscious moment, and it is from this that you consider the neighbouring space, an activity of the will, delicacies of social tone, and your personality. The scales are so far apart as almost to give the effect of defining two dimensions; they do not come into contact because what is too large to be conceived by the one is still too small to be conceived by the other. Thus, taking the units as a century and the quarter of a second, their ratio is ten to the tenth and their mean is the standard working day; or taking the smaller one as five minutes, their mean is the whole of summer. The repose and self-command given by the use of the first are contrasted with the speed at which it shows the years to be passing from you, and therefore with the fear of death; the fever



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and multiplicity of life, as known by the use of the second, are contrasted with the calm of the external space of which it gives consciousness, with the absolute or extra-temporal value attached to the brief moments of self-knowledge with which it is concerned, and with a sense of security in that it makes death so far off. (STA, 23–24) Note how both of the scales hold something inimical at bay: the long scale allows relief from the fretfulness of the moment, and indeed from any local concerns, but makes death near; the short scale gives one the sense that the spatial realm around one is large and full of possibilities, the sense also that there is an almost immeasurable array of possibilities between the observer and extinction, making death hardly worth considering when there are so many other things to think about. Empson continues, returning to the lines, and demonstrating how important to his argument his misquotation is: Both these time-scales and their contrasts are included by these two lines in a single act of apprehension, because of the words swift and still. Being contradictory as they stand, they demand to be conceived in different ways; we are enabled, therefore, to meet the open skies with answering stability of self-knowledge; to meet the brevity of human life with an ironical sense that it is morning and springtime, that there is a whole summer before winter, a whole day before night. (STA, 24) Had Empson remembered Tao Qian’s poem exactly as it appears in Arthur Waley’s translation, he could not have written this beautiful sentence, or at any rate would have had to quote more of the poem and to introduce a number of distracting aspects of the poem in order to write it. I call swift and still here ambiguous, though each is meant to be referred to one particular time-scale, because between them they put two time-scales into the reader’s mind in a single act of apprehension. But these scales, being both present, are in some degree used for each adjective, so that the words are ambiguous in a more direct sense; the years of a man’s life seem swift even on the small scale, like the mist from the mountains which ‘gathers a moment, then scatters’; the morning seems still even on the large scale, so that this moment is apocalyptic and a type of heaven. (STA, 24) These two scales parallel, though they are not identical to, the intensity of the textual moment and the understanding of the text as part of a whole

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life, itself in relation to yet larger structures of belief and custom, that I’ve identified above as A and B. Moreover, we can see both A and B in these passages, though they are clearer in the full text. There is no invocation of authorial biography in Empson’s treatment of a translation of a Chinese text that Empson does not credit with either an author or a date. Nonetheless, in Empson’s reading of the couplet something like an authorial intention emerges. By bold explanatory paraphrase, Empson treats the poem as contemplating, and enabling its readers to contemplate, a general or even universal biological contrast between a moment of perception and the whole lifetime of a human being. The goal, as often in Empson’s imputations of motive to poets or poems, is making human existence more bearable. Moreover, the passage contrasts short and long time – treating us to some dazzling if obscure calculation in the process (‘their ratio is ten to the tenth and their mean is the standard working day’) – while ignoring the intermediate time structures that, for people like Empson and most adults, stand between the conscious moment and the lifetime whether we are looking back in memory or forward in anticipation: such structures as projects, career phases, epochs of relationship, periods of institutional affiliation, etc. In ignoring such intermediate structures, Empson parallels in a rather uncanny premonitory way his general lack of interest in the larger formal and generic traditions – the inherited structures artists work in – that might be seen as intermediate between particular passages and grand struggles in the life of the author. Christopher Norris sees this inattention to form and genre as part of Empson’s focus on the philosophy of communication: He treats the poem as a concentrated species of ordinary language; drama and the novel as complex solutions to typical problems of social conflict and adjustment… . What seemed to many critics (especially the Chicago Aristotelians) a culpable laxness in matters of formal classification, indicates in fact a much greater interest on Empson’s part in the means of communication common to all forms of literature.20 Since many literary critics make careers out of the exploration of such formal classifications or intermediate inherited structures, Empson’s tendency to over-leap them deserves to be stressed. Empson’s book on the pastoral mode, Some Versions of Pastoral, might seem to offer a counter-example, but in it Empson treats pastoral as a way to get the complexity of an author’s relation to the social order into an apparent local simplicity:



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The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language (so that you wrote about the best subject in the best way). From seeing the two sorts of people combined like this you thought better of both; the best parts of both were used. The effect was in some degree to combine in the reader or author the merits of the two sorts; he was made to mirror in himself more completely the effective elements of the society he lived in. (SVP, 11–12) Thus an author’s struggle to live well in a world where class-difference makes the social order seem unjust can be read out of a generic pastoral habit of local complexity: the paradox of shepherds who speak like courtiers. Empson does comment wonderfully on form, but it tends to be local form, as can be seen in his discussion early in Seven Types of the predominant absence of ambiguity in The Faerie Queene. Meditating on ‘the dreamy repetition of the great stanza perpetually pausing at its close,’ Empson comments wakefully that ‘stanzas may … be classified by the grammatical connections of the crucial fifth line, which must give a soft bump to the dying fall of the first quatrain, keep it in the air, and prevent it from falling apart from the rest of the stanza’ (STA, 33). He performs such a classification in a meaty paragraph that anatomizes a number of the kinds of voice and pace to be found in Spenser’s epic, and then adds the following observation: The size, the possible variety, and the fixity of this unit give something of the blankness that comes from fixing your eyes on a bright spot; you have to yield to it very completely to take in the variety of its movement, and, at the same time, there is no need to concentrate the elements of the situation into a judgment as if for action. As a result of this, when there are ambiguities of idea, it is whole civilisations rather than details of the moment which are their elements; he can pour into the even dreamwork of his fairyland Christian, classical, and chivalrous materials with an air, not of ignoring their differences, but of holding all their systems of values floating as if at a distance, so as not to interfere with one another, in the prolonged and diffused energies of his mind. (STA, 34) Here, one can see Empson moving from local complexity to an author’s attempt to live well by way of trying to imagine the creative process of a

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great poet whose mind could be so untroubled as not to produce local ambiguities of diction. Empson returns to the matter in 1952 in a radio talk entitled ‘Edmund Spenser: Is he the “Poet’s Poet”?’; after again discussing Spenser’s capacity to extend himself (often by placid self-contradiction) rather than concentrating his differences with himself in local complexity or ambiguity, Empson ends that talk by repeating, with evident admiration for his own youthful productions, this paragraph.21 Empson’s A and B premises, seen either as a way to map lyric or to analyse drama, may seem old-fashioned – though probably they seem less decidedly old-fashioned than they would have 15 or 20 years ago, before books like Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, Katharine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shakespeare, David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe or James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 reminded us of the possibilities of speculatively reading authorial biography out of a mixture of facts and fictions. Nonetheless, it is premise B, the idea that we must always be imagining an author attempting to live well, that may seem controversial; premise A, the assumption of local complexity, is not overtly ideological as a habit of reading or thought. But premise B, with its imperative interest in the author as an imagined self, located in both an individual and a collective history, clearly is an ideological commitment in its emphasis on agent rather than structure, though a flexible one (because Empson’s authorial agents are always in a complex state of engagement with social forces). On the basis of premise B, Empson in his own time polemicized against formalist anti-intentionalism, and Empson now seems to weigh in from the grave on how we should go about imagining the subject’s position in discourse. More generally, Empson weighs in against any attempt to find a vocabulary that will somehow excuse readers from imagining themselves and the authors they read as, to quote D. H. Lawrence, ‘damned and doomed to the old effort at serious living’.22 Given this insistent humanism, we might expect both poststructuralist readers and historicist readers to be uncomfortable with premise B, specifically with its reliance on an idea of the author as a historically located individual whose intentions we should be trying to infer.23 But this discomfort, if felt at all, does not impede Empson from exerting influence on many sorts of critics. I noted above, in suggesting that Empson was ‘a critic’s critic’s critic’, that influential critics of many different kinds quote Empson with a mixture of affection and reverence, and I cited, among others, deconstructors, historicist materialists and queer theorists. In terms of the A and B premises, one can see why deconstructive critics working in English would wish to connect their enterprise with Empson’s habit of extrapolating apparent problems



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in resolving local meaning into deeply surprising accounts of the central attitudinal problems behind them. Empson locates these problems (which we might call A/B problems, using our premises) in the author’s struggles; deconstructors tend to locate them more impersonally in the erasures and occlusions necessary to preserve a façade of logocentric order; but, in some classic deconstructive texts, one finds reference to the authorial consciousness of an entirely Empsonian premise-B variety. For instance, in ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, after describing the shock of the death in the white space between the two stanzas of Wordsworth’s ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’, Paul de Man concludes that ‘there is no real disjunction of the subject; the poem is written from the point of view of a unified self that fully recognizes a past condition as one of error and stands in a present that, however painful, sees things as they actually are … Wordsworth is one of the few poets who can … speak, as it were, from beyond their own graves’.24 This is a particular case of the general tendency de Man finds (and approves of) in Empson. In the essay ‘The Dead End of Formalist Criticism’, the next chapter of Blindness and Insight, de Man comments on how Empson’s interrogations of local complexity (what I call premise A) lead him ineluctably to ‘the deep division of Being itself’, and when de Man discusses Empson’s practice further, it is clear that this division of Being is, for Empson, located in the self of the author, though de Man avoids the word ‘self’ in describing it: Empson sheds light upon this dialectic … of the unhappy consciousness … He begins with Keats … a very good selection, for Keats lived this tension especially acutely and lived in its substance… . We have traveled far from Richards’ universe where there never is any error, only misunderstanding. Empson’s inquiry, drawn by the very weight of his cogitations to problems that can no longer be ignored, has led him to broader questions. Instead of concentrating on details of poetic form, he will have to reflect henceforth upon the poetic phenomenon as such; a phenomenon that does seem to deserve this kind of attention since it leads, willy-nilly, to unsuspected perspectives upon human complexity.25 Though I do not imagine that de Man would be entirely happy with formulating this as ‘the author’s struggle to live well under inimical conditions’, that is, I believe, the way Empson looks at the human complexity his discussions of verbal complexity lead him to.26 And Empson is clearly a critic de Man takes as an admirable model of rigour, though a rigour that does not express itself in de Man’s own chosen philosophical vocabulary (a vocabulary in which ‘rigour’ is an impersonal God-term).

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Similarly, historically-minded critics find a model for their own work in Empson’s way of seeing large social conflicts coming into minute focus in an author’s struggles to write a sufficiently complex representation of relations among consciousness, communication and the social order. Stephen Greenblatt briefly invokes Empson in ‘Invisible Bullets’, an essay that stands to New Historicism in roughly the same relation that ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ does to American deconstruction, when Greenblatt gets to his central account of Prince Hal’s chilly effectiveness and wishes to suggest that Shakespeare must have had the same ambivalence about Hal that Greenblatt does: Hal is an anti-Midas: everything he touches turns to dross. And this devaluation is the source of his own sense of value, a value not intrinsic but contingent, dependent upon the circulation of counterfeit coin and the subtle manipulation of appearances: And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. I’ll so offend, to make offense a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will. (1.2.212–17) Such lines, as Empson remarks, ‘cannot have been written without bitterness against the prince,’ yet the bitterness is not incompatible with ‘an ironical acceptance’ of his authority.27 Similarly, though Greenblatt never mentions Empson in his treatment of Wyatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Greenblatt makes a very Empsonian movement from A to B in summing up his treatment of Wyatt: We are now prepared to grasp how the gap between discourse and intention opens up in Wyatt and hence how it is possible for his greatest poems to engage in complex reflections upon the system of values that has generated them. The result is the complex response evoked by a poem like ‘They Flee from Me’: on the one hand, acceptance of the speaker’s claim to injured merit, admiration for his mastery of experience, complicity in his ‘manly’ contempt for women’s bestial faithlessness; on the other hand, recognition of the speaker’s implication in his own betrayal, acknowledgement of the link between the other’s imputed bad faith and his own, perception of an interior distance in the ideology so passionately espoused.28



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Certainly Greenblatt sees Wyatt’s lyric as part of an author’s struggle to live well – a struggle in which the author is, at least in part, failing because he has been fashioned by a courtly system that programs him for failure, but also partly succeeding by including intense awareness of this fact in his lyric. Examples from Empson’s criticism both of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Shakespeare’s plays will show the frequency with which his own moves to imputed biography end in the imputation of a dialectical or ambivalent selfhood to his author. Similarly, queer critics and theorists have taken Empson as a model, both of candour about the complexities of sexual self-positioning (for instance, in his late discussions of Marvell’s sexuality), and in his recognition that verbal complexity is, and should be recognized as, an aspect of the presence of queer issues in the life and culture of authors. Thus Jonathan Goldberg writes on how Empson’s reliance on B-variety intentionalism can guide modern theorists and critics attempting to understand sodomy in Marlowe’s Edward II: Sodomy may be a void, but it is central to the will… . This is not a position easily assimilable to those who would find in Marlowe a spokesman for modern gay identity. William Empson, with his usual genius, was closer to the point when he argued that Marlowe believed that ‘the unmentionable sin for which the punishment was death was the proper thing to do’; Marlowe is defending sodomy, not an idealized friendship or some spiritual relationship or some self-integrative principle of identity; ‘a critic,’ Empson continues, ‘who muffles it up, from whatever kind intention, cannot be saying anything important about him’.29 Notice here that it is Empson’s belief in his own premise B insight into Marlowe’s mind that makes him, for Goldberg, not only a useful model for Goldberg’s own treatment of Edward II, but a useful corrective for the errors of others. I now turn to Shakespeare’s sonnets, and, finally, to Empson as Shakespeare critic. As is well known, the sonnets bear a privileged historical role in Empson’s formation as a literary critic. He got the idea for what became Seven Types of Ambiguity from a 1928 essay by Laura Riding and Robert Graves that explored the punctuation, syntax and meaning of sonnet 129 by reading an unedited version of that poem (WE1, 217–225). The first part of Empson’s book to appear in print was an essay on sonnet 16 that pursued their method. A number of the analyses in Seven Types focus on sonnets, though Empson’s most remarkable sonnet criticism comes

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later. Empson’s central treatment of the sonnets is the chapter on sonnet 94, ‘They that have power to hurt’, in Some Versions of Pastoral, and there are recurrent references to the sonnets in Empson’s discussion of the plays and narrative poems ever after, notably in the chapter on ‘sense’ in Measure for Measure in Complex Words and in the essay introducing the Signet edition of the narrative poems, now reprinted in Essays on Shakespeare. I want to suggest, however, that Empson may have been drawn to the sonnets not merely because they are luminous beacons for any interpreter drawn to complex utterance. For it is in relation to the sonnets that Empson could be said to discover how to join A and B, extremely close textual analysis with speculative authorial biography. The reason for this is fairly obvious. After all, the sonnets are to a preeminent degree both locally complex and biographically suggestive. More crucially, without large-scale biographical inferences local ingenuity has a great deal of difficulty making sense of them: witness the debate over whether Stephen Booth’s attempts, in the notes to his edition, to have a lot of A without much B produce satisfaction.30 For Empson, at any rate, it is evidently both impossible and undesirable to do much type A analysis of the sonnets without involving himself in a good deal of type B hypothesizing about the life of the author. Empson moves from one to the other in the first two pages of Seven Types, citing line four of Sonnet 73. To take a famous example, there is no pun, double syntax, or dubiety of feeling in, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang, but the comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots, and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of



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effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry. (STA, 2–3) The final sentence in the passage shows that Empson feels that his B-drenched exploration of A gets at something central about the nature of lyric. This is a baroque passage, richer and more startling than most of the later treatments of whole sonnets in Seven Types, and it encapsulates an Empsonian movement from specific words through an emotional state in the mind of the author (Shakespeare’s feelings for the young man) to various aspects of the author’s culture that may have pressed upon Shakespeare’s consciousness. These include Shakespearean ambivalence about the destruction of English Catholicism, possibly an historically prescient awareness that religious intolerance in England is always part of a struggle for power and property between one group and another, and a ‘fear of puritanism’ that seems to involve both a professional wariness of the consequences of puritan anti-theatricalism and a more personal fear that puritanical resistance to the pursuit of bodily pleasure will not only oppress him but also possibly infect him, as it seems to be doing in some of the Dark Lady sonnets (compare Complex Words, 272). Such speculative unpacking of Empson’s own formulations is, surely, encouraged by Empson’s general way of going about things. Moreover, as we have seen, Empson’s biography supports the speculation. When he published Seven Types, Empson himself was a recent victim of what he clearly regarded as hypocritical puritanism on the part of the fellows of Magdalene. Thus Empson’s biographical projection of a Shakespeare haunted by puritanism and the casting-off of bad influences on the young – a projection that informs his close readings of the Henriad and of Measure for Measure – seems linked to Empson’s own biography from the start. Empson’s extended discussion of Sonnet 83 in Seven Types furthers such reflections. The discussion comes at the beginning of his chapter on ambiguities of the fourth type, already mentioned above with respect to a poem of Empson’s: ‘when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author’ (STA, 133). Thus Empson abstractly states one of the major relations between A and B in his criticism: a problem encountered in type A local exegesis leads to, and is then retroactively fixed or transcended by, an advance in type B imputed biography. The full sonnet, with Q punctuation and capitalization (though not spelling) as quoted by Empson, is as follows:

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I never saw that you did painting need, And therefore to your fair no painting set, I found (or thought I found) you did exceed, The barren tender of a Poet’s debt: And therefore have I slept in your report, That you yourself being extant well might show, How far a modern quill doth come too short, Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow, This silence for my sin you did impute, Which shall be most my glory being dumb, For I impair not beauty being mute, When others would give life, and bring a tomb. There lives more life in one of your fair eyes, Than both your Poets can in praise devise. (STA, 133) Empson comments of the whole: One must pause before shadowing with irony this noble compound of eulogy and apology. But one may notice its position in the sequence (Shakespeare seems to have been taunted for his inferiority, and is being abandoned for the rival poet); the mixture of extraordinary claims and bitter humility with which it is surrounded; and that the two adjacent Sonnets say: ‘Thou truly fair wert truly sympathised In true plain words by thy truth-telling friend,’ and ‘You to your beauteous blessings add a curse, Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse.’ It is not true that the feeling must be simple because it is deep; irony is similar to this kind of lyrical self-abandonment, or they relieve similar situations; by the energy with which such an adoration springs forward one can measure the objections which it is overriding, by the sharpness of what is treated as an ecstasy one may guess that it would otherwise have been pain. (STA p. 134) Here, Empson moves to a direct declaration, ‘it is not true that the feeling must be simple because it is deep’. The statement seems, in its generality, to be grounded in Empson’s own mind mirroring the imputed experience of Shakespeare as well as in his reading of this particular sonnet. The claim makes Shakespearean ambiguity (at least as manifested in this sonnet) into the expression of Shakespeare’s (and, perhaps, everyone’s) ambivalence, an ambivalence that can find ‘relief’ in either lyric idealization or irony, or an ambiguous combination of the two. The particular biographical



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construction Empson has in mind becomes clearer in his discussion of the final quatrain. It too involves the characteristic movement from A to B. Modern editors almost without exception insert a comma after ‘beauty’ in line 11, so that 11–12 reads: ‘For I impair not beauty, being mute, / When others would give life, and bring a tomb’. This insertion makes it natural to read line 12 as meaning ‘When the other poets who are now writing about you intend to give you life but in fact give you a tomb’. Empson reads the quarto punctuation, ‘For I impair not beauty being mute, / When others would give life, and bring a tomb’. As a result, Empson considers at length the possibility that lines 11 and 12 should rather be paraphrased together to allow the possibility that it is Shakespeare who ‘bring[s] a tomb’: It would be possible to regard line 12, which clinches the third quatrain, as an antithesis: ‘when others would bring life, I in fact bring a tomb.’ This might be Shakespeare’s tomb; ‘I do not flatter you but I bring you the devotion of a lifetime.’ More probably it is W. H.’s; ‘I do not attempt to flatter you at the moment; I bring you the sad and reserved gift of an eternal praise’. We may extract from this some such meaning as: ‘I do not describe your beauty or your faithlessness, but my love for you’. (STA, 137) Notice how the series of paraphrases bring out both possible ironies and declarations of abject dependence on Shakespeare’s part – a dependence that, in being expressed, becomes a bit less abject, particularly since it may include the possibility that the older poet is eulogizing the beautiful young man after imagining his death. Empson continues his unpacking: However, there are two other ways of taking the syntax which destroy this antithesis: ‘When others would bring life, I, if I wrote about you, would bring a tomb’, and ‘When others would try to write about you, would try to give you life, and thereby bring you a tomb’; for both of these the tomb must imply some action which would impair beauty. The normal meaning is given by Sonnet xvii: Who will beleeve my verse in time to come If it were fild with your most high deserts? Though yet Heaven knowes it is but as a tombe Which hides your life, and shows not halfe your parts. This first use of the word has no doubt that it is eulogy; the Sonnet is glowing and dancing with his certitude. But when the metaphor is

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repeated, this time without being explained, it has grown dark with an incipient double meaning; ‘I should fail you, now that you have behaved so badly to me, if I tried to express you in poetry; I should give you myself, and draw from my readers, a cold and limited judgment, praise you without sincerity, or blame you without thinking of the living man’. (STA, 137–38) This is something new, and something more powerful than what came just before it. What is Empson doing when he, as Shakespeare, says to ‘W. H.’ ‘now that you have behaved so badly to me, if I tried to express you in poetry … I should … blame you without thinking of the living man’? Surely we must call this a kind of performance of the sonnet (this is well within our ideas of what one does with lyric), but it is also a kind of impersonation of the poet (and this stretches our normal thinking). Having followed premise A and explored the varieties of possible meaning in the quatrain, Empson takes premise B so far that he in effect becomes the speaker/poet who voices the complex of feelings within it. Like a Stanislavskian actor, Empson constructs a biography for the lyric speaker (mostly out of the adjacent sonnets in the sequence and his general sense of it), and what he voices is a kind of through line for the sonnet – a set of declarations in his own distinctive prose. His tendentious paraphrase picks up the aspect of Shakespeare’s relation to the young man that most interests Empson by giving priority to what most readers find the least probable construction of lines 11–12. This ‘incipient double meaning’ lets Empson, having temporarily become Shakespeare, return and tell us what Shakespeare is like, quoting Parolles’ most famous line from All’s Well that Ends Well in the process: ‘I should … blame you without thinking of the living man’. (‘Simply the thing I am Shall make me live’; Shakespeare continually draws on a generosity of this kind. It is not ‘tout comprendre’, in his view, it is merely to feel how a man comes to be a working system, which necessarily excites a degree of sympathy.) (STA, 138) A fairly arid exercise in paraphrase has morphed into the exciting claim that one of the goals of Shakespearean lyric is to anatomize the excitation of sympathy by ‘feel[ing] how a man comes to be a working system’. The ‘generosity’ Empson brings out here is both Shakespeare’s own, and Empson’s own, and is both something Shakespeare aims to arouse, and something Empson intends to evoke. It is quite close, it seems to me, to



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the way that Greenblatt suggests that our response to Wyatt involves both a sympathetic admiration for Wyatt’s expression of loss and an awareness that, in his lyric, Wyatt is worked by the system that he is working. But Empson is bolder than Greenblatt in his entry into the mind of his author. And all this plausible and powerful Empsonian generalization about Shakespeare emerges from a type A problem in reading that most modern editions, by repunctuating, render invisible. Let me close this part of the essay by briefly discussing the chapter on sonnet 94 in Some Versions of Pastoral, which offers a kind of exercise in moving through A to B and fully displays Empson’s technique of Shakespeare impersonation. Following Graves and Riding, Empson quotes the Q version: They that haue powre to hurt,and will doe none, That doe not do the thing,they most do showe, Who mouing others,are themselues as stone, Vnmooued,could,and to temptation slow: They rightly do inherrit heauens graces, And husband natures ritches from expence, They are the Lords and owners of their faces, Others,but stewards of their excellence: The sommers flowre is to the sommer sweet, Though to itselfe,it onely liue and die, But if that flowre with base infection meete, The basest weed out-braues his dignity: For sweetest things turne sowrest by their deedes, Lillies that fester, smell far worse then weeds. (SVP, 88) Empson begins by setting up the basic problem of interpretation posed by the unspecified terms that need to be placed in comparison with one another in the sonnet: ‘you can work through all the notes in the Variorum without finding out whether flower, lily, “owner”, and person addressed are alike or opposed … the simplest view (that any two may be alike in some one property) … yields 4096 possible movements of thought’. He concludes that ‘the niggler is routed here; one has honestly to consider what seems important’ (SVP, 89). There is no ‘person addressed’ in 94 proper (just as line 4 of 73, ‘Bare ruin’d choirs’, is not the ‘simile’ Empson calls it in a passage quoted above), but Empson will not be inhibited from biography by such minor matters of form, and as he points out later, the idea of address is carried over from 93 and continues through 95, both

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sonnets on related themes. Empson’s calculation that the number of possible movements of thought here is 45 has been disputed, incidentally. Empson’s treatment of the sonnet includes many of the kinds of meditation joining A and B I have talked about above – for instance his reflection on the mental instrument sonnet 94 turns out to be. It is both a map on which one can trace many routes, and an instrument on which the reader and the author are both imagined as performers. The mind of the reader and the mind of the author meet here in much the way they met in Empson’s discussion of the Spenserian stanza in Seven Types: The vague and generalised language of the descriptions [in sonnet 94], which might be talking about so many sorts of people as well as feeling so many things about them, somehow makes a unity like a crossroads, which analysis does not deal with by exploring down the roads; makes a solid flute on which you can play a multitude of tunes, whose solidity no list of all possible tunes would go far to explain. The balance of feeling is both very complex and very fertile; experiences are recorded, and metaphors invented, in the Sonnets, which he went on ‘applying’ as a dramatist, taking particular cases of them as if they were wide generalisations, for the rest of his life. (SVP, 90) After an illuminating discussion of the passage (and as part of a generous and helpful discussion of Empson’s brilliant contribution to studies of pastoral), Paul Alpers comments oddly in What Is Pastoral? that ‘the unity of a crossroads (such as it is) is a fact of social existence, with no grounding in nature or analogy to the human individual; the solid flute suggests the limits of the minds that write and interpret, for of course no tune can be played on it’.31 But surely Empson means that the sonnet is a device that lives through interpretive performance, polysemous in that many varied meanings can pass through it, but solid in that it remains the singular and unchanging instrument on which such meanings are ‘played’ by the author or by readers? I do not think, pace Alpers, that Empson intends the idea of a flute that has no hollow passage through which to blow air. At any rate, this idea of the lyric as crossroads or instrument serves as Empson’s segue in the wide-ranging linkage between this sonnet, all the sonnets and a number of the plays that follows. As he notes, ‘it is hard not to go off down one of the roads at the crossing, and get one plain meaning for the poem from that, because Shakespeare himself did that so very effectively afterwards; a part of the situation of the Sonnets, the actual phrases designed for it, are given to Prince Henry, to Angelo, to Troilus, to the



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Greek army; getting further from the original as time went on’ (SVP, 102). After exploring these, Empson concludes with a tendentious paraphrase that is both his own final attempt to read sonnet 94 and Shakespeare’s final attempt to sum up his relation to the young man: It is not surprising that this sentiment [Bassanio’s awareness that he is loved for superficial beauty and for his own success in being loved] should make Shakespeare’s mind hark back to the Sonnets, because it was there so essential; these poems of idealisation of a patron and careerist depend upon it for their strength and dignity. ‘Man is so placed that the sort of thing you do is in degree all that any one can do; success does not come from mere virtue, and without some external success a virtue is not real even to itself. One must not look elsewhere; success of the same nature as yours is all that the dignity, whether of life or poetry, can be based upon’. This queer sort of realism, indeed, is one of the main things he had to say. The feeling that life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit, and yet that a good life must avoid saying so, is naturally at home with most versions of pastoral … (SVP, 114–115) Thus, in his type B criticism of Shakespeare, Empson is preoccupied with, and vocalizes from the inside, a quasi-biographical question about Shakespeare that was probably at times an autobiographical question for Empson as well: how could someone so unimaginably successful in literary creation be so unhappy – or, to put it another way, how could someone with such extraordinary analytical gifts make such self-destructive object choices? Empson’s answer comes here, in the idea that literary creation can come out of the acceptance that ‘life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit, and yet that a good life must avoid saying so’. This intellectually enabling though not personally reassuring attitude, a kind of negative humanism, informs much of Empson’s Shakespeare criticism. Empson’s example has had a considerable effect on later critics of the sonnets, most explicitly in their embrace of the A position outlined above. As Empson says in defence of this A premise at the end of Seven Types of Ambiguity, ‘an advance in the machinery of description makes a reader feel stronger about his appreciations, more reliably able to distinguish the private or accidental from the critically important or repeatable, more confident of the reality (that is, the transferability) of his experiences; adds, in short, in the mind of the reader to the things there to be described, whether or not it makes those particular things more describable’ (STA, 254).

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As we turn from Empson’s criticism on Shakespeare’s sonnets to his treatment of Shakespeare as a playwright, it is worth restating and slightly expanding the claims I am making for an Empsonian critical scheme: Empson consistently follows out the implications of linking, and treating as inseparable, two large ideas about literary experience: A. When allowed to mean in the mind of a receptive reader, particular passages or words convey extremely complex, often ambiguous, selfdivided or historically unexpected meanings; B. When, as readers, we move inevitably from local complexity to a more general meaning-giving framework, that framework is not centrally historical or generic, but interpersonal: meanings need to be understood as the intentions (conscious or not) of an author struggling to live well amid an array of usually inimical forces, some so pervasive as to be almost universal (e.g. mortality, inequality, subjective isolation), others particular to the author’s historical situation or the author’s way of using the form s/he is employing. A and B taken together imply: C. Literary meaning requires a fit reader who is also preoccupied with the problem of living well under inimical conditions and who is not boxed in by an inappropriately limited, or misleadingly technical, view of how serious reading proceeds. A critical reader striving to understand the sense of a particular line is also a human being trying to identify in imagination with another human being. Precise attention to semantic features of verbal complexity does not diminish the necessity of attending to the author’s social struggle. Attention to social struggle does not make semantic analysis of verbal complexity unnecessary, moot or relatively frivolous. In fact, verbal complexity registers how, in the minds of poets – but also ordinary speakers – the struggle to make sense of social complexity manifests itself. Empson’s insistence on both A and B at once has rich implications for philosophy of language as well as for literary criticism. Christopher Norris, probably the most philosophical of Empson critics, argues in 1978 that readers of Wittgenstein and Austin ought to be taking Empson seriously, and in 2002 that readers of Derrida and Davidson ought to do the same.32 Much of the interest, both philosophical and psychological, of Empson’s B premise comes from the question it raises about whether authors are



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fully conscious of how their words and works participate in their struggle to live well. Empson throughout his career is fascinated by paradoxes about intentionality, self-awareness and meaning, particularly in the minds of writers whom most readers take to be deeply committed to an ascertainable system of beliefs. Empson reads both Herbert and Milton, for instance, as resistant, at complex moments, to aspects of the Christianity Empson has no doubt that they generally believed in. Late in life, in the course of an interview, Empson tells Christopher Ricks an anecdote intended to clarify his own position with respect to authors’ conscious intentions, an exploration of the way premise C both obliges and allows critics to have fun in their relations to the struggles of authors. The anecdote nicely illustrates Empson’s infectious delight in mischief directed at dogmatic commitments, supporting Jonathan Bate’s bold remark that ‘Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson are the greatest English critics of their respective centuries not least because they are the funniest’.33 There was a fine statement by G. K. Chesterton, a very good critic I’ve always thought, who said that if criticism means anything … [it] means saying about the author the very things that would have made him jump out of his skin. And the idea that you should avoid making the author jump out of his skin, I really do hope hasn’t occurred to me. That would be falling down on the great duty. This is worth taking note of: Empson regards it as the critic’s ‘great duty’ – perhaps a bit jocosely – to as it were demonstrate to authors that they may not really know what they meant, but really do mean it. Empson continues with an example: [T]here’s a grand case of it in the nineties when Frank Harris … greatly admired, very rightly, the poems of the Shropshire Lad, the poems of A. E. Housman. And so he took a taxi to the north of London and insisted on dragging Housman … out to lunch, and Housman recited a poem about God Save the Queen and praising the first, second, and third Zulu wars, and various wars of that kind which were going on in the nineties, and said ‘Oh God will save her, be you the man you’ve been, get you the sons your fathers got, and God will save the Queen’. And Harris said, ‘and so he will, and so the old bitch will be saved till the men can be fooled no longer’, or something. At any rate, ‘old bitch’ came in, and Housman rose up, white and shaking, and said ‘You must allow me to go, I had no intention of meaning anything of the kind’,

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and it is very baffling to see how he could have written those poems without knowing that they were being ironical or at any rate saying that the [soldiers] were being wasted for trivial purposes … I mean, here is a case where the author was made to jump out of his skin. And this could only be because in some mysterious way he knew what was inside his skin. (WE2, 635–636) For Empson, Frank Harris succeeded in a type C reading, to shocking effect, in his response to A. E. Housman. Such readings often involve a technique of projective biography, and given the ways C links engaged reader with engaged author, projective biography is often projected autobiography as well. As Paul Fry puts it, ‘We don’t doubt for a moment that … [Empson] was a good though opinionated judge of character; the reason we don’t doubt this is that we gladly agree with Empson in liking, admiring, and recognizing the lineaments of the character he judges well, even though it is to a large extent the character he sees in the mirror’.34 This biographical and autobiographical tendency has often been mentioned and is obvious in Empson’s later writing. The readers of Empson who see his work proceeding alphabetically often also believe that he peaked early, with Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral, and so regard Empson primarily as a close reader or practical critic. They do not see projective biography as central to Empson’s best work. One thing I hope to have accomplished already in this essay is to demonstrate that there is no A without B, even in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Nonetheless, the projected biography and projected autobiography do grow more evident as Empson’s career proceeds. René Wellek comments that Empson’s reading of Sonnet 94 in Pastoral discussed above ‘assign[s] to Shakespeare what seems Empson’s own peculiar wisdom about life, “the feeling that life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit, and yet that a good life must avoid saying so”’.35 Frank Kermode, reviewing the first volume of John Haffenden’s biography of Empson in the London Review of Books, comments that ‘Empson himself was a pugnacious believer in the relevance of biography to the study of literature’.36 Paul Fry says that for Empson ‘in honouring literature we are praising the scope of the human mind, hence should keep the mind as fully in view as the static interference of the text will allow’, and goes on to say of The Structure of Complex Words that ‘a book devoted to the analysis of self-conception becomes at the same time a wonderfully suggestive moral and intellectual autobiography’.37 And everyone who cares about Empson knows that biographical readings of literature, constructing complex unexpected intentions for authors,



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characterize Empson’s late work. John Haffenden, in the second volume of his biography, William Empson: Against the Christians, entitles a late chapter ‘Rescuing Donne and Coleridge’ and details how Empson argued passionately for beliefs and intentions on the part of Coleridge and Donne that he felt essential in recognizing their struggle to live decently in a world deformed by bad Christian structures of belief (WE2, 560–605). And of course a late volume collecting Empson’s essays, published just after his death in 1984, is entitled Using Biography. It should be noted here, given the corrective tendency of much of Empson’s later criticism, that B and C involve both an intentionalist idea about how literature should be read and a platform for the critique of ideas about reading that limit the power of authors to mean in unexpected ways and the entitlement of readers to be correspondingly surprised by what they read. Moreover, Empson’s corrective tendencies very often involve impatience with what he sees as a false science, or an inappropriately determinative contextualizing vocabulary, that gets in the way of surprising identification between reader and author. I believe that this aspect of Empson’s basic stance still has corrective power. Indeed, I suggest that Empson’s likely future salience as a great critic (by the standards suggested earlier in this essay) and a great Shakespearean arises from a combination of exemplarity in explicating local complexity with reference to Shakespeare’s imputed human struggle, on one hand, and on the other corrective force in showing how wrong it is to rule out interpersonal imputation of this kind in reading.

Is Empson a Great Shakespearean? Empson’s reputation as a remarkable critic is closely associated with A; that is, with the way his work is shot through with exemplary local readings. Everyone knows he can find amazing things in passages and words, and relatively few link their amazement to Empson’s complex projections of ethical intentionality. In the rest of this essay, I will take Empson’s powers as an exemplary explicator for granted, thus assuming readers who can remember the dazzling experience of reading Seven Types of Ambiguity or Some Versions of Pastoral.38 Most also know that Empson had mathematical training, and at some points attempts quasi-scientific classifications of linguistic phenomena. This means that his reputation as a theorist is a bit misleading. A good deal of his work that appears on its face theoretical rather than critical – chapters or passages in which Empson is generalizing

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rather than reading – proposes taxonomic structures for local verbal complexity. Thus seven types of ambiguity (René Wellek notes that the card catalogue at the University of Iowa library had the title as Seventy Types of Ambiguity without enormous distortion),39 and the difficult-to-remember set of ‘equations’ expounded in the opening chapters and charted at the end of The Structure of Complex Words. Nonetheless, Empson’s taxonomies never for him conflict with the idea that poetry should be construed as someone grappling with a life-problem that we need to participate in imaginatively (or actually) in order to understand. Indeed, he asserts such views regularly in defence of his most theoretical work, as in this comment on an unsympathetic review by an academic philosopher of The Structure of Complex Words that accused it of ‘logical monstrosities’: ‘if a training in logic makes a man stupider than he would be without it, that is only to its discredit … As to the “personalist [biographical] heresy”, I think that a reader should try to decide what his author intended to say … Any theory designed to give a shorter answer, I think, loses touch with common sense … I think a critic should have an insight into the mind of his author’.40 And it is this view that gives Empson’s controversial writing long-term corrective force. The long-term corrective force, combined with local exemplarity, makes Empson great. An example of corrective use of Empson’s criticism is provided by Richard Strier’s Resistant Structures. Strier begins his book with an account of Empson’s extended public and private disagreement with Rosamund Tuve about how to interpret Herbert’s ‘The Sacrifice’, and how to read Renaissance poetry more generally. Strier’s point is that Empson’s view of the open relation of the poet to history and tradition ought to be more congenial to historically-minded critics of poetry than Tuve’s more deterministic one, because Empson’s view means ‘trying to appreciate each text’s distinctive qualities, however strange or familiar … [and] letting the historical chips fall where they may’. In other words, if we historicize by identifying traditions that determine what people at a given moment are able to think, as Tuve does, we don mind-forged manacles (partly in order to bash others with them), whereas Empson shows how, as Strier puts it, ‘Lots of different ideas were available in the past, especially in so yeasty a period as the Renaissance’. This is both helpful and right, and Strier’s chapter gives a very attractive introduction to Empson’s wit, reasonableness and generosity as a reader. But one might, following the scheme I have suggested, tweak the account slightly and see Empson vs Tuve as Empson’s quite passionate and consistent defence of the freedom of Herbert and other Renaissance poets to be surprising to themselves as well as to us,



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undertaken by Empson in an emancipatory spirit somewhat reminiscent of Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poesy’. Tuve, exemplifying the historicizing critic who diminishes her own capacity to read for surprise, becomes a kind of censor, restricting not only the freedom of her followers, but also that of the poets she discusses.41 Thus Empson’s work not only provides Strier with a way of correcting the wrong kind of historicizing, but provides us all with a warning not to let whatever learning we have ossify into a set of directive expectations that prevents us from being surprised by the genuinely surprising. In Empson’s later work on Shakespeare, he often turns explicitly to a kind of speculative unverifiable biography, creating a possible human author in a plausible situation to explain what he is finding in a text. This serves not only to contextualize a local unexpected understanding, as in the discussion of Herbert, but also to create a plausible literary-historical or generic surround for a general approach to a large issue, like Hamlet’s enactment of human depth or Lear’s enactment of cruelty and folly. Many of the telling remarks about Shakespeare in Empson’s later writing fall into this category, such as his comment on Macbeth and civil war: ‘Cruel are the times, when we are traitors, and do not know ourselves’ – the point could hardly be rubbed in more firmly, with even the child Macduff prattling about whether his father is a traitor too. It is not merely a literary effect; it is what people really do feel in times of civil war, and Shakespeare had a practical and lasting fear of civil war. (ES, 143) We should add that some plays, notably Lear, arouse in Empson admissions of partial uncertainty about what was in Shakespeare’s mind rather than the confident eloquent impersonation of Shakespeare we see when Empson is sure of a reading. He concludes the Lear chapter in Complex Words with a set of possibilities raised by his method of investigation: ‘What the keyword or “pattern” approach brings you to, I submit, is a fundamental horror, an idea that the gods are such silly and malicious jokers that they will soon destroy the world’ (SCW, 156). But, as Empson points out, ‘The question of whether Shakespeare meant this or not is still quite a live controversy, and usually thought to be independent of any question of critical technique’ (ibid). And Empson goes on to ventriloquize a debate among different critics, each of whom seems to speak partly for Empson, disagreeing about whether the apocalyptic atmosphere of the play needs to be subordinated to the moral development of the characters, or vice versa. Empson concludes, characteristically, by locating the uncertainty

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in the reader’s attempt to see into the mind of Shakespeare, a mind in this case perhaps not quite made up: ‘I do think that the suggestions of a fundamental horror in the play were meant to be prominent, whether you interpret them as some profound intuition about life or prefer to say, more simply, that the theme released a lot of real bad temper in him’ (ibid). In Empson’s discussion of Hamlet, he claims that by putting the problem of theatrical behaviour – the subjective problem for a person of attempting seriously to intend a scripted, externally imposed set of actions – out front as a problem that Hamlet as the theatrical protagonist is aware of and puzzled by, Shakespeare opens an endlessly interesting and provocative set of relations among consciousness, will and action. Empson arrives at this idea by entering Shakespeare’s own perspective on the play: ‘the enormous panoply of theory and explanation [of Hamlet] falls into a reasonable proportion if viewed, so to speak, from Pisgah, from the moment of discovery by Shakespeare’ (ES, 79). Empson’s Shakespeare is, in this context, at the outset a canny professional and cooperative company man who is ordered to revise Kyd’s Ur-Hamlet, a script that has been intermittently performed since the late 1580s: We have to consider why Shakespeare rewrote a much-laughed-at old play, and was thus led on into his great Tragic Period, and the obvious answer is that he was told to; somebody in the Company thumbed over the texts in the ice-box and said ‘This used to be a tremendous draw, and it’s coming round again; look at Marston. All you have to do is just go over the words so that it’s life-like and they can’t laugh at it’. (ES, 80) Empson actually traces Shakespeare’s steps from a meeting in Southwark back to his lodgings: ‘I think he did not see how to solve this problem at the committee meeting, when the agile Bard was voted to carry the weight, but already did see how when walking home’ (ES, 80). Now Empson wrote this essay at a time when a great deal of Shakespeare scholarship (notably that of John Dover Wilson, a favourite critical antagonist of Empson’s) mapped Shakespeare’s early printed texts in layers on the basis of putative stages of revision, usually of his own early drafts. Empson has already efficiently summed up the evidence that there was an Ur-Hamlet, and that it was both widely-known and thought to be funny in an over-the-top theatrical way in the 1590s. So his version of Shakespeare confronted with a ten-year-old script by Kyd brings to life a version of Shakespeare’s activity that was hypothesized (far less vividly) by many scholars. In rewriting Kyd, Empson thinks, Shakespeare may indeed have



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followed Kyd’s play closely: ‘For all we know, when Shakespeare created a new epoch and opened a new territory to the human mind, he did nothing but alter the dialogue for this structure, not even adding a scene’ (ES, 80). But Empson has a general complaint about this mode of reconstruction of Shakespeare’s writing process, which is that critics often use it to denigrate or limit aspects of Shakespeare’s creativity – rather as, from Empson’s point of view, Tuve limits Herbert’s creativity as well as Empson’s by attempting to fix Herbert in a static and weighty tradition. As Empson says, The trouble with this kind of critical approach, as the experienced reader will already be feeling with irritation, is that it can be used to say ‘That is why the play is so muddled and bad’. On the contrary, I think, if taken firmly enough it shows how, at the time, such a wonderful thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet could be conceived and accepted. (ES, 80) Another corollary of B and C is that, as in interpersonal relations, we need both a minimal principle of charity to understand authors at all, and we need a substantial principle of charity to learn from and care about them. This charity needs to include realism: for Empson in this situation, it means postulating the originality of Hamlet as Shakespeare’s craftsmanlike solution to a problem between company and audience: [We should not] forget that the misfortunes of genius often have a wild luck in their timing. But he must have seemed an unlikely person just then to start on a great Tragic Period, and he never wrote a Revenge Play afterwards; we can reasonably suppose that he first thought of Hamlet as a pretty specialised assignment, a matter, indeed, of trying to satisfy audiences who demanded a Revenge Play and then laughed when it was provided. (ES, 84) Though Empson does not say this, he must have in mind Hamlet’s critique of theatrical clowning that ‘though it makes the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve’ (3.2.25–26).42 In any case, while turning this over in his mind on his walk, Empson’s Shakespeare sees what to do: It was a bold decision, and probably decided his subsequent career, but it was a purely technical one. He thought: ‘The only way to shut this hole is to make it big. I shall make Hamlet walk up to the audience and tell them, again and again, “I don’t know why I’m delaying any more than you do; the motivation of this play is just as blank to me as it is to you;

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but I can’t help it.” What is more, I shall make it impossible for them to blame him. And then they daren’t laugh’. It turned out, of course, that this method, instead of reducing the old play to farce, made it thrillingly life-like and profound. (ES, 84) Having thus ventriloquized Shakespeare ventriloquizing Hamlet – creating imaginary self-paraphrases and statements of intent by authors is a mark of Empson’s criticism when it really gets going – he proceeds to explain what this turns Hamlet into: ‘Looked at in this way, the plot at once gave questions of very wide interest, especially to actors and the regular patrons of a repertory company; the character says: “Why do you assume I am theatrical? I particularly hate such behaviour. I cannot help my situation. What do you mean by theatrical?” ’ (ES, 84) Notice how Empson’s imputation of authorial intention here creates an extraordinarily lively imputed relation between character and audience. Empson continues: Whole areas of the old play suddenly became so significant that one could wonder whether Kyd had meant that or not; whether Hamlet really wants to kill Claudius, whether he was ever really in love with Ophelia, whether he can continue to grasp his own motives while ‘acting a part’ before the Court, whether he is not really more of an actor than the Players, whether he is not (properly speaking) the only sincere person in view. In spite of its great variety of incident, the play sticks very closely to discussing theatricality. Surely this is what critics have long found so interesting. (ES, 84) In offering this extremely suggestive summary, drawing on an imaginary Shakespeare talking to himself in the voice of his protagonist while working over a semi-imaginary play by Kyd, Empson is able to offer an answer to the important question he poses at the beginning of his essay: The real ‘Hamlet problem’, it seems clear, is a problem about his first audiences. This is not to deny (as E. E. Stoll has sometimes done) that Hamlet himself is a problem; he must be one because he says he is; and he is a magnificent one, which has been exhaustively examined in the last 150 years. What is peculiar is that he does not seem to have



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become one until the end of the eighteenth century; even Dr Johnson, who had a strong grasp of natural human difficulties, writes about Hamlet as if there was no problem at all. We are to think, apparently, that Shakespeare wrote a play which was extremely successful at the time (none more so, to judge by the references), and continued to hold the stage, and yet that nearly two hundred years had to go by before anyone had even a glimmering of what it was about. This is a good story, but surely it is rather too magical. (ES, 80–81) Empson sees, that is, that psychological readings of Hamlet that take his inhibitions and nature, his discovery of his own mysterious interiority, as the central problem of the play need, if they are to be part of an authorial intention (conscious or not), to be somehow incorporated into a plausible view of what Shakespeare was trying to do as a theatre professional for an imaginable audience at the time. Empson is trying to be historical without ruling out rich readings: in fact, he goes on to point out that raising the historical problem of delayed recognition of Hamlet’s profundity can create a reductive historicist response, and has done so: Indeed, as the Hamlet Problem has developed, yielding increasingly subtle and profound reasons for his delay, there has naturally developed in its wake a considerable backwash from critics who say ‘But how can such a drama as you describe conceivably have been written by an Elizabethan, for an Elizabethan audience?’ Some kind of mediating process is required here; one needs to explain how the first audiences could take a more interesting view than Dr Johnson’s, without taking an improbably profound one. (ES, 81) 43 Empson believes, however, that by grounding Hamlet in an authorial struggle to make something lifelike and expressive out of an old script that had both absurdity and theatrical power, he has made the psychological profundity of Hamlet into something Elizabethans could appreciate without turning themselves into improbable proto-Coleridges: What the first audiences came to see was whether the Globe could revamp the old favourite without being absurd. To be sure, we cannot suppose them really very ‘sophisticated’, considering what plays by other authors they admired; to make The Spanish Tragedy up-to-date enough for the Admiral’s Company … to catch up with Shakespeare’s Hamlet … only required some interesting ‘life-like’ mad speeches. But that they imagined

