The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  In other words, he adds, “the attack on women familiar to medieval literature was often a simultaneous attack on language. Commentators reached as far back as Eden to connect the female with the decorative, the artificial, the inessential.… As Tertullian [the early church theologian] put it, ‘with the word, the garment entered.’ ” Just as garments “entered” after the Fall. Cloaking naked truth with verbal ambiguity and potential deceptiveness.

  McDonald puts Coriolanus in the context of this dispute over the allegedly treacherous femininity of language. He speaks of the way “Coriolanus … presents a contest of styles with each side sexually marked. The Baconian, phallic position informs the laconic speech of Coriolanus, who flees from words. Volumnia [his mother] on the other hand represents Ciceronian loquacity and indirection.”

  And then he turns from the last pure tragedy to that mixture of tragedy and romance, Antony and Cleopatra, where the “contest” has shifted in favor of, or at least in thematic attentiveness to, Cleopatra as “the embodiment of those [language] values for which Volumnia so eloquently and lengthily pleads—multiplicity, equivocation.… Enshrined on the barge through the medium of Enobarbus’ encomium [the description quoted earlier] she is the ultimate floating signifier, the play’s main figure (like her ancestor, Falstaff) of verbal prowess and ambiguity.”

  “The ultimate floating signifier”! It is, among other things, a great lit-crit in-joke, “floating signifier” being a favorite postmodernist term for the waywardness of language’s signification. McDonald has in effect re-constructed the deconstructionist idea of a floating signifier and embodied it in Cleopatra floating, shimmering on her barge. It’s a remarkably smart and funny line that makes “floating signifier” far more persuasive a concept than I’ve ever found it before.

  That description of Cleopatra on the barge becomes for McDonald the locus of a momentous shift in late Shakespeare language from masculine to feminine, from Senecan to Ciceronian. A shift not unaccompanied by ambiguity, or as McDonald puts it: “the playwright’s ambiguous attitude toward ambiguity” becomes evident as well as his inability to resist it and its potential treachery. (Love the “ambiguous attitude toward ambiguity”!)

  It is for McDonald the pivotal, fulcrum-like moment when Shakespeare embraces baroque embellishment, not just of plot, but of language, without renouncing his mistrust. The way one can embrace a woman despite one’s mistrust. (Or so I’ve heard.) The moment when Shakespeare becomes, in effect, Mark Antony, and language his “fatal Cleopatra.” Loved madly, a Cleopatra to whom he gives himself over, however self-destructively. Even at times, at the expense of sense.

  McDonald proposes a comparison so insightful, it made me envious: “If we were to read Shakespeare’s professional development allegorically as I have proposed, then Antony becomes the central figure for the dramatist poised stylistically between the masculine and feminine, the Attic [classical Greek] and the [stereotypically more wild and baroque] Asiatic.”

  Antony’s “dissolute behavior is censured by Octavius in language of dissolution (‘the ebb’d man’) and Antony himself adopts such terms in the celebrated passage from the suicide scene that begins with the image of the shifting cloud, continues with the liquid metaphor of lost difference (‘as indistinct/As water is in water’) [the lost drop of water from Comedy of Errors wanders, or trickles, back into the picture!] and ends with ‘Here I am Antony,/Yet cannot hold this visible shape …’ As the rhythms and syntax of Antony and Cleopatra indicate, the contours of Shakespeare’s verse tend to melt in the heat of the Egyptian sun.”

  I guess some of this—Shakespeare as Antony—might have been implicit in Samuel Johnson’s rather dire condemnation of Shakespeare’s inability to resist the seduction of strained puns and wordplay as his “fatal Cleopatra.”

  But in Johnson’s pejorative metaphor Shakespeare is Antony whoring after unworthy temptresses. After the kind of forced punning that Alexander Leggatt dismisses when he describes the sexual puns at the opening of Romeo and Juliet as about plumbing, what part goes where, crude and sexual. McDonald is saying something more here.

