FEMINIST CRITICISM
Shakespearean studies as well as literary studies were influenced the feminist movement of the mid- to late twentieth century and its antecedents. There are broad definitions and differing expressions of feminism in literary criticism generally. Nevertheless, significant areas can be discerned: the first relates to politics, feminist philosophy and gender as seen in the work, for example, of Marilyn French, who exposes in cultural terms how gender determines the identity of the ‘female’ who is subordinate to the ‘male’. A second approach is related to the location of women within Shakespeare’s society, as found in the work, for example, of Lisa Jardine, Juliet Dusinbere, Catherine Belsey and Germaine Greer. A third is concerned with Shakespeare in performance in theatre and film. In this, the growing voice of many female directors and actors in both experimental and mainstream theatre became prominent from the 1970s onwards.
CULTURAL MATERIALISM
Cultural materialism attempts to understand the ‘materiality’ of a work of art within the context of its historical production and location. It denies the universality of truths contained in the text and emphasizes areas of resistance that the text privileges or disguises. It argues that texts do not mean something in themselves but have meanings conferred upon them and those meanings have a political charge. Cultural materialism anchors meaning in an overtly stated political understanding of material reality. It draws heavily on the philosophies of writers such as Raymond Williams (1921–88) and Louis Althusser (1918–90), but also makes some reference (like new historicism) to the writings of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Michel Foucault.
STRUCTURALISM
This is a complex idea that takes the structure of language as a model for the structure of all forms of human endeavour. It is concerned to establish patterns that can be replicated across the human sciences in order to establish hitherto obscure connections. In literary discourse it distinguishes between the ‘word’, or ‘signifier’, that is comprised of arbitrary elements, and ‘the signified’, which is the concept that lies behind it. In literary criticism structuralism divides texts according to the tension between binary elements that derive meaning from their relation to each other. Meaning is generated by selecting elements from language (la langue) and combining them into meaningful units (la parole). So, ‘put crudely, structuralism is (at least in its early or “pure” form) interested rather in that which makes meaning possible than in meaning itself: even more crudely in form rather than content’ (Hawthorn, J. [1992: 174]).
POST-STRUCTURALISM
As Hawthorn says, this is a term ‘that is sometimes used almost interchangeably with Deconstruction’ (Hawthorn J. [1992: 137–8]). In literary criticism it follows on from structuralism’s attempt to discover mechanics of meaning but it questions the overt distinction between ‘the signifier’ and ‘the signified’. For structuralists, the ‘death of the author’ represents a challenge to the principle of a single controlling authority of meaning. For post-structuralists, the relative stability of any ‘structure’ is undermined by what is perceived to be a constant deferral of meaning. Any structure, according to post-structuralism, can be undermined or reduced to the conditions under which its structure is formulated.
Unlike modernism, which is content to reflect the fragmentary nature of reality, post-structuralism challenges all attempts to anchor knowledge, and asserts that there are only ‘knowledges’ whose authorities are always capable of being undermined. Consequently, post-structuralism rejects attempts to interpret texts which claim to have a finality of meaning or any authority that cannot be deconstructed (see Hawthorn, J. [1992: 137–8]). Post-structuralists consider texts as asking questions rather than giving answers, and as revealing the conditions under which meanings are produced. They look for ‘the differences between what the text says and what it thinks it says’ (Selden, R. [1985: 102]). Thus post-structuralism opens the way for other forms of criticism such as new historicism and cultural materialism. The title of Malcolm Evans’s Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in Shakespeare’s Text (1986) not only references Macbeth’s soliloquy following the news of the Queen’s death (5.4.28), but points also to Evans’s own post-structuralist approach to be found in his book that you, maybe, are about to read, whether as a whole or in parts.
For definitions of the Renaissance and the Reformation, see Chapter 4.
Glossary
Anagnorisis: The moment of discovery or recognition.
Aporia: When characters ruminate on issues that are irresolvable. An example is Hamlet in the opening lines of the soliloquy ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.56–88), but it isn’t just a simple weighing up of alternatives. It points also to those moments in a text where gaps appear and meaning risks falling into a void. In that respect, it is an area of interest in post-structuralism whereby deconstructivist critics are ‘centrally concerned with looking for the aporias, blind spots or moments of self-contradiction where the text begins to undermine its own presuppositions’ (Peck, J. and Coyle, M. [1993, 2nd edn: 135]).
Catharsis: A purging or release of emotions of pity and fear in the audience.
Hamartia: The fatal or tragic flaw within the protagonist, arising usually from an error of judgement but often interpreted wrongly as weakness of character.
Hubris: Excessive or outlandish pride, which in Greek tragedy tries the patience of the gods too far and leads to nemesis.
Nemesis: The retribution of the gods and the cause of the resulting downfall.
Onomatopoeia: A term denoting words that imitate what is being expressed, e.g. ‘fizz’ or ‘sizzle’ or ‘shiver’; so Bottom’s humorous ‘The raging rocks,/And shivering shocks’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.2.28–9).
