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Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Deep Thoughts
While lesser mortals bother themselves hotly over sublunary orbs - boobs: whether they should or should not be - I, a scholar, occupy myself with more permanent superlunary spheres, held pert for all eternity in the great, crystalline push-up bra of the universe, beneath the soft sweater of the ether. Example: I’m reading all this old stuff about Troilus and Cressida, which is all about the Great Chain of Being, of course. It’s a wonder to behold: all these old critics insisting on their feelings about the title characters, especially the heroine. If you don’t know the plot: basically, they’re a couple of nice-seeming kids, and they hook up, with the best of intentions of staying that way; but she cheats on him (sort of, although she doesn’t even kiss the other guy, and Troilus has his faults); and, honestly, it’s the worst of luck all around that she ended up in that situation. And she was practically sexually harassed earlier.
Anyway, the play doesn’t give you any clear indication how you are supposed to feel about all this. So all these scholars say stuff. But like it’s scholarship. As a result, nearly everyone who wrote about it before about 1965 manages to sound ... well, I’ll quote from Comical Satyre and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1938), by Oscar James Campbell.
First he quotes one Professor Tucker Brooke:
In her relations with both her lovers, he [Shakespeare] shows us the pathos of a daintiness reaching vainly after nobility, a wistful sincerity which knows it lacks strength to be the thing it would be ... Ulysses [may] cry, "Fie, fie, upon her!" But Shakespeare does not cry, "Fie!" Rather, I think, we hear him whisper, "But yet the pity of it, Ulysses! O Ulysses, the pity of it!" (p. 108)
I find this not implausible, yet implausibly daintily expressed. But Campbell is enraged and determined to put in her place the uppity broad threatening to turn the heads of his colleagues in such fashion.
After this display of the irrational tendency of many men to regard every woman lover in fiction as in some sense desirable [I’m sure we all agree no quarter may be granted this irrational and, may I add, culturally corrosive tendency], it is refreshing to read a woman’s clearheaded appraisal of Shakespeare’s Cressida. Mrs. Olwen Campbell is not blinded by the obvious sexual charms of an actress and wanton. She says:
Critics with whom Thersites and Pandarus have disagreed are frequently found to strain at Cressida. But this is the result of trying to swallow her: whereas she is meant to be rejected. Not, according to the distorted and unimaginative view of a certain well-known modern Shakespeare scholar [this is probably Knight, not Brooke], because the great dramatist was ever liable to an attack of the bilious malady of woman-hatred, but simply because Cressida is the villain of the piece.
To call Cressida a villain is slightly misleading, because the term suggests that she plays a part in a tragedy. In all other respects Mrs. Campbell’s comment is unassailable. (p. 210)
Anyway, such overbearing epistemological harrumph seems very hysterically Althouse avant la lettre. At least this week. Speaking of ancient history, and following up on Scott’s Samuel Jackson post: why hasn’t anyone Photoshopped Jackson’s head onto a picture of Laocoön? Snakes on a Dardan Plain! (Writes itself.)
Comments
Have you been borrowing Yglesias’s spelchek?
What didn’t I chek? I see ‘thinik’ only.
dantiness
This kind of thing is why Theory replaced Literature Appreciation. Whatever its faults, at least in theory-driven criticism the critics don’t write about the characters as if they were gossiping (gossipping? Help, spelchek!) about the other kids in the dorm.
Spelling corrected.
It reads better as danteness.
"To call Cressida a villain is slightly misleading, because the term suggests that she plays a part in a tragedy “
The distinction, in many instances, between history and tragedy is a fine one. While the first Folio editions of Troilus and Cressida labelled it a tragedy, we follow the Quarto tradition in reading the play as a history instead. It is easy to see how the subject matter of this piece lends itself to both.
I am reminded of the story of Jephtha and his daughter in Judges 11. Not only does that piece also lend itself to both the tragedy and history genres, but many moderns are also beginning to perceive Jephtha himself as being the true victim of the story, despite the fact that his daughter is the one murdered. While we may not be able to refer to her as Campbell’s “villain”, she is nonetheless a function of the “tragedy” within which he is the focal protagonist.
BE assured a lit-ur-rare-ee analysis offered by a ValveFraud will not touch upon any of the following:
War.
Sex.
