The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  The Folio addition has generated two major schools of thought. The first was articulated most colorfully by the Edwardian-era critic A. C. Bradley, who argued that when Lear says, “Look her lips,/Look there, look there,” Lear is witnessing Cordelia showing signs of life. Bradley ascribed to Lear’s Folio dying words what has become a famous phrase: “unbearable joy” at the sight.

  By which he meant that Lear had been granted “an ecstatic vision that Cordelia is alive, that at last she speaks the words he wants so to hear; a vision of some supernatural aura about her, presumably beatific, even an apparent glimpse of her spirit rising toward heaven; or a horror of the ultimate silence that has stilled her.”

  Over the years Bradley has become identified with the former rather than the latter vision—the redemptive and beatific rather than the horrific. Recent support for this position has come from some of the Revisers who believe that the Folio Lear vision of Cordelia at least momentarily resurrected is an instance that prefigures the Shakespeare of the Late Romances—the Shakespeare of miraculous resurrections and reunions—returning to the grimmest, most terrifyingly bleak moment of his pre-Romance works and adding that beatific touch.

  The choice of how to play Lear’s death has divided actors, directors and scholars long before the Revisers came along. Alexander Leggatt, in an unpublished paper entitled “How Lear Dies,” says “John Gielgud chose joy, Morris Carnovsky, despair.” Many attempt some conflation of the two.

  After Bradley the second turning point in the modern debate over Lear’s last words might be the moment in 1962 when Peter Brook put on his Lear at the RSC with Paul Scofield playing the King.

  It’s hard to overestimate how influential Brook’s production was. Some who saw it, such as the critic Frank Rich (who told me he saw it when it came to New York), said it changed their lives. The icy bleakness of the Brook-Scofield Lear derived in part from the Polish-born critic Jan Kott’s essay “Lear as Endgame”—Lear, in other words, as a Beckett-like broken hymn to hopelessness.

  Which made the alteration of Lear’s dying words all the more central to the argument about whether the play was ultimately redemptive—was it about the wisdom, even the vision earned through suffering—or about the denial of redemption, the futility of suffering, the absence of justice in the moral order of the cosmos? The absence of a moral order in the cosmos.

  The bleak Brookean view suggests that Lear’s final vision, the one he refers to in “Look there, look there,” is a sad delusion, a delusion that is not a blissful comfort, but one further flawed and failed attempt to find solace in a hostile cosmos. One where “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport,” as Gloucester puts it. Thus, at the end, Lear realizes his vision is a cruel deception, like all the other things he believed in about this world and the next. False hope unmasked and dashed again.

  These are not the only possible positions to take on the Folio addition (and cut: remember the four O-groans are excised as well). In addition to the party of redemption and the party of bleakness, R. A. Foakes, the editor of the Arden Lear, offers a third vision of “Look there,” one might say, one that gazes upon the last words of Lear in the Folio and finds, “There can be no return to simply optimistic or pessimistic readings of the play, and the difficulty of reconciling them has helped to promote a deep distrust of all attempts at closure in King Lear, a negation of the possibility of unity, coherence and resolution.” Undecidability.

  So it’s unbearable joy, unbearable bleakness, or unbearable undecidability, depending on how one interprets Lear’s dying words in the Folio text. Unbearable any way you see it. Exit, pursued by an unbear, you might say.

  The presence of two endings has produced a continuing torrent of scholarly polemics. Is the new ending one of Shakespeare’s “considered second thoughts,” as those who believe he revised his work like to call them?

  A “considered second thought” about the nature of tragedy, of the cosmos, its cruelty or redemptiveness? What status do the revised dying words of Lear have if they are incorporated into just about every production of Lear ever staged, and yet we cannot be sure Shakespeare wrote them? Do they become Shakespearean by usage, and if so do we mean something different when we say “Shakespearean” than we thought we did? Do we redefine “Shakespearean,” as some of the more postmodern textual theorists do, as any version produced by his collaborative theatrical company?

  Perhaps, like their respective tragic heroes, Hamlet scholars are more at home with doubt and ambiguity, and Lear scholars must (in a scholarly way) rage. There is a kind of anger and bitterness now between the two Lear camps (and within one camp) that doesn’t seem to obtain with the Hamlet specialists. I know that one Lear scholar uses a classical Greek obscenity that translates as “goatsucker” to refer to another scholar. (“Tragedy” of course is derived from the Greek for “goat song,” but I don’t think that’s the referent here.)

  And the goatsucker was his ally! Well, they were, intellectually, predisposed to the same position in the Lear text conflict. (It had something to do with who got credit for publishing something first.)

  It’s fascinating to me that controversy over the two Lears and revision hasn’t broken out into the public realm among educated nonspecialists.* It’s almost like the engine room refusing to report to the captain on deck that the Titanic had a hole breached below the water level. The apparent un-solvability of the two-Lear problem is a similar kind of damaging—if not physically dangerous—breach in literary culture. Damaging to any attempt to form a coherent picture of perhaps the most formidable and influential work in the language.

