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Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Some of the People, Some of the Time
The new issue of Bookforum features James Shapiro’s excellent review of Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars and Kenneth Gross’s Shylock Is Shakespeare. As I noted last month, I’ve come to Shakespeare through the criticism. Instead of having my love of The Bard desanguinated by years of graduate study, I’ve acquired a taste for the man whose works inspired Dead Poets Society to inspire generations to hazard a thwack at the GRE Subject Exam in Literature in English.[1] Not only that, I’ve been inspired by the very works which earn Rosenbaum’s ire:
Had Rosenbaum finished up at Yale and landed an academic job (at a time when it was still possible to find one), he would probably have been one of those colleagues soured by the success of New Historicism, cultural materialism, and deconstruction. By the 1980s, Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries had replaced Cleanth Brooks’s reading of Macbeth on syllabi, feminists had shown how much earlier Shakespeare scholarship had ignored, and Irving Ribner’s providential approach to the history plays had given way to Stephen Greenblatt’s "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V" and other brilliant readings.
Initially, I thought "other brilliant readings" Shapiro’s attempt to distance his position on the Dollimore/Greenblatt junta from Rosenbaum’s. Two paragraphs later, I had to reconsider:
Rosenbaum blames "Theory" for this turn of events, and his book is in part an attempt to persuade us that, in the end, Theory lost and Shakespeareans are beginning to cast off its shackles and once again celebrate beauty, pleasure, and ambiguity. This is wishful thinking. Theory didn’t lose; its victory was so complete that we no longer need Theory with a big T anymore because we all do theory, though most of us do it without giving it much thought.
I don’t exactly disagree with Shapiro so much as question how complete that victory actually is; that is to say, I wonder whether the distinction drawn here between the New Critics and proponents of theory ever existed outside overheated rhetoric. But I digress. I want to focus on that "though most of us do it without giving it much thought," which strikes a similar note to the earlier "other brilliant readings." Are Dollimore and Greenblatt like "most of us" or do they actually produce "brilliant readings"? Do they do so because of or despite their theoretical sophistication?[2]
That Shapiro continues by praising Rosenbaum’s account of Shakespeare’s recent editorial history doesn’t help much; after all, sussing out the authentic Shakespeare is more paleographical than bleeding edge.
He wants to find the middleground between materialism (cultural and paleographical) and close-reading, like the work destined to follow Linne Mooney’s "Chaucer’s Scribe"—discussed informally here, formally here—in which historicism wins a "victory" as complete as theory’s. Still, he insists there’s a place for idiosyncratic works like Gross’ Shylock Is Shakespeare:
Argument and speculation can only get you so far in pursuit of a character’s mystery. So he turns to imagining, and imagines himself at various points in the book walking with Shylock through Venice after the trial scene, imagines "what it would be like to hear the sad, self-wounding merchant Antonio recite sonnet 87 to Bassanio," imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald studying the play for "certain atmospheric effects," even imagines "Shylock’s laughter after the trial"—assuming, of course, that laughter was his response.
I don’t necessarily disagree; however, I wonder what it suggests about his idea of what a professional literary scholar does. Produce flawed but useful work? "Chafe at the deadening constraints of traditional criticism" while advancing its cause?
1 You have to love ETS’s question-begging description of the test:
The committee that develops the test is aware of the limitations of the multiple-choice format, particularly for testing competence in literary study. An examination of this kind provides no opportunity for the student to formulate a critical response or support a generalization, and, inevitably, it sacrifices depth to range of coverage. However, in a national testing program designed for a wide variety of students with differing preparations, the use of a large number of short, multiple-choice questions has proved to be the most effective and reliable way of providing a fair and valid examination.
That may look like a period after "examination," but it’s actually what linguists call the "understood exasperative." Like the "understood you," the other two periods and the interrobanged "..OF WHAT!?!" are grammatically implicit. As Eugene Nida observed in his classic Morphology: The Descriptive Analysis of Words (1949):
The need for the "understood exasperative" emerged as more corporations sought to create a "culture" via "employee handbooks." Lacking the dubitative mood, English speakers could only express their reservations with certain statements directly. For example, the sentence "Requiring employees to remain seated at their desks for five uninterrupted hours prior to and six following lunch will improve the workplace environment" initially provoked statements listed elsewhere in the handbook under "fireable offenses." The "understood exasperative" "..FOR WHOM!?!" allows for the sentence to be read aloud without fearing the immediate termination of employment.
Of course, if English possessed the optative mood, these sentences could be written without recourse to the "understood exasperative."
2 Or am I expecting too fine a distinction from Bookforum?
Comments
The GRE Lit Exam, at least when I took it a few years ago, seemed strangely out of step with what actually goes on in English graduate programs—it seemed more like a way of confirming that one had more or less mastered the “traditional” stuff so that one could go on to do something else.
(I had largely focussed my study on what I had heard was the primary focus of the GRE Lit Exam, in the belief that the exam reflects what is considered most important in the field—as a result, I know far more about Spenser, for example, than a man my age rightly should.)
Couldn’t we just paraphrase Nida, and say ETS was playing it dark on the line when it decided to turn the subjective statement, “I would like for x to be true,” expressed in the first person, subjunctive mood, into the objective “x [is the case],” third person straight, no chaser.
Ain’t no reason to blame English (and most (all?) other Germanic and Romance languages) for a lack it never feels when it’s not tied up in knots by some duplicitous fill-in-the-bubble folk. Extra moods are a real hell.
The real problem is when someone takes an idea, like “we would like our test to be the most effective and reliable andsoforth,” uproots it from the formal region of linguistic thought in which it was nurtured and took root (subjunctive! I learned to stop worrying and love the ), and tries to pass it off as native to another climate. That just ain’t right.