L. C. Knights, Further Explorations
L. C. Knights, Further Explorations, Chatto & Windus, London 1970
Criticism of Julius Caesar is sometimes confused by considerations that apply either to the historical situation at Rome at the time of Caesar’s assassination, or else to specifically twentieth-century political situations, and the play is debated as though Shakespeare were putting before us the question of whether dictatorship or republicanism were the more desirable form of government. He is doing nothing of the kind; and perhaps the first things to notice is how much of possible political interest the play leaves out. There is no hint of, say, Dante’s conception of the majesty, the providential necessity, of the empire which Caesar founded. On the other hand, there is nothing that can be interpreted as a feeling for the virtues of aristocratic republicanism— [35]… Yet—and this brings me to the substance of what I want to say—Julius Caesar does have important political implications. It takes up Shakespeare’s developing preoccupation with the relation between political action and morality. (Personality and Politics in ‘Julius Caesar’, 35-36)
Now Shakespeare at this time was nearing the height of his powers—Hamlet is only a year or two away—and it is unlikely that he put in these domestic scenes and glimpses because he didn’t know what else to do. It is obvious that we are intended to be aware of some sort of a contrast between public life and private, … (36)
It is this Brutus, the close friend of Caesar, who wrenches his mind to divorce policy from friendship; and the way in which he does it demands some attention. (39)
…personal feelings, which Brutus tries to exclude from his deliberations on ‘the general good’, are, in fact, active in public life. But they are active in the wrong way. Unacknowledged, they influence simply by distorting the issues. (42)
But when Brutus, the man of honour and high moral principles, accepts Cassius’s arguments and enters the world of the conspirators, he enters a topsy-turvy world—a world where [43] ‘impersonal’ Reasons of State take the place of direct personal knowledge; and at the same time true reason, which is a function of the whole man, has given way to obscure personal emotion. Shakespeare leaves us in no doubt of the confusion of values and priorities in that world. We have noticed how often love and friendship are invoked in this play, indicating what men really want and need. What we also have to notice is how often the forms of friendship are exploited for political ends. (43-44)
…Brutus was not, in any of the ordinary senses of the word, a villain; he was simply an upright man who make a tragic mistake. The nature of that mistake the play, I think, sufficiently demonstrates. Brutus was a man who thought that an abstract ‘common good’ could be achieved without due regard to the complexities of the actual; a man who tried to divorce his political thinking and his political action form what he knew, and what he was, as a full human person. Many of us remember the idealizing sympathy felt by liberal young men in the 1930s for the Communist cause. (51)
Shakespeare offers little comfort to those who like to consider historical conflicts in terms of a simple black and white, or who imagine that there are simple solutions for political dilemmas. (52)
It is doubtful whether Cambridge did much for Marlowe beyond giving him access to a good library. Ruled by an oligarchy, divided into factions, remote from the world of action yet offering a foot-hold for worldly corruption, it was not a great home of learning, nor a place where exceptional talent could be sure of reward. [78] … theology, narrow and intolerant, remained the dominant study; and although rhetorical and logic retained their medieval pre-eminence, the mathematical sciences had no place in the formal curriculum, such knowledge as there was of cosmography and astronomy had no relation to contemporary discovery, history and linguistic studies were at a low ebb. By the end of the century, according to Bass Mullinger, ‘the enquiring spirit of the Renaissance had again given place to something like medieval credulity’. (The Strange Case of Christopher Marlowe, 78-79)
The self-righteous self-assurance of a world that offered small resistance to drives for power and riches might well provoke exasperation in a mind that was not afraid of asking radical questions:--‘What right had Caesar to the empery?’ In these circumstances the intelligent outsider who was also a born writer might do one of two things. He might identify himself with the expansive drives of his contemporaries, magnifying them and stripping them of any conventional protective justifications. Or he might—and by the same process of stripping—expose them for what they were. … My reading of the plays is that Marlowe attempted to do both, and that for the most part he was never quite clear about his own purposes. (81)
Marlowe’s plays deal with power and pride and individual self-assertion. … that ‘unrestrained individualism’ which is rightly regarded as his main, [81] his obsessive, theme? (81-82)
…the verse itself—with its constant superlatives, over-emphasis, and hyperbole—is characteristically Marlovian. The exaggeration and expansiveness are not in the least critical—as you can see by putting the passage beside comparable speeches of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus: it simply flows with the minimum of control. Marlowe, as we shall see, had other ways of writing, and what he achieved in blank verse, at his best, has been rightly praised; but the passage quoted does fairly represent a qualify found in almost all his plays—a free-flowing impetuousness that somehow fails to be transformed into the energies of art. (83)
In Marlowe this subtle balance between ‘reason’, deliberate craftsmanship or formal artifice and the unconscious or partly conscious affective life from which reason springs, is upset. His work does not only enlist, it is partly at the mercy of, unconscious drives. That is why Symonds could say of Marlowe’s ‘colossal personifications’ that ‘we feel them to be day-dreams of their maker’s deep desires’. [Shakespeare’s Predecessors, Chapter XV; quoted by Raymond Mortimer in an article in the Sunday Times, February 2, 1964.] (84)
Tamburliane… The scenes of violence, … They are spectacular, and their function—crudely enough—is to say. ‘Look at me, doing this!’ [85] … For the gazing gods we may substitute parents and other grown-ups whose favours can be won for the powerless and demanding child by almost magical means: … None of this has any relation to the real extension of human capacity in the sixteenth century; it is simply the regressive craving for effortless and unlimited power. (85-86)
For Marlowe, with all his limitations, does have a creative energy that keeps his plays alive as something other than pieces in the Elizabethan museum. He is important, moreover, not only because of the unusual vigour with which he pursues his day-dreams, but because with part of his mind he knew those day-dreams for what they were. (87)
I have commented on the free-flow of much of Marlowe’s verse. But besides the note of unresisted self-indulgence there is, almost from the first, another note, which Dr Bradbrook has defined so well in relation to Hero and Leander: it is the note of dry and sardonic detachment and irony that blends with and qualifies the exuberance. (88)
…Marlowe’s failure ever to bring his gifts to fruition in a coherent ‘criticism of life’—for ‘criticism of life’ is what the plays are, in part, directed towards. The material of the plays that succeed Tamburlaine is the behavior of men in sixteenth-century England—their greed for power and money, their violence, falsehood and (in the Elizabethan sense) ‘policy’, all summed up in Machiavel’s scornful prologue to The Jew of Malta. (90)
It may be doubted, however, whether he ever succeeded in understanding, and so mastering, his own fantasies. That, at all events, seems to me the only explanation for the lapses and uncertainty of purpose that prevent even his best work from being complete satisfying. There are emotional entanglements at the roots of his conscious attitudes, and he is too heavily committed to what his intelligence condemns. (91)
In The [93] Jew of Malta there is no focus; there is no unseen spectator—as there is, say, in Volpone—effectively disposing our attitudes to manipulator and victim alike. There are no standards, and by way of contempt alone there is no escape. (93-94)
No one who studies the play with any care can subscribe to the view that Marlowe damns Faustus unwillingly, either as a concession to orthodoxy or because of a final failure of nerve. No one writes poetry of the order of Faustus’s last terrible soliloquy without being wholly engaged, and more than in any other of his plays Marlowe shows that he knows what he is doing. From the superbly presented disingenuousness of the opening soliloquy, in which Faustus dismisses the traditional sciences with a series of quibbles, Marlowe is making a sustained attempt to present as it really is the perverse and infantile desire for enormous power and immediate gratifications. (95)
…Dr. Faustus. But few even of the play’s warmest admirers claim that it lives in the imagination as an entirely satisfying and consistent whole. Interest flags and is fitfully revived. And although the scenes in which Faustus’s power is exhibited in such imbecile ways may be defended as presenting the gross stupidity of sin, this always feels to me, in the reading, as an explanation that has been thought up. With one or two exceptions, Faustus’s capers represent an escape from seriousness and full realization—not simply on Faustus’s part but on Marlowe’s: and what they pad out is a crucial gap in the play’s imaginative structure. For where we may ask, are the contrasting positives against which Faustus’s misdirection of his energies could be measured? (96)