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they were too sophisticated for the old Hamlet does seem to emerge from the surviving jokes about it, and that is all that was required. We need not suppose, therefore, that they missed the purpose of the changes; ‘he is cunning past man’s thought’ they are more likely to have muttered into their beards, as they abandoned the intention to jeer. (ES, 85) Empson’s Hamlet essay does not, in fact, contain many stunning examples of local reading. It does, however, show Empson navigating a prime historical problem in the interpretation of Hamlet through projective biography: constructing a believable problem that Shakespeare could be trying to solve by writing the Hamlet (or Hamlets) we have. Empson’s use of projective biography also incorporates a very full idea of collaboration into its view of authorship: Empson’s Shakespeare collaborates not only with the other members of his company, but with an audience he knows and caters to, in conceiving this version of Hamlet. Moreover, we see Empson framing the ethical issues raised by a genre in the same sort of way in his appendix on Revenge Tragedy. For ‘a critic living in a fairly placid society’, he comments, it can be ‘an initial obstacle’ to ‘bring his mind round’ to find ‘revenge very real or interesting’. Then he continues, in an appendix he appears to have added in the early 1980s, perhaps with the IRA in mind, to the essay as revised from the initial 1953 publication sans appendix in Sewanee Review: ‘But in the modern world it has become painfully familiar to have some social group or nation take into its head that it has been unbearably wronged, so much wronged that it positively ought to cut off its nose to spite its face; and this is the fundamental situation of the Revenge Play, which is practically always concerned with the painful and distorting effects of revenge regarded as a duty’(ES, 118–-119).44 Empson follows this remarkable comment, which seems even more salient now than it can have seemed in the 1980s, by bringing to bear his experience as an English department head at Sheffield, generalized so as to apply also to the President of the United States or, indeed, to God: ‘Indeed, anyone who has to do administrative work is likely to come to feel that the basic purpose is not so much to do justice as to prevent anyone from coming to feel too much wronged; there is always a suggestion of handling the waters which might otherwise flood the plain’ (ES, 119). Once again, we see Empson’s way of placing literature, in this case a genre without an author, into a context of long-term life problems. Empson personalizes the process of reading other critics as well as that of reading poets and playwrights. Thus he comments on Dr. Johnson’s personal access to Falstaff’s inner life (in contrast to Dover Wilson’s stress on Falstaff as a generic Vice figure):



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This interior of Falstaff, rather hard to get at for most of us, is … sharply lit up by some remarks of Dr Johnson … he could say without absurdity that he regretted not having met Falstaff. Also [Johnson] himself was a man of startling appearance; a pugnaciously and robustly amusing talker, who regularly conquered but never won anything that mattered, a hero of taverns, fretted by remorse … starved of love, unwilling to be alone. He has several comments such as that ‘a man feels in himself the pain of deformity’; ‘however, like this merry knight, he may make sport of it among those whom it is his interest to please’. If we compare this with the struggles of Dover Wilson to prove that Falstaff was a Medieval Vice, with no interior at all, surely the truth of Johnson stands out like a rock. (ES, 65) Here Empson uses his own sense of Johnson’s premise B criticism to correct what he regards as the inhumanity of generic/historicist criticism among Empson’s contemporaries. Let me conclude with one more example of how Empson combines postulating purposes and problems for Shakespeare with a corrective attitude toward modes of criticism that would rule out his kind of imaginative identification. Empson defends Shakespeare’s freedom of thought – and thus, in effect, his own freedom to make up Shakespeares that suit him from his understandings of text and context – with considerable attention to competing ways of doing criticism at the opening of his chapter ‘Sense in Measure for Measure’ in The Structure of Complex Words. Empson comments on two ways that critics on either side of the Atlantic limit what they feel Shakespeare is entitled to have meant, asserting that ‘the recent drift of various British critics toward royalism is mild compared to that of various American ones toward behaviourism, which happens to go in the same direction’. This ‘direction’ inclines critics to collect evidence about the way Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought and use it to limit what he can be allowed to mean: As the evidence about the Elizabethan mind piles up, we are tacitly asked to believe that Shakespeare could not possibly have disagreed with it, or have dared to show that he disagreed. I think he was a more self-indulgent kind of man than that, as well as not such a stupid one.45 The last sentence sounds flippant, but it is actually deep: it forces critics to recognize that they ought to accord great authors the same sorts of mental freedom they would be shocked not to be thought to have

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themselves. Empson continues along this line, amplifying his reservations about ‘American critics of Shakespeare [who] claim their work is “objective” ’. Basically, he has in mind New Critical claims to be discussing verbal icons as self-standing pieces of ‘behaviour’ to be divorced from the intentions of their creators, alongside the attempts of North American genre critics like the Chicago Aristotelians to discuss literary form as if it is subject to immutable laws. In a 1953 letter draft, apparently never sent, to W. R. Elton in response to Elton’s King Lear and the Gods, Empson writes of scholars who attempt to overwhelm their readers with contextual evidence while ignoring the meaning of the text, ‘The work of a “scholar” is the same as that of an Imagist poet; both proceed from complete rejection of the intelligence and rely upon a Behaviourist technique of glutting the reader with immediate stimuli’.46 So this is what Empson means by his initially puzzling mention of ‘behaviourist’ critics in North America. If we give objective its full claims, to ‘wonder what Shakespeare thought about it’ becomes a disgraceful self-indulgence; a critic should limit himself to rigid proofs, like the scientist that he is. That is, in effect, he should talk about the author as one of a type, not as an individual acquaintance; to a certain extent this really gets done, and it seems clear to me that the method produces superficial criticism. No doubt the timidity of the thing saves a critic from the more flamboyant errors of the last century; and you may reasonably say that we cannot make Shakespeare into a personal acquaintance. But it is enough to refute the behaviourist, on this issue, if he admits that we can make anybody into a personal acquaintance; that we can ever get any ‘insight’ into another person’s feelings. (SCW, 271) In other words, for Empson interpersonal intimacy, as opposed to systematic science, ought to function as a model for literary knowledge. In saying this, Empson asserts neither that there can be no science about literature, nor that there can be no science about human intimacy: One of the things a critic has normally claimed to do is to show this sort of insight about authors; there is nothing that I can see in the theory of behaviourism, only in its ‘atmosphere’, to get this forbidden; and if a critic insists that he has no such insight, it seems to me, he is only saying in an unnecessarily pompous manner (and sometimes quite falsely) that he is unfit to do his work. (SCW, 271–2)



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If Empson survives as a great Shakespearean, I suggest, it will be not only because we are swept away by the exemplary brilliance of his local readings and because we recognize his imputed human socially-located Shakespeare as a helpful locus for our understandings of the plays and poems. He will survive also because we experience a continued corrective power in his conception of the ‘insight about authors’ needed to make critics ‘fit to do their work’. Indeed, by gathering together, under the idea that good reading involves ‘insight about authors’, such rich varieties of authorial struggle – conscious and unconscious, historical, philosophic, sexual, religious, whatever in Shakespeare allows him to ‘feel how a man comes to be a working system’ (STA, 138) – Empson’s capacious B premise offers a formulation of the aims of his own critical practice that is likely to have corrective force in Shakespeare studies for a long time. 47

Chapter 2

G. Wilson Knight Michael Taylor

Knight’s Critical Legacy George Richard Wilson Knight (1897–1985) had a profound influence on the Shakespeare criticism of the mid-twentieth century, but he has been a nearly forgotten figure in the age of the Postmodernist Shakespeare extending from about 1980 to the present, due to a number of his most prominent critical qualities – such as impressionistic, often overwrought ‘poetic’ writing and a constant Romantic search for the transcendental. But despite Knight’s marked incompatibility with the critical methods and theoretical assumptions of the present, the technique of ‘spatial interpretation’ he developed to define and explore the atmospheric, aesthetic and thematic effects of the poetic imagery of Shakespeare’s plays was one of the most studied and imitated critical methods of the era from about 1930–70. A Romantic in many ways, as we will see, Knight nevertheless developed one of the most consequential versions of Modernist readings of Shakespeare’s plays in the twentieth century, shifting the critical paradigm profoundly in ways that continue to influence us without, perhaps, many of us noticing. Not everyone will agree that Knight is an undoubted ‘Great Shakespearean’, but if striking originality and widespread influence on the construction of Shakespeare for the critic’s contemporaries and subsequent generations count importantly in our criteria for evaluating greatness, there is little doubt that Knight is a great Shakespearean by those standards. By 1930, the gradual shift of the study of Shakespeare from a generalized public sphere to the halls of a newly professionalized university system and its rapidly evolving English departments had arguably reached the point where the universities were now playing the dominant role. At the same time, the Modernist revolution in art and literature had produced its first wave of masterpieces, and Modernism was now an aesthetic fait accompli. These two developing revolutions had, however, not yet coalesced. English departments



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in the US were by and large creating a historical scholarship of facts and literary history epitomized by such figures as Hardin Craig and Mark van Doren. In Britain, A. C. Bradley, with his synthesis of Romantic character analysis, ‘realist’ aesthetic assumptions and unprecedented attention to details, was still the leading Shakespeare interpreter. The beginnings of New Critical close reading and formalism had already occurred in the Cambridge and Vanderbilt English departments (with the latter influenced by the former but working independently), but drama was much less important to this development than the lyric, and consequently Shakespeare was less central to its development than John Donne. Still, Modernists in the 1920s outside of academia were in fact turning their attentions to rethinking Shakespeare from the point of view of the new aesthetics. T. S. Eliot is the most important and most influential instance here: his critical ideas were central to the later New Critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and by introducing anthropological issues into the study of Shakespeare, according to Richard Halpern’s analysis, he initiated a critical trajectory still in full force today.1 Eliot had already become the leading proponent of Donne and Metaphysical poetry, and at the same time forged a highly influential theory of a ‘unification of sensibility’ shared by the Metaphysicals, French Symbolists and (implicitly) early Modernists like himself – preparing the way for a new appreciation of Shakespeare.2 When Knight’s 1930 book The Wheel of Fire came to his attention, Eliot recognized that the positive method for carrying out the modernization of Shakespeare criticism that had eluded him was at hand: ‘It has taken me a long time’, he wrote, ‘to recognize the justification of what Mr. Wilson Knight calls “interpretation”’.3 The reasons for Eliot’s hesitation over this word, connected to his own ideas about the nature of poetry, are briefly spelt out in the rest of the Introduction and need not concern us here. What is germane is his diagnosis of the importance of Knight’s methods: But I think that Mr. Knight, among other things, has insisted upon the right way to interpret poetic drama. The writer of poetic drama is not merely a man skilled in two arts and skilful to weave them in together.... His task is different from that of the ‘dramatist’ or that of the ‘poet’, for his pattern is more complex and more dimensional....The genuine poetic drama must, at its best, observe all the regulations of the plain drama, but will weave them organically (to mix a metaphor and to borrow for the occasion a modern word) into a much richer design. But our first duty as either critics or ‘interpreters’, surely, must be to try to grasp the whole design, and read character and plot in the understanding of this subterrene or submarine music. Here I say Mr.

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Knight has pursued the right line for his own plane of investigation, not hypostasizing ‘character’ and ‘plot’. For Shakespeare is one of the rarest of dramatic poets, in that each of his characters is most nearly adequate both to the requirements of the real world and to those of the poet’s world. If we can apprehend this balance in Pericles, we can come to apprehend it even in Goneril and Regan. And here Mr. Knight seems to me to be very helpful in expressing the results of the passive, and more critical, poetic understanding (The Wheel of Fire, xix) That is to say, unlike the Shakespeare critics of earlier eras, Knight had developed a technique for defining what had largely escaped previous commentators, namely the contribution of the play’s poetic imagery to its overall meaning. This attention to poetic imagery, of course, was very much ‘in the air’ in the 1920s, when many of the essays that made up Knight’s 1930 book had been written (as will be further discussed below). In fact, S. Viswanathan considers 1930 as an annus mirabilis for twentiethcentury Shakespeare criticism.4 Besides The Wheel of Fire, this year saw the publication, inter alia, of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, Mgr. Frederick Kolbë’s Shakespeare’s Way and Caroline Spurgeon’s Leading Motives in the Imagery of Shakespeare’s Tragedies. I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism – in many ways the pioneering work of the new critical methods to which Knight’s methods are clearly aligned – had just appeared in 1929,5 and the milestone work of Richards’ most brilliant student, William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity came out in the following year. The paradigm shift to Modernist approaches to reading texts was now fully underway, and Knight played a strategic and unique role in it. For example, while Empson discussed passages from Shakespeare as poetry, he did not attempt to treat the plays as wholes. Speaking generally, the early phase of the New Criticism was devoted to developing methods of close readings of lyric poetry. The poetic drama, as Eliot intimated, might seem a logical next step, but the task of ‘close readings’ of entire plays in minute detail seemed daunting. Indeed, it took until 1948 before a cardcarrying New Critic – namely Robert Heilman, Cleanth Brooks’s co-editor for the New Critical textbook Understanding Drama – attempted a close reading of a Shakespeare play, and it took the length of a book to do so.6 Two other works attempted analyses of Shakespeare’s poetic imagery that had affinities with Knight’s work, but neither of them, for different reasons, proved to be as influential as Knight’s approach. The two are Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery And What it Tells Us7 (1935) and Wolfgang Clemen’s The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery, which appeared in



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German in 1936. Clemen’s book did not appear in English until 1951, so that, whatever its other merits, it appeared to English-speaking readers as an interesting example of a general method that had already become well known.8 In the Anglophone world, Spurgeon’s work is therefore better known, but Spurgeon, unlike Knight, limited her survey of imagery to metaphors and similes only, with often truncated results. G. Wilson Knight, then, stands as the most important pioneer of a method that revolutionized how to read a Shakespeare play. One word that he used to describe his method was ‘interpretation’ – the term which made T. S. Eliot uneasy, as we have seen, but which Knight preferred to ‘criticism’ because he thought the latter was too negative in its connotations. The term that has lasted longer, and which gives a better idea of Knight’s uniqueness, however, is one he also introduced early in The Wheel of Fire: ‘spatial’. ‘A Shakespearian tragedy’, Knight famously wrote, ‘is set spatially as well as temporally in the mind’ (3). And he continued, ‘By this I mean that there are throughout the play a set of correspondences which related to each other independently of the time-sequence which is the story: such are the intuition-intelligence opposition active within and across Troilus and Cressida, the death-theme in Hamlet, the nightmare evil of Macbeth. This I have sometimes called the play’s “atmosphere”....Now if we are prepared to see the whole play laid out, so to speak, an area, being simultaneously aware of these thickly-scattered correspondences in a single view of the whole, we possess the unique quality of the play in a new sense. “Faults” begin to vanish into thin air’ (3). We need to see how Knight puts these ideas into operation, for, as will be discussed below, he can be confusingly imprecise in some of his attempts to define what he is doing, often having recourse to religious and spiritual terminology hard to decipher. But if we observe closely what his critical procedure is in the best of his chapter-essays, we can begin to understand Knight’s great success in the heyday of the Modernist Shakespeare. His was the best developed and most fruitful of several contemporaneous attempts to ‘spatialize’ the Shakespeare text. Knight’s notion in 1930 of the spatial as the supervenient elaboration of theme over plot ushered in a critical activity which dominated Shakespeare criticism for decades and is still going strong. L. C. Knights’s Some Shakespearean Themes (1959) was a direct beneficiary of Knight’s approach, and the 1993 anthology of essays, The Return of Thematic Criticism, edited by Werner Sollors (though not restricted to Shakespeare), an indication of its periodic re-emergence (not that it ever at any time totally disappeared).9 Something like this method continued with American Modernists like Maynard Mack in his essay ‘The

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World of Hamlet’;10 the method has strong parallels with structuralist attempts to map texts, not so much with poetic images, but through the thematic oppositions which Knight also used. Many phenomenological attempts to describe and recreate the ‘world’ of a text or an oeuvre can be said to be continuing a method Knight co-created and centrally developed. Knight’s spatial readings are uneven. His notorious leap from what seems a quite accurate portrayal of the centrality of the theme, images and metonymies of death in Hamlet, to his startling and much criticized identification of the play’s hero as the ‘ambassador of death’ in the play, a hero-villain responsible for the play’s mayhem, is perhaps the most important example of how Knight can go wrong in specific ‘interpretations’. As we will see below, his unending quest to grasp the transcendental signified by means of his interpretative techniques also has not aged well, to put it mildly. At his best, however, the scope and precision of Knight’s method is both unprecedented in Shakespeare criticism and illuminating in its aesthetic construction of the text. Knight shows the originality and power of his new technique to great advantage, for example, in a bravura reading of one of his favourite plays, Antony and Cleopatra (a reading to which I will return below for other purposes). What I want to emphasize here is that under his spatial analysis, the play emerges as a masterpiece – a designation that has become a commonplace in our own time, but which was far from universal when Knight published his two readings of the play in The Imperial Theme in 1931.11 Not even 30 years earlier, A. C. Bradley had spoken for many in his generation in faulting the play for what he thought was badly flawed dramatic construction as evidenced in the many short scenes in the middle of the play.12 Knight, in effect, counter-poses against this sense of a flawed narrative unity a focus on the play’s rich and, as he shows, highly patterned poetic and thematic imagery that endows the play with a different and artistically richer kind of unity. As a spatial interpreter, Knight, like the New Critics before him, ‘freezes’ the text into a single moment of time, so that it becomes possible to connect elements – ‘correspondences’, he calls them – that occur early in the play with those that come later. And those elements are primarily poetic images – not just metaphors and similes, but also repeated words, visual elements and repeated themes – themes often defined in terms of binary oppositions. For example, in his survey of such connected motifs in Antony and Cleopatra, he demonstrates the play’s ample use of snake and serpent imagery from Antony’s reported playful identification of Cleopatra as the ‘Serpent of the Old Nile’ to the stage-prop fatal asps in the play’s spectacular conclusion.



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But this is just one of the first steps in Knight’s immense catalogue of the play’s poetic imagery, leading to higher poetic syntheses. The serpent, with its connections to the Nile, is next linked to a larger group of aquatic animals, and these in turn are seen as in binary opposition to creatures of the air. Knight then unites all this into one large synthesis:13 There is a clear and significant newness about the animal-imagery: it helps to define the watery and ethereal quality which interpenetrates our vision. There is continued suggestion of immaterial life-modes, beautiful and volatile, swimming free in ocean or air....In this play nature is ever at work, blending, mingling, dissolving element in element, to produce new strangeness, new beauty. The natural imagery thus reflects our lovetheme: the blending of elements reflects the blending of sexes in love. Hence our earth is here fruitful, and many references to life-processes occur, throwing the sex-talk of Cleopatra’s girls into a new light: for human and physical love is, to a pure vision, itself pure as the dissolving of clouds in rain. (The Imperial Theme, 228–29) Like the structuralists and the phenomenologists after him, then, Knight ‘maps’ the text frozen in a single point of time, often through the identifying of central binary oppositions. He shared this ‘spatial’ procedure with all the New Critics as well, but he more than any other successfully applied it to entire Shakespeare plays. In effect, he is treating the play like a French Symbolist poem, as his off-hand reference to the word ‘correspondences’ suggests. That term had famously emerged as one of the Symbolists’ many synonyms for their central poetic technique, the symbol, in one of the key early lyrics of Baudelaire’s celebrated Les Fleurs du Mal , ‘Correspondances’: La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de long échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté Les perfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.14 [Nature is a temple whose living colonnades Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs;

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Man wanders among symbols in those glades Where all things watch him with familiar eyes. Like dwindling echoes gathered far away Into a deep and thronging unison Huge as the night or as the light of day, All scents and sounds and colors meet as one.15] Baudelaire had here created, out of Romantic practices, a more compressed, concise, less discursive and more aesthetically concentrated poetic technique than can be found in all but a few Romantic lyrics. It is a particularly ‘spatial’ technique, and it was one of the seminal works for the lyric Modernism that was to develop in all the major Western literatures of the twentieth century. There is little or no narrative development. Instead, a series of words and images function in the lyric space like musical phrases, their connotations as important or more important than their denotations. In what amounts to an aesthetic statement of the new poetics, Baudelaire singles out a synaesthetic unity of images (‘parfums, les couleurs et les sons’) that correspond one to another by virtue of the feeling-tones, or connotations, that each word/image evokes. Sometimes Knight is less directly Symbolist and aestheticist and more the (‘poetic’) philosopher. In the essay-chapter ‘Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil’, for example, Knight first announces what he considers the primary characteristics of the play in comparison to the other tragedies: ‘Shakespeare’s most profound and mature vision of evil ... not gloom but blackness: the evil is not relative but absolute ... here the murk and nightmare torment of a conscious hell’ (The Wheel of Fire, 140). But before turning away in impatience at another Bradleian encomium to absolute evil, we might take the trouble to trace the steps by which Knight supports his assertions, for it enlarges our understanding of his ‘spatial’ approach by incorporating not just the verbal and imagistic motifs emphasized in his reading of Antony and Cleopatra, but also a number of other kinds of dramatic motifs. For example, Knight charts such elements as the predominance of questions in the play (141); the motif of continual surprises (142); the number of second-hand reports leaving the audience with various uncertainties (143); the many references to darkness; the motif of ‘strange and hideous creatures’, like the Hyrcan tiger, the armed rhinoceros, the rugged Russian bear, the wolf, or the raven. Climactically, Knight notes ‘the central act of the play is a hideous murder of sleep’, itself climaxed in the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth (146). All these attempt to get at what



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‘temporal’ readings of the plays, with their emphasis on dramatic narrative techniques, tended to overlook. Here Knight is greatly enriching formalist analysis of Shakespeare’s poetic dramas beyond the Aristotelianism that had dominated it previously. Knight’s new science of poetic interpretation, then, leads us to read a literary work – any literary work provided it’s an appropriately ‘ratified’ one – in ‘spatial’ terms. We must not, Knight says, simply ‘let ourselves be blinded by the temporal approach’,16 ‘blinded’ in the drama, presumably, by the mere linear unfolding of plot, character and outcome. The latter kind of reading would be particularly restrictive in the case of something as densely metaphorical and closely meshed as a play by Shakespeare. For Knight, reading one of Shakespeare’s plays was a particularly efflorescent experience – across its five acts pulse networks of interactive elements, nodes of verbal activity, uncircumscribed by plot and character, though obviously not divorced from them. On many occasions Knight, like a true Symbolist, privileges the spatial function in Shakespeare of symbol, ‘symbol cluster’ and imagery in general: the spatial, that is, as the pattern of intricate symbolisms. The Shakespearean art-form, Knight argues, is to be approached ‘as a unity, through inspection of those subtle and intricate symbolisms I have so often been at pains to elucidate’.17 Pursuing his cartographical model, Viswanathan thinks of these symbols as ‘standing out like features of a relief map.’ (65). Imagery in general has a networking function, Knight insists, it is not mere decoration: ‘The action is not decorated with images: the images are the action’ (The Imperial Theme, 20). Knight’s concept of the radiating, cohering image and symbol has had an immensely fruitful critical afterlife. (Conversely, Knight believes, the poetry also ‘is pre-eminently in the events themselves, which are intrinsically poetic’).18 However much symbols, their clusters, and images, act as unifying activities in a Shakespeare play, Knight sees them as also having a life of their own, as somehow separate from the play they help make so coherent. He looks at them, he says, ‘as entities speaking in their own right, almost, one might say, out of context’.19 He pursues this thought in a number of places in his work. ‘A true symbol’, he believes, ‘does not properly stand instead of something else. Meanings can be found in it: it is not conditioned by any meaning’.20 On another occasion, he argues that the symbol ‘might be said to have infinite relations’.21 But the infinite relation Knight particularly savours is the one that, like the spatial quality in all its manifestations, works inward, burrowing beneath Shakespeare’s enigmatic words, always tending ‘to reveal things in depth as

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existing simultaneously within the story and yet also apart from it, in their own right; and in so doing it introduces what we may call “the spiritual”, a new dimension, vertical rather than horizontal, of time, movement, and energy’ (The Sovereign Flower, 254–55. Knight’s italics). Spatial quality for Knight reveals ‘that burning core of mental or spiritual reality from which each play derives its nature and meaning’ (The Wheel of Fire, 246). It is no wonder that Knight quotes approvingly from Wilde’s De Profundis: ‘Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward; the soul made incarnate, the body instinct with spirit’ (Shakespearian Dimensions, 20). The spatial always goes beyond the poet. ‘It is not content with what the poetry says; it attempts to reveal the meaning of what it is’ (The Sovereign Flower, 256. Knight’s italics).

Knight in the Theatre Knight’s own temperament was, however, much more theatrical than academic, critical or philosophical. As a schoolboy and ardent theatregoer in Dulwich, London, from 1909–14, he immersed himself in the spectacular and lavish productions of Shakespeare by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s Theatre in London. (He later admiringly recalled Tree’s ‘ethereal intonations’22 and his ‘spiritualised showmanship’.23) During this impressionable time in his life, he saw, among other Shakespeare plays, the three famous productions by Harley Granville-Barker of The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Savoy Theatre, also in London.24 In the preface to the first edition of Principles of Shakespearian Production in 1936,25 he recalls his boyhood attendance at the production of Twelfth Night where he experienced the play ‘as a single unique quality, indissoluble and unanalysable as the pungent sweetness of an aroma’ (22). He began acting himself in amateur productions of Shakespeare when he was a schoolmaster at Dean Close School, Cheltenham in 1925. As Chancellor’s Professor of English in the 1930s at Trinity College, in the University of Toronto in Canada, he played a number of leading Shakespeare roles in Hart House Theatre productions which included Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Caliban and Orsino. He produced – we would now say directed – eight different Shakespeare plays during his Toronto sojourn. He had been hired as a lecturer in English (in Shakespeare really) by the university on the basis of The Wheel of Fire. Ultimately, Knight returned to England, where he taught at the University of Leeds and continued acting in and directing Shakespeare’s plays until he retired in 1962. He continued writing his



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Shakespeare ‘interpretations’, however, bringing out a last book of critical essays, Shakespiarean Dimensions, in 1984. He died the following year. The spirit that drove him, then, in all his highly influential critical works was in many ways that of the actor and recitalist – he observed that his recitals ‘became more and more acted performances’.26 (Robert Blackmore suggests intriguingly that both John Cowper Powys and Knight were ‘impatient with the capabilities of the written word’. 27) So it might be useful to look at some of the things he had to say about the way in which Shakespeare should be acted and spoken. In an essay Knight wrote in 1928 in The Shakespeare Review, ‘The Principles of Shakespeare Interpretation’,28 he lays out the kind of necessary commitment to the art of acting Shakespeare’s plays from whose principles he never deviated. What the actor must do above all, in Knight’s view, is to match the poetry of Shakespeare’s plays with a kind of poetry of his own, an acting poetry: ‘A new dimension of poetic acting must be awakened’ (Shakespearian Production, 288. Knight’s italics). Knight would demand a similar poetic awakening from the writer on and the reader of Shakespeare, with mixed results as we shall see. But it was supremely important, he believed, ‘to act the poetry itself, on every level of performer and production’ (234. Knight’s italics). Knight’s admirable insistence on the necessity for the student of Shakespeare to respond to the infinite variety of intonation demanded by his works is one of the main reasons why all those pages in his books are filled with chunks of Shakespeare. They are there for us to read aloud, to listen to ourselves reading them aloud; they are passages awaiting recital. In the theatre they are also passages demanding more than a flexible vocalization. For Knight, acting Shakespeare was a pretty strenuous affair: ‘The body should speak: this is the quintessence of acting. It is as a supreme exhibitionism, but it is more than that; it is prophetic’ (Shakespeare’s Dramatic Challenge, 135). In this respect, as in many others, Knight is the quintessential Romantic purveyor of Shakespeare as the visionary writer. The task of Shakespeare’s heroes, Knight argues, and by extension his actors, and by further extension his readers, ‘is to adjust [themselves] to [their] own poetry; to make the poetry real’.29 When Romeo thinks he sees Juliet lying dead he is, so Knight states somewhat mysteriously, ‘exactly measured to his own poetry’ (45). Knight talks persuasively of the actor’s enjoyment in the deaths and vicissitudes of Shakespeare’s tragedies: the greater the catastrophe the more pleasure the actor takes in ‘the poetic dimension of what is being performed’ (42). We should all, he urges, take our direction from Aristotle’s statement in the Poetics that in tragedy action should take precedence over character. The actor should not be

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performing the part of an ordinary man, or of a ‘character’, but the part of a poetic man. Although by and large Knight is a rather humourless writer – ‘devoid of humour’ is Roger Sale’s dismissive judgement30 – when he describes the ways in which the professional stage of his time failed to achieve the grandeur he thinks Shakespeare’s tragedies demand, he shows himself to have a good eye for comic inadequacy.31 In Shakespearian Production, for instance, he recalls how often the knocking at the gate in Macbeth suggested ‘rather an irritable postman than a fateful summons’ (56). He describes how he has seen an Edgar in King Lear wearing ‘a neat slip of a loin-cloth on a spotless body’ in the storm scenes that made him look ‘exactly like a young man going for a swim’ (61). He protests against gratuitous symbolic effects (though he himself was a passionate advocate of the power of Shakespeare’s symbolism) that ‘sit on a Shakespearian play like a monkey on a war-horse’ (78). About how to act Shakespeare, Knight is almost always oblique, tantalizingly impressionistic, as is often the case for many critics with his other writings on Shakespeare. The actor (and the reader) needs to attend to those ‘rhythmic curves of poetry’ (Shakespearian Production, 29). We have a sense in Shakespeare, Knight says, of ‘speed-waves’ (31), and a succession of curves and undulating hills: ‘After a fall there is continuation: he never cuts off his action at a precipice’ (31). We can see what he’s getting at when he talks in this way about the landscape of Shakespeare’s plays and about their concomitant aural undulations – ‘A Shakespearian play moves in waves of sound and rhythmic surges’ (59)32 – but much of what he says here (and elsewhere), or perhaps how he says it, conveys the sense of someone attempting to grasp something intrinsically ungraspable by any analytic or intellectual discourse. Knight’s zeal as an actor and director of Shakespeare was matched throughout his life, of course, by the need he felt in book after book that he wrote on Shakespeare – in reprinting after reprinting of them or of parts of them – to reaffirm his missionary sense of what Shakespeare was about. And the publication history of some of his essays is, in fact, remarkable. To take a single instance of the complicated provenances of Knight’s books, the 1962 edition of his most famous one, The Wheel of Fire, tells us that it was first published as the fourth revised and enlarged version of a reprinting of the original 1930 book in 1949 with three additional essays (one of which had previously been published as an English Association pamphlet). It was reprinted in this form with minor corrections in 1954, 1956 and 1959. It appeared as a University Paperback in 1961. Many of the essays that made up the original 1930 book had already appeared elsewhere in journal form.



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So, for example, ‘The Pilgrimage of Hate: an Essay on Timon of Athens’ first appeared in 1929 in The Churchman; ‘Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil’ appeared as ‘Macbeth and the Nature of Evil’, earlier in 1930 in The Hibbert Journal; ‘Shakespeare and Tolstoy’ also appeared earlier in 1930 in The Occult Review, as did ‘The Problem of Hamlet’ in The Quest. (I shall return to the significance of these journals later.) Although the divagations of these essays in The Wheel of Fire are especially labyrinthine, similar trajectories can be mapped for many of the chapters of all of Knight’s major books on Shakespeare. Such frequent reappearances of the works, or bits and pieces of them, besides indicating Knight’s popularity over a number of decades, enabled him to maintain a conversation with himself over the years, sometimes to reprove himself for a minor infelicity. More usually, however, he’s there to take issue with his critics over the value of his work, or to insist on the continuing relevance of what he has to say for a new generation of readers, a message largely unchanged in its fundamental concerns from the first essays he wrote on Shakespeare in the The Adelphi and The New Adelphi in the early 1920s.

Knight’s Shakespeare Shakespeare for Knight was the radiant centre of English literature. And we must acknowledge that his obsession with him was above all in response to the power of the plays and poetry, to the ‘consummate artistry of Othello’, to Antony and Cleopatra as ‘the subtlest and greatest play’, to Timon of Athens as ‘the most masterfully deliberate of Shakespeare’s sombre tragedies’ (The Wheel of Fire, 240). No poet has had a more devoted disciple, nor one who found more myriad forms in which to express his devotion. Even as far back as 1928, when Knight was beginning his career as a writer, Middleton Murry warned him that he was being ‘too prolific about Shakespeare’.33 We can indeed, as we’ve seen, find Shakespeare everywhere in Knight’s works, primarily as the standard for other writers to strive for and (inevitably) to fail to reach; as the touchstone for the moral life of individual and society; as spiritual enlightener and, of course, as superb entertainer. A revealing light is thrown on the nature of Knight’s commitment to Shakespeare in his casual remark in The Sovereign Flower, to which we must return, that he considers Shakespeare ‘less a literary artist than a force of nature’ (16). Here, he shows his Romantic side very well, since the quotation is basically a condensed repetition of remarks Coleridge had made much earlier:

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Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is inexhaustible in forms. Each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror. And even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper than consciousness.34 Where the essays in The Wheel of Fire whose titles I quoted first appeared tells us a good deal about Knight’s interests at this time (and throughout his life, in fact). None of their venues was devoted to literature or literary criticism. The Hibbert Journal, for instance, was a liberal Christian periodical that ran from 1902–68, whose ambition was to aid in the spread of Christianity in its most simple and intelligible form; The Churchman was an Anglican quarterly established in 1879, which went on to become essential reading for Christians who wished to gain a Biblical perspective on matters of morality; The Occult Review was a British illustrated monthly journal published between 1905–51 containing, as its name suggests, articles and correspondence by many notable occultists of the day. (To this list we could add the likes of the The Dublin Review, The Aryan Path, Two Worlds and The Church Quarterly Review. So Knight’s essays play no denominational favourites; he appears happily in journals variously devoted to Evangelical, Methodist, Unitarian, Catholic, Anglo-Catholic and Occult points of view.) And although The Adelphi, old and new, was a journal devoted to English literature, published between 1923–55, it was founded by John Middleton Murry whose importance for Knight rested in a series of articles he wrote in the 1920s ‘proclaiming the religious importance of literature in a voice of authority’, as Knight describes them in Neglected Powers in 1971 (352). The religious importance of literature in a voice of authority: such a phrase could well sum up the direction and impact of Knight’s life’s work on Shakespeare (and on Byron, Pope, Milton etc.). At a time when it was not fashionable to do so, Knight embraced what he considered to be the indisputable, over-arching spirituality of Shakespeare’s works. Knight’s hierophantic stance is at its most consequential in his sturdy defence of the imaginative power of Shakespeare’s Romances, beginning forcefully with his 1929 essay ‘Myth and Miracle. An Essay on the Mystic Symbolism of Shakespeare’ (The Crown of Life, 9–31). Knight may well have had in mind at the time of writing this essay Lytton Strachey’s notorious devaluation of Shakespeare’s final period in his Books and Characters: French and English, first published in 1922. In it, Strachey



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suggested that these last plays reveal a writer fundamentally bored with life, with only poetry and poetical dreams to divert him in his ennui. For Knight, the final plays are not Strachey’s ‘freaks of a wearied imagination’ (The Crown of Life, 9). The life in them, on the contrary, is ‘dynamic’, the suffering ‘creative’, they reveal ‘the poet’s intuition of immortality and conquest within apparent death and failure’ (13). They are, in a word, an answer to the dilemma posed in Shakespeare’s tragedies whereby ‘the human soul finds love too delicate a reality to weather the stormy voyage of temporal existence’ (12). Storms certainly abound in the last plays, but so too do havens of love. In one of his frequently heuristic uses of Christ’s suffering, Knight says that the last plays are to the tragedies what the resurrection was to the crucifixion. R. A. Foakes reminds us that Knight’s book The Crown of Life was the one that established for decades a way of reading the Romances as Christian allegories or ‘myths of immortality’.35 Time and again, then, in book after book, Knight insists on our noticing and taking seriously the spiritual (and Christian) dimensions of Shakespeare’s work. For many critics, this emerges as one of his most important legacies to the Shakespeare critical tradition. In these opening years of the twentyfirst century, in fact, Knight’s emphasis in his criticism on the spiritual in Shakespeare has reappeared in various guises, and with a remarkable intensity, in the work of a number of contemporary critics. Of course, Knight’s own concern with the spiritual in Shakespeare is itself an intensified moment in the history of the explorations into Shakespeare and religion and the spiritual life. At the end of the nineteenth century, for example, R. G. Moulton, in his portentously entitled (and portentously written) book, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism, abandons, time and again, his scientific principles for a very different kind of conduit to the Shakespearean experience: through Shakespeare, he intones, ‘we come anew into the presence of most stupendous mysteries, and … we receive the gift with solemn awe, and bow the head in reverential silence’.36 A century later, books such as Cynthia Marshall’s Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology37 or H. W. Fawkner’s Shakespeare’s Miracle Plays38 make a renewed case for what Fawkner calls Shakespeare’s ‘hyper-transcendental dimensions’.39

Knight’s Humanism One of the real strengths of Knight’s treatment of Shakespeare’s spirituality, however, is his unwillingness to cut it adrift from what he describes

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as the ‘intensely human’ (Shakespearian Production, 77) in Shakespeare.40 In Shakespeare & Religion, Knight argues that Shakespeare can be aligned with Christianity ‘in respect to what might be called his earthy, humanly warm, approach to spiritualistic truths’.41 He castigates what he thinks is a peculiarly British misunderstanding of Nietzsche who emphasizes ‘creative good-living as opposed to conventional morality’ (130). Shakespeare throughout his plays demonstrates an ‘earth-reality’ (10), and his language ‘is charged with a vital non-bookish energy’ (The Burning Oracle, 25). (Knight often distinguishes on this score the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries from Shakespeare’s. He notes, for instance, that there is ‘a certain want of imaginative commonsense’ in Spenser [The Burning Oracle, 16]). In his essays on other writers, Knight welcomes their inclusion of a quotidian materiality – the technicalities of whaling, for instance, in Moby Dick, or Hardy’s ‘exactly located rusticity’ (Neglected Powers, 37). In his treatment of Shakespeare’s characters, Knight responds to their affective corporeality. Although Marina in Pericles is clearly an instrument of a ‘spiritualized royalty’ (The Crown of Life, 64), she is also, Knight writes simply, ‘a natural girl’ (65). Knight had a bustling life himself in the material world. As we have seen, he had a larger than life presence in the halls of academe and on the world’s amateur stages; he often appeared on the radio as a recitalist of Shakespeare and other poets and, during the Second World War, as a propagandist of Shakespearean good cheer. For him, or at least part of him, life was the thing, and, despite his reverence for those he considered the great writers of English literature, real heroic life always trumped heroic literature, the Earl of Essex was greater than Shakespeare, and Christ, of course, was greater than anyone else, real or fictional. Creative living is always greater than creative art in Knight’s estimation. And creative living is greater than its mere expression in poetry in the work of art itself; at least this is how I understand Knight’s remark about Timon: ‘Timon’s world is poetry made real, lived rather than imagined’ (The Wheel of Fire, 231). Life, Knight informs us, is the key word in the New Testament, not God or even love: a ‘radiant life’ is its distinctive teaching.42 At the same time, in an interesting counter-adjustment on Knight’s part, Jesus corresponds to the art-form of a Shakespeare play; he’s the protagonist in an art-form of the Divine Artist. In his book on Ibsen, Knight talks of ‘the paradox of his drive through writing for a life of deeds in comparison with which all writing was trash’.43 In an odd by-product of this view, however, Knight contrasts the expansively heroic life of fictional characters with that of their deskbound creators to the detriment, in this instance, of real life (as though



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creative writing itself were not a signal instance of creative living).44 And so Achilles was greater than Homer or Antony greater than Shakespeare. This seems to be an extension of a chronic worry in Knight (as in Ralph Waldo Emerson and A. C. Bradley) as to the status of fictional characters, despite Knight’s frequent asseverations to the contrary. Knight’s confusion in this matter is ingenuously exposed when he talks of the difference between Shakespeare’s ‘supposed persons’ (Shakespeare’s Dramatic Challenge, 19) and the poetry that they speak. He goes on to say: ‘With Macbeth it is regularly in dispute as to how much of his superb imaginative apprehension is to be attributed to himself and how much to Shakespeare’s artistry. It is an extraordinarily difficult problem’ (20). It is, of course, only a problem at all if we grant Macbeth some kind of unfictional consciousness. As for Knight’s dramatic criticism, it would have been a stirring experience in the decades of Knight’s greatest influence, the 1930s through the 1950s, to read his acclamations of the Dionysian energy of Renaissance tragedy.45 We may imagine how, during this time, students in particular (or some of them anyway) would have responded to the proposition in Christ and Nietzsche that ‘conscience make[s] eunuchs of us all’ (73). Knight’s invitation to shunt conventional morality to one side in our enjoyment of tragedy’s sexy wrongdoers might well have been for them a liberating experience, as when he urges his readers, for example, to enjoy – uncritically – Middleton’s villain De Flores in his masterpiece, The Changeling, who is ‘lit by a gleam from beyond morality and is not all unworthy of his romantic name’,46 or when he maintains that Webster’s characters should be admired for their ‘fire and detonation’ (105) if not for their morality. Tragedy is after all ‘the fruit of rapture’ (7) and ‘if we must be guilty of bias, it would be safer to start with such poetic splendours and remain true to them at the risk of lesser infidelities’ (The Imperial Theme, 24). He puts this position most strongly in Christ and Nietzsche when he argues that great tragedy demands ‘some new acceptance of the humanly repellent’ (78), but mitigates this judgement’s brutality by arguing that the new acceptance of it leads to a ‘new faith, the nature-powers which are God’ and ‘[t]he harmonization of the cruelty and blessedness of existence’ (78). There’s enough of the humanly repellent in Shakespeare – one thinks immediately of King Lear and Titus Andronicus – to see the force of Knight’s argument. Indeed, his essay on King Lear in The Wheel of Fire seems to me one of the book’s most assured and persuasive pieces. Knight describes the play in terms of Shakespeare’s mature awareness of the tragic power of incongruity, absurdity and indignity. His aphoristic description of Lear’s essential nature has never been bettered: ‘A tremendous soul is, as it

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were, incongruously geared to a puerile intellect’ (177). And he talks, in a fine phrase, of the poet’s ‘towering fantasticality’ (188) which incorporates the ‘satanically comic’ (185) and the ‘macabre humoresque’ (186). The percipient term Knight chooses to get at the heart of Shakespeare’s comedy in this play is ‘philosophic’ (183): it is simply an error of aesthetic judgement ‘to regard humour as essentially trivial’ (175). The play makes much of ‘the humour of cruelty and the cruelty of humour’ (181). Most of Shakespeare’s tragedies, according to Knight, make much of what Yeats called the rag and bone shop of the heart, with its displays of human weakness and sin. One of the epigraphs to Christ and Nietzsche consists of a couple of Henry’s lines from the beginning of Act 4 in Henry V: ‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil / Would men observingly distill it out’ (4.1.5–6). We’re asked to remember that ‘Satanisms are as creative as paradisal visions’ (The Christian Renaissance, 94). Of Falstaff, Timon and Macbeth, Knight writes in hortative italics, ‘spurning morality, they nevertheless channel powers from which good, not bad, will spring’ (The Golden Labyrinth, 80). Many critics – even the less than admiring ones – respond positively to all of this. In his Oxford edition of Timon of Athens in 2004, for instance, John Jowett offers a discriminating assessment of Knight’s critical position: ‘For all its waywardness, Knight’s criticism at its best offers a valuable insight as to why the spectacle of rage and hate is theatrically powerful in a way that reaches beyond sheer negation’.47 Knight, of course, would have found Jowett’s affirmation pusillanimous. For him, the beautiful fury of the Dionysian with its ‘lusts, indecencies and indignities’ (The Golden Labyrinth, 4), its ‘crimes, ghosts and death’, overwhelms and transforms man’s ‘inhibited, ethical, civilized self-consciousness’ (4). A vital indulgence in ‘depravity’ and ‘perversion’ leads us far beyond sheer negation into a mystified realm wherein we reach ‘the deepest “I” of selfhood, a oneness with all life far deeper than the individual ego as normally known’ (6). Acting itself is Dionysian, Knight argues. In tragic drama ‘the darkest themes of blood and sin are transmuted, are in a way transcended, in the art-form itself’ (Shakespeare & Religion, 183). More broadly, Renaissance literature characteristically finds ‘a purpose in the evil itself’ (188). It is little wonder, then, that Knight should find that the play that most notably sweeps aside ethical considerations as petty and irrelevant is Antony and Cleopatra which ‘we watch as though from the turrets of infinity, whence the ethical is found unreal and beauty alone survives’ (The Imperial Theme, 264). Nothing in Shakespeare, we might counter, alone survives, and we must acknowledge the justice of Jonathan Dollimore’s critique of Knight’s belief that Antony’s



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and Cleopatra’s transcendent love ‘translineates man to divine likeness’ (217). On the contrary, Dollimore believes, ‘… the language of desire, far from transcending the power relations which structure this society, is wholly in-formed by them’.48 Nonetheless, by the same token, the language of desire in this play remains gloriously itself, whether or not informed by society’s power relations. On occasion, on the other hand, Knight notices a Shakespeare tragedy that deviates to an important degree from this Nietzschean perspective. In ‘The Embassy of Death’, one of his essays on Hamlet in The Wheel of Fire, he concludes that a ‘balanced judgement’ of the play ‘is forced to pronounce ultimately in favour of a life contrasted with death, for optimism and the healthily second-rate, rather than the nihilism of the superman … ‘ (The Wheel of Fire, 40). Such a balanced judgement is applauded by Philip Edwards: ‘Wilson Knight, in that brilliant early essay of his, recognized the alien and inhuman prophet that Hamlet essentially is. And he repudiated him’.49 The deepest ‘I’ of selfhood, however, extrudes the healthily second-rate. Ethical considerations in heroic life and art must be swept aside; lusts, indecencies and indignities must needs prevail, lusts especially. Tragedy is indeed sex flooded. Throughout his work – as much on Pope and Byron, say, as on Shakespeare – Knight sings the body electric. We need to avoid ‘a premature spiritualizing of the human’ (Neglected Powers, 247), he urges, for the spiritual in this ‘dappled world’ (The Burning Oracle, 36) always ‘keeps one foot … within the world of Johnsonian common-sense’.50 Life is ‘“spirit” mated to “body” ’ (The Wheel of Fire, 118). We have to listen ‘to the impassioned lyrist, the dithyrambist’ (The Mutual Flame, 98), the orgiastic celebrant, especially in the case of Shakespeare in whom ‘sex ran … like a sea’ (this is Knight’s admiring quotation in The Wheel of Fire from an essay by John Masefield). Knight’s essays – as we saw earlier in the analysis of his reading of Antony and Cleopatra – are full of the poets’ celebrations of sex-forces having their way from Pope’s ‘How glowing guilt exalts the keen delight’ in his poem Eloisa to Abelard to Yeats’s celebration of ‘The fury and the mire of human veins’. On occasion, Knight’s view of the emancipatory power of sexual activity might have had a special appeal to the turbulent adolescent mind. In his essay, for example, on ‘Masturbation and Powys’, he conveys masturbation’s undoubtedly therapeutic value by linking it, in one of his numerous breathtaking convergences, to Wordsworth, the great poet of therapeutic nature: ‘Powys’s masturbatory doctrine is really an extreme Wordsworthianism’ (Neglected Powers, 167). There is no doubt that this concatenation of Knight’s beliefs brings out the Freud in many of his readers. Who can resist, for instance, speculating

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about his confession in Neglected Powers that there was a point in his life, coinciding with the ‘unfurling’ of his Shakespeare interpretations, when he first indulged in ‘thoroughly abnormal fantasies’? (30. Knight’s italics). Especially as they have to be differentiated from what he describes on the same page as the ‘frantic and futile thoughts and lonely actions related to normal sexuality’ (so much, we might say, for normality). Although Knight never quite spells out what he means by abnormal fantasies, it requires little process of elimination to see them as deviations from the strictly heterosexual. In his 1960 epilogue to The Christian Renaissance, a book he wrote originally in 1932, he writes that he wishes he had spent more time on what he now calls bisexual and homosexual idealisms, although he believes that what he said then, as far as it went, is still ‘sound and important’ (269). A mélange of these idealisms and ‘dangerous semi-sexual instincts’ (273) forms the ‘seraphic’ ideality of the great writer (and, for that matter, the great athlete).51 It is the ‘seraphic’ to which a civilization or a religion should aspire, like Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well whose ‘sanctity aspires to sexuality’ (The Sovereign Flower, 160). In Neglected Powers, Knight reminds us once again that ‘the seraphic is shown as conditioned by, and flowering from, the obscenities’ (51) and, in 1971, sees the symptoms of such a burgeoning – despite his customary contempt for contemporary society – in the liveliness of 1960s pop culture, although we may question some of the judgements that follow from this insight.52 As we might expect, Shakespeare is the supreme example of the seraphic and produces some of Knight’s more acute insights (in, for instance, his two essays on Julius Caesar, ‘The Eroticism of Julius Caesar’ and ‘The Torch of Life: an Essay on Julius Caesar’ (both in The Imperial Theme). In contrast with high-class literature, pop culture or ordinary daily life, twentieth-century Christianity is woefully incomplete in Knight’s view. In The Christian Renaissance, he observes: ‘Today, novels, theatres, cinemas are charged with a passionate, dissolute, homeless but warmly human eroticism; while our religion, aloof, remains cold, chaste and charitable’ (216). We need to find an institutional home for this warmly human eroticism. In contrast with romance, ‘our Christianity is dark and threatening; or worse, pallid and fearful’ (257). How can this religion, Knight asks, ‘concentrating on reproof, discipline and sacrifice, challenge with its ghostly canticles the lithe grace and laughing eyes of our as yet unrecognised Eros?’ (258). And yet, paradoxically, as Knight constantly reminds us, Christianity is supremely the religion of the body. In Christ and Nietzsche Knight, eschewing lithe grace and laughing eyes, lingers on the dark erotic potentiality of the Crucifixion, regarding it, as John Cowper Powys did,



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in terms of the ‘divine narcissism’. Christ’s sacrifice, Knight believes with Nietzsche, is sexually generated; not only do we incorporate his suffering, but in some way we enjoy it as spectacle, almost as the tormentor does who ‘uses his victim to call up these divine energies, would play on him as a quivering string, in order to enjoy, to learn, to possess’ (108). In another of his provocative linkages – an extreme conjunction of the physical and the spiritual – he asks us to see Christ’s body in terms of a ‘vivisectional and mystical curiosity’ (108). But Christ can also be seen, so Knight goes on to argue, in the way Oscar Wilde sees him – that is, in terms of a transcendental male beauty and a supreme artist, the first and greatest romantic. Neither of these perspectives has much purchase on contemporary Christianity in Knight’s view. What this decadent civilization demands, he believes, is a Christian renaissance, as his book’s title proclaims, animated by untraditional proclivities, which alone ‘can fulfil the derelict purposes of the modern world’ (260). And with a revitalized religion will come, inevitably it seems given Knight’s emphasis on spectacle, a revitalized theatre, involving ‘the refreshingly cosmic, the recreating poetry, the new dynamic’ (112). And, not least of all, a reinvigorated Shakespeare.