  When he’s talking about Shakespeare as Antony (and Cleopatra as language), he’s not just talking about the punning language Johnson objected to, but about all the beauties and pleasures, the extravagance and treacheries, the fluidity, liquidity, slipperiness of language, as his Cleopatra. Not his fatal Cleopatra, but his final Cleopatra. Not someone he whores after, but someone he falls madly in love with.

  At last: here was the kind of contention about love in Shakespeare I’d been looking for.

  McDonald is careful to support his contention through close reading particularly attentive to the metrical style of the “late language.” He cites George T. Wright, the superb analyst of Shakespearean metrics, who “points out about the late style in general, ‘the sense runs over … into the next line, a tendency facilitated by Shakespeare’s radically increased use of weak and light line-endings,’ or what used to be called feminine endings.…

  “Rhythmically,” McDonald continues, “the sense o’er flows the measure of the line [like the Nile and its banks]. In its syntax Antony and Cleopatra depends heavily on the figure known as hyperbaton, or as Puttenham [the sixteenth-century author of the guide to figures of speech Arte of English Poesie] Englishes it, ‘the trespasser.’ ”

  The trespasser! According to McDonald, Puttenham defines “the trespasser” in Book III of the Arte of English Poesie, “Of Ornament,” in which he calls the “trespasser” a class of figures and literary devices that disrupt the classical formalities of verse. As McDonald catalogs its manifestations, they include: “Inverted word orders and disrupted sentences … inserted episodes, digressive scenes and disordered geography … increasingly metrical irregularity and syntactic disorder … frequent ellipsis and a reliance on verbless constructions.”

  Let us take a moment here to give McDonald credit for giving us an example of the values of actual scholarship: how many Shakespeareans have actually read Book III of the Arte of English Poesie? And how many would emerge from it with a breathtaking conjectural leap about love and language as McDonald does?

  The final movement, from Antony’s suicide to the end of the play, constitutes the bridge between the tragedies and the romances because it attests to Shakespeare’s developing attitude toward fictional language … this final episode depends upon an imaginative scrambling of gender, a recombination of the masculine and feminine. Cleopatra, a boy actor, neither man nor woman, talks her way into the male role of tragic hero, using women’s weapons [extravagant language] … this imaginative union of the masculine and the feminine helps to account for Shakespeare’s reconceived attitude towards words, verse style, dramatic mode, and the theatrical enterprise itself.

  I have quoted at length from McDonald because his essay represents to me a different kind of Shakespearean pleasure one comes across all too infrequently: the pleasures of genuine scholarship combined with the pleasures of the scholar’s own style. Locating in an obscure sixteenth-century rhetorical text a vocabulary that helps us speak about some deeply mysterious change in the DNA of Shakespearean language.

  What struck me as well about McDonald’s essay was its reticence. That phrase of his, “Shakespeare’s recovery of the feminine,” has an academic air about it that belies what he seems to be speaking about.

  “Recovery of the feminine”? Yes, in part it’s a way of referring to Shakespeare recovering “feminine” language from the disapprobation of the anti-Ciceronians.

  It’s the recovery of the feminine within the writer, within his language, within the way he plays with words, the pleasure he takes in extravagance and display. But it’s also the “recovery of the feminine” in the sense that he abandons the mockery of love we find in As You Like It, say, and the recurrently cruel and unfaithful women that populate the tragedies.

  The recovery of the feminine is also the recovery of love in Shakespeare. I think in “recovery of the feminine�
� McDonald is alluding as well to Shakespeare’s increasingly tempestuous, yet forgiving, relationship, his love affair, with language.

  * “Hendiadys” is the figure of speech for a phrase that exhibits simultaneous division and fusion. “The book and volume of my brain” in Hamlet, for instance. Frank Kermode and George T. Wright here in the United States wrote famous analyses of hendiadys in Hamlet, a play where it occurs more than in any other Shakespearean drama. Reflecting perhaps the dividedness of its hero.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “No Cause”: The Unexpected Pleasures of Forgiveness

  I would like to make a suggestion about forgiveness and pleasure in Shakespeare, about forgiveness as perhaps the ultimate pleasure.