It is as though Marlowe himself felt guilt about any of his assertive drives (understandably enough, since they were tied up with his regressions), and conceived of religion not in terms of a growth into freedom and reality but as binding and oppressing. … But even in the last great despairing speech, where almost overpowering feeling moulds the language in a way in which it had never been moulded before, the reader’s submission is, I suggest, of a different order from the submission one gives to the greatest art, where a sense of freedom is the concomitant of acceptance of reality, however painful this may be. (97)
It seems to me that those who see the final soliloquy as the logical culmination of the play’s action are right; and that those who see a more or less deliberate suppression of Marlowe’s sympathy for his her, in order to bring about an orthodox denouement, are wrong. (97)
What we find in Marlow’s work therefore, besides great verbal power, is a critical intelligence almost, but not quite, of the first order, combined with unruly and conflicting emotions that were never fully clarified in a compelling dramatic image. (98)
Now the assumption on which I am working is that a positive distinctive quality common to half a dozen good poets and a number of competent and interesting ones, all writing within the same half-century, is not likely to be the result of a purely literary relationship to the founder of the ‘school’ whose individual genius can be regarded as the sole source of his followers’ idiom. It is much more likely that the distinctive note of Metaphysical poetry—the implicit recognition of the many-sidedness of man’s nature—is in some ways socially supported; … (The Social Background of Metaphysical Poetry, 105)
We can say in a general way, however, that the social milieu of the Metaphysical poets was aristocratic in tone, connecting in one direction (partly but certainly not exclusively through patronage) with the inner circles of Court, in another with the universities and with the middle and upper ranks of the ecclesiastical, administrative, and legal hierarchies, and in yet another with the prosperous merchant class represented by Izaak Walton and the Ferrars. A short study of the life of Sir Henry Wotton, a representative member of Donne’s circle, … [106] What emerges very clearly from Mr Logan Pearsall Smith’s biography is that Wotton’s scholarly, artistic, and quasi-scientific interests were by no means private hobbies, carefully kept apart from his public interests; they were shared with a large and varied circle of friends, and they entered into his ordinary social living. (106-109)
In so far as Wotton was representative of a class—and he was certainly not unrepresentative—two points of some importance for our understanding of the seventeenth century emerge. The first is that the aristocracy from whom so many of the friends and patrons of the Metaphysical poets were drawn was a functional aristocracy. The general significance of this was indicated by D. W. Harding in two articles in the Musical Times (May and June, 1938) on ‘The Social Background of Taste in Music’. / ‘Common experience suggests that the people who really influence public taste (at the moment chiefly by sanctioning its low level) are those who remain in close touch with industry and commerce and public affairs—what may conveniently be called the upper business class. The leisured are of less account. They or their ancestors were influential while they made their money, but once elevated to the ranks of the leisured they receive deference without possessing influence.’ [111] … The second point, which has a more direct bearing on the particular qualities of Metaphysical poetry, is that in this milieu there was not only ‘a current of ideas’, but a current fed from varied sources. … In Jonson’s or Donne’s or Wotton’s circle, politics and public affairs, scholarship and ‘the new philosophy’, literature and the arts, meet and cross: they are not compartmentalized. (111-112)
I do not want to idealize the life of the aristocratic households in town and country in which the poets and men of letters had a footing. But it does seem true to say that they were places where a variety of living interests were taken for granted, and where men of different bents and occupations could find some common ground. And since the country houses were still functional units in the rural economy of the time, I think they helped to foster that intimate feeling for natural growth and the natural order—something so very different from the modern ‘appreciation of nature’—that almost disappears from English poetry after Marvell. (115)
We have recently been reminded that Donne and his generation were the inheritors of the medieval view of man that saw him as half way between the beasts and the angels, and as sharing something of the nature of both. According to this view, man shares sense and instinct with the animals. Like the angels, he is capable of intellectual knowledge, but whereas the angels know at once, intuitively, man can only attain knowledge of a limited kind by the exercise of reason. (116)
…the medieval traditions—questioned and undermined but still active in Donne’s day—do not survive the Civil War. The new intellectual current is rationalist and materialist, pointing forward to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Restoration assumptions concerning man’s nature are narrower than those previously accepted. Whereas man had been recognized as a complex being, rooted in instinct, swayed by passions, and at the same time an intellectual and spiritual being, he is now something much simpler. He is a reasonable creature, in the limited way in which the new age understood ‘Reason’: he is in fact something much more like a mechanism than a mystery; for, says Hobbes, ‘What is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joints but so many Wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? [Leviathan, The Introduction, (Everyman edition), p. 1. The naked mechanistic attitude was of course qualified in the common acceptance; but that does not destroy Hobbes’s representative significance.] … Dryden is a great poet, but, as I have already suggested, there are wide ranges of human potentiality and human experience that he is quite unaware of. … At the Restoration the Court was the centre of polite letters. But Charles II’s courtiers, though some of them were interested in the Royal Society, were far from being the intellectual centre of a national culture. Wotton would have been sadly out of place at that Court, not only on account of his piety. … Country housekeeping in the old sense—though still a factor in the national life—is rapidly giving way before the attraction of a life in the town. And what ‘the Town’ thought of the country is amply demonstrated in the comedies of [119] the period. … Rochester… one is conscious of a rather chilly wind of emptiness. It is symptomatic that in Rochester, ‘wit’, canalized into satire, is completely divorced from ‘feeling’. And in the best of his love poems the feeling is both simple—a momentary tenderness—and quite unrelated to that fuller life so actively present in Donne’s poems… (119-120)
Shakespeare’s Use of Learning: an Inquiry into the Growth of his Mind and Art, by Virgil K. Whitaker, … Nor would I wish to challenge Dr Whitaker’s insistence of the formative influence of the greater plays of a body of traditional ideas, transmitted largely, it is suggested, by the first book of Hookers Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; it is certainly a reasonable contention that ‘Macbeth is a greater play than Richard III not so much because Shakespeare knew more about the theatre as because he had developed a new understanding of life in terms of traditional Christian thought’ (p. vii). (Historical Scholarship and the Interpretation of Shakespeare, 139)
What I am concerned with is the terms in which Dr Whitaker develops this thesis, for they seem to me characteristic of the ‘historical’ school. / The following are representative quotations: … [139] ‘Most of the tragedies are constructed to study the working out of these principles in human conduct… (p. 11) / [In the earlier plays] the plot determined the characters. Beginning with Hamlet the exact opposite is true. In using Plutarch, … Shakespeare made relatively few changes… But he reshaped his other sources drastically in order to make the action reveal characters that illustrate or conform to philosophic concepts, the best examples of this process being Macbeth and Lear. (p. 179) / The earlier plays merely adapt a source narrative to stage presentation. The problem comedies try to superimpose philosophic interpretation upon material developed by the same easy-going methods, and trouble results. The tragedies, on the other hand, reshape the plot to fit a predetermined character problem. (p. 179) [140] … to see his imaginative exploration as though it were merely the application of already formed concepts is to miss the dimension of depth, the personal vibrancy, … T. S. Eliot, in his essay on John Ford, long ago gave us the necessary corrective when he wrote: / It is suggested, then, that a dramatic poet cannot create characters of the greatest intensity of life unless his personages, in their reciprocal actions and behaviour in their story, are somehow dramatizing, but in no obvious form, an action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet. [Selected Essays, (London, 1932), p. 196] (139-141)
And corresponding to the rather rigid externalizing assumptions about the nature of the poetic process is a complementary distortion of the nature of the work of art in relation to the reader, of what the act of appreciation means. [141] … The play, in short, makes complex demands and asks of us something more than the ability to pick out ideas, however significant in themselves. I should say that it is only in the light of a fully imaginative responsiveness to the play as a dramatic poem, in which Elizabethan ideas are assimilated and used, but never merely applied, that we can see the full significance of Hector’s admirable defence of the law of nature, to which Dr Whitaker rightly gives so much attention. (141-142)
