The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  But at the time I e-mailed him I hadn’t read the essay or talked to him about the “late language” question. I was focused on finding the debate over love in Shakespeare studies.

  McDonald certainly seemed like the person to ask. Since I had last seen him at the Shenandoah Shakespeare Blackfriars conference, he had edited a nine-hundred-page volume called Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945–2000. He seemed in close touch with the trends and tendencies of Shakespeare studies.

  So I e-mailed to ask him if he could tell me what the locus of the debate over love was now, what “the smart current contentions” were.

  Frankly no, he said in reply. “Nobody has written much about love in the past three decades or so. Poststructuralism, even though its harshest, most skeptical strains didn’t have a very powerful effect on Shakespeareans, still manages to set the tone for much criticism, and poststructuralists aren’t much interested in the representation of ideals or in the positive side of such topics.

  “That’s a crude but not inaccurate explanation of why we’ve had so much about sex and the body and other physical matters for the past few years. In other words there aren’t any ‘smart current contentions’ [about love] at the moment.”

  Could it be true? I knew of one exception: Shakespeare on Love and Lust by Maurice Charney, the scholar who—perhaps not coincidentally—coined the phrase “O-groans.” But as McDonald suggested, even discussion of the Sonnets focused not on love but on sex, the body, the gaze. He did, however, hold out some hope that a change might be in the wind.

  “We are moving back to the possibility of discussion of such things to be sure: the plenary session of the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Bermuda next month—we’ve finally caught up with the dentists on choice of conference venue—is ‘Beauty’ and I’m in a seminar on ‘Pleasure.’ ”

  Beauty and Pleasure! In Bermuda! The island that was (by most accounts) the inspiration for the magical island in The Tempest, perhaps Shakespeare’s final solo work.

  The focus on such concepts as beauty and pleasure represented a new development, McDonald told me. “The profession,” he said, of Shakespeare studies, and literary studies in general, is returning to the discussion of “ideals” and these were two harbingers of that turn.

  This was remarkable news and I wondered if something hopeful I’d written five years earlier about the direction of Shakespearean scholarship in The New York Times Book Review (in August 2000)—something I’d come to think of, in subsequent years, as somewhat wishful thinking—might at last be coming true.

  Back then, writing about some signs and hints I saw at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Montreal (including Linda Charnes’s Bloom paper), I’d suggested that the reign of Theory in literary studies was coming to an end and that the smarter scholars, recognizing the exhaustion if not meretriciousness of Theory, were searching for a post-Theory, post-postmodernist perspective.

  There was a plenary session in Montreal entitled “Before Theory,” paying renewed attention and respect to three great literary minds—William Empson, T. S. Eliot and Oscar Wilde—who responded to Shakespeare as if there was some special reason to value his work (that notion—literary value—long dismissed by the more stringent of the Theorists). One of the session’s participants, Columbia’s David Scott Kastan, had just published a book called After Theory.

  The way I read the SAA’s collective mindset then, Theory still remained the central event in the history of literary studies, the divide between the B.C. and the A.D. of thinking about Shakespeare. But the interest these days was in what lay on both sides of the divide, especially what might lie ahead. With all the speculation about Before Theory and After Theory, that which might be called “mere Theory” seemed suddenly retro.

  Of course in speaking so hopefully, I had underestimated the inertial drag that tenure tracks clogged with Theorists would exert (in practical terms it meant tenure track aspirants had to adopt the jargon of the faculty thesis adviser to get ahead and so younger intellects had to wait ‘til they got tenure to be free to express a view that, nonetheless, would still prevent them from advancing to a position at a more prestigious institution).

  But now in 2005, some of the smartest young faculty had established posts from which they could abandon the intellectual aridity, if not outright sterility, of Theory and explore notions such as “ideals”—Beauty, Pleasure, etc.—that had long been abandoned as meaningless terms, empty abstractions at best, at worst tools of the oppressive hegemonic authority. McDonald himself was a partisan of a revived, “reconceived close reading,” as he put it.

  And by 2005 a number of developments all seemed to converge. In addition to the return to “ideals” McDonald spoke of, I would soon discover there had been a parallel post-Theory rehabilitation of “formalism” (as close attention to the internal resonances of a poem is somewhat misleadingly called) which McDonald was influential in advancing. A “neo-formalism” that reinstated close reading (with lip service paid to the “incorporation of the insights of Theory”).

  A scholarly tendency that involved, as I would learn, to my great pleasure, the revaluation, one might almost say rehabilitation, of Stephen Booth’s work.

  Beauty! Pleasure! Vindication! Bermuda! I made reservations immediately.

  THE ANATOMY OF PLEASURE

  What could be more pleasurable in a certain way than savoring the irony of intense discussions of Beauty and Pleasure in hotel conference rooms shut off from the natural beauty and pleasure of the island outside the hotel (the Southampton Princess no less, Southampton of course having been one of Shakespeare’s first patrons).