Knight’s Royalism Knight was drawn to alien and inhuman prophets, to stern Machiavellian leaders, to sexual libertarians. The balanced judgement Edwards praises in ‘The Embassy of Death’ is in the self-same essay unbalanced by Knight’s notorious judgement that commends Claudius as a king for all seasons.53 It doesn’t matter apparently, in the last analysis, that Claudius murdered King Hamlet; what really matters is how he governed Denmark afterwards. We need to look beyond the peculiarities of Knight’s individual psyche, however, to understand this yearning for absolute political and sexual authorities. Knight was tormented by what he saw as the depravity of the culture around him. Throughout his life, he recoiled from the spectacle of mass capitalist society’s threat to his spiritual values (Knight imagines a similarly discomfited Shakespeare: ‘Shakespeare’s sociology was probably conditioned by a psychological incompatibility with his surroundings’ [Shakespearian Dimensions, 33]). In Neglected Powers, his book on nineteenthand twentieth-century English literature, he looks back on his work (as he so often does) and observes that his theories have always sprung from what he quaintly describes as ‘the thought-atmosphere of our time’ (41).54 In his Ideology of Obsession: A. K. Chesterton and British Fascism (1996), David

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Baker talks of Knight’s ‘mild form of cultural despair’55 in the 1930s and 1940s. ‘Mild’ seems to be a more or less appropriate epithet from a political point of view as Knight was never drawn at this time – nor at any other time -- to find in British fascism the political solution to the decadence he saw around him. Nonetheless, we cannot help but notice how, throughout his life, Knight shows himself to be romantically in thrall to the notion of a super-hero as the cleansing scourge for the mess that passes as modern civilization – for a contemporary culture in which ‘youth takes suicidally to drugs in reaction to a murderous and vision-thwarting society’ (Neglected Powers, 105). Knight’s ‘thought-atmosphere’ in the first decades of the twentieth century was dominated by a version of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose ‘phrases drop like burning iodine into the sores of our civilisation’ (Christ and Nietzsche, 161). Knight found in Nietzsche confirmation for his conviction of the necessity to acknowledge the evil in ourselves – you have to ‘make friends with these dark energies’ as he has Nietzsche say in Shakespeare & Religion (193) – and for his contempt for modern European society. Had he read Beyond Good and Evil, Knight would no doubt have agreed with Nietzsche that European man is now a ‘measly, tame, domestic animal’.56 Although no fascist, Knight’s Nietzschean perspective encouraged him to have some sympathy for both fictional and real devils – representatives of those dark energies – for Tamburlaine and Richard III, say, and even, in the real world, for Adolf Hitler. In Christ and Nietzsche, he admires – despite everything – the way in which Italian and German societies ‘think less of freedom and more of service’ (119) in contrast with England’s ‘indecision, self-deception, and “national not-being”’ (13). Pan-Germanism, he later writes, ‘is in places infectious’ (120). The world needs strong leadership but ‘our cause lacks the necessary radiations’ (120). It is odd to think of someone writing three years after the Second World War, after having fought on behalf of the Allies, who can, with whatever qualifications, applaud Germany’s ‘satanic virility’ (13), someone who can still commend Germany and Russia for their ‘communal inspiration’ which flourishes ‘beyond any religious, national, or social group in England or America’ (13). (In 1948, it would, of course, have been more pardonable for someone to think in these terms about the Soviet Union.) Knight contrasts Germany and England [sic] to the detriment of the latter for its ‘devitalized church theology’ and its neglect of ‘a succession of poet-prophets’ (29). After centuries of a stern and robust Christianity, Knight believes, modern-day English Christianity, and modern-day English democracy, are anaemic. And yet, at the same



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time, as in his ‘balanced judgement’ of Hamlet, Knight admits at an early point in Christ and Nietzsche that twentieth-century English democracy, feeble though it may be, is ‘more subtly inclusive’ than a ‘more vital order’ (14).57 It includes, for instance, Shakespeare, ‘a national prophet if ever there was one, concerned deeply with the royal soul of England’ (Shakespeare & Religion, 93). In his retrospective Introduction to Shakespeare & Religion in 1967, Knight harks back a few of those years to his ‘Lift up your Hearts’ talks for the BBC in 1964, celebrating the Quartercentenary Shakespeare birthday week, which he describes, somewhat unexpectedly, as ‘the heart of my life’s work on Shakespeare’ (3). He talks in epiphanic terms of the ‘sudden illumination’ (65) he received at this propitious time of the supreme importance of the problems and conflicts of Shakespeare’s ‘seemingly-outdated English kings and barons’ (4) as if they were really ‘true reflections of the turmoils and tyrannies rampant across Europe’ (4) in the twentieth century. Of course, he was not alone in seeing the connections between the war-ravaged waste land of the fourteenth century, say, as refracted through Shakespeare’s history plays, and that of the blighted twentieth. As Michael Bristol observes in his engaging book, Big-time Shakespeare, Shakespeare has lasted a long time because of his ‘uncommon capacity... to represent the complex pathos of Western modernity’.58 Knight’s sudden illumination in 1964 is only the capstone on an already elaborately constructed edifice over the years in which the British crown, as he writes in 1948, acts as ‘a dream, a myth, a poetic creation, a mighty symbol’ (Christ and Nietzsche, 121), one ‘piercing the eternity dimension’ (The Crown of Life, 107), to challenge the dynamic example of Nazi Germany. In his 1958 collection of essays, The Sovereign Flower, Knight explains, in those portentous italics once again, how his wartime writings on Shakespeare have used ‘Shakespeare to define the meaning of the Crown, for us, today’ (274). ‘Today’ the ‘Crown’ is ‘a mystic symbol … an almost maternal presence above childish arrogance’ (270), connoting, unlike in Shakespeare’s time, ‘liberalism’ and democracy, as do its qualifiers, ‘royal’ and ‘imperial’. (As does, for that matter, Nietzsche, when he is properly understood, for his superman doctrine ‘demands a democratic order allowing for originality’ [Shakespeare & Religion, 130].) The true opposite of tyranny is not freedom but royalty, ‘symbolizing, as it does, a wisdom over-arching the ephemeral, and often self-delusory, choice’ (The Sovereign Flower, 278). Symbolically, the Crown also subtends a healthy nationalism: it is ‘both heart and aura of the nation’s body, at once soul and whole’ (274). Crown (royalty), poetry (Shakespeare), Christianity (Christ) merge ‘seraphically’ in Knight’s work

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‘to create some new, more deeply Shakespearian, manhood’ (Shakespeare & Religion, 124). Knight is always the proclaimer of convergence. In The Sovereign Flower, he insists that ‘Always in Shakespeare royalty aspires to be a Christian power; it is, or symbolizes, Christ in power’ (278). What poet, Knight asks, can be more divine and inspired than Shakespeare? Who has a greater moral authority than he, especially as his poetry, like all the world’s greatest poetry, so Knight believes, comes from an orderly age, comprehensively disciplined – ‘queen-centred’? (Christ and Nietzsche, 20). While Shakespeare may expose the fallibility of individual English kings, the ‘royal essence’ remains ‘poetically invulnerable’ (Byron and Shakespeare, 337. Knight’s italics). In this context, instances of Knightian ‘merging’ proliferate: the king merges transcendentally into the prince (a distinction of nomenclature Elizabeth I herself preferred) who becomes in later times ‘the saintly aristocrat’ (337), the hero-god and the priest-king, imbued with a visionary eroticism. All that rises must converge. Shakespeare, according to Knight, had a Blakeian sense of England’s possibility under a saintly king to become the new Jerusalem; he ‘sees England, as did Milton later, as a Messiah-nation’ (Shakespeare & Religion, 236). Lest we should lose ourselves in the realm of spiritualized nationalism, Knight reminds us that Shakespeare’s fondness for Dukes and Kings and lovers is not dissimilar from our own love of their modern representatives in the world of romantic cinema. Shakespeare’s aristocratic characters are, in a word, ‘aspects of our own, kingly, selves’ (The Burning Oracle, 43). There is, in fact, something of a shift of emphasis in Knight’s later work from Shakespeare as the poet of England to ‘Shakespeare as the poet of royalism, in a wide sense’ (The Sovereign Flower, 8). Beyond any other poet, as far as Knight is concerned, Shakespeare strikes ‘the note of royalty. His is a royal world’ (15). For all his Modernist innovations of technique, Knight remained a Romantic in many essential ways. Like Coleridge, for example, Knight faced the basic problem of how one can talk about a writer who is, as Knight puts it, so great that he is ‘less a literary artist than a force of nature’ (The Sovereign Flower, 16). As we have seen already in this essay, one way to do so is in large measure to take Shakespeare’s poetry as a given, as Knight so often does despite its massive presence in his books, to bracket to a large extent its literary artistry, and to concentrate instead on its exhortative power in the world of a spiritualized, patriotic politics.59 But for Knight, as for many Romantics, art – and especially great art like Shakespeare’s – works at a mystical level, those shadowy hinterlands, wherein we reach the deepest ‘I’ of selfhood, forcing us to grapple ‘with some super-thought



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which baffles expression’ (The Mutual Flame, 58). Although this last imperative is from The Mutual Flame, Knight’s book on Shakespeare’s scandalously ambiguous sonnets and The Phoenix and the Turtle, it can apply mutatis mutandis to all of his books on Shakespeare, as all of them, to some degree or other, wrestle with a Shakespearean reality ‘outspacing, or eluding, definition’ (89). The odd locution ‘outspacing’ – a favourite with Knight – seems to imply, in its suggestion of some kind of movement and location, a destination for interpretation that can be reached in the vicinity of the words on the page if not in the words themselves: in the spaces, that is, or the interstices between (or under, above or beneath) them. In other words, Knight, like many post-Romantics, sees a transcendental function for art as ‘pointing to’ or ‘revealing’ an otherwise unavailable-torationality domain of deeper significance – akin to, but not the same as, religion. Throughout his books, especially when it comes to dealing with Shakespeare’s works, Knight rings the changes on these elusive prepositions of place: ‘below’, ‘above’, ‘beyond’, ‘behind’, ‘within’, ‘outside’. And so Knight, in his most famous book on Shakespeare, The Wheel of Fire, talks of the interpretative desirability of burrowing beneath the words to come at the work’s essential reality: ‘a true philosophic and imaginative interpretation will aim at cutting below the surface to reveal that burning core of mental or spiritual reality from which each play derives its nature and meaning’ (246). But Knight is a contradictory writer. As we have seen, his books on Shakespeare overflow with Shakespeare’s words. As readers of Knight, we are at the same time ipso facto readers of Shakespeare. And, as though to emphasize by contrast the difficulty he has of reaching the heart of the organism, he frequently makes the paradoxical claim that the mere surface of Shakespeare’s texts is sufficient for his interpretations, that he draws them from ‘a simple regard to surface impressions’ (The Christian Renaissance, p. 87). Shakespeare does not, that is, write like T. S. Eliot. Knight prides himself on taking no notes, on taking, rather, ‘a simple and direct view of the plays’ (p. 8). His work, he says, ‘has unrolled without purposive direction’ (p. 12), yet it seems to him to have heft and centre. And he is often scornful of what he calls ‘a pseudo-intellectualism’ (p. 141), and ‘the disintegration of misguided scholarship’ (The Shakespearian Tempest, p. 2), in the prevailing criticism of Shakespeare who is, when all is said and done, a writer who doesn’t hide what he means as the Modernists tend to do and who, over the course of his writing career, writes more, rather than less, simply. (One often gets the impression, however, that Knight is talking about himself rather than Shakespeare. In a

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letter to George Panichas, he writes: ‘I do not like intellectual conundrums – my mind is childish in a way’.)60 ‘Shakespeare’s poetry shows a steady process of simplification’, Knight judges in The Shakespearian Tempest (267). When we think of the extraordinarily corrugated language and tangled thought that often distinguish Shakespeare’s last plays (so productively examined in Russ McDonald’s book, Shakespeare’s Late Style),61 we may feel justified in thinking that Knight’s charge of a pseudo-intellectualism is a species of anti-intellectualism. Knight tells us that ‘my interpretations have unfurled with little effort and no hard thinking. That does not mean that they are the less trustworthy’ (The Christian Renaissance, 9). As F. W. Bateson observed in 1954, ‘Mr. Wilson Knight’s most engaging characteristic is his uncorrupted, incorruptible innocence’.62 While this may well be true, the flip side of such an innocent view of his own procedures reveals sometimes an unappealing self-regard – a self-righteousness even in which, for instance, Knight makes outrageous claims for his acting and production techniques. ‘My own work has been analogous to the splitting of the atom’, he says absurdly, ‘it has let the pictures out, and they can never again be rehoused as formerly’ (Shakespearian Production, 233. Knight’s italics). (This hubristic – and self-defensive – vein runs throughout Knight’s work, but need not be examined here.) On the one hand, then, the significance of Shakespeare’s works, the elusive target of critical interpretation, lies in their hidden complexities beyond our understanding; on the other hand, the vehicle that somehow or other must bring these complexities into mind, the poetry itself of Shakespeare’s plays, is, according to Knight, luminously transparent. As he says in The Shakespearian Tempest: ‘Shakespeare’s poetry demands no esoteric instruction, nor his symbols any elaborate interpretation. They are most simple and inevitable’ (271). A sometimes haughty abrogation of the critical language of the times, in fact, distinguishes Knight’s major books on Shakespeare. He believed that a true objectivity of interpretation can only stem from ‘a sincere and personal poetic criticism’ (The Crown of Life, 4) paralleling the actor’s poetic acting; the reader’s interpretative faculty must always be ‘the bride of the poet’s imagination’ (The Wheel of Fire, 230). Knight is by no means the only Shakespeare interpreter in (and before) the twentieth century to write literary criticism as though inspired by a muse of fire, despite Hardin Craig’s admiring review of The Imperial Theme in 1952, whose author, he thinks, is uniquely ‘a poet let loose in the arena of prosaic critics’.63 A little less admiringly, Van Domelen thinks of Knight as the ‘Wild Man of Academe’ (7), while David Baker talks more soberly of Knight’s merger with ‘the work under scrutiny [as] almost an active form of



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phenomenology’ (98). Knight, Baker argues, rejects the ‘mere critic’s’ (98) attempt to view the work within the social, historical and literary environments, accepting instead the ‘moral validity’ of the ‘poetic unit’ (98). John Jones pursues this line of thinking when he writes in apparent approval of Knight’s attempt ‘to get inside [the poet] in order to interpret, aiming by a kind of inspired ventriloquism to speak with the voice of genius’.64 (Though he also says ‘There is a loose-limbed quality about his writing’.65) It is tempting, in Knight’s case, to redirect Harold Bloom’s well-known judgement on the anxiety of influence felt by succeeding generations of poets and critics for their distinguished forebears, not only to actors, who are notoriously fixated on the triumphs of their colleagues, past and present, but to critics overwhelmed by the genius of their literary subjects. Knight’s inspired ventriloquism when he writes on Shakespeare assumes, it seems to me, an almost competitive Shakespearean brio. And so, in his major works on Shakespeare, we get a prose from him that adopts Shakespearean techniques wholesale: the prolific use of inversion; the ultra-vivid, Enobarbus-like scene-painting; those extraordinary similes in which, for instance, Othello is ‘like a large glowing coal’, or Timon of Athens ‘like phosphorus churned to flame in a tropic ocean’ (The Imperial Theme, 204); complicated and serpentine metaphors and metonyms; the fecundity of hyphenated noun phrases; the plethora of neologisms. This rich ‘Shakespearean’ verbal texture suggests that Knight is so overcome by the example of Shakespeare’s poetry that he cannot help but attempt to speak in its terms, in the voice of genius, as Jones believes; the genius, that is, of Shakespeare. In a letter to The Listener, C. B. Purdom argues that Knight interprets Shakespeare’s plays ‘as moral and human works and above all practical in relation to his life, his own life seen in imagination, as though the plays were written for him’.66 And, upping the ante, in a review in the Exeter University Club Bulletin of Knight’s dramatic recitals of Shakespeare when he was 78, Olivia Anderson notes: ‘someone said: “If Jackson Knight is Vergil, then Wilson Knight is Shakespeare”’ (Shakespeare’s Dramatic Challenge, 153).67 It might have been advantageous in some ways for Knight to have followed Byron’s decision, as he describes it in his book Byron and Shakespeare, to take Pope as his stylistic model rather than Shakespeare – not, that is, the ‘poet of Dionysian tumult but . . . the Laureate of Peace’ (10). Knight seems to me more profitably at peace when he is writing on Pope or Byron or Cowper Powys or Ibsen than when he is writing in much of his work on Shakespeare; his prose in these books is more measured and considered, more convincing, I would say, than much of the histrionic writing of The

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Wheel of Fire or The Imperial Theme.68 The phenomenological move on Knight’s part from poet to critic takes some theoretical sustenance, as we have seen, from Knight’s insistent and persistent distinction between what he calls ‘interpretation’ and ‘criticism’. In the famous essay that opens The Wheel of Fire, ‘On the Principles of Shakespeare Interpretation’, Knight expresses the fear that the essays in this book may confuse and even repel the reader in their rejection of criticism in favour of interpretation. In his interpretation, criticism objectifies the work by measuring it against some externally inspired model or standards of excellence – as the neoclassicals did in their objections to Shakespeare’s ‘irregularities’. Knight preferred the kind of criticism defined in the German hermeneutic tradition – that is, an active, sympathetic entering into the spirit of the work that attempts to understand before criticizing – and in practice in the case of Shakespeare, never in fact arriving at that lonely hour of judgement. Thus, as Knight sees it, it is through active imaginative engagement that interpretation merges somehow with the work. Accordingly, in principle the critic should make no attempt to establish what is good or bad in it (a prohibition, needless to say, impossible even for Knight always to follow). Criticism, Knight argues, ‘is a judgement of vision; interpretation a reconstruction of vision’ (1), which is much the more important activity; interpretation ‘speaks less from the seats of judgement than on the creative centre’ (The Imperial Theme, vi). Or as he restates it: ‘Criticism aspires to a judgement, a valuing, of symbolic statement; interpretation aspires to an understanding of it’ (The Sovereign Flower, 258).69 What is the point, Knight asks, of judging a vision so unassailably ratified (my italics) as Shakespeare’s? (‘Ratified’ proves to be the unassailable parti pris of Knight’s critical vocabulary.) All we have to do when reading such a genius as Shakespeare, so Knight believes, is to indulge an ‘utmost passivity’ (The Wheel of Fire, 7), to surrender to him in an act of uncritical generosity.70 Despite Knight’s professed admiration for the investigative efforts of a William Empson, then, it is clear that in general he found that kind of reading deeply suspect and threatening. It represented at another level, in another arena, Nietzsche’s ‘real devil’, ‘the pharisaic intelligence with its filming over of vital energies’ (Christ and Nietzsche, 208), an example in the literary domain of Nietzsche’s ‘pallid rationalism’ (61) in the political. Somewhat ironically, we might say, Knight imagines the critical mind at work on Shakespeare (or on any ‘ratified’ poet) as an egotistical barrier between perceiver and perceived. The critical act, in this view, can be supremely destructive. ‘Criticism tears at the heart of literature’ is his memorable judgement in Neglected Powers (26). Knight fears the onslaught



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of a fashionable pessimism: ‘High tragedy and cynicism are incompatible’ he writes in The Crown of Life (11). Perhaps his most revealing aside on this issue is his comment in the same essay in Neglected Powers on the career of the journal Scrutiny (1932–53), founded by F. R. Leavis, who remained its principal editor until its demise and memorably undertook, among other ambitious goals, a principled re-evaluation of the canon of British literature according to the lights of the New Criticism.71 Its illustrious contributors over the years included such luminaries as T. S. Eliot, William Empson, L. C. Knights and I. A. Richards (to all of whom, by the way, Knight occasionally acknowledged an intellectual debt, especially in the case of Eliot). But in Neglected Powers in 1971 he sees Scrutiny – as he saw much twentieth-century literary criticism – as appealing ‘to the prisoned mentality of twentieth-century scepticism’ (26). We need to ponder this remark in the context of Knight’s insistence throughout his life on the necessity for a wide-eyed, uninhibited reading of the great masters, stretching back to that Pauline moment in 1927 when he suddenly realized that what was needed to understand Shakespeare ‘was a simple, child-like, response to the miraculous, such as we accord to similar events in the New Testament’ (Shakespeare & Religion, 199). As he says, ‘Any one can understand Shakespeare’s symbolism’ (The Shakespearian Tempest, 40). This response, unimpeded by intellection, is the first duty of interpretation as when, for instance, Hermione ‘comes to life’ in the last act of The Winter’s Tale: ‘To withhold the mystical sympathies demanded is to shirk the first duty of interpretation. Eventually the resurrection of Hermione must be considered the most strikingly conceived, and profoundly penetrating, moment in English literature’ (The Burning Oracle, 58).

Knight’s Libertarianism We need to acknowledge the truth of Van Domelan’s judgement that ‘Knight helped destroy the ossified academic approaches to the study of Shakespeare’s plays and to introduce a more adventurous spirit in their interpretation’. As a student, I remember responding positively to the liberating gusto of Knight’s trampling on the sacred principles of traditional Shakespeare scholarship. We should, for instance, he says in The Wheel of Fire, free ourselves from an excessive concern for Shakespeare’s ‘sources’, for, after all, ‘a friend of Shakespeare’s may well have played a more important part in the creation of Brutus than did Plutarch’s Lives’ (290). Any concern with sources, whatever their nature, may well

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turn out to be barriers to the work’s ‘immediate symbolic and aesthetic value’ (The Shakespearian Tempest, 8–9). We need to watch out for those ‘false arguments in terms of history, sources, intentions’ (The Christian Renaissance, 74).72 Time would be better spent with the plays themselves, Knight argues, than with worrying about where they came from, and Bateson acknowledges the attractiveness of this unfettered approach to the reading of Shakespeare in the expanded version of his remarks above: ‘The time that the rest of us find it necessary to devote to turning up works of reference and consulting “learned” articles he can spend in actual contact with the work itself’.73 (Although I don’t think Bateson’s language is loaded here, there is of course a case to be made for the likely fatuity of reading any piece of literature unconcerned with its inevitable cultural constraints and historical dependencies.) Knight believes it to be fatal ‘to suppose that any great genius is necessarily bound by the current thought-forms of his, or any, age’ (The Shakespearian Tempest, viii), to which careful phrasing we must give assent, but we may have more difficulty with his chiastically rendered exclusiveness in The Imperial Theme when he judges that ‘the correct procedure is to interpret an age in the light of its great books and men of visionary genius, not the men of genius in the light of their age’ (xii). In the light of these remarks on the writer’s supreme authority, we can imagine the relish with which Knight in The Burning Oracle quotes Pope’s lines condemning the meddlesome critic as a ‘bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, / With loads of learned lumber in his head’ (158). Similarly, The Wheel of Fire extends this line of thought beyond a concern for sources to a critique of what was at the time a prevailing obsession with the artist’s ‘intentions’, which Knight thinks are phantasmagoric, ‘clouded forms’ (7). We need to remember here that an acceptance of the ‘intentional fallacy’ – a term not available to Knight in 1930 – did not become standard until the famous essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in 1946. (Knight’s name doesn’t appear by the way – as noted above, certain critics studiously avoided any mention of him – in the index to Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon74 in which this essay is reprinted. An account of Knight’s neglect by the editors of anthologies of literary criticism can be found in Panichas’s article.) So Knight was talking about the problem of intentionality in his own way – as was the case with Shakespeare’s spirituality – years before it became one of the dominant topics in post-World War II literary criticism. Above all (and with a prophetic assurance), Knight derides the traditional critical obsession with Shakespeare’s ‘persons’ (his preferred word for ‘characters’) whom he regards as ultimately not human at all, but purely symbols of a poetic vision.75



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The Wheel of Fire becomes most incendiary, as we have seen, in recording Knight’s disdain for what he perceives as the dry-as-dust practices of academic literary criticism, those ‘favourite academic distinctions, valuable enough as stammering approaches, as laborious grammar exercises preparatory to wisdom’, but which need finally to be ‘melted down’ (Christ and Nietzsche, 194). Elsewhere in his work, he continues to appeal to a critical libertarian instinct in advocating, for instance, an unfurrowed enjoyment of the texts’ infrequent intransigencies. We should welcome ‘the occasional hiatus, the mysterious depths and crevices, of Shakespearian drama’ (The Mutual Flame, 77). Knight promotes the same kind of reading – certainly a rewarding one – for a book like the New Testament, whose attitude towards sex, for example, is ‘remarkable in its baffling and ingenious indecisiveness’ (The Christian Renaissance, 218). In the case of plays like Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra, we have, ‘in both commentary and performance, to accept poetic intangibles to assure our comprehension and save us from unnecessary complexities and ambiguities’ (Shakespearian Dimensions, xix). It is perhaps an aspect of Knight’s mystical, almost osmotic, critical understanding that accepting poetic intangibles aids comprehension. Liberating too, perhaps especially for students of literature, is Knight’s view of Shakespearean creation. He postulates a writer who, at times, and invitingly, doesn’t quite know what he’s doing: ‘the poet responds, perhaps without knowing why, to a certain tale’ (The Crown of Life, 34). Knight believes that this is almost certainly the case with a play such as Pericles; so elusive is its ‘truth’ that it ‘may well be one he [Shakespeare] cannot himself think, but to which, once created, he will look up as to a religious dogma of recognized validity’ (34). We have, Knight believes, ‘poetry, as it were, writing itself and are to see what new thing unfolds’ (37). All of these contributions to the critical conversation about Shakespeare’s works would have struck Knight’s original readers in the 1930s and 1940s as refreshing, exciting alternatives to the more traditional ways of reading Shakespeare’s texts. And still do, perhaps. Throughout these years – not to say his whole life – he bears down hard on those whom he thinks are the narrow-minded moralizers of great literary texts (although he himself in the last analysis reads Shakespeare as morally sublime). The poetic consciousness of Shakespeare’s plays, he asserts on a number of occasions, ‘knows no shame … and is quite unmoral’ (The Sovereign Flower, 289). He repeatedly adjures us to interpret Shakespeare on a metaphysical rather than an ethical level (see The Wheel of Fire, 11). A whole critical agenda flows from these bedrock positions. Shakespeare ‘awakes us not to realism, but to reality’ (Shakespearian Production, 160), although Knight is, as we

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have seen, properly appreciative of Shakespeare’s unrivalled ability to bring the everyday to vivid life on the page. He asks us to remember that ‘poetic art gives us not the factual, which is dead, but the actual, which lives’ (Shakespearian Production, 40). Knight’s disdain for the pieties of conventional morality makes him an inspiring reader of a play like Macbeth, the radiance of whose final brutal act is irresistible, ‘to deny it is to deny the aristocracy of mind’ (The Wheel of Fire, 173): its vision is ‘powerfully superlogical’ (174). In The Sovereign Flower, Knight talks of Macbeth in terms of ‘the grandeur of the soul meshed in crime’ (289). The play is ‘so powerful, so positive, so pleasant’ (290). (How unexpected that last word is, and how resonantly so.) Deeply ingrained in all Shakespeare’s tragedies is ‘the mystique of growth’ (The Sovereign Flower, 246): each tragic hero ‘attains to some variety of eternal insight’ (249). Should we think of them in terms only of their contraventions of the moral code, at best we get ‘a pathetic story of noble but unhappy people tormented by unconvincing spooks as they sink to a sad end. This is not Shakespeare’ (The Sovereign Flower, 248). In the last analysis, Knight’s copious oeuvre on Shakespeare demonstrates above all Shakespeare as literary artist nonpareil. He is also, as was demonstrated in the opening of this essay, a Modernist critic who took the art in a quite different, more synthesizing direction than the classic New Critics of the Cambridge school did. For example, Knight does not really do what his great admirer and coeval, L. C. Knights, says poetic criticism should do, or even what he thinks Knight does, which is to explain ‘why the lines “are so and not otherwise”’.76 Knight more often than not declines the invitation implicit in the metaphoric intensity of the words he quotes from Shakespeare’s pages to tease out meaning and significance or, even, to use his word, interpretation. He gives a passing nod to the problem and moves on, as in his typical remark about Caliban’s speaking style: ‘it is a style that does not submit to analysis’ (Shakespearian Dimensions, 11). The lines are so and not otherwise and not analysable. Knight’s own exegetical style is usually more remote of access than many other critics, more abstract, as when he talks, for instance, of Milton’s ‘heavy-plated style’ (Christ and Nietzsche, 88), or Othello’s ‘architectural stateliness of quarried speech’ (The Wheel of Fire, 114), or of a ‘gnomish fearsomeness within the atmosphere’ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Shakespearian Tempest, 32). (All three remarks are, by the way, strikingly phrased and suggestive, as many of Knight’s ‘exegetical’ asides are.) His strength, rather, is in that disciplined grouping of images and motifs, demonstrating how they unify the poetic dramas in ways that no critic had observed hitherto and showing how deeply connected into the verbal warp and woof of the textual fabric Shakespearean themes can be.



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In order to come closer to Knight’s powers of literary exegesis – to use Knight’s own words – we need to stretch the term, to widen the angle of its applicability, to take in larger linguistic units than those of word and line in their local habitations. We need to be more ambitious as readers for, as Knight complains, we tend to ‘read the words but not the book’ (Christ and Nietzsche, 219). Reading the book the way Knight wants us to forces us to acknowledge the interpenetration of its various elements in response to the elastic nature of the Shakespeare play as poem. We need to read the poem, not the words. Knight insists that a true appreciation of their imaginative quality entails taking Shakespeare whole, both in terms of the individual play (and poem) and all the plays read as though they were really one long play comprising 180 acts, scenes that are truly unlimited and individable.77 A similar intensification and sophistication distinguish Knight’s adoption of Edward Dowden’s famous account of the ‘Shakespeare progress’ in which play follows play in an autobiographical sequence, recording the depths and heights of Shakespeare’s progress through life.78 In Knight’s hands, the progress becomes less transparently autobiographical, more the expression of an artistic and spiritual evolution, each play linked to its predecessors and successors in a chain of interpretative enrichment. More than that, their collocation expresses ‘the immanence of the Great Spirit in man’ (The Sovereign Flower, 292), as though the Shakespeare progress were not confined to an individual writer but recorded the spiritual progress of humankind itself. The ‘chain’ climaxes in the last plays in a flurry of dreams, oracles and divine appearances, which are ‘essentially mystical resolutions of those difficulties and despairs which are the theme of earlier plays’ (Shakespeare & Religion, 66). The individual Shakespeare play, Knight believes, a microcosm of the Shakespeare progress, operates ‘as a visionary whole’ in which merge ‘close-knit personification, atmospheric suggestion, and direct poetic symbolism’ (The Wheel of Fire, 12). This is one of Knight’s repeated attempts throughout his books on Shakespeare to make his readers understand what is entailed in reading the plays as poems. Despite his reputation as an unreconstructed Romantic critic of European literature, Knight from the 1920s on was obsessed with bringing order into what he conceived as a disorderly critical world, especially when he surveyed the intellectual chaos of Shakespeare criticism with its outlandish extravagances of individual opinion – or so he believed. In his 1928 essay, ‘Principles of Shakespearian Criticism’, he proffers the rhetorical question, ‘By what concepts, then, can we express rationally our unrational yet positive joy in tragedy?’ (The Sovereign Flower, 289). (Although also writing on the histories and comedies

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– extensively on the histories – Knight was most concerned with the nature of tragedy, especially with the paradox of the pleasure we take in tragedy, Shakespeare’s in particular.) We need, Knight urges, to bear down on the individual Shakespeare play with discipline and exactitude, because, as he says, it isn’t just a good story with vibrant characters and dazzling rhetoric, but ‘a close mesh demanding a more exact study … than it has so far received’ (Shakespearian Production, 27). He sets himself at this time against what many readers may perceive to be his own essential nature as a Shakespeare critic. He claims, for example, to have found ‘a new position in the handling of imagery and symbol that was repellent to the more romantically minded’ (The Sovereign Flower, vi). Throughout his career, he tempers his own romantically-minded critical self with its imprecise, expressive vocabulary of rhythmic curves, undulating hills, and unanalysable aromas, with the ambitions of another kind of critic altogether, a sterner one – someone more like Ivor of the squared shoulders perhaps,79 or in real life an I. A. Richards, brandishing a very different vocabulary, employing words such as ‘analysis’, ‘science’, ‘objectivity’, ‘dispassion’, ‘exactitude’ and their derivatives. In essence, Knight avers time and again, we need ‘a new science of poetic interpretation’ (The Christian Renaissance, 4) in contradistinction to the old and fusty (and unpoetic) science of traditional Shakespeare scholarship. It is he, Knight believes, who is best able to see ‘the Elizabethan Shakespeare objectively’ (The Christian Renaissance, 5), though, somewhat wistfully, perhaps, in his Preface to The Wheel of Fire Knight hopes that in ‘this book will be found a development of orthodox Shakespearian commentary’ (vii). ‘Exact analysis’, Knight typically claims, ‘reveals significance on significance in this structure’ (The Burning Oracle, 50).80 And so it does. For all his contradictions, G. Wilson Knight was a singular voice, a part of a larger whole of the generation who constructed the mid-twentieth century Shakespeare, but one with qualities and contributions that were his alone. He left Shakespeare’s plays a different kind of art than they were seen to be before he reconstructed them in a decidedly twentieth-century idiom.

Chapter 3

C. L. Barber Peter Erickson

‘Yet we experience art as a process of creation, as Paul Klee said, creation by ourselves, and by the author. So criticism, fortunately, will always be concerned with the new meanings a work takes on as our own changing sense of life leads us to see new relations “within” it.’1 Published in 1959, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy became a permanent landmark in the history of modern Shakespeare criticism. Two features stand out. The first is C. L. Barber’s sustained attention to the external social context of the plays. The second is his equally strong focus on the plays’ internal structure. The delicately intertwined combination of these two prominent elements established Barber’s greatness as a Shakespearean. Through this combination, Barber’s most important contribution is to bring a new seriousness and intellectual cogency to the treatment of comedy as a distinctive genre with its own compelling, intricate logic. Acting as a counterforce against a tendency to underestimate or trivialize the cultural work that comedy performs, Barber’s insightfully complex perspective raises the critical stakes to a point where there is no turning back from rigorous analysis of Shakespearean comic form consistent with the interpretive standards set by Barber’s eloquent study. The organizational structure of Barber’s book can be described in terms of three distinct sections. The introductory part consists of the first four chapters. Chapters 5 and 6 comprise a self-contained section, complete with its own culmination, on Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream conceived as a pair that together shows the emergence of festive form in Shakespeare’s drama: ‘In his third early comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, instead of dramatizing a borrowed plot, he built his slight story around an elegant aristocratic entertainment. In doing so, he worked out the holiday sequence of release and clarification which comes into its own in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This more serious play, his first comic masterpiece, has a crucial place in his development’ (11). One reason that Shakespeare’s power of development was set

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free in connection with this specific pair of plays is the detachment implied by their deliberate move from literal festivity to fictional ‘model’: ‘Shakespeare, here [in Love’s Labour’s Lost] and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and nowhere else, makes up everything himself, because he is making up action on the model of games and pastimes’ (88). Finally, the third section of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy involves the four final chapters on post-Midsummer comedies that are more complex but that Barber still sees as festive.2 This three-part division allows me to call attention to the prominence that Barber’s approach to drama places on social context. The proportion devoted to presenting contextual material – four chapters out of ten – registers a strong commitment to the principle that drama cannot be understood in a vacuum. Barber’s emphasis here is all the more significant given the postwar rise of the New Criticism with its narrowed, isolated focus on ‘the words on the page’ based on a belief in reading without contexts. Against this position, Barber insists on the value of history: ‘This process of translation from social into artistic form has great historical as well as literary interest. Shakespeare’s theater was taking over on a professional and everyday basis functions which, until his time, had largely been performed by amateurs on holiday. And he wrote at a moment when the educated part of society was modifying a ceremonial, ritualistic conception of human life to create a historical, psychological conception. His drama, indeed, was an important agency in this transformation’ (15). As Barber’s double use of the term ‘historical’ suggests, theatre as a new cultural space and institution makes possible a reflexive self-awareness about history and historical change in this period and, by extension, in ours. One measure of our indebtedness to Barber’s stance is the acknowledgement by new historicists in the next generation of Barber as a precedent. In a 1985 memorial Festschrift for Barber, Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) honors Barber for having demonstrated that ‘Shakespeare’s theater was not isolated by its wooden walls, nor was it merely the passive reflector of social and ideological forces that lay entirely outside it. Rather, as Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy has most clearly taught us, the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater was itself a social event.’3 In responding to the psychoanalytic emphasis later in Barber’s career, Greenblatt adds: ‘But it is the hallmark of Barber’s criticism that the psychological is bound up with the social: the “unconscious” in his work is most often, to use a phrase of Bakhtin’s, the “unofficial conscious”’ (301, n.39). Similarly, with Barber as a point of reference, Louis Montrose stresses the uses of popular culture as a critical resource in the theatre in a long list made familiar from Barber’s cultural anthropology of festivity:



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the counter-hegemonic elements of Shakespearean drama are assimilated into the playworld from an enormous range of available social practices and cultural forms: popular traditions of complaint, satire, and festive misrule; representative opinions and behaviors of such socially marginal figures as clowns, fools, lunatics, transvestites, beggars, criminals, aliens, children, and women; double plots and other forms of dramatic construction that create social juxtapositions, parallels, and parodies; subversions of linguistic, logical, and social categories by such folk forms as jokes, parables, riddles, and prophecies.4 Of course, the degree of subversion one sees in a given Shakespearean comedy is a matter of interpretation. In an earlier reference, Montrose contrasts Barber and Northrop Frye: ‘the former emphasizes the cathartic element in festive misrule and the reaffirmation of social norms; the latter emphasizes the millenarian element in comic romance and the affirmation of social change. In other words, the difference of perspective between Barber and Frye adumbrates the containment/subversion debate recently raging in Shakespeare studies’ (34, n.24).5 From this standpoint, one might find that, at the time of the ‘Invisible Bullets’ essay, Greenblatt is not only in alignment with Barber’s position on the ability of Shakespeare’s comic structure to contain subversion, but he even in effect out-Barbers Barber in the downplaying of the subversive. Yet, whatever the variations, Barber’s way of structuring the social tensions as represented in Shakespeare’s theatre helps to provide a critical discourse for our modifications and disagreements in the next generation –not only among new historicists but among all of us – and, in this sense, the line from his legacy to us is still visible, intact and vibrant.6 In addition to Barber’s emphasis on social and historical context, his work also addresses internal artistic form. Barber consistently displays a fine-tuned capacity for highly detailed close reading, especially of larger dramatic movements and patterns. He thus concedes no ground to New Criticism, as exemplified by Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947). Barber gives the term ‘festive’ critical leverage through his ability to translate it into structure: ‘ “festive” can also be a word for structure.’7 As Barber puts it, ‘I shall be trying to describe structure to get at the way this comedy organizes experience’ (4). Brooks’s ‘structure’ and Barber’s ‘structure’ are two different conceptual frameworks because Barber’s version has a broader, more complex scope. The range includes social context but without simply equating social and artistic form. To the contrary, the carefully formulated subtitle of

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Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom suggests that the relation is something other than a one-to-one correspondence or equation in which the two are fused. Barber traces how popular culture is transformed when seen from the perspective of its representation in the medium of theatre because theatre subjects popular forms to self-conscious exploration and testing. In the arena of theatre, the festive becomes something like a meta-festive exposure of underlying problematic aspects. In terms of this more sophisticated critical stance, William Empson (1906–84) is a key figure for Barber. From the outset, Barber places Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy in the tradition of Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral (1935): ‘“festive comedy,” as I discuss it here, is a “version of pastoral” ’ (12, n.6). But, in the long run, Empson also helps Barber make the bridge between comedy and tragedy. In The Whole Journey, Barber will take Empson with him on the journey into tragedy through his consistent recourse to the chapter on ‘They That Have Power,’ where Empson links the Sonnets and the Henriad through parallel relationships between the young man and the older poet of the Sonnets and Hal and Falstaff in the plays (64–65). Empson’s development of this conjunction is crucial to Barber’s understanding of the crisis in male identity that makes the tragedies necessary: ‘Shakespeare’s search for idealized manhood carries on in a heroic mode the effort of the Sonnets poet to live through the life of his friend’ (213). Barber does not hesitate to call Empson’s work ‘very great criticism’ (183, n.31), and Empson’s formulation allows Barber to see the unresolved issues in the Henriad as the gateway to tragedy: ‘King Henry V, “all shining with the virtues of success,” in Empson’s phrase, is not adequate to the possibilities for manhood Shakespeare comes to envisage in tragedy’ (217).

Biographical Coordinates In order to situate César Lombardi Barber (1913–80) in his social context, I begin with a sketch of the institutional and geographical trajectory of his career. Though Barber was born in Berkeley, California, the site of his professional development, comprising his advanced education and first teaching, was New England, primarily in Massachusetts. Barber spent two years of secondary school at Phillips Exeter Academy (1929–31), where his short article ‘Creative Reading’ – presumably his first publication – appeared in a student magazine. The piece takes a forceful position on



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the reader’s active role that is simply but profoundly summarized in the final line of the essay: ‘If we would read deeply, we must first live deeply.’8 I pause here to note the uncanny way that this modest essay prefigures what will become a consistent thread throughout Barber’s future work. At this strikingly early point, Barber’s ideal of criticism as a reader–author interaction based on mutuality is already present in his articulation of a twofold need for an intensely personal engagement that exposes literary works to the individual reader’s inner experiential resources and thereby generates new interpretations while, in the process, it also opens the reader up to the possibility of being changed by literature. Barber’s conviction about the life-giving force of the reader–author exchange emerges, as though without preparation, in the second paragraph of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, elevated to the heights of a barely expressible mystery: ‘for every new moment, every new line or touch, is a triumph of opportunism, something snatched in from life beyond expectation and made design beyond design. And yet the fact remains that it is as we see the design that we see design outdone and brought alive. “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”’ (4). Where are we? Confronted with Yeats at the very outset, we have to remind ourselves that we are at the beginning of a study of Shakespearean comedy. The unusual point of departure invites and challenges us to enter a realm of criticism that places high expectations on the reader’s ability to not only respond but fully to participate. This high order answers to the specifications of the high-school essay. Barber pursued his undergraduate work at Harvard College (1931–35), where he received a BA, summa cum laude, in History and Literature, an innovative honours programme whose leading figure was Barber’s mentor F. O. Matthiessen, author of American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). It is worth noting that Barber’s degree was not in English, but rather in the special interdisciplinary combination of the History and Literature programme, because the historical dimension became an important component in his later professional writing on the English Renaissance. After a Henry Fellowship at Magdalen College at Cambridge University where he studied with I. A. Richards (1935–36), Barber returned to the United States, married Elizabeth Putnam, and became a Junior Fellow in Harvard University’s Society of Fellows (1936–39) at a time when fellows were not permitted to be candidates for degrees – and hence Barber never obtained a PhD. He also taught for three years as an instructor and tutor in the History and Literature concentration. In The Triennial Report (1938) of

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the Harvard College Class of 1935, Barber, perhaps a bit ruefully, observes: ‘As you can see, I haven’t succeeded in getting very far away from Harvard in these three years.’9 Retrospective accounts by students who preceded Barber at Harvard by two and one years, respectively – Harry Levin and Richard Schlatter – help to fill in the detailed background for this extended period at Harvard.10 Harry Levin’s remarks on Matthiessen’s role provide a picture of the educational context and ambience of the programme in History and Literature, the ‘pioneer and pilot of the tutorial system at Harvard’ founded in 1906: for Matthiessen, as for others, History and Literature maintained a special esprit de corps, possibly because it was not a structured department but a flexible means of correlating some of the richest resources of the catalogue. . . . Matthiessen much preferred its board of five cooperating tutors to the strung-out twenty in the English Department. . . . From 1931 until his death [1950] he was chairman of the Tutorial Board in History and Literature, and he paid the most conscientious attention to its members and their students.11 Currently, the tutorial system in History and Literature includes tutorials for groups of four to six students in the sophomore year and one-on-one tutorials in the junior year. In 2000–02, Stephen Greenblatt was Chair and, in 2006, the programme celebrated its 100th anniversary.12 One must assume that Barber’s early experience as a Harvard undergraduate in the History and Literature programme led to his subsequent lifelong commitment evidenced by his substantial contribution to large-scale institutional experiments in educational structure. Barber’s involvement in the creation of Hampshire College is recorded in his work on two originating documents, The New College Plan: A Proposal for a Major Departure in Higher Education, co-authored in 1958, followed by his monograph, More Power to Them: A Report of Faculty and Student Experience in the Encouragement of Student Initiative in 1962. Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, was founded in 1965 and opened in 1970 as the fifth member of the Five College Consortium, which includes Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts. During this period, Barber also served as a trustee at Bennington College and Sarah Lawrence College, both of which had experimental education profiles. Finally, coming full circle at the end of his career, the arrival in 1970 at Santa Cruz brought Barber to a then still new campus in the University of California system which had opened only five



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years earlier in 1965 and hence belonged to the same time period as the origin of Hampshire College. As he put it, ‘I am also extremely interested in methods of bringing about learning, in how colleges and universities create environments that stimulate the life of the mind.’13 To return to the intensity and excitement of Barber’s starting point at Harvard, I shall quote at length from the valuable first-hand testimony in the historian Richard Schlatter’s letter to me of October 10, 1982. In the following passage, Joe is the name by which Barber was known to his friends, and Matty refers to F. O. Matthiessen. Joe was one of my closest and oldest friends. I was the class of 1934 and Joe was ’35. We were both close friends of Matthiessen and Perry Miller. Joe and I spent weekends in Kittery, Maine with Matty—with our wives after our marriages. We both took courses under Matty as undergraduates and we both heard large chunks of American Renaissance [1941] read aloud in Kittery and in the apartment on Pinckney Street. We were also both friends of Perry Miller and I heard a large part of The New England Mind [1939] read aloud in the same way. Speaking very generally, Miller was my master and I am named in the preface to The New England Mind, Matty was Joe’s master and Joe appears in the Preface to Matty’s great book. Matthiessen was, of course, the great influence in Joe’s intellectual development and, through him, I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot. Joe and Matty were devoted to each other and this, on Matty’s part, contained an unexpressed and unmentioned homoerotic interest, which I suppose Joe must have known about but it was not something we ever mentioned. We both knew, of course, that Matty and Russell Cheney [an artist] were lovers but this was not something one talked about in the years before Matty died. Regarding Schlatter’s remark on the status of the homoerotic element in the Barber–Matthiessen relationship, we can note that, in his letter to me of June 28, 1982, Harry Levin makes a similar observation: ‘I have no doubt that, of the many disciples he had, whom he really loved with a sublimated eros, Joe was the most beloved and most abiding.’ With regard to Matthiessen’s intellectual influence, Levin’s letter adds that ‘Joe had to work his way through the discipleship’ and ‘it seems clear that he had to put some distance between himself and Matty in order to develop his individuality.’14 To pick up the thread in Richard Schlatter’s letter, the narrative goes on to address the issue of Matthiessen’s political stance:

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Matty’s socialism, so far as I know, developed in the years after 1934 when I was in England. When I returned to Harvard in 1937 the place had been politicized in a startling fashion and both Joe and Matty were involved in the Teachers’ Union which was the focus of most radical thought. But I was much more radical then than Matty ever was and it was I who introduced Joe to Granville Hicks, who was teaching at Harvard, and he [Joe] and I and Dick Goodwin and Dan Boorstin—the latter three all Harvard class of 1934 and all friends of Joe—joined the Harvard Communist group.15 In 1939 we all left the communist movement because of the Soviet-German pact. Dan Boorstin repented and repudiated his past and us. The three others continued as radicals, growing more and more politically inactive. The point of all this history is that Joe’s political radicalism did not come solely or mostly from Matty.16 Schlatter’s letter concludes by considering the question of T. S. Eliot’s impact during Barber’s time at Harvard: On the subject of T. S. Eliot [1888-1965], Joe listened to his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures [1932-33]. We used to argue about Eliot a lot—and I argued forever with Matty—since I found Eliot’s politics and religion uncongenial and could not, like Matty and Joe, respond very warmly to Eliot’s poetry—I have always been the historian. My general impression is that both Joe and Matty were not happy with Eliot’s politics, found his religion acceptable, and thought his excellence as critic and poet was the main point.17 I. A. Richards [1893–1979] was greatly respected by Matty and Joe and we all read Richards’ Principles [of Literary Criticism (1924)] and Practical Criticism [1929] in Matty’s course on “Five Poets” and Joe saw a lot of Richards at Magdalen, Cambridge. The summary in Harry Levin’s letter concurs. Levin notes the significance of Eliot’s year at Harvard: ‘T. S. Eliot’s advent as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry in 1932-33 was a major influence on us both, as it was on our two most sympathetic teachers, F. O. Matthiessen and Theodore Spencer (both of them ten years older than we were, and closer to Eliot than anyone else at Harvard).’ But Levin also remarks on the problematic aspect: ‘Our admiration for Eliot was sharply qualified when we were confronted by his reactionary credo.’ On Barber’s time in England, Levin adds that ‘Joe got most that year from his Cambridge mentor, I. A. Richards.’