No one who has made his own the idea of a critical discipline embodied in Matthew Arnold’s formula, ‘To see the object as in itself it really is’, is likely to accept the spineless relativism of ‘So many men, so many minds’. For the worth of any interpretation or judgment of literary value depends on the mind that makes it, its lucidity, discipline, and capacity for genuinely confronting its object. (145)
In his classic lecture, ‘A Plea for the Liberty of Interpreting’ [Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, 1930 (Proceedings of the British Academy, XVI); reprinted in Aspects of Shakespeare.), Lascelles Abercrombie … ‘To limit interpretation to what the play may have meant to Elizabethans is, frankly, to exclude the existence of the play as a work of art; for as a work of art it does not exist in what it may have meant to someone else, but in what it means to me: that is the only way it can exist.’ Abercrombie is, however, quite clear about the reasonable limits of interpretation: / By liberty of interpretation I do not mean liberty to read into a play of Shakespeare’s whatever feeling or idea a modern reader may loosely and accidentally associate with its subject: associate it, that is, not because he found it in the play, but because some idiosyncracy of his own suggested it and irresponsibly brought it in from his private world. But I do mean that anything which may be found in that art, even if it is only the modern reader who can [145] find it there, may legitimately be taken as its meaning. Judge by results, I say; not by the results of reverie, which the poem merely sets going, and in which attention may ramble anywhere it pleases,… The existence of a work of art is completed by the recipient’s attention to what the author says to him; whatever may come in through inattention to that does not belong to the art at all.’ (145-146)
It may of course be claimed that what has since informed our consciousness—romantic inwardness (Lamb’s ‘While we read…, we see not Lear, but we are Lear’), the accumulated insights of different critics regarding the powers of language, a vastly increased knowledge of Elizabethan dramatic conventions and intellectual background… that all this… has indeed brought us closer to the Elizabethan Shakespeare. It may be so; but so far as the present argument is concerned there are other relevant considerations. One, already glanced at, it that even for the unhistorical eighteenth century Shakespeare was a genuine possession: indeed what the men of that century lost from their ignorance of the Elizabethan setting was at least partially compensated by the very fact that their approach was not that of the ‘Elizabethan specialist’ but that of the moralist, man of the world, or common reader. Another, more important, is that when we call to mind representative samples of twentieth –century criticism, by writers most of whom are in possession of the advantages of modern scholarship, [148] … we certainly cannot assume that if all our critics were equally sensitive, intelligent and informed they would present us with the same interpretation of the play. Clearly they would not. … We come out of course at a paradox, beautifully suggested in Wallace Stevens’s address to the ‘Supreme Fiction’—encountered, it will be remembered, / ‘In the uncertain light of single, certain truth, / Equal in living changingness to the light / In which I meet you. …’ / It is with these lines in mind that Marius Bewley comments [The Complex Fate, p. 182] : From Stevens’s work as a whole we know that one of the intrinsic elements of the imagination (as of life) is motion and change… ‘Single, certain truth’ is in constant motion, is glimpsed and realized in moments of vital, vivid apprehension, and this act of apprehension itself may constitute ontologically a part, and perhaps a large part, of the truth.’ …what is ‘there’ for intelligent discussion—something belonging to the more-than-individual world of shared experience—exists only in individual apprehensions which themselves, in some sense, contribute to its being. (148-149)
[Shakespeare, as individual as reader] Shakespeare, we may now safely assume, was not unlearned; he had a naturally philosophic mind; he was in touch with the ideas of his age. But those ideas entered into his plays in so far as they met an intense inner need to find meanings in experience. They were tested and assimilated as part of the ‘action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet’ of which T. S. Eliot speaks. (150)
Starting from our own direct experience of the plays (and without that we have nothing to start from) we are interested, first, in anything that may make that experience deeper and more vivid, and then, but only then, in anything that may illuminate the relation between living art and the civilization behind it, and so give us a firmer grasp of the nature of a living tradition. (151)
And if you are genuinely interested in Shakespeare almost any reliable information about his age is likely to come in handy—so long, that is, as you do not allow yourself to become cluttered up with miscellaneous information as a substitute for the more exacting task of reading poetry: remembering also that a little personal reading of Shakespeare’s greater contemporaries is more profitable than too much reading of ‘background’ books. (152)
In the second place, even as common readers, we need to know something about the reading and listening habits of the poet’s first audience. I have in mind such things as L. A. Cormican’s suggestive account of the habits of mind fostered by a familiarity with the Liturgy [L. A. Cormican, ‘Medieval Idiom in Shakespeare’: (I) ‘Shakespeare and the Liturgy’, (2) ‘Shakespeare and the Medieval Ethic’. Scrutiny, XVII, 3]. We need to know these things, not so that we can attempt to make ourselves into Elizabethans (we cannot do that), but so that we can cultivate comparable skills, a comparable flexibility of mind, in our own approach to Shakespeare’s meanings. (152)
Finally—and here we come to the crux of the matter—aware of the ‘philosophical’ aspect of Shakespeare’s work, we shall find that we want to know something of the traditional moral philosophy which nourished, without confining, his imagination—whilst yet avoiding the danger of substituting such knowledge for the direct experience of the plays, or of supposing that these can be reduced to anything like an illustration or demonstration of past systems of thought. (152)
And the condition of our fruitfully applying these ideas to our study of Shakespeare is that we should not approach them as Shakespearean scholars bent on reconstructing a merely historical background, but—paradoxically—that we should study them for themselves, responding to them as themselves actual and vivifying. Thus when Professor Curry describes for us the traditional background of the metaphysics of evil in Macbeth, we value his work because it puts us in touch with creative insights, developed by religious teachers and philosophers, that apply in any age, and so enable us to grasp more firmly what is essential to Macbeth as an ever-present work of imagination. (153)
…living art can best be studied in the light of living ideas. Such ‘historical’ study as we find necessary would not presuppose as its ultimate aim the restoration of Renaissance meanings. For the most part it would not be ‘historical’ at all in any limited sense: it would be predominantly the study of the varying forms—the varying apprehensions—of the great perennial truths. (154)
‘In stressing what Shakespeare meant to the Elizabethan age the historical critics have helped us forget what he might mean to ours.’ [Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press), Vol. I., pp. viii-ix.] (King Lear as Metaphor, 169)
[Included in the World’s Classic volume, Recollections and Essays, translation with an Introduction by Aylmer Maude. Page references are to this volume.] Tolstoy’s conception of the function of art led him to claim that the aim of drama is ‘to elicit sympathy with what is represented’ (p. 353). For this, illusion—‘which constitutes the chief condition of art’ (p. 336)—is essential, and the context makes plain that what Tolstoy meant by illusion was an imaginative sympathy or identification with the dramatis personae as though they were characters in a real-life situation. (173)
…it is plain that what Tolstoy demands [173] is a straightforward verisimilitude to life. With such a criterion he has no difficulty in showing (though he does it at some length) that King Lear is arbitrary, unnatural, and ridiculous. Mr Wilson Knight, in a valuable paper, [G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, The English Association, Pamphlet No. 88.] claims that Tolstoy’s powerful mind was misled by the nineteenth-century commentators on Shakespeare, with their excessive emphasis on ‘character’: (174)
Instead of a simple sparseness (as in a morality play like Everyman) [176] there is an almost overwhelming richness. Boundaries are firmly drawn: certain interests are excluded, and there questions we are not allowed to ask. But this simplification is the condition of the greatest possible compression and intensification: character and situation alike take on a symbolic quality and are made to point to a range of experience beyond themselves. (176-177)
The questions raised by King Lear do not allow ‘explanations’ that you can complacently store in a pocket of the mind: they seem designed to cause the greatest possible uncertainty, or even bewilderment. Within the areas cleared by a formal simplification they centre on certain words and conceptions: in the first scene, ‘love’ and ‘nothing’ and ‘unnatural’ (shortly to be joined by ‘Nature’), and then as the play proceeds, ‘fool’ and ‘need’. (177)