Pathos: Stimulating pity or sorrow in the audience for the ‘casualties’ of an event; distinct from the downfall of the protagonist.
Peripeteia: A reversal of fortune leading to the downfall of the protagonist.
Pentameter: The poetic line of five feet, each foot characterized by two stresses – that is, iambus (soft/strong) or trochee (strong/soft). Shakespeare predominantly employed the iambic pentameter but he often varied both line length and the position of the stresses for effect.
Soliloquy: A substantial speech in which a character voices his or her innermost thoughts to the audience or provides them with important information. As these are ‘private’ thoughts being exposed, the character is ‘alone’, so Hamlet’s ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’ is prefixed by the words ‘Now I am alone’ (2.2.549). But it is not always the case that no one else is on the stage. Directors and actors in contemporary productions tend, for example, to decide whether they wish Ophelia to be on stage in the ‘background’ for Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.56) soliloquy. Desdemona, asleep, is on the stage for Othello’s ‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!’ (5.2.1f.). Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy ‘Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be/What thou art promis’d’ (1.5.14f.) is preceded by her reading a letter from Macbeth.
Stichomythia: Short, sharp, quick-fired repartee or banter between characters. For example:
QUEEN Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
HAMLET Mother, you have my father much offended.
QUEEN Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
HAMLET Go to, you question with a wicked tongue.
(Hamlet, 3.4.8–11)
Selected recent biographies
This introduction to Shakespeare has taken its structure from a desire to look at how the dramatist’s plays work. Another way to introduce Shakespeare is to look at his life and what we know about the man himself.
To a great extent the work of Samuel Schoenbaum, in his Shakespeare’s Lives (1970) and William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975), has provided the basis for a number of lively and interesting biographies over recent years. Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as a Stage (2007) is an entertaining introduction to the dramatist’s life. Michael Wood’s
In Search of Shakespeare (2005) is a tremendously enjoyable read, written with the enthusiasm of an accomplished historian who has the skill to engage his readers and television viewers in the historical stories he tells. Here he draws out the influence of Mary Arden, Shakespeare’s mother. Jonathan Bate’s The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2008) and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) come from literary critics whose lives have been steeped in Shakespearean scholarship and research but who in their wide-ranging forms of biography make the dramatist highly accessible.
Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (2010), thinks that Bate and Greenblatt stray into the realms of the historical novel in their approach. She attempts to be more objective, though she often still has to qualify her views with admissions of speculation. In her determined objectivity, Duncan-Jones work is a useful warning and corrective to any sentimentalism.
Peter Ackroyd is an accomplished biographer–author, writing, for example, a weighty biography of London. His Shakespeare: The Biography (2005) demonstrates the professionalism that you would expect to find, locating Shakespeare particularly within the city and town environments where he lived. Anthony Holden’s William Shakespeare (1999) is a sympathetic and at times forgiving biography. His journalistic background allows his enthusiasm to be unfettered and yet sound, providing a good read.
Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) takes a different line of enquiry, writing an informative book on Anne Hathaway, but it is a book also seen by Duncan-Jones as an example of a tendency towards novel writing. In order to shape a biography of Hathaway, Greer has to comb records of how women made their way in Elizabethan and Jacobean society. She is one of the few biographers, however, who has recourse to the anthropological and demographic research of writers such as Peter Laslett, in The World We Have Lost (1983). In the same year as Greer’s book appeared, Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, and René Weis’s Shakespeare Revealed were published. The first looks at Shakespeare particularly in London with the Mountjoys, with whom he lodged, and the second considers the context and influence of his family and friends.
Work on detailed aspects of events or years in Shakespeare’s life have provided some excellent studies by James Shapiro: 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) and 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (2015), while Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare and the Countess (2014) approaches an aspect of Shakespeare’s life from the perspective of a particular event, the opposition of Elizabeth Russell to the Blackfriar’s Theatre, which had a knock-on effect in the building of the Globe and the subsequent development of Shakespeare’s plays. Shapiro’s work, and that of Laoutaris, provide a fresh approach but in an area which over recent years has produced an excellent array of biographies.
Another biography that might be of interest is by Ian Donaldson about one of Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights: Ben Jonson: A Life (2011). Finally, Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare for All Time (2002) is not a biography as such but is a good introduction to Shakespeare’s life and subsequently his reception across the centuries and, in the final chapter, worldwide.
The next chapter considers two plays that in the past have had the label ‘problem’ linked to them.
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All’s Well That Ends Well (1605) and Measure for Measure (1604)
You may recall how, following The Comedy of Errors – and even in plays before it – Shakespeare broke neoclassical rules, developing his own structure to underpin his romantic comedies. Once we realize, as critics and admirers of his work, what he has done, we tend to pigeonhole his work again, perceiving an aesthetic harmony that we accept as being part of the genre as Shakespeare conceived it. But great artists rarely stay within the structures that they create or that we define. They continue to experiment, pushing the frontiers of their art, testing its limits as we have seen, for example, in King Lear, Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida. So it is also with two further comedies, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, where Shakespeare deliberately strains the relationship between structure, narrative and content, disturbing some critics who have tried to create another term, ‘problem plays’, to describe these texts and the puzzlement that they have produced.