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Service in the US Navy during World War II, from October 1941–August 1946, pulled Barber outside the Harvard and Cambridge Universities orbit. In his entry in the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report (1960) for his Harvard class, Barber provided this summary: ‘I entered the Navy via a job as executive secretary of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, so that I was an ersatz oceanographer in uniform, with a missionary mission to promote the use of smoke screens which led in the end to being a gunnery officer in charge of smoking at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.’18 As he elaborates elsewhere, ‘It was my job to cover our anchored ships. We had to make it impossible for the kamikaze pilots to see us at night, which was no simple task with these vast armadas afloat. Our Navy, like Shakespeare’s Antony, “o’er green Neptune’s back, with ships made cities.”’19 A lieutenant as of April 1943, Barber received a Commendation Ribbon in the Atlantic Fleet in 1944 and a Bronze Star in the Pacific Fleet in 1945.20 Barber spent the post-war period, from 1946–62, in the English Department at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, during which time he moved up from assistant professor to full professor. Toward the end of his stay at Amherst came what, for the purposes of this essay, was the culmination: the publication of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy in 1959 when Barber was about 46-years-old. As early as 1942, Barber had published an article on ‘The Use of Comedy in As You Like It’ in which basic elements of festive comic form are already in place. In this initial statement, ‘balance’ is the key value in Barber’s critical lexicon: ‘Romantic participation in love and humorous detachment from its follies, the two polar attitudes which are balanced against each other in the action as a whole, meet and are reconciled in Rosalind’s personality’ (362).21 The concept of ‘balance’ elides with T. S. Eliot’s ‘alliance of levity and seriousness’ (365), which becomes the title of Barber’s chapter 9 on the play in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (222, 236–37). Yet, despite this direct link from early essay to finished book, I think it is fair to say that the book was largely written during the 16-year stay in Amherst, and to describe the book as occupying and expressing a historically specific post-war, pre-1960s space. The stance of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy can be usefully juxtaposed with the mood Barber articulates in the reflections a year later in the Twentyfifth Anniversary Report for Harvard, when he comments on his earlier involvements in politics and in literary studies. As for the first, he remarks: ‘From the time of the Spanish Civil War until World War II, I was much concerned with campus left-wing politics – political action seemed desperately necessary, even though the chances of its being effective came to seem smaller and smaller – the more so because in studying literature, depth

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psychology and anthropology I was constantly dwelling on those areas of life and art which are beyond the control of will or mind. My experience in the war, and the new situation the war created, made the wholesale hopes and fears of the prewar period seem quite unreal’ (49). Barber’s account of the second area, literature, traces a parallel arc: ‘When I was in college I thought that we were taking part in an emergent literary and intellectual revolution; now it seems that we came in just at the end of a great moment which had begun around the turn of the century, and that we may be living out our intellectual lives in a period which is consolidating and elaborating rather than making its own fresh starts’ (50). Informal notes to one’s college classmates can hardly be taken as definitive, yet the tone carries a genuine tinge of frustration, disappointment and even melancholy. Barber’s political identity was characterized by a sharp split (as well as blur) between early radicalism in his contemporary life and conservatism in his Renaissance scholarship, with the latter perhaps moderating the former over time into a settled liberalism. Because of its adherence to, and sympathetic investment in, aristocratic social hierarchy, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy could not be a ‘left-wing’ book. Some of the emphatic stress on festivity, including its affable, sanguine identification with the temporary holiday mixing of classes, may be heard as a defense against, and compensation for, the loss of any radical possibility. At this point in time, Barber had not yet fully developed a psychoanalytic mode of interpretation. Though not necessarily the ‘revolution’ which he missed and mourned, the psychoanalytic approach would subsequently offer a new direction capable of addressing the sense of stasis and malaise that Barber expresses in 1960. Although we lack a complete biography with all the specific details, his 1960 Harvard notes are consonant with a pivotal moment in which Barber is about to make a decision to leave Amherst, New England, and the east coast. It is especially not surprising in light of Barber’s poignant hope in the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report that ‘the surprise of my life is still coming at me’ (50). And it is fitting that Barber himself might be personally interested in taking a look ‘Outside the Garden Gate’, as the final section of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy envisions it. In the subsequent travel, one feels a restless desire to keep moving and growing and to avoid being too settled – both geographically and intellectually. The next two phases show a westward career mobility. First is the eight-year midwest period as chair of the English Department at Indiana University (1962–67) and then as professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo (1967–70), where Barber joined Norman Holland,



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Murray Schwartz and David Willbern at the most important American site for psychoanalytic literary studies. Second is the move to California when Barber became the Vice Chancellor of Humanities and Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in what will turn out to be the final decade of his life (1970–80). This move was also a return that brought Barber close to his birthplace in Berkeley. In 1970, during the first year in Santa Cruz, his wife of almost 35 years, Elizabeth Putnam Barber, died, a loss acknowledged in the amended dedication to the 1972 reissue of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy in a Princeton paperback edition. In his 1982 letter to me, Harry Levin reminisced: ‘Among our immediate contemporaries, Joe was the earliest to get married. He and Betty offered their hospitality to the rest of us in their top-floor apartment on the corner of Harvard and Ellery Streets. We admired and envied and were dazzled by this blonde and beautiful couple (Joe had a full head of curly hair, and Betty was still very far from resembling her somber Norwegian mother).’ Barber’s remarriage in 1971 to Cleo Higgins Leavitt, a child psychologist from Seattle, was a prominent feature of the time in Santa Cruz and one that especially involved their animated shared conversation about psychological issues and perspectives. I arrived in Santa Cruz the same year as Barber to begin my graduate work in the Board of Studies in Literature, and I immediately plunged into graduate courses with Barber on Shakespeare and with Harry Berger, Jr. on Spenser – courses so galvanizing that they established my focus from the very outset. I well remember when several of us organized a dinner party to which Joe and Cleo arrived, kayaks atop the car, bearing a huge flat of strawberries. After his death, Cleo H. Barber was the dedicatee both of Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’ and of The Whole Journey. She was instrumental and untiring in helping to found Shakespeare Santa Cruz as a living memorial to Joe.22 The on-campus performances of this repertory company in residence continue today over 30 years later, sometimes staged in a magnificent natural setting of redwood trees. To what extent Barber’s wide geographical trajectory with its endpoint in Santa Cruz can be mapped on to the internal landscape of his personal intellectual development is an open question. But, from my observation, the academic environment at Santa Cruz as a public university site committed to experimental education reinvigorated his long-term project. Looking back once again in 1975 to his political experience at Harvard, now from the prospect of his new location at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Barber ardently and expansively defends his earlier political activity as a matter of ‘political conscience’ and as ‘the response of a whole

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human being’. As evidence, he celebrates as one of the collective achievements of the Harvard period ‘when it stopped McCarthyism in its tracks’ and he goes on to support ‘the radical student protest against the radical wrong of the Vietnam War’.23 The Santa Cruz context included the powerful, imaginative intellects of Norman O. Brown (1913–2002) and Harry Berger, Jr. (b. 1924), whose free-ranging, far-reaching scope was, in their different ways, conducive to Barber’s own ambitious, comprehensive vision. In particular, Brown’s two books – Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959) and Love’s Body (1966) – would have spoken to Barber’s own deep engagement with Freud and psychoanalytic interpretations of literature. Though Berger’s remarkable series of books did not began appearing until 1988, well after Barber’s death, Berger’s work in the early modern period, particularly on Shakespeare, was already fully formed and very much part of the intellectual environment at Santa Cruz. In addition, the strong Santa Cruz–Berkeley nexus in the field of Renaissance studies provided Barber with rich opportunities for congenial contact with a wider circle of scholar friends. As one indication of the Berkeley connection, we can note that six contributors to the memorial Festschrift for Joe were associated with Berkeley. With three contributors from Santa Cruz, the overall northern Californian community accounted for nine of the Festschrift’s 17 authors.24 In one sense, the relocation to Santa Cruz enabled Barber to finish the ‘whole journey’ toward which he had been striving. Published in the year of his death, ‘The Family in Shakespeare’s Development: Tragedy and Sacredness’, outlines, in summary form, the entire scope of Barber’s approach to the full sweep of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.25 This completed statement can be read as the symbolic culmination of his ten years at Santa Cruz, as well as of his lifetime’s work. At the time, this partial fulfillment of Barber’s quest provided consolation and inspiration to his friends. My approach to Barber’s work is inflected by a specifically Santa Cruz focus, and I would like to take a moment to reflect on my own position as a participant observer. Looking back at the memorial Festschrift for Joe (which coincided with the publication of my first book) from the standpoint of over 25 years later, I now see my first account of his work from a distance in which much more of my own life’s course has unfolded. The starting point of my Santa Cruz formation (1970–6) has evolved in various fruitful directions, but has always referred back to the two figures of Joe Barber and Harry Berger. As a Santa Cruz scholar, I cannot imagine Barber without Berger, and I believe that, however warily, they were important to each other.26



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I shall quote in full Harry Berger’s tribute to Barber in the first two paragraphs of his contribution to the memorial Festschrift because I read this statement as an indication of the tangible productive value of their exchange, not only for Berger, but for Barber in the latter’s final years: My interest in dramatic action as community action was first aroused by Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, in which C. L. Barber traced the path of the saturnalian pattern from ‘community observances of periodic sports and feast days’ into the comedies. Barber’s readings everywhere threw new light on the way ritual forms shape the social and political environment of the plays’ characters; in his subsequent work he never swerved from his allegiance to this concern. His recently published essay on the family attests to the generative power of the original conception, for in assimilating the insights of psychoanalytic criticism to the study of community, he not only deepened and enriched those insights but also enhanced the explanatory power of his approach. It is with mingled feelings prompted by the occasion of this volume that I acknowledge however belatedly my profound debt to his work. My reading of the family romance owes much to his analysis of the family in the tragedies, and even more to his criticism of the first formulations of the topic of this essay. Himself a genial ironist, he resisted my version of the ironic interpretation on the grounds that it implicated me in the very cynicism I thought I discerned in the text. With characteristic generosity he tried by that resistance to help me improve the tone and avoid the pitfalls of an approach for which he did not feel great sympathy. I think I have discovered what he wanted me to see: that unless the ironist was capable of a minimal level of sympathy for and generosity toward the fictional objects of his criticism, he could not hope to respond adequately to the human claims the characters in the plays make on him; and such a response depended on one’s ability to engage the characters within the context of their community.27 Even at this remove, I continue to find this account moving because of the way, without at all denying or resolving their differences, Berger meets Barber’s generous critique with his own generosity, even tenderness.28

Festive Comedy and the Whole Journey What makes the case for C. L. Barber’s greatness so unusual is that his ongoing influence rests to such a large degree on a single book now a half

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century behind us – the widely circulated, frequently cited, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (1959). Because of the peculiar shape of Barber’s overall writing career, two additional books – The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (1986) and Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd (1988), 27 and 29 years after Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy – have not so far had the same wide, sustained reception. Both were published after Barber’s death in 1980 and depended for their completion on the extraordinary editing and co-authorship of Richard P. Wheeler, Barber’s former graduate student at Buffalo and an author in his own right of Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies (1981).29 The paradoxical effect is that Barber did not himself finish the ‘whole journey’ and yet we have a whole body of his work. Hence we must address a critical expanse much greater than Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, while recognizing at the same time that the first book remains the beloved central core of his reputation. It is not quite accurate to say that Barber wrote one book; nevertheless, the question why he published only one book on his own during his lifetime remains pertinent. My assessment places a premium on Barber’s book-length studies and projects. Published articles are, of course, also important, and a full bibliography can be compiled from the material gathered by Wheeler, as well as from the references in my concluding article on Barber’s career – ‘In Memory of C. L. Barber: “The man working in his works” ’ (303–22) – in the memorial Festschrift in Barber’s honor. Because of the sharply bifurcated circumstances of publication and the huge time lag, the two more recent books have an anomalous belated status. Since the posthumous work appeared in a very different historical moment from that of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, the impact of Barber’s late work has been reduced. Critical frameworks at the end of the 1950s and in the mid-to-late 1980s had significantly shifted. Given the time span, a crucial tension emerges involving the question to what extent Barber’s approach was frozen in time and to what extent it was sufficiently adaptable to bridge the gap and to address a new interpretive moment.

‘Our Own Changing Sense of Life’ My approach to Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy attempts to achieve a double perspective. The first is the original historical moment of its publication in 1959; the second is our own contemporary moment at the time of writing, 52 years later, in 2011. In coordinating these two perspectives, I



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am guided in part by Barber’s statement in the epigraph: ‘criticism, fortunately, will always be concerned with the new meanings a work takes on as our own changing sense of life leads us to see new relations “within” it.’ Shakespeare’s plays are not fixed and stable but change with time because we change. Our changing historical situation brings new pressures and insights that enable us to approach from a different angle, to see different aspects and to interpret a different way. Hence we face the paradox that we can stand on Barber’s shoulders yet use his festive structure to reinterpret and to create meanings opposed to his. Even Barber’s own original moment is fluid and potentially moves in multiple directions, as Murray M. Schwartz’s excellent summary indicates by locating it at, or just prior to, a major historical turning-point that has reshaped our culture: The book has stood the test of time as much through its performative dimension as through its argument about the plays. It is saturated with a playfulness and wit that presumes trust in social institutions not only among Elizabethans but within Barber’s audience. The words ‘energy,’ ‘vitality,’ ‘life,’ and ‘nature,’ find their way easily into Barber’s language, and belief in the capacity of social institutions to contain and structure these forces is a part of Barber’s own stylistic vivacity. Even the last chapters, which begin to explore a new historical consciousness working against this trusting commitment, still do not undermine its force. Just as there is in Shakespeare’s festive universe ‘a communion embracing the merrymakers in the plays and the audience’ (p. 10), so Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy bespeaks a moment in criticism when this sustaining trust could be embodied in the play of language. (It is significant that its first versions were written and published during World War II and that the book as we have it was published in 1959, just before the saturnalia of the 1960s began to generate profoundly different critical styles.)30 Yet the boundary line between the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s cannot be neatly drawn because of the overlapping elements that connect the two. For example, to cite a seemingly incidental and innocent generic analogy that I find jarring, Barber comments: ‘In their terrified response to Puck’s intervention, Bottom’s companions are like the colored man in the Hollywood ghost thriller’ who is portrayed ‘showing the whites of his eyes and running without even an effort at courage’ (151, n.23). In the context of increasing awareness of racial problems through the fifties – the Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education in 1954;

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Rosa Parks’ protest against segregated seating on public buses in 1955; the desegregation of the Little Rock public schools in 1957 – this uncritical allusion to cinematic stereotype is infelicitous and culturally insular. Barber’s passing remark here is confined to a tiny footnote, but in my mind it connects with his incomplete commentary shortly thereafter on Titus Andronicus: ‘in the almost comical scene about killing the fly, Titus first bemoans the act because the fly is a fellow victim, then exults at the creature’s death because its blackness links it with the Moor who has wronged him’ (160). This interpretive stance remains static in The Whole Journey, when Barber notes Bassanius and Lavinia’s ‘taunting’ (140) of Tamora but omits the race-specific baiting when Bassanius’ goading – ‘Believe me, Queen, your swart Cimmerian / Doth make your honour of his body’s hue, / Spotted, detested, and abominable’ – is seconded by Lavinia’s snide ‘let her joy her raven-coloured love’ (2.3.72–83). Barber again notes Titus’ ‘mangling’ (134) and ‘mauling’ (153) the ‘black ill-favoured fly’ (3.2.66) in ‘the likeness of a coal-black Moor’ (77), but does not examine the structural implications of this racially-based emotional release. Finally, Barber tries to define Aaron as ‘a stock stage villain’ (131) without fully considering how, through Shakespeare’s creation of a more complex black identity, the Moor exceeds this stereotype and hence resists the simplistic scapegoating that he ironically invites. Once Aaron moves outside the stereotypical box through his devotion to his son, he cannot be put back into the box without exposing, by his over-the-top exaggeration, the rhetorical conventions of the villain role that he enacts with such melodramatic cooperation at the end. This essay asks: what is it like appreciatively to revisit and critically to reread Barber’s work in 2011? In making the contrast between Barber’s past and our present, this retrospect aims to view his work in the light of his historical formation and to reassess its place in the future of Shakespeare studies.

The Garden Gate As though poised teasingly on the brink, the title of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy’s short conclusion – ‘Outside the Garden Gate’ – simultaneously holds fast inside the book’s frame and gestures toward stepping outside it. Hence the paradoxical tension that points and pulls in opposite directions. Structurally, this section is both retrospect and prelude. On the one hand, it is firmly incorporated and enclosed within the book’s final chapter as



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an extension of the discussion of Twelfth Night. On the other hand, it also functions as a separate, almost detachable, entity that looks forward to the much larger project encompassing Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre. From the standpoint of the end of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, Barber surveys the terrain beyond, stretching from the ‘problem plays’ and Hamlet out as far as The Winter’s Tale in Shakespeare’s final phase. At the moment of the book’s closure, he thus already has in view the expansive discussion of the overall trajectory of Shakespeare’s career that will be realized 27 years later in the co-authored culmination of The Whole Journey. In Barber’s anticipation, tragedy as a genre is portrayed apprehensively: ‘The tragedy moves into regions where the distinction between madness and sanity begins to break down’ (260). Yet tragedy in itself does not appear to be an automatic stumbling block because the very last sentence in the book foresees a subsequent phase of ‘the renewal of life’ that goes beyond Shakespeare’s tragic period. As Barber summarizes the ‘larger movement’ that is to follow: After Twelfth Night, comedy is always used in this subordinate way: saturnalian moments, comic counterstatements, continue to be important resources of his art, but their meaning is determined by their place in a larger movement. So it is with the heroic revels in Antony and Cleopatra, or with the renewal of life, after tragedy, at the festival in The Winter’s Tale’ (261). Nonetheless, this open vision of future interpretive work is accompanied by a sense of postponement, even resistance. Though perhaps understandable, Barber’s retroactive urge to protect his investment in festive comic form competes against the desire to move forward. Something in the emotional tone of ‘Outside the Garden Gate’ suggests a quality of hesitation that makes Barber pull back from taking the next step out into the wider world that he has sketched. The incredible image of the gate is evocative because it speaks to this reluctance. In celebrating the eerie song that ends Twelfth Night, Barber characterizes Feste as an intermediary between inside and outside: ‘We can notice here that the fool in Twelfth Night has been over the garden wall into some such world as the Vienna of Measure for Measure. He never tells where he has been, gives no details. But he has an air of knowing more of life than anyone else – too much, in fact’ (259). In advocating the reduction of consciousness in the name of preserving festive comedy, Barber places himself in a position analogous to Feste as

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though, at the level of critic, he is not telling everything he knows and he too deliberately shuts the gate. A part of Barber feels a strong need to stay inside the pastoral refuge of festivity that he has created and stoutly defended so that he does not have to venture into the world outside the garden that, with another part of himself, he knows ‘too much’ about. In this poignantly expressive pause, Barber, like the fool, ‘never tells where he has been, gives no details’ (259) – he offers only hints, then withdraws into the benignly festive account of ‘general beneficent forces in life’ (259). The metaphor of the gate is built into the very structure of Barber’s version of festive comedy: ‘the unnatural can appear only in outsiders, intruders who are mocked and expelled’ (261). We do not get a clear enough definition of ‘unnatural’; a consensus is simply assumed in which we know the ‘unnatural’ when we see it and all agree on what needs to be done about it. Although he acknowledges the limitations – things ‘the festive comic form cannot handle’ (261) – Barber does not see this form as problematic but exclusively as a strength and resource. The absolute division between insiders and outsiders means that the inconvenient characters who raise difficult issues can simply be shown the door, shut out and ‘expelled’ where they can cause no further disruption and need be given no further thought. In an alternative view, this scapegoating action is itself troubling because it is not a solution but an avoidance mechanism, a form of uncritical escapism. In this second line of interpretation, all comedies are thus problem plays because the proffered resolutions are never completely adequate to the issues that have been raised and remain unresolved.31 In the face of such issues, our suspension of disbelief should be unwilling. We need not be pressured by the scare labels of ‘kill-joy’ and ‘craven or inadequate people’ (8) into choosing the simplifications necessary to promote the festive mission. To take one example, Barber’s model of festive comedy cannot satisfactorily explain why Antonio should be a casualty of the comic outcome and why we should ignore the feeling he arouses. Barber as critic participates in the exclusion of Antonio by the brevity of his treatment: ‘Antonio’s impassioned friendship for Sebastian is one of those ardent attachments between young people of the same sex which Shakespeare frequently presents, with his positive emphasis, as exhibiting the loving and lovable qualities later expressed in love for the other sex’ (246). This perspective can apply only to Sebastian. Antonio, who has no desire to make the same transfer of affection from men to women, is simply left out of account. But such cursory dismissal is unconvincing because Antonio’s emotional impact is too forceful, and too central, to be so easily relegated to the periphery and



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made silently to drop out of the picture. Antonio’s presence is registered in multiple appearances, including the climactic final scene (2.1; 3.3; 3.4; 5.1). He does not go quietly: his powerful declaration of love resonates with an unforgettable anger and pain at the loss of Sebastian. Barber’s curtailment of Antonio’s significance is authorized in advance by a definition of festivity that supports a clear-cut boundary between ‘normal’ and aberrant: The most fundamental distinction the play brings home to us is the difference between men and women . . . Just as a saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation. One can add that with sexual as with other relations, it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is benign. This basic security explains why there is so little that is queazy in all Shakespeare’s handling of boy actors playing women, and playing women pretending to be men (245) According to this framework, Antonio represents a serious, permanent aberration which does not fit the festive program and can therefore be sacrificed without reservation or regret. Barber is so explicit about his declaration of a heterosexual approach, and his terminology about ‘basic security’ is so loaded, that one is forced to ask what purpose this reassurance serves for the critic or his readers in 1959. If, from our present standpoint in 2011, we substitute the term ‘queer’ for Barber’s word ‘queazy’ in the festive stance advocated here, the interpretive rhetoric seems overdone and implausible.32 The more interesting focus concerns explicit attention to what the festive resolution has to leave out in order nominally to finesse the happy ending. To sharpen the point, one might say that Shakespeare’s humor permits and perhaps encourages us to see the finessing which Barber’s idealization of festivity occludes. Even when revisiting this moment in The Whole Journey and allowing that ‘the normal is never of course wholly secure’, Barber continues to insist that Antonio ‘must at the end be content to look on while his protégé moves into a new stage of life through marriage’ (189). Barber’s restricted account of the festive process understates the play’s range of sexual possibilities. One need not venture outside the garden gate to discover the intractable ambiguity that is found right inside Twelfth Night’s protected walls. Barber attempts to recuperate the ambiguity by assimilating it into a strictly heterosexual argument: ‘The effect of moving

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back and forth from woman to sprightly page is to convey how much the sexes differ yet how much they have in common, how everyone who is fully alive has qualities of both’ (247). The implications of this assertion are narrowly controlled when Barber immediately sorts out the line ‘You are betroth’d both to a maid and man’ (5.1.256) into its heterosexual pairings – ‘The countess marries the man [Sebastian] in this composite, and the count marries the maid [Viola]’ (247) – thereby undoing the deeper ambiguity. Yet the implication of spiraling ambiguity continues to reverberate in the sexual fusion envisioned in Antonio’s last words: ‘An apple cleft in two is not more twin / Than these two creatures’ (5.1.216–17).33 An unresolved tension remains between Barber’s insistence on ‘the difference between men and women’ (245) and his incompletely defined suggestion about ‘how everyone who is fully alive has qualities of both’ sexes (247). One wants to ask: specifically which qualities and exactly how extensive can the overlap be? Could the shared qualities become more significant and thus subordinate the assumed differences? Within Barber’s festive framework these questions cannot be fully explored and the quandary about gender remains a central strand in Barber’s overall project. The same formulation is at work in the much later account in The Whole Journey concerning the ‘failure’ of manhood in the tragedies: The manhood whose failure we feel with awe, regret, and something like metaphysical dismay, is one in which the milk of human kindness is as necessary as the ability to assert virile identity. The tragic loss is the loss of something human society can rarely, if ever achieve, toward which the fulfillment of both sexes vulnerably reaches (14) The instability in this statement is indicated by the special use of the word ‘human’, which would logically seem to transcend gender difference but which the context channels toward men. The continued implication of sexual division is conveyed in the interpretive commitment to ‘virile identity’ as a component necessary for ‘manhood.’ An unanswered question lingers in the assertion, from Barber’s perspective as critic, that ‘human society can rarely, if ever achieve’ the ‘milk of human kindness’ needed for the ‘fulfillment’ of both men and women. It remains unclear what this fulfillment entails when successful, and what precisely would be involved in women’s access to it. As a result, the terms in which the argument is formulated are never fully tested. For the women’s movement of the 1970s, imagining the possibilities for social change, such a fatalistic starting point would not be acceptable as a



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self-evident principle. Subsequent feminist analysis in the next generation would raise critical questions about the fixed assumptions regarding masculine identity and the token inclusion of ‘both sexes’ with such little elaboration of the position of women. Proceeding with the view that men can change and women can change produces a different stance at the level of critical perspective. Though Barber was associated with feminist critics, he was not himself a feminist critic, and his work is best understood as a vitally important precursor on gender issues.34

Class, Religion and Ethnicity The section on ‘Liberty Testing Courtesy’ in the chapter on Twelfth Night exudes a sentimentality about aristocratic culture that, from our current standpoint, might seem excessive. In Barber’s view, this sympathy is licensed by ‘history’ since courtesy refers to ‘the large, humanistic meaning of that term as the Renaissance used it, the corteziania of Castiglione’ (248).35 Adhering to this spirit, Barber pointedly criticizes ‘Charles Lamb’s sympathy for the [lower class] steward’s enterprise’ as being inappropriately ‘bourgeois’ (255). In his expansive, but also florid and vague, celebration of ‘the basic, free humanity which, be it virile or feminine, is at the center of courtesy and flowers through it’ (249), Barber’s indulgence extends to nostalgia: ‘the play’s central feeling for freedom in heritage and community’ is ‘consciously nostalgic’ (252). In the context of Barber’s personal history, a striking split emerges between his earlier radical politics and the conservative attraction to social hierarchy embodied in festive comedy, as Barber reads it. The conservatism that Barber would not countenance in contemporary life becomes available in another form through this particular version of Renaissance history. Festive endorsement of aristocratic culture is legitimized and protected because, in Barber’s view, it is historical. But this history may also function as a surreptitious retreat and release for the critic. Barber’s mode of presentation does not guard against this latent danger, and thus history runs the risk of serving as a cover for escapism. In the chapter on ‘Shakespeare in the Rising Middle Class’ in The Whole Journey, Barber later revises his attitude toward the middle class, which here he devalues and scorns, when he acknowledges Shakespeare’s own middleclass origin as an asset: ‘Shakespeare’s middle-class difference and sense of tough realities simultaneously contribute to the increasing ironic clarity with which he makes us see that a social order, whose structure as such he

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does not question, fails to work’ (65). But an underlying reluctance lingers in the contorted distinction between ‘ironic clarity’ and the not-to-bequestioned ‘as such’. Irony may be its own form of interrogation. Dramatic irony about failure would appear not only to show that problems can exist within the given system, but also to raise the structural issue of why they occur. In Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, Barber’s degree of identification with aristocracy is nowhere more evident – to the point of over-identification – than in his analysis of The Merchant of Venice, where class hierarchy is bolstered by a monoculture of religion and ethnicity implied in the chapter’s title: ‘The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth’s Communion and an Intruder’. As a firm believer in festive comic form, Barber takes a harsh stance toward Shylock as an ‘intruder’ who is to be accorded no sympathy or emotional connection. The unfortunate result is that adherence to this narrow festive line leaves criticism not only unable but unwilling to address anti-Semitism, and thus saddled with a huge blind spot. In contrast with this hard line is the soft Christianizing language of ‘communion’ in the chapter title and ‘grace’ in the final heading ‘Sharing in the Grace of Life’ (186). This patently and unpalatable sanctimonious language has no analytic leverage because the characters manifestly do not live up to the high standards that it claims on their behalf.36 The gap between the critic’s language and the characters’ behaviour is so conspicuous that it throws the focus back on to the critic’s role in producing the disparity. Overall, it is painful to watch, and hard to swallow, the rhetorical knots into which Barber ties himself in order to justify the play as purely festive. In the end, to Barber’s credit, he is uneasy with his own strict festive interpretation and unable to silence his own doubts and second thoughts. In an extraordinarily revealing moment in which the festive argument comes close to breaking down, he spends the final three pages in a discussion that verges on retraction. The first acknowledgement comes in the form of an exaggerated distinction among different modes of access: ‘I must add, after all this praise for the way the play makes its distinctions about the use of wealth, that on reflection, not when viewing or reading the play, but when thinking about it, I find the distinction, as others have, somewhat too easy’ (189). Yet we do not cease to be thinking beings when we enter a theatre or a book, nor is thinking restricted to the scholar’s study. We remain fully alert and consciously aware during performance: we experience the antiSemitism as it is happening in real time, not only as an after-effect. Backtracking, Barber’s second tactical adjustment grants as much: ‘About Shylock, too, there is a difficulty which grows on reflection, a difficulty



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which may be felt too in reading or performance. His part fits perfectly into the design of the play, and yet he is so alive that he raises an interest beyond its design’ (190). In the attempt to circumscribe the paradox and to rescue and preserve the festive design, Barber mounts a last line of defence that feels like a throwaway conclusion: ‘Shakespeare provided material that asks for a whole additional play to work itself out’ (191). But this is to wish for another play when we must confront the one we have. A more elegant way to account for the seemingly unnecessary and extraneous complexity might be to say that The Merchant of Venice is more complicated than the festive interpretation allows, and that the play can be understood in its own terms as a conscious problem play without simple resolution. The problematic equation of religion with ethnicity is compounded because The Merchant of Venice involves not only anti-Semitism but also racism. The latter is overtly expressed through the dismissal of the Prince of Morocco for his black skin (‘Let all of his complexion choose me so’ – 2.7.79) and the scorn for Lancelot’s interracial sex, which encompasses not only hostility to the black maid but also a negative reaction toward her pregnancy (‘the getting up of the Negro’s belly’ – 3.5.32) and the prospect of a mixed-race baby. This additional element of anti-black racism is, in turn, superimposed on Shylock in order to facilitate and vindicate his separation from his daughter Jessica: ‘There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory’ (3.1.33–34). In sharp contrast to her father, Jessica willingly rejects her Jewish heritage in favor of Christianity. And her religious conversion is accompanied and reinforced by her racial transformation to whiteness. The latter affirmation of her new symbolic colour makes her more fully a member of the Christian community she has joined by virtue of her renunciation of Judaism.37 Against this background, the white Christian group assembled in the pastoral world on Belmont seems an unappealing fantasy that leaves a bad taste, for which Barber’s festive analysis too readily serves as extenuation. In Shakespeare’s second Venetian play, a similar whitening will be accorded another non-white Christian convert – ‘Your son-in-law is far more fair than black’ (1.3.289) – though here the tragic process exposes the patronizing falseness of the initial honorific gesture when Othello is later forced to reclaim his blackness – ‘Haply for I am black’ (3.3.267).38

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History as Royal Power and English Nationalism The one place in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy where a tougher reality breaks in and unequivocally asserts itself is the chapter on ‘Rule and Misrule in Henry IV ’, as though by crossing the generic boundary from comedy to the history play, Barber finds an opportunity to express critical dissatisfaction more directly and cogently. In the two-play sequence, the festive agenda is consummately executed. Barber shows no more sympathy for Falstaff than for Shylock. He has no doubts about the need for, and justice of, Falstaff’s expulsion, and Barber’s heading ‘The Trial of Carnival’ resonates with the format of the court trial that destroys Shylock. Nevertheless, Barber is in this case unsatisfied with the result and, as he does nowhere else in the book, forthrightly confronts and articulates his reservations about the outcome. The festive pattern embedded in the second tetralogy of English history plays operates under greater pressure and therefore produces a different concluding clarification. In the context of festive comedy, Barber traces a largely predictable transition from the release of holiday to the return to, as well as clarification of, everyday order. In Barber’s view, the stakes are much higher in the Henry IV plays because they do not precisely fit this model. The challenge is more severe in the case of the history plays because, rather than a temporary exercise of license, the forces of holiday threaten to become permanent and thus pose the potential for serious disruption and long-term destabilization of the social system. To underline the seriousness, Barber twice uses the word ‘radical’: ‘Shakespeare expressed attitudes towards experience which, grounded in a saturnalian reversal of values, went beyond that to include a radical challenge to received ideas’ (198–99); ‘the effect is to raise radical questions about social sanctities’ (214). In the festive environment of the comedies, as Barber summarizes it, the play has the power of ‘keeping out the wind and the rain’ (260). The shift from the pastoral to the political realm in the histories makes this exemption from the wind and the rain much more difficult to achieve. In the normal scheme of festive things, Hal should emerge with a clarification involving a renewed, expanded consciousness. Instead, surprisingly, Barber finds constriction and pronounces the effort to pursue the festive process, as completed in 2 Henry IV, a ‘failure’: ‘The reason for his failure at the close of Part Two is that at this point he himself [Shakespeare] uses ritual, not ironically transformed into drama, but magically’ (217). In assessing Barber’s view of this failure, I would like to highlight the way in which Barber’s dissatisfaction is directed at Shakespeare the author



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and thus bypasses the character Hal-Henry V. This peculiar dynamic allows Barber to treat Hal as untouchable. He critically evaluates other characters such as Hotspur and Falstaff but grants Hal immunity. Though he briefly considers Hal’s ‘priggish tone’ as Henry V (219), Barber quickly deflects this problem to the authorial level: ‘If ironies about Hal were expressed by the context, we could take the scene as the representation of his becoming a prig. But there is simply a blur in the tone, a blur which results, I think, from a retreat into magic by the dramatist, as distinct from his characters’ (219). Important and convincing as Barber’s critical perspective on Shakespeare is, it is still possible to ask if his critique goes far enough. Although the word ‘prig’ is too imprecise and tonally burdened to serve as a critical term, it may be worth pursuing the representation of Hal’s character as including the development of negative elements, and hence as being implicated in the same social and psychological network as the others. Perhaps the one place in the book where Barber expresses irritation toward another critic to the point of being strident and intemperate is his rejection of L. C. Knights’ argument that ‘the comedy should be taken as a devastating satire on war and government’ (205). Barber counters: ‘But this is obviously an impossible, anachronistic view, based on the assumption that politics and war are unnatural activities that can be done without . . . This interpretation makes a shambles of the heroic moments of the play— makes them clearly impossible to act’ (205).39 By contrast, Barber puts the full force of his critical energy behind ‘the validity of the whole conception of a divinely-ordained and chivalrous kingship to which Shakespeare and his society were committed’ (207). Hal is thereby contained within the closed interpretative circle of orthodoxy, which to criticize is portrayed as anachronistic and ruled out of bounds. This orthodoxy may indeed be historical but it does not constitute a monolithic, all-encompassing history of the Renaissance. To stress this single element to the exclusion of the multiple strands historically available in the early modern period, including the radical aspects Barber cited previously, is unconvincing. The effect of the very limited history on which he insists here is to give an unqualified, but also uncritical, endorsement of Henry V’s legitimacy. Barber places himself on the side of established hierarchy but this affiliation need not be automatic: the critic as analyst is capable of viewing the material from a variety of angles and allegiances. Barber accepts the orthodox narrative that Hal can restore purity to the contaminated kingship that he inherits from his father: ‘After the guilty reign of Bolingbroke, the prince is making a fresh start as the new

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king’ (206); ‘the prince can free himself from the sins, the “bad luck,” of Richard’s reign and his father’s reign, to become a king in whom chivalry and a sense of divine ordination are restored’ (207). Barber’s only objection to this scenario is that the entirely appropriate legitimization of Henry V is insufficiently dramatized by Shakespeare. Barber preserves the vision of Hal as an ideal by treating Hal primarily as an abstract symbol rather than as a complex character – ‘Hal stands for the judgment side of our response’ (208) – and then takes this emblematic function at face value. Barber looks back to Richard II’s use of magic (209–11), but does not look forward to the next play, Henry V, where the new king is shown to use religious ritual as a form of magic in an unsuccessful attempt to expiate the guilt inherited from his father and continued by Henry V himself. After enumerating the details of his effort, Henry V acknowledges the emptiness of the routine: ‘More will I do, / Though all that I can do is nothing worth, / Since that my penitence comes after ill, / Imploring pardon’ (4.1.284– 87).40 The goal of purification proves to be a myth and the human failure to achieve it is dramatized as an inescapable consequence not only of the tainted succession but, more specifically, of the overall development of Henry V’s inner character. The idealized view of sacred kingship is unsustainable. Barber’s exemption of Hal’s character may be seen in effect to perform Barber’s own version of magic as critic. The investment in Hal-Henry V as the hoped-for vehicle for decontaminated royal power dovetails with an underlying gender-specific belief in heroic manhood. In Barber’s analysis, Shakespeare ‘values the conversion of love into war as one of the human powers’ (202). To protect Hal as king is also to protect and enhance the possibility of male heroism. But when the festive design is transferred from comedy to the English history plays, sober realism replaces fantasy even with regard to Hal. This sobriety test applies not only to Falstaff’s sack-inspired dreams of advancement but also to Henry V’s aspiration to a royal integrity that is completely unsullied and so beyond all questioning. In Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, the chapter on Henry IV occupies a crucial position. Because of the two plays’ mixed genre status and the obstacles that hinder, if not block, festive efficacy, the chapter is a bit of an outlier in the book as a whole. In terms of the metaphor of the gate at the end of the book, this chapter takes a step ‘outside the garden gate’ that the book’s final section conspicuously resists. The chapter on the history plays puts the festive comedies in perspective by making the residual romanticism of the festive mode stand out and thereby raising the question of suppressed



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problems inside, as well as outside, the gate. The starker realities of the history plays serve, by contrast, to highlight an element of denial and wish fulfillment in the festive resolutions of the comedies. The genre of the history play temporarily breaks the festive mood; the reinstatement of festivity in the final two chapters attempts to counteract and repair this break, whose lingering effect nonetheless helps to explain the book’s concluding mood of wistful pause and poignant fragility. In The Whole Journey, Barber does address Henry V in the chapter ‘From Mixed History to Heroic Drama: The Henriad’ (198–236). The term ‘mixed history’ clearly qualifies the inclusion of the Henry IV plays under the rubric of ‘festive comedy’, while the limitations of the term ‘heroic drama’ for Henry V is acknowledged by Barber’s final observation on the play’s indication of generic tendencies toward tragedy: ‘Shakespeare saw the incompleteness and the tragic potentiality of the manhood of a “band of brothers” ’ (236).

Opening the Gate to Tragedy In making the transition from Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy to The Whole Journey, co-authored by Barber with Richard P. Wheeler, I would like to note the polar opposition between the comfort that Barber takes in festive comic form and the personal fear that he expresses when approaching tragedy. As Wheeler’s Foreword indicates, Barber was exceptionally open and vulnerable to the burden of tragedy . . . he speculated that “perhaps in all tragedy, certainly in some, we experience the almost unnameable qualm and dread that comes from opening the gates to regression—gates which, once opened in our individual minds, make us tremble, regardless of the fate of the fictive protagonists, because we ourselves might go through, might go down into the whirlpool” ’ (xxi)41 In Barber’s imagery, when we find ourselves outside, with the festive garden gates closed behind us, we turn to see tragedy’s gates open before us to reveal a plunging abyss. The central question that Barber seeks to answer for himself, as well as for us, is: how can we not only understand but also cope with the emotional impact and psychological stress that tragedy elicits? Crucial to Barber’s entry into Shakespearean tragedy was the gradual emergence of his psychoanalytic approach. Freudian psychoanalysis was a

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double resource because Barber’s relation to it was not only intellectual, but also experiential.42 The challenge was to translate psychoanalytic concepts into a useable language for literary criticism. How, for instance, can the specialized set of strategies for psychoanalytic interpretation, which amounts to a self-contained belief system, be communicated to the wider audience which does not share it with the same degree of commitment? In his Foreword to The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development, Richard Wheeler quotes Barber’s May 1962 letter to his friend Richard Schlatter on the difficulties of finding a satisfactory formulation for psychoanalytic literary criticism (xxii–xxiii). Yet the psychoanalytic component was essential to Barber’s ‘power of development’ and especially to taking the next step into the tragedies. We can imagine that a central cause of the delay in Barber’s ‘whole journey’ was the painstaking, perhaps agonizing, slowness of his creating the necessary psychoanalytical perspective by refining it to a sufficiently sophisticated, subtle level. The best testimony to the psychoanalytic component of Barber’s ongoing legacy in the next generation is articulated by the two brilliant, psychoanalytically inclined scholars whose work is consistent with Barber’s approach and most in keeping with the spirit of his vision. Richard P. Wheeler’s meticulous, scrupulous accounts in the Foreword (xi–xxvii) to their co-authored The Whole Journey and in the extended Introduction (1–44) to his edited Creating Elizabethan Tragedy are indispensable resources for understanding the depth and complexity of Barber’s perspective. Wheeler’s role goes far beyond editing to being an interpreter who elaborates, develops and extends Barber’s insights and, through this careful mediation, makes Barber’s work available to Wheeler’s age cohort and potentially to succeeding generations – a point of subsequent transition that is soon approaching. The closest we can come to an ultimate realization of Barber’s interpretive vision is in the perceptive detail of Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (1992), where Barber is acknowledged, in D. W. Winnicott’s terms, as ‘the “good enough mother” that enabled this book, as he enabled the work of a whole generation of psychoanalytic critics’ (x).43 One reason that the chapter on the Henry IV plays in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy has such a marked transitional role is that it occasions Barber’s most substantial recourse to Freud in the early book: Freud’s account of bad luck, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, sees it as the expression of unconscious motives which resist the conscious goals of the personality. This view helps to explain how the acting out of disruptive



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motives in saturnalia or in comedy can serve to master potential aberration by revaluing it in relation to the whole of experience. So Falstaff, in acting out this absolutist aberration, is taking away what might have been Hal’s bad luck, taking it away not in a magical way, but by extending the sphere of conscious control. The comedy is a civilized equivalent of the primitive rite. A similar mastery of potential aberration is promoted by the experience of seeing through Falstaff’s burlesque of the sort of headlong chivalry presented seriously in Hotspur (208–209; italics mine). The psychoanalytic argument about increasing awareness of unconscious forces (‘Where id was, ego shall be’, in Freud’s famous line) is straightforward and modest. But I particularly want to call attention to the appearance of two words in the above passage – ‘control’ and ‘mastery’. As applied in the immediate context, they suggest that Hal’s formation is a complete success. Subsequently, the two terms will be carried over as key elements in Barber’s later writing on tragedy – when achieved, control and mastery provide the secure standpoint that enables the critic to withstand the harrowing psychological depths of regression that tragedy forces us to witness. Yet control and mastery are not always necessarily coextensive with, and equivalent to, critical insight and illumination. In Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy Barber’s observation is cut-and-dried in the way it easily aligns with the triumphant image of Hal: ‘When he stands poised above the prostrate bodies of Hotspur and Falstaff, his position on the stage and his lines about the two heroes express a nature which includes within a larger order the now subordinated parts of life which are represented by those two’ (204–205). The addition of the psychoanalytic dimension simply buttresses the neat formulaic analysis and does not enable us to do anything but unquestioningly celebrate Hal. By placing the Henry IV plays inside the critical framework of ‘the garden gate’ at the time of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, Barber prevents himself from contemplating Hal’s underlying tragic potential as Henry V. Richard Wheeler’s Introduction to Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd provides an extended discussion of the more complex psychoanalytic principles that Barber subsequently developed to deepen his literary studies. The Introduction repeatedly returns to Freud as a major touchstone, as Wheeler’s outline pieces together Barber’s fragments over many years (10–13, 18–20, 31–32, 35–40). So organized, the material conveys the sense of a cumulative series of discoveries – a process that suggests Barber’s step-by-step commitment to, and growing conviction in, his psychoanalytic criticism.

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Through a network of cross-connections, the two posthumous books work beautifully together to establish an absolutely trenchant account of the origin of tragic form in the English Renaissance. The strategic back references to Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in The Whole Journey need the support of the more detailed expositions of their work provided in the accompanying book on Creating Elizabethan Tragedy.44 Similarly, the forward references in the latter that anticipate Shakespeare’s further elaborations require the scope of The Whole Journey fully to realize the argument about Shakespeare’s innovative additions to the collective tradition of tragedy as it was being built. In Barber’s telling, the dynamic interactions among Marlowe, Kyd and Shakespeare are compelling because the antecedent works of the first two are often so graphic in a raw, elemental way and therefore provide such sharp contrasts with Shakespeare’s evolution toward more nuanced structures. The motif of control allows Barber to enter the difficult terrain of tragedy because it provides him with a stringent standard for measuring Shakespeare’s success and admitting Shakespeare’s failures. The subtitle of the chapter on Titus Andronicus, for example, characterizes the play as ‘Abortive Domestic Tragedy’ and links Shakespeare’s early effort to the problems in its precursor, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. Barber’s summary specifies Shakespeare’s deficiency of control: ‘Titus and the revenge play by Kyd that seems to have inspired it both fail in a measure because they lack control of a social perspective on the protagonist, or lose it toward the end’ (157). Yet Barber’s evaluation of Titus Andronicus makes use of a second comparison to Shakespeare’s later King Lear, whose achievement of control will underwrite our faith in a ‘power of development’ that enables the author to grow and mature in the handling of tragic matter. In this sense, Titus serves its purpose as an apprentice training ground for the eventual emergence of a more positive version of tragic value. Astonishingly, Barber, applying the same criterion of control, also finds Hamlet and Othello wanting. It is as though Barber wants to emphasize how long it takes to fashion a fully adequate tragic form and how, because of the ultimate success of King Lear, we can afford to wait. In his remarks on Hamlet, the term control is now coupled with irony: ‘It is a play in which something gets out of hand. In it Shakespeare poses – and leaves open – the problem of control that later tragedies will master by an ironic balance’ (266). Barber suggests that the public theatre provided a professional arena in which ‘transforming aggression into dramatic irony’ (63) satisfied a specific need in Shakespeare’s temperament and thus offered a release that, given



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his psychological structure, could not otherwise be easily obtainable. Barber correlates this phenomenon with ‘Shakespeare’s long delay in turning to the tragic exploration of such [father–son] confrontation’ (52): ‘In short, he does not make tragedy, with its dominant concerns of heritage and authority organized by the stresses of Oedipal conflict, his central form of expression until he has outdone his father in the rising middle class’ (64). The significance that Barber gives to irony is brought home by repetition: The action, in leading the protagonist to his death, moves us toward ironic awareness of his role in necessitating the tragic outcome. Poised against the hero’s aggressive self-assertion, and shaping our understanding of it, irony is the aggressive assertion of a vantage point on the protagonist by means of the dramatist’s control over the whole action. Ironic awareness enables us to see, from the outside, the limitations and the destructive force of a figure who, like King Lear, is simultaneously the object of our full sympathy. In Hamlet we are invited to identify with the hero at the expense of comprehensive ironic perspective; there is no adequate basis for an outside, controlling perspective (267)45 In Barber’s reading, the decisive indication is that ‘the creation of the Ghost is an experiment in theatrical aggression that forecloses the possibility of ironic control’ (267). Framing ‘Othello as a Development from Hamlet’ (272), Barber extends his criticism of Shakespeare: The ending of Othello, its tendency to exonerate the protagonist at the expense of the antagonist, fails to achieve full artistic control because it fits [Kenneth] Burke’s description, falling into ritual simplification in the scapegoating of Iago by the honest Venetians . . . To hide what is on the bed and center only on the evil of Iago is to turn away from the full horror (281) I pause here to note that Barber’s curious literalism short-circuits his interpretation of the play’s conclusion, as though what a character says automatically describes what happens and what we must therefore believe, with absolutely no room for independent assessment. Barber’s response simply avoids alternative interpretations. Yet with equal plausibility we can take Barber’s description of the white characters’ desperate rhetorical emphasis on scapegoating Iago as efforts that are not only failures but

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manifest failures – the failure is visible and the characters’ ulterior motives put on display and dramatically exposed. Similarly, despite Othello’s injunction that we ‘Nothing extenuate’ (5.2.351), he nonetheless engages in extenuating behaviour, but this does not mean that Shakespeare follows suit. When Othello’s attempted extenuations fail, he is not let off the hook. Rather, Shakespeare’s ending succeeds in exposing to the audience’s view the implausibility of placing all blame on Iago because the complicity of the other characters is transparent and we are all too aware of the complexity of the overall social network as the source of causality. From my current standpoint of participating in the major scholarly development of nearly two decades of concerted work in early modern race studies, I must add that Barber’s selective psychoanalytic focus leaves completely out of account the issue of race as a contributing factor of high importance in Othello. For Barber, the arrival at King Lear is the penultimate moment before the turn to the late romances. Barber sees King Lear as ‘Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy’ (37) and finds the Lear–Cordelia reunion ‘for me as for many the most moving moment in Shakespeare’ (292). Yet, in an odd twist, King Lear is not simply the culmination of Shakespeare’s development of artistic control of the tragic form. Paradoxically, Barber’s pursuit of the motif of control becomes both a way into tragedy and a way out of tragedy. On the one hand, Barber now unreservedly praises Shakespeare’s achievement of ‘ironic control’: ‘But still he wants his daughter “to love [her] father all.” His vision of prison amounts, almost literally, to a conception of heaven on earth – his heaven, the “kind nursery” after all. A chasm of irony opens as we realize that he is leading her off to her death. . . It is her sacrifice that the generous-hearted, loving old father is praising’ (293–94). On the other hand, as though unable to stop at the scrupulously ironic vision, Barber now counterbalances this control with another force that he refers to as ‘the springs of religious feeling’ (294). Technically, the two ironic and redemptive sides are held in balance as Barber continues to give us reminders of the ironies. But, in practice, the irony is subordinated, trumped by what Barber calls ‘the play’s extraordinary final effect of affirmation along with tragic loss’ (296). Barber affirms the two characters by reconceiving them as icons: Lear and Cordelia, while they are presented with marvelous understanding as human individuals, also become in effect icons. Lear with Cordelia in his arms is a Pietà with the roles reversed, not Holy Mother with her dead Son, but father with his dead daughter, whom he looked to



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for the divine in the human . . . but the realization of them in the theater takes them out of time, so that there is a kind of epiphany as we finally see them, a showing forth not of the divine but of the human, sublime and terrible as it reaches toward the divine and toward destruction (296) The soaring term ‘epiphany’, so far above tragic desolation, leaps forward in anticipation of the ‘visionary realization’ (322) to follow in the late romances and takes retroactive sanction from them. Yet, even when recast in secular terms, the analogy of Lear as the Holy Mother feels like a compensatory overreaching. In Barber’s King Lear, ‘Shakespeare’s art finds new intensity of grace possible in human life, and new intensity of tragic loss’ (296). But, in the overall account, the former – ‘new intensity of grace’ – is emphasized at the expense of the latter – ‘new intensity of tragic loss’ – which is not expressed with the same emotional force and therefore cannot compete. The redemptive swerve can seem unwarranted and unearned because the epiphanic grace is superimposed on, and blunts, recognition of the loss. It is as though the grace and the loss are counterpoised as positive and negative, but in my view the loss itself has a positive aspect. Lear’s tragic situation is not resolvable through consoling, and perhaps falsely reassuring, diversions. The form that his suffering takes is persistent selfdeception to the very end. Difficult as it may be, we must remain open and vulnerable to this stark result in order to learn from it. One way to understand the particular arc that Barber traces through Shakespeare’s oeuvre is to register the shaping influence of T. S. Eliot, whom Barber encountered as an undergraduate and whom he acknowledges in the Introduction to his thesis, ‘Individualism and High Order: An Essay towards an Understanding of the Elisabethan Drama’ (Harvard, 1935). Eliot’s presence in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy is signalled in the chapter on As You Like It, whose title ‘The Alliance of Seriousness and Levity’ draws on Eliot’s essay on ‘Andrew Marvell’ (222, 236). The very title elements of The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development come from Eliot, as the epigraph announces (1–2). Eliot is central to Barber’s discussion of Hamlet (265–6, 272) and, though implicit, Eliot’s observation about Othello’s ‘cheering himself up’46 in the final speech can be heard behind Barber’s remark in his commentary on Othello about the ‘tendency to exonerate the protagonist’ (281). Most important is Barber’s pivotal recourse to Eliot’s poem ‘Marina’ in the section on Pericles (322–4) in the final chapter, with its subtitle ‘Pericles and the Transition from Tragedy to Romance’. It is not too much to say that

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Eliot provides instigation for Barber’s eager, premature generic reaching out for the life line of the late romances from inside the tragic framework of King Lear.