Now what I am here to do today is to try to get one aspect of that movement into perspective; more specifically I wan t to ask, after some twenty-five years of Shakespeare criticism that has not on the whole been on Bradleyean lines, what we now understand by the term ‘character’ when we use it in giving an account of Shakespeare’s plays, to what extent—and within what limitations—‘character’ can be a useful critical term when we set out to define the meaning—the living and life-nourishing significance—of a Shakespeare play. (The Question of Character in Shakespeare, 187)
But it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that Shakespeare’s remarkable power to make his men and women convincing led to a more and more exclusive concentration on those features of the dramatis personae that could be defined in terms appropriate to characters in real life. The locus classicus is of course Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777). Twelve years before, in 1765, Dr Johnson, in his great Preface, had given the more traditional view: … ‘His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and prin-[187] ciples by which all minds are agitated, … In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.’ … Morgann, on the contrary, is interested in what in uniquely individual in the character he describes, and these individual traits, he affirms, can be elicited from the stage characters in much the same way as one builds up the character of an acquaintance in real life: ‘those characters in Shakespeare, which are seen only in part, are yet capable of being unfolded and understood in the whole’. / … ‘the characters of Shakespeare [he goes on] are thus whole, and as it were original, while those of almost all other writers are mere imitation, … when occasion requires, to account for their conduct from the whole of character, from general principles, from latent motives, and from policies not avowed.’ / It is this principle that allows him to distinguish between ‘the real character of Falstaff’ and ‘his apparent one’. … It seems true to say that in the nineteenth century Shakspeare’s characters became ‘real people’, and—[188] with varying degrees of relevance—the plays were discussed in terms of the interaction of real people for whom sympathy or antipathy was enlisted. (187-189)
Now Bradley had the great virtue of being thoroughly immersed in what he was talking about, and I am sure that his book has helped very many people to make Shakespeare a present fact in their lives. Also there is no need to make Bradley responsible for all the vagaries of the how-many-children-had-Lady-Macbeth? kind, which mostly lie on the fringes of criticism. But Bradley’s book did endorse a particular kind of preoccupation with ‘character’, and once ‘character’-criticism became the dominant mode of approach to Shakespeare, certain important matters were necessarily obscured, and people’s experience of Shakespeare became in some ways less rich and satisfying than it might have been. For one ting genuine perceptions became entangled with irrelevant speculations—‘How is it that Othello comes to be the companion of the one man in the world, who is at once able enough, brave enough, and vile enough to ensnare him?. Macbeth’s tendency to ambition ‘must have been greatly strengthened by his marriage’. (189)
…witness the ease with which the old Arden edition of Macbeth dismissed as spurious scenes that do not contribute to the development of character or of a narrowly conceived dramatic action. (189)
…Shakespeare was doing more than merely holding a mirror up to nature, more even than representing conflict in the souls of mighty characters: he was exploring the world and defining the values by which men live. In short, Shakespearean tragedy, any Shakespearean tragedy, is saying so much more than can be expressed in Bradleyean terms. (190)
…any one of Shakespeare’s greater plays is very much more than a dramatized story; that it is, rather, a vision of life—more or less complex and inclusive—whose meaning is nothing less than the play as a whole. This is what Wilson Knight meant when he sometimes referred to his work in terms of ‘spatial analysis’, as distinguished from the analysis of a series of steps in time. Ideally, we try to apprehend each play as though all its parts were simultaneously present: … Shakespeare’s meanings in terms of ‘themes’ rather than in terms of motive, character-development, [190] and so on. Wilson Knight speaks of cutting below ‘the surface crust of plot and character’, and remarks that in Macbeth, for example, ‘the logic of imaginative correspondence is more significant and more exact than the logic of plot’. He also, of course, told us that ‘we should not look for perfect verisimilitude to life, but rather see each play as an expanded metaphor, by means of which the original vision has been projected into forms roughly correspondent with actuality’; … (191)
[note 1] ‘And Shakespeare’s was a mind that thought in images, so that metaphor packs into metaphor, producing the most surprising collocations of apparently diverse phenomena; he thought of time, and death, and eternity, in terms of a candle, a shadow, and an actor. Is it not likely that the large and composite image of the story as a whole would serve him as a metaphor or symbol for his attitudes to certain aspects of experience?’—S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, p. 115. (191)
The ‘new’ Shakespeare, I should say, is much less impersonal than the old. Whereas in the older view Shakespeare was the god-like creator of a people world, projecting—it is true—his own spirit into the inhabitants, but remaining essentially the analyst of ‘their’ passions, he is now felt as much more immediately engaged in the action he puts before us. … [See T. S. Eliot’s essay on John Ford.] We take it for granted that Shakespeare thought about the problems of life, and was at least as much interested in working towards an imaginative solution as he was in making a series of detached studies of different characters, their motives and their passions. Here again, specialist studies are indicative: we think it reasonable that a scholar should inquire what evidence there is that Shakespeare had read Hooker… In short, we take seriously Coleridge’s remark that Shakespeare was ‘a philosopher’ … But at the same time we remember—at least, I should like to be able to say we remember—that the plays are not dramatizations of abstract ideas, but imaginative constructions mediated through the poetry. (192)
If ‘plot’ and ‘character’—mere ‘precipitates from the memory’—sometimes seem to be described in abstraction from the full living immediacy of our direct experience of the plays, and therefore to lead away from it, so too ‘themes’ and ‘symbols’ can be pursued mechanically and, as it were, abstractly. (193)
J. I. M. Stewart’s witty, entertaining and instructive Character and Motive in Shakespeare. … To the extent that Shakespeare is concerned with character and motive—and he does ‘present “man” and reveal psychological truths’—he works not through realistic portrayal but through poetry—that is, through symbolism and suggestions as well as by more direct means; and in this way he makes us aware not—or not only—of what we normally understand by character but of its hidden recesses. … ‘But this superior reality is manifested though the medium of situations which are sometimes essentially symbolical; and these may be extravagant or merely fantastic when not interpreted by the quickened imagination, for it is only during the prevalence of a special mode of consciousness, the poetic, that the underlying significance of these situations is perceived (pp. 9-10)
The other book I want to refer to is Character and Society in Shakespeare by Professor Arthur Sewell. … Mr Sewell’s contention is that the character of a play only exist within the total vision that the play presents: (195)
‘We can only understand Shakespeare’s character so long as we agree that we cannot know all about them and are not supposed to know all about them’ (p. 12) … And again, there is the suggestion ‘that character and moral vision must be apprehended together, and that when character is understood separately form moral vision it is not in fact understood at all’ (p.59)
…however we define for ourselves a character and his r[o]le, there is a strict criterion of relevance: he belongs to his play, and his play is an art-form, not a slice of life. (199)
As You Like It… It is largely an entertainment; but at the same time it is a serious comedy of ideas—not abstract ideas to be debated, but ideas as embodied in attitude and action. (200)
But of all the greater plays it is true to say that all the characters are necessary to express the vision—the emergent ‘idea’ or controlling preoccupation—and they are necessary only in so far as they do express it. Gloucester’s part in King Lear is not to give additional human interest, but to enact and express a further aspect of the Lear experience; for with Gloucester, as with Lear, confident acceptance of an inadequate code gives place to humble acceptance of the human condition, and there are glimpses of a new wisdom: (200)
In the storm scenes, where Lear’s vision of horror is built to a climax, we are acted on directly by the poetry, by what is said, in some respects independently of our sense of a particular person saying it. So too in the play as a whole, and in the other greater plays, our sense of the characters—of what the characters stand for in their ‘address to the world’, their ‘moral encounter with the universe’—is inseparable from the more direct ways in which, by poetry and symbolism, our imaginations are called into play. (201)
