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Sunday, September 17, 2006
Zeitgeist, Coast-to-Coast
At Matt Greenfield’s benevolent instigation I’m dusting off an old hobbyhorse in the attic: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, with special attention to the likely influence of John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais thereupon. (Confidentially, my dear sir or madam, I have theories.)
So it comes to pass that, on the same day, I am reading Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet
From the latter:
It is small wonder, however, that those who know most about Shakspere and care most for him should display this tendency to insist that assurance in such a case should be double sure. The Baconians have brought the argument from parallels into such disrepute that one no sooner bases a case upon them than the critic smilingly assumes that he is being invited to play Monsieur Jacques’ game of calling fools into a circle, and refuses to respond to the cry of ducdame.
The critic is aware of the hundred and one pitfalls lying even in the beaten way of anyone who sets out to trace literary influences in Elizabethan literature. He realizes that he who relies upon parallel passages, or upon correspondences in thought, or even in phrase, in writers of that age, is attempting to "swim with fins of lead" or "hew down oaks with rushes." He understands how easy it is for one who fails to take into account the innumerable literary common-places of that day to pursue conclusions infinite in regard to influences and counter-influences. A goodly number of stock phrases, stock ideas, stock passages were the common property of thinkers, talkers, and writers of the time. This renders the problem baffling. Whenever, for example, two similar passages in two writers go back to a common origin in Plutarch or Seneca, the investigator has, so to speak, a herring drawn across the trail, and is forced, from that point on, to walk circumspectly. Now it is certain that both Shakspere and Montaigne drank deep and often of Plutarch; as Montaigne has it, "he can no sooner come into my sight, or if I cast but a glance upon him, butI pull some legge or wing from him." By Plutarch both Shakespere and Montaigne were profoundly affected, to the extent even of the very quality of their thought. This makes the problem doubly baffling. Shakspere and Florio were, moreover, doubtlessly reading the same books, or talking with the same literary people, on different days of the same week, possibly even reading each other’s works simultaneously. This renders the problem trebly baffling. If Shakspere had never read a line of Montaigne, he would inevitably have employed many of the same wise saws and modern instances, the stock phrases and literary commonplaces of their age, and likewise many of the same brilliant detached thoughts and fragments of thought in which the literature of the age of Elizabeth and James abounded. Take one somewhat remarkable instance of misleading similarity ... (pp. 5-6)
Now from Grady:
But how does one undertake a parallel investigation of Machiavellian concepts in court and on stage with only the sketchiest of information as to the channels of communication between court and theatre? Should we simply remain silent in the absence of knowledge of concrete, material links between these central Elizabethan institutions?
The methodological answer to this, I believe, is provided by Michel Foucault’s ideas concerning discursive formations. The term ‘discourses’ in Foucault’s writing is protean and complex, resisting simple definition, but it is extremely useful for thinking about the transmission of ideas in society. Most importantly, it ‘brackets’ issues of human agency and concentrates on the close connections of ideas with the institutions and social structures which both embody and animate them. To be sure, this ‘bracketing’ has consequences, producing some of Foucault’s notorious blind spots, as I indicated in the introduction. But the procedure is also a powerful and productive one, used within its limits. Among other things, discourses are sets of interconnected assumptions and practices which provide small-scale mental frameworks for the creation of concepts. (pp. 28-9).
And then a bit later, Grady more or less gives it away, as far as I am concerned: "Here again I am following Foucault’s notions that discourses circulate in societies in fluid ways not necessarily dependent on direct, author-to-author contact; or, as an older critical idiom had it, sometimes ideas are ‘in the air’" (p. 52).
It is, to put it mildly, misleading to polish up the possibility of invoking a Zeitgeist as if it were some sort of cutting edge, philosophical technology. People were waving their hands like that long before Foucault first set pen to paper concerning ‘discourses’.
It wouldn’t be right to say Grady gets no other critical work done before p. 52, but he expends far more energy that he should saying no more than Taylor said in 1925 - and probably Taylor was already belaboring the point, with all his herrings and rushes to hew down oaks. Grady is coasting on a sense that he has something philosophically special going on, methodologically. So far as I can tell, this is not the case.
This really has to do with the general problem that the New Historicism is a style, not a method, if you know what I mean.
By the by, Nietzsche quotes Montaigne quoting the Petrarch bit in "Schopenhauer as Educator": ""kaum habe ich einen Blick auf ihn geworfen, so ist mir ein Bein oder ein Flügel gewachsen."No sooner do I glance at him than I grow a leg or a wing." This is either Nietzsche misremembering, or else it is an intentionally creative mutilation of the original.
Comments
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, with special attention to the likely influence of John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais thereupon. (Confidentially, my dear sir or madam, I have theories.)
Bravo, I say. Mind you, on the general subject of ‘Florio’s Montaigne and Shakespeare’ I’ll be impressed if you’ve found something new to say. Since it was discovered that S. quotes chunks of Florio’s transl. in The Tempest my sense is that he’s been pretty thoroughly excavated in various approaches to ‘sources for S.’ crit; the two books you mention are icebergtips.
And on the specific subject of ‘Florio’s Montaigne and Troilus and Cressida‘, isn’t there a beastly empirical problem? I hate to be pedantically literal, but this is a play entered into the Stationer’s Register on 7 Feb 1603—which therefore, practically speaking, must have been written no later than 1602. Whereas Florio’s Montaigne doesn’t get published in England until 1603. Or am I missing something obvious? Does Grady deal with that?
The idea is that there was a personal connection. They shared a patron: Southhampton. Florio probably began work on his translation in 1598 or so, and Shakespeare might have had extensive access to it before publication. This also raises the real possibility that what looks like linguistic borrowing from Florio could, in fact, be Florio borrowing from Shakespeare. Grady mentions something I hadn’t known. (I shouldn’t be so hard on Grady. He’s helped me.) There are, apparently, references before 1603 to portions of the Florio manuscript circulating around among men of letters. That’s important, as it proves he didn’t keep a fanatical lock on the thing until it was done. Anyway, if anyone had access, it’s a good guess a fellow house-guest at Southampton could have been one.
Historically, focus on possible Florio influence has buzzed about Hamlet (1601) and Lear (1604). And Measure For Measure (1603). And a couple others. “Troilus and Cressida” seems to me a stronger case, actually, and it’s no worse than these others (at least.)
I’m going to go for the ‘lots of striking parallels no one has noticed before, make what you will’ argument. Then let others make what they will. The parallels will also subserve a different argumentative function: namely, emphasizing the curious philosophical style of the play. It’s habit of reversing itself on a dime when it is, apparently, mid-philosophical meditation. (Yeah, that happens in Hamlet, too. I know what you are thinking. But the philosophical style of “T&C” is distinctive, and I want to connect it up to “Apology For Raymnd Sebond” in particular.)
By ‘no worse than’ I meant date-wise. There is a fairly long tradition of assuming it is at least reasonable to consider plays from 1601-3 as likely Florio influence candidates