  This is why I use the term “scandalous” for this situation: we are a culture which at least professes reverence for Lear as one of the great works in the language, one of the great works of the human spirit, blah, blah, blah. What are the last words, the final reflections of the tormented human spirit at the heart of it? Must we be condemned to choose one answer from column A, another from column B? It’s something worth caring about.

  Or maybe it says we don’t care. I don’t think so. I think more people would care if more were aware of the problem. I think it’s important at least to try to bring the news of the problem, and the implications of the various solutions, to the attention of a wider audience.

  GREENBLATT’S CHALLENGE:

  OR A GREENBLATTIAN DIGRESSION UPON STEPHEN

  GREENBLATT AND THE “THIRTY-SECOND-DEGREE ADEPTS”

  But there are some who disagree, who think it’s too complicated for the nonspecialist and can cause undue worries. In other words: you, the educated general reader, can’t handle the truth.

  Stanley Wells, who was, in his Oxford edition, the first to divide Lear and later called for “editors of courage” to divide Hamlet, became trepidatious when an editor of courage, Ann Thompson, did so. On a BBC program prompted by my New Yorker piece about Ann Thompson’s three-text Hamlet, Wells argued the general public would be too confused by the problem.

  Then Stephen Greenblatt said something remarkable to me when I raised the question with him. It was a semipublic context in which he made the remark, one that consigned the Lear text question to “thirty-second-degree adepts.” The occasion for this pronouncement, which I have come to think of as “Greenblatt’s Challenge,” was a rather posh luncheon for Greenblatt, perhaps the most eminent of Shakespearean scholars in America, if you don’t count Harold Bloom (and many serious scholars just don’t).

  Star of the English department at Harvard, successor to Bloom as the most famous explainer of Shakespeare, founder of the most influential academic school of Shakespeare theory, the one known as the New Historicism, Greenblatt was about to launch a book designed to launch him out of the academic world and—like Bloom—onto the bestseller list.

  His publisher, well-respected W. W. Norton, for whom Greenblatt had edited an American version of the Oxford Complete Works edition of Shakespeare widely used in colleges—the only Complete Works edition
to publish not one, not two, but three versions of King Lear—was putting on this luncheon for some twenty-five editors, writers and reviewers. Not to celebrate publication of the book, but release of the galleys—four months before publication of the book Will in the World, his exploration of “the ways in which Shakespeare’s life experiences inform his writings.”

  The luncheon was designed to indicate just how important an occasion the forthcoming publication of the book (for which they’d paid Greenblatt a reported million-dollar advance) would be. After cocktails and hors d’oeuvres the guests would be seated for a formal three-course meal, before which Greenblatt would give a little talk; between courses Greenblatt would shift from table to table for a little informal conversation with those attending. My table had him for dessert.

  Given the limited amount of time I’d have with Greenblatt, time shared with the others at my table (although it turned out he was seated next to me during his dessert appearance), I spent the first two courses trying to think of the single unanswered question about Shakespeare and Shakespeare scholarship I found most important, the one in any case I most wanted to hear from Greenblatt about. I wanted to ask him about the question of revision in King Lear, to learn what his answer would say about Lear, what it said about Shakespeare. And, I guess, what his answer would say about Greenblatt. And so as I finished off my extremely good molten-centered chocolate disk, I asked him.

  But since Greenblatt is famous for framing his scholarly discourses with unhurried personal anecdotes which turn out to bear upon the Shakespearean and theatrical issues he subsequently addresses, perhaps the reader will permit me a Greenblattian digression about Greenblatt and myself which bears upon the recent trajectory of Shakespearean theory.

  I had known Greenblatt, though not well, since we had both been Junior Fellows at Yale, at Jonathan Edwards College there. He was far more serious about academia than I was at the time, but I had a number of rewarding conversations with him about literature and politics, and one of them has remained in my mind.

  Remained because it had an important effect on my thinking back then, and because of the way it can historicize, let’s say, the fascinating trajectory of Greenblatt’s own thinking. His thinking about Shakespeare as an author. That conversation back at Yale was not explicitly about Shakespeare, but rather about the Black Panthers. It was at a time when protests against the murder trial of a Black Panther leader were causing disruption in the Yale community. One aspect of the contention had to do with whether white supporters of the Panthers had the “right” to criticize the tactics of the Panthers (for example, allegedly murdering those alleged to be “informers”).

  At the time, I was an impressionable reader of Left publications, some of which had advanced the view that “fact”—objectivity about evidence—was merely “a liberal concept.” That reality was a matter of the racial perspective—essentially the racial identity—of the person apprehending it. As I recall Greenblatt and I were having an after-dinner drink in Greenblatt’s suite in Jonathan Edwards, talking about this question, and I said I thought there was merit in the argument that it was inappropriate for whites on the Left to criticize the strategies and tactics of black “revolutionaries,” because we could not possibly enter into their consciousness and understand “reality” the way they did—we lacked their history of oppression, hence we could not shed our “white skin privilege.” And since our consciousness was ineluctably shaped by our racial identity, our criticism was not appropriate or relevant to those engaged in “the struggle.”