Criticism of Julius Caesar is sometimes confused by considerations that apply either to the historical situation at Rome at the time of Caesar’s assassination, or else to specifically twentieth-century political situations, and the play is debated as though Shakespeare were putting before us the question of whether dictatorship or republicanism were the more desirable form of government. He is doing nothing of the kind; and perhaps the first things to notice is how much of possible political interest the play leaves out. There is no hint of, say, Dante’s conception of the majesty, the providential necessity, of the empire which Caesar founded. On the other hand, there is nothing that can be interpreted as a feeling for the virtues of aristocratic republicanism— [35]… Yet—and this brings me to the substance of what I want to say—Julius Caesar does have important political implications. It takes up Shakespeare’s developing preoccupation with the relation between political action and morality. (Personality and Politics in ‘Julius Caesar’, 35-36)
Now Shakespeare at this time was nearing the height of his powers—Hamlet is only a year or two away—and it is unlikely that he put in these domestic scenes and glimpses because he didn’t know what else to do. It is obvious that we are intended to be aware of some sort of a contrast between public life and private, … (36)
It is this Brutus, the close friend of Caesar, who wrenches his mind to divorce policy from friendship; and the way in which he does it demands some attention. (39)
…personal feelings, which Brutus tries to exclude from his deliberations on ‘the general good’, are, in fact, active in public life. But they are active in the wrong way. Unacknowledged, they influence simply by distorting the issues. (42)
But when Brutus, the man of honour and high moral principles, accepts Cassius’s arguments and enters the world of the conspirators, he enters a topsy-turvy world—a world where [43] ‘impersonal’ Reasons of State take the place of direct personal knowledge; and at the same time true reason, which is a function of the whole man, has given way to obscure personal emotion. Shakespeare leaves us in no doubt of the confusion of values and priorities in that world. We have noticed how often love and friendship are invoked in this play, indicating what men really want and need. What we also have to notice is how often the forms of friendship are exploited for political ends. (43-44)
…Brutus was not, in any of the ordinary senses of the word, a villain; he was simply an upright man who make a tragic mistake. The nature of that mistake the play, I think, sufficiently demonstrates. Brutus was a man who thought that an abstract ‘common good’ could be achieved without due regard to the complexities of the actual; a man who tried to divorce his political thinking and his political action form what he knew, and what he was, as a full human person. Many of us remember the idealizing sympathy felt by liberal young men in the 1930s for the Communist cause. (51)
Shakespeare offers little comfort to those who like to consider historical conflicts in terms of a simple black and white, or who imagine that there are simple solutions for political dilemmas. (52)
It is doubtful whether Cambridge did much for Marlowe beyond giving him access to a good library. Ruled by an oligarchy, divided into factions, remote from the world of action yet offering a foot-hold for worldly corruption, it was not a great home of learning, nor a place where exceptional talent could be sure of reward. [78] … theology, narrow and intolerant, remained the dominant study; and although rhetorical and logic retained their medieval pre-eminence, the mathematical sciences had no place in the formal curriculum, such knowledge as there was of cosmography and astronomy had no relation to contemporary discovery, history and linguistic studies were at a low ebb. By the end of the century, according to Bass Mullinger, ‘the enquiring spirit of the Renaissance had again given place to something like medieval credulity’. (The Strange Case of Christopher Marlowe, 78-79)
The self-righteous self-assurance of a world that offered small resistance to drives for power and riches might well provoke exasperation in a mind that was not afraid of asking radical questions:--‘What right had Caesar to the empery?’ In these circumstances the intelligent outsider who was also a born writer might do one of two things. He might identify himself with the expansive drives of his contemporaries, magnifying them and stripping them of any conventional protective justifications. Or he might—and by the same process of stripping—expose them for what they were. … My reading of the plays is that Marlowe attempted to do both, and that for the most part he was never quite clear about his own purposes. (81)
Marlowe’s plays deal with power and pride and individual self-assertion. … that ‘unrestrained individualism’ which is rightly regarded as his main, [81] his obsessive, theme? (81-82)
…the verse itself—with its constant superlatives, over-emphasis, and hyperbole—is characteristically Marlovian. The exaggeration and expansiveness are not in the least critical—as you can see by putting the passage beside comparable speeches of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus: it simply flows with the minimum of control. Marlowe, as we shall see, had other ways of writing, and what he achieved in blank verse, at his best, has been rightly praised; but the passage quoted does fairly represent a qualify found in almost all his plays—a free-flowing impetuousness that somehow fails to be transformed into the energies of art. (83)
In Marlowe this subtle balance between ‘reason’, deliberate craftsmanship or formal artifice and the unconscious or partly conscious affective life from which reason springs, is upset. His work does not only enlist, it is partly at the mercy of, unconscious drives. That is why Symonds could say of Marlowe’s ‘colossal personifications’ that ‘we feel them to be day-dreams of their maker’s deep desires’. [Shakespeare’s Predecessors, Chapter XV; quoted by Raymond Mortimer in an article in the Sunday Times, February 2, 1964.] (84)
Tamburliane… The scenes of violence, … They are spectacular, and their function—crudely enough—is to say. ‘Look at me, doing this!’ [85] … For the gazing gods we may substitute parents and other grown-ups whose favours can be won for the powerless and demanding child by almost magical means: … None of this has any relation to the real extension of human capacity in the sixteenth century; it is simply the regressive craving for effortless and unlimited power. (85-86)
For Marlowe, with all his limitations, does have a creative energy that keeps his plays alive as something other than pieces in the Elizabethan museum. He is important, moreover, not only because of the unusual vigour with which he pursues his day-dreams, but because with part of his mind he knew those day-dreams for what they were. (87)
I have commented on the free-flow of much of Marlowe’s verse. But besides the note of unresisted self-indulgence there is, almost from the first, another note, which Dr Bradbrook has defined so well in relation to Hero and Leander: it is the note of dry and sardonic detachment and irony that blends with and qualifies the exuberance. (88)
…Marlowe’s failure ever to bring his gifts to fruition in a coherent ‘criticism of life’—for ‘criticism of life’ is what the plays are, in part, directed towards. The material of the plays that succeed Tamburlaine is the behavior of men in sixteenth-century England—their greed for power and money, their violence, falsehood and (in the Elizabethan sense) ‘policy’, all summed up in Machiavel’s scornful prologue to The Jew of Malta. (90)
It may be doubted, however, whether he ever succeeded in understanding, and so mastering, his own fantasies. That, at all events, seems to me the only explanation for the lapses and uncertainty of purpose that prevent even his best work from being complete satisfying. There are emotional entanglements at the roots of his conscious attitudes, and he is too heavily committed to what his intelligence condemns. (91)
In The [93] Jew of Malta there is no focus; there is no unseen spectator—as there is, say, in Volpone—effectively disposing our attitudes to manipulator and victim alike. There are no standards, and by way of contempt alone there is no escape. (93-94)
No one who studies the play with any care can subscribe to the view that Marlowe damns Faustus unwillingly, either as a concession to orthodoxy or because of a final failure of nerve. No one writes poetry of the order of Faustus’s last terrible soliloquy without being wholly engaged, and more than in any other of his plays Marlowe shows that he knows what he is doing. From the superbly presented disingenuousness of the opening soliloquy, in which Faustus dismisses the traditional sciences with a series of quibbles, Marlowe is making a sustained attempt to present as it really is the perverse and infantile desire for enormous power and immediate gratifications. (95)
…Dr. Faustus. But few even of the play’s warmest admirers claim that it lives in the imagination as an entirely satisfying and consistent whole. Interest flags and is fitfully revived. And although the scenes in which Faustus’s power is exhibited in such imbecile ways may be defended as presenting the gross stupidity of sin, this always feels to me, in the reading, as an explanation that has been thought up. With one or two exceptions, Faustus’s capers represent an escape from seriousness and full realization—not simply on Faustus’s part but on Marlowe’s: and what they pad out is a crucial gap in the play’s imaginative structure. For where we may ask, are the contrasting positives against which Faustus’s misdirection of his energies could be measured? (96)