‘Potent Art’, ‘Rough Magic’ and ‘Charms O’erthrown’ In the middle of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy at the end of the chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Barber concludes with an astonishing section under the acidly blunt title ‘The Sense of Reality’ (157–62). After celebrating Shakespeare’s dramatic achievement in establishing the festive form, Barber permits himself to specify its ‘limitations’ (157): ‘one can feel, indeed, that in the comedy, as compared with Shakespeare’s later works, mastery comes a little too easily, because the imaginary and the real are too easy to separate’ (159). Emotionally, Barber allows himself to exude a certain dissatisfaction and restiveness with the festive mode and to undertake some tentative forays into tragedy (Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet and Richard II) before pulling back to resume his festive praises of ‘the peculiarly unshadowed gaiety of the fun’ (161), though to my ears the chapter’s final paragraph sounds flat. In this brief moment of reflection, Barber pauses and stands back from the festive focus to anticipate the wider purview of Shakespeare’s ‘whole journey’ to The Tempest. Though Barber did not actually complete the journey in his lifetime, the posthumous publication of The Whole Journey 27 years later did reach that goal. As a preface to The Whole Journey’s concluding pages on The Tempest (334–42), I would like to return to the relevant passage in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy where Barber thinks ahead to the final moment: Later in Shakespeare’s work, the imagination becomes in its own right a way of knowing ‘more things in heaven and earth’ than cool reason ever comprehends. Contrasts between real and imaginary are included in and superseded by contrast between appearance and reality, as these unfold at various levels of awareness. How different Shakespeare’s sense of reality finally became is evident if we set the proud skepticism of Theseus beside the humble skepticism of Prospero. The presiding genius of Shakespeare’s latest fantasy also turns from a pageant-like work of imagination to reflect on its relation to life. But for him life itself is like the insubstantial pageant, and we, not just the Titanias and Oberons, are such stuff as dreams are made on (161)



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The word I wish to single out here is the adjective ‘humble’ that Barber applies to Prospero’s final posture because I feel that this apposite term fits Barber’s self-presentation as critic in the book’s closing moment. When we chose ‘Rough Magic’ as the title for the Barber Festschrift, we had in mind the series of rapid transitions at the end of The Tempest as apt for the legacy of Barber’s personality and criticism. The tonal pivot within a single line from ‘my so potent art’ to ‘this rough magic’ (5.1.50) that Prospero is about to ‘abjure’ is quickly followed by another abrupt shift of mood: ‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown, / And what strength I have is mine own, / Which is most faint’ (Epilogue, 1–2). This formulation leaves open who or what has done the ‘overthrowing’ which has left him stripped, as though this new vulnerability may have been forced upon him, as much as chosen, like Lear’s reduction and exposure to ‘the thing itself; unaccommodated man’ (3.4.98–99). Lear’s vision of human nakedness without the trappings resonates with Prospero’s ultimate condition. In The Whole Journey’s final section on The Tempest, Barber not only aligns Prospero’s Epilogue with Shakespeare but also adopts it as his own. This doubling allows Barber, in the final sentence, to enact a loosening of the tight grip in which striving for the concept of ‘control’ as his overriding critical goal has held him in thrall. Speaking for himself, as well as for Shakespeare, Barber concludes: ‘And perhaps also there is a need for expiation after having bodied forth, in The Tempest and throughout the unprecedented diversity and power of the work prior to it, motives underlying life – “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (V.i.275-76) – even though they have been brought under the control of art’ (342).47 The ‘control’ is still recognized to be sure, but its clausal status subordinates it to ‘motives underlying life’. The latter phrase is so discreetly put as to be almost opaque, barely legible, verging on inchoate, but it does seem to accord primacy to our inner emotional depths before complete explanatory control is imposed. And yet, in the terms set by the present multi-volume project, Prospero’s Epilogue gives moving testimony to what makes Barber a great Shakespearean. As a graduate student at Santa Cruz, I knew Barber above all as a man of passion, whose range of emotion readily displayed not only streaks of maudlin sentimentality and angry disagreement, but also fragility and sensitivity to suffering. In a choked voice, near tears, he once ended a conversation by saying to me with little apparent prior context, ‘I don’t know why there is so much depression in the world.’ Carried over into his writing, this passion is a driving force in Barber’s criticism so that his emotional accessibility and his giving of himself become prominent aspects of our experience of his interactions with Shakespeare.

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One of the most striking qualities of his writing is the way it brings his emotional presence so close to the surface. I admire and honour his putting of himself into his work: we are always aware of Barber’s individual speaking voice, and he makes us feel that what is at stake goes beyond scholarship. For Barber, getting the interpretation right is connected to managing and balancing psychological forces within his own identity, and this personally inflected interpretive drama places its hold on us. In terms of the opening epigraph, Barber’s self-presentation permits us to be privileged witnesses of an in-depth reader who ‘experiences art as a process of creation’ by himself as an individual reader. Barber’s emotional engagement with his own internal exploration and struggle is the source of his lasting power. For me, Barber’s triumph at the end of The Whole Journey is the way he avoids the tempting prospect of closure offered by the late romances. In availing himself of the parallel with Prospero’s and Shakespeare’s valediction, Barber takes the risk of presenting his own work as incomplete, open-ended and ongoing. Shorn of ‘staff’ and ‘book’ (5.1.54–57), he, too, simply asks for release. By giving priority to ‘motives underlying life’, Barber in effect brings back the image of the gate. The gate to tragedy is reopened, not closed, and, beckoned by Barber, we have to re-enter. Instead of the happy ending of resolution, Barber’s bequest acknowledges the bitterness and asks, with Keats, that we ‘once more assay / The bittersweet of this Shakespearean fruit.’48 Especially noteworthy in Barber’s final summation is his emphasis on collaboration: ‘The epilogue refers us back to Shakespeare himself and to his dependence on the audience’ (340); ‘the artist relinquishes the art that has shaped the play and sustained the artist, to turn for sustenance to the audience’ (341); ‘there is recognition of the profoundly social process involved in dramatic art, recognition of the audience’s cooperation in the actors’ project’ (341). Barber’s criticism promises full cooperation in the larger cultural process by contributing his ‘whole awareness of life’: ‘One cannot honestly read except with one’s whole awareness of life.’ The passage continues: ‘imaginative design is open, always made anew by every reader and every time, and made with reference always not only to the text but also whatever else we know.’49 These fragments I find to be Barber’s bravest, most perceptive and liberating, statement. They claim Barber’s location in the historical moment of his own time – ‘every reader and every time’ – while, at the same time, generously granting us our distinctive moment as we, in turn, must grant to those who come after, their changing moment.



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In my own farewell here, I would like to return to the epigraph with which I started, and to invoke Barber’s sense of criticism as a creative act: ‘we experience art as a process of creation . . . creation by ourselves.’ Shakespeare’s collaborative turn to the audience is matched by Barber’s implied request for the reader’s participation. As we have watched Barber reading and creating Shakespeare, so we continue to read and create Barber.

Chapter 4

Jan Kott An Introduction

Jan Kott (1914–2001) burst on to the scene of Shakespeare studies through the influence of one major book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, first published in English translation in 1964. The impact of the book was extraordinary for a work from a non-English speaking writer in a field dominated with only a few exceptions by the Anglo–American world. And indeed Kott’s ‘foreign’ provenance was basic to the intellectual point of view of his work. Kott’s work can be seen as pivotal in the complex process at the end of the twentieth century in which Shakespeare criticism shifted from a central preoccupation with formal and aesthetic issues to a new political and social-minded critical practice beginning around 1980 and still in force today. Shakespeare Our Contemporary was a series of essays written over several years in Poland, in the context of a Communist-dominated cultural apparatus. Kott’s work was both an intervention within Eastern European Marxist Shakespeare criticism and, eventually and more famously, a work that spoke to a far larger audience in Western Europe and the US. Kott had sojourned in France and come in contact with French artists and intellectuals in the years in which Sartrean existentialism was very much at the forefront of intellectual life, not only in France but beyond. He synthesized existentialism and themes from the Theatre of the Absurd with Marxist concepts – as of course, in a different mode, the leading French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would undertake himself, beginning with A Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). Kott saw in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies above all – he also wrote of the comedies in Shakespeare Our Contemporary and later – an historical pattern all too familiar to a Polish patriot who had seen the promised liberation of his country from Nazi occupation and oppression turn into another form of domination through the imposition of a one-party, dictatorial regime under the control of Poland’s supposed Soviet liberators. He recognized this succession of one tyranny by another as a major pattern, not only in world history, but in Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, in the English



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histories and in other plays. He called it the ‘Grand Mechanism’ and related it to themes of Marxist theory. It soon came under withering attack from official Marxist critics throughout the Soviet bloc, but it attracted the attention of Peter Brook, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the time, who used Kott’s ideas in ground-breaking, landmark productions of King Lear (1962) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970). Kott’s ideas were taken up later in other Shakespeare productions by Peter Hall, Michael Bogdanov, Ariane Mnouchkine, Charles Marowitz and Giorgio Strehler. Soon the book became influential in the academy as well as in the theatrical world. One of the reasons for the impact of Kott’s work on the West was the challenge it constituted to what had become, by the mid-1960s, a tired critical orthodoxy in Shakespeare studies divided between positivist ‘historical’ criticism and a late, academicized New Criticism, which had become shorn of its earlier attempts to challenge the commodified culture of mid-century America and the UK. Kott put the present first in his approach to Shakespeare, as his title blatantly proclaimed. Whereas historical criticism attempted to recreate a lost past context into which Shakespeare’s works could be re-inserted and read for their historical interest, Kott found in the plays applications to, and lessons for, our political present. Whereas New Critics studied the plays for verbal tensions and thematic contrasts within a time-transcending aesthetic space, Kott read Shakespeare as inhabiting both the past and the present – and a good deal of the time in between as well – but never out of history, never out of politics. Thus, he became one of the most important critical precedents for the late twentieth-century ‘political’ turn in Shakespeare studies, both in its new historicist and ‘presentist’ forms. Kott had been a hero of the Polish resistance against Nazi occupation during the war, and an honoured Communist intellectual in its immediate aftermath. But, like many other Eastern European leftwing intellectuals, he slowly rebelled against the new orthodoxy the Soviets imposed on Eastern Europe, and as a result eventually became a non-person in Poland and had to find political refuge in the West, settling in the United States in 1969. Kott went on to have an active career in the US, becoming a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island and writing several more books, and not only on Shakespeare, over a 32-year span. Kott’s extraordinary life, then, falls into two main sections, and we have chosen to divide up the discussion of his work, its production and its influence into two different sections, by two different authors. Accordingly, Madalina Nicolaescu discusses the story of Jan Kott in Poland – and more

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broadly in the Soviet bloc as represented here by discussions of reactions to his work in Poland, in the former Czechoslovakia, in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and in Romania. It is a story of Kott’s challenge to Communist orthodoxy and the rejection of his ideas by the official cultural apparatuses of these countries. The second half of the chapter, by Zoltán Márkus, takes up the story of the quite different reaction to Kott in the West and his subsequent career after he immigrated to the United States in 1969, where he taught, wrote and lived until his death in 2001. Hugh Grady

Kott in the East Madalina Nicolaescu

On 22 April 1964, on the occasion of the celebration of the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s birth, Alexander Abusch, a high ranking official in the former GDR, gave a talk fulminating against ‘reactionary positions’ that ‘falsified Shakespeare’.1 Abusch never mentioned Jan Kott, yet his references to the decadent, ‘nihilistic readings of Shakespeare’ that equate ‘the great, humanist Shakespeare with the absurd à la Beckett’2 were too clear for anyone in the audience to miss. Abusch’s attack against Kott was continued in the first East German issue of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch. Hildegard Schumann ended her essay on King Lear in a strong admonitory tone, first dismissing Kott’s treatment of the play and finally warning against any deviation from the party line: ‘We must reject all attempts to read Lear as an expression of despair about the meaninglessness and absurdity of the human condition; we must endeavour to understand the historical significance of the tragedy as well as the meanings that are valid for us’.3 It was not just Kott’s hybridization of Shakespeare and Beckett that was deemed scandalous in the GDR, but also what Abusch had called ‘the primitive, violently modernizing’ readings of Shakespeare’s plays.4 Kott’s essays on Shakespeare were perceived as dangerously challenging the rigidly dogmatic political discourse that continued in the GDR even after Stalin’s death, throughout the 1960s. Any contemporary readings of Shakespeare were suspected of highlighting questionable aspects of the



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policed history of the present and were viewed as dangerously threatening to the legitimacy of the regime.5 In the same year, 1964, Czech Shakespearean scholars were complaining that ‘Shakespeare had turned Kott-ean’ both on the stage and in critical discussions, and that Shakespeare Our Contemporary had become a ‘kind of Shakespearean Bible’.6 At the celebrations of Shakespeare’s anniversary organized by the Charles University in Prague, Zdenek Střibrnỳ responded to Kott’s huge impact by exhorting his fellow scholars to ‘read Shakespeare not merely Kott’.7 Together with other academics, Střibrnỳ mounted a campaign against Kott. Next to the scholarly arguments adduced against Kott’s study of Shakespeare, Střibrnỳ also enlisted ideological arguments that rendered his essays unacceptable on political grounds. Kott’s treatment of history was ‘not based on Marxist thought’; his book was part and parcel of the Western ‘anti-renaissance campaign’, which had ‘annexed Shakespeare to the medieval period’. Střibrnỳ insisted in words echoing Schuman’s admonition that this campaign must be resisted and support must be given to ‘the historical conception of the age of the renaissance and to the existence of a definite, even if difficult to determine, borderline between that age and the one which preceded it.’8 What was so politically disturbing about placing Shakespeare in the medieval rather than in the Renaissance period or about the effacement of the borderline between the two periods? In what ways did Kott’s views on history depart from Marxist thought? Similar responses were registered all over Eastern Europe in the 1960s, with Kott either welcomed as a ‘liberating’ influence on the theatre9 or dismissed if not rejected as a subversive ‘deviation’ from ‘dogmatic’, Marxist Leninist Shakespearean scholarship. Theatre people and critics avidly read Shakespeare Our Contemporary in French (first published in 1962) and commissioned translations for a wider readership.10 Performances taking up Kott’s readings were mostly iconoclastic both in their political and theatrical approaches; the degree of absorbing Kott’s influence was often indicative of the scale of the de-Stalinization processes going on in the respective socialist regimes.11 However, 25 years later, Kott’s readings of Shakespeare were given a surprisingly different assessment: at the conference ‘Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?’ Richard Wilson voiced the belief shared by many British oppositional critics that Kott’s approach was ‘deeply conservative’ as it offered no possibility of change and no analysis of failure.12 Polish critics after 1989 adopted an even less sympathetic critical position and accused

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Kott of having ‘set up excuses for wrong ethical choices’. The Marxist legacy perceptible in his book was said to ‘foreground real Communism and negate Christianity’, neither of which could be easily forgiven in Poland.13 Kott himself admitted the existence of ‘contradictions’ (a term borrowed from the official Marxist Leninist vocabulary) in both his work and career.14 What he also acknowledged is the fact that ‘. . . there are times when, to paraphrase George Orwell, he [Shakespeare] is more contemporary than at others‘.15 Shakespeare was Kott’s contemporary in the early 1960s in ways that he was no longer in the late 1980s. His construction of a political Shakespeare was grounded in the experiences and expectations of a particular audience, which was primarily that of post-Stalinist Poland and, by extension, of the other socialist ‘brother’ countries in the ‘60s.16 Therefore, a better understanding of the ambivalent political character of Shakespeare Our Contemporary will call for a close contextualization and localization of his work and of its impact in socialist Europe. In order to project a comprehensive image of Kott’s impact in the region, this chapter will look into the reception of his book in the three countries : first in the former GDR and Czechoslovakia and secondly in a more ‘marginal’ East European country, Romania. The latter being geographically closer to the former USSR, yet culturally more oriented to Paris and the Francophone world, the presentation of Kott’s influence in this area will cover the region in a more balanced way and will open up the discussion to different ways of relating the East and the West in the reception of Kott. This essay also sets out to contextualize Kott’s essays so as to recuperate some of the dissident, iconoclastic meanings that made Kott’s volume successful in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The essay is organized in two parts, the first dealing with Kott’s production of revisionist meanings in the context of postStalinist Poland. The second part considers the reception of his book in the socialist countries, with a subsection devoted to the lesser known case of his reception in Romania. While the greatest part of the essay focuses on critical responses to Kott by Shakespeare scholars, the last section also traces his impact upon Shakespeare productions of the 1960s and 1970s.

Shakespeare Our Contemporary in the Context of Post-Stalinist Poland A brief survey of the events Kott participated in during the early period of the Polish socialist regime can offer interesting insights into the



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ambivalence that both his career and work were riddled with. Kott, born in 1914, was of Jewish ancestry but baptized as a Roman Catholic. He was trained at Warsaw University in law (1937), the Sorbonne University (1938–9), and Lodz University (where he completed a PhD in French literature in 1947). He was active in the Polish Resistance and became a member of the Moscow-backed Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) in 1942, one of his cellmates being Władisław Gomułka, who was later to become head of the Party and of the State. Kott joined the Communist Party despite his knowledge of the mass deportations and executions, the famous show trials and other forms of repression the Stalinist regime had been perpetrating. He admitted to also having been aware of the torture and persecutions in Poland in the ‘40s and ‘50s, yet at the time he repressed this knowledge and only confronted it later.17 In the early years of socialism in Poland, Kott was a favoured son of the regime, wooed and pampered by the Party, only later to find himself accused of ‘rightist deviation’ and relegated from political life. He was ‘exiled to university’, to teach Romance languages in Wroclaw (a prominent Polish regional university) in 1949.18 The Stalinist grinding machine – as he called it – had eventually caught up with him as well.19 His faith in the Party began to waver; he adopted an increasingly critical attitude to the hardline cultural policies adopted by the Stalinist regime, and in the mid-1950s turned ‘revisionist’. The group of Polish revisionists of the ‘50s included prominent names such as Lesek Kolakovski and Zygmunt Baumann, Marxist thinkers initially promoted by the regime who now hoped to transform and democratize socialism, first of all by emancipating it from Soviet influence, reforming it from within and by combining Marxist doctrine with alternative discourses. Many of their initiatives in the public sphere would be later taken up and developed by KOR, the Polish Workers Defense Committee of the late 1970s that was a precursor to Solidarity.20 Kott participated in the revolutionary events of 195621 yet lost faith in any possibility of restructuring the socialist system when the Gomułka regime failed to deliver its promises and re-established the previous oppressive policies. In 1957, Kott quit the party and after further public acts of protest in 1964, his name was banned in all printed material and university education. After the final purges of 1968, his Polish citizenship was revoked. In the early postwar period between 1945–9, Kott was editor at Kuznica (The Forge), a hard left influential journal, set up by top-ranking party officials to push the party line on socrealizm (the infamous Stalinist ‘socialist realism’) and promote the cultural and political strategies associated with it.22 It was at that time that Kott developed what he called, quoting the poet

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Czesław Miłosz, ‘double thinking’: he would publicly mouth the official discourse whilst at the same time trying to undermine it. Kott was aware ‘that socialist realism and Zdhanovism meant the death of all creativity’, yet he would still promote it trying, however, to create a space of freedom within it; in Kott’s own words: ‘I was putting a noose around my neck as well as putting others in a similar position, although I did all I could to keep the noose as loose as possible.’23 While working for Kuznica, he introduced the notion of ‘grand realism’, similar to Lukács’s ‘critical realism’, which was officially designed to support socialist realism; yet, by offering models of realistic writing in English and French literature, it was intended to hold off the dogmatic and schematic rigidity of the socialist realist formula. Kott’s theatre reviews further expanded the list of the officially acceptable playwrights and included articles on Shakespeare, Molière and Goldoni, as well as on Brecht, Durrenmatt, Beckett or Witkiewicz. He was devastatingly critical of Polish socialist realism. However, he himself produced socialist realist stories on Stachanovite coal miners, which were printed in over 100,000 copies. Kott‘s major contribution to revisionist thinking in 1956 was his talk delivered at the session of the Writers Union entitled ‘Mythology and Truth: On Modernism and the Revolutionary Nature of Art’.24 Kott addressed the issue of the falsification of reality by means of the officially imposed idealizing rhetoric, and pointed to the strangulation of Polish culture as a result of the adoption of Soviet socialist realism. His talk was intended to bring up in the public sphere the consequences of political control and manipulation of art, such as the projection of a fictitious version of reality and the promotion of myths (actually downright lies) around contemporary history that served to legitimize the regime in power. Next to assigning writers the revolutionary role of fighting official ‘mythology’ and of awakening the nation’s conscience, Kott insisted on the need for an autonomous space for literature from which to critique and judge reality. Writers were to resume their traditional duty in Polish history of providing a public forum of debate and of initiating actions of resistance against political oppression.

Shakespeare Our Contemporary – A Critical History of the Socialist Present The 1956 talk can be said to have set the agenda for Shakespeare Our Contemporary (published in Polish initially as Skzice o Szekspirze [‘Shakespeare Sketches’])25, whose unacknowledged goal was to demythologize reality



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and strip off all the illusions mobilized by socialist propaganda. Kott developed in this work the recommendations made earlier with respect to the use of Marxist tools of analysis to be employed for the investigation of the very socialist reality he was experiencing. He availed himself of the experience and prestige he had accumulated as a theatre critic to critique the power mechanism, and thereby to continue to participate in the public sphere and play the role he was expected to adopt as an intellectual and writer.26 Reading Shakespeare’s plays, particularly as they had been or might have been staged,27 became a way of writing a ‘critical history of the present‘, albeit in an indirect and veiled way that could circumvent censorship. What later critics identified as ‘Marxist’ about Shakespeare Our Contemporary – and what his contemporaries in Eastern Europe esteemed as non-Marxist or a serious deviation from Marxism – was Kott’s employment of the concept of ‘Great Mechanism’. In conversation with Allen Kuharski he summed it up as follows: In this theatre of the Great of Mechanism there is an old, hated king on the throne. A usurper is climbing the steps to the throne, and he promises changes. But when he gets to the throne and replaces this old king, he puts on the crown and is as cruel as the old king. That was the mechanism – a great mechanism, because everything repeats itself all of the time.28 Kott identifies this mechanism as the structure underlying the history plays as well as Hamlet and Macbeth. According to him, it corresponds to Shakespeare’s vision of history, but it is, at the same time, a metaphor of the very essence of history.29 Kott’s use of the generic present indefinite in the description quoted above is indicative of the conflation he deftly and subtly creates between the sense of history projected in a fictional world (in Shakespeare’s history plays) and a universally valid notion of ‘History’. At the same time, however, what stands for the mechanism underlying the universalized history is but a description of the highly particularized history of the Communist rule. Thus the working of history in Shakespeare’s plays is meant to be recognized as an allegorical description of the struggle for power in the Stalinist governments in Eastern Europe; the Grand Mechanism in Shakespeare’s plays provides an oblique way of referring to the Stalinist ‘grinding machine’, described in his autobiographical work Still Alive. The slippages from one notion of history to another, from a moment in the past to one in the present, from the identification of a

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particular local situation (Stalinist Europe) to sweeping generalizations about ‘History’ are confusing and vexing to a present-day reader. Within the context of the book’s first appearance, however, they were perceived to be both productive and liberating. The fashion the concept of the Grand Mechanism set in East European performances up until the 1980s, its transformation into a cliché for dissident Shakespeare, provides ample proof of the powerful political resonance it had.30 Much of the success the Grand Mechanism enjoyed derives from its hybrid and over-determined nature in which Marxist categories converge with notions of history derived from existentialist philosophy as well as from Polish revisionist writings. Last, but not least, the concept helps Kott sum up and translate into essayistic language the topical, subversive messages of the oppositional Shakespeare performances staged in Poland in the late 1950s. Most of the vocabulary (mechanism, historical forces, historical necessity, driving forces and objective laws of history) used in conjunction with the Grand Mechanism is derived from the official discourses on history of the time, such as Stalin’s treatise on dialectical materialism, or from influential Marxist writings, such as Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness.31 Lukács’s definition of the reification process as a ‘reality made by man and which appears to him to be a natural phenomenon alien to himself; . . . man is wholly at the mercy of its laws, while acting he remains the object and not the subject of events’32 matches closely that of the Grand Mechanism.33 Kott’s Grand Mechanism keeps perpetuating itself similarly to the way in which, as Lukács shows, the system producing reification and alienation in capitalist society is implacably reproduced. In both cases, individual agency is allowed no scope: Kott’s description of Shakespearean characters (and by analogy of individuals in Stalinist regimes) as cogwheels in the Mechanism echoes Lukács’s analysis of the incapacity of the individual to modify the process of reification and ‘the laws’ governing economic and social activity.34 Unlike Kott, Lukács is still optimistic about the possibility of overcoming reification along with the attainment of ‘the complete knowledge of the whole’.35 To Lukács, this comprehensive ‘knowledge of the present’ (judged as ‘totalizing’ by postmodern thinking) 36 is linked with action and change: it means ‘that the objects of the empirical world are to be understood as aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of historical change’.37 The subject that Lukács credits with the agency capable of bringing about the momentous and ultimate change which would put an end to reification is the proletariat in the fulfilment of its historical



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role. Though Kott is indebted to Lukács’s notion of ‘the knowledge of the present’ and to its enabling propensity of making way for action, he nevertheless adopts a much more pessimistic view. In this respect, Kott voices the Polish revisionists’ loss of faith and disenchantment with orthodox Marxism and its utopian dimension. After the defeat of their revolutionary attempts, and in the face of the overwhelming repressive force of the reified structure, which the socialist state had proved to be, 38 revisionists like Kolakovski and Kott abandoned the ‘myth of progress’ associated with the Marxist narrative. It is this feeling of powerlessness in relation to the reified state which most resonated with East European audiences living in Stalinist or post-Stalinist regimes. At the same time, Kott’s anti-teleological view of the pervasive, self-perpetuating mechanism of power can be said to anticipate Foucault’s conceptualizations of power. Kott’s comments on Shakespeare also echo Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism, a text that was imposed in the Socialist bloc as dogma for the interpretation of history, or rather as the template for thinking about everything from history to biology or geophysics. In line with official Marxist-Leninist thinking, Stalin insists upon the ‘forces of history’ and the ‘laws of development’ and makes it clear that the ‘determining forces of social development’ and not ‘the good wishes of ‘great men’ are responsible for change’.39 In Kott’s approach to history, individual agency is similarly evacuated in favour of the ‘system’: ‘For there are no bad or good kings; kings are only kings. Or let us put it in modern terms: there is only the king’s situation, and the system.’40 The centrality of the notion of a ‘mechanism’ responsible for historical change, ubiquitous in Stalin’s discourse,41 is also striking in Lukács’s work and was preserved in the Marxist theories of history and historiography of the 1960s.42 Kott’s employment of the concept of mechanism unfortunately reproduces the monolithical and reductive approach that Stalinist discourse was accused of. Most importantly, his notion of Grand Mechanism rules out all possibility for conflict. All Kott can identify, in either the implied concept of ‘History’ in Shakespeare, or in his history plays in particular, is violence and terror.43 However, as Krystyna Kuiawińska has pointed out, the Polish public readily supported Kott’s version of history in Shakespeare as they fully sympathized and identified ‘with the characters caught up in humanity’s helpless fight against the forces of history’.44 The Polish public, as well as audiences elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, not only accepted but welcomed Kott’s vision of history as well as his appropriation of Shakespeare as a ciphered critique of the present.45

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Peter Brook was among the first to highlight Kott’s political perspective which rendered the book as much a critique of Polish contemporary society as it was of the Shakespearean world: ‘Here we have a man writing about Shakespeare’s attitude to life from direct experience. Kott is undoubtedly the only writer on Elizabethan matters who assumes without question that every one of his readers will at some point or other have been woken by the police in the middle of the night’.46 Kott starts from the inevitable situatedness of his position as a reader of Shakespeare: ‘A reader or spectator in the mid-twentieth century interprets Richard III through his own experiences. He cannot do otherwise.’ This position licenses ‘discovering in Shakespeare’s plays problems that are relevant to our own times’. The assumption that ‘every historical period finds in him [Shakespeare] what it is looking for and what it wants to see’47 further legitimizes Kott’s discursive strategy to establish continuous analogies between the world in Shakespeare’s plays and that of recent Polish history, of which reference is explicitly made to the Nazi occupation, while the Stalinist period is only indirectly alluded to in the ‘Aesopian’ language that East European readers had become adept at deciphering. His comments on Richard III, for example, are redolent of references to Stalinist practices employed to strike terror in the population, such as the famous fake political trials to which representatives of juridical institutions were forced to or were only too willing to become complicit with. Discussing Hastings’s execution in the play, Kott describes what had become standard practice in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s and which led to the corruption of the juridical system in socialist countries: The crime must now be legalized. There has not been time for a trial. But the trial must and will take place, with all appropriate ceremony. Except that the accused cannot be brought to court. Shakespeare knew the working of the Grand Mechanism. What are the Lord Mayor of London, and the judges, for? They have only to be persuaded. Richard and the Duke of Buckingham call for the Lord Mayor. He comes at once. No, he does not have to be persuaded. He is persuaded already. He is always persuaded.48 The fierceness of the political critique obliquely included in the comment on the scene in Richard III relies heavily on Kott’s idiosyncratic style. The short sentences, the use of the present tense, the colloquial tone asking questions, the dry humour that relies upon a host of implicit political references, all well known to readers yet never acknowledged in public, turn



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the text from a reading of Shakespeare’s play into a political pamphlet. The pungency of the pamphlet is increased by Kott’s skill at rewriting the Shakespearean text as a powerful script of present political events that includes the director’s guidelines for its staging: Thus has the long week begun. It will end with the great coronation scene. Richard has by now eliminated all those who had stood in his way to the throne. He has terrorized the Council, the House of Lords, and the City. It is night. The forestage represents a courtyard of the royal palace. The terrified nobles, assembled here, watch in silence. Gloster’s agents walk about everywhere. In a corner of the courtyard there is a crowd of townspeople dragged from their house. It is they who are to proclaim Richard king, for he has agreed to reign only by the will of the people. At last he shows himself on the balcony, with a prayer-book in his hand. He is praying. After all, he is to be king by the will of God.49 The scene as described by Kott could readily be recognized as the moment of installing a totalitarian leader at the head of a socialist state. Staging it would not incur the risk of censorship as it would be performed as part of Shakespeare’s history play. No wonder theatre people found Kott’s book exhilarating, with Czech directors calling it their Shakespeare bible.50 In his preface, Brook sums up the appeal of Kott’s text: ‘his book has the freshness of the writing by an eyewitness at the Globe or the immediacy of a page of criticism of a current film. To the world of scholarship this is a valuable contribution – to the world of the theatre an invaluable one’. 51 What Brook does not mention is the political dimension of Kott’s position as ‘eyewitness’ not only at the Globe, but also in the theatre of political reality in Poland. Kott combines his own sense of theatricality, his capacity to ‘stage Shakespeare in the theatre of his mind’52 with the experience derived from the dissident Shakespeare produced on the Polish stages (e.g. the 1956 Hamlet in Krakow or the 1958 Richard III in Warsaw) to rewrite the officially sanctioned versions of both Shakespeare and recent Polish history. His undertaking is not that of the ‘professional’ Shakespeare scholar, 53 but of a universally educated intellectual, an ‘homme de lettres’, whose lineage goes back to Francis Bacon and Montaigne. In Poland, as well as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the intellectual, often called ‘writer’, assumed an outstanding social importance, placing himself at the very centre of political life. 54 Kott positioned himself as a member of the liberal minded, revisionist intelligentsia addressing the debate-starved audiences

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of socialist cultural journals. He defined the position he wrote from as being out in the streets, in the agora of the city. 55 Much of the political localization of Kott’s reading of Shakespeare, as well as much of the urgency and directness of his essayistic style, is lost in the English version that, unlike the French one, ‘domesticates’ his writing to make it comply with the standard impersonal and neutral style of literary criticism and scholarship in the 1960s.56 Important references, such as the one to the ‘Polish October’ (the mass protests in Warsaw leading to the change of government in 1956) in Kott’s comment on the Krakow Hamlet, were elided.57 Cetera argues that the replacement of this event with the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, well publicized in the West as the moment when Stalin’s crimes were unveiled, was designed to accommodate ‘a better Western sense of Eastern politics, with the peculiarities of local politics shrunk into an irrelevant and rather inexplicable detail’.58 Kott’s widely read essay on Hamlet loses most of its force if the narrow localization, already announced in its title ‘Hamlet of the Mid-Century’, is glossed over. The essay was the result of Kott’s experience of the dissident Krakow performance, a fortnight before the mass revolt in Warsaw. It expressed his belief that the theatre both reflected and provided further stimuli for revolutionary events.59 In his comment, he acknowledged that he privileged the representation over the text: he only ‘reached for the text after the performance’.60 Kott’s present-oriented Shakespeare readings, grounded in performance, marked a significant departure from the officially accepted practice of historicizing Shakespeare scholarship. Critics like Střibrnỳ were aware of the appeal and subversive potential of such ‘modernizing criticism’. He repeatedly insisted on inaccuracies in Kott’s essays and called for support for ‘traditional practice’. 61 Abusch rejected such modernizing tendencies and held up Weimann’s historicizing work as a model. Kott remained influential with theatre people, and the keywords of his reading of Hamlet – political manoeuvrings, surveillance, Fortinbras as a totalitarian ruler – informed most of the productions of Hamlet in the Socialist bloc up until the 1989 change in political system.

Kott’s Revision of the Marxist Concept of History Kott’s approach to temporality in history has been the object of most of the criticism directed against him. The ambivalence of the political attached to his cyclic vision of history and denial of development was largely the result



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of his negotiation between the official Marxist discourses and alternative existentialist positions, which he employed to substantiate a revisionist, iconoclastic position. According to the official position, formulated in Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism, history, just like ‘nature’, ‘is in a state of continuous movement and change, of continuous renewal and development’, and ‘the process of development should not be understood as a movement in a circle, not as a simple repetition of what has already occurred but as an onward and upward movement, as a transition from an old qualitative state to a new qualitative state. . .’. The rationale behind the teleological projection of history is the legitimization of the socialist system which replaces the capitalist system ‘just as at one time the feudal system was replaced by the capitalist system’. The process of transition from one system to another is governed by the ‘law of development’ and is a ‘natural and inevitable phenomenon’. Historical change is largely understood as the replacement of ‘the old’ by ‘the new’, these categories being projected in a Manichean opposition and invested with unambiguous moral and political significances. ‘Old ideas and theories. . . which serve the interests of the moribund forces of society’ and ‘hamper the development and progress of society’ are opposed to ‘the new and advanced ideas and theories which serve the interests of the advanced forces of society’. This grid was both rigid and flexible enough to allow the instrumentalization of social and cultural history to the particular needs and interests of the Stalinist government. For example, one of the reasons for categorizing medieval culture as ‘reactionary’, while Renaissance culture was privileged as progressive, was the fact that the Stalinist ideal society of the 1930s was envisaged as the continuation and development of the sixteenth-century European Renaissance.62 The enormous political investment of this vision of history was refracted in Kott’s obstinate insistence upon the non-dialectical, cyclical nature of history, upon the denial of development, with repetition replacing growth. Kott enlists the concept of the Grand Mechanism coupled with the metaphor of the ‘grand staircase of history’, traced in Shakespeare’s history plays, to give a political edge to his repetitive sense of history: In Richard II Bolingbroke was a ‘positive hero‘; an avenger. He defended violated law and justice. But in his own tragedy he only plays the part of Richard II. The cycle has been completed. The cycle is beginning again. Bolingbroke has mounted half-way up the grand staircase of history. . .. A new reign has begun: six heads are being sent to the capital for the new King. But Shakespeare cannot end a tragedy in this way. A shock is

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needed. The working of the Grand Mechanism has to be highlighted by a flash of awareness. . . For this is one of the great scenes that history will repeat; scenes that have been written once and for all. 63 The ‘great scenes that history will repeat’ are the scenes of terror and violence during World War II and the Stalinist post-war period and which kept recurring even after the 1956 events. The official discourse on Shakespeare similarly relied on repetition and continuity, with the Renaissance prefiguring the socialist society.64 Kott demystifies the idealizing rhetoric of the official view and focuses instead on the violence and cruelty that gets repeated. Therefore, when reading the scene of Richard III’s wooing of Lady Anne ‘through our own experiences’, ‘one must find in it the night of the Nazi occupation, concentration camps, mass murders. One must see in it the cruel time when all moral standards are broken, when the victim becomes the executioner, and vice versa.’65 On account of censorship, Kott could not make direct reference to the Stalinist terror, but his audiences understood the allusions perfectly well. For example, the second French edition of Kott’s book inserted among images of Shakespearean representations, a photograph of Stalin’s burial where Khrushchev and Beria were carrying his coffin; this was one piece of evidence the editors provided for the book’s many parallels between past and present. Kott’s conviction ‘that history has no meaning and stands still, or constantly repeats its cruel cycle; that it is an elemental force, like hail, storm, or hurricane, birth and death’66 was partially the result of frustration, of lost hope and faith in the socialist regime, of the nihilism and even cynicism that was prevalent among the revisionists after 1956.67 Kolakovski, a major figure of the Polish rewizjonism, had also scandalized the authorities with his contestation of the Marxist rationalistic and deterministic view of history and with his denying any meaning to history as a whole.68 This sense of history was also the result of the absorption of existentialist philosophy to which Polish revisionists eagerly turned to fill the vacuum left by the dissolution of orthodox Marxism. Kott, being a theatre person, also tapped the resources of modernist theatre and theatre theories to articulate an alternative version to the official reading of history in Shakespeare. In an interview conducted by Kuharski, Kott admitted that one of the ‘contradictions’ of his activity as a socialist ideologue was his equal fascination with both Marxism and modernist, avant-garde literature and theatre, modernism having officially been rejected as an expression of ‘bourgeois decadence’. 69 In the context of Kott’s iconoclasm, the modernist revolt against history, and particularly



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against a Hegelianized sense of history understood as progress, acquired the alluring promise of an oppositional discourse. Equally appealing to Kott was the modernist revision of the nineteenth-century romantic or realistic Shakespeare and Artaud’s revolutionary essays on the theatre.70 Kott’s view of history as ‘one continuous chain of violence’, ‘no more than a gigantic slaughter’, it being propelled by a ‘cruel mechanism which forces people to violence, cruelty and treason’71 echoes Artaud’s vocabulary.72 So does Kott’s valorization of the world ‘stripped of illusions’, in which ‘violence has been openly revealed’, a world reduced ‘to elemental forces of hate and lust’.73 In his preface to the 1989 German edition of his book, Kott prides himself on having been the first critic to foreground violence in Shakespeare’s plays.74 The centrality of violence in his essays can also be attributed to his openness to contemporary modernist theatre, including the Polish avantgarde theatre thriving in the late 1950s. The hybridization of Shakespeare with Beckett in Kott’s reading of King Lear should be placed against the background of the unparalleled boom in the innovative, experimental Polish theatre that he witnessed: the latest in the West European theatre of the absurd was readily staged and absorbed. The production of Waiting for Godot in 1957 became a major cultural and political event, reviewed by Kott as ‘Waiting for Socialism’; outstanding theatrical figures such as Grotowski and Kantor were starting their career; Polish absurdist playwrights, like Mrozek, were competing with the Western ones. 75 Understanding King Lear ‘through the theatre of his time’ involved juxtaposing lines from King Lear with excerpts from Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and constructing similarities between the ‘cruelty’ in Shakespeare and that in Durrenmatt, Beckett and Ionesco. Kott replaced the concept of the tragic or of tragedy, revered by the socialist realist authorities, with the notion of the ‘grotesque’, taken over from the theatre of the absurd. The Grand Mechanism of history is rethought in terms of the grotesque and of commedia dell’arte buffoonery to voice the revisionist’s loss of faith in Marxism and in its utopian dimension.

Kott and Socialist Realist Criticism on Shakespeare ‘Shakespeare is a participant in the great struggle for the fair future’ – from Pravda The full force of the iconoclasm of Kott’s Shakespeare can be best perceived if it is contrasted with the socialist realist Shakespeare constructed in the 1930s in the Soviet Union and imposed as a form of colonizing discourse

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all over socialist countries (Mao’s China included) in the late ‘40s and ‘50s. Shakespeare our Contemporary was designed primarily as a contrasting foil to the ‘prescriptive’ definition of Shakespeare, 76 first established by Anatoly A. Smirnov in 1934, right after the official imposition of Socialist Realism as official dogma,77 to be extended and refined by Mikhail Morozov and Alexander Anikst.78 Morozov and Anikst were translated into all the languages of the socialist bloc and were compulsory references in writings on Shakespeare until the early ‘60s.79 In the first place, Kott rejects the rhetoric of idealization that socialist realist Shakespeare was conceived in. Kott reappropriates Shakespeare for the opposite purpose of demystifying and demythologizing the constructions of socialist propaganda that configured Shakespeare as a great hero of socialism. As a form of negative reconfiguration, Kott’s Shakespeare is constantly deconstructing and inverting the ‘party line’ as well as the cultural and political references that underpin it. Judged by the official norms of Shakespeare criticism, Kott commits gross ideological errors, such as not embedding Shakespeare in the ‘progressive’ Renaissance and not aligning him with the social forces of the bourgeoisie.80 His Shakespeare is not a ‘militant’, offering support to ‘revolutionary’ actions 81 and to ‘people of the new era’,82 nor do his plays openly protest against social exploitation and racial discrimination,83 or promote a ‘scientific’, ‘objective’, rationalist view, fighting religious mysticism and idealism, or at least opposing reason to ‘wild passions’84. In Kott’s reading, Shakespeare’s tragedies, let alone the history plays, are not ‘optimistic’ either.85 His plays did not affirm a ‘positive view of humanity’ which transcended class bounds and anticipated a socialist culture. Kott’s approach to characters definitely ignores the idealizing rhetoric about their optimism and vitality. In his readings, the endings of the tragedies are not similar to the ‘life asserting’, ‘joyous’ comedies, 86 since Fortinbras and Malcolm are no longer projected as representatives of forces of renewal. Smirnov, for example, had insisted that in Macbeth the only corrupt ‘cankers’ are the titular hero and his wife, whereas the body of society is healthy, with Duncan and Malcolm being ‘wholesome and energetic heroes’.87 The most grievous departure from the ideologically correct line is, of course, Kott’s failure to prove that the ‘idea of movement and development’, that ‘dynamism’ and ‘uninterrupted ascent’,88 inform both Shakespeare’s plot and character and suggest a dialectical sense of history. Kott denies the continuity between Shakespeare and ‘socialist man’, between Shakespeare’s world and that of socialist society; in his readings the plays do not prefigure ‘the dreams of the coming victory of humanity’.89



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It therefore comes as no surprise that Kott’s book was banned in the Soviet Union and circulated only in samizdat (homemade clandestine copies) and that more or less ‘orthodox’ critics in other socialist countries focused their response on Kott’s transgressions of the official norms. In his 1964 address, Alexander Abusch rehearsed all the traditional arguments of socialist realist Shakespeare, privileging the idea that his plays represent ‘history with necessity’s iron passage from the feudal past to periods of transition and then to a higher stage of development’.90 Kott is not mentioned in the talk, but reference to him is more than transparent. Abusch turns against ‘all nihilistic readings of Shakespeare’, and he particularly objects to Kott’s hybridized Shakespeare. To place on the same footing ‘the great realistic and humanistic Shakespeare with the absurd à la Beckett’ is nothing less than ‘a falsification of Shakespeare’ and is to be forcefully rejected. Brook’s performance of King Lear is similarly an instance of ‘the latest performance style of late bourgeois decadence’. Abusch issues a strong warning similar to the one given by Novikov in Romania: any failure to condemn this (i.e. Kott’s and Brook’s) position is tantamount to ‘opening the door to a bourgeois, reactionary world view’; in other words, it will incur dire political consequences. Kott’s ‘primitive and violent modernization’, opening up the past to present inquiries and establishing undesirable links with the present, is opposed to the established historicizing approach. Critics writing for the newly established socialist version of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch had no choice but to take up and develop Abusch’s line of argument. Hildegard Schuman turned to the critical position adopted by the British hardline Marxist Alick West to counter Kott’s ‘contradictory view of history’ that ‘single[s] out parts at the expense of the whole’ (Schuman, 205). The argument was clinched with a rehearsal of Morozov’s view of the ‘growth’ of characters in King Lear. Schuman reissued Abusch’s warning of the need to ‘reject all such attempts’ at decadent reading. In a GDR, where the process of de-Stalinization was much delayed, Kott’s work did not have a significant impact either on Shakespeare critics or on theatre people until the 1970s. Heiner Műller’s transgressive adaptation of Macbeth signals dangerous breaks in the monolithic approach to Shakespeare. In Czechoslovakia, academics like Zdenek Střibrnỳ, Zdenek Vancura, and Zdenek Horinek were highly critical of Kott, although without adopting hardline positions like their GDR counterparts. Unlike the GDR, in 1964, when Kott gave a talk in Prague at a conference of translators of Shakespeare, Czechoslovakia was experiencing a period of détente and de-Stalinization. This involved a greater tolerance for alternative discourses

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and positions, such that a dialogue could be established between the former monolithic party line and modernist, iconoclastic views, embraced mostly by theatre people. This dialogue took the public form of a round table talk on the recent Kott mania and was published in the journal Divaldo in January 1965.91 In his contribution to this talk, as well as in earlier papers,92 Střibrnỳ largely rehearsed the conservative Marxist-Leninist objections to Kott’s denial of a dialectical sense of history as well as to his failure to highlight Shakespeare’s ‘humanism’ and optimism: ‘Shakespeare introduces a sense of dialectical dynamics in history and opens the possibility for man’s active intervention in history’.93 In Richard III, as well as in the Henry plays, Kott fails to take into consideration the fact that ‘Shakespeare was putting the whole of his art into a patriotic interpretation of English history’ and that Shakespeare ‘emerges from these plays as the great poet of the people, strengthening the unity of the nation’.94 Neither does Kott understand that ‘Shakespeare’s image of time . . . brings in the will of man, set free from religious bonds and metaphysical fatalism’.95 If Střibrnỳ does not warn against the fascination with Kott in as strong terms as does Abusch, he still turns against ‘the thoughtless following of foreign models of whatever origin’, lumping into the category of ‘foreign models’ Peter Brook’s staging of King Lear as well.96 Zdenek Vancura charges Kott with medievalizing Shakespeare and with joining the ‘anti-renaissance campaign’ in the West.97 Given the success that Kott and Brook had recently had in Prague, Bretislav Hodek wants to take a stronger stand against ‘the way Kott is tempting the theatre people’.98 And indeed theatre critics and directors not only think that Kott’s book is an immense provocation to the traditional theatre and helps them ‘renew the theatre by playing Shakespeare’,99 but would like to establish it as a director’s handbook.100 What theatre people value in Shakespeare Our Contemporary is the new ‘theatre theory’ it advances which has the potential to revolutionize theatrical performances in Eastern Europe. They insist that the book is less a piece of Shakespearean scholarship than a treatise in ‘theatrology’ which is invaluable in helping theatre people overcome the rigid conventions and limitations still prevailing in Czechoslovakia.101 The theatre people’s defence of Kott includes a critique of the deadening rhetoric of idealization in approaching Shakespeare and the Renaissance that was prevalent in the scholarly approaches of Czech academics.102 Rather unexpectedly, the response in Poland to Kott’s work was muted by comparison. In the theatre world, only Wajda’s Hamlet and Swirnawski’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream adopted Kott’s insights. The silence in the



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public sphere was largely determined by that fact that in 1964, when Kott achieved the greatest visibility both in Western and Eastern Europe, he was blacklisted in Poland; four years later his citizenship was withdrawn. In countries like Romania and Bulgaria, which did not experience a strong reformist movement in the ’50s or ’60s, Kott’s impact was largely restricted to the stage. Unlike the closely policed and regimented academia, the theatre people, particularly young directors, were more committed to experiment and change and welcomed the possibilities for contestation and innovation that Kott’s book offered. As in Czechoslovakia, Shakespeare Our Contemporary did turn into a new theatre bible, even if never acknowledged as such. In Romania, at least, his influence on the staging of Shakespeare’s plays was instrumental in the final departure from socialist realism and the movement towards fashioning a new modernist, avant-garde theatre.