Actual history: either relating to a text, or a writer’s milieu
You actually think I’m too dainty to discuss Shakespeare on war and sex? Bless you, troll! You are a peach!
To put it another way, however: if you can’t think of something sensible to say, don’t say anything at all. If you please. (Otherwise I’m going to have to go back to banning you.)
maybe you should let me post about “Genghis Khan’s 800 wives”. Our friend might find that titillating. There may be a video out.
The problem here, Doc, is that you don’t quite understand what sensible is.
When you mention a traditional text as if it were another episode of Happy
days or Batman, you miss the point, ... When you fail to perceive the real history of the
text--written by Chaucer and lifted by Shakespeare, with little or no basis
in Homeric legends--you continue the fraud. Refusing to address the obvious
military and sexual context (much more effectively brought out in Chaucer
than in Ss), ...
Trollery deleted at discretion of the management.
You might as well delete. The guy is capable of rationality but he seems to prefer invective. His point might have been an interesting one, if someone else had made it for him.
...
The management
OK, this is sort of fun. The problem, troll, is that you are making an invalid inference: from the fact that some x was not mentioned in my post, to the conclusion that I must be unaware/suppressing x. This is a fallacy. Because, of course, it is quite common for posts - especially short ones - to be not very long, i.e. to omit discussion of certain matters. Especially when those matters are so obvious that it can be generally assumed the audience is aware. (And it is VERY uncommon even for long posts to discuss absolutely every possible relevant fact in the universe that might conceivable bear on the topic at hand.)
But let’s stick with the topic. I stand accused of suppressing sex and war. Well, what can I say? “Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion” is generally taken to be the closest thing the play has to a choric self-summary (inadequate as it may be.) So anyone who knows that might be presumed cognizant of the sordid sex and war theme. So it doesn’t bear mentioning unless I am actually undertaking a direct analysis. (A couple months back I made a post at CT “hackery, hackery, still wars and hackery” on the assumption that a substantial portion of the audience would get the reference. After all, some commenter named ‘Thersites’ shows up there a lot.)
As to the claim that Shakespeare is plagiarizing Chaucer. I am kind enough to assume that the Troll actually has read his Shakespeare and Chaucer. I’ll charitably chalk this up to the fact that, as we have seen before, he simply has no idea what the English word ‘plagiarism’ means.
As to the claim that T&C has little or no basis in Homeric legend - well, I am afraid I can only assume appalling ignorance of Homer and/or Shakespeare. Ulysses, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Nestor, Hector, Priam, so forth. The troll may be unaware, but all these characters - and the Trojan war itself - feature prominently in Homer’s poetry. Of course there’s no Cressida in Homer, and Troilus gets - I think - just a one-line mention as one of Priam’s many dauntless sons, who died young. Troilus starts to get a bit more press in the 6th century Historia de Excidio Trojae (if memory serves). Then Benoît de Sainte-More (?) gives us a 12th Century troubador-thingy Le Roman de Troie. In that one Troilus hooks up with Briseida (a mangling of Briseis, Achilles’ girlfriend?) Then there’s Boccaccio. Then there’s Chaucer, who read Filostrato - which is very different than Boccaccio in substance and spirit. As Shakespeare is very different in substance and spirit from Chaucer. So, to repeat: to accuse Shakespeare of plagiarizing Chaucer reveals the most appalling ignorance of the texts we are dealing with here.
And I think it is very shocking that the troll in his comment actively SUPPRESSED information (kids, ‘the man’ doesn’t want you to know - it’s too hot to handle!) about the possible influence of Chapman’s Homer (1598) on Shakespeare. For example, Chapman dedicated his Homer “to the most honoured now living instance of the Achillean virtues eternaized by divine Homer, the Earl of Essex, Earl Marshal, etc.” The troll doesn’t want you to know this, not only because he himself is presumably of Essex’ party (!!), and no doubt concerned about reprisals in the wake of the failed 1601 plot. But because he doesn’t want you to know that Shakespeare’s play has some basis in Homeric legend - Achilles/Achilles. Both have characters named Achilles. That sort of thing will start people talking, start seeing connections between the two. Can’t have that.
Thank you. Please don’t come again.
