Aesthetics of Reception: Shakespeare Criticism down the Ages
Nothing can please many
and please long but just representations of human nature.
Samuel Johnson
An anonymous
critic once declared, with a little bit of pardonable jingoism, that if all the
writings on Hamlet were to be
collected and piled one upon another, it would touch the nearest planet! Fun
apart, none can deny that of all writers in this cosmos, it is the Bard-of-Avon
who has elicited the widest response to his works from all over the world. Lay
readers, students, scholars, critics, theatre-goers, translators—indeed all of
them have marvelled at what Harold Bloom terms him as the ‘human invention.’ It
is well-nigh impossible to put together all the reactions which have been so
continuously pouring over the four centuries. I intend to restrict myself to
the critical output on Shakespeare by established critics ever since the plays
were staged.
In his own
time, Shakespeare met with favourable response; and right from the Restoration
in 1660 onwards critics and editors began their focus on the dramatic text and
language of Shakespeare and quite naturally the attention shifted from theatre
performance to the text, the printed version. A vantageous point to begin our
journey would be to start from John Dryden who in his Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668) offers this remark:
To begin,
then, with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient
poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature
were still present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily; when
he describes anything, you may more than see it, you may feel it too. Those who
accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was
naturally learned; he needed not the spectacle of books to read nature; he
looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were
he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind, He
is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his
serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion
is presented to him; no man can ever say he had a fit subject to his wit, and
did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the poets.
It was Dryden who declared
that the credit of initiating the genre of the tragicomedy goes to Shakespeare
for till then ‘the sock and the buskin were not worn by the same poet’, that is
the genres of the tragedy and comedy were kept apart from each other and were
not practised by one and the same poet.
Samuel
Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare (1765) was the sixth edition of the great poet
in terms of history of editions (after the folio) The earlier ones were by
Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald and William Warburton. All of
these textual details connected with the definitive, authoritative editions
were updated and published by the great bibliographer W.W. Greg as Editorial Problems in Shakespeare. On his own method of textual editing and
emendation, Johnson was of the view that that reading is right which requires
many words to prove it wrong, and that emendation is wrong which cannot without
much labour appear to be right. In form and spirit, he follows the earlier
prefaces. The Preface which was
intended as the introduction to his edition of Shakespeare is Johnson’s first
work in extended criticism. There are seven units in this long essay:
Shakespeare as a poet of nature, a defence of his tragicomedy, his style, his
defects, and attack on the dramatic unities in general, the historical
background to drama, and finally, his editorial practice. There are some
inconsistencies in his views on tragicomedy, in his praise of Shakespeare and
the later attack on him, and on his style—“A quibble to Shakespeare, what
luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is
sure to lead him out of the way, and sure to engulf him in the mire…… A quibble
was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to
lose it--but these were the characteristic defects—not taken seriously—of his
age.” In his own Johnsonian language, his estimate of immortal Shakespeare, who
it was said knew little Greek and less Latin, runs thus:
The work of a
correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted
varied with shades and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a
forest in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air,
interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to
myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind
with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities,
minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness.
Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in inexhaustible
plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled
with a mass of meaner minerals.
When you come next to the
Romantic age, here is Coleridge’s dispassionate judgement:
As proof
positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakespeare by this
criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human faculties, as
reason, or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the coincidence or the two
called the conscience, the understanding, or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination,
judgment, and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties,
the terrors, and the seeming caprices of nature, the capabilities, that is, the
actual and the ideal of the human mind, conceive as an individual or a social
being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise or in a war field of
temptation: and then compare with Shakespeare under each of these heads all or
any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived! Who, that is
competent to judge doubts the result?
Charles and
his sister Mary Lamb were avid readers of Elizabethan drama. It is said they
read together all the plays of Shakespeare twice over every year. As a regular
theatre-goer Lamb felt that the depth of Shakespeare’s plays cannot be seen
through ocular aids; they have to be felt on the pulse through an imaginative
response that can be aided only by reading. Stage presentation cannot do
justice to the play. His work On the
Tragedies of Shakespeare came out in 1811. The tragic experience of a play
will always remain ‘unplumbed and unplummable by the best actors and producers.
Appreciation
of a play by Shakespeare through his character portrayal begins with William
Hazlitt, one of the most notable critics of the Romantic age. In his
trend-setting book Characters of
Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), he evaluates the playwright on the basis of the
real, life-like portrayal of his characters. “Macbeth and Lear, Othello
and Hamlet are usually reckoned
Shakespeare’s four principal tragedies. Lear stands first for the profound
intensity of passion; Macbeth for the wilderness of the imagination and the
rapidity of action; Othello for the progressive interest and powerful
alternations of feeling; Hamlet for the refined development of thought and
sentiment.” With him began what has now come to be called the character school
of Shakespearean criticism, later on to be taken up for more serious study and
interpretation by Dr A.C. Bradley. Charles De Quincey’s famous essay “On the
knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” is a
penetrating and philosophic piece of criticism. The Porter scene (II, 3) in
which Macduff and Lennox knock at the gates of Duncan’s castle Inverness is
usually taken to mean a comic interlude to relieve the mental tension the after
effect of the most foul murder. “We must be made sensible that the world of
ordinary life is suddenly arrested—laid asleep—tranced—racked into a dead
armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and
all must be self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly
passion. Hence it is that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is
perfect … the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that
the reaction has commenced….” The
Scottish philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle in his famous work On Heroes and Hero-worship remarks that
history is nothing but the biography of the Great Man. In the light of this
remark he puts to test Shakespeare’s work and concludes that he is a hero poet.