  I had been thinking about pleasure in Shakespeare, the pleasures of Shakespeare and the arguments over it for some time. Unbearable pleasure is, after all, at the heart of my theory of the rise of Theory in literary studies: close reading brought some too close to a core meltdown, so to speak, too close to pleasures whose destabilizing intensity threatens the dissolution of the self. After all, look at the way pleasure is often described: “giving in to the pleasure,” “giving one’s self up to pleasure.” Giving up the self: never a light matter.

  One thing all the diverse theorizing methodologies that took over literary studies like a cult with pretensions to science did was distance, protect one’s self from having to “give in” to pleasure, absorption, immersion, contemplation of the bottomless abyss of the text. Rather the text must be made to “give in” to us, to submit itself to our theoretical constructs, dance (or rather collapse) to our tune. If as the critic Louis Menand once put it, the New Criticism made things cohere too readily, deconstruction made them fall apart too perfectly and predictably.

  And, one could speculate, the peculiar preference for reading Shakespearean biographies, shuffling and reshuffling the same old anecdotes, is another way of avoiding the destabilizing pleasures of reading and rereading the work. Frankly, the little we know about Shakespeare is far less threatening than “the Shakespearean” with its dizzying plentitude.

  Pleasure is at the heart of Stephen Booth’s argument about what “all the fuss is about” in Shakespeare, the exhilarating pleasures the mind discovers itself capable of when reading Shakespeare, the pleasures of “pole-vaulting on the moon.”

  And the more I thought about the subject of pleasure the more I realized there is an argument about pleasure in just about every play in Shakespeare, and in the poems as well, of course. An argument about pleasure and the dangers of pleasure that is laid out in the simplest, starkest terms at the close of Love’s Labor’s Lost in the “debate” between the songs of Spring and Winter.

  THE SONG OF SPRING (OR “VER”)

  When daisies pied, and violets blue,

  And lady-smocks all silver-white,

  And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

  Do paint the meadows with delight,

  The cuckoo then on every tree

  Mocks married men; for thus sings he,


  “Cuckoo;

  Cuckoo, cuckoo”—O word of fear,

  Unpleasing to a married ear!

  It’s impossible not to notice the way the initial “delight” and painted pleasures of spring swiftly slide to words of “fear.” From pleasure to the “unpleasing,” destabilizing hint of jealousy, betrayal, mockery, deceit.

  Sometimes pleasure is seen to contain the seed of its own destruction: the amorous delight of the spring licensing the call of the cuckoo signaling, instigating sexual treachery, cuckoldry and Shakespeare’s virtual obsession with venereal diseases as the consequence of “venery,” veneration of Venus, a savage goddess dangerous to those she loves and those she’s beloved by.

  In some plays the argument is divided into clear-cut personifications of pleasure and anti-pleasure: in Twelfth Night it’s Sir Toby and his relish for a realm of “cakes and ale” counterposed to Malvolio and his penchant for restrictions.

  Sometimes it is embodied in one conflicted body as it is in Falstaff and Cleopatra, both conflicted icons of pleasure and indulgence. Actually they are not conflicted about their pleasures—they regret nothing—but they bear the burden of their indulgences. In Falstaff the punishment for pleasure is written, embellished, em-bellied on his body—the burden is physical: fat and age, alcohol and sexual diseases have made him pay for the pleasures of the flesh.

  If there is a defining moment in Shakespearean pleasure, it may be found in Enobarbus’s recollection in Antony and Cleopatra of Cleopatra’s first appearance to Mark Antony in Alexandria. Here art and nature incite each other to “o’er-picture” the other in the spectacle of Cleopatra resplendent in a golden barge sailing forth to dazzle Mark Antony for the first time.

  We are fortunate to have the original description from the Greek historian Plutarch, the source Shakespeare relied upon (in a translation by Thomas North), and I’ll quote it in a moment, but this is Shakespeare writing about pleasure in perhaps his most sensually pleasurable mode. And I’d prefer to begin with the final refinement:

  The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

  Burnt on the water. The poop was beaten gold,

  Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

  The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,

  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

  The water which they beat to follow faster,

  As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

  It beggar’d all description: she did lie

  In her pavilion—cloth of gold, of tissue—

  O’er-picturing that Venus where we see

  The fancy outwork nature.

  … At the helm

  A seeming mermaid steers; the silken tackle

  Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands,

  That yarely frame the office. From the barge

  A strange invisible perfume hits the sense

  Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast

  Her people out upon her; and Antony

  Enthron’d i’ th’ market-place, did sit alone,

  Whistling to th’ air, which, but for vacancy,

  Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,

  And made a gap in nature.

  That’s pleasure. Now, this has been done before, notably by Jonathan Bate, but I want to do it my way, and it can’t be done enough: comparing those lines above to Shakespeare’s source in Plutarch.

  Here’s the Plutarch version of that same scene:

  She disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poope whereof was of gold, the sailes of purple and owers [oars] of silver which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of the flutes, howboyes [oboes], citherns, violls, and such other instruments that they played upon in the barge.