It is as though Marlowe himself felt guilt about any of his assertive drives (understandably enough, since they were tied up with his regressions), and conceived of religion not in terms of a growth into freedom and reality but as binding and oppressing. … But even in the last great despairing speech, where almost overpowering feeling moulds the language in a way in which it had never been moulded before, the reader’s submission is, I suggest, of a different order from the submission one gives to the greatest art, where a sense of freedom is the concomitant of acceptance of reality, however painful this may be. (97)
It seems to me that those who see the final soliloquy as the logical culmination of the play’s action are right; and that those who see a more or less deliberate suppression of Marlowe’s sympathy for his her, in order to bring about an orthodox denouement, are wrong. (97)
What we find in Marlow’s work therefore, besides great verbal power, is a critical intelligence almost, but not quite, of the first order, combined with unruly and conflicting emotions that were never fully clarified in a compelling dramatic image. (98)
Now the assumption on which I am working is that a positive distinctive quality common to half a dozen good poets and a number of competent and interesting ones, all writing within the same half-century, is not likely to be the result of a purely literary relationship to the founder of the ‘school’ whose individual genius can be regarded as the sole source of his followers’ idiom. It is much more likely that the distinctive note of Metaphysical poetry—the implicit recognition of the many-sidedness of man’s nature—is in some ways socially supported; … (The Social Background of Metaphysical Poetry, 105)
We can say in a general way, however, that the social milieu of the Metaphysical poets was aristocratic in tone, connecting in one direction (partly but certainly not exclusively through patronage) with the inner circles of Court, in another with the universities and with the middle and upper ranks of the ecclesiastical, administrative, and legal hierarchies, and in yet another with the prosperous merchant class represented by Izaak Walton and the Ferrars. A short study of the life of Sir Henry Wotton, a representative member of Donne’s circle, … [106] What emerges very clearly from Mr Logan Pearsall Smith’s biography is that Wotton’s scholarly, artistic, and quasi-scientific interests were by no means private hobbies, carefully kept apart from his public interests; they were shared with a large and varied circle of friends, and they entered into his ordinary social living. (106-109)
In so far as Wotton was representative of a class—and he was certainly not unrepresentative—two points of some importance for our understanding of the seventeenth century emerge. The first is that the aristocracy from whom so many of the friends and patrons of the Metaphysical poets were drawn was a functional aristocracy. The general significance of this was indicated by D. W. Harding in two articles in the Musical Times (May and June, 1938) on ‘The Social Background of Taste in Music’. / ‘Common experience suggests that the people who really influence public taste (at the moment chiefly by sanctioning its low level) are those who remain in close touch with industry and commerce and public affairs—what may conveniently be called the upper business class. The leisured are of less account. They or their ancestors were influential while they made their money, but once elevated to the ranks of the leisured they receive deference without possessing influence.’ [111] … The second point, which has a more direct bearing on the particular qualities of Metaphysical poetry, is that in this milieu there was not only ‘a current of ideas’, but a current fed from varied sources. … In Jonson’s or Donne’s or Wotton’s circle, politics and public affairs, scholarship and ‘the new philosophy’, literature and the arts, meet and cross: they are not compartmentalized. (111-112)
I do not want to idealize the life of the aristocratic households in town and country in which the poets and men of letters had a footing. But it does seem true to say that they were places where a variety of living interests were taken for granted, and where men of different bents and occupations could find some common ground. And since the country houses were still functional units in the rural economy of the time, I think they helped to foster that intimate feeling for natural growth and the natural order—something so very different from the modern ‘appreciation of nature’—that almost disappears from English poetry after Marvell. (115)
We have recently been reminded that Donne and his generation were the inheritors of the medieval view of man that saw him as half way between the beasts and the angels, and as sharing something of the nature of both. According to this view, man shares sense and instinct with the animals. Like the angels, he is capable of intellectual knowledge, but whereas the angels know at once, intuitively, man can only attain knowledge of a limited kind by the exercise of reason. (116)
…the medieval traditions—questioned and undermined but still active in Donne’s day—do not survive the Civil War. The new intellectual current is rationalist and materialist, pointing forward to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Restoration assumptions concerning man’s nature are narrower than those previously accepted. Whereas man had been recognized as a complex being, rooted in instinct, swayed by passions, and at the same time an intellectual and spiritual being, he is now something much simpler. He is a reasonable creature, in the limited way in which the new age understood ‘Reason’: he is in fact something much more like a mechanism than a mystery; for, says Hobbes, ‘What is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joints but so many Wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? [Leviathan, The Introduction, (Everyman edition), p. 1. The naked mechanistic attitude was of course qualified in the common acceptance; but that does not destroy Hobbes’s representative significance.] … Dryden is a great poet, but, as I have already suggested, there are wide ranges of human potentiality and human experience that he is quite unaware of. … At the Restoration the Court was the centre of polite letters. But Charles II’s courtiers, though some of them were interested in the Royal Society, were far from being the intellectual centre of a national culture. Wotton would have been sadly out of place at that Court, not only on account of his piety. … Country housekeeping in the old sense—though still a factor in the national life—is rapidly giving way before the attraction of a life in the town. And what ‘the Town’ thought of the country is amply demonstrated in the comedies of [119] the period. … Rochester… one is conscious of a rather chilly wind of emptiness. It is symptomatic that in Rochester, ‘wit’, canalized into satire, is completely divorced from ‘feeling’. And in the best of his love poems the feeling is both simple—a momentary tenderness—and quite unrelated to that fuller life so actively present in Donne’s poems… (119-120)
Shakespeare’s Use of Learning: an Inquiry into the Growth of his Mind and Art, by Virgil K. Whitaker, … Nor would I wish to challenge Dr Whitaker’s insistence of the formative influence of the greater plays of a body of traditional ideas, transmitted largely, it is suggested, by the first book of Hookers Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; it is certainly a reasonable contention that ‘Macbeth is a greater play than Richard III not so much because Shakespeare knew more about the theatre as because he had developed a new understanding of life in terms of traditional Christian thought’ (p. vii). (Historical Scholarship and the Interpretation of Shakespeare, 139)
What I am concerned with is the terms in which Dr Whitaker develops this thesis, for they seem to me characteristic of the ‘historical’ school. / The following are representative quotations: … [139] ‘Most of the tragedies are constructed to study the working out of these principles in human conduct… (p. 11) / [In the earlier plays] the plot determined the characters. Beginning with Hamlet the exact opposite is true. In using Plutarch, … Shakespeare made relatively few changes… But he reshaped his other sources drastically in order to make the action reveal characters that illustrate or conform to philosophic concepts, the best examples of this process being Macbeth and Lear. (p. 179) / The earlier plays merely adapt a source narrative to stage presentation. The problem comedies try to superimpose philosophic interpretation upon material developed by the same easy-going methods, and trouble results. The tragedies, on the other hand, reshape the plot to fit a predetermined character problem. (p. 179) [140] … to see his imaginative exploration as though it were merely the application of already formed concepts is to miss the dimension of depth, the personal vibrancy, … T. S. Eliot, in his essay on John Ford, long ago gave us the necessary corrective when he wrote: / It is suggested, then, that a dramatic poet cannot create characters of the greatest intensity of life unless his personages, in their reciprocal actions and behaviour in their story, are somehow dramatizing, but in no obvious form, an action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet. [Selected Essays, (London, 1932), p. 196] (139-141)
And corresponding to the rather rigid externalizing assumptions about the nature of the poetic process is a complementary distortion of the nature of the work of art in relation to the reader, of what the act of appreciation means. [141] … The play, in short, makes complex demands and asks of us something more than the ability to pick out ideas, however significant in themselves. I should say that it is only in the light of a fully imaginative responsiveness to the play as a dramatic poem, in which Elizabethan ideas are assimilated and used, but never merely applied, that we can see the full significance of Hector’s admirable defence of the law of nature, to which Dr Whitaker rightly gives so much attention. (141-142)