Key idea
The term ‘problem play’ to describe these plays by Shakespeare was taken over from the description of some early twentieth-century dramas that dealt with social problems. In Shakespeare’s case the ‘problem’ is much to do with an acknowledgement of the gap between form and content, between the expectations that the drama arouses in readers and audiences, and its refusal (or failure) to satisfy those expectations.
All’s Well That Ends Well
In our earlier discussions of the romantic comedies, and the hybrid romantic tragedy Romeo and Juliet, I invited you to consider the relationship between the plays and fairy tales. In the case of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, the romantic narrative, ‘children of an idle brain’ (1.4.97), ridiculed by Mercutio, goes wrong, first with the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, and subsequently with the deaths of the lovers. In a fairy tale, Romeo should kiss the sleeping Juliet for her to awake, but in Shakespeare’s play, thinking that she is dead, he kills himself, and she follows suit when she wakes from her drug-induced sleep. Here, as we have seen, is an echo of the classical tale of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, an intended ‘tragedy’ amusingly portrayed by the artisans in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Spotlight
Shakespeare toys with these tales and their genres asking questions of them and posing variants on and within comic conventions. What happens, he asks, if the expectations of the traditional narrative do not adhere to convention? He would have known traditional fairy tales and romances such as those written, for example, by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1345–1400).
In The Wife of Bath’s Tale, one of Chaucer’s famous stories, the Wife holds that the reason why fairies no longer exist is because of ‘holy friars’ who ‘seem to have purged the air’ but that, in ‘ancient days’, ‘This was a land brim-full of fairy folk./The Elf-Queen and her courtiers joined and broke/Their elfin dance on many a green mead…/But no one now sees fairies any more’ (Chaucer, G., The Wife of Bath’s Tale, trans. into modern English by Coghill, N. [1960, rev. edn: 299]. Harmondsworth: Penguin). In that tale a knight who has raped a young woman is condemned to death unless he can solve a riddle given to him by the Queen: ‘What is the thing that women most desire?’ The answer is eventually given to him by an old foul-looking woman who thereby saves his life, ‘A woman wants the same sovereignty/Over her husband as over her lover,/And master him; he must not be above her’ (301, 304).
The payment for the answer, however, is that he has to marry the deformed old woman. He does so but recoils from her because of her poverty, her lack of status and her ugliness. But she gives him another question to answer. He can choose for her to be old and ugly until she dies but faithful always to him, or to be young and pretty but possibly flirtatious, even, adulterous, risking making him a cuckold. He responds that the choice has to be hers. In this way, she has ‘mastery’ over him and transforms herself into a beautiful woman. But what if she did not? Or what if she then did become unfaithful? Those are the kind of questions Shakespeare asks in the Jacobean comedies, not necessarily of the women, but of the men.
The Chaucerian tale is not the source of All’s Well That Ends Well; that is a story from Boccaccio’s Decameron that Shakespeare probably encountered through William Painter’s English translation, The Palace of Pleasure (1566). But Shakespeare would have known many fairy tales, fables and mythic narratives such as Chaucer’s with their twists and turns. Like many of us, his mind would have been a cultural repository which retained specific narratives, and which contributed to a facility for storytelling on which he consistently drew. As we journey through these plays, therefore, it is not only the immediate source that can inform our understanding but also the cu
lture of a lost age of fairy and folk tale, which appears to have interested him.
With such tales, he discovers that there are elements of human conduct which, we may find, continue to exert a certain force in the modern world or which run counter to our predilections and expectations, thereby confronting us with ‘problems’. Some of these predilections over the ages, as we’ve been discussing throughout our journey, relate to the issues of harmony and consistency between form, plot, character and thematic development. In this, certain judgements are made and, as in the case of All’s Well That Ends Well, they are invariably almost apologetic.
FEELINGS AND THE ‘BOX OFFICE’
‘Shakespeare cannot have been entirely satisfied with the way All’s Well turned out. The idea is brilliant, but the play is padded out with some dreary material. It is the ending, however, that is the real trouble. Helena at the beginning of the play is an extraordinarily interesting person; at the end she has become a kind of smothering Amazon with the feeble male cowering at her feet.’
Edwards, P. (1986, 1987 p/b edn: 164), Shakespeare: A Writer’s Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press
How can we possibly know what Shakespeare felt about the play? One of his performance indicators would have been ‘box office’ pressure. In reading the play it does appear a little laboured and forced. It is generally talked and written about less by critics than some of the other plays but, as we have noticed, dramas, such as King John, for example, go in and out of fashion according to the time. In modern performance All’s Well That Ends Well has had notable and enjoyable successes on the modern stage, although it does not appear in the modern repertory as many times as Twelfth Night or, indeed, Measure for Measure.
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