  [Sorry to interrupt, but I can’t help noting at this point how Plutarch just completely loses focus in this pointless enumeration of the musical instruments. Compare the way Shakespeare’s oars “to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made/The water which they beat to follow faster,/As amorous of their strokes.” He doesn’t list the musical instruments, but rather, lets us hear the flutes and their bewitching power to transform the rhythm of the oars in the water into an erotic engagement. Back to Plutarch.]

  And now for the person of her self she was layed under a pavillion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddesse Venus, commonly drawn in picture

  [Note that “commonly drawn”—one almost thinks Plutarch is consciously resisting the seductiveness of this uncommon Venus.]

  and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretie faire boyes apparelled as painters doe set forth god Cupide, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereides (which are the mermaides of the waters) and like the Graces, some stearing the helme, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge,

  [Look at the way this focus on nautical technique becomes a focus on another kind of technique in Shakespeare: “the silken tackle/Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands,/That yarely frame the office.” Perhaps the most erotic line in all Shakespeare. “Flower-soft hands”! Back to Plutarch’s barge …]

  out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweete savor of perfumes, that perfumed the wharfes side, pestered with innumerable numbers of people …

  Enough! “Pestered” indeed. (Yes, it’s North’s word, but still …) But we must be grateful to Plutarch for the plodding template that gave birth, like Venus from the foam, to Shakespeare’s lush, louche, amorous, seductive, near-pornographic excursus on pleasure. Evoking in words alone the sensual manifestations of eros, it is perhaps the most purely sensual passage in all Shakespeare, perhaps the most intense and exhilarating in the language. (The “hounds and echo” passage in the Dream, while lovely esthetically and even sensually, is not necessarily erotic, or if erotic, only in a more distanced estheticized way, although the sound and echoes could prefigure the way the oars and “The water which they beat … follow faster,/As amorous of their strokes.” Echoes are, in a way, amorous followers of the sounds they respond to.)

  The Plutarch passage is often compared with Shakespeare’s to demonstrate how often, how blatantly Shakespeare “copied” from his sources. But the difference between Plutarch and Antony and Cleopatra is all the difference in the world. All the difference we identify as Shakespearean.

  The things being described and the actions being taken are exactly the same in each passage and we get to see how Shakespeare turned the plodding Plutarch’s reporting into sublimely pleasurable poetry. And while much of this is infusing, transubstantiating Plutarch’s prose into sensual beauty, barely on the “threshold of comprehension,” there is one addition that is most purely Shakespearean. While Plutarch has the “Cupids” fanning Cleopatra, Shakespeare had “Cupids,/With divers-color’d fans, whose wind did seem/To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,/And what they undid did.” Glowing the cheeks they cooled, doing and undoing is Shakespeare alone.

  “What they undid did.” That “undid did”—the literal pressing together of doing and undoing, being and not-being, the suggestiveness of the verbal sexual coupling, is remarkable. Echoed, embodied in the image of the way the fans heat to a flushed “glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool.” It’s an endlessly, bottomlessly reciprocating process of inflaming, fulfilling and regenerating desire. Amazing the pleasure that passage gives.

  It is here one can’t help, no matter how one distrusts biographical opportunism, to stop and wonder at what the moment of writing this passage was like for Shakespeare. The decision to give himself up to pleasurable excess in language, in the attempt to embody the power of Cleopatra’s spell, in the way it bewitches the winds and waves around her. It is no accident that, when Samuel Johnson sought to find words to condemn Shakespeare for taking too much pleasure in puns and wordplay, he called them Shakespeare’s “fatal Cle
opatra,” the embodiment of pleasure taken to illicit excess, pleasure as self-destructive seductiveness.

  A SEA CHANGE IN BERMUDA

  It was more than island breezes that had me anticipating the convention of Shakespeare scholars in Bermuda. I was looking forward to a lunch during the conference (after the Beauty Plenary, before the Pleasure Seminar) with Russ McDonald. Especially so after I had discovered his essay on Shakespeare’s “late language,” which I thought was a crucial document in the debate over the evolution of what we think of as “Shakespearean” language.

  It was raining outside during the Beauty Plenary. A chill wind was whipping the palm trees. Not exactly a tempest, but the easy irony of pedants ignoring the beauty of a glorious island day to discourse on the theory of beauty was unavailable. In fact it rained three out of the four days of the “beauty and pleasure convention,” as I came to think of that year’s Shakespeare Association of America conference.

  The star of the Beauty Plenary was Stephen Greenblatt. There were two other papers on beauty delivered to the five hundred or so scholars packed into the main conference room, but neither of them addressed the subject of Shakespearean beauty directly. (One spent the time examining Renaissance printers’ use of random blocks of print type as design motifs.)

  One has to give Greenblatt credit: riding the crest of publicity and sales from Will in the World (and scholarly suspicion of popular success), he was nonetheless prepared to take on one of the long-scorned “ideals”—Beauty!—that the profession had assiduously avoided for fear of the taint of “bardolatry” or “essentialism.”

  Indeed I wondered what was going through the minds of the large audience of scholars, many of whom had learned to look at Shakespeare through the lens of Greenblatt’s New Historicism with its skepticism about such things as “beauty” and “literary value” or at least the value of talking about them when there was so much historicizing to be done.