  That sort of thing. (I was, in effect, a New Historicist avant la lettre: I was expressing a historicist view of the self, that it was not autonomous, that my consciousness could not escape the determinisms of my identity and the culture that shaped it.)

  Greenblatt’s response back then was basically to say “that’s nonsense.” That one always has the right to think for oneself, to assess a situation as objectively as one can, to offer an opinion, a criticism if one felt it was warranted. That the opinion needed to be tested, challenged, of course, but that one’s thoughts were not the inevitable product of one’s perspective. Implicitly one could enter, sympathetically, into a perspectival world shared with others. Which is what he attempts, by the way, in Will in the World—as well as anybody has, considering the dubious fragments of Shakespearean biographical evidence that he builds on. But the journey from our conversation to that endeavor would be a roundabout one.

  Before leaving behind that long-ago conversation, I want to say Greenblatt’s words then were—and remain—important to me. To my own life, at a time when perspectivist historicist arguments were coming to be considered the most intellectually sophisticated. Greenblatt’s calm defense, back then, of the validity of personal reflection, of the possibility of an autonomous, intellectual free will seeking truth (rather than the notion that one’s thoughts, one’s will, one’s truth were historically, culturally, racially “determined”—“authored” by the culture), had an impact on me back then as it does now in assessing the claims of much of lit crit theory (claims Greenblatt paradoxically ended up shaping). The conviction Greenblatt brought to the belief in autonomy, the responsibility to exercise autonomy, impressed me and I think influenced me at a formative time of my life in a way I’m still grateful for.

  But Greenblatt had already begun moving away from autonomy when he’d gone to study in England on a fellowship to Cambridge, where he came under the influence of the then-fashionable “cultural materialist” Raymond Williams, an extremely influential neo-Marxist, or cultural Marxist. Greenblatt absorbed the British strain of historicism, and it seemed to me changed his mind—autonomously?—about autonomy. Going far in the direction of belief in “culturally determined” consciousness that internalized the power relations of a society at every expressive and representational level. Consciousness and literature were both “constructed” by the “material culture,” and only the elite who developed “critical consciousness” could deconstruct the fiction of individual creativity—historicize the self—by specifying (“unpacking”) the material forces that determined it.

  Greenblatt brought to British cultural materialism the anthropological perspective of the American scholar Clifford Geertz. And from these materials he crafted what came to be known in the United States as “the New Historicism,” more cultural, poststructural, less Marxist than British cultural materialism, but that was more a matter of degree.

  Later, at Berkeley, he absorbed Michel Foucault’s determinist critique of the illusion of autonomy, founded an influential New Historicist quarterly called Representations and began earning a well-deserved reputation for himself by bringing first-person confessional storytelling into his scholarship—he framed his linkages between literary and nonliterary texts with anecdotes about crazed airline seating companions and the like.

  But soon, it is no exaggeration to say, he became the center of a cult worthy of anthropological study. Graduate students in theory-centered comparative literature departments all aped his style so sedulously that, in 1996, when I noticed and pointed out in print that the quarterly Raritan had published a parody of Greenblattian New Historicism (written pseudonymously by Ed Mendelson and David Bromwich), it turned out that virtually no one outside Raritan had noticed its parodic intent: the style itself had become indistinguishable from its own parody. (The parody had been dutifully and obliviously incorporated into scholarly databases.)

  When Greenblatt became the academic equivalent of a guru for the New Historicism, what surprised me most personally was how the New Historicism constituted an almost precise reversal of the sensible argument Greenblatt made to me back at Yale. Historicism suggests there is no such thing as autonomous “agency,” that free will was an illusion, in life or art as well.

  In the epilogue to the book that made his reputation, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Greenblatt tells us of the transition that took place in his attempt “to understand the role of human autonomy in the constructio
n of identity.”

  He began with a belief in autonomy, but “as my work progressed, I perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions—family, religion, state—were inseparably intertwined. In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity.…”

  “Unfettered subjectivity”: a way of saying free will, the ability to author one’s acts and (if one was an artist) author one’s works freely. Instead, “the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society,” he wrote. “If there remained traces of free choice, the choice was among possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force.”

  The implications of this disbelief in autonomy, free will, authorship of self or work—disbelief in the self itself as having any meaningful role to play in selfhood—were both radical and illogical: How did the “social and ideological system in force” that limited free will or choice come to be if not through the choice, or accumulated choices, of somebody somewhere?

  Even among postmodernists, many (especially some feminist critics) have questioned this radical dismissal of free will or “agency,” as the jargon had it, because it seemed to argue that change was impossible, because of the invisible shackles of the hegemony on autonomy.

  In its more extreme forms it denies the existence of the so-called bourgeois self, otherwise known often as “the Romantically constructed illusion of individual subjectivity.” And some of Greenblatt’s acolytes took denial of a belief in autonomy all the way to denial of belief in authorship itself. It was now outmoded to believe that a text was the product of an “author,” a word usually written with scare quotes. Instead a text was “produced” by an “author function,” the real “author” was the historical moment, which inscribed itself on the waxen tablet, the blank slate of the nominal creator’s mind.