No one who has made his own the idea of a critical discipline embodied in Matthew Arnold’s formula, ‘To see the object as in itself it really is’, is likely to accept the spineless relativism of ‘So many men, so many minds’. For the worth of any interpretation or judgment of literary value depends on the mind that makes it, its lucidity, discipline, and capacity for genuinely confronting its object. (145)
In his classic lecture, ‘A Plea for the Liberty of Interpreting’ [Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, 1930 (Proceedings of the British Academy, XVI); reprinted in Aspects of Shakespeare.), Lascelles Abercrombie … ‘To limit interpretation to what the play may have meant to Elizabethans is, frankly, to exclude the existence of the play as a work of art; for as a work of art it does not exist in what it may have meant to someone else, but in what it means to me: that is the only way it can exist.’ Abercrombie is, however, quite clear about the reasonable limits of interpretation: / By liberty of interpretation I do not mean liberty to read into a play of Shakespeare’s whatever feeling or idea a modern reader may loosely and accidentally associate with its subject: associate it, that is, not because he found it in the play, but because some idiosyncracy of his own suggested it and irresponsibly brought it in from his private world. But I do mean that anything which may be found in that art, even if it is only the modern reader who can [145] find it there, may legitimately be taken as its meaning. Judge by results, I say; not by the results of reverie, which the poem merely sets going, and in which attention may ramble anywhere it pleases,… The existence of a work of art is completed by the recipient’s attention to what the author says to him; whatever may come in through inattention to that does not belong to the art at all.’ (145-146)
It may of course be claimed that what has since informed our consciousness—romantic inwardness (Lamb’s ‘While we read…, we see not Lear, but we are Lear’), the accumulated insights of different critics regarding the powers of language, a vastly increased knowledge of Elizabethan dramatic conventions and intellectual background… that all this… has indeed brought us closer to the Elizabethan Shakespeare. It may be so; but so far as the present argument is concerned there are other relevant considerations. One, already glanced at, it that even for the unhistorical eighteenth century Shakespeare was a genuine possession: indeed what the men of that century lost from their ignorance of the Elizabethan setting was at least partially compensated by the very fact that their approach was not that of the ‘Elizabethan specialist’ but that of the moralist, man of the world, or common reader. Another, more important, is that when we call to mind representative samples of twentieth –century criticism, by writers most of whom are in possession of the advantages of modern scholarship, [148] … we certainly cannot assume that if all our critics were equally sensitive, intelligent and informed they would present us with the same interpretation of the play. Clearly they would not. … We come out of course at a paradox, beautifully suggested in Wallace Stevens’s address to the ‘Supreme Fiction’—encountered, it will be remembered, / ‘In the uncertain light of single, certain truth, / Equal in living changingness to the light / In which I meet you. …’ / It is with these lines in mind that Marius Bewley comments [The Complex Fate, p. 182] : From Stevens’s work as a whole we know that one of the intrinsic elements of the imagination (as of life) is motion and change… ‘Single, certain truth’ is in constant motion, is glimpsed and realized in moments of vital, vivid apprehension, and this act of apprehension itself may constitute ontologically a part, and perhaps a large part, of the truth.’ …what is ‘there’ for intelligent discussion—something belonging to the more-than-individual world of shared experience—exists only in individual apprehensions which themselves, in some sense, contribute to its being. (148-149)
[Shakespeare, as individual as reader] Shakespeare, we may now safely assume, was not unlearned; he had a naturally philosophic mind; he was in touch with the ideas of his age. But those ideas entered into his plays in so far as they met an intense inner need to find meanings in experience. They were tested and assimilated as part of the ‘action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet’ of which T. S. Eliot speaks. (150)
Starting from our own direct experience of the plays (and without that we have nothing to start from) we are interested, first, in anything that may make that experience deeper and more vivid, and then, but only then, in anything that may illuminate the relation between living art and the civilization behind it, and so give us a firmer grasp of the nature of a living tradition. (151)
And if you are genuinely interested in Shakespeare almost any reliable information about his age is likely to come in handy—so long, that is, as you do not allow yourself to become cluttered up with miscellaneous information as a substitute for the more exacting task of reading poetry: remembering also that a little personal reading of Shakespeare’s greater contemporaries is more profitable than too much reading of ‘background’ books. (152)
In the second place, even as common readers, we need to know something about the reading and listening habits of the poet’s first audience. I have in mind such things as L. A. Cormican’s suggestive account of the habits of mind fostered by a familiarity with the Liturgy [L. A. Cormican, ‘Medieval Idiom in Shakespeare’: (I) ‘Shakespeare and the Liturgy’, (2) ‘Shakespeare and the Medieval Ethic’. Scrutiny, XVII, 3]. We need to know these things, not so that we can attempt to make ourselves into Elizabethans (we cannot do that), but so that we can cultivate comparable skills, a comparable flexibility of mind, in our own approach to Shakespeare’s meanings. (152)
Finally—and here we come to the crux of the matter—aware of the ‘philosophical’ aspect of Shakespeare’s work, we shall find that we want to know something of the traditional moral philosophy which nourished, without confining, his imagination—whilst yet avoiding the danger of substituting such knowledge for the direct experience of the plays, or of supposing that these can be reduced to anything like an illustration or demonstration of past systems of thought. (152)
And the condition of our fruitfully applying these ideas to our study of Shakespeare is that we should not approach them as Shakespearean scholars bent on reconstructing a merely historical background, but—paradoxically—that we should study them for themselves, responding to them as themselves actual and vivifying. Thus when Professor Curry describes for us the traditional background of the metaphysics of evil in Macbeth, we value his work because it puts us in touch with creative insights, developed by religious teachers and philosophers, that apply in any age, and so enable us to grasp more firmly what is essential to Macbeth as an ever-present work of imagination. (153)
…living art can best be studied in the light of living ideas. Such ‘historical’ study as we find necessary would not presuppose as its ultimate aim the restoration of Renaissance meanings. For the most part it would not be ‘historical’ at all in any limited sense: it would be predominantly the study of the varying forms—the varying apprehensions—of the great perennial truths. (154)
‘In stressing what Shakespeare meant to the Elizabethan age the historical critics have helped us forget what he might mean to ours.’ [Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Phoenix Books, University of Chicago Press), Vol. I., pp. viii-ix.] (King Lear as Metaphor, 169)
[Included in the World’s Classic volume, Recollections and Essays, translation with an Introduction by Aylmer Maude. Page references are to this volume.] Tolstoy’s conception of the function of art led him to claim that the aim of drama is ‘to elicit sympathy with what is represented’ (p. 353). For this, illusion—‘which constitutes the chief condition of art’ (p. 336)—is essential, and the context makes plain that what Tolstoy meant by illusion was an imaginative sympathy or identification with the dramatis personae as though they were characters in a real-life situation. (173)
…it is plain that what Tolstoy demands [173] is a straightforward verisimilitude to life. With such a criterion he has no difficulty in showing (though he does it at some length) that King Lear is arbitrary, unnatural, and ridiculous. Mr Wilson Knight, in a valuable paper, [G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, The English Association, Pamphlet No. 88.] claims that Tolstoy’s powerful mind was misled by the nineteenth-century commentators on Shakespeare, with their excessive emphasis on ‘character’: (174)
Instead of a simple sparseness (as in a morality play like Everyman) [176] there is an almost overwhelming richness. Boundaries are firmly drawn: certain interests are excluded, and there questions we are not allowed to ask. But this simplification is the condition of the greatest possible compression and intensification: character and situation alike take on a symbolic quality and are made to point to a range of experience beyond themselves. (176-177)
The questions raised by King Lear do not allow ‘explanations’ that you can complacently store in a pocket of the mind: they seem designed to cause the greatest possible uncertainty, or even bewilderment. Within the areas cleared by a formal simplification they centre on certain words and conceptions: in the first scene, ‘love’ and ‘nothing’ and ‘unnatural’ (shortly to be joined by ‘Nature’), and then as the play proceeds, ‘fool’ and ‘need’. (177)