Kott’s Reception in Romania In 1964, the performance of Peter Brook’s King Lear in Romania was discussed cautiously in Scinteia, the official newspaper of the communist Party. The text included the following indirect reference to Jan Kott: ‘We cannot agree with the conception of some commentators who extend the decomposition of Lear’s world to any other world, and by mixing it up with that of Beckett’s theatre bring about unwanted confusion. And in this spirit of truth, we liked the production very much’. The author of the review was a well-known, ‘ideologically correct’ Shakespearean scholar, Mihnea Gheorghiu. Radu Popescu, a hardline theatre critic writing for the other official daily, România liberă, did not even ‘like the production very much’ and obviously preferred the other production with which the RSC toured Romania, namely Clifford Williams’s The Comedy of Errors. Kott’s influence on Brook and the resulting hybridization of Shakespeare and Beckett must have been a major reason for Popescu’s misgivings about Lear. It is significant that none of the official papers, or any of the theatre or art and literature journals of the time mentioned Kott, nor dealt with the entropic Beckettian world of Brook’s Lear. As in the GDR, Kott was the ‘unnamable’, the revisionary figure, whose mere mention threatened to destabilize socialist values and canons. Yet reference to Kott in Romania goes back to 1961, the very year when Kott’s Szkice o Szekspirze was published in Poland. In a last-ditch defence of socialist realism, Mihail Novicov criticized Kott for his 1956 essays, in which

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he displayed a ‘negative attitude’ to socialist realism, and concluded that Kott was hostile to socialism itself.103 Novicov insisted on the incompatibility of socialist realism and modernism, which was nothing but an expression of bourgeois decadence, and defined the opposition of the two artistic modes as another form of the class struggle waged at a global level. Attempts to combine the two, such as had been advanced by Kott and other revisionist writers in Poland, were not only politically and ideologically suspect but most dangerous as they subjected socialist realism to the degrading influence of modernism.104 Brook’s production must have galvanized the artistic world in Bucharest, providing legitimacy to non-conformist positions in the theatre. Only one month after the performance of King Lear, David Esrig was able to announce a production of Troilus and Cressida based on Kott’s reading of the play. His essay ‘Fişă pentru un viitor spectacol shakespearian’ [‘Outline for a future Shakespeare production’] was published in the weekly Contemporanul, the journal which had been most enthusiastic about Brook’s production. In this essay, Esrig quotes Kott extensively, even audaciously. Esrig organizes his essay on Kott’s debunking attitude to the Trojan War in Troilus and Cressida –‘the war is fought over a cuckold and a hussy’.105 Adopting a strategy similar to Kott’s way of universalizing and at the same time topicalizing Shakespeare, Esrig projects the Trojan War as the ‘prototype of all wars’. The implications of this trans-historical view were quite subversive in 1964, when socialist propaganda heavily employed the notion of a ‘just war’ to rally support for ‘revolutionary’, ‘anti-imperialist’ actions, which the Romanian audience secretly believed to have been initiated by the Soviet Union. Esrig’s discussion of his future production of Troilus and Cressida looks very much like a summary of Kott’s essay: the play is a political pamphlet, its buffo tone expresses a bitter philosophy, all the great heroes in Homer’s poem, be they Greeks or Trojans, are ridiculous caricatures, they do not believe in the war but have to defend their involvement in it. What Esrig sets out to show in his staging of the play is a world whose logic implacably forces the characters to act foolishly. They are ‘caught up in a vicious circle that makes them perform ever more stupid and illogical acts’. To Esrig, this is a grotesque world, and he quotes Kott to support his thesis: ‘In tragedy the protagonists die, but the moral order is preserved. Their death confirms the existence of the absolute. In this amazing play Troilus neither dies himself, nor does he kill the unfaithful Cressida. There is no catharsis. Even the death of Hector is not fully tragic . . .. The grotesque is more cruel than tragedy.’106 The identification of the world as cruelly grotesque will



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be the catchword for Romanian productions of Shakespeare well into the 1980s. Esrig’s reading of Hector’s dilemma reiterates Kott’s line of argument on Hector’s abrupt switch from criticizing a war fought over a morally dubious cause to his sudden statement that nevertheless it was impossible to give Helen back – and adds a twist that has a topical resonance: Hector’s situation is one in which ‘a person who is able to adopt a correct ethical attitude and who rationally weighs down all arguments, finds out that there is no alternative to choose from’. The awareness of this hopeless situation is what he calls ‘lucidity’. Staging Shakespeare’s play is an exercise in ‘bitter lucidity’.107 The performance premiered one year later in April 1965. By that time, the Romanian stage had already witnessed several productions of Eugene Ionesco as well as the hybridization of the canonical Romanian playwright I. L. Caragiale with the theatre of the absurd.108 A new discussion of the meanings and prospects of realism had been launched in the most important theatre journal of the time, Teatrul, marking the emancipation from the norms and strictures of socialist realism. However, at the time of the performance of Troilus and Cressida, the journal Teatrul denounced the theatre of the absurd, as well as the artists and critics influenced by existentialism, and reasserted the doctrinaire opposition between the ideologically sound socialist culture and the decadent Western one. Kott was referred to in the usual oblique way.109 The theatrical and political context in which Esrig produced his Troilus and Cressida was therefore still volatile. The production was near to being banned, and was rescued by the fact that it won a prestigious prize at the festival Théâtre des Nations, organized the same year in Paris. If the French journal Arts praised the way Esrig had translated Kott’s reading of the play into a powerful burlesque revel, critics like Radu Popescu condemned this approach to Shakespeare.110 They complained of the excess of parody and comedy. The representation of celebrated figures like Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnon and Patroclus as subhuman barbarians dressed in the furs of wild animals was deemed unacceptable; the costumes of the ‘civilized’ Trojans were equally questionable with their ornate silk clothes and silver armour, denoting decadent indulgence.111 The set of the play, delightfully innovative as it was, was a further insult. The stage represented an age-worn battlefield, gutted with holes and trenches in which the characters got lost, stumbled, slipped, crawled or waded in mud in a most undignified way.112 Troy was presented as a diminutive model, fully equipped with ramparts, towers and bridges, suggesting either miniature drawings in medieval Books of Hours or Lego toys for children.113

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Esrig’s insistence on the carnivalesque was perceived as a threat to the ideological constructions of the cause of anti-war protest. The production’s treatment of ‘the violence and inhumanity of war’ was found wanting on account of the overall flippant and ‘cheerful’ atmosphere.114 A number of directors and actors toed the official line and declared Esrig’s production to be ‘non-educational’115 and even dangerous. Its distorted representation of Shakespeare’s humanist anti-war message threatened to corrupt the response of young people and pervert their relation to Shakespeare. Hence the performance was judged to be defective in discharging the proper ideological function the theatre was assigned in a socialist society. The animus against the production reached a climax when Radu Popescu peremptorily demanded that theatre people ‘put an end’ to active re-readings of the text as well as to all theatrical experimenting.116 Text-centered performances, no longer ‘adulterated’ by the director’s intervention, should replace excessive experiments such as Esrig’s. There loomed the danger that the movement of pluralizing theatrical discourse by breaking away from dogmatic socialist realism might be put in jeopardy. Critics favourable to innovation stood up against the reversion to the previous monologism in theatrical productions; by defending Esrig’s Troilus and Cressida, and by implication Kott’s reading of the play, they defended the right of the theatre to be innovative in dealing with the dramatic text.117 Dinu Cernescu’s Hamlet (Bucharest 1974) represented the most daring Romanian representation of Kott’s notion of the Grand Mechanism. Cernescu himself uses the term, and the critics adopt it as part of their vocabulary. The implacable determinism of the Mechanism crushing the individual and leaving no room for agency, the cyclical repetition as well as the foregrounding of the violence the struggle for power involves, are all foregrounded. Both the director and the reviewers seem to have assimilated Kott’s essay as the most persuasive reading of the play, in tune with ‘the existential and political truth of the audience’.118 This unreserved acceptance can be attributed to recent changes in the political context in Romania that seemed to re-confirm Kott’s description of the socialist/ Stalinist mechanism of power: 1974, the year of the Hamlet production, was also the year Ceausescu shored up his totalitarian rule by having himself appointed president of the country (a function hitherto non-existent in Romania). As reviews of Cernescu’s production in Bulgaria suggest,119 the theatrical representation of the Grand Mechanism and of the world of spying and surveillance was visually compelling. An important clue to the visual representation was the set of the performance which literalized Denmark as a prison. The set surrounded and included the auditorium,



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thus imprisoning the spectators in ‘an actual penitentiary, with black iron bars at the window, with dark and long lateral walls, crooked corridors full of whispers, ending in iron doors’.120 Equally suggestive was the transformation of the major prop of the production: Old Hamlet’s coffin morphed into Claudius’ throne, then into the wedding table and into Gertrude’s bed, to end with its recycling as Ophelia’s tomb. This chain of transformation highlighted the centrality of death and murder to power; at the same time the circular recurrence of the image of death reinforced the sense of the implacability of the Grand Mechanism that ultimately crushed everyone. Cernescu’s considerable rewriting of characters and plot enhanced the effect of the Grand Mechanism. Most shocking to the audience were the changes in the positions and relations between characters with secondary figures such as Horatio and Fortinbras foregrounded and the stature of Hamlet diminished. Horatio is no longer Hamlet’s friend but the archschemer in the play, out to depose Claudius. He tries to manipulate Hamlet against Claudius, to which purpose he impersonates the Ghost and utters his revelations; as Hamlet does not prove strong enough to depose the king, Horatio turns to Fortinbras. The plot continues Kott’s reading of Fortinbras as the ‘strong arm’, which carries on the ruthless struggle for power and initiates a period of terror. Hamlet’s final line ‘the rest is silence’ is given to Fortinbras to suggest the silencing of his new subjects and the suppression of all resistance. With respect to Hamlet, Cernescu imagined him as an ordinary man, deprived of the aura of a hero, and a ‘blind victim’ of the Grand Mechanism; his downfall is the best evidence of the latter’s propensity to crush everybody.121 Hamlet has to be suppressed not necessarily because he opposes the system, but because he is different from the other characters. His very difference interrogates the rules underpinning the Grand Mechanism and poses the most serious danger to the system.122 The Bulgarian audience welcomed Cernescu’s Hamlet as most innovative and transgressive, and rated it in importance next to Lyubimov’s celebrated Moscow production; reviewers singled out Hamlet’s loneliness: This betrayal by a friend resounds more powerfully than Gertrude’s sudden remarriage to Claudius; it shows Hamlet as absolutely lonely and completely helpless. Thus Cernescu changes the relations in the tragedy, treating all characters, without a single exception, as Hamlet’s enemies, active and merciless at that. Gertrude in the closet scene is chiefly afraid for herself while Ophelia betrays Hamlet’s love in an egotistic

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and wicked way. All are part of a plot; the dialogues resemble conversations between conspirators. The mise-en-scène creates the impression of secret meetings of criminals carefully preparing the next murder.123 In a way, Cernescu’s Hamlet also can be said to have introduced Kott-based productions of Shakespeare into Bulgaria. The review of a production of Macbeth at the Vraska theatre in 1977 highlighted the Kottian political vocabulary, however, without mentioning him explicitly; reference to the political reality in the socialist system is veiled, to be inferred from the Aesopian language about ‘fascism’: [The Vratsa Theater] shows an acute and modern way of thinking, a sense of political involvement with the hot issues of the day: violence, killing, despotism as the expression of a certain philosophy, as the materialization of a concrete political conception, as aggressive fascism, incompatible with either the principles of democracy and humanism or the progressive tendencies of human civilization.124 Another reviewer, however, strongly disapproved of the Kottian reading of the end of the play adopted by the Vraska production: I cannot accept the concept underlying the final conflict between Macbeth the murderer and his opponents avenging his horrid crimes. Here this conflict is entirely abandoned and replaced with the idea of the absolute power of violence in the world and its endless repetition through time and generations. . .Taking away the splendid triumph of retribution in Macbeth is tantamount to denying Shakespeare’s humanist pathos. And this is exactly what the production tries to convince us of when Macduff fights Macbeth not as a legitimate revenger but rather as a common weak dueler; when amidst a corpse-strewn wilderness Malcolm receives a crown and a sword from the hands of murderers who are Macbeth’s former tools.125 One can conclude that the Romanian reception of Kott was representative for southeastern socialist Europe. The Romanian story was, by and large, reiterated in Bulgaria, and continued until the 1989 revolutions. As Dennis Kennedy has shown, Kott exerted the greatest influence on Shakespeare performances in those years, and established a tradition of reading classical texts as coded messages about the present to foil repressive regimes which kept ‘Shakespeare as cold warrior’ alive in Eastern Europe throughout



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the whole socialist period.126 However, the importance of his readings in the region went beyond turning Shakespeare into a socialist dissident playwright: Kott’s book not only articulated an intellectually powerful way of opposing the regime while evading its censorship, but was also instrumental in radically innovating theatrical vocabulary and techniques. Kott’s ‘contemporary Shakespeare’ became part of a larger political and artistic project that turned the theatre into a major forum for debate, innovation and oppositional action.

Kott in the West1 Zoltán Márkus

In 1969, in his mid-50s, Jan Kott received political asylum in the United States. The decision to move to America and accept a professorship at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook was the culmination of several chains of events. One of these was Kott’s personal trajectory from a powerful Polish intellectual luminary right after World War II to a persona non grata in Poland by the end of the 1960s. In 1946, he was, as one of his contemporaries recalls, much ‘admired and envied’2 in his home country. His first books (Mythology and Realism [1946] and School of Classics [1949, enlarged 1955]) were well received; he was one of the most formidable critical authorities in the new regime, a founder of the Institute for Literary Studies of the new Polish Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the Polish State Prize (twice: 1951 and 1955), and – at 34 – Professor of Romance Literature and Polish Philology. However, like numerous other Eastern European intellectuals, he went through a post-Stalinist awakening, resigned from the Communist Party in 1957, and became increasingly disgruntled with Polish political life. In 1964, he signed ‘The Letter of the Thirty Four’ protesting against Communist censorship, which the regime took as a declaration of his dissident status. His move to the US was, first and foremost, the consequence of political necessity and coercion. Shortly after his departure, his professional titles and privileges in Poland were annulled; even his entry in a Polish encyclopaedia was removed and substituted by a section devoted to the ‘domestic cat’ (‘kot’ in Polish). Several earlier stints abroad had also paved the way for Kott’s decision to leave Poland. Starting in fall 1938, at 24, he spent a formative year in Paris,

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which inspired his work for the rest of his life. His readings in the French Enlightenment (especially of Voltaire) and the French essay tradition from Montaigne through Henry de Montherlant were filtered through eclectic contemporary influences. His personal contacts with Tzara and fellow Dadaists; André Breton, Paul Eluard and fellow Surrealists; and an assortment of Marxists and Trotskyites were uniquely inflected by his acquaintance with Jacques Maritain, and his neo-Thomist philosophy. ‘In those few years between the Spanish civil war and the outbreak of World War II’, Kott remembers in his autobiography, ‘the truly great philosophical debates took place between the disciples of the four sages – Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel – between the phenomenologists and dialecticians of both faiths, between the once-again hungry devils of history and action and the elusive angels of pure knowledge.’3 It was upon Maritain’s recommendation that Kott – a non-believer – spent a few weeks in a Dominican seminary in the Massif Central during spring 1939. After his return to Poland and the harrowing experience of World War II, Kott was able to travel beyond the Iron Curtain to Western Europe and elsewhere. In 1956, at Sartre’s invitation, he was the editor of a special Polish issue of the prestigious Les Temps modernes.4 In 1963, he received a British Council fellowship to learn English in Oxford; in 1965, he went on a lecture-tour in England. In 1966, he was granted permission to leave Poland to accept the Russianist/East-Europeanist professor Victor Ehrlich’s invitation to work as a Visiting Professor of Polish Literature at Yale University. After his year at Yale, he was a visiting professor at Berkeley and in Leuven, Belgium. By the time he received political asylum and his university appointment at Stony Brook in 1969, he had accumulated considerable experience of living abroad. ‘When we left for the United States in the summer of 1966’, Kott recalls, ‘I brought my own publications and some books with dedications. The rest were distributed among friends and people we didn’t even know.’5 One of the recurring motifs of Kott’s autobiography (and life) is the heartrending act of abandoning his books, notes and manuscripts. He found financial stability and permanence at Stony Brook; he was a professor there, and later emeritus professor, till the mid-1980s, while he also accepted shorter appointments at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, at Yale and – as a dramaturge – at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Following a Getty Foundation Fellowship in 1985–6, he moved to Santa Monica, California, where he died in December 2001. It is clear both from Kott’s autobiographical notes and his other writings that, although he acknowledged (or was forced to acknowledge)



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the political rupture of Europe into East and West, he always believed that East-Central Europe from Poland through Romania belonged to a culturally unified (and ultimately ‘Western’) Europe. In a letter to Czesław Miłosz about his visit to the Venice Biennale in 1978, Kott remarks about a few Russian émigrés, ‘They are the anti-Soviet Soviets, very different from Hungarians and Rumanians, who, like Poles, are instantly and naturally “Western”, as if they never left Paris.’6 It is also clear, however, that Kott does not define ‘Europeanness’ as a kind of chauvinistic Euro-centrism, but as a shared experience of the tragedies of twentieth-century European history. In a moving essay devoted to the memory of Tadeusz Borowski, he uses the title of the novel Une éducation européenne by Romain Gary (a French writer of Polish origin), and defines the concept of ‘European education’ as the experience of living through the horrors of Stalinism, Nazism and the Holocaust. In this sense, Kott states, ‘Borowski received a full “European education”. One might even say overeducation.’7 In the same vein, therefore, Europeanness does not entail some kind of cultural superiority for Kott, but the common experience of a shared history of totalitarian terror and oppression. In addition to political necessities and his various travels, Kott’s move to the United States had been prepared by the publications of his work in the West. As Kott puts it, his ‘own initial entry into the world’8 was the translation of his Szkice o Szekspirze into English as Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Boleslaw Taborski9 in 1964. It is also relevant that the English translation was financed by the Polish Scientific State Publishing House. Its director Adam Bromberg suggested to Kott that his work be published in English a year after the Polish edition came out. ‘His idea’, Kott admitted 30 years later, ‘seemed to me even more foolish than unexpected, but Bromberg commissioned the English translation by Bolesław Taborski and paid for it in hard currency.’10 The English edition was printed in Poland. Kott always felt indebted to Bromberg for his help and admired him for his talent as both a supportive editor and a shrewd businessman. Shakespeare Our Contemporary has become one of the most influential works on Shakespeare in the 20th century, and it is still in print in various editions around the world today.

Whose Contemporary? Since the publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a lot of attention has been paid to Shakespeare as ‘contemporary’ and much less to the

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possessive pronoun ‘our’. But who are ‘we’ implied – or evoked – by this title? Are we Polish? Are we from Eastern Europe? Or Europe? From the West? Or does the ‘we’ referenced in ‘our contemporary’ mean simply everyone? Behind the phrase ‘Shakespeare Our Contemporary’, there lurks ‘our Shakespeare’, or in a more familiar manifestation: ‘unser Shakespeare’. In fact, this association is highly relevant, because the expression unser Shakespeare does not refer to ‘our Shakespeare’ as a global and universal Bard but specifically to the Germans’ own tradition or Shakespeare myth. Unser Shakespeare is, first of all, a reference to the German Shakespeare. But what does ‘our contemporary’ Shakespeare refer to? In the Introduction to his groundbreaking collection of essays Foreign Shakespeare, Dennis Kennedy names Bertolt Brecht and Jan Kott as the most influential authors of contemporizing Shakespeare for mid-twentieth century stage productions.11 In his Looking at Shakespeare, furthermore, Kennedy quotes Brecht’s famous aphorism, ‘Ich denke, wir können Shakespeare ändern, wenn wir ihn ändern können’. Kennedy translates this sentence as, ‘ “I think we can change Shakespeare, if we can change him”: that is, if we are equal to the task’, and adds that Brecht’s ‘annexation of the classics and of history to serve the political uses of the present had large implications for the visual aspects of performance in the second half of the century’.12 What Kennedy does not acknowledge here – and, thus, misses in his translation – is the same dilemma of understanding the first person plural personal pronoun ‘wir’ [‘we’] as above: to whom or what does ‘we’ refer in Brecht’s oft-quoted sentence? The driving force of the playful ambivalence in Brecht’s adage is the difference between ‘we’ as a general subject (such as ‘you’ or ‘one’) and ‘we’ as a concrete subject referring to a group of people including the speaker. A more successful translation of the sentence could, therefore, be something like this: ‘Shakespeare can be changed, if we can change him’. Moreover, this translation is quite helpful for understanding the dilemma of ‘our contemporary’ Shakespeare: Shakespeare is our contemporary if we are willing and able to make him our contemporary. As Kott puts it in a brief essay written towards the end of his life, ‘But contemporaneity is never given to us: it is asked of us – and of our theaters.’13

Whose Contemporary in the Theatre? In a passage in The Empty Space discussing the relationship between theatre and its audience, Peter Brook recalls the international tour of his RSC



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production of King Lear in 1964 and avers, ‘the best performances’ of his production ‘lay between Budapest and Moscow’. Brook found it fascinating that an Eastern European audience ‘. . . with little knowledge of English could so influence a cast’:14 the audience’s devoted attention and concentration ‘affected the actors as though a brilliant light were turned on their work’.15 On the other hand, the audiences of the same production’s tour in the US did not share their Eastern European counterparts’ enthusiasm about the production. Brook initially ‘wanted to blame the actors, but it was clear that they were trying as hard as they could. It was the relation with the audience that had changed.’ Brook describes the rather frosty reception of his Lear in Philadelphia in the following way: In Philadelphia, the audience understood English all right, but this audience was composed largely of people who were not interested in the play; people who came for all the conventional reasons—because it was a social event, because their wives insisted, and so on. Undoubtedly, a way existed to involve this particular audience in King Lear, but it was not our way. The austerity of this production which had seemed so right in Europe no longer made sense. Seeing people yawn, I felt guilty, realizing that something else was demanded of us all.16 It is bad form for a director to blame the audience for the failure of his production, and Brook does not exactly do that, although we could do without the remarks about conventions and nagging wives as the chief reasons for visiting the theatre. More important is Brook’s realization that changing a production’s audience changes the production itself, and some audiences are more open or tuned in to a production than others. These are hardly profound insights, of course, if we bear in mind the day-to-day fluctuations of audiences from high school students to tourist groups in a theatre of a given stable location, but they are essential reminders that the interpretation of the phrase ‘Shakespeare our contemporary’ as a reference to Shakespeare’s universality and global greatness is rather misconceived even in the context of the theatre. It appears that the Shakespeare evoked by Brook’s Lear was more contemporary in Eastern Europe than in Philadelphia in 1964. Brook offers three major reasons for this: he argues that Eastern European audiences showed ‘a love for the play itself, real hunger for a contact with foreigners and, above all, an experience of life in Europe in the last years that enabled them to come directly to the play’s painful themes.’17 We could add a fourth – and perhaps the most important – reason to these: the tour of

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Brook’s Lear in Europe was a ‘homecoming’ of sorts, since Kott’s quintessentially (East-Central) European views expressed in his essay ‘King Lear, or Endgame’ (or, more precisely, ‘Le Roi Lear, autrement dit Fin de Partie’; Brook read the French translation in manuscript) strongly informed the production. Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary greatly influenced the work of Peter Brook18 in particular, and the Royal Shakespeare Company in general, in the 1960s and early 1970s. In his ‘Preface’ to the English translation of Shakespeare Our Contemporary (first published only in British editions, later in the US editions as well),19 Brook claims that ‘Shakespeare is a contemporary of Kott, Kott is a contemporary of Shakespeare’, and explains that ‘England in becoming Victorian lost almost all its Elizabethan characteristics – today, it has become a strange mixture of Elizabethan and Victorian worlds’, whereas ‘[i]t is Poland that in our time has come closest to the tumult, the danger, the intensity, the imaginativeness and the daily involvement with the social process that made life so horrible, subtle and ecstatic to an Elizabethan. So it is quite naturally up to a Pole to point us the way.’20 Brook’s endorsement of Kott’s work is a double gesture of re-authenticating Shakespeare through the act of defamiliarization: Kott’s Polish Shakespeare offers a displacement that helps Brook both to de-Englishize or de-nationalize the (Victorian) Bard and to reconstruct him as more progressively (both European and Elizabethan) English. The geographical displacement offers a link to a historical identity that appears to have been both forgotten and distorted by later ages. In his ‘Preface’, Brook relates the dramatic circumstances in which he first met Kott in Warsaw (in an interview close to the end of his life, Kott offers another, somewhat different narrative of their first personal encounter – although the two accounts concur that the first evening together came to a close in a Polish jail),21 and Brook states that Kott ‘pointed the way’ to his Shakespeare interpretations. What the ‘Preface’ does not address, however, is that Kott’s influence on Brook and the RSC was not unilateral but a reciprocal and mutual inspiration. Brook omits that his first meeting with Kott took place in Warsaw when the RSC was touring there with Brook’s Titus Andronicus (with Laurence Olivier in the title role) in the summer of 1957. About 30 years later, Kott remarks about this Titus, ‘[i]t was one of the most important days of my life to see’ this production, and adds that ‘the beginning of the beginning of my book was with this production perhaps! After that, my life changed.’22 In addition to Brook’s production, Kott also names a Polish theatrical event as his ‘point of entry into the Shakespearean world’: Jacek Woszczerowicz’s



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performance of Richard III in Warsaw in 1958, in which, Kott argues, ‘the theatrical experience, the Shakespearean experience, coincided with my political experience’.23 In his autobiography, furthermore, Kott also recalls a Hamlet production that he saw in Cracow in September 1956 and claims that ‘Shakespeare Our Contemporary had its beginning in that Polish version of Elsinore, where “Denmark is prison” and “walls have ears” but people don’t.’24 Evidently, Kott received the most decisive inspiration for his Shakespeare Our Contemporary from the theatre, and it is not surprising that it is the theatre (rather than the academy) that most enthusiastically adopted Kott’s views of his contemporary Shakespeare. Starting with his collaboration with Peter Brook on King Lear, Jan Kott much influenced the work of the RSC from the early 1960s onward. As he remarks in his autobiography, ‘my theory of the Grand Mechanism was cited for more than a decade in almost all programs accompanying productions of Shakespeare’s royal tragedies in England and, to an even greater extent, in Germany.’25 Beyond his specific views on the Grand Mechanism in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, Kott’s work in general was enormously influential in theatres of Britain and Continental Europe. His Shakespeare Our Contemporary helped theatre directors to reassess or, as they frequently put it, modernize their approaches to Shakespeare. As the newly appointed director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company in 1960, Peter Hall set out to revitalize his ensemble by radically re-conceptualizing Shakespeare. ‘I am a radical, and I could not work in the theatre if I were not. The theatre must question everything and disturb its audience’, Hall summed up his directorial manifesto in the mid-1960s.26 Brecht and Kott were particularly important for his efforts to create an active, politically and socially conscious theatre –‘Brecht for his theatrical innovations, Kott for his philosophical approach’.27 The monumental productions of The War of the Roses (1963), for which John Barton rewrote Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of histories into three plays titled Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III, heavily drew on Kott’s scepticism and historical determinism. As we have seen, Brook’s King Lear (1962) followed Kott’s suggestion that the vision and the world of Shakespeare’s tragedy were close to the theatre of the absurd in general, and Samuel Beckett in particular. ‘The politics’ of this staging, as Alan Sinfield comments, was ‘nihilist; Brook made sure that his Lear could not be construed as offering any positive possibilities for humanity’.28 The tensions between existentialist scepticism and modernist activism, absurdist grotesque and tragic despair, as well as historical determinism and political radicalism shaped Kott’s views on Shakespeare as

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much as a series of RSC productions in the 1960s and early 1970s, such as Hamlet (1965, dir. Peter Hall), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970, dir. Peter Brook), and the Roman Plays directed by Trevor Nunn in 1972 (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Titus Andronicus). These RSC productions not only appropriated but also disseminated Kott’s ideas: Western European productions such as Der Krieg der Rosen [The War of the Roses], directed by Peter Palitzsch in Stuttgart in 1967, and Il Gioco dei Potenti (The Game of the Mighty),29 directed by Giorgio Strehler in Milan in 1965, were as inspired by Hall’s War of the Roses productions as by Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Kott’s work was particularly well received in West German theatres. In addition to the legacy of Brecht and Artaud, as well as the new impressions of the theatre of the absurd, Kott’s views informed, to a varying degree, memorable Shakespeare productions such as Peter Zadek’s Held Henry (Bremen, 1964) and Hamlet (Bochum, 1977), Hans Hollman’s adaptation of Coriolanus (Munich, 1970), and Peter Stein’s Shakespeare’s Memory (West Berlin, 1977) and As You Like It (West Berlin, 1977).30 The Italian director Giorgio Strehler often expressed his admiration of Shakespeare Our Contemporary. In addition to Il Gioco dei Potenti, his productions of King Lear (1972) and The Tempest (1978) were also much influenced by Kott. Strehler invited Kott to Milan while he was preparing his Tempest; as he explains, ‘I was looking for a dialectical discussion. Kott knew much more about Shakespeare and The Tempest than I did, and he explained to me many beautiful things.’31 Strehler seems to have been more satisfied with their collaboration than Kott, who later called Strehler ‘a prisoner of his imagination, of his theatre, and of all the plays he has ever directed’.32 Although Kott strongly criticized the production in a review published in 1979, his essay on The Tempest in Shakespeare our Contemporary (‘Prospero’s Staff’) in many ways affected Strehler’s directing of the play. A similar blend of absorption and resistance characterized the French director Ariane Mnouchkine’s views on Kott and his work. Although Mnouchkine has argued, ‘Shakespeare is not our contemporary and must not be treated as such’,33 her efforts to demystify Shakespeare and present him in a multicultural context had a lot to do with Kott’s approach. Kott severely criticized Mnouchkine’s famous Richard II production (Vincennes, 1982) in which she staged Shakespeare’s history in the style of Kabuki performances: ‘I have a great admiration for Ariane Mnouchkine, but when I watch her Shakespearian productions with big Japanese-type dolls and Samurais and a kind of mock Kabuki, I think to myself, “This is fake Japanese and fake Shakespeare.” ’34 What neither Mnouchkine nor Kott



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realized, or were inclined to acknowledge, is that the French director’s method is a logical continuation of Kott’s approach of displacing and de-Englishizing Shakespeare. In the same way in which Kott offered a denationalized, European Shakespeare, Mnouchkine attempted to present a decolonized, cosmopolitan Bard. Moreover, in the same way in which Brook and Hall were able to appropriate Kott’s views in their efforts to rearticulate Shakespeare’s Englishness, Mnouchkine’s multicultural extravaganza could be easily contained by a ‘West vs the Rest’ neo-colonial discourse. Kott had very close ties to the theatre. Beyond his work as an avid and formidable theatre critic, he also worked as a dramaturge. In 1958–60, he was the literary director of the Jaracz Theatre in Łódź; in 1976–7, he worked as the visiting head dramaturge at the Viennese Burgtheater. He also tried his hand at directing: he staged Polish and Ancient Greek plays, chiefly in students’ productions. He also directed a Hamlet at Stony Brook: in an interview, he recalls, ‘It was an “instant Hamlet” – an hour and five minutes, no longer. Ophelia was a very beautiful black girl. That was an early example of what later became universal: colour-blind casting.’35

Whose Contemporary in the Academy? The Western academic reception of Shakespeare Our Contemporary was generally positive. The first review in The Shakespeare Quarterly focused on the original Polish edition Szkice o Szekspirze as it observed that ‘Jan Kott’s experience and penetration serve him equally well when he views Shakespeare from the stalls of Poland’s metropolitan or provincial theatres or when he contemplates him in the tranquility of his study’.36 The reviewer emphasized that, in addition to Kott’s ‘original insights’, ‘there filters through to the outside reader a sense of excitement and participation in the vitality and versatility of the contemporary Shakespearian stage in Poland – that remarkable Attica of Eastern Europe’.37 As in Brook’s endorsement quoted above, this reviewer also embraces Kott’s quintessentially Polish perspective on Shakespeare. In his ‘Introduction’ to Shakespeare our Contemporary, Martin Esslin also poses the question, ‘Where, in the world of the mid-twentieth century, shall we seek the vantage point from which Shakespeare can be seen and reinterpreted with the highest degree of relevance, of fresh, revitalized significance for our own age?’ Which he immediately answers, ‘In the light of Jan Kott’s book, which is here made available to an English-speaking

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public, it might be argued that this point of vantage might well be situated in Eastern Europe, and in Poland in particular.’38 Esslin’s argument is similar to Kott’s later insight into mid-twentieth-century ‘European education’ vis-à-vis Tadeusz Borowski: the Polish ordeal of World War II, the invasions, the uprooted and tragic individual fates, the concentration camps or ‘univers concentrationnaire’ and the double experience of both Nazism and Stalinism all offered a unique angle on life, theatre and Shakespeare. In addition, there was clearly one more advantage to the Polish perspective: it is more expedient (or, quite simply, possible) to imagine Shakespeare as our contemporary in a culture in which Shakespeare has a prominent role, but he is primarily known through translations. The changing needs of the theatre lead to a continuous demand for comprehensible and up-to-date translations – and contemporary translations directly evoke a sense of Shakespeare as our contemporary. It is much easier for a non-English-speaking person, whose first encounter with Shakespeare usually is through nineteenth-, twentieth- or twenty-first-century vernacular translations, to see Shakespeare as a protean contemporary than for an English-speaking audience, which is both trained and invested in a more constant and immutable ‘original’ Shakespeare. Michael Taylor calls Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary ‘the most widely read book on Shakespeare since A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904)’ and contrasts Kott’s views on history with those of E. M. W. Tillyard: ‘If Tillyard was blithely unaware of his modernist agenda, no one could be more aware, I suppose, than Jan Kott was of his.’ Taylor argues, ‘Kott replaces the unshunnable authoritarianism of Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture with what he calls the Grand Mechanism’, which is ‘equally Elizabethan (and Polish) and expresses “the conviction that history has no meaning and stands still, or constantly repeats its cruel cycle ... ” ’ Kott’s new perspectives on a geographically and chronologically displaced Shakespeare resulted from a radical reinterpretation of history as ‘a cruel and tragic farce’.39 Due to its innovative methodological and philosophical treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, Kott’s work posited a challenge to the dominant methodology of literary analysis of the day, New Criticism. As Russ McDonald puts it, ‘the breadth of his approach removes it almost as far as possible from New Criticism’.40 Kott’s emphasis on context as key to interpreting Shakespeare’s works certainly puts pressure on New Critical insistence on the inherence and autonomy of literary works of art. Despite (or, perhaps, due to) the great popularity of Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Kott’s work also provoked severe criticism as well. As early as 1964, Frank Kermode published a scathing review in The New York Review



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of Books, in which he refers to Kott’s Grand Mechanism as ‘Grand Banality’, and suggests, ‘the most interesting material in Kott’s book is often not particularly original’. ‘It may be added that’, the review continues, ‘what is most original in his book is, in my opinion, for the most part useless and sometimes harmful, or would be if anybody really took it seriously.’41 The somewhat circuitous logic of this argument is revealing about the academic resistance to Kott’s work: what Kott’s detractors have found ‘the most interesting’ in Shakespeare Our Contemporary is the scholarship they have been studying and producing, as well as the links between Kott’s essays and their own work and methodologies. Any departure from their concepts of what literary analysis proper ought to be is deemed ‘useless and sometimes harmful’ and not to be taken seriously. Kermode draws a distinction between ‘liberty’ and ‘licence’ of interpretation: the liberty of criticism ‘is to make available insights into meanings and relationships proper to the plays, not to make the plays themes for variations’. On the other hand, ‘license gives the critic or fantasist rights over the poet and produces versions which can live only at the expense of more humbly probable readings’. In the light of this distinction, Kott ‘may be a freedomloving Polish man of the theatre but he can also be one more licentious professor’. Kermode’s assessment of Kott rings rather austere today: ‘His Polish viewpoint is perfectly valid, to be sure, and there is no reason why it should not afford insights; but the originality of his work has been exaggerated; what he does is not invariably done well; and he is much given to license.’42 In a paper presented in 1969 (and first published in 1970), Alfred Harbage twice calls Jan Kott’s work ‘the most fashionable book of Shakespearean commentary of the past decade’ and proceeds to criticize it for not paying enough attention to Shakespeare’s words.43 Harbage’s argument rests on the thesis, ‘The only valid test for determining how justly a work of art is seen, in its own age or later, is the measurement of how much of its data is taken into account. In the case of a Shakespearean play, the data consist of the words, the actions, and their relationships.’ The trouble is, according to Harbage, that Kott only focuses on the actions and ignores the words. Harbage’s example of Kott’s tendentious quoting from the Epilogue to The Tempest in the essay ‘Prospero’s Staff’ is well chosen, and it leads Harbage to the conclusion, ‘. . .to interpret the action in disregard of the words is an extreme form of selectivity, available only to the most ruthless type of exegete.’44 Harbage admits that his first reaction to Kott’s work was ‘angry indignation’, which was gradually dissolved into ‘relative tranquility’ and eventually ‘succeeded by curiosity’.45

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Harbage even offers a quick survey of how other people responded to Kott’s work, since this review of other people’s opinion might be revealing about ‘the temper of our times’. Harbage discerns three different groups of readers of Shakespeare Our Contemporary: ‘First, and quite small in number, were those who dismissed it as worthless.’ These Harbage greets with his ‘respectful salute’. ‘In a second and larger group, made up mainly of academics, judgment was hedged with qualifications’: ‘the key phrase’ of these academics’ assessment is that ‘Kott had gone “too far”.’ About this qualification, Harbage remarks, ‘I must confess that judiciousness of this kind strikes me as a conditioned reflex rather than a working principle; if someone is headed in the wrong direction, is not his first step “too far”?’ The third, ‘and by far most numerous group of responders greeted the book with enthusiastic approval. For the most part they were theatrical and literary journalists’, in whose occupation, as Harbage puts it, ‘an espousal of the contemporary is a condition of employment, and one can only sympathize with their elation at the discovery of so reputable a contemporary as Shakespeare; why look this gift horse in the mouth?’46 This enthusiastic popular reception of Shakespeare Our Contemporary is not limited to the English-speaking world: Kott’s book was well received ‘everywhere from Sweden to Israel and from Czechoslovakia to Japan’. On the other hand, concedes Harbage, ‘it was viewed as ratsbane by the Russians.’ As he finds himself on the same critical platform as his Soviet or Communist colleagues in rejecting Kott’s work, Harbage muses, ‘One is bound to ask whether the kind of “contemporary” that Shakespeare proves to be depends less on when one lives than on where one lives. Or putting it another way: is there now a “Shakespeare West” and a “Shakespeare East”?’47 According to Harbage, theatrical interpretations of his day harmfully polarize and politicize Shakespeare, and Kott is a major culprit in these processes. By the end of the essay, it becomes clear that Harbage finds both going to the theatre and reading Shakespearian criticism a distorting, indirect and unnecessarily mediated approach, whereas reading Shakespeare’s plays (both in English and in translation) is a more direct and noble engagement: ‘These readers are getting Shakespeare with words, and with words wholly his own.’48 The extent to which the words attributed to Shakespeare are ‘wholly his own’ is rather questionable today, but it is more salient here that Harbage’s (quite justifiable and astute) critique of Kott’s tendentious approach to some of Shakespeare’s lines serves a more comprehensive and conservative agenda that privileges literature over theatre, reading over staging, apolitical analyses over politically and philosophically informed essays, Shakespeare’s universality over his particularity and his timelessness over his contemporariness.



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The majority of Kott’s conservative critics appear to fall back on to these dichotomous preferences (or prejudices) in East and West alike.

Is He Still Our Contemporary? In the light of all this, Shakespeare seems to have been more of a contemporary in Europe than in the United States or the Soviet Union. These geographical differences are further complicated by chronological divergences as well: Shakespeare seems to be more of a contemporary in some ages than in others. In October 1986, the British section of the International Association of Theatre Critics organized a public seminar in London devoted to the subject ‘Is Shakespeare Our Contemporary?’, in which they reviewed the reception and effects of Kott’s work in the past quarter century since its first publication in Polish. In his Introduction to the volume, which includes the transcribed and edited proceedings of this seminar at the Young Vic Theatre, John Elsom also draws an East vs West distinction: on the one hand, ‘Shakespeare challenged the East European orthodoxies of the time’; on the other, ‘[i]n the West, [...] the movement was aesthetic rather than political.’ ‘In Britain’, argues Elsom, ‘we did not lack contemporary writers who were ready to abuse the government, quite the reverse.’ Elsom sees Kott’s significance as ‘a matter of style’ rather than a matter of politics: ‘By bringing Shakespeare up to date, by making him sound more topical, relevant and accessible, we were trying to rescue his plays from doublet-and-hosiery and dress them up in more fashionable gear.’49 Both Elsom’s usage of past tenses in describing Kott’s influence and his depoliticized interpretation of Kott’s significance in 1980s Britain indicate that the radicalism of the 1960s that reciprocally both embraced and inspired Kott was a distant and forgotten (or suppressed) past in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. In the opening session of the seminar, even Kott admits that he sees Shakespeare in a different light in 1986 than he did in 1961. First he points out, ‘While Shakespeare is nearly always in one sense or another our contemporary, there are times when, to paraphrase George Orwell, he is more contemporary than at others’; and then he acknowledges that ‘he is not so much of a contemporary today. During the last ten years, our understanding of Shakespeare has changed.’50 These words might appear as a retraction of his earlier views, although Kott remains critical of the new (or oldest) tendency of placing Shakespeare ‘in no time and in no particular place’.51 By offering the floor first to Kott, the organizers intended ‘to

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give Professor Kott a chance to recant before facing the wrath of the Shakespearian purists, either the traditionalists or those who, like Brecht, believed that Shakespeare could only be appreciated within a modern historical perspective’.52 The organizers clearly expected harsh attacks against Kott on two fronts: from traditionalists and historicists. The former group’s critical points (manifested in variations of the dichotomous preferences discussed above via Alfred Harbage’s article) occasionally emerged in the course of the public seminar, but they were not dominant at all. Modern historicists (especially from East Germany and the Soviet Union) were more vociferously critical, but their critique was also accompanied by polite admiration of Kott’s work in general. The most caustic assault on Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in fact, came from the rather surprising corner of the British progressive left, effectively represented by Richard Wilson, who argued that Shakespeare was ‘our contemporary’, indeed, but ‘in alarming ways’. Wilson found Shakespeare’s contemporariness deeply problematic for two major reasons. First, he pointed to the example of Wilson Knight and ‘his concept of Shakespeare as our contemporary and a kind of guardian angel or unpaid consultant to Mrs Thatcher’s war cabinet’ to demonstrate that Shakespeare as our contemporary could easily be appropriated for disturbingly blinkered political agendas. In this sense, Wilson considered ‘Kott’s alternative picture of a Shakespearean world’ to be ‘deeply conservative’: ‘Its view of human behaviour, as revealed through the plays as essentially and unchangingly animal-like and its constant reference to the absurdism of Beckett belong to the last days of modernism and the post-war recoil from politics.’ From this arguable conservativism of Kott’s work followed Wilson’s second major criticism that this pessimistic view made meaningful political action impossible: ‘. . .in its insistence that Shakespeare’s world is ours, that “the implacable roller of history crushes everybody and everything” and that the human condition is forever the same and forever hopeless, Shakespeare Our Contemporary offers no possibility of change and no analysis of failure.’ What Kott offered, according to Wilson, was lethargic and ‘paralysed acquiescence in the belief that this is simply and for all time “the way things are” ’53 and deemed the efforts to fight for radical change futile or preposterous. Richard Wilson’s critique reaffirmed Alan Sinfield’s concerns quoted above regarding Kott’s influence on the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s. In an article published just a year before the public seminar, Sinfield also accused Kott of having offered ‘a pessimistic revision of the Marxist emphasis on history’, although Sinfield dampened his critique by



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adding that ‘Kott’s scepticism about any positive possibilities in politics is comprehensible enough, especially in relation to his native Poland, but whether it was constructive in England in 1963 is doubtful.’54 A few months later, in an essay co-authored by Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, the British cultural materialists’ reservation about Kott’s work was even more clearly articulated: ‘Kott does little more than invert the Elizabethan World Picture’ proposed by Tillyard in 1944; ‘the terms of the debate are not changed’. Dollimore and Sinfield acknowledge that ‘Kott’s approach has been influential, especially in the theatre’, but they find Kott’s influence rather harmful, as ‘it has chimed in with attention to modernist and existentialist writings which offer as profound studies of the human condition a critique of progressive ideals and an invocation of “spiritual” alienation’.55 Kott’s revisionist Marxism appeared unpalatable to British progressive Shakespeareans as much as to his Eastern European Communist colleagues. In his later work, Kott himself admitted that Shakespeare was not, or should not always be, ‘our contemporary’ in the same way in which he had appeared to be in mid-century Central Europe. At the same time, it is also clear that Kott’s book has been tremendously popular as well as influential since its first version came out in Poland half a century ago: it did not simply develop existing approaches and methodologies, but offered a new kind of discourse regarding Shakespeare and his plays. The influence of his pioneering work is clearly with us in numerous shapes and forms even at the beginning of the new millennium. For one, he opened dialogues between theatre producers and academics, as he always acknowledged the theatre as the primary location of (re)presenting, interpreting and disseminating Shakespeare’s work. As a dramaturge-academic, he strove to complicate or break down the artificial boundaries between academic discourse and theatrical language. Kott’s emphasis on contexts (rather than inherently valorized, internal components of a given work) as chief factors of cultural, literary or theatrical interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays pointed beyond positivistic, New Critical or early structuralist approaches of his day. His understanding that meanings can only be generated by assigning contexts anticipates both poststructuralist and even new historicist approaches. Although Kott was occasionally criticized as anti-historical, he insisted that his work showed ‘the way in which the history is part of the drama and the drama is part of the history’.56 As we have seen, British cultural materialists critiqued Kott’s post-Stalinist, diluted Marxist approach, but their denial now seems Oedipal as we bear in mind Kott’s emphasis on contemporaneity as the

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starting point of any cultural analysis. In this sense, Kott was clearly an important precursor of both late twentieth-century cultural materialism and early twenty-first century presentism. Kott, however, was not rigid or doctrinaire about his approach: methodological rigidity would have contradicted his smoothly flowing, essayistic style. Several of his harshest critics seem to have simply ignored the genre of his work: Kott was a fine essay writer, who found the dry and matterof-fact style of mid-century (as well as more recent) academic writing alienating and undesirable. His writing style matched his method; Kott’s point of view was different, foreign: as a non-Anglo–American author, he called attention to the relevance of foreign Shakespeare and anticipated a disciplinary shift towards the study of non-English-speaking, post-colonial and globalized/localized Shakespeares.