At least in this latest of your attempts to pass yourself off as some sort of renaissance scholar (that, along with your mastery of analytical philosophy, oh, political theory, cognitive science, and most importantly, cutting-edge criticism of Marvel and DC comics), you toss in some of the textual history. Nonetheless, as you admit, T & C is not derived from the Iliad, except for some name-dropping. So where is the history? It would seem a great heeder of fallacies and logical consistency such as yourself might find fault with someone--even Ss-- listing T & C as history, given that the only “history” consists of vague references to characters from the Iliad (and not to the actual tale of the Trojan war), not itself a work of history (but that might be getting a bit too deep for you). Idealist philosophers, however, generally aren’t too worried about distinguishing between history and literary artifice: why, in a Noumenal realm, they could indeed be synonymous! It is certainly not impossible, at least for someone as deluded and narcissistic as a Holblo.
And the Shakespearean T & C does follow Chaucer’s narrative fairly closely anyways. But I strongly doubt you ever managed to read C’s T & C (however bizarre and Boschean it may be), and even if you did, most likely failed to note that it concerns rather frightful and indeed highly unpleasant topics--such as betrayal, deceit, war, sex, etc. Ghastly! And T & C’s definitely not suitable material to be “appropriated” by a comic strip writer: tho perhaps with some work you could like manage an ebonics version.....
I win!
"This kind of thing is why Theory replaced Literature Appreciation. Whatever its faults, at least in theory-driven criticism the critics don’t write about the characters as if they were gossiping (gossipping? Help, spelchek!) about the other kids in the dorm.”
Yeahbut - there were people reviling the dorm gossip approach long before the Theory turn, surely. The scrutineers were rabidly anti-gossip - Leavis squandered whole jereboams of bile on Bradley and his influence. There’s quite a lot of good Shakespeare criticism that’s neither ‘how many children had Malvolio?’ nor Theory, and Theory isn’t the only possible alternative to ‘how many children had Banquo’s horse?’
I often peg 1965 as the year Theory got started (although that’s quite arbitrary.) I actually picked 1965 as the year Cressida got rehabilitated for a non-arbitrary reason. Joseph Papp put on a famous production and wrote an essay about it, defending Cressida as a victim of men. It’s not a fully convincing essay, for rather interesting reasons, but many of Papp’s feminist ideas and responses to the heroine seem ... well, normal to us today. In a way that many earlier reactions just strike us as comically weird. (Even when Papp seems wrong, he’s wrong in a way that seems almost inevitable today, I think.) I don’t think that Papp’s production has anything to do with Theory. He wasn’t influenced by it, nor it by him. (Actually, I don’t know that. I’m talking through my hat here. It just doesn’t seem like a Theory-y essay.) There is a general sort of 60’s thing that suffuses both, of course. So I would NOT say that this sort of thing is why Theory replaced Literary Appreciation, although no doubt there is something weaker to be said in the general vicinity. Namely, there sure was a lot of crap written before Theory came along. (And there sure has been a lot of crap since.)
True enough. I have to admit, I’ve noticed the same phenomenon with Desdemona - even very sharp critics (pre-c.1965?) take it for granted that Othello was wrong because Desdemona didn’t actually have sex with Cassio, apparently feeling quite comfortable with the thought that if she had, he would have been quite justified. Odd that Sxhpr himself was way ahead of them on that point, and that they managed not to notice.
Oh yes, your clearly spending your time on much richer activities other than boobs…
Of what concequence is any of your writings? You consider yourself superior to us mere mortals because you use unessicary, overly descriptive language?
Reading into plays is as much of a wasted of time as considering the finer points of breasts. Perhaps even lesser, at least breasts accomplish something…
Its just ridiculous to try to pick apart and analyise every sentence or word of shakespeares plays, he has been raised to a godly stature, by nerds such as yourself. He was just a man! He was writing a commercial play! Therefore every thing he wrote can be disected as pleasing the audience (or shocking, acheiving the same result)
Damm you people piss me off! Sure we must know about the past, but we must also look to the future! Imagine what your capable of, or you can settle into a bitter life of criticism and confusion.
Oh, Frank! You’re such a card!
And you, frank, have decided the best way to express your apprehension of impending futurity is by leaving irate and irony-deaf comments (of questionable orthography, may I add) to old blog posts?
Damn, Emerson beat me to it.