Now what I am here to do today is to try to get one aspect of that movement into perspective; more specifically I wan t to ask, after some twenty-five years of Shakespeare criticism that has not on the whole been on Bradleyean lines, what we now understand by the term ‘character’ when we use it in giving an account of Shakespeare’s plays, to what extent—and within what limitations—‘character’ can be a useful critical term when we set out to define the meaning—the living and life-nourishing significance—of a Shakespeare play. (The Question of Character in Shakespeare, 187)
But it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that Shakespeare’s remarkable power to make his men and women convincing led to a more and more exclusive concentration on those features of the dramatis personae that could be defined in terms appropriate to characters in real life. The locus classicus is of course Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777). Twelve years before, in 1765, Dr Johnson, in his great Preface, had given the more traditional view: … ‘His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and prin-[187] ciples by which all minds are agitated, … In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.’ … Morgann, on the contrary, is interested in what in uniquely individual in the character he describes, and these individual traits, he affirms, can be elicited from the stage characters in much the same way as one builds up the character of an acquaintance in real life: ‘those characters in Shakespeare, which are seen only in part, are yet capable of being unfolded and understood in the whole’. / … ‘the characters of Shakespeare [he goes on] are thus whole, and as it were original, while those of almost all other writers are mere imitation, … when occasion requires, to account for their conduct from the whole of character, from general principles, from latent motives, and from policies not avowed.’ / It is this principle that allows him to distinguish between ‘the real character of Falstaff’ and ‘his apparent one’. … It seems true to say that in the nineteenth century Shakspeare’s characters became ‘real people’, and—[188] with varying degrees of relevance—the plays were discussed in terms of the interaction of real people for whom sympathy or antipathy was enlisted. (187-189)
Now Bradley had the great virtue of being thoroughly immersed in what he was talking about, and I am sure that his book has helped very many people to make Shakespeare a present fact in their lives. Also there is no need to make Bradley responsible for all the vagaries of the how-many-children-had-Lady-Macbeth? kind, which mostly lie on the fringes of criticism. But Bradley’s book did endorse a particular kind of preoccupation with ‘character’, and once ‘character’-criticism became the dominant mode of approach to Shakespeare, certain important matters were necessarily obscured, and people’s experience of Shakespeare became in some ways less rich and satisfying than it might have been. For one ting genuine perceptions became entangled with irrelevant speculations—‘How is it that Othello comes to be the companion of the one man in the world, who is at once able enough, brave enough, and vile enough to ensnare him?. Macbeth’s tendency to ambition ‘must have been greatly strengthened by his marriage’. (189)
…witness the ease with which the old Arden edition of Macbeth dismissed as spurious scenes that do not contribute to the development of character or of a narrowly conceived dramatic action. (189)
…Shakespeare was doing more than merely holding a mirror up to nature, more even than representing conflict in the souls of mighty characters: he was exploring the world and defining the values by which men live. In short, Shakespearean tragedy, any Shakespearean tragedy, is saying so much more than can be expressed in Bradleyean terms. (190)
…any one of Shakespeare’s greater plays is very much more than a dramatized story; that it is, rather, a vision of life—more or less complex and inclusive—whose meaning is nothing less than the play as a whole. This is what Wilson Knight meant when he sometimes referred to his work in terms of ‘spatial analysis’, as distinguished from the analysis of a series of steps in time. Ideally, we try to apprehend each play as though all its parts were simultaneously present: … Shakespeare’s meanings in terms of ‘themes’ rather than in terms of motive, character-development, [190] and so on. Wilson Knight speaks of cutting below ‘the surface crust of plot and character’, and remarks that in Macbeth, for example, ‘the logic of imaginative correspondence is more significant and more exact than the logic of plot’. He also, of course, told us that ‘we should not look for perfect verisimilitude to life, but rather see each play as an expanded metaphor, by means of which the original vision has been projected into forms roughly correspondent with actuality’; … (191)
[note 1] ‘And Shakespeare’s was a mind that thought in images, so that metaphor packs into metaphor, producing the most surprising collocations of apparently diverse phenomena; he thought of time, and death, and eternity, in terms of a candle, a shadow, and an actor. Is it not likely that the large and composite image of the story as a whole would serve him as a metaphor or symbol for his attitudes to certain aspects of experience?’—S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, p. 115. (191)
The ‘new’ Shakespeare, I should say, is much less impersonal than the old. Whereas in the older view Shakespeare was the god-like creator of a people world, projecting—it is true—his own spirit into the inhabitants, but remaining essentially the analyst of ‘their’ passions, he is now felt as much more immediately engaged in the action he puts before us. … [See T. S. Eliot’s essay on John Ford.] We take it for granted that Shakespeare thought about the problems of life, and was at least as much interested in working towards an imaginative solution as he was in making a series of detached studies of different characters, their motives and their passions. Here again, specialist studies are indicative: we think it reasonable that a scholar should inquire what evidence there is that Shakespeare had read Hooker… In short, we take seriously Coleridge’s remark that Shakespeare was ‘a philosopher’ … But at the same time we remember—at least, I should like to be able to say we remember—that the plays are not dramatizations of abstract ideas, but imaginative constructions mediated through the poetry. (192)
If ‘plot’ and ‘character’—mere ‘precipitates from the memory’—sometimes seem to be described in abstraction from the full living immediacy of our direct experience of the plays, and therefore to lead away from it, so too ‘themes’ and ‘symbols’ can be pursued mechanically and, as it were, abstractly. (193)
J. I. M. Stewart’s witty, entertaining and instructive Character and Motive in Shakespeare. … To the extent that Shakespeare is concerned with character and motive—and he does ‘present “man” and reveal psychological truths’—he works not through realistic portrayal but through poetry—that is, through symbolism and suggestions as well as by more direct means; and in this way he makes us aware not—or not only—of what we normally understand by character but of its hidden recesses. … ‘But this superior reality is manifested though the medium of situations which are sometimes essentially symbolical; and these may be extravagant or merely fantastic when not interpreted by the quickened imagination, for it is only during the prevalence of a special mode of consciousness, the poetic, that the underlying significance of these situations is perceived (pp. 9-10)
The other book I want to refer to is Character and Society in Shakespeare by Professor Arthur Sewell. … Mr Sewell’s contention is that the character of a play only exist within the total vision that the play presents: (195)
‘We can only understand Shakespeare’s character so long as we agree that we cannot know all about them and are not supposed to know all about them’ (p. 12) … And again, there is the suggestion ‘that character and moral vision must be apprehended together, and that when character is understood separately form moral vision it is not in fact understood at all’ (p.59)
…however we define for ourselves a character and his r[o]le, there is a strict criterion of relevance: he belongs to his play, and his play is an art-form, not a slice of life. (199)
As You Like It… It is largely an entertainment; but at the same time it is a serious comedy of ideas—not abstract ideas to be debated, but ideas as embodied in attitude and action. (200)
But of all the greater plays it is true to say that all the characters are necessary to express the vision—the emergent ‘idea’ or controlling preoccupation—and they are necessary only in so far as they do express it. Gloucester’s part in King Lear is not to give additional human interest, but to enact and express a further aspect of the Lear experience; for with Gloucester, as with Lear, confident acceptance of an inadequate code gives place to humble acceptance of the human condition, and there are glimpses of a new wisdom: (200)
In the storm scenes, where Lear’s vision of horror is built to a climax, we are acted on directly by the poetry, by what is said, in some respects independently of our sense of a particular person saying it. So too in the play as a whole, and in the other greater plays, our sense of the characters—of what the characters stand for in their ‘address to the world’, their ‘moral encounter with the universe’—is inseparable from the more direct ways in which, by poetry and symbolism, our imaginations are called into play. (201)
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