Kott’s Later Works Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary was his first book translated into English, and it was undoubtedly his most significant and most influential publication. After his emigration to the US, he published several other works both on Shakespeare and other topics, although these later books did not generate nearly as much intellectual excitement and feedback as Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Kott’s writing method remained the same throughout his exile in the US: he completed his manuscripts in Polish, and then other people – in collaboration with the author – translated them into English. ‘Translation was a mode of writing Kott highly valued and constantly employed’, remarks Jadwiga Kosicka, one of the translators of Kott’s works in the last 15 years of his life.57 Kott himself was a translator; especially in his younger years in Poland, he often translated from French into Polish. In addition, as Kosicka explains, Kott ‘depended on translation in all his writing; whether it was Shakespeare, Stendhal, or Büchner, he worked from Polish translations.’ While he was working on Shakespearean topics, Kott preferred to look at a variety of Polish translations of Shakespeare’s plays (‘and there are many to choose from in Polish’,58 Kosicka reminds us), but, of course, he also consulted the English texts as well. Kott’s reliance on translations both necessitates and elucidates his intertextual approach to Shakespeare and other non-Polish authors. ‘Kott was a master stylist in Polish’, Kosicka remarks. ‘Avoiding the usually abstract, syntactically involved, colourless, evasive, and noncommittal language used by most Polish reviewers and critics, Kott strove for



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directness and immediacy.’ Moreover, he ‘produced his essays rapidly and effortlessly’: once he even confessed, ‘he wrote faster than he thought’. In the collaborative effort of producing his English texts, ‘the translator’s obligation was, above all, to keep up with him’; so Kosicka thinks it was ‘no wonder that over the course of his career he needed many translators and [. . .] literally wore them out’.59 As Kott’s readers, we ought to be conscious and appreciative of the efforts of all those translators who both mediated and produced Kott’s work in English and other languages. Kott’s third book in English, The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy (1973, translated by Boleslaw Taborski and Edward J. Czerwinski), presents essays about ancient Greek tragedies such as Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and his Oresteia-trilogy; Sophocles’ Ajax, The Women of Trachis and Philoctetes; and Euripides’ Alcestis, Heracles, The Bacchae and (via a performance in Pescara) Medea. As he explains in his Preface, he ‘started writing this book in Warsaw in 1966’; then he ‘continued writing it at Yale and Berkeley, and completed it in Stony Brook.’60 Although Shakespearean references frequently appear within the volume, the most directly relevant argument to Shakespeare is the last essay in the Appendix: ‘Lucian in Cymbeline’, which argues, perhaps not in a fully convincing manner, that ‘a debt (apparently hitherto unnoticed) to Lucian’s Charon in Cymbeline may serve to reopen the entire question of Lucian’s impact on Shakespeare.’61 A more persuasive article titled ‘Orestes, Electra, Hamlet’ offers an insightful argument on the role of fate and revenge in Aeschylus’s Oresteia-trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation-bearers and Eumenides), Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra in contrast to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Kott’s next book in English, The Theater of Essence and Other Essays (1984), presents an Introduction by Martin Esslin and 16 essays (translated by more than a dozen translators) on a great variety of authors from Chekhov to Ionesco, directors from Grotowski to Brook, and other topics from Japanese theatre to Absurd Drama. The essay from which the book has borrowed its title is a review of Tadeusz Kantor’s two productions in New York City (The Dead Class and Wielopole Wielopole) and Peter Brook’s Carmen in Paris; the link between these productions is that all three represent a ‘theatre of essence’. Kott defines essence (in contrast to existence) as ‘the human drama freed of accident and of the illusion that there are choices. Essence is a trace, like the still undissolved imprint of a crustacean on a stone.’62 My favourite essay in this volume is the closing piece, titled ‘The Seriousness of Theater’, which is a classic example of Kott’s writing: filtered through Kott’s personal memories and subjectivity, this article discusses wide-ranging issues from a student production of Hamlet through cultural

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contexts determining the meanings of theatrical productions at a given historical moment. The essay is eclectic, impressionistic and anecdotal – as if Kott were presenting it to a lucky companion sitting at his table in their favourite café. The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition (1987; translated by Daniela Miedzyrzecka and Lillian Vallee) presents essays on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest as well as on ‘The Aeneid and The Tempest’. As in his previous volumes, Kott also includes an Appendix that offers the bonus of three more articles: ‘Prospero, or the Director’, ‘Ran, or the End of the World’ and ‘The Cruel Webster’. In her review of this volume, Bernice W. Kliman points out that ‘the connecting thread’ among these essays, as the book’s subtitle indicates, ‘is the carnival tradition; Kott alludes here to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin who found in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance a world of misrule, mixed styles, and ambivalence opposing the ordered, seemingly monolithic official world.’63 Kott turns to Bakhtin’s concepts of chronotope, dialogization, heteroglossia and polyphony as he develops his own notion of polytheatricality and discusses Doctor’s Faustus as ‘a great polytheatrical tragedy’.64 Although Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination has clearly informed Kott’s essays, Kliman is right in suggesting that ‘the best approach to this text is to enjoy Kott’s erudition and his control over an impressive number of genres and sources – without too much concern about a unifying theme.’65 Behind Kott’s essayistic style, however, there is also a strong emphasis on intertextuality in all the essays of the book. If we compare this volume with Shakespeare Our Contemporary, we realize that Kott’s later work may be less profound and provocative, but his theoretical framework of intertextuality (e.g. through his distinction between transcription and translation in this volume) has become more polished and persuasive. As of the mid-1980s, Kott was able to publish in Polish again (Kamienny potok, 1986; revised edition, 1991; Nowy Jonasz i inne szkice, 1994); and he often brought out his essays in both Polish and English. His book The Gender of Rosalind: Interpretations: Shakespeare, Büchner, Gautier (translated by Jadwiga Kosicka and Mark Rosenzweig) was also published in Polish as Płeć Rozalindy in the same year (1992). This book includes five essays: the Introduction is an edited version of Kott’s opening remarks for the ‘Is Shakespeare Our Contemporary?’ seminar in London, the other essays are ‘The Gender of Rosalind’, ‘Head of Maidenhead, Maidenhead for Head: The Structure of Exchange in Measure for Measure’, ‘The



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Guillotine as a Tragic Hero: Julius Caesar and Büchner’s Danton’s Death’, as well as the usual extra (or bonus) essay in the Appendix: ‘Directors and the Ghost’. In the Introduction, Kott declares, ‘Every era has the Shakespeare it deserves, or at least each theater has the Shakespeare it deserves.’ On the other hand, he needs to concede, ‘It appears that this extraordinary connection between Shakespeare and contemporary drama and theater [. . .] has already passed.’66 Kott may not consider Shakespeare as a contemporary any longer, but he remains loyal to his methodology of examining, as he has put it above, ‘the way in which the history is part of the drama and the drama is part of the history.’ This epistemological investigative tool (and personal obsession) offers fine intellectual dividends throughout this book. In the essay that lends its title to the whole volume, Kott draws the conclusion, ‘The gender of Rosalind seems to be dictated by history. Yet history on various levels and in various versions is present in everything contemporary, either openly or more often in disguised form.’67 In other word, the gender of Rosalind needs to be understood historically: ‘Shakespeare’s Rosalind on the contemporary stage is accompanied by the shadows of all the Rosalinds who have disguised themselves as Ganymede – and by all the other myths, all the obsessions, all the temptations of androgynous eros, all the ebb and flow of the ever-recurring past.’68 In 1992, Kott published another collection of essays titled The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death (translated by Jadwiga Kosicka). This book does not discuss Shakespeare directly; instead, it offers a great variety of topics from the theatre to his autobiography (and back). Two years later, Kott’s ‘autobiographical essay’ titled Still Alive (1994; translated by Jadwiga Kosicka; the English edition was based on the Polish work Przyczynek do biografii, 1990) appeared in print: it is a dramatic page-turner revealing much about Kott’s intellectual development as well as his deteriorating health and five heart-attacks. Shortly before Kott’s death in December 2001, Charles Marowitz published a book titled Roar of the Canon, whose ‘centrepiece’, as Marowitz puts it, is a discussion between Marowitz and Kott. In addition to this pivotal section ‘Wrestling with Jan Kott’ (as well as several essays authored solely by Marowitz), the reader can find here three more conversations between Kott and Marowitz, such as ‘What Color Is Othello?’, ‘Made to Measure’, and ‘Two Nights of Love: Romeo, Juliet, Troilus & Cressida’. As Marowitz states in his Introduction, ‘The object is not so much symbiosis as it is bi-partite diagnosis, proceeding from differing standpoints and different sets of priorities.’69

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Kott in Exile: A Public Intellectual Without His Public Jan Kott was an academic, critic, dramaturge, editor, poet and translator. His hobbies included hiking in the mountains and collecting ugly postcards. In an interview with Mel Gussow, he defined himself as ‘a man who has political, sexual, emotional and national life’,70 as he wanted to emphasize both his multifaceted nature and the deep-rootedness of his identity in multiple traditions. In this brief account, however, I have only been able to focus on his life and work as an influential Shakespearean. As a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) reminder of the importance of always bearing the larger picture in mind, Kott confessed at the end of his life, ‘I never expected Shakespeare to be the most important thing in my biography.’71 Among all his roles and accomplishments, Kott was a professor as well. Rustom Bharucha was his graduate student; he recalls Kott’s idiosyncratic habit of clicking his tongue while pondering his provocative questions: I remember one such question that prefaced Jan’s introductory lecture to As You Like It: ‘Is it possible to think of the Forest of Arden as a massage parlor?’ Facing our somewhat stupefied silence with perceptible disappointment, he added: ‘Perhaps it is not such a good idea.’ A few minutes later, after some futile attempts to sound academic, he slammed the text on the table and affirmed: ‘No, it is a massage parlor.’ Take it or leave it: this is how he saw Shakespeare.72 Bharucha found Professor Kott, ‘[i]diosyncratic, iconoclastic, and, more often than not, audaciously off the mark’, but he also ‘brought a performative dimension to his reading of the dramatic text long before performativity got theorized in academia’.73 Bharucha calls attention to two vital points about Kott’s approach to Shakespeare: ‘(1) If his Shakespeare was contemporary, it was always already Polish. (2) As provocative as his interventions were in reading Shakespeare differently, against the received wisdom of the Anglo-Saxon canon, he was assisted by an insufficiently acknowledged capacity to misread Shakespeare.’74 These two tendencies, their balances and imbalances, largely determined Kott’s work on Shakespeare. Bharucha also recalls two other crucial aspects of Kott’s life as an academic in the United States. On the one hand, ‘though he earned his living in the university system, he was never comfortable as an academic. His rigor as a scholar was constantly being challenged through his uncanny



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ability – and desire – to open the enigmas of the text through the sensations of everyday life.’ On the other hand, ‘[a]s a long-term immigrant to the United States, Jan never quite accepted the norms of assimilation, preferring to live across the borders, both imagined and real.’75 When Kott immigrated to the USA in the late 1960s, he was already in his 50s – and, as he said once to his translator, Jadwiga Kosicka, ‘emigration is for a young man without memories.’76 Another main reason of his sense of isolation was his unfamiliarity with (and prejudice against) American commercial theatre. ‘The bulk of my writing is about theater’, he revealed to Kosicka, ‘not only theater as seen on stage, but also theater backstage and theater of the audience. I stopped writing about theater in America; I did not have a public platform, I did not know anyone backstage and I had to pay for my own tickets. All that was left me was a theater of the imagination.’77 Beyond the lack of contacts and familiarity with the theatre, Kott also missed (and perhaps that is what he missed the most) ‘a public platform’ that he had built up with half a lifetime’s work in Poland, and now he was supposed to start anew. Kott was both unable and unwilling to have a brand new start; instead, ‘whenever he wrote, he returned to Poland.’78 In Poland, Kott was a public intellectual – not in today’s meaning of the phrase, an intellectual discussing politics or even policy in popular media, but in a more East-Central European sense: as an intellectual focusing on more encompassing and crucial issues. Kott’s autobiography Still Alive (about which his translator Kosicka – with characteristic Central European wit – remarks, ‘After all, still alive was the same as still dying, and it had to be captured with the same passions’)79 presents several of these public intellectuals as Kott’s friends and acquaintances. Obviously, he was much less known or recognized in the US. One of his friends describes how much Kott was impressed by the popularity of his books in Germany: ‘The elegant, uniformly bound four main volumes of his works, excellently translated by Agnieszka Grzybkowska and Peter Lachmann, can be found in the lobbies of every important German language theater.’ In contrast, when this friend was ‘searching for Kott’s The Eating of the Gods at a bookstore somewhere in the American Midwest’, he was only able to find it, ‘hidden in the cookbook section.’80 Beyond this story, however, we also need to acknowledge that, after the collapse of the Communist political system in Poland, Kott decided not to repatriate. This decision was due largely to family reasons and his advanced age, but his preference for unorthodox and liminal existence must have had

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something to do with it as well. So did the increasingly evident and globally shared recognition that, despite the controversies and his detractors, Kott was one of the most influential Shakespeareans as well as one of the finest essay writers of the twentieth century.

Notes

Introduction My thanks to Lars Engle for several suggestions and corrections incorporated in the final version of this essay. Other errors are my own. 1 S. T. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, extracted in David Perkins, ed. English Romantic Writers (New York: Harcourt, 1967), 496–502, 500. 2 Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 3 Magali Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 4. 4 Larson, 4. 5 Ricardo J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1985), 91. 6 Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, The Sewanee Review 53 (Spring, Summer, and Autumn 1945), 221–40, 433–56, 643–53. 7 Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 81. 8 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Kegan Paul, 1929). 9 Stanley Fish, ‘Editing the Variorum’, Critical Inquiry 2, 3 (1976): 465–86, 473. 10 G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays, (1947; repr. London: Methuen, 1962), 3. 11 Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery: And What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). 12 See Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Rowe’s Symbols’, The New York Review of Books, Oct. 7, 1971; available at http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Rowe.txt_with-big-pictures.html – a reply to a critic named William W. Rowe in which Nabokov wrote, ‘One may wonder if it was worth Mr. Rowe’s time to exhibit erotic bits picked out of Lolita and Ada – a process rather like looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in Moby Dick.’ Knight used similar phrases to categorize imagery in Antony and Cleopatra. 13 Howard Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory. 1985. (Repr. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 141. 14 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1968). 15 Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 114–58.

176 Notes Allen Tate, ‘The Present Function of Criticism’, in his Collected Essays (Denver: Swallow, 1959), 5–6. 17 T. W. Adorno, ‘Theses Upon Art and Religion Today’, Kenyon Review 7 (Autumn 1945), 676–82; John Crowe Ransom, ‘Art and the Human Economy’ (1945), reprinted in his Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays, 1941–1970 (New York: New Directions, 1972), 128–35. 18 See Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare, 116–23. 19 Steven Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets’, in his Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21–65. 20 Peter Brook, Preface to Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), viii–ix. 21 John Elsom ed. Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? (New York: Routledge in association with the International Association of Theatre Critics, 1989). 16

William Empson See Clifford Geertz, ‘Centres, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power’, in Joseph ben-David and Terry Nicholas Clark, (eds), Culture and Its Creators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 151; Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. and ed. Talcott Parsons (1947) (New York: Free Press, 1964), 358–92; see also William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Rise of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 14–16. 2 D. Nichol Smith, ed. Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 137–8. 3 John Ashbery, ‘Second Presentation to the Jury’, World Literature Today, 51, 1 (Winter 1977): 8. I am grateful to Elizabeth Gregory, Sue Schweik and Thomas Travisano for help tracking this reference down. 4 Philip Rahv, ‘Paleface and Redskin’, The Kenyon Review, 1, 3 (Summer, 1939): 251–6. 5 John Haffenden, William Empson, vol. I: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); John Haffenden, William Empson, vol. II: Against the Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); John Haffenden, ed. The Complete Poems of William Empson (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000); John Haffenden, ed. Selected Letters of William Empson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 6 G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 29, 146, 162. 7 ‘Warning to undergraduates’, in John Haffenden, ed. The Complete Poems of William Empson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 49–51. 8 John Haffenden, William Empson, vol. I: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 255. Henceforth cited parenthetically as WE1. 9 ‘Empson’s Tact’, in Matthew Bevis, ed. Some Versions of Empson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 182–200. I am grateful to Richard Newman for alerting me to this essay, and for other intelligent suggestions. 1

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William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rev. ed. New York: New Directions, 1947). Henceforth cited parenthetically as STA. 11 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; corr. ed. New York: New Directions, 1974). Henceforth cited parenthetically as SVP. 12 William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (1951; rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967). Henceforth cited parenthetically as SCW. 13 William Empson, Using Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); The Royal Beast and Other Works, ed. John Haffenden (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986); Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David Pirie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), henceforth cited parenthetically as ES; Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987); Faustus and the Censor (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 14 WE1, pp. 237–8, 268, 292–3. 15 ‘Empson’s Tact’, in Bevis, ed. Some Versions of Empson, 187. 16 I discuss these in ‘William Empson and the Sonnets’, in Michael Schoenfeldt, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 163–82, which draws on Paul Fry’s William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (New York: Routledge, 1991). Paul Fry discusses Empson’s intentionalism, and its ethical aspects, in ways that resemble mine in his fine essay ‘Hermeneutic Circling: Empson, Rosamund Tuve, and the ‘Wimsatt Law’, in Bevis, ed. Some Versions of Empson, 201–16. 17 See Matthew Bevis, ‘Empson in the Round’, in Some Versions of Empson, 1–20, where Bevis notes Empson’s penchant for ‘looking round’ any generalization that claims to give a simplifying account of a literary or human phenomenon; Christopher Norris, ‘The Machinery of a Rich and Full Response: Empson as Philosopher-Critic’ in Bevis, ed. Some Versions of Empson, 217–41; also Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Athlone, 1978); Norris, ‘Introduction’, in Norris and Nigel Mapp, (eds), William Empson: The Critical Achievement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–120; and Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 7–26. 18 Matthew Bevis, ‘William Empson’, The Literary Encyclopedia (2004), available at www.LitEncyc.com. 19 See Jason Harding, ‘Empson and the Gifts of China’, in Matthew Bevis, ed. Some Versions of Empson, 86–8. 20 Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Athlone, 1978), 25–6. 21 Empson, Argufying, 247–9. 22 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007), 302. 23 For discussion of type A analyses leading to a type B biographical understanding in sonnet commentary by Stephen Booth and Helen Vendler – both critics who might be expected to resist type B readings in general – see Engle, ‘William Empson and The Sonnets’, which also comments on Michel Foucault’s characterization of the idea of the author as something that, for post-structuralist readers, always opens up a wider set of impersonal questions. 24 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 224–5. 10

178 Notes Blindness, 237–8. On the ways de Man, while generally depersonalizing Empson’s modes of reading, may have covertly been attracted by their relevance to aspects of de Man’s own life, see Neil Hertz, ‘De Man reading Empson’, in Norris and Mapp, The Critical Achievement, 213–42, especially 216–17 and 230–2. 27 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University California Press, 1988), 42, citing SVP, 103. 28 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1980), 156. 29 Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 124, quoting Empson, ‘Two Proper Crimes’, The Nation 163 (1946), 444–5. The other proper crime is atheism. David Riggs once told me that reading this comment of Empson’s got him started on The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). 30 See e.g. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 2–4. 31 Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1997), 37–8. 32 Norris, Empson and the Philosophy of Criticism, 30, 105–8. 33 The London Review of Books, 13, 2 (24 January 1991): 4. 34 ‘Hermeneutic Circling’, 215. 35 A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, Volume 5: English Criticism 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 281, quoting SVP, 114–15. 36 Frank Kermode, ‘The Savage Life’, The London Review of Books, 17, 10 (19 May 2005): 3. 37 Paul H. Fry, William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991), 8, 22. See also 130: ‘Empson’s faith in the presence of other minds is justified very simply: it takes one to have one’. 38 Herbert Tucker comments on the experience of re-reading Seven Types, quoting many wonderful passages, in ‘Teaching Ambiguity’, Pedagogy, 3, 3 (2003): 441–50. 39 René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, Volume 5: English Criticism, 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 276 40 Letters quoted in WE2, 293–4. 41 Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 13–26; quotation from p. 25. 42 David Bevington, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 1089. Further quotations from Shakespeare will follow this text. 43 Margreta de Grazia’s recent ‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) sees first audiences as recognizing in Hamlet a question about land inheritance and political succession that seemed quite real to them, and she (citing Empson) starts with the problem that Hamlet’s modern ‘meaning’ was not recognized until around 1800, but she makes clear that she will have no truck with B and C as critical methods: ‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet makes a sweeping claim: a 200-year-old critical tradition has been built on an oversight … This is not, it must be said, the same as retrieving Hamlet as intended by Shakespeare or as experienced by its first readers and audiences’(5). As we have 25 26

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seen, Empson attempts to deal with the same problem precisely by doing what de Grazia abjures: retrieving Shakespearean intentions and possible audience experiences. Moreover, Empson’s polemic against historicizing criticism that rules out interesting but anachronistic-seeming authorial intentions bears on de Grazia’s claim that modern views of Hamlet’s psychological complexity are ‘built on an oversight’. 44 See David Pirie, ‘Sources and Acknowledgements’, ES, ix. 45 William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (1951; rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 271. Citations parenthetically henceforth. 46 Selected Letters, 444; compare Empson’s description of ‘behaviourism’ in a 1933 letter to I. A. Richards on pp. 59–60. 47 Hugh Grady read the first draft of the essay and made helpful suggestions, then edited the final draft. Jonathan Crewe provided detailed and illuminating commentary throughout. David Hillman corrected errors and asked a key question. To all, my thanks. Parts of this argument, now substantially revised, were composed at the invitation of Michael Schoenfeldt for the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and other parts were first written for Richard Strier’s seminar ‘Great Shakespeareans?’ at the 2010 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to quote Empson’s “The Wife is Praised” on pp. 24–5.

G. Wilson Knight Note: The final version of this essay is the result of the modification of Michael Taylor’s original draft through editing, cutting and inserting additional passages (amounting to about 15 per cent of the final version) by volume editor Hugh Grady. Grady undertook this work when the illness of author Michael Taylor forced him to discontinue the final revisions that had been agreed on in the editing process. Prior to press time, the essay was reviewed and further condensed by Michael Taylor. We believe the designation of Michael Taylor as author and Hugh Grady as editor accurately captures the creative process of the work published here. 1 Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 15-50. 2 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), in his Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 241-50. 3 T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, in G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays (1947; London: Methuen, 1962), xiii. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 4 S. Viswanathan, The Shakespeare Play as Poem: A Critical Tradition in Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 69. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 5 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, A Study of Literary Judgment (1929; New York: Harcourt, 1960). 6 Robert Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in ‘King Lear’ (1948; reprint Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963).

180 Notes Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery And What it Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). 8 Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (1951; London: Methuen, 1977). 9 L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes & An Approach to Hamlet (1959; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), and Werner Sollors, ed. The Return of Thematic Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). The runaway success of thematic criticism – where almost anything can be thematized (or anyone in Knight’s case, who talks of the Brutus-theme and the Cassius-theme, the Macbeth-theme and the Lady Macbeth-theme) – has had its critics, most notably Richard Levin, whose essay ‘Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy’, PMLA, 103 (1988): 125–38 still packs a punch. 10 Maynard Mack, ‘The World of Hamlet’, Yale Review, 41, 4 (1952): 502–23. 11 G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme. Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Including the Roman Plays (1931; London: Methuen, 1951). Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 12 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on ‘Hamlet’, ‘Othello’, ‘King Lear’, and ‘Macbeth’ (1904; London: Penguin, 1991), 78. 13 This summary of Knight’s reading of Antony and Cleopatra in his ‘The Transcendental Humanism of Antony and Cleopatra’, in The Imperial Theme, 199–262, draws from Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 92–7. As Grady tells us, Knight’s ‘techniques of reading, his spatial hermeneutics, permeated the subsequent era of Shakespeare interpretation’ (97). In effect, Grady tells us, Knight ‘reconstitute[d] Shakespeare as a Modernist text’ (73). 14 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondances’, The Flowers of Evil, (eds) Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, rev. edn (New York: New Directions, 1989), 241–42. 15 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondences’, trans. Richard Wilbur, The Flowers of Evil, (eds) Marthiel and Jackson Mathews, 12. 16 G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism Together With Related Essays and Indexes to Earlier Volumes (London: Methuen, 1958), 257. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 17 G. Wilson Knight, Christ and Nietzsche: An Essay in Poetic Wisdom (London: Staples Press, 1948), 229. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 18 G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (1947; London: Methuen, 1965), 224. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 19 G. Wilson Knight, Neglected Powers: Essays on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 356. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 20 G. Wilson Knight, Shakespiarean Dimensions (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 169. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 21 G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest: with a Chart of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Universe (1932; London: Methuen, 1968), 14. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 7

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Quoted by John E. Van Domelan, Tarzan of Athens: A Biographical Study of G. Wilson Knight (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 1987), 56. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 23 G. Wilson Knight, Shakespearian Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 208. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 24 Viswanathan argues that these productions and others by Gordon Craig and William Poel probably influenced Knight’s ‘spatial’ view of drama. See 70. 25 Principles of Shakespearian Production with Especial Reference to the Tragedies. 1936. Revised reprint: Shakespearian Production. 26 G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Challenge: On the Rise of Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 15. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 27 Robert Blackmore, ed. The Letters of John Cowper Powys to G. R. Wilson Knight (London: C. Woolf, 1983), 13. 28 Reprinted with some minor changes as Appendix E in The Sovereign Flower. 29 G. Wilson Knight, The Burning Oracle: Studies in the Poetry of Action (1939; London: Folcroft Library Editions, 1971), 39. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 30 Roger Sale, ‘G. Wilson Knight’, Modern Language Quarterly, 29 (1968): 77–83. See 77. 31 Knight writes in disdainful italics about how the twentieth century ‘reduces the Shakespearian grandeur to twentieth-century terms’ (Shakespearian Production, 265). 32 Knight criticizes Laurence Olivier’s 1946 performance as King Lear for not following ‘the curves of the dramatic rhythm’ (Shakespearian Production, 243). Donald Wolfit’s, however, did, and as a result his Lear ‘was magical, Druidical, hideous with an old age, hag-like, malice’ (253). 33 The Principles of Shakespearian Production, 34. 34 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930); extracted in David Perkins, ed. English Romantic Writers (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 500. 35 R. A. Foakes, ‘Romances’, in Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin, (eds), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 249–60. See 259. Foakes’s italics. 36 Richard Green Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism. With a New Introduction by Eric Bentley (1885; New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 34. 37 Cynthia Marshall, Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1991). 38 Harold William Fawkner, Shakespeare’s Miracle Plays: Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992). 39 Ibid., 8. 40 Knight responds, for instance, to the coarser-grained spirituality of Shakespeare’s delight in folk-lore and superstition: ‘Drama hooks on to our deep instincts; we have ingrained in us folklore and its superstitions; we are not creatures of pure reason’ (Shakespearian Dimensions, 45). For a recent, perhaps excessive, claim 22

182 Notes for the importance of the folkloric basis of Shakespeare’s work, see Catherine Belsey, Why Shakespeare? (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 41 G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare & Religion: Essays of Forty Years (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), 11. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 42 G. Wilson Knight, The Christian Renaissance with Interpretations of Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe and a Note on T. S. Eliot. 1933. Revised and with a new subtitle: with Interpretations of Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe and New Discussions of Oscar Wilde and the Gospel of Thomas (London: Methuen, 1962), 248. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 43 G. Wilson Knight, Ibsen. Writers and Critics Series. (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 31. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 44 Byron, no desk-bound creator he, scores heavily here. ‘Shakespeare’s aim was drama, whereas Byron’s was life itself’, G. Wilson Knight, Byron and Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 71. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 45 Knight remarks wryly: ‘It seems that our producers and actors do not naturally breathe the Dionysian air of Shakespearian tragedy’ (Shakespearian Production, 258). 46 G. Wilson Knight, The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British Drama (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 100. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 47 John Jowett, ed. Timon of Athens. The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 34. But Jowett is rightly critical of Knight’s adulation of Timon: ‘The play exposes an infantilism in Timon that diminishes him. He himself is a product of a pointedly deformed society with a pointedly deformed cultural poetics’ (45). 48 Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 207. 49 Philip Edwards, ‘Tragic Balance in Hamlet’, Shakespeare Survey, 36 (1983): 43–52; see 52. It’s arguable that Knight himself took back his repudiation in his reconsidered essay on Hamlet in 1947. ‘The Embassy of Death’, however, has many insights into Hamlet. Knight is one of the few critics at that time to take seriously Hamlet’s suspicion that the Ghost he has seen may be the devil, and one of the few also to emphasize Hamlet’s cruelty: ‘we have done ill to sentimentalize his personality’ (27). 50 G. Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare’s Sonnets and ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ (1955; London: Methuen, 1962), 120. Further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the body of the essay. 51 Bruce R. Smith’s take on Shakespeare’s spiritual sexuality may be helpful here. ‘In terms of our own nomenclature, the passions played out in Shakespeare’s plays and poems are not heterosexual, not homosexual, not bisexual, but pansexual’. See his ‘Studies in Sexuality’, in An Oxford Guide: Shakespeare, 431–42; see 438. Knight may have approved of the grand sweep of this judgement. 52 He notes, for example, that the ‘famous “Puppet on a String”, sung by Sandie Shaw, is a brilliant condensation of Antony and Cleopatra’, 85.

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‘He is – strange as it may seem – a good and gentle King, enmeshed by the chain of causality linking him with his crime’ (The Wheel of Fire, 39). ‘[E]nmeshed by the chain of causality’ is an interestingly evasive periphrasis. There is, however, a strain of reluctant admiration for Claudius in the larger critical world for the ‘witchcraft of his wits’ and his ‘traitorous gifts’, as King Hamlet bitterly describes them to his son, Hamlet 1.5.44. Knight, as it happens, is an instinctively periphrastic writer yet quick to spot it as a weakness in other writers. 54 According to Viswanathan, Knight was, at least in the 1930s and 1940s, ‘the great representative critic, embodying the Zeitgeist’ (The Shakespeare Play as Poem, 112). 55 David Baker, Ideology of Obsession: A. K. Chesterton and British Fascism (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1996), 98. 56 Quoted by Jonathan Glover, Humanity. A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 16. 57 Knight argues that British colonialism is different from, say, Italy’s or Germany’s, in its ‘more gradual, unobtrusive and subtly organic expression’ (The Sovereign Flower, 268). 58 Michael D. Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 130. See also the essays collected in Hugh Grady, ed. Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (London: Routledge, 2000). 59 For Richard C. Clarke this is a central concern in Knight’s work. See his article, ‘Shakespeare’s Contemporary Relevance’, A Review of National Literatures: Shakespeare and His England, ed. J. G. McManaway, 3 (1972): 185–97. 60 George A. Panichas, ‘G. Wilson Knight: Interpreter of Genius’, English Miscellany, 20 (1969): 291–312; see 310. Knight’s italics. 61 Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 62 F. W. Bateson, ‘G. Wilson Knight’, Essays In Criticism, 4 (1954): 221–4; see 222. 63 Hardin Craig, ‘Review of The Imperial Theme’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 3 (1952): 267–71; see 271. But no one, not even Knight, can compete as a bride of the poet’s imagination with A. C. Bradley in full spate, as we may see in the following: ‘What spectacle can be more painful than that of this feeling [of jealousy] turned into a tortured mixture of longing and loathing, the “golden purity” of passion split by poison into fragments, the animal in man forcing itself into his consciousness in naked grossness, and he writhing before but powerless to deny it entrance, gasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief only in a bestial thirst for blood?’ (Shakespearean Tragedy, 178). 64 John Jones, ‘Shakespeare and Mr Wilson Knight’, The Listener, 52 (1954): 1011-12; see 1011. 65 Ibid., 1012. 66 C. B. Purdom, ‘Shakespeare and Mr Wilson Knight’, The Listener, 52 (23 December 1954): 1120. 67 Van Domelan tells us that at a spiritualist meeting in Pinetown, South Africa, in July 1952, ‘Knight’s guide turned out to be no less than Shakespeare himself’ (150). 68 René Wellek in A History of Criticism, 1750–1950. 6 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955–86. Vol. 5: English Criticism, 1900–1950 (1986), 128–38, 53

184 Notes admires The Laureate of Peace (1954) as ‘the most sober, text-oriented of the later books’, and quotes Middleton Murry’s perplexed disdain for The Wheel of Fire: ‘I can scarcely recognize some of the plays after they have passed through the process of “interpretation” to which [Knight] submits them’ (137). 69 In a footnote in The Imperial Theme, Knight talks of Eliot’s essay ‘The Perfect Critic’ where Eliot says that ‘in matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgements of worse and better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the correct judgement for himself’ (383). Yet Knight is happy to make judgements of worse and better in Eliot’s poetry and plays – and of Eliot himself: ‘Eliot was in some deep way wanting in self-trust’ (390). 70 To read in utmost passivity, however generously motivated, would not win many converts these days. We may well agree with Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), that ‘the reverential attitude … is the attitude of the exegetes before the sacred text; whereas, what is needed is a judicious attitude: scrupulous to understand, alert to probe for blind spots and hidden agendas, and, finally, critical, questioning, skeptical’ (16). 71 Viswanathan believes that ‘the main implications of the poetic approach are best seen at work, and in overt formulation, in the writings of Leavis and of the Scrutiny critics’ (The Shakespeare Play as Poem, 47). 72 Knight is equally contemptuous of the notion that understanding Elizabethan stage conventions and examining Elizabethan prompt books will ‘render up . . . the Shakespearian secret’ (Shakespeare & Religion, 197). 73 Bateson, 223. 74 W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (New York: The Noonday Press, 1964). 75 It has to be said, though, that much of Knight’s criticism does deal with Shakespeare’s characters and often in the most Bradleian of ways. Remarks such as the following on Cassius’s nature in Julius Caesar are legion: ‘I see Cassius as a man thwarted by life, embittered, lonely; but with a passionately loving heart’ (Shakespeare & Religion, 41). 76 L. C. Knights, Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century. 1946 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 16. Knights’s remark came originally from his essay ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth’, first published in 1933. 77 How far such an approach has fallen into desuetude in these postmodern times can be experienced in much recent criticism. As Gabriel Egan remarks, we now encourage ‘a rejection of a desire for unity and a celebration of the dispersed, the indefinite, the self-contradictory, the de-centred’, Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: from Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. Accents on Shakespeare Series (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 12. 78 Edward Dowden, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art. (1872; New York: Capricorn, 1962). 79 G. Wilson Knight, Atlantic Crossing: An Autobiographical Design (London: J. M. Dent, 1936), 400. 80 The structure in question is Nietzsche’s Dionysian structure of inner experience.

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C. L. Barber The epigraph, drawn from the Barber quotation on the opening page of Richard Wheeler’s Introduction to C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. Richard Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1, highlights the active creative engagement on the reader’s part that, I will suggest, applies to Barber’s own activity as a reader. As Wheeler explains, this passage comes from the ‘rather extensive array of incomplete drafts among Barber’s papers’ (3). 2 Later in this essay I discuss three of the four final chapters, those on Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice and the Henry IV plays. I have omitted discussion of As You Like It because I have already commented on the play in relation to the concept of festive comedy in ‘Sexual Politics and Social Structure in As You Like It’, the first chapter of Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 15–38. 3 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion’, Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 276–302; quotation from p. 295. Greenblatt subsequently modified the original 1981 version in Glyph – on which his contribution to the Festschrift was based – in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). In his Foreword to the 2011 reissue edition of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), Greenblatt aptly remarks that ‘Much of the vital Shakespeare scholarship over the last half century has been, implicitly or explicitly, a disagreement with Barber’ (xv). In particular, Greenblatt locates the source of disagreement in three specific clusters of dissent: ‘gay and lesbian critics’, ‘feminist critics’ and ‘new historicist critics’ (xv). 4 Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 121–2. 5 In the Introduction to Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, Richard Wheeler discusses Barber’s relation to new historicism (5–9) and sees Barber’s approach as closer to that of Louis Montrose (8). Yet Montrose’s view of Barber’s ‘reaffirmation of social norms’ suggests a significant distance from Montrose’s own position. 6 Beyond new historicism, Barber’s emphasis on the ‘festive’ continues to be widely generative. A major development in the overall critical discussion has been the conjunction of Barber’s idea of festivity and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that Barber himself considered Bakhtin’s work. Specific studies on festive patterns pursue various directions, as the following examples indicate: Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (New York: 1

186 Notes Routledge, 1995); David Ruiter, Shakespeare’s Festive History: Feasting, Festivity, Fasting and Lent in the Second Henriad (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2003); and Phebe Jensen, Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). This strand also includes ancillary studies by social historian David Cressy such as Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Birth, Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 7 I received Barber’s key word ‘structure’ as a direct inheritance when he gave my project the name ‘patriarchal structures’, which I adopted as the title of my first book, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama. 8 Barber published ‘Creative Reading’ in his senior year under the name ‘C. Lombardi Barber’ in The Phillips Exeter Monthly, 39, 7 (April 1931): 174–6. 9 The Triennial Report (Cambridge: Cosmos Press, 1938), 4. 10 Barber predeceased Levin and Schlatter, whose obituary accounts in the New York Times are dated June 1, 1994 and October 26, 1987, respectively. Harry Levin (1912–94) spent his entire career as Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard from 1944–83, while Richard Schlatter (1912–87) was Professor of History and Provost at Rutgers University from 1945–82. 11 Harry Levin, Matty at Eliot House: An Address (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England: Skelton’s Press, 1982), 4–5. 12 Kyle C. Frisina provides a detailed account in ‘History & Literature’ (Harvard College, 2006), available at www.fas.harvard.edu/~histlit/centennial/H&L-100years.pdf (accessed January 5, 2012) 13 This comment appears in Barber’s substantial statement (20–22) in an institutional publication for the University of California at Santa Cruz from c.1979. 14 The letter is on file in Houghton Library in the ‘Harry Levin Papers, 1920–1995’, Series: I. Correspondence, 291. 15 Granville Hicks, then a Marxist literary critic, was at Harvard in 1938–9. Of the two other students in the group with Schlatter and Barber, Richard M. Goodwin (1913–96) was an economist who subsequently taught at Harvard and at the University of Cambridge, England, and Daniel Boorstin (1914–2004) was a historian who served as the Librarian of the United States Congress from 1975–87. 16 On the political context, an important supplement is Richard Schlatter’s ‘On Being a Communist at Harvard’, Partisan Review, 44 (1977): 605–15. 17 For detailed references to the role of T. S. Eliot in the work of C. L. Barber, see my essay, ‘In Memory of C. L. Barber: “The man working in his works” ’, Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”, 303–22, especially 305–7 and 311–13. 18 Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report (Cambridge: Harvard University Printing Office, 1960), 48–50; quotation from 48. 19 The remark occurs in the Santa Cruz document cited in note 13. Given Antony’s spectacular military failure, the gesture of Shakespearean allusion is oddly incongruous. 20 The information about Barber’s military service comes from his University of California ‘Biography’ form dated March 14, 1970. 21 C. L. Barber, ‘The Use of Comedy in As You Like It’, Philological Quarterly, 21 (1942), 353–67.

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Cleo Barber eventually returned to the Seattle area, where she died in August 2001. 23 Barber’s remarks are quoted from his contribution to the symposium held in 1975 and published as A Symposium on Political Activism and the Academic Conscience: The Harvard Experience, 1936–1941, ed. John Lydenberg (Geneva, NY: Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1977), 63–66. 24 Contributors to the Barber Festschrift affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley included four professors in the English Department – Norman Rabkin, Janet Adelman, Stephen Booth and Stephen Greenblatt – and two Berkeley PhDs – Coppélia Kahn and Murray M. Schwartz. The Santa Cruz group included two professors – Harry Berger, Jr. and Robert M. Durling – and myself as a Santa Cruz PhD. 25 C. L. Barber, ‘The Family in Shakespeare’s Development: Tragedy and Sacredness’, Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980): 188–202. 26 I record here, in quick outline, the documentation that tracks my sense of the Barber–Berger connection as a central part of the Santa Cruz experience during Barber’s time there. The first brief reference to Barber and Berger as contrasting influences occurs in the preface to Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama, xi–xii. My introduction to Harry Berger’s Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) occasioned an expanded contrast (xxv–xxxviii, specifically xxviii– xxxii). Finally, there is the implied counterpoint between my essay on Barber – ‘In Memory of C. L. Barber: “the man working in his works” ’, 303–22 – at the end of the Barber Festschrift and the new essay in the recent Berger Festschrift – ‘The Power of Prodigality in the Work of Derek Walcott and Harry Berger’, 165–81 – in A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation, ed. Nina Levine and David Lee Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 27 Harry Berger, ‘Text against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance’, Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’, 210–29, quotation from 210–11, and reprinted in Making Trifles of Terrors, 50–69, quotation from 50–1. 28 My inquiry is in basic sympathy with Harry Berger’s concept, in Making Trifles of Terrors, that Shakespeare’s plays enact and expose a pattern of social relations based on the characters’ efforts to ‘redistribute complicities’. To summarize the gist very simply, Berger’s conception gives us simultaneous access to two versions of the characters’ responsibility. In the surface plot, characters are either good or bad; the good are totally absolved, the bad are totally responsible. This separation fosters self-justifying behaviour on the part of the self-nominated good characters. But, just because a ‘good’ character says it, that in and of itself does not mean that it is true. We need not accept a character’s self-assessment at face value, and we do not have to participate in his or her self-deception because we become aware of a deeper plot in which there is no pure good and pure evil. Since responsibility is shared among good and bad characters, we must seek, through linguistic analysis, more complex descriptions and assessments of each individual character’s mix of strengths and weaknesses, and how these weaknesses might contribute to a larger social process that produces an 22

188 Notes overall collective outcome which all (in one way, and to one degree, or another) are complicit in bringing about. 29 Complete citations for the three books are: C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Wheeler’s own book is Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 30 Murray M. Schwartz, ‘C. L. Barber and the Mastery of Expression’, Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”, 19–27; quotation from 20–1. 31 For an eloquent explanation of why all the plays are problem plays, see Harry Berger’s distinction between interlocutory and intralocutory speech in ‘Language as Gesture’, the Preface to A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare’s Venice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012): ‘By “inwardness in discourse” I mean the goings-on that irrupt within speech, the things language does for its speakers, or with them, or to them, the things it says about them, regardless of their express intentions and interlocutory strategies.’ 32 Valerie Traub’s ‘The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy’, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992), 117–44, was crucial in creating a new perspective that questioned Barber’s assumptions. Related work is Alan Sinfield’s ‘How to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist’, Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (London: Routledge, 2006), 53–67. 33 Citations of Shakespeare are to the second edition of The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2008). 34 A detailed discussion of Barber’s relation to feminist Shakespeare criticism is presented in my essay ‘On the Origins of American Feminist Shakespeare Criticism’, Women’s Studies, 26, 1 (1997), 1–26. 35 More recent analysis in Harry Berger’s The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) demonstrates that there is more than one way to interpret Castiglione’s historical position. 36 The ironic coinage ‘mercifixion’ in Harry Berger’s ‘Marriage and Mercifixion in “The Merchant of Venice”: The Casket Scene Revisited’, in Making Trifles of Terrors, 1–9, directly punctures the inflated religious language in Barber’s approach. See also Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Shakespeare & Shylock’, New York Review of Books (September 30, 2010) and the related commentary in chapter 3 of Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 49–73. 37 On Jessica’s role, see Mary Janell Metzger, ‘“Now by My Hood, a Gentle and no Jew” ’, PMLA, 113 (1998), 56–63, and Ania Loomba’s ‘Jessica’s Difference’ in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 156–60. 38 For detailed discussion of these passages as stress points in Othello’s racial trajectory, see my articles on ‘Images of White Identity in Othello’, Othello: New

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Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2002), 133–45, and ‘Race Words in Othello: Migrating from London to the Black Mediterranean’, Shakespeare and Immigration, ed. David Ruiter and Ruben Espinosa (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). 39 Similarly, Barber denies the contention in Jan Kott’s title Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) on historical grounds. In Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, Barber asserts that neither Kyd nor Shakespeare is our contemporary ‘because their sensibility is grounded in expectations of a sanctified social world, and their tragedy involves loss shaped by this expectation’ (142–3). In his discussion of the tragic implications of Richard III in The Whole Journey, he repeats this argument – ‘Kott proposes a completely ironic handling of Richmond’s pious finale’ – which ‘reading is clearly anachronistic as it is developed by Kott’ (115). Nonetheless, though rejecting Kott, Barber does allow that the ending is a problem: ‘we cannot entirely accept the ceremonial resolution that affirms Tudor orthodoxy by the marriage of the two houses, nor what comes to seem the scapegoat role given Richard. It is as if, at the end, the fully dramatized, secular, family-based determinants of the action are abruptly exchanged for a sacred, ceremonial causality’ (116). For a cogent analysis of the deep linguistic and motivational structures of Richard III and subsequent history plays, see Harry Berger, Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare’s Henriad (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming). 40 For a full discussion, see my two essays, ‘ “The Fault/My Father Made”: The Anxious Pursuit of Heroic Fame in Shakespeare’s Henry V’, Modern Language Studies, 10, 1 (Winter 1979–80): 10–25, and ‘Fathers, Sons, and Brothers in Henry V’, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama, 39–65. 41 The document from which Wheeler selectively quotes is Barber’s astonishing notes after a Ford Foundation Humanities Project Seminar. The date of the notes is 1961, shortly after the publication of Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. 42 In his 1982 letter to me, Richard Schlatter mentions Barber’s personal experience with therapy. 43 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992). Adelman’s death of cancer on April 6, 2010 at age 69 is an incalculable loss. 44 It should be noted that the configuration of Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare is faintly present as early as Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy through brief, tangential references to Marlowe and Kyd. 45 In response to G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985), Barber focuses on the split response to Hamlet in successive editions of The Wheel of Fire: Essays in the Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sombre Tragedies, originally published in 1930 and cited by Barber in the 5th edition of 1957. In The Whole Journey, Barber finds Wilson’s approach to Shakespeare’s first major tragedy unsatisfactory because Knight evades the problems in Shakespeare’s perspective on Hamlet’s character by separating out the elements into the two-part sequence of a changed view: ‘No less problematic is the radical difficulty of judging the son, whom Wilson Knight could see as an “Embassy of Death,” only to turn around on such recognition to join the majority who to come to rest in various vindications of a “sweet prince”’ (31 and 31, n.33).

190 Notes T. S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 111. References to Eliot’s work on Marlowe and Kyd also appear in the third book, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy. 47 In my view, when Barber places the phrase ‘motives underlying life’ in symbolic apposition with ‘this thing of darkness’, the abstract symbolism of this equation decontextualizes, and all but erases Prospero’s quite specific reference to Caliban as the non-human ‘thing’ that needs to be acknowledged. This move is part of a larger problem in handling the topic of ‘colonization’ (338), a topic that is no sooner introduced than it is dropped, left undeveloped. Unaddressed, for example, is the racism expressed toward the African king to whom Claribel, Alonso’s daughter, has been married off (2.1.69–70, 124–31). With an assist from Prospero’s magic, the marriage of Alonso’s son Ferdinand to Miranda will create a white couple to offset the loss of Claribel in a racially mixed couple. There is no reason for us to share in the supposed happiness of this racial politics of love. 48 John Keats, ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’, Keats’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York: Norton, 2009), 114. See also my comments on Keats’ poem in Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’, 252, n.4. 49 The Whole Journey, xxii. This statement comes from Barber’s 1961 notes, which I quoted earlier on ‘opening the gates to regression’ (xxi) in introducing Barber’s approach to tragedy: see endnote 41 above. 46

Kott in the East Alexander Abusch, Shakespeare Realist und Humanist, Genius der Weltliteratur (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1964), 38. 2 Ibid, 36. 3 Hildegard Schumann, ‘König Lear’, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft (Osten), 1 (1965): 207. 4 Abusch, Shakespeare Realist und Humanist, 40. 5 Tanja Walenski, Verweigerte Entstalinisierung: Die Beziehungen des Literatursystems der DDR zur Sovietunion 1961–1989 (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern: Peter Lang, 2006). 6 Milan Lukes, ‘Kottův Shakespeare v diskusi’, Divaldo, 16, 1 (1965): 49. 7 See Zdeněk Střibrnỳ, ‘Shakespeare Today’, in Zdeněk Střibrnỳ ed. Charles University on Shakespeare (Prague: Universita Karlova, 1966), 29. 8 Ibid. 30, 47. 9 Antonín Dvořàk, ‘Oběvený Shakespeare’, in Divaldelni noviny, 6 (1963): 6. 10 See, for example, the Serbian translation published as early as 1963 or the Czech version which appeared early in 1964. Both versions preserved the initial title in Polish Szkice o Szekspirze [Shakespeare Sketches], (Warsaw: Panstowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1961). The second version Szekspir wspolczesny [Shakespeare Our Contemporary] was published later in 1964. GDR critics relied upon the West German translation, called Shakespeare Heute [Shakespeare today] published in 1964; the Romanian translation was published later in 1968, yet directors and 1

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critics readily used the 1962 French version. See n. 56 below for further information on editions and translations. 11 A Kott-inspired perspective was introduced in the GDR performances of Shakespeare later in the 1970s, after Honnecker had replaced Ulbricht and the de-Stalinization of East German culture had set in. See Lawrence Guntner, ‘In Search of a Socialist Shakespeare: Hamlet on East German Stages’, in Irena Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (eds), Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 177–205; Maik Hamburger, ‘Shakespeare on the Stages of the German Democratic Republic’, in Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage. The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 205–15; and Walenski, Verweigerte Entstalinisierung. Die Beziehungen des Literatursystems der DDR zur Sovietunion 1961–1989. 12 Richard Wilson understood that Shakespeare Our Contemporary was the result of experiences of World War II but was less alert to the political references to the Stalinist and post-Stalinist period in Poland. See Richard Wilson, in ‘Is Shakespeare a Feudal Propagandist?’ in John Elsom ed., Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 145. 13 Anna Cetera, ‘”Be patient till the last”: The Censor’s Lesson on Shakespeare’, in Tina Krantiris and Jyotsna Singh (eds), Shakespeare Worldwide and the Idea of an Audience, special issue, Journal of Theory and Criticism 15 (2007), 133–51: 144. 14 See Jan Kott, ‘Raised and Written in Contradictions: The Final Interview. Jan Kott in conversation with Allen J. Kuharski’, New Theatre Quarterly 18/2 (2002), 103–20: 107. 15 ‘While Shakespeare is nearly always in one sense or another our contemporary, there are times when, to paraphrase George Orwell, he is more contemporary than at others.’ Jan Kott, ‘Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary’, in John Elsom ed. Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, 11. 16 Kott insisted over and again upon the inevitably situated character of all readings of Shakespeare and pointed to the need to read his book in the context of its own production (Ibid., 14–15). 17 Jan Kott, Still Alive: An Autobiographical Essay, trans. Jadwiga Kosicka (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 203. 18 Wroclaw is the main city in south-western Poland, situated on the River Oder (Polish: Odra). It was the historical capital of Silesia and is today the fourth largest city in Poland. 19 Kott, Still Alive, 181. 20 Carl Tighe, The Politics of Literature: Poland 1945–1989 (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1999), 56. 21 The unrest started in Poznan in June and peaked with mass rallies in Warsaw in October, 1956. An extraordinary session of the Communist Party was convened, which denounced Stalinism and attempted to shake off the oppressive regime by requiring a ‘Polish way to Socialism.’ The Moscow imposed leadership (headed by Bierut) was replaced by what was believed to be a reformist government, led by Gomułka. Soviet troupes were massed in Poland ready to intervene, but unlike in Hungary a month later, a peaceful compromise was eventually reached.