Likewise Carlyle’s contemporary, the American philosopher, essayist and
transcendalist Emerson in his Representative
Men eulogises and extols the virtues in Shakespeare’s works. The two of
them opine that it was Shakespeare who had created the European imaginative
empire.
Criticism came to occupy its place
in the universities only in the beginning of the twentieth century. Until then
men of letters combined criticism and scholarship and articulated their views
in journals. The situation now is different: criticism does not—indeed cannot
exist outside the academia. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Carlyle and De Quincey did not
belong to the university fold. George Saintsbury was the first to effect some
reforms. Edward Dowden published his biographical criticism Shakespeare: His Mind and Art. Dr AC.
Bradley and W.R. Ker were the critics of prominence—the first among the
academic critics--entering the university for the spread of their critical
enterprise. At a time when Walter Raleigh and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch were
occupying positions of prominence in the two citadels of learning, criticism
came into its own in the beginning of the twentieth century. The most
distinguished of them all was the redoubtable Dr A. C. Bradley. His Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) was so much
of a bible for Indian students. It used to be a wisecrack that Shakespeare
failed in the ‘Shakespeare’ paper because he had failed to read Bradley. A
critic Guy Boas composed this limerick: I dreamed last night that Shakespeare’s
ghost/Sat for a civil service post,/The English paper of the year/Contained a
question on King Lear,/
Which Shakespeare answered very badly/Because he had not read his Bradley.”
Middleton Murry thought that it
was the greatest single work of criticism in English, while Leavis and the Scrutiny scholars forcibly pushed Bradley off the
pedestal. Bradley was a committed student of Hegel. No wonder then that his
ahead aesthetic theory was based on Hegel’s philosophy of tragedy. He was most
at home in German metaphysics. The English had known the meaning of tragedy
from the Aristotelian tradition, and its effect on the audience by arousing the
twin emotions of pity and fear. For Bradley reality is one and the same. All
things which exist are only imperfect manifestations of the real one, the
infinite. Evil is that which alienates the part from the whole. Finite is
imperfect while the infinite is perfect. Finally moral order is restored and
harmony prevails. Tragedy as an art is the very image of this human drama.
Tragedy defends and confirms this order of the world. The tragic hero goes
against this order succumbs and submits. “We feel that this spirit, even in the
error and defeat, rises by its greatness into ideal union with the power that
overwhelms it.” Passive suffering cannot lead to the tragic. A tragic hero is
one who is responsible for his actions. There is no element of chance in
tragedy. The concept of poetic justice that virtue is rewarded and evil
punished is alien to the tragic spirit. To understand tragedy Bradley has to
look at the characters because actions issue through the characters. It is this
insistence on character that has come in for much criticism.
L.C. Knights made a scathing
attack on him in his famous essay, “How many children had Lady Lady Macbeth?”
The rejection of Bradley came from different quarters: from those who
maintained that Shakespeare’s plays should be discussed as effective stage
drams; Granville Barker took up Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and the practical
matters and problems of staging Shakespeare in Prefaces to Shakespeare that appeared in 12 volumes over a period
of 20 years; from those who thought that he was unhistorical in his concept of
tragedy, from those, the Scrutiny
group of critics who wanted to interpret Shakespeare’s plays as poems in terms
of imagery and themes. Bradley relied upon his personal emotional reactions to
Shakespeare. He succeeded in inculcating in us something about the profundities
of Shakespeare’s plays and laid the foundations for a philosophic criticism of
Shakespeare practised later by such well-known critics as Middleton Murry and
Wilson Knight. L.C. Knights, the co-editor of Scrutiny, however, wanted to reject this
character approach that dominated Shakespeare criticism and so mockingly wrote
the essay “How many children?”a classic of modern criticism. His position is
that “the only profitable approach to Shakespeare is a consideration of his
plays as dramatic poems, of his use of language to obtain a total complex
emotional response.” He demonstrates this method by exploring the twin themes
of reversal of values and unnatural disorder in the play Macbeth by a close examination treating it as a poem and not as a
play. This attention to the organic poetic unity that expresses the intention
of the playwright was the next step in Shakespeare criticism, followed by a
great many New critics like Derek Traversi (Approach
to Shakespeare), Robert Heilman (This
Great Stage )among others. This lop-sided insistence on the words alone to
the exclusion of other elements such as the plot and constructive features of
the play came in for rejection at the hands of a group Neo-Aristotelians. They
argued in favour of treating the play as play taking into consideration all
constitutive elements: plot, character, dialogue, music and spectacle all of
which together built up a play. Ronald Crane, Elder Olson and others formed
this group which came to be known as the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians.