  It’s not a familiar way to think about it—forgiveness as pleasure. Pleasure being associated so often with the sensual, the carnal, the esthetic, and forgiveness with the ascetic and spiritual. And yet, forgiveness: perhaps it’s not merely an ideal, it is, in a certain sense, on another level, a pleasure as well. It’s not often defined as a pleasure, it’s rarely mentioned as one of those numinous “pleasures of Shakespeare,” but I’ve come to think a case can be made that the pleasures of forgiveness are, in some way, more central to the Shakespearean experience than often recognized.

  Forgiveness, both for the forgiver and the forgiven: if it’s not a pleasure of the senses, nor a pleasure (solely) of the intellect, it still can feel at some level deeply pleasurable. It’s a different kind of pleasure, but it’s felt as a pleasure of some kind nonetheless, isn’t it?

  Perhaps the experience of the “sea change” in the profession in Bermuda had something to do with my focus on forgiveness. I was able to give up some of my anger at academia as the tide and tyranny of Theory receded. But I must give credit to my friend Helen Whitney, the documentary filmmaker with whom I’d once worked (PBS’s Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero). Helen is a rare phenomenon: a subtle intellect not afraid to take on big topics—“ideals”—that many less audacious intellects shy away from. Shortly after I came back from Bermuda, she told me over coffee that she’d been approached to make a documentary on the theme of “forgiveness.”

  I think that’s when I began to start thinking consciously, systematically, about forgiveness in Shakespeare—although it hadn’t been absent from my thinking about Shakespeare before then. When doing an essay on a production of Henry V for The Shakespeare Newsletter I was surprised when I found myself focusing on forgiveness as the neglected subtextual drama of the play.

  I was fascinated by the recurrent staging and restaging of moments of forgiveness in Henry V: pleas for forgiveness, hypocritical forgiveness, debates about mercy, displays of what you might call “meretricious mercifulness” in that play. I argued, “Henry V is as much a play about mercy as Merchant of Venice.”

  So much so that I gave the essay the somewhat perverse title “The Quality of Mercy in Henry V,” after the line in Portia’s famous speech on the subject in The Merchant.

  What I began to realize, as I focused further on it, was that in almost every Shakespearean play one could find an examination of “the quality of mercy,” the pleasure of forgiveness, or the conspicuous absence of it.

  And thinking about forgiveness in Shakespeare I suddenly found myself coming full circle in a way. My initiation, my induction into Shakespeare had climaxed with a powerfully memorable moment of forgiveness at the close of Peter Brook’s Dream.

  I found myself thinking what a shock of pleasure that moment had been, with an emphasis on the somatic impact in “shock.” It still gives me chills when I think of it. It reminded me what a primal function theater can serve, that Shakespeare can serve, moving us physically, shaking us with laughter or sobs, shocking us, leaving us pierced, shaken, Shake-speared with pleasure.

  It was that moment at the climax of the Dream when Puck makes the traditional epilogue plea for forgiveness from the audience. That moment after the action of the play (Puck’s final blessing on the three newlywed couples) comes to an end. The moment when Puck steps to the front of the stage, breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly and begins to ask for forgiveness on behalf of the players and (implicitly) the playwright:

  “If we shadows have offended,/Think but this, and all is mended …”

  And concludes: “Give me your hands, if we be friends,/And Robin shall restore amends.”

  Forgive us and let us make amends: It is an almost literally crowd-pleasing moment. Especially in that case, when so many in the crowd had been given so much pleasure, we had so little to forgive and yet were being asked for forgiveness.

  It was beautiful, it was pleasurable, and it became more than abstract when Brook’s cast literalized “give me your hands” and Puck and the other actors came crawling over the lip of the stage to stretch out their hands, grasp ours and crawl into our world, almost as if out of the womb of fantasy.