192 Notes In 1934 Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s Culture Minister, proclaimed the doctrine of Socialist Realism as the one acceptable form of writing. It was a combination of nineteenth-century Russian realism and ‘revolutionary romanticism’. Zhdanov’s prescription included an ‘optimistic’, ‘educational approach’ plus a simplified and transparent form and historical concreteness. As experiment, innovation or any formally ‘difficult’ style became increasingly intolerable, Socialist Realism inevitably led to standardization and cultural conservatism. Furthermore, it was radically opposed to any form of ‘Western, decadent formalism’. For Socialist Realism in the Soviet theatre see Robert Leach, Makers of Modern Theatre. An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 20–5 and 110–12; for the adoption of Socialist Realism in Shakespeare performances and criticism in the satellite socialist countries, see Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova, Painting Shakespeare Red: An East-European Appropriation (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), Martin Hilskỳ, ‘Shakespeare in Czech: an Essay in Cultural Semantics’, in Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper (eds), Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 150–9, Veronika Schandl, Socialist Productions in Kadar Regime Hungary (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008) and Krystyna Kuiawińska Courtney, ‘From Jan Kott to Commerce: Shakespeare in Post-Communist Poland’, in Krystyna Kuiawińska Courtney and R. S. White (eds), Shakespeare’s Local Habitations (Łódź: Łódź University Press, 2007). 23 Kott, Still Alive, 186, 190. 24 The talk would be published in an extended form in Przeglad Kulturalny, on 17 April 1956. 25 On the publication in Poland and the Polish discussion on Kott’s volume in the early 1960s see Cetera, ‘“Be patient till the last”: The Censor’s Lesson on Shakespeare’, 142–5. 26 For the traditional role of a writer as member of the Polish intelligentsia see Carl Tighe, The Politics of Literature: Poland 1945–1989, 6–15. 27 On the theatricality of his readings of Shakespeare see his interview by Kuharski, Kott, ‘Raised and Written in Contradictions’, 108. 28 Ibid., 110. 29 Once again one could trace Lukács’s influence who praised literature for showing the essence of social phenomena and historical changes. See Lukács’s praise of Shakespeare and Balzac. 30 The English version translated by Boleslav Taborski uses the phrase ‘Grand Mechanism’ for what Kott describes in his conversation as the ‘Great Mechanism’. 31 Kott himself acknowledges his debt to Georg Lukács in Still Alive, 199–201. 32 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, Ma.: The Merlin Press, 1971). 33 Kott, Still Alive, 199–201. 34 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, 87. 35 Ibid., 102. 36 For a discussion of Lukács’s notion of reification as both relevant to Shakespeare studies and as encumbered by Hegelian, totalizing assumptions, see Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 35–57. 22

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Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, 162. On an analysis, contemporary with Kott’s book, of the socialist/Soviet state as a reified, hypostasized social structure, whose self-perpetuation is determined by the very rationality of socialist society, see Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (London : Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1958). 39 Josif Visarionovich Stalin, ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, September, 1938. Available at: http: //www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/ works/1938/09.htm. (accessed January 10, 2011). 40 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1967), 67. 41 Stalin loved metaphors related to engines, machines and mechanisms, and envisaged progress, particularly the one to be achieved in the five-year plans, as the linear forward movement produced by internal combustion engines. See the description of Stalin’s obsession with engines and mechanisms in Gabriel Egan, Shakespeare and Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 59. 42 Jerzy Topolski, Metodologia historicii (Warsaw: Pariswowe Wydawn, Naukowe, 1973) [Method of Historiography] is an example of a sophisticated Marxist, socialist approach to the study of history that still privileges the notion of ‘mechanism’ (‘mechanism of change’, ‘social mechanism’). For the English translation, see Jerzy Topolski, Methodology of History, trans. Olgierd Wojtasiewicz (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976). Topolski was widely studied and quoted in socialist Romania. 43 See, for example, the reductive definition Kott offers in his essay on Macbeth: ‘Mechanism and nightmare are just different metaphors to depict the same struggle for power and the crown . . . History, shown as mechanism, fascinates by its terror and inevitability. Whereas nightmare paralyses and terrifies’ (Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1967), 68. 44 Krystyna Kuiawińska Courtney, ‘From Jan Kott to Commerce: Shakespeare in Post-Communist Poland’, in Shakespeare’s Local Habitations, Krystyna Kuiawińska Courtney and R. S. White, (eds) (Łódź: Łódź University Press, 2007), 15. 45 Veronika Schandl points out that the public was eager for the injection of topical, political meanings into the Shakespearean text and would travel long distances only to hear what they perceived to be subversive insertions. Audiences would even politicize readings, initially not meant to be subversive. See Veronika Schandl, Socialist Productions in Kadar Regime Hungary (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), 20–4. 46 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1967, ix. 47 Ibid., 5. 48 Ibid., 23. 49 Ibid., 28–9. 50 Milan Lukes, ‘Kottův Shakespeare v diskusi’, 48. 51 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary,1967, ix. 52 Kott, ‘Raised and Written in Contradictions’, 111–12. 53 Kott did not write the book as a Shakespearean scholar. His field was rather French avant-garde literature, having studied the French surrealists (Lautreamont, Breton and Tzara) in France and modern theatre (he was the first to introduce and translate Eugene Ionesco’s plays in Poland). As a university professor, he taught Polish and French literature in Wroclaw and Warsaw. Initially, he 37 38

194 Notes read Shakespeare only in translation. Even in his later work he would quote Shakespeare using several Polish translations. See Jadwiga Kosicka, ‘Translating Kott’, Theater, 32/3 (2002): 5–29. 54 Esslin expands on the form of ‘ literary essay’ Kott adopts, and which he describes to be ‘as erudite as the best scholarship, as urbane as the most cultured conversation, as deeply felt and finely wrought as poetry’. Essayists like Kott fulfil an essential function: according to Esslin, ’they concentrate and reflect the spirit of the times across the ever-more-rigid boundaries of specialization’. See Martin Esslin, ‘Introduction’, in Jan Kott, The Theatre of Essence (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1984), 2–4. 55 Kott, ‘Raised and Written in Contradictions’, 108. 56 Kott’s Skzice o Szekspirze was first translated into French in 1962, when it was given the title it would be subsequently known by – Shakespeare notre contemporain. A second French edition that included a large number of pictures of Shakespeare performances in the ‘new’ style initiated by Kott’s book followed in 1965. The English version was published in 1964 at Methuen – see n.10 above for further publication information on Kott’s much translated work. As can be expected, most of the translations in other languages (German, Czech and Serbian) were also published in 1964. In the English version, unlike in the French or the Romanian ones, many of the colloquial accents are dropped or replaced by impersonal structures in the passive, while strong emotional descriptions or political allusions are often elided. In many instances, the French text is almost twice as long as the English one. Compare, for example, the following French version of Kott’s comment on Richard III: ‘C’est pourquoi, écoutons les voix de la rue. Ne les avons-nous pas entendues nous-mêmes en des nuits semblables?’ (Shakespeare notre contemporain, 41) with its corresponding English one: ‘Let us, then, listen to the voices in the streets’ (Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1967, 17). The link with the present (des nuits semblables – similar nights) is left out. 57 The 1956 Hamlet was an intensely political play, full of pain and hatred against Stalinist oppression and surveillance. ‘Watch’, ’enquire’ and ‘prison’ were the words most insistently addressed at the audience. Every curtain was hiding a spy; everything was corroded by suspicion and fear. (Střibrnỳ, Shakespeare and Eastern Europe, 101) The performance, directed by Roman Zawistowski, also made ample cuts in the text, as did other influential Polish Shakespeare performances in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. For the adaptation of the Shakespearean text for the stage and its influence on Kott see Gibińska, ‘Polish Hamlets’ and ‘More Than Jan Kott’s Shakespeare’. See also Anna Cetera, ‘ “Be patient till the last”: The Censor’s Lesson on Shakespeare’. 58 Anna Cetera, ‘ “Be patient till the last”: The Censor’s Lesson on Shakespeare’, 142. Not unexpectedly, the Romanian version of the book leaves out all temporal and political specification. Neither the XXth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party nor the reformist Plenary Session of the Polish Communist Party which gave power to Władislaw Gomułka is mentioned, both events being too disruptive to make reference to. 59 Ibid., 140. 60 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1967, 50. 61 Zdeněk Střibrnỳ, ‘Shakespeare Today’, 32–5.

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Arkady Ostrovsky, ‘Shakespeare as a founding Father of Socialist Realism: The Soviet Affair with Shakespeare’, in Irena Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (eds), Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 63. 63 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1967, 13. 64 See Lawrence Guntner for the insistence on this continuity in the East German approaches to Shakespeare in Lawrence Guntner and Andrew M. McLean (eds), Redefining Shakespeare. Literary Theory and Theatre Practice in the German Democratic Republic (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1988). 65 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1967, 37. 66 Ibid., 30. 67 Krystyna Kuiawińska-Courtney, ‘From Jan Kott to Commerce: Shakespeare in Post-Communist Poland’, 14. 68 Stanley Pierson, Leaving Marxism: Studies in the Dissolution of an Ideology (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 137. Anna Cetera points out that opposition to Marxism did not necessarily involve a nihilistic understanding of history and quotes the works of Zbigniew Herbert on Shakespeare and for whom, as the poet Czesław Miłosz explained, history was not ‘a senseless repetition of bloodless crimes and illusions’ (Cetera, 144). 69 Kott, ‘Raised and Written in Contradictions’, p. 110. On the rejection of modernist literature see also Lukács, Essays on Realism, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 1981. 70 For the modernist revolt against the Hegelian sense of history as well as the refunctioning and reinventing of Shakespeare, see Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare. Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), and Hugh Grady’s ‘Introduction: Shakespeare and Modernity’ in Hugh Grady ed. Shakespeare and Modernity. Early Modern to Millennium. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–19, as well as Hugh Grady, ‘Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism in the Twentieth Century’s Shakespeare’, in Michael Bristol, Kathleen McLuskie and Christopher Holmes (eds), Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 20–35. 71 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1967, 25, 37. 72 See Antonin Artaud, Collected Works of Antonin Artaud, translated by Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1971). 73 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1967, 33, 37. 74 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Heute (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 1989), 10. 75 Particularly influential was Witkiewicz, mostly known as Witkacy, whom Kott had known as a student and who was rediscovered in the détente period immediately following the 1956 events. Kott also directed one of Witkacy’s plays at Berkeley and wrote the preface to the English version of The Madman and the Nun. 76 Martin Hilskỳ, ‘Shakespeare in Czech: an Essay in Cultural Semantics’, in Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper (eds), Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 152. 77 See Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price, ‘Introduction: When Worlds Collide: Shakespeare and Communisms’, in Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (eds), 62

196 Notes Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 78 For excerpts in English of their work, see the collections of essays edited by Samarin Roman (1966), Arnold Kettle (1964) and Norman Rabinov (1964). 79 Morozov was published in Polish in 1950. 80 Both Smirnov and Morozov devote ample space in their essays to the question of whether Shakespeare was an ideologue of the (feudal and therefore reactionary) aristocracy or of the (capitalist and therefore progressive) bourgeoisie. A. A. Smirnov, ‘Shakespeare, the Renaissance and the Age of Barocco’, in Roman Samarin ed., Shakespeare in the Soviet Union (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), and Mikhail M. Morozov, ‘The Dynamism of Shakespeare’s Characters’ in Roman Samarin ed. Shakespeare in the Soviet Union (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966). 81 A. A. Smirnov, ‘Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation’, in Norman Rabinov ed. Approaches to Shakespeare (New York and Toronto and London: McGraw Hill Inc., 1964). 82 A.A. Anikst, ‘Shakespeare – A Writer of the People’, in Roman Samarin ed. Shakespeare in the Soviet Union (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966). 83 Mikhail M. Morozov, ‘The Dynamism of Shakespeare’s Characters’, in Samarin ed. Shakespeare in the Soviet Union. 84 Smirnov, ‘Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation’ (1964). 85 See Arkady Ostrovsky, ‘Shakespeare as a founding Father of Socialist Realism: The Soviet Affair with Shakespeare’, in Makaryk and Price (eds), Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. 86 See also M. M. Morozov, Shakespeare on the Soviet Stage with an Introduction by J. Dover Wilson (London: Soviet News, 1947). 87 A. A. Smirnov, ‘Shakespeare, the Renaissance and the Age of Barocco’(1966), and M. M. Morozov, ‘The Dynamism of Shakespeare’s Characters’ (1966). 88 Ibid., 73. 89 Morozov, 1966. 90 Alexander Abusch, Shakespeare Realist und Humanist, Genius der Weltliteratur: ‘In allen Werken zeigt er die Geschichte mit dem ehernen Gang der Notwendigkeit aus der feudal absoluten Vergangenheit durch Zeiten des Űbergangs zu einer hőheren Stufe der Entwicklung’, 23. See also 35, 36, 38, 40. 91 The talk was organized by Milan Lukes; it brought together directors, theatre critics and academics. The same issue also published an essay on Edward Albee, signalling thus the full reception of the theatre of the absurd and of modern American theatre, which was no longer banned as ‘decadent’. See Milan Lukes, ‘Kottův Shakespeare v diskusi’ in Divaldo, 16, 1 (1965): 48–54. 92 See Zdeněk Střibrnỳ, ‘Henry V and History’, in Arnold Kettle ed. Shakespeare in a Changing World (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964). 93 Milan Lukes, ‘Kottův Shakespeare v diskusi’, 51. 94 Zdeněk Střibrnỳ, ‘Shakespeare Today’, 29. 95 Ibid., 31. 96 Střibrnỳ would remain loyal to his positions even after 1989 and even expand them in his book Shakespeare in Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University, 2000), 103–6.

Notes

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Zdeněk Vankura, ‘Shakespeare – Whose contemporary?’ in Zdeněk Střibrnỳ ed. Charles University on Shakespeare (Prague: Universita Karlova, 1966), 46. 98 Milan Lukes, ‘Kottův Shakespeare v diskusi’, 52. 99 Antonín Dvořàk, ‘Oběvený Shakespeare’, 6. 100 Antonín Dvořàk, ‘Oběvený Shakespeare’, 6, and Milan Lukes, ‘Kottův Shakespeare v diskusi’, 48. 101 Milan Lukes, ‘Kottův Shakespeare v diskusi’, 50. 102 Martin Hilskỳ. ‘Shakespeare in Czech: an Essay in Cultural Semantics’, in Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper (eds), Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 150–3. 103 Mihai Novicov, Realism, realism critic, realism socialist (Bucureşti: Editura pentru literatură, 1961), 62. 104 Ibid., 82. 105 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary,1967, 64. 106 Ibid., 67. 107 David Esrig, ‘Fişă pentru un viitor spectacol›, Contemporanul, 14 (1964) 108 Valeriu Moisescu. ‘Eu nu imit natura, eu lucrez cu ea’, Teatrul, 4 (1965): 76–9. 109 Florin Tornea. ‘Printre noi’, Teatrul, 4 (1964): 40–7 110 Gilles Sandrier, ‘Troilus et Cressida. Planchon commence par une soirée ingrate et passionante’, Arts. Lettres, spectacles, musique, 952 (1965): 5. 111 Radu Popescu, ‘Scurte preliminarii’, România liberă, 6505, (September 15, 1965). 112 Valentin Silvestru, ‘Shakespeare – moment actual – Troilus şi Cresida la Teatrul de Comedie’, Contemporanul 14 (1964). See also Andrei Băleanu, ‘Troilus şi Cresida la Teatrul de Comedie’, Scînteia, 6593 (April 18, 1965). 113 Gilles Sandrier‚ ‘Troilus et Cressida. Planchon commence par une soirée ingrate et passionante’, 5. 114 Ana Maria Narti, ‘Troilus şi Cresida de Shakespeare la teatrul de Comedie’, Teatrul, 4 (1965): 29–35 and Pîrvulescu, Mariana, ‘Troilus şi Cressida de W. Shakespeare’, România Liberă, 6400 (April 1, 1965). 115 Mugur, Vlad. ‘Prima noastră scenă trebuie să pună cel mai puternic accent în cultura teatrală ţării’, Teatrul, 8 (1965): 9–21, and Dina Cocea, ‘Criteriile în educarea publicului’, Teatrul, 10 (1965): 9–21. 116 Radu Popescu, ‘Scurte preliminarii’, România liberă, 6505 (September 15, 1965). 117 See Anna Maria Narti, ‘“De-regizarea” problema Nr.1’, Teatrul, 10 (1965), 20–5. 118 Ion Cocora, Privitor ca la teatru (Cluj: Editura Dacia, 1975), 20–4. 119 Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova, Painting Shakespeare Red: An East-European Appropriation (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 190–1. 120 Nicoleta Cimpoies, Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Romania, 1778–2008 (Lewingston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press), 2010, 148–9. 121 Dinu Cernescu, ‘Cu Dinu Cernescu despre Shakespeare şi Hamlet. Interviu de Aurel Bădescu’, Contemporanul 8 (1974). 122 Ion Cocora, Privitor ca la teatru, 22–4. 123 Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova, Painting Shakespeare Red: An East-European Appropriation, 191. 124 Ibid., 192. 125 Ibid., 194. 97

198 Notes Dennis Kennedy, ‘Shakespeare and the Cold War’, in Angel-Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars (eds), 400 Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2003), 177.

126

Kott in the West I acknowledge and thank the help I received from ‘Collegium Budapest’ Institute for Advanced Study and Halina Bren for the completion of this article. 2 Andrzej Wirth, ‘Theater As the Theory of Everything’, trans. Linda Bartholomai, Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 23. 3 Kott, Still Alive, 19. 4 Ibid., 207. 5 Ibid., 131. 6 Jan Kott, ‘Letter from Jan Kott to Czesław Miłosz’, Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 27. 7 Jan Kott, ‘Tadeusz Borowski: A European Education’, in The Theater of Essence: And Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984), 168 8 Kott, Still Alive, 42. 9 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964). 10 Kott, Still Alive, 42–3. 11 Dennis Kennedy, ed. Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7. 12 Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance (2nd edn; New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001), 202. 13 Jan Kott, ‘Last Words’ [Excerpted from Jan Kott, Szekspir współczesny 2. Płeć Rozalindy i inne szkice, edited and with introduction by Tadeusz Nyczek (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1999), 272–4], Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 26. 14 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (1968; New York: Atheneum, 1987), 21. 15 Ibid., 22. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 See Brook’s tribute to Kott in Peter Brook, ‘For Jan Kott’, New Theatre Quarterly, 10 (1994): 303. 19 The ‘Preface’ was also published under the title ‘It Happened in Poland’ in Brook’s essay collection The Shifting Point 1946–1987 (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 43–5. 20 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1964, viii–ix. 21 Kott, ‘Raised and Written in Contradictions’, 108–9. 22 Elsom, ed. Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, 98. 23 Kott in conversation with Allen J. Kuharski, 108. 24 Kott, Still Alive, 204. This Hamlet-production is also described in Kott’s Chapter ‘Hamlet of the Mid-Century’ in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1974), 59–64. 25 Kott, Still Alive, 188. 26 David Addenbrooke, The Royal Shakespeare Company (London: Kimber, 1974), 66. Quoted in Alan Sinfield, ‘Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of 1

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Ideology’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985), 159. 27 Margaret Croyden, ‘Shakespeare: “Cruel and True” ’, The Antioch Review, 27, 3 (Autumn 1967): 399. 28 Sinfield, ‘Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology’, 163. See also Robert Shaughnessy, Shakespeare in Performance, New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 176. 29 Il Gioco dei Potenti (The Game of the Mighty, 1965; a two-part, loose adaptation of the Henry VI plays, heavily influenced by Kott’s theory of the Grand Mechanism). 30 See Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare and the Berlin Wall’, in Makaryk and Price, (eds), Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, 167–8. 31 In an interview with Pia Kleber. See Pia Kleber, ‘Theatrical Continuities in Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest’, in Kennedy, Foreign Shakespeare, 141. 32 Jan Kott, ‘Prospero or the Director: Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest (Piccolo Teatro di Milano)’, trans. Barbara Krzywicka, Theater, 10 (Spring 1979): 119. Quoted in Kleber, ‘Theatrical Continuities in Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest’, 141. 33 Quoted in Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 286. 34 Elsom, ed., Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, 15–16. 35 Kott, ‘Raised and Written in Contradictions’, 115. 36 W. W. Arndt, Review article of ‘Szkice o Szekspirze. By Jan Kott. Warszawa: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1961. Pp. [332]. Zł. 20.00’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 15, 4 (Autumn 1964): 438. 37 Ibid., 439. 38 Martin Esslin, ‘Introduction’, Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1964, xiii. 39 Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 137, 180. 40 Russ McDonald, Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 150. 41 Frank Kermode, ‘The Shakespearian Rag’, The New York Review of Books, 24 September, 1964. Available at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/ archives/1964/sep/24/the-shakespearian-rag/ (accessed 13 February 2011). 42 Ibid. 43 Alfred Harbage, ‘Shakespeare Without Words’, in Shakespeare Without Words and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 8, 15. The essay was first presented as The Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy in 1969, and printed in Proceedings of The British Academy, vol. 55 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). 44 Ibid., 14, 6. 45 Ibid., 15. 46 Ibid., 15–17. 47 Ibid., 17–18. 48 Ibid., 22. 49 Elsom, ed., Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, 2–3. 50 Ibid., 11, 15. 51 Ibid., 16. 52 Ibid., 10.

200 Notes Ibid., 150. Sinfield, ‘Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology’, 161–2. 55 Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V’, in John Drakakis, ed. Alternative Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1985), 208. 56 Eric Pace, ‘Jan Kott, 87, Critic and Shakespeare Scholar’, Obituary in The New York Times, 4 January, 2002. Available at: http://query.nytimes.com/ gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E6DF1E30F937A35752C0A9649C8B63&scp=1&s q=jan%20kott%2087&st=cse (accessed on 17 March 2011). 57 Jadwiga Kosicka, ‘Translating Kott’, Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 19. 58 Ibid., 19. 59 Ibid., 20. 60 Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy, trans. Boleslaw Taborski and Edward J. Czerwinski (New York: Random House, 1973), ix. 61 Ibid., 269. 62 Kott, The Theater of Essence, 161. 63 Bernice W. Kliman, ‘Booknotes’, Clio, 17, 3 (Spring 1988): 309. 64 Jan Kott, The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition, trans. Daniela Miedzyrzecka and Lillian Vallee (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 1–27. 65 Kliman, ‘Booknotes’, 309. 66 Jan Kott, The Gender of Rosalind: Interpretations: Shakespeare, Büchner, Gautier, trans. Jadwiga Kosicka and Mark Rosenzweig (Evaston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 6. 67 Ibid., 36. 68 Ibid., 37. 69 Charles Marowitz, Roar of the Canon: Kott and Marowitz on Shakespeare (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2001), xvii. 70 Quoted by Gordon Rogoff, ‘Loud Conversations with Jan Kott’, Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 10. 71 Kott, ‘Raised and Written in Contradictions’, 108. 72 Rustom Bharucha, ‘Take It or Leave It’, Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 5. 73 Ibid., 5. 74 Ibid., 6. 75 Ibid., 5. 76 Kosicka, ‘Translating Kott’, 19. 77 Ibid., 21. 78 Ibid., 19. 79 Ibid., 21. 80 Wirth, ‘Theater As the Theory of Everything’, 23. 53 54

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Gibińska, Marta. ‘Polish Hamlets: Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Polish Theatres after 1945’, Shakespeare in the New Europe, Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper, (eds). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994, 159–74. —‘More Than Jan Kott’s Shakespeare – Shakespeare in Polish Theatre After 1945’, On Page and Stage: Shakespeare in Polish and World Culture, Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney, ed. Krakow: Krakow University Press, 2000, 183–94. Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Grady, Hugh. The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. —Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. —‘Introduction: Shakespeare and Modernity’, Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, Hugh Grady, ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, 1–19. —‘Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism in the Twentieth Century’s Shakespeare’, Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity, Michael Bristol, Kathleen McLuskie, and Christopher Holmes, (eds). London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 20–35. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare. London: Sidgewick & Jackson, 1927– 1929. Greenblatt, Stephen. ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion.’ Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, (eds). Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985, 276–302. —‘Invisible Bullets’, Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 21–65. —Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. —“Shakespeare & Shylock,” New York Review of Books, 57, 14 (September 30, 2010): 85–91. —Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. —Shakespeare’s Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Guntner, J. Lawrence, and Andrew M. McLean, (eds). Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Theory and Theatre Practice in the German Democratic Republic. Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1988. —‘In Search of a Socialist Shakespeare: Hamlet on East German Stages’, Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, Irena Makaryk and Joseph G. Price, (eds). Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006, 177–205. —‘Rewriting Shakespeare: Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, and the Politics of Performance’, Shakespeare and European Politics. Dirk Delabastita, Jozef de Vos and Paul Franssen, (eds). Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2008. Habicht, Werner. ‘Shakespeare and the Berlin Wall’, Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. Irena Makaryk and Joseph G. Price, (eds). Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006, 157–77.

206

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Haffenden, John, ed. The Complete Poems of William Empson. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000. —Selected Letters of William Empson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. —William Empson: Among the Mandarins. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 2 vols. —William Empson: Against the Christians. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 2 vols. Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare Among the Moderns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Hamburger, Maik. ‘Shakespeare on the Stages of the German Democratic Republic’, Shakespeare on the German Stage. The Twentieth Century. Wilhelm Hortmann, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 205–15. Harbage, Alfred. ‘Shakespeare Without Words’, Shakespeare Without Words and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972, 3–23. Harding, Jason. ‘Empson and the Gifts of China’, Bevis, 86–8. Harvard College. Class of 1935. The Triennial Report. Cambridge: Cosmos Press, 1938. —Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report. Cambridge: Harvard University Printing Office, 1960. Hilskỳ, Martin. ‘Shakespeare in Czech: an Essay in Cultural Semantics’, Shakespeare in the New Europe. Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper, (eds). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994, 150–9. Jensen, Phebe. Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Jones, John. ‘Shakespeare and Mr. Wilson Knight’, The Listener, 52 (1954): 1011–12. Jowett, John, ed. Timon of Athens. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Keats, John. ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’, Keats’s Poetry and Prose. Jeffrey N. Cox, ed. New York: Norton, 2009, 114. Kennedy, Dennis. ‘Shakespeare and the Cold War’, 400 Years of Shakespeare in Europe, Angel-Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars, (eds). Newark: Delaware University Press, 2003, 163–80. Kennedy, Dennis, ed. Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. —Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kermode, Frank. ‘The Savage Life’, The London Review of Books, 17, 10 (19 May 2005): 3. —‘The Shakespearian Rag’, The New York Review of Books. September 24, 1964. Available online (accessed 13 February 2011). Kleber, Pia. ‘Theatrical Continuities in Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest’, Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, Dennis Kennedy, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 140–57. Kliman, Bernice W. ‘Booknotes’, Clio, 17, 3 (Spring 1988): 309–10. Knight, G. Wilson. ‘Poetry and Immortality’, The Adelphi, 4 (September, 1926): 169–72.



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207

—Atlantic Crossing: An Autobiographical Design. London: J. M. Dent, 1936. —The Burning Oracle: Studies in the Poetry of Action. 1939. London: Folcroft Library Editions, 1971. —Byron and Shakespeare. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. —Christ and Nietzsche. An Essay in Poetic Wisdom. London: Staples Press, 1948. —The Christian Renaissance with Interpretations of Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe and a Note on T. S. Eliot: With Interpretations of Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe and New Discussions of Oscar Wilde and the Gospel of Thomas. 1933. London: Methuen, 1962. —The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays. 1947. London: Methuen, 1965. —The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British Drama. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962. —Ibsen. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962. Writers and Critics Series. —The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Including the Roman Plays. 1931. London: Methuen, 1951. —Laureate of Peace: On the Genius of Alexander Pope. 1955. Reissued as The Poetry of Pope: Laureate of Peace. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965. —The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare’s Sonnets and The Phoenix and the Turtle. 1955. London: Methuen, 1962. —Neglected Powers: Essays on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. —Poets of Action Incorporating Essays from The Burning Oracle. London: Methuen, 1967. —Principles of Shakespearian Production with Especial Reference to the Tragedies. 1936. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. —The Saturnian Quest: A Chart of the Prose Works of John Cowper Powys. London: Methuen, 1964. —Shakespeare and Religion: Essays of Forty Years. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967. —Shakespeare’s Dramatic Challenge: On the Rise of Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes. London: Croom Helm, 1977. —Shakespearian Dimensions. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984. —The Shakespearian Tempest: with a Chart of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Universe. 1932. London: Methuen, 1968. —The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism Together with Related Essays and Indexes to Earlier Volumes. London: Methuen, 1958. —The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision. With an Introduction by W. F. Jackson Knight, and an Appendix on Spiritualism and Poetry. 1941. London: Methuen, 1959. —The Wheel of Fire: Essays in the Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sombre Tragedies. London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1930. —The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays. 1930. London: Methuen, 1962. Knights, Lionel Charles. Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century. 1946. London: Chatto & Windus, 1963. —Some Shakespearean Themes & An Approach to Hamlet. 1959, 1960. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1966. —Further Explorations. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965. Kolbë, Frederick Charles. Shakespeare’s Way: A Psychological Study. London: Sheed & Ward, 1930.

208

Selected Bibliography

Kosicka, Jadwiga. ‘Translating Kott’, Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 5–29. Kott, Jan. ‘Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary’, in Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? John Elsom, ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1989, 10–16. —‘Letter from Jan Kott to Czesłav Miłosz’, Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 27–28. —‘Prospero or the Director: Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest (Piccolo Teatro di Milano)’, Barbara Krzywicka, trans. Theater, 10 (Spring 1979): 117–22. —in conversation with Allen J. Kuharski. ‘Raised and Written in Contradictions: The Final Interview’, New Theatre Quarterly, 18, 2 (May 2002): 103–20. —Shakespeare Heute. Peter Lachmann, trans. Vienna and Munich: Langen-Müller, 1964. —Shakespeare Heute. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 1989. —Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Boleslaw Taborski, trans. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964. —Shakespeare Our Contemporary. London: Methuen, 1967. —Shakespeare notre contemporain. Anna Posner, trans. Paris: René Julliard, 1962. —Shakespeare notre contemporain. Paris: Juillard, 1962 and Paris: Marabout Université, 1965. —Still Alive: An Autobiographical Essay. Jadwiga Kosicka, trans. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. —Theatre Notebook, 1947–1967. Boleslaw Taborski, trans. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968. —The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition. Daniela Miedzyrzecka and Lillian Vallee, trans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987. —The Eating of the Gods : An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy. Boleslaw Taborski and Edward J. Czerwinski, trans. New York: Random House, 1970. —The Gender of Rosalind: Interpretations: Shakespeare, Büchner, Gautier. Jadwiga Kosicka and Mark Rosenzweig, trans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992. —The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theatre and Death, Jadwiga Kosicka, Lillian Vallee, et al, trans. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992. —The Theater of Essence and Other Essays. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1984. Kott, Jan, ed. Four Decades of Polish Essays. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Kuharski, Allen J. ‘Jan Kott in Exile: Arden and Absolute Milan’, New Theatre Quarterly, 18, 2 (2002): 121–31. Also in Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America. Halina Stephan, ed. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003, 235–58. —‘Raised and Written in Contradictions: the Final Interview Jan Kott in conversation with Allen J. Kuharski’, New Theatre Quarterly, 18, 2 (2002): 103–20. Kujawińska-Courtney, Krystyna, ed. On Page and Stage: Shakespeare in Polish and World Culture. Krakow: Krakow: Krakow University Press, 2000. ‘Krystyna Skuszanka’s Shakespeare of Political Allusions and Metaphors in Communist Poland’, in Irena Makaryk and Joseph G. Price, (eds). Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006, 228–46.



Selected Bibliography

209

—‘From Jan Kott to Commerce: Shakespeare in Post-Communist Poland’, Shakespeare’s Local Habitations. Krystyna Kuiawińska Courtney and R.S. White, (eds). Łódź: Łódź University Press, 2007, 11–25. Laroque, François. Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Larson, Magali. The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007. Leach, Robert. Makers of Modern Theatre. An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Levin, Harry. Letter to Peter Erickson: 28 June 1982. —Matty at Eliot House: An Address. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England: Skelton’s Press, 1982. Levin, Richard. ‘Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy’, PMLA, 103 (1988): 125–38. Liebler, Naomi Conn. Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre. New York: Routledge, 1995. Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lukács, Georg. Essays on Realism. David Fernbach, trans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. —History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: The Merlin Press, 1971. —‘Postscriptum 1957: Mein Weg zu Marx’, Marxismus und Stalinismus. Politische Aufsätze. Ausgewählte Schriften. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970, 161–72. Lukes, Milan. ‘Kottův Shakespeare v diskusi’, Divaldo, 16, 1 (1965): 48–54. Lydenberg, John, ed. A Symposium on Political Activism and the Academic Conscience: The Harvard Experience, 1936–1941. Geneva, NY: Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1977. Makaryk, Irena, and Joseph G. Price. ‘Introduction: When Worlds Collide: Shakespeare and Communisms’, Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, Irena Makaryk and Joseph G. Price, (eds). Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006, 3–11. Manolescu, Nicolae. ‘Realismul modern al lui Shakespeare’, Teatrul, 3 (1970): 33–5. Marcuse, Herbert. Soviet Marxism. London: Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1958. Marowitz, Charles. Recycling Shakespeare. New York: Applause, 1991. —Roar of the Canon: Kott and Marowitz on Shakespeare. New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2001. Marshall, Cynthia. Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1991. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. McDonald, Russ. Shakespeare’s Late Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. McDonald, Russ, ed. Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. McMullan, Gordon, ed. King Henry VIII. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomas Learning, 2000.

210

Selected Bibliography

Metzger, Mary Jane. ‘ “Now by My Hood, a Gentle and no Jew”: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity’, PMLA, 113 (1998): 52–63. Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century . New York: Macmillan, 1939. Moisescu, Valeriu. ‘Eu nu imit natura, eu lucrez cu ea’, Teatrul, 4 (1965): 76–79. Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Moulton, Richard Green. Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism. With a New Introduction by Eric Bentley. 1885. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. Morozov, Mikhail. ‘On the Dynamism of Shakespeare’s Characters’, Shakespeare in the Soviet Union: A Collection of Articles. Roman Samarin and Alexander Nikolyukin, (eds). Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966, 113–40. —Shakespeare on the Soviet Stage with an Introduction by J. Dover Wilson. London: Soviet News, 1947. Mugur, Vlad. ‘Prima noastră scenă trebuie să pună cel mai puternic accent în cultura teatrală ţării’, Teatrul, 8 (1965): 9–21. Norris, Christopher. ‘The Machinery of a Rich and Full Response: Empson as Philosopher-Critic’, Bevis, 217–41. —William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism. London: Athlone, 1978. —Introduction. William Empson: The Critical Achievement. Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp, (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 1–120. Novicov, Mihai. Realism, realism critic, realism socialist. Bucureşti: Editura pentru literatură, 1961. Ostrovsky, Arkady. ‘Shakespeare as a Founding Father of Socialist Realism: The Soviet Affair with Shakespeare’, Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. Irena Makaryk and Joseph G. Price, (eds). Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006, 56–84. Pace, Eric. ‘Jan Kott, 87, Critic and Shakespeare Scholar’, Obituary in The New York Times, January 4, 2002. Available online (accessed 17 March 2011). Panichas, George A. ‘G. Wilson Knight: Interpreter of Genius’, English Miscellany, 20 (1969): 291–312. Pierson, Stanley. Leaving Marxism. Studies in the Dissolution of an Ideology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pîrvulescu, Mariana. ‘Troilus şi Cressida de W. Shakespeare’, România Liberă, 6400 (April 1, 1965). Popescu, Radu. ‚Scurte preliminarii’, România liberă, 6505 (September 15, 1965). —Royal Shakespeare Company – Regele Lear’, România Liberă, 6034 (March 13, 1964). The Publications of Jan Kott, Gerhard Vasco and Hélène Volat-Shapiro, (eds). Stony Brook, NY: SUNY at Stony Brook, 1979. Purdom, C. B. ‘Shakespeare and Mr. Wilson Knight’, The Listener, 52 (23 December 1954): 1120. Quinones, Ricardo J. Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1985. Ransom, John Crowe. ‘Art and the Human Economy’, Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays, 1941–1970. 1945. New York: New Directions, 1972, 128–35.



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211

Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924. —Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. —Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. London: Kegan Paul, 1929. —Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement. 1929. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1964. Rogoff, Gordon. ‘Loud Conversations with Jan Kott’, Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 7–10. Ruiter, David. Shakespeare’s Festive History: Feasting, Festivity, Fasting and Lent in the Second Henriad. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2003. Sale, Roger. ‘G. Wilson Knight’, Modern Language Quarterly, 29 (1968): 77–83. Sandrier, Gilles. Troilus et Cressida. Planchon commence par une soirée ingrate et passionante’, Arts. Lettres, spectacles, musique 952 (1965): 5. Schandl, Veronika. Socialist Productions in Kadar Regime Hungary. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Schlatter, Richard. Letter to Peter Erickson: 10 October 1982. —‘On Being a Communist at Harvard’, Partisan Review, 44 (1977): 605–15. Schoenfeldt, Michael, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Scholes, Robert. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. Schumann, Hildegard. ‘König Lear’, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (Osten), 1 (1965): 192–207. Schwartz, Murray M. ‘C. L. Barber and the Mastery of Expression’ Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, (eds). Newark: University of Delaware, 1985, 19–49. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, (eds). 2nd edn. New York: Norton, 2008. Shaughnessy, Robert. Shakespeare in Performance. New Casebooks. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Shurbanov, Alexander, and Boika Sokolova. Painting Shakespeare Red: An East-European Appropriation. Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Press, 2001. Silvestru, Valentin. ‘Shakespeare – moment actual – Troilus şi Cresida la Teatrul de Comedie’, Contemporanul, 14 (1964): 4. Sinfield, Alan. ‘How to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist’, Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism. London: Routledge, 2006, 53–67. —‘Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology’, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materilalism, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, (eds). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985, 158–81. Smirnov, A. A. ‘Shakespeare, the Renaissance and the Age of Barocco’, Shakespeare in the Soviet Union, Roman Samarin and Alexander Nikolyukin, (eds). Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966, 58–82. —‘Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation’, Approaches to Shakespeare. Norman Rabinov, ed. New York and Toronto and London: McGraw Hill Inc., 1964, 160–73. Smith, Bruce R. ‘Studies in Sexuality’, An Oxford Guide: Shakespeare, Stanley W. Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin, (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 431–42.

212

Selected Bibliography

Smith, D. Nichol. Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963, 137–8. Sollors, Werner, ed. The Return of Thematic Criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Spurgeon, Caroline Frances Eleanor. ‘Leading Motives in the Imagery of Shakespeare’s Tragedies’, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. 1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935. Stalin, J. V. ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, Marxists Internet Archive. (September, 1938). Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Stein, Walter. Criticism as Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Stewart, J. I. M. Shakespeare’s Lofty Scene. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1971. Strachey, Lytton. Books and Characters: French and English. London: Chatto, 1922. Střibrnỳ, Zdeněk. Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Střibrnỳ, Zdeněk, ed. Charles University on Shakespeare. Prague: Universita Karlova, 1966. —‘Shakespeare Today’, Zdeněk Střibrnỳ, 25–39. —‘Henry V and History’, Shakespeare in a Changing World, Arnold Kettle, ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964, 84–108. Strier, Richard. Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Tate, Allen. ‘The Present Function of Criticism’, Collected Essays. Denver: Swallow, 1959, 5–6. Tighe, Carl. The Politics of Literature: Poland 1945-1989. Cardiff: University of Wales, 1999. Topolski, Jerzy. Methodology of History. Warsaw: PWN Polish Scientific Publishers and Dodrecht, Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1976. Tornea, Florin. ‘Printre noi’, Teatrul, 4 (1964): 40–47. Traub, Valerie. ‘The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy’, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama. London: Routledge, 1992, 117–44. Tucker, Herbert. ‘Teaching Ambiguity’, Pedagogy, 3, 3 (2003): 441–50. Van Domelen, John E. Tarzan of Athens: A Biographical Study of G. Wilson Knight. Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 1987. Vankura, Zdeněk. ‘Shakespeare – Whose contemporary?’ Zdeněk Střibrnỳ, 39–55. Viswanathan, S. The Shakespeare Play as Poem: A Critical Tradition in Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Walenski, Tanja. Verweigerte Entstalinisierung. Die Beziehungen des Literatursystems der DDR zur Sovietunion 1961–1989. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. Weber, Max. Theory of Social and Economic Organization. 1947. Talcott Parsons, trans. New York: Free Press, 1964. Wellek, René. English Criticism, 1900–1950. A History of Criticism, 1750-1950, vol. 5. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986, 128–38. 6 vols. —English Criticism 1900–1950. A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, vol. 5. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, 276, 281. 6 vols.



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213

Wheeler, Richard P. Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-turn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. London: Athlone Press, 1994. 3 vols. Wilson, Richard. In ‘Is Shakespeare a Feudal Propagandist?’ Elsom, 140–68. Wimsatt, William Kurtz, Jr., and Monroe Beardsley. ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. W. K. Wimsatt, ed. 1946. New York: The Noonday Press, 1964. Wirth, Andrzej. ‘Theater As the Theory of Everything’, Linda Bartholomai, trans. Theater, 32, 3 (Fall 2002): 22–24.

Index

Abusch, Alexander  130, 140, 145, 146, 196n. 90 Artaud, Antoin  143 Bakhtin, Mikhail  16, 170 Barber, Cesar Lombardi  11–12, 91–127 and aristocracy  111–12 and comedy  91 and Empson, William  94 and feminism  110–14 at Harvard University  95, 96–8, 99 and historicism  91–3 and homoeroticism  97, 109–10 King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 112, 114–17 The Merchant of Venice 112–13 and new historicism  92–3 and psychoanalysis  101, 117–19 and race  105–6, 113 Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy  91–2, 99, 100, 104–17 and tragedy  120–4 Twelfth Night 107–11 at the University of California at Santa Cruz  101–3 The Whole Journey  111–12, 117–18, 124–7 Bate, Jonathan  17, 46 Bateson, Frederick Wilse  82, 86, 183n. 62, 184n. 73 Beckett, Thomas  130, 134, 143, 145, 147 Berger, Harry  102–3, 187nn. 26, 28 Bevis, Matthew  26 Bharucha, Rustom  172–3 Bloom, Harold  15–16

Bradbrook, Muriel  23 Bradley, A. C.  59, 62, 73, 180n. 12, 183n. 65 Brecht, Bertholt  156, 159, 166 Bristol, Michael  79, 183n. 58 Brook, Peter  12, 129, 138, 139, 145, 146, 147, 148, 156–8, 159 Burke, Kenneth  2, 11, 18 Byron, Lord  70, 75, 83, 182n. 44 Cernescu, Dinu  150–1 charisma, academic  14–15 Clemen, Wolfgang  60, 61 close reading see New Criticism Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 3,  69–70, 80 corrective force of great criticism  16, 47, 55–7 Craig, Hardin  59, 82, 183n. 63 Creasy, Matthew  21, 24 Crewe, Jonathan  179n. 47 Davies, Hugh Sykes  23 de Grazia, Margreta  17, 178–9n. 43 de Man, Paul  14, 33–4 Dollimore, Jonathan  74, 75, 167, 182n. 48 Eliot, Thomas Stearns  8, 15–17, 59, 60, 61, 81, 85, 98, 123–4, 182n. 42, 184n. 69. Elsom, John  165 Empson, Hetta  22–5 Empson, William  7, 14–57, 60, 84, 85, 94 author’s struggle premise  26, 30–7, 39–44

216 Index bisexuality 19–25 in China  22 as critic’s critic  17, 32–5 expulsion from Cambridge  19–21 lack of interest in genre  30–1 life 18–25 local complexity premise  26, 30–7, 39, 41–4 marriage 22–5 Seven Types of Ambiguity  21, 23, 25, 27–32, 35–41, 43, 46 Some Versions of Pastoral  22, 26, 30–1, 41–3, 46 Structure of Complex Words  22, 23, 26–7, 37, 48 ‘The Wife is Praised’  24–5 Empson on Shakespeare  22, 49–55 Erickson, Peter  11–12, 102–3, 185n. 3 Esrig, David  148–50 Esslin, Martin  161–2 exemplary force of great criticism  16, 47, 57 existentialism  128, 149, 159 Fish, Stanley  6–7 Fry, Paul  26, 46, 177n. 16 Frye, Northrop  9–10, 93 Goldberg, Jonathan  17, 35 Grady, Hugh  180n. 13, 192n. 36, 195n. 70 Grand Mechanism  135–8, 141, 142, 143, 150, 151, 159, 162, 163, 193n. 43 see also Kott, Jan Graves, Robert and Laura Riding  35 great critics, characteristics of  viii–ix, 14–18, 59, 61–2 Greenblatt, Stephen  32, 34–5, 41, 92–3, 185n. 3 Haffenden, John  18–19, 21–6, 46 Hall, Peter  159, 168 Harbage, Alfred  163–5 Heilman, Robert  60 Hillman, David  179n. 47 Housman, A. E.  45–6

Ionesco, Eugen  143, 149 Johnson, Samuel  15, 53, 55 Kennedy, Dennis  152, 156 Kermode, Frank  17, 46, 162–3 Knight, George Richard Wilson  7–9, 58–90 as actor  67, 68, 82 Antony and Cleopatra  62, 64, 69, 74, 76, 87, 180n. 13, 182n. 52 and Christianity  70, 72, 76–9 and criticism (as opposed to ‘interpretation’)  61, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89 and the Dionysian  73, 74, 83 as director  66–8 and Eliot, T. S.  59, 60, 61, 81, 85, 184n. 69 Hamlet  61–2, 66, 69, 75, 77, 79 and humanism  71–7 and interpretation  58–9, 61–7, 76, 81–2, 84–5, 88, 90 and modernism  58, 64 and morality  70, 72–4, 88 and nature  63, 69, 70, 80 and New Criticism  60, 85 and Nietzsche  72–9, 84, 184n. 80 and royalism  77–85 and sex  63, 73, 75–7, 87, 182n. 51 and the spatial  58, 61–6, 180n. 13, 181n. 24 and the spiritual  61, 66, 69–72, 75, 77, 80, 81, 86, 89, 181n. 40, 182n. 51, 183n. 67 and symbolism  59, 63–5, 68, 70, 79–80, 82, 84–6, 89, 90 and theme  61–3, 74, 88, 89, 180n. 9 and the transcendental  58, 62, 71, 77, 80, 81 The Wheel of Fire  59–61, 64, 66, 68–70, 73, 75, 81, 82, 84–7, 88–90, 184n. 68 Knights, Lionel Charles  61, 85, 88, 115, 184n. 76 Kott, Jan  12–13, 128–74

Index and academia  161–8, 172 The Bottom Translation 170 in Communist Eastern Europe 130–53 in Bulgaria  147, 151–2 in Czechoslovakia  130–1, 145–7 in East Germany  130, 144–5, 191n. 11 in Poland  146 in Romania  147–53 and cultural materialism  168 The Eating of the Gods 169 as essayist  168 and France  153 The Gender of Rosalind  170–1 and Germany  159–60, 173 and historicism  167, 170–1 and history  140–3 influence on the theatre  156–61, 167, 173–4 and the Polish perspective  161–2, 173 and Polish theatre  158 and political criticism  163–4, 165, 166–7 Shakespeare Our Contemporary 128, 131, 132–40, 155–6, 157–8, 161–8 The Theater of Essence 169 and translation  168 in the United States  153, 155, 168–74 see also Grand Mechanism; revisionism; and socialist realism Kuhn, Thomas  14–15 Lawrence, D. H.  17, 32 Leavis, Frank Raymond  10–11, 17, 85, 184n. 71 Lukács, Georg  134, 136, 192n. 29 Marxism  10–13, 98, 99–100, 135–7, 166, 167 Matthiessen, F. O.  95, 96, 97–8 Mnouchkine, Ariane  160–1 Modernism  4–6, 12, 58, 64, 134, 142–3

217

Montrose, Louis  92–3, 185n. 5 Morozov, Mikhail M.  144, 145, 196n. 80 Murry, John Middleton  69, 70, 184n. 68 New Criticism  5–7, 8, 9–11, 18, 59, 60, 92, 93, 129, 162 Norris, Christopher  17, 26, 30, 44 Palitzsch, Peter  160 poetic imagery  58, 60, 63 postmodernism 9 presentism  12–13, 129, 168 professionalism 3–4 Raine, Kathleen  23 revisionism (of official Marxism in Eastern Europe)  132, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147 Richards, Ivor Armstrong  6, 19, 60, 85, 90, 95, 98 Ricks, Christopher  17, 45–6 Riggs, David  32 romantic  3, 58, 59, 64, 67, 69, 77, 80, 81, 89 Rorty, Richard  15 royalism  72, 77–85 Sartre, Jean-Paul  128, 154 Schlatter, Richard  96–8 Shakespeare, William, All’s Well that Ends Well 40 Antony and Cleopatra  62, 64, 69, 74, 76, 87, 180n. 13, 182n. 52 As You Like It  99, 172, 185n. 2 Hamlet  49–55, 61–2, 66, 69, 75, 77, 79, 120–1, 135, 140, 150–2, 194n. 57 King Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 112, 114–17 King Lear  49–50, 73, 120, 122–4, 130, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 157, 159 King Richard II 141 King Richard III  138, 139, 142 Macbeth  49, 144

218 Index Measure for Measure  37, 55–7 The Merchant of Venice 112–13 Othello 121–2 Sonnets  25, 35–46 Troilus and Cressida 148–50 Twelfth Night 107–11 Sinfield, Alan  159, 166–7 socialist realism  133, 134, 147, 148, 149, 150, 192n. 22 spatial, the  5, 7–8 see also Knight, George Richard Wilson Spenser, Edmund  31–2 Spurgeon, Caroline  60, 61 Stalin, Josif Visarionovich  136, 137, 138, 140, 142, 193n. 41 Strehler, Giorgio  160

Střibrnỳ, Zdenek  131, 140, 145, 146, 196n. 96 Strier, Richard  26–7, 48–9 Taborski, Boleslaw  155 Taylor, Michael  162 violence  137–8, 142–3, 152 Viswanathan, S.  60, 65 Waley, Arthur  28–9 Weimann, Robert  140 Wellek, René  46, 48 Wheeler, Richard  117–19 Williams, Raymond  11 Wilson, Richard  131, 166