After the advent of Structuralism and Deconstruction, Shakespeare
criticism took a different turn, veering away from the interpretative
methodology, spearheaded by the New Historicists Stephen Greenblatt and his
followers. New Historicism is based on a parallel reading of literary and
non-literary texts (chosen from the archive) both of which belong roughly to
the same historical period. It does not privilege the literary text. It does
not attempt to ‘foreground’ the literary text and treat history as its
background as was done by Tillyard in his Elizabethan
World Picture (1943). Literary and all other discourses are given equal
importance: the one is used to read and interpret the other. The two are seen
to mutually interrogate, contradict, modify and inform each other. In other
words it textualises history and historicises the text. Social structures are
determined by ‘discursive practices.’ Their high powered journal Representations became its organ,
promoting essays that gave a historicist reading of literature of the
Renaissance and Elizabethan age. It is more of a practice than an
interpretation or a theory. To quote Greenblatt, “the work of art is the
product of a negotiation between a creator or class of creators, equipped with
a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions
and practices of society.” Most of the plays of Shakespeare have been subjected
to this new historicist reading and this has marked a new wave in Shakespeare
criticism.
The British version Cultural materialism, a critical method of enquiry
gained currency in the mid-1980s. Jonathan Dollimore and Catherine Sinfield in
their book of essays (Political
Shakespeare) on religion, ideology and power in the drama of Shakespeare
and his contemporaries provided a reading based on political commitment. This
served as an alternative to the conventional Christian framework of Shakespeare
criticism which had run its course for more than four hundred years. By way of
an example, let us juxtapose the readings of Greenblatt and Dollimore of King
Lear. In his essay “Shakespeare and the Exorcists”Greenblatt makes a
comparative study of the play in relation to an unnoticed social document, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Imposture
written by one Harsnett in 1603 two years before Shakespeare’s play made its
first appearance. Harsnett exposes exorcists as frauds and persuades the State
to punish them. Greenblatt proves with textual evidence that Shakespeare uses
the theatre for a similar purpose of ritual demystification of the supernatural.
There is a deeper and unexpressed institutional exchange of the two texts.
Dollimore employing a similar method of engaging with the historical, social
and political realities concludes that the materialist conception challenges
all forms of literary criticism premised on essentialist humanism and idealist
culture. Such a radical reading of Shakespeare throws overboard the idea of a
timeless, humane and civilising Shakespeare replacing it with the one anchored
in social, political and ideological concepts of his historical moment.
Leaving aside these critical
estimates based on some or the other critical assumptions, there have been an
enormous variety of contributions on different aspects of Shakespeare studies. The
Oxford Renaissance scholar Dover Wilson, the editor of the New Cambridge series
of Shakespeare’s works along with Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote two influential
studies, “What happens in Hamlet?”
and “Fortunes of Falstaff” as an answer to Bradley’s “The Rejection of
Falstaff.” Terry Eagleton’s Shakespeare
and Society (1967) and William
Shakespeare (1986) are two major studies based on his treatment of the
literary text in relation to moral, historical and political realities.
Shakespeare’s works are inseparable from Elizabethan social issues. In the Western Canon, a work by Harold Bloom
which makes a list of 22 authors who form the fulcrum, the foundation for a
liberal education affords the central place to Shakespeare and Dante. The two
have divided the western world between them. For sheer cognitive acuity,
linguistic energy and power of imagination they achieve canonical centrality.
‘Negative Capability’ and ‘Objective
Correlative’ are two among the best known critical vocabulary used in relation
to Shakespeare’s works. Keats, defining Negative capability says, “At once it
struck me, what quality went to form a man of Achievement, especially in
literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—that is Negative
Capability when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” T. S. Eliot coins the
term ‘objective correlative’ in his famous essay “Hamlet and his Problems”.
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
‘objective correlative,’ in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion, such that
when the external facts which terminate in sensory experience are given, the
emotion is immediately evoked” Using this formula Eliot dismissed the play Hamlet as an artistic failure. The
yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production Shakespeare Survey has been publishing international scholarship in
English regularly since 1948, and many of its essays have become classics of
Shakespeare criticism.
There have
been poetic tributes to the Bard-of Avon pouring in from all quarters all the
ages. It was Ben Jonson, who firsts composed “To the memory of my beloved
author William Shakespeare.” It is most appropriate to conclude with the best
well-known of them by Matthew Arnold:
Others abide our
question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask
Thou smilest and art still
Out-topping
knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars
uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his
steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his
dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his space
To the foiled searching of mortality;
And thou who didst the stars and sunbeams
did know,
Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured,
self-secured,
Didst tread on earth unguessed at. Better
so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs
which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious
brow.
M.S.
Nagarajan