  An act reciprocated by the audience by grabbing their hands and pulling them off the stage into the pit. The power of that moment is what’s remarkable to me. It felt extraordinary then, but I was young. Perhaps, I thought, life would be filled with moment after moment like this. Maybe it is for some, but not for me. I’m still grateful for that one.

  Only later did I realize that, in a sense, they did have something to ask our forgiveness for. I realized this from talking to a wide range of people who’d seen Brook’s Dream. Almost all of them said something similar to what I felt: it made virtually every later experience of Shakespeare on stage a disappointment to some degree. Left us feeling something was missing. Left us longing for that unique exhilaration we’d felt once and failed to recapture. So Brook and company have a lot to answer for.

  I keep coming back to that “shock of pleasure.” It was a shock that almost redefined pleasure for me. It was neither sensual nor strictly intellectual. I hesitate to say it was a spiritual pleasure, but it was not unlike a spiritual experience.

  What was it? It was as if they were asking forgiveness for the inevitable separation from us, one that the clasped hands would only postpone. For the inevitable separation of reality and dream, reality and the realm of higher reality they’d briefly ascended to like Bottom. Taking us with them and then waking us and forcing us to abandon the dream.

  And then—come on!—to find this experience repeated again when the theater caught fire as it did the second time I saw Brook’s Dream. I’m not saying there’s anything supernatural about it, but I do feel grateful for the conjuncture of those experiences. It felt like fate, and, in important ways, my fate was being shaped by seeing that play.

  The fire, it seemed, and the response to it by actors and audience, was a kind of spontaneous combustion that validated a sense of primal communal experience embedded in this “insubstantial pageant.” Something Brook, like Prospero, conjured up. A pleasure until then unknown to me.

  A remarkable moment in my life, and certainly in my thinking about Shakespeare. And the more I began to think about it, the more I thought about other striking moments of forgiveness in Shakespeare and the way they are, so often, the final dramatic fulcrum in the plays. Often, in a way, the real denouement.

  What I mean by this is that we know comedies will end in marriage, and tragedies will end in death. But underneath the familiar dramatic arcs defined by genre there are often other dramatic arcs whose resolution is less predictable: Who will be forgiven, who will be refused forgiveness?

  A play beneath the play, often more suspenseful and unpredictable in denouement than that of the larger play. A play beneath the play whose arc and terminus are sometimes in harmony, sometimes out of synch with the arc and terminus of the play as a whole. A play beneath the play that climaxes when the possibility of forgiveness is fulfilled or not.

  It suddenly occurred to me to wonder, is this the secret play, or at least one secret play, beneath all the plays?

  Obviously the final plays of Shakespeare’s career, if they are “about” anything, are explicitly about the possibil
ity of forgiveness. But this shouldn’t blind us to the preoccupation with the question of forgiveness in the earlier plays. Indeed, thinking about the epilogue of Brook’s Dream made me realize how often moments of forgiveness within the other plays are echoed in the often overlooked (by me) epilogues to the plays.

  I feel I owe the epilogues a debt of forgiveness: all too often I’d looked upon the epilogues as the remnant of a stale theatrical convention. They are often spoken in doggerel verse, not even pentameter. Not “Shakespearean” it sometimes seemed, in the grandest sense of the term, but rather Shakespeare deliberately diminishing himself and his powers to make the expected but pro forma plea for forgiveness.

  But there he or she is, in play after play, the epilogue awkwardly appended at times, with a convoluted and de-familiarizing naked plea for forgiveness, which cumulatively make it impossible not to think there is something “Shakespearean” about them that deserves more attention and respect. Perhaps the plea for forgiveness is not pro forma at all.

  And it occurred to me how many moments in the plays that are touchstones for me, are those moments of suspense on the “threshold of comprehension” (or perhaps “the threshold of compassion”) when forgiveness is—often unexpectedly and dramatically—granted.

  What is it about that moment in Lear’s reunion with Cordelia that has such power? The moment when he tells her:

  If you have poison for me, I will drink it.

  I know you do not love me, for your sisters

  Have (as I do remember) done me wrong:

  You have some